Authors: Odd Westad
In the end, it was Nixon himself who cut to the chase and decided on the greatest political gamble of his career. He was, he told Zhou Enlai in a secret message in May 1971, willing to come to Beijing if a secret trip by Kissinger could be arranged first and a suitable format for the visit could be found. The Chinese interpreted the proposal as a sign of US weakness. The Politburo speculated that Nixon acted mainly on account of pressures from “the broad masses of the people” who were
against the “Vietnam War and racial discrimination.” But China’s leaders concluded that “since there is no way to be sure that an armed revolution would break out in the United States,” Nixon’s offer should be accepted. Kissinger arrived in Beijing for a secret visit in July 1971, after having feigned illness during a trip to Pakistan. Nixon followed for an official visit in February 1972. For Mao, ill and politically weakened after his second in command, Lin Biao, had broken with the regime and died while trying to flee to the Soviet Union, Nixon’s visit was a true godsend. In the eyes of many Chinese, the leader of the most powerful Western country recognized China’s centrality by himself coming to Beijing to sit with the Chairman and listen to his political wisdom. The Americans were full of praise for their new acquaintances. Kissinger said that Mao’s chief diplomat, Zhou Enlai, was “the most impressive foreign leader I have ever met. We spoke for 20 hours, he completely without notes. . . . Those 20 hours were the most impressive conversations I have ever had.” Mao was less fulsome. “Kissinger is a university professor who does not know anything about diplomacy,” he told the North Vietnamese.
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As could be expected, everyone agreed that Nixon in China was the week that changed the world. But no one could say how it had actually changed.
It took Chinese and Americans almost the rest of the decade to decide the content of what Kissinger had called Sino-American “rapprochement.” The Chinese wanted trade, which got underway quickly, and military technology, which was slower in coming. The two countries began a limited cooperation against the Soviets, especially in the Third World, with the Chinese helping the CIA get in touch with small Maoist or anti-Soviet groups in southern Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Most importantly, Beijing helped the United States get out of the Vietnam War. The moment the North Vietnamese leaders heard of Nixon’s visit to China, they knew that they had better settle fast. The Vietnamese, alongside the great majority of the world’s left-wing movements, saw Mao’s willingness to work with Washington as
treason, and the most important effect in the Third World was probably to drive radical regimes and movements closer to working with the Soviets. China was no longer an alternative for those who wanted world revolution.
Despite the hopes for a quick normalization of Sino-American relations after Nixon’s visit, another seven years would pass before full mutual recognition took place. The main reason for this delay, which gave the Soviets time to mobilize against Chinese and US collusion in the Third World, was the political turbulence of the 1970s in both Beijing and Washington. On the Chinese side, much of the political madness of the Cultural Revolution continued up to Mao’s death in 1976, and uncertainty reigned afterward. On the American side, Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal, and his successors, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, shared neither his political bravery nor his brutality against political enemies. The relationship to Taiwan became a major irritant. Most Americans were unwilling to give up the old alliance with the rump Guomindang regime (with Chiang Kai-shek, now in his mid-eighties, still president) in order to normalize fully with Communist Beijing. Despite increases in trade and technology transfers, the complete lack of dynamism in the state-run Chinese economy prevented strong links from being developed. Inside China, after years of anti-American propaganda, Mao’s about-face contributed to the dominant political cynicism, in spite of the leadership’s lame explanations that the Americans had finally come to their senses and realized the strength of the Chinese people. Among Americans who visited, such as the US representative in Beijing, George H. W. Bush, the Maoist dictatorship was orientalized into an expression of the collectivism and regimented will of the Chinese. Meanwhile the Chinese leaders’ gnomic statements on international strategy were taken as ultimate examples of the realist wisdom of an ancient civilization, instead of the ignorance about the world that they really represented. The main advantages China had in the first years of its renewed relationship with
the United States were probably the chance it now got to normalize relations with other US allies—Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, and the West European countries, for instance—and the increased security it received vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.
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M
AO
Z
EDONG DIED ON
9 September 1976. In spite of the chaos and confusion he had created over the last part of his rule, most Chinese looked upon Mao as a once-great leader who had united the country and made it strong. Just as after Stalin’s death in the Soviet Union, many people felt bereaved and uncertain, and it took time for the immensity of Mao’s misjudgments and crimes to become known. In fact, the CCP government has never admitted them fully, and, absurdly, Mao’s portrait still dominates the vista at the central square in Beijing, Tian’anmen. In terms of foreign as well as domestic policy, all cards were off the table once the Chairman had died. China could have moved further to the left and become a genocidal hell not unlike Pol Pot’s Cambodia (Pol Pot was China’s closest foreign ally when Mao died) or it could have moved toward a more open and pluralistic form of socialism. Mao’s chosen successor was the recently appointed Premier Hua Guofeng. His main attraction for the Chairman, beside his oafish loyalty, seems to have been that he was from Hunan, Mao’s home province, and therefore could better understand what the party leader said. Hua did not have much of a vision of his own, but after weeks of uncertainty he allied himself with the military and carried out a coup d’état in which the Chairman’s radical allies on the Politburo were arrested. The military, afraid of a return to the chaos of the height of the Cultural Revolution, insisted that old leaders such as the party’s former general secretary Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, the planning expert, both purged by Mao before his death, be brought back into power. All over the country those who had been sent away, purged, or arrested began coming back to their homes. For the Communist Party old guard, and for many ordinary Chinese, especially in the cities, it was as if a nightmare was over.
