BETWEEN
FOUR WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA;
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS: DIPLOMAT, ECONOMIST, JOURNALIST AND
JAPANOLOGIST;
BETWEEN
FOUR LANGUAGES: ENGLISH, CHINESE, RUSSIAN AND
JAPANESE
Chapter
4a
The ANU
and the Vietnam War Debate
1. 'The Australian' Connection
2. Going Political
3. Back to the PhD
4. The China Book
5. Jim Cairns, and the Enclave Solution
6. Finding a Publisher
September
1965. After almost a decade within the bureaucracy, the
umbilical cord was finally cut. I had formally resigned
from External Affairs.
It was not an easy decision. I was on my own. The people
with whom I had worked so closely for almost a decade were
now firmly on the other side of the fence. And while today
I realise that I had to make the move, at the time its
logic was not obvious.
On the other hand, I was now able to begin to speak my mind
about the growing horror of Vietnam, and the anti-China
lies and fantasies that I had had to live with for years.
No longer would I have to exist as a gagged and tongue-tied
government official in a state of artificial limbo for four
more years.
I was free. And realising that freedom came much sooner
than I had expected.
1. 'The
Australian' Connection
I had run into Eric Walsh earlier in the year when he was
still a cub reporter for the Canberra Times. He had since
moved to working for a Sydney evening paper as Canberra
correspondent.
Even in those early days he had strong personal connections
to a wide range of people. He gave me an introduction to
Adrian Deamer, then number two on The Australian, the
national newspaper based in Canberra that Rupert Murdoch
was trying bravely to create.
In those days, The Australian was the one media voice of
progressive good sense on Vietnam, and many other issues.
Murdoch himself was also mildly progressive. His shift to
the Right only came later, triggered in part by the
problems he began to have with the leftwing print unions in
Sydney and later in London.
Many have praised Deamer’s liberalism and
intelligence as a newspaper editor, and I can only add to
the praise. He introduced me to the chief editor, Walter
Kommer. Both were more than happy to run the minor scoop I
had given them, on how a ‘senior’ External
Affairs official had resigned in protest against
Australia’s intervention in Vietnam.
That report was picked by the agencies and run in a few
newspapers abroad. But for most part the reaction was
fairly muted.
I may have been the first Western diplomat to resign in
protest against the Vietnam intervention. But in those
early days, Vietnam was still not a hot issue. Most assumed
that the intervention would soon be all over. Most believed
it would be impossible for the pro-communist forces in the
South to resist the full weight of US power.
However, Pravda took the news seriously (no doubt it had
its KGB reasons). It published a long two column piece
about how even in my Moscow days I had realised the
immorality of Western intervention in Vietnam (how did they
know that?) and had bravely decided to resign when
confronted by the anti-communist beast in Canberra.
Needless to say, the Pravda intervention sent the ASIO
people into fits. I heard later that it had led these
trusty guardians of Australian security to conclude that
not only was I in the pocket of the Soviets, but also that
the Soviets may have prompted me to resign from government
service so they could use me as a tool to boost their
global anti-US campaign over Vietnam!
Kommer and Deamer had also encouraged me to write something
explaining my Vietnam views. Entitled ‘Australia and
the Lost War,’ and published in October 1965, my
article strongly criticised the aims and tactics of the
US-Australian military intervention in Vietnam.
But contrary to the title, it stopped short of actually
predicting US- Australian defeat. Like most others, I
assumed that the sheer weight of US military power would
probably win out in the end. After all, if you kill enough
people, then as Stalin, Hitler and quite a few other
butchers had proved, the rights and wrongs of disputes
become irrelevant.
The article also launched me firmly into the ranks of
Australia’s nascent anti-Vietnam War protest movement
– people whom in my conservative External Affairs
days I would have avoided as a bunch of long-haired radical
ratbags. I even had an approach from the Sydney-based
branch of the Australian Communist Party (which I dutifully
reported to my former External Affairs colleagues –
the umbilical cord was still not quite as firmly cut as it
should have been). And at Deamer’s request, I
followed up with a series of articles on China and Russia.
Needless to say, none of this activism passed unnoticed in
the government. I am told it even led John Gorton, then
minister in charge of education affairs, to query how and
why the government-funded ANU was providing refuge to this
anti-Vietnam War subversive.
I am also told that the ANU people decided to resist
Gorton’s pressure. But that did not mean they
approved of what I was doing. At around the same time,
Crawford, then the head of the Research School of Pacific
Studies where I had my scholarship, pulled me in for a
formal dressing down over the dreadful sin of agreeing to
give an extension course on Chinese history at the
affiliated Canberra University College.
PhD scholarship students were obliged to concentrate
entirely on their PhD studies he told me. The implication
– lay off the anti-Vietnam War activities - did not
escape me, even if it did not deter me.
2. Going
Political
Government pressure was not my only problem.
Within weeks of arriving at the ANU I was thrown into a
life of total confusion. On the one hand I had to try to
educate myself rapidly in the economics needed for PhD
studies (the second year economics I had studied back in
1958 was not quite enough, I soon discovered). I also had
to start learning Japanese (I had already discovered that
Chinese and Japanese were two very different languages).
Meanwhile I was being pulled around Australia to talk to
anti-Vietnam War seminars and conferences.
On my anti-Vietnam talk trips to Sydney I also began to get
to know some people from the Sydney Push –
libertarians who believed in free love and quite a few
other human vices. For a refugee from puritanical Canberra
it was all very exciting.
The Push people did a lot to broaden my still very narrow
conservative outlook. In particular I owed a lot to a
rather caring lady called Liz Fell who helped educate me in
Push philosophies and ways. But none of that did much to
help my PhD studies.
I had also joined the Canberra branch of the Australian
Labor Party, thinking that there at least I would be able
to do something about the Vietnam issue. And among the
leftwingers in the branch I did find support, especially
from Bruce Macfarlane, the political scientist.
