One of George H. W. Bush’s less discussed jobs, lost among president of the United States, ambassador to the United Nations, and CIA director, was head of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing during the Nixon administration. Bush’s China journal has recently been published, and it reveals frustration at being made irrelevant by direct contacts between Henry Kissinger and Deng Xiaoping.

James Mann, author most recently of The China Fantasy, has an article on the book in The New Republic. A couple of choice paragraphs.

When Bush landed in Beijing on October 21, 1974, its wind and dust reminded him of places he had encountered in the oil business. “It reminded me very much of West Texas and also of a trip to Kuwait,” he observed. He soon tried to establish high-level contact with Chinese leaders. He paid a call on Deng Xiaoping, then a vice premier under Mao Zedong. Bush’s initial impression of Deng, eventually the father of China’s economic reforms: “He was a very short man.” (For American one-liners about China, this ranks right up there with Richard Nixon’s verdict on the Great Wall: “It really is a great wall.”)

…

And then there was the question of human rights. “China is very vulnerable on human rights, just as the Soviet Union was,” Bush thought. “Some day sure as can be Congress will turn its attention to these aspects of the Chinese policy. … [T]his euphoric analysis of this society as an open society, as a free society, a soft or gentle society, is simply wrong.” All in all, Bush concluded, China was getting more out of its relationship with the United States than the United States was getting from China. “They need us, actually more than we need them in my judgment,” he decided. “This is the consensus of the international community incidentally.”

Today, just as my wandering was turning into a walk home, I passed the Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, a bookstore in an apparently never-used parking garage. Needless to say, I was not able to resist. Though its selection of foreign-language books is apparently zero, the range of subjects and the atmosphere of the store and the cafe inside are better than anything I’ve seen for a long time. This is located on the north side of Wutaishan (五台山). More pics after the break.

Driving up into the store.

(I have no idea what’s with the cross.)

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Jonathan Spence has a new book centered around a late-Ming intellectual Zhang Dai. I have not read the book (nor have I seen it yet in Beijing), but the folks at Frog in a Well have critiqued the New Republic review and it’s an interesting meta-discussion. Most interesting to me is a passage included by Alan Baumler in what amounts to his own review on the blog. Noting that the new book is no simple academic monograph (and fretting a little that related academic discussions are absent from the text), Baumler notes “There is more in heaven and earth than is in academic monographs, and Spence apparently thinks so as well, as he includes this little story…”

…. at the heart of the scholarly life itself there often lurked a real element of futility. Strangely, Zhang Dai followed up this particular theme most carefully with the example of his own grandfather, whom at many levels he had clearly loved and respected, even revered. Yet, despite all his brilliance, grandfather—according to Zhang Dai—spent his last years of life in pursuit of a truly impossible vision, the compilation of an immense dictionary that would marshal all knowledge in composite categories based on a rhyme-scheme series of classifications. As Zhang Dai wrote in an essay aptly named “Rhyme Mountain,” right up to the end he rarely saw grandfather without a book in his hands, and piles of books lay in disorder all around his study, under layers of dust. When the sun was bright, grandfather took his books out of doors so he could read more easily. At dusk he lit candles and held his book right close to the flame, “leaning across the desk into the brightness.” Thus he would stay far into the night, showing no signs of tiredness. Claiming that all the previous dictionaries were inaccurate, grandfather determined to create his own, using the idea of mountains as his controlling metaphor of organization: key words were termed “high mountains,” catch phrases were “little mountains,” characters that had variant rhymes were termed “other mountains,” proverbs were classified as “worn-out mountains” and so on. In this “Rhyme Mountain,” wrote Zhang, grandfather’s columns of little characters followed in tight columns “like the pleats in a skirt, on sheets of paper yellowed from the beat of the lamp”; he had filled, in this way, over three hundred notebooks, “each thick as bricks.” Some rhyme schemes might fill ten books or more.

Tell me this grandfather’s life work is not akin to something that might occur in Borges’ “La Biblioteca de Babel.”

After my initial reaction to James Mann’s China Fantasy, I was ready to be disappointed by the rest of the book. As it turns out, rhetorical excesses aside, the book is a valuable read for anyone interested in how the U.S. political world discusses China, especially those of us who discuss the U.S.–China relationship every day.

