On China (37 page)

Vestiges of the crisis were still all around us when my associates and I arrived on October 20. On the way from the airport, we passed posters that proclaimed the familiar slogan “Down with American Imperial Capitalism and its Running Dogs.” Some of the posters were in English. Leaflets with similar themes had been left in our rooms at the State Guesthouse. I asked my staff assistant to collect and return them to the Chinese protocol officer, saying that they had been left behind by a previous occupant.

The next day, the acting Foreign Minister escorting me to a meeting with Zhou at the Great Hall of the People took note of the potential embarrassment. He called my attention to a wall poster that had replaced an offending one, which said in English: “Welcome to the Afro-Asian Ping Pong Tournament.” All other posters we passed had been painted over. Zhou mentioned as if in passing that we should observe China’s actions, not its “empty cannons” of rhetoric—a forerunner of what Mao would say to Nixon a few months later.

The discussion on the communiqué began conventionally enough. I tabled a draft communiqué that my staff and I had prepared and Nixon had approved. In it, both sides affirmed their devotion to peace and pledged cooperation on outstanding issues. The section on Taiwan was left blank. Zhou accepted the draft as a basis for discussion and promised to present Chinese modifications and alternatives the next morning. All this was conventional communiqué drafting.

What happened next was not. Mao intervened by telling Zhou to stop the drafting of what he called a “bullshit communiqué.” He might call his exhortations of Communist orthodoxy “empty cannons”; he was not prepared to abandon them as guidelines for Communist cadres. He instructed Zhou to produce a communiqué that would restate Communist orthodoxies as the Chinese position. Americans could state their view as they chose. Mao had based his life on the proposition that peace could emerge only out of struggle, not as an end in itself. China was not afraid to avow its differences with America. Zhou’s draft (and mine) was the sort of banality the Soviets would sign but neither mean nor implement.
⁴¹

Zhou’s presentation followed his instructions from Mao. He put forward a draft communiqué that stated the Chinese position in uncompromising language. It left blank pages for our position, which was expected to be comparably strong to the contrary. There was a final section for common positions.

At first, I was taken aback. But as I reflected, the unorthodox format appeared to solve both sides’ problem. Each could reaffirm its fundamental convictions, which would reassure domestic audiences and uneasy allies. The differences had been known for two decades. The contrast would highlight the agreements being reached, and the positive conclusions would be far more credible. Without the ability to communicate with Washington in the absence of diplomatic representation or adequate secure communication, I was confident enough of Nixon’s thinking to proceed.

In this manner, a communiqué issued on Chinese soil and published by Chinese media enabled America to affirm its commitment to “individual freedom and social progress for all the peoples of the world”; proclaim its close ties with allies in South Korea and Japan; and articulate a view of an international order that rejected infallibility for any country and permitted each nation to develop free of foreign interference.
⁴²
The Chinese draft of the communiqué was, of course, equally expressive of contrary views. These could not have come as a surprise to the Chinese population; they heard and saw them all day in their media. But by signing a document containing both perspectives, each side was effectively calling an ideological truce and underscoring where our views converged.

By far the most significant of these convergences was the article on hegemony. It read:

Alliances have been founded on far less. For all its pedantic phraseology, it was a stunning conclusion. The enemies of a little more than six months earlier were announcing their joint opposition to any further expansion of the Soviet sphere. It was a veritable diplomatic revolution, for the next step would inevitably be to discuss a strategy to counter Soviet ambitions.

The sustainability of the strategy depended on whether progress could be made on Taiwan. By the time Taiwan was discussed during the Nixon trip, the parties had already explored the subject, starting with the secret visit seven months earlier.

Negotiations had now reached the point where the diplomat has a choice to make. One tactic—and indeed the traditional approach—is to outline one’s maximum position and gradually retreat to a more attainable stance. Such a tactic is much beloved by negotiators eager to protect their domestic standing. Yet while it appears “tough” to start with an extreme set of demands, the process amounts to a progressive weakening ushered in by the abandonment of the opening move. The other party is tempted to dig in at each stage to see what the next modification will bring and to turn the negotiating process into a test of endurance.

Rather than exalting process over substance, the preferable course is to make opening proposals close to what one judges to be the most sustainable outcome, a definition of “sustainable” in the abstract being one that both sides have an interest in maintaining. This was a particular challenge with respect to Taiwan, where the margin for concession for both sides was narrow. We therefore from the beginning put forward views on Taiwan we judged necessary for a constructive evolution. Nixon advanced these on February 22 as five principles distilled from previous exchanges during my July and October meetings. They were comprehensive and at the same time also the limit of American concessions. The future would have to be navigated within their framework. They were: an affirmation of a one China policy; that the United States would not support internal Taiwan independence movements; that the United States would discourage any Japanese move into Taiwan (a matter, given history, of special concern to China); support for any peaceful resolution between Beijing and Taipei; and commitment to continued normalization.
⁴⁴
On February 24, Nixon explained how the Taiwan issue might evolve domestically as the United States pursued these principles. His intention, he affirmed, was to complete the normalization process in his second term and withdraw American troops from Taiwan in that time frame—though he warned that he was in no position to make any formal commitments. Zhou responded that both sides had “difficulties” and that there was “no time limit.”

