标题: 1959.12 红色中国对亚洲的影响 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-20 02:01 标题: 1959.12 红色中国对亚洲的影响 Red China's Impact on Asia
A. DOAK BARNETT, who was born and brought up in China, has spent most of his professional life studying Chinese affairs. A former member of the State Department, Mr. Barnett is now program associate at the Ford Foundation. This article is drawn from his new book, COMMUNIST CHINA AND ASIA: CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN POLICY, to be published by Harper for the Council on Foreign Relations early next year.
By A. Doak Barnett
DECEMBER 1959 ISSUE
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BY A. DOAK BARNETT
IN THE decade since the Chinese Communists established the Peking regime, Mao Tse-tung and his followers, while steadily improving their domestic base for national power, have worked persistently to achieve ambitious foreign policy goals. It is important that these goals, and the Chinese Communists’ strategy in pursuing them, be understood. It is essential to ask some fundamental questions. How do the Chinese Communists look at the world? What do they feel China’s role in it should be? What are they attempting to achieve, and how do their day-to-day foreign policy tactics relate to long-range strategic concepts?
There can be disagreement about many of Communist China’s aims, but Peking’s leaders are explicit in stating one thing: they are determined to be accepted as a great power. Premier Chou En-lai stated this bluntly in 1956; Communist China’s views, he said, should be heard “in the settlement of any major international issue.”
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In addition, the Chinese Communists obviously accept a new version of “Asia for the Asians” and seem confident that, if Western influence can be expelled from Asia, Communist China will automatically become the dominant power in the region. One of the clearest statements of this idea was made by Chou at the Geneva Conference in 1954. “We hold,” he declared, “that interference in the internal affairs of Asian nations be stopped, all foreign military bases in Asia be removed, foreign armed forces stationed in Asia be withdrawn, the remilitarization of Japan be prevented, and all economic blockades and restrictions be abolished.” This was a frank and concise way of saying, leave Asia to us.
In the Chinese Communists’ eyes, the United States is their principal enemy. It is the only nation now capable of counterbalancing their power and blocking the achievement of many of their basic aims. All nations allied with the United States are labeled contemptuously as mere “tools of imperialism.”
Peking’s leaders place special importance on the role of Japan as the key nation in terms of regional security. Liu Shao-chi, who succeeded Mao as Chairman of the Republic when Mao retired from this post, has stated this very clearly. “It would be impossible for American imperialism or any other imperialist power to launch largescale aggressive war in the Far East without Japan as a base,” Liu declared in 1953, adding, “It can be said that peace in the Far East is assured as long as it is possible to prevent the resumption of aggression and violation of peace by Japan or any other state that may collaborate with Japan.”
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There are other areas on China’s immediate periphery which Peking also regards as being of particular importance to its national interests. Of prime importance, of course, is Taiwan. The Chinese Communists look on Taiwan as unliberated Chinese territory, and in this sense not a foreign policy issue at all. Although they apparently hope to win Taiwan eventually without risking a major war with the United States, they will certainly continue attempting to probe, threaten, and subvert the Chinese Nationalist and American position, and for this reason the Taiwan Strait area will undoubtedly continue to be dangerous and potentially explosive for a long time to come.
The Chinese Communists are sensitive about all their border areas, and, like most strong Chinese rulers in the past, they have exerted pressure at many points on China’s circumference. Undoubtedly, Peking now regards both North Korea and North Vietnam as buffer areas of great importance, and it would probably go to great lengths to prevent any serious military threat to China arising in or from either area. It has probed the undefined boundary of Burma and created serious doubts about China’s intentions regarding some of its other borders which are as yet not clearly settled. Conceivably, at some time in the future, the Chinese Communists might put forth irredentist claims elsewhere, to Hong Kong and Macao, as they have to Tibet and certain Indian and Burmese territories, and they might someday try to re-establish claims to territory in Outer Mongolia or in the Soviet Far East, where the Chinese once were predominant.
