Unholy Fury (19 page)

Fear of China had been a cornerstone of the Australian–American Cold War outlook. Although in the immediate postwar period policy makers in Canberra feared a rearmed Japan, protection against an expansive and communist China was to become one of the major factors shaping the two countries' strategic cooperation. Equally, however, the Australians did not share the same absolute ideological worldview that shaped America's China policy.

The Truman administration in Washington resented deeply the communist victory in China, regarding the People's Republic, in contemporary parlance, as a rogue state. The United States over the succeeding years encouraged all its allies to deny China international recognition. Britain had recognised the communist regime very shortly after Mao assumed power. It seems clear that Australia, under both the Chifley and Menzies governments, was intending to follow Britain's lead, but since the Americans placed so much store on isolating China, Australia deferred to America. Menzies had told the British government in December 1949, when he became prime minister, that the question of recognition of China could not be postponed indefinitely, adding that ‘it is the question of timing that is important … when we are convinced that the time is appropriate we shall act, although not in advance of the US'.
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Thus throughout the Cold War the only major concession that Australia felt obliged to make to the US to keep the alliance in good shape was to refuse diplomatic recognition to Communist China. From the time of the
Korean War, the perception of China as the embodiment of militant and subversive communism had become the strongest strategic bond between Australia and the United States. Those attitudes underwrote the two treaties—ANZUS and SEATO—for mutual defence relations and provided a rationale for resisting what Menzies called the ‘downwards thrust' of Chinese communism.

Since coming into parliament Whitlam had opposed this position. During the Cold War, his ‘worldview' was first and foremost expressed in terms of a progressive realism. It was ‘progressive', since it rejected the strategies of containment, forward defence and ideological confrontation, and repudiated the view that power was the decisive factor in international relations. For Whitlam, the world was not one where ‘red menaces' or ‘yellow perils' were coiled springs waiting to pounce on a vulnerable Australia. Nowhere was this stance more apparent than in his approach to China. In one of his first major speeches on international affairs, Whitlam argued that the Menzies government's policy of non-recognition was ‘to the provocation of the people of China and of all our neighbours'. He described it further not only as ‘an unrealistic view but a menacing one', especially in view of the fact ‘that all our neighbours, including the colonial powers, Great Britain and the Netherlands, have recognised it'.
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Not surprisingly, the stance earned him a stinging rebuke from BA Santamaria—the staunchly anti-communist leader of the ‘Groupers'. Santamaria was a guiding force in the creation of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) that split from the ALP and would henceforth direct its preferences to the Liberals: preferences that helped keep the ALP out of federal office. Santamaria mocked Whitlam's ‘legalism' and challenged his Cold War credentials.
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A year later, at the 1955 federal Labor conference in Hobart, following the Labor split and the absence of the ‘Groupers', recognition of China became official party policy. For Whitlam, the inescapable fact of world politics was that the Soviet Union and China, regardless of their communism, were both great powers. In 1965 he told the Parliament that ‘Chinese power and influence must be accepted … It is a fact of life which we have to accept, and we have to learn to live with it in Asia as we have learned to live with Russia in Europe. Peace in the area will
depend on an accommodation between China and the West'.
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And in a revealing interview with Channel 7 he recounted the views that had been put to him in Washington during his visit there on the Leader's grant: ‘China must be recognised', he said, ‘and when I was in America in the middle of last year, very prominent Americans, in Congress and the Administration, admitted that this was so. It is only a question of time'.
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Whitlam was picking up the signs that US China policy was on the move. His stance in the early 1970s, then, was entirely consistent with the one he had taken twenty years earlier.

