Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks During the Cold War, 1949–1972 (review)

A respected diplomatic historian declared that if "diplomacy" is "the process of negotiation and dialogue by which states in a system conduct their relations," then "it can be said that the United States had no meaningful diplomacy with Communist adversaries through long stretches of the Cold War."¹ Xia Yafeng disagrees. This deeply researched and clearly organized monograph argues that communication between the governments of the United States and the People's Republic was continual, though perhaps "negotiation" might be a slight exaggeration and often "dialogue" was only the exchange of rebarbative monologues. Xia tells a story of intrigue, subterfuge, frustration, courage, and massive hypocrisy. But he shows "how the two sides eventually came to grips with mutual differences and slowly but surely learned to engage each other productively" (p. 4). Xia analyzes the structural shifts in balance of power as perceived on either side but insists that diplomacy—that is, the process of personal negotiation—in the end made a difference. He optimistically concludes that "self-learning and mutual learning" led to the diplomatic coup in 1972. Disaster was, indeed, avoided, but success still seems, in the famous words of Wellington after his victory at Waterloo, "a damn close run thing."

Before coming to the United States for doctoral training, Xia was a diplomat in the Chinese Foreign Service, serving in Washington from 1995 to 1998. Being an insider, although of junior rank, gave him access to gossip, extensive interviews, and, even more important, a certain feel for how the flow of events inside China's "diplomatic establishment" interacted with international politics and domestic issues. Xia made knowledgeable use of recently opened archives in China (others are still closed), copious memoirs, semi-official biographies, compilations of documents, and scholarly studies in Chinese and English.

The first question is how the friends in the anti-Japanese war became enemies in the Cold War. While Xia does not buy the argument that there was a "lost chance" for continued friendly relations, he is also careful to show that there was no inevitability that hostility would reach the level that it did. New China would "lean to one side," said Zhou Enlai, but suggested that American policy would determine just how far the lean would go. The State Department hoped to split the new regime into pro- and anti-Soviet factions. Zhou refused the bait, as the American position was based on a condescending and much resented assumption that China was a weak and supplicant nation.

The disastrous Korean armistice talks were followed by the creation of a "special channel" through the embassies in Poland, which lasted through the 1960s. Several chapters detail the period of mutual hostility and self-sabotage in which neither side acted in its own rational self-interest. Nonetheless, as the relative power of the two nations began to shift, mid-level diplomats on either side began to develop a cohesive set of insights and skills. Each side was forced to think clearly and to distinguish what it wanted, what it needed, and what it would settle for. This was often a matter of fanmian jiaocai, "learning from negative example," bringing to mind the American State Department apothegm "Good judgment is usually the result of experience. And experience is frequently the result of bad judgment."

By the mid 1960s, the stage was set and the curtains parted on a new act. The story moves briskly without losing sight of the structural analysis of the international situation. Xia's Chinese sources provide fresh force and nuance to the familiar story. He reasserts that in the early 1960s Kennedy and Johnson were working toward a normalization that was delayed first by Kennedy's assassination, then by Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War, and finally by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. One can observe that perhaps it was just as...