Twenty-five years ago this week, Richard Nixon changed from a Red-baiter to Communist China’s most important friend. Beijing, after calling Nixon the “God of plague and war,” embraced him as a shield against the Soviet Union. His eight-day stay in China–the longest visit to any foreign country by an American president–marked the first time a U.S. chief executive had negotiated on the soil of a nation lacking diplomatic relations with Washington.
Nixon declared on his way home, “That was the week that changed the world.” His deal with China did change the world of the 1970s–though a quarter-century later, the ground has shifted under our feet again.
Chairman Mao Tse-tung ill with congestive heart failure, was excited at Nixon’s arrival. In preparation he had his first haircut in five months. Rising early on the day Nixon was due, he dressed in a new suit and shoes and sat restless on a sofa, pestering Chou En-lai, premier of North Vietnam, with phone calls on Nixon’s exact movements. “I like rightists,” the 78-year-old dictator said to Nixon, gripping his hand for a full minute.
China had not yet fully emerged from the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping, later to be the giant of post-Mao China was working as a fitter in a factory in the south, still in political exile after Mao’s purge of him in 1967. Nixon never saw him. Yet the outcome of the Nixon trip would set the stage for the era of Deng Xiaoping.
Even for those too young to recall the Nixon opening to China, it lives on as a symbol of political audacity; a scintillating maneuver pulled off by the wrong person opening the right door.
Nixon took a courageous step, and what he did had to be done.
Recall the dangers he faced. His opening to China bucked majority opinion in his own Republican Party. War was still raging in Vietnam, with Beijing backing Hanoi. Had the secrecy of Kissinger’s pre-trip moves broken down, anti-American reaction was likely in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
In the face of all this, Nixon went ahead. This is called leadership, a quality not so evident in the White House today.
Some summit aims were achieved, others were not, and one momentous outcome was not planned at all.
In 1972, the issue in China policy was to remove the danger of war. Few people focused on trade. Fewer still on human rights or pushing China toward democracy. It just seemed less dangerous to deal with China than not to.
China wanted to stick to the Taiwan issue, while the U.S. wanted to broach an “overall structure of peace” in East Asia. Then Mao said to Nixon, “Taiwan is not an important issue; the international situation is an important issue.” With that remark he had compromised on Taiwan because of alarm about the Soviet Union. Broader issues were on the table. (One lesson from 1972 is that the Chinese Communists are just as susceptible to compromise as anyone else.)
Nixon wanted a soft landing from the Vietnam disaster and leverage against the Soviet Union. He got both. China took the headlines away from Vietnam; Moscow fretted about the new cordiality between Washington and Beijing.
America achieved a generation (at least) of peace in Asia from the new relationship with China. Prior to the Nixon trip, we suffered the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Since the Mao-Nixon summit, the U.S. has not fought a new battle in Asia. On the contrary, the Beijing-Washington link has helped hold the line for peace in Korea and elsewhere.
The role of Japan (Tokyo quickly followed Nixon’s lead and set up ties with Beijing) has been crucial to this generation of peace. An indirect, spectacular consequence of the Nixon-Mao summit was to usher in a tripartite balance, Japan-USA-China. It is under that umbrella that Asia Pacific has prospered.
China achieved protection against Moscow for the remainder of the life of the Soviet Union, plus an American military pullback from its periphery.
But it got little on Taiwan. We kept our embassy in Taipei until 1979. We continued to supply arms to Taiwan–to this day.
In 1972, a fear of China was mixed with condescension toward a relatively weak China; the task was to coax a smile from the exotic dragon. In 1997, China’s power and behavior, taken together, seem alarming.
The Nixon-Mao compromise had three ingredients. The two sides began an unspoken cooperation against the Soviet threat. On Taiwan, China got the form (“One China”) and the U.S. got the substance (ongoing ties with an ongoing Taiwan). And there was a tacit agreement to pay minimal attention to ideological differences.
Three subsequent events have undermined the Nixon-Mao compromise.
– The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the raison d’etre of the strategic cooperation.
– The coming of democracy in Taiwan gave the island a new sense of itself as a de facto independent country.
– The Tiananmen Square tragedy of 1989 ended any denial of ideological differences between China and the U.S.
These events together unraveled the world of 1972.
In the Shanghai Communique, the foundation for re-establishing Sino-American relations, the U.S. acknowledged that “all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait” upheld “One China.” That premise is no longer true. A third to a half of the Taiwan population, who define themselves as Han Chinese, reject One China. This 7-10 million group doesn’t want reunification with the Communist regime in Beijing. The U.S. cannot go on chanting “One China” as if nothing has changed.
China’s economic advance is inevitable, and the U.S. can benefit from it. Negligible in 1972, China-USA trade is now worth $60 billion a year. One day, the relationship between a democratic China and the USA could well be the most important economic, political and even military relationship in the world.
The Chinese radicals were correct to warn in the 1970s that the opening to America was a threat to Chinese socialism–in the long run a mortal threat. Deng was the chief enemy of the Left. Five years after Nixon’s trip, with Mao dead, Deng turned the tables on the Left. The Deng era began, the new relationship between China and America its essential setting. Every day is different in the life of almost every one of the 1.2 billion Chinese because of China’s relation with some aspect of America. Some 80,000 of tomorrow’s Chinese elite are studying on our campuses. But this play of influences is largely independent of the will of the U.S. government.
The problem of China is not the rise of China, but the rise of a China that remains Leninist. The unelected Beijing government is a dinosaur of arrogance and repression.
In 1972 I was a target for conservatives on China policy. “It is not a small thing,” I said to William Buckley on “Firing Line” soon after the summit in Beijing, “that Mr. Nixon has agreed on a live-and-let-live policy with China.” Buckley swept this aside: “I desire the liberation of the Chinese people from their current slave masters.” In 1972 those two statements were an apple and a banana. Today, the two concerns of peace and freedom have drawn closer.
Nixon told Mao, “What is important is not a nation’s internal political philosophy.” Yet today in U.S.-China relations, domestic values are extremely important. Likewise, the existence of democracy in Taiwan adds to the reasons why the U.S. must prevent the use of force in the Taiwan Strait.
In 1972 we could achieve peace largely by the mere step of opening high-level communication with Beijing. In 1997 the task is not so simple: In the long run peace may require an end to the Leninist dictatorship in Beijing. Many desirable things in our ties with China–trade balance, equal cultural exchanges, protection for US investment–will not come about until major political liberalization occurs in Beijing. Nixon and Kissinger did not have occasion to weigh this consideration 25 years ago.
Beyond the hope for a freer China, we need a firm stance against an expansionist or aggressive China. This is where President Clinton has been ineffectual. He seems innocent of any trace of realpolitik.
A feel for the balance of power made Nixon and Kissinger a refreshing force in American policy toward Asia. Kissinger correctly scoffed at the widespread view that the problems of the bilateral China-America relationship–blocked financial assets, Washington’s opposition to Beijing’s seating in the United Nations–had to be tackled first and directly. He felt the breakthrough with the Chinese would come on broader grounds and he was right. We need a dose of Kissinger’s balance of power thinking in 1997.
Our policies are not themselves going to bring down the Leninist system in China; that will happen largely through the internal dynamics of China. We benefit from full engagement with China. But we also must build an equilibrium in Asia Pacific that keeps in check a China in the grip of dictatorial arrogance. Engagement itself is not a policy–it does not speak of aims.
Only a strong America with geopolitical vision can ensure that the Chinese Communists do not get more out of the Nixon breakthrough than does the U.S. and its friends. In a world without the Soviet Union, we do not lack the power to hold China in balance. Do we have the will?
