Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  Nixon and Kissinger made a half-hearted effort to put things right with the Japanese. In September, they flew to Anchorage to meet Emperor Hirohito when his plane refuelled on the way from Japan to Europe. Nixon described their meeting as an historic event, ‘a spiritual bridge spanning East and West’. To Chou a month later, Kissinger was dismissive: ‘Not a very profound conversation, Mr Prime Minister.’ The Americans also invited Sato to Washington for a summit in January 1972. In his private conversation with Nixon and Kissinger, Sato was polite but critical. Japan was rather concerned about Nixon’s visit to China. Kissinger said that he had been very firm with the Chinese, who could be under no illusions but that the Americans intended to stand by their commitments to their friends. ‘We have made no deal,’ Nixon interjected. The announcement of Kissinger’s trip, Sato went on, had come as a great shock to the Japanese people, who thought, wrongly of course, that it had been arranged behind Japan’s back. Nixon was unapologetic; the important thing, in his view, was that on policy issues their two nations must consult fully. The Japanese, he noted, appeared to be moving quickly to establish full relations with the People’s Republic of China. ‘If Japan were to crawl, or to run, to Peking,’ Nixon warned, ‘its bargaining position would evaporate.’ He was worried not so much that Japan would give away too much to get full diplomatic relations with China as that this would happen before the United States could do the same. In an election year, he did not want allies or Democrats taking the limelight.14

  Sato left the United States pessimistic over the future of the Japanese–American relationship. His own political position had been irretrievably undermined by the series of shokkus. He resigned in the summer of 1972 and was replaced by Tanaka Kakuei, who moved rapidly to open up Japan’s own relations with the People’s Republic of China. Japan’s relationship with the United States remained highly important, but as a senior official had said at the end of 1971, ‘It will be necessary for us to recognize, once again, that Japan is an Asian nation’.15

  If Japan felt tremors from the shift in American policy, Taiwan was hit by an earthquake. After Truman had guaranteed Taiwan’s defence, its Guomindang rulers had confidently but unwisely assumed that the United States was their friend and protector in perpetuity. They had not noticed that a new generation of Americans, less affected by the early Cold War and the battle for Korea, was moving into influential positions in government, the media and the academic world. They had counted, too, on the ability of the China lobby to keep American governments in line. They had failed to see that it was slowly fading away, although they should perhaps have taken notice when its chief organizer abruptly resigned in 1969 and moved to London to take up producing plays, and when the New York Times referred to the ‘once powerful China Lobby’. The Guomindang government did little to prepare its own citizens for the possibility that American allegiances might one day shift. An old and stubborn Chiang kept tight control on the media and refused to allow any consideration of such issues as dual membership for both his government and that of the mainland in the United Nations. ‘There is no room for patriots and traitors to live together.’16

  As the signs of a major shift in American policy – from Nixon’s first use of the term ‘People’s Republic’ to ping-pong diplomacy – multiplied, the leadership in Taiwan drifted glumly along in a state of indecision. When Nixon made his announcement in the summer of 1971 that Kissinger had secretly visited Beijing, the first reaction in the capital, Taipei, was ‘utter disbelief. To James Shen, the Taiwanese ambassador in Washington, Kissinger was reassuring: in his conversations with Chou, he had stressed that the United States had no intention of turning its back on its loyal ally and friend. He had not made any secret deals with the Chinese over Taiwan. Just before he left on his second trip, Kissinger saw Shen again. He had no intention, he said, of bringing up the issue of Taiwan but it was possible that Chou might. In any case, Nixon was going to make completely clear that the American relationship with Taiwan was ‘nonnegotiable’. He himself, Kissinger went on, with his many friends in Taiwan, found going to China ‘exceedingly painful’; he had no choice, however, but to accept the assignment. Was this, the ambassador wondered, sincere or a case of crocodile tears?

