Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Their other option is to basically honor the Agreement and seek their objectives through gradual evolution. They would welcome a more constructive relationship with us, seek our economic assistance and concentrate on reconstruction and building socialism in the north. Their Indochina allies would be told to pursue their objectives by political and psychological means. They would, in short, adhere to a more peaceful course and let the forces of history work their will, at least for a few years.

  The North Vietnamese naturally proclaim the second option as their settled course, but this means nothing. I could not judge from my talks whether their enormous losses, isolation from their allies, and the prospect of aid mean they are ready for a breather. For them the ideal course would be to follow both options at once: violating the Agreement to pursue their objectives and improving relations with us so as to get economic aid. Our essential task is to convince them that they must make a choice between the two. This was the primary objective of my trip. I emphasized that the first course would mean renewed confrontation with us and that they cannot have their aid and eat Indochina too.II On the other hand, if they showed restraint and honored their obligations, we were prepared to normalize relations as we are doing with Peking, and we would not interfere with the political self-determination of Indochina, no matter what its manifestations.

  To navigate this passage successfully would have proved very difficult in the best of circumstances. It required a united country and a strong, purposeful, disciplined American government capable of acting decisively and of maintaining the delicate balance of risks and incentives that constituted the Paris Agreement. Watergate soon ensured we did not have it.

  * * *

  I. The Paris Agreement of January 27 provided for the release of all our POWs in stages, in parallel with the withdrawal of all US troops from South Vietnam, within sixty days. The process had begun but would not be completed until March 27.

  II. This sentence reveals that Winston Lord was one of the drafters of the report. No one else could have produced such a pun, whose merit resided in its awfulness, than the author of the line about one of Hanoi’s negotiators: “Xuan Thuy does not make a forest.”

  III

  China: Another Step Forward

  Peking Revisited

  I FLEW out of Hanoi for a rest stop of forty-eight hours in Hong Kong. Whenever I have left a Communist country (with the exception of China) I have experienced an overwhelming sense of relief. When one breaks free of the monochrome drabness, the stifling conformity, the indifference to the uniqueness of the human personality, the result is a sudden easing of tensions, a feeling akin to exhilaration. Hanoi, as I have said, was probably the grimmest. In striking contrast, the very self-indulgence of Hong Kong’s rampant materialism was a garish reminder of the manifold human spirit.

  The Chinese used my stay in Hong Kong for one of those subtle signs of goodwill that conveys simultaneously the futility of trying to outthink a people who have specialized in awing visitors for three thousand years. We had delicately not informed the Chinese of our stop in Hong Kong, a British enclave on the Chinese mainland. Instead, we had matter-of-factly noted that as on all previous visits we expected to pick up the obligatory Chinese navigators in Shanghai. This meant a considerable detour for us.

  The Chinese have grace as well as a competent intelligence service. Without mentioning our stop in Hong Kong, they suggested we take on navigators in Canton, which was much more convenient. Lest we miss the point, the senior Chinese representative in Hong Kong (technically the New China News Agency bureau chief) demonstrated that nothing occurred in the British Crown Colony beyond the ken of Peking. He inquired at our consulate about the time of my departure so that he could come to the airport to see us off. As indeed he did.

  On the afternoon of February 15, 1973, we arrived in Peking for my fifth journey to the Middle Kingdom. By now Peking had become familiar. There was a warmth to our welcome that the settlement of the Vietnam war had clearly released. The Chinese felt free of the constraints imposed by the need to show solidarity with an embattled North Vietnamese ally. Our hosts stood at the bottom of the steps and applauded as my colleagues and I disembarked from the aircraft. We were immediately whisked off along the wide boulevards of Peking to the state guest house that served as our residence, where for the first time the military guards stood at attention and saluted as we passed through the gates. From then on military honors were shown wherever guards were stationed, including at the Great Hall of the People.

  Soon after my arrival Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai came to the guest house to ask each of us what he could do to make us more comfortable. Though the Chinese are less formal than the Japanese, their sense of propriety is as subtle and highly developed. The correct answer to the query is “nothing,” since it certifies that Chinese hospitality has not been found wanting. If a comment is unavoidable it is best to ask for something the Chinese could not possibly have thought of by themselves. One of my secretaries, whose necessity to respond to the Chinese Premier was not obvious, replied that she wanted a Peking duck dinner — something that had been served as a matter of course on each previous visit. She had a profound impact. Peking duck was not offered again on any of my subsequent visits while I was in office — a little lesson that the Chinese need no instruction in the self-evident!

  This little contretemps of protocol aside, the Chinese did us the greatest kindness imaginable. On the evening set aside for a cultural performance they spared us the presentation of one of the revolutionary operas whose stupefying simplemindedness one could escape only by a discreet doze. (This required that to avoid embarrassment one came to just before the lights went on after the final curtain. I am told that West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, having opened his belt to be more comfortable, once missed this deadline, awakened only when the applause was well started, and had trouble hitching up his trousers and applauding at the same time.)

