Transcription
Hello. It gives me a great pleasure to welcome you back, uh, to the conversation with Professor Wang Gang Wu. Uh, as you know, last week we covered, uh, the period of the century of humiliation and its impact on US-China relations. Today, we are going to move beyond the century of humiliation and cover the period from the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 till today. And I'm going to begin, uh, by asking Professor Wang Gang Wu about the, in a sense, the, the truly major war that, uh, the US and Chinese forces fought against each other, uh, which was the Korean War, from June 25th, 1950, to July 27th, 1953. So, the first question I'm going to ask you, Gangu, is, um, could this war have been avoided, and what damage did this war do to US-China relations?
It probably could have been avoided if the Americans had made it very clear that they were not going to let anybody take South Korea, and that, in other words, they were prepared to fight for South Korea. But apparently, some of the leaders in the State Department had been a bit vague about that, that their defense line was really more about Japan. That was the, the ultimate line, and they didn't say anything about South Korea. And that misled Kim Il-sung, and the Russians, to believe that there was an opportunity to, to take South Korea, that the Americans were not prepared to stick out their necks out to fight for South.
So, the Russians were pushing Kim Il-sung more than the Chinese?
Oh, no. Chinese were not pushing anybody.
Yes. And the Russians, I wouldn't say, was pushing, but when Kim wanted to do it, the Russians were looking at the opportunities and didn't actually stop him. Stalin didn't say you can't.
Yeah. So, but, and at that time, Stalin was much more powerful than, much more powerful. And Stalin did not want to come in open because he didn't want to come in direct conflict with the United States because the United States was watching the Russians. Uh, so when Mao was approached, the information that I have seen is that the Russians encouraged the Chinese to go in because they can't go in. And Mao waited very carefully, I believe, and they did so because they were afraid that if Kim did that without any support from them, then, then unification of Korea under Kim, backed by the Russians, may also affect them where they, they had just started, you know, they had only just won the war in China. They were in need of all kinds of things from Russia. They needed Russian help, but what they did not need is to have trouble on their borders. So I think they had tremendous difficulty agreeing to this. I, I, I believe they debated a long time. They were not enthusiastic about that.
They were not enthusiastic, and they couldn't stop Kim Il-sung anyway.
They couldn't, they couldn't have, Kim Il-sung wouldn't have listened to them. Kim Il-sung would have listened to Stalin.
Oh. But Stalin did not stop him.
So when he started the war, the Chinese had to decide whether to support or not support. And not to have supported him would have, would have also been a different message, and would have put Kim very hostile towards China thereafter. So there were all kinds of considerations, and after fierce debate, they decided to go in. But they knew it was a terrible cost because they were not prepared for that kind of war against most modern army, armed forces in the world, led by the United Nations, or United States for the United Nations. But they decided that they had to do it.
So, by that, by the time Kim Il-sung decided to go to war, it was probably unavoidable that Mao would get in. But even then, as I said, there was fierce, but Mao did decide to go in, and the United States didn't, didn't really expect it. I think they, they were a bit shocked, and MacArthur was furious, and one of the reasons why he was prepared to actually prepared to push into Manchuria, to take over, and in fact, even prepared to use nuclear weapons. And he was sacked for that because Truman refused to do it.
That was very brave of Truman, right?
It was really quite a remarkable decision. Yeah. And, and MacArthur was, he was a very popular general. He was, when he was sacked, and he went back to America, he was welcomed as a great hero. Yes. So Truman took a brave decision, definitely.
So, anyway, both Truman and and Mao, in some ways, took very brave decisions, uh, to fight in that war. And, you know, the, the interesting thing is the, uh, is how, what a strong personality Mao Zedong, uh, was, you know. And, and as we know, China is fortunate to have at least two great leaders in the 20th century, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. And what's interesting is that when Western scholars discuss these two leaders, uh, they often are much more critical of Mao Zedong and criticize him for several disasters, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, they also give Deng Xiaoping credit for reducing poverty dramatically in China and making China a great economic power. So, if you had a vote among Western scholars, or Western observers on China, they would say Deng is a greater leader than Mao. But within China, Mao is regarded as a much greater leader than Deng Xiaoping. How do you explain this? Why do the Chinese people revere Mao Zedong so much?
