In December 1975 Gerald Ford became the second American president to visit China. The adjustment of his country’s deep-seated distrust and hostility towards the People’s Republic had begun with the slow recognition of the lessons of Vietnam. On the Chinese side, change was a part of an even greater development: China’s resumption of an international and regional role appropriate to her historic stature and potential. This could only come to fruition after 1949 and by the mid-1970s it was complete. An approach towards establishing normal relations with the United States was now possible. Formal recognition of what had already been achieved came in 1978. In a Sino-American agreement the United States made the crucial concession that its forces should be withdrawn from Taiwan and that official diplomatic relations with the island’s KMT government should be ended.
Mao had died in September 1976. The threat of the ascendancy of a ‘gang of four’ of his coadjutors (one was his widow), who had promoted the policies of the Cultural Revolution, was quickly averted by their arrest (and, eventually, trial and condemnation in 1981). Under new leadership dominated by party veterans, it soon became clear that the excesses of the Cultural Revolution were to be corrected. In 1977 there rejoined the government as a vice-premier the twice-previously disgraced Deng Xiaoping, firmly associated with the contrary trend (his son had been crippled by beatings from the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution). The most important change, though, was that China’s long-awaited economic recovery was at last attainable. Scope was now to be given to individual enterprise and profit motive, and economic links with non-communist countries were to be encouraged. The aim was to resume the process of technological and industrial modernization.
The major definition of the new course was undertaken in 1981 at the plenary session of the central committee of the party that met that year. It undertook, too, the delicate task of distinguishing the positive achievements of Mao, a ‘great proletarian revolutionary’, from what it now identified as his ‘gross mistakes’ and his responsibility for the setbacks of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. For all the comings and goings in CCP leadership and the mysterious debates and sloganizing which continued to obscure political realities, and although Deng Xiaoping and his associates had to work through a collective leadership that included conservatives, the 1980s were to be shaped by a new current. Modernization had at last been given precedence over Marxist socialism, even if that could hardly be said aloud (when the secretary-general of the party pronounced in 1986 the incautious and amazing judgement that ‘Marx and Lenin cannot solve our problems’, he was soon dismissed). Marxist language still pervaded the rhetoric of government. Some said China was resuming the ‘capitalist road’. This, too, was obscuring, though natural. There persisted in the party and government a clear grasp of the need for positive planning of the economy; but there was a new recognition of practical limits and a willingness to try to discriminate more carefully between what was and was not within the scope of effective regulation in the pursuit of the major goals of economic and national strength, the improvement of living standards, and a broad egalitarianism.
One remarkable change was that agriculture was virtually privatized in the next few years in the sense that, although they were not given the freeholds of their land, peasants were encouraged to sell produce freely in the markets. New slogans - ‘to get rich is glorious’ - were coined to encourage the development of village industrial and commercial enterprise, and a pragmatic road to development was signposted with ‘four modernizations’. Special economic areas, enclaves for free trade with the capitalist world, were set up; the first at Canton, the historic centre of Chinese trade with the West. It was not a policy without costs - grain production fell at first, inflation began to show itself in the early 1980s and foreign debt rose. Some blamed the growing visibility of crime and corruption on the new line.
Yet of its economic success there can be no doubt. Mainland China began in the 1980s to show that perhaps an economic ‘miracle’ like that of Taiwan was within her grasp. By 1986 she was the second largest producer of coal in the world, and the fourth largest of steel. GDP rose at more than 10 per cent a year between 1978 and 1986, while industrial output had doubled in value in that time. Per capita peasant income nearly tripled and by 1988 the average peasant family was estimated to have about six months’ income in the savings bank. Taking a longer perspective, the contrasts are even more striking, for all the damage done by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The value of foreign trade multiplied roughly twenty-five times in per capita terms between 1950 and the middle of the 1980s. The social benefits that have accompanied such changes are also clear: increased food consumption and life expectancy, a virtual end to many of the fatal and crippling diseases of the old regime, and a huge inroad into mass illiteracy. China’s continuing population growth was alarming and prompted vigorous measures of intervention, but it had not, as had India’s, devoured the fruits of economic development.
