Chapter 263: The Architecture of Collapse
January 1977New York; Guangzhou; Taipei; Tokyo; Moscow; Lhasa; and the specific places where a country's civil war became the world's problem
The United Nations Security Council chamber had heard worse arguments in its thirty-two-year existence.
It had heard the Cuban Missile Crisis debated through the specific, operatic tension of two superpowers announcing to each other through procedural language that they were prepared to end the world. It had heard the 1971 India-Pakistan war debated through the specific, exhausting frustration of a council whose best efforts produced resolutions that India's veto prevented and Pakistan's allies supported and nothing that changed what was happening on the ground. It had heard, in this specific chamber with its horseshoe table and its simultaneous translation booths and its gallery of observers who were not permitted to speak but who were permitted to watch, the specific weight of human events being argued about by people who were often not the ones who would live with the consequences.
The January 1977 session on the Chinese civil war was different from those previous sessions in one specific and important particular.
The Republic of China's representative occupied the seat.
This required explanation for anyone who had not been following the arcana of UN institutional history — and in 1977, in this alternate timeline, it required explanation because the conventional history of the United Nations had bifurcated from the real world's history at the specific juncture that India's intervention had created.
In the original timeline, the People's Republic of China had received the UNSC seat in October 1971, displacing the Republic of China over American objections that were ultimately futile. In this timeline, . The deferral had been India's specific diplomatic achievement in the 1971 negotiations — the argument that a council being reformed to add a permanent member should resolve its existing composition disputes before locking in a new configuration. The argument had succeeded, and the dispute had been referred to a committee, and committees moved at the speed that committees moved at, and the PRC-ROC question was still in committee when the civil war started in October 1976.
The civil war had made the question moot in the specific practical sense that the entity claiming to be the People's Republic of China was currently engaged in fighting itself in three separate theatres simultaneously and had no coherent government capable of representing it at the United Nations in any meaningful sense.
The ROC's representative in January 1977 was a diplomat named Wei Tao-ming, sixty-two years old, a career foreign service officer who had spent his professional life defending the Republic of China's legal claim to represent the Chinese nation from the increasingly uncomfortable position of a government that controlled one island and claimed a continent. He was a man of considerable intelligence and considerable fatalism — he understood the position he occupied, understood its absurdity, and had nonetheless defended it with the specific, dogged professionalism of someone who believed that the legal argument mattered even when the political argument was lost.
Now, in January 1977, the political argument had become complicated in a way that Wei Tao-ming had not anticipated.
The People's Republic was in civil war. Its two primary factions were each controlling portions of the mainland. Neither faction had the capacity to function as the governing authority of a unified China. The legal question of which entity represented China at the United Nations — the question that had been generating procedural argument since 1949 — had acquired a new dimension: which China was China?
Wei Tao-ming sat in the UNSC chamber on January 18th, 1977, and delivered the statement that his government in Taipei had spent three days preparing.
The statement said: the Republic of China notes with grave concern the internal conflict currently consuming the mainland. The Republic of China reiterates its position as the legitimate government of all China, including the mainland territories. The Republic of China calls upon all parties to the mainland conflict to observe the principles of legitimate constitutional governance that the Republic of China has maintained since 1949 in the territory under its administration.
He delivered the statement with a straight face.
In the gallery, the ambassador from Japan was watching Wei Tao-ming with the specific attention of a man who was trying to determine, from the statement's precise language, what the ROC's actual policy was as opposed to what its official position was.
The distinction was significant.
Japan's relationship with the Chinese civil war was not simple.
Japan's relationship with almost nothing regarding China was simple, given the specific history of the two countries across the preceding century, but the civil war had added a layer of complication that was operational rather than merely historical.
Japan imported Seventy percent of its oil from India, through the Bharat Urja Mahasagar supply agreements that had been expanding since 1973. Japan imported significant quantities of rare earth minerals, titanium, and industrial coking coal from India's northeastern and Gilgit operations. The India-Japan economic relationship was, by January 1977, the second most important bilateral trade relationship for Japan after the United States.
This created a specific tension: Japan had significant economic interests in India and also had historical relationships with Taiwan and had been managing its relationship with the mainland carefully since the early 1970s. The mainland's civil war complicated those relationships simultaneously.
Japan also had, in January 1977, a specific concern about the civil war's effect on shipping. The Taiwan Strait's security was directly relevant to the Japan-to-Middle East shipping lanes that carried the portion of Japan's energy that did not come from India. A Chinese civil war that destabilised Taiwan Strait navigation was a direct threat to supply chains that Japan depended on.
The Japanese ambassador in New York, a man named Noboru Takeshita, had been in the UNSC gallery on January 18th because Japan was one of the elected non-permanent members that year, and its perspective on the Chinese situation was therefore formally relevant to the council's proceedings even though Japan did not have a veto and could not by itself determine the outcome of anything.
After Wei Tao-ming's statement, Takeshita had spoken with his government on a secure line from the Japanese mission.