Bruce later was to go overboard in praise of Mao and
Cultural Revolution China. But his generosity and
personality helped carry me through a difficult period. He
even suggested that I should try to be the ALP candidate
for the seat of Canberra, an invitation I was able to
decline even if it felt rather flattering.
At the time the ALP was badly divided over Vietnam. On the
Left were ideological leftwingers such as Macfarlane who
would instinctively support any and all pro-communist
revolutionaries around the world. With them, but separate
from them, were the concerned activists – people like
myself with no political bias but who were badly upset by
the cruelty and immorality of the US intervention.
Opposed to us, however, was a powerful rightwing,
particularly strong in the Canberra and NSW, and which
basically supported the Vietnam intervention. Even worse
were the lumpen ALP proletariat - workers and trade-union
officials who subscribed to the crudest of all the
pro-Vietnam arguments: ‘Kill the little yellow
buggers up there before they get down here and try to kill
us.” It was not a happy mix.
One activist group I came to respect highly were the
Quakers. At an early stage of the war they went to a lot of
trouble to prepare a booklet giving facts and opinions on
the Vietnam war, including my own original article in The
Australian. Needless to say, they were totally ignored by
Australia’s dominant conservative media.
Another group was centered around a Melbourne magazine
called Dissent edited by a very concerned activist, Leon
Glazer. I will never forget one of the covers for their
magazine – a dozen of so unarmed young Vietnamese men
in peasant clothing lying dead by a stream, with a group of
smirking heavily-armed US soldiers behind them. The
obscenity of it all still remains with me.
A Run-in
With 'The Bulletin.'
Glazer had asked me if I could write something for them,
and by chance I did have something to write. The
Sydney-based magazine, The Bulletin, had under its very
rightwing editor, Peter Coleman, just run a long piece by
the equally rightwing commentator, Brian Buckley. In it
they had taken great delight in flagellating the Left, and
Dissent, for their alleged failure to realise the dangers
of global communism and China, especially over Vietnam.
It was an unusual article since unlike the standard, lazy,
‘bash –the- lefties’ style of Australia
rightwing polemics at the time, the author seemed to have
gone to a lot of trouble to muster facts and dates to
support his case, including even alleged Chinese plots
against Afghanistan. It was especially contemptuous of the
Left for failing to realise the threat posed by Beijing.
But as I read the Buckley article more closely, I realised
that large parts of it had been lifted, in part
word-for-word, from a London Economist article only a few
months earlier. The Economist in those days was also up to
its neck in anti-leftwing vitriol over Vietnam and China.
In short, our ‘bash-the-lefties’ types were now
into plain, old-fashioned plagarism to cover up their
weaknesses in their own thinking and research.
I also realised that if one looked closely at the wording
of the anti-communist vitriol of the original Economist
article, it was very similar to the wording of the
anti-capitalist vitriol that the Soviet ideologues were
then using to lambast their own dissenters, in particular
one unfortunate author Victor Nekrasov who had foolishly
urged a more sensible approach to the West and some
understanding of the merits of the capitalistic system.
The mirror-image mentalities of pro-communist and
anti-communist ideologues was something that had long
interested me.
So I began my Dissent article first by noting the
remarkable similarities between the Buckley article and the
earlier Economist article. Some might suggest that
plagiarism was involved, I said tongue in cheek, but in
fact it was simply great minds thinking alike, I noted.
I then was able to take each of the anti-communist,
anti-China, anti-Leftwing tirades in the article and set it
along side its mirror image in anti-capitalist, anti-West,
anti-Nekrasov tirades then underway in the Moscow
ideological rags. More great minds thinking alike, I was
able to note.
Even better, I was able to pick up points where the
Bulletin article was even stronger and more vitriolic than
the original Economist article and use them, even more
tongue-in-cheek, to argue that Buckley had done even better
than the Economist in matching Soviet thinking.
If I say so myself, I think it was one of the best and more
powerful articles I have ever written. And having just
spent two years listening daily to Soviet pro-communist
ideologues, and endless years listening to their
anti-communist, mirror-image opposite numbers in the West,
it was a topic on which I could write both accurately and
with some authority. It was the perfect opportunity to
pillory the ideological biases of both sides.
But if anyone in Australia realised those points, they kept
it to themselves. Most of my colleagues, both leftwing and
mid-road, could not even begin to grasp the concept of
equating the foolishness and word-for-word similarities of
pro-communist and anti-communist biases.
Australia was not ready for that kind of sophistication. In
any political debate one always had to assume that one side
was right and the other was wrong.
One or two of the mid-roaders even rebuked me for having
been so cruel to the hapless Buckley. In other words, it
was allright for the Right to pour scorn and vitriol on the
Left, but it wrong for the Left to retaliate. I could never
get to the bottom of that kind of logic, but it seemed quie
strong in Australia at the time.
Needless to say, the Right, including the Bulletin, were
outraged; I was even threatened with legal action from
Coleman. Why had I not bothered to contact him before I
wrote my piece, he thundered. If I had done that he could
have assured me that it was only by accident that an
attribution to the Economist had been cut from the original
Buckley article.
Needless to say, Coleman did not even bother to try to
rebut the main thrust of the article, namely the
mirror-image similarities of Right-Left dogmatists.
Nor was there any hint that Buckley, in launching his
anti-Leftwing tirade, might have been under any obligation
to contact the people he was lambasting to find out exactly
what their views really were. As I have found so often with
the Right, both in Australia and elsewhere, their
over-weening confidence that they alone are the repository
of intelligence, goodwill and the truth remains unshaken,
even after Vietnam.
The Economist remains a particularly good example of this
unsullied confidence in action. But the Bulletin, both
under Coleman and his equally virulent anti-communist
successor, Donald Horne (he of the subsequent smarmy
conversion to pro-Whitlam and other trendy leftwing causes)
were not far behind.
