Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  In that seamless web of reality, China was increasingly coming to figure. Nixon had always been, and remained, firmly opposed to Communism, but by the time he was President some of the passion had gone out of him, as it had out of many of his contemporaries. The Soviet Union, they all knew, had an evil system and was the enemy of the United States, but they had become accustomed to dealing with it. If they could deal with one Communist power, why not another? American dealings with the Soviet Union were an example of what might be possible. The Cold War was a conflict, but it was also a relationship. Statesmen on both sides had gradually come to the realization that nuclear weapons meant they could not afford a hot war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two sides had been obliged to talk to each other. Like individuals in an intense relationship, they had got to know each other’s ways and what to expect. They had continued to fight each other, but indirectly. And sometimes they had collaborated – to limit the spread of nuclear weapons to other powers, for example, or to ease tensions in the Middle East.

  By the end of 1969, Kissinger had come round to Nixon’s point of view, that an opening to China was worth trying for. ‘We moved to China,’ he wrote later, ‘not to expiate liberal guilt over our China policy of the late 1940s but to shape a global equilibrium.’ The United States, if all went well, could end up holding a balance between China and the Soviet Union for, of course, ‘constructive ends – to give each Communist power a stake in better relations with us’. Or, as he said to Nixon in 1973, referring to the national drinks, ‘With conscientious attention to both capitals, we should be able to continue to have our maotai and drink our vodka too.’20

  In the autumn of 1969, Kissinger began to prepare the press for a shift in policy. As he told a briefing in December, ‘We have always made it clear that we have no permanent enemies and that we will judge other countries, and specifically countries like Communist China, on the basis of their actions and not on the basis of their domestic ideology.’ If China could be brought in as a player, the existing bilateral relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union could become a triangle to the benefit, so Kissinger and Nixon assumed, of the United States. ‘The hostility between China and the Soviet Union’, wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, ‘served our purposes best if we maintained closer relations with each side than they did with each other.’ The United States would be in the middle, keeping the balance or, as Kissinger preferred to call it, the equilibrium between the two. Both the Soviet Union and China would then have a strong incentive to deal with the United States ‘constructively’. This, he always said firmly, was not a crude attempt to play a China card against the Soviet Union, or vice versa, but not everyone, alas, understood the subtle distinction.21

  9

  The Polar Bear

  IN THEIR TALKS with the Americans, both during Kissinger’s preliminary visit and now during Nixon’s, the Chinese did not lay great stress on the Soviet Union. Occasionally they referred to ‘our northern neighbour’ or ‘another big power’ or made jokes about polar bears. During his conversation with Nixon, Mao refused to be drawn in on the subject at all. In fact, as the Americans were well aware, the Chinese were locked in a dispute with the Soviets which had all the bitterness and hurt feelings of a family fight. They were also deeply concerned about what the Soviet Union might be planning. If the Americans were hoping to play the China card against the Soviets, the Chinese saw an America card for precisely the same purpose.

  In December 1971, Chou En-lai explained to his colleagues that improved relations between the People’s Republic and the United States would act as a brake on Soviet expansionism. ‘The US got stuck in Vietnam; the Soviet revisionists caught the opportunity to expand their sphere of influence in Europe and the Middle East. The US imperialists have no choice but to improve their relations with China in order to counteract the Soviet imperialists.’ Nixon was under pressure from his own people to mend fences with China, but China was going to make sure it got something in return. ‘When he comes, he has to bring something in his pocket.’ With Nixon’s visit, China now had a chance to make use ‘of the contradictions between the US and the USSR and to magnify them’.1 China also, although Chou seems not to have spelled it out, possessed the means with which to deter the Soviet Union.

