President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser (NSA) Henry Kissinger engineered a transformation of American policy in 1971-72 that terminated diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan) and normalised relations with the Chinese Communist government on the mainland. It was insisted that the policy was a strategic masterstroke against the main adversary in the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and did not involve selling out Taiwan. A 2005 paper by Nancy Bernkopf Tucker examines the Nixon-Kissinger policy in detail.
NIXON JOINS WITH THE LIBERAL INTELLIGENTSIA OVER CHINA
There are two broad framing points Tucker makes that are often overlooked.
The first is that Kissinger was not initially a driver of the pro-Peking policy; he had shown very little interest in China and had no expertise on the subject as late as 1968 when working as an adviser to both the Democratic administration of President Lyndon Johnson and the Republican presidential campaign of Nelson Rockefeller. Kissinger had said that Nixon was a “paranoic” and the “most dangerous of all the men” seeking the presidency around the time of the Republican Convention in August 1968, but Kissinger’s ambition took precedence over this consideration. Once Nixon had won the nomination, Kissinger changed horses seamlessly, quickly getting involved in Nixon’s shadier campaign tactics, and took office as President Nixon’s NSA in January 1969. To the extent Kissinger thought about Taiwan after this, he did so only as a domestic political issue—a view that would hold constant, as Tucker details. Kissinger’s focus was on Peking once he came to realise how set Nixon was on normalising relations with Red China.
Which leads to the second framing point Tucker makes. Nixon—who made his name as an anti-Communist in the 1950s, the man who had sided with General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War in advocating that troops from Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government on Taiwan be utilised to open a second front against Mao Zedong’s mainland regime—had, by 1965 if not before, concluded the U.S. would “have to” improve relations with Red China, since the Taiwan government would never get back to the mainland to assert its legal rights to govern all of China and the U.S. should not help it try. Nixon was quite fanatical on the point by the time of his inauguration.
A subsidiary point to this, no less important, is that the Nixon-Kissinger portrayal of their “opening” to the Chinese Communists as a bold move against the all-powerful “China lobby”—with its apparently entrenched pro-Taiwan cadre at the State Department and in Congress, and its levers of control over public opinion—is a lie. Nixon was not defying elite opinion, but being swept along with it in regarding normalisation with Mao as the “grown up” and “realistic” course. The Nixon administration’s derision of the intellectuals was mostly an expression of rage that Nixon’s desperate craving for their approval was so frequently denied; with his China policy, he would at last receive uniform adulation from that quarter.
As for the “only Nixon could go to China” narrative, it is literally false. One of the things that most alarmed Nixon in the run-up to his February 1972 visit to Peking was that he would be upstaged by some other American, likely a member of Congress, visiting first. This was hidden for decades, but the White House transcripts are now available, showing how Nixon resolved this problem, by having his new friends in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ban visits by other elected Americans until he had arrived.
THE U.S.’S WEAK AND WORSENING POLICY ON TAIWAN
Nixon’s China policy built on an American adamancy for drift over China that went back at least to 1950-51, when MacArthur was denied the ability to follow the military logic of the war on the Korean Peninsula, where Mao had sent millions of soldiers to assist the Communist effort to conquer South Korea, by bringing Chiang’s forces back to the mainland and blockading the nascent People’s Republic. In many ways, the problem went back to Cairo in 1943, when the U.S. and Britain decided to limit their support to Chiang, even as they gorged Stalin’s Soviet Union with Lend-Lease aid that would—after it had been used to displace Nazism with Communism in Eastern Europe—be used to install the CCP, rested from avoiding the war with Japan, in power in Peking.
Neither Mao’s vast contribution to the slaughter of Allied troops and Korean civilians, nor the initiation of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait in 1954 that raised the spectre of nuclear weapons’ use again, stopped President Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, whose public rhetoric was passionately opposed to Communism, trying to get a “two-Chinas” policy through Congress in 1956. Tucker documents that Dulles repeatedly suggested bringing Red China into the United Nations General Assembly and at one point mused on the idea of removing Taiwan from the Security Council, replacing it with India, so that Taipei could not veto the entry of Mao’s despotism into the U.N. system.
In the conditions of de facto siege on Taiwan, democratic reform was not really on the agenda, though Chiang—who turned seventy in 1957—had taken something of a step back from day-to-day governing, setting the direction of policy for the leaders of his Guomindang party to carry out in detail and preparing his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, to take over as ruler. Tucker notes that the results were impressive: “Taiwan … prospered, with programs of land reform, infrastructure development, and industrialization that were more farsighted and better implemented than those on the mainland, all assisted by American funding—U.S. nonmilitary aid averaged $100 million a year from 1950 to 1965.”
In the early 1960s, there were some points of friction in U.S.-Taiwanese relations, such as the maintenance of Guomindang troops in Burma, but these were more than made up for by Taiwan’s contributions to Alliance security, especially the sending of troops to assist in the defence of South Vietnam against the Soviet onslaught and the stationing of 20,000 Americans, plus tactical nuclear weapons, on Taiwanese territory to buttress that effort. Within the U.S., the “China lobby”—what Tucker describes as the “amorphous and informal coalition of U.S. officials, members of Congress, businessmen, publishers, journalists, scholars, church officials, [and] missionaries” (Chiang was a devout Protestant)—seemed to be on firm footing: Red China remained outside the U.N., aid kept flowing to Taiwan, and Washington-Taipei relations included a formal defence treaty.
