The CIA made public on Monday a rich trove of previously classified documents on China, including the supposedly authoritative National Intelligence Estimates issued over the 30-year period of Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) rule.
For scholars of what Mao called China's "continuous revolution," of its tumultuous and intertwined relationships with the US, the Soviet Union and Taiwan, and of the US intelligence efforts aimed at understanding the unfolding events, the records disclose a mixed record of insights and miscues.
A National Intelligence Estimate published in June 1954 said that "no clearly established factions" existed within the Chinese leadership. In fact, the first major party purge had taken place earlier that year, something that did not become public for another year.
Yet in the confusion and chaos of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when radicals published so many documented exposes and denunciations that the flow of data became a glut, a 1967 intelligence estimate correctly predicted that cautious military and political leaders would find common cause eventually.
"As long as Mao is capable of political command, China's situation will probably be tense and inherently unstable," it said; a "disorderly and contentious" struggle would follow, and eventually a move away from "discredited" policies to "secure modest economic growth."
In an introduction to the collection of 71 documents, which are on the agency's Web site at www.cia.gov and will be released by the Government Printing Office on compact disc, Robert Suettinger, a career intelligence analyst and China scholar, says, "Unfortunately, the collection provides only a few examples of this kind of cogent analysis on China's leadership situation." But Suettinger described the record as "nonetheless an impressive one" in which "the fundamentals are consistently right."
Among the most important judgments, Suettinger wrote, was a consistently accurate assessment that the Communist Party in China was never challenged from 1948 onward in its predominance of power in China.
Other assessments contained in the documents include one written in 1950, on the eve of China's entry into the Korean War. It correctly said that Chinese forces were capable of either halting the northward path of UN forces or "forcing UN withdrawal further south through a powerful assault."
A pair of Special National Intelligence Estimates on China's response and involvement in the Vietnam War made clear that China would not risk an open confrontation with the US. One of the estimates, issued in 1966, said, "At present levels of American action [in North Vietnam], we continue to believe that China will not commit its ground or air forces to sustained combat against the US."
The documents show that US intelligence agencies were slow to recognize the emergence of differences between the Soviet Union and China in what is known as the Sino-Soviet split. As late as 1966, three years before clashes along the border took the relationship to its lowest state, an estimate described an open break in relations between the Soviet Union and China as unlikely.
A big shortcoming, Suettinger wrote in his assessment, was "overestimating the importance of ideological solidarity and other centripetal forces within the Communist bloc at least during the 1950s."
Documents on the emergence and status of China's strategic nuclear forces, the subject of 13 estimates between 1962 and 1974, were heavily censored, Suettinger writes, but if nothing else, they "reveal that estimating a country's nuclear capabilities -- much less intentions -- on the basis of a few photographs and other scarce clues has been an imprecise science from the start."
It is a lesson that will not be lost on students of intelligence still looking at the agency's work on Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, described the documents as presenting "a unique historical record of a formative stage in China's development" between 1948 and 1978, including "the drama of the Chinese Civil War."
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