Thomson Testifies on China

(Three weeks ago, James C. Thomson, Assistant Professor of History and a member of the East Asian Research Center, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Vietnam and China. Following are his introductory statement and his testimony before the Committee.)

We are moving into a fourth year of systematic bombing of China's neighbor and ally, North Vietnam. Clearly no discussion of our response to revolution in Asia, Mr. Chairman, can avoid that matter of most urgent concern to us all, the war in Vietnam.

I myself have long been persuaded that our Vietnam involvement was unwise. It is, moreover, a profoundly depressing case study of our mishandling of an Asian revolutionary problem.

We moved in as a result of our shock at the Communist victory in China and the French defeat in Vietnam--a defeat, as I have noted, by a Communist Party that had achieved leadership of a nationalist movement. And at each juncture that we felt ourselves losing our grip, we increased our investment. Opportunities to exit with a modicum of grace were regularly by-passed in the expectation of eventual success. And now that that success seems further off than ever, our stakes have been transformed, and exit is infinitely harder.

Today there are some American planners, in the universities as well as Washington, who still see Vietnam as the ultimate test of their doctrine. I have in mind those gifted but in my view, wrongheaded men who have given a new life to the missionary thrust in American foreign relations--who believe that this nation, in this era, has been granted a threefold endowment of sorts that can transform the world.

That endowment is, they believe, composed of, first, our unsurpased miltary might; second, our clear technological supremacy; and third, our allegedly invincible benevolence (our altruism, our affluence, our lack of territorical aspirations).

Together, it is argued, this three-fold endowment provides us with the opportunity and the obligation to ease the nations of the earth toward modernization and stability, towards what might be called a full-fledged "Pax American Technocratica."

In reaching toward this goal, Vietnam is seen as the last and crucial test, a test not only of doctrine but a test of our character. Once we have succeeded there, they seem to feel, the road ahead is clear.

They are our counterpart to the visionaries of communism's radical left; they are, in a sense, technocracy's own Maoists.

I do not suggest that this governs Washington today, but I do suggest that this doctrine rides high and poses a danger. It is a doctrine that would perpetuate our East Asian overinvestment in response to the Chinese revolution. And it is a doctrine that must be rejected.

The highest of character is clearly to learn from the past, to admit one's mistakes, and to act on that admission. The record of our East Asian involvement is long and complex; we have done unwise things, we have done hard things, we have done good things--and there is much more good we can do.

The Testimony

THE CHAIRMAN: I would also say that from your own remarks you think our policy is disastrous for the country?

MR. THOMSON: That is correct, sir.

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, Senator Morse, I believe I will let you ask the next question. That answered my questions.

SENATOR MORSE: It is my judgment that the warp and woof of that doctrine ["Pax Americana Technocrata"] has woven our foreign policy rug. I think it pretty much outlines the foreign policy of this country today, and you take your principles and apply them to any analysis of our foreign policy and I think they are all in that rug.

My question is, do you think that we can follow this State Department and Pentagon Building and White House policy of containing China and not end up in the passage of time in a war with China?

MR. THOMSON: Let me suggest, as a way of answering your question, that the problem is China and the United States are squared off against each other with intense suspicion, and the problem is how to break out of the bind of mutual misapprehension.

It seems to me the way that you can back out of that bind is saying "all right, let's both stay out" and in that way you back down from this kind of action-reaction bind that we are in right now.

SENATOR MORSE: In your papers, you referred to one degree or another to the inevitability of change of leadership in China, from natural causes if from none other. We were briefed once before by a great authority on China who pointed out that these old communist leaders are going to die off.

MR. THOMSON: Senator, let me throw out a quick comment on that. It belongs so clearly in the crystal ball realm that anyone who would pretend to give you an answer is deluding himself. We see through a glass darkly here, and any pretense to an understanding of who will suc-Mao--and even if we knew who he was, what he would do--involves self-delusion.

I do myself believe--and I think Mao Tse-tung believes, which is why he has unleashed this "Cultural Revolution"--that China is in grave danger, from his viewpoint (I do not regard is as a danger) of gradually evolving more in the direction of the Soviet state, toward a more pragmatic, revisionist form of Marxist Leninism.

SENATOR MORSE: If we changed from the foreign policy you outlined, could we speed reconciliation with China?

