On a crisply cold day 20 years ago Friday, Richard Nixon came to China. His arrival presaged an infusion of values and ideas that his hosts have been trying to control or expunge ever since.
Today Chinese officials acknowledge they`ve lost their battle against free-market enterprise and the profit mentality. But they have suppressed, often by brute force, sporadic outbursts against the Communist Party monopoly. When Nixon came here Feb. 21, 1972, the Chinese mostly rode bicycles, and millions dressed uniformly in Mao jackets and loyally chanted Mao Tse-tung`s slogans.
Today, the state-controlled media still pound out official slogans, but change is evident everywhere.
New cars plague major cities with traffic jams and shops sell Western clothing, Western music and Western books. The videocassette is increasingly within the reach of Chinese homes, and English has supplanted Russian as the foreign-language study of choice.
”We still remember Nixon`s visit as a milestone after thousands of years of isolation. It opened our doors and our eyes to the outside world. Perhaps since then the party has not changed very much-but people have,” says a teacher named Liu, who was allowed to study abroad.
Xiao, a factory worker, recalled her confusion over a front-page photo in the People`s Daily of Mao, the ”Great Helmsman,” shaking hands with the U.S. president.
”For years we had been shouting `Down with U.S. imperialism.` We were puzzled. There was no explanation,” she said.
She also remembers that hard-liners used Nixon`s visit as a pretext to vilify the late Premier Chou En-lai as a reactionary and closet capitalist. Yet a just-released film hails Mao, not Chou, as the man who insisted China needed friendship with the U.S. and invited Nixon, officially dubbed ”The God of Plague and War.”
The film makes no mention of Mao`s diminished status today as a leader who made many errors, or Nixon`s disgrace after Watergate.
”For us, Mao and Nixon are still heroes. Both changed the course of China,” said Liu.
The legacy of Nixon`s visit, at the height of the Vietnam War and China`s Cultural Revolution, has haunted a relationship that was once perceived as a powerful weapon to curb the Soviet threat but now is bogged down in arguments over trade practices and a new emphasis on China`s human rights record.
At the official root of the discord are the Shanghai Communiques (1972, 1978 and 1982) in which Washington pledged non-interference in Beijing`s internal affairs.
China`s leaders argue that the U.S. violates that pledge when it denounces arrests and persecutions of dissidents or separatists. American diplomats reply that human rights is an international issue, not an internal one.
During Nixon`s visit, human rights violations-far more cruel in the 1970s than today-were never an issue.
Subsequently, neither were the current wrangle over Beijing`s exports of arms and missiles or the status China acquired as a most-favored-nation trading partner of the U.S.
Western diplomats say that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington no longer relies on good relations with China to stifle Soviet expansionism in Asia and tilt the superpower balance.
”Global changes have given the U.S. a free hand to pressure China. The $11 billion trade deficit (in China`s favor) has made China an easy scapegoat for the U.S. recession, and the Tiananmen Square massacre has suddenly brought home to Americans that the Chinese system can be very nasty,” said a senior Asian diplomat.
But Beijing`s hard-line rulers are stuck, for good or ill, with an America that has become China`s main export market at a time when Chinese socialism depends on providing consumer benefits to mollify political discontent.
Privately, U.S. officials agree that China is committed to economic reform, if not political change, and will compromise to maintain the U.S. market.
Beijing has promised to eliminate ”unfair trade practices” and signed an intellectual property rights agreement that will halt the pirating of American-patented technology.
Thus, though the tug-of-war is far from over, Chinese-American relations are, in the words of a U.S. official, a far cry from ”the days before Nixon`s visit, when if we ran into a Chinese diplomat, he spun on his heel and walked away.”
