Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  Over the years, thousands of Chinese went to the United States to acquire Western learning or to make money on the ‘Golden Mountain’. When they returned home, they brought American attitudes and American learning with them. To Chinese nationalists, a growing force by the late nineteenth century, the United States appeared in a variety of lights, sometimes merely as part of a larger West threatening China, sometimes as a sympathetic power, sometimes even as a model. On the other hand, the United States was a new society, founded on revolutionary principles, and that appealed to Chinese radicals who blamed their own civilization for their country’s woes. As a young man, Mao urged his fellow students to study Americans such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln because the Chinese needed similar, progressive leaders. ‘China is very weak; she will grow strong, rich and independent only after many years; but the important thing is that we must learn these things.’4

  The signals sent by the United States itself were contradictory. In 1900, American soldiers were part of the expeditionary force which invaded Beijing in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion and forced yet another humiliating treaty with exorbitant indemnity payments on China. Along with other foreign troops, American soldiers stayed on to protect their nationals. Yet at the same time the American government sent notes to the other powers advocating an open-door policy in China, where all powers had equal rights rather than staking out exclusive areas, even colonies, for trade and investment. (Even though the notes were really more about keeping access in China for American businessmen, they at least assumed that China would continue as a sovereign state.) Moreover, although the American government had taken its share of the indemnities levelled on China after the Boxer Rebellion, it remitted most of them to China in 1908 and converted the remainder into a scholarship fund for Chinese students who wanted to study in the United States. In 1972, if they had been allowed to talk to them, the American visitors would have found elderly intellectuals who had gone to Princeton or Columbia or Berkeley on these scholarships.

  In the early days of the republic, many Chinese looked to the United States as a model, of government, but also of society. President Woodrow Wilson’s promises of a new world order founded on justice and peace, his talk of national self-determination and his evident antipathy to Japanese attempts to dominate China and the rapid expansion of Japanese forces into Siberia in the wake of the Russian Revolution made him, briefly, a hero to nationalistic Chinese. That came to an abrupt end in 1919 when Wilson took a prominent role in the gift of former German possessions in China to Japan. The Americans, so many Chinese concluded, were simply imperialists in republican clothing.

  As Chiang Kai-shek and his Guomindang moved to unite China in the 1920s, the United States, like most other foreign powers except the Soviet Union, was initially hostile. Chiang, or so it was widely held in the West, was a dangerous radical who was out to expropriate foreign businesses. When Chiang made it clear that, although he was a nationalist, he was no radical, the United States moved cautiously to recognize his regime. In 1928, it signed a treaty with China which for the first time in decades allowed the country to set its own tariffs on imports. On the other hand, at the start of the 1930s, when Japan seized Manchuria, the United States merely protested and did nothing more than adopt a policy not to recognize the puppet state of Manchukuo which the Japanese hastily set up there. Now the United States seemed neither a strong friend nor an enemy.

  That was gradually to change in the late 1930s as Japan’s intentions for China became increasingly clear. The seizure of Manchuria was, for the militarists who now dominated the Japanese government, only a first step to making China part of a greater Japanese empire. The United States, reluctantly, shook itself out of its isolation and moved to counter Japan in the Pacific and on the mainland of Asia. The Japanese invasion of China, with its bombing of Chinese cities and brutal treatment of civilians, enraged American public opinion and led to President Roosevelt’s famous ‘quarantine speech’ where he argued that aggressor nations should be treated as part of a dangerous epidemic. From the end of 1938 onwards, the United States lent money to Chiang’s government. By 1941, the Flying Tigers, American pilots under the leadership of General Claire Chennault, were helping to build him an air force.