MR. THOMSON: I certainly believe we could. I would caution that this is a job that is going to be incumbent on all of us, this process of learning to live in the same world with the Chinese Communist Revolution and helping to moderate it and helping to assimilate it. Our role, even if played with the greatest skill, and with a great deal of luck, may be marginal at best to the outcome.

I would nonetheless strongly argue for playing that role because--as has been set forth this morning--the role we are playing now very much serves Mao Tse-tung's purposes, the maintenance of ourselves as the enemy he needs.

Tripwires on Vietnam

Incidentally, I would just add on an earlier point that it has been our view--those of us in government and outside government--that the tripwires or at least one tripwire which would bring on Chinese intervention in Vietnam, and, therefore, a collision with China despite China's very considerable reluctance to intervene--Mao Tse-tung, appreciates the situation as it is now, he believes we are bleeding ourselves to death, he believes we are isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, and this ideally suits his purposes.

However, the tripwire which many of us, I think, still regard as a tripwire is he following: China cannot tolerate what it regards as a real threat to its own frontiers. This means, as a corollary, that China cannot tolerate the displacement of a friendly neighbor on its immediate frontier by an unfriendly neighbor or an unknown quantity. Ergo, any imminent threat to North Vietnam as a state that would imply to China that North Vietnam was to be displaced as a state, as a friendly state, and replaced by another state, would, we have always believed, bring on almost automatically greatly intensified Chinese involvement in North Vietnam and, in effect, an intervention in North Vietnam.

This is a two-sided threat: the North Vietnamese would prefer that the Chinese not come in, and the Chinese would prefer not to come in; but engagement of this tripwire by us would be an invasion of North Vietnam or else close and destructive bombing near the China border which might accidentally spill over into China.

"My question is, do you think we can follow this State Department and Pentagon policy...and not end up in a war with China?"

Senator Fulbright: From your remarks, you think our policy is disastrous for our country?

MR. THOMSON: What I am concerned about is really a contemporary manifestation of a theme in American history. You know it was Jefferson who said that the American Revolution was "intended for all mankind,"

In the many decades since that vision was projected, there have been some--there have been basically two types of strategies. One was that we should stand more or less as a beacon and an example--a more passive form--of demonstrating to the world one form of development and hopefully the form of development that they would emulate in due course.

There has been, however,--particularly toward the end of the last century--been a more activist thrust, a hope that we could not only show them from after but help them do it; and that moves awfully close in due course to doing it for them.

I would say that in general I am speaking about a tendency within our social sciences and our development-minded people, in conjunction with tendencies within some of the more enlightened of our miltary people. I think it was this conjunction that gave birth to the concept of counter-insurgency as a constructive, both military and economic action that could help transform revolutionary situations in our direction.

All I am asking, all I am suggesting, is that on the basis of experience, and particularly Vietnam experience but also elsewhere, we stand back a few paces and re-examine how successfully applicable that strategy,born as I say, of gifted social science minds, techniques, technology, how really applicable it can be in these highly alien cultural, historic and geographic situations that we so barely understand.

MR. THOMSON: I think many of the steps we took from 1949, 1950, onward seemed plausible at that time within the immediate circumstances although had we had better expertise available to bring to bear on the problem even in those early periods, I think that many of these decisions could have been avoided, would have seemed less plausible even in the light of the expertise at that time and, of course, in terms of hindsight this is a process of really collective error, cumulative error, collective guilt by both parties, a long and tragic and deep involvement, and at each stage the error and the guilt is compounded.

We could and should learn from the past. I would just throw in one comment, and that is that we don't always learn the right lessons from the past, and one of the lessons we may learn from Vietnam which may not be the right lesson is that we should never get that deeply involved in an underdeveloped far-away country. I am not sure that this is the appropriate lesson. The real lesson is the uniqueness of the Vietnam situation, the unique complex of forces there, which made success in that enterprise so highly improbable even if you looked at it in 1949.

I would add that we must learn not that we should never get quite so deeply involved in an undeveloped country, but learn rather that each of these situations is unique.

Our universities were similarly limited in their Vietnam understanding until recent years.

SENATOR CASE: If this was a lesson in the broader sense it means we had better get busy in similar activity in Africa and other places and develop as much as we can a real understanding of the problems of each area and its locality, is that not true?

MR. THOMSON: Absolutely.

The role we are playing now very much serves Mao Tse-tung's purposes: the maintnance of courselves as the enemy he needs.