An essay in universal history

39. NIXON IN CHINA

“As the 1970s began,” writes Chang, “China seemed beset by external and internal crises. Domestic politics took a bizarre turn in 1971 when it was revealed that Mao’s designated heir, Lin Biao, had perished in a plane crash in Outer Mongolia after twice attempting to assassinate the Chairman himself. At the same time, the Soviet Union was threatening to use its most ‘modern and devastating weapons’… and target specific nuclear strikes against China. Mao’s foreign policies had created a threat environment that jeopardized the very continuity of the People’s Republic. Clearly, China’s foreign posture required reassessment…

“That reassessment was undertaken under the direction of Zhou Enlai. The Manichaean notion that the world was divided into a capitalist and a socialist camp gave way to a conviction that reality was complex, where socialist China could be threatened by socialist Russia in league with socialist Vietnam. Suggestions began to be bruited that appeals be made to the capitalist powers for capital, technology transfers, and security assistance. Finally, Beijing announced that it no longer considered the United States to be China’s ‘number one enemy’. With that, China’s rapprochement with the West began – a process that spanned Mao’s remaining years, culminating in the normalization of relations between the United States and the People’ Republic of China on January 1, 1979.”⁴⁸⁷
The United States under Nixon and his crafty Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were quick to exploit the Sino-Soviet quarrel. After the clash on the Ussuri river in March, 1969, writes Stone, “Moscow asked Nixon to condemn the Chinese nuclear tests; there were hints at a nuclear strike to destroy the Chinese ‘facilities’; and the Chinese were refusing the Russians the right to fly supplies to Vietnam or to use their airfields. The Chinese needed America against Russia. There was room, here, for clevercleverness, and in April 1971 the world was surprised when an American table tennis team went to Peking. It was even more taken aback a year later, when Nixon followed, on 21 February 1972…”⁴⁸⁸
This moment of political détente between the United States and China was no less important than the other détente taking place between Washington and Moscow. This was expressed mainly in fairly open and business-like arms-control agreements and some loans from western banks to the Soviets. In the Chinese-American negotiations, however, everything was conducted in secret; neither side wanted to appear too eager to get together with the other. After all, Nixon had built his political career since the time of McCarthy on his anti-Communism, while Mao could not afford not to appear anti-American. In the event, both sides – but especially the United States – made unprecedented concessions they would not have dreamed of only a few years before.
Kissinger himself pointed out the importance of these events. “While I was on the way to China on the so-called secret trip in July 1971, [Nixon], addressing an audience in Kansas City,… argued that ‘Chinese domestic travail’ – that is, the Cultural Revolution – should not confer ‘any sense of satisfaction that it will always be that way. Because when we see the Chinese as people – and I have seen them all over the world… - they are creative, they are productive, they are one of the most capable people in the world. And 800 million Chinese are going to be, inevitably, an enormous economic power, with all that that means in terms of what they could be in other areas if they move in that direction.’
“These phrases, commonplace today, were revolutionary at that time. Because they were delivered extemporaneously – and I was out of communication with Washington – it was Zhou Enlai who brought them to my attention as I started the first dialogue with Beijing in more than twenty years. Nixon, inveterate anti-Communist, had decided that the imperatives of geopolitical equilibrium overrode the demands of ideological purity – as, fortuitously, had his counterparts in China…”⁴⁸⁹
The winner, unquestionably, was Mao. For the Chinese-American détente followed the pattern observed that in all negotations between the Capitalist West and the Communist East at least until the Reagan-Gorbachev summits, of the West conceding more than it gained. As Jung Chang and Jon Halliday write, “Mao’s change of mind [about relations with America] changed his fortunes. The invitation [to the American table-tennis team], the first ever from Red China to an American group, caused a sensation. The fact that it was a sports team helped capture the world’s imagination. Chou En-lai switched on his charm, and his totalitarian regime’s meticulously orchestrated theatre, to produce what Kissinger called ‘a dazzling welcome’ for the ping-pong team. Glowing and fascinated reports littered the American and major Western press day after day. Mao the old newspaperman had hit exactly the right button. ‘Nixon’, wrote one commentator, ‘was truly amazed at how the story jumped off the sports pages and onto the front page.’ With one move, Mao had created the climate in which a visit to China would be a political asset for Nixon in the run-up to the 1972 presidential election.
