February
20, 2002
REALITY
CHECK: 30
Years Later - Bush Following in Nixon's Footsteps
by Dan Ewing
President Bush will arrive in China thirty years to the day after President Nixon made his historic visit to Beijing and opened relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. On February 21, 1972, Nixon ended twenty-two years of mutual isolation when he began a week of talks with Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai. Together, they took the first steps in a new relationship that changed both countries and altered the course of history. Three decades later U.S.-China ties have strengthened and expanded into a complex relationship; often cooperative, sometimes contentious, but always vital to global stability. On Thursday, George Bush will continue a dialogue between the countries that Nixon began decades ago.
Nixon had wanted to create an opening with China since 1969 and employed skill and back channel diplomacy to make a connection with Beijing. The break came when Nixon personally asked Pakistani President Yahya Khan to impart a secret message to Zhou Enlai expressing his view that "it was essential we open negotiations." The channel was a success, Nixon received word that Beijing wanted talks, and Henry Kissinger soon made his secret visit to the Chinese capital in 1971.
The China that Nixon saw on his visit was still firmly in the grip of Mao’s socialist vision. It was reclusive and strange to Americans. The Chinese were dressed in the drab Maoist uniforms and carried copies of the Little Red Book. China’s state planned economy was years away from the first cracks of reform, and with Mao’s autarkic policy and American economic embargoes, China was virtually closed to world trade.
In 1972, Mao was eighty-one years old and in failing health, but he remained a towering historical figure. Leader of the Chinese Communist revolution, Mao assumed near absolute power within China after the Communist victory in 1949. Mao’s foreign policy promoted Third World revolution and he pursued a radical socialist construction program that occasionally produced disastrous results. In the late 1960s, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to instill revolutionary fervor in China’s youth and threw the country into chaos.
Nixon and Mao: A Conversation the Changed the World.
Nixon met Mao in the study of his Beijing residence. The fierce anticommunist Nixon and anti-capitalist revolutionary Mao Zedong were at once comfortable with each other, and they were intent on changing world politics. The two played down their potential threat to one another. Mao assured Nixon that his anti-imperialist slogans were "empty cannons", while Nixon told Mao that "the United States has no territorial designs on China."
Nixon wanted China to help America counterbalance the Soviet Union’s global power. The Chinese, recently bloodied by Soviet troops on their mutual border, were eager to offset the USSR. That common strategic factor grounded the U.S.-China relationship for nearly two decades. Moreover, cooperation against the USSR opened the "Strategic Triangle" and began a new realist phase in American foreign policy. Capitalist America and Communist China leapt past ideological rhetoric and cooperated to advance national interests where they overlapped.
Also important to Nixon was Beijing’s help in ending the Indochina War, their discussion on East Asia, and a foreign policy victory that might lessen some domestic pressure against his administration. For his part, Mao was determined to discuss the future of Taiwan, but conceded that "[China] can do without Taiwan for the time being and let it come after one hundred years."
But the most important result of Nixon’s visit was the dialogue between the leaders of the two countries and gradually their citizens as well. As Nixon said to Mao, "Looking at the two great powers, the United States and China... we can find common ground, despite our differences, to build a world structure in which both can be safe to develop in our own ways on our own roads."
The Shanghai Communiqué codified the beginnings of this new relationship, and was the first of three communiqués outlining bilateral relations. The document defined the framework of U.S.-China relations and was a remarkable diplomatic achievement. Notably, it stressed the differences between the U.S. and China, as well as their shared opposition regional hegemony and other issues.
Yet in this early period, America’s relationship with China was almost solely strategic: economic and social ties were virtually non-existent. Gradually, however, China reached out to the world, and economic, cultural and political ties with America steadily broadened the relationship’s strategic base.
President Bush: Continuing the Dialogue
This Thursday, President Bush will visit a much different China. Two decades of economic reforms, booming high-rise construction, and newly minted WTO membership have profoundly changed the country. Chinese today enjoy substantially greater economic liberty and a vastly higher standard of living than in 1972. Chinese culture has opened to the world and its citizens are better informed. Bush, if he wants, can stroll out from the Great Hall of the People to get a Starbucks coffee or a Big Mac.
Although China still wears a communist nametag, official ideology masks significant political changes that have taken place. At the apex, Mao, the revolutionary titan, has departed. In his place, a generation of less radical, more professional leaders now steers the country. Although they still rule through authoritarian means, China’s political process has been gradually institutionalizing. In fact, this year will witness a leadership succession unlike any in modern Chinese history – a stable one. Though Mao was removed from power only by his death in 1976, Jiang Zemin will step down through a formal process. Grassroots political changes, severely curtailed by the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, are nonetheless slowly taking place as well.
Bush will have a full agenda. At a general level, he hopes to maintain the improvement in ties since the April low when the damaged American EP-3 landed on Hainan. Specifically, he wants to engage China on human rights, weapons non-proliferation, WTO issues, and more. Bush will also talk to Jiang Zemin about the war on terror, and he hopes to arrange for both Jiang Zemin and upcoming leader Hu Jintao to visit Washington this year.
What is noticeably absent in the U.S.-China relationship today is a strategic base as solid as that during Nixon’s Presidency. During the Cold War, the common anchor of each nation’s security interests was the Soviet Union. Now, each eyes the other and worries about the long-term. The U.S. frets that China’s increasing power will, in time, produce a challenge to America’s regional influence. Meanwhile, the Chinese are suspicious about American intentions to restrain them and preserve what Beijing sees as unipolar dominance. The war on terrorism has provided a welcome agenda for cooperation, but has yet to bring America and China together strategically as closely as they were in the early stages of the relationship.
While in Beijing, Bush should note the incredible changes that Nixon helped create and remember the former President’s parting words for Mao:
"History has brought us together. The question is whether we, with different philosophies, but with feet on the ground, and having come from the people, can make a breakthrough that will serve not just China and America, but the whole world in the years ahead. And that is why we are here."
(Dan Ewing is
Assistant Director of Chinese Studies at The Nixon Center.)