More
Vietnam Debate - AIPS
Thanks to the Dissent people and occasional anti-Vietnam
talkfests, I got to know many of those active on the
Melbourne front. Max Teichman of Monash University helped
me greatly and introduced me to some of the denizens of the
dreaded Victorian Left. Their zeal, and their hatreds, were
impressive.
The Left in Sydney seemed much less motivated; many seemed
keener on enjoying life rather than hunting down enemies
and arguing foreign policies. The Push people were also
anarchistic and anti-government, which made them fairly
intolerant of all regimes, communist ones included. There
was little sympathy for Vietnam's plight.
Their ideological flabbiness was highlighted by the way
their guru at the time, Paddy McGuiness, later defected to
the Right. There he managed to show much the same
intolerance and sloppy argumentation has he had shown on
the Left.
John Barton’s newly-formed Australia Party tried hard
to bring me in to support their anti-war position. But they
were badly disorganised.
One of my darker moments was sharing the stage at a party
rally in a Sydney suburb with Alex Carey, a genuine
humanist who agonised even more than I did over the Vietnam
atrocity. He had dragged in a mountain of historical and
legal documents –1954 Geneva agreements etc - to
prove the illegality of the intervention. But before us was
seated an audience of exactly ten - three old men, six
housewives, and a dog.
The climax to all this was being asked by John Mant, then a
conservative but concerned Sydney lawyer, to give a paper
at the Australian Institute of Political Science annual
conference in January 1967. The theme was ‘Communism
in Asia – A Threat to Australia?’
On the threat side they had a strong array of well-known
names - J.D.B, Miller, Owen Harries, Zelman Cohen and some
flown in from the abroad, including that longtime US State
Department subsidised, biassedly anti-communist academic,
Robert Scalapino.
On the anti-threat side there was just one combatant - me.
Once again I was on my own. Fitzgerald had carefully
declined my requests to help me make a joint presentation.
The paper I delivered can be found on this website. I put
enormous time into preparation, even if I let my agony over
the escalating atrocity in Vietnam get the better of me. My
main aim was to try to counter the conventional wisdom that
said the world, and Australia, faced a grave threat from
China’s innate aggressiveness and its communism.
Much of the anti-China hysteria in Australia at the time
was due to the polemics of the Sino-Soviet dispute. Time
and time again the pro-Vietnam War faction would drag out
one or other of Beijing’s fiercer statements in the
dispute, and intone wisely how at the very least we had to
take the Chinese at their aggressive word.
That, together with the grossly distorted view of the 1962
Sino-Indian dispute, had created the indelible image of an
extremist Beijing far to the Left of the more moderate
Western communists in Moscow.
This is turn underlay the topic chosen for the AIPS
conference, namely that in Asia, Australia faced a variety
of Communism far more virulent than any other Communism the
world had seen before. The West had to do everything it
could to oppose the spread of this Asian
‘virus’, specifically in Vietnam, regardless of
the rights and wrongs of what was actually happening in
that unfortunate country.
By way of counter-attack, I had tried in my AIPS paper and
elsewhere to get people to focus in on what exactly both
sides were in fact saying in the Sino-Soviet polemical
dispute. And when one did that it was fairly clear that
both sides were simply trying to score points against the
other by dragging out different versions of communist
dogma. Both remained just as communist as the other.
Indeed, by carefully choosing quotes, one could easily
prove that Moscow was the extremist and Beijing was the
moderate.
A particular Canberra obsession at the time was
Beijing’s vocal support for something called wars of
national liberation, with the war in Vietnam seen as the
forerunner. But as I pointed out in the paper, Moscow was
saying exactly the same about wars of liberation, and just
as vocally.
As well, Moscow was doing far more than Beijing about
helping those wars materially, especially in Vietnam. In
any case, both were entitled to want to see pro-communist
regimes emerge in a world where they were constantly
threatened by anti-communist activities.
As I mentioned earlier, I had begun this research into
Sino-Soviet polemics while in Moscow; and had even sent off
a paper on the topic to External Affairs, which had been
kind enough to include it in the Department’s Digest
of Dispatches circulated to embassies and others each
month.
It was probably my one and only contribution to Australian
foreign policy wisdom, even if it ended up as water off
EA’s anti-Beijing biassed back.
To the AIPS prestige audience assembled in Canberra, this
kind of research was equally ineffective. The image of
Beijing as some kind of Asiatic monster plotting Asian
takeover was too deeply ingrained to be shaken by a few
quotes from obscure polemical documents.
I had wasted not just time but also opportunity to present
the anti-Vietnam War case before an important audience. I
had failed. I should have saved my breath.
It reminded me of Alex Carey’s dilemma in the Sydney
lecture hall, even if my audience was much larger and
better educated. Australia simply did not have the foreign
affairs sophistication to handle sensible argument or
debate about Communism or revolution. And the establishment
gurus ministering to that ignorance were determined to keep
it that way.
Peter Hastings of the Sydney Morning Herald, yet another of
the many ASIO tainted journalists in a position to mould
Australia foreign policy opinion, managed to report in
detail on every one of the pro-Vietnam War conference
papers. He omitted only one - mine, even though I was the
only one to give the other side of the debate.
At the time of the AIPS talkfest the other big issue was
Beijing’s intense anti-Americanism. This too was
dragged out constantly to prove Beijing’s inherent
aggressiveness.
Back in those pristine days, to be anti-American in
Australia was to be anti-God. After all, had not the
Americans saved us from the Japanese aggressors just a
generation earlier?
Few seemed to realise that the Chinese we were trying to
paint as aggressive monsters were in fact precisely the
same Chinese who had joined us in trying to fight those
Japanese aggressors.