“’Nixon was excited to the point of euphoria,’ Kissinger wrote, and now wanted to skip the emissary state lest it take the glow off his own journey. By the end of May it was settled, in secret, that Nixon was going.
“Mao had not only got Nixon, he had managed to conceal that this had been his objective. Nixon was coming thinking that he was the keener of the two. So when Kissinger made his first, secret, visit in July 1971 to pave the way for the president, he bore many and weighty gifts, and asked for nothing in return. The most startling offer concerned Taiwan, to which the US was bound by a mutual defence treaty. Nixon offered to abandon Washington’s old ally, promising to accord full diplomatic recognition to Peking by January 1975, provided he was re-elected in 1972.
“Nixon was accepting Peking’s position wholesale and cutting Taiwan loose. By the end of the trip Chou was talking as if pocketing Taiwan was a matter of course. It was only at this point that Kissinger made a feeble gesture: ‘We hope very much that the Taiwan issue will be solved peacefully.’ But he did not press Chou for a promise not to use force.
“As part of the recognition package, Nixon offered to get Peking into the UN straight away: ‘you could get the China seat now’, Kissinger told Chou when proposing the behind-the-scenes fix, adding that ‘the President wanted me to discuss this matter with you before we adopted a position.’
“And there was more, including an offer to tell the Chinese everything about America’s dealings with Russia. Kissinger: ‘Specially, I am prepared to give you any information you may wish to know regarding any bilateral negotiations we are having with the Soviet Union on such issues as SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks]. A few months later Kissinger told the Chinese: ‘we tell you about our conversations with the Soviets; we do not tell the Soviets about our conversations with you’…
“Kissinger also made two huge commitments on Indochina: to pull out all US forces, mentioning a twelve-month deadline; and to abandon the South Vietnamese regime, promising to withdraw ‘unilaterally’ even if there were no negotiations – and that US troops would not return. ‘After a peace is made,’ said Kissinger, ‘we will be 10,000 miles away, and [Hanoi] will still be there.’ Kissinger even made a promise that ‘most, if not all, American troops’ would be out of Korea before the end of Nixon’s next term, without even trying to extract any guarantee that Mao would not support another Communist invasion of South Korea.
“Mao was being given a lot, and on a platter. Kissinger specifically said that he was not asking China to stop giving aid to Vietnam, and Mao was not even requested to soften his bellicose anti-American tone, either in the world at large or during the meetings. The minutes show that Chou was hectoring (‘you should answer that question… you must answer that question’), and constantly referring to ‘your oppression, your subversion, and your intervention’. He in effect suggested that Nixon must make more and more concessions for the privilege of coming to China, and being allowed to recognise Peking. Kissinger did not ask for reciprocal concessions. Chou’s outlandish claim that China was not ‘aggressive’ – ‘because of our new [Communist] system, no less – went unchallenged. And Chou’s reference to American ‘cruelties’ in Vietnam earned no reproof about Mao’s cruelties in China. On a different occasion, when North Vietnam’s negotiator had obliquely criticized the Nixon administration, Kissinger had shot back: ‘You are the representative of one of the most tyrannical governments on this planet…’ Now, Kissinger described Chou’s presentation as ‘very moving’.
“When Mao heard the report of the first day’s talks, his ego soared, and he remarked to his top diplomats that America was ‘changing from monkey to man, not quite man yet, the tail is still there… but it is no longer a monkey, it’s a chimpanzee, and its tail is not very long.’ ‘American should start its life anew,’ he proclaimed, expanding on his Darwinian approach, viewing America as a slowly evolving lower primate. ‘This is evolution!’ Chou, for his part, compared Nixon to a loose woman ‘tarting herself up and offering herself at the door’. It was now, during this first Kissinger visit, that Mao drew the conclusionthat Nixon could be manipulated, and that Peking could get a lot out of America without having to modify its tyranny, or its anti-American ranting…”⁴⁹⁰
The taunts were deserved. America had betrayed all its Far Eastern allies for a mess of Chinese pottage. The undignified and hypocritical grovelling of the world’s most powerful nation and the supposed number one champion of human rights in the world before one of the most evil and murderous regimes in history was worthy of scorn and boded badly for the situation of Capitalism in the coming decade.
“Immediately after Kissinger’s secret visit,” continue Chang and Halliday, “it was announced that Nixon had been invited to China and had accepted. Kissinger returned to Peking in October 1971 to prepare for the president’s visit. His second trip coincided with the annual UN voted on China’s seat, which Taiwanheld, and the public presence in Peking of the president’s top adviser turned the tide. On 25 October, Peking displaced Taipei in the UN, giving Mao a seat, and a veto, on the Security Council.
