Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  As 1969 wore on and the threat from the Soviet Union reached its most acute phase, China’s need to break out from its isolation became apparent. The Four Marshals produced their reports on China’s grand strategy and Mao pondered them. Gradually China began to send ambassadors abroad again. A number of American allies were no longer prepared to wait, and China for its part was clearly receptive to increasing contacts with the world in general, if not the United States in particular. Between 1970 and 1971, China re-established diplomatic relations with a number of countries, from Italy to Iceland.

  Most significant of all, it opened talks with the United States’ neighbour, Canada. The Canadians, while they shared Western concerns about the Soviet Union in the early decades of the Cold War and had fought in the Korean War, had never felt as strongly about the Communist Chinese threat. Canadian missionaries, who had been active in China for decades, were generally sympathetic to China, whatever government was in power. Most of the China experts in Canada’s foreign service were missionary children who had grown up in China. Canadians by and large did not share the United States’ hard line towards Communist China and, like other American allies, were alarmed by the insistence of the Americans on prolonging the Korean War and by loose talk about using the atomic bomb to dislodge the new regime. The Department of External Affairs, as it was then known, advocated establishing diplomatic recognition in the 1950s, and the Liberal government of Louis St Laurent concurred. The Canadians, however, had to try to balance a number of factors.

  Canada still looked to Britain for leadership, and the British had established their relations with China. In addition, an increasing number of Commonwealth countries were recognizing the People’s Republic in the 1950s and Canada cared about Commonwealth solidarity. Then there was the United States, always a factor in Canadian thinking. If Canada moved too far away from American policy, it might damage both the North Atlantic Treaty alliance and the bilateral relationship. American administrations tended to be easily irritated if they felt their allies were getting soft on Chinese Communism. In the early 1960s, when a Chinese classical opera company came to Toronto, the American authorities announced that any American citizens who bought tickets were violating American law. When a few determined Americans came anyway, they were welcomed by Canadians who were irritated, as so often before and since, by the American government’s attempt to enforce American laws outside the United States.13 On the other hand, Canada had much more at stake in its relationship with the United States than it did in that with China, and so the Canadian government, whatever it thought and sometimes said, did not move on the issue.

  At the end of the 1950s, the Canadians suddenly found themselves being courted by the Chinese Communists, not for recognition but for Canadian wheat. Reports were coming out of China of severe shortages (an understatement). The Canadian government briefly contemplated a gift but decided that the Chinese might see charity as an insult. In any case the Chinese were prepared to pay hard currency at first and seemed eager to take a lot more Canadian wheat if some credit arrangement could be worked out. Canadian wheat farmers were delighted and Canadian public opinion in general was quiescent, so, although the Americans raised objections, Canadian governments in the 1960s continued to allow trade between Canada and China. In Hong Kong, a Canadian trade commissioner travelled back and forth to China on a diplomatic passport and behaved much like a Canadian diplomat. In Ottawa, the Department of External Affairs discussed recognition of the People’s Republic year after year, but nothing happened until the end of the decade.

  In 1968, things began to move when Canada got a new Prime Minister. Although he had a reputation as a radical free thinker, Pierre Trudeau was essentially a pragmatist. He himself was not particularly interested in American culture or in the United States, but he knew that Canada had little choice but to get along with its giant neighbour. On the other hand, he thought Canadian foreign policy was stuck in a rut, and understood that Canadians were increasingly willing to distance themselves from the United States. Canadians had just celebrated their centenary as a nation and, perhaps to their own surprise, were enjoying a burst of cultural activity and of Canadian nationalism. And an influx of American draft dodgers and deserters was persuading Canadians not only that the Americans were very wrong but that Canadians were very right over Vietnam. (Canada had not become a combatant largely because its role on the International Control Commission, set up in 1954 to monitor the agreements governing Indochina, precluded it from doing so.) And it seemed to Trudeau, who had actually visited China twice as a private citizen, illogical for nations not to recognize its government.

  Shortly after he took office, Trudeau ordered a complete review of Canada’s foreign policy. As far as Asia was concerned, the experts were to take into account the separate government in Taiwan. As the Canadians moved cautiously towards a change in their policy towards China, the Americans were not pleased. The Secretary of State, William Rogers, reportedly told his Canadian counterpart, ‘We hate like hell what you are doing but you are still our best friends.’ In January 1969, the Canadian cabinet authorized its representatives in Stockholm to contact the Chinese embassy. (Sweden was good neutral territory and had excellent communications.) The Canadian third secretary duly invited a Chinese acquaintance to attend dinner at his house and watch a new film on Dr Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor seen by the Communists as a saintly figure who gave his life for the Revolution. The Chinese diplomat had to refer the invitation back to Beijing, and two weeks later, on the afternoon of the dinner, an urgent telegram came back with authorization, possibly from Mao himself. The Canadian-made film, which also depicted Bethune’s lively and varied romantic career, may have left the Chinese bewildered but they did recognize the friendly intent. Permission was received from Beijing to start talks about establishing diplomatic relations. Although Chinese knowledge of the outside world was limited at this time thanks to the Cultural Revolution, Canada was seen as a relatively friendly power within the American camp; Canadian interest in talks was perhaps a sign of changes in American thinking.14

