402 { China’s Quest
with Richard Nixon, US leaders sought China as a partner because of China’s
weight in containing the Soviet Union. Simply stated, Soviet and American
leaders saw China as an important factor in the global correlation of forces.
Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping used China’s triangular leverage in very
different ways. Mao aligned with the Soviet Union and the world commu-
nist movement in a quest to build socialism, but then switched sides and
aligned with the United States to deter Soviet intervention or attack. Deng
maintained Mao’s latter-day strategic alignment with the United States but
gave it new economic content, allowing China to draw deeply on the assets
of advanced capitalist countries to modernize China’s economy. It is an open
question whether Deng could have achieved China’s alignment with the
United States if Mao had not opened the way to alignment with the United
States only five or so years earlier. In this regard, at least, Deng’s diplomacy
followed Mao’s.
Deng employed triangular diplomacy for purposes radically different from
Mao’s: to create a favorable macroclimate for the success of China’s long-term
drive for economic modernization by drawing on the assets of the advanced
capitalist countries. Deng reached the breathtakingly radical conclusion that
the key font of assistance and inspiration for China’s development should not
be the USSR or the reform socialist countries of East Europe (although there
was some discussion of these East European models early in the opening pro-
cess). Instead, Deng concluded, China would look to the advanced capitalist
countries of Western Europe, Japan, and North America for technology, sci-
entific and managerial know-how, export markets, and capital to transform
communist-ruled socialist PRC into a powerful and relatively prosperous
country by the end of the twentieth century. The problem confronting Deng’s
radical new strategy, which he dubbed the Four Modernizations, was that
the global capitalist system that made available these crucial developmental
inputs was dominated, for better or worse, by the United States, which could,
if it chose, substantially restrict China’s access to vital developmental inputs.
Why should the preeminent capitalist power, the United States, with its long
history of using its vast power to oppose socialism and communism, treat
benignly the rise of a strong, communist-ruled socialist China?
The other East Asian states that had successfully pioneered the develop-
mental path China set out on under Deng—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea,
Hong Kong, and Singapore—were all allies of the United States and embraced
liberal ideals and institutions (at least in theory, if not yet fully in practice).
The PRC, on the other hand, was and would remain communist-ruled, or so
Deng was determined. The PRC had also been a vehement rival of the United
States for several decades and fought wars with it in Korea and Vietnam. Even
after Sino-American rapprochement in 1972, China had continued to pa-
tronize foreign revolutionary movements. How could the United States now
be persuaded to look benignly on China’s push for wealth and power?