Nixon in China Read online

  The People’s Republic, for its part, sent aid to anti-Western and left-wing movements throughout Asia, for example in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. It also involved itself in the attempt among what were called Third World countries – a growing number as the old Western empires folded – to create a non-aligned movement which would steer a middle course between the two great antagonistic blocs in the Cold War. This of course was regarded with the deepest suspicion by Dulles, who felt that neutrality was a cover for Communist sympathies.

  Dulles’s hard line was echoed at senior levels in the State Department, where Walter Robertson headed the bureau of Far Eastern Affairs. According to a junior colleague, ‘There was no question in Robertson’s mind that we should be 100 percent pro-Nationalist government on Taiwan and 100 percent anti-Communist government in Peking.’ Recognition of the new regime in Beijing was quite simply out of the question. ‘As far as I could make out, the Communists would have had to have ceased being Communists to make him shift.’17

  From 1949 to the start of the 1970s, China and the United States had virtually no diplomatic relations, no summits, no joint meetings,no exchanges of tourists, business leaders or academics. Chinese and American athletes did not compete against one another. Chinese and American journalists did not report from one another’s countries. China and the United States did not trade directly with each other and their planes and ships did not visit one another’s airfields and ports. American officials would not use the term ‘People’s Republic of China’ and insisted on calling the capital ‘Beiping’, as the Guomindang still did. Indeed young diplomats were warned that they could damage their careers by the careless use of ‘Beijing’, which is what the Communists had chosen.18

  The United States set up an enormous consulate in Hong Kong, still a British colony, partly to ensure that there was no leakage, that goods from the mainland did not move on to the American market under the British flag. The American owners of the new Hong Kong Hilton had to get rid of the expensive Chinese antiques they had just bought because these came from the mainland. The effort to keep goods from Communist China away from Americans produced much work and increasingly arcane debates. If an egg came from Communist China but hatched in Hong Kong, was the chicken Communist or not? Was an egg laid in Hong Kong by a hen from the mainland a Communist one? The Americans were also concerned that important strategic goods did not move into China through Hong Kong. A junior American consular officer once had to spend considerable time on condoms. ‘I had to go all around Hong Kong, talking to importers of prophylactic rubbers and asking: How many do you think Hong Kong uses? And how many are reexported to China?’ His lengthy report was received with commendations in Washington and he was then sent an urgent follow-up question. ‘Please update this carefully. We have heard that the Chinese Communists are using prophylactic rubbers to protect the muzzles of their guns from moisture.’ The brief panic ended when the Pentagon got in on the act and a final message came from Washington. ‘Our experts have said that if you do try to protect your gun muzzles that way, it will simply rust and pit-out the muzzles themselves because moisture will collect, there is no air in the muzzle. So any prophylactic rubbers that want to go to Communist China, okay.’19

  The other mission of the American establishment in Hong Kong was to try to gaze over the border into China. The China-watchers interviewed refugees and those foreigners and Chinese who were able to travel into China. They pored over Chinese Communist publications when they could get them. They gathered scraps of information in whatever ways they could. Herbert Levin, who later worked for Kissinger on the National Security Council, used to monitor shipments of live pigs from China into Hong Kong. ‘When there were suggestions that there were food shortages and crop failures and so forth in China, you could see what provinces the carloads of pigs were coming from, whether they were coming like previous years, whether they were thinner or fatter, and all that kind of thing.’20 The Americans gained general impressions of what was going on inside China. They knew something about the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward because streams of desperate refugees forced their way into Hong Kong. They learned about the Cultural Revolution first hand when Red Guards tried to stir up trouble for the British authorities. But the Americans had almost no idea of who was really in power and what the great internal debates were. (Of course, neither did the Chinese people.)

  Although the Chinese Communists had far more access to material on American society, it is not clear that they were able to benefit from it, given their own ideological blinkers. None of the top party leadership had ever been to the United States and even a man as knowledgeable and sophisticated as Chou En-lai had naive views of Americans. ‘If American troops really invade China,’ he said in a 1949 speech, ‘we will surround them from the countryside, forcing them to ship all military supplies, including toilet paper and ice cream, from the United States.’ Zhang Wenjin, one of the foreign ministry officials involved in planning Nixon’s trip, later told an interviewer, ‘Chairman Mao and Premier Chou actually knew very little about the United States; they had to rely upon us.’21

  American society, so the Chinese people were told for years, was deeply corrupt. In 1950, a Chinese pamphlet entitled Look, So This Is the American Way of Life!, painted a lurid picture of the United States: ‘It is a nation that is thoroughly reactionary, thoroughly black, thoroughly corrupt, and thoroughly cruel. It is heaven for a handful of millionaires and hell for countless millions of poor people. It is a paradise for gangsters, swindlers, hooligans, special agents, fascist vermin, profiteers, debauchers, and so on and so forth – all the dregs of humanity.’ Chinese propaganda showed Uncle Sam as an avaricious millionaire, his teeth and hands dripping with blood. Chinese newspapers played up American racial tensions and American crime.22

