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by
John Pomfret
But it was Chang’s work in the drafting of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was to cap the life of a man born in China and educated in America.
John Humphrey, the first director of the UN Secretariat’s Division on Human Rights. But Chang could be diplomatic, too. He was, Humphrey wrote, “a master of the
The story of Chang’s labors, along with those of the Lebanese Christian Charles Malik and the Indian feminist Hansa Mehta, demolishes the notion, circulated later in Asia and backed strongly by the Chinese Communist Party, that the Universal Declaration on Human Rights represents Western political values incompatible with those of the rest of the world.
government as the Kuomintang crumbled. On December 10, 1948, he addressed the third meeting of the UN General Assembly in Paris. In the face of Mao’s juggernaut and the collapse of the Nationalist army, he lamented that force was deciding China’s future and criticized the Communist “tendency to impose a standardized way of thinking and a single way of life.”
As children, John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, who would serve Eisenhower as the first civilian chief of the CIA, spent a lot of time in the Dupont Circle mansion of their grandfather, John W. Foster, surrounded by mementos of his days as a lobbyist for the Qing dynasty. Yet neither acquired an interest in the Far East. In 1927, Allen resigned from the State Department rather than accept a posting to Beijing. And when President Truman tried to appoint John Foster Dulles ambassador to Japan, Dulles resisted what he called “exile” in Asia.
John Foster Dulles, a prominent member of the Presbyterian Church, reserved a special place in the darkest corner of his heart for the godless Chicoms. He made sure that economic sanctions applied against Beijing were even more severe than those against Moscow, a policy that became known as the China Differential. Though Americans could travel freely to the Soviet Union, Dulles did his best to cut off all contact with the Red Chinese.
Eisenhower shared his secretary of state’s distaste for the Chinese. He threatened Mao’s regime with nuclear annihilation eight times.
In the 1950s, the United States government discarded the hundred-year-old American belief that a united, sovereign China was in the best interests of the United States.
With the help of Allen Dulles at the CIA, the Eisenhower administration launched a series of covert operations to chip away at Beijing’s control over its territory. The United States began its decades-long involvement in Vietnam. Taiwan became America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier”
Eisenhower’s threats to use nuclear weapons against China, for example, contained a healthy dose of high-stakes bluffing. In September 1958, at the height of a crisis over Taiwan, when the Strategic Air Command deployed to Guam B-47s capable of carrying Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs, Eisenhower remarked to his generals: “You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time.”
Ultimately, Eisenhower and Dulles were limited in their flexibility toward China not because they were unyielding Cold Warriors but because China remained a domestic political issue.
If Washington couldn’t lure Mao away from Khrushchev, it would tempt Khrushchev away from Mao.
Eisenhower’s policies toward Taiwan were also less monolithic than they are often portrayed. Just as World War II rescued Mao Zedong, the Korean War saved Chiang Kai-shek.
thirty-eighth parallel, America decided to underwrite the Kuomintang. A formal American Military Assistance Advisory Group, led by a US general, soon replaced Charles M. Coo...
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In 1954, the Eisenhower administration concluded a mutual defense treaty with Chiang that committed the United States to a multidecade program of military and economic aid. The treaty’s purpose was not to start a war but to prevent one.
The desire to try to avoid war also led Eisenhower and Dulles to push China and Taiwan to accept the existence of “two Chinas”—just as there were an East and West Germany and a North and South Korea. Both the president and the secretary of state spent years unsuccessfully trying to persuade Chiang Kai-shek to withdraw his troops from a few specks of land hard along China’s southern coast. Politically, those islands—Quemoy (Jinmen), Matsu (Mazu), and Dachen—constituted Chiang’s sole remaining claim to be the ruler of all China. Militarily, they were a tinderbox.
In April 1954, Communist China attended its first international peace conference, in Geneva, with the United States, Britain, France, and the USSR, to discuss problems in Korea and Indochina.
French suffered a historic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, sounding the death knell for their colonial enterprise in Southeast Asia.
At Geneva, Dulles pressed the British to join the fight against Communism in Vietnam. To the Americans, the looming threat from China had turned the anticolonial battle in Vietnam into a struggle of global importance. But the British were not interested. Unlike the United States, Britain recognized the PRC as the legal government of China in January 1950. When it became clear that the conference would not block the rise of the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, Dulles withdrew, the only time in US history that a secretary of state abandoned a Big Power conference before it ended.