  The relationship between the two great Communist powers, and, before that, between China and Russia, dated back several centuries. In one of the first exchanges after the Nixon visit, a visiting Chinese scholar gave a lecture on China’s foreign policy, which, he said, was about undoing the wrongs and humiliations of the recent past. The first question from his audience was to ask him what period he was talking about. Charles Freeman, of the State Department, was interpreting. ‘And he said, “Well, some people would argue that this means everything since the Yuan Dynasty,” which was the Mongols in the twelfth century. He said, “I don’t agree with that. I think it’s everything since the Treaty of Nerchinsk,” which was in 1689.’2 For many Chinese, recent history began with the treaty that acknowledged the Russian presence to the north and that set the boundary, much the same as it is today, between Russia and China. By the eighteenth century, there was a small Russian community in Beijing with its own Orthodox church.

  The relationship between the two peoples, the Chinese and the Russians, was never an easy one. Part of the tension was cultural. The Chinese, who regarded most other peoples as uncivilized, found the Russians particularly impulsive and lacking in self-control. Russian sweat, so folklore had it, was stronger than that of other Westerners. Russians had their own stereotypes. Even Russian Communists were not immune to the old fears of the Yellow Peril. They were fed by memories of the Mongol hordes (when relations soured in the 1960s the Soviet press took to comparing Mao to Genghis Khan) or of the Boxer Rebellion at the end of the nineteenth century, when foreigners were indiscriminately attacked. The atmosphere in Beijing was ‘typically Oriental’, Nikita Khrushchev found on his first visit in 1954. ‘Everyone was unbelievably courteous and ingratiating, but I saw through their hypocrisy.’ Even Chinese hospitality was suspect. ‘I remember, for instance, that the Chinese served tea every time we turned around – tea, tea, tea.’ The Chinese were basically immoral, a ‘remarkably unattractive’ Soviet diplomat remarked during the Cultural Revolution to the urbane Belgian sinologist Simon Leys. ‘Moral individual conscience is the treasure and unique legacy of our Western Christian civilization!’3

  The mutual mistrust was about much more than culture alone. From the Chinese side, it was about national humiliation. Russia had been one of the powers imposing the unequal treaties and threatening to carve up China. When the Russians had expanded eastwards to the Pacific in the nineteenth century, they had seized territory the Chinese regarded as theirs. At the turn of the century, there had been Russian moves into Manchuria with Russian-built railways and a Russian port at Manchuria’s southern tip. When Japan challenged Russian control there, a weak China had been obliged to sit on the sidelines as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 was fought to decide which outside power ran one of China’s richest provinces. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the new Soviet rulers had made that notorious promise to hand back to China the territory seized in the old tsarist days but, somehow, the moment for doing so never arrived. In fact, in 1924, the Soviet Union blocked China’s hope of re-establishing control over territory the Chinese had long argued was theirs by recognizing the independence of Outer Mongolia. As the Second World War drew to a close, Stalin shocked the Chinese Communists by signing a treaty with their enemy, Chiang Kai-shek. Not only did the treaty give the Nationalists recognition as the legitimate government of China but it granted the Soviet Union extensive concessions including the use of the southern port of Dairen in Manchuria. The Soviets were also active in China’s western province of Xinjiang, hoping, with the aid of local Communists, to turn it into another Outer Mongolia.

  Although representatives from the Soviet Union helped to bring the Chinese Communist Part
y into existence and provided much essential funding, the Chinese Communists acquired much to reproach their mentors with over the years. Soviet advice to work with the Guomindang in the 1920s in the hopes of overthrowing it later had produced instead the triumph of Chiang Kai-shek and the near annihilation of the Communist Party. That had led in turn to the long years when Mao and his colleagues stumbled about the countryside trying to find a safe haven.