The danger signs were appearing, though, and Chiang noticed them, writes Tucker. In October 1964, Mao’s regime tested a nuclear weapon for the first time and Chiang was shocked when the U.S. did not immediately launch military strikes against the reactors on the mainland. The December 1965 modification of the U.S. ban on citizens visiting mainland China, the first “thaw” in U.S. relations with Peking, was picked up on immediately by Chiang as a signal meant to lead to something more; that President Johnson failed to build on this was cold comfort. As Chiang clearly understood, the fact LBJ had tried is what mattered. Tucker documents as one effect of this a distinct chill felt by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in engaging its Taiwanese counterparts: the intelligence services “began to watch each other as much as they cooperated”.
In 1966, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held the “Fulbright Hearings”, which were focused on Vietnam but “may have been the most important milestone” in decisively turning American opinion about China, says Tucker, because inter alia they introduced the concept of “containment without isolation”, one of the obfuscatory phrases in the discourse that covered up what the U.S. was doing in embracing Mao’s abattoir State.
Nixon had made comments about his thinking on China during a stay in the Grand Hotel in Taipei in 1965, which he must have known was bugged, and the remarks do appear to have gotten back to Chiang, whom Nixon had known personally for a long time. In October 1967, during the presidential campaign, Nixon added to this with a Foreign Affairs article lamenting the CCP regime’s “angry isolation”. Tucker quotes Marvin Liebman, the great organiser of conservative Cold War causes, most importantly in this context the “Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations”, remarking on his worries about Nixon after this, but even Liebman was cautious and hardly anybody agreed with him. There was also little Liebman could do: like Chiang, American anti-Communists were trapped with the choice of LBJ, who had signalled moves toward Mao’s regime, or Nixon, who might follow a similar course.
NIXON TAKES OFFICE
Even before his election, Nixon had reassured Moscow—via Kissinger’s channel to KGB officer Boris Sedov, who posed as a journalist—that his image as a Cold Warrior was mistaken. Just five months into the Nixon administration, in June 1969, Chiang Kai-shek became deeply disturbed when he discovered for himself this was true. In a meeting with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu (r. 1967-75), Chiang was told of the way Nixon was drawing down American troops, despite no change in the Soviet-Chinese aggression against South Vietnam, under the banner of “Vietnamization”.
As Tucker notes, there are arguments to be made that Taiwan did not do everything it could in reacting to the signals it was receiving, that its vaunted “lobby” became complacent—and the lobby certainly proved to be a paper tiger: its demise was being written about publicly in the spring of 1970, around the time Chiang Ching-kuo arrived in Washington. In a trip that effectively recognised Chiang Junior as Head of State—the welcome ceremony was organised as such and Nixon spent an unusually-long seventy-five minutes with the Taiwanese heir—the Taiwanese delegation was able, in D.C., to get a feel for the falsity behind Nixon’s promise that “I will never sell you down the river”.
A year later, in April 1971, it was made crystal clear to Taiwan that something dramatic and dangerous was in the works. The month started with an American ping pong team turning up in Peking and being welcomed by the Communist premier Zhou Enlai. In the middle of the month, Nixon personally said, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, words to the effect of “he had advised his daughters to travel to China as soon as they could and that he himself hoped to do so”. The month ended with State Department spokesman Charles W. Bray saying Taiwan should negotiate directly with Red China over its existence since this was an unresolved matter, drawing a furious public protest from the Taiwanese government at such a grossly irresponsible statement about the status of its sovereignty.
That the U.S. was planning a tilt towards Red China, while obviously seen as deleterious by Taiwan, was neither unexpected nor novel. The truly alarming thing for Taiwan was that the CCP was reciprocating, Tucker explains. What Taiwan’s leaders understood was that U.S.-CCP rapprochement not only entailed negative consequences for Taiwanese standing and security, but that the only way this policy change could happen was if the U.S. had explicitly agreed to measures that threatened Taiwan. Peking’s entry into the U.N., trade, and some kind of alignment with the U.S. against the Soviet Union—whose “revisionist” heresy since 1956 under Nikita Khrushchev had been denounced by Mao—had all been on offer for a decade and more. No breakthrough had been possible because of the CCP regime’s ideological obsession with liquidating the remnants of the Republic of China and conquering the island of Formosa (as most people still called Taiwan). All the U.S. asked was that Mao’s regime renounce the use of force as a means of solving the Taiwan Question and Peking had refused. If this sticking point had been overcome, it could only mean one side had moved. Taipei quite correctly assumed it was not the Communists who had made concessions.
The Nixon administration was notoriously suspicious about who had access to information. Many have called this paranoid and with Nixon’s haunted personality who is to argue, but even paranoids have enemies. The “plumbers” of Watergate break-in fame were established to solve a real problem of leaks of highly classified intelligence and sensitive diplomatic material. The preventive measures Nixon took in preparing his “opening” to Red China were extensive.