Even fewer wanted to think about why a Beijing regime that
had suffered from cruel US intervention in its former civil
war, which was still under US trade embargo, which had seen
the US deny its legitimate claim to Taiwan, and which was
still under constant threat of US attack via Taiwan, might
want to direct a few harsh words against the source of its
problems.
In the minds of Australia’s easily brainwashed
public, and not a few of its weak-minded academics, if
Beijing was anti-US then that proved it must be aggressive,
expansionist and anti-Australian.
The almost total non-reaction to my AIPS efforts, even
among the Left, left me deeply depressed.
In desperation I had in my AIPS paper thrown in something
about the scandalous lack of Asian language speakers in
External Affairs. In those innocent, pre-Vietnam debacle,
pre-Watergate days, the public assumed naively that the
people at the top were responsible people who had the
information and expertise to know what was going on.
If they said China was aggressive then China was
aggressive. If they said intervention in Vietnam was
needed, then it was needed.
The only way to counter this naivete, I thought, was to
prove that the people at the top did not really know very
much about what was going on in the world. They could not
even speak the languages of the countries which they were
happily condemning.
External Affairs, still under Plimsoll, came back with a
document in which anyone who had ever claimed even a
smattering of a local Asian language was listed as a fluent
Asian language speaker. Hastings gave it publicity, finally
mentioning that someone called Clark had spoken at the AIPS
conference, and adding that in view of the EA document,
Clark had obviously got it all wrong.
Deamer at The Australian was good enough to give me space
for a rebuttal, and this time I was finally able to
persuade Fitzgerald to lend his name. But the damage had
been done.
Writing a
Book?
In short, those were dark days.
Fortunately I was getting to know R. whom I had met earlier
when she was doing part time work at a small Civic Centre
coffeehouse run by a Ukrainian lady with whom I liked to
practice Russian. R's gentle femininity did a lot to calm a
tortured soul.
Gradually I began to realise that if I was to present the
anti-Vietnam War case properly, I had no choice but to
confront the China question fully and properly. And if I
was to do that I would have to write a book.
It was no use quoting bits and pieces from the past
statements.
Nor were occasional articles in The Australian or elsewhere
enough.
In a book I could try to explain the full background to
Beijing’s various foreign policy disputes. I could go
into details - the Korean War, the occupation of Tibet, the
Taiwan problem, the Sino-Soviet dispute, everything I knew
about the Sino-Indian dispute, even the origins of the
communist revolution in China.
Taken together, all this would show that the disputes were
largely interconnected, and that they came back to Beijing
feeling that it had a legitimate right to protect its
territory and its borders, whether in Korea, Taiwan, India
or Tibet. Beijing’s highly justified position over
Taiwan in particular was the key to most of what the West
wanted to see as innate belligerency.
With all these details explained, Beijing’s attitudes
began to make sense, even during the mad days of Mao. One
reason they made sense was because foreign policy remained
very much the bailiwick of two intelligent and moderate
Chinese – Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping .
But how do you sit down to write a full-scale book on
Chinese foreign policy when you are a PhD researcher still
trying to get on top of advanced economics, master the
Japanese language, collect research materials for a
difficult PhD topic - Japan’s direct investment
overseas - not to mention still being involved in the
anti-Vietnam War debate?
3. Back
to the PhD
Fortunately some of the problems on the study side of
things, economics especially, were beginning to be
resolved.
After a dreadful experience with a typical ANU theoretical
economist delegated to teach advanced economics to PhD
candidates (these characters can fill an entire blackboard
with figures simply to prove some obscure point of economic
theory quite divorced from the real word of economic
activity) I was taken in hand by the ANU expert on trade
economics, Max Corden.
Corden too liked economic theory. But by using graphs and
diagrams, he could explain things so clearly, neatly and
simply that finally I began to realise not just what the
theories were about but also the logical beauty of
economics as a science.
I learned how readily one can come up with the right
analyses of complex economic situations, provided one gets
the variables in the right cause and effect order. It was a
lesson that would help me enormously later in getting to
understand the Japanese economy.
Max was also a very moral person. He too agonised over the
Vietnam War. But his mathematical mind was never able fully
to grasp the bias and emotion behind so much of the policy
debate.
He wanted to believe that if, as in economics, one simply
set out the political variables in the right sequential
order, the conclusions would automatically emerge, QED. But
in foreign affairs there is little room for this kind of
logical analysis.
Learning
Japanese
Meanwhile, I was also trying to do something about the
Japanese language side of things. Initially I had tried to
plough through economic texts with the help of dictionaries
and my knowledge of Chinese ideographs. I was getting
nowhere very fast.
Soon I was forced to realise that I had no choice but to
try to learn the language from the bottom up, as a living
language, before I could use it for research. As I had
discovered with Chinese and Russian, to read a difficult
language easily, you must reach a stage where, when you see
the script, you ‘hear’ the spoken equivalent.
When you do that, meaning emerges naturally, as if you were
slowly listening to tsomeone saying the same thing. But if
you do not do that you have to consciously translate each
word into meaning, and then try to assemble it all
consciously into sentences which provide some kind of
consistent meaning. That can be very painful and
time-consuming
How to learn Japanese from the bottom up while still stuck
in Canberra?
My first step was to enrol for a course in the Japanese
language department at the university. And since I had
already taught myself the Japanese phonetic script
–kana – and knew Chinese ideographs I was
allowed to enrol for the second year Japanese reading
course.
I soon realised my mistake. The course was a classic
example of the criminal irresponsibility of Australian
universities when it came to the teaching of Asian
languages at the time (fortunately some have since
improved).
Our alleged teacher was a typically useless Japanese
academic recruited at great expense from Tokyo. His main
aim in life was to preserve his dignity as an ivory tower
resident, improve his English, and convince us how remote,
refined and impossible was the language we were supposed to
be learning.