Principle and pragmatism thus existing in ambiguous equilibrium, Qiao Guanhua and I drafted the last remaining section of the Shanghai Communiqué. The key passage was only one paragraph, but it took two nearly all-night sessions to produce. It read:

This paragraph folded decades of civil war and animosity into an affirmative general principle to which Beijing, Taipei, and Washington could all subscribe. The United States dealt with the one China policy by acknowledging the convictions of Chinese on either side of the Chinese dividing line. The flexibility of this formulation permitted the United States to move from “acknowledge” to “support” in its own position in the decades since. Taiwan has been given an opportunity to develop economically and internally. China achieved recognition of its “core interest” in a political connection between Taiwan and the mainland. The United States affirmed its interest in a peaceful resolution.

Despite occasional tensions, the Shanghai Communiqué has served its purpose. In the forty years since it was signed, neither China nor the United States has allowed the issue to interrupt the momentum of their relationship. It has been a delicate and occasionally tense process. Throughout, the United States has affirmed its view of the importance of a peaceful settlement and China its conviction of the imperative of ultimate unification. Each side has acted with restraint and sought to avoid obliging the other side to a test of wills or strength. China has invoked core principles but has been flexible as to the timing of their implementation. The United States has been pragmatic, moving from case to case, sometimes heavily influenced by domestic American pressures. On the whole, Beijing and Washington have given priority to the overriding importance of the Chinese-American relationship.

Still, one must not confuse a modus vivendi with a permanent state of affairs. No Chinese leader has ever abandoned the insistence on ultimate unification or can be expected to do so. No foreseeable American leader will jettison the American conviction that this process should be peaceful or alter the American view on that subject. Statesmanship will be needed to prevent a drift toward a point where both sides feel obliged to test the firmness and nature of each other’s convictions.

The reader should keep in mind that the kind of protocol and hospitality described here has evolved substantially in the decades since. Ironically, the style of hospitality practiced by the early Communist leaders was more comparable to that of the Chinese imperial tradition than of contemporary practice, which is less elaborate, with fewer toasts and a less effusive tone on the governmental side. What has not changed significantly is the meticulous preparation, the complexity of argumentation, the capacity for long-range planning, and the subtle sense for the intangible.

Nixon’s visit to China is one of the few occasions where a state visit brought about a seminal change in international affairs. The reentry of China into the global diplomatic game, and the increased strategic options for the United States, gave a new vitality and flexibility to the international system. Nixon’s visit was followed by comparable visits by the leaders of other Western democracies and Japan. The adoption of the anti-hegemony clauses in the Shanghai Communiqué signified a de facto shift of alliances. Though at first confined to Asia, the undertaking was expanded a year later to include the rest of the world. Consultation between China and the United States reached a level of intensity rare even among formal allies.

For a few weeks, there was a mood of exaltation. Many Americans greeted the China initiative as enabling China to return to the community of nations to which it originally belonged (which was true), and treated the new state of affairs as a permanent feature of international politics (which was not). Neither Nixon, by nature skeptical, nor I forgot that the Chinese policies described in the earlier chapters had been carried out with the same conviction as the current ones, or that the leaders who greeted us so charmingly and elegantly had, not too long ago, been equally insistent and plausible in their diametrically different course. Nor could it be assumed that Mao—or his successors—would jettison the convictions that had seen them through a lifetime.

The direction of Chinese policy in the future would be a composite of ideology and national interest. What the opening to China accomplished was an opportunity to increase cooperation where interests were congruent and to mitigate differences where they existed. At the time of the rapprochement, the Soviet threat had provided an impetus, but the deeper challenge was the need to establish a belief in cooperation over the decades, so that a new generation of leaders would be motivated by the same imperatives. And to foster the same kind of evolution on the American side. The reward for Sino-American rapprochement would not be a state of perpetual friendship or a harmony of values, but a rebalancing of the global equilibrium that would require constant tending and perhaps, in time, produce a greater harmony of values.

In that process, each side would be the guardian of its own interests. And each would seek to use the other as a source of leverage in its relations with Moscow. As Mao never tired of stressing, the world would not remain static; contradiction and disequilibrium were a law of nature. Reflecting this view, the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee issued a document describing Nixon’s visit as an instance of China “utilizing contradictions, dividing up enemies, and enhancing ourselves.”
⁴⁶

Would the interests of the two sides ever be truly congruent? Could they ever separate them from prevalent ideologies sufficiently to avoid tumults of conflicting emotions? Nixon’s visit to China had opened the door to dealing with these challenges; they are with us still.

T
HE SECRET TRIP to China reestablished the Sino-American relationship. The Nixon visit began a period of strategic cooperation. But while the principles of that cooperation were emerging, its framework remained to be settled. The language of the Shanghai Communiqué implied a kind of alliance. The reality of China’s self-reliance made it difficult to relate form to substance.

Alliances have existed as long as history records international affairs. They have been formed for many reasons: to pool the strength of individual allies; to provide an obligation of mutual assistance; to supply an element of deterrence beyond the tactical considerations of the moment. The special aspect of Sino-American relations was that the partners sought to coordinate their actions without creating a formal obligation to do so.