If there was complacency from Taiwan and its friends in D.C. that meant potentially helpful actions were not taken in time, it also has to be said that the White House’s secrecy played a significant part in blinding Taiwan to how far things had gone and how bad they had gotten. By the time something was clearly afoot in April 1971, Tucker writes, fifteen months had elapsed since an important meeting that set the tone for what was to come:
Ambassador Walter J. Stoessel … [met] in Warsaw on 20 January 1970 with Lei Yang, the Chinese ambassador to Poland. During the encounter, where Lei emphasized Taiwan to the exclusion of almost everything else, Stoessel asserted that the American military presence on the island constituted no threat to China. But, acknowledging that Beijing wanted more than vague reassurances, he explicitly pledged, “we will also not support and in fact will oppose any offensive military action from Taiwan against the mainland … and it is our hope that as peace and stability in Asia grow, we can reduce these facilities on Taiwan that we now have.” He also made clear that Washington was prepared to accept a negotiated resolution between Beijing and Taipei.
This was kept from Taiwan, but at least Taiwan was a foreign entity: the White House’s secrecy kept most of the U.S. government in the dark, never mind the public. The State Department, used to make the earliest contacts with Peking, had the broader intentions of the policy hidden from it. In short order, the White House basically cut the State Department and the CIA out entirely, and, as Tucker describes, ran virtual active measures against them—consuming them with worthless tasks analysing fine points that had no relevance to the policy-making process while the White House got on with what it wanted to do. Partly because of these deception and distraction methods, both the State Department and CIA were taken by surprise when Kissinger took his secret trip to Peking in July 1971.
THE VAGUERIES OF HENRY KISSINGER
An argument frequently advanced is that the Soviet crushing of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968 induced a new openness among the CCP leadership to the idea of a U.S. alliance to safeguard themselves from falling victim to the “Brezhnev Doctrine”, and this sentiment was supposedly reinforced by the Sino-Soviet border skirmishes through 1969. But this is mistaken. The border tensions had ended at the time of the funeral for the North Vietnamese tyrant, Ho Chi Minh, in September 1969,1 and Red China did not need to play “the America card” to get the Soviets to back off: Moscow was also reaching out to Peking to find a less hostile modus vivendi. In short, it was Peking that had the choice of which way to tilt. The lack of a public U.S. statement in support of Communist China during the border war with the Soviets meant Kissinger’s messages to the CCP regime through Pakistan’s Yahya Khan had been ignored.2 What moved Mao in the American direction was the U.S. withdrawal of two carriers from the Taiwan Strait in October 1969 and the termination the next month of the naval patrols in the Strait that had begun in 1950. “We should pay attention to Nixon’s and Kissinger’s inclinations”, Zhou told Mao on 16 November 1969.
From the beginning, then, it was considerations about Taiwan, not the Soviets, that led Communist China to seeking closer relations with America. Fast forward two years. From Tucker [emphasis added]:
Kissinger and his entourage were astonished simply to be in Beijing, and the euphoria of what their arrival signified overwhelmed them … In his memoir, ‘The White House Years’, Kissinger maintained that during his foray to Beijing, he barely discussed Taiwan and had not jeopardized its interests. But declassified transcripts of the first meeting between Kissinger and Zhou Enlai demonstrate that this contention is not true. Zhou immediately challenged Kissinger to address China’s core interests: acknowledgment that Taiwan was part of China and withdrawal of military forces and facilities from the island in a limited time. …
On that very first day, in his opening statement to Zhou, Kissinger gave Beijing more than it could have expected. Cautioning the Chinese to be discreet because Nixon had authorized him to make offers before vetting them inside his government or with Congress, Kissinger withheld only formal recognition. He agreed to remove U.S. troops from Taiwan: two-thirds with the end of the Vietnam War and the other third progressively as relations got better. He did not demand that Beijing renounce force, and he asserted that the military issue would not be “a principal obstacle between us.” He ruled out pursuing a policy of two Chinas or of one China, one Taiwan. He pledged that no one in the U.S. government would give any support to the Taiwan independence movement and promised to enforce the policy himself. The United States would also refrain from running covert CIA or other intelligence operations out of Taiwan.
On the second day, Zhou reiterated, in tough terms, his insistence on his Taiwan agenda … Zhou wanted to impress upon the Americans that for Beijing “Taiwan is not an isolated issue.” Without settlement on Taiwan, he insisted, there would be no reconciliation. Washington had yielded ground on Taiwan and must go further, abandoning the position that its status remained in any way undetermined. Zhou would be delighted to find that Kissinger would give more. Kissinger added that the United States would not give Chiang Kai-shek assistance for an assault against the mainland, rendering such a venture impossible. The United States would also favor China’s entry into the UN even as it tried to keep a seat for Taiwan. To Zhou’s objections, Kissinger responded that this was a necessary, but hardly permanent, expedient. Finally, Kissinger reassured Zhou that “we will strongly oppose any Japanese military presence on Taiwan.”
