The Communists also watched Taiwan apprehensively for signs of an independence movement, something that was not unlikely given Taiwan’s history and the fact that many of its inhabitants had no ties to the mainland. In his talks with Kissinger and then with Nixon, Chou demanded that the Americans promise not to support the independence movement in Taiwan. In his meeting with Nixon on February 24 he noted, with some asperity, that Professor Peng Mengmin, a leading figure in the movement, had received some support in the United States and had fled from Taiwan with American help. (By coincidence, Peng had once been a student of Kissinger’s.) Chiang Kai-shek, Chou added approvingly, knew how to deal with talk of independence; he would suppress any such movement in Taiwan. Nixon and Kissinger did their best to reassure Chou. “I told the Prime Minister,” Kissinger said, “that no American personnel, directly or indirectly, nor any American agency, directly or indirectly, will give any encouragement or support in any way to the Taiwan Independence Movement.” If Chou had any information, Kissinger asked, he should send it on through their secret channel and the Americans would take action against the movement. “I endorse that commitment at this meeting today,” Nixon added.22
It was perhaps a curious position for the leader of a nation that had done so much in the past to support national self-determination, but Nixon was determined that Taiwan should not stand in the way of his rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. When they had first contemplated their opening, Nixon and Kissinger had prepared to abandon Taiwan, slowly, quietly, and, if they could, without enraging the right. Kissinger, as someone who was primarily interested in Europe, had never taken much interest in it. As he told Chou the first time they met, he had never been there. Nixon, by contrast, knew Taiwan well. In his heyday as an anti-Communist he had been one of its prominent supporters. In the 1950s he had been all for allowing Chiang to attack the mainland, and he’d apparently shared Chiang’s faith that the Communist regime would crumble. By the 1960s, however, when he had time to travel and reflect, he was reconsidering many of his former views. “Chiang was a friend,” he told an interviewer much later, “and unquestionably one of the giants of the twentieth century. I wondered whether he might be right, but my pragmatic analysis told me he was wrong.”23
Nevertheless, in his first years as president, even while he was re-thinking his China policy, Nixon continued to reassure Chiang of his support. “I will never sell you down the river,” he told Chiang’s son in the spring of 1970.24 As the secret channel to Beijing began to produce results, Nixon had to face doing just that. In April 1971, as they waited anxiously for Chou’s reply to one of Nixon’s messages, Nixon told Kissinger, “Well, Henry, the thing is the story change is going to take place, it has to take place, it better take place when they got a friend here rather than when they’ve got an enemy here.” Kissinger agreed: “No, it’s a tragedy that it has to happen to Chiang at the end of his life, but we have to be cold about it.” In the end, said Nixon, “We have to do what’s best for us.” As Kissinger prepared to leave for his secret trip to China, Nixon gave him some last instructions: “he wished him not to indicate a willingness to abandon much of our support for Taiwan until it was necessary to do so.”25
In his briefing notes for that first trip, Kissinger indicated that he expected the Chinese to want some agreement on reducing American forces in Taiwan and in the strait (although he found it encouraging that they used the word “eventually” when they talked of the prospect). He thought, though, that the Chinese might well be prepared to accept a continuation of the existing political relationship between the United States and Taiwan. In the account of his meetings with Chou that he wrote for Nixon, he noted the Chinese “preoccupation” with Taiwan, but he may not have taken it all that seriously. Certainly in his memoirs he gives the impression that Taiwan came up only briefly during that first visit.26
That is not what the record of the talks shows and not how the Chinese viewed them. Huang Hua, who was present, told the Canadian foreign minister shortly afterward that they had focused almost entirely on Taiwan.27 While this was an exaggeration, Kissinger and Chou spent much of their time on the subject. The Chinese, from the first tentative contacts, hoped to make their recovery of Taiwan a precondition for any improvement of relations between the United States and China. Taiwan came at the top of the list of the instructions to Chou worked out by the Politburo and approved by Mao before Kissinger’s secret trip: “All U.S. armed forces and military installations should be withdrawn from Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait in a given period. This is the key to restoring relations between China and the United States. If no agreement can be reached on this principle in advance, it is possible that Nixon’s visit would be deferred.”28