  On this occasion the cultural program consisted of classical music, both Western and Chinese, performed by the Peking City Orchestra, newly revived after the Cultural Revolution. They attempted — if I may use the word — the Sixth Symphony of Beethoven. Not even my affection for things Chinese can induce me to report that the Chinese musicians were in their element when attempting the Pastoral Symphony after the destructive interruption of the Cultural Revolution; indeed, there were moments when I was not clear exactly what was being played or from which direction on the page. But the symbolism was what mattered: Zhou Enlai intended to modernize, that is, to throw off the shackles of China’s recent past and to adapt his country not only to Western technology but also to an awareness of the Western culture that had spawned it. (He was premature. A year later the revolutionary opera had been reinstated; Zhou Enlai was mortally ill; and little more was heard of modernization and opening to the West until after Chairman Mao’s death.)

  Zhou, as always, was electric, quick, taut, deft, humorous. He greeted me warmly, his expressive face reflecting the fact that he needed no interpreter. (He nevertheless continued to insist on a Chinese translation, gaining an unneeded advantage in hearing my remarks twice and so having twice as much time to think up his reply.) His grasp of international realities was masterly. In the nineteen months since we had come to know each other, Zhou and I had developed an easy camaraderie not untinged with affection:

  I think that the Prime Minister [I said early in our first talk] notices that I am especially inhibited in his presence right now.

  ZHOU ENLAI: Why?

  DR. KISSINGER: Because I read his remark to the press that I am the only man who can talk to him for a half hour without saying anything.

  ZHOU ENLAI: I think I said one hour and a half.

  The friendly banter indicated that with the peace in Vietnam signed, China could accelerate its move toward us without embarrassment. The growing warmth of Sino-American relations was surely not uninfluenced by Soviet military dispositions. The number of Soviet divisions on the Chinese b
order had grown from twenty-one in 1969, to thirty-three in 1971, to forty-five in 1973. A common danger clears the mind of trivialities; a further advance in our relations was clearly desirable to demonstrate that we had an interest in China’s territorial integrity. In our exchanges before my trip I had suggested as agenda items “the normalization of relations, the current world situation, and future policies in South and Southeast Asia in the postwar period.” Even this was not broad enough for Zhou. He replied that “other subjects of mutual interest can also be discussed.” It was soon apparent what this other subject was: the establishment of diplomatic offices in each other’s capital.

  We had come a long way since the Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1969 had first alerted us to the desirability of restoring contact with Peking. More than a year and a half had been spent in finding an intermediary whom both sides trusted. We thought Peking might prefer a Communist country as a channel; we chose Romania. It turned out that the Chinese were too wary of Soviet penetration of Eastern European Communist parties. In time the significant messages reached us through Pakistan, the only country in the world allied with both the United States and China.

  During my secret trip to Peking in July 1971, we reestablished direct communication and decided on a Presidential trip to China. But both sides were still too cautious to share their international assessments. On my second visit, in October 1971, under the pretext of preparing for President Nixon’s trip, Zhou Enlai and I began an intimate dialogue on major world issues. Not the least paradox in this effort to achieve a joint foreign policy analysis was that Peking had no legal status as far as the United States was concerned. Legally Washington still recognized the Republic of China on Taiwan as the government of China; we had a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, and American military forces were still stationed there, on what the People’s Republic considered its own territory. But Peking had brought us into play despite this affront to its legitimacy to counterbalance the Soviet threat on its northern borders. In light of that threat from the Soviet Union, Peking chose to ignore the insult. In the Shanghai Communiqué at the end of Nixon’s visit in February 1972, we and the Chinese agreed on a carefully crafted formulation that accepted the principle of one China but left the resolution to the future. For the time being these differences over Taiwan were being subordinated to what was stated in the Shanghai Communiqué as the common goal of opposing the hegemonic aims of others in Asia. Only one country qualified for this mischievous role: the Soviet Union. In plain language, China and the United States agreed on the need for parallel policies toward the world balance of power.

  The visit in February 1973, a year after Nixon’s historic journey, began under auspicious circumstances. Not only was Vietnam behind us, but with Nixon just reelected by a landslide, the Chinese felt they could count on dealing with a strong leader for four years. Taiwan did not detain us long. I pointed out that — as we had indicated in the Shanghai Communiqué — with the end of the war in Vietnam the forces supporting our effort there would be withdrawn. Zhou commented that China had no intention of liberating Taiwan by force “at this time.” With this both sides decided to leave well enough alone and turn to global — which to Zhou meant Soviet — affairs, reviewing events with a frankness rarely practiced even by close allies.

  To Zhou, China’s conflict with the Soviet Union was both ineradicable and beyond its capacity to manage by itself. One of the ironies of relations among Communist countries is that Communist ideology, which always claimed that it would end international conflict, has in fact made it intractable. In systems based on infallible truth there can be only one authorized interpretation; a rival claim to represent true orthodoxy is a mortal challenge. On this level, the dispute between Moscow and Peking was over who controlled the liturgy that would inspire the political orientation of Communist and radical parties around the world. This dimension of the conflict could be resolved only by the willing subordination of one to the other, which was impossible; or the victory of one over the other, which in Peking’s view was precisely Moscow’s aim.

