THOUGHTS ON THE STICK AND CARROT APPROACH TOWARD COMMUNIST CHINA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 29, 2005
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: June 18, 1964
• Content Type: MEMO

Approved For Lease 2005/05/ JECk 79R00967AkGO0900020008-3
/1/0 Z.(d a e%
18 June 196+
SUBJECT: Thoughts on the Stick and Carrot
Approach Toward Communist China
We are all for imaginative thinking which looks beyond
immediate Far East problems and policies, but we consider that
the circumstances assumed do not constitute propitious grounds
for embarking on a rewarding US course of action. In fact,
the course would probably not only fail to produce its
desired rapprochement with Communist China, but would be
likely to embroil the US in more troublesome relations with
Communist China -- and with the USSR -- than is now the case.
We outline below our principal objections to the line of
argument implicit in the assumptions, noting that these
judgments apply to the present and foreseeable leadership
in Peiping, and not to some distant generation of possible
successors.
1. Communist China would not be receptive to the idea
of rapprochement.
SECRET
GROUP I
Excluded from automatic
downgrading and
declassification
Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
 Approved For Release 2005/03 -FDP79R00967Aai00900020008-3
a. This judgment would certainly apply in the
event the US had attacked bases and supply routes in Southern
China. Peiping would consider itself at war with the US, and
years would probably have to pass before a rapprochement could
be effected.
b. The judgment would also apply even if the US had
not attacked China, but only the DEV. Having attacked the DRV,
the US would have provoked a major Far East crisis. China, even
if it had not intervened militarily against the US, would
certainly be assisting the DRV and beating the drum against us.
Rapprochement would not flower in such a setting.
c. In any case, it takes two to effect rapprochement.
A switch of US policy would be only part of the prerequisites, and
would almost certainly not change the fact that to the Chinese
Communists, we are the enemy by definition and not because of what
we do.
2. A critical factor militating against rapprochement from
the Chinese side would be Peiping's need for the image of the US
as the external enemy, the scapegoat for the regime's frustrations
and the stimulus for domestic Chinese unity and discipline. A
sudden Chinese reversal of course to rapprochement would confuse
the party apparatus and the public and almost certainly intensify
SECRET
Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
 Approved For Release 2005/05/2-
1: CIA-RDP79R00967 0900020008-3
already difficult control problems. The aid program would involve
US technical assistance, thus confounding the regime's extreme
suspicion to date of foreigners. In short, these domestic con-
siderations would in themselves probably be sufficient to preclude
any Chinese Communist receptiveness to US-initiated rapprochement
efforts.
3. We cannot be optimistic about Chinese willingness to
reduce pressures on Southeast Asia, even given feasible inducements.
In the very best of circumstances, the most that could reasonably
be expected would be Chinese pressure on Hanoi to slow down the
pace of insurrection in Laos and South Vietnam for a while until
new and more promising circumstances arose. If, as seems more
likely, the very best of circumstances did not apply, we should
expect little Chinese give on Southeast Asia and, hence, little
rapprochement. Although the Chinese give the DRV general support
and urge a strenuous pace of insurrectionary activity on Hanoi's
leaders, it has yet to be established that Communist effort to
subvert Southeast Asia is a Chinese Communist show, or, indeed,
that there is a definite and direct link between Peiping's wishes
and the execution of Communist policy in the Laos and South
Vietnamese countrysides. Central to the foreign policy of
Communist China are its aspirations to extend Communist influence and that of China -- in Southeast Asia and to remove US power and
Approved For Release 2005/05/t3 IAA 6P79R00967A000900020008-3
 Approved For R&ease 2005/05/23,;..CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
influence from that area in the process. We see no forces in
the given assumptions sufficient to compel China to give up
these aspirations.
4+. Nor is the proposition valid that Peiping now
"focuses" its attention on Southeast Asia, but might change
that "focus" northward to the USSR. China has active aspirations
even now in both directions and would so continue. There would
be no need for Peiping to give up its southward aspirations,
certainly not for an area so inviting by reason of its historic
interest to China, its readily exploitable weaknesses, and its
economic attractiveness -- considerations which apply with much
less force to Soviet Siberia and Mongolia. In fact, in some
respects, the greater China's conflict were with the Soviet
Union, the greater might be the inducements of an activist
Chinese effort in Southeast Asia.
