Nixon and Mao (37 page)

Not all the concessions, by any means, came from the American side. The Chinese accepted that the United States could not turn away from Taiwan overnight. Mao was particularly pleased, however, when Kissinger, on his first visit, promised that at least some of the American troops would be pulled out. The United States, Mao exclaimed to Chou, was evolving. Like an ape moving toward becoming a human being, its tail—its forces in Taiwan, in this case—was growing shorter.
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Armed with Mao’s approval, Chou talked in a friendly and positive way about the gradual lowering of tension over Taiwan and the normalization of relations between China and the United States. Although American troops were clearly going to remain in Taiwan for some time, he conceded that normalization of relations could proceed in parallel rather than, as the Chinese had first insisted, with the troop withdrawal as a precondition. In a chat that autumn of 1971 with Jack Service, a former American diplomat whom he had known during the Second World War, Chou made it clear he understood that American policy on Taiwan would have to evolve over time.
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When Kissinger said that the United States hoped the fate of Taiwan could be resolved peacefully, Chou replied, “We are doing our best to do so.”
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Although Kissinger tried repeatedly on both his visits in 1971 to get Chou to say explicitly that China had given up the option to reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force, he in turn had to be content with strong hints. China, said Chou, was showing great restraint on the Taiwan issue: “For the sake of normalization of relations between the two countries, we are not demanding an immediate solution of this in all aspects, but that it be solved step by step.” And Chou accepted the American wording for the draft communiqué for the Nixon visit, which said that the Americans would encourage the Chinese people to settle the matter “through peaceful negotiations.”
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When Nixon set out for Beijing, the final wording on Taiwan had still not been settled. “The trouble,” as Kissinger had said to Chou in a moment of frankness, “is that we disagree, not that we don’t understand each other.” The Chinese wanted Taiwan to be part of China, if not right away, at a firm date in the future; the Americans could not openly accept that. “The Prime Minister,” said Kissinger, “seeks clarity, and I am trying to achieve ambiguity.”
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Before he started his discussions with Chou, Nixon seems to have wanted to take the high moral ground and be completely frank with the Chinese. As he reviewed the references to Taiwan in his opening statement to Chou, he scribbled in the margin, “Won’t play games—tell you what we will do—what we cannot do.” One thing the United States could not do was break its treaty with Taiwan. Kissinger was optimistic: “We could allow history to take care of this problem.” By the time all American troops had withdrawn from Taiwan and full relations had been established between the People’s Republic and the United States, the treaty would probably lapse anyway.
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Because much of the record on the Chinese side is still restricted, it is not yet possible to know in detail how Chou planned to deal with Taiwan in his talks with Nixon, but he can only have been pleased at the way in which Nixon opened with the issue at their first private meeting, on February 22. “There is one China,” the president stated, “and Taiwan is part of China.” Nixon then reiterated the other undertakings made by Kissinger: no support for any Taiwan independence movements; the use of American influence to keep Japan out of Taiwan and to keep Taiwan from attacking the mainland; and the gradual reduction of American forces on the island. The United States, he said, was committed to both a peaceful resolution of the issue and the normalization of relations with China.

