Nixon and Mao (23 page)

For most of Nixon’s first year in office, the People’s Republic of China showed no signs of being aware that anything had changed in American attitudes. In June, in response to an American query, the Chinese chargé in Warsaw said that his government had no immediate plans for resuming the suspended talks.
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In fact, the Chinese government—and in the end that meant Mao—was paying attention to the American signals. The Chinese also had a spy in Washington, in the CIA. Mao, moreover, was already inclined to think that Nixon was someone he could deal with. He had apparently read Nixon’s 1967 article in
Foreign Affairs
and recommended it to Chou En-lai.
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When Nixon became president, Mao approved the publication of his address in the
People’s Daily.
True, it appeared under the headline “A Desperate Confession,” but it disseminated Nixon’s message about wanting an open world, one where no people lived in “angry isolation.”
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At some point Chou En-lai ordered all government departments with any interest in the United States to watch American policies closely.
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In July, when an American yacht sailed into Chinese waters near Hong Kong and the local security forces arrested the two American crew, Chou dealt with the case personally. He ordered that there be no publicity and none of the usual rhetoric about CIA agents.
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The two Americans were later quietly released.

As 1969 wore on and the threat from the Soviet Union reached its most acute phase, China’s need to break out of its isolation became apparent. The four marshals produced their reports on China’s grand strategy, and Mao pondered them. Gradually China began to send ambassadors abroad again. A number of American allies were no longer prepared to wait, and China, for its part, was clearly receptive to increasing contacts with the world in general, if not the United States in particular. Between 1970 and 1971, China reestablished diplomatic relations with a number of countries, from Italy to Iceland.

Most significant of all, it began talks with the United States’ northern neighbor, Canada. The Canadians, while they shared Western concerns about the Soviet Union in the early decades of the Cold War and had fought in the Korean War, had never felt as strongly about the Communist Chinese threat. Canadian missionaries, who had been active in China for decades, were generally sympathetic to China, whatever government was in power. Most of the China experts in Canada’s foreign service were missionary children who had grown up in China. Canadians by and large did not share the United States’ hard line toward Communist China and, like other American allies, were alarmed by the insistence of the Americans on prolonging the Korean War and by loose talk about using the atomic bomb to dislodge the new regime. The Department of External Affairs, as it was then known, advocated establishing diplomatic recognition in the 1950s, and the Liberal government of Louis St. Laurent concurred. The Canadians, however, had to try to balance a number of factors.

Canada still looked to Britain for leadership, and the British had established their relations with China. In addition, an increasing number of Commonwealth countries were recognizing the People’s Republic in the 1950s, and Canada cared about Commonwealth solidarity. Then there was the United States, always a factor in Canadian thinking. If Canada moved too far away from American policy, it might damage both the NATO alliance and the bilateral relationship. American administrations tended to be easily irritated if they felt their allies were getting soft on Chinese Communism. In the early 1960s, when a Chinese classical opera company came to Toronto, the American authorities announced that any American citizens who bought tickets were violating American law. When a few determined Americans came anyway, they were welcomed by Canadians who were irritated, as so often before and since, by the American government’s attempt to enforce American laws outside the United States.
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On the other hand, Canada had much more at stake in its relationship with the United States than that with China, and so the Canadian government, whatever it thought and sometimes said, did not move on the issue.

At the end of the 1950s, the Canadians suddenly found themselves being courted by the Chinese Communists, not for recognition but for Canadian wheat. Reports were coming out of China of severe shortages (an understatement). The Canadian government briefly contemplated a gift but decided that the Chinese might see charity as an insult. In any case, the Chinese were prepared to pay hard currency at first and seemed eager to take a lot more Canadian wheat if some credit arrangement could be worked out. Canadian wheat farmers were delighted and Canadian public opinion in general was quiescent so, although the Americans raised objections, Canadian governments in the 1960s continued to allow trade between Canada and China. In Hong Kong, a Canadian trade commissioner traveled back and forth to China on a diplomatic passport and behaved much like a Canadian diplomat. In Ottawa, the Department of External Affairs discussed recognition of the People’s Republic year after year, but nothing happened until the end of the decade.

In 1968, things began to move when Canada got a new prime minister. Although he had a reputation as a radical freethinker, Pierre Trudeau was essentially a pragmatist. He himself was not particularly interested in American culture or in the United States, but he knew that Canada had little choice but to get along with its giant neighbor. On the other hand, he thought Canadian foreign policy was stuck in a rut and knew that Canadians were increasingly willing to distance themselves from the United States. Canadians had just celebrated their centenary as a nation and, perhaps to their own surprise, were enjoying a burst of cultural activity and Canadian nationalism. And an influx of American draft dodgers and deserters was persuading Canadians not only that the Americans were very wrong but that Canadians were very right over Vietnam. (Canada had not become a combatant largely because its role on the International Control Commission, set up in 1954 to monitor the agreements governing Indochina, precluded it from doing so.) To Trudeau, who had actually visited China twice as a private citizen, it seemed illogical for nations not to recognize its government.

