There was a marginal difference in our perspectives. Nixon saw in the opening to China a somewhat greater opportunity than I to squeeze the Soviet Union into short-term help on Vietnam; I was more concerned with the policy’s impact on the structure of international relations. Nixon tended to believe that ending the isolation of 800 million Chinese itself removed a great threat to peace. To me a China active in foreign policy would call for very skillful diplomacy to calibrate our policies in the more complicated context that would evolve and that would alter all international relationships. But these differences rested on the same fundamental judgment: that if relations could be developed with both the Soviet Union and China the triangular relationship would give us a great strategic opportunity for peace. We had both come to the same perception independently. In an important article in Foreign Affairs in October 1967 Nixon had written:
Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation. But we could go disastrously wrong if, in pursuing this long-range goal, we failed in the short range to read the lessons of history. . . .
For the short run, then, this means a policy of firm restraint, of no reward, of a creative counterpressure designed to persuade Peking that its interests can be served only by accepting the basic rules of international civility. For the long run, it means pulling China back into the world community—but as a great and progressing nation, not as the epicenter of world revolution.
In a magazine interview on August 9, 1968, immediately after his nomination for President, Nixon reiterated that “We must not forget China. We must always seek opportunities to talk with her, as with the USSR… We must not only watch for changes. We must seek to make changes.”[38]
China had not figured extensively in my own writings. In 1961, I had written about the possibility of a Sino-Soviet rift. Such a prospect, I argued, “must not be overlooked” and if it occurred “we should take advantage of it.” But we could not promote this rift by our own efforts and we could not build our policy on the expectation of it.[39] (In fact, we know now that the rift had already occurred.) In my article on the Vietnam negotiations published in the January 1969 issue of Foreign Affairs but written three months earlier, I had argued that “the Soviet doctrine according to which Moscow has a right to intervene to protect socialist domestic structures made a Sino-Soviet war at least conceivable. For Moscow’s accusations against Peking have been, if anything, even sharper than those against Prague.” I saw this as a potentially serious problem for Hanoi and as a factor to press Hanoi toward a settlement. More fundamental, in July 1968, before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, I had worked with Nelson Rockefeller on a speech he gave on US-Soviet relations that contained a passage foreshadowing later policy: “We will have to learn to deal imaginatively with several competing centers of Communist power… I would begin a dialogue with Communist China. In a subtle triangle of relations between Washington, Peking, and Moscow, we improve the possibilities of accommodations with each as we increase our options toward both.”
My perception owed something to my general approach to the conduct of foreign policy. Our relations to possible opponents should be such, I considered, that our options toward both of them were always greater than their options toward each other. If we could free our diplomacy from the dead weight of two decades, each Communist superpower would have greater inducement to deal with us constructively.
Though many scholars urged a rapprochement with China, such an approach to the question was not widely shared. A number of sinologists urged an improvement of relations as an end in itself, for which Americans should make concessions. A group of distinguished professors from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, sent a memorandum on China policy to Nixon during the transition period. They urged that we move toward China by such initiatives as relinquishing our ties to Taiwan and inviting the People’s Republic into the United Nations. Their memorandum did not mention—nor do I recall any other China experts who did so at the time—the geopolitical opportunities for us with respect to the Soviet Union or the possibility that the Chinese might have an incentive to move toward us without American concessions because of their need for an American counterweight to the Soviet Union.
But all ideas about rapprochement, whatever their rationale, it has to be said, were little more than nebulous theories when the new Administration came into office. For twenty years, there had been virtual isolation and ideological hostility, punctuated by the war in Korea in which American and Chinese soldiers fought ferociously against each other. Bilateral talks had been begun between consular officials of the United States and the People’s Republic of China in 1954 in Geneva; these were raised to the ambassadorial level in 1955 and later moved to Warsaw. On September 10, 1955, an agreement was reached on repatriation of some nationals. And that was all. In the 134 meetings held from 1954 through 1968 the repatriation accord remained the only concrete achievement.