For each class he would set a few paragraphs from a very
difficult Japanese literary text for translation. Taking a
sentence at a time, he would ask students in turn to
attempt a translation.
Since students knew in advance the order in which he would
ask for a translation, they would be careful to sit in the
same order at each class, which meant they needed only to
prepare in advance the sentences which they knew he would
ask them to translate – a total of about two
sentences per class.
Ivory tower man would then spend long slabs of time
explaining, in English, the subtleties of the vocab and
literary expressions in that sentence. Finally he would
give us his official translation of the sentence, which we
were all supposed diligently to write down.
In the final exam our so-called teacher would set for a
translation one of the very few literary texts he had
managed to teach the class during that year. Needless to
say, none of the students could have handled the Japanese
in the text, even after a year in the class.
But by that time they would have memorised the official
translations they had received during the year and had
diligently written down. All they then had to do was write
out what they had memorised, and if they did that
correctly, a pass mark was guaranteed.
Ivory-tower man would then tell the world how in just one
year he had brought his students to the level where they
could all easily translate these difficult literary texts.
And the world, including the university authorities,
knowing nothing about the way the class was run, believed
him.
The scandalous fact that his students could not even
stammer out a sentence in simple Japanese, or translate a
page of simple Japanese text, remained unkown.
At first I could not believe that serious, fee-paying
students could want to go along with this nonsense . But
all they wanted was the pass mark and the credits needed
for graduation. Later it was to remind me of the fraudulent
way young Japanese are taught English in Japanese
universities.
In years since I have met several from that ANU class. Like
their Japanese equivalents learning English, few of them
ever recovered from the damage they had suffered from the
bad teaching. Most ended up as hopeless speakers of the
language despite years of subsequent effort. Some were
determined never to see or speak the language again.
It was a good example of something I have since come to
realise strongly: start people on the wrong foot in
learning a difficult language and usually they will find it
impossible to recover.
It took me all of three weeks to decide I did not need to
be part of this fraud. I would begin to learn the language
by myself, in the same way that I had begun to learn
Russian four years earlier.
I abandoned the class and found a rather nice Japanese
woman, Mrs Crawford, married to a former Australian soldier
who had been based in Japan.
As with Mrs Gapanovich when I was learning Russian, each
week I would ask her to tape- record a few very simple
texts for me to study. I would listen closely and
repeatedly to the tape over the week, check a textbook for
the grammar and vocab, and then try to talk to her about
the contents at the following meeting a week later.
Given the many other distractions in my life at the time I
did not get very far. But at least it gave me a start with
the language, something those poor wretches in the
university class would never have.
In later years I would try occasionally to expose the
scandalous way Chinese and Japanese were being taught at
most Australian universities. But I was tilting at
windmills. The only result was to upset the academic
establishment and be bombarded with angry rebuttals.
As I have discovered over the years, when Australians are
criticised they either cry or get indignant. Few reflect on
why they are being criticised.
I even wrote a long letter to Crawford once, when he was
ANU chancellor, begging him to intervene and try to change
things for the sake of Australia’s relations with
Asia and not just for the students. I got no reply.
4. The
China Book
Meanwhile, I still had the much larger problem of what to
do about explaining China and its polices to an Australian
audience. Writing a book would require enormous time and
effort, even though I had much of the material in my head.
In those days we did not have computers for typing. There
was no Internet Search to help us. Everything would have to
be done by old-fashioned hand typing and library research.
R. was willing to help. But was that enough?
Nor did I have much experience as a book writer. I had had
some years of writing submissions and reports in EA. But
that is not a very good way to learn how to write books. In
fact, it is a very bad way, as I still have to remind
myself.
As well, I had no publisher.
There was a further problem. If I was to write a book I
would need time off from my PhD scholarship work, and there
was no guarantee it would be granted.
My anti-Vietnam War activities had made me
persona-non-grata with J.D,B. Miller and his international
relations department. And I had already had my run in with
Crawford. Now I would be asking for permission to write
about Chinese foreign policy when my specialization was
supposed to be Japan and economics.
Meanwhile the Vietnam War and the political situation in
Australia were getting uglier by the day. Someone had to
present the anti-government case. Could I stay forever on
the sidelines?
The turning point was an invitation from Lo Hui-min, a
middle aged researcher into Chinese history at the ANU, to
give a seminar in the Asian Studies department.
Lo was 100 percent Chinese; he fretted constantly over the
way I courted political reprisals by criticising government
policies (in China, the key to survival had always been to
keep out of the way of the people in power) . But he
appreciated what I was doing and wanted to give me a voice,
at least within the university.
I chose the Sino-Soviet dispute as the topic of the
seminar. Finally I was motivated to start doing the
homework I should have done much earlier, namely to try to
nail down the origins of the dispute rather than
concentrate on who said what to whom.
If the dispute was not ideological, as I had discovered,
then what was it?
Origins
of the Sino-Soviet Dispute
At the time the conventional academic wisdom both in
Australia and abroad was that the dispute had begun in 1956
with Nikita Khruschev’s willingness to denounce
Stalin’s crimes.
Mao Tse-tung was supposed to have been a hard-liner upset
by this frontal attack on communist orthodoxy. He was also
supposed to resent Moscow's claim to lead the communist
bloc.
Later documents confirmed that the Chinese were not
entirely happy about the 1956 attacks on Stalin. They,
unlike the Russians, had not suffered decades of mad
dictatorship and killings. But any Beijing discomfort over
Khruschev’s anti-Stalinism could hardly have been
decisive.
For already in 1956 Beijing was showing some sensible
pragmatism in its own domestic and foreign policies. At a
1957 gathering of world communist parties, the Chinese had
specifically endorsed Moscow’s leadership of the
communist bloc. As late as January 1959, Mao Tsetung had
sent an effusive message to Moscow praising
Khruschev’s leadership of the Soviet communist party.