I think there's a big difference. Mao was the great leader. Deng Xiaoping was one of, after all, one of his loyal supporters, right up through the Cultural Revolution. Yes. He was still a supporter of Mao. And not even the, not even the immediate number two or number three. He was a bit further down, but still one of the, very loyal supporters. All the achievements, unification of China, winning the civil war against the Kuomintang, in a way, major contributions towards keeping China safe from Japan on the, at the northern part where he, where his Red Army held, held control. All these things that he was able to lead the Communist Party to victory through all those difficulties, and then to go through the whole cycle of change, transforming a very battered country, very economically poor, to the point when they were beginning to make their presence felt in the world. All that was done by Mao under his leadership. So he picked up a broken country. Broken country, put it together, gave them a sense of identity and pride, and a new China with great hope. The aspirations of the young were tremendous. Of course, his greatness was also the cause of his great failures. You might say the very fact that he failed was because he was so great that he failed. He made some mistakes, and that, every mistake he's made, he made had great consequences.
Yeah, because you're so powerful.
It's because he's so powerful. So, but in the end, the benefits that he brought to China by, by success and victory, was definitely a, a great moment in history. When you say China had stood up, he was that was a good, nothing compared to that. Deng could not have done what he had done if not have, if not because Mao laid the foundation, foundations. I think that's how the Chinese will see. They say Mao made some mistakes at the end of his life. Yeah. It's a pity, you know, and he would have been even greater if he hadn't lived that long, so to speak. But in the end, what he achieved was absolutely stupendous, compared to which Deng was doing some repair job, cleaning up after the mess, and did a very good job, fine job. But Deng was not always right either. I think also made many mistakes. It went too far one way to relax, and therefore you had a ten, yes, massacre was partly because Deng had been a bit too lax. We were also a bit lax about decentralizing, so that later on they had a tremendous job pulling back, tightening, and the party got corrupted by too quick a move towards capitalism, when he said that some people must get rich first before others. And so all these things misled a lot of people, and some of the corruption that followed, even, even before Deng, all the way down to Xi Jinping, and became worse and worse, and so on. Some, some people would blame that on that he had not foreseen that, and he had allowed, by being too relaxed, too too relaxed too early, had allowed some of that to happen under his successors. So that Xi Jinping had to come and, you know, do clean up some more. So, it's hard to, it's, it's dependent on where you, what emphasis you give. If you want to emphasize the horrendous things that the mistakes that Mao made, you can say Mao was an absolute failure and turned him into a kind of monster. But that's not how the Chinese people see it. You must look at what he did first.
Mhm. So the mistakes are pity, regrettable, but probably forgivable given the, the remarkable achievements that he first. I guess if you didn't have someone with a kind of iron will of Mao Zedong, the country would have it difficult to pull the country together and make it one strong country again.
Yes, iron will. But more than that, it was cunning. Cunning. He was very smart. He made use of his young colleagues, one against the other, played them against others. He was a highly skilled strategist, both political and military strategist. He, he, he strategized and he seized power in all sorts of ways. I mean, he, he was not an easy or innocent person in that. He was tremendously ruthless to achieve what he did, at the expense of a lot of other people. But whatever he did, in the end, for various reasons, he made all the right decisions for the great successes of the first 20 years, from the end of this, end of the war with Japan, all the way to the Cultural Revolution, you can say up to the Great Leap Forward, I would say that successes will far outnumber his failures, so that I think people still say that he deserves to be treated as the founder of, of, of it all.
Yeah. Well, I mean, uh, the, the other person who recognized that, uh, Mao Zedong was a great man, uh, was, uh, another great American, Henry Kissinger. [laughter] And as you know, Henry Kissinger made a surprise dramatic visit to Beijing in July 1971. You were 40 years old then. I'm sure this visit must have made an impression on you. And I'm just asking, just from memory, what, what do you remember about this visit, and, uh, what were your thoughts and impressions, as you said, wow, this is unusual? And how do you think future historians will assess the significance of this visit by Kissinger?
There's no question about that being both a, a remarkable decision that he could persuade Nixon to let him go. But, but for myself, I was in a slightly different position, and saw it slightly differently, because I happened to be in Australia at the time.
Mhm. And, uh, in other words, there was a, a move, pressure against the United States' position of hostility against China was already being pushed back by a large majority of the members of the General Assembly. Secondly, I'd also been keeping up about the Sino-Soviet split, and the fighting in Ussuri from 19, late 1950s already onwards, when Khrushchev came in, and Mao was extremely unhappy with Khrushchev, the way he treated Stalin, on the one hand, but also his recon, his more conciliatory voice with the West. He was very suspicious of Khrushchev, and he also felt that he deserved a higher reputation than Khrushchev. Who was Khrushchev?
Schoolboy.
Yeah. Nothing. Whereas he was as good as Stalin.