  In October, shortly before Kissinger’s second trip to China, Nixon sent Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, to Taipei to talk to Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang sat like a stone, looking straight ahead. Reagan, who was a strong supporter of Taiwan, later said that he regretted helping Nixon out. Shortly after Reagan’s visit, Taiwan was expelled from the United Nations. To add to Taiwan’s humiliation, a number of countries indicated that they were going to switch their recognition to the People’s Republic of China. Japan, Taiwan’s prominent supporter and most important trading partner, hinted that it was starting negotiations with Beijing. For many Taiwanese, it was not just their status but their new-found prosperity which was threatened.17

  From the Taiwanese perspective, there were only a few bright spots in 1971. The United States finally agreed to sell Taiwan’s navy two submarines and to hold joint military training exercises, which had been in abeyance since 1968. In August, the USS Oklahoma City, flagship of the Seventh Fleet, visited a Taiwanese port. The authorities organized an enthusiastic welcome with singers, acrobats and dancers. Another event which occurred that month may have done even more to boost local morale. The Tainan Giants won the Little League World Series in baseball. Two-thirds of Taiwan’s fourteen million inhabitants watched the games on television.18

  Wild rumours came out of Taiwan. On his October visit, Kissinger, who had been alerted by American intelligence, passed on a warning to Chou that the Guomindang might use its American-made aircraft to cause trouble. ‘We have a report that the Chinese Nationalists on the Taiwan General Staff are considering flying an R-104 reconnaissance aircraft over the mainland in order to disrupt our policy and our talks.’ The American government was trying to put a stop to it. Such planes often came to harass them, Chou said, but the Chinese would assume that anything taking off from Taiwan was being flown by Guomindang pilots. As Nixon prepared to make his trip to China, the Chinese informed the Americans of reports that Chiang Kai-shek would use a plane painted with People’s Republic markings to try to shoot down Air Force One. Chiang’s more moderate son, Chiang Ching-kuo, promised that there would be no unusual incidents or manoeuvres in the Strait during Nixon’s visit.19

  The Taiwanese watched the Haldeman show in Beijing with gloomy fascination. (Some remained happily unaware: ‘Oh, is that near Taipei?’ asked a farmer’s wife.) The press in Taiwan said that people all around the Pacific no longer trusted the United States as an ally. Nixon, so Shen thought, had made a great mistake in going to China at all. And why was Nixon so humble when he met Mao? He might as well have been on his knees doing the kow-tow to an emperor. The scene at the opening banquet, when Nixon went round the tables toasting everyone indiscriminately, was, in Shen’s view, particularly demeaning. ‘This was something no Oriental guest of honour with any sense of personal dignity would have done.’ Shortly after Nixon’s visit concluded, the Taiwanese government issued a defiant statement reaffirming its intention to overthrow the illegitimate regime on the mainland. It might also look elsewhere for new friends. The Taiwanese Foreign Minister said he would not rule out ‘shaking hands with the devil’. Rumours went around Taipei that the Soviets might lease one of Taiwan’s outlying islands as a naval base.20

  On the whole, the reaction of the government was less violent than it might have been. Most ordinary Taiwanese were mainly confused and uneasy about what the future held – partly, said an American diplomat, because their own government had done so little to prepare them for this moment. Their reaction to the Nixon visit, the Australian ambassador in Taipei reported, was one of ‘essential helplessness in the face of events happening or to happen elsewhere’. Even the supporters of Taiwan’s independence as a separate country shared the growing feeling of isolation.21 Were they, as the American di
plomat put it, ‘an annoying fragment complicating the implementation of a grand American strategy devised in Washington’?

