The Soviet-Chinese Relationship - 19 May 1989

I sometimes envy the men who sit in clubs and stand in pubs – in fact anyone who is not a journalist who can enjoy the get-together at twilight and argue and prophesy and generally decide how the world is turning.

I can’t recall a single friend of mine, a non-journalist that is, who ever said, “I remember all those years ago when I said that the French would never leave NATO or Ronald Reagan would never be president or John Connally of Texas was the coming man, boy was I wrong.”

The club man and club woman, the pub gossip, the teatime ladies and the girls in the office can express themselves freely and lay down the law for years and maintain a local reputation as a shrewd one – because they keep no records to remind them that they, too, are as fallible as the rest of us.

In a word, civilians – I’m defining a civilian as non-journalist – civilians, wisely, don’t keep records. Journalists do. They can’t help it, their expert cogitations and shrewd predictions are embalmed in print and can be quoted later for the amusement of the public.

The late Walter Lippmann who was, for a decade or two, probably the most distinguished political commentator in American journalism, wrote in January 1932 – in the depth of the Depression when everybody was looking around for a presidential candidate to elect the following November – he wrote, “Mr Roosevelt is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.”

A month or two later, when Franklin Roosevelt had a setback, two setbacks, in the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania primaries, Mr Lippmann’s shrewd doubts were confirmed. He wrote, “The people of the east know about Mr Roosevelt. They just do not believe in him. They have detected something hollow in him, something synthetic, something pretended and calculated. This has been the judgement of the great majority of Democratic insiders. It has now been confirmed by the urban masses of the east.”

Well need I remind you that the pleasant, hollow, synthetic Mr Roosevelt went on to win a resounding victory in 1932, a positive slaughter of his opponent in 1936, another great victory in 1940 and again in 1944 – the only president ever to be elected four times, which caused the long-agonising Republicans to get through a Constitutional amendment that forbids any president from ever again running for more than two terms.

However the point of this reminiscence is that Walter Lippmann, who lived for more than 40 years after that first clanger, was never allowed to forget it. It was quoted – meanly – even in his obituary notices.

Well, before some small-minded librarian gets busy riffling through the Cooke file, let me do it for him. You’ll see at once why it was this particular passage that unfortunately came to mind.

At the end of a talk done in February 1972 a talk, I regret to say, that is in print between hard covers, I said “The late Walter Lippmann, in one of his rare appearances on television, I believe it was his last, was asked at the end by a student what did he consider to be the worst catastrophe that could happen to the world. The clock ticked audibly as he thought for the longest time, then he said very slowly and emphatically ‘China on the loose’."

I followed on with this final comment, “To end this ghoulish bulletin I can think of something worse, the possibility that China and the Soviet Union deciding in a year or two that they have more to lose by being at odds than by being together might conclude a pact as unthinkable as the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 which guaranteed the Second World War as this second get-together would herald the end, or at best the last stand, of the West.”

So there. Now it has happened. Are we down-hearted? Apparently not. I suppose I’ve retained this fear, snoozing away at the back of my mind through all these 17 years, but the wisdom of our pundits, our wise guys, is against me.

Let’s go back and look at what had been the critical turning points in the post-war relations of China and the Soviet Union. The last summit meeting was between Mao Tse Tung and Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 and it was a clammy encounter.

They fought over ideology, which country was upholding true Marxism, over the parts of Asia they could each claim as being within their sphere of influence, and over charges and counter-charges about breakthroughs, incursions, of each side into the other’s territory along the 4,000-mile border they share.

This last quarrel has remained so unhealed that in the 30 years we’ve been busy with upheavals and changes in Europe and the Middle East and the Far East most of us, I find, have to be reminded that to this day the Soviet Union has over a million soldiers posted along that frontier and the Chinese have about the same.

