How to Dupe Foreigners,Chinese Style

From ancient times the sedentary Chinese farmers and bureaucrats have always had to deal from weakness with powerful, mobile, non-Chinese fighters and conquerors. Today, Chiang deals with us from weakness, while Mao deals with the Russians, also from weakness. Both are doing well.

1.The cardinal Chinese principle in dealing with a non-Chinese is to use friendship as a halter. Admit the outsider to a guest membership in Chinese society. Compliment him on his knowledge of aspects of Chinese culture or of the Chinese language. Entertain him with informality and frankness. Establish the personal bonds of friendship, which in the old China were stronger than in Western urban life today. Become really intimate friends and understand his unspoken assumptions and personal motivations.

2.Ask the foreigner's advice so as both to ascertain his aims and values and to enlist his sympathy and support. (Both these principles help to account for our Sinophilism.)

3.Disclose to him those Chinese vital interest which are allegedly more important than life itself, so as to pre-empt a position ahead of time and warn him it is not negotiable.

4.Build up the peculiar uniqueness of Chinese values and conduct (as I am doing here) so as to suggest the dangers of stormy unpredictability, preternatural stubbornness, or other traits of the power holder, which present the foreigner with insuperable difficulties.

5.Find out the foreigner's friends enemies and other circumstances so as to avoid offense to him and also to know where to find allies if necessary to mobilize against him, and so on.

6.Use the foreigner's own rules to control him, especially the Western legal concept of sovereignty, the idea that diplomats are accredited to governments (not to the local people), that domestic matters are beyond foreign question, and so on.

7.Stir the foreigner's conscience and sense of guilt so that the hamstrings himself.

8.Use some foreigners against others, to secure Chinese ends. Thus Chiang Kai-shek has cultivated American supporters of his own military doctrine, and by putting one third of his forces on Quemoy, with American help, he has made the defense of Quemoy probably necessary to the defense of Taiwan. Meanwhile Mao Tse-tung has found a staunch ally against Moscow in the state of Albania.