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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Pomfret
The problem for Mao was that he had schooled his people to hate the very nation that possessed the solution to China’s dilemmas. How to use the United States to attain his goals without allowing America to reseed China’s soil with Yankee ideals was Mao’s challenge. It continues to torment his successors.
They brought together the two great nations of the West and the East, triggering a convulsive economic boom that raised more people out of poverty than ever before in history. As Mao observed, “Out of bad things can come good things.”
On April 27, 1971, barely a week after the US Ping-Pong team returned to a tumultuous reception in Los Angeles, the White House received another invitation from Zhou Enlai to send a high-ranking envoy to Beijing.
Kissinger rushed into the Oval Office with the news; the missive, he gushed, was “the most important communication that has come to an American president since the end of World War II.” He would travel to Beijing in July.
Nixon’s motives for drawing closer to China were as complex and contradictory as Mao’s. On a geopolitical level, they involved a grand strategy to counter the Soviet Union and to extract the United States from the quagmire in Vietnam.
mean, you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system—and they will be the leaders of the world.”
As they plotted a rapprochement with China, neither Nixon nor Kissinger believed that America’s tilt toward China should be permanent. “I think in twenty years your successor, if he’s as wise as you,” Kissinger told Nixon, “will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese.” The president concurred.
In seventeen hours of meetings over two and a half days, Kissinger gave the Chinese the one thing he believed obsessed them—“strategic reassurance, some easing of their nightmare of hostile encirclement.” To show his good intentions, he provided intelligence on Soviet military deployments. He would supply more, starting an American tradition of bringing gifts to Beijing without asking for anything in return.
He even claimed that Taiwan was barely discussed and that Zhou assured him that the island’s status would not delay the warming of relations. In reality, Taiwan played a key role in the discussions. It dominated the first part of the July 9 meeting and takes up a substantial chunk of the forty-six-page manuscript of the talks. As Zhou told Kissinger on the day they met, “Taiwan is the crucial issue.”
Over the next few days, Kissinger made a series of astounding statements and promises that raised Chinese expectations about the benefits of ties with America. He started off by framing America’s support for Taiwan as a historical mistake that he blamed on “public opinion at the time” and not on the American belief that Stalin and Mao planned to back violent revolution throughout East Asia.
Kissinger then announced America’s intention of retreating from ...
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When Zhou observed that once America pulled out of Taiwan, unification could be expected, Kissinger agreed. Taiwan’s “political evolution,” Kissinger said, “is likely to be in the direction which Prime Minister Chou En-lai indicated to me.” What’s more, Kissinger dropped the decades-old American demand that China abandon its threat of force in dealing with the island.
The president loathed the idea of a Democrat, like George McGovern or Ted Kennedy, beating him to Beijing.
The only condition China met was the last one. Chinese aid to Vietnam continued throughout the early 1970s. Mao waited six months after Kissinger’s departure to free CIA officer Richard Fecteau. But he kept Fecteau’s comrade, John Downey, the last incarcerated American, in custody until March 12, 1973, after Nixon had left China. The twenty-one years Downey was imprisoned made him the longest-serving prisoner of war in US history.
When Mao heard about Kissinger’s promise to withdraw US troops from Taiwan, he quipped that it would take some time for a monkey to evolve into a human being. The Americans, he said, were now at the ape stage, “with a tail, though a much shorter one, on his back.”
On July 15, 1971, Richard Nixon took a helicopter from the presidential compound in San Clemente to the Burbank studios of NBC to make an announcement. It was over in ninety seconds, and, in the words of UPI reporter Helen Thomas, it “made the room rock.”
Most of the Taiwanese government found out about the planned summit from a news broadcast. When two American diplomats arrived in Taipei to offer explanations, Chiang Kai-shek refused to see them, ordering his son Ching-kuo to host them instead. “Our relationship with them will continue,” wrote American official John Holdridge, “because they have nowhere else to go.”
Chiang Ching-kuo had been president of Taiwan since 1978. He had run Taiwan’s brutal internal security apparatus since the 1950s, and like his father, he brooked no dissent. But, as Taiwan’s economy blossomed, a self-confident middle class had emerged on the island, demanding more freedom and a government that represented its interests.
At a time when the United States was ignoring mainland China’s human rights violations, its pressure on Taiwan was intense.
American officials linked Taiwan’s human rights practices to US arms sales. Leading the US charge was a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn named Stephen Solarz. Born in 1940 in New York City, Solarz had parlayed his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1975 into a congressional seat representing the liberal thirteenth district. In 1980, he became the first American official to visit North Korea since the Korean War. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he involved himself in major events in Asia. He played a key role in the ouster of
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two biggest cities, Taipei and Kaohsiung. And when the Democratic Progressive Party was founded on September 28, 1986, becoming the first opposition party in any Chinese territory since 1949, something extraordinary happened: no one was thrown in jail.
On October 7, 1986, just a few days shy of the second anniversary of Liu’s murder, Chiang announced that he would be ending thirty-eight years of martial law.
In a clear signal to his key international friend, Chiang revealed his plans in an interview with Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. He vowed that the Republic of China would ultimately “democratize.” The Post treated Chiang’s announcement with skepticism; its editors buried the story on page A18. But it was epochal nonetheless. “We ...
