Nation: Political Perversity

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A Soviet insider's view of the coming war with China

The scenario is chilling. China's ethnic minorities, which occupy some 60% of the nation's territory, want to break away from Peking. The inhabitants of Inner Mongolia yearn to unite with the Mongolian People's Republic and the Turkic peoples of Sinkiang with their cousins in Soviet Central Asia. "An exchange of blows," as the author puts it, "may start at any moment." When that happens, hundreds of thousands of "volunteers" on the Soviet side of the Chinese frontier will "come to the aid of [their] brothers in blood and in faith," and the Soviet authorities will be unable to stop them. As the fighting spreads, the Chinese may attack Russia itself. The Soviets consider escalating to nuclear weapons. "It is difficult," the author warns, "to overestimate the scale of the retaliation. . ."

If The Coming Decline of the Chinese Empire were the creation of some hack novelist, it might be dismissed as turgidly written and historically inaccurate—for it is both of those—but it is in fact the work of Victor Louis, 50, Moscow correspondent for the London Evening News, world traveler, bon vivant and a man widely reputed to have close connections with the Soviet KGB. The book thus can be interpreted as a Soviet government fantasy of China's eventual political and geographical disintegration—and a rationale for direct Soviet military intervention.

One expert who so interprets it is Harrison Salisbury, who was asked by Times Books, a subsidiary of the New York Times and the publishers of Louis' effort, to write an introduction. A onetime Moscow correspondent for the Times and author of a book entitled War Between Russia and China, he responded with a blistering attack. "Louis is a longstanding and experienced KGB agent," Salisbury charges in a 14-page "dissenting introduction," and his creation "is a book of spurious content, dubious logic, flagrant untruth . . . What confronts us is political perversity seldom seen." But because of Louis' position, Salisbury adds, his tract "commands our attention."

Louis claims to have worked on The Coming Decline for ten years, roughly the length of time since he became the first Soviet citizen in two decades to visit Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan, secretly, in late 1968. His book, however, is virtually devoid of contemporary sinological research, not to mention eyewitness reporting. Louis draws on czarist-era studies to proclaim that nationalism is flourishing even in Manchuria, though the Manchus have virtually vanished as an identifiable ethnic group, largely because of overwhelming Han Chinese immigration for a century. At one point Louis admits this; at another point he claims, preposterously, that the issue of Manchu nationhood is being debated "heatedly" by scholars. He even concocts a bizarre drama in which the Tibetan Dalai Lama takes up residence in the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator and rallies Tibetans and Mongols—who share the same kind of Buddhism—to separatism.