On May 28, 1968, Peking postponed the Warsaw talks, suggesting two dates in November, after the American Presidential election. Peking Radio asserted that “there is nothing to discuss at present.” The first faint glimmer of change followed the events of August 21, 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Whereas in the upheavals of 1956 in Poland and Hungary the Chinese had attempted to act as conciliators, this time their response was abusive condemnation of the Soviet Union. The Chinese Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily on March 17, 1969, for example, called the Czech invasion “armed aggression and military occupation” by the “Soviet revisionist renegade clique.” It denounced the Brezhnev Doctrine of limited sovereignty as an “out- and-out fascist theory.” For in its literal meaning, the Brezhnev Doctrine applied as much to China as to any East European country; indeed, given China’s unconcealed hostility to the Soviet leadership, perhaps even more so.
Thus, on November 26, 1968, three months after the Czech invasion and just after the US election, Peking proposed another Warsaw meeting with the United States to take place on February 20, 1969. True to the ancient Chinese tradition of never revealing any need for the cooperation of foreigners, Peking adopted a challenging tone, calling on the United States to join “an agreement on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” and “to withdraw all its armed forces from China’s Taiwan Province and the Taiwan Straits and dismantle all its military installations in Taiwan Province.”
There was no question that the Soviet Union was emerging as the principal Chinese foreign policy concern. Sino-Soviet hostility had many roots. What started as a close alliance soon showed increasing strains, which were at first papered over. There was an ideological disagreement over China’s claims to have achieved Communism without passing through the stage of socialism—a doctrine of Mao Tse-tung’s that implied that Peking was ideologically more pure than Moscow. There was also a national rivalry between two powerful states, and a growing mistrust. In the late 1950s Khrushchev refused nuclear cooperation; the Chinese retaliated by stepping up ideological attacks. In 1959 the Soviet Union pulled out its technical advisers and ended all economic aid. Personal antipathy developed between the two groups of Communist leaders, violating all Marxist-Leninist injunctions against “subjectivism.” The Chinese resurrected ancient grievances, demanding the return of vast stretches of Siberian territory allegedly seized by the tsars in centuries of Russian expansion.
By 1969, the political conflict was beginning to take an ominous military form. Until about 1965-66, a rough military balance had existed along the Sino-Soviet border. Force levels on both sides were low. Opposite Sinkiang, Soviet forces were more numerous; the Chinese had numerical superiority near Manchuria. Soviet forces were, of course, consistently superior in quality and in logistical support. Border incidents began around 1959, and increased in frequency thereafter. Nevertheless, for several years there was no large-scale buildup by either side. Then in early 1966 the Soviets began transferring highly trained and well-equipped combat units from Eastern Europe to the Far East. Nuclear-tipped surface-to-surface rockets made their appearance. More worrying for Peking, in January 1966 the Soviet Union signed a twenty- year “Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Aid” with Mongolia that allowed it to station troops and to maintain bases there. The number of Soviet divisions along the Chinese border increased from about twelve understrength divisions in 1964 to over forty modernized divisions by 1970.
On November 29, 1968, the Johnson Administration, with President-elect Nixon’s blessing, accepted the Chinese offer to resume the Warsaw talks. (I had not yet been appointed as Nixon’s Assistant.)
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n retrospect all successful policies seem preordained. Leaders like to claim prescience for what has worked, ascribing to planning what usually starts as a series of improvisations. It was no different with the new China policy. The new Administration had the general intention of making a fresh start. But in all candor it had no precise idea how to do this and it had to take account of domestic realities, not the least of which was Nixon’s traditional support among the conservative “China lobby” that had never forgiven Truman and Acheson for allegedly betraying Chiang Kai-shek.
The leaders in Peking probably had the same problem. It is likely that Mao Tse-tung decided to move toward the United States shortly after the Czech invasion. But he governed a country just emerging from the Cultural Revolution. Mao had sought by this extraordinary convulsion to head off the fatal tendency of Communist states toward bureaucratization and stagnation by imposing from the top a permanent revolutionary upheaval—surely one of the few times in history the head of a country deliberately overthrew his own institutions as an educational device. The impact of the upheaval on foreign policy is revealed by the fact that in 1969 China had only one ambassador serving abroad (he was Huang Hua, stationed in Cairo, later Ambassador to the United Nations and still later Foreign Minister).
