A bright summer day in early July 1971. The skies were clear. Beijing’s morning haze was still a few decades away. Ye Jianying, a Marshal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China, and his associate Huang Hua, a rising star of the Foreign Ministry, were waiting at the Beijing airport to receive a special guest.
The guest’s country had requested complete secrecy to be maintained about the visitor. It suited the Chinese leadership of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. They were not greatest of friends of the media anyway. But at the beginning, the two had wanted wide publicity of the trip. They were told to save it for later—a bigger, grander guest.
Soon, the Pakistan International Airlines plane landed on the tarmac. The welcoming party advanced to receive the newcomers. Henry Kissinger came down the stairs, along with a group of aides from the US National Security Council (NSC). Kissinger headed the NSC as President Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser (NSA).
The newly arrived were quickly bundled into cars and whisked through the streets of Beijing to their lodgings. Riding in one car of the cavalcade was John Holdridge, the China expert in the NSC with Huang Hua. Huang, who would later become China’s Foreign Minister, broached the topic first. Would Kissinger shake Zhou Enlai’s hands, he asked?
The question encapsulated more than 20 years of Sino-US relationship, ever since the 1949 takeover of the country by the communists under Mao. China’s new leaders had to soon embroil themselves in a war on the Korean Peninsula, fighting the US and allied forces. The latter had just returned victorious over the Fascists and Nazis in the Second World War. But soon the Cold War loomed.
So in 1954, when the US’s top diplomat, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had confronted China’s legendary Zhou at the Geneva conference on IndoChina, he had refused to shake the hands of the Chinese premier. Huang was ensuring that history would not repeat itself.
History of that period was marked with diplomatic strife and implacable hostilities. Even Kissinger called it the ‘regress(ive) Dulles era’.1 Dwight Eisenhower was the President of the US when Dulles was the Secretary of State. The administration had concluded that at the end of the Korean War and the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu, Asian communism was at a vigorous phase. And China was at the vanguard of that.
They were afraid that if they adopted a softer line with China, the trend of communism in Asia would catch an irreversible momentum. A flexible China policy would lead to a loss of the US’s structural power.2 Plus, they were afraid that they would lose the support of the right wing of the US Congress. For the US to maintain hegemony, it was important letting the countries of Southeast Asia think that what was good for America was good for them. And, in that matrix a theoretical tenet of the realist school, propounding balance of power as a way for global order, fell by the wayside. To deter what was then the USSR; the US did not seek to join hands China, as the experts would have liked.
Instead, Dulles allowed the negotiations in Geneva to languish on piffling issues. How soon China would release the Prisoner of Wars (POWs) of the Korean War became a sticking point that blocked all negotiations on lifting a US-led trade embargo on the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Or what would be the status of Formosa (Taiwan)—an island where Chiang Kai Shek and his men had fled after losing to Mao Zedong’s Red Army.
The PRC claimed Taiwan as one of its provinces. While America fuelled the myth that Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) were the real Chinese government. They even backed the rump government to hold China’s permanent member seat at the United Nations Security Council.
John Foster Dulles did not stop at just stonewalling Mao’s government from getting international recognition. He even propounded the theory that if PRC was pushed towards the USSR, the proximity would breed contempt. Richard H. Immerman, one of Dulles’s biographers’ details what he calls his subject’s ‘creative solution’.3 Dulles calculated that the Chinese government would turn to the Soviet Union for relief and discover that Moscow was not up to the task. The resulting disillusionment, he believed, would eventually lead to the severing of Sino-Soviet ties and to the collapse of Communism in China.4
Florid imagination apart, the main American strategy applied to China till the Nixon era was of ‘containment through isolation’.5 Even the short and truncated John F. Kennedy administration that failed to take any major initiative about China made it difficult for the latter to enter the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) as a member. They persuaded other members of the UNGA to elevate the China issue as an ‘important question’, requiring two-thirds of the members to vote to change the status quo.6
The slain John F. Kennedy was substituted by Lyndon B. Johnson as the President in Washington in 1963. His major problem in the initial years of his government was managing the growing perception in world capitals that China needed to be vigorously engaged. In 1964, the French recognised PRC. The same year China exploded its atomic bomb. It was on Johnson’s watch the Vietnam War was ‘Americanised’. That meant American armed forces were engaged in battles with North Vietnamese forces, resulting in Johnson administration looking at China through the Vietnam prism.