The thesis that a plebiscite would "dispose" of the
Taiwan problem is a flimsy proposition indeed.
a. We are not aware of any report to the effect
that Mao would accept a plebiscite.
b. In any event, it is almost certain that he would
accept no outcome of a plebiscite which did not provide for the
transfer of Taiwan and its population to his effective control.
Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
 Approved For Release 2005/05/23': CIAzRDP79R00967P 00900020008-3
Mao and the Chinese Communist leaders have consistently held
the acquisition of Taiwan, in their terms, the completion of
the revolution," to be a central objective of their regime.
Even in the unlikely event that they made a deal with Chiang
Kai-shek which provided for an "autonomous" Taiwan, the arrange-
ment would be a phony which at best delayed the full exercise
of Communist sovereignty over the island.
c. Chiang would almost certainly not permit a
plebiscite to be held, anyway.
d. Even if one were held, an opting for the Communists
would almost certainly be the least likely result. Assuming that
a reasonably fair polling could be held, one which included the
Taiwanese, the order of preference concerning Taiwan's future
would probably be: independence, international protectorate of
some kind, Japanese control, GRC control, and, lastly, mainland
control.
6. The objectives of the proposed rapprochement are not
very clear. It looks as if the objectives of the course must be
(a) to reduce markedly Communist pressures on Southeast Asia,
(b) to dispose of the tricky Taiwan problem, and (c) to exploit
the Sino-Soviet split. These are most worthy objectives. They
are also terribly ambitious, especially three at one blow. But
Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
 Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967AQ00900020008-3
SECRET
why try this via this particular rapprochement scheme? Is it
because we must pay this price to get the Communists to stand
down their assault on Southeast Asia? Or is this really the
only way we can solve the anomaly of a fugitive GRC on an
offshore island? Or, do we do this because we fear coming
world isolation on the Chin& problem. Or, for some other
combination of motives not given us?
7. In sum, the US would stand to lose considerably, and
on a number of fronts, from having tried such a rapprochement.
a. The US reversal of course would dispirit mainland
Southeast Asia and open it up to added Communist gains.
b. The course would also almost certainly stimulate
Japanese accommodation7with Peiping and lessen US influence in
Japan and the ROK.
c. US firmness to date has been a major factor con-
tributing to Sino-Soviet discord. Removal of that firmness
toward China would not necessarily drive China back toward the
USSR, but might lead Moscow to feel that it could, and should,
move farther down the road toward rapprochement with the Chinese
than could the US.
d. We would not have advanced US-Soviet rapprochement,
but Soviet suspicions of the US.
SECRET
Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
 Approved For R ease 2005/Qh2 ': ARDP79R00967A&00900020008-3
e. We could not expect to reap world applause for
our new acceptance of mainland China. Any beneficial effects
resulting from greater US acceptance of China would be dampened
in much of the world by our having attacked China or the DRV
in the first place, and by our subsequently reducing t1 firmness
which alone has protected East Asia from potential Chinese
Communist aggression -- and for which many governments and
peoples are grateful even if they don't admit it.
f. The US course would also confirm the Chinese
Communists in their present estimates of US staying power and
of the proper way to push revolution in the world. For what
it's worth, we would be further undercutting Soviet restraining
influences among CP's in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and
giving a fillip to Chinese-inspired irresponsibility among
various raggle-tailed revolutionaries.
Meanwhile, back at the Mekong, our troops might
well be bogged down, maldeployed, in inconclusive brush wars.
h. Finally, even though a majority of the American
public probably now favors, or would accept, a rapprochement of
some kind with Communist China, this particular scheme -- with
its vistas of money disappearing into the vast needs of a
triumphant enemy China -- would be a tough one indeed to sell
SECRET
Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
 Approved For R1ease 2005105/23 , .CIA-RDP79R00967AA00900020008-3
These criticisms do not mean that we consider present
policy lines to be ideal, or that there might not be some
merit in exploring some regularization of relations with main-
land China. There is a vast area of US maneuver between the
assumed course given us and our present one, however, and it
is between these extremities that there is room for much more
sober, realistic, and rewarding US tactics than those proposed.
lk~
FE Staff
Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
 Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3
Date
tQ4
From Sherman Kent
To:
j
II1, -
1
11
Approved For Release 2005/05/23 : CIA-RDP79R00967A000900020008-3