Nixon had been scornful, before his trip, when Kissinger suggested, as he had already said to Chou, that the Americans could agree to do more than they could say publicly: “1. too dangerous 2. sounds tricky,” he wrote in one of his notes to himself.
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Now, however, he said to Chou, “My record shows I always do more than I can say, once I have made the direction of our policy.” Chou offered the Americans tea and snacks but made no immediate comment.
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Much later in the meeting, after he had spent considerable time rehearsing past American misdeeds, Chou said airily that the Taiwan question was really rather easy to discuss: “We have already waited over twenty years—I am very frank here—and can wait a few more years.” And he threw in a promise: when Taiwan came back to the motherland, China would not put any nuclear bases there. In their discussion two days later, Chou also assured Nixon that the People’s Republic would not use its armed forces against Taiwan as long as American forces were there. As in his talks with Kissinger, however, Chou was not prepared to renounce the use of force against Taiwan. Indeed, China has never renounced it.
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In the meeting on February 24, Nixon continued to ignore his own advice to himself about not promising more than he could safely admit in public. He intended to move on normalization in his second term, he told Chou, and he was going to withdraw all American forces from Taiwan. He could not, however, make that explicit in their joint communiqué because it would give his opponents something to attack him on during the campaign. “I must be able to go back to Washington and say that no secret deals have been made between the Prime Minister and myself on Taiwan,” he explained. Once he was safely reelected, he would have four years “to move us towards achieving our goal.”
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The difficult issue was how to find language that would reassure the Chinese without alarming the Americans. As Nixon put it, “Our problem is to be clever enough to find language which will meet your need yet does not stir up the animals so much that they gang up on Taiwan and thereby torpedo our initiative.” That difficult task was left to Kissinger and Qiao Guanhua.
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Chou pushed Nixon hard on Taiwan, but on the last day of the visit, February 28, he reminded him that China could wait for some time more to settle the issue. Indochina, he said, was another matter. There had been fighting there since the end of the Second World War. “People there have been bleeding,” he said. China could not help but be sympathetic: “We have an obligation to sympathize with them and support them.” If President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger were sincere, and Chou believed they were, in wanting to reduce tensions in the Far East, then the question of Vietnam and its neighbors in Indochina was “the key point.” It was a great pity, though, that the Americans had kept on the attack even while Nixon had been in China: “You have given the Soviet Union a chance to say that the music played in Peking to welcome President Nixon has been together with the sounds of the bombs exploding in North Vietnam.”
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CHAPTER 16

INDOCHINA

J
UST BEFORE HE LEFT WASHINGTON, NIXON MADE A NOTE TO HIMSELF
: “1. Taiwan—most
crucial
2. V. Nam—most
urgent
.”
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When he took office, he had optimistically thought that he could extricate the United States from the war in Vietnam within six months. On the ground, though, the North Vietnamese showed no signs of weakening, and in Paris the peace negotiations, which had started in 1968, dragged on. The war, far from winding down, had expanded, drawing in Cambodia and Laos. The conflict was overshadowing Nixon’s presidency much as it had Johnson’s; it was hurting American society and harming Nixon’s ability to deal with the big issues facing the United States abroad, such as relations with the Soviet Union.

The public Paris talks, which involved the governments of the United States and North and South Vietnam, as well as the Communist-backed National Liberation Front for South Vietnam, were stuck in endless wrangles over such matters as the type of table to be used. However, while Kissinger had been dealing with the opening to China, he had simultaneously been conducting highly delicate and secret talks, also in Paris, with the North Vietnamese representatives in an effort to get the peace process moving ahead. The North Vietnamese were prepared to talk but not to make significant concessions, and the two sides remained apart on a number of issues. The two most important were the insistence by North Vietnam that President Nguyen Van Thieu’s government in the south be removed, something the United States dared not do unless it wanted to be charged with betraying an ally, and North Vietnam’s refusal to state publicly that it would withdraw its troops from the south as the Americans withdrew theirs. It did not help matters that Nixon, who was convinced it was always best to negotiate from a position of strength, was trying to bomb the North Vietnamese into a more conciliatory frame of mind. In the spring of 1970, he extended the war into Cambodia, bombing and attacking the Communist bases there, and in February 1971 moved forces into Laos. Both escalations of the war caused huge protests in the United States, and the Cambodian incursion led the Chinese Communists to ostentatiously (but, as it turned out, only temporarily) break off their developing contacts with the Americans.

