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43. Clashes on the Frontiers

When John F. Kennedy became president of the United States in January, 1961, he made no change in the policy inherited from Eisenhower and Dulles based on uncompromising hatred of the People's Republic of China. Eisenhower threatened to come out of retirement fighting if the new Democratic administration changed China policy but Kennedy himself turned out to possess a suspicion of China scarcely distinguishable from that of Dulles.1

The great schism of China and Russia was fully under way when Kennedy became president and he possessed a dazzling opportunity to reach an understanding with the People's Republic and isolate the Soviet Union, the principal American antagonist. Kennedy failed to seize this opportunity. On the contrary, he sought an understanding with Russia at the expense of China.

The relaxing American attitude about the Soviet Union reflected the fundamental reason for the split between Moscow and Beijing. The Chinese feared the Kremlin's campaign to seek peaceful coexistence with the West masked a plan to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union and form an alliance with the United States against China. This was implicit for a long time but not enunciated until 1965.2

A leitmotif that ran through the Kennedy administration and extended into the Johnson years was a persistent conviction that the People's Republic was hostile to the West and menacing to its neighbors.3 The United States reacted warmly to the Soviet Union's efforts at peaceful coexistence yet rejected as propaganda China's virtually identical five principles of peaceful coexistence. The primary reason for this inconsistency was the American belief that Beijing was demonstrating aggression by its refusal to accept as permanent the Nationalist regime on Taiwan and its support of North Vietnam in the growing war in southeast Asia. U.S. leaders found it impossible to consider that it was American aggression in these two regions which brought about Chinese defensive reactions and not the other way around. In preferring Russia over China, they had to play down in addition the fact that the Soviet Union also supported North Vietnam.

Although the United States was constantly accusing them otherwise, the Chinese had based their foreign policy publicly on peaceful coexistence since 1954 and in fact this doctrine always had guided China's actions. The People's Republic had operated extremely circumspectly in foreign affairs, moving outside its borders only once (in Korea) and then only to protect its national interests.

The Chinese also were and had been extremely hesitant in their support of Communist movements in Asia. They practiced cautious diplomacy in a contest between the Communist Pathet Lao and U.S.-supported elements in Laos. They eschewed a radical revolutionary line in their dealings with Cambodia and Thailand. In the Geneva conference of 1954 they opted for a peaceful solution of the Vietnam War with France to the detriment of the Communist Vietminh. They gave Red insurgents in Burma little or no aid and in 1960 signed a border agreement which met practically all of Burma's claims. They concluded a treaty of friendship and nonaggression with Afghanistan in 1960 and acted with extreme caution in Indonesia, despite aggressive action by the Jakarta government against the large Chinese resident population.4

The Chinese leadership demonstrated it was not interested in committing its armies in hopes of gaining socialism in foreign countries. The Chinese claimed that violent revolution was necessary to overthrow imperialism but that did not mean that China itself was going to invade foreign countries and forcibly convert them to socialism. Rather, the Chinese expected indigenous forces within countries to rise up and drive out imperialists.

In regard to Taiwan, U.S. leaders found themselves boxed into an intellectual impasse which required Red China to be the aggressor, since the only other logical answer was that the United States was the aggressor. Having formally adopted the island and Chiang Kai-shek as a result of the mutual-defense treaty of 1955, American leaders in effect ignored the position taken both by Chiang and the Communists: that Taiwan was a part of China. The United States worked diligently to promote "two Chinas" and fought Beijing's position that the resolution of the Taiwan problem was an internal Chinese matter in which the U.S. had no right to meddle. The only way Chiang Kai-shek could get around the logical inferences of Taiwan being a part of China was to maintain that the Chinese Communists were not indigenous elements but represented a conspiracy of world conquest directed by the Kremlin. In light of the Sino-Soviet split and Moscow's efforts to promote a peaceful rapprochement with the West, the idea of the Chinese Communists being agents of a Kremlin-directed conspiracy had become ludicrous. Yet the United States had no right to hold Taiwan as a protectorate if both sides contending in the Taiwan strait were domestic factions. It therefore overlooked the facts and continued to maintain the fiction of a conspiracy.

Few other countries accepted the American position and by September, 1961, the U.S. policy of excluding the People's Republic from the United Nations was on the verge of collapsing. In a State Department paper, the administration acknowledged that the American UN tactic of maintaining a "moratorium" on Red China's admission (and Nationalist China's expulsion) could not be sustained much longer.5 The American position had almost come unglued in 1960 when forty-two nations voted for the moratorium, thirty-four against and twenty-two abstained. Several nations warned they were voting with the U.S. for the last time. Fortunately for the United States, Beijing raised no challenge in the UN and the Soviet Union did not contest the status quo except formally.