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In 1990, just months after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, a massive student movement calling for full democracy rocked Taiwan. Lee had just been “reelected” by 671 members of the rubber-stamp National Assembly, and the protesters wanted a real democracy. Unlike the Communists across the Taiwan Strait, Lee did not crack down.
The freedoms the Taiwanese won in the 1980s and 1990s stood as a challenge to the Chinese Communist claim that individual rights and democracy were somehow incompatible with Chinese culture.
Five days after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests on June 4, 1989, Deng Xiaoping emerged to congratulate officers from the People’s Liberation Army. He declared that the “biggest mistake” the party had made was “primarily in ideological and political education—not just of students but of the people in general.”
Deng’s statement signaled the beginning of another ideological operation—the Patriotic Education Campaign—to guide the thoughts of the Chinese people away from America.
Faced with a spiritual vacuum following June 4 and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, the Chinese Communist Party turned to a resentful for...
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Class struggle, once hailed by Communist historians as history’s driving force, disappeared from the curriculum, replaced by nationalism.
For the party, the defining issue of its history was no longer the battle with the Nationalists, but the fight with Japan, and behind it, America. Chiang Kai-shek, once the antihero of Communist history, was rehabilitated as a patriot. American support for China during World War II vanished from Chinese textbooks. It was as if China had fought the war alone.
The whole nation, the party’s Central Committee and the State Council noted in a document of August 1994, was to study China’s humiliating history from the Opium War on in order to grasp the evil intent of what came to be known as “hostile Western foreign forces.”
As Ambassador James Lilley noted just after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, “The Chinese need a single bogeyman.” And that bogeyman was the West.
the show represented the party’s frustration with America, its sense of powerlessness, and its desire for revenge. Communist Party writers embraced A Native of Beijing as an antidote to pro-American feelings. The show, wrote one columnist in the party-run China Daily, will “help those who entertain a rosy American dream to become more realistic.” As the writer Jianying Zha noted, the show’s operative emotion was “Screw you, America.”
As president, he promised to pursue a new policy toward the Middle Kingdom, one that kept tariffs on Chinese imports low but only if China’s human rights record improved.
As was typical of his approach in other areas, Bill Clinton tried to marry contradictory policies. With regard to China, those policies involved America’s missionary impulse to reform China and its strategic desire to keep it stable.
Clinton’s hand was forced by the rise of a powerful business lobby in favor of trade with China. As they had in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion nine decades earlier, American businesses in the 1990s argued that the US should not punish China because of the way it treated its citizens; it should instead encourage commerce so that China’s door would remain open to the West.
Americans were divided. Was China a threat or an opportunity? Pessimists tapped into a deep vein of fear of the Middle Kingdom.
the elements of a new Yellow Peril—a resurgent economic power, an expanding military, a hostile ideology, and a huge population—coalesced. In 1996, historian Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order predicted a “civilizational war” between China and the US. China, Huntington wrote, was the major rival to the American-led international system and the “biggest player in the history of man.”
rights.” In Beijing, Clinton’s promise of global democratization read like a declaration of war. In December 1992, Li Peng declared that any major concessions on human rights “would shake the basis of our society.”
When Secretary of State Warren Christopher traveled to Beijing the following month and demanded “significant progress and soon” on human rights, he got nowhere. Li Peng raked him over the coals in what Winston Lord, at the State Department, described as “the most brutal diplomatic meeting” he’d ever attended. China’s human rights, Li Peng said, were “none of your business.”
Yet, even as China was clamping down on human rights, its government dangled the prospect of more profits in front of the American business community. Inside Party Central at Zhongnanhai, Deng Xiaoping was pondering his final act.
In 1992, China’s economy grew by more than 14 percent.
nation into the factory of the world. In 1991, foreigners had invested only $4 billion in China; by 1993, investment surpassed $25 billion.
American companies, drooling at the prospect of a billion customers, came to China prepared to hand over the secrets to US technology in exchange for market share. Aircraft manufacturer McDonnell Douglas went so far as to provide China with state-of-the-art machine tool manufacturing capability on the condition that the Chinese use the technology solely in civilian operations. (The Chinese broke that promise.)
The Chinese used the lure of their market to deflect attention from human rights, betting that the American profit motive would beat out its political ideals.
Deng Xiaoping remarked that China was “too big a piece of meat” for foreign businesses to ignore. As Premier Li Peng boasted, “The number of friends is increasing and our international status is on the rise.”
On May 26, 1994, Clinton abandoned the link between human rights and trade,
He called his new policy toward China “constructive engagement.” It would...
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In November 1991, the United States began pulling its forces out of the Philippines. A combination of natural disasters—the dramatic eruption of Mount Pinatubo on June 15, 1991, burying the US Air Force’s Clark Air Base under tons of mud and rubble—and the vagaries of Filipino politics forced Washington to end a military presence on the island nation that had begun in 1898. In 1992, the same year the US Navy pulled out of Subic Naval Base, China’s legislature passed a bill laying claim to the seas the United States was leaving. The “Law on the Territorial Waters and Their Contiguous Areas”
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Almost a century earlier the Qing dynasty reformer Liang Qichao had dreamed of excluding foreign powers from China’s seas. Now China was taking steps to make it happen.
