Mr Edward Kennedy has gone much further than any leading political figure in the USA since 1949 in proposing reconciliation with Communist China. He has suggested that the United States should unilaterally withdraw travel and trade restrictions except on strategic goods, end its opposition to Peking’s admission not only to the UN General : Assembly but also to the Security Council, recognise China “as a legitimate power in control of the mainland entitled to full participation as an equal member of the world community and to a decent regard for its own security” and attempt to open talks with it on the questions of arms control and consular and subsequently diplomatic relations.
On the question of Formosa, Mr Kennedy has gone so far as to say that “if a political accommodation is reached between the Communist regime on the mainland and the Government of Taiwan, the people of Taiwan might be represented in the United Nations as an autonomous unit of China, by analogy to the present status of Byelorussia and the Ukraine in the United Nations as autonomous provinces of the Soviet Union.
Kennedy’s Move
This clearly refers to a distant possibility in a distant future. The more practicable proposal that Mr. Kennedy has made is that the United States should withdraw its token military presence from the island in order to convince both Peking and Taipeh of its commitment to a negotiated settlement. Clearly such a gesture by the United States will go a long way in meeting China’s demands.
Mr. Edward Kennedy is not the only one to have made these proposals. He has the support of other liberals like Senator Fulbright, Senator Morse, Senator Jacob Javits, Mr. Theodore Sorenson, President Kennedy’s aide, Prof. Reischauer, former Ambassador in Tokyo, Prof. Doak Barnett and a vast majority of the large community of China specialists in the United States.
Mr. Edward Kennedy is seeking to fill the vacuum that was created by the assassination of his elder brother, Mr. Robert Kennedy, last year. He is assuming the leadership of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and taking up the cause of under-privileged sections of the community. Only the other day he made an unannounced appearance at a mass rally at Memphis to mark Dr. Martin Luther King’s death anniversary. It is symbolic of the change in the climate of opinion in the United States that Mr. Kennedy can be confident that his political prospects would improve rather than suffer as a result of his conciliatory posture towards China. The American people have had enough of the anti-Communist crusade and have no stomach any longer for the role of an international gendarmerie.
It is absurd for anyone to suggest that the desire for better relations with China in the United States is the result of some deep and secret hatred and fear of the Soviet Union. Primarily it reflects a growing awareness that Washington’s China policy has been based on outdated assumptions and that it has not served either America’s national Interests or the cause of peace and stability in Asia.
It is hardly necessary to point out that America’s China policy was shaped at a time when it was taken for granted in Washington that the Communist bloc was monolithic, that it was ruled from Moscow, that it did not permit even a country of the size of China to think and act in terms of its own interests and that world domination was its unalterable goal. Surely all these assumptions have been invalid for years.
Normally the American Administration should have been expected to undertake an “agonising reappraisal” of its China policy by the end of 1962 when even a layman could no longer be in any doubt that the Sino-Soviet split was too deep to be papered over and that Chairman Mao Tse-tung would not subordinate his country’s policy and interests to those of the Soviet Union. Instead, the United States began stepping up its commitments in Viet Nam on the implausible plea of containing China.
American spokesmen have offered any number of explanations for their Viet Nam policy. They have contended that Washington could not ignore its treaty obligations under SEATO, that it could not allow South Viet Nam to be overrun by infiltrators from the north without jeopardising the security of other non-Communist States in South-East Asia (the Domino theory), that it was necessary to defeat the Maoist copybook exercise in subversion to strengthen the Soviet Union’s more moderate ideological position and that the American military presence was necessary on the mainland to provide the only effective counterweight to China’s massive power.
Little Room
But there is little room for doubt that American involvement in Viet Nam has primarily been the result of the momentum of policies that were conceived and implemented at the time of Sino-Soviet friendship in the early ‘fifties. The decisions to back President Diem’s regime, send military advisers and then troops to South Viet Nam and finally convert the conflict there into an American war flowed from an undifferentiated hostility to Communism.
On this assessment an era in American foreign policy that began with the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 or even earlier with the triumph of Communism in China in 1948-49 is drawing to a close with the military stalemate in Viet Nam. The old anti-Communist impetus has run out. Washington must review its Asia policy and reappraise its whole attitude to China as it moves towards a negotiated settlement in Viet Nam.
In order to justify its massive military commitments in Viet Nam and the heavy sacrifices in terms of men and money (over 33,630 dead and an expenditure of $25 billion last year), the US Administration had of necessity to project China as a dragon with nuclear teeth ready to devour every small country in its neighbourhood. The point is not that this picture was overdrawn but that Washington cannot afford to emphasise the Chinese danger too much as it plans to withdraw its forces from Viet Nam.
The US Administration must in fact try to prove that the Chinese danger is not as great as it is made out to be if it is to convince the other Asian countries that by working for a settlement in Viet Nam it is not abandoning the whole region to the tender mercies of the Maoist regime in Peking. In a sense it has been doing so for some years but only in a guarded way. It has, for instance, told New Delhi since 1963-64 that the Chinese danger is not all that great and imminent and that it does not really need much sophisticated equipment to cope with the security problem in the Himalayas. The massive contradiction in the American position whereby it has been advising India to cut down its defence expenditure and has been pouring in masses of men and equipment in Viet Nam has been all too glaring. But that is a different matter.
Softer Approach
Mr. Edward Kennedy and the others, who are advocating a softer approach towards China and are providing a rationale for it, are fulfilling a vital psychological need in this period of transition in the USA from war to peace. They are helping to ensure that the pull-out from Viet Nam does not produce an intense feeling of guilt in their country and that there is no wild talk of a sell-out as there was at the time of the triumph of Communism in China. They are trying to convince their people that the United States can co-exist with Communist China on acceptable terms.
The job has partly been done already. Since the marathon hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on China and Viet Nam in 1966 the better educated among the American people have been sceptical about the anti-communist and anti-China propaganda. This feeling of scepticism has been greatly strengthened by the widespread revulsion against the war in Viet Nam – the use of napalm bomb, the destruction of whole villages and so on.
There is also a better awareness of the limitations of power in America than even a few years ago when Senator Fulbright and others began to warn the people against “the arrogance of power.” Above all, the Americans have had time to accept the plain fact that China was not theirs to lose to Communism, get over their feelings of paternalism towards the Chinese people and recognise that Communism like nationalism was a part of the process of political modernisation.
There will not be much resistance to a change of policy towards China in the United States if Peking responds to gestures of reconciliation. That the Maoists may maintain a posture of hostility is only too likely. But that is a different issue. The relevant point in the present context is that in all probability Washington will not retaliate.
But the fact that an era is drawing to a close in American foreign policy does not mean that Washington can pick up the thread where it was snapped at the time of the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950. The United States was then about to recognise the Communist regime in Peking. It had not transposed the Seventh Fleet between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan and had not assumed responsibility for the island’s defence. It had withdrawn its forces from South Korea and had not established bases in Thailand. In the new situation America cannot be expected to withdraw either from South Korea or Thailand in the foreseeable future. It will not abandon its mutual security pact with Formosa except perhaps under an overall agreement with China to ensure the island’s existence as a separate entity. But it is reasonably certain that Washington will be speaking a new language in respect of China in the none too distant a future. The failure to win the war in Viet Nam as well as the change in the climate of opinion at home point in the direction of a soft line towards China.
The Times of India 9 April 1969