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

160. Memorandum From the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council (Smith) to President Johnson¹

Washington, June 29, 1966, 7 p.m.

Mr. President:

Consul General Rice in Hong Kong sends in a highly interesting summary of what is apparently going on in Communist China.

Bromley Smith

Attachment

From Hong Kong (2327)

SUBJECT

• Mainland China: Speculation on Recent Developments

At no time in recent years have there occurred on Mainland China developments at once so important and so clouded in obscurity as those of the past few months. Part of what has been happening is on-stage drama, but the stage managers’ identities have been unclear. Their purposes have been ambiguous, and the noises from the wings suggest that the most important events have been occurring offstage. I have, at least, so concluded since my return earlier this month to the vantage point provided by Hongkong. Evidently foreign observers on the Mainland enjoy no substantially better overview of events: One of them, British Charge Hopson, remarked to me a week ago that it is impossible for those observers now to know what is really going on in China.

It may nevertheless be worthwhile at this point to draw back from reporting of daily events and speculate about what may be going on—if only to identify some of the main unanswered questions and to set up hypotheses and alternative explanations to be tested for subsequent acceptance or discard when further facts become known. Within my post there is a healthy range of opinion on which I have drawn and which should facilitate further hammering-out of conclusions on the anvil of argument.

Multiple Character of the Crisis

First of all, have we been observing an ideological purge, a dispute over policy, or a power struggle? Almost certainly all three.

In arguing over policy or in criticizing an official’s performance in a Communist State, ideology provides much of the language, and ideological correctness is likely to be advanced as the main yardstick. No group of leaders could address the major problems China faces or contemplate the setbacks it has recently suffered, without arguing over policies. Even if ChiCom leaders were all selflessly devoid of individual ambition to wield power—and there is much reason to think otherwise—the outcome of policy disputes and ideological arguments will help decide who moves up, down, or out. It is the relative weight which should be assigned each of these three aspects of the present struggle which cannot be judged with any degree of accuracy.

The Internal Power Struggle

The antagonists in the power struggle must surely have in the back of their minds Mao’s age (now 73) and the question of who will succeed him. And the shadow of this coming event must lend urgency to maneuverings for position among the leadership under Mao—maneuverings in which Mao may not have played a deliberate role. At the same time official statements and the atmospherics both suggest to some members of my staff that there may have been a serious challenge from within the party to the authority of Mao himself. If Mao himself unleashed the present storm, its violence—before which all China seems to be bowing down as though Mao were God—suggests his doing so was triggered by something of no mean importance. A May 4 editorial in the Liberation Army Journal about a “life and death struggle” against elements which include “Right opportunists within the Party” may have overstated the case with typical Chinese Communist hyperbole, but such circumstances as recourse to an Army journal to contradict the Party’s leading newspaper suggest a serious struggle did indeed occur. In any case, political power abhors a vacuum and there will always be those who are tempted—sometimes prematurely—to seize authority from apparently failing hands. That a hard-liner, ranking Politburo member and “close comrade in arms” of Mao like Peng Chen would fall during a “cultural” purge suggests how dangerous it can be to be called—as Peng was in the talk of some Chinese—the “Crown Prince” while the Sovereign is still alive.

The Cultural Purge

The ideological purge now being attempted in China under the current “Cultural Revolution” undoubtedly is intended to be more sweeping than any which has occurred in China since about 221 B.C. It was then that the authoritarian first Emperor of the Ch’in Dynasty ordered the burning of the Confucian books, in an effort to destroy the ideological basis of Feudalism and the authority of the scholar-official class which had served the Feudal Lords.

As Chou En-Lai has put it, the present objective—and it represents an unrealistically big order—is “to liquidate completely all old ideas, all old culture, all old customs and traditions which have been created in the course of thousands of years by the exploiting classes to corrupt the people.” The current cultural campaign is largely directed against what might be broadly termed today’s class of scholar-officials, who are or are suspected of being the carriers of that old culture—not only scholars and educators, but also newspaper editors and other Party specialists in the field of publicity and propaganda. A topmost Communist scholar like Kuo Mo-jo may perhaps escape a worse fate by publicly asserting that everything he has ever published was “rubbish,” but a Peking newspaper editor like Teng T’o will not get off so easily for having at one point written, in veiled but understandable language, that one of Mao’s foreign policy assessments—that the East wind was prevailing over the West wind—was “great empty talk.”