He said: "Wei Tao-ming's statement is a masterpiece of diplomatic ambiguity. He has called for constitutional governance on the mainland without specifying which constitution. He has reaffirmed the ROC's claim to represent all China without acknowledging which faction on the mainland the ROC government was prepared to recognise as the legitimate challenger for that claim."
His foreign minister said: "What does that mean practically?"
Takeshita said: "It means the ROC is not supporting either Hua Guofeng or the Gang of Four. It means the ROC is positioning itself as the legitimate constitutional alternative to both. It means that if the civil war produces an outcome in which neither faction can claim a convincing victory, the ROC will be there to make the argument that the legitimate government of China has been in Taipei all along."
"They cannot be serious," the foreign minister said.
"They are completely serious," Takeshita said. "They have always been completely serious. The question is whether the civil war on the mainland has made their seriousness relevant for the first time in twenty-five years."
Taiwan's actual situation was considerably more complicated than Wei Tao-ming's public statement suggested.
The ROC government in Taipei in January 1977 had three concerns about the mainland civil war, and the three concerns were in direct conflict with each other.
The first concern was ideological: the Gang of Four represented a version of Communism that was, in the ROC's political framework, the most radical and most threatening version. A Gang of Four victory on the mainland would produce a China that was more ideologically hostile to the ROC's liberal capitalist self-presentation than a Hua Guofeng administration, which was at least nominally pragmatist.
The second concern was territorial: the ROC officially claimed not only Taiwan but the entire mainland, including Tibet, including Xinjiang, including the territories that the PRC had disputed with India, Vietnam, and the Soviet Union. The civil war was dismembering those territorial claims in real time — Guangdong was effectively autonomous, the northeastern military regions were operating independently, Tibet was in a condition whose description required careful language to avoid either validating its independence or describing a situation that the word "controlled" could not accurately cover. The territorial claims were the ROC's legal foundation, and the foundation was crumbling.
The third concern was economic: Taiwan imported a significant portion of its energy and industrial materials from India. The India-Taiwan relationship — which could not be called formal because Taiwan was not formally recognised by India — was nonetheless real and was economically important in both directions. India supplied oil, rare earth minerals, and SPEI pharmaceuticals that the Taiwan market had been importing through the specific creative architecture of commercial relationships that did not require diplomatic recognition.
Taiwan's dependence on Indian energy supply was significant. By January 1977, India supplied approximately fifty-two percent of Taiwan's petroleum consumption. The Bharat Urja Mahasagar had extended supply agreements to Taiwan through a Singapore-based trading intermediary, and the arrangement worked because both sides found it useful and neither side wanted to make it formally visible.
The economic dependence created a specific diplomatic constraint: Taiwan could not take a position on the Chinese civil war that India found objectionable without risking the energy supply that its economy had become structurally dependent on.
India had not made this threat explicitly. It had not needed to. The structure was self-evident.
Wei Tao-ming, preparing his January 18th UNSC statement, had been acutely aware of the structure.
His statement had been drafted, revised, and re-drafted over three days by a team in Taipei that included not only foreign ministry officials but also the economics ministry's senior advisor on the Indian supply relationship.
The result was the statement that he delivered: a statement that reaffirmed ROC legitimacy without taking any position on the mainland conflict's outcome, without supporting any faction, and without saying anything that could be interpreted as inconsistent with the continued good functioning of the India-Taiwan commercial relationship.
It was, as Takeshita had correctly assessed, a masterpiece of diplomatic ambiguity.
In Taipei, in the National Assembly chamber where the government had been sitting since 1949, an elderly legislator named Wu Kuo-chen who had been in the Assembly since 1947 sat through the reports from New York and then said to his colleague, a man named Lin Wei-hsia who had also been in the Assembly since 1947: "We have been waiting for the mainland to collapse for twenty-eight years."
Lin Wei-hsia said: "And now it is collapsing."
Wu said: "And we are too dependent on India to say what we actually think about it."
Lin said: "What do we actually think about it?"
Wu was quiet for a moment.
He said: "I think it is a catastrophe. I think the people dying in Beijing and Shanghai are Chinese people and I think that matters regardless of which government they live under."
Lin said: "And the oil from India."
Wu said: "And the oil from India matters too. Both things are true."
Lin said: "Wei Tao-ming's statement."
Wu said: "Was the correct statement given both things being true simultaneously."
They sat with this for a moment.
Then Wu said: "The question of Aksai Chin."
Lin looked at him.
Wu said: "If the PRC's claim to Aksai Chin is in abeyance because neither faction claiming to be the PRC has a functional government, and if the ROC's claim to Aksai Chin is technically the same claim because we claim the same territory — then someone is going to ask the ROC whether we recognise India's administration of Aksai Chin."
Lin said: "We have always said Aksai Chin is Chinese territory."
Wu said: "We have always said it when China was one thing. It is no longer one thing."
