这是美国著名的中国问题专家-费正清先生（John K. Fairbank）的一篇文章：《从历史的视角观察中国的对外政策》，共分两部分，这是第一部分。
CHINA'S FOREIGN POLICY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE（01）
By John K. Fairbank
American breakthrough in studies of Communist China during the last decade, despite all the difficulties of study from a distance, has given us a new capacity to appraise Peking's shifts of current policy. At the same time, our very success in understanding short-term developments tends to foreshorten our perspective, as though Chairman Mao's new China were actually as new as he so fervently exhorts it to be.
If we ask the long-term question—What is China's tradition in foreign policy,?—our query may provoke two counter-questions: Did the Chinese empire ever have a conscious foreign policy? Even if it did, hasn't Mao's revolution wiped out any surviving tradition?
To answer these questions is easy in theory, difficult in practice. Theoretically, since China has had two millennia of foreign relations (the Iongest record of any organized state), her behavior must have shown uniformities—attitudes, customs and, in effect, policies. In fact, however, the Chinese empire had no foreign office, and the dynastic record of "foreign policy" is fragmented under topics like border control, frontier trade, punitive expeditions, tribute embassies, imperial benevolence to foreign rulers and the like, so that it has seldom been pulled together and studied as an intelligible whole.
Again, one may theorize that Maoism is only the latest effort to meet China's problems of national order and people's livelihood on Chinese soil: the scene, the wherewithal, even the issues are largely inherited, and the violent shrillness of Mao's attack on Chinese tradition indicates to us how difficult he has found it to break free of that tradition. But for this very reason we cannot in practice look to Maoism for a realistic definition of China's foreign policy interests and aims over the centuries.
Most of the record is simply condemned and brushed aside, except as parts of it may fit into current polemics. If Peking's foreign relations have left a still potent tradition, we have to discover it ourselves.
To deal with a major power without regard for its history, and especially its tradition in foreign policy, is truly to be flying blind. The fact that in the case of China we have flown blind and still survived does not guarantee our future. Even with us, tradition provides the base-line for foreign policy and even the most novel of our policies has points of reference in the past, Washington's farewell address, the Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door may lie well back in our tradition, but they are part of the historical matrix of our thinking. Stereotypes like the freedom of the seas and most-favored-nation treatment form part of our foreign policy repertoire. Has China inherited no comparable repertoire? No stock of shibboleths that spring to mind? No classic models of success and failure in foreign affairs? No foreign policy truisms bequeathed to posterity?
The danger in flying blind, ignorant of an antagonist's inherited style and propensities in making war and peace, lies in our resulting lack of objectivity. Not sensing the values and modes of his culture, we impute to him those of our culture. To North Viet Nam, for example, we offer a rational choice, the carrot of billion-dollar economic development or the stick of limited-war bombing, and then we are frustrated to find Hanoi thinking in terms of either-or, we-or-they absolutes rather than hurting-or-not-hurting calculations of material interest. We bomb to parley. They resolve to outlast us. We state our case in time-tested (though culture-bound) terms of self-determination, collective security, f acta sunt servanda, and other solid concepts from our own tradition, Hanoi denies them all. Eventually we realize we are fighting on a cultural frontier, the frontier in fact of the Chinese culture area. No one, I hope, will suggest that tradition governs Peking's foreign policy today (however much it may seem at times to govern ours). It is stale and unprofitable to argue for continuity against discontinuity, and equally so to argue the reverse. Continuity and discontinuity are with us every day, in our personal lives as much as in great events. They coexist as constant aspects of change, the new and the old intertwined, however we may define and perceive them. History alone, therefore, cannot give us an image of current reality; yet to imagine Peking acting com-pletely free of history would be the height of unrealism. Tradition is one ingredient in China's foreign policy today, but it seems to be the missing ingredient in our effort to understand that policy. Our difficulty is the very practical one that we are ignorant of the Chinese tradition, and no one article, book, specialist or school of thought can adequately up-date us; yet the effort must be made.
