Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  A month after Mao’s death, his chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, and his allies in the armed forces made their move. Jiang Qing and her fellow radicals in the Gang of Four, along with many of their followers, were arrested. Gradually some of the more radical policies of the Cultural Revolution were put aside and China began to wake slowly out of its nightmare. Experienced officials and managers were brought back from exile; universities started to reopen; and official propaganda proclaimed that China must modernize itself. Deng Xiaoping returned from the south and gradually made himself the most powerful man in China. Hua was no match for him and by 1980 he had been forced on to the sidelines as Deng, who preferred to remain in the background, put his own men into office. The pace of change quickened; new economic zones were set up to encourage foreign investment; farmers were allowed to keep a greater share of what they produced; workers were given cash incentives to work harder; and an increasing amount of private enterprise was permitted, indeed encouraged. The government now had a new slogan: ‘To Get Rich Is Glorious’. Over the next two decades, China’s gross domestic product grew at almost 10 per cent per year, an extraordinary figure.

  In 1980, as well, the Gang of Four were finally brought to trial. They were charged and convicted, conveniently for everyone involved, with all the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. Jiang Qing was portrayed as a demon, an unwomanly woman and modern-day empress who had plotted to murder her own husband and seize power. Even her favourite American movie, Gone with the Wind, was hauled in as evidence to show that, like Scarlett O’Hara, she was out to bring men under her sway. Although Jiang was sentenced to death, the sentence was suspended and she was locked away in China’s elite prison north of Beijing where, so it is said, she knitted sweaters and embroidered dolls, none of which could be sold because she always put her name on them. There are stories that she wrote her memoirs but that Deng, who feared what she could tell, ordered them destroyed. In 1991, she died, perhaps of cancer of the throat. The official news agency reported that she had hanged herself with the belt of her trousers. Like much about Jiang, we will probably never know the truth. Her body was cremated and the ashes have disappeared.

  Qiao Guanhua’s career came to an unhappy end in 1976 when he was dismissed in the purges that followed Mao’s death. Although he had tried desperately to steer between the factions which tore the foreign ministry apart, he was accused both of making rightist mistakes and of taking part in the Gang of Four’s conspiracies. He and his wife, Zhang Hanzhi, were held under arrest for the next two years and subjected to public meetings where they were criticized and manhandled. Qiao, who had tuberculosis, became increasingly feeble. As Deng began to consolidate his power, he was able to intervene and make sure that Qiao received medical treatment. In 1982, the last of the charges against Qiao were withdrawn. He died in 1983. His wife, who still lives in Beijing, refused to have him buried in the special plot for high-ranking ministers and his ashes are in the beautiful city of Suzhou in a tomb flanked by two pine trees from Geneva, a city where he had once been happy. Their daughter went to Vassar and edits a magazine in China devoted to profiles of celebrities and filled with advertisements for luxury goods.19

  Henry Kissinger survived the turmoil of the Nixon White House and stayed on as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State. Ford, who trusted and admired him, gave him a free hand to run American foreign policy. In 1976, with the election of Jimmy Carter to the presidency, Kissinger found himself out of a job. He confidently expected that Harvard University would invite him back as a distinguished professor; when it only offered him his old post back, he turned it down with disdain and some bitterness. Life provided many compensations, though: an apartment in New York with his second wife, Nancy; a country house in Connecticut; a circle of famous and powerful friends; well-paid consultancies for banks and television networks; and an enduring reputation as one of the United States’ most brilliant and fascinating men. He continued to write: articles, columns, three large volumes of memoirs and several books on international relations. When there were international crises, the press inevitably came calling; his comments were incisive, clear and amusing, but, although he continued to hope that he would be called back to office, especially when Ronald Reagan became President in 1980, the call never came. He increasingly devoted his time to his work as a high-level consultant. Kissinger and Associates, which still flourishes in New York, provides the sort of analysis and contacts with governments around the world for which companies are willing to pay handsomely. As China opened up as a field for trade and investment, Kissinger was much in demand to help get American business in the door. He was able to provide introductions to virtually every important official, including Deng himself.

  He has been criticized for blurring the roles of commentator and consultant, for, to take one example, advocating restraint on the part of the American government in its reaction to the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989 at a time when he had just established a company with a group of big American corporations to look for investments in China. He remains, as he has been for much of his life, a controversial figure who is widely admired and widely condemned. What both his defenders and his critics agree on is that he has never been dull.20

  Richard Nixon left the White House in disgrace in 1974. In his resignation speech, as Kissinger put it, he admitted his mistakes but not his guilt. He reminded his audience of his efforts to make the world a safer and more stable place. ‘This, more than anything, is what I hope will be my legacy to you, to our country, as I leave the presidency.’ A month later, President Ford granted him a blanket pardon for anything he might have done. Unlike Qiao, Nixon lived long enough to see his reputation at least partly restored. He worked hard at it. He wrote his memoirs; they deal with Watergate but spend much more time on the great achievements of his presidency, including of course the opening to China. He continued to visit China and its leaders as a private citizen, and the Chinese, who regarded Watergate as a trivial domestic matter, always welcomed him as an honoured guest. He gradually started to give speeches and interviews again. He wrote books and articles, on foreign affairs or about the world leaders he had known. His last book, Beyond Peace, published shortly before his death, gave the United States advice on how to conduct itself in the post-Cold War world. Jimmy Carter consulted him; so did Presidents Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton. In 1986, Newsweek ran a cover story: ‘He’s Back: The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon’.21