  At the same time the conflict between the Soviet Union and China transcended ideology; it was primeval. The two tremendous continental countries shared a frontier of 4,000 miles in a vast arc from the frozen tundras of Siberia to the stark deserts of Central Asia. The border ran erratically through the cradle of conquerors of both of them — at times called Huns, Mongols, Kazakhs — dividing sovereignty in huge areas without regard to race or language; the peoples straddling the line generally spoke the same native tongue, different from either Russian or Chinese, thus magnifying the insecurity and potential hostility of both regimes. In this ill-defined vastness sovereignty in the contemporary sense is a new phenomenon; borders have swayed back and forth throughout history with the ambition and power of the contending parties. Much of Central Asia was appropriated by the tsars only in the nineteenth century and was now governed by the new rulers in the Kremlin who have rejected the entire legacy of their predecessors except their conquests. All this alone would have doomed China and Russia to reciprocal paranoia. The superimposition of ideological conflict and personal jealousies turned inherent rivalry into obsession.

  No Soviet leader could overlook the demographic realities. Close to a billion Chinese were pressing against a frontier that their government officially did not recognize — in Chinese high school textbooks large areas of Siberia are shown as Chinese — confronting a mere thirty million Russians in a barren Siberia so forbidding to the Soviet nationalities that throughout history it has had to be forcibly colonized by convict labor. In 1974, when I visited Vladivostok, after having been to Tokyo, Osaka, and Seoul, I noted with a start of surprise that this was not a teeming Asian city but a provincial European one; in fact it was geographically closer to Honolulu than to Leningrad and much nearer to Peking than to Moscow. I began to understand how the sense of isolation and foreboding engenders near-hysteria in Soviet leaders brooding on China.

  Similarly, no Chinese leader could ignore the strategic realities. The vast increase of Soviet military forces along the Chinese frontier since 1969, backed by a sophisticated arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, hardly bespoke an intention to conciliate. The encounter between the Soviet Union and China was the stuff of an enduring geopolitical contest.

  No negotiation would be able to remove the Soviet military preponderance, which might last for decades, nor the Chinese demographic edge, which would last forever. Even were Soviet forces “thinned out” as part of some hypothetical deal, they could always return in a matter of weeks. And no “compromise” of Chinese boundary claims could alter the fact that sometime in the next generation the disparity between Soviet and Chinese power in Asia would first narrow and then tilt the other way; from then on, Siberia’s future would increasingly depend on Peking’s goodwill, which no Chinese government could ensure for eternity. To be sure, clumsy American diplomacy or demonstrations of our impotence might drive China and the Soviet Union together. But whatever pattern of coexistence developed, it would not likely be perceived as natural or become permanent — though it could last long enough to damage us grievously.

  The Chinese leaders, who were among the shrewdest analysts of international affairs that I have encountered, understood these realities very well indeed. They saw no possibility of compromise with the Soviet Union that was not debilitating. In their view the minimum aim of Chinese statecraft had to be that no other major country would combine with the Soviets; better yet would be to convince such countries to add their strength to the Chinese side. From their experience with foreigners, they could not exclude that others might settle their differences over the prostrate body of China; indeed, during my secret visit in 1971, Zhou had specifically mentioned the possibility that Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan, and we might decide to carve China up again, though he professed indifference to ambitions that he was confident of defeating. The attitude was characteristic: China sought its safety in a reputation of ferocious intractability
, in creating an impression, probably accurate, that it would defend its honor and integrity at any cost. It acted as if the smallest concession would start it down a slippery slope and hence had to be resisted as fiercely as an overt challenge to the national survival. China identified security with isolating the Soviet Union, and with adding the greatest possible weight to its side of the scale — which meant a rapid rapprochement with the United States.

  The single-mindedness of the Chinese leaders eased our opening to Peking; it also complicated our relationship thereafter. For the parallel commitments to the strategic objective of containment of the Soviet Union did not preclude differences in style, in tactics, and even in perception. For China, ideological intransigence was a method of domestic control as well as a weapon to discourage outside pressures; foreign policy and domestic needs coincided. But we, having just emerged from a divisive war in Vietnam — in which the dedication to peace of America’s leadership had been the key domestic issue — could not afford to be perceived as courting confrontation. The Nixon Administration was determined to run what military risks were necessary to prevent Soviet expansionism. However, we could sustain this course at home and with our allies in Europe and Japan only by the demonstration that we had made every honorable effort to avoid confrontation. Nor were we free of the hope, however fragile, that the stabilization of US–Soviet relations achieved in 1972 might in time lead to a more positive era characterized by balance in armaments and restraint in behavior. We could never forget that those nations possessing weapons capable of destroying mankind have a moral obligation to coexist on this planet. American tactics were therefore necessarily more complex, more supple, less frontal than China’s — “shadowboxing,” Mao called it sarcastically in a later conversation.