  Even when Chinese Communist fortunes improved after Japan invaded China, Stalin continued to put his faith in Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang as the natural rulers of China and to urge caution on the Chinese Communists. When the Second World War ended, the Soviet leader urged Mao to go to China’s wartime capital of Chongqing and have talks with Chiang Kai-shek rather than trying to fight the Guomindang. In the spring of 1949, when Chinese Communist forces stood on the banks of the Yangtze, ready to continue their advance southwards, Stalin told Mao he should be content to control the northern part of China. In 1950, when the Communist victory was complete, Stalin told Liu Shaoqi, ‘We feel that perhaps we hampered you in the past.’ And he made what was, for Stalin, a highly uncharacteristic statement: ‘We did not know a lot about you, so it’s possible that we made mistakes.’4

  What the Soviets did know, they did not much like. In 1941 and 1942, while the Soviet Union was fighting for its survival against Nazi Germany, Stalin had begged Mao in vain to attack Japanese forces in China in order to prevent them from attacking the Soviet Union itself. In the event, Japan had respected its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists had launched a half-hearted attack only in 1943. In any case, Stalin always had trouble with foreign Communists who were too independent. In China, Stalin would have preferred someone educated in Moscow. The Soviets, as keepers of the revolutionary flame, also regarded the Chinese Communists as ideologically primitive. Mao, in Stalin’s words, was a ‘margarine Marxist’.5 It was particularly irritating, then, when the Chinese Communists lauded the greatness of Mao’s thought and held his ideas up as a model for the rest of the world.

  The years after 1949 saw much public rhetoric about the undying friendship between the Soviet and the Chinese peoples, and friendship associations sprang up in both countries, acquiring millions of members overnight. Underneath the surface, however, the mutual suspicions and old grievances festered. Stalin feared either that the Chinese Communists would make their peace with the Americans or that they would recklessly provoke a military confrontation over, especially, Taiwan. In either case, from Stalin’s point of view, the Soviet Union would find an aggressive United States on its eastern doorstep. Although Mao made it clear that he was leaning to the Soviet side in world affairs, he was also determined to get Taiwan back. For that, however, he needed substantial Soviet military assistance. China as a whole needed whatever aid the Soviets could supply to start the long work of rebuilding and developing its economy. Mao knew that Stalin hoped to keep the People’s Republic as a junior partner in the Communist bloc and he knew that the Soviets had allies within his own party. In Manchuria, the local Communist leader, Gao Gang, prominently displayed portraits of Stalin. There were none of Mao to be seen. (An emergency meeting in Beijing condemned Gao for shaming China in this way and most of Stalin’s portraits came down.)6

  In December 1949, Mao went off to Moscow by train to negotiate a new treaty between China and the Soviet Union and to obtain much-needed Soviet aid. This was at a time when the Chinese Communists were confronting the daunting problems of establishing their new regime in a China badly damaged by years of war. The first meeting, when Mao’s train pulled into Moscow, gave a hint of what was to come. The Soviet welcome was formal but disdainful. Two senior Soviet officials, Molotov and Bulganin, greeted Mao but refused to have any of the elaborate lunch that the Chinese had prepared, not even a drink. That evening, when Mao finally met Stalin, the two Communist statesmen chatted politely but with reserve. Both circled around the issue of what sort of agreement should be made between their two countries, whether, as the Soviets wished, their existing treaty with the vanished Guomindang government should simply be updated or, as Mao wanted, a new treaty, more favourable for China, should be drawn up. Stalin simply stonewalled, keeping Mao hanging about for two months in comfortable seclusion at the Soviet leader’s own dacha outside Moscow. When Stalin abruptly cancelled a day of talks, Mao shouted in a rage to his Soviet attendants that he was left with only three things to do: ‘The first is to eat, the second is to sleep, and the third is to shit.’7

