Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

It proved to be a disastrously wrong position. The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the Untied States government and its Department of Defense. I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework. One day at the height of the protests, I went to the university library to check out what was then available to students on Vietnamese communism, the history of communism in East Asia, and the international Communist movement. I was surprised to find that all the major books were there on the shelves, untouched. The conclusion seemed obvious to me then: these students knew nothing about communism and had no interest in remedying that lack. They were defining the Vietnamese Communists largely out of their own romantic desires to oppose Washington’s policies. As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.

During a year of China-watching (as it was then called) from Hong Kong, I began to have inklings of the Cultural Revolution to come, and in 1966, I wrote a long piece on how China’s People’s Liberation Army was being transformed into the personal political instrument of Mao Zedong.³ As we would later learn, Mao was indeed in the process of allying himself with the army—in order to attack the Communist Party itself, the very organization he had begun building into a mass movement in those years of Japanese occupation. But none of us studying China then came close to imagining what the Cultural Revolution would be like or what kind of a disaster it would become, all because Mao Zedong wanted revenge on some of his fellow revolutionaries. Before the savagery ended with Mao’s death in 1976, the so-called Cultural Revolution came to resemble Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s. It destroyed the last shreds of Chinese idealism about the promise of communism.

The Cultural Revolution isolated China from the First, Second, and Third Worlds. It became a pariah state, unable even to forge a united front with the Soviet Union to support the Vietnamese Communists. China and Russia came perilously close to war. The only stable person left among the top Chinese leadership, Premier Zhou Enlai, sought to avoid a preemptive Soviet strike against China’s fledgling nuclear weapons program by opening relations with the devil himself—the United States. President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, jumped at the opportunity, and Sino-American rapprochement unfolded—against a backdrop of the war in Vietnam, Watergate, and China’s purge of anyone not totally committed to the cult of Mao. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 renewed popular interest in an etherealized China of acupuncture, the Great Wall, ancient cultural artifacts, and pandas—just as the real land was being run into the ground by its most despicable twentieth-century regime.

Like other foreign specialists in Chinese politics, I was active in trying to understand what was going on, writing papers and attending conferences where Chinese matters were discussed. In 1967, at age thirty-six, I was appointed chairman of Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies. Perhaps the most important action I took in my five years at the center was to hire, as our librarian, John Service, one of America’s great State Department China hands of the 1940s, who had been savaged by Senator Joseph McCarthy and whose career in the Foreign Service had been ruined. When, after Kissinger’s initial visit, Zhou Enlai told American reporters that Service was one of only three Americans the Chinese would welcome back (the other two were Professors John Fairbank and Owen Lattimore), we at the center hastily helped arrange for his trip. I can vividly remember him calling me on the day in July 1971 when it was announced that President Nixon had accepted an invitation from Mao Zedong to visit China. As much as he hated Nixon, he told me, he had to give him credit as virtually the only conceivable president who could have brought off such a breakthrough.