Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  In another memorandum he sent Nixon a few days before the flight to China, Kissinger reminded him that the Chinese were fanatics, committed to revolution, yet also highly pragmatic. They needed the Americans because China was faced with threats from the Soviet Union and a resurgent Japan, as well as with the possibility that Taiwan might abandon all claims to the mainland and declare its independence. Nixon, Kissinger said, would find Chou the practitioner and Mao more the philosopher. He would enjoy dealing with the charming and articulate Chou, who would be, in Kissinger’s opinion, at once ambiguous, evasive, oblique and frank. Chou was tough and sometimes it would be necessary for Nixon to stand up to him. ‘Chou’s firmness, however, is not the kind of brutalizing toughness which we have come to expect from the Russians, but rather a hardness and consistency of purpose derived from fifty years of revolutionary experiences.’ The most important thing Nixon could achieve would be to assure the Chinese that the Americans were serious and reliable. ‘If in our formal and informal talks we can impress the Chinese with these intangibles, we will have truly made your visit an historic success. If we fail to do so, we can expect the Chinese to be an increasingly thorny adversary, and history could record your visit as a gallant but stillborn venture.’12

  In his opening remarks, Nixon did his best to follow this advice. He intended, he told Chou, to speak frankly and to keep the record of their talks secret: ‘I’m determined where the fate of our two countries, and possibly the world, is involved, that we can talk in confidence.’ He also wanted Chou, he said, to convey a very important message to Chairman Mao: ‘When I give my word – I don’t give it very often – I want him to know that I will keep it.’ What the United States desired, in the long run, was the complete normalization of relations with the People’s Republic. The issue of Taiwan, he recognized, was a problem, but he was prepared to work with the Chinese for a peaceful resolution which would remove an irritant in their relationship.13

  Nixon took care to remind the Chinese that he had taken a considerable risk in coming to China. His own bureaucracy, particularly in the State Department, opposed him. Back in the United States, an unholy alliance across the political spectrum wanted him to fail to establish a new and productive relationship with the People’s Republic. The left, according to him, was pro-Soviet while the right backed Taiwan. Then there were those who were pro-Indian or pro-Japanese. Another source of danger were the isolationists, who wanted the United States to cut its military budget in half and withdraw its forces from Europe and Asia.

  He was, Nixon assured Chou, anything but a militarist; indeed he was a Quaker. He was convinced, however, that the world would become dangerously unstable without a strong United States as a counterweight to aggressive nations such as India and, of course and above all, the Soviet Union. China, in his view, clearly benefited from the American presence in Asia. The Soviet Union had to think twice before it embarked on adventures, for example on the subcontinent. In addition, the United States acted as a brake on another enemy of China’s: Japan. The Americans hoped that Japanese militarism was a thing of the past, but who could tell? If the United States, which currently gave Japan its military protection, were to withdraw its forces, the Japanese might well rearm and, given their strong economy and their past, that would not be a good thing for China or indeed the rest of Asia. Moreover, the United States did not want to see Japanese forces moving into Taiwan or South Korea if American forces had to move out. As long as the United States remained in Asia, it could keep Japan under control. ‘But’, Nixon warned Chou gravely, ‘if the U.S. is gone from Asia, gone from Japan, our protests, no matter how loud, would be like – to use the Prime Minister’s phrase – firing an empty cannon; we would have no rallying effect because fifteen thousand miles away is just too far to be heard.’14

  In his response, Chou paid little attention to the suggestion that having American troops in Asia helped China. Indeed, he pointed out, their presence in Indochina was only helping the Soviets increase their influence there. He also refused to be drawn into discussions of a common front against the Soviet Union. When Nixon suggested that a stronger China alongside the United States could balance the power of the Soviet Union in Asia and, incidentally, allow the US to cut back its own military spending, Chou was firm: ‘You have too much confidence in us. We don’t want to.’ Both the superpowers, he said sternly, were spending far too much on their military. Their arms race, sooner or later, would result in war. It could be a good thing for the world if the two of them could get on better terms and start to limit their armaments. The Chinese, he said, had made it clear that they had no objection to Nixon having a summit with the Soviets before he visited China. As it was, he had chosen to visit China first. ‘Moscow is carrying on like anything,’ Chou said. ‘But let them go on. We don’t care.’15

  As he had done in his earlier conversations with Kissinger, Chou dwelled on the past, in particular on the injustices done to China and the sufferings of the Chinese people. China’s past contained much more, of course, than a sorry tale of weakness and humiliation at the hands of outsiders. In the great Tang dynasty, for example, China had been confident and strong and had reached out to the world. For the Communists, however, it was the Century of Humiliation that mattered. Their history of China was one of survival in the face of oppression; the victory of Communism had finally allowed China to ‘stand up’ and face off the imperialists.