  The talks, highly formalistic and drawn out with the necessary references back to the respective capitals, took place alternately at the Chinese embassy, which was in an elegant old Stockholm house, and its Canadian counterpart, which was in a nondescript office building in the red-light district. By the autumn of 1970 an agreement was ready and after some last-minute discussions over whether Chinese or Canadian paper should be used (Swedish was the compromise), Canada and the People’s Republic of China agreed in October to establish diplomatic relations. The first Canadian diplomat arrived in Beijing in November to look for accommodation. In February 1971, the Chinese opened their embassy in Ottawa.

  By this point, the United States had secretly made its own contact with the People’s Republic of China. Since no answer had come from the Chinese to the roundabout messages that the Americans had been sending, Nixon and Kissinger decided in the late autumn of 1969 on a direct approach. Walter Stoessel, the American ambassador in Warsaw, was told to make contact with local Chinese diplomats. On 3 December, he and a colleague who spoke some Chinese went to a gala fashion show being put on by the Yugoslavians to which the whole diplomatic corps had been invited. As the chief Chinese representative was leaving, the Chinese-speaking American bumped into him. ‘I introduced myself. And he was, you know, being very Chinese and bowing with hands clasped. I said, “I want you to meet my ambassador.”‘ Stoessel passed on the message from the US government suggesting talks and asked if they could meet again. The Chinese diplomat hastily said in Chinese, ‘Okay Okay,’ and fled to his waiting car. ‘If you want Chinese diplomats to suffer a heart attack,’ Chou En-lai later said to the Americans, ‘you just have to speak to them on diplomatic occasions.’15

  The Chinese embassy immediately reported this ‘unusual behaviour’ back to Beijing and Chou En-lai went straight to Mao. ‘The opportunity is now coming,’ he told the Chairman. ‘We now have a brick
in our hands to bang on the door with.’ Four days after the fashion show, Lei Yang, the Chinese chargé, quietly called on the American embassy to announce that the Chinese government had decided to release another pair of American yachtsmen who had been in Chinese custody since February. On 11 December, Stoessel returned the call at the invitation of the Chinese. The press started to notice the black limousines with their national flags going back and forth and the State Department, following standard procedure, also informed its own departments and selected embassies abroad. Nixon, according to Kissinger, worried that news of the initiative was leaking too soon; ‘We’ll kill this child before it is born.’ Kissinger saw this as yet another example of the rigidity and incompetence of the State Department and yet another good reason why the White House should deal with China policy. On 8 January 1970, China and the United States announced that the Warsaw talks were resuming. Nixon, in the foreign policy report he sent to Congress a month later, said, ‘It is certainly in our interest, and in the interest of peace and stability in Asia and the world, that we take what steps we can toward improved practical relations with Peking’.16

  Stoessel, under instructions from Washington, told Lei Yang at an informal meeting on 20 January that the United States was prepared to send a high-level representative to Beijing if necessary for discussions. At their first formal meeting on 20 February, Lei, who had received his instructions from China, replied that the Chinese would be pleased to receive a high-level envoy ‘to explore further solutions to the fundamental questions in Sino-American relations’. He mentioned what was for the Chinese the most fundamental of all and that was the future status of Taiwan. The United States wanted to improve relations with China but it continued to support ‘the Chiang Kai-shek clique’ which had long since been repudiated by the Chinese people. ‘Is this not self-contradictory?’ Nevertheless, the meeting ended with an agreement to meet again. The Chinese politely declined the offer of a cup of tea and left. In the event, that was to be the last of the formal Warsaw meetings.17

  In the United States, a debate broke out between the White House and the State Department about whether it was wise to think of sending an emissary to China before relations had improved significantly. Would such a move, the State Department asked, cause problems with America’s allies in Asia such as Japan and Taiwan? Would the Chinese use the evidence of American interest to put pressure on the Soviet Union to mend fences? Kissinger was infuriated by what he saw as bureaucratic rigidity of the worst kind. Of course the diplomats wanted to continue the old-style talks, ‘without result, true, but also without debacle or controversy’. As the Americans argued among themselves, they kept postponing the date of the next meeting. In the spring, the long-running conflict in Indochina upset the delicate negotiations through Warsaw. In March, the situation in Cambodia suddenly deteriorated when Lon Nol, an American-backed general, overthrew the neutralist government of Prince Sihanouk. By the beginning of May, Sihanouk had established a government in exile in Beijing and South Vietnamese and American forces were invading Cambodia to prop up Lon Nol. The Chinese put out a statement condemning the ‘brazen’ invasion and said that it was not ‘suitable’ for the meeting scheduled for 20 May to be held. Tiananmen Square filled with an enormous protest rally and Mao called on the people of the world to defeat ‘the US aggressors and all their running dogs’.18

