• How Strong is China?

By BRIAN CROZIER

TItE, vicious energy expended by the Chinese Communists in attacking the American bombing of North Vietnam has been balanced by a singular reluctance to help their Vietnamese allies out of present difficulties. True, they have sent obsolete MiGs, and the flow of minor arms across the border goes on. But by obstructing the flow of Soviet supplies of more modern equip- ment over Chinese territory, the Chinese leaders have shown that they attach more importance to keeping the Russians out of Indochina than to giving the North Vietnamese the tools to cope with the job.

This reticence to get involved may seem sur-

prising at a time when China has exploded its second atom bomb, but it reflects precisely the frustrating inadequacy of Chinese power in its present phase. When Mao Tse-tung told Mr. Edgar Snow earlier this year that China would not fight anybody unless her own territory was attacked, he was simply dealing in current realities. When he told the same interviewer that the 'South Vietnamese liberation forces' did not need the help of Chinese troops, he was serving notice on Ho Chi Minh that Hanoi must go it alone. For consolation, he added that the more US troops and weapons were poured in, the faster the 'people' would win.

China is a formidable land power in limited

actions, such as the Himalayan campaign of 1962, and probably unconquerable in direct invasion, but its 'capability for sustained conventional action on a major scale outside her own borders is poor.' The quotation is from a chapter by Samuel B. Griffith, the distinguished translator of Mao on guerrilla warfare, in a useful new study, China and the Peace of Asia.* Potentially menac- ing though China's advance into the nuclear field certainly is, the net effect of possession of the bomb without—as far as is known—the means 01 delivering it is bound to be that `the Chinese can be expected to be ' even more cautious in taking military action around their periphery than they have been in the past.' This time the words are those of Morton H. Halperin, of Harvard, in

The China Quarterly. who argues that during this Phase, Chinese fear of a pre-emptive attack by the US or Russia must be paramount. The simplest and aptest comment on these expert opinions is that they fit in perfectly with Chairman Mao's reported words. There are many reasons, political and historical as well as mili- tary, for China's strategic frustration in Vietnam.

sChatto and Windus for the Institute for Strategic Studies (30s.). It is tempting but misleading to draw a parallel between Vietnam now and Korea fifteen years ago. The technological gap between China's equipment and America's is much greater now than it was then. When the Chinese `People's Volunteers' crossed the Yalu river in 1950, the ink was not long dry on the Sino-Soviet Treaty. Today, though neither party has formally de- nounced it, the grand alliance between the giants of Communism lies in ruins. Until the departure of the Soviet technicians from China in 1960, the Chinese armed forces were receiving reason- ably up-to-date Soviet equipment—short of nuclear weapons (Moscow's refusal to give China such weapons, or the secrets of their manufac- ture, being one of the main reasons for the rift between them). Today the growing obsolescence of much of China's equipment, especially that of the air force, is thought to be one of Peking's most nagging preoccupations.

It was in full possession of such facts that President Johnson decided on his present policy of limited escalation in Vietnam. His advisers were presumably aware that the escalation would indeed be limited, not only by China's inability and unwillingness to reply, but by the even more frustrating situation of the Soviet Union. Active Soviet intervention would run counter to the

• long-term policy of military rapprochement with the United States and threaten a repetition of the painful nuclear confrontation of October 1962. Supposing, however, that the Russians were will- ing to run such risks: they would run into Chinese objections that such aid as the Soviet Union has given to North Vietnam has been `merely for the purpose of making capital out of it in order to bargain with the US, undermine the anti-US revolutionary struggle of the people of Vietnam . .. and serve US imperialism.'

The risk of another Korea must, of course, be taken seriously, should the Americans and their

South Vietnamese allies make the cardinal error of attempting to invade North Vietnam. But even then, the Chinese would be less advan- tageously placed to intervene than they were in 1950. For one thing, North Vietnam—an over- crowded and poverty-stricken half-country, wrestini a depressed sustenance from the over- worked Red River Delta—is even less able to feed a collaborating army than was North Korea. For another, this is not—as too many people have supposed it is—China's war. It is, in fact, an irredentist North Vietnamese affair, launched by Ho Chi Minh to fulfil historical and personal ambitions in which the wish to escape from China's embrace may well be uppermost.

To suppose that a `liberating' Chinese army would be welcome in Vietnam is to set aside all the lessons of Vietnamese history. Even to take it for granted that China would rejoice in a North Vietnamese victory is questionable. A penurious Communist half-country is a reason- ably pliant satellite; a united Vietnam, richer by the acquisition of southern rice and with irredentist designs on Laos and Cambodia, would be a tougher handful.

What, then, is China's interest in the Viet- namese conflict? To get the Americans out of the South-East Asian mainland, certainly, if this can be done by fighting to the last Vietnamese. But not at the cost of a military embroilment with the United States. Indeed, reflecting on the consequences of North Vietnamese policy during the past few years, Mao and his associates can- not be entirely happy. Until 1961, the United States had only a few hundred military men in South Vietnam, of no conceivable danger to China. The build-up and escalation are responses to the Vietcong's `war of liberation'; both have brought the threat of war to China's doorstep.

To keep the Russians out is another element in China's interest in Vietnam. There are a number of reasons for this, one being a desire to reduce the weight of Russia's presence if and when a peace conference takes place. Another reason is to make it impossible for Russia to claim the credit for any North Vietnamese success and show up China's inability to defend Hanoi.

But the most powerful consideration of all is simply that relations with Russia are now too bad for any fruitful co-operation in Hanoi's interest.