True, every political ideology needs an icon, and at the
time Stalin and Lenin were the only icons available. But
Stalin had done very little to help China’s
communists, both before and after 1949 . So why would they
be greatly upset by Khruschev's criticisms?
True, at a later stage there had been intense personal
dislike and rivalry between Mao Tsetung and Khruschev. But
that had only become obvious after the dispute had begun,
not before.
For example, in June,1957, Beijing had thrown crucial
support behind Khruschev in his life-and-death
confrontation with the Moscow hard-liners - the anti-party
group centered on Molotov. If Beijing was hard-line,
anti-Khruschev from 1956, why was it going out of its way
to help him for attacks by hard-liners in 1957?
Beijing had also given some support to moderate Eastern
European communist regimes confronting Moscow. None of this
did much to support the thesis of a Marxist fundamentalist
China determined ideologically to confront a soft-line
Moscow.
But in that case what had triggered the dispute? And why
had it become so vicious and intense? To find a causal
factor, I decided to go carefully through the chronology of
events between June 1957 and the early 1960’s when
the polemics burst into the open. And when I did that I
found I could narrow the field of suspects greatly.
On October 15, 1957, soon after he had ousted his hard-line
opponents, Khruschev gave Beijing a promise to help China
develop nuclear weapons. It was in effect a promise of
nuclear backup if China was subjected to nuclear threat.
Khruschev also endorsed the Chinese model of communist
development. Clearly these were acts of gratitude for the
support he had gained from Beijing in June 1957.
But on June 20, 1959, the Soviets cancelled their nuclear
agreements with China. Soon after they began open
criticisms of the Chinese communist model.
Clearly the cause of the dispute had to be something that
had occurred between June 1957 and June 1959. What was it?
By careful elimination I ended up with just one event
– Beijing’s August 1958 confrontation with a
US-backed Taiwan over the Offshore Islands in the Taiwan
Straits.
Already while in External Affairs I had heard hints that
the US, at a crucial period in the confrontation, had
threatened use of nuclear weapons against China.
Meanwhile Khruschev had already begun his attempts to reach
détente with the Eisenhower administration in Washington
– attempts which began with the 1955 'Geneva Spirit'
of detente, and culminated in the famous ‘Camp
David’ meeting of September 1959.
Just three months before Camp David, Khruschev had
cancelled his nuclear promises to Beijing.
The causes, and effects, seemed obvious.
In other words, the Taiwan Straits crisis had forced
Khruschev to realise the full implications of his nuclear
promise to China – that he would committed to help
China in a nuclear confrontation with the US at precisely
the same moment that he was trying to ease tensions with
the same US.
That this indeed was the origin of the dispute was
confirmed in the subsequent polemics, where the theme of
Moscow’s foolish willingness to trust and appease an
aggressive US was a constant refrain in the Chinese
statements.
In short, the dispute had little to do with one side being
ideologically more moderate or more extreme than the other,
or being more aggressively inclined than the other. It came
back squarely to a clash of national interests, with
Beijing locked into confrontation with the US by the Taiwan
issue – an issue for which the blame lay squarely
with Washington rather than Beijing - and Moscow
understandably trying to lock itself into detente with the
US.
Both had good reasons for what they were doing. But what
each was doing was bound to antagonise the other.
Beijing’s dislike of Khruschev and the Soviets after
June 20, 1959, was a result, not a cause, of the dispute.
At the time Beijing was making much of the fact that it did
not fear nuclear war with the US; that it could lose much
of its population and industry and still survive. This was
immediately picked up by our hawks, and to some extent by
Moscow, to prove Beijing's inherent adventurism.
But if you are threatened with nuclear attack, and you have
no way to retaliate with nuclear weapons, then all you can
do to dissuade the likely attacker is say you do not fear
nuclear attack.
(If anyone is being adventurist it is the side which is
threatening nuclear attack. But in those days in the West
you were not allowed to say that kind of thing. The US was
supposed to be pure of heart, and all-powerful.)
Needless to say, this kind of detailed analysis went
straight over the heads of most of the assembled ANU
academics at Lo’s seminar. But as an historian Lo
realised that I had dug up material of value. He urged me
strongly to get it published somewhere, and I realised he
was right.
At the time not just the media but the overwhelming
majority of China watchers went along with the conventional
wisdom of an aggressive China confronting a moderate
Moscow. My material not only undermined the wisdom; it
provided a very valuable insight to the mechanics of the
Cold War at the time.
If I say so myself, it was a block-busting piece of
historical and politicial analysis, with enormous
implications. I did indeed have to get it published,
somewhere, somehow.
(Some Chinese researchers have published similar material
lately. But to this day, as far as I know, no one else in
the West has done the detailed research. China-watchers
such as Donald Zagoria with their former detailed studies
of the polemics 'proving' the aggressive China thesis are
still regarded as experts on China.)
But once again I was back my earlier problem: to explain
the Sino-Soviet dispute I would have to give much of the
background to China’s other foreign policy disputes,
Taiwan especially, and that would require a book.
I put in an application to the ANU authorities for leave to
do preparation. Crawford very reluctantly approved a
maximum of six months, with scholarship stipend suspended
during that period.
I should add that in four years at the ANU, Lo was the only
person to take any real interest in my views on China,
despite the fact that as the ex-China desk officer in
External Affairs and a former First Secretary in Moscow it
was obvious that I had much information of interest. Not
once did I even get to talk to most of the people in that
wretched, ASIO-infiltrated, international relations
department.
The only person in that department to show any interest in
my information was an American, Hanno Weisbrod. His
excellent work on US and Australian covert involvement in
Laos in the early sixties never received the attention it
deserved, even though it was crucial to the later
US-Australian involvement in Vietnam.
5. Jim
Cairns, and the Enclave Solution
Meanwhile I was still trying to fight the Vietnam war
outside the ANU.
