Nixon and Mao
Authors: Margaret MacMillan
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 14
GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
CHAPTER 15
THE IRRITANT: TAIWAN
CHAPTER 17
HALDEMAN’S MASTERPIECE
To my sister, Ann, and brothers, Tom, Bob, and David
MAPS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Most Chinese names are now transliterated into English using the pinyin system. Hence Peking has become Beijing. I have kept the older system only for names that are very well known already: Mao Tse-tung (in pinyin Mao Zedong); Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai); Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi); and Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian).
INTRODUCTION
O
N A COLD FEBRUARY MORNING OVER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY
ago, Richard Nixon entered Mao Tse-tung’s study in Beijing. The conversation that followed was slow and fitful because it went through interpreters. It was as one might expect of two people who were strangers but who had heard a lot about each other. They said how pleased they were to meet and exchanged polite compliments. They talked about mutual acquaintances: Chiang Kai-shek, the president of that other China in Taiwan, for example, and the former president of Pakistan, Mohammad Yahya Khan, who had helped arrange for their meeting to take place. And they talked briefly about their mutual foe, the Soviet Union. They made some jokes, mainly at the expense of Nixon’s companion Henry Kissinger, but they were generally serious.
Nixon tried to raise some matters that he felt were important. Mao waved him off and spoke vaguely in what he called “philosophical” terms. After about an hour, he looked at his watch and suggested that they had talked long enough. After a last exchange of pleasantries, Nixon took his leave. Neither man had said anything that surprised the other, and they had not come to any momentous conclusions. Yet their conversation was one of the most important occurrences in the recent past.
President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Tse-tung were well aware that they were making history that day in 1972. Both understood that their meeting and, indeed, Nixon’s whole visit to China were important above all else for their symbolism. It was, after all, the first ever visit of an American president to China, an end to the long standoff where neither country had recognized the other. It was an earthquake in the Cold War landscape and meant that the Eastern bloc no longer stood firm against the West.
One of the things the two men talked about was the past, particularly the events and the issues that had kept their two countries apart ever since the Communists took power in 1949. They also talked about politics, about Nixon’s problems with his own right wing and the threat to his administration from the Democrats, and about the recent upheaval in China when Mao’s chosen successor, Lin Biao, it was claimed, had tried to stage a coup. They did not discuss the much greater turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, which had started in 1966 when Mao called on the young to attack the old—whether values, traditions, or people—in order to make Chinese society properly socialist. Nixon, like an importunate guest, tried to bring the conversation around to his favorite topics, such as the future balance of power in Asia and, indeed, the world as a whole. Mao, the affable host, refused to be drawn in and insisted on speaking in vague generalities. They parted, with more polite words, both apparently expecting that they would meet again in a few days. They did not, in fact, meet again that time, although they would on Nixon’s subsequent visits to China.
International relations are about treaties, arms control, economic structures, courts, and bilateral and multilateral deals, but they also involve gestures. Exchanges of ambassadors, public statements, state visits—all of these indicate the ways in which nations see themselves and how they see others. The meeting itself and Nixon’s week in China that followed were partly about confirming what had already been negotiated, but they were also intended to underscore that there was a new era in the long and often stormy relationship between China and the United States and, indeed, between Asia and the West. The visit shook American allies such as Japan and Taiwan; it infuriated China’s few friends in the world; and it worried the Soviet Union. We have been debating exactly what it really meant ever since.
The relationship between China and the West and, more specifically, between China and the United States has seen many stages. Long before the thirteen colonies revolted against the British Empire, China had had indirect contact with the West in the shape of trade through central Asia with the Roman Empire. In Europe’s Middle Ages, a few brave or foolhardy travelers, Marco Polo among them, had managed to survive the overland route and see China for themselves. Later still, Jesuit missionaries had gone to China to convert the Chinese court to Catholicism, only to end up becoming quite Confucian in their outlook. They were followed by traders—impertinent bandits, in the Chinese point of view—who clustered around the south coast of China to buy its silks, teas, and porcelains and, eventually, to sell the Chinese opium in return. American traders joined in enthusiastically. And missionaries, among them many Americans, arrived to save Chinese souls.
Until the start of the nineteenth century, the Chinese dealt with Westerners, to their own satisfaction at least, as inferiors who were fortunate if they even had contact with the Middle Kingdom (the name the Chinese used for themselves), if they even enjoyed the Middle Kingdom’s superior products. That calm assumption of superiority was shaken and then shattered (although perhaps not irrevocably) when Western powers, strengthened by the products of the Industrial Revolution, forced their way into China and, in the end, helped destroy the old order. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ruling dynasty was on the point of collapse and China itself appeared to be on the edge of disappearing into one empire or another.
The United States had been part of that sorry story, but it had sometimes shown itself to be friendly. It had supported the continuation of a Chinese state. American missionaries who were actively founding schools and hospitals provided a growing constituency of support back home for a beleaguered China. There were other views of China in the United States, though: from the repository of the wisdom of the ages to the Yellow Peril, or the source of powerful Oriental plots to overthrow American power and the American way of life. American attitudes toward China continue to this day to oscillate between those two poles of fascination and sympathy, on the one hand, and fear and repugnance, on the other.
Chinese attitudes have gone through similar evolutions, from suspicion and hostility to an admiration for American values such as democracy. The United States was China’s ally during the Second World War, fighting against Japan, which had occupied much of China. As the war ended, though, the United States slid from backing China to backing one faction, the Guomindang, against another, the Chinese Communists. When the Communists won the civil war in 1949, they had every reason to fear and hate the Americans. That became open hostility during the Korean War, the first armed conflict of the Cold War, when Chinese and American soldiers fought each other.