  In that story, the United States played a key role. (This was a standard Chinese negotiating technique, to stress the faults of the other side.)16 The United States, Chou reminded Nixon, had sided with Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists during the civil war and had been protecting him ever since President Truman sent the Seventh Fleet to defend Taiwan; and later, in the 1950s, the despised Dulles had signed a defence treaty with Taiwan which remained in effect. In the Korean War, Truman’s armies had driven towards the Yalu River border in North Korea and the Chinese Communists had been obliged to intervene. When the two sides signed a truce in 1953, the Americans had allowed Chiang Kai-shek to entice prisoners of war from the People’s Republic to settle in Taiwan. (The fact that several thousand of their soldiers had chosen not to go home still rankled with the Chinese Communists.) In 1956, the United States had failed to live up to its promises at the Geneva Conference of 1954 to hold elections in Vietnam. It had backed successive illegitimate regimes in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and sent its soldiers to fight the peoples of Indochina.

  In Chou’s remarks then and on subsequent days, he singled out three other countries which had been troublesome to China. India, for one. If you read the book Discovery of India by Indira Gandhi’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, Chou told Nixon, its real meaning was all too clear. ‘He was thinking of a great Indian empire – Malaysia, Ceylon, etc. It would probably also include our Tibet.’ From 1959 onwards India had unfairly mounted attacks on China along their common border. The Chinese had complained several times to Nehru, by then Indian Prime Minister. ‘He was so discourteous; he wouldn’t even do us the courtesy of replying, so we had no choice but to drive him out.’ So China had gone to war, justifiably, in 1962 to teach India a lesson. It was a pity, Chou thought, and Nixon agreed with him, that Pakistan had lost the recent war with India. They had both let Bhutto know that he must protect Yahya Khan. Yahya had not been a good general or a good leader, Chou said, but he’d done both the United States and China a service in getting Kissinger to Beijing for his first, crucial talks. ‘One doesn’t burn down a bridge’, said Nixon, ‘which has proved useful.’ Nixon and Chou also agreed that India must be pressured to withdraw its remaining troops from Bangladesh and Pakistan. They promised to keep in touch through their secret Paris channel on the matter of recognizing the new state of Bangladesh.17

  Chou also expressed a surprising amount of concern about Japan. The Chinese could not forget what Japan had been like in the past and the suffering it had caused China. This was a theme Chou had raised repeatedly with Kissinger as well in
their talks in 1971.18 The Japanese economy was developing with ominous rapidity. Japan needed both raw materials and markets abroad. ‘Expanding in such a great way as they are towards foreign lands, the inevitable result will be military expansion.’ Perhaps, Chou suggested to Nixon, they could share anything they learned about what Japan was up to.

  The Americans, Chou charged, had been careless in helping Japan to rebuild after the Second World War. ‘You helped Japan fatten herself, and now she is a very heavy burden on you.’ It had also been a mistake to receive the Japanese Emperor in the United States; as Chou had said earlier to Kissinger, he remained the basis on which a renewed Japanese militarism could be built. Kissinger’s view, as he told Nixon, was that the Chinese were deeply ambivalent about how to prevent this. While they blamed the United States for Japan’s resurgence, they also recognized that the United States could act as a brake on its rearmament and expansion. Although the Chinese wanted the United States to reduce its forces in Asia, Chou in his talks both with Kissinger and now with Nixon repeatedly expressed concern that Japan would move its troops into countries such as Taiwan and South Korea to fill the vacuum.19

  Although Korea had been a battlefield between China and the United States in the 1950s and had played a major role in the long chill in their relations, it was now relegated to the sidelines. China had a close but occasionally tense relationship with the North, which like North Vietnam showed an unwanted independence and a tendency to drift into the Soviet camp, and the United States was allied to South Korea. As Kissinger put it in his summary for Nixon of his conversations with Chou in October 1971, both powers would stick with their friends but neither wanted another war between the two Koreas. What is important, Nixon told Chou when they briefly discussed Korea, is for both of their countries to restrain their small, impulsive allies. ‘It would be silly, and unreasonable, to have the Korean peninsula be the scene of a conflict between our two governments.’ It would be good, Chou said, if the two Koreas might one day be peacefully reunited. It would, however, take a long time.20

  Apart from Japan, the other main threat to China, from Chou’s perspective, was the Soviet Union. The Soviets, he told Nixon, were socialists in word only; in reality they were imperialists and troublemakers. Soviet leaders, from Stalin onwards, had been false to China. They had talked of handing back the territory Russia had taken in the time of the tsars; of course, they had not done so. After the Second World War, the Soviet Union had signed a treaty with Chiang Kai-shek and left the Chinese Communists on their own. In the conflict between China and India at the start of the 1960s, the Soviets had encouraged India to attack China and when the Chinese had remonstrated with Khrushchev, he had answered them rudely. And, of course, in 1969 the Soviets had threatened a major war with China itself. China had been the innocent party in the fighting that had broken out in March of that year and had always been willing to negotiate.21