Yet, despite the fact that Peking’s leaders, like the leaders of any modern nation, have a great and real concern about territorial questions, national security problems, and similar issues, these do not provide the sole key to an understanding of their view of the world. The key must also be sought in their ideological convictions. There is no doubt that these men are genuine revolutionaries, with a strong sense of mission to speed up the course of an “inevitable” world revolution. Ideology clearly molds Peking’s strategy and provides the rationale for both the ends and means of its foreign policy. While the Chinese Communists are pragmatic in interpreting their ideology, it would be a great error to believe that ideology is no more than a meaningless cloak for their national interests. It is, in fact, a basic determinant of their strategy.
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THE Chinese Communists see the world as engaged in a prolonged, continuous, and intense revolutionary struggle, and this simple fact has profound implications. They are not fundamentally concerned with freezing the existing status quo, stabilizing situations, or permanently solving problems. Instead, they are interested in promoting constant change, in the hope that each change, however small, will further their longterm aims. They view the world-wide struggle as one in which great social, economic, and political forces—some identified with particular national states and others cutting across national lines — are contending for supremacy.
Consequently, international relations are not only a matter of conventional dealings between governments. Government-to-government relations are regarded as important, it is true; but equally important in Peking’s eyes is the necessity of using every possible means, formal and informal, overt and covert, to influence social trends, political opinions, and economic conditions within foreign countries, in order to exert an indirect influence on the policies of other governments, and, in favorable situations, to promote revolutionary changes.
Viewing the world in this fashion, the Chinese Communist leaders have a very sophisticated philosophy of power, evolved during their own struggle within China. They certainly believe that there is an intimate relationship between military and political power. In an oft-quoted statement, Mao Tse-tung declared bluntly over two decades ago: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. . . . Anything can grow out of the barrel of a gun.”
Yet the Chinese Communists also recognize that power in the modern world is the product of many complex factors — political, economic, and psychological, as well as military — a product of people and ideas as well as guns. They attach extraordinary importance, in fact, to men’s minds and appear to believe that by manipulating them they can gain control over basic social forces and thereby offset the power even of enemies with greater military strength. Therefore, despite the great emphasis which they place on the need for military power, their concept of continuing world revolution is not a simple idea of military conquest. It involves a strategy which is far more complex and subtle than overt military expansionism.
In translating strategy to tactics, the Chinese Communists are masters of the zigzag. Although tactical opportunism is characteristic of Communists everywhere, Mao and his followers have elaborated a doctrine of flexibility, growing out of the revolution in China, which has a unique Chinese flavor. Thinking, as they do, in longrange terms, they are prepared to make tactical retreats when necessary, without abandoning their constant striving toward ultimate goals. “To defend in order to attack, to retreat in order to advance, to take a flanking position in order to go straight: these,” Mao once said, “are the inevitable phenomena in the process of development of any event or matter. All of us know that in a boxing contest a wise boxer usually yields a step.”
Most important of all, the Chinese Communists see an unceasing contest between two camps: Moscow, Peking, and the so-called “camp of peace” on the one side, the United States and its allies in the “imperialist camp” on the other. Each situation, each problem, and each issue is evaluated in terms of its relationship to this basic struggle and to the fundamental aim of steadily enlarging the size, strength, and influence of the Communist sphere.
Between these two poles are the colonial and semicolonial countries, the uncommitted nations, and the broad area which Lenin regarded as the “rear bases” of imperialism, without which the capitalist world would crumble. The Chinese Communists look on this area as a political battleground, a primary focus of the struggle between the two camps, and they feel that China, as the Asian partner in the Sino-Soviet alliance, must play a very large role in the Communists’ approaches to this area.
WITHIN the broad framework set by its longrange goals, Peking, in close coordination with Moscow, has made several tactical shifts in its foreign policy in the past decade, and among the most important have been its changes of approach toward the non-Communist Asian nations which, in its view, belong to the colonial and semicolonial world. These shifts have had far-reaching effects on Communist China’s relations with all of Asia. The most striking contrast is between the peaceful-coexistence tactics which Peking, and the entire Communist bloc, evolved during 1952 to 1954 and the militantly revolutionary posture which the Chinese Communists adopted when they first came to power.