From that point on, neither side trusted the other and neither was seriously prepared to try to bridge the chasm between them. Chinese newspapers and Chinese officials railed against American imperialism. Chinese schoolchildren threw beanbags at an Uncle Sam whose long fangs dripped innocent blood, and Chinese streets and squares carried giant slogans of hatred and resistance. The United States reciprocated in full. It backed the Guomindang regime in Taiwan and its ludicrous claims to speak for the whole of China. It kept China—the People’s Republic—out of the United Nations and other international bodies. At the Olympics, the only Chinese athletes were those from Taiwan. American presidents referred contemptuously to the Reds and insisted that the capital of China was Beiping and not Beijing, because that is what their allies in Taiwan still called it.
Occasionally there were hints that both sides would like to move away from what was becoming an increasingly tedious impasse, but something would always go wrong. An American flier would be shot down on a spy mission over China; a Chinese diplomat would defect; and the insults would start up afresh. In the 1960s, two events made the deep freeze even deeper. With Mao’s Cultural Revolution, China virtually ceased to have a foreign policy at all, as its diplomats were summoned home to be cleansed of imperfect attitudes. And the United States plunged headlong into Vietnam. With American troops pouring into South Vietnam and American planes bombing the north, China could not abandon its ally North Vietnam and engage in talks with its enemy.
The end of the 1960s brought shocks to both countries and their leaders and, perhaps, a new sense of realism. The Chinese and, most important, Mao, realized just how isolated they were in the world. Among China’s neighbors only Pakistan was friendly; the Soviet Union was distinctly hostile, amassing vast armies along the common border and talking, none too quietly, about the possibility of a nuclear strike on China. The United States was not as friendless, but it was newly aware of its own vulnerabilities. Vietnam had fueled passionate debate and dissent at home; abroad, it had made both American friends and enemies wonder just how strong the superpower really was.
President Nixon and Chairman Mao often took credit for ending the absurd standoff between their two countries, and they deserve it—but not all of it. The times were ripe for each side to make a move toward the other. In both countries there were influential voices saying that the advantages of a relationship, even a cool one, outweighed continuing nonrecognition. For each the other was a card to play against the common enemy, the Soviet Union.
Bringing the United States and China together, though, was not easy. History, particularly recent history, stood in the way. National pride, too, was an impediment. The United States so often saw itself as the shining city on the hill, the repository of the right ways of managing a society and running an economy, its values those for all of humanity. The Chinese were not much different. If the old China of the dynasties had seen itself as the center of the world and all other nations as subordinates, the new Communist one held itself out as the world’s revolutionary vanguard, with the thoughts of Chairman Mao as the only guide for the future.
Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972 had taken three years to arrange, three years of delicate feelers, of careful signals sent out and usually but not always received, of indirect contacts, of intense internal debates, and, finally, of direct negotiations. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, had made a secret trip to Beijing in the summer of 1971 and then a public one in the autumn to prepare the way for a visit by Nixon himself. Kissinger had discussed grand strategy with Chou En-lai, the Chinese prime minister, and, in sharp exchanges, the issues that still divided their two countries. Kissinger and Chou had also discussed the details of Nixon’s coming trip. Was the American president a supplicant, asking to come to China, or were the Chinese inviting him? Such questions matter in international relations, especially between two countries when each is convinced that it is the more important.
The Chinese leadership, which had worked so hard to make China the center of world revolution, now found itself with the leader of the world’s greatest capitalist nation coming to visit. The Americans, for their part, risked attacks from conservatives at home and possible humiliation in China. Both sides knew that they were taking a terrific gamble. On the one side lay a new relationship that would change the balance in international relations and, if all went well, produce great benefits. For the United States, a friendly China could put pressure on the recalcitrant North Vietnamese to negotiate an end to the war. For China, the relationship promised access to technology and vital strategic information. For both, the other provided a counterbalance to potential enemies: Japan and the Soviet Union in the case of China; the Soviet Union, above all, for the United States. If the trip went wrong, the recriminations and the renewed suspicions would send Chinese-American relations back to where they had been at the start of the 1960s.
To the end of his life, through the long, dreary years after the disgrace of Watergate, Nixon maintained that the opening of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China was the high point of his time in office. Good relations between the two countries, so Nixon held, were a way not only of keeping the Soviet Union under control but of bringing stability and peace to Asia and, indeed, to the world. As he prepared to leave Shanghai at the end of his momentous trip, Nixon made a toast: “We have been here a week. This was the week that changed the world.”
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Typical bombast, one might say. Does it really matter now that Nixon and Mao chatted among the antimacassars and spittoons of Mao’s study? That the Cold War, itself now vanished, saw a realignment of forces? Or that the United States and China finally began to trade with each other and exchange visitors?
Of course it matters. We worry, as we must, about terrorism, about the potential for conflict between the values of liberal democracy and of religious fundamentalism. We look at the instability in the Middle East with concern. We must not, however, forget Asia. With its vast population, its wealth, and its extraordinary rate of economic growth, it promises to be the continent of the future. Already the edge in technology and the lead in development and power are shifting eastward. Asia will be at the center of the world again. Yet there will be no peace for Asia or for the world unless those two great Pacific powers, the United States and China, the one supreme today and the other perhaps tomorrow, find ways to work with each other. To understand their relationship we need to go back to 1972, to the moment when it started anew.