The new line specifically linked modernization to strength. Thus it reflected the aspirations of China’s reformers ever since the May 4th Movement and of some even earlier. China’s international weight had already been apparent in the 1950s; it now began to show itself in different ways. In 1984 came agreement with the British over terms for the reincorporation of Hong Kong in 1997 on the expiration of the lease covering some of its territories. A later agreement with the Portuguese provided for the resumption of Macao, too. It was a blemish on the general recognition of China’s due standing that among its neighbours Vietnam (with which China’s relations at one time degenerated into open warfare, when the two countries were rivals for the control of Cambodia) remained hostile; but the Taiwanese were somewhat reassured by Chinese promises that the reincorporation of the island into the territory of the republic in due course would not endanger its economic system. Similar assurances were given over Hong Kong. Like the establishment of special trading enclaves on the mainland where external commerce could flourish, such statements underlined the importance China’s new rulers attached to commerce as a channel of modernization. China’s sheer size gave such a policy direction importance over a wide area. By 1985 the whole of East and South-East Asia constituted a trading zone of unprecedented potential.
Within it, new centres of industrial and commercial activity were developing so fast in the 1980s as to justify by themselves the view that the old global balance of economic power had disappeared. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore had all shed the aura of undeveloped economies; Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, by 1990, looked as if they were moving up rapidly to join them. Their success was part of that of East Asia as a whole, and Japan had been indispensable to this outcome. The rapidity with which Japan, like China, recovered its former status as a power (and surpassed it) had obvious implications for its place both in the Asian and the world balance. In 1959, Japanese exports again reached pre-war levels. By 1970 the Japanese had the second highest GDP in the non-communist world. They had renewed their industrial base and had moved with great success into new areas of manufacture. Only in 1951 did a Japanese yard launch the country’s first ship built for export; twenty years later, Japan had the largest shipbuilding industry in the world. At the same time it took a commanding position in consumer industries such as electronics and motorcars, of which Japan made more than any country except the United States. This caused resentment among American manufacturers - the supreme compliment. In 1979 it was agreed that Japanese cars should be made in England, the beginning of their entry to the EEC market. The debit side of this account was provided by a fast-growing population and by the ample evidence of the cost of economic growth in the destruction of the Japanese environment and the wear and tear of urban life.
Japan was, nevertheless, long favoured by circumstance. The Vietnam War, like the Korean, was a help; so was American enforcement of a bias towards investment rather than consumption during the occupation years. Yet human beings must act to take advantage of favourable circumstances and Japanese attitudes were crucial. Post-war Japan could deploy intense pride and an unrivalled willingness for collective effort among its people; both sprang from the deep cohesiveness and capacity for subordinating the individual to collective purposes which had always marked Japanese society. Strangely, such attitudes seemed to survive the coming of democracy. It may be too early to judge how deeply democratic institutions are rooted in Japanese society; after 1951 there soon appeared something like a consensus for one-party rule (though irritation with this quickly showed itself in the emergence of more extreme groupings, some anti-liberal). Mounting uneasiness was shown, too, over what was happening to traditional values and institutions. The costs of economic growth loomed up not only in huge conurbations and pollution, but also in social problems that strained even Japanese custom. Great firms still operated with success on the basis of group loyalties buttressed by traditional attitudes and institutions. Nonetheless, at a different level, even the Japanese family seemed to be under strain.