  In 1976, Pat Nixon suffered a stroke but did not tell anyone until Nixon found her struggling to make breakfast. She kept going with the strong sense of duty that had carried her through her life and died in 1993. When Nixon himself died in a New York hospital a year later, President Clinton proclaimed a national day of mourning. Nixon’s coffin was carried from New York to California by the same Air Force One that had first taken him to China all those years before, and his funeral was organized by Ron Walker, the advance man for that momentous trip. He was buried beside Pat Nixon at the Richard M. Nixon Memorial Library near where he had grown up in Yorba Linda. As all the living former presidents, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush senior, sat with their wives in the front row, Clinton asked Americans to forgive Nixon. ‘May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.’ An emotional Kissinger delivered the eulogy. He admitted Nixon’s faults but praised him for his outstanding conduct of foreign policy. Nixon had never given up. ‘In his solitude he envisaged a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen historic friendships, and give new hope to mankind.’22

  To the end, Nixon regarded the opening to China as one of his greatest achievements, perhaps the greatest. As he said on his last trip to China in 1993, ‘I will be known historically for two things. Watergate and the opening to China... I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but Watergate, that silly, silly thing, is going to rank up there historically with what I did here.’ He hoped that his initiative had brought the United States and China int
o a working relationship which would benefit both and bring stability to Asia.23

  Nixon and Kissinger both witnessed the full normalization of relations in the late 1970s, from the sidelines. By then, changes in China and the United States made it possible for the two countries to take another step forward in their relationship. Both were concerned about the Soviet Union, which was aggressively expanding its military and its influence. China was stirring out of the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and Deng was firmly in control. The seeds of China’s extraordinary development over the next two decades had been planted. Learning from the outside world, making money, individual initiative – all were not only permissible but encouraged. In 1977, when the new Democrat administration under Jimmy Carter took office, determined to push ahead on normalization, it found a receptive audience in Beijing. The two sides agreed to establish full diplomatic relations. The United States cut its formal ties with Taiwan, withdrew the last of its troops and gave notice that the defence treaty would be terminated. In January 1979, Deng was welcomed enthusiastically in the United States. American television audiences were charmed when he wore a cowboy hat in Texas and kissed little children. The White House gave him a twenty-one-gun salute and the band at the Kennedy Center played ‘Getting to Know You’.24

  Nixon also was around to witness the growing strains in the relationship between China and the United States in the late 1980s. Ever since they first made contact, the two countries had struggled to sustain relations. Perhaps they are bound to be rivals, for each in its own way aspires to be a model for others. Each has a tendency to think it is right, that it is more moral than other nations. They have come to know each other well but they do not always understand each other. The Americans hope that the Chinese are becoming more like them; repeatedly they have been disappointed. The Chinese are repeatedly surprised by and suspicious of American concerns for democracy and human rights. American protests, notably after Chinese authorities brutally put down the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, strike them as interference on a par with that of the Western imperialists during the century of humiliation.

  In April 1993, two decades after he had first been there, Nixon went back to Hangzhou. ‘The growth of this place’, he told his companions, ‘is really unbelievable. And you know, I like to think that I had something to do with it.’ Yet China’s increasing prosperity has brought its own difficulties and caused tensions. American consumers love the prices of goods made in China; American labour and some American businesses do not. The United States’ trade deficit with China grew sharply in the new century; in 2005 alone it neared $200 billion. As China’s economy continues to expand rapidly, the Chinese government is moving to secure sources of raw materials, especially oil, in parts of Africa and Central Asia which the United States has till now considered its own. It is not just China’s growing economic power that worries Americans. Chinese firms, many of them close to the military, are enthusiastic exporters, often to some of the most troubled parts of the world, of weapons, from handguns to missiles. And, according to official figures, China’s defence budget has increased at least 10 per cent every year since the mid-1990s. In Washington, military planners have adopted what they describe as a long-range ‘hedging strategy’ to prepare for the eventuality that there might, one day, be a conflict between the United States and China. The United States has quietly been strengthening its forces in the Pacific and encouraging Japan to enhance its military establishment. The Soviet Union has gone but perhaps, so the pessimists think, there is a new Cold War in the making between the United States and China.25

  Taiwan of course remains the major unsettled issue between the United States and China. It is neither independent nor a part of China. The Americans have never quite been able to give up their interest in it; the formal links have gone but the unofficial ones remain strong, whether through trade or personal contact or, from time to time, the sale of American military equipment. The Chinese have found this irritating and still maintain that Taiwan must be reunited with the Motherland. When leaders of Taiwan’s lively independence movement visit the United States, the Chinese government reacts angrily. When the presidential election in 2004 brought a proindependence candidate into office, the Chinese government responded with solemn warnings. Today in Taiwan there is talk of a compromise that will fudge reality, just as it has been fudged since 1972. Why not a thirty- to fifty-year ‘interim agreement’ under which Taiwan would give up on formal independence and China would renounce the use of force? The danger with such an ingenious solution is that it leaves the door open for trouble. What if hardline nationalists in China grow impatient with the lack of clarity about whether Taiwan belongs to China? There have already been plenty of warning shots: Chinese submarines in waters claimed by Taiwan, missile tests, planes in Taiwan airspace. What if Japan, whose own relations with China are troubled, decides that Taiwan must be defended? And what choices then will the United States face?