* * * * * * * * * *

Although the Moscow conference of eighty-one Communist parties in November, 1960, patched over the differences between the Soviets and the Chinese, the dispute in fact accelerated in 1961 and 1962.6

Accentuating the conflict was a growing Chinese anxiety concerning its frontiers. In 1961, Moscow sold India eight four-engine troop transports and a number of helicopters capable of operating at 17,000 feet. These aircrft could be used to ferry soldiers to Ladakh in northern Kashmir and then lift them into the Aksai Chin occupied by China but claimed by India.

In 1961-62 the economic dislocations of the Great Leap Forward prompted non-Han peoples in Xinjiang province to join ethnic kinsmen inside the Soviet Union, where they enjoyed better living standards. The growing exodus alarmed Beijing and in May, 1962, it imposed restrictions. The result was a series of local riots which the People's Liberation Army suppressed. In July, 1962, China closed all Soviet consulates in Xinjiang and transformed the border into a security zone with all residents evacuated. Beijing later accused Moscow of attempting to "detach" Xinjiang from China.7

During May, 1962, tens of thousands of Chinese refugees crossed the border into Hong Kong. This movement focused world attention upon the economic chaos in China which still had not recovered from the Great Leap. At the same time, the Nationalists on Taiwan gave the impression they might, with American help, launch an invasion of the mainland in hopes of capitalizing on the economic disorder. During the first three weeks of June, the PLA rushed more than a hundred thousand troops into regions opposite Taiwan. And on June 23, 1962, the Chinese ambassador at Warsaw warned the U.S. against supporting Chiang Kai-shek in an attack on the mainland. Four days later President Kennedy eased the tension by announcing that U.S. policy opposed the use of force in the area.8

In August, 1962, Moscow informed Beijing that it had accepted an American proposal to halt nuclear proliferation by banning transfer of nuclear information to nonnuclear countries. Although the Soviet Union had withdrawn from its atomic assistance program with China in 1959, Beijing viewed the new agreement as a direct slap at China's efforts to build a nuclear bomb and a sign of Soviet willingness to accommodate the United States. Also during the summer, Moscow agreed to deliver MIG jet fighters to India and to permit India to build MIGs under license, another sign that Russia was siding with New Delhi against Beijing.9

In October, 1962, the virtual last remnants of Sino-Soviet solidarity collapsed as a result of two great international crises, one in Cuba and the other along the Indo-Chinese frontier.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1962 Indian army patrols had advanced into areas disputed between India and China along the Himalayas. In mid-September, 1962, Beijing warned New Delhi it was "playing with fire" and proposed negotiations without prior conditions.10 New Delhi made no response. Meanwhile, several serious incidents resulted in casualties on both sides. By October 20 Indian troops had crossed the McMahon line in the North East Frontier Agency in eastern India and had thus gone beyond even the farthest point claimed by India as its territory.

On this date the PLA launched a large-scale offensive against the Indian attacks in the northeast and in the Aksai Chin. Chinese troops shattered Indian forces and within days had driven deep into the Frontier Agency toward the line a hundred miles south claimed by China. In the Aksai Chin the Chinese were equally successful and advanced to the frontier line they claimed along the Himalayan ridges but did not cross it. After one week, Chinese forces halted while Beijing assessed reactions from New Delhi, Moscow and Washington.

The superpowers, however, were preoccupied with a far more urgent and dangerous crisis. On October 22, President Kennedy announced the U.S. government had unmistakable evidence that the Soviet Union had installed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba which could deliver nuclear strikes to large portions of the United States and Central America, including the Panama Canal. Kennedy declared "a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba" on Soviet freighters. The confrontation ended on October 27 when Kennedy assured Khrushchev that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its missiles and dismantle its bases.

Although China supported the Soviet Union while the missile crisis was in full cry, it swiftly shifted to criticism once it ended. Beijing publicly accused Moscow of "adventurism" for having put the missile sites into Cuba in the first place and for "capitulationism" for agreeing to pull them out under American threat.