  The American public and indeed many policymakers back in Washington had an equally simplistic view. The China lobby and publications such as Time and Life (owned by Henry Luce, a child of American missionaries in China) enthusiastically painted a picture of a sterile and dreadful world behind the Bamboo Curtain, with the Chinese people turned into a horde of red ants. The entry of China into the Korean War was taken as more evidence of Communist treachery and the appearance of brainwashed American prisoners of war in Beijing caused a thrill of horror back in the United States. On the right, Senator McCarthy and his supporters, who included a young Richard Nixon, made much of the fact that many American diplomats in China had predicted the collapse of the Guomindang, evidence enough for conspiracy theorists that such men had actively worked for the Communist victory. The diplomats were summoned to Congressional hearings where their motives and loyalty were freely impugned.

  The impact on the State Department and on the capacity of the United States to understand what was going on in Asia was devastating. Seasoned and knowledgeable experts were driven out or resigned in disgust. Those who survived were kept away from anything to do with Asia; one of the Department’s leading China specialists ended up as ambassador in Iceland. The Department as a whole was shell-shocked and became increasingly timid in offering unpalatable advice to its political masters. A young man who started out as a junior diplomat in Hong Kong in the late 1950s remembered older colleagues who were careful about what they sent back to Washington. ‘I don’t think it meant not reporting facts, it’s just that one was cautious.23

  On the other hand, the experience of being in Hong Kong tended to make the American China-watchers more pragmatic than their superiors back in Washington. The lack of relations between two such big countries seemed absurd, an anomaly which must be temporary.‘Well, you know,’ said an American diplomat, ‘what the hell, China’s there, we’re going to have to recognize it. I mean, it was a fact of life. It wasn’t through admiration, it was just, well, let’s get on with it.’24

  Nor were the Chinese Communists yet ready to look for friends among the enemies of the Soviets. In China, no one dared openly suggest that one day relations might
be re-established with the United States. Except for one man. ‘If there is no war,’ Mao told a party conference in 1956, ‘the capitalist countries will face economic difficulties. Our door is open. In 12 years, Britain, America, West Germany and Japan will all want to do business with us.’25

  The door remained open, just a crack. In the aftermath of the Geneva Conference, representatives of China and the United States had to talk to each other from time to time, about the exit visas for Americans still in China or the exchange of prisoners of war, for example. The main contacts were through Warsaw, where Chinese and American diplomats met quietly over the years right up until 1970. The Communist Polish government obligingly provided a magnificent old palace for the talks, which it equally obligingly bugged for its Soviet masters. The Americans found the bugging useful, both as a way of communicating with the Soviets and because they were able to tap into the bug, which saved them from making extensive notes.26

  Occasionally, when there was a crisis, one side or another would break off, but the talks always resumed. Although the issue of Taiwan remained, for the time being, insoluble, both sides saw an advantage in keeping some sort of contact if only as ‘a kind of mailbox’, as one American put it. ‘Even then,’ recalled John Holdridge, who was to return to China with Nixon, ‘we always 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.’ The Chinese had much the same view. In 1958, after one hiatus, the Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, told his ambassador in Warsaw that the talks might produce some useful results: ‘You may shake hands with, say hello to, and chat with the American ambassador. You may have a dinner with him.’ China was not begging for negotiations or refusing them. ‘The manner of a great country should be neither haughty nor humble.’27

  For the most part, the conversations were stilted and formal as both sides presented prepared statements. During the Cultural Revolution, an American remarked casually on an attractive view to a Chinese diplomat who promptly answered, ‘Yes it is but not as beautiful as it is in Beijing where the glorious sun of Chairman Mao Tse-tung shines upon the Chinese people twenty-four hours a day.’ Years later, after Mao’s death, the two men met again in Tanzania. The Chinese looked at the American and said, ‘It is a beautiful day, but not as beautiful as it is in Beijing where the glorious sun of—’, and started to laugh. ‘I look back often on that conversation,’ he said. ‘By god, how stupid it was.’28

  8

  Breaking the Pattern

  IN HIS CONVERSATION with Nixon that February afternoon in Beijing, Chou En-lai returned, yet again, to the famous snub at the Geneva Conference in 1954. ‘As you said to Chairman Mao this afternoon, today we shook hands, but John Foster Dulles didn’t want to do that.’ Nixon extended his hand and he and Chou solemnly shook hands again. ‘We couldn’t blame you,’ Chou said, ‘because the international viewpoint was that the socialist countries were a monolithic bloc, and the Western countries were a monolithic bloc.’ The Chinese knew better now. Nixon agreed: ‘We have broken out of the old pattern.’1

  Nixon would not have been in Beijing if both sides had not been prepared, for their own reasons, to break out of the old patterns. The timing had never been quite right before. In 1949, when the Truman administration considered trying to establish relations with the new Communist regime, the Chinese Communists were not prepared to negotiate. In the mid-1950s, when Chou En-lai offered a settlement of outstanding issues, especially Taiwan, in talks at Geneva, it was the turn of the Americans to be intransigent.

