The two preceding chapters analyzed the China policy debate within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and traced American officials' arguments for and against relaxing China policy in the 1960s. They demonstrated that four distinct subdiscourses about China existed within the internal official discourse, each a representation of the perceived identity and characteristics of China, of the Sino-American relationship, and of resulting U.S. interests and policy stances. These are summarized in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1 highlights how each discourse focused on particular aspects of China's identity, used separate frames of reference, and made distinct policy recommendations. The Red Menace image emphasized China's aggressive hostility toward the noncommunist world, working from the 1950s international framework of two opposing rigid blocs in a Cold War. The second hostile discourse based on the image of China as Revolutionary Rival used the less rigid international framework resulting from the Sino-Soviet split to suggest selective opposition to the more militant Chinese brand of communism. The two revisionist subdiscourses of China, on the other hand, stressed indigenous aspects of Chinese identity. The Troubled Modernizer image was concerned with China's poverty and “basic needs” crises, viewed through the lens of Western models of socioeconomic development. The policy recommendation was that Washington should try to encourage the ascendance of the moderate elements of the Chinese leadership that wanted to concentrate on these internal problems, thereby muting China's external hostility.

As the hostile policy discourse toward Communist China evolved and became more acute and yet also more ambiguous during the 1960s, a parallel revisionist discourse was developing both in reaction to events and as a result of personal convictions. Throughout the decade, a number of officials within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations worked to convince their colleagues of the need to alter the official U.S. position toward the PRC. This group combined liberal Democratic stalwarts such as Chester Bowles, Averell Harriman, and Adlai Stevenson; “old China hands” such as Edward Rice; and Asian and China specialists such as Roger Hilsman, Edwin Reischauer, James Thomson, and Robert Komer. They variously occupied the main China advisory positions in the State Department and the White House and headed key diplomatic posts.

These officials pushed for the relaxation of China policy and accumulated a “shopping list” of possible American initiatives that included lifting the travel ban on Americans wishing to visit China, removing trade restrictions on nonstrategic goods, inviting the Chinese to disarmament negotiations, and ending Beijing's exclusion from the UN on the basis of various “two Chinas” arrangements. They advanced arguments that were based on two central revised images of China, focusing in turn on its weakness and poverty, and on its pride and potential strength. Together, these two images identified China in ways that revealed potential common areas of understanding between the United States and China. Initially, the revisionist discourse was submerged within internal memoranda, waged as personal campaigns by midlevel officials.

Richard Nixon's opening to China in 1972 has been indelibly associated with balance-of-power politics and its attendant assumption of a sudden, almost automatic realist reaction to structural changes from 1969 onward. Yet Nixon had been a prominent figure in the U.S. government since the 1950s and had maintained a high-profile involvement with communist and Asian affairs during the 1960s, when he was out of office. This chapter traces Nixon's thinking about China policy prior to, and during the first two years of, his presidency and investigates its relationship to the developing discourse of reconciliation in official and informed public circles during the 1960s. Did Nixon, in keeping with his front-line Republican conservative position, perceive China as a “Red Menace” to be ruthlessly contained and isolated? How then did he turn to the discourse of reconciliation with China that accompanied his moves toward rapprochement when he took office?

“TOUGH COEXISTENCE”: NIXON'S CHINA POLICY THINKING AS VICE PRESIDENT, 1952–1960

Nixon's early political career was built significantly upon anticommunist foundations. Shortly after being elected a congressman from California in 1947, he was appointed to the Herter Committee, which undertook a study tour of Europe in preparation for the Marshall Plan.

In the process of constructing a new relationship with Beijing, Washington had not only to cultivate a convergence in worldviews and in the appreciation of certain common national interests, but also to demonstrate its willingness to act in accordance with the basic principles governing the relationship. The latter included the agreement to counter hegemony in Asia and the aim of working toward normalization of relations. Between 1971 and 1972, the two sides established regular high-level channels of contact that would allow bilateral communication and policy coordination. This took two forms: Kissinger's occasional trips to Beijing and, in between, his secret meetings, first with the Chinese Ambassador Huang Zhen in Paris and then with the Chinese UN Representative Ambassador Huang Hua in a CIA “safe house” in New York after the PRC gained UN representation in October 1971.

President Richard Nixon's historic visit to the People's Republic of China in February 1972 marked a Sino-American rapprochement and the beginning of the route to normalization of relations. This came more than twenty years after mainland China was “lost” to the communists and, less than a year later in 1950, attacked American-led United Nations forces in Korea. Thereafter, a key tenet of U.S. Cold War strategy was to “contain” Communist China by means of bilateral alliances and military bases in East Asia, and to isolate it by severing trade, travel, and diplomatic contacts and refusing to recognize the communist regime. The next twenty years were characterized by American opposition to UN membership for mainland China, three crises in the Taiwan Straits, offensive rhetoric, threats of nuclear attack, and the fighting of a proxy war in Vietnam. In ending this hostile estrangement in 1972, Nixon thus executed a dramatic reversal of U.S. China policy. The U.S.–China rapprochement was the most significant strategic shift of the Cold War prior to 1989, more so than the Sino-Soviet split. As Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger claimed, the rapprochement “changed the world” by transforming a Cold War international system made up of two opposing ideological blocs into a tripolar one in which great-power foreign policy was conducted on the basis of “national interest” and power balancing.

This chapter traces and offers some explanations for the transition, in practice, from a rapprochement relationship in which China was characterized as a “former enemy” – a fellow realist power with whom the United States cultivated a mutual distrust of the Soviet Union, and toward whom the United States “tilted” covertly while pursuing a superpower détente – to a relationship that encompassed more intimate diplomatic and military ties with a China represented as a “tacit ally.” The latter contained a much more overt anti-Soviet focus, within which Kissinger emphasized offering strategic reassurance to the Chinese and the development of conceptual and domestic opinion bases for a closer security relationship, while bargaining for more favorable terms of diplomatic normalization.

After the Beijing summit, the negotiation of the U.S.–PRC rapprochement was closely influenced both by triangular politics and by domestic politics. At the same time, the sustained interaction between the two sides had a significant impact upon the development of the discursive context and resulting policy actions. Interestingly, this process was again characterized by competing discourses: this time, Kissinger's representation of the Soviet threat and U.S.–PRC relations versus that of the Chinese leaders. Kissinger portrayed the Chinese not just as former adversaries or friends but as tacit allies, whose strategic viewpoint increasingly coincided with that of the United States and who placed their priority on anti-Soviet aspects of the relationship rather than on bilateral issues.

As the president's personal envoy, Henry Kissinger flew secretly to Beijing from Pakistan on 9 July 1971 and stayed for two days of talks with Zhou Enlai. Upon his return, Kissinger characterized those discussions as “the most searching, sweeping and significant … I have ever had in government.” These meetings, he reported to Nixon, marked a “major new departure in international relations,” and the Nixon administration now had the opportunity to “transform the very framework of global relationships.”

In spite of the prior back channel messages, Kissinger's first trip was in some ways a step into the unknown, and his fundamental task was to establish whether the Chinese leaders were indeed ready to relate to the United States in a nonhostile and nonmilitant fashion. Kissinger found that the small coterie of Chinese leaders he met were people whom he could deal with. More than that, he was clearly in awe of Zhou, and drawn to admiration and respect for the man whom he felt “ranks with Charles De Gaulle as the most impressive foreign statesman I have met.”