  When Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the United States and China became allies, even if not necessarily friends. American soldiers, advisers, arms and money poured into the inland provinces which made up free China. Chiang was grateful but not excessively so. As a nationalist, he was prepared to take American assistance but not American advice. And he was not about to risk what remained of his armed forces in all-out attacks on the Japanese; he had done his share of fighting and now it was the turn of his new allies. The Americans found this frustrating. Those on the spot also became increasingly pessimistic about the ability of a creaky, corrupt and inefficient Guomindang to hold China together. The trouble was that the alternative, the relatively small Chinese Communist Party, was hard to imagine as a government for China. Moreover, its ideology ran counter to everything that most Americans believed.

  Nevertheless, the American government, acting on the same principle that made it an ally of the Soviet Union against Germany, sent a military mission in 1944 to the Communist headquarters at Yan’an in north-west China. This was the first time many of the Communist leaders had met Americans, other than sympathizers such as Edgar Snow, but, although the Americans demonstrated the conga line at the weekly dances, the contact did little to bring greater understanding.5 If anything, Mao got the wrong ideas from chatting to the Americans and from watching the Hollywood movies they sometimes showed on an outdoor screen: for example, that Americans did not know how to fight properly.

  A small amount of US military aid made its way to the Communist armies, although most American support continued to go to the Guomindang. After the defeat of Japan in 1945, that support continued, sliding into outright American backing for the Guomindang against the Communists in the growing post-war tension between the two camps in China. At first Mao seems to have hoped that he could use the Americans against the Guomindang. He expected, too, that American capitalism would be eager to invest in China, even a Communist one.6

  Although President Truman sent the eminent General George Marshall on a prolonged visit to China at the end of 1945, in a lastditch effort to broker a compromise between the Guomindang and the Communist Party, his efforts succeeded only in irritating the former and convincing the latter that the United States was its enemy. By the summer of 1946, China was plunged into civil war. The United States was clearly in the Guomindang’s camp, although it limited its help to equipment, money and international recognition. (Offering American military support was out of the question, given the other demands on US forces.) Mao was bitter, and perhaps embarrassed, by what he saw as American betrayal. In a 1947 speech, he admitted that the Communists had made mistakes. ‘It was the first time for us to deal with the U.S. imperialists. We didn’t have much experience. As a result we were taken in. With this experience we won’t be cheated again.’7

  In August 1946, Mao gave an interview to the fellow-travelling journalist Anna Louise Strong. Striking what was a favourite theme, he distinguished between the peace-loving and progressive American people and their reactionary leaders. American reactionaries and capitalists (virtually the same thing) were waging war on their own people and looking to dominate the world. Only the Soviet Union stood in their way. ‘That is why the U.S. reactionaries rabidly hate the Soviet Union and actually dream of destroying this socialist state.’ Fortunately, he went on, ‘All reactionaries are paper tigers.’ The progressive forces of the world were bound to sweep them all away8

  By the summer of 1949, the Communists had swept the Guomindang away, but the Truman administration looked as strong as ever. Although there were some feelers put out by both the Communists and the Americans, neither side was really prepared to deal with the other. It was not so much that an opportun
ity was missed as that it did not exist in the first place. The Cold War was now an established fact, dividing up much of the world into two camps. The Americans were already deeply concerned about the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe and were moving into, for them, an unprecedented state of military preparedness in peacetime. The Chinese Communists were perceived, with some truth, as heavily dependent on and much under the influence of the Soviets. For their part, the Chinese Communists saw no alternative but to join forces with the Soviet Union. In a major policy statement, Mao wrote that China’s critics were accusing it of ‘leaning to one side’. Quite right, he went on. ‘All Chinese without exception must lean either to the side of imperialism or to the side of socialism. Sitting on the fence will not do, nor is there a third road.’ In any case, or so he claimed, Mao expected that revolution would break out in the poorer areas of the world, and perhaps in the United States itself. In a decade or two, China would be much stronger and the US much weaker. ‘Why can’t we live without the United States?’9