The crux of Mann’s criticisms of the U.S. discourse on China is this: He sees the discussion in the United States as centered around an assumption that more trade will inevitably bring more democracy to China. His core message is: maybe not. That’s it. The whole book is devoted to cutting down what Mann sees as a widely-held assumption.

I’m always in favor of tossing out rhetorical conventions that have no relation to reality, and I agree with Mann that, as far as trade leading to democracy, “maybe not” is an important possibility to consider. In fact I can’t imagine any transition to democracy coming about through means so simple as more trade with the United States and greater integration in the international community.

However, the book can be frustrating. In addition to certain logical problems when Mann attacks people he disagrees with (see my previous post), he has not set out to find evidence one way or another on the central question he says faces us. The book is, as advertised, purely about how people talk about China-U.S. relations, not about the relationship itself.

But that’s why it’s valuable to those who read and write about China and the United States. Whether you agree with his positions or not, many of the clichés of the field are laid bare. As Mann predicts, the 2008 Olympics will be venue for much discussion about China, and let’s hope journalists and governments give due consideration to what they say.

Perhaps another day I will have more to say about Mann’s online debate with David Lampton.

I’m half done reading journalist James Mann’s The China Fantasy: How our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression, and it’s an interesting, if controversial, read. One thing stands out so far: Mann’s relationship with evidence is strained, and he sometimes fails in logic.

In his defense, Mann notes in the first lines, “This is not a book about China itself. This is a book about the China I have encountered outside of China.” That might be fine, if it were true. But writing about the way U.S. media and politicians talk about China, in Mann’s book, entails trying to make points about how China actually is or might someday be.

Mann has clear opponents. He brings up writings by David Lampton, who later took him to task in a debate on ForeignPolicy.com. What’s most bothersome so far is the rhetorical excess Mann displays in opposing some other commentators. In one case, he criticizes “logical problems” in another argument one sentence after screwing up the logic in his own argument. He writes on page 37:

But this seemingly punchy aphorism, “If we treat China as a threat, it will become a threat,” bears further scrutiny. The suggestion is that the reverse is also true—if we don’t treat China as a threat, it won’t become a threat. But there are all sorts of logical problems with this notion, because one can imagine other possibilities.

Let’s take “treat China as a threat” and call it A. And “China will become a threat” will be B. The argument Mann seeks to refute is then:

If A then B.

His rhetoric turns to deriding a completely different position:

If not A then not B.

In fact this is not implied at all by the statement he’s opposing. He may be thinking of the contrapositive, through which in this case:

“If A then B.” would imply “If not B then not A.”

Anyway, there are indeed “all sorts of logical problems with this notion,” but I don’t suppose Mann was referring to his own logic.

UPDATE: In a later entry, I come around to appreciating Mann’s book despite misgivings about the rhetoric he uses to criticize others’ rhetoric.

This is the first of two posts in which I will outline some historical context on U.S.–China–Japan relations surrounding Nixon’s 1972 China visit. This material is all drawn from Margaret MacMillan’s Nixon and Mao, which I recently finished reading. (Page citations are included.) The book was full of engaging reconstructions of the diplomatic maneuvers and rhetorical subtleties of the visit and the extensive preparations. Its only weakness is the sometimes elementary background information that is interspersed throughout.

Nixon, in conversations with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai,* tried to make the case that U.S. involvement in Asia was good for China. Its ability to keep Japan in check was a primary reason, along with balancing India and of course the Soviet Union. If the United States withdrew from providing Japan with security, he argued, Japan may rearm, which would be disagreeable to China and the rest of Asia. He said the United States could keep Japan under control.

“But,” Nixon warned Zhou solemnly, “if the U.S. is gone from Asia, gone from Japan, our protests, no matter how loud, would be like—to use the Prime Minister [Zhou]’s phrase—firing an empty cannon; we would have no rallying effect because fifteen thousand miles away is just too far to be heard.”

