Ross Terrill, Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar and Research Associate at Harvard University, gave a sweeping presentation of U.S. perceptions toward Chinese communism from the 1930s to the present time. At an Asia Program-sponsored event April 17, Terrill described three large swings in U.S. attitudes to China up until 1972: hopeful toward the Chinese communists while they were at their guerilla base in Yenan during the 1930s and 40s, followed by a big swing toward fatalism in the late 1940s, then turning to hostility in the 1950s and 60s, and finally morphing into geopolitical cooperation as a result of Nixon's policies in the early 1970s. From 1972 to the present, asserted Terrill, despite some minor swings, there has been an overall stability to the bilateral relationship.

Elaborating, Terrill declared that in the 1930s, there was a lot of wishful thinking toward the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The first Americans who made contact with Mao and the CCP were journalists and diplomats. Edgar Snow's book, Red Star Over China, gave a favorable impression and was highly influential. American foreign service officers like John Stuart Service and John Paton Davies also tended to be impressed by Mao. This was the view mostly of American liberals, but even a conservative Republican U.S. Ambassador to China in the 1940s, Patrick Hurley, declared that Mao was not really a communist. When asked how he knew this, Hurley replied that Stalin had told him so.

There was a concomitant judgment as the Chinese civil war dragged on in the 1940s, stated Terrill, that Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese nationalists were a "hopeless" ally, thereby further bolstering the image of Mao and the CCP. The gradual dissipation of the Chiang regime led the United States to conclude there was no hope for Chiang in the Chinese civil war. With the release of the U.S. White Paper on China in 1949, the United States essentially washed its hands of the situation.

With the advent of the Korean War and the intervention of the United States, including the insertion of the U.S. seventh fleet into the Taiwan Strait, Mao was prevented from conquering Taiwan, and the U.S.-communist China relationship was set onto a period of hostility for the next several decades. The McCarthy era was also unleashed, noted Terrill, adding an element of acerbic domestic politics to the situation. McCarthy's personal attacks and questioning the loyalty of U.S. policymakers on China obscured an examination of actual policy failures during the 1940s.

In the 1950s, Mao was perceived in the United States as a junior Stalin. The Soviet Union replaced the United States as the country having a special link to China. For a dozen years, official U.S. hostility toward China was not in accord of the views of U.S. China-watchers. John Foster Dulles and John F. Kennedy were particularly anti-Chinese. In the 1960s, there was change yet again.
A New Left arose amongst China specialists in the United States. According to Terrill, this New Left presented a vision of a "new man" in China, and blamed bad relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the United States. Nevertheless, the Johnson administration remained completely hostile toward the PRC. Johnson said China's bad behavior had to change before the United States would talk to China. Academics argued the opposite: they advocated dialogue with China, and admittance of China into the United Nations. The Nixon administration brought another shift in 1971-72. Nixon cast aside ideology. China appealed to him in anti-Soviet terms. With the Nixon opening to China, the left in the United States was defanged, as was the right. Nixon's motivation for opening to China, noted Terrill, had nothing to do with a moral evaluation of the Chinese communists or their regime.

The Nixon years were followed by those of the Carter/Reagan administrations in the United States, and the Deng Xiaoping era in China during the 1980s. Normalization in 1979 under Carter was reasonable, stated Terrill. The Taiwan Relations Act provided for Taiwan's future stability. Under Deng, economic development replaced class struggle as the main driver of society in China. In the United States, the feeling was that if capitalism were replacing communism in China, the area for cooperation and common ground would grow. This wishful thinking, asserted Terrill, came home to roost in 1989. After the Tiananmen Incident of June 4, 1989, the Kissingerian policy, that U.S. relations with China had little to do with the nature of the Chinese communist regime itself, could not be sustained. Pushed by public opinion and the U.S. Congress, the issue of human rights entered the bilateral relationship in a big way—and has not left.

The Chinese recovered from Tiananmen surprisingly quickly, the Soviet Union fell, and in the United States during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the dominant focus became the mantra that economics is destiny. The American desire to improve China returned, as did the drive to make money in China. But the context was new: China now could pay, and it was becoming more responsible in its international behavior.

In his concluding remarks, Terrill described the United States as currently having a hedging policy toward China. He stated hedging seems a rational policy for the present, since the United States does not know where a rising China will lead. For its part, China has a similar policy toward the United States. Most Chinese leaders prefer a cooperative relationship with the United States, but there are contingency plans should the United States conclude that China's rise is not in U.S. interests. The bottom line for Terrill is that the United States should always act in its national interest, with a clear view of China and the Chinese communist regime. It did no good to view Mao in the 1930s or 1940s as a "radish" (red only on the outside), or Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s as a "cuddly capitalist." China is a Leninist, authoritarian regime, and, when threatened, as it has been recently in Tibet, will always react as one.




Drafted by Mark Mohr, Asia Program Associate
Robert M. Hathaway, Director, Asia Program. Ph: (202) 691-4020