I had got to know some people in the very leftwing
Victorian ALP executive. Through them I had met up with Jim
Cairns, later deputy Prime Minister in the Whitlam
government, and then the leading ALP voice of reasoned
opposition to the Vietnam War.
Later in my dealings with Cairns I was to discover there
was a sloppy, indulgent side to his personality, especially
when women were involved, and that was long before the
Morosi affair of 1975. Ultimately this would lead to his
political downfall.
But for all that, his political views and arguments were
clear and crystalline. His book “Living with
Asia” not only gives an excellent analysis of the
dynamics of leftwing anti-government insurgenicies and
revolutions; it also happens to include one of the best
outlines I have ever read of the evolution of Soviet
communism in the twenties and thirties.
That a self-educated ex-policeman from Melbourne could get
to know in such detail the events of another age in a very
foreign country on the other side of the globe is amazing.
Yet even on the Left, and certainly not on the Right, he
never got the credit he deserved for this research.
When the Vietnam War got underway his principled opposition
to that war would be written off as the typical way-out
bleatings of an old-time leftie. The writing off would be
done by establishment academics proud that they had never
sullied their minds with any serious study of Communism and
its origins, let alone the dynamics of insurgenicies and
revolutions.
Through Cairns and the Victorian ALP executive I got drawn
into ALP infighting a lot more than I probably should have.
But I was consumed by what as I saw as the urgent need to
force a debate over Vietnam.
It was a race against time. The US military machine had the
power to grind down the insurgents in South Vietnam, just
as the British, relying on every kind of brutality, had won
out against the insurgents in Malaya.
But unlike Malaya, where much of the war and the brutality
were hidden, there was a good chance that with time people
in the West would come to realise what was actually
happening on the ground in Vietnam – that a genuine
and very justified resistance movement was been suppressed
with great cruelty in favor of a corrupt and incompetent
regime in Saigon.
Some first-class journalists on the ground were beginning
to report much of this in detail. I assumed that the
soldiers and the officials there must also be coming to
realise the facts.
As well, I knew already how Australia had played such a
crucial role in encouraging Washington into Vietnam. By
getting the facts of the war into circulation in Australia,
there was a chance of a change in Australian opinion, which
in turn offered a very real chance that an anti-war
Australia could exert a strong influence on Washington's
view of the war.
Fanciful thinking? Of course, it was. For soon I was to
discover in the clearest, and worst, possible way the
impossibility of stirring any sensible debate in that
intellectual and moral morass called Australian public
opinion.
The
Enclave Solution
It began with a chance meeting mid-1966 in Sydney with
Brian Johns, then trying to make a name for himself as the
Sydney Morning Herald correspondent in Canberra.
I had first met Johns in Canberra in 1957 when I was still
a fresh EA recruit and he was trying to become a government
information bureaucrat. We had got on reasonably well with
each other even if in those days he seemed burdened with an
Irish Catholicism and an inferiority complex due to his
lack of formal education
Later in 1975 when he was to become spokesperson and media
handler for the Whitlam government, we both worked together
for a while and he was to leave me holding the can over the
Vietnam Cables affair (details later). He would then go on
to be ALP media tzar and to head the ABC, while I ended up
back in Tokyo.
Johns was a typical mid-road Australian moderate for those
days.
Deep down he subscribed to Yellow Peril and anti-communist
bogies. But he did not want to seem to support government
policies. Like most journos he liked to mix in leftwing
circles; perhaps that was because they threw the best
parties and attracted the most interesting people.
I got to talking with him about Vietnam. I told him about
the crucial role Canberra had played in 1965 in getting the
US more deeply involved in a war than it (the US) might
otherwise have wanted, and my hopes that if Australian
opinion could be made to realise the facts about the war,
then Canberra might conceivably play a similar lead role in
getting the war wound down.
But something had to be done quickly. Thousands of
Vietnamese were being killed and bombed every day for a
totally worthless cause. Could not his newspaper be
persuaded to take a closer look at what was actually
happening in Vietnam?
As I agonised over all this to Johns, I could see he was
less than fully engaged. At the end he turned to me and
said, in effect: “ Greg, it is all very well being
anti the war in Vietnam. But in that case you have to put
forward an alternative. You can’t just ask Australia
and the US to walk away from it all.”
He was right in a political sense. An alternative policy
that preserved US face, and guaranteed the survival of the
anti-communist Vietnamese, had to be put forward. And as
chance would have it, I did have that policy. I called it
the enclave solution.
While in EA I had realised, and urged, the role that Taiwan
could have played in moderating Beijing’s occasional
lunges into crazy economic and other policies if only there
was some contact and exchanges between the two sides
(needless to say, none of this made any impression on my
hawkish superiors).
Beijing’s fits of anti-Westernism could also be
moderated if there was some guarantee the US would not try
to use Taiwan as a beach-head for attacks against China.
Even better would be some guarantee that the US would not
oppose eventual reunification with China.
Why not push this idealised Taiwan model as the answer in
Vietnam?
The mechanics of it all were quite simple. It would begin
with the West recognising that a civil war was underway in
Vietnam, and that while it hoped the South would win out
against its pro-communist enemies, the West would only
provide as much support to Saigon as the pro-communists
were receiving from outside sources.
Once it was clear that the pro-Saigon Vietnamese could not
win out in their civil war, the West would then say that,
while it had no choice but to accept the outcome of a civil
war fought on equal terms, it could not tolerate seeing the
anti-communist Vietnamese wiped out by their enemies.
To prevent this tragedy, it would provide them with an
enclave – a little 'Taiwan' - a strip of coastal
territory where they could regroup and continue their
anti-communist existence.