  Mao was at once a revolutionary and a nationalist and it was never easy to separate the two. He wanted and needed help from the Soviet Union and he confidently expected that, in building socialism, China would make rapid progress. ‘We have stood up,’ he said in a famous speech in September 1949. ‘The Chinese have always been a great, courageous, and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And it was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments.’ That era, when China could be insulted and humiliated, when its people were regarded as uncivilized, was now over. ‘We shall emerge in the world as a nation with an advanced culture.’ And with power. ‘No imperialists will ever again be allowed to invade our land.’10

  Yet he also assumed that they would try, especially the leading ones. With the confidence of a civilization that had seen itself for centuries as the Middle Kingdom, Mao took it for granted that, out of all the world, China was the centre of the Americans’ attention. ‘By seizing China, the United States would possess all of Asia. With its Asian front consolidated, U.S. imperialism could concentrate its forces on attacking Europe.’ The United States, or rather the reactionaries and capitalists who ran it, was determined to destroy the Chinese people’s great revolution: ‘They will smuggle their agents into China to sow dissension and make trouble’.11 (Branding opponents of the new regime as the dupes and collaborators of the Americans was of course also a convenient way to eliminate them.)

  The foreigners still in China, among them American diplomats, journalists, businessmen and missionaries, had to leave. They were probably spies in any case. As Mao put it, the house must be cleaned before guests could be invited in. In its foreign relations, China was starting over, turning its back on the old shameful pattern of unequal treaties, punitive fines and foreign meddling. China, he said, in another of those folksy metaphors he liked so much, was building a new cooking oven. Even though other Western nations, Great Britain for example, were prepared to extend recognition to the new government in China, even at the risk of serious disagreement with the United States, the Chinese Communists were in no hurry to establish relations with the enemy camp.12

  On the American side, as it became clear in the late 1940s that the Communists were bound to win, there was a debate over how to deal with the new reality in China. Even the diehard supporters of Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang were disheartened as he prepared to move his government and his remaining forces to Taiwan. Nevertheless, what was to become known as the China lobby insisted that the United States should not recognize the Communist seizure of power in China. Their opponents, some within the Truman administration, argued that it was important for the United States to establish ties with Communist China. Given the past tensions between China and Russia, it was possible that, at some point in the future, the two Communist regimes would fall out. By 1948, they could point to the encouraging case of Tito’s Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, which had broken off relations. The Soviet leader had ordered other Communist countries in Eastern Europe to follow the Soviet lead and cut diplomatic and economic ties. Stalin was also doing his best to remove Tito permanently by sending teams of assassins into Yugoslavia. Marshal Tito’s offence was that, although he was a Communist, he was not Stalin’s Communist. He and his comrades had made their own way to power, like Mao, and perhaps as a result Stalin had never been able to trust him. Was it not likely that Mao would one day be an Asian Tito? And that China and the Soviet Union would also find themselves enemies?13

  These were sensible questions, but few Americans cared to hear them in those early days of the Cold War. In early 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy discovered that accusing the Truman administration of being riddled with Communist traitors was a marvellous way to revive a failing political career. He found a ready-made audience and his attacks helped to harden American attitudes towards the Chinese Communists. Anti-Communists in the United States were already talking about the red tide rising in Asia, of which the Soviet ‘puppet regime’ in Beijing was only the first wave. Although US allies such as the British thought such American reactions absurd and still hoped to establish relations with the People’s Republic of China, Truman and his administration found themselves being pushed in the direction of a harder line. Dean Acheson, the American Secretary of State, who had been trying to make up his mind about the best long-term policy towards the Communist regime in China, publicly denounced the Sino-Soviet treaty in March 1950 as ‘an evil omen of imperialistic domination’ and warned the Chinese people that they were abandoning their loyal old American friends for the voracious Soviets. In Congress, Walter Judd, a leading Republican supporter of Taiwan, voiced his approval: Acheson had finally recognized the extent of the Communist conspiracy for domination of the world – ‘Asia, then of Europe, then of ourselves.’14 Talk of reaching out to the Chinese Communists, of trying to detach them from the Soviets, became difficult, even dangerous, for careers.