“This was just over a month after the flight and death of Lin Biao. The news that there had been a plot to kill him had left Mao in a state of deep depression. Taiwan’s defeat and Nixon’s coming visit lifted his spirits immeasurably. Laughing broadly and joking, he talked for nearly three hours in full flow to his top diplomats. Looking at the UN vote, he declared that: ‘Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Canada, Italy – they have all become Red Guards….’
“Before China’s delegates left for the UN, Mao made a point of reminding them that they must continue to treat the USA as Public Enemy no. 1, and fiercely denounce it ‘by name, an absolute must’. He wanted to make his debut on the world stage as the anti-American champion, using the UN as a new platform.
“Nine days before Nixon was scheduled to arrive in China on 21 February 1972, Mao passed out, and came very close to death. The prospect of Nixon’s imminent arrival helped to restore him…”⁴⁹¹
And indeed, it could be argued that America’s support for China brought the evil dragon back from the dead…
“During the relatively brief 65-minute (the only one between Nixon and Mao on this trip), Mao parried every attempt to engage him in serious issues. This was not because he had been ill, but because he did not want to leave a record of his positions in the hands of the Americans. Nothing must damage his claim to be the global anti-American leader. He had invited Nixon to Peking to promote that claim, not to waive it. So when Nixon proposed discussing ‘current issues like Taiwan, Vietnam and Korea’, Mao acted as if he were above such lesser chores. ‘These questions are not questions to be discussed in my place,’ he said, conveying an impression of lofty detachment. ‘They should be discussed with the Premier,’ adding that: ‘All those troublesome problems I don’t want to get into very much.’ Then he cut the Americans short by saying: ‘As a suggestion, may I suggest you do a little less briefing?’ When Nixon persisted in talking about ‘common ground’ and building a ‘world structure’, Mao ignored him, turned to Chou to ask what it was, and said: ‘Haven’t we talked enough now?’
“Mao was especially careful not to pay Nixon any compliments, while Nixon and Kissinger both flattered Mao fulsomely. Nixon told Mao: ‘The Chariman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world.’ Mao retruned no thanks, and made only one, condescending comment on Nixon: ‘Your book, Six Crises, is not a bad book.’…
“Mao clearly felt he could push Nixon quite far. At the end of the visit there was to be a joint communiqué. Mao dictated one in which he could denounce America. ‘Aren’t they talking peace, security… and what not?’ he said to Chou. ‘We will do the opposite and talk revolution, talk liberating the oppressed nations and people all over the world…’ So the communiqué took the form of each side stating its own position. The Chinese used their space for a tirade against America (though not by name). The American side did not say one word critical of Mao’s regime, going no further than a vague and much qualified platitude about supporting ‘individual freedom’.”⁴⁹²
But in a world turned truly upside down, while the powerful Americans groveled to the starving Chinese who so feared a Soviet invasion (which was their real reason for seeking relations with the Americans), the Chinese themselves were vulnerable to some of their lowly satraps – like Albania…
“In spite of all his efforts to come across as the champion of anti-Americanism, Mao caught a lot of flak from his old allies. The fiercest came from Albania, which mattered to Mao because it was the only East European regime he had detached from Russia’s orbit. Albania’s dictator, Hoxha, penned Mao a nineteen-page letter expressing his fury over what he called ‘this shitty business’. Actually, Hoxha cunningly used rhetoric to extract colossal amounts of extra aid, basically saying: You are consorting with the enemy, but you can buy our silence for more money. Mao paid up.
“The biggest problem was Vietnam, which counted far more than Albania internationally. The Vietnamese were worried that Mao was trying to use them as a bargaining chip with the US. [They needn’t have worried: the Americans had given everything to the Chinese already.] When Chou went to Hanoi immediately after Kissinger’s first visit, to explain Peking’s move, he got an earful from North Vietnam’s leader. ‘Vietnam is our country.’ Le Duan protested; ‘you have no right to discuss the question of Vietnam with the United States.’… Mao tried to salvage some influence by pouring in even more aid, which rose to unprecedented levels from 1971, peaking in 1974.
“All these bribes to keep old allies quiet meant a tighter squeeze on the Chinese population. Nor did its extra burdens stop there. As more and more countries recognized Peking in the wake of Nixon’s visit, the number of states to which China sent aid jumped from 31 prior to 1970 to 66. On tiny and immeasurably more prosperous Malta (pop. c. 300,000), Mao lavished no less than $25 million in April 1972. Its prime minister, Dom Mintoff, returned from China sporting a Mao badge.