“Given that the exchange on Taiwan proved difficult and lengthy, Kissinger’s subsequent comment that he found the Chinese relaxed on the Taiwan question might seem deceitful,” writes Tucker, but she suggests that in his own mind Kissinger could have believed “he was telling the truth, because he never grasped the real importance of Taiwan to Beijing” and he personally never saw Taiwan as important, merely as a domestic political stumbling block to his ambitions to reconfigure the Cold War.
Now, one might think that Tucker is being a bit lenient since Kissinger, on behalf of the U.S., had surrendered everything that really mattered to Red China as a precondition, with the CCP being asked only for was some ‘flexibility’ about the timing of the U.S. troop withdrawal and the elimination of the U.S. Mutual Defence Treaty with Taiwan. But what Tucker is obliquely raising is a really important point about Kissinger more generally and his time (from 1969-77) as steward the American Imperial order, where his ideas and the decisions he made based upon them impacted large swathes of the human race, usually negatively.
Consider:
Kissinger … consistently believed that the emphasis on the future of Taiwan was exaggerated by his advisers and the academic China experts. He considered it inconsequential to his Chinese interlocutors compared to the opportunity to gain U.S. support against the Soviets. … Kissinger, even after his trip to Beijing, told the former foreign service officer John S. Service that the Chinese were not serious about Taiwan, they were just using it as a bargaining chip.
CCP interlocuters somewhat led Kissinger on in this perception once they realised the Americans were mirror-imaging, but of course the Communists were deadly serious and operated under the belief that soon after the U.S. recognised Mao’s regime there would be a collapse of the Chiang government, allowing the CCP to occupy Taiwan.
Then there is this:
[In Kissinger’s] exchange with Zhou on July 9 in Beijing[, t]he prime minister asserted without hesitation that “the U.S. must recognize that the PRC is the sole legitimate government in China and that Taiwan Province is an inalienable part of Chinese territory which must be restored to the motherland.” Kissinger replied that “as a student of history, one’s prediction would have to be that the political evolution is likely to be in the direction which Prime Minister Zhou Enlai indicated to me.” Kissinger continued by assuring Zhou, “we will not stand in the way of basic evolution.”
Did Kissinger interpret Zhou’s words as unserious ideological decoration that it would be rude not to play along with since they both ‘knew’ nothing would come from them? Did Kissinger know that Zhou was serious but assumed that Red China would not be in position to conquer Taiwan for decades, so his words in response that improved the atmospherics were cost-free? Was this an example of “constructive ambiguity”—the use of ambiguous language in diplomatic agreements to disguise disagreements—which Kissinger favours? Did Kissinger simply not care about the fate of Taiwan?
In one sense, it does not matter since the outcome is the same: the CCP leaders came away from the July 1971 meeting believing “their most cherished goal had been accomplished”, as Tucker writes: “The Americans would not stand in the way; Taiwan would be theirs.” And, in the course of events, when the U.S. did not stand aside and Taiwan did not collapse, the Chinese Communists were left feeling as betrayed as Chiang. By failing to understand that Taiwan was the central issue at hand, and making promises that were either off-handed or cynical and in either case not fulfilled, Kissinger created a source of smouldering resentment in Peking that has prevented the relationship developing in the way he wanted it to—whether one agrees with his vision or not, and without getting into the various crises this left his successors trying to clean up to this day.
In another sense, however, the likelihood that Kissinger was operating on false premises, driven by his “realist” ideology, and thus produced a disaster on his own terms, is of a piece with the rest of his career at the helm of American foreign policy, the gruesome period summed up with the word détente, when Kissinger’s theories about how to stabilise the “world system” and find a “balance” led to devastating global instability as the Soviets used the space he had given them to radically unbalance the system, with aggression from Indochina to Iran and Afghanistan to Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and on and on.3
Kissinger’s upfront concessions in China, confusion over central and marginal interests, and unshakeable belief the Communists were invested in pursuing common interests with America was drawn straight from the détente template. Kissinger’s détente started by conceding the central Soviet demands: legitimising the revolutionary regime and its Empire, instead of trying to destroy it; helping economically stabilise this Revolution with food and billions of dollars in subsidies; letting the Soviets ‘feel secure’ by building up weapons systems to rival the U.S.; and politically engaging the Soviets as a strategic equal. Kissinger assumed that these concessions would make the Communists moderate their conduct by becoming more invested in being a partner in what America cared about (a superpower condominium to stably run the world system), rather than pursuing their own interests (namely overthrowing the system), and in this framework he could secure from the Soviets some measure of cooperation in “peripheral” areas like Vietnam (when the Soviets regarded the Third World as key to victory in the Cold War).4
The Soviets, driven by their millennial ideology, pocketed everything Kissinger gave them and exploited all the new openings to press on with their mission to rule the world, bringing the West to its nadir by the late 1970s. Kissinger’s prioritisation of theory meant that détente had to be working, no matter the evidence of its outcomes. In practice, this involved America ceasing to do anything against Soviet interests and explaining away gross Soviet violations of the letter and spirit of détente by defining these violations out of existence.5 Mutatis mutandis, so it would be with China.
TAIWAN BETRAYED
President Nixon revealed Kissinger’s trip to Peking in a televised address on 15 July 1971 and announced that he would make his own visit in 1972.