Lin said: "And India's supply relationship with us."
Wu said: "Yes."
They sat in silence for a long time.
Wu said: "I think the answer we give will be: the Republic of China's territorial position is under review in light of the changed circumstances on the mainland. This review will be conducted in a spirit of historical accuracy and contemporary pragmatism."
Lin said: "That means nothing."
Wu said: "It means exactly as much as the situation permits. No more. No less."
The Japanese ambassador's concern about the Taiwan Strait was being mirrored, in different register, in every foreign ministry in Asia. But Japan's concern was the most economically grounded because Japan's dependence on both Indian supply and Pacific shipping made the civil war's geography directly relevant to Japan's immediate operational situation.
The Shinkansen was powered by electricity generated partly from Indian coal that had arrived at Yokohama on Indian Ocean shipping that transited the Malacca Strait. The steel in the Shinkansen's rails contained iron ore from Odisha, processed in Japanese blast furnaces. The LED lighting in the Tokyo subway's newest stations — installed in the previous eighteen months as part of a programme that had been examining Shergill LED technology since the Nobel Prize — was manufactured in Gorakhpur. The car plant in Toyota City had begun testing an assembly process that used KUKA robots, the same KUKA robots in which Shergill Industries held a forty-nine percent stake.
Japan in January 1977 was not merely interested in India's success.
Japan was structurally integrated into India's production network in ways that made the Indian economy's health a direct input into Japanese industrial competitiveness.
This was not how the relationship had been designed. It was what the relationship had become through seven years of incremental supply agreements, technology partnerships, and the specific, irreversible quality of industrial integration: once you had redesigned your assembly line around a specific component's delivery schedule, changing that component supplier was expensive in ways that went beyond price.
The automobile industry was the most visible example. Toyota's engineering team had spent fourteen months adapting their assembly tolerances to the KUKA robotic arms that Shergill Motor Works used. The adaptation produced an efficiency gain of twelve percent on door assembly time. The efficiency gain was real and was now embedded in the line. Returning to the previous arm configuration would cost fourteen months of re-adaptation and would lose the twelve percent. Japan's automobile manufacturers had made a calculation and the calculation was now structural.
The same calculation had been made, in different forms, across steel, electronics, and pharmaceuticals.
This was not public. It was not discussed in the papers. The specific architecture of supply chain dependency was a commercial matter handled by commercial departments. But it was known, in the specific way that things were known in the corridors of Japanese industrial and government planning, to the people whose job it was to know it.
The civil war in China was a direct threat to this architecture not because China was part of the architecture but because China's instability threatened the Malacca Strait, and the Malacca Strait was the channel through which the non-Indian portion of Japan's supply chain moved. A disruption to the Malacca Strait was a disruption to everything.
The METI planning directorate had been working, since November, on the specific contingency analysis that asked: if the Malacca Strait was disrupted for sixty days by the Chinese civil war's spillover, what would the impact be on Japanese industrial production?
The analysis had produced a number that the directorate had shared with the Minister and not published.
The Minister had requested a briefing on India's naval posture in the Indian Ocean.
The briefing had noted: the Indian Navy's Eastern Fleet, currently engaged in the Burma conflict's naval blockade operations, had four destroyers, three frigates, two submarines, and the INS vikrant carrier in the Bay of Bengal. The Western Fleet, in the Arabian Sea, had a comparable surface force. The Andaman and Nicobar command had additional patrol vessels and shore-based maritime patrol aircraft.
The Minister had said: "If the Malacca Strait was under threat from a Chinese faction's naval operations, what would India do?"
The naval analyst had said: "India's stated doctrine is freedom of navigation for all legitimate commercial traffic. The Indian Navy's position in the Indian Ocean is sufficient to enforce that doctrine in the Malacca Strait region. Whether India would choose to enforce it against a Chinese faction is a political question, not a naval one."
The Minister had said: "The political question."
The analyst had said: "India has a vested interest in Malacca Strait security. India's own oil exports transit the Malacca Strait to reach East Asian markets. India would not benefit from Strait disruption."
The Minister had thought about this.
He had said: "So India's interest and Japan's interest are aligned."
"In the specific matter of Malacca Strait security, yes," the analyst had said.
The Minister had said: "This is the meeting we need to have with India."
Hence the January 25th meeting and the forty-third session of the bilateral series and Tanaka Yoshio raising the Strait question directly.
And hence Ashok Mehta's response, which had been specific enough to be meaningful and careful enough not to commit India to anything it had not already committed to — a position that required skill to maintain and that the Indian foreign service had been developing the skill to maintain for years.
Guangdong was on fire.
Not metaphorically. Several districts of Guangzhou — the provincial capital, the trading city, the city that had been the commercial hinge between China and the world since the eighteenth century — were physically on fire, in the specific way that dense urban residential structures caught fire when they were in the path of fighting and the fire brigades had other priorities.