A few isolated cases of double-talk might be passed over without resulting in an ideological purge, but frequent and more explicit challenges of the Party line could not. It is the official line that the thinking of Mao Tse-tung provides the basis for solving all problems. “Mao’s thought” is undoubtedly intended to serve as a gyroscope, keeping the Chinese Communist ship of state away from the shoals of revisionism and on the revolutionary course he has set—now and for the future after he is gone. This line has been questioned too often of late, while he is still alive, to instill confidence it would be generally accepted after he goes. A Mao who attacked Peking University students for giving only lip-service to Communism could scarcely be expected to tolerate explicit challenge, and evidently he has not.

Who is in Charge?

We do not know to what extent Mao is in charge of the purge, and to what extent he has felt personally threatened by events leading up to it. Mr. Hopson, the British Charge, reports that the atmosphere in Peking reminds him of that in Moscow during the time of the doctors’ plot. I would not blame Mao, given his suspicious and obsessive character, if he did not feel safe in Peking. In any case, he appears to have stayed away from the Capital throughout the past half-year. (The last two times we have heard of his whereabouts he was, respectively, near Canton and probably in the vicinity of Shanghai: except in political terms their climate is not all that much healthier than Peking’s.)

Reports of conversations held with Mao at Canton last March pre-sent the picture of a man complaining that his subordinates do not tell him everything—which is undoubtedly true—and in the grip of what we would regard as obsessions. However, the vigor of his arguments makes it clear he has not become, as one commentator had concluded, a senile vegetable. It would accordingly be logical to suppose he is well able to fight back against his adversaries. It is not likely that he is directing the campaign in detail: that was not his habit when, a far younger man, he was directing campaigns from his cave in Yenan, so it is unlikely he is doing so today. It is also unlikely that Mao’s subordinates, in carrying out operations under his authority, do not utilize it in ways which serve their own interests and discredit their rivals.

It is now clear that the campaign is being spear-headed by or in the name of Minister of Defense Lin Piao. Retrospectively, one is entitled to wonder whether the opening maneuvers of this campaign did not begin long ago. For some time Lin has been building himself up as a leading exponent of “the thought of Mao Tse-tung.” The abolition of military ranks and distinctions of uniform, a reversion to practices of civil war days which created so much speculation at the time, put the leaders of the Peoples Liberation Army in position to point to themselves as exemplars or pure revolutionary orthodoxy. And the extension of the commissar system from the People’s Liberation Army to industrial, financial, and commercial sectors of the economy, with many Army veterans becoming its commissars, may have inserted the influence of Lin and his associates deep into the citadels of the pragmatists and revisionists who had been challenging Maoism as the solution of all China’s problems.

It is also possible that Mao may have decided to back Lin as the successor to his own position of Party Leader. A number two man like Liu Shao-chi, who is almost Mao’s age, might not provide a succession which is long enough to ensure its consolidation, and Mao may remember the fate of the one really revolutionary and authoritarian Chinese Dynasty—it perished in a power struggle shortly after its founder’s death. Lin Piao not only has more charisma than Lin: at 59 he is a decade younger than the average among the full members of the Politburo.

The foregoing hypothesis is open to questions based, inter alia, on long-held assumptions that Lin was in chronically poor health. However, these assumptions are drawn into question by evidence of his intense if not generally publicized activity in 1960–61, as indicated in captured documents from that period. Moreover, the veterans of the long march were a tough lot: many of them endured great hardships, survived serious illnesses such as tuberculosis, and have lived to ripe age.

Mao’s most recent pictures showed him meeting the Albanian Premier, who was in China in May, in company of the triumvirate of Lin Piao, Teng Hsiao-ping, and Chou En-Lai—not looking moribund. The ever-supple Chou En-Lai has been acting as exponent of the Cultural Revolution and has just been entrusted with an important mission abroad. Teng also was with Mao during a recent meeting with Japanese Communist leaders. And Lin has retained the greater prominence into which he stepped, with the publication last September of his article on “People’s War”; it is only he who now is being cited as having “creatively applied the thought of Mao Tse-tung.”

