Chinese Lessons:Nixon, Mao, and the Course of U.S.-Chinese Relations

In the mid-1960s, having failed to win either the presidency or the governorship of California, Richard Nixon had ample time to think about international relations, his primary policy interest. Like most China specialists, he concluded that the United States should end its efforts to isolate China. Few analysts doubted the reality of the Sino-Soviet split, and Nixon was among those who recognized that opening diplomatic ties with Beijing might strengthen the U.S. position in the Cold War. If China was no longer an urgent threat requiring containment, the United States would be able to reinforce the lines against the Soviet Union and marshal its power for a single great war. Moscow, meanwhile, would have to worry about China as well as its western front: the Soviets reportedly had 500,000 troops stationed on the Chinese border.

When Nixon was elected president at the end of the decade, the most pressing foreign policy problem of the day was finding a way out of Vietnam. But he and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, understood that managing relations with the Soviet Union and China had to be their principal task. Perhaps Moscow or Beijing, they thought, could help with Hanoi.

Margaret MacMillan, author of the prize-winning "Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World", has marked the U.S.-Chinese rapprochement of 1971-72 as another major turning point in world history. Her new book, "Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World," is a well-researched and analytically sound popular history. MacMillan may not be the equal of James Mann or the late Barbara Tuchman, but she has the ability to turn complex foreign affairs into engaging tales. She takes her readers through the delicate maneuvers between Chinese and U.S. leaders that ultimately led to Kissinger's secret mission to Beijing -- secret in particular from Secretary of State William Rogers -- and provides thoughtful analysis of the two sides' goals during the ensuing negotiations.

Nixon's initial overtures to Chinese leaders won a favorable reception. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was burning out, and Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were uneasy about what they perceived as the rising Soviet threat. The invitation they issued to their suitors from Washington indicated that a high-level mission to China would be welcomed -- provided the Americans understood that resolution of differences over Taiwan would be the price of rapprochement.

Having read the transcripts of the conversations between Kissinger and Zhou, the Chinese premier, MacMillan does not take Kissinger's memoirs at face value. She notes the discrepancy between his claim to have talked little about Taiwan and the actual centrality of the Taiwan issue in his meetings with Zhou. Kissinger was indifferent to the fate of the Kuomintang regime on the island, and Nixon, who had exhibited considerable sympathy for Chiang Kai-shek in the past, proved willing to sacrifice Taiwan to achieve his purposes in Beijing. Kissinger flew off on his secret mission in July 1971, and Nixon followed in a highly publicized visit in February 1972. At the conclusion of Nixon's visit, a carefully worded communiqué declared that the United States "acknowledged" that "all" Chinese on the mainland and on Taiwan agreed that there was but one China and that Taiwan was a part of it. Of course, as State Department specialists pointed out immediately, that was nonsense: it ignored the many Taiwanese who wanted to be independent. But Kissinger and Nixon were dismissive of such nitpicking, even if Kissinger did make a perfunctory and unsuccessful effort to drop the word "all." Only fear of a political firestorm sparked by Taiwan's supporters back home kept them from openly abandoning Chiang.

MacMillan's chapters on the negotiations between Kissinger and Zhou and the meetings between Nixon and Mao are excellent. She captures Kissinger's obsequiousness in his determination to win Zhou's confidence in 1971, the excitement of the Americans in Beijing, and their awe of the Delphic and demented Mao. She does a magnificent job of focusing on the public-relations aspects of Nixon's trip -- the president's craving to be seen as a great world leader and his staff's manipulation of the media.

INTERNAL AFFAIRS

Did Nixon's week in China "change the world"? The short answer must be yes. The tacit alliance that emerged between China and the United States over the subsequent decade reshaped the balance of power in the Cold War. It alleviated the enmity that had kept the two countries apart for more than three decades, eased U.S. concerns about communist expansion in East Asia, and made the U.S. defeat in Vietnam more palatable. Beijing and Washington shared intelligence about the Soviet Union and increased the pressures on Moscow, which eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet empire.

But then one day the Cold War was over. Mikhail Gorbachev recognized that the Soviet Union, with its pathetic economy, could not sustain the competition with the United States, and in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the European satellites won their freedom with minimal bloodshed, except in Romania. (This truly world-changing series of events would be worthy of MacMillan's next book.) Unfortunately, when the Chinese, led by students and Communist Party intellectuals, demanded an end to arbitrary rule at home, they were crushed brutally by their own government in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere. Peaceful change did not come to China; the contrast with the events in Europe at the time served only to highlight the Chinese Communist Party's determination to hold on to unchecked power at any cost.