Nixon and Mao
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If every message back and forth, each step in the negotiations to arrange Kissinger’s secret visit and then Nixon’s, had been conducted publicly, the Americans would have found themselves with a very public controversy. As Alexander Haig put it, “The sensitivity of opening up a dialogue with the People’s Republic of China could not be overestimated and was very likely to have caused such a brouhaha in our legislature that the whole initiative could have been squashed before it was even born.”2 And American allies such as Japan and, of course, Taiwan would have certainly made their views known. The Chinese Communists, who had little understanding of how an open society worked, would have concluded that the American government was not sincere in wanting an opening and would have pulled back.
It is true that Nixon and Kissinger were able to take advantage of a powerful current that was already flowing in favor of a Sino-American relationship, but without their skillful and, yes, secretive handling of the opening, it might well not have happened. Both men had a natural bent toward secrecy, which some of their colleagues have characterized as obsessive, and it did not always serve them well when they failed to keep their own experts informed or when, in Nixon’s case, he tried to cover up the Watergate break-in. While secrecy is not always necessary in human affairs, in negotiations of this delicacy, with such huge potential for misunderstandings, it was essential. Nixon and Kissinger claimed, perhaps unfairly, that the State Department always leaked, but they were probably right to keep knowledge of their first contacts with China restricted to a very small number. As it was, a New York Times correspondent managed to figure out that something was up in the fall of 1970 merely by picking up hints on the diplomatic circuit.
In later years both Nixon and Kissinger also made much of their own courage and determination in creating the opening to China in defiance of a timid bureaucracy and the enormously powerful pro-Taiwan China lobby, whose tentacles stretched everywhere, into Congress and throughout the media. In an interview he did in 1998, Kissinger claimed that the State Department thought that any rapprochement with the People’s Republic was “extremely dangerous.”3 Soviet specialists warned of the dire effects on Soviet-American relations if the United States tried to play at triangular diplomacy. “Of course,” wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, “we envisaged nothing so crude as ‘using’ the People’s Republic against the Soviet Union.”4 The bureaucracy, claimed Kissinger, not only leaked like a sieve but refused to accept Nixon as its legitimate leader: “Here was a President who didn’t follow the New York Times editorial direction. And that was considered against nature.”5
Although he constantly complained about liberal eggheads, Nixon could count on considerable support from the academic community, and from within the State Department. “We always,” said Holdridge, who was in the State Department in the 1950s and 1960s, “had this feeling in the back of our minds—through the Geneva talks, the ambassadorial-level talks, and in various ways—that we didn’t want to foreclose any opportunities which might open in the future. We wanted some kind of a relationship.”6 By 1968, the old hard-liners who had shaped policy toward China had pretty much retired. The younger generation felt, as one of them said, that “we should be moving in the direction of rapprochement with Peking.”7
In the months before Nixon took office, both China and the United States continued, as they had done over the years, to send out the equivalent of messages in bottles, and sometimes an answer came back. The Voice of America had moderated the language it used in its Chinese broadcasts directed at the People’s Republic; so Beiping, the Guomindang’s preferred name, became Beijing, which the Communists always used. Although the Americans did not know it until later, this change in language was remarked upon in China, where there was much speculation about what it meant.8 Just after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the State Department sent a message to the Chinese suggesting that both sides resume the talks that had gone on between the American and Chinese ambassadors in Warsaw since the mid-1950s. The Chinese, who were alarmed by the Soviet interference in the affairs of a fellow Communist state, agreed with unusual speed.
John Holdridge, who was in China as part of the Nixon trip, remembered the excitement in Washington, especially when the Chinese reply said, “It has always been the policy of the People’s Republic of China to maintain friendly relations with all states, regardless of social systems, on the basis of the five principles of peaceful coexistence.” The Five Principles—Chou had mentioned them in his toast at Nixon’s welcoming banquet—had been sacrosanct in Chinese foreign relations ever since Chou had brought them up with Prime Minister Nehru of India in the early 1950s.
Although they had not prevented India and China from going to war some years later, they expressed high-minded sentiments about equality, nonaggression, mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, and, curiously, peaceful coexistence, the phrase that had so infuriated the Chinese when Khrushchev used it about Soviet relations with the United States. “Boy,” said Holdridge, “bells bonged all over.”9
Both sides agreed that they would restart the Warsaw talks. The first of the new round was scheduled for February 20, 1969, but before this could take place, a Chinese diplomat jumped out of a window of his embassy in The Hague and asked for, and was granted, asylum in the United States. (He turned out to be mentally disturbed and proved to be no use to the Americans.)10 The Chinese immediately accused the CIA of arranging to abduct him. “All this once again,” said their note, “reveals the vicious features of the new U.S. Government which has inherited the mantle of the preceding U.S. Governments in flagrantly making itself the enemy of the Chinese people.”11 The meeting was postponed indefinitely. The Americans did not move at once to reopen contacts with the People’s Republic. And it is doubtful, given their continued preoccupation with the Cultural Revolution and their long-standing suspicions of the Americans, that the Chinese would have responded. Mao’s change of heart toward the United States, furthermore, did not take place until the autumn, after the fighting with the Soviet Union.
