RETHINKING U.S CHINA POLICY
FOR the past two decades, since Mao Tse-tung seized control of nearly one-quarter of the human race, the U.S. has done its best to quarantine Communist China. The policy began with nonrecognition, based partly on moral disapproval of the Communist takeover. It was later stiffened with "containment," a strategy designed both to weaken the regime and to keep the Chinese from overrunning their neighbors. Despite a long tradition of U.S. sympathy for China, most Americans have regarded the quarantine as all the more prudent since China exploded its first nuclear device in 1964.
How well has that policy actually worked? It has certainly not helped bring about the "passing" of Chinese Communism that the late John Foster Dulles hoped for. It has probably deterred Chinese expansionist impulses, although to what extent is unknown; the strength of such impulses has never been clear. One possible result of the policy is Peking's intense hostility toward America: the world's most populous nation (750 million people) seems convinced that the world's most powerful is bent on destroying it at the first chance. It cannot be proved, of course, that a different U.S. attitude would have produced a different mood in China. But as Richard Nixon observed during last year's campaign: "We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation."
Nixon was taking "the long view," and his Administration is not prepared, at present, to alter the U.S. position. The question remains whether "the long view" should not get somewhat shorter. Should the U.S. begin to change its policy now and start laying the foundation for eventual reconciliation? If so, can such an effort be successful?
Recovery Before Adventure
Most China experts question whether the assumptions on which present U.S. policy is based remain realistic in the '60s. Some U.S. officials still talk as if China were both ready and willing to conquer Asia. Is it? Despite its nuclear power and its formidable manpower reserves, China is one of the world's poorer countries (estimated annual per capita income: $100, compared with Japan's $1,100). China's recent Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the upheaval it caused may put domestic recovery ahead of foreign adventure for some time to come. Even before the Cultural Revolution, China was too weak in air, sea and industrial power to sustain a modern war much beyond its borders. However absurd it may seem to Americans, the Chi nese regard their actions in Korea and Viet Nam as defensive, and those in Tibet and India as attempts to regain territory that all Chinese (including the exiled Nationalists) have long claimed.