One of the first and most important steps taken by the Nixon Administration was something we did not do. The Johnson Administration had used the specter of Asian Communism led by Peking as a principal justification for the Vietnam war. President Johnson in his speech at Johns Hopkins University on April 7. 1965, had argued that “the rulers in Hanoi are urged on by Peiping”; [Peiping was the Nationalist Chinese name for Peking; this usage was an additional insult.] the contest in Vietnam was “part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes.” In the same vein Secretary of State Dean Rusk before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 18, 1966, saw Peking as the instigator of aggression and Peking and Hanoi as in collusion. By contrast, the Nixon Administration, from the beginning, never cited, or even hinted at, an anti-Chinese motive for our Vietnam involvement; we did not agree with the analysis; we needed no additional enemies.
The first few months were full of contradictory tendencies. In his Inaugural address Nixon made a veiled reference to the new Administration’s willingness to talk to China: “Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open. We seek an open world—open to ideas, open to the exchange of goods and people—a world in which no people, great or small, will live in angry isolation.” The phrase “angry isolation” harked back to his Foreign Affairs article of 1967. But there was no response. The Chinese were not to be impressed by a single conciliatory allusion.
The day after Inauguration the New China News Agency denounced Nixon as the new “puppet” chosen by the “monopoly bourgeois clique” to implement “the vicious ambitions of US imperialism to continue to carry out aggression and expansion in the world.” Nixon’s low- key rhetoric and the demonstrations against him at the Inaugural in Washington revealed, according to NCNA, that US imperialism was “beset with crises” and facing a “deathbed struggle.” The People’s Daily of January 27 gloated that US imperialism was “on its last legs.” The article mocked: “Although at the end of his rope, Nixon had the cheek to speak about the future… A man with one foot in the grave tries to console himself by dreaming of paradise. This is the delusion and writhing of a dying class.”
Nixon’s Inaugural address may have been more statesmanlike but the Chinese had more pungent writers.
Nixon was indeed somewhat schizophrenic in the early days. Five days after the Inauguration, Nixon sent me and Rogers a message complaining that our Ambassador in a European country had failed to prevent that country from announcing its recognition of Peking. The Ambassador, he said, was a “disaster”; we were told to “get rid of him” immediately. At his first news conference, on January 27, Nixon was asked whether he was planning to improve relations with Communist China. He gave a long account of Chinese hostility, concluding that at the forthcoming Warsaw meeting China would have an opportunity to prove whether it had altered its attitude. “Until some changes occur on their side, however, I see no immediate prospect of any change in our policy.”
The converse, of course, was that if China changed its attitude in some unspecified manner, we would be receptive. Formally this did not differ substantially from the pronouncements of previous administrations. And it was in sharp contrast also with more conciliatory references to the Soviet Union, SALT, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty in the same news conference. To the suspicious Chinese all this must have looked like the feared condominium. And they were already fretting over another incident. Three days before this news conference the Chinese chargé d’affaires in the Netherlands had defected and sought asylum in the United States. On February 6 the Chinese protested. On February 18 they canceled the Warsaw meeting scheduled for February 20, on the ground that the United States had “incited” the charge “to betray his country and he was carried off by the CIA.” Not to be outdone, Nixon, in his press conference of March 4, poured more cold water on the prospects of a Sino-American rapprochement: “Looking further down the road, we could think in terms of a better understanding with Red China. But being very realistic, in view of Red China’s breaking off the rather limited Warsaw talks that were planned, I do not think that we should hold out any great optimism for any breakthroughs in that direction at this time.”
