Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXX, China

129. Memorandum From James C. Thomson, Jr., of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant (Valenti)¹

Washington, March 1, 1966.

SUBJECT

• Some Propositions on a China Strategy

In response to your request, here are some informal thoughts on the China problem:

1. One highest priority task for American policy-makers in the years ahead is to help domesticate the Chinese Communist revolution in its relations with other nations—or, to put it another way, to help reclaim the Chinese mainland to responsible membership in the world community.

2. The importance of the task is self-evident: 700 million people; the key to stability in Asia; the grandiose belligerent aims of Chinese Communist doctrine; Peking’s development of a nuclear capability.

3. This task demands not merely “containment”, but a multiple strategy. Three chief aspects of such a strategy should be: (a) traditional military containment—the deterrence of overt and covert Chinese aggression, and resistance to such aggression wherever it may occur (as in Vietnam or Laos on the one hand, India on the other); (b) generous assistance to the fragile societies on China’s perimeter in the process of nation-building; and (c) systematic efforts to help erode the Chinese totalitarian state, to influence Chinese behavior, and to combat Chinese ignorance and fear of the outside world.

4. All three aspects, simultaneously, are essential to a broad-gauged policy. With the first two, we seek to prevent a disturbed China from inflicting harm on its weaker neighbors; with the third, we attempt to induce more rational patterns of behavior on the part of China’s leaders and/or their successors.

5. The first two of these aspects have received much attention since the Korean war. They underlie our network of military alliances and our aid program; they are reflected in the Vietnam war today. But the third aspect has been very largely neglected.

6. By the third type of strategy, I mean essentially the familiar array of flexible initiatives—of instruments of leverage and erosion—that we have brought to bear on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for many years now: a freeing of the flow of ideas, people, and goods—the instruments of contact, of communications, travel, and trade.

7. One primary reason for failure to develop this second approach has been the residue of bitterness and suspicion here at home over the “loss of China” and the Korean war; “flexibility” toward China has seemed politically risky, and the Democratic Party has felt especially vulnerable. In addition, the existence of an alternative claimant to Chinese sovereignty—Taiwan—has acted as a brake against China initiatives.

8. A second chief reason of this failure has been the policy pursued by the Chinese Communists themselves since the Korean war, and particularly since the failure of the Great Leap Forward (roughly 1959–60). It has been and still remains evident that any and all U.S. initiatives in the areas of communications, travel, trade, and the like, would be currently spurned by the Chinese Communists; Peking has made clear that for the foreseeable future the U.S. is a useful Public Enemy, still Number One (with the USSR now running a close second).

9. However, the primary U.S. domestic arguments against a flexible approach are today of greatly diminished significance. The leadership of the so-called “China Lobby” has largely passed from the political scene; public opinion polls show a high degree of public tolerance for coexistence with Communist China (see especially the newly issued Council on Foreign Relations study by A. T. Steele); and recent conciliatory moves such as the Hilsman “Open Door” speech of December 1963 and State’s medical travel package of December 1965 elicited widespread press support and no Congressional criticism whatsoever. (Note the Zablocki Sub-Committee recommendation last May for increased non-diplomatic contacts with the China mainland. Note also the total non-success of Mme. Chiang’s recent public relations trip to the U.S.)

10. At the same time, the argument of Chinese intransigence or non-responsiveness is only marginally relevant. The strategy of flexible initiatives is based not on expectation of a favorable Chinese response but rather on several near-term and longer-term objectives.

11. Among the near-term objectives are: (a) a signalling to the Chinese people that we are not eternally and implacably hostile to China (despite their leaders’ propaganda to the contrary); (b) a rebuttal of the widely held view, among many of our allies as well as neutrals, that Americans are obsessive and irrational on the subject of Communist China; and (c) a shifting of the onus for Peking’s belligerence and isolation to the ChiComs, where it rightly belongs.

12. The major longer-term objective is the offer of alternative patterns of relationships with the U.S. to China’s leaders, to their successors, and to doubting elements within the Chinese elite. Simultaneously, the objective is gradually to help break down China’s acutely distorted view of the outside world that plots her encirclement and destruction.

13. The specific ingredients of a flexible “third” approach might ideally include the following items: (this list is only illustrative)

(a) unilateral termination of the present travel ban to Communist China (we now bar all Americans except bona fide journalists and, since December, specialists in medicine and public health);

(b) a renewed invitation to Chinese journalists, scholars, artists, etc., to visit the U.S.;

(c) licensing of commercial sales of medicines and foodstuffs to China;

(d) eventual further modification of the present trade embargo to permit trade in non-strategic goods, as with the USSR;

(e) inclusion of China in disarmament talks;

(f) a shift in our UN strategy from exclusion of Peking to inclusion of Taipei;

(g) A proposal that the now sterile Warsaw dialogue be reinvigorated through transfer of these talks to a major European or Asian capital (Paris?).

14. Two points should be made about the preceding list:

(a) All these initiatives will almost certainly be rejected outright by the Chinese Communists in the present circumstances.

(b) Such initiatives may have only the most marginal and very long-term effects on Chinese outlook and behavior.

15. Despite these cautionary comments, the pursuit of a third strategy of flexibility commends itself as a low-risk imaginative policy worthy of a strong and confident power in its dealings with the China problem.

16. It is a strategy that can be implemented most easily at a time when our toughness and firmness in opposition to Chinese Communist aggressiveness is being manifested in Southeast Asia as never before.

James C. Thomson, Jr. ²

1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, POL CHICOM-US. Confidential. Filed with a note of March 3 from Thomson to Read. A copy is filed with a July 25 memorandum from Thomson to Alfred Jenkins, which stated that “we have made some significant moves in this direction since early March” and “the new rhetoric has moved toward ‘containment without isolation’ and now ‘reconciliation’—or a policy of ‘firmness and flexibility’ (a phrase the President likes).” (Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, China, Vol. VI)
2. Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.