The coming Cold War with China

Contemplating the cascade of boasts, bluff and bluster, of childish lies and ill-concealed misdirections that pour from the mouth of Donald Trump, it is easy to become transfixed by the performance. Some Americans take guilty pleasure in the transgressive noise generated by his persona. Others shrug and say: “That’s just Donald.” But relatively few understand the damage he has done and is doing to their country.

The damage is not temporary. A political system that can produce such an abject character as its chief representative naturally forfeits general respect, although Trump is not the sole author of America’s journey into unreason: George W. Bush’s two election victories, along with his catastrophic actions after 9/11, gave ample notice of the country’s surrender to political autism. Now the president has threatened China with demands for reparations for its initial handling of the virus, and last weekend (May 3) his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeated a conspiracy theory on an ABC News programme that there is “enormous evidence” the strain of the novel coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China. We are clearly moving into a new, more confrontational phase in the relationship between the world’s two most powerful countries.

Early last month, according to Reuters (May 4), China’s Ministry of State Security presented President Xi Jinping with a report warning that global anti-China sentiment is at its highest level since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. The report’s analysis apparently suggested that Beijing faces a wave of anti-China sentiment led by the US in the wake of the pandemic. In a worst-case scenario, it argued, China needs to be prepared for armed confrontation between the two global powers.

In the US, many tend to see these events as echoes of the original Cold War, as a replay of the stand-off with the Soviet Union which lasted from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That is a mistake. Not only is the US today a vastly different country from the one it was in 1945, China is not the USSR. As ever, reading the present through the prism of the past is a fraught exercise where category errors can lead to disastrous misjudgements.

I am a child of the Cold War, born in London in June, 1948, a fortnight before Stalin began his blockade of Berlin. As I lay in my cot, Douglas C-47 Skytrains and C-54 Skymasters, along with a contingent of British Lancasters and Halifaxes, were streaming into the western sectors of the city. For much of the crisis, which lasted some eleven months in all, the planes were taking off or landing every thirty seconds, twenty-four hours a day. It was the first time in history that a substantial city — West Berlin had a population of over two million at the time — had been supplied entirely from the air.

Forty years later, while making a series of documentaries on the history of the Cold War as seen through Soviet eyes, I met KGB General Sergei Kondrashev in Moscow. As a young recruit, he was stationed in Berlin during the blockade. Looking back to the time when he and his comrades watched the US planes flying into the city’s western sectors every minute, day and night for many months, he told me they felt overawed: “We thought, if the Americans could do this, then there was nothing they couldn’t do…”

The triumph of the airlift stemmed mainly from the abilities and experience of US leaders in the postwar period. They would have much to teach those heading for confrontation with China. The man who established the intellectual framework for the Cold War, George Kennan, was a US diplomat, a fluent Russian and German-speaker who wrote the famous Long Telegram in February, 1946 while posted as an official at the US Embassy in Moscow. It is called “Long” but in fact, given the ground it covers, it’s remarkably short: nine concise, penetrating pages which succinctly summarise the “Soviet outlook” in the wake of the recent war. It covered the historical and philosophical premises on which that outlook was based, the policies the USSR might adopt as a result and, finally,  the “practical deductions from standpoint of US policy,” as Kennan put in telegrammatic prose. His essential conviction was that what was required of the US administration was clarity and honesty towards both the American people and the world. “I am convinced,” he observed, “that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if [the] realities of this situation were better understood by our people.”

The following year he published an article in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym, Mr X, entitled: “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”. Here he articulated his concept of containment, which became the basic premise of the western alliance during the cold war. “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union,” Kennan wrote, “must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

These tendencies, he explained, were constitutive premises of the Soviet system, derived from Marxist-Leninist ideology and also from circumstances, particularly the fact that when they seized power, “the Communists represented only a tiny minority of the Russian people”. This in itself, he wrote,  “made the establishment of dictatorial power a necessity”.

Kennan did not welcome the contest with the Soviet Union. Even so, containment was necessary in his view because a confrontation was inevitable. Armed conflict, though, wasn’t. In resisting what Kennan called, rightly, a “mystical, Messianic movement” which held absolute power over the lands of the former Russian empire, his aim was to fashion a course of action likely to lead to a peaceful outcome. “Such a policy,” Kennan argued, “has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward “toughness.”

He wrote:

“While the Kremlin is basically flexible in its reaction to political realities… like almost any other government, it can be placed by tactless and threatening gestures in a position where it cannot afford to yield even though this might be dictated by its sense of realism. The Russian leaders are keen judges of human psychology, and as such they are highly conscious that loss of temper and of self-control is never a source of strength in political affairs. They are quick to exploit such evidences of weakness. For these reasons, it is a sine qua non of successful dealing with Russia that the foreign government in question should remain at all times cool and collected and that its demands on Russian policy should be put forward in such a manner as to leave the way open for a compliance not too detrimental to Russia.”