Shortly after he took office, Trudeau ordered a complete review of Canada’s foreign policy. As far as Asia was concerned, the experts were to take into account the separate government in Taiwan. As the Canadians moved cautiously toward a change in their policy toward China, the Americans were not pleased; Secretary of State William Rogers reportedly told his Canadian counterpart, “We hate like hell what you are doing but you are still our best friends.”
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In January 1969, the Canadian cabinet authorized its representatives in Stockholm to contact the Chinese embassy. (Sweden was good neutral territory and had good communications.) The Canadian third secretary duly invited a Chinese acquaintance to attend dinner at his house and watch a new film on Dr. Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor seen by the Communists as a saintly figure who gave his life for the revolution. The Chinese diplomat had to refer the invitation back to Beijing, and two weeks later, on the afternoon of the dinner, an urgent telegram came back with authorization, possibly from Mao himself.
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The Canadian-made film, which also showed Bethune’s lively and varied romantic career, may have left the Chinese bewildered, but they did recognize the friendly intent. Permission came from Beijing to start talks about establishing diplomatic relations. Although Chinese knowledge of the outside world was limited at this time, thanks to the Cultural Revolution, Canada was seen as a relatively friendly power within the American camp; Canadian interest in talks was perhaps a sign of changes in American thinking.
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The talks, highly formalistic and drawn out, with the necessary references back to the respective capitals, took place alternately at the Chinese embassy, which was in an elegant old Stockholm house, and the Canadian one, which was in a nondescript office building in the red-light district. By the fall of 1970 an agreement was ready, and after some last-minute discussions over whether Chinese or Canadian paper should be used (Swedish was the compromise), Canada and the People’s Republic of China agreed in October to establish diplomatic relations. The first Canadian diplomat arrived in Beijing in November to look for accommodations. In February 1971, the Chinese opened their embassy in Ottawa.

By this point, the United States had secretly made its own contact with the People’s Republic of China. Since no answer had come from the Chinese to the roundabout messages the Americans had been sending, in the late fall of 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had decided on a direct approach. Walter Stoessel, the American ambassador in Warsaw, was told to make contact with local Chinese diplomats. On December 3, he and a colleague who spoke some Chinese went to a gala fashion show being put on by the Yugoslavians to which the whole diplomatic corps had been invited. As the chief Chinese representative was leaving, the Chinese-speaking American bumped into him. “I introduced myself. And he was, you know, being very Chinese and bowing with hands clasped. I said, ‘I want you to meet my ambassador.’” Stoessel passed on the message from the U.S. government requesting talks and asked if they could meet again. The Chinese diplomat hastily said in Chinese, “Okay. Okay,” and fled to his waiting car.
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“If you want Chinese diplomats to suffer a heart attack,” Chou En-lai later told the Americans, “you just have to speak to them on diplomatic occasions.”
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The Chinese embassy immediately reported this “unusual behaviour” to Beijing, and Chou En-lai went straight to Mao. “The opportunity now is coming,” he told the chairman. “We now have a brick in our hands to bang on the door with.”
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Four days after the fashion show, Lei Yang, the Chinese chargé, quietly called on the American embassy to announce that the Chinese government had decided to release another pair of American yachtsmen who had been in Chinese custody since February. On December 11, Stoessel returned the call at the invitation of the Chinese. The press started to notice the black limousines with their national flags going back and forth, and the State Department, following standard procedure, also informed its own departments and selected embassies abroad. Nixon, according to Kissinger, worried that the news of the initiative was leaking too soon, saying, “We’ll kill this child before it is born.” Kissinger saw this as yet another example of the rigidity and incompetence of the State Department and yet another good reason why the White House should deal with China policy.
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On January 8, 1970, China and the United States announced that the Warsaw talks were resuming. Nixon, in the foreign policy report he sent to Congress a month later, said, “It is certainly in our interest, and in the interest of peace and stability in Asia and the world, that we take what steps we can toward improved practical relations with Peking.”
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Stoessel, under instructions from Washington, told Lei Yang at an informal meeting on January 20 that the United States was prepared to send a high-level representative to Beijing if necessary for discussions. At their first formal meeting, on February 20, Lei, who had received his instructions from China, replied that the Chinese would be pleased to receive a high-level envoy “to explore further solutions to the fundamental questions in Sino-American relations.” He mentioned what was for the Chinese the most fundamental question of all: the future status of Taiwan. The United States wanted to improve relations with China, but it continued to support “the Chiang Kai-Shek clique,” which had long since been repudiated by the Chinese people. “Is this not self-contradictory?” Nevertheless, the meeting ended with an agreement to meet again. The Chinese politely declined the offer of a cup of tea and left. In fact, that was to be the last of the formal Warsaw meetings.
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PHOTO INSERT

Nixon spent much of his time aboard Air Force One on the long flight to the Far East conferring with Henry Kissinger.