Three months earlier, amid Kissinger’s advice that “we have to be cold about it”, Nixon had said it was “better [for the normalisation with Red China] take place when [the Taiwanese have] got a friend here rather than when they’ve got an enemy here”. There was very little evidence of this benefit. Even the minutiae around Nixon’s television broadcast was an affront to Taiwan: Kissinger personally told the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin about the broadcast twelve hours before it happened; the Taiwanese government got a half-hour heads-up.
The U.S. did almost nothing to even keep Taiwan informed about developments, let alone to reassure Taipei. The U.S. started paying some more attention to Taiwan in August 1971, when it seemed Chiang might do something provocative on the coast of the mainland to cancel Nixon’s trip, but nothing came of it.
On 10 October 1971, Nixon sent then-California Governor Ronald Reagan to visit with Chiang and explain what Kissinger had been up to. Chiang was impassive throughout the meeting, aware if only by instinct that this attempted mollification was barely half-hearted: Reagan had been sent for precisely the same reason that Nixon had previously used Vice President Spiro Agnew for reassurance chats with Taiwan—because these were men known as staunch supporters of Taiwan whom Nixon could completely disavow if need be; neither of them had any influence over government policy and Nixon did not think much of them personally.
The first milestone of Taiwan’s betrayal was reached with its expulsion from the United Nations on 25 October 1971.
The U.S., led by U.N. Ambassador George H. W. Bush, had tried to come up with a formula that admitted Red China to the U.N. and gave it the Republic of China’s Security Council seat, while keeping the Republic/Taiwan in the U.N. as a General Assembly member. It was a fiasco. On the one hand, neither Peking nor Taipei agreed with the idea of dual representation: each insisted they were the sole legal representative of the Chinese people. On the other hand, within the U.N. system most Member States rejected the idea that they were setting a dangerous precedent on “expulsion” that could soon be applied to some other unpopular government—Israel was an obvious candidate and some Arab States directly said so. It was claimed that it was simply a matter of credentials for China’s seat, the kind of routine process that applies with a change of government within Member States.
By the time of the actual U.N. vote, Tucker documents, Taiwan had de facto come to support the U.S.’s dual representation “compromise”, lobbying from its Embassies for host governments to vote in favour, though the Taipei government did not publicly admit to this. The premise of dual representation was a hard sell at the U.N. and Kissinger’s arrival in Peking right before the vote—he left the day after—caused the evaporation of any hope it would pass. This was not accidental. Kissinger did not believe the dual representation formula could prevail—seeing it as “essentially doomed rearguard action” mounted because it was “the only piece of the action on China under State Department control”—and he did not want it to. Red China was opposed to Taiwan remaining in the U.N., and Kissinger took his cues from Peking. Kissinger could have changed the date of this trip to avoid the optics of the U.S. preferring the CCP to Chiang, and wilfully chose not to; the signal was picked up loud and clear, and Taiwan was ejected.
Nixon did feel some guilt and tried to rationalise it by telling aides the U.N. did not matter anyway. Kissinger showed no remorse: he had made Taiwan’s expulsion inevitable and done so deliberately. Ambassador Bush recalled with some bitterness being undermined by Kissinger, even as Kissinger gave false statements in public about his intentions. Taiwan knew that Kissinger was the architect of their defeat. Two months before the vote, when the beleaguered Taiwanese ambassador in the U.S., James Shen, was being given the runaround as he tried to contact Kissinger, he sent a note asking with acid contempt if perhaps Kissinger would find time for dinner “to see if [a Republic of China] … cook couldn’t equal or excel the level of the Chinese cooks in Peking.”
Tucker is critical of Chiang’s (lack of) reaction as the U.N. vote loomed and it is surely true he could have initiated a publicity campaign to mobilise the anti-Communist critics of Nixon, but she concedes that “even a creative proposal would probably not have withstood the Nixon/Kissinger July shock”. Arthur Hummel, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asia, said Chiang “was a very old fashioned, authoritarian figure. Not very well educated.” This condescension, however, is misplaced. The ‘complexities’ over the U.N. were really sophistries. Chiang’s ‘simplistic’ outlook was the correct one.
Chiang’s government was a founder member of the United Nations and held its seat by virtue of the fact it had spilled oceans of blood in the war against the Axis. From that time onward, Taiwan had been a stalwart ally of the United States, including in Vietnam. The question was whether Taiwan should be replaced by a bitterly anti-American Communist despotism that had refused to fight the Axis, was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and had already killed on a scale even Stalin could not match, with tens of thousands of Americans in Korea and Vietnam among its victims.
The U.S. had veto power to prevent Taiwan’s replacement; it chose not to exercise it. As Chiang had put it to one of Nixon’s emissaries, “should the [Republic of China] one day leave the U.N., the world would know that she has been forced out not by the Communists, but by the U.S.”
