Nixon had been scornful, before his trip, when Kissinger suggested, as he had already said to Chou, that the Americans could agree to do more than they could say publicly: ‘1. too dangerous 2. sounds tricky,’ he wrote in one of his notes to himself. Now, however, he said to Chou: ‘My record shows I always do more than I can say, once I have made the direction of our policy’. Chou offered the Americans tea and snacks but made no immediate comment. Much later in the meeting, after he had spent considerable time rehashing past American misdeeds, Chou said airily that the Taiwan question was really rather easy to discuss. ‘We have already waited over twenty years – I am very frank here – and can wait a few more years.’ And he threw in a promise: when Taiwan came back to the Motherland, China would not put any nuclear bases there. In their discussion two days later, Chou also assured Nixon that the People’s Republic would not use its armed forces against Taiwan as long as American forces were there. As in his talks with Kissinger, however, Chou was not prepared to renounce the use of force against Taiwan. Indeed China has never renounced it.26
In the meeting on 24 February, Nixon continued to ignore his own advice to himself about not promising more than he could safely admit in public. He intended to move on normalization in his second term, he told Chou, and he was going to withdraw all American forces from Taiwan. He could not, however, make that explicit in their joint communiqué because it would give his opponents something to attack him on during the campaign. ‘I must be able to go back to Washington and say that no secret deals have been made between the Prime Minister and myself on Taiwan.’ Once he was safely re-elected, he would have four years ‘to move us towards achieving our goal’. The difficult issue was to express the issue in language which would reassure the Chinese without alarming the Americans. As Nixon put it, ‘Our problem is to be clever enough to find language which will meet your need yet does not stir up the animals so much that they gang up on Taiwan and thereby torpedo our initiative.’ That difficult task was left to Kissinger and Qiao Guanhua.27
Chou pushed Nixon hard on Taiwan but on the last day of the visit, 28 February, he reminded him that China could wait for some time more to settle the issue. Indochina, he said, was another matter. There had been fighting there since the end of the Second World War. ‘People there have been bleeding.’ China could not help but be sympathetic. ‘We have an obligation to sympathize with them and support them.’ If President Nixon and Dr Kissinger were sincere, and Chou believed they were, in wanting to reduce tensions in the Far East, then the question of Vietnam and its neighbours in Indochina was the ‘key point’. It was a great pity, though, that the Americans had kept on the attack even while Nixon had been in China: ‘You have given the Soviet Union a chance to say that the music played in Peking to welcome President Nixon has been together with the sounds of the bombs exploding in North Vietnam’.28
16
Indochina
JUST BEFORE HE LEFT Washington, Nixon made a note to himself: ‘1. Taiwan – most crucial 2. V. Nam – most urgent.’1 When he took office, he had optimistically believed that he could extricate the United States from the war in Vietnam within six months. On the ground, though, the North Vietnamese showed no signs of weakening, and in Paris the peace negotiations, which had started in 1968, dragged on. The war, far from winding down, had expanded, to draw in Cambodia and Laos. The conflict was overshadowing the Nixon presidency much as it had the Johnson; it was hurting American society and harming Nixon’s ability to deal with the big issues facing the United States abroad, such as relations with the Soviet Union.
The public Paris talks which involved the governments of the United States and North and South Vietnam, as well as the Communist-backed National Liberation Front for South Vietnam, were stuck in endless wrangles over such matters as the type of table to be used. However, while Kissinger had been dealing with the opening to China, he had simultaneously been conducting highly delicate and secret talks, also in Paris, with the North Vietnamese representatives in an effort to get the peace process moving ahead. The North Vietnamese were prepared to talk but not to make significant concessions, and the two sides remained apart on a number of issues. The two most important were the insistence by North Vietnam that President Nguyen Van Thieu’s government in the South be removed, something the United States dared not do unless it wanted to be charged with betraying an ally, and North Vietnam’s refusal to state publicly that it would withdraw its troops from the South as the Americans withdrew theirs. It did not help matters that Nixon, who was convinced that it was always best to negotiate from a position of strength, was trying to bomb the North Vietnamese into a more conciliatory frame of mind. In the spring of 1970, he extended the war into Cambodia, bombing and attacking the Communist bases there, and in February 1971 into Laos. Both escalations of the war caused massive protests in the United States, and the Cambodian incursion led the Chinese Communists ostentatiously (but as it turned out only temporarily) to break off their developing contacts with the Americans.