Deng Xiaoping, given his third chance to set China’s course, did not waste time. More than any other Chinese leader, Deng realized that his country’s isolation and endless political campaigns had cost it dearly in terms of development. He wanted to experiment in order to advance. First he wanted to go back to using material incentives to increase production in agriculture, along the lines of what he and Liu Shaoqi had proposed in the early 1960s, before Mao had purged Deng and killed Liu. He was looking at the more liberal socialist economies of Hungary and Yugoslavia as possible models for China. Then, as his power grew within the leadership, Deng began considering more radical reforms. While exiled in the south in 1976, Deng had noticed attempts by factories and collectives to import technology through Hong Kong or use surpluses to barter for materials or equipment they needed. In 1978 he began asking whether all of China now needed such reform and opening. Deng told the CCP that instead of being denounced as smugglers and traitors, those who wanted to develop fast and test political theory against practical results were heroes of the four modernizations that China needed. By 1981, with Mao’s successor, Hua Guofeng, demoted and the military firmly behind a policy of growth, Deng was ready to go further. In agriculture, industry, technology, and military affairs China was still a backward country, he declared, and the party had to throw overboard Mao’s errors and focus on “modernization centering on economic construction.” In that process, “some people may get rich first, through hard work.”
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That did not matter, as long as the Chinese economy could grow.
Upon returning to the frontline of Chinese politics, Deng made it clear that the United States would serve as the model for China’s technological needs. After he had been purged for a second time, Deng had spent much time thinking about the significance of the change that was taking place in science and technology in the 1970s. In a conversation with the Chinese-Belgian writer Han Suyin in 1977, he spoke about his concerns over China falling behind.
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In the 1960s, the gap between the scientific and technological levels of China and the rest of the world was not very big. However, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the . . . levels of the rest of the world improved tremendously. All fields of science developed quickly. The improvement made in one year amounted to that of several years; we might even say the improvement made in one day amounted to that of several years. In 1975, I once said, China was fifty years behind Japan in science. At the time, I had wanted to pay more attention to scientific study, but, in the end, I could not do so, since I myself was under house arrest. If we do not take the newest scientific achievements as our starting points. . . , I am afraid there is no hope for China.
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For Deng, the easing of tension with the United States could be made to serve China’s economic development. Visiting several American cities in 1979, the Chinese leader was bowled over by the technology, the productivity, and the consumer choices he found. After returning home, he told his colleagues that he could not sleep for several nights, thinking about how China might achieve such abundance. One thing was clear to Deng: Working with the United States on foreign affairs opened gigantic opportunities for US technology transfers to China, both military and civilian. America was the world’s leading power, and opposing it made no sense, even if the Taiwan issue remained unresolved. Deng often said that there would be a time for China to take a more prominent position in international affairs. But that time was not now, when China was weak and needed to grow fast.
B
Y
1979, T
HE YEAR
D
ENG
visited the United States, the relationship between the two countries had begun to look like an alliance. Full diplomatic relations were restored that year, and Washington cut off all formal ties with its former clients on Taiwan, now led by Chiang Ching-kuo after the 1975 death of his father, Chiang Kai-shek. But even more important than diplomacy was the increase in economic and
military cooperation between the two sides, directed against the Soviet Union and its allies. “Wherever the Soviet Union sticks its fingers, there we must chop them off,” Deng told President Jimmy Carter during his visit. Deng said that he was certain a war with the Soviets would break out, but he hoped to postpone it as long as possible. The 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were harbingers of things to come, Deng believed. Deng’s short 1979 war with Vietnam, in response to the latter’s removal of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, proved a dismal failure. China would have to rely on the United States to supply what was needed for China’s military modernization. General Zhang Aiping, a revolutionary veteran who had been badly tortured during the Cultural Revolution and whom Deng put in charge of modernizing the military, spoke with the visiting US secretary of defense, Harold Brown. Zhang said, “we are glad you want to help us develop our military capability. With your help we can develop faster. . . . We want to develop our weapons not only for China but also for the interests of the world and perhaps of the US.” Deng himself put it plainly to Carter’s cabinet: “I hope all of you present will provide, in your corresponding area, the very best. Of course, you do not have things that are of 1950s vintage. We still have many facilities of that period. I wish that you would provide us with the 1970s rather than the 1960s. I hope you will provide us with the late 1970s rather than the early 1970s. Do you understand?”
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The Chinese strategy was to get as much as possible out of the Americans by telling them what Beijing assumed they wanted to hear: that the Soviet Union was a threat to world peace and that only a strong China could dam up Soviet advances in Asia. During Ronald Reagan’s hard-line administration, starting in 1981, the Chinese message was even more welcome than it had been to Jimmy Carter, despite Reagan’s early concerns about not betraying old friends on Taiwan. Throughout the 1980s the United States treated China as a de facto ally, sharing sensitive intelligence information with it and giving it access to much-needed
technology that was sometimes unavailable to others outside the United States itself. Reagan’s purpose was to build China into a real threat to the Soviet Union, thereby putting pressure on the leaders in Moscow and reducing their capacity to intervene elsewhere. Reagan’s friend the film producer Douglas Morrow toured China in 1981 and told the president that the Beijing leaders were “absolutely obsessed about Taiwan” and that any focus on the island’s position would effectively prevent the United States from working with Deng and the Chinese leaders. And such cooperation was important, Morrow told the president:
I sure as hell don’t know where they are going. I don’t think they know. But they are going. . . . It would be advisable not to be too paranoid, at this stage, about their being a communist state. There are hints that they might develop into some unprecedented hybrid. . . . I think they will bend, twist, and adjust to whatever seems to abet their progress. And perhaps come up, eventually, with a mutant system which neither they nor the world have yet experienced.
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