Throughout the year, nevertheless, the Americans sent out strong hints that the United States hoped to mend fences with the People’s Republic. In a major foreign policy speech in New York that spring, William Rogers declared, “We shall take initiatives to reestablish more normal relations with Communist China and we shall remain responsive to any indications of less hostile attitudes from their side.”12 Nixon had ordered an end to the provocative sweeps by high-speed U.S. Navy patrol boats near the coast of China in the Taiwan Straits during his first month in office, and that fall he ended the regular patrols through the straits by the Seventh Fleet. Although his press conference in Guam in late July 1969 referred to the People’s Republic of China as having a “very belligerent” foreign policy, he also announced, in what became the Nixon Doctrine, that the United States was going to learn from its mistakes in Vietnam and not get militarily involved in supporting its allies.
In July, Kissinger’s revamped National Security Council recommended that the United States should take steps to improve the relationship with China without waiting for any Chinese response. The administration eased up its restrictions on trade and travel between the United States and China. American passport holders from certain professions—scholars and doctors, for example—were now allowed to travel to China and bring whatever they bought there back to the United States. (At first only a handful of Americans were able to take advantage of this.) American companies would no longer get into trouble if their foreign subsidiaries sold goods to China. Small changes perhaps, but they signaled that a major rethinking of American foreign policy was under way.
The Americans also used roundabout channels to send a quiet message to the Chinese. American diplomats suggested to the Poles, the Cambodians, and the French that they let Beijing know that the United States wanted to start talking again with a view to improving relations.13 In Paris, the American mi
litary attaché was told to stand by for a visit—which never came—by Donald Rumsfeld, in those days a minor member of the administration, who would be bringing a letter for the Chinese.14 On the plane carrying him from Guam on his Asian tour, Nixon ordered Holdridge to draft a letter with the same message to the People’s Republic. During a brief stay in Pakistan, which had cordial relations with China, Nixon urged General Yahya Khan to be his intermediary with the Chinese. He may have asked the same of another dictator, President Nicolae Ceauescu of Romania, whom he visited next.15 In late August, the Americans tried to reactivate their Warsaw contacts. When American diplomats called on the Chinese embassy, they were received cordially, but the Chinese declined to discuss resuming the talks. (The Chinese ambassador himself was back in China for reeducation.)16
Nixon, who liked leaks when they were his own, was also working quietly at home to prepare the way for a shift in American policy toward China. At the beginning of February, he directed the NSC to undertake a study of current U.S. policies toward both Chinas, of possible Communist Chinese intentions in Asia, and “alternative U.S. approaches on China and their costs and risks.”17 He also told Kissinger to let it be known quietly in government and political circles that the administration was exploring the possibilities of a rapprochement with China. “I would continue to plant this idea,” he said.18 Nixon himself planted it with key figures such as Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, when he told him that the time had come to involve China in “global responsibility.”19 Later that June, Mansfield used Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia to contact Chou En-lai to ask whether he could visit China, a move the Chinese noted with interest although they did not send a reply.20
That fall Nixon suggested to Kissinger that he bring up the possibility of a “subtle” American move toward China with two old hard-liners, Walter Judd, a congressman from Minnesota, and Senator Karl Mundt.21 Where the China lobby, that collection of Cold Warriors who steadfastly opposed recognition of the People’s Republic, had once thrown its weight about to effect, it had run out of steam by the late 1960s. Many of its initial supporters, such as Henry Luce, had disappeared from the scene; others, like Nixon himself, were thinking that it was time to move on. American public opinion, always difficult to gauge, seemed torn between fear and suspicion of Red China and a willingness to accept its membership of the United Nations. By the late 1960s, academics were increasingly calling for opening up contacts with their counterparts in China. Perhaps more importantly, people in business were calling for trade relations.22
For most of Nixon’s first year in office, the People’s Republic of China showed no signs of being aware that anything had changed in American attitudes. In June, in response to an American query, the Chinese chargé in Warsaw said that his government had no immediate plans for resuming the suspended talks.23 In fact, the Chinese government—and in the end that meant Mao—was paying attention to the American signals. The Chinese also had a spy in Washington, in the CIA. Mao, moreover, was already inclined to think that Nixon was someone he could deal with. He had apparently read Nixon’s 1967 article in Foreign Affairs and recommended it to Chou En-lai.24 When Nixon became president, Mao approved the publication of his address in the People’s Daily. True, it appeared under the headline “A Desperate Confession,” but it disseminated Nixon’s message about wanting an open world, one where no people lived in “angry isolation.”25 At some point Chou En-lai ordered all government departments with any interest in the United States to watch American policies closely.26 In July, when an American yacht sailed into Chinese waters near Hong Kong and the local security forces arrested the two American crew, Chou dealt with the case personally. He ordered that there be no publicity and none of the usual rhetoric about CIA agents.27 The two Americans were later quietly released.
As 1969 wore on and the threat from the Soviet Union reached its most acute phase, China’s need to break out of 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 reestablished diplomatic relations with a number of countries, from Italy to Iceland.
Most significant of all, it began talks with the United States’ northern neighbor, 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 toward 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 NATO 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.28 On the other hand, Canada had much more at stake in its relationship with the United States than 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 traveled 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 freethinker, 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 neighbor. On the other hand, he thought Canadian foreign policy was stuck in a rut and knew 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 Canadian nationalism. And an influx of American draft dodgers and deserter
s 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.) To Trudeau, who had actually visited China twice as a private citizen, it seemed 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 toward a change in their policy toward China, the Americans were not pleased; 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.”29 In January 1969, the Canadian cabinet authorized its representatives in Stockholm to contact the Chinese embassy. (Sweden was good neutral territory and had good 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.30 The Canadian-made film, which also showed Bethune’s lively and varied romantic career, may have left the Chinese bewildered, but they did recognize the friendly intent. Permission came 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.31