NIXON IN PEKING
Nixon arrived in Peking on 21 February 1972 and left on 28 February. During Nixon’s first substantive talks with Zhou Enlai on 22 February, Taiwan was prominent. Tucker writes [emphasis added]:
[T]he parameters had already been set for agreements on Taiwan, as had the practice of saying different things in public and in private. … Nixon immediately raised Taiwan [with Zhou] and reiterated understandings reached by Kissinger, hoping to set the issue aside and discuss matters that interested him more. “Principle one,” he began, “There is one China, and Taiwan is a part of China.” He went on to disavow support for Taiwan independence movements, Japanese involvement, references to Taiwan’s status as undetermined, and military action against the People’s Republic. Nixon emphasized his fears that domestic groups would manipulate the Taiwan question to block his China initiative. Language had to be found to disguise concessions so that a joint communiqué between the United States and the People’s Republic setting out areas of agreement at the end of the president’s visit “would not stir up the animals,” motivating them to hurl charges that “the American President went to Peking and sold Taiwan down the river.” … “The problem here,” Nixon told Zhou, “is not what we are going to do, the problem is what we are going to say about it.” The resulting Shanghai Communiqué, therefore, did not tell the people of the United States, Taiwan, or China that privately Nixon had accepted Beijing’s key demand.
Nixon’s agreement with the Chinese Communists that Taiwan was theirs was to be hidden behind language wherein America “does not challenge” the position—shared in Peking and Taipei—that there is only one China in the world, and adopts a posture of neutrality about which government represents that one China. The only ‘demand’ the U.S. made was that the issue not be settled by force, though even here it is clear that both Nixon and Kissinger were giving ambiguous signals to their CCP hosts.
At one moment, Nixon says to Zhou, “[We] know that [Vietnam] is an irritant in our relations. I want to assure the Prime Minister I am removing this irritant as fast as anyone in my position could. … I will end American involvement … [I]f I can put it quite directly—we will withdraw” [emphasis original]. Nixon says that the U.S. “cannot remove the government of South Vietnam and in effect turn over the government to the North Vietnamese”, but he then adds: “We believe [the Communists] can have a fair chance to [take over South Vietnam] through what we regard as a fair election”, and Nixon is fine with that. Zhou got the message: “Your old saying [is] you don’t want to cast aside old friends. But you have already cast aside many old friends.”
The whole ethos of Nixon’s trip had been set several hours before, in the evening of 21 February 1972, when Nixon attended a banquet with Zhou and two-dozen other senior CCP officials after meeting with Mao. Nixon embraced them with a shocking enthusiasm, raising a glass to toast each of these mass-murderers, and then promising “a long march together”.
William F. Buckley, the leader of the small group of conservative Republican anti-Communists who objected root-and-branch to Nixon’s program, was in the room to watch this grotesque spectacle, and wrote afterwards: “[Nixon] would toast Alger Hiss tonight, if he could find him”. Shortly afterwards, Buckley added:
It is unreasonable to suppose that anywhere in history have a few dozen men congregated who have been responsible for greater human mayhem than the hosts at this gathering … The effect [of Nixon’s round-robin toasting of them] was as if Sir Hartley Shawcross had suddenly risen from the prosecutor’s stand at Nuremberg and descended to embrace Goering and Goebbels and Doenitz and Hess, begging them to join with him in the making of a better world. … [T]he latter were convicted butchers, aggressors, and genocide-makers, and the former, by the narrowest quirk of the Cultural Revolution, are not[.]
If the phrase “Red China” used throughout this article has seemed archaic or otherwise jarring, it is the doing of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who banned the phrase—as well as “Communist China” and even “mainland China”—from official U.S. government verbiage. It was not propaganda quite on the scale of what the CCP regime did to prepare the town of Nanjing for the arrival of foreigners, but it was successful all the same. Most of the Western press obliged with this linguistic change, as they did with the new benevolent presentation of Mao’s China. It is notable that Buckley, nearly alone in rejecting Nixon’s justifications for embracing the CCP, was also the only foreign journalist in Peking in 1972 who was not deceived by the apparent support shown by the population for the Communist regime. Buckley understood that these allegedly spontaneous interactions with local people—in the capital and well-beyond—were scripted encounters with the terrorised inhabitants of a big prison. The rest of the press corps went too far even for Peking, which at one point had to remind Western journalists that there were actually still problems in mainland China.
AFTERMATH
In January 1973, Nixon abandoned South Vietnam and Taiwan’s leaders knew they were next. The only positive spin came from Ambassador James Shen, who caustically remarked that Taiwan should cheer up: it clearly had “a breathing space” because even Kissinger would recognise that “selling one ally down the river was quite enough for one year.” Nixon and Kissinger placed an informal ban on high-ranking U.S. government personnel meeting with Taiwanese officials, and by the end of 1973 the two Chinas had changed places in American estimations, proof positive of the malleability of public opinion when led.
Nixon and Kissinger had “willingly betrayed an ally, conceding Taiwan’s interests before negotiations began”, writes Tucker:
Nixon and Kissinger forfeited not simply the right of Taiwan’s people to self-determination, but potentially their ability to avoid Communist rule, and they did so at a time when a popular movement for representative government in Taiwan was seeking greater U.S. support. … The president and his national security adviser viewed Taiwan as expendable, as less valuable than the strategic and political advantages that a new relationship with the People’s Republic would secure. As a result, Nixon and Kissinger … decided to give Beijing what it wanted in order to make a deal.
