The Trip That Changed the World

Twenty-five years ago this week, Richard M. Nixon changed from a red baiter to Communist China’s key friend, and Beijing, after calling Nixon the “god of plague and war,” embraced him as a shield against the Soviet Union. His eight-day stay in China--the longest visit to any foreign country by a U.S. president--marked the first time a U.S. president had negotiated on the soil of a nation lacking diplomatic relations with Washington.

On his way home, Nixon declared “that was the week that changed the world.” His deal with China (not just the trip) did change the world of the 1970s, though a quarter-century later, the ground has shifted under our feet again.

In 1971-72, many Americans felt that when the torment of Indochina ended, the United States would have to share the future in Asia with China. China had not yet fully emerged from the Cultural Revolution. But Beijing was ready to ease China’s isolation and terminate the risks of its 1960s’ double hostility toward Russia and the United States alike. Deng Xiaoping, the giant of post-Mao China who died last week, was working as a fitter in an factory in the south, still in political exile after Mao Tse Tung’s purge of him in 1967. Nixon never saw him. Yet, the outcome of the Nixon trip would set the stage for the Deng era.

Back then, I sat in a CBS TV studio in New York with anchorman Charles Collingwood. Each morning and evening, I chatted with CBS correspondents Walter Cronkite and Bernard Kalb, as they watched the Nixons on the Great Wall or strolled with them in the Forbidden City. We all made harmless comments on a China that now held Americans in thrall.

China was like a mirror; much that was seen depended on the observer’s own stance. Nixon’s starting point was his quest for peace in Asia. Then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger’s was leverage against the Russians. Businessmen saw China as a market. Conservatives saw it as an exemplar of law and order.

Nixon took a courageous--and politically audacious--step, and what he did had to be done. His opening to China bucked majority opinion in his own Republican Party. War was still raging in Vietnam, with Beijing backing Hanoi. Had the secrecy of Kissinger’s pre-trip moves broken down, anti-American reaction was likely in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, not to speak of apoplexy in Washington. The No. 2 nuclear power, the Soviet Union, was certain to be stressed out. In the face of all this, Nixon went ahead. This is called leadership.

In 1972, the issue in China policy was war or peace. Few people focused on trade. Fewer still on human rights or pushing China toward democracy. It just seemed less dangerous to deal with China than not to. And there was a tendency to accommodate Beijing because of residual guilt over the West’s isolation of China for 20 years.

Nixon and Mao’s compromise had three ingredients: a strategic dialogue with the Soviet threat as focus; a modus vivendi on Taiwan, in which China got the form (“one China”) and the United States got the substance (continuing ties with ongoing Taiwan), and a tacit agreement to pay minimal attention to ideological differences.

Three subsequent events have undermined this compromise. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the raison d’etre of the strategic dialogue. The coming of democracy in Taiwan gave the island a new sense of itself as a de facto independent country. The Tian An Men Square tragedy of 1989 ended any denial of ideological differences between China and the United States. These events together unraveled the world of 1972.

In the Shanghai Communique, issued on Feb. 28, the United States acknowledged that “all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait” upheld one China. A first draft said, “all people” on either side of the Taiwan Strait. Marshall Green, then assistant secretary of state, wisely pushed to get this changed to all Chinese, removing any claim that Taiwan-born people favored reunification.

Still, the verbal improvement cannot hide the fact that a premise in the communique is no longer true. One-third to a half of the Taiwan population, who define themselves as Han Chinese, reject “one China.” This 7 million to 10 million people don’t want reunification with the Communist regime in Beijing. Washington cannot go on chanting “one China” as if nothing has changed. Acting multilaterally with friendly powers, it must ensure Taiwan’s unfettered existence.

China’s economic advance is inevitable, and the United States can benefit from it. Negligible in 1972, China-U.S. trade is now worth $60 billion a year. One day, the relation between a democratic China and the United States could well be the most important economic, political and even military relationship in the world.

The Chinese left wing was correct to warn in the 1970s that the opening to America was a threat to Chinese socialism--in the long run, a mortal threat. Deng was the chief enemy of the left. Five years after Nixon’s trip, with Mao dead, Deng turned the tables on the left. The Deng era began, the new relation between China and America its essential setting. Every day in the life of almost every one of the 1.2 billion Chinese is different because of China’s relation with some aspect of America. Some 80,000 of tomorrow’s Chinese elite are studying on U.S. campuses. But this play of influences is largely independent of the will of the U.S. government.

The problem of China is not the rise of China, but the rise of a China that remains Leninist. The unelected Beijing government is a dinosaur of arrogance and repression. Nixon told Mao, “What is important is not a nation’s internal political philosophy.” Yet, today in U.S.-China relations. domestic values are extremely important.

In 1972, we could achieve peace by the negative step of ending the danger of war that flowed from Washington’s and Beijing’s mutual hostility and ignorance. In 1997, peace, in the long term, may require an end to the Leninist dictatorship in Beijing. Sustained partnership of U.S. democracy with a Leninist regime is not possible. Many desirable things in U.S. ties with China will not come about until major political liberalization occurs in Beijing.

Beyond the hope--that is all it is--for a freer China, the United States needs to maintain a firm stance against an expansionist or aggressive China. This is where President Bill Clinton has been ineffectual. He seems innocent of any trace of realpolitik. A feel for a balance-of-power dynamic made Nixon and Kissinger a refreshing force in U.S. policy toward Asia. They saw that China and the United States had a mutual interest in drawing closer to each other to counter Soviet power. Kissinger correctly scoffed at the widespread view that the problems of the China-U.S. relationship--blocked financial assets, Washington’s opposition to Beijing’s seating in the United Nations, the competing diplomatic and property claims of “two Chinas”--had to be tackled first and directly. He felt the breakthrough with the Chinese would come on broader grounds, and he was correct.

U.S. policies are not going to change China; that will happen largely through the internal dynamics of China. We benefit from full engagement with China. But we also must build an equilibrium in Asia-Pacific that keeps in check a China in the grip of dictatorial arrogance. Engagement itself is not a policy--it does not speak of aims. Only a strong America with geopolitical vision can ensure that the Chinese Communists do not get more out of the Nixon breakthrough than does the United States and its friends. In a world without the Soviet Union, we do not lack the power to hold China in balance. Do we have the will?