Yet on February 1, in response to a report indicating some East European concern about possible Chinese-American contacts, Nixon had written me a memorandum:
I noted in your January 31 report the interesting comments from [the East European] source. I think we should give every encouragement to the attitude that this Administration is “exploring possibilities of raprochement [sic] with the Chinese.” This, of course, should be done privately and should under no circumstances get into the public prints from this direction. However, in contacts with your friends, and particularly in any ways you might have to get to this… source, I would continue to plant that idea.
To be sure, the memorandum did not ask me to do anything toward the Chinese; it simply urged me to create the impression that we were exploring a move toward China. I was to plant the idea, moreover, not with friends of the Chinese but with East Europeans. The maneuver was intended to disquiet the Soviets, and almost certainly—given Nixon’s preoccupations—to provide an incentive for them to help us end the war in Vietnam.
I used the Nixon memorandum to initiate a policy review, and on February 5 I called for an interagency study of China policy. The departments and agencies were asked to examine:
1. The current status of U.S. relations with Communist China and the Republic of China;
2. The nature of the Chinese Communist threat and intentions in Asia;
3. The interaction between U.S. policy and the policies of other major interested countries toward China;
4. Alternative U.S. approaches on China and their costs and risks.
China also featured in Nixon’s conversations with President de Gaulle during the visit to Paris on March 1, 1969. Nixon did not actually ask de Gaulle for any particular assistance; indeed, it was de Gaulle who initiated the subject and Nixon who seemed to be skeptical. In characteristically sweeping terms, de Gaulle stressed the importance of China, a huge entity with great resources. As time passed, the Chinese would make their influence felt in all parts of the world; their ambitions matched their skills. It was unwise to isolate them “in their own rage”; contacts could only be helpful. Nixon replied that in the short term there would be no change largely because of the unsettling impact of such a move on the rest of Asia; but over the long term—say ten years—we would have more communications with China, especially after it began to make progress in nuclear weapons. This indirect reply by Nixon was a sure sign that he meant to keep his options open. It was as compatible with an intention to wait ten years as with the objective of moving at the first opportunity. At best, it reflected the reality that the new Administration had no clear-cut plan.
Therefore on March 14, we talked again in a seemingly anti-Chinese direction. In announcing our “Safeguard” ABM program the President gave it in part the same anti-Chinese orientation that had also been the principal rationale of the Johnson Administration’s “Sentinel” ABM program of 1967. The reason was the same in both Administrations: it seemed wise to obtain some protection against accidental launches or deliberate attacks by smaller nuclear powers, without attempting a massive population defense against the Soviet Union that raised arms control as well as budgetary problems. “The Chinese threat against our population,” Nixon’s statement declared, “as well as the danger of an accidental attack, cannot be ignored. By approving this system, it is possible to reduce U.S. fatalities to a minimal level in the event of a Chinese nuclear attack in the 1970’s, or in an accidental attack from any source.” To make matters worse from the Chinese point of view, Nixon went on to imply that the Soviet Union and the United States shared a common interest in containing China: “I would imagine that the Soviet Union would be just as reluctant as we would be to leave their country naked against a potential Chinese Communist threat. So the abandoning of the entire system, particularly as long as the Chinese threat is there, I think neither country would look upon with much favor.” Not surprisingly, the New China News Agency on March 16 denounced the ABM decision as American “collusion with the Soviet revisionists to jointly maintain the nuclear threat and nuclear blackmail against the people of the world, particularly against the Chinese people.”
Thus by March 1969, Chinese-American relations seemed essentially frozen in the same hostility of mutual incomprehension and distrust that had characterized them for twenty years. The new Administration had a notion, but not yet a strategy, to move toward China. Policy emerges when concept encounters opportunity. Such an occasion arose when Soviet and Chinese troops clashed in the frozen Siberian tundra along a river of which none of us had ever heard. From then on ambiguity vanished, and we moved without further hesitation toward a momentous change in global diplomacy.
