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Lowering Expectations of China as a World Power
| Article
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16734 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1989 |
3,967 Words |
| Author
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Harold C. Hinton
Harold C. Hinton is a professor of political science and
international affairs at the Institute for Sino-Soviet
Studies, George Washington University. His latest book is
Korea under New Leadership: The Fifth Republic. Several of his
books will be published soon, including China's Long Ascent:
The Foreign Policy of a Dissatisfied Power. |
Recent developments in China suggest that Beijing's highest priorities in the near future will lie more than ever in the domestic arena. On the other hand, China's international affairs have always borne watching, and there is not evidence that the current crackdown at home will seriously affect Beijing's behavior abroad.
China is often perceived as forming a strategic or "iron" triangle with the United States and the Soviet Union. China was the first of the three to learn the costs and dangers of committing troops in offensive battle against a formidable opponent on foreign soil; this was the lesson that Beijing drew from the Korean War. The United States learned the same lesson in Vietnam two decades later, and the Soviet Union was the last to learn it, in Afghanistan. All three powers also have serious domestic problems, including shaky economies, that are likely to reinforce their reluctance to overcommit themselves abroad.
A Gentler Colossus of the North
Mainly for ideological and geopolitical reasons, China's relationship with the Soviet Union, the colossus to the north, has never been a comfortable one. Nevertheless, in the 1950s Mao Zedong and his colleagues "tilted" sharply toward Moscow, in the expectation of aid and support against the then-perceived adversary, the United States. China's expectations were fulfilled to some extent, but not to Beijing's full satisfaction. Stalin tended to treat the Chinese more as satellites than as colleagues, even though he could not actually control them. After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev became enraged by Mao's pretensions to ideological eminence in the communist bloc.
By the end of the 1950s, patience had been exhausted on both sides. Mao publicly branded the Soviet Union a threat to China and to mankind, a threat as bad as, although different in many ways from, the United States. In a surge of ultramilitancy, he led China into the Cultural Revolution, the greatest convulsion the country has experienced since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. Of the two superpowers, the Soviet Union was the more accessible and vulnerable to Chinese pressures during this carnival of folly and, accordingly, it was the one that reacted.
In 1969, following a most unwise armed provocation by Chinese troops across the common border, the Soviet Union rapidly built up its strategic and conventional forces in Asia to a level that not only contained China on its north and west but seriously
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