  By June 1950, it became impossible. With the outbreak of the Korean War, when a Soviet-backed Communist North attacked the South, the Cold War reached a new, acute stage and the battle lines between the Eastern bloc and the West appeared to be firmly fixed. Although new evidence shows that Mao and the Chinese were unenthusiastic about the attack, they had no choice but to side with the Soviets and the North Koreans. From the American perspective, one in which nuances no longer seemed to make much sense, world Communism was on the move. ‘There can be little doubt’, Acheson wrote to the British Foreign Secretary, ‘but that Communism, with Chi[na] as one spear-head, has now embarked upon an assault against Asia with immediate objectives in Korea, Indo-China, Burma, the Philippines and Malaya and with medium-range objectives in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Siam, India and Japan.’15 American public opinion, already concerned by the ease with which the Soviet Union had taken over so much of the centre of Europe and by revelations of Soviet spies stealing American atomic secrets, became firmly anti-Communist. Congress moved further to the right as Republican gains whittled away the Democrats’ majority. The Truman administration, unfairly castigated for being soft on Communism, was already upping defence spending and moving the United States onto a war footing. When the news came in from Korea of the outbreak of war, Truman responded immediately. Even before the United States had got a mandate from the United Nations to assemble a force to defend South Korea, he had ordered American forces to go there and had sent the Seventh Fleet to protect the straits between mainland China and Taiwan, just in case the Chinese Communists were planning to invade.

  Mao had perhaps been thinking of doing just that. Certainly the Communists had concentrated some of their best forces just across from Taiwan. They had few troops in the north near the border with North Korea. The Chinese Communists also had a huge task ahead of them at home, both to consolidate the Communist victory and to begin the long process of setting a wartorn country on the path to recovery. A war with the United States was the last thing they wanted at that
point. Events left them little choice. The United Nations forces, predominantly American and under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, landed in South Korea and pushed the North Koreans back towards the border with China. American planes flew increasingly close to Chinese airspace, and American hawks, including MacArthur himself, made no secret of the fact that they saw an opportunity to get rid of the Communists (or, as they preferred to see it, to retrieve the loss of China), possibly by using atomic bombs on Chinese industrial sites. In late November 1950, Chinese Communist ‘volunteers’ poured down over the border and it was the turn of UN forces to retreat. The fighting dragged on for another three years as both sides continued to hope for victory. Even when talks started, the mutual suspicions between Communist China and the United States meant that every issue, from the withdrawal of forces to either side of the 38th parallel to the exchange of prisoners of war, took months to settle.

  The Korean War finally ended in a truce, with a divided Korea and a deep gulf between the People’s Republic of China and the United States. The strategic map of Asia was also altered. Japan, its economy starting to revive partly thanks to spending from the Korean War, was independent again and firmly in the American camp; the United States was committed to the defence of Taiwan; and the Cold War had spread to French Indochina, on China’s southern borders, where the French, with copious American aid, were fighting a Communist-led nationalist movement.

  In Washington, a Republican administration had taken office at the start of 1953 amid charges that the Democrats had not been tough enough on Communism. Senator McCarthy was revelling in his newly acquired fame as the scourge of Communists and other subversives. President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, talked, perhaps too much, about rolling back Communism. At the Geneva Conference of 1954, Dulles was in the bath when a State Department official rushed in to say that the Chinese Communists were prepared to release their remaining American prisoners of war and move towards normalizing relations. While his subordinate perched on the toilet seat, Dulles lay back in the tub and said firmly, ‘No, we will not do it.’16 Dulles tried to build an anti-Communist alliance in Asia to contain China, just as NATO was containing the Soviets in Europe. The CIA tried, in vain, to stir up trouble within China by supporting Tibetan nationalists. At the United Nations, the Americans used their dominance to block China’s entry. Taiwan kept the China seat and China’s membership in a whole range of international organizations.