  It looked as though Chinese–American relations were going back into the deep freeze. Nixon in any case was preoccupied with Indochina and with the widespread protests in the United States as a result of Cambodia. Mao, as became apparent later, was brooding over the loyalty of his chosen successor, Defence Minister Lin Biao. Nevertheless, there were some encouraging signs that the will to improve relations remained on both sides. In the second week of May, as Washington and the rest of the country were being rocked by demonstrations against the Cambodian invasion and bombings, Nixon, to the dismay of his security and staff, impulsively decided to go out and talk to the demonstrators. In a strange late-night conversation by the Lincoln Memorial, he tried to explain himself and his ideals to a group of students. In rambling but widely reported remarks, he urged them to travel, to know not just their own country but the world. One of the overriding hopes he had for his administration was that ‘the great mainland of China be opened up so that we could know the seven hundred million people who live in China and who are one of the most remarkable people on earth’. In an interview with Time later that autumn, he said, ‘If there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China. If I don’t, I want my children to.’19

  Although the Cambodian invasion in May 1970 disrupted the gradual opening of contacts between China and the United States, the two sides did not pull back completely to their old stance. In July, after American troops had withdrawn from Cambodia, the Chinese suddenly released an unfortunate clergyman who had languished in a Chinese jail for two decades. (He was carried across the border on a stretcher to Hong Kong and died soon afterwards.) The Chinese also announced that another imprisoned American had committed suicide several years earlier. The United States, for its part, dropped its longstanding opposition to Italy’s exporting heavy trucks to China. The Italians profited by getting frozen pork as an exchange. That autumn, at a state banquet for Ceau¸sescu of Rumania, Nixon used the words ‘People’s Republic of China’ for the first time.

  Nixon and Kissinger, partly because they did not trust the State Department to manage the contacts through Warsaw, by this point had decided to establish their own, highly secret channels of communication. One, they hoped, would be through Paris. Vernon Walters, the military attaché, who had been standing by for over a year, got orders in the summer of 1970 to pass on word from Nixon to the Chinese embassy that the United States was prepared to hold secret talks and that Nixon would send a high-level official to Paris if necessary. At some point, and it is not clear from his memoirs exactly when, Walters found himself standing alone with his Chinese opposite number, Fang Wen, as they waited for their cars after a reception at the Polish embassy. He took the opportunity to say in French that he had a message from the President for the Chinese government. Fang’s jaw dropped and he hastily said, ‘I’ll tell them; I’ll tell them; I’ll tell them.’ He jumped into his Mercedes limousine and drove off before Walters could hand over his letter.20 Walters finally delivered it a few days later. The Chinese greeted him cautiously but courteously.

  The channel did not immediately produce results. It took until the following summer, and only after he had made his secret trip to Beijing, for Kissinger to be able to talk to the Chinese ambassador in Paris. For some reason, perhaps because secrecy had become second nature, he flew in and out of Paris incognito and had himself smuggled in and out of Walters’s apartment and the Chinese embassy. Over time Walters himself became very friendly with Fang, also a retired general. They conducted much detailed business about the arrangements for Nixon’s trip and compared notes about the Soviets – a menace – and about how they would deal with drug dealers – execution. The Chinese invariably gave Walters a present of preserved apricots as he left; he could not bear their taste and, for fear of compromising security, filled up his safe with them.21

  The other secret channel Nixon and Kissinger opened up was through Pakistan, and this is the one that finally produced the dramatic breakthrough they were looking for. Nixon had been using Yahya Khan to send indirect messages to Beijing since 1969. In the autumn of that year, for example, the Americans asked Yahya to let the Chinese know that they were cancelling the Seventh Fleet’s patrols in the Taiwan Strait. According to Chinese sources, the direct channel was opened in the early spring of 1970 but did not become really active until late in the year. Modern technology was bypassed as the two sides used only trusted emissaries in a way that would have been familiar to the ancient Greeks or the great Venetian diplomats of the Renaissance. If Nixon wanted to contact Beijing, he or Kissinger passed a message, typed on ordinary paper and unsigned, to Agha Hilaly, the ambas
sador of Pakistan in Washington, who in turn took it himself to Yahya. In Pakistan, Yahya then called in the Chinese ambassador and read the message to him. The two men then carefully checked the Chinese diplomat’s handwritten notes, and the contents of the American message went on to Chou and Mao in Beijing. Eventually a reply would come back through the same circuitous route. Hilaly would arrive at the White House with a handwritten note from Yahya and would dictate its contents to Kissinger and then carefully carry the paper away again. The messages sometimes took several days, and in one case three weeks, to reach the other side. The Chinese never entirely understood why Nixon insisted on such secrecy. It was all a bit mysterious, Mao told his old friend Edgar Snow, that Nixon wanted to keep all contacts with China secret even from the State Department. Nixon and Kissinger tried to explain that if word of the negotiations leaked out the resulting political uproar in the United States would make it difficult to carry on.22

  Nixon spent much of his time aboard Air Force One on the long flight to the Far East conferring with Henry Kissinger.

  A sketch of the famous

  West Lake in Hanzhou,

  showing possible photo