Both Nixon and Kissinger placed great hopes in using their opening to China to put pressure on North Vietnam to make more substantial compromises in the Paris negotiations. Both men assumed, in spite of much evidence to the contrary, that the Communist world was organized like an army or a successful corporation, with all lowranking officers following orders from above. North Vietnam, just like North Korea or East Germany, was a subordinate which would surely do what it was told. There was a difficulty, though, in knowing which of its quarrelling senior partners – the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China – it would obey. At first Nixon and Kissinger hoped that the Soviet Union was the key; in an early meeting with Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Kissinger painted an attractive picture of better relations between their two countries, with frequent summit meetings. The only condition was that the Soviet Union help the United States get a settlement in Vietnam. The Soviets, who were having their own troubles with the North Vietnamese, whom they found stubborn and irritatingly independent, made it clear that they were happy to talk about improved relations but that they were not so easily scared into doing the Americans’ bidding.2
Nixon and Kissinger, who invariably thought in terms of linkages, of trading gains in one area for concessions in another, increasingly placed their hopes on their new relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Surely it would make sense for the Chinese Communists to help over Vietnam, indeed over the whole of Indochina, in return for the Americans giving them much of what they wanted on Taiwan. On 27 April 1971, the day Chou’s invitation for Nixon to send a high-level emissary arrived in Washington, Kissinger was euphoric about the possibilities opening up: ‘Mr President, I have not said this before but I think if we get this thing working, we will end Vietnam this year.’ After his first two visits to China, Kissinger remained optimistic. He had been cautious, he told Nixon on the eve of the President’s trip, not to embarrass Chou by asking too openly for his assistance. ‘Nevertheless, from July onward the two key issues in our dialogue have been Taiwan and Indochina, and they contain an inherent quid pro quo. Only we can help them concerning Taiwan; and they can help in Indochina. Accordingly, I have indirectly but consistently linked these two in my talks with Chou.’ He was sure, Kissinger went on, that the Chinese had already spoken forcefully to the North Vietnamese.3
As Nixon went over the briefing notes Kissinger had prepared, he jotted down his own thoughts on how he would stress the importance of the United States getting out of Indochina with the Chinese.
1. Helps on Taiwan troop removal
2. Reduces Soviet hand there
3. Reduces irritant to our relations
4. Gets us out – gives them a fair chance
While the Chinese certainly understood how important ending the Vietnam War was to the Americans (Kissinger and Nixon told them so repeatedly), they denied that it was important to China and firmly refused to be drawn in to helping to settle the conflict. While the Chinese had be
en made nervous by the American presence in South Vietnam, the fact that, in the early 1970s, the Americans were finding it difficult to withdraw left a bargaining chip on the table for China as it negotiated with them over Taiwan.4 Furthermore, China – so Mao certainly insisted – was the centre of world revolution. North Vietnam was part of the worldwide struggle against imperialism and had to be supported.
