The 1970s by Thomas Borstelmann

Author:Thomas Borstelmann [Borstelmann, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, non.fiction
ISBN: 9780691141565
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

CHINA AND THE HOLLOWING OUT OF SOCIALISM

Nothing confirmed the world turn toward markets by the late 1970s as dramatically as the path taken by the government of China. No country was larger, no regime more unremittingly hostile to capitalism. After consolidating its victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949, the Communist Party had moved with ideological clarity and revolutionary fervor to erase from Chinese society what it considered the corrupting influence of capitalism. Mao Zedong and his allies succeeded to a remarkable extent. They eradicated private property and collectivized agriculture and industry, even at the cost of millions of deaths by starvation during the Great Leap Forward era of the late 1950s. Aligned uneasily with fellow Communists in Moscow, Beijing fought the United States to a standstill in Korea earlier in the decade. Tensions with the Soviets grew more public after 1960, partly for reasons of competing national interests, but partly due to China’s fierce commitment to socialism in the face of what it saw as a growing Soviet inclination to compromise with the hated capitalist bloc. No government on Earth was more opposed to free markets. In 1966, Mao—determined to keep China from sliding into Soviet-style “revisionism”—set off a decade of domestic turmoil by instigating the Cultural Revolution, a new wave of socialist enthusiasm among Chinese youth that targeted supposed dissenters. Facing economic stagnation at home and increasing conflict abroad with the Soviet Union, including military skirmishes on their common border in 1969, the Chinese government took two major steps in the 1970s to improve its deteriorating strategic situation.70

First, Mao decided to warm up relations with the United States. Concluding that the Soviets next door now constituted the greater danger of the two superpowers, the previously highly ideological Chinese government put theoretical principles aside and found common ground with the capitalist Americans. Mao feared a Soviet attack on China and wanted U.S. assistance should it come, a complete reversal of Chinese expectations for the superpowers. He would use the “faraway barbarians” to balance the “near barbarians.” He hoped for technological assistance from the more sophisticated industrial nations as well as shared information from U.S. intelligence services. Mao found willing partners in Nixon and Kissinger. The fact of Chinese and Soviet soldiers shooting and killing each other convinced Nixon that the abstract notion of tensions between the two great Communist powers had become a hard reality and a major U.S. opportunity. Chinese-American negotiations began quietly in Warsaw in 1970, followed by Kissinger’s secret visit to China the following year. Nixon’s very public trip to Beijing in 1972, the first ever by a U.S. president, then opened a new era by ending twenty-three years of hostility between the two nations. As Kissinger wrote privately to the president about China and the United States a year later, “We have now become tacit allies.” Under Mao’s leadership, China took a major first step: it was still sticking with a command economy at home, but it was realigning itself internationally.71

The second step on

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