"
GOLIA ANDANA Ade dat
!
any do as they are expected to do. The fees of half the 5,000 Chinese students at American universities are paid by United States citizens of Chinese descent. At bottom, when it comes to "inside" and "outside", the Chinese are trying to have things both ways. They demand total political loyalty from the 75 million inhabitants of China who are not ethnic Chinese, but ask for strong cultural loyalty from the 30 or more million ethnic Chinese who live in other countries.
8. The omission of any reference, so far, to Marxist-Leninist ideology is deliberate. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Lenin's theory of imperialism held great appeal for many Chinese, as a seemingly plausible explanation of China's experience from the Opium War onwards and as a prophecy of inevitable deliverance from her "semi-colonial" status. Later on, the notion of "proletarian internationalism" helped inspire a number of Mao's post-war adventures, for instance in Indonesia. But in foreign policy, as in other fields, the debacle of the cultural Revolution brought home to almost everyone in China the dangerously self-destructive character of assertively radical behaviour. Externally as well as domestically, the reaction was to "seek truth from facts" and turn back from ideology to the language of self-interest and (non- proletarian) internationalism. It is symptomatic that Wu Xueqian': long speech to the United Nations General Assembly this year used the word "socialism" just once, and then only in a passage about domestic affairs. "Capitalism" and "imperialism" were mentioned not at all. Instead, Wu spoke in much the same terms as would a West Foreign Minister of "the international community" and "the rules of international law".
9. I think it safe to conclude that a desire to practice "proletarian internationalism" is lacking in Chinese policy at present. The Chinese have after all disavowed (at least for quite a long period) the ambition to apply socialism even within what they regard as Chinese territory in the cases of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. I do not think they would feel bound by principle to answer an explicit plea for help by an embattled Communist regime or faction abroad. Even in Mao's time they were selective about how much help they gave to whom, under cover of the theory that national revolutionary movements should chiefly rely for success on their own efforts. Today some of their main customers for military support are non-Communist or only partly orthodox - for example the Afghans and the Cambodian Resistance confirming that reasons of state weigh more in the balance than ideology. There are, of course, limits to how far the Chinese can explicitly shed the philosophical baggage of Communist solidarity, and so long as moral support comes cheap there is no strong need for them to do so. Meanwhile, the trend away from ideology has operated in practice more by omission, and by a steady shift of emphasis and style.
CONFIDENTIAL
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