‘We have had no military advisers,’ said Chou mendaciously, the first time he met Kissinger. ‘They were only to build roads.’ In fact the Chinese had been supporting the North Vietnamese Communists and then the Viet Cong in South Vietnam ever since the start of the 1950s, first in the war against the French and then against the Americans. The Chinese government itself calculated that its aid amounted to some $20 billion between 1950 and 1975, when the fighting finally ended with the fall of Saigon. China sent hundreds of thousands of guns, millions of bullets and shells, uniforms, boots, even mosquito netting. It also sent military missions and troops, some 320,000 of them in the late 1960s. True, Chinese soldiers did build roads, but they also manned anti-aircraft guns and ground-to-air missiles. The presence of so many Chinese troops also freed up North Vietnamese to fight the South Vietnamese and American forces.5
Propaganda from both Hanoi and Beijing talked about the relationship between the Chinese and the North Vietnamese as being that between the rear and the front lines or between the lips and the teeth. The lips, however, did not always cover the teeth properly and the teeth sometimes quietly bit the lips. Communist brotherhood, just as in the case of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, was not enough to paper over deep cultural and historical differences. China and Vietnam have had a long and complicated relationship which goes back many centuries. To the Chinese, with their self-centred view of the world, the Vietnamese were younger brothers, the ‘half-cooked’ as one expression had it, who had not yet become thoroughly civilized. While the Vietnamese absorbed much from Chinese civilization, they also resented their great meddlesome neighbour to the north. In 111 BC, the Chinese conquered the northern part of Vietnam and remained in possession for a thousand years, until a revolution led by two formidable sisters liberated it. Chou’s frequent reminders that the new China was not responsible for the imperialist sins of the old dynasties and his gesture of laying wreaths on the sisters’ graves were not enough to reassure the Vietnamese.
The Chinese Communists, for all their rhetoric about international revolution, tended to look out for China’s interests first. In 1954, because China was apprehensive that the conflict in Vietnam might draw it into a major war with the United States, Chou En-lai pressured the Vietnamese Communists to come to terms with the French and accept the establishment of Laos and Cambodia as neutral countries and the temporary division of Vietnam. The Vietnamese agreed, but it rankled ever after. When the United States, the leading imperialist power, got bogged down in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, the Chinese encouraged the Vietnamese Communists to fight on, partly because Mao needed something to radicalize the Chinese people as he launched the Cultural Revolution, partly because a settlement might leave the Soviet Union, which was becoming the more important patron of North Vietnam, too strong. North Vietnam tried to steer a course between its two difficult patrons but, from time to time, when, for example, it openly backed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, it showed which camp it was favouring.6
When the North Vietnamese decided in 1968 to start peace talks with the United States, Chou told them that they were being ‘too fast and too hurried’. And the criticisms kept coming as the talks moved very slowly ahead. The North Vietnamese were showing the white flag by even agreeing to talk; at the very least, they should have insisted on a full halt to American bombing, not a partial one; and they should never have accepted the ‘puppet regime’ of South Vietnam as a participant in the talks. At a reception to celebrate the anniversary of Vietnam’s independence, Chou took the opportunity to say that the North Vietnamese were bound to win the war, if only they would fight on. Tensions also grew over Laos and Cambodia, where both North Vietnam and China manoeuvred to get hold of the local Communist forces and so extend their own influence.7
Chou hinted at the differences in his first conversation with Nixon (‘the ideology of Vietnam, too, may not necessarily be completely the same as ours’), but neither Nixon nor Kissinger seems to have been aware of the potential for China and North Vietnam to fall out. Both men preferred to believe that China was capable of bringing the Vietnamese Communists into line if it chose. Shortly before Nixon left for China in 1972, the Americans found out that Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam’s chief negotiator at the Paris talks, was going to be in Beijing at the same time. General Walters, who managed the secret channel through Paris to Beijing, sent a message to ask whether the Chinese would arrange a meeting between Nixon and Le Duc Tho. A brusque refusal came back: the Americans and the Vietnamese should settle their own affairs.8