General Xu Shiyou had been found dead in his command vehicle on December 28th, a pistol wound to his right temple. The official announcement from the Guangdong Military Region's political officer — who had been attempting to maintain some form of institutional authority in the three days since the discovery before announcing anything — described the death as occurring under circumstances that were under investigation.
The circumstances were not under investigation in any meaningful sense. Xu Shiyou had been under investigation by himself, and he had reached his own conclusion.
The conclusion he had reached was specific: the war had gone on too long, the position he had tried to maintain — Guangdong stable, available to whichever faction won, the province that both sides needed and that he had therefore protected from both sides' demands — had held for two and a half months and had then stopped holding when both sides simultaneously demanded that Guangdong commit. Both sides had told him they would not accept continued neutrality. Both sides had presented him with an ultimatum on the same week in December. He had been a military commander for forty years and he was seventy-one years old and he had concluded that the specific calculation that had guided the past two and a half months — that you could wait out any war if you protected the things that both sides needed — was wrong, and that being wrong in this way, at seventy-one, after forty years of service, was not something he was willing to manage.
He was found in his command vehicle on December 28th.
What he left behind in Guangdong was a military region with no commander, an economy that had been running on its own institutional momentum for two and a half months and was now confronting the fact that the institutional momentum required someone to direct it, and two competing factions within the Guangdong military establishment — one affiliated with the Hua Guofeng command structure through the specific loyalty networks of the PLA's senior officer corps, one affiliated with the Gang of Four's regional network through the industrial worker organisations that the Cultural Revolution had organised in Guangdong's factories.
The two factions had been in uneasy coexistence as long as Xu Shiyou was alive and commanding.
By January 3rd, they were in open fighting.
Guangzhou's civil war within the civil war had the specific character of a conflict in a place that had not been prepared for war — not the months of preparation that Beijing and Shanghai's positions had involved, but the sudden, improvisational violence of people who had been in proximity and tension and who had lost the specific individual who had been keeping the tension from becoming violence.
Major Liu Jianwei — thirty-six years old, loyal to the PLA command structure, commanding the 42nd Group Army's forward brigade in Guangzhou — found himself in the specific situation of an officer whose superior had died and whose next superior was two thousand kilometres away and whose immediate environment was fragmenting faster than communication could address.
He said to his political officer, Captain Zhao Min, on January 4th: "We need orders."
Zhao said: "I have been trying to reach the command since the morning of the 29th. The radio traffic is continuous but I cannot get a clear line through to the authority that can give orders."
Liu said: "Then we do what soldiers do when they don't have orders."
Zhao said: "Which is?"
Liu said: "We secure our position and wait for the orders to arrive."
Zhao said: "Our position is the eastern barracks. The industrial worker militia has been at the southern perimeter since yesterday evening."
Liu said: "Then we secure the eastern barracks and wait."
"Sir," Zhao said. "If we wait and the militia advances—"
"Then we respond to the advance," Liu said. "We don't initiate. We respond."
Zhao said: "And if they interpret our waiting as weakness?"
Liu was quiet for a moment.
He said: "Then they interpret it as weakness. I am not starting a fight in Guangzhou because I'm afraid someone will misread my restraint."
He said this in the flat, tired tone of a man who had been managing an impossible situation for nine days and who had decided that the specific variable he could control was his own next action and that the specific next action that was correct was not escalation.
Zhao looked at him.
He said: "Yes sir."
The militia's leader in the southern district was a man named Chen Defu, fifty-three years old, a factory foreman who had been organising workers since the Cultural Revolution and who had spent the past two and a half months in the specific position of a man who had maintained his forces in readiness without knowing what they were ready for. With Xu Shiyou dead and the authority vacuum real, Chen understood that the variable Guangdong had been waiting on had resolved: there was no longer a strong man holding the province neutral. There was only the power available to whoever moved first.
Chen was not a military professional. He was an organiser. He understood the specific kind of power that came from thousands of organised people moving in the same direction at the same time, because he had spent twenty years making that happen in factory contexts.
He was also aware that the army was the army and that the specific power of thousands of organised people moving in the same direction was not the same power as the army's power and that the distinction mattered when the two came into direct contact.
He moved his people to the southern perimeter on January 3rd and held them there.
He was doing the same calculation Liu was doing from the other side of the perimeter.
Neither man moved.
The city burned in other districts where the calculation had not reached the same conclusion.
In the Haizhu district — the commercial island between the Pearl River's north and south channels — a local committee of the Gang of Four's allied organisations had attempted to occupy the district tax office on January 4th, on the specific logic that controlling the district's financial records gave them leverage over the local business community. The PLA's Haizhu garrison unit had responded. The fight in the Haizhu district had lasted three days and had destroyed a significant portion of the market area that had been the commercial district's commercial identity for a hundred and fifty years.
In the Tianhe district, where the newer industrial and commercial development was concentrated, the fighting had been between two militia factions rather than between militia and army — both affiliated with the Gang of Four's network but with competing claims to the district's resources and competing ideas about who held legitimate authority after Xu Shiyou's death.