  The Soviets, Chou complained, hated China, but at the same time they sometimes wanted to relax the state of tension ‘to a certain extent’. The difficulty in dealing with the Soviets was that they negotiated only when it suited them and they did not negotiate in good faith. They repeatedly raised new issues or tried to get the Chinese to accept their draft agreements. Of the top Soviet leaders, Kosygin was reasonable if unimaginative, but Leonid Brezhnev, who was more ambitious and aggressive, unfortunately had more power. Nixon offered reassurance in his talks with Chou on 23 February. The United States certainly did not want war between China and the Soviet Union and it was prepared to back China. The US had been ready to do so during the crisis between India and Pakistan the previous December and it would continue to oppose any aggression against China. ‘This we do’, Nixon said solemnly, ‘because we believe that it is in our interest, and in the interest of preserving peace as well, world peace.’ He assured Chou, however, that the United States remained firmly committed to improving relations with the Soviet Union and getting agreements which would lower tension in the world. Nixon may have intended a subtle hint that China should not take American friendship for granted. Kissinger had indirectly conveyed the same message during his visits. ‘We are making some progress with the Soviets’ was the way Winston Lord put it, ‘and you Chinese should be sure that you keep up with us and improve relations with us, so that we don’t get ahead of you in relations with the Russians.’ In the new triangular diplomacy, of course, Nixon and Kissinger intended that the United States should hold the balance between the other two powers.22

  Chou also made much of China’s comparative weakness. ‘We are still backward,’ he said to Nixon in their first private exchange of views that Tuesday in Beijing, ‘and we admit our backwardness.’ China, Chou insisted, had no ambitions to become a superpower. ‘We can only say’, he had told a visiting American journalist in 1971, ‘that China is comparatively important, not so very important.’ Foreign visitors invariably found this self-deprecation charming. Look, Chou once said to an American diplomat, as he showed where his long winter underwear had stretched below his trousers: ‘We cannot expect to export if we have this kind of quality.’23

  Chou may well have had in mind the ancient Chinese adage ‘Feign weakness’ as a way of deceiving one’s enemies. He was also taking the high moral ground for China. Superpowers, to the Chinese Communists, meant the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which wanted domination of the world, or, in Chinese Communist terminology, hegemony. China was not only renouncing such imperialist ambitions, but also placing itself at the head of all those nations and peoples who resisted such dominance. Chairman Mao taught them, Chou said, ‘that once one thinks one is number one under heaven one is bound to suffer defeat’. Vietnam, he added pointedly, was only a small country but with a great people. The world, he said, in another faithful echo of Mao, was in a state of turbulence. The Chinese knew the risks they were taking in not seeking to be powerful, and were aware of the danger that the United States and the Soviet Union might collude with their other enemies such as Japan to invade their country.24

  Nixon and Kissinger went to extraordinary lengths to convince the Chinese that the United States had no intention of colluding with the Soviet Union, or indeed any other nation, to harm China. While neither man went into much detail in his memoirs, the picture has become clearer over the years of the extent to which they provided the Chinese with information, much of it highly secret. On his first, secret, visit, Kissinger told Chou that he was prepared to give him anything the Chinese might want to know about American discussions with the Soviet Union, including the very delicate and important Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), ‘so as to alleviate any concerns you should have in this regard’. In any talks with the Soviets, the Americans would also consult the Chinese when there were clauses that might apply to third countries. Kissinger was true to his word. On his second visit in 1971, he brought copies of various agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union, including one on methods for preventing an accidental nuclear war. That December, when he met Huang Hua in New York to discuss the war between India and Pakistan, Kissinger told him, ‘Incidentally, just so everyone knows exactly what we do, we tell you about our conversations with the Soviets: we do not tell the Soviets about our conversations with you. In fact, we don’t tell our own colleagues that I see you.’25

  Now, in February 1972, while the press got details about Milton and Mathilda, the pair of musk oxen Nixon was presenting to China, Kissinger was quietly giving the Chinese the fruits of American intelligence-gathering about the Soviet Union and top-secret information about the state of discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Much of what he gave the Chinese was not known even at the highest levels of the State Department because Nixon and Kissinger preferred to use their own secret channels in dealing with Moscow.

  In a long meeting on Wednesday, 23 February, with Qiao Guanhua and Ye Jianying, the Vice-Chairman of China’s Military Commission, Kissinger handed over classified material on Soviet milit
ary capabilities and a list of the main issues between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Chinese must have been delighted as Kissinger displayed lists of Soviet hardware, from bombers to missiles, and pulled out maps showing Soviet military dispositions along their common border. Ye exclaimed in English at a photograph, ‘Rocket!’ He wanted details: Two-stage or one-stage? And how many kilotons were the nuclear warheads? Kissinger provided them and much more: numbers, speeds, ranges, sites.

  Kissinger was careful to underline that, while Soviet strategic forces – the long-range bombers, and the land- and submarine-based missiles – were targeted on the United States, they could easily be used against China. While no one in the American government, not even the intelligence people themselves, he said, knew that he was handing over this information, he wanted the Chinese to have the same information as he and Nixon when they all faced future crises.26

  At the same meeting, Kissinger also gave the Chinese a full briefing on the state of American negotiations with the Soviet Union. A number of things were happening in Europe to ease tensions between the Soviet bloc and the West: there would probably be treaties on Berlin, whose status had remained in limbo since the end of the Second World War; there might be a conference on European security and possibly some talks to reduce the level of forces all round in Europe. Both sides also had an interest in the Middle East, particularly in the possibility of negotiations between Israel and Egypt, as well as in arms control in the Indian Ocean, and would probably discuss those issues at the forthcoming Moscow summit.