Yeah. If not better. He wouldn't dare to claim that. But he was a great revolutionary who led a country to independence. You know, what did Khrushchev do? So he had contempt for Khrushchev. So the Sino-Soviet split had already begun in the late 1950s. So by the time of the 1960s, it was becoming increasingly clear that China and Russia were suspicious of one another, no longer trusted each other, and the growing hostility was making it almost impossible for them to collaborate about anything except Vietnam. They were, they were helping Vietnam in the Vietnam War. But apart from the Vietnam War, the split was becoming very obvious by the late 1960s. So that when the United Nations admitted China, and the United States couldn't stop it, Australia, who had been supporting America all along, began to change their minds. So Whitlam had actually gone to China as opposition leader of the Australian government, Labour Party leader, had gone to China before Kissinger arrived.
Oh. Before that. So, so I happened to know these people in Australia at the time, and knew about Whitlam's trip, which was hammered by the government. The government said, you can't do that. You opposition is pro-communist, and so on. So Whitlam went, and just a few weeks later, Kissinger went.
I see. So although Kissinger is remarkable, where I stood in Australia, Whitlam had already made the move. But Kissinger's calculations are different. He calculated on the side of the Soviet split, that this is a time to get the Chinese away from the Soviet orbit and encourage the Chinese to be even more anti-Soviet. So it was in that context that I didn't quite immediately see that as the turning point. Yes. But, but looking back, there's no question the fact that Kissinger would go at the behest of Nixon, the president of the United States, and arranging for the president to visit China, is an amazing transformation in the whole political scene.
Yeah. But it must have, it showed that both, uh, Nixon and Kissinger, and I think this is confirmed also by Mr. Kuan Yew, were very astute students of geopolitics, you know, and probably in a class by themselves. I remember, uh, uh, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew was once asked who do you consider to be the greatest American president, and he actually said Richard Nixon.
The Chinese actually will agree with that.
Chinese agree with that. What, what were the Chinese, friend to that? Chinese was a great friendly act. What, what do you remember about any of the discussions that took place between Kissinger and Nixon and the Chinese leaders? What do you remember, if anything, about that period?
Well, I, I'm a bit confused about all that because I went to, at that point, followed in great detail all the problems with Nixon afterwards, and all the reports about what was on his tape, and Watergate. So, Watergate. So that a lot of my memories about that got caught up with all the details, some rather nefarious ideas that were exchanged at that time. So I, I must confess that I didn't have a very positive view of this kind of machinations in the White House at that time, and the Watergate was a fascinating story for most of us who read it at the time. So that, in a way, colored my, uh, attitude towards Nixon. But my admiration for Kissinger never stopped. That was remarkable.
Mhm. But his, of course, his background is so different. And, and in his case, I would say he benefited from the fact that he was moving among the highest analysts in the, in the American universities who understood Russia and who saw the Sino-Soviet split as being particularly significant and really believed it, because there are some others who believe they're communist anyway, all bunch of don't trust them. But he, and this realistic group of analysts, they said, this is a great opportunity to break this up, because that combination is a threat to us, but divided, and if China could be at least partly on our side, and at least away from the Soviets, will give us a tremendous leverage over the Russians. I think that part was part of his academic background too, that scholars have done the work to show that this is a serious split. It isn't just quarreling among comrades. They really were bitterly opposed to each other, and that, I think, that reading is very important, and I think Kissinger was emboldened by that to actually say to Nixon, and as I understand, to say to Nixon, this split is serious. We can take advantage of this.
Yeah. I, I'm sure that that split was also the key reason, uh, why Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, of course, we must mention Zhou [snorts], were very welcoming of both Kissinger and Nixon. But at the same time, you know, what's interesting is that the, the Chinese have always had a kind of mixed feelings about the West, you know, regarding it with great admiration, and at the same time, also recognizing that the West played a role in humiliating China and so on and so forth. So, how, in, you know, as you look, if you take a sort of a longer view here of, uh, China's attitudes towards Western civilization as a whole, and I don't know whether this is a fair question. I'm sure one man who actually understood Western history very well was Zhou Enlai. How would you characterize the attitudes of a man like Zhou Enlai, you know, towards the West? What did he, how would he regard it, and [snorts] how would he see its strengths and weaknesses?