In their first flush of victory in 1949, the Party leaders, apparently confident that their own success would give a decisive impetus to Communist insurrections throughout Asia, openly and unabashedly proclaimed their broad revolutionary aims. Calling for armed struggle wherever possible, Liu Shao-chi declared that “The path taken by the Chinese people ... is the path that should be taken by the peoples in the various colonial and semicolonial countries in their fight for national independence and people’s democracy.” All the non-Communist leaders in Asia, including those in the nonaligned nations, were regarded as “running dogs” and “hirelings” of the “imperialists.”
Five years later, Peking and the Communist bloc as a whole had put on a new and very different face. The Chinese Communists embarked on a major diplomatic campaign to woo the nonCommunist governments of Asia, and in particular the governments of the nonaligned nations. In April, 1954, they signed an important agreement with India embodying the now famous “five principles of peaceful coexistence,” in which Peking pledged its noninterference in other countries’ affairs.
Chou En-lai soon converted these principles into a major theme song with which he attempted to attract the nonaligned nations into alignment with the Communist bloc in one broad “zone of peace.” “Revolution is not for export,” Chou blandly assured the Indians, the Burmese, and others. And then, at the Bandung Conference of Asian and African nations in early 1955, he adopted a conciliatory posture which had a wide impact on many Asians. We “come here to seek unity, not to quarrel,” Chou declared at Bandung; all Asian nations should “seek common ground,” and this would be found, he said, in “doing away with the sufferings and calamities of colonialism.”
Since that time, the entire Communist bloc, pursuing this peaceful-coexistence approach, has made vigorous efforts to attract the non-Communist countries of Asia. Despite the recent hardening of its policies, Peking seems likely to continue these tactics for a long time, unless it decides that the balance of world forces has swung drastically in the Communists’ favor. Clearly, Peking, Moscow, and their allies now feel that, with the world balance as it stands, they must concentrate on influencing the existing governments in nonCommunist Asia, while standing ready to exploit revolutionary situations within these countries if and when they occur.
Peking’s policy is never confined exclusively to either blandishments or pressures, however. Attraction is always mixed with intimidation and subversion, even though the recipe constantly changes. This fact is probably clear to a good many more Asians now than it was during 1955 and 1956, when the Bandung spirit was at its height. Since the latter half of 1957, Peking has shown a new militancy in its foreign policy, and this has greatly affected Communist China’s relations with the rest of Asia.
Communist China has applied new pressures or threats in a variety of ways and places: by banning all trade with Japan; hinting at its willingness to send “volunteers” to the Middle East and Indonesia; using its own brand of brinkmanship in bombarding Quemoy; engaging in cutthroat economic competition in Southeast Asia; issuing warnings to South Vietnam about its activities in the Paracel Islands, which Peking claims; and exerting strong pressures on India and Laos. These pressures and threats have greatly tarnished the five principles, even in the eyes of Asians who have been most predisposed to view the Chinese Communist regime sympathetically.
Yet, it would be a mistake to conclude that Peking has abandoned its general tactics of peaceful coexistence. It seems likely that, while its blend of attraction and intimidation may vary from time to time, Peking will continue focusing its efforts on the short-term aim of separating the non-Communist Asian nations from the West and aligning them with the Communist bloc, while steadily working to build up Communist China’s prestige and influence throughout Asia.
IN PURSUING its foreign policy goals, Peking has numerous instruments of policy at its command: its military power, both conventional diplomacy and “people’s diplomacy,” trade and aid, the Overseas Chinese, and the Communist parties throughout Asia.
Communist China’s military forces, reorganized and modernized since 1949, are now probably stronger than the military establishments of all the non-Communist nations of the Far East, Southeast Asia, and South Asia combined. Peking has two and a half million men in its People’s Liberation Army, backed by millions more in its reserves and its militia; 2500 planes in its air force, 1800 or more of them jets; and a navy which, although small, is nevertheless the largest indigenous naval force in the Far East. All of these forces are supported by continuing Soviet assistance and advice.