“Mao often had to pay over the odds to buy himself back into favour with states he had earlier tried to subvert. One former target, President Mobutu of Zaire, told us how generously he was funded by Mao, who – unlike the IMF and the World Bank – let him defer loans indefinitely, or repay them in worthless Zairean currency. In the years 1971-5, foreign aid took up a staggering average of 5.88 per cent of China’s entire expenditure, peaking at 6.92 per cent in 1973 – by far the highest percentage in the world, and at least seventy times the US level.
“While Mao dished out money and food, and built expensive underground railway systems, shipyards and infrastructure for countries far richer than China, most of the 900 million Chinese hovered just above survival levels. In many areas, peasants recall that the hungriest years after the Great Famine of 1958-61 were those from 1973 to Mao’s death in 1976 – the years immediately after Nixon’s visit.
“Nixon had often been credited with opening the door to China. Inasmuch as a numbef of Western statesmen and businessmen, plus some press and tourists, were able to enter China, he did increase the Western presence in China. But he did not open the door of - much less from – China, and the increased Western presence did not have any appreciable impacton Chinese society while Mao was alive. Mao made sure that for the vast majority of the population, China remained a tightly sealed prison. The only people who benefited at all from the rapprochement were a small elite. Some of these were allowed to see relatives from abroad – under heavy supervision. And a tiny number could lay hands on the half-dozen or so contemporary Western books translated in classified editions, one of which was Nixon’s own Six Crises. From 1973 some foreign-language students were sent abroad, but the very few who were lucky enough to be allowed out had to be politically ultra-reliable, and lived and worked under the closest surveillance, forbidden even to step out of their residence unescorted.
“The population as a whole remained rigidly quarantined from the few foreigners allowed into China, who were subject to rigorous control. Any unauthorized conversation with them could bring catastrophe to the locals involved. The lengths to which the regime would go were extraordinary. For Nixon’s one-day visit to Shanghai, which coincided with Chinese New Year, the traditional occasion for family reunions (like Christmas), thousands of rusticated youths who were visiting their families were expelled back to their villages of exile, as a precaution against the extremely remote possibility of any of them trying to complain to the president.
“The real beneficiaries of Nixon’s visit were Mao himself, and his regime. For his own electoral ends, Nixon de-demonised Mao for mainstream opinion in the West. Briefing White House staff on his return, Nixon spoke of the ‘dediation’ of Mao’s cynical coterie, whom Kissinger called ‘a group of monks… who… kept their revolutionary purity’. Nixon’s men asserted, falsely, that ‘under Mao the lives of the Chinese masses have been greatly improved’. Nixon’s favourite evangelist, Billy Graham, lauded Mao’s virtues to British businessmen. Kissinger suggested that Mao’s callous crew would ‘challenge us in a moral way’. The result was an image of Mao a whole lot further from the truth than the one that Nixon himself had helped purvey as a fierce anti-Communist in the 1950s.
“Mao became not merely a credible international figure, but one with incomparable allure. World statesmen beat a path to his door. A meeting with Mao was, and sometimes still is, regarded as the highlight of many a career, and life…”⁴⁹³
“Nixon’s visit also opened up for Mao the possibility of laying his hands on American nuclear weapons.
“Obtaining nuclear secrets had always been central to Mao’s American policy. ‘The only objective of these relations,’ he told the North Korean dictator Kim, ‘is to obtain developed technology.’ Mao knew that he could only achieve his goal if America considered him an ally…
“The Russians were alarmed by Mao’s overtures towards the Americans. In June 1973 Brezhnev warned Nixon and Kissinger that (as Kissinger paraphrased it to China’s liaison): ‘if military arrangements were made between the US and the PRC [People’s Republic of China], this would have the most serious consequences and would lead the Sovietw to take drastic measures.’ This conversation with Brezhnev, which concerned US national security, was promptly related to Mao’s envoy, who was present at the Western White House during Nixon’s talks with Brezhnev, but not to America’s allies – or to the US government itself. ‘We have told no one in our government of this conversation,’ Kissinger confided to Mao’s envoy. ‘It must be kept totally secret.’
“One ostensible purpose of Nixon’s journey to Peking had been to lessen the danger of war with Russia. Thanks to Mao, this danger had if anything increased…”⁴⁹⁴
At the same time, both China and the Soviet Union continued to supply arms and food to the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. So while international politics was becoming more complex and multi-polar, the Communist-Capitalist struggle remained primary.