The western response to Stalin’s blockade of Berlin was a stunning example of a policy based on these considerations. Stalin had cut off West Berlin, which was an island under western control in the Soviet sector of defeated Germany. No trains or vehicles could pass through the Soviet checkpoints surrounding the city without the possibility of an armed confrontation. The US and the British were determined to assert their rights as occupying powers without risking a pitched battle with their former Soviet allies, with all the incalculable consequences such a clash could bring in its train. The airlift was an extraordinary technical and political feat which forced Stalin to stand down his blockade before a year was out, just as Kennan had suggested he might. The planes involved in the airlift — mainly American but nearly a quarter from Britain, along with contingents from France, Canada, Australia and other allied nations — flew well over 200,000 sorties, delivering more than 1.78 million tons of supplies of food and fuel while flying over 92 million miles in the process.

The men in charge of US policy at the time were veterans of two world wars. The US Secretary of State was George C.Marshall, a five-star general and former Army Chief of Staff who, during World War Two, organised the largest military expansion in US history. Lucius D. Clay was Commander-in-Chief, US Occupation Zone of Germany, a military engineer who had been the youngest brigadier general in the US Army and deputy to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Forces, Europe.

Eisenhower himself, later president, was at the time back in Washington as Army Chief of Staff. These were men of proven toughness, experience and acumen, leaders who, having seen the worst that humans could do, were prepared to do their duty without flinching. The president, Harry Truman, was also a former soldier who, during the First World War, had been promoted to captain in France. He led his battery through heavy fighting in the Meuse-Argonne campaign at the end of the war which, according to the US National Archives, was the deadliest campaign in American history, with over 120,000 casualties.

Like George Kennan, these were the last people who would think it clever to strike provocative poses, to make threats they couldn’t carry out or try to bluff potential opponents. The Soviet Union of the time was a genuine adversary. Led by Stalin, it had both the long-term aim and, certainly in the late 1940s, the military means to challenge the western alliance of democracies. Stalin was not a man given to flights of fancy. He despised the dreamers and intellectuals attracted to the left and presented himself as their polar opposite — a pragmatist and realist.

Yet he was only a realist “north-north-west”, to paraphrase Hamlet: when the wind was southerly, he couldn’t tell a hawk from a handsaw. Lacking intellectual originality, he had taken his conception of the Soviet mission wholesale from Lenin. While a first-degree paranoiac with an unlimited capacity for cruelty, he was also a reasonably competent administrator who gave Soviet rule a structure and system. His failure, and that of his successors up to Gorbachev, was an obdurate refusal to see that Lenin’s mission was unachievable.

In the 1992, I interviewed Alexander Yakovlev in Moscow. As one of Gorbachev’s closest allies, he was the chief architect of Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness). A penetrating intellect and an intrinsically honest man, he looked back over his life as a senior figure in the party’s ideological apparatus and accepted the truth: “The system was bound to break down, sooner or later. The whole mechanism developed as a military-bureaucratic system. And alongside this militarisation, there was the world communist movement, there was the military machine, there was the mobilisation of the people towards universal happiness. And for this you had to militarise consciousness.

“This deformed and militarised consciousness, this confrontational consciousness, is an awful thing, and we are still suffering from it. For a long time, this country has been living on confrontation, that is its essential nature. The ideology was based on lies but it was strongly inside people and inside society. The gap between the ideology and what was happening in actual fact, it was everywhere, in the speeches and in mass information. And along with it you had the ideology of violence and force — if there is something you don’t like, you just cut it out…

“This ideology of violence and this psychology of fear, it is still here. But the truth is we knew this thing, from the beginning, was unrealisable. There was the contradiction between the final goal and what was actually happening, and this enormous bureaucratic machine had to find a way out. As it couldn’t find a way out into world revolution, it began to seek it in the confrontation between these two systems…”

During the Cold War, the Soviet opponent looked like a country but wasn’t: it was, in essence, an ideological construct based on an idea of unending struggle with capitalism and imperialism. Lenin’s concept of the Soviet Union as the bulwark of proletarian internationalism was a deployment of the Russian imperial state for other purposes. Imperial Russia had been a multi-national empire “more than half of whose subjects were not Russians”, in the words of Hugh Seton-Watson, the prominent historian of Russia and Eastern Europe.

For Lenin, the nation was a fiction, and the class interests of notional proletarians far more urgent and decisive than the national, ethnic and religious identities they had inherited. The problem was that “proletarians” are not abstractions but people, and their cultural backgrounds generally form an important part of their consciousness. Despite its contradictions, it was Marxist-Leninist ideology that made the USSR such an uncomfortable adversary for, whatever the casuistry of its formulations, it was clear its demands could never be satisfied and were always merely tactical.

China, by contrast, is a nation, based on a civilisation which goes far back into pre-Christian times. Until very recently, the country remained a commercial and agrarian society to its core, centred on the extraordinarily fertile lands between the two great rivers, the Yangtse (the Chang Jiang — the “Long River”) and the Yellow River (a direct translation of the Chinese, Huang He). In an agrarian society, land was the main source of wealth and the family, the principal refuge from an external world ruled by autocratic power. The importance of the family in Chinese culture is implied by the fact that, in the Chinese world, family names precede personal names.

