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

174. Telegram From the Embassy in Japan to the Department of State¹

Tokyo, August 11, 1966, 1030Z.

1126. 1. The problem of China looms large in the future of that half of the world’s population which lives in East and South Asia, and it casts a shadow over the rest of the world as well. Before leaving Tokyo, I should like to address myself to this problem as it appears from Japan, the only important industrialized and modernized nation in Asia and our one great Pacific partner on whom the future of our own posture in East Asia is heavily dependent.

2. During the five years I have been here, I have seen bilateral American-Japanese problems decrease markedly in number and intensity. Short of a major depression in either country, our economic relations raise no great difficulties, though some specific irritants, such as salmon fisheries, remain. The determination of much of the Japanese left to break the security relationship with the U.S. in 1970 has all along posed the greatest threat to our bilateral relations, but the growing realism about world problems on the part of the Japanese and their increasing defense mindedness make it now seem improbable that this problem will of itself cause serious difficulties in 1970 or thereafter. One specific aspect of the defense relationship, however, does bear careful watching and a readiness for rapid and flexible action on our part. This is the growing confrontation in the Ryukyu Islands between Japanese nationalistic pride and U.S. and Japanese defense needs. The deep emotional reaction of the Japanese in 1965 to U.S. actions in the Vietnamese war also shows that so long as this war continues it will have dangerously explosive possibilities for U.S.-Japanese relations. But the Ryukyu and Vietnamese situations are themselves in part reflections of the China problem. It seems safe to conclude that the continuing danger areas in U.S.-Japanese relations lie not so much in our bilateral relations as in our respective approaches to regional Asian problems. Among the latter the deep Japanese uneasiness over the China problem, and over American policies toward China presents the greatest threat.

3. The fundamental reasons for Japanese uneasiness over our China policy have often been reported from this Embassy. While attitudes vary greatly among age and occupational groups, the Japanese for the most part have a strong sense of closeness to the Chinese, which they express in the term “same race and same culture.” They look with respect and affection to China as the country from which their own civilization in early days was in large part derived. They feel that their geographic proximity to the Chinese giant makes the maintenance of friendly relations all the more imperative from them. Despite their recent great economic success, they still feel uncertainties about their economic future, and, continuing to think along channels well established over the past forty years, they look upon close economic relations with China as necessary for their own economic well being. In all these respects—racial, cultural, historical, geographic and economic—they feel that the United States stands in a very different position with regard to China and that, therefore, US policy is likely to diverge sharply from Japan’s interests. They thus picture in their mind’s eye a relatively small Japan which has strong reasons to be friendly to both the U.S. and China but is tragically caught between the mutual antagonisms between these two great giants. While more realistic Japanese would feel that the Chinese are more responsible than Americans for this situation, they tend to excuse the Chinese as driven by understandable psychological compulsions and in any case not open to reason. On the other hand, they tend to feel that the United States, as the stronger and more reasonable of the two nations, should make the adjustments to ease the Sino-American tensions that Japanese find so disturbing.

4. Despite these pervasive Japanese attitudes, the GOJ, particularly under Prime Minister Sato and Foreign Minister Shiina, has given us strong support on our China policy. The men now in charge of the Japanese Government represent those Japanese who are most fully in sympathy with the US position. A large part of their own party, however, is restive about Japan’s close identification with our China policy, and the public at large is decidedly unhappy about it. Except for the extreme left, there is general sympathy for Taiwan’s “independence” of continental China and its continued membership in the U.N. There is also an increasing awareness of the threat inherent in Peking’s dogmatism and of the need to discourage its open aggressiveness. At the same time, the Japanese by and large believe that it is only sensible to admit that two Chinas (or one China and one Taiwan) do exist. They are not satisfied with a policy which ostensibly maintains that the GRC is the one and only representative of the great historical entity known as China. They feel that Communist China is here to stay for the foreseeable future and that the best outcome that can be realistically hoped for is that it will in time become a less cantankerous member of world society and will be satisfied to accept peaceful coexistence, at least to the extent that this term is understood by the Soviet Union. To hasten this process, they feel that it is important to increase trade and cultural contacts with Peking and to allow Peking or even encourage it to enter the U.N. (on the U.N.’s terms, of course, and not Peking’s). The Japanese are fearful that as things are now going an overly inflexible U.S. will drift into conflict with a blindly intransigent China, and Japan will be caught in the resultant catastrophe. While they welcome recent efforts on our part to foster the movement of newspapermen, scholars and the like between the U.S. and China, they wonder why we cannot go further than this. They are unhappy about a ChiRep strategy that is clearly aimed at keeping Peking out of the U.N. rather than facilitating its ultimate entrance. Many of them realize that for the time being Peking no doubt will refuse to enter the U.N. if Taipei is also there, but they see no reason why the responsibility for Peking’s absence from the U.N. should not fall on Peking itself rather than on a joint U.S. and Japanese blackball operation.