Geneva produced an accord on Indochina. Under that deal, Vietnam would be divided along the seventeenth parallel.
a pro-Western government in Saigon. The parties agreed that an election to unify the country would be held in July 1956. With Eisenhower’s blessing, Dulles and his brother, Allen, moved to subvert the deal. An ever-expanding CIA operation was established in South Vietnam to support Ngo Dinh Diem, a former official in the French colonial regime, whom the Americans had picked as leader in the South.
In July, as the Geneva Conference limped to its conclusion, Washington announced its defense treaty with Chiang Kai-shek. The United States then formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, grouping eight nations in Asia together in an anti-Communist bloc.
On September 3, 1954, as diplomats headed to Manila to sign the SEATO treaty, Mao’s forces bombarded Nationalist forces on Quemoy Island, off the coast of Fujian province, barely a mile from the Communist-held city of Xiamen. In November, Mao ordered bombing raids on the Kuomintang-held Dachen Island, off the coast of Zhejiang province. On December 2, the United States and the Republic of China signed their mutual defense treaty. In January 1955, the People’s Liberation Army landed on one of the islands in the Dachen chain.
On March 10, 1955, as Mao’s forces continued to shell the offshore islands, Dulles threatened China with nuclear war. Six days later, Eisenhower repeated the threat. “A-bombs can be used,” Eisenhower declared, “as you would use a bullet.”
Eisenhower sent Joint Chiefs chairman Arthur Radford to Taiwan to offer Chiang a deal: if Chiang would withdraw from all the offshore islands, the United States would blockade a five-hundred-mile stretch of the Chinese coast until China agreed to renounce force against Taiwan. Chiang rejected the proposal. The United States would never follow through, he told his diary.
In mid-April 1955, Zhou traveled to Indonesia to attend the Bandung Conference, the first gathering “of colored peoples in the history of mankind,” as then Indonesian president Sukarno put it.
Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek both emerged stronger from what became known as the First Straits Crisis. On the mainland, Mao used the affair, especially Eisenhower’s nuclear threat, to wheedle from the Soviets a commitment to help China build its own bomb.
Chiang got his defense treaty and a new multiyear US aid commitment. But, as usual, the Generalissimo was not happy. The signing of the mutual defense pact ended Chiang’s dream of ever “recovering the mainland.”
On the economic front, also gone was American pressure to privatize Free China’s economy. By 1953, the Kuomintang owned 80 percent of the industry on Taiwan. The Americans supported Taiwan’s policy of keeping tariffs high to protect Taiwanese businesses, even if this blocked free trade. Taiwan’s first four-year economic plan was drawn up as a result of American pressure.
American-educated finance officials tamed inflation. Chiang even kept his military budget in check. It helped, of course, that from 1945 to 1965, the United States gave Taiwan more than $4 billion, the largest military and economic infusion per capita at the time. But, unlike many other countries, Taiwan did not waste the aid. It resulted in the creation of a global exporting giant. From 1952 to 1982, Taiwan’s economy grew an average of 9 percent a year. An island that had but a few paved roads in 1950 became the Taiwan Miracle.
Back home, Qian piloted China’s strategic rocket program. Two other returnees, Deng Jiaxian, a PhD from Purdue, and Zhu Guangya, from the University of Michigan, became the chief architects of China’s program to build the Bomb. Xie Jialin, who had been pulled off a boat in Hawaii in 1951, was a leader in particle physics.
Chinese educated in America built China’s first satellites, designed China’s first intercontinental ballistic missile and its first cruise missile, and founded the discipline of nuclear physics in China, including research into cosmic rays, particle and high-energy physics, and bubble chambers.
Jinhui, who had teamed up with American jazzman Buck Clayton in Shanghai to create modern Chinese pop music. The Communists fingered Li as one of three “big demons” of the Cultural Revolution, and Red Guards killed him. Murdered, too, was Chen Xujing, an American-educated sociologist who had advocated China’s “complete Westernization” in 1933. Hundreds of thousands more Chinese with “bourgeois ideas” and “bad class backgrounds” followed them into the grave.
In late 1967, Mao Zedong obtained a translation of Richard Nixon’s article in Foreign Affairs and concluded that if Nixon were elected to the presidency, he would reach out to China. On November 25, 1968, just weeks after Nixon won the White House, Zhou Enlai signaled that China was ready to resume the ambassadorial talks in Warsaw.