To understand how such historical and cultural traditions may affect contemporary events, it is worth looking at the two countries’ recent rejection of the Leninist faith to which they had been more or less devoted for a number of decades. For Russia, the collapse of the Soviet mythology in the late 1980s returned the state, at least partially, to its status quo ante where a ruling clique divided up the spoils of power, living off the country’s vast natural resources of land and minerals while the people survived in a reduced condition as well as they could. The Soviet and Russian pasts soon merged as nostalgic resources and, after a wistful, troubled democratic interlude, the future was once again conceived in military and diplomatic terms. This was defined by the familiar aim of restoring national power and respect that stems from Peter the Great’s initial attempt to transform Russia into a great European power in the early 18th century. Removing the shadow of the Russian historic past has proved impossible because, in Russia, there is little else that can replace it.

For China, casting off the Maoist past was a simpler matter. It was fundamentally a dynastic change. The “Mandate of Heaven” had passed from one dynasty to the next. Under the previous dynasty, everyone had worshipped the emperor of the day; now they would obey a new one. According to the paradoxical theology of the Mandate, the Emperor ruled by the will of the Gods and must be obeyed on that account. But if he lost his power and position, whether through rebellion or assassination, why then he had clearly lost the favour of the Gods, which then passed to the one who had replaced him. By this simple, inherently circular device, China was ruled for over two thousand years. Yet the relative ease of dealing with the politics of change — in this case, the transition from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s — was finally only possible because China did not need to invent a civil society, as post-Soviet Russia has struggled to do.

Under Putin, Russia has reverted to its past as an autocratic “security” state, in which the secret police and military play leading roles, and the bulk of the productive economy consists of natural resources. Under the Tsars the resources were agricultural. Now they involve the sale of natural resources. Moving between the two countries, the contrast could hardly be clearer, for China is a genuine civilisation-state with its own essentially hermetic cultural universe. Despite the massive destruction caused by China’s terrible twentieth century culminating in Mao’s many delusions and follies, the nation was far too deeply-rooted and inured to suffering to lose hold of its core values. Through all that had happened, it retained its seductive culture, its deeply-ingrained family structures, the commercial aptitudes of its people, their resilience and practicality, their ethic of civilised virtue. When living in China, I was again and again impressed by the quality and decency of its people, both in small matters and large.

It is true, of course, that China is ruled by the Communist Party, which means it is a one-party state with pervasive censorship, a powerful secret police and a vast apparatus of surveillance. It unhesitatingly resorts to repression against dissenters as well as those who, like the Uyghurs and Tibetans, are suspected of disloyalty or whose customs differ from those of the Han Chinese. These are deplorable realities which cannot be palliated, yet they still do not make China a geopolitical rival of the Soviet type. China’s military ambitions are modest and local and, although they are no doubt growing with its power, there is no suggestion as yet that they are likely to become much more extensive.

Historically, China has always been largely concerned with managing itself, partly because as a huge country, it is not easy for it to do so, but also because it has always known or sensed that its culture is highly distinctive. This is not merely a question of language (although mastering Mandarin to a reasonable level is not a minor task). It is much more a matter of its value system, which has only proved transferable within the “Confucian circle” of neighbouring East Asian countries. You can speak Chinese to a certain level; you can appreciate the culture and qualities of the people; but the more you know, the more you understand that there is no universal model there. To be part of Chinese culture, you have to be Chinese which means, at least, possessing an instinctive understanding of the implicitly hierarchical nature of Chinese social relations, the sense of the collective, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the commandment of delayed gratification and the fear of humiliation. This applies not only to those who may be subject to humiliation but also to those who may inflict it. Much Chinese behaviour is concerned with avoiding placing others in a position where they may feel humiliated, even though in hierarchical structures humiliation is a frequent outcome.

Above all, a Cold War with China would be a gratuitous event for the simple reason that the country has no grand, eschatological dream. It is rather the contrary. China’s dreams are resolutely prosaic. This is partly because, despite the expansion of its economy over the last few decades, it remains a poor country whose primary concern is with economic development. Having experienced a century of chaos, the Chinese deeply fear it. In speaking with Chinese people, pa luan, a fear of chaos, is a readily-offered, shorthand explanation for Chinese political behaviour. Meanwhile, the economic rise of China is a source of national pride, and its people are only too conscious, in the frequently-used Chinese phrase, laizhi-buyi — “it has been hard-won”.

The Chinese Communist Party has been rightly criticised for the country’s relatively slow reaction to the emergence of Covid-19, but the CCP is organised on the Stalinist model, with certain modifications: its departmental structures feed information up the hierarchy. The caution and instinctive unwillingness to bear bad news which tends to pervade such state bureaucracies may well have been at the root of the problem, far more than any of the labyrinthine conspiracies which have spread on the internet. (It’s also possible Xi Jinping was informed but failed to react in a timely manner).

At the same time, in fairness, American and British leaders were also quite slow to recognise the threat of the virus — and they had far less reason for their obtuseness and indolence than nervous, low-level Chinese officials. In this, as in so many other areas, we would do well to heed Kennan’s advice: “loss of temper and of self-control is never a source of strength in political affairs…”. As in dealing with Russia, so with China, “the foreign government in question should remain at all times cool and collected”. Sadly, with characters like Trump in charge, there’s little chance of that.