For the past several years, there has been a rough sort of balance between American atomic weapons and Chinese manpower, and Peking, in the name of peaceful coexistence, has refrained from bringing the full weight of its military power to bear on its Asian neighbors. Nevertheless, Communist China’s growing strength has steadily enhanced its international prestige and its ability to make its political weight felt in Asian affairs. No country on China’s periphery can today overlook the fact that Peking, even when speaking softly, carries a big stick.
But until recently, in pursuing tactics of competitive coexistence, the Chinese Communists have de-emphasized military pressure on their neighbors and have made vigorous efforts to expand their influence throughout the Asian-African world by more conventional and respectable political and economic means.
Diplomatically ostracized by the United States and excluded from most international bodies, Peking has nevertheless steadily expanded its contacts abroad. Its successes have been most notable in South and Southeast Asia and in the Middle East and North Africa, where it has been able to establish diplomatic relations with Burma, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, the U.A.R., Yemen, Ceylon, Cambodia, Iraq, Morocco, and Sudan. At the height of Chou En-lai’s freewheeling drive to broaden and develop Communist China’s diplomatic influence, during 1954 to 1956, the Chinese Communists signed numerous joint statements and communiqués with the leaders of nonaligned nations in Asia, and they concluded several important intergovernmental agreements with India, Indonesia, and others.
In all of its diplomatic dealings, Peking has persistently worked toward certain limited aims: to arouse and exploit anticolonial resentments, to reinforce neutralism, to highlight existing areas of agreement between the Communist bloc and the newly independent nations, to mobilize support for the Communists’ views on issues such as the control of atomic weapons, and in subtle ways to align the nonaligned nations with the Communist orbit. The impact of its efforts on the AsianAfrican world should not be underestimated. It is true that, since the hardening of the Communists’ policies in 1957, and particularly since Peking’s suppression of revolt in Tibet, many Asians have taken a more critical look at Communist China. But it would be wishful thinking to assume that Peking has lost all of its power of attraction.
ONE of the most remarkable aspects of Communist foreign policy in recent years is the fact that, despite China’s immense domestic economic problems, it has become a major participant in the Communist bloc’s economic offensive, focusing on the underdeveloped areas.
Peking’s total foreign trade has more than doubled in the past decade, rising from $1.8 billion in 1950 to perhaps $4.9 billion in 1958. In contrast to the years before 1949, the bulk of this trade has been with Russia and Eastern Europe, and it has consisted essentially of an exchange of Chinese agricultural products for needed capital goods. Since 1952, however, the Chinese Communists have steadily increased their trade with the non-Communist nations, and they have vigorously promoted trade with the Asian-African area. Peking’s political motives undoubtedly go beyond the simple aim of purchasing good will; since 1958, its strong economic sanctions against Japan and its drastic price cutting, bordering on dumping, in Southeast Asia provide a warning that Peking may be able to use trade as an instrument of direct political pressure.
At present, Communist China is trading with more than eighty non-Communist countries or areas. By early this year, it had signed formal, intergovernmental trade pacts with a wide range of countries in the Asian-African area: India, Afghanistan, Ceylon, Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia, the U.A.R., Lebanon, Nepal, Yemen, Tunis, Morocco, Iraq, and Sudan. Of Peking’s total trade with the non-Communist world, roughly two thirds is now with the Asian-African area, and in the Far East and South and Southeast Asia, Communist China accounts for over two thirds of the entire Communist bloc’s trade. In this trade, the Chinese Communists maintain a large export surplus, and they are steadily expanding their exports of manufactured goods — textiles, other consumer goods, and even some capital goods. They are beginning to compete seriously with Japan and other industrial nations. Between 1954 and 1957, Communist China’s trade with the underdeveloped countries of the Far East and Southeast Asia rose by more than three quarters, at a rate over three times as fast as the increase of Japanese trade with the area.