In response, Zhou paid little attention to the suggestion that having American troops in Asia helped China. Indeed, he pointed out, their presence in Indochina was only helping the Soviets increase their influence there. (236)

Meanwhile, Zhou had brought up the suffering Japan had caused China in the past with Kissinger frequently in the 1971 talks leading up to Nixon’s visit. Noting Japan’s developing market and appetite for raw materials and markets abroad, Zhou told Nixon, “Expanding in such a great way as they are towards foreign lands, the inevitable result will be military expansion.” (238) Quoting directly from MacMillan:

The Americans, Zhou charged, had been careless in helping Japan rebuild after the Second World War: “You helped Japan fatten herself, and now she is a very heavy burden on you.” It had also been a mistake to receive the Japanese emperor in the Unite States; as Zhou had said earlier to Kissinger, he remained the basis on which a renewed Japanese militarism could be built. … Although the Chinese wanted the United States to reduce its forces in Asia, Zhou in his talks with Kissinger and now with Nixon repeated expressed concern that Japan would move its troops into countries such as Taiwan and South Korea to fill the vacuum. (238–9)

I may just have missed it, but the emperor seems to have fallen out of the debate over Japanese rearmament these days. Much of the rest of the sentiments seem to resonate quite a bit 35 years down the line.

*I use the Pinyin spelling. Macmillan uses Wade-Giles. I have changed her renderings for my style.

Next time: Japan’s reactions to the Nixon visit.

I’m reading Margaret MacMillan’s Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World these days. Here’s a paragraph to consider from page 97.

In the early days of the republic, many Chinese looked to the United States as a model—of government, but also of a society. President Woodrow Wilson’s promises of a new world order founded on justice and peace, his talk of national self-determination, and his evident antipathy to Japanese attempts to dominate China and the rapid expansion of Japanese forces into Siberia in the wake of the Russian Revolution made him, briefly, a hero to nationalistic Chinese. That came to an abrupt end in 1919, when Wilson took a prominent role in the gift of former German posessions in China and Japan. The americans, so many Chinese concluded, were simply imperialists in republican clothing

Sometimes, it’s useful to remember that arrangements of the China–United States–Japan triangle have been so different in the last century as to seem a fantasy hypothetical—something out of a Star Trek: The Next Generation allegory.

“Challenges to Bilateralism,” T. J. Pempel’s wide-ranging introduction to 2004’s Beyond Bilateralism (which he edited with Ellis S. Krauss) lays out a compelling narrative for post-WWII U.S.–Japan relations. One of modern history’s strongest and most enduring bilateral relationships, he writes, is giving way to a complex network of ties involving other actors: in short, moving “beyond bilateralism.”

The story goes like this: From occupation through the 1980s, the relationship was characterized by common priorities, established means for negotiations in important policy areas (which were kept separate by a tacit “non-linkage rule”), all in an overtly asymmetrical relationship. The countries were on the “same side in the bipolar international arena,” their economies were intimately related, and they shared a commitment to democracy, albeit in different forms.

Since the mid- to late 1980s, Pempel writes, these strictly bilateral relationships have been increasing in complexity and ambiguity. Among the causes for this change are (1) the end of Cold War geopolitics, (2) the development of other Asian economies, coinciding with a huge growth in cross-border capital flow, (3) the rise of regional and global multilateral institutions, and most recently (4) the effects of 9/11 on global politics.

This frame for the book starkly coincides with the perspective of my current line of thinking when Pempel takes on the issue of China as an element of the changed U.S.–Japan arena.

For the three countries, the relationship has clearly become trilateral, as Mochizuki’s analysis in Chapter 3 shows [I will address this soon]. U.S. unilateralism pushes Japan and China closer together, while any warming of ties between either Japan or China on the one hand and the United States on the other forces a re-calibration of interests by the party left out. Japan fears that closer U.S. ties to China may come at Japan’s expense. Japan–China ties remain the triangle’s weakest link, but American policymakers have long worried that closer links between those two countries would come at the expense of American influence in Asia. And as China grows economically, some people in Japan feel similarly threatened, despite the short-term profitability to many Japanese corporations derived from investment in and trade with China. (17, emphasis mine)

This is the most concise statement I have yet seen on the significance of the U.S.–Japan–China triangle as grounds for analysis. (It also courteously underlines the importance of the thesis work I did, phew.) The chapter also demonstrates the importance of taking other actors into account in any set of relations, whether bilateral, trilateral, or multilateral. I look forward to the remainder of this book.

