Nixon and Mao
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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 with Vietnam, indeed with the whole of Indochina, in return for the Americans giving them much of what they wanted on Taiwan? On April 27, 1971, the day Chou’s invitation to 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.”3 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,” he said. “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, he went on, that the Chinese had already spoken forcefully to the North Vietnamese.4
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 chance5
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 into helping to settle the conflict. The Chinese had been made nervous by the American presence in South Vietnam, but 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 the United States over Taiwan.6 Furthermore, China—so Mao certainly insisted—was the center 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 Vietcong 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 antiaircraft 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.7
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 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 that goes back many centuries. To the Chinese, with their self-centered 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 neighbor to the north. In 111 B.C., the Chinese had conquered the northern part of Vietnam, and they 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 was 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 and 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 favoring.8
When the North Vietnamese decided to start peace talks with the United States in 1968, 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 occasion 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 maneuvered to get hold of the local Communist forces and so extend their own influence.9
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 in 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.10
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. In 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 that of 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.11
Chou could not resist providing his customary history lessons. From Truman onward, he told the Americans, their presidents had meddled in the affairs of Vietnam and the other countries of Indochina. China, Chou said blandly and untruthfully, never attempted to influence the internal affairs of its neighbors. 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.12
Nevertheless, Kissinger drew surprisingly optimistic conclusions: Chou, he told Nixon after his first visit, understood the linkage 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, saying, “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 left, Kissinger said, it would not intervene, no matter what 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 Vietnam. “Shall we leave in a way that gives the South Vietnamese a reasonable chance to survive as a free people?” Nixon asked. “My plan will end American involvement in a way that would provide that chance.”13
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, saying, “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.”14
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.”15
The North Vietnamese leaders, in shock at the news of the sudden breakthrough in Sino-American relations, were not to be consoled. “Vietnam is our country, not yours,” one exclaimed to Chou. “You have no right to say anything about it; you have no right to discuss this issue with the United States!” Kissinger’s visit had come at a particularly bad time because their front organization in South Vietnam had shortly before issued a program that was designed to appeal to American public opinion with a call to end the war and allow democracy and self-determination for the people of Vietnam. In the general enthusiasm with which the announcement of Kissinger’s visit was received, the program’s impact was blunted. The Hanoi newspapers did not mention the news that Nixon was going to visit China for months. In Paris, the chief negotiator from North Vietnam complained about Nixon’s “perfidious maneuver” to divide socialist nations from each other.16
The day Nixon arrived in Beijing, the Chinese embassy in Hanoi had its customary spring party. To the surprise of the Chinese officials, not a single North Vietnamese came. Another Chinese friend from Indochina also showed his displeasure. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, whose government had been overthrown by forces backed by the United States, could not bear to remain in Beijing while Nixon was there. He left his comfortable villa in the Diaoyutai for Hanoi and did not return until Nixon had gone.17
Although Nixon barely touched on Vietnam in his opening remarks on February 22, Chou homed in on the issue at once. Nixon had talked about the whole world; he, Chou, preferred to deal with the areas, close at hand, that mattered most to China. He urged the United States to get out of Indochina, and quickly: “As to how to resolve this issue I can’t say, since we do not take part in the negotiations nor do we want to take part.”
Nixon tried to persuade Chou that American intentions to withdraw were sincere and honorable but that the obstacle was the North Vietnamese, who were refusing to negotiate in good faith. If Hanoi remained obdurate, Nixon warned Chou, when the subject came up again two days later, the United States might have to step up the war. Nixon added that he would understand if China had to react. He also tried to put pressure on Chou by pointing out that he and the Republicans would be in trouble if the Democrats were able to say that the United States had compromised on Taiwan but gained no concessions in return from the Chinese on Vietnam. Nixon urged the Chinese to use their influence with Hanoi.18
Chou, as he had with Kissinger, refused to commit himself to helping the United States. China, he repeated, when he and Nixon returned to the subject of Indochina two days later, must support its friends, even—and this was a prescient observation on Chou’s part—if the peoples of Indochina embarked on wars among themselves after the Americans left. Whatever occurred would not be the fault of China, which only wanted peace and tranquillity in the region. If North Vietnam was expanding into Cambodia and Laos, he said, ignoring the long history of Vietnamese expansion into its neighbors’ territory, this was only because of its need to counter the United States. Now there was also the danger that “a certain big power” might try to move in to set up a sphere of influence. (Indeed, Alexander Haig firmly maintained after his trip to China in January 1972 that the Chinese had hinted to him that they would prefer the United States to remain in South Vietnam as a counter to the Soviet Union.)19
“The channel of negotiations should not be closed” was the most Chou would say. “We can only go so far,” he added. “We cannot meddle into their affairs.” China would not negotiate on behalf of the peoples of Indochina. Nixon was forced to recognize that, as with the Soviet Union, linkage did not always work: “What the Prime Minister is telling us is that he cannot help us in Vietnam.” Chou underlined the message on February 28 as Nixon was preparing to leave China: “We have no right to negotiate for them. This I have said repeatedly. This is our very serious stand.”20
The mere fact that Nixon went to China, though, did help the United States. The North Vietnamese were obliged to recognize that China placed a high priority on enhancing its new relationship with the United States. When Chou flew to Hanoi in March 1972 to brief the North Vietnamese on the Nixon visit, he told them, “If the problem of Indochina is not solved, it will be impossible to realize the normalization of China-U.S. relations.” Although he also reassured them that China intended to continue its support for N
orth Vietnam, his North Vietnamese comrades got the message. “Now that Nixon has talked with you,” said the party secretary, Le Duan, “they will soon hit us even harder.”21 The Americans did indeed hit hard that spring; in retaliation for a major North Vietnamese attack in the south, American planes bombed the north and mined Hanoi’s harbor of Haiphong. China criticized the United States publicly and continued to send large amounts of aid to North Vietnam but, through one of Kissinger’s private channels, made it clear that it still wanted to proceed with normalizing relations. The Chinese also encouraged both the United States and North Vietnam to bring the Paris peace talks to a conclusion. Why not let South Vietnam’s President Thieu participate in the provisional coalition government for the south, Mao suggested to the North Vietnamese. Once the American troops left, they were unlikely to come back. “After rest and reorganization,” he said, “you can fight again to reach the final victory.”22