From then on, the Western military intervention in Vietnam
would be restricted to protecting the borders of this
enclave. Meanwhile much of the money being used to
prosecute the war would be diverted to help create a viable
economy for the enclave. Eventually it might even come to
provide an economic and social model for the rest of
Vietnam, as Taiwan was to do for China.
Would Hanoi and the other pro-communist forces in Vietnam
accept this? Almost certainly, I thought.
They too were tired of the war, and they were suffering a
lot. Provided there was some guarantee of eventual
reunification, or at the very least some kind of
confederation agreement, say after 20 years, they could
feel they had achieved their objectives.
In the meantime they would be able to set up their own
government for the rest of Vietnam. War hatreds would
gradually abate.
My first move was to try to sell the enclave idea to the
ALP, then in opposition. I went first to Cairns. Despite
his close identification with the ALP Left, he realised the
merits of this compromise solution.
But he said he would first need to try to sell it to the
Victorian ALP executive. After that, he would try to have
it endorsed as ALP policy.
Cairns did not even get to first base. I am told that at
the end of his presentation to the Victorian executive, one
of the more extreme leftwingers had sarcastically
congratulated him on having outlined the government policy,
and would he now kindly outline the leftwing policy.
I heard no more from Cairns for a while.
I decided to try another tack. An election was due later
that year. The then Prime Minister, Harold Holt, was
trumpeting his famous pro-Vietnam War slogan – All
the Way with LBJ.
In advance of the election, LBJ, in the shape of US
president Lyndon Baines Johnson, was about to descend on
Australia to give support to Holt's Vietnam intervention
policies.
During his visit LBJ would also condescend to meet the ALP.
But the then ALP leader, Arthur Caldwell, was getting
nowhere with his calls for a withdrawal of Australian
troops from this ‘dirty, filthy unwinnable war’
even if history was to prove him 100 percent correct. He
would get even closer to nowhere if he just repeated this
to LBJ.
Meanwhile Caldwell’s heir apparent and ALP foreign
policy spokesman, Gough Whitlam, was just keeping his head
down and saying nothing. He was leaving Caldwell to take
the flak.
My idea was to get to Whitlam and persuade him of the
merits of the enclave solution in advance of the LBJ
meeting. Obviously LBJ would reject it. But the ALP could
then go into the election saying it had put a moderate,
compromise solution to Washington , only to see it rejected
out of hand.
This proved Washington was not interested in sensible
solutions. In which case, the ALP was justified in seeking
the withdrawal of Australian troops.
My first problem was how to get to Whitlam, whom I had
never met and who had little reason to know me. Eric Walsh
said he could give me an introduction to John Menadue who
was then Whitlam’s secretary.
Menadue met me cagily, but promised to pass on my proposal.
I never got a response from either him or Whitlam. The ALP
went to crashing defeat in the election.
The election over, I still wanted to do something about my
idea. I leaned hard on Deamer to give me space in The
Australian to publish it, which he did – almost an
entire page.
But once again the reaction was minimal. There was a
querulous letter from an ANU international relations
academic who thought my idea flawed since the communists
would never accept it and the enclave would be indefensible
anyway.
As for the rest of pro-war crowd, I can only assume that
they saw my compromise proposal as a sinister leftwing
attempt to forestall the inevitable US victory.
It was, after all, only 1966 and almost everyone, including
myself to some extent, assumed a gory US victory was likely
if the intervention and the killing continued.
Years later, after the US and its Saigon friends had lost
the war, completely and humiliatingly, I tried to prick a
few consciences by reminding our Vietnam hawks how much
better things would have been for their anti-communist
Vietnamese friends if they had been willing to consider a
compromise solution.
But once again, no reaction. By definition, I guess, being
a hawk means never having to say sorry or admit past
mistakes.
6. Finding a Publisher
Meanwhile I was plodding away with the manuscript of my
China book, helped as ever by the unstinting and
uncomplaining R.
My six months time limit from the ANU had quickly expired.
I was eating into the time that I should have been using
for my PhD work. And I still needed a publisher.
Some time earlier I had had an offer from Lloyd
O’Neil, the energetic and very liberal-minded manager
of The Lansdowne Press based in Melbourne. I had met him at
some anti-Vietnam War affair, and he was keen to help me
get my ideas into print.
But Lansdowne usually concentrated on popular books
–sport, nature, childrens’ tales. It was an
unlikely place to go for a serious book on Chinese foreign
policies. Even so, O’Neil seemed very keen to have
the book.
As the writing progressed, my doubts grew. I was moving
into some rather heavy academic territory. Could Lansdowne
really handle that kind of book?
I decided I should check out first whether the ANU Press
would be interested. They took one look at the emerging
manuscript and fled. They were not into publishing
polemical books, they said.
Later I learned that they had passed the MS to my dear
friends in the ANU international relations department, who
had lost no time in saying that this ‘leftwing,
pro-Beijing tract’ was quite unsuitable for an
academic publisher.
It was a serious setback. But around the same time I had
had an approach from a rather slippery character called
Peter Ryan running the Melbourne University Press.
I knew something about Ryan's rightwing views and various
past involvements with Australia’s spy networks. But
surely none of this would carry over to his management of a
reputable university press, I thought.
I was wrong. Ryan had gone out of his way to tell me how
much MUP wanted to put out a book on China and I had
cooperated by giving the book a much stronger academic
slant than I had originally intended.
I had then hopefully sent my MS off to him for appraisal.
He sat on it for months, by which time I was already in
Japan. I then got an abrupt letter saying it was much too
biassed to be fit for publication.
It was a bad setback. Fortunately I was able to contact
O’Neil from Japan, who was still willing to publish.
But there was no way sitting in Japan I could rewrite it as
a more popular book. I never really recovered from the MUP
setback, which was probably Ryan's intention from the
beginning.
Once again, the Empire had struck back.
Japan was to become, had to become, the only way I could
escape the nightmare I was facing in my native
Australia.
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