Disaster was averted in the end by Nixon having to resign over the Watergate scandal in August 1974. Kissinger remained in place under Gerald Ford and tried to push on with normalising relations with Peking, but the process was disrupted as the Republican Right-wing, silently furious under Nixon, refused to go along with Kissinger’s détente any more after the Communists were allowed to transform Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos into concentration camps above ground with mass-graves underneath. In an extraordinary turn of events in 1976, the conservative base of the Republican Party that grouped around Reagan to challenge Ford for the nomination and the Democrats’ General Election candidate Jimmy Carter effectively ran against Kissinger.
The U.S. and Red China did finally establish diplomatic relations in December 1978, but the existential danger for Taiwan had passed by then. Occurring nearly two years after Kissinger left office, the new equilibrium in American politics that made Taiwan safer was partly the result of Kissinger’s absence: the conservative anti-Communists, no longer held in check by Nixon and Kissinger, had been energised, and a Democratic President was constrained in how far he could make concessions to Communists.
That said, as Tucker notes, some of what undid the Nixon-Kissinger process with Red China was more actively their doing, specifically because they lied to everyone:
[T]hey misled [Communist] China’s rulers into believing that the United States would step aside and allow Taiwan to collapse. When that did not happen, Beijing—like Taipei and the American friends of Taiwan—felt betrayed. In their eagerness to play the China card, Nixon and Kissinger undermined the effectiveness and durability of their own initiative.
Some credit must go to Taiwan, too. Whatever criticisms there are about Taipei’s handling of 1970-72, in the 1980s Taiwan added meaningful political reform to its economic success, creating a thicker bond with America and other democratic allies. Whether the arrangements Taiwan has made with America are sufficient to prevent the destruction it avoided in the 1970s is an open question, albeit we may have an answer quite soon.
If there is one part of Tucker’s otherwise excellent paper that is open to challenge, it is her terse assertion that “[Nixon and Kissinger] had unquestionably been right to press ahead to normalize relations with the People’s Republic, a policy too long in coming and clearly in the national interest”. It is perhaps unfair to criticise somebody for a paper they did not write, but this is not nit-picking. Tucker really should have spelled out what these national interests were; the one passing reference to the “strategic leverage against the Soviet Union” that Red China “could” provide really is not sufficient.
The Sino-Soviet split had nothing to do with the West, being caused by a dispute over Communist theology, and the death of that mutual animosity pact in 1989 happened even though the U.S. had embraced Red China. The CCP regime continued killing Americans to ensure the communization of Vietnam and underwrote the Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia. The flow of Cold War intelligence was clearly to Peking, so there was no benefit on that front. Contact with the West did not induce restraint in Tiananmen Square.6 Western trade certainly helped stabilise Communist-ruled China, but the “liberalisation” that was supposed to accompany this was a sham: the “reforms” within China ended in the mid-1980s and the Party-State remains a quasi-totalitarian nightmare to the present day, only now empowered by decades-worth of Western money and stolen technology that allow the CCP to infiltrate our societies and pose a far more formidable threat to the West. The CCP exports its model of high-tech despotism to anti-Western governments around the world, and wherever there is a geopolitical crisis—from nuclear proliferation to Russia’s attempt to eliminate Ukraine—it is either made in China or exacerbated by China. Tibet remains enslaved and the ethnocide of the Uyghurs continues apace.
Perhaps it is too early for a full answer, but after half-a-century it is not too much to ask that some hint is given of what exactly was gained by Nixon’s embrace of Red China when the negatives are this monumental.
REFERENCES
Ho Chi Minh, an agent of Stalin’s COMINTERN since the early 1920s, had been deployed as part of Moscow’s CCP cadres in China in the 1930s and then redeployed to Vietnam after the Soviets’ then-ally Nazi Germany conquered France in 1940, opening up the French colonies to the infiltration of the two totalitarian powers. After the Second World War, Ho took leadership of the Vietnam section of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and this “Vietnamese” Communist Party (VCP) worked under Moscow’s command, with significant Chinese armed support, to push the French out, a mission completed at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. It was the effort of this coalition to Sovietize the south of Vietnam that drew in America to uphold the Containment Doctrine and that struggle over the next twenty years is what we remember as “the Vietnam War” (even though it involved Laos and Cambodia, which were aggressed against by the other branches of the Soviets’ ICP.)
Ho thus had close ties to both Moscow and Peking, and in Vietnam it was functionally as if the Sino-Soviet split had not happened. The Communist powers saw Vietnam as it was, a strategic replay of the Korean War, and they kept to their old roles: the Soviets set the strategy, had the direct loyalty of the local Party leaders, and provided the funds and arms, while the Red Chinese provided the muscle as a “deniable” cutout to prevent a direct superpower clash leading to apocalyptic unpleasantness. After the U.S. air campaign against North Vietnam started in April 1965, Mao was on standby to invade if the U.S. launched a ground invasion to put an end to the problem at source in Hanoi, just as had happened in Korea when the U.S. pushed over the 38th parallel and approached the Yalu River in October-November 1950. In the meantime, 300,000 Chinese troops were deployed to secure Ho’s realm and free up Ho’s KGB-trained troops for deployment in the South, where they would be flagged as “Viet Cong” so they could be presented as local rebels—participants in a “civil war”, rather than the outsider invaders they were.