In the Liwan district, where the old city's narrow streets and the residences of Guangzhou's professional and commercial classes were concentrated, there was no fighting. There was departure — a specific, sustained, organised movement of people with resources and options toward the Pearl River Delta's smaller cities and toward Hong Kong's border, carrying what they could carry, leaving what they could not.
The departure from Liwan told a specific story about how populations in conflict zones managed the information available to them: the people with the most options moved first, which removed from the conflict zone the people most capable of rebuilding the institutional functions that the conflict was destroying, which made the conflict more destructive, which accelerated the departure of the next group of people with options.
By January 15th, Guangzhou's Liwan district had lost approximately forty percent of its pre-conflict population.
The people who had left were the doctors, the teachers, the accountants, the engineers, the traders.
The people who remained were the people who had nowhere to go.
Hong Kong's specific position in the civil war's geography was the position of a city that was technically British territory located at the edge of a country that was consuming itself.
Hong Kong had been watching the mainland's civil war through the specific lens of a population that was majority Chinese, that had extensive family connections to Guangdong and to the rest of the mainland, and that had chosen — or had found itself, through historical circumstance — living under British administration partly because the specific political conditions on the mainland had made British administration the available alternative.
The people departing Liwan were arriving in Hong Kong through the border at Lo Wu and through the boat crossings in the Pearl River Delta, and the British colonial administration was managing this with the specific, controlled bureaucratic competence that it managed most things and the specific, escalating anxiety of a bureaucracy that was receiving more people than its institutions had been designed to receive.
The Governor's weekly telegram to the Foreign Office in London on January 14th described the situation as "requiring attention" — which was the colonial administration's language for a situation that required immediate action and that the colonial administration was not certain it had the authority to take without direction from London.
London's attention was divided among several crises of its own and arrived at the Hong Kong situation with the specific delay that attention divided among several crises always arrived at any single one of them.
The arrivals continued.
In Kowloon's Sham Shui Po district, which had been a reception area for mainland migrants since the 1950s, the density of newly arrived people in the first two weeks of January produced the specific public health consequences that density always produced — not dramatically, not immediately, but in the small ways that preceded the larger ways if the small ways were not addressed.
The Red Cross established a coordination centre at the Sham Shui Po community hall on January 9th. The Shergill Foundation's Hong Kong office — which had been established the previous year as part of the SPEI pharmaceutical distribution expansion into Hong Kong's market — contributed medicines to the coordination centre on January 11th without being asked, which was the way the Shergill Foundation typically operated when it saw a gap between a need and an available resource.
The contribution was noted by the Red Cross coordinator, a Swiss woman named Marie-Claire Dupont who had been in disaster relief for twenty years and who noted, in her personal diary, that the Indian pharmaceutical company's Hong Kong office had responded faster than either the British colonial administration or the United Nations system.
She filed a formal acknowledgement and moved on to the next problem.
In Moscow, the Soviet Union's assessment of the Chinese civil war had been evolving through October, November, December, and January with the specific, careful deliberateness of an intelligence apparatus that had been watching a neighbour's catastrophic instability and was trying to determine what the catastrophe meant for the Soviet Union's position.
The Soviet Union and China shared a 4,300-kilometre border. The Soviet military had been planning for a Chinese military threat since the 1969 Sino-Soviet border clashes. The Chinese civil war had removed the threat — a China fighting itself could not simultaneously threaten the Soviet border — but had replaced it with a different kind of risk, which was the risk of instability on a 4,300-kilometre border leaking across that border in ways that were harder to manage than a conventional military threat.
The specific risks that the Soviet border commanders were reporting through January included: armed units crossing the border to avoid encirclement by opposing forces, refugees from the northeastern fighting seeking safety in Soviet territory, and the specific concern about the Second Artillery's command-and-control status that the Soviet military intelligence had been tracking since October.
The Soviet Union's nuclear response doctrine required a clear assessment of the opposing nuclear force's command-and-control status. If the opposing force's command and control was intact, deterrence functioned normally. If the opposing force's command and control was fragmented in the way that the civil war had fragmented the Chinese political authority, then the deterrence calculation required adjustments that the doctrine had not been designed for.
Marshal Ogarkov — the same Marshal Ogarkov who had led the Soviet delegation to the Project Foxbat Bharat negotiation in October 1976 — had presented the GRU's January assessment to the Defence Council on January 20th, the same day that Carter was inaugurated in Washington.
The assessment's key finding: The Second Artillery Corps has not received launch orders from any established authority since October 6th. Individual facility commanders are applying conservative interpretation of their launch authority protocols. The assessment is that launch probability in the current environment is lower than in a stable command environment because the absence of authorised command creates hesitancy rather than autonomy. This assessment may change if the civil war produces factions with access to individual facilities.