In the very first message Chou sent to Nixon, in December 1970 through the Pakistan government, he said, “In order to discuss the subject of the vacation of Chinese territories called Taiwan, a special envoy of President Nixon’s will be most welcome in Peking.” The Americans did not want, and indeed could not allow, that their withdrawing of support from Taiwan be a precondition to either Kissinger’s visit or Nixon’s or that the agenda for their discussions with the Chinese be confined to that one subject. In his replies to Chou, Nixon insisted on a broad agenda, one that would deal with all of the important issues between their two countries. The Chinese accepted this. Taiwan remained at the top of their list, but they focused on getting American troops out rather than their end goal of reuniting the island with China. Nixon did not make a concrete commitment on the withdrawal from Taiwan but pointed out that as tensions in Asia diminished, the United States would be cutting back on the forces it had there. Both sides had enough at stake in improved relations that they were prepared to compromise. Both had to do so, however, in a way that did not look as though they were showing weakness.29
During Kissinger’s two trips in 1971, he worked out the basis for an agreement on Taiwan.30 He has since been criticized for too readily abandoning an old American ally and for exceeding his instructions by promising more than he should have. Yet the Chinese Communists had made it amply clear that without American concessions on Taiwan, they were not prepared to move forward to put Sino-American relations on a more normal footing. Moreover, as Chou, a master at diplomacy himself, well knew, negotiations proceed by a combination of clear statements, hints, and suggestions. Kissinger, when it was necessary, gave firm commitments to the Chinese, but he also hinted at more to come once Nixon had been reelected as president in the fall of1972. The United States, he said categorically, did not support the idea of two Chinas or of a mainland China and a Taiwan. The United States accepted the Chinese claim that Taiwan was a part of China, although here he expressed himself cautiously, saying that the United States would like to see a solution of the issue “within the framework of one China.” As he said to Chou, “There’s no possibility in the next one and a half years for us to recognize the PRC as the sole government of China in a formal way.” Once Nixon had made a successful visit to China, Kissinger promised, and once he had been reelected for a second term, the United States would be able to move ahead rapidly to establish full and normal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. “Other political leaders,” he told Chou in what was a familiar theme, “might use more honeyed words, but would be destroyed by what is called the China lobby in the U.S. if they ever tried to move even partially in the direction which I have described to you.”31
Kissinger also indicated that the United States was going to end its support for Chiang Kai-shek, although he was vague about the fate of the United States’ defense treaty with Taiwan. The Americans, Kissinger said, realized that China did not recognize the legitimacy of the treaty, adding that “maybe history can take care of events.” (History did not take care of it, and the continued existence of the treaty was going to cause considerable trouble with the People’s Republic later on.) The United States, Kissinger also promised, would not support any attempt by the Taiwanese to becom
e independent. The Chinese Communists, who did not fully understand how a democracy worked, were puzzled and disturbed by apparent American contradictions—when, for example, Senator Jacob Javits called, just after Kissinger’s October 1971 visit, for a plebiscite where the people of Taiwan might express their views. “This rabid nonsense,” said the Xinhua news agency, “fully demonstrates that even after its defeat in the General Assembly, US imperialism is still pushing the scheme to create ‘one China, one Taiwan.’” When Chou expressed repeated fears about Japanese expansionism, Kissinger reassured him that the United States would oppose any Japanese military presence on Taiwan. (In their darker moments, the Chinese worried, or said they did, that Japan was plotting with leaders of the Taiwanese independence movement.) On the other hand, Kissinger promised, once the United States had found a way to make peace in Vietnam, it would set a firm timetable to remove the two-thirds of its forces in Taiwan that were there only because of the war. The remaining American forces would be removed as relations between the United States and China improved.32
Not all the concessions, by any means, came from the American side. The Chinese accepted that the United States could not turn away from Taiwan overnight. Mao was particularly pleased, however, when Kissinger, on his first visit, promised that at least some of the American troops would be pulled out. The United States, Mao exclaimed to Chou, was evolving. Like an ape moving toward becoming a human being, its tail—its forces in Taiwan, in this case—was growing shorter.33 Armed with Mao’s approval, Chou talked in a friendly and positive way about the gradual lowering of tension over Taiwan and the normalization of relations between China and the United States. Although American troops were clearly going to remain in Taiwan for some time, he conceded that normalization of relations could proceed in parallel rather than, as the Chinese had first insisted, with the troop withdrawal as a precondition. In a chat that autumn of 1971 with Jack Service, a former American diplomat whom he had known during the Second World War, Chou made it clear he understood that American policy on Taiwan would have to evolve over time.34