All of this may help answer the question as to what men are really in charge of China and the purge: it suggests that under Mao the party chairman there is a triumvirate: Lin, the Head of Armed Forces; Teng, the Party Secretary; and Chou, the Prime Minister. Chief of State Liu Shao-Ch’i continues to perform his representational duties, but his chance for succession to Party leadership may have been hurt by close association with the career of P’eng Chen, Mayor of Peking and only Politburo member known to have been caught so far in the purge.

The Policy Struggle

China has, within the past few years, suffered two sets of great policy failures, one internal and the other external. The first, of course, was the failure of the policies of the Great Leap towards rapid industrialization and full-scale Communism. Defense Minister P’eng Te-huai objected to them and was purged in consequence; it later failed and China was so badly shaken that the third Five-Year Plan had to be postponed for three years, and may still be the subject of dispute.

The second was the great series of setbacks attending initiatives in the foreign field which, had they succeeded, might have diverted U.S. efforts from Vietnam. (The disaster in Indonesia was the most resounding: Communist China may have intended Indonesia to serve as the southern arm of a great pincers on the two sides of Southeast Asia.)

The foregoing failures would undoubtedly have brought down the elected regime in any parliamentary democracy. They undoubtedly raised serious strains within the regime in China where, given its one-party system, policy dispute would be largely contained within the Party but could hardly be excluded from it.

It may be premature to say what the final result will be, in policy terms, of the leadership struggle and ideologic purge which have been going on. However, it appears clear that the ship of state is, internally at least, on a leftward track: the pragmatists are being discredited and there is published and other evidence of plans for another Leap Forward.

The greatest issues in the external policy sphere evidently have concerned China’s confrontation with the U.S. There is reason to think Mao expressed, at a meeting late last September of the Party’s Central Committee, the conviction the U.S. and the USSR would attack China within the next two or three years. Mao professed that same belief to the head of the Japanese Communist Party as recently as last March. It is doubtful all within the Chinese leadership believe such an attack inevitable or that efforts to avoid it should not be made: Chen Yi on June 9 conveyed to British Charge Hopson the impression he did not totally share Mao’s apparent conviction. And even if the leadership were agreed that an early war with us were inevitable it does not follow they would be careless about precipitating it on the theory that how it comes does not greatly matter. They will greatly prefer the external and internal advantages of being the party to conflict which is the apparent victim of aggression. This undoubtedly contributes to the apparent Chinese Communist intention not to become directly embroiled with the U.S. in Vietnam provided we do not precipitate such embroilment.

To most Western minds, and undoubtedly to some Chinese Communist military and non-military minds as well, a conviction we will soon attack China—consequent to frustration in Vietnam or out of more deliberate calculations—would not be consistent with presumably reliable reports of continued Chinese Communist supply of tanks and MIG’s to Pakistan. It might be assumed China would want not only to retain its present inventory of these items but also to build it to the maximum extent from current production against the day of our attack. This may leave out of account two considerations: Mao may hope Pakistan would put such materiel to good use for renewed operations against India—to the discomfiture of both the U.S. and the USSR—in case we were embroiled in a war with China. (A U.S. war on China, its leaders like to warn, would not be limited.) Moreover, Mao’s defense strategy would depend primarily on the resources of manpower, space, and time rather than complex weapons—he would pit China’s strengths against our weaknesses, not vice versa.

Accordingly, the ChiCom supply of tanks and planes to Pakistan is one more evidence that Mao remains in command of major decisions in China and that his strategic thinking prevails there.

Rice

1. Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, China, Vol. VI. No classification marking. A handwritten “L” on Smith’s note indicates that it was seen by the President. The attachment is a retyped copy of telegram 2327 from Hong Kong, June 25, and is identical in substance to the telegram as received, a copy of which is ibid. Another copy is in Department of State, Central Files, POL CHICOM.