Several hundred thousand Chinese troops are reported to have been massed along the Sinkiang border with the Soviet Union, in addition to those that threaten India and guard the Amoy hinter- land against Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. You man a border where you expect trouble, and China has already had plenty of trouble from Russia along their interminable common boundary. Moreover, Peking's terms for ideological peace with Moscow are simple, apparently irreversible and quite unacceptable. As Chinese reactions to the miserably depleted inter- national Communist meeting in Moscow in March confirmed beyond doubt, the Soviet leaders can have peace and unity any time they wish. All they need do is to admit their error and accept the Chinese Communist party's views on war, revolution and other disputed issues. This would mean, inter alia, a reversion to Stalin's total hostility towards the West. And if Mr. Kosygin and Mr. Brezhnev don't want to go that far, let them ponder the Chinese threat to keep up the argument, if need be, 10,000 years.

If one turns now from China and Vietnam to China and the world as a whole, one finds little to bring comfort. Mr. Richard Harris and others have argued from time to time that China is in no sense a threat to its neighbours. It de- pends, I suppose, what one means by a threat. I find it more logical to qUestion, as Dr. Coral Bell does, in The World Today, why 'China, unlike all other powers, should be uninterested in the power competition even round her own periphery.'

The facts are simple and sobering. Mao Tse- tuag's tremendous achievement has been to restore central authority over a vast area that very nearly corresponds to that of the Ch'ing empire at its height. The most ethnocentric of the world's great peoples again finds itself ruled from the centre, more firmly than ever before, in the. Middle Kingdom of Chinese tradition, press- ing outwards- against the Barbarians. Tibet has been subdued and ruthlessly colonised by Han Chinese, as is true of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang. India has been humiliated. Cam- bodia and Burma pay tribute. Borders have been settled with Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Burma and Mongolia. Hong Kong is a useful excres- cence, to be absorbed when the time comes. Indonesia's ambitions are not yet a threat.

Three obstacles only stand in the way of a Chinese image on the imperial scale: Russia, America and (potentially) Japan. Not only do the stubborn Russians refuse to acknowledge the rightness of Peking's views, but they even cling to territory wrested from the decaying Chinese empire by the Tsars under 'unequal' treaties Which China specifically denounced two years ago. The arrogance of the Americans is still harder to take: the old imperialists—Britain, France and Holland—have duly retreated. But the new imperialists are there in force, from Japan to South Vietnam.

If, as I believe, I have roughly described a view of China's own position that would not cause raised eyebrows in Peking. what are we supposed to think of the 'Chinese threat'? It is idle lo argue that all China needs to become a contented power ls a string of vassal states, for it is of academic interest whether truly subservient neighbours are militarily occupied by China or left nominally independent. Nor can the view that Communism makes no difference be given any weight. A united China would have been a problem even if Chiang had won the civil war; but unlike Mao, Chiang lacked an exportable proselytising ideology. The fact that China's population is about seven times larger under Mao than under the Ch'ing would also be a problem, even without Communism. But a non-Communist regime that Was not committed to implacable hatred of America would have benefited from America's vast grain surpluses and the technological and financial resources that have wrought something of an economic miracle in Formosa.

Nor will it do to blame America's China policy entirely on the short-sightedness of successive American administrations, for Mao launched his

he campaign against the United States before ue had won his victory in 1949 and at a time of profound American disillusionment with the Kuomintang, thereby making recognition impos- sible. Equally beside the point is the pious argu- ment that all would be well if only China were admitted to the United Nations. The cold fact is that Communist China has never been par- !leularly interested in entering the UN, except on terms that would impose the utmost humiliation on Washington and that amounted to the expul- sion of Formosa ('Republic of China') from the the world body and the right to incorporate the island under Communist rule without American interference. Whatever may be thought of For- mosa's future, it is plain to anybody who has been there that neither the mainland Nationalists who rule it as a province of China nor the local Taiwanese have the slightest wish to be part of the Chinese People's Republic. The time, in any case, is past when Peking would consider enter- ing the UN on any terms. Almost alone in the world, China applauded Indonesia for leaving the UN, and has since raised the possibility of creating a new world body to represent the `new emerging forces.'

This seems, perhaps, to reduce the alternatives of China policy to appeasement or containment. For my part, I have no more liking for appease- ment now than I had in 1938 or 1939. Contain- ment, on the other hand, is long, arduous and hazardous. Before China exploded its first and surprisingly advanced nuclear device, western experts doubted whether it would have a 'nuclear capability' in less than twenty years. Now the likelihood of a Chinese-made medium-range bal- listic missile within three to five years is being faced. It is not unthinkable that the actual

possession of nuclear power will have the same sobering effect on China's policy-makers as it has on others. But this cannot be predicted with certainty: by the time China is *a full-fledged nuclear power, younger men may have taken over from the ageing band of men who were Mao's companions on the Long March. And no- body can tell whether these will be more or less revolutionary than their elders. My guess is less, In more ways than one, the key to the Far East power equation seems increasingly to lie in Japan. Mao's foreign policy has alienated two of the three potential sources of economic and technical assistance that might modernise China—the US and Russia. The third is Japan, dynamic, successful, free-enterprising and de- militarised. The Japanese `self-defence forces,' though more advanced than many Japanese would like, are hardly sufficient for the Great Power role their country is increasingly called upon to play. Nor is it, in the long run, healthy that Asia's most advanced nation should rely on the United States for its defence.

Doubtless the notion that a re-armed Japan, under civilian control, could play its part in 'con- taining' China has passed through Mr. Sato's mind.