When Kissinger said that the United States hoped the fate of Taiwan could be resolved peacefully, Chou replied, “We are doing our best to do so.”35 Although Kissinger tried repeatedly on both his visits in 1971 to get Chou to say explicitly that China had given up the option to reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force, he in turn had to be content with strong hints. China, said Chou, was showing great restraint on the Taiwan issue: “For the sake of normalization of relations between the two countries, we are not demanding an immediate solution of this in all aspects, but that it be solved step by step.” And Chou accepted the American wording for the draft communiqué for the Nixon visit, which said that the Americans would encourage the Chinese people to settle the matter “through peaceful negotiations.”36
When Nixon set out for Beijing, the final wording on Taiwan had still not been settled. “The trouble,” as Kissinger had said to Chou in a moment of frankness, “is that we disagree, not that we don’t understand each other.” The Chinese wanted Taiwan to be part of China, if not right away, at a firm date in the future; the Americans could not openly accept that. “The Prime Minister,” said Kissinger, “seeks clarity, and I am trying to achieve ambiguity.”37 Before he started his discussions with Chou, Nixon seems to have wanted to take the high moral ground and be completely frank with the Chinese. As he reviewed the references to Taiwan in his opening statement to Chou, he scribbled in the margin, “Won’t play games—tell you what we will do—what we cannot do.” One thing the United States could not do was break its treaty with Taiwan. Kissinger was optimistic: “We could allow history to take care of this problem.” By the time all American troops had withdrawn from Taiwan and full relations had been established between the People’s Republic and the United States, the treaty would probably lapse anyway.38
Because much of the record on the Chinese side is still restricted, it is not yet possible to know in detail how Chou planned to deal with Taiwan in his talks with Nixon, but he can only have been pleased at the way in which Nixon opened with the issue at their first private meeting, on February 22. “There is one China,” the president stated, “and Taiwan is part of China.” Nixon then reiterated the other undertakings made by Kissinger: no support for any Taiwan independence movements; the use of American influence to keep Japan out of Taiwan and to keep Taiwan from attacking the mainland; and the gradual reduction of American forces on the island. The United States, he said, was committed to both a peaceful resolution of the issue and the normalization of relations with China.
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.39 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.40 Much later in the meeting, after he had spent considerable time rehearsing 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.41
In the meeting on February 24, 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,” he explained. Once he was safely reelected, he would have four years “to move us towards achieving our goal.”42 The difficult issue was how to find language that 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.43
Chou pushed Nixon hard on Taiwan, but on the last day of the visit, February 28, 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,” he said. 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 neighbors 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.”44
CHAPTER 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 thought 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, drawing in Cambodia and Laos. The conflict was overshadowing Nixon’s
presidency much as it had Johnson’s; 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 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 moved forces into Laos. Both escalations of the war caused huge protests in the United States, and the Cambodian incursion led the Chinese Communists to ostentatiously (but, as it turned out, only temporarily) break off their developing contacts with the Americans.
Both Nixon and Kissinger placed great hope in using their opening to China to put pressure on North Vietnam to make greater 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 low-ranking officers following orders from above. North Vietnam, just like North Korea or East Germany, was a subordinate that would surely do what it was told. There was a difficulty, though, in knowing which of its quarreling 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
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