1^ Judt, “Why the Cold War Worked” in When the Facts Change. Essays 1995-2010, London: Vintage, 2015, p. 66.

2^ The word was coined in France in 1936 (Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1914-1991), London: Abacus, 1994, p. 545, note).

3^ With greater financial resources enabling them to exploit nuclear technology, the Nazis may well have won World War II. Thus Eric Hobsbawm writes: “Essentially it is now clear that Nazi Germany failed to make a nuclear bomb not because German scientists did not know how it could be made, or try to make it, with different degrees of reluctance, but because the German war-machine was unwilling or unable to devote the necessary resources to it. They abandoned the effort and switched to what seemed the more cost-effective concentration on rocketry, which promised quicker returns” (Age of Extremes, p. 527, note).

4^ Yuval Noah-Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, London: Harvill, 2016.

5^ “In 1948, talking about the Potsdam conference, he told a reporter that he knew Stalin well and that ‘I like old Joe’; the dictator, he maintained, was a decent sort who could not do as he wished because he was the Politburo’s prisoner. Here we are, back to the hawks and doves, a notion that the Soviets would always know how to play on to extort one-way concessions” (Jean-François Revel, How Democracies Perish, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985, p. 220).

6^ Norman Stone, The Atlantic and its Enemies, London: Penguin, 2010, p. 1.

7^ Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur, London: Zed Books, 2013, pp. 57-59.