My understanding of Zhou Enlai was he was fundamentally a Mandarin by his instincts, serving his country, serving whoever is the ruler loyally and intelligently, would be his upbringing, and his, his whole background, his family background would put him in that sort of position, which makes him a top Mandarin in the best Confucian context, as it were. Uh, at the same time, he had been to the West. Um, he belongs to that generation, together with the young May Fourth generation, who knew that the West has something to offer China, by absolutely no question. And because the slogans like science and democracy, which was thrown around at that time, everybody, almost everybody in China agreed that these were the two things that China needed to be a modern country. Science and democracy. And democracy, both. And I think at that time, even the communists didn't really disagree. The Chinese Communist Party didn't disagree with that. They accepted that these were the two thrusts. They just defined democracy differently, but they accepted that the concepts were vital to China's modernization process. And I think they had no question. They rejected the traditions. They were agreed that the traditions had failed us. We were wonderful in the past for 2,000 years, but 2,000 years too long, and they were, they were slow to react. Therefore, we are in this terrible position now. We must catch up. And science and democracy will be the key. And I think that was right across the board, with the exception of some old generation people who were old conservatives. The vast majority of the Chinese people would go along with that, and I think they have been consistent about that. Their success in sciences have proven, we, we know that, no question at all. Their success of democracy is in dispute because they have defined democracy in a way which is unacceptable to the liberal democrats who have interpreted that to mean the Anglo-American parliamentary system, elections, the republican French system, these are the proper way to do democracy. Whereas the Chinese have, you know, we've reinterpreted Marx and Lenin and so on to mean that as long as you're caring for the people, you're doing it in the name of the people, for the sake of the people, and the people respond and agree and like what you do, that is democracy. And that is a little bit closer to a Chinese traditional idea of a caring emperor. The Son of Heaven is after all there because he's morally the person to provide the welfare, caring for the welfare of the people, and ultimately help making the people peaceful, happy, prosperous, harmonious, and so that's part of his responsibility as Son of Heaven. So that's a little bit nearer to what the Chinese would normally expect their leaders to be anyway. So the question that democracy, however, has caused tremendous drifts within the Chinese folk, arguing among themselves precisely what they need. There are Chinese who would prefer the American, the Anglo-American system, believe that that way, participatory democracy, enabling you to change your rulers by the people directly, and peacefully, without killing each other, that's a much better way. Whereas others feel, provided it doesn't create chaos and anarchy and disruptions and continual fight, internal fights and so on, and provide what the people need. They are so poor, going to lift them, care for them. So they, they put a different priority on that. And that priority, I think, has led them more and more to say the, the kind of system that the traditional Chinese had, which is now modernized by the Chinese Communist Party, is probably what we need. And this is what China needs to succeed, and it's proven to be more or less right today. I would say most Chinese say, yes, I think we got it right, because otherwise we'll have civil wars. We'll have tremendous difficulties getting people all agreed. There's so many different opinions. You need leaders, strong leaders who provide a sense of direction, a vision to lead the way, and then ensure that this is done peacefully and harmoniously, and everybody, most people are enjoying the benefits of that, and we don't take the risk of all this up and down. And they look at the, some of the democracies outside has actually confirmed in many of the, uh, people in China that that's probably not what we need in China. But what has been done in China has actually worked so far. So why not stick with this? And this fits in with our tradition. It doesn't go against any of our traditional ways of doing things. And to have a new class, new set of mandarins doing that job, selected for their skills and devotion and and and utter loyalty to do the job, provided they're not corrupt, is probably the best, uh, for the best thing we can do at the moment.
I'm just going to fast forward to 2020, and wouldn't you agree that COVID-19, in many ways, when the Chinese see how, how much better they have handled COVID-19, where, uh, 4, 5,000 deaths, and the United States is now exceeding 300,000 deaths. Has that, in some ways, also helped to confirm the Chinese?
There is no doubt that the Chinese are interpreting that to confirm what they've been inclined to believe anyway, and that is their system works better when there's a crisis, and that people can unite and can share the burden of trying to solve a problem together. A sense of being brought together and united in their in their efforts to do something. Whereas, uh, they, they feel even more than ever that the kind of freedom that has been so much talked about only leads to so much disagreement and inability to support a unified or national purposeful way of solving national crisis problems. So I think this, the Chinese at the moment are actually almost gloating at the, at what they, they have, they think they have achieved compared to what all the so-called Western liberal democratic countries have failed to achieve.
This may be a good moment for us to, uh, pause our discussion on, uh, week two, because when we come to week three, we actually going to touch upon, uh, some of the difficulties that have arisen in the US-China relationship, and one of them, of course, being the misunderstandings about their political system. So thank you very much, uh, Gangu, for joining us, uh, on this discussion for week two of this course. Thank you.