Economic progress also helped to change the context of foreign policy, which moved away in the 1960s from the simplicities of the preceding decade. Economic strength made the yen internationally important and drew Japan into western monetary diplomacy. Prosperity involved it in many other parts of the world, too. In the Pacific basin, it was a major consumer of other countries’ primary produce; in the Middle East it became a large buyer of oil. In Europe, Japan’s investment was thought alarming by some (even though its aggregate share was not large), while imports of its manufactured goods threatened European producers. Even food supply raised international questions; in the 1960s, 90 per cent of Japan’s requirements for protein came from fishing and this led to alarm that the Japanese might be over-fishing important grounds.
As these and other matters changed the atmosphere and content of foreign relations, so did the behaviour of other powers, especially in the Pacific area. Japan increasingly assumed in the 1960s an economic predominance in relation to other Pacific countries not unlike that of Germany towards central and eastern Europe before 1914. As it evolved into the world’s largest importer of raw materials, too, New Zealand and Australia found their economies increasingly and profitably tied into the Japanese. Both of them supplied meat, and Australia minerals, notably coal and iron ore. On the Asian mainland the Russians and the South Koreans complained about the Japanese fishing. This added a new complication to an old story. Korea was also Japan’s second biggest market (the United States was the biggest) and the Japanese started to invest there again after 1951. This revived a traditional distrust; it was ominous to find that South Korean nationalism had so anti-Japanese a tone that in 1959 the president of South Korea could urge his countrymen to unite ‘as one man’ against not their northern neighbour, but Japan. Within twenty years, too, Japanese car manufacturers were looking askance at the vigorous rival they had helped create. As in Taiwan, so in South Korea industrial growth had been built on technology diffused by Japan.
Yet although Japan’s dependence on imported energy meant a nasty economic shock when oil prices shot up in the 1970s, nothing seemed for a long time to affect Japan’s economic progress. Exports to the United States in 1971 were worth $6,000 million: by 1984, that total had grown tenfold. By the end of the 1980s, Japan was the world’s second largest economic power in terms of GDP. As its industrialists turned to advanced information technology and biotechnology, and talked of running down car manufacturing, there appeared no reason to think that it had lost its power of disciplined self-adaptation.
Greater strength had already meant greater responsibilities. The withdrawal of American direction was logically rounded off in 1972 when Okinawa (one of the first of its overseas possessions to be reacquired) was returned to Japan, a large American base there notwithstanding. There remained the questions of the Kuriles, still in Russian hands, and of Taiwan, in the possession of the Chinese nationalists and claimed by the Chinese communists, but Japanese attitudes on all these matters remained - no doubt prudently - reserved. There was also the possibility that the question of Sakhalin might be reopened. All such issues began to look much more susceptible to revisions or at least reconsideration in the wake of the great changes brought to the Asian scene by Chinese and Japanese revival. The Sino-Soviet quarrel gave Japan more freedom for manoeuvre, both towards the United States, its erstwhile patron, and towards China and Russia. That too close a tie with the Americans might bring embarrassment became clearer as the Vietnam War unrolled and political opposition to it grew in Japan. Its freedom was limited, in the sense that all three of the other great powers of the area were by 1970 equipped with nuclear weapons (and Japan, of all nations, had most reason to know their effect), but there was little doubt that Japan could produce them within a relatively brief time if it had to. Altogether, the Japanese stance had the potential to develop in various directions; in 1978 the Chinese vice-president visited Tokyo. Indisputably, Japan was once more a world power.
If the test of that status is the habitual exercise of decisive influence, whether economic, military or political, outside a country’s own geographical area, then by the 1980s India was still not a world power. This is perhaps one of the surprises of the second half of the century. India moved into independence with many advantages enjoyed neither by other former European dependencies, nor by Japan in the aftermath of defeat. It had taken over in 1947 an effective administration, well-trained and dependable armed forces, a well-educated elite, thriving universities (some seventy of them), had much international benevolence and goodwill to draw upon, a substantial infrastructure undamaged by the war and, soon, the advantages of Cold War polarization to exploit. The country also had to face poverty, malnutrition and major public health problems, but so did China. By 1980 the contrast between them was very visible; the streets of Chinese cities were by 1970 filled by serviceably (though drably) dressed and well-nourished people, while those of India still displayed horrifying examples of poverty and disease. This made it easy to be pessimistically selective in considering India’s poor development performance. There were sectors where growth was substantial and impressive. But such achievements are overshadowed by the fact that economic growth was followed closely by that of population; most Indians remained little better off than those who had welcomed independence in 1947.
