The country needed technology, fertilizer, and farm equipment. The Russians weren’t helping. That left the United States. Second, China felt besieged. To the north, the Soviets threatened. The Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, followed by the rapid buildup of Soviet forces in Siberia, had stoked Mao’s fear of war. To the south, India was still smarting from its defeat in 1962 at China’s hands. Taiwan’s forces continued to harass the mainland. And Japan was rising in the east, its economy even more miraculous than that of Taiwan. As Zhou Enlai said in 1968, “We are now isolated. No
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