5. Japanese unease at being linked to a China policy which they consider is basically unrealistic and not in Japan’s long-range interests is, in my judgment, the most serious problem that now exists in U.S.-Japanese relations. It places a heavy burden on our relations, which may become heavier rather than lighter the longer it lasts. Growing Japanese realism about the ChiCom menace is likely to be more than offset by mounting fears of a U.S.-ChiCom military confrontation and a rapidly rising sense of national pride, which makes Japanese increasingly desirous of asserting a position on ChiRep and other China policies more in line with basic Japanese feelings and less open to the charge of subservience to the U.S.

6. The heavy price we pay in U.S.-Japanese relations for our current stand on ChiRep policy is, of course, only one of many factors that must be taken into consideration in deciding on that policy. I am aware of the arguments for maintaining the present position or something as close to it as possible. It should be remembered, however, that Japan is not the only country in which we pay a price for our present stand. The cost may be higher here than elsewhere, but I believe that we pay something of a price in practically every other of our major industrialized allies and in many other countries throughout the world. It is also my considered opinion that, wholly aside from the price we pay in Japan and other countries, it is to U.S. interests to modify our stand on the ChiRep issue and our whole attitude toward Peking.

7. No sensible person would deny the great threat to world peace posed by the blind dogmatism of the Peking leaders and their tragic ignorance of the outside world. I personally am less optimistic than some observers about the rapidity with which these dangerous attitudes may change, because I feel that they are not just the product of Communist dogmatism and the very special and restricted experience of the Peking leaders. They are perhaps more fundamentally an expression of frustration on the part of the Chinese people, whose traditional pride and sense of superiority to all other nations have been gravely injured by a century of continuing humiliations. I, therefore, see no alternative to our present policies of firm containment. It would be folly on our part and a betrayal of our own basic ideals if we did not continue to give full support to the right of the people who live on Taiwan to self-determination. I have throughout given complete support to our policy of strong but measured military containment in Vietnam and neighboring areas. I believe that we just be prepared to continue to contribute to the security and stability of the Asian countries that surround China, though I would hope that in the future we could find ways to be not so much the primary actor in such defense as one of a group of outside powers that gives the necessary support to local forces of nationalism and regional efforts to maintain stability.

8. I am thus strongly in sympathy with what we are doing with regard to the containment of the threat of Communist China, but I feel that the public definition of our attitude towards this threat and our future relation with Communist China does not contribute to the efficacy of these actions and, in fact, tends to undermine them. As I see the situation, we make a pretense of believing that the twelve million people on Taiwan, and not the seven hundred million in continental China, represent the great historical political entity known as China and that the Chinese Communist regime is not here to stay, but may be swept away almost any time by the GRC on Taiwan. We of course do not really believe either proposition, and I feel that it is highly damaging to ourselves and our policies that we make the pretense of doing so. It is confusing to the American people, it distresses almost all our major allies, including the Japanese, and it angers many of the less-developed nations, who sometimes interpret our seeming scorn for Peking as a broader scorn for all less developed nations. Some people may argue that these pretenses are necessary to bolster up our small Asian allies in the Far East and maintain morale in Taiwan. I would not deny that we would face a difficult problem, particularly in Taiwan, in persuading the leaders to accommodate themselves to a recognition of reality, but in the long run this will be necessary in any case. In the meantime, the maintenance of our pretense permits the continuation of serious economic and political distortions of what would otherwise be a most encouraging situation in Taiwan itself; it sometimes encourages dangerous tendencies among our more committed allies, such as the Koreans; it is damaging to the development of regional solidarity in Southeast Asia; and most of all it stands in the way of the development in Japan, in Europe and throughout the world of the sort of broad international concern for peace and stability in Asia that is needed to replace the one-man policement role we are performing today.

