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China's obsessive military concern remains the U.S.S.R., just as Moscow's prevailing concern is the nature of Peking's goals. Peking's new open door policy toward the rest of the world will make it a stronger and more flexible rival of Moscow in the years to come. By simultaneously cultivating ties with Western —and even Eastern—Europe and with Japan, China is developing flank protection on two sides of its Soviet enemy.
The emerging pattern exasperates Moscow. Among other things, the Soviets profess astonishment that the West is willing to sell weapons to an unreliable China that still speaks of the inevitability of war. At the same time, the Russians seem willing enough to accept the normalization of relations between the U.S. and China, so long as the new friendship does not produce a tacit anti-Soviet alliance. Warns Georgi Arbatov, a Soviet expert on U.S. policy: "You cannot reconcile detente with attempts to make China some sort of military ally of NATO." A Western diplomat also cautioned: "I wonder if an economically and militarily powerful China by the year 2000 would be an unmitigated blessing for American interests. Would a China strong enough to threaten Russia in nuclear terms not constitute any threat to us at all?"
The U.S. normalization of relations with the People's Republic brings to full circle an extraordinary one-century course of American involvement in China. It is a history of passionate infatuation and ruthless exploitation, of missionary zeal and often of tremendous mutual incomprehension. The cycle started with the education in Hartford, Conn., of China's first foreign students in 1872. Eventually, as Dean Acheson wrote, "hardly a town in our land was without its society to collect funds and clothing for Chinese missions ... Thus was nourished the love portion of our love-hate complex that was to infuse so much emotion into our later China policy."
If there was condescending benevolence on America's part, there was also a deep cultural fascination—on both sides. Eventually many Americans seemed to have found in Chinese society forgotten revolutionary hopes transplanted from their own, and many Chinese discovered an unsuspected delight (even Mao finally did) in the mobility and openness of American society, the antithesis of China's own introspective and hierarchical world. In the late 1970s, many Americans are inclined to forget their view of the Chinese, during the Korean War, as a menacing ant-people in quilted jackets swarming across the Yalu River and brainwashing American innocents.
The most fascinating thing about China now is that it is a society facing almost infinite possibilities: No one, perhaps least of all the Chinese, knows how the tremendous experiment will end. Talking to a Japanese political delegation in Tokyo last October about a territorial dispute, Teng remarked: "Let's put it off for ten or 20 years. After that, who knows what kind of system we'll