Great traditions have to be seen first in their context of world history, China has been the great hold-over, the one ancient empire that, largely because of its isolation in the Far East, survived
into the twentieth century. Its anachronistic tardiness in modernizing has now intensified the stress of China's revolution —there is so much to change and do in order to catch up. At the same time the great tradition is hardly out of sight around the corner, back no farther than grandfather's day. No wonder Mao's generation, who were born under the last Son of Heaven, have violently denounced it. We do not know how far Chinese communism, like other great revolutions, will see a post-revolutionary swing back to certain earlier norms. Granted that many changes are irreversible, still many old wines may prove palatable in the new bottles, A new Chinese order that from 1860 to 1960 has learned much and rejected much from Britain, Japan, the United States and Russia in succession is likely to create its new synthesis and national style by salvaging what it can (perhaps too much) from its own rich tradition. As Peking's communism shakes down into its distinctively Sinified version, foreign ofiices dealing with it will need to know more of the history of China's foreign relations.
Let us analyze three major traditions: the strategic primacy of Inner Asia, the disesteem of sea power, the doctrine of China's superiority, and then ask what remains of these traditions today.'
I, THE STRATEGIC PRIMACY OF INNER ASIA
The fulcrum of ancient China's foreign relations, even before the first unification of 221 BC was the irreparable difference between the Chinese who tilled their fields within the Great Wall rainfall boundary and the tribal nomads of Inner Asia who pastured their fiocks and herds beyond it. Climate and terrain sustained these two ways of life as irreducibly separate but interacting entities for over two thousand years down to the nineteenth century. China of course developed nearly all the population, wealth and higher civilization in the area, but meanwhile Inner Asia never ceased to play a vital military-strategic role on her continental frontier. China's maritime frontier occasionally produced rebels and sea-raiders but no major invasion ever came by sea. In contrast. Inner Asia produced mounted archers raised in the saddle, under tribal leaders who periodically united for invasion. The nomad cavalry invasions of North China grew more powerful and irresistible century by century. Early invaders were absorbed into border states. Later they set up Sinobarbarian dynasties—first along the Great Wall (the Liao dynasty of the Khitan Mongols 907-1125), then in North China
(the Chin dynasty of the Jurchen 1125-1222) and finally over the whole country (the Yuan dynasty of the Mongols 12791368, and the Ch'ing dynasty of the Manchus 1644-1911). Sparsely populated Inner Asia—the arc running from Tibet and Sinkiang around to Mongolia and Manchuria—thus became a strategic component of an East Asian empire that centered on China but in the last thousand years has been ruled half the time by non-Chinese emperors.
The first aim of China's traditional foreign policy has therefore been defense against Inner Asia or, preferably, control over it, Chinese rulers of the Ming (1368-1644), after they expelled the Mongols, remained obsessed with the Mongol problem. But Inner Asian invaders, once in power, faced it too. Thus the Manchus were first vitally concerned with the Eastern Mongols and eventually with the Western Mongols, The great strategic feat of their Ch'ing dynasty was to conquer and finally ncorporate the whole of Inner Asia within the East Asian empire: the Manchus kept Manchuria as a homeland preserve; they took over Eastern Mongolia through early alliances, and gradually dominated Tibet through expeditions of 1720, 1728 and 1750, This was a strategic move so that Peking could control the Buddhist Church under the Dalai Lama at Lhasa, through which in turn Mongol life could be stabilized. The capstone of imperial control was laid through the final destruction of the rebellious Western Mongols in Hi in the 1750s, and the establishment of Ch'ing rule over the Turkestan oases to the south.
Thus Inner Asia took strategic precedence over the nascent maritime threat from Portuguese, Dutch or British warships at Canton, Macao, Amoy, Ningpo or elsewhere on the China coast.