While I get ready to read the rest of this book, here is a brief summary of some other key points:

• Pempel alludes to a U.S. idea that helping Japan to develop economically “was all calculated to assist Japan in becoming an economic success story that could be projected as a model for much of the rest of Asian development.” (7) I wonder whose rhetoric this was.
• There was little unofficial influence on pre-”beyond” U.S.–Japan ties. Non-governmental actors had little pull. (8) Additionally, “Functionally specific agencies in both countries worked with their counterparts on matters within their joint domains relatively independently of agencies dealing with issues in other areas,” (9) meaning that issues were kept separate in negotiations—”a non-linkage rule.”
• Similarly, when disputes arose, the U.S. president or Japanese prime minister rarely engaged in negotiations, instead depending on counterpart bureaucratic organizations, representing “a network of connectors [running] from one country’s government to that of the other.” (11)
• Japan being concerned about increased U.S. engagement with China in the ’90s, 9/11 escalated those concerns. “Japanese concerns were enhanced by the American warming toward China and its SCO [Shanghai Cooperative Organization] allies [Russia and four Central Asian states] as a result of the U.S. post-September 11 antiterrorism campaign, as well as by China’s willingness to utilize the antiterrorism label to justify actions against dissidents.” (16) (The latter concern refers to China’s defining Muslim separatists in Xinjiang Province as terrorists. That may be, but the Uighurs in northwest China are not aligned with any strains of the much feared “global Islam.”)
• President Clinton “personally took the initiative to upgrade the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to include a national leaders’ meeting,” yet the Bush administration has opposed multilateral arrangements. (27)
• Japan has supported regionalism because “after the many trade frictions of the mid- to late 1980s, Japan was anxious to reduce its dependence on the United States and also on those global multilateral organizations in which U.S. influence was overwhelming.” (29) This last point relates to a recent proposal by Japan to study the creation of a massive free trade area that would exclude the United States, which I will examine later.

I have been a good little bibliophile.

• Today I read most of China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files by Andrew Nathan and Bruce Gilley. This book has been a deeply informative backgrounder on the personal histories of the CCP’s top leaders, and it will serve as a fine reference during future readings. I will have more on this when I finish with it—I am particularly impressed by the authors’ candor on the sourcing for the book.
• I began my shopping spree last week when I bought China’s New Rulers and Murakami Haruki’s Kafka on the Shore at Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle.
• The buying continued with a visit to Amazon, which yielded a copy of Embracing Defeat, John Dower’s award-winning history of post-WWII Japan. I’ve read bits and pieces of this book over the last few years, but now I have my own copy. It is up next after China’s New Rulers.
• Between reading sittings today, I shopped for more books. At Idle Time Books next to the cafe Tryst, I finally bought their copy of Living With China: U.S.–China Relations in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Ezra Vogel at Harvard.
• Before returning home I discovered yet another bookstore on a bike-ride through Georgetown. There, I happened upon a truly exceptional used book. In 1989, LDP politician Ishihara Shintaro (who later left the LDP and is now governor of Tokyo) and Sony Chairman Morita Akio co-authored an anti-U.S. nationalist manifesto called The Japan That Can Say ‘No’ （｢ノー｣と言える日本）that was not intended for U.S. publication. A sloppy translation was entered into the Congressional Record and republished by The Jefferson Educational Foundation. That’s the copy that I found. Who cares? Well, most libraries only hold the later, better translation with an introduction by Ezra Vogel, but Morita withdrew his portion of the book before that official English translation because of negative reaction to the unauthorized edition. The unauthorized edition made the rounds in Washington and affected this city’s view of Japan, according to Vogel’s introduction, so the original is a better historical document. The price? Two dollars.
• My last stop was a swing by the Georgetown University library, which mercifully admits anyone with an ID during reasonable hours. There, I was able to download about half a dozen obscure articles I’ve been needing, and I photocopied key chapters from two relatively recent books edited by T.J. Pempel relevant to my research: Remapping East Asia and Beyond Bilateralism: U.S.–Japan Relations in the New Asia-Pacific (co-edited with Ellis S. Krauss).

Meanwhile in the news, there are two recent diplomatic headlines worth noting, after the jump. (more…)