Meanwhile the Indian government, despite the fact that its army had suffered a crushing defeat, remained intransigent. This prompted a resumption of the Chinese attack. By November 20, 1962, the PLA had routed the Indian army and gained the entire North East Frontier Agency and was standing on the verge of the Assam plain. On this date, however, Beijing announced a unilateral cease-fire and complete withdrawal from the Frontier Agency in the northeast but retained control of the entire Aksai Chin in the west. This action foreclosed any possibility of action against China by American forces.11

Although Beijing on its own and without help from New Delhi had finally brought a conclusion to the border dispute with India, the crisis only worsened with the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet dispute degenerated into mutual name calling. Khrushchev, stung by Chinese accusations that he'd been cowardly by giving in to the American ultimatum on Cuba, taunted the Chinese in December, 1962, for their lack of courage in dealing with the "imperialist colonialists" in the British crown colony of Hong Kong and the Portuguese enclave of Macao (opposite Hong Kong).12

Beijing responded with a list of territories China had lost to Russia during the period of unequal treaties from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. The Chinese noted at least half a million square miles of land lost in central Asia, parts of southern Siberia and the maritime province (containing Vladivostok). The Chinese statement demanded that the Soviet Union acknowledge the present-day Sino-Soviet frontier was a result of illegal treaties. It was an extremely provocative statement and threw open a highly divisive issue that both sides had kept closed during the years of Sino-Soviet cooperation.13

On July 25, 1963, the Soviet Union signed a test-ban treaty with the United States and Britain, prohibiting nuclear tests in the atmosphere. One of the principal reasons President Kennedy worked for the treaty was to get assistance of the Soviet Union in preventing China from developing its own nuclear deterrent. He also envisioned a "stable world order" dominated by the two superpowers. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev never showed interest in agreeing to such an unholy alliance and refused, moreover, either to attempt to pressure China to halt its nuclear-development program or to join with the U.S. in making a preemptive strike to destroy the Chinese facilities at Lop Nur in Xinjiang province. The United States was unwilling to make a strike at Lop Nur alone for fear it might reunite China with the Soviet Union.14

The Chinese, who were closing in on achieving their own nuclear detonation, wanted no restraints on their experiments. Beijing called Moscow's signing ideological heresy, political betrayal and direct threats to the interests of both the Soviet Union and China.15

An assassin shot and killed President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, continued Kennedy's policy with Red China. The first briefing President Johnson got on the Far East in November, 1963, claimed that Communist China was embarked on a drive for domination of Asia. "Communist China, with its 700 million people and ruthlessly aggressive regime, casts a shadow over all of Asia," the briefing said.16 In light of Red China's unilateral withdrawal from the Sino-Indian war and its circumspect dealings with southeast Asian countries, this extremely hostile appraisal of China shows how little attention Washington was paying to the real behavior of Beijing.

Other countries were not so obtuse. On January 27, 1964, France under Charles de Gaulle finally broke ranks with the United States and extended diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic, while withdrawing it from the Nationalists. This move by a member of the UN Security Council caused rapid erosion of American support in the UN and a rush of new recognitions by Third World countries. By the end of the year seven additional African nations had recognized Beijing, bringing to fifty-two the number of countries which accepted the People's Republic as the legitimate government of China. Even Japan toyed with formal exchange of ambassadors but finally remained loyal to the United States, though extending its informal ties to such a degree that they were tantamount to recognition.17

Meanwhile, the United States, now under the leadership of an activist and increasingly bellicose president, was becoming deeply preoccupied with the advance of the Communists in southeast Asia.

A flimsy accord confirming the neutrality of Laos worked out at a second Geneva conference (which ended in July, 1962) had failed to contain the fighting factions. The situation worsened as North Vietnam used routes through Laos to infiltrate troops and supplies to assist in the guerrilla war against the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government. American attacks through Thai and Laotian intermediaries on the infiltration routes and on Communist Pathet Lao bases raised tensions.18

A U.S.-engineered military coup against the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam had resulted in the death of Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, on November 2, 1963. The U.S. hoped that, by getting rid of Diem, a more efficient leadership could destroy the Communist Vietcong insurrection in South Vietnam. The opposite occurred. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara visited Vietnam in December and reported that the Communists were likely to take over unless American forces intervened in force. This led President Johnson to escalate American involvement in the Vietnam War.19

In early 1964 President Johnson authorized a vastly expanded program of covert actions against North Vietnam. These included parachuting sabotage teams into the north, commando raids to blow up bridges and bombarding North Vietnamese coastal installations with torpedo boats. U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin gathered intelligence information on North Vietnamese radar warning and coastal defenses which might be useful for the raiding parties. The destroyers ran as close as four miles off the North Vietnamese coast to conduct their electronic surveillance.20