Both Nixon and Kissinger placed great hope in using their opening to China to put pressure on North Vietnam to make greater compromises in the Paris negotiations. Both men assumed, in spite of much evidence to the contrary, that the Communist world was organized like an army or a successful corporation, with all low-ranking officers following orders from above. North Vietnam, just like North Korea or East Germany, was a subordinate that would surely do what it was told. There was a difficulty, though, in knowing which of its quarreling senior partners—the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China—it would obey. At first Nixon and Kissinger hoped that the Soviet Union was the key; in an early meeting with Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Kissinger painted an attractive picture of better relations between their two countries, with frequent summit meetings. The only condition was that the Soviet Union help the United States get a settlement in Vietnam. The Soviets, who were having their own troubles with the North Vietnamese, whom they found stubborn and irritatingly independent, made it clear that they were happy to talk about improved relations but that they were not so easily scared into doing the Americans’ bidding.
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Nixon and Kissinger, who invariably thought in terms of linkages, of trading gains in one area for concessions in another, increasingly placed their hopes on their new relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Surely it would make sense for the Chinese Communists to help with Vietnam, indeed with the whole of Indochina, in return for the Americans giving them much of what they wanted on Taiwan? On April 27, 1971, the day Chou’s invitation to Nixon to send a high-level emissary arrived in Washington, Kissinger was euphoric about the possibilities opening up: “Mr. President, I have not said this before but I think if we get this thing working, we will end Vietnam this year.”
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After his first two visits to China, Kissinger remained optimistic. He had been cautious, he told Nixon on the eve of the president’s trip, not to embarrass Chou by asking too openly for his assistance. “Nevertheless, from July onward the two key issues in our dialogue have been Taiwan and Indochina, and they contain an inherent
quid pro quo,
” he said. “Only we can help them concerning Taiwan; and they can help in Indochina. Accordingly, I have indirectly but consistently linked these two in my talks with Chou.” He was sure, he went on, that the Chinese had already spoken forcefully to the North Vietnamese.
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As Nixon went over the briefing notes Kissinger had prepared, he jotted down his own thoughts on how he would stress the importance of the United States’ getting out of Indochina with the Chinese.

1. helps on Taiwan troop removal

2. Reduces Soviet hand there

3. Reduces irritant to our relations

4. Gets us out—gives them a fair chance
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While the Chinese certainly understood how important ending the Vietnam War was to the Americans (Kissinger and Nixon told them so repeatedly), they denied that it was important to China and firmly refused to be drawn into helping to settle the conflict. The Chinese had been made nervous by the American presence in South Vietnam, but the fact that in the early 1970s the Americans were finding it difficult to withdraw left a bargaining chip on the table for China as it negotiated with the United States over Taiwan.
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Furthermore, China—so Mao certainly insisted—was the center of world revolution. North Vietnam was part of the worldwide struggle against imperialism and had to be supported.

“We have had no military advisers,” said Chou mendaciously the first time he met Kissinger. “They were only to build roads.” In fact, the Chinese had been supporting the North Vietnamese Communists and then the Vietcong in South Vietnam ever since the start of the 1950s, first in the war against the French and then against the Americans. The Chinese government itself calculated that its aid amounted to some $20 billion between 1950 and 1975, when the fighting finally ended with the fall of Saigon. China sent hundreds of thousands of guns, millions of bullets and shells, uniforms, boots, even mosquito netting. It also sent military missions and troops, some 320,000 of them in the late 1960s. True, Chinese soldiers did build roads, but they also manned antiaircraft guns and ground-to-air missiles. The presence of so many Chinese troops also freed up North Vietnamese to fight the South Vietnamese and American forces.
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Propaganda from both Hanoi and Beijing talked about the relationship between the Chinese and the North Vietnamese as being that between the rear and the front lines or the lips and the teeth. The lips, however, did not always cover the teeth properly and the teeth sometimes quietly bit the lips. Communist brotherhood, just as in the case of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, was not enough to paper over deep cultural and historical differences. China and Vietnam have had a long and complicated relationship that goes back many centuries. To the Chinese, with their self-centered view of the world, the Vietnamese were younger brothers—the “half-cooked,” as one expression had it—who had not yet become thoroughly civilized. While the Vietnamese absorbed much from Chinese civilization, they also resented their great meddlesome neighbor to the north. In 111
B.C.,
the Chinese had conquered the northern part of Vietnam, and they remained in possession for a thousand years, until a revolution led by two formidable sisters liberated it. Chou’s frequent reminders that the new China was not responsible for the imperialist sins of the old dynasties and his gesture of laying wreaths on the sisters’ graves was not enough to reassure the Vietnamese.

