U.S., China Coordinated Policy During Cold War : Diplomacy: Washington, Beijing went to great lengths in working against Moscow, according to CIA study.

It began on the edges of President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing.

On the morning of Feb. 23, 1972, Henry A. Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser, briefed Chinese officials on troop deployments by China’s chief rival, the Soviet Union, near their common northern border, according to a secret history of U.S.-China relations done for U.S. intelligence agencies. In Shanghai four days later, he gave Chinese officials another military briefing.

From the outset of the Nixon Administration’s opening to China, the study shows, Washington and Beijing went to extraordinary lengths to cooperate with one another against Moscow, the Cold War nemesis of the United States. On high-level visits, they regularly shared intelligence and teamed up in devising anti-Soviet strategies.

At the United Nations in 1973, the study further shows, the Americans promised Chinese officials that they would not vote with the Soviet Union and against China on any major issue. And before and after U.S. summit meetings with the Soviets throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, U.S. officials briefed China on the agenda, discussions and results.

“We can work together to commonly deal with a bastard,” Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung told Kissinger in February, 1973, in a reference to the Soviet Union. That quote--taken from the first transcripts of top-level conversations between U.S. and Chinese leaders ever made public--captured, in Mao’s feisty way, the heart of the U.S.-China relationship during the Cold War.

That does not mean working together was easy. In fact, Chinese and U.S. officials often mistrusted one another.

In 1973, Premier Chou En-lai accused the United States of trying to “stand on Chinese shoulders” to confront the Soviet Union, according to the study. And Mao quickly took this idea a step further, claiming that the secret aim of the United States and its European allies was “to push Russia eastward, mainly against us and Japan.”

Still, the history--prepared by the Santa Monica-based RAND think tank--shows that the United States and China sought each other’s help on foreign policy issues around the world. On Jan. 23, 1974, for example, Kissinger told the Chinese that Egypt was very unhappy in its relations with the Soviet Union and asked China for help in building a factory to make MIG-21 warplanes in Egypt.

The Cold War dynamics changed after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. During the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations, China’s top leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, regularly goaded and implored the United States to be tougher with the Soviet Union.

“The Soviets went on a large-scale offensive in Angola, and we believe this was caused by the weak attitude you adopted . . . toward the Soviets,” Chinese Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua was quoted as lecturing Kissinger in October, 1976.

“Really, Mr. Foreign Minister, I don’t want to be impolite, but I don’t agree,” Kissinger replied. “We are not weak. Rather we are temporarily weak until after our (presidential) elections. . . . But that will end on Nov. 2.”

Angola and Zaire were among several African countries where civil wars and disorder became swept up in Cold War-style confrontations as the United States, the Soviet Union and China backed their own factions.

With the Carter Administration, which in its early years was trying to conclude arms control agreements with Moscow, the Chinese seemed to be almost incendiary.

In August, 1977, when Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance said he had heard Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua would be visiting Kinshasa, Zaire, on his way home from the United States, Huang shot back, “You should go also . . . but I doubt you will--you may be apprehensive of offending the Soviet Union.”

China’s goading of the United States in this period, the intelligence study says, was designed to “make it more difficult for Moscow to direct its attention to China and (to) limit the possibilities for any coordinated U.S.-Soviet action against (China).”

During the Ronald Reagan Administration, by contrast, the roles were reversed. This time, the United States found itself urging China to take a tougher line toward the Soviets.

In a 1983 visit to Beijing, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger warned Chinese officials about the Soviet threat and urged China to stop treating the two superpowers on equal terms.

Under President Reagan, the study concludes, Chinese leaders “decided to seek to reduce the level of Sino-Soviet hostility . . . to deflate Soviet pressures against them and also to avoid being caught in the middle of the deteriorating Soviet-American relationship.”

The intelligence study contains much other new information about U.S. foreign policy. Here are some of the other subjects:

TAIWAN

The history shows that on the first day of Kissinger’s first visit to Beijing, on July 9, 1971, he secretly gave Chou a promise that the United States would not support the Taiwan Independence Movement.

That movement, propelled by some of the indigenous Taiwanese who make up about 80% of the island’s population, argued that Taiwan should be considered a separate country. By contrast, Taiwan’s Nationalist regime, then headed by Gen. Chiang Kai-shek, claimed that it was the government for all of China and that Taiwan was part of China.

“That’s interesting, because Kissinger’s line has been that China didn’t really care about Taiwan (during the early days of the U.S. opening to China), that all they cared about was strategic cooperation against the Russians,” Harry Harding, a China scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of a leading book on U.S.-China relations, said in a recent interview.

According to the intelligence history, Kissinger also told Chou then that the United States would reduce its forces on Taiwan as U.S. relations with China improved and that U.S. recognition of the Beijing government could come in Nixon’s second term.

None of these early commitments is mentioned in Kissinger’s memoirs.

“Chou and I by tacit agreement did not press controversial issues,” Kissinger wrote. “Taiwan was mentioned only briefly during the first session.”

CAMBODIA

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the intelligence study shows, the United States frequently coordinated its policy on Cambodia with China. The Chinese government was backing the Khmer Rouge, the radical Communist faction under whose leadership more than 1 million Cambodians were murdered or starved to death between 1975 and 1978.