This should not have come as a surprise, because Chou had made it amply clear in his discussions with Kissinger in 1971 and later with Haig in January 1972 that China did not want to get involved and that, moreover, it continued to support North Vietnam. At their very first meeting in July 1971, Chou laid out China’s position and he never subsequently deviated from it. Like all peoples, the Vietnamese must choose their own political system and, he said pointedly, ‘So long as no foreign force interferes in that area, then the issue is solved.’ The United States, he went on, must withdraw all its troops and all its military installations. Moreover it should end its support for the Thieu government in South Vietnam and for Lon Nol in Cambodia. As long as the war continued, China would keep on supporting the heroic people of Vietnam, and those of Cambodia and Laos as well.9
Chou could not resist providing his customary history lessons. From Truman onwards, he told the Americans, their presidents had meddled in the affairs of Vietnam and the other countries of Indochina. China, he said blandly and untruthfully, never attempted to influence the internal affairs of its neighbours. The United States had broken many promises along the way, including the one to respect the agreements reached at Geneva in 1954. The infamous Dulles had refused to hold the elections scheduled for 1956. ‘This was false, dirty, what Dulles did,’ said Chou, striking the table with his hand, in what Kissinger felt was a genuine display of emotion.10
Nevertheless, Kissinger drew surprisingly optimistic conclusions: Chou, he told Nixon after his first visit, understood the link the Americans were making between Taiwan and Indochina and did not object to it. On his last day in Beijing in July 1971, Kissinger claimed, Chou had talked about Indochina in ‘an astonishingly sympathetic and open manner’ and hinted that the United States would find North Vietnam more generous than expected. It may have helped that, in their talks, Kissinger had made some significant concessions. ‘If there are no negotiations,’ he had assured Chou at their first meeting, ‘we will eventually withdraw, unilaterally.’ He also showed a willingness to jettison the government of South Vietnam. ‘Our position is not to maintain any particular government in South Vietnam.’ The United States could not, of course, take part in overthrowing its former allies. ‘If the government is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn the quicker it will be overthrown.’ Once the United States had gone, Kissinger said, it would not intervene whatever happened. This was certainly not the public position of the United States. In an address to the nation a few months before Kissinger’s secret trip, Nixon had said that the United States should not announce that it would pull out no matter what North Vietnam did. ‘We would have thrown away our principal bargaining counter to win the release of American prisoners of war, we would remove the enemy’s strongest incentive to end the war sooner by negotiation, and we will have given enemy commanders the exact information they need to marshal their attacks against our remaining forces at their most vulnerable time.’ Moreover, the United States had an obligation to the people of South V
ietnam. ‘Shall we leave in a way that gives the South Vietnamese a reasonable chance to survive as a free people? My plan will end American involvement in a way that would provide that chance.’11
Kissinger left Beijing confidently expecting that Chou was going to put some pressure on the North Vietnamese to come to terms with the Americans. In fact, shipments of weapons from China to North Vietnam were already going up sharply (as North Vietnam later said, ‘to cover up their betrayal and to appease the Vietnamese people’s indignation’). Chou made his trip to Hanoi right after Kissinger left, to brief the North Vietnamese and to reassure them that China’s commitment to their struggle was as strong as ever. At some point during the year, he also told a leading North Vietnamese Communist that China intended to press the Americans to withdraw their forces completely and by a fixed date. ‘If they do not comply we will fight hard.’ If Nixon was not sincere in saying that he wanted to get out of Vietnam, China would be able to expose his ‘deceptive schemes’.12
China found itself in an awkward position. It could not, for the sake of its revolutionary credentials, openly abandon North Vietnam but it was finding its small, recalcitrant ally an increasing liability. In December 1971, Chou spoke relatively frankly to a Chinese Communist Party meeting. Of course, he said, China remained committed to supporting Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in their struggle against American imperialism. ‘But, for the present, it is not appropriate to praise Vietnam excessively; we should treat her as we do the other two nations.’ In the end, the nations of Indochina had to settle their own issues. North Vietnam was nervous about Nixon’s visit, Chou went on, even though the Chinese had explained why it was necessary. ‘If she cannot figure it out for the moment, just let her watch the development of the truth.’13
Nixon in China Page 32