  The two sides finally hammered out a new treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance by the middle of February 1950. At the banquet to celebrate, both Mao and Stalin appeared to be in bad moods. It did not help that Stalin chose the occasion to make a speech denouncing Tito of Yugoslavia. The treaty, as the Chinese Communists had wished, was a new one but it contained several of the same provisions as the previous treaty with the Nationalists. Xinjiang province and Manchuria were both effectively Soviet spheres of influence, with Soviet companies working there on very favourable terms. China and the Soviet Union would defend each other against Japan and its allies, which now included the United States. Stalin had made some minor concessions: Soviet control of two key Manchurian cities and a railway, for example, would end sooner than before. He had also promised financial aid, though less, as it turned out, than the Soviet Union was to provide to its satellite East Germany. In addition, the two sides had reached a tacit understanding that the Soviet Union would leave spreading revolution in Asia to the People’s Republic of China. From the United States’ perspective, the Sino-Soviet friendship and the alliance looked solid, and both were deeply worrying in the context of the loss of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, the explosion in August 1949 of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the discovery of extensive Soviet spy rings in the West and then of course the Korean War.8

  Stalin may have hoped that the United States would not become involved in that war and that a victorious North would provide him with a united Korea firmly under his sway. Or, in the spirit of the gambler he was, he may also have seen an advantage in the United States entering the conflict because that would put pressure on the People’s Republic and force it closer to the Soviet Union. In either case, the needs of China were clearly of secondary importance to him. Although he encouraged the Chinese Communists to enter the war against the American-led forces, he proved surprisingly reluctant to provide them with adequate military assistance. He would not, he said, be able to send units of the Soviet air force right away to give the Chinese air cover. In the end, the Soviet Union sent a significant number of planes (the Soviet pilots wore Chinese uniforms in case they were captured) and other military hardware. What we now know, of course, is that the war also added fresh strains to the relationship between the Chinese and the Soviets. The Chinese had to pay for everything they received, and China did not finally settle the last of its debt until 1965.9 When relations between the two great Communist powers soured in later years, Chinese officials complained about the inferior guns and ammunition sent by the Soviet ‘merchants of death’.

  Stalin’s death at the beginning of 1953 did not improve matters. The Chinese were annoyed by the Soviet assumption that the Soviet Union would continue to lead world Communism. Mao, it could be argued, was now the senior Communist statesman. Within China and throughout the Third World, Mao’s thought and the Chinese way of making a revolution based on the peasantry were held up as examples to emulate. By implication, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet pattern of development were being downgraded as proper models. The Soviets did not like what they saw as Chinese pretensions. Khrushchev, who had emerged by 1956 as Stalin’s successor, felt that Mao was always putting the Soviets down.10

  By the mid-1950s, both sides were increasingly prone to look for offence. When Khrushchev made his sensational secret speech in 1956 to denounce Stalin’s mistakes, even using the word ‘crimes’, the Chinese were annoyed, more because they had not been told in
advance than because they cared about Stalin’s reputation. And Mao, whose own personality cult was already formidable, did not care for the idea of toppling great leaders from their pedestals. When the Chinese offered to send labourers to Siberia, Khrushchev, so he said, smelled a rat: ‘They wanted to take over Siberia without war’. Then, in the late 1950s, when Khrushchev suggested that the Soviet Union and China establish a combined submarine fleet which would operate in the Pacific out of Chinese bases, it was the turn of the Chinese to be suspicious. ‘Better take the whole sea-coast of China,’ said Mao sarcastically. He himself would go up to the hills and fight a guerrilla war again. If, he told Khrushchev, the Soviet Union ‘insisted on stopping China’s nostrils, what else could be done’?11 What particularly annoyed the Chinese was that the Soviet Union gave only lukewarm backing to the longstanding Chinese Communist goal of reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. In the late summer of 1958, when the People’s Republic suddenly started shelling Taiwan’s islands of Quemoy and Matsu, off the Chinese coast, the Russians were alarmed that this might lead to a full-scale confrontation with the United States which could drag the Soviet Union into a major war. Although Moscow eventually produced a statement of support for the People’s Republic, it was not as enthusiastic as Mao and his colleagues would have wished. In 1959, as China and India moved towards a confrontation over their borderlands, the Soviet Union tried to make peace and, if anything, showed itself to be sympathetic to the Indians.