Even after the Opium War and the Anglo-French war of 1858-60, Ch'mg strategic thinking saw the Inner Asian frontier as more vital than the maritime frontier. When Li Hung-chang in 1875 wanted to build naval strength against Japan's infiuence in Korea, Tso Tsung-t'ang wanted instead to finance his expedition to defeat rebels and keep Russia out of Hi, three thousand miles to the west. The Court decided in favor of Tso and Hi, as against Li Hung-chang and the Japanese menace.
The People's Republic during its twenty years in power has consciously expanded the Han-Chinese nation to fill out (except in Outer Mongolia) the old area of the Ch'ing East Asian empire, Chinese farming colonies have changed the population balance in Sinkiang and Tibet, Like military colonies of old and criminals banished to the frontier, contingents of young people and refractory intellectuals have been shipped out to populate and develop Inner Asia, Chiang Kai-shek agrees with Mao Tse-tung that Outer Mongolia should be part of this Chinese national realm inherited from the Ch'ing empire. Plainly, Communist China's early turning inward away from the sea, trying to reduce the prominence of the greatest ex-treaty port, Shanghai, and cut down China's dependence on maritime trade with the West, was no new thought but followed an ancient pattern. So does her present-day concern for her land frontier—the world's longest— with the U,S,S,R, and Outer Mongolia,
II, THE DISESTEEM OF SEA POWER
By the time China's original river valley civilization had expanded southward to the seacoast, the Yangtze delta and Canton, the empire's institutional mold had long since set. Rulers and their scholar-bureaucrats looked upon merchants as dangerous parasites, as fair game to squeeze for profit, the lowest of the four occupational classes. Confucian philosophers pointed out that scholar-officials, farmers and artisans labored with mind or muscle but merchants only moved things about. Maritime traders were even more shady characters, sailing about with no fixed abode, out of administrative control. Until the eighth century, although maritime trade of course developed, there was no sanction, much less a policy, for China's expansion overseas.
As the tribal invaders from Inner Asia set up their Sino-barbarian dynasties in North China, the Chinese dynasty of the Southern Sung (i 127-1279) became more interested in foreign trade revenues. By this time China's silks, porcelains, lacquer-ware, teas and other superlative products were being eagerly sought in the first great oceanic commerce of world history, that between the Near East and the Far East through South and Southeast Asia, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Koreans and eventually Japanese joined in this commercial revolution centuries before the Europeans broke into it. Sea trade gave the Southern Sung not only revenue but a merchant fieet capable of being used for naval power. There ensued, from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, a competition within the Chinese state between the new sea power and the older land power, with fateful results.
Hard pressed from the north, the Southern Sung began to develop maritime policies. Against the Mongol conquest during the thirteenth century, they (the Southern Sung) relied heavily on their naval forces on the Yangtze, The Mongols did not achieve victory until they had bought over many Chinese merchant vessels and created a fieet of their own of several hundred sail. In the end, the Mongols' Yuan dynasty inherited much of the Sung fleets. They provided the wherewithal for the spectacular maritime assaults upon Japan in 1274 and 1281 and the even more distant attack upon Java in 1292, Thus in the late thirteenth century the overflow of the Mongol conquest sent Chinese fighting ships into Southeast Asia and even the Indian Ocean, Mongol envoys reached Ceylon and South India by sea. In the 1280s ten small states on the coasts of southern India, Sumatra and the Malay peninsula sent tribute to the Yuan court at Peking, This accumulated maritime experience helps explain China's amazing naval feats, once the Mongols had been driven out. At its height in the early decades of the fifteenth century, the Ming navy had coastal guard fleets that cruised out to sea, naval bases with large garrisons on coastal islands, and a system of communication by means of dispatch boats and beacon fires. Each major province had a fleet of several hundred ships. War junks carried primitive explosives in the form of grenades and rockets, making use of China's invention, gunpowder. Big warships carried up to four hundred men. Ships were built with as many as four decks and a dozen watertight compartments and were sometimes four hundred feet in length. Captains of this period had well-proved capacities for seamanship and navigation. They used detailed sailing directions as well as the compass, another Chinese invention.