  The start of the 1960s brought the best chance in over a decade to end the impasse between the two powers. In China, the failure of the Great Leap Forward temporarily sidelined Mao and brought more pragmatic leaders such as Liu Shaoqi to the fore. In the United States, the inauguration of the new young Democratic President, John Kennedy, promised a fresh approach to the foreign policy and to the troubling China question. Adlai Stevenson, the respected ambassador to the United Nations, published an article in Foreign Affairs at the end of 1960 in which he argued that the People’s Republic of China should be admitted to the UN. The Secretary of State, Dean Rusk,who was later to become more hard line, agreed that existing US policy on the admission of China to the UN was ‘unrealistic’. Reaction from the China lobby and the right was surprisingly muted.2

  China seemed ready to shift its policies as well. Although the situation in Indochina, particularly in Laos, was deteriorating by 1961, Chou En-lai indirectly let the Americans know that his government hoped to find a way of keeping Laos neutral. In 1962, the United States responded in kind when it used indirect channels to inform China that it was discouraging Taiwan from attacking the mainland.3 As China-watchers in Hong Kong scrambled to translate the scatological terms the Chinese Communists were using about the Soviets, the split between China and the Soviet Union also promised new opportunities for ending the long freeze between the United States and China.

  Inside the State Department, retirements removed some of the older Cold Warriors and brought younger, more open-minded Asian specialists to responsible positions. At the end of 1961, the existence of two Chinas was accepted when what were called Mainland China Affairs began to be dealt with separately from those of Taiwan. Shortly after, a new office of Asian Communist Affairs was created. ‘There was a feeling in the air’, remembered one of the specialists appointed to it, ‘that Kennedy would like to do something about China, but they hadn’t really focused on it, so it was a wonderful time, in a way, the sense that people wanted something done, but didn’t know quite what they wanted.’4

  Kennedy himself talked of change and his defenders have claimed that, had he lived, he would have made the sort of breakthrough that only came with Nixon. We will never know. In his tragically short term in office, though, Kennedy seems to have regarded the People’s Republic of China with as much mistrust as John Foster Dulles himself. The deepening conflict in Indochina and the growth of Communist influence in Indonesia helped to harden his attitudes towards the Chinese Communists, whom he saw, not entirely incorrectly, as behind much of what was happening. It did not help that China attacked India in the autumn of 1962. The Americans frequently found the Indians infuriating, but they did not like, as they saw it, unprovoked aggression by a Communist power against a democracy. In a speech in the summer of 1963, Kennedy talked of the dangers posed by a warlike China which might shortly get its own nuclear weapons: ‘a more dangerous situation than any we have faced since the end of the Second World War’.5 China tested its first bomb in 1964.

  After 1964, when Kennedy’s successor, President Johnson, made the decision to send greatly increased numbers of American troops to South Vietnam and to start bombing the North, there was little hope that Chinese–American relations were going to thaw. The war brought American forces perilously close to China’s borders and awakened American memories of how Chinese troops had attacked in Korea. Would they do the same in Vietnam? Allen Whiting, a senior China specialist in the State Department, kept warning his superiors, ‘The Chinese are coming. The Chinese are coming.’ And he found a receptive audience right up to Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State.6

  From China Mao issued a series of pronouncements to the Chinese people and to the world. Returning to an idea he had formulated a decade before, he talked about ‘intermediate zones’, those parts of the world between China and the great powers. China had an obligation to the oppressed, whether in the intermediate zones of Europe or in those of Asia, to encourage them to take up revolutionary war against their oppressors, in particular the United States. ‘The raging tide of the people of the world against the U.S. aggressors is irresistible,’ he told journalists from the People’s Daily at the start of 1964. In 1965, Lin Biao, his handpicked lieutenant and China’s Defence Minister, issued a major policy statement, which must have had Mao’s approval. ‘Long Live the Victo
ry of People’s War’ talked with relish about the coming destruction of American imperialism, ‘the most ferocious common enemy of the people of the world’.7

  Although the Chinese urged the peoples of Indochina, including the North Vietnamese, to stand on their own feet, China continued to ship significant amounts of aid southwards and Chinese military advisers continued to assist the North Vietnamese war effort. And, of course, such revolutionary wars like the one raging in Vietnam could also help to protect China by tying down the United States. It was a gamble, though, because it also brought American forces on to China’s doorstep. Mao perhaps tried to signal to the United States that China hoped to avoid a repeat of the confrontation in Korea. In January 1965, he had a long chat with his American biographer and old friend Edgar Snow. ‘We shall not make war beyond China, and we shall fight in defense only if the U.S. comes and attacks us.’ China, he told Snow, was obliged to show its support for revolutions but it preferred to do so by issuing statements and holding meetings. ‘We are fond of prattle and empty talk, but send no troops.’8