8^ Halligan, “We should be tearing down barriers, not putting them up”, The Sunday Telegraph, Business section, September 4, 2016, p. 4. As we shall see, there was an important change in the Bretton Woods system in 1973. Nevertheless, the “spirit of Bretton Woods” survived.

9^ Varoufakis, op. cit., p. 60.

10^ Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Pimlico, 2007, p. 105.

11^ David Reynolds, America. Empire of Liberty, London: Penguin, 2010, pp. 379-380.

12^ Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 381-382.

13^ Revel, op. cit., p. 102.

14^ John M. Owen IV, “From Calvin to the Caliphate”, Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2015, vol. 94, no. 3, p. 84.

15^ Judt, op. cit., p. 125.

16^ Reynolds, op. cit., p. 383.

17^ Kissinger, World Order, London: Penguin, 2015, pp. 281-282.

18^ Revel, op. cit., pp. 251-252.

19^ Kissinger, op. cit., pp. 282-283.

20^ Sebestyen, 1946: The Making of the Modern World, London: Pan, 2014, p. 20.

21^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman.

22^ Paul Johnson, History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, pp. 524-525.

23^ Judt, op. cit., pp. 36-37. Cf. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, London: Penguin, 2013, pp. 13-17.

24^ Judt, op. cit., p. 27.

25^ Sebestyen, 1946: The Making of the Modern World, London: Pan, 2014, p. 140.

26^ In view of the massive propaganda directed by the modern Russian media against the “Banderites”, it is worth heeding the words of Professor Andrei Zubov: “This was a national liberation movement, an anti-communist one.

“Stepan Andreyevich Bandera was born and lived in that part of the Ukraine which was part of Poland before 1939. And he saw all the Soviet horrors from peaceful and wealthy (by comparison with Soviet Ukraine) Galicia. He saw how, during the Great Ukrainian Famine [golodomor], people who were dying from hunger hurled themselves across the frontier onto Polish territory, how they were shot by Soviet border-guards. And for that he hated Soviet power.

“Any nationalism is a terrible thing, especially with weapons in its hands. But Bandera was a hundred times less cruel than the NKVD of Beria and Abakumov when they fought against the Banderites.

“Therefore any attempt to liberate them from this state was already an element of justice. And in this sense the Banderite movement was more justified from the point of view of morality than the Stalinist Soviet state.”(“Banderovtsy – eto primer bol’shoj lzhi sovietskoj sistemy” (The Banderites are an example of the big lie of the Soviet system), Nash Dom, January 8, 2016, http://www.nashdom.us/home/public/publikatsii/banderovtsy---eto-primer-bolshoj-lzhi-sovetskoj-sistemy)

27^ Erich Hartmann, “Antisovietskoe partizanskoe dvizhenie Belarusi v 1944-1956g.”, http://www.erich-hartmann.com/antisovetskoe-partizanskoe-dvizhenie.

28^ Keith Lowe, “The War Without An End”, BBC History Magazine, July-August, 2015, pp. 50-55.

29^ Judt, op. cit., p. 24.

30^ Sebastyen, op. cit., p. 287.

31^ Sebestyen, op. cit., pp. 129-130.

32^ Judt writes: “The British were extracting at most $29 million in reparations from Germany; but the occupation was costing London $80 million a year, leaving the British taxpayer to foot the bill for the difference even as the British government was forced to impose bread rationing at home (an expedient that had been avoided throughout the war). In the opinion of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, the British were ‘paying reparations to the Germans’” (op. cit., p. 123).

33^ Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War, London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp. 710-711.

34^ Kennan, in Judt, op. cit., p. 19.

35^ In reality, it was probably much worse than in antiquity.

36^ However, the Prime Minister of Norway from 1945-49 and 1955-65, Einar Gerhardson, was a KGB agent. He was the first western leader to visit the Soviet Union after the war. “Norvegi v shoke: ‘otets natsii’, 15 let vozglavliaiuschij kabinet, byl agentom KGB”, December 25, 2015, 9