Ming China's naval capability was most clearly demonstrated m the seven great voyages captained by the court eunuch, Cheng Ho, and others in the period 1405-143 3, Carrying as many as 28,000 men in 62 vessels, these fleets all went to India, Two of them reached Aden, and three sent Chinese vessels all the way to Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, They also touched the coast of Africa, In 22 years the Yung-lo emperor sent out 48 missions, nearly all headed by court eunuchs as his personal agents. They arranged for fifty new places to become his tributaries. Tribute missions went back to China from Hormuz and the African coast four times and from Bengal eleven times.
Patently, Ming China was a naval power capable of dominating Southeast Asia a full century before the Portuguese arrived there. Compare China and Europe as of about 1430: the exploring, ships of Prince Henry the Navigator had not yet even reached the bulge of West Africa at Cape Verde and neither Columbus, da Gama nor Albuquerque had yet been born, China was superior in size and wealth, in many lines of technology and in the art of bureaucratic government. Her demonstrated sea-power in the Indian Ocean was a natural expression of all-around capacity at home. Yet after the 1430s her maritime expansion ceased. What went wrong,?
The simplest explanation is that China's long development had already reached its height and maturity on a self-contained and stabilized basis, while Europe's great expansion was just gettmg started along the far more dynamic lines of national competition, religious zeal, government support of overseas trade, and adventurous individual enterprise, none of which was so prominent in the Chinese scene. Even more simply, China remained self-sufi[icient and land-based while Europe became acquisitive and seafaring.
Without pretending to put all this world history in a nutshell, let us note one fact that pulled Ming China back from maritime expansion—the continued menace of Mongol power in Inner Asia, In the very years when the Yung-lo emperor was sending out the first six fleets, he was obliged to lead five enormous military expeditions out into Mongolia, He took along cannon to reduce Mongol strongholds and great squadrons of cavalry. The expedition of 1422 used a host of 235,000 who needed a supply train of 117,000 carts. Even so, the enemy escaped westward and China's Mongol problem thereafter increased. By 1449, Ming vitality was on the ebb after less than a century of power; when Mongol invaders captured the emperor himself, Ming dominance of East Asia was permanently damaged. All capacity for maritime expansion had thenceforth to be sacrificed to self-defense at home. By the time the Portuguese arrived in 1513, the great Ming voyages had been all but forgotten, for scholar-officials, jealous of the eunuchs' power, had actually suppressed the record. The overriding demands of land power had eclipsed China's potential but superficial sea power.
After 1644 China's new Manchu rulers, intent on building their continental empire, ignored the sea. To suppress Ming remnants they even applied tactics once used by the Ming to discourage Japanese pirates: the Ch'ing shut down maritime trade, evacuated coastal islands and moved the coastal population ten miles inland behind a patrolled barrier. One could hardly be more anti-maritime.
To be sure, British gunboats after 1839 inspired an effort to buy and build a modern Chinese steam navy. Indeed, four navies were begun, based on Tientsin, Shanghai, Foochow and Canton, But the French destroyed the Foochow fleet in a few minutes in 1884, The Japanese destroyed the northern fleet in 1894-95, China's potential sea power was eclipsed again and has not reemerged, Peking's submarine fleet, reportedly being built today, seems hardly more than a defensive force,
III, THE DOCTRINE OF CHINA' S SUPERIORITY
Since ancient China began as a culture island, it quite naturally considered itself superior to the less cultured peoples roundabout, whom it gradually absorbed and assimilated. The striking fact is not that China's universal kingship originally claimed to be superior, but that this claim could have been so thoroughly institutionalized and preserved as the official myth of the state for more than two thousand years.
The central problem was how to make superiority credible at times of military inferiority—a trick that any foreign office would like to master. Of course, China's predominance in size, population, settled wealth and literate culture gave her a constant advantage both over the Inner Asian nomads who lacked urban culture and over the small satellite states of the Chinese culture area. Even so, a considerable rationale and supporting practices had to be developed.