Ogarkov said, in the oral presentation that accompanied the document: "We have a situation on our southern border that is approximately as dangerous as it is possible for a border situation to be, and it is dangerous not because of any threat directed at us but because of the unpredictable consequences of a nuclear power's political dissolution."
The Defence Minister said: "What do we do?"
Ogarkov said: "We maintain communication with every identifiable authority on both sides. We make clear to both sides that Soviet interests in border stability are non-negotiable. We position forces to respond to any border intrusion. And we wait."
The Defence Minister said: "That is a passive strategy."
Ogarkov said: "There is no active strategy available. We cannot enter China to stabilise it. We cannot support either faction without making the other faction hostile. We cannot resolve the command-and-control question from outside. We wait."
The Defence Council accepted this.
The forces repositioned.
They waited.
The UNSC session on January 22nd was the second session on the Chinese situation in four days.
The first session had produced a statement of concern and a call for all parties to observe humanitarian law. This was the outcome of Security Council sessions that could not produce a resolution: a statement, which was a form of words that had no binding effect and that demonstrated that the Council had noted the situation.
The January 22nd session was prompted by a formal request from the Soviet Union — which held one of the permanent seats — for a substantive discussion of the humanitarian situation in the conflict zones.
The Soviet representative, Anatoly Dobrynin, who had been the Soviet Ambassador to the United States for fourteen years and who was in New York for this specific purpose, opened with a statement that was unusual in that it described the humanitarian situation in direct terms rather than the diplomatic terms that Security Council statements normally used.
He said: "The council has before it a situation in which a country of seven hundred million people is engaged in an internal armed conflict that has produced significant civilian casualties, significant food insecurity in the conflict zones, significant displacement, and significant risk to the stability of the nuclear command-and-control architecture of a state that possesses nuclear weapons."
He said the last phrase very carefully.
The chamber was quiet in a way that chambers were quiet when something had been said that everyone in the room already knew but that nobody had yet said in that room in that form.
He continued: "The Soviet Union is not calling for intervention in China's internal affairs. The Soviet Union is noting that the current situation in China has regional and global implications that extend beyond the internal affairs of China and that the Security Council has a responsibility to address."
Wei Tao-ming spoke next.
He said the statement that he had been preparing for four days, the statement that Wu Kuo-chen and Lin Wei-hsia had assessed as correct given both things being true simultaneously.
He said: "The Republic of China notes with deep concern the suffering of the Chinese people on the mainland. The Republic of China reiterates its commitment to the principle that the Chinese nation should be governed under a constitutional system that respects the rule of law and the rights of citizens. The Republic of China is prepared to offer humanitarian assistance to affected populations through appropriate channels, subject to the practical arrangements that such assistance would require."
He said nothing about which faction he was prepared to deal with.
He said nothing about Aksai Chin.
He said nothing about the specific territorial disputes that were, in any technical accounting, disputes between the ROC and India, Japan, Vietnam, and the Soviet Union, because the ROC claimed all the same territory the PRC had claimed and some additional territory besides.
He said nothing because saying something would require saying something specific and saying something specific required choosing between the two things that were simultaneously true, and the diplomatic art of not choosing was what the statement had been designed to achieve.
India's representative, who was Vijaya Lakshmi's successor — a man named Rajan Bahadur who had come up through the Foreign Ministry's New York posting and who had been at the permanent mission for three years — said: "India notes the Soviet Union's concerns about the humanitarian situation and concurs that the situation has regional implications. India wishes to note one specific additional implication."
He said: "The nuclear command-and-control situation that the Soviet representative has described is a matter of concern to all of India's neighbours. India shares a border with China. India's concern about the stability of the Chinese nuclear deterrent is therefore direct and geographic rather than general and theoretical. India requests that whatever mechanism the Council establishes for monitoring the humanitarian situation also include a mechanism for monitoring the nuclear command-and-control situation, with reporting to the Council on a regular basis."
The American representative, who was in a complicated position because the new Carter administration had not yet fully established its China policy and was therefore operating from the previous Ford administration's framework, said: "The United States supports the Soviet Union's call for humanitarian attention and notes India's specific concern about nuclear stability."
It was a minimal statement. It was what the American delegation had been authorised to say.
The British representative said something about humanitarian law and the importance of all parties facilitating access.
The French representative said something about the need for dialogue.
Wei Tao-ming said nothing further. He had said what he had been authorised to say.
The session ended with a presidential statement — the weakest form of Security Council output, a statement that did not have the force of a resolution and that required no vote — noting concern about the humanitarian situation and calling for humanitarian access.
Dobrynin, leaving the chamber, walked beside Rajan Bahadur for a moment.
He said, quietly: "Your nuclear monitoring proposal."
Bahadur said: "Yes."
Dobrynin said: "The Americans won't support it formally."
Bahadur said: "I know."
Dobrynin said: "But it was the right thing to say."
Bahadur said: "It was accurate. It should be said."
Dobrynin looked at him.