  19

  The Shanghai Communiqué

  ON SATURDAY, 26 FEBRUARY 1972, the American party prepared to leave Beijing for the last stage of the visit. Nixon’s mood had not improved since the banquet the night before. As he sat in the airport waiting room, Chou politely called his attention to various pictures of China on the walls. Nixon tried to ignore him but was eventually forced to look about him. His smile grew strained, then disappeared. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he snapped. If the Chinese Prime Minister understood, he remained his usual imperturbable self.1

  They were all flying together in a Chinese plane (this had caused great concern to the Secret Service) to Hangzhou, just south of Shanghai. The Chinese had insisted on putting this, one of China’s most beautiful cities, on the itinerary. For its tree-covered hills and, above all, its West Lake, with its bridges, pavilions and temples, Hangzhou had been a favourite subject of China’s writers and artists for centuries. Mao spent much time at his villa by the lake, especially during the winter months; he had also planned much of the Cultural Revolution there. It was possible, or so the Americans hoped, that he might be available there for a second meeting with Nixon. It would give the visit even more significance; it would also appease Rogers, who was deeply aggrieved that he had been cut out of the one meeting in Beijing. Kissinger raised the matter with Chou and Qiao in their private talks but was told that the Chairman’s bronchitis made it difficult. There was no second meeting.2

  By way of compensation, the two sides held a second plenary session at the Beijing airport. The Chinese had originally scheduled fifteen minutes, but Nixon had asked that the meeting be stretched out to half an hour: ‘It would make some of our people who have not had a chance to sit in on the private sessions feel that they have a part to play, too.’ Nixon and Chou talked blandly about how good their talks had been. There were, of course, still differences between them but they had made a good start on finding common ground. Nixon also took the opportunity to warn the Chinese, yet again, not to believe what the American press or American politicians said.

  Perhaps, said Chou, they should invite their foreign ministers to report on their own discussions. That, said Kissinger sardonically in his memoirs, did not take long. Rogers led off; his talks with Ji, the Chinese Foreign Minister, had been frank and friendly. And useful in clearing up misunderstandings. For example, when the Chinese had been concerned that they might need to be fingerprinted for visas to the United States, he had been able to make one quick phone call to Washington and reassure them that the procedure was no longer required. ‘That’s a very serious and earnest attitude,’ Chou commented. No mention was made of the communiqué, even though its wording had finally, or so Nixon and Kissinger confidently thought, been settled the night before with the Chinese. He would show it to Rogers only in confidence, Kissinger assured Qiao, and then only when they reached Hangzhou.3

  In his memoirs, Nixon made only a brief mention of any problems over the communiqué. Both sides, as already agreed, stated their positions over Taiwan, the Chinese at first rather belligerently, in Nixon’s opinion. ‘Thanks largely to Kissinger’s negotiating skill and Chou’s common sense, the Chinese finally agreed to sufficiently modified language.’ In his own memoirs, Kissinger devoted considerably more space to what he admitted were delicate and tricky negotiations. The transcripts of his talks, mainly with Qiao but occasionally with Chou present as well, show just how difficult they were.4

  Qiao, who was a trusted colleague of Chou’s, was, like his superior, clever, tough and, when he chose, charming. Like Chou, he came from an upper-class background and had studied and lived abroad, in Japan and then in Germany where he had done a doctorate in philosophy. He had first worked for Chou during the civil war and had joined the Foreign Ministry after the Communists took power. Like Chou, Qiao was a skilled negotiator who had learned his craft in the negotiations at the end of the Korean War. More recently, he had headed the Chinese team negotiating with the Soviets after the confrontations of 1969. Kissinger found Qiao a worthy opponent, and his subordinate, Zhang Wenjin, a stubborn nuisance with a fondness for splitting hairs. Kissinger’s own assistants, Winston Lord and John Holdridge, from the State Department, rarely intervened in the discussions. The Americans had no inkling of the strains the men on the other side were under.