9. I believe that most people would agree that the best we can reasonably hope for from Communist China in the foreseeable future is that it may gradually relax its present drive for immediate world revolution and that in time it will accept peaceful coexistence, at least as a temporary stratagem, and will thus wish to rejoin the world on the world’s terms. Most people would also agree that, in order to work toward this one and only realistic objective, we should not only continue to frustrate ChiCom expansionist drives but should also help to develop greater communication and contact between Peking and the outside world. Our willingness to exchange newspapermen, scholars, and the like is a helpful step in this direction. The opening of trade in non-strategic goods would also be useful. Since all our major allies trade with the ChiComs, our present trade embargo is all but meaningless economically, while being psychologically disadvantageous to us. More important than these concrete steps, however, would be the redefinition of our attitude toward Peking. China presents us with what is fundamentally a psychological problem. The leaders are of course tragically misled by their own dogmatic beliefs, but even more basic is Chinese pride, made all the more fierce and unbending because of the past century of humiliation and the present frustrations growing out of China’s obvious weakness and backwardness. Nothing stands more firmly in the way of a Chinese readiness to seek a rapprochement with the world than their resentment of what they regard to be the callous pretense on the part of the world’s greatest power that China does not really exists or that, if it does exist, it is so depraved or so unstable or so inconsequential that it should be barred from world society. I would not claim that a more realistic and more tolerant and appreciative attitude on our part would bring any quick change in Chinese attitudes. I am sure that it would not. But at least it would remove the greatest single barrier on our side that now stands in the way of China moving in the direction we would hope to see it go, and at the same time it would remove a serious barrier to the development of a broader international approach to the problem of containing Chinese Communist expansionism.

10. It might be argued that until China shows itself more conciliatory toward the U.S., particularly at this time when we are engaged in the war in Vietnam, we might lose face or might weaken our containment policy if we were to redefine our attitude toward Peking in this way. I would disagree strongly. I do not see how face would be involved. As by far the world’s greatest nation, we lose face by pretending to believe things that most people in the world, including ourselves, realize are not true. We lose face by letting our basic policies seem to be determined by the peculiar sensitivities of a small country like Taiwan. The only sound course is for us to stand frankly on our own ideals and on our own judgments, and these do not include the concepts that the GRC will reconquer the continent or that we must approve of Communist China to admit that it exists. As to a redefinition of our attitude weakening the containment policy, I believe that the reverse is the case. The very fact that we are militarily so committed in Vietnam would prevent any serious misinterpretation of our actions. On the contrary, our clarified stand would be more understandable to our own people as well as to outsiders; we could count on increased sympathy and possibly more actual aid from the rest of the world; we would have laid the ground work for a broader international approach to the continuing ChiCom menace; and most important, by showing respect for Chinese nationalism we would help to strengthen all Asian nationalism and the possibilities for increased regional solidarity, which in the long run are the only real answers to the threat of Communist subversion.

11. In conclusion, let me outline specifically what it is that I advocate. It is merely the further clarification of the current semi-official phrase “containment with [without] isolation” and the sections of the President’s July 12 speech² which call for a “peace of conciliation” and “the full participation by all nations in an international community under law.” In other words, we should make clear that, however strongly we insist on the right of Taiwan to retain its membership in the United Nations, we recognize that Peking represents a great country which, according to the basic concepts of the U.N. and our own ideals of international society, should also be represented in the U.N. and other international bodies, so long as it is willing to join these on the same terms that are expected of every other nation. We should also make clear that we are ready to live peacefully with Peking and develop such friendly cooperation as it is willing to accept; that we believe that the form of government which exists in continental China is a matter for the people who live there to decide; and that we have no intention of interfering in any way in the domestic affairs of continental China. In addition, we should find ways to express our admiration for the great historic entity of China as not only the largest nation in the world today in terms of population but as one of the truly great national units throughout human history.

12. We have for some time been hinting at the sort of attitude I advocate, but I believe that we should move to a clear and unequivocal definition of this attitude as soon as possible. I realize that the delicacy of the political situation on Taiwan would require carefully coordinated steps over a certain period of time before the new positions could be reached. But we should not allow the peculiarities of one small country to continue to determine the position of the world’s greatest power year after year. In view of the dangers of an adverse outcome on the ChiRep vote, in the U.N. this autumn, we need to move with considerable speed. World opinion and votes in the U.N. are likely in any case to push us step by step towards the type of redefinition of our attitude I have outlined above. If we move in this direction only out of pressing necessity and with obvious reluctance, we shall probably end up with most of the disadvantages of our present stance and few of the possible benefits of the new. I am convinced that it is overwhelmingly in our interests to move quickly and on our initiative to the new stance, which is both in keeping with the realities and with our own fundamental ideals.

Reischauer

1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, POL CHICOM. Secret; Exdis. A copy was sent to the President with an August 16 covering memorandum from Komer supporting Reischauer’s arguments. A note in Johnson’s handwriting on Komer’s memorandum reads, “Ask Rostow to contact Rusk & comment. L.” An attached note in an unknown hand reads, “Call Bill Moyers before you do anything about attached.” (Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, China, Vol. VI)
2. See Document 168.