Peking has also entered into the business of foreign aid. Since 1953, if one includes its aid to other Communist regimes, the Chinese Communists have given more than $750 million in grants and $150 million in loans (this loan figure is incomplete, since the amounts of a few loans have not been announced) to North Korea, North Vietnam, and Outer Mongolia, and have also provided more than $30 million in grants and loans to Hungary.
Communist China’s aid to countries outside the Communist orbit started only in 1956, and to date it has been relatively modest. But the fact that Peking is giving any aid at all to countries in South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East is significant. All of its programs of aid to these countries fall into a definite pattern. They have been given to nonaligned nations, with the clear aim of reinforcing neutralism and building up Communist China’s political prestige as well as its economic influence. Peking’s promises to these countries include grants totaling more than $60 million to Cambodia, Nepal, Egypt, and Ceylon, and loans totaling over $40 million to Yemen, Indonesia, Burma, and Ceylon.
This year, Communist China plans, according to its budget, to deliver over $250 million of foreign aid to both Communist and non-Communist countries. This is particularly remarkable in view of the fact that, as far as is known, Peking itself is not now receiving any financial aid from the Soviet Union in the form of either grants or long-term loans. It is also worth noting that the total foreign aid which Peking plans to deliver this year, if expressed as a percentage of China’s small national income, takes a slice out of economic output which is comparable to that which the United States is allocating to its foreign economic aid programs.
DIPLOMACY, trade, and aid are useful to Peking in its current dealings with existing governments in Asia, but Peking’s ultimate objective is to encourage successful revolutions throughout Asia. In the long run, what it hopes most to export is revolution, and even though its general tactics of peaceful coexistence have forced it to play down this aim for the present and to be discreet and covert about encouraging subversion, the objective remains unchanged.
Among Peking’s various instruments for promoting subversion, the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia have attracted wide attention in recent years. They are certainly important, and in a few key areas they will probably be decisive in determining the shape of the future. But their importance should not be exaggerated; in Peking’s strategy toward Asia as a whole, their role is clearly a subordinate one.
There are about ten million Overseas Chinese living in Southeast Asia. With impressive commercial skills, they have acquired great economic power, and the large majority of them are unassimilated. Almost every Southeast Asian government regards them as a major problem and would like both to reduce their economic influence and to integrate them more fully into the local societies. A large percentage of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia have retained ties of many sorts with their homeland, and both the Communists and the Nationalists have competed actively to obtain their loyalty. Ever since 1949, Peking has devoted major attention to the Overseas Chinese, and with the advantage of its growing power it has manipulated them in various ways to serve its purposes. They provide valuable sources of intelligence as well as channels for financial or other aid to local Communist and proCommunist groups.
Where the Overseas Chinese make up a large proportion of the population, as in Singapore, Malaya, and Thailand, they are potentially an extremely important instrument of Peking’s influence. In all three of these areas, the local Communist movements are essentially Chinese in membership, and without any doubt Peking regards the Overseas Chinese as the key to the future of the entire Malayan peninsula. In Singapore, specifically, the political dangers which they pose are immediate. Communist-manipulated and pro-Peking Chinese laborers and students provide much of the political backing for the People’s Action Party, which won a landslide victory in last summer’s Singapore elections. If these elements were to gain complete control of the PAP, they would undoubtedly try gradually to convert the new state of Singapore, at the crossroads of Southeast Asia, into a political satellite of Peking.
Peking’s strategy elsewhere in Asia depends far more on the indigenous Communist parties than on the Overseas Chinese. Confident that these parties will eventually gain power, the Chinese Communists constantly strive to support them.
Although Communist China’s people’s diplomacy emphasizes so-called cultural relations, it has a strongly subversive purpose. It might, in fact, be called overt subversion. Peking distributes an enormous amount of Communist propaganda in Asia through the conventional media of communication. It has become a mecca for visitors from all over Asia and has arranged exchanges of persons on a wide scale. Even more important, it has supported the establishment within other Asian countries of numerous front organizations which mobilize the support of thousands of nonCommunists behind Communist-sponsored causes. Its aim in all of these activities is to foster favorable, or at least benevolently tolerant, attitudes among key groups in other Asian countries toward Communist China, toward the Communist bloc as a whole, and toward local Communist movements. People’s diplomacy aims at the cultivation of fellow travelers and potential converts to serve both as lobbyists within their own countries for the ideas and policies of the Communist bloc and as backers of local Communist causes.