North Vietnam shared a border with China. And it shared ideology, besides strategic depth with the country. The Soviet Union soon realised that America could be engaged in a proxy Cold War battle in this Southeast Asian battleground. They routed huge amounts of war materiel through China to Hanoi. This complicated China’s engagement with the US even more.
On top of these, internally China was going through convulsions with Mao and the Communist Party seriously beginning nation-building and state-making. The ‘Great Leap Forward’, which was to transform the agrarian, peasant-based Chinese economy into an industrialised powerhouse, had ended after causing huge miseries to the common Chinese. And tensions were being felt within the Chinese leadership with Mao losing some of his grip on the top leadership.
Liu Shiaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, two of the Communist Party of China (CPC) stalwarts seemed a threat to Mao’s dominance. Lin Biao, a Marshal of the People’s Liberation Army and someone who had kicked-off the Mao cult by tagging ‘Mao Thought’ with Marxism-Leninism, and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, came up from the ‘left’ with a visceral antipathy towards the US.
This is also the time when the Soviet Union and China got embroiled in an ideological battle for the leadership of world Communist movement. Stalin’s death and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev as the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) gave China an opportunity to contest some of the formulations of the CPSU about ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West; and collaboration of the Asian communist parties with the national bourgeoisie of their countries.
There were more realpolitik reasons too for the rift. China was deeply unhappy about the way the Soviet leadership delayed and eventually stopped cooperation with the country on transfer of nuclear technology. Beijing was also worried that the Soviet Union under Khrushchev would trade on the China’s national interests, in its phase of intensive engagement with the US.
The Cultural Revolution that Mao launched to gain control on an increasingly divided Polit Bureau unleashed forces of partisanship that virtually ripped apart the country. Not only did the rampaging Red Brigades—unrestrained youth committing violence—challenged and in many cases, overturned established State institutions, they drove out of office leaders like Deng or even then Foreign Minister and Vice Premier, Chen Yi. The same Chen Yi was called upon by Mao to undertake a very important task a few years later.
But for Johnson administration, much of what was happening inside China was quite incomprehensible. On the one hand, they wanted to take policy initiatives that were designed to catch the attention of ‘second generation leaders’, on the other, they were apprehensive about the prospect that Vietnam War could escalate into a full-scale Sino-US war. So Johnson tried to calibrate the bombing runs of US air force in Vietnam, so that the bombs did not hit Chinese targets.7
While the Geneva talks between the US and China, begun by the Eisenhower administration had languished as Dulles allowed himself to be persuaded that it needed to be downgraded to below the ambassador level, a new approach was made with the Chinese in Warsaw. Johnson’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk took a decision in 1965 to communicate to the Chinese side that the US wanted ‘peaceful relations’ with the country. The message was communicated in Warsaw.8
Warsaw again became the stage for next climactic scene in Sino-US relation. That was when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sent a message to the Chinese they were eager to send a high-level emissary to Beijing for wide-ranging talks. But that is getting ahead of the story; a narrative which unfolded sequentially till now.
To Nixon’s eternal regret, his China initiative has not got recorded in history as his own individual initiative. For, in so much that has been written about it, writers have invariably hyphenated the historic embrace of the Chinese dragon by the US as a Nixon-Kissinger affair. This is truly galling considering that Nixon had tried so hard to not have to share the credit for what he considered ‘the greatest diplomatic watershed since World War II’.
But much of that hyphenation is not quite accurate. It was Nixon, and not Kissinger, who had first thought up the China move. Politician Nixon upstaged the academic, Kissinger, when he wrote in the Foreign Affairs journal, September 1967, ‘Any American policy toward Asia must come urgently to grips with the reality of China….Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbours. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation…’.9
The highfaluting language hid shrewd political and strategic calculations. Kissinger wrote a few years later about the perceptions that underlay the decision to make overtures to China for establishing relations, including an alliance. He noted that for the US, opportunity was combined with nec...