On August 2, 1964, two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin were engaged in a spy mission when two North Vietnamese torpedo boats fired on them but caused no damage or casualties. Two days later American destroyers returned at night to the area and again reported they were under attack (these reports later were found to have been in error). President Johnson immediately ordered air strikes against six North Vietnamese naval bases and asked congressional leaders for support. Congress, which did not know the destroyers were spying, responded by passing the fateful "Gulf of Tonkin resolution" on August 7, 1964. This gave Johnson virtually a blank check, authorizing him to take "all necessary measures in support of freedom in southeast Asia," including use of U.S. military forces. The resolution cleared the way for escalating the war, although Johnson delayed making any move until he was safely elected president in November, 1964.21

The harsh American response roused a storm of protest from the Communist world. The Soviet Union wanted to take the matter to the UN and Red China sent Hanoi a squadron of jet fighters piloted by Vietnamese trained in China.22

China warned publicly on August 7 that, if the U.S. invaded "the territory, territorial waters or air space" of North Vietnam, "the Chinese people without hesitation will resolutely support the Vietnamese people's just war against U.S. aggressors." It was a promise of assistance but it stopped short of a threat of intervention. Beijing informed Washington privately that, despite its public declaration, it would not go beyond material aid provided the U.S. did not invade North Vietnam with ground forces and threaten China's frontiers.23

Thus Beijing treated American aggression against North Vietnam in the same fashion as it had that against North Korea: air assaults and naval bombardments would be tolerated but invasion which threatened to eliminate China's strategic buffer and place American forces on the Chinese frontier would bring in direct Chinese intervention.24 Despite President Johnson's arrogance of power, he did not want to step again into the bottomless swamp of a direct military confrontation with Red China. That much, at least, the Korean War had taught him.

Neither the Soviet Union nor China could abandon North Vietnam, though they tried to distance themselves from the struggle.25 President Johnson ordered sustained American air attacks on North Vietnam in early 1965 and soon thereafter Washington began a massive buildup of American ground forces in South Vietnam.26

Nikita Khrushchev fell from power in a virtual coup on October 14, 1964, with Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin succeeding him. Two days after the dramatic events in Moscow, China finally exploded its first atomic bomb. The achievement was due mostly to the exertions of China's own scientists. In informing President Johnson about the event, Zhou Enlai declared that "at no time and in no circumstances will China be the first to use nuclear weapons."27 China's development of the A-bomb (though it still had yet to explode a hydrogen bomb) changed the view of other nations about China. Joining the nuclear club demonstrated that China had come of age technologically and militarily, although it was still well behind the U.S. and the Soviet Union in development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering atomic warheads.

Nevertheless, China now stepped fully upon the world stage as a great power. This immediately brought forth a rash of proposals for the U.S. to "move off dead center" in its China policy. Most observers recognized it was useless to attempt to talk with Beijing about limitation of nuclear weapons, or at least testing of them, unless the United States was willing to recognize the People's Republic and stop blocking its membership in the United Nations. But the Johnson administration relied on public-opinion polls which, in the absence of any positive statements from Washington about China, still reflected suspicion of the People's Republic. The result was that President Johnson made no change in policy.

Indeed, when he reported on the Chinese nuclear explosion in a television and radio speech on October 18, 1964, Johnson reflected the same anti-China bias of his predecessors. He said China "fools no one when it offers to trade away its first small accumulation of nuclear power against the mighty arsenals of those who limit Communist Chinese ambitions." Thus Johnson accused the Chinese of threatening to use their nuclear bombs aggressively, though China never in fact did so.28

American persistence in trying to exclude China from world counsels appeared enormously foolish now that China had exploded an A-bomb. This was clear to James C. Thomson, Jr., an advisor to the assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs. In a memo to McGeorge Bundy, the president's national-security chief, Thomson proposed "modified containment—plus subversion." By subversion he meant "the careful use of free-world goods, people and ideas—instruments which have proven their long-term corrosive value in our relations with other totalitarian societies."

Thomson suggested that Secretary of State Dean Rusk casually remark that the U.S. had already accorded de facto recognition to Red China by means of the ambassadorial-level talks at Geneva and Warsaw and that the real problem was Beijing's continued threat to Taiwan and its neighbors. Thomson thought such a low-key remark would move the U.S. toward "one China, one Taiwan."29

The plan, of course, was doomed because Thomson proposed no change in the numbing American commitment to Chiang Kai-shek. He wanted to avoid igniting public concern over formal recognition of Beijing and its admission to the United Nations. This would be, he said, "a move that I would regard as of little value and of very low priority as long as we maintain our commitments to the security and independence of Taiwan."30

China's success in developing atomic weapons made no difference in relations with the Soviet Union. Zhou Enlai flew to Moscow on November 5, 1964, for high-level talks with the new Soviet leaders but he returned with Sino-Soviet relations about where they had been before Khrushchev's ouster.31

Chapter 44: The Cultural Revolution >>

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