There was a certain amount of Sino-Soviet tug-of-war as the Maoists sought to spread their creed, but this was insignificant, both in the sense that it never got very far—Ho’s forces were Moscow-line through and through (one of their first actions after the de facto creation of North Vietnam in 1954 was a bloody purge of Trotskyists)—and it never affected the big picture cooperation toward the same end of ensuring American defeat and Communist victory.
Kissinger rather enjoyed the “cloak and dagger exercise” of his secret trip to China in July 1971, and was quite content to pay the price of covering-up for the Pakistani rampage in Bengal that year—an outrage eventually stopped by India in December 1971, leading to the independence of Bangladesh. “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!” Kissinger ‘joked’ in one meeting. The other main channel the U.S. used to reach Peking was Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, falsely believed to be autonomous within the Soviet Bloc.
By avoiding the focus on Kissinger’s ignorance, and how routinely he operated according to theories that he had misunderstood and/or that produced outcomes directly contrary to what Kissinger intended, the endless argument over whether Kissinger is a “war criminal” effectively lets Kissinger off easily by taking him at his own estimation of what he was doing and just arguing that the methods were cruel. Setting aside the misinformation that gets spread in this debate, where the accusations are frequently infused with myth and conspiracy theory, the main impact of this—since Kissinger is never likely to be arrested—is to reinforce the image of an unsentimental “realist” and even of a Cold War “hardliner” that Kissinger himself likes to cultivate.
Kissinger was reduced in the end to begging for the Soviets to give him a “decent interval” before taking over Vietnam after the fake “peace” deal in January 1973, and returning the American prisoners-of-war, which Moscow’s dependencies refused to do: about 600 American POWs were sent back, and a massive bribe was demanded to get the other 300 home. Admitting what had happened would have meant admitting this was not the “peace with honour” that had been promised, so Kissinger disappeared the POW issue from government communications and the press. None of this affected Kissinger’s willingness to continue running interference for the Soviets even on relatively “small” issues, such as blocking dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from visiting the White House during his American visit in 1975.
As just one example, when Kissinger was asked in late 1975 how the Soviets overrunning South Vietnam was consistent with his claims to have reached de-escalatory terms with Moscow, Kissinger mendaciously asserted that the Soviets had nothing to do with the fall of Saigon. A couple of years earlier, Kissinger was asked if the assault against Israel by Egypt and Syria, two Soviet client States, might not constitute an example of the sort of immoderate behaviour his détente was supposed to have ended. Denying that the Yom Kippur War constituted a disproof of his masterly policy, Kissinger offered: “When I see an example of such a thing, I will tell you.” He never did find an example.
Kissinger, incidentally, defended the CCP regime over Tiananmen Square massacre. Condemning the “unprecedented” decision of Congress to impose sanctions “against a major world power in reaction to events entirely within its domestic jurisdiction”, Kissinger wrote: “No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators who blocked the area in front of the main government building.” Kissinger went on, “A crackdown was therefore inevitable”, and there is not much to be concerned about in its aftermath: “as so often in Chinese history, the rhythm of life and of common sense is likely to produce some practical solution”.
Kissinger expressed contempt for America’s elected representatives launching America on a course that was “dangerous and indefinable” because they were swept up in the “emotions of the moment”. Kissinger blamed the television and media coverage, with its focus on the slaughter of civilians and exclusion of the “historical or political context”, namely, in Kissinger’s view, the Peking despotism’s “moderating influence in Asia and [its commitment to] not challenge America in other areas of the world”. Kissinger went on with a fulsome defence of Deng Xiaoping—“The caricature of Deng as a brutal tyrant thus seems unfair to me”—and declared it “extraordinarily unwise” for the U.S. to cease supporting him: “reform” had not been among the victims in the square, Kissinger insisted, and “China cannot undo past actions”, so there was no sense in punishing the regime.
To this rather question-begging syllogism, Kissinger added an attack on the student demonstrators, first claiming they had become a tool of intra-Party competition, and, second, suggesting that the ostensibly pro-democracy demonstrators would have brought “civil war”—after all, the French Revolution, at the time marking its bicentenary, had shown that the course of events cannot “deduced from the proclamations of its creators.”
Setting aside the grisly excuse-making for murder on display here, what is notable, once again, is the ignorance and misguidedness Kissinger displays on his own terms. There was nothing “inevitable” about the massacre, for example: there had been many chances for a settlement; the demands being made were not exorbitant. The idea that dominance of “common sense” is the defining feature of Chinese history is bewildering: the wholly ideological carnage of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were within living memory, as was turmoil over the Gang of Four. Even at the time, it was distinctly dubious to say Red China had been a “moderating influence in Asia”—its first action after being brought in from the cold by Kissinger was to spread Communism to South Vietnam—and at this distance it is simply absurd.
"What was gained" was, at the time, a division of the two nuclear-armed communist powers against each other. Nuclear risk was reduced, at least in theory. Part of Nixon's strategic calculus, I am sorry to report, was that the destruction of half a million Indonesian communists meant that South Vietnam would be the last "domino" in the region. Something something about the deaths of millions being a statistic.