Revolution, modernization and Chinese foreign policy

Abstract

If Churchill's aphorism about Russia being ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ was an apt formulation of Western puzzlement about that nation, several further layers of obfuscation would be required accurately to depict Western perceptions of China. Since 1949 a number of conflicting conceptions of China's nature and purpose have vied with each other to gain the allegiance of analysts, governments and the general public alike. There was, for too many years, the China of American demonology: aggressive, expansionist and cruel, conspiring with the USSR to bring about world domination, its implacable rulers brooding malevolently over their nation of docile ants. Even while this notion held centre stage, an alternative perspective was available from such eminent Sinologists as C. P. Fitzgerald and I. K. Fairbank: that China had not undergone such a dramatic metamorphosis under the communists as many believed but was still ‘eternal China’, reproducing the same age-old patterns of behaviour that had persisted with little change through many centuries, if not millennia. Then, during the 1960s a new image emerged: China the ultrarevolutionary power, itself engaged upon a process of radical transformation through the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, while simultaneously acting as the principal inspiration of violent revolution elsewhere in the world. The Sino-American rapprochement soon produced an entirely different perspective: China was now a responsible great power, maintaining a global balance of power in accordance with the Nixon–Kissinger vision of international order.