  In 1967, as the Cultural Revolution was getting into full swing, Zhang, who was then ambassador in Pakistan, had been summoned back to Beijing along with many other diplomats. Radicals had seized him at the airport and clapped a dunce’s cap on his head. They had then held him in the foreign ministry where he had been forced to kneel for hours on a wooden bench, holding his leather shoes, signs of his bourgeois failings, above his head. As a protégé of Chou’s, Qiao had also been caught up in the disputes in the Foreign Ministry. His enemies had accused him of being a rightist, an all-purpose but damning label. (Later on, after Mao’s death, he faced the completely different charge of being part of the Gang of Four.) His personal life was also complicated; his wife had died suddenly in 1970 and a year later he had fallen in love with a much younger woman in the Foreign Ministry. Zhang Hanzhi, who was extremely pretty and charming, was the daughter of an old friend of Mao’s and something of a favourite of the Chairman’s. She had once tried to teach him English and now worked as an interpreter for Chou. There was much gossip about her relationship with Qiao and it was not until the end of 1973 that they were permitted to marry. Not surprisingly, given the turmoil in his political and private lives, Qiao suffered from fits of depression and melancholy.5

  While most of the communiqué had been settled on Kissinger’s and Haig’s earlier trips, three issues still remained: trade and exchanges, the recent conflict between India and Pakistan, and Taiwan. While the communiqué was unusual in that both sides were going to state their respective positions where they disagreed, they still had to settle on the actual wording and set out those areas where in fact they did agree. In an intense series of meetings, in the intervals either in the morning or late at night when their presence was not required at the Nixon–Chou meetings or at social events, Kissinger and Qiao went over the communiqué line by line. They argued over words and grammar. Did ‘should’ imply a moral obligation, for example? Could Nixon endorse a common statement that talked about revolution in the world? (In this case, they agreed to refer merely to ‘important changes and great upheavals’.) Should the American names listed as participants in the talks have middle initials? That one had to be referred to Nixon himself, who ruled against initials.

  Behind the quibbles lay real and important issues. Two great powers were taking a public stand on significant questions where they differed but also demonstrating that they had found some common ground. The words they used in the communiqué were going to be read and studied – in Moscow, Hanoi, Tokyo, in capital cities worldwide. And the commitments, to work on normalizing relations between China and the United States, while not binding, would be hard to break once made public. The transcripts of Kissinger and Qiao’s talks show masters of their craft at work. They assure each other that they do not want to be tricky. They swear that they are being completely frank with each other. They do much thinking aloud. It was a useful device, said Kissinger, because both sides could advance positions without being committed to them. At times they flatter each other shamelessly. ‘Our efficiency’, sighed Qiao, ‘is not as high as yours.’ The Chinese, said Kissinger, were so much more subtle than most Americans.6

  On South Asia, one of the outstanding issues, the Americans wanted to say simply that the peoples of South Asia had the right to determine their own future without the threat of force and without outside interference, while the Chinese wanted to stress that India must obey the United Nations’ resolutions and withdraw its forces from Pakistan’s territory in Kashmir. After a brief discussion, both sides agreed on what was an u
nconventional way to have a joint communiqué: while there would be common statements, each would also have a separate section with its own wording.

  The wording on trade and exchanges was also relatively easy to settle and here the two sides were able to agree that it was desirable to expand the contacts and understanding between their two peoples, whether through cultural and academic exchanges or through sport. The Chinese were nervous about allowing foreigners into China and not particularly interested in trade or tourism, but Kissinger was reassuring. The words in the communiqué would be window-dressing: ‘We both know that basically they don’t mean anything’. He was obliged by ‘sentimental’ public pressure back home to push for more contacts between their two countries. ‘The maximum amount of bilateral trade possible between us, even if we make great efforts, is infinitesimal in terms of our total economy. And the exchanges, while they are important, will not change objective realities.’ The Chinese were hardened revolutionaries; ‘pedants’ from American universities were not going to make any impression on them. These are interesting predictions viewed from our vantage point today: now Wal-Mart’s imports from China amount to some $18 billion a year and place that one company ahead of Canada, Russia and Australia as a trading partner with the People’s Republic; and almost 900,000 Americans a year now visit China and many of China’s new leaders hold degrees from American universities.7