The spread of Communism in Asia will not be accomplished by fellow travelers, however, and Peking’s main hopes obviously rest upon the hardcore Communist parties in each non - Communist country. Since the early 1920s, the Chinese Communists have maintained links with many of these parties, and, since 1949, Peking has become, along with Moscow, a major center of guidance and support to them. During the past decade it has channeled financial support to the parties in several countries, but its major support, particularly since the world-wide shift in Communist tactics from violent insurrection to political maneuver, has been intangible. Peking has given constant encouragement and advice, and possibly training, to other Asian Communists. The stamp of the Chinese model for revolution has had a wide impact throughout Asia, even though the path of armed insurrection which Peking proclaimed a decade ago as China’s strategic prescription for Asia has been subordinated, at least temporarily.
In the past few years, the growth of Communist strength has been disturbing in many areas. In Indonesia, the Communist Party’s membership is claimed to have jumped from 8000 in 1952 to more than a million in 1957; and in the 1957 local elections, when it received 8 million votes, it emerged as the strongest single party on Java, the center of political power in Indonesia. In Laos, the pro-Communist Pathet Lao, converted into a legal party called the Neo Lao Haksat, won most of the seats which it contested in the 1958 elections. In India, the Communist Party, having doubled its membership between 1952 and 1957, emerged as the second strongest national party in the 1957 elections, and in mid-1959 reverted to insurrectionary tactics.
In the past year or more, the growth of Communism seems to have been checked, for the moment, in some places. Since late 1958, nonCommunist military leaders have taken control or political leaders with military backing have assumed special powers in a number of Asian countries, including Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, Thailand, and Laos. Wherever this has taken place, there has been a clampdown on Communist activities, but, as events in Laos indicate, one cannot conclude that the basic Communist threat has been substantially reduced. Anti-Communist military leaders have assumed new political importance in these countries because of a breakdown of democratic institutions and processes, and it remains to be seen whether the new regimes will be able to strike successfully at the root causes of Communist growth.
In an Asia characterized by continuing revolution, instability, and an uneasy balance of power, the growing power and influence of Communist China pose a major challenge to the United States and all other nations concerned with the future of the region. The United States must recognize that it cannot avoid engaging in a longterm contest with Communist China throughout Asia, a contest which is now, and will continue to be, ideological, political, and economic, as well as military. The tasks which face the United States in this contest are formidable. In direct dealings with Communist China, it must attempt to deter aggression, avoid war, and — to the extent possible — reduce the present acute military tensions on China’s immediate periphery. In meeting the broad challenge which Communist China poses throughout Asia, it must help to build strong nonCommunist states which can maintain their national integrity in the face of both external pressures and internal subversion. These tasks will demand a high level of statesmanship and a far larger commitment of American resources — intellectual, moral, and material — than the United States has been willing to make so far.
红色中国对亚洲的影响
A. 多克-巴尼特（DOAK BARNETT）在中国出生和长大，他的大部分职业生涯都在研究中国事务。巴尼特先生曾是国务院的成员，现在是福特基金会的项目助理。本文摘自他的新书《共产主义中国和亚洲：对美国政策的挑战》，将于明年初由哈珀为外交关系委员会出版。
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在中国的周边地区，还有一些被北京视为对其国家利益特别重要的地区。当然，最重要的是台湾。中国共产党人把台湾视为未解放的中国领土，从这个意义上说，它根本不是一个外交政策问题。虽然他们显然希望在不冒与美国发生重大战争的风险的情况下最终赢得台湾，但他们肯定会继续试图探测、威胁和颠覆中国国民党和美国的立场，由于这个原因，台湾海峡地区在未来很长一段时间内无疑将继续处于危险和潜在的爆炸性状态。