For Mao Zedong, the idea of some type of relationship with America had a certain logic. Relations between China and the Soviet Union had gone from tense to deadly, and China needed protection.
The Chinese had also picked up credible rumors in Eastern Europe that the Soviets were weighing a surgical strike against China’s nuclear facilities. In
Faced with the Soviet threat, Mao directed a group of senior military officers to conduct an independent review of China’s foreign policy.
“The United States and the Soviet Union are different,” he said. “The United States never occupied Chinese territory.”
By the fall of 1969, Mao ordered the Red Guards disbanded and directed the People’s Liberation Army to quell violence among various factions. The death toll surged as the Red Army stepped in. The chairman then dispatched seventeen million Chinese urban youth to the countryside to “learn from the people.” With his revolution curtailed, Mao’s opening to America began.
On July 25, 1969, Nixon, passing through the US territory of Guam on his first presidential trip to Asia, unveiled the Nixon Doctrine, declaring that the United States did not want a future land war in Asia and would no longer “undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.” The United States began a drawdown of its forces in South Korea. Nixon ordered destroyers from the Seventh Fleet to stop patrolling the Taiwan Strait and began moving US soldiers out of Taiwan.
Then, in the spring of 1971, an opportunity emerged that would electrify the world.
The Thirty-First World Table Tennis Championships were scheduled to take place in April in Nagoya, Japan, and China, after an absence of six years, was sending a team.
An event that occurred on the morning of Monday, April 5, is still disputed. Was it a providential accident or part of a well-thought-out plan? One of the American players was Glenn Cowan, a long-haired stoner from California with a predilection for playing while high. According to one version of the event, Cowan unwittingly boarded the Chinese team bus on his way to the stadium. The other version, from Japan’s Kyodo News Service, is that Cowan, who was sporting a US team jacket, was invited to hitch a ride. Either way, after a few minutes of awkward silence, Cowan addressed the Chinese team
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the Chinese, he was hilarious—and free. Inviting the laughably bad American Ping-Pong team to China turned out to be the ideal way for Mao Zedong to sell his people on a resumption of ties with the US. On occasion, Chinese players deliberately lost to the Americans, playing the role of munificent hosts. This display of both Chinese dominance over and magnanimity toward the Beautiful Country clearly demonstrated China’s superiority. The unwitting Americans were put in the role of supplicants; they had begged to be allowed to come to China, and China had heard their pleas. Mao would frame the
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American historians have portrayed China as the passive partner in the dance with the United States. They tend to blame Washington for ignoring China in the 1950s and credit it with waking up to China in the 1970s. In reality, China’s leadership needed America at that point far more than the reverse. The reasons were many, ranging from geostrategic considerations to the very basic imperative of survival.
had been trying to solve for decades. China wanted to become rich, strong, respected, and united. So Mao, like his predecessors, found himself looking to the Beautiful Country for solutions. Years of disastrous economic, political, social, and environmental policies had ravaged China. Mao’s continuous revolution was a
The country needed technology, fertilizer, and farm equipment. The Russians weren’t helping. That left the United States. Second, China felt besieged. To the north, the Soviets threatened. The Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, followed by the rapid buildup of Soviet forces in Siberia, had stoked Mao’s fear of war. To the south, India was still smarting from its defeat in 1962 at China’s hands. Taiwan’s forces continued to harass the mainland. And Japan was rising in the east, its economy even more miraculous than that of Taiwan. As Zhou Enlai said in 1968, “We are now isolated. No
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In 1949, he had proclaimed that China had “stood up,” but until America recognized this fact, the Chinese historian He Di has observed, Mao’s revolution would be incomplete.
Finally, in the late 1960s, Mao was no closer to the dream of unification with Taiwan than he had been in 1949. In fact, he was farther from it. The Republic of China was firmly allied with the United States, and Taiwan boasted the second-highest standard of living in Asia. Mao realized that he needed a relationship with America to draw closer to the island. The road to unification ran through Washington, not Taipei.
In December 1970, when Edgar Snow asked why Mao was seeking talks with the United States, the chairman declared that “American production is the biggest of any country in the world.” The Soviet Union had failed as China’s guide, Mao said. “I place my hopes on the American people.”
