A Cold War Turning Point: Nixon and China, 1969-1972

2 A New Mood in Beijing

14 2 W hile the Nixon administration ramped up its public and private efforts to affect a rapprochement with the PRC, little did it know that Mao Zedong had decided to reciprocate. The evidence from U.S. archives, as noted above in chapter 1, shows that the administration hoped for a change in Chinese policy, but did not expect such a change until Mao left the scene. Recently unearthed documents from China, other foreign archives, and secondary sources published by Chinese scholars , however, demonstrate that Mao decided to seek rapprochement with the United States for two reasons of his own that reinforced each other. First, he wanted to end the chaos and self-isolation of the Cultural Revolution, yet continue to keep the Chinese people in line by whipping up anti-Soviet sentiment . Doing this, however, required that he keep the peace between the moderates , led by Premier Zhou Enlai and others in the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and the radicals, led by Lin Biao, the defense minister and Mao’s designated successor, and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who had been, and would continue to be, jockeying for power as the Cultural Revolution waned. Second, and most important, the Sino-Soviet split had moved from the theoretical and ideological sphere into the military sphere. The August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the border clashes between Chinese and Soviet troops in March and August 1969 forced Mao to gradually seek better relations with the United States because he now perceived Moscow to be the bigger threat to Chinese security. This fear of the Soviet Union temporarily united the moderates and radicals. Because it also wanted to pursue détente with the Soviet Union, the Nixon administration, meanwhile, responded cautiously to the new dimension to the split. It also refused to take sides and did not play triangular diplomacy with either nation because it feared that a hot war between Moscow and BeiA NEW MOOD IN BEIJING a new mood in beijing 15 jing could conceivably break out at any moment, particularly after both sides made veiled nuclear threats. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution and its ideological fight with the Soviet Union had adversely affected China’s foreign relations. Mao had recalled all of his ambassadors except for Huang Hua in Egypt and repeatedly condemned both Moscow and Washington with vituperative rhetoric—including threatening to use China’s new nuclear capabilities. He also pushed for communist revolutions throughout Asia. Meanwhile relative moderates such as Chen Yi, who had been foreign minister since 1958, and Zhou Enlai, had tried to convince Mao to tone down the anti-foreign rhetoric. However, the radicals purged Chen Yi. Only Zhou’s personal intervention on behalf of the moderates prevented an actual bloodbath in the Foreign Ministry. The chaos was even worse in the streets. Former Pakistani diplomat Sultan Khan described “frightened men and women with hands bound and ropes round their necks being dragged in the streets for a ‘trial’ by angry-looking male and female Red Guards who thought they were following in the footsteps of Mao and creating a new order in China.” The situation peaked in 1967, when millions of Chinese students, responding to the quashing of a protest by a small group of Chinese students in Moscow, protested outside the Soviet embassy in Beijing in January and radical Red Guards burned the British chargé d’affaires office in August. Zhou, Niu Jun has shown, “was determined to use the opportunity provided by the burning of the British mission to turn the situation around.” This, however, proved easier said than done. The French ambassador in Beijing, Lucien Paye, reported that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership had charged that the United States and the Soviet Union had “colluded” against China by signing arms control treaties such as the 1963 Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty and the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. Beijing called the latter the “machinery to establish a U.S.-Soviet nuclear military alliance against China and the people of all countries.” The American “imperialists” and the Soviet “revisionists,” Beijing argued, wanted to “encircle” China. After Warsaw Pact troops overran Czechoslovakia, Paye told Paris that Zhou “vehemently” criticized the invasion and called it an example of U.S.Soviet “collusion.” Wu Teh, the vice president of the Revolutionary Commit- 16 a cold war turning point tee of Beijing, said Moscow wanted to “partition...