Nixon took a somewhat different path to China. As a congressman and senator, Nixon had been a strong supporter of Jiang Jieshi's Formosa (now Taiwan), labelling it ‘Free China' and the home of the ‘Nationalist Chinese'. ‘Red China', on the other hand, was an ‘outlaw nation'. During his term as vice president he had led the charge in accusing the Truman democrats of having ‘lost China', and after his trip through the region in 1953 he had come back supporting a hardline containment strategy to check Chinese communist ambitions. Allowing China admission to the United Nations, recognising or trading with the regime, he believed, would constitute nothing less than shameful ‘appeasement'. And in 1965 during his visit to Australia as a private citizen, Nixon even publicly criticised President Johnson for his failure to sufficiently escalate the Vietnam war in order to halt the spread of the ‘red peril'. Nevertheless with the fracturing of the Cold War consensus on China in American politics in the mid 1960s—when opinion leaders, politicians, the press and business started to re-evaluate the policy of isolating Beijing in the light of a worsening situation in Vietnam—Nixon had shown some signs of a preparedness to change. During his wilderness years from 1963 to 1968, when he travelled abroad regularly as a private citizen, he took soundings from, among others, French President Charles De Gaulle, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Pakistani President Ayub Khan, all of whom advised him to begin reassessing his long-standing opposition to bringing China into the international fold.
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Nixon was listening—and waiting for the right moment to show his China hand.

By 1967 as he prepared for his second tilt at the presidency, Nixon was prepared to go on the public record with the first tentative steps
towards change. In a landmark
Foreign Affairs
article setting out his view of the world, Nixon argued that the United States had to come ‘urgently to grips with the reality of China' by bringing her ‘back into the world community'. In classic balance-of-power politics, he wanted to play China off against the Soviet Union. Looking at the longer term, he added that:

 

we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbours … there is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.
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The American shift continued once Nixon came to power, with the president ordering a comprehensive review of China policy to be undertaken by the National Security Council, and a relaxation of trade and travel restrictions. Nixon's report to Congress in February 1970 proclaimed the Chinese to be a ‘great and vital people who should not remain isolated from the international community … it is certainly in our interest … that we take what steps we can toward improved practical relations with Peking'.
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Politicians in Canberra had been warned the previous year by Frank Cooper, Australia's returning ambassador from Taipei, that Australia needed to do its own thinking on China—‘in any event, one of the lessons of Vietnam is surely that we cannot assume that the Americans will always consult us if and when they decide that the time has come to attempt to settle the China problem'.
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But the policy in Washington was being changed so quickly that Australia was struggling to keep pace. Canada's recognition of China in mid October 1970—a move followed in quick succession by seven other governments—left Australian leaders unmoved. Other countries in South-East Asia, especially Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, also looked set to alter their position, while pressure was building in Japan and India for change. But the conservative government in Canberra had not the same inclination to think anew about China and to reassess its old fears about the ‘red peril'. Consequently, Doug Anthony, leader of the Country Party, dismissed
any concerns that Australia's wheat trade might suffer if the Chinese preferred to take Canadian wheat instead. Speaking to the press he was adamant that since the ‘United States saw difficulties in relation to Taiwan if mainland China were recognised immediately', he could not ‘sell his soul just to benefit trade'.
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The overwhelming ambition of successive conservative governments to keep the Americans engaged in South-East Asia meant that Australians largely missed—or were reluctant to acknowledge—the signs coming from the United States. It was a conservative blind spot. Now, the most incendiary issue in Australian domestic politics for a generation was about to explode in McMahon's face.

‘LESS FLAT-FOOTED … LESS IMITATIVE'