He said: "The Soviet Union has been trying to establish a nuclear monitoring mechanism for the Chinese situation since November. We have been blocked at every level."
Bahadur said: "Blocked by whom?"
Dobrynin said: "By the fact that nobody wants to formally acknowledge that the Chinese nuclear arsenal is currently without unified command authority, because acknowledging it formally creates obligations that nobody wants to have."
Bahadur said: "And if something happens."
Dobrynin said: "Then the fact that nobody wanted to acknowledge it formally will not protect them from the consequences."
Bahadur said: "No."
They separated at the corridor.
In Lhasa, Thubten received a letter.
It was not a letter in the conventional sense — it had not passed through the normal postal system, which would have been dangerous for what it said. It was a folded piece of paper that arrived in the specific way that things arrived in Lhasa in early 1977, which was through the specific informal networks that had been maintained by people who understood that some communications required channels that the official communications system did not provide.
The letter was from his brother, Sonam.
Sonam was forty-three years old. He had been in the Shigatse monastery that had been destroyed in 1968. He had not been in it when it was destroyed. He had been in the hills above it, and he had watched the destruction from a distance that was protective but not protective enough to prevent him from seeing what happened.
He had spent eight years in a way that the letter did not describe in detail — the letter was careful in what it described, because even arriving through the unofficial channels it described did not mean it was private.
The letter said, in the Tibetan that both brothers maintained in private as the language of who they actually were: Brother. I am alive. I am in a place that is not the place we grew up but that has features that remind me of it. The situation here, as you know from the news that reaches you, is changed. Whether the change will last is not something I can assess from where I sit. But the change is real in the sense that things are different today from how they were in October. I don't know if different means better. I know it means different, and different was not something I expected in my lifetime.
He said: I think about the monastery often. I think about it the way you think about a place that was a certain kind of thing and is no longer that thing, but that was real when it was what it was and that reality does not disappear because the place does.
He said: Write back if you can. Use the same channel. The people who carry these things are reliable. I know this because other things have arrived through them that were reliable.
Thubten read the letter twice.
He held the paper.
He thought about the monastery. He thought about October, and the six weeks of reduced monitoring, and the thought he had been carrying since October about the fact that the weight could lift. He thought about his brother alive in a place that reminded him of home.
He thought: Sonam is alive.
He thought: the civil war on the mainland has changed things in ways that are not yet fully visible and that cannot be assessed from where either of us sits. But the civil war has occupied the attention and the resources of the people who would otherwise be attending to the specific, targeted management of every person in Lhasa who might have opinions about Lhasa's status.
He thought: different is not better. Different is different. But different means that the permanent weight I thought I was going to carry for the rest of my life may not be permanent.
He sat with this thought for a long time.
Then he folded the letter very carefully and put it in the specific place in his room where he kept the things that mattered most.
He wrote a reply.
He did not say much in the reply. He said: Brother. I am alive. I am the same. What you describe is also visible from here — the difference is visible. I am carrying what you described in the letter you sent through the previous channel, the one about the stone lantern. I am keeping it carefully.
He meant: the thought about the weight lifting. The thought about permanence not being permanent.
He sent the letter through the same unofficial channel.
He went to work.
In Tokyo, the meeting between the Indian trade representative and the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry on January 25th was the forty-third such meeting in the bilateral series that had been running since 1973.
The forty-third meeting was different from the previous forty-two in one specific respect: for the first time, the Japanese side raised the question of the Chinese civil war directly, in the context of the India-Japan trading relationship.
The METI senior official, a man named Tanaka Yoshio, said: "We have been conducting these meetings for three years on the assumption that the supply relationships we have been developing are stable over a medium-term horizon. The situation in China introduces a variable that we want to discuss directly."
The Indian trade representative, Ashok Mehta, said: "Please go ahead."
Tanaka said: "Japan's dependence on the Strait of Malacca and the Taiwan Strait for its shipping to and from the Middle East and Southeast Asia is a structural feature of our geography that we cannot change. The Chinese civil war raises questions about the security of those straits that we have not previously had to ask."
Mehta said: "India's position in the Indian Ocean is relevant to your concern."
Tanaka said: "Yes. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands' naval facilities, which the Indian Navy has been developing since 1972, are positioned to influence shipping through the Malacca Strait in ways that are significant to Japan's energy security."
Mehta said: "India maintains freedom of navigation as a fundamental principle. We are not in the business of disrupting shipping that is not in violation of international law."
Tanaka said: "We know this. We are asking whether that principle would be maintained in a scenario where the civil war on the mainland produced a faction with maritime ambitions that challenged Strait security."
Mehta said: "India's position is that the freedom of navigation through international waters is non-negotiable. Any faction on the Chinese mainland that attempted to challenge Strait security through naval action would find that India's response was appropriate to the action."
He said this in the flat, careful way of a man stating a position that was Indian policy and that he had full authority to state.
Tanaka received this and wrote briefly in his notebook.
