Fairbank's Senate Testimony on China: U.S. Should Be Firm in Vietnam While Widening Peking Contact

Americans, being on the giving end of modernization, got a great deal more fun out of Sino-American relations.

(Thefollowing are excerpts from Professor Fairbank's March 10 statement to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations)

Dealing with the Peking rulers is frustrating because they are so implacably doctrinaire. They call us all lackeys of "Wall Street capitalist imperialism," lumping together indiscriminately Democrats and Republicans, professors and public servants, even the executive and legislative branches, all of us due for extinction by the laws of Marxist history.

Peking is not only unrealistic about us. Chairman Mao even thinks of himself as the successor to Marx, Lenin and Stalin, whereas in actual fact, as the ruler of China, he is much more a successor of the emperors who ruled at Peking until 1912 when Mao was already eighteen years of age. To hear the Peking leaders talk talk you would think they were an off-shot of European Socialism. Actually the problems they face and the methods they use are in large part inherited from Chinese history.

We Americans talk every day about our founding fathers of the eighteenth century. Our founding fathers lived in the period of the Emperor Chlien-lung, who ruled for sixty years at the height of a two thousand-year development of imperial monarchy. Chairman Mao doesn't seem to know it, but he owes something of his style and world view to his predecessors in Peking in ages past. Since we have now given up calling Communism a great international monolith, everywhere and always the same, it is high time for us to examine the Chineseness which is now showing through the Communism in Peking.....

I imagine we would all agree on a first point--China's remarkable feeling of superiority. Here was a very big, ancient, isolated, unified and self sufficient empire, stretching from the latitude of Hudson's Bay to Cuba or from the Baltic Sea to the Sahara Desert, with a great deal of domestic commerce to meet its needs, cut off from West Asia by the high mountains and deserts of Central Asia and thus isolated throughout most of its history, preserving a continuity of development in the same area over some three or four thousand years, during most of which time the Chinese state had been a unified entity. As we might expect, this biggest, most isolated and distinctive, most long continued culture and society developed a strong tendency to look inward, an attitude of ethnocentrism or Sinocentrism, China being the center of the known world and of civilization, the non-Chinese being peripheral and inferior, China being superior to all foreign regions.

It is fascinating to note how this cultural isolation is still reinforced by the Chinese writing system. Because it uses ideographic characters, it can not easily take in foreign words by sound but only by representing the foreign ideas in Chinese characters, yet the Chinese characters have their own meaning already. Our current research finds that foreign ideas have come into Chinese most easily when the Chinese have already had the same general idea. The writing system makes for continuity and inertia in Chinese ways. Unlike Japan, Korea, or Vietnam, who all had a phonetic writing system combined with Chinese characters, the Chinese cannot take in foreign words purely by transcribing their sound even today.

A second point is that the old Peking rulers were the custodians and propagators of a true teaching, the Confucian classical doctrines of social order, an orthodoxy which told every man how to behave in his proper place and kept the social pyramid intact with the emperor on top. The emperor was himself the high priest of a cult of social order. The three main bonds of the Confucian social order were the filial piety of children to their superior parents, the admirable devotion of wives to their superior husbands, the loyalty of scholar officials to their superior the emperor. This system did not believe in the equality of all men, which was obviously untrue. It believed in selecting the talented, training them in the orthodoxy, and promoting them as officials to keep the populace under control and maintain the system. We need not labor the point that China today still has a ruling class selected for their abilities who propagate a true teaching under a sage ruler and strive to keep the various social classes in order....

We can conclude, I think that the ideological component of power in China has been proportionately greater than in the West. Calling everything by its orthodox name helped keep things in order. The emperors were constantly spelling out the true doctrines, having them read in the Confucian temples and studied by all scholars. Heterodoxy and deviation could not be permitted, or if they did exist, could not be acknowledged to exist. Even when the foreigners were more powerful, the myth of China's superiority had to be solemnly recorded and preserved in ritual. This stress on orthodoxy strikes one today when Peking is continuing its nationwide indoctrination in Chairman Mao's true teachings.

Applying all this background to the present moment, I suggest we should not get too excited over Peking's vast blueprints for the onward course of the Maoist revolution. Some American commentators who really ought to know better have over-reacted to the visionary blueprint of world revolution put out by Lin Piao last Sep- tember in Peking (about the strangling of the world's advanced countries or "cities" from the underdeveloped countries or "countryside.") This was, I think, a re-assertion of faith, that the Chinese Communists own parochial example of rural-based revolution is the model for the rest of the underdeveloped world to emulate. It was put out mainly as compensation for China's recent defeats in many parts of the globe. To compare it to Hitler's Mein Kampf would be quite misleading. Rule by virtue required that the rulers proclaim their true teaching, claiming that it will still win the world even if they themselves are too weak to support it in practice....