Whitlam's visit to Beijing in July 1971 was a bold initiative, defying the accepted terms on which Australia and the United States based their China policy. The Labor leader had asked China's Premier Zhou Enlai to meet a Labor Party delegation to talk about ‘the terms on which your country is interested in having diplomatic and trade negotiations with Australia'.
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Labor's announcement came in the wake of growing international support not only for recognition of China, but also for its admission to the UN. When Italy announced its decision to recognise Communist China in November, McMahon described the news as ‘unfortunate'.
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For a Labor leader to visit a China still emerging from the Cultural Revolution, a country branded as a more sinister threat to the Australian way of life than the Soviet Union, constituted a momentous breakthrough for Whitlam, his party and Australian foreign policy. At the time ‘no one could have dreamt', said one member of the delegation, ‘that going to China could be a path to anything other than electoral disaster'.
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But Whitlam had been watching US politics far more closely than his political opponents. As he was to remark in the wake of his visit: ‘nobody who was remotely in tune with trends in the United States—official and public trends—should have been taken so utterly by surprise by the Nixon initiative'.
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So Whitlam viewed his China visit both as a symbol of a different alliance relationship with the United States and as a watershed in
Australia's future relations with Asia. Indeed he consistently portrayed the visit as one that would assist the United States to transcend its own fears and phobias about China, praising Nixon's reduction of tensions—in April 1971 the president announced an easing of travel restrictions for Chinese visitors to the United States and a relaxation of US currency controls to permit the use of dollars by Communist China—as a ‘move towards diplomatic sanity in the Pacific'.
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Later he was to remark that he saw ‘no irremovable obstacles towards improved relations' between the two countries.
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Whitlam also believed the visit gave the chance to show what kind of partner Australia could be for the United States. And it was to be a different, more plain-speaking ally within the alliance. Whitlam himself commented at the time that not only was the Labor delegation the ‘first significant mission [to China] from a non-recognising country', but also that he and his colleagues ‘go there as the first Pacific ally of the United States'. It was a remarkable statement: Whitlam was flying the alliance flag at the very moment he was waving the banner of Australian ‘independence'.

But in Beijing, the Labor leader's language on the alliance was double-edged. On the one hand, Whitlam hoped that during the visit he might be able to assuage Chinese concerns about US intentions in Asia. ‘It may even be', he mused, ‘that as candid friends of the United States, we will be able to moderate … ever so slightly, some of the unreasonable fears of China about aggressive encirclement of the West'.
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Equally, Whitlam certainly kept faith with his commitment to greater candour. In addition to playing the role of reassuring interlocutor to the Chinese, he could just as easily slip into sharp denunciation of US Cold War policy. Once in Beijing, he judged that it was his job to start ‘easing the US down from her generation of over-reaction against the Chinese revolution'. It sounded very much as if he was about to lecture the Americans about their misguided policies. And if he could not entirely rewrite the history of postwar US foreign policy, he did venture to suggest that had an Australian political leader been able to visit China a decade earlier, ‘we would not now be in Vietnam'.
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It was nothing more than romantic speculation, but Whitlam's view of history was haunted by these lost opportunities.

It was just as well Whitlam considered the implications of his visit to China for the US alliance. During his pivotal meeting with the Chinese premier, the Labor leader skilfully avoided the trap Zhou set for him by refusing to denounce the ANZUS treaty—indeed he had given his host a short seminar on the historical background of the document and in particular how it derived from Australia's ongoing fears of Japan following World War II. Zhou was intrigued that Whitlam had told acting Chinese Foreign Minister Ji Pengfei that ANZUS was a defensive treaty: aimed primarily at preventing a restoration of Japanese militarism. ‘That is a fresh approach to us', said Zhou. It was an argument that the Chinese could not dismiss, given their own view of Japan. Whitlam went on, admitting that although some in his party had originally wanted the British included in ANZUS, ‘that criticism lost its force very soon'. To Zhou he stressed again that the ANZUS treaty had ‘never been used as justification for operating in Vietnam'. But Zhou clearly wanted Whitlam to go further—to view the US presence in the Pacific through Chinese eyes, as part of a western strategy of encirclement. His Australian guest, however, would only go halfway. Although with great fanfare Whitlam dismissed SEATO as ‘moribund', he was careful to refute any kind of comparison between the Sino-Soviet split and Australia's relations with the United States. When asked by the Chinese leader whether the United States was ‘reliable', Whitlam responded: ‘With respect', he told Zhou, ‘there has been no similar deterioration between Australia, New Zealand and the US as there has been between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union'. It was a critical moment in the discussion: perhaps the most critical. Whitlam had shown that a new relationship with China did not mean selling out the US alliance.