  The present troubles between China and the United States tempt us to look backwards and wonder what mistakes might have been made in the past. It was probably a mistake for the United States to back the Guomindang for as long as it did, but, on the other hand, the risks of abandoning a longstanding ally were also great. It was a mistake on Mao’s part that his new Communist regime in China threw in its lot with the Soviet Union and perhaps missed the chance of coming to an accommodation with the United States in 1949. There is always the question, though, of how ready the Americans would have been to talk to a new Communist regime in those tense early days of the Cold War. It is true that they were able to come to an accommodation with Tito’s Yugoslavia but only after it was clear that he had broken with the Soviet Union. It is a pity that the Cold War and Korea and then Vietnam intervened to keep China and the United States apart for so long.

  The breakthrough of the 1970s, most would agree now, was not only overdue; it was good for both countries and their new relationship had great potential, which still remains, to act as a stabilizing force in world politics. It is possible, though, to ask whether the United States was too eager and whether it gave away too much. Should, for example, Nixon have visited China first, without knowing whether he would see Mao, and without a firm agreement on the Shanghai communiqué? Should the Americans have handed over quite so much confidential material about the Soviets and, moreover, given the impression that the United States was eager to have an alliance with China against the Soviet Union?

  American behaviour raised among the Chinese expectations which could not always be met. The China of the 1970s was both weak and apprehensive about its place in the world. The Americans may have unwittingly done more than merely reassure the Chinese leadership; they may have fed into the old Chinese belief that China was at the centre of the world. Did Kissinger have to be quite so deferential, even at times obsequious? The decision to use Chinese interpreters in his own and Nixon’s conversations with the Chinese may have been politic, a gesture of reassurance. Was it necessary to explain away the presence of an American interpreter in the meetings? ‘We will tell the press’, Kissinger warned Chou, ‘we have Mr Holdridge there to check on your interpreter. I apologize to your interpreter. It is only so our people won’t say we put ourselves at your mercy – which we are doing.’ When relations got on to a more normal footing, as they were bound to after those first euphoric moments in 1972, the Chinese were surprised when the Americans treated them as merely one power among several, suspicious when the White House and the State Department appeared to be following different policies, and they were aggrieved when the United States was not able to live up to its promises. Nixon and Kissinger went too far, for example, in making assurances to China about withdrawing American forces from Taiwan, which they were not in the end able to do.26

  For Nixon and the Americans, the visit was a bold and dramatic move which placed Nixon himself in the centre of great events and the United States as the pivotal power between China and the Soviet Union. The
China card did not produce as much as the Americans hoped for, but cards, particularly if they have a will of their own, usually do not. For a time the Soviet Union was more amenable in its negotiations with the United States, and unease about China certainly played a part in that. The North Vietnamese did not stop fighting and, in the end, gave way very little in the Paris negotiations to conclude the war. China’s new relationship with the United States did, however, help to deepen the suspicion with which the Vietnamese regarded the Chinese and paved the way for the later war between China and a newly reunited Vietnam.

  For the Chinese, there were also losses and gains as a result of the Nixon visit. They agreed to wait on Taiwan and they are still waiting. On the other hand, the visit was an acknowledgement of China’s importance in the world and marked the end to the isolation of the 1960s. Although the legacy of the Cultural Revolution was to lie heavily on China until Mao’s death, the beginnings of the reawakening and revitalization of China after 1976 lie in this period.

  We now take for granted that, whatever the ups and downs between China and the United States, there was bound to be a relationship, that the gap between 1949 and 1971 was an aberration which could not last. Yet we should remember that the long chill between the United States and Cuba has lasted for more than four decades and that with Iran for nearly three. Nixon’s visit occurred because both sides came to the conclusion at the same time that it was a good idea. Yet it took individuals, four men in this case, to make it happen. Nixon and Mao, Kissinger and Chou. Two men who for all their faults possessed the necessary vision and determination and two men who had the talent, the patience and the skill to make the vision reality. In one of their conversations, Chou told Kissinger of an old Chinese proverb: ‘The helmsman who knows how to guide the boat will guide it well through the waves. Otherwise he will be submerged by the waves. A far-sighted man will know how to till the helm.’ Or as Mr Spock will say aboard his spaceship many centuries from now, there is an old Vulcan proverb, ‘Only Nixon can go to China.’27