I do not contend that we today are simply nineteenth-century imperialists come back to life, any more than Chairman Mao is actually a resurrected Son of Heaven in a blue boiler suit.

But what has happened to the old Confucian tradition of balance, harmony, and tolerance for private variations in faith and custom? The training of bureaucrats who were also humanists, artists and scholars, to carry on the established order, was the major tradition, dominant over most of the centuries, whereas the present regime seems to be in a minority rebel tradition of dynastic founders, more like a band of sworn brothers rising from the countryside as leaders of peasant rebellion, animated by an extreme fanaticism.

The Peking leaders of today remind one of the leaders of the Taiping rebellion of the 1850's who picked up Christianity as a foreign ideology, rebuilt it to suit their needs, and took over half the country. The Taipings came from the back country, not from the foreign trade centers. They began as a secret society with a cult, invoked the radical tradition in the Chinese classics, and sought a utopian collective or communal society, at one time even segregating the sexes. But the Taiping leaders were so dogmatic and doctrinaire that they alienated both the Chinese scholar class who might have helped them and the foreign merchants and missionaries who also might have helped them. Their simple fanaticism and xenophobia led them to pluck disaster from the jaws of victory.

In the course of time Peking should see a resurgence of the more humanistic and bureaucratic tradition of government by well-educated administrators who keep society in balance. While the past is gone forever, the present is not permanent either. Eventually we may expect the Chinese revolution to mellow down a bit.

As Americans we can only begin to imagine how the Chinese have suffered from being on the receiving end of modernization rather than the giving end. It has been hard for them to take, because under their traditional code there should be reciprocity between people, one should not accept gifts without paying them back. For China to be always receiving from the West not only hurts national pride. Being on the receiving end with no chance of repaying the favors of missionaries, for example, also hurts personal self-respect.

We Americans, being on the giving end of modernization, got a great deal more fun out of Sino-American relations. In the privileged status thrust upon them by the treaty system, most Americans enjoyed their contact with China, the chance to be an upper-class foreigner riding in a rickshaw while still remaining an egalitarian grassroots democrat in one's own concience. For an average American to go abroad and find himself a rich man by comparison with the local people is also quite enjoyable. The Chinese were very polite, and countless Americans made warm friends among them. The American people built up a genuine, though sometimes patronizing, fondness for China....

We Americans prided ourselves on championing China's modernization and self-determination. We considered ourselves above the nasty imperialism and power politics of the Europeans. We developed a self-image of moral superiority. The Open Door and benevolence toward Chinese nationalism became the bases of our Far Eastern policy until war with Japan brought us up against the realities of power politics. Then we began to realize, for almost the first time, that the power structure of East Asian politics had been held together by the British navy in the nineteenth century, and by the British and Japanese navies under the Anglo-Japanese Alliance from 1902 to 1922.

Today we find ourselves in an onerous situation trying to maintain the power balance in East Asia. It is reminiscent in some ways of the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, a type of situation that we generally succeeded in avoiding in that era. I do not contend that we today are simply nineteenth century imperialists come back to life, any more than Chairman Mao is actually a resurrected Son of Heaven in a blue boiler suit. But I don't believe we can escape our historical heritage entirely, any more than he can. We have been part and parcel of the long-term Western approach to East Asia and ought to see ourselves in that perspective, just as any view of our China policy has to include a perspective on our program in Vietnam...

My conclusion is that the alternative to war with Peking, over Vietnam or elsewhere, lies along two lines of effort--one is to achieve a better balance between destruction and construction in our own efforts in Vietnam, so that the non-Communist model of nation-building there can compete more effectively with the Chinese Communist model of nation-building. The other line of effort is to defuse or dampen Peking's militancy by getting China into greater contact with the outside world, more connected with the international scene and more interested in participating in it like other countries.

How to get the Peking leadership into the international order, instead of their trying to destroy it according to their revolutionary vision, is primarily a psychological problem. Therapy for Peking's present almost paranoid state of mind must follow the usual lines of therapy: it must lead the rulers of China gradually into different channels of experience until by degrees they reshape their picture of the world and their place in it. The remolding of Chairman Mao, the greatest remolder of others in history, is not something I would advocate as feasible. But I think it is high time