The Chinese Communists, for all their rhetoric about international revolution, tended to look out for China’s interests first. In 1954, because China was apprehensive that the conflict in Vietnam might draw it into a major war with the United States, Chou En-lai pressured the Vietnamese Communists to come to terms with the French and accept the establishment of Laos and Cambodia as neutral countries and the temporary division of Vietnam. The Vietnamese agreed, but it rankled ever after. When the United States, the leading imperialist power, got bogged down in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, the Chinese encouraged the Vietnamese Communists to fight on, partly because Mao needed something to radicalize the Chinese people as he launched the Cultural Revolution and partly because a settlement might leave the Soviet Union, which was becoming the more important patron of North Vietnam, too strong. North Vietnam tried to steer a course between its two difficult patrons, but from time to time—when, for example, it openly backed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968—it showed which camp it was favoring.
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When the North Vietnamese decided to start peace talks with the United States in 1968, Chou told them that they were being “too fast and too hurried.” And the criticisms kept coming as the talks moved very slowly ahead. The North Vietnamese were showing the white flag by even agreeing to talk; at the very least, they should have insisted on a full halt to American bombing, not a partial one; and they should never have accepted “the puppet regime” of South Vietnam as a participant in the talks. At a reception to celebrate the anniversary of Vietnam’s independence, Chou took the occasion to say that the North Vietnamese were bound to win the war, if only they would fight on. Tensions also grew over Laos and Cambodia, where both North Vietnam and China maneuvered to get hold of the local Communist forces and so extend their own influence.
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Chou hinted at the differences in his first conversation with Nixon (“the ideology of Vietnam, too, may not necessarily be completely the same as ours”), but neither Nixon nor Kissinger seems to have been aware of the potential for China and North Vietnam to fall out. Both men preferred to believe that China was capable of bringing the Vietnamese Communists into line if it chose. Shortly before Nixon left for China in 1972, the Americans found out that Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam’s chief negotiator in the Paris talks, was going to be in Beijing at the same time. General Walters, who managed the secret channel through Paris to Beijing, sent a message to ask whether the Chinese would arrange a meeting between Nixon and Le Duc Tho. A brusque refusal came back: the Americans and the Vietnamese should settle their own affairs.
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This should not have come as a surprise, because Chou had made it amply clear in his discussions with Kissinger in 1971 and, later, with Haig in January 1972 that China did not want to get involved and that, moreover, it continued to support North Vietnam. In their very first meeting in July 1971, Chou laid out China’s position, and he never subsequently deviated from it. Like all peoples, the Vietnamese must choose their own political system, and, he said pointedly, “So long as no foreign force interferes in that area, then the issue is solved.” The United States, he went on, must withdraw all its troops and all its military installations. Moreover, it should end its support for the Thieu government in South Vietnam and that of Lon Nol in Cambodia. As long as the war continued, China would keep on supporting the heroic people of Vietnam, and those of Cambodia and Laos as well.
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Chou could not resist providing his customary history lessons. From Truman onward, he told the Americans, their presidents had meddled in the affairs of Vietnam and the other countries of Indochina. China, Chou said blandly and untruthfully, never attempted to influence the internal affairs of its neighbors. The United States had broken many promises along the way, including the one to respect the agreements reached at Geneva in 1954. The infamous Dulles had refused to hold the elections scheduled for 1956. “This was false, dirty, what Dulles did,” said Chou, striking the table with his hand, in what Kissinger felt was a genuine display of emotion.
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Nevertheless, Kissinger drew surprisingly optimistic conclusions: Chou, he told Nixon after his first visit, understood the linkage the Americans were making between Taiwan and Indochina and did not object to it. On his last day in Beijing in July 1971, Kissinger claimed, Chou had talked about Indochina in “an astonishingly sympathetic and open manner” and hinted that the United States would find North Vietnam more generous than expected. It may have helped that, in their talks, Kissinger had made some significant concessions. “If there are no negotiations,” he had assured Chou at their first meeting, “we will eventually withdraw, unilaterally.” He also showed a willingness to jettison the government of South Vietnam, saying, “Our position is not to maintain any particular government in South Vietnam.” The United States could not, of course, take part in overthrowing its former allies: “If the government is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn the quicker it will be overthrown.” Once the United States left, Kissinger said, it would not intervene, no matter what happened. This was certainly not the public position of the United States. In an address to the nation a few months before Kissinger’s secret trip, Nixon had said that the United States should not announce that it would pull out no matter what North Vietnam did: “We would have thrown away our principal bargaining counter to win the release of American prisoners of war, we would remove the enemy’s strongest incentive to end the war sooner by negotiation, and we will have given enemy commanders the exact information they need to marshal their attacks against our remaining forces at their most vulnerable time.” Moreover, the United States had an obligation to the people of South Vietnam. “Shall we leave in a way that gives the South Vietnamese a reasonable chance to survive as a free people?” Nixon asked. “My plan will end American involvement in a way that would provide that chance.”
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