He said: "The oil supply. The current agreements."
Mehta said: "Are performing on schedule."
Tanaka said: "We want to expand them."
Mehta said: "Tell me the expansion."
Tanaka said: "An additional 40,000 barrels per day from the Bombay High field, beginning the fourth quarter of 1977. And a long-term supply agreement for the rare earth minerals from the Gilgit-Baltistan operations — specifically neodymium for the growing motor manufacturing sector."
Mehta said: "The neodymium."
Tanaka said: "Japan's automobile industry has been developing electric motor applications. The neodymium magnet is critical for motor efficiency in this application. The Gilgit-Baltistan deposit is the only confirmed large-scale source in Asia that is accessible through a stable government partner."
Mehta said: "The China deposits."
Tanaka said: "Were accessible through a government partner. That partner is currently engaged in a civil war that may produce any number of outcomes. Japan's industrial planning does not function well with 'any number of outcomes' as the supply assumption."
Mehta said: "India's government is stable."
"Yes," Tanaka said. "That is precisely why we are here."
The meeting lasted four more hours. The supply expansion was agreed in principle. The neodymium agreement was agreed in principle. The formal contracts required subsequent legal review.
At the end of the meeting, Tanaka said: "There is one more thing."
Mehta said: "Yes."
Tanaka said: "The Star Wars merchandise." He said it with the specific quality of someone raising a subject that was not part of the meeting's agenda but that was on his mind. "My son. He is twelve. He has the Ayan Shan figurine and the lightsaber. He talks about it constantly."
Mehta looked at him.
Tanaka said: "I wanted to say — the film. It was extraordinary."
Mehta said: "I will pass the observation to the relevant people."
Tanaka looked at him with the expression of a man who had understood something that he had been carrying as separate facts and had now assembled into a single connected picture.
Tanaka was quiet for a moment.
He said: "India is a very unusual country."
Mehta said: "We find it adequate."
In Lucknow, Karan read the UNSC summaries that Meera put on his desk on January 23rd.
He had not attended any of the UNSC sessions. He was not on the Security Council. He was the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, which had no UN representation of any kind.
But the summaries were on his desk because what happened at the UNSC was relevant to the calculation about China and what China's civil war meant for India, and the calculation about what China's civil war meant for India was relevant to the calculation about what India should be doing over the next five years.
He read Rajan Bahadur's nuclear monitoring proposal with specific attention.
He called Meera.
He said: "Rajan Bahadur's nuclear monitoring proposal. Who drafted it?"
Meera said: "The Foreign Ministry's legal and strategic affairs division. The proposal was cleared at senior levels before Bahadur raised it."
"Was it expected to succeed?" Karan said.
"No," Meera said. "The assessment was that it would not be adopted. The assessment was that saying it mattered regardless."
"Why?" Karan said.
"Because India is the country that said it," Meera said. "If the nuclear command-and-control situation produces a crisis and the crisis produces an event, India's record will show that India raised the concern in the appropriate forum at the appropriate time. The proposal was not designed to be adopted. It was designed to be on the record."
Karan was quiet for a moment.
He said: "Who made that call?"
"The Foreign Minister," Meera said. "In consultation with the PM's office."
"It was the right call," Karan said.
He set the summaries down.
He thought about China. Not the civil war's immediate situation — that was being managed by people whose job it was to manage it. The longer question.
The longer question was: what did China look like in five years, and what did that mean for India?
The five-year scenarios were multiple. The scenario where the Hua Guofeng faction won clearly, established a stable government, and eventually rehabilitated the pragmatist-reformist programme through whatever institutional form was available — that scenario produced a China that was building again, more slowly than before the civil war, hampered by the institutional destruction of the past year, but building. In that scenario, India's five-year window of China being focused inward was real but limited. Ten years, maybe.
The scenario where neither side won clearly — where the country fragmented into regional power structures, where Guangdong operated effectively independently, where the northeastern military regions maintained their effective autonomy, where the Gang of Four held the Yangtze valley but could not extend their control — that scenario was longer. It was also more dangerous in the nuclear dimension that Rajan Bahadur had raised.
The scenario where the Gang of Four consolidated — where the Cultural Revolution's mechanisms produced the kind of comprehensive political purge that destroyed the technocratic infrastructure at the depth that the Commission's operations were attempting — that scenario produced a China that was ideologically unified and economically weakened for a generation. It also produced a China that was more hostile to India than the alternatives, because the Gang of Four's framework did not accommodate a non-Maoist developmental state as a legitimate political model.
He thought: in all three scenarios, India's window is real. In all three scenarios, what India builds in that window is what determines what India is when the window closes.
He picked up the next file.
It was the SPEI pharmaceutical distribution network's Q1 expansion plan for the northeastern territories.
He read it for forty minutes, made seven annotations, and put it in the outgoing file.
He picked up the next file.
There was still work to do.
There always was.
End of Chapter 263