It can be argued that to have kept India together at all was a great achievement, given the country’s fissiparous nature and potential divisions. Somehow, too, a democratic electoral order was maintained, even if with qualifications, and peaceful changes of government occurred as a result of votes cast. Yet even India’s democratic record looked less encouraging after 1975 when the prime minister (and Nehru’s daughter), Mrs Gandhi, proclaimed a state of emergency and the imposition of presidential rule akin to that of viceroys in the old days (one of the two Indian communist parties supported her). This was followed, it is true, by her loss of the elections in 1977 and her judicial exclusion briefly from office and parliament the following year, which could be thought a healthy symptom of Indian constitutionalism. But on the other side of the balance were the recurrent resorts to the use of presidential powers to suspend normal constitutional government in specific areas and a flow of reports of the brutality of police and security forces towards minorities.
It was an ominous symptom of reaction to the dangers of division that in 1971 an orthodox and deeply conservative Hindu party made its appearance in Indian politics as the first plausible threat to the hegemony of Congress and held office for three years. That hegemony persisted, nonetheless. Forty years after independence, Congress was more visibly than ever not so much a political party in the European sense as an India-wide coalition of interest groups, notables and controllers of patronage, and this gave it, even under the leadership of Nehru, for all his socialist aspirations and rhetoric, an intrinsically conservative character. It was never the function of Congress, once the British were removed, to bring about change, but rather to accommodate it. This was in a manner symbolized by the dynastic nature of Indian government. Nehru had been succeeded as prime minister by his daughter, Mrs Gandhi (who had begun her divergence from his wishes by setting aside his request that no religious ceremony should accompany his funeral) and she was to be followed by her son, Rajiv Gandhi. When he was blown up by an assassin (he was not in office at the time), Congress leaders at once showed an almost automatic reflex in seeking to persuade his widow to take up the leadership of the party. In the 1980s, though, there were signs that dynasticism might not prove viable much longer. Sikh particularism brought itself vividly to the world’s notice in 1984 with the assassination of Mrs Gandhi (once more prime minister), after the Indian army had carried out an attack on the foremost shrine of Sikh faith at Amritsar. In the next seven years, more than 10,000 Sikh militants, innocent bystanders and members of the security forces were to be killed. Fighting with Pakistan over Kashmir, too, broke out again in the later part of the decade. In 1990 it was officially admitted that 890 people had died that year in Hindu-Muslim riots, the worst since 1947.
Once again, it is difficult not to return to banal reflection that the weight of the past was very heavy in India, that no dynamic force emerged to throw it off and that modernity arrived slowly and patchily. As memories of pre-independence India faded, the reassertion of Indian tradition was always likely. Symbolically, when the moment for independence had come in 1947 it had been at midnight, because the British had not consulted the astrologers to provide an auspicious day and a moment between two days had therefore to be chosen for the birth of a new nation: it was an assertion of the power of Indian ways that were to lose little of their force in the next forty years. Partition had then redefined the community to be governed in much more dominantly Hindu terms. By 1980 the last Indian civil service officer recruited under the British had already retired. India lives still with a conscious disparity between its engrafted western political system and the traditional society on which that has been imposed. For all the great achievements of many of its leaders, devoted men and women, the entrenched past, with all that means in terms of privilege, injustice and inequity, still stands in India’s way. Perhaps those who believed in its future in 1947 simply failed to recognize how difficult and painful fundamental change must be - and it is not for those who have found it hard to accomplish much less fundamental change in their own societies to be supercilious about that.