Reading the Dragon's Mind

To most Americans, Peking's motives are about as scrutable as they were in Marco Polo's day--and about as predictable. Last week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman, J. William Fulbright, acknowledged that he needs educating on Red China, called in two distinguished academic Sinologists for help in reading the dragon's mind.

It was educational, all right. The experts, in remarkable agreement, were of scant comfort to the committee's clamorous antiwar faction. On Viet Nam, their testimony in all but accent virtually echoed Lyndon Johnson. The conflict is not a civil war, as Fulbright and many other liberals like to think, said Harvard Historian John K. Fairbank, but rather the current arena for what may be a longterm, historical struggle between the U.S. and China. He reasoned that the Communists must be stopped in their attempt to take over South Viet Nam, which he regards as their testing ground for other potential "wars of liberation" in under-developed countries. "There has to be a struggle," he said. "The Chinese understand struggle."

Optimism & Caution. Neither Fairbank nor Columbia Political Scientist A. Doak Barnett would accept the Fulbright line that the war in Viet Nam would lead to full-scale hostilities with China, with the proviso--which the Administration has repeatedly endorsed--that the U.S. does not intend to destroy what the Chinese consider a buffer regime in North Viet Nam. Both, however, cautioned against bombing Hanoi or Haiphong. Indeed, Administration experts whose policies embody the same reservations advanced by Fairbank and Barnett, expressed mystification last week at Fulbright's recent assertion that "certain China experts in our Government think the Chinese leaders themselves expect to be at war with the United States within a year."

While supporting the Administration on Viet Nam, the two scholars took issue with Washington's fundamental approach to China. The U.S. should shift, Barnett suggested, from "containment plus isolation of Peking to containment without isolation," working simultaneously to block Chinese expansionism--as in Viet Nam--and to bring the Chinese into the international community, particularly the United Nations. Peking--like any psychotic patient--would resist therapy with every obnoxious means at its disposal. Nonetheless, said Barnett, "initiatives on our part are clearly required if we are to work, however slowly, toward the long-term goal of a more stable, less explosive situation in Asia." The Communists, added Fairbank succinctly, should be brought into the U.N. "even if they said they were going to dynamite the place."

There is probably no concession the U.S. could make that would mollify aging Mao Tse-tung's strident, frequently hysterical anti-Americanism. Nonetheless, both witnesses argued, Mao's successors--and their successors--might be more amenable to reason, and the U.S. should encourage any sign of mellowing in the Chinese revolution. Though Mao would hardly appreciate the comparison, Fairbank said that the Chinese leader actually more closely resembles the prototypical Chinese emperor than any of his heroes in the Marxist pantheon. Eventually, he said, the better side of the feudal Chinese ruler may reassert itself in his successors. China is still governed, after all, by a "great Confucian political fiction, the myth of rule by virtue."

Assertion of Faith. In Fairbank's view, most U.S. China watchers have attached too much weight to the "visionary" blueprint of world revolution outlined by Chinese Defense Minister Lin Piao last September. Said he: "This was a reassertion of faith, put out mainly as compensation for China's recent defeats in many parts of the globe."

All in all, despite the criticism of his basic stance toward China, and that of previous Administrations, President Johnson could only have been pleasantly surprised by the Fulbright committee hearings in which non-Administration witnesses--and from the often critical academic community at that--actually expressed support for the war in Viet Nam.

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