Yet that 1959 summit was supposed to reaffirm an alliance between the two great Communist powers. Ten years later, in 1969, they broke the alliance, still hotly arguing over who was upholding and who betraying Marxist dogma and hotly engaging in small battles and random clashes along the huge border.

At that point, we in the west – all our best commentators – breathed a comfortable sigh. The two Communist superpowers seemed as far apart as Hitler and Stalin. Somewhere I have a faded clipping of some eminent Kremlinologist saying as much, which was what prompted me to express that gloomy fear that the day might come when they would find they had more to lose by being at odds than by being together.

But nothing in foreign relations stays frozen and we noticed years later, in the late '70s, that China began to talk about bringing Soviet-Chinese relations back to normal – that’s to say, to a formal friendship again.

The Chinese set three conditions – the Soviets should get out of Afghanistan, they should put an end to the occupation of Cambodia by the Vietnamese (a Soviet ally), and they should do substantial reducing of the million-man army on the Chinese border.

Well, Mr Gorbachev has moved in all these directions, not without some loss of face. Afghanistan has been evacuated. In response to the Chinese contention – unverified, I believe – that they have reduced their armed forces by one million in all, not of course all on that border, Mr Gorbachev has promised to start a systematic withdrawal of his military force. He’s talked about demobilising 200,000 troops in the Far East. How many of them on the Chinese border? I don’t believe he said.

The enormous slaughter in Cambodia is the nightmare, since the invading Vietnamese, China’s implacable enemy, are wards and allies of the Soviet Union. However the conventional American wisdom – spelled out with sonorous eloquence by Mr Henry Kissinger this week – is that all of this is, on the whole, a good thing.

Mr Kissinger admits that if a Soviet leader had undertaken such a journey a decade ago it would have seemed like a diplomatic earthquake. Reminding us that he was he, Mr Kissinger – and it was – who made that secret visit to Beijing in 1971 which produced President Nixon’s astonishing initiative in normalising relations with China, Mr Kissinger goes on to say that in the '70s the hostility between Moscow and Beijing was so ineradicable that all Washington had to do was to position itself so that it was closer to each of the two Communist giants than they were to one another with, however, a new tilt toward the weaker giant, China.

Now that this period of what he calls "mechanical simplicity" has ended, Mr Kissinger notes that the Soviet Union is troubled by domestic difficulties and Beijing has lost its fear of a Soviet invasion. Incidentally, Moscow has at last lost its fear of a Chinese-American alliance poised against it.

The reality in Asia, says Mr Kissinger, is that none of the major nations will run the risk of separating itself from the United States in order to gain the goodwill of Moscow, nor will any of them challenge the Soviet Union simply to curry favour with the United States.

The conclusion from all this is that there is, as between the Soviet Union and China, a new imbalance of power, a balance of hope and an admission that their two main concerns for some time to come will be China’s attempt – now forced on it by the protesting millions – to match the Soviets’ democratic reforms and the Soviets attempt to copy the pace of China’s economic reforms.

These interesting thoughts were all set down before the truly astounding protest and hunger marches in Beijing and Shanghai and other cities. A notable Chinese expert, who had been calmly expounding such ideas, was brought into a television studio on Wednesday night and asked what effect the seething millions of protesters would have on the summit, on east-west relations, on the Soviet Union and its satellites, on us all.

He said, in exhaustion and bewilderment, “This is the most alarming and unpredictable thing that has happened in China in my lifetime. I see no credible political alternative to the present leadership. I have no idea how it will all come out.”

Another prospect was considered by a commentator who does not share the majority view about the summit. He wrote, “A continued Communist split would better serve the cause of peace and freedom if – a big if – the crowds of freedom-seekers were to reach a critical mass or if repression were triggered that spills blood without gaining control.

"The great Chinese counter-revolution might soon be under way and in that case, reverberations would be felt in Warsaw, Budapest, Kiev and Moscow. That is why Mr Gorbachev castigated Chinese hotheads.”

Could it be China on the loose?

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