The United States appears to have raised the subject of Khmer Rouge atrocities during a visit to Beijing by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser.

According to the history released by the CIA, Chinese Foreign Minister Huang bluntly told Brzezinski on May 20, 1978, that “the United States is not qualified to raise the human rights issue regarding Cambodia.”

After Vietnam invaded Cambodia and installed a new government there, Huang informed then-Defense Secretary Harold Brown in Beijing on Jan. 7, 1980, that China would support a coalition resistance organization under the leadership of Prince Norodom Sihanouk “only if the Pol Pot forces are included.” Pol Pot was--and by most accounts remains today--the leader of the Khmer Rouge.

KOREA

U.S. and Chinese leaders also regularly discussed the future of the two Koreas.

The intelligence study shows that in the October, 1974, meeting with Foreign Minister Qiao in New York City, Kissinger hinted that the United States might cut China out of its role as intermediary between the United States and North Korea. Kissinger claimed that the North Koreans had been trying to contact him through other countries.

During a 1979 visit to the United States, Deng told Carter that North Korea trusted China “and we cannot have contact with the South (Korea) or it will weaken that trust.” He also assured Carter that North Korea would not attack the South even if all U.S. troops were withdrawn from South Korea.

Those assurances underscore what has changed and what has not on the Korean peninsula. China and South Korea established diplomatic relations two years ago. The United States decided not to withdraw its troops from the peninsula. But the worries of war or an invasion by North Korea are as alive today as they were 15 years ago.

TRADE

The intelligence study says that the Nixon Administration began talking as early as 1973 about the possibility of granting China most-favored-nation trade benefits--the privileges under which its goods enter the United States under the same low duties as those of most other countries.

At times in those early days, China did not seem too interested. On Oct. 22, 1974, Deng told Kissinger in Beijing that China did not need most-favored status if the Soviets did not get it.

But by the end of the 1970s, China was pushing hard for the trade benefits. During a trip to Washington on Jan. 31, 1979, Deng met with the entire Cabinet of the Carter Administration. He said that if China got most-favored status, China’s trade with the United States should surpass its trade with Japan. Moreover, he said, U.S.-China trade should be 10 times larger than U.S. trade with Taiwan.

“We want your most up-to-date technology--not even that of the early 1970s, do you understand?” Deng thundered to the Cabinet members at that 1979 meeting.

With the Carter Administration’s support, China got most-favored status the following year, more than a decade before the privileges were extended to Russia.

Not all of Deng’s predictions have been borne out. In 1993, U.S. trade with China slightly exceeded $40 billion, almost exactly the same as the United States’ trade with Taiwan. But as Deng forecast, that was higher than China’s trade with Japan, $38 billion last year.

CHINESE POLITICS

Throughout the period covered by the intelligence history, U.S. leaders were often forced to deal with the vicissitudes of China’s domestic politics.

On the very first Kissinger visit, for example, Chou hinted at the tensions between Mao and his designated successor, Lin Piao.

“I would also like to take the opportunity to say we express thanks for the gifts which the President and you have sent to Chairman Mao, Lin Piao and myself,” Chou said. “You may say that Chairman Mao and I both send our regards to President Nixon,” pointedly leaving out Lin’s name.

Two months later, Lin died in a plane crash in Mongolia after what Chinese officials said had been an assassination attempt against Mao.

In 1984, then-President Reagan met in China with Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, then Deng’s second in command. According to the study, Hu told Reagan that there was no need for Americans to fear political chaos in China after Deng’s death because a second echelon of leaders was being trained.

At that time, this “second echelon” was headed by Hu himself and by Premier Zhao Ziyang. As it turned out, however, Hu was ousted from office in 1987, Zhao was forced out in 1989, and the concern about what will happen in China after Deng is at least as strong today as it was a decade ago.

The intelligence study concluded that, over the years, one of China’s occasional negotiating tactics was to tell U.S. leaders “that if they do not meet certain Chinese political needs in a negotiation, their ‘old friends’ in the (Chinese) political system will lose their influence.”

Over the years, U.S. officials have been told that if they do not make concessions, the result would be to hurt Chou or Deng or China’s reformers. The intelligence study calls this ploy, “Your Chinese friends are in trouble.”

DETENTE’S DIALOGUE

SUBJECT: Formal diplomatic relations.

OCCASION: President Carter sent National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to Beijing on open talks.

DATE: May, 1978

Brzezinski: At the outset, I would like to express to you our determination to move forward on the process of normalization. I can say on behalf of President Carter that the United States has made up its mind on this issue. . . .

Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua: On the Chinese side, we have raised three conditions on normalization of relations between our two countries. . . . Let no one harbor any hope that the Chinese side will make any concessions in this respect.

Deng Xiaoping: You must be tired (from your long trip)

Brzezinski: I am exhilarated.

Deng: President Ford stated that if he were reelected he would move to full normalization according to the three conditions without any reservations. . . . We are looking forward to the day when President Carter makes up his mind. Let’s now shift the subject.

Brzezinski: I have told you before, President Carter has made up his mind.

Deng: So much the better.