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N the remotest reaches of NorthEast Asia, a brief stretch of the 4,000- mile border between the Soviet Union and China is demarcated by the Ussuri River. If one drew a straight line from Vladivostok North- NorthEast to Khabarovsk, the Ussuri would run along most of its length. At a desolate point in the river about two hundred fifty miles from Vladivostok is a tiny island called Damansky by the Russians and by the Chinese Chenpao. (See the accompanying map.) The island is about a third of a square mile in area, wooded and uninhabited. It is somewhat closer to the Chinese bank of the river; the land opposite on both sides is marshy and barely populated. Apart from occasional fishermen and loggers from both sides, the only human presence in the region is the border outposts, Soviet and Chinese, guarding their respective river banks. The border with respect to the island has never been delimited. The Chinese had for some time asserted that the demarcation line ran down the middle of the river, which would have made the island Chinese. The Soviets maintained that the historical border put the entire Ussuri riverbed under Russian control. To this day no one has adequately explained why either side attached so much importance to an uninhabited island in a barren and largely empty territory.
On the morning of March 2, 1969, according to Soviet press accounts, 300 Chinese troops on the island ambushed a Russian patrol of frontier guards with machine-gun fire, killing twenty-three and wounding fourteen in the twenty-minute battle that resulted. Soviet reinforcements were sent, and they too were ambushed on arrival. Thereupon both sides withdrew from the island.[40]
The Soviets gave the clash enormous and immediate publicity. This was itself unprecedented. It seems to have been the first time either country had reported an armed incident or acknowledged casualties. The two sides traded protest notes and propaganda charges. The Chinese alleged that Soviet troops had made sixteen “intrusions” on Chenpao since 1967, eight of these in January and February of 1969; they recited a long list of Soviet incursions on other disputed islands in the Ussuri, and incidents of harassment and abuse of Chinese fishermen, frontier patrols, and local inhabitants. About ten thousand Chinese demonstrators mobbed the Soviet Embassy in Peking on March 3; a reported one hundred thousand Soviet demonstrators attacked the Chinese Embassy in Moscow on March 7, smashing windows and throwing ink bottles. Demonstrations spread to eighteen other Soviet cities over the next four days. Red Star, the Soviet Defense Ministry newspaper, reported on March 8 that Soviet troops in the Far East were on alert. A press conference at the Soviet Foreign Ministry displayed photographs of Soviet soldiers said to have been killed and mutilated by the Chinese, and Soviet television broadcast a special program on the border clashes. Chinese newspapers on March 4 proclaimed, “Down with the New Tsars!” Peking Radio reported that over four hundred million people (half the country’s population) took part in various demonstrations across China.
In Washington we were still too preoccupied with Vietnam to respond to events whose origin we little understood and whose significance took some weeks to become apparent. And while I favored establishing a triangular relationship as a matter of theory, both Nixon and I still considered the People’s Republic of China the more aggressive of the Communist powers. We thought it more than likely that Peking had started the fighting.
Ironically, it was heavy-handed Soviet diplomacy that made us think about our opportunities. On March 11, an emotional Ambassador Dobrynin raised the Ussuri incident with me. I had not even asked about it, but he insisted on giving me a gory account of the atrocities allegedly committed by the Chinese and an extended briefing. When I tried to change the subject by suggesting that it was a Sino-Soviet problem, Dobrynin insisted passionately that China was everybody’s problem. I listened politely, thought a lot, but made no comment. Later that evening I described the encounter to the President. Nixon was intrigued, and remarked how sometimes unexpected events could have a major effect. I suggested that we stood to gain a great deal strategically. Nixon agreed that the incident must have shaken the Chinese.
On the morning of March 15 there was a second border clash on Damansky/Chenpao. In contrast with March 2, this time both sides were prepared. The battle lasted longer and casualties were higher. The Soviets had increased their patrolling, and a scouting party had camped on the island on the night of the fourteenth, probably to set a trap. Heavy fighting broke out and continued on and off for nine hours; tanks, armored cars, artillery, and antitank rockets were used. Both sides claimed victory (although the Chinese seem to have retained possession of the island).[41]
The origin of these incidents—who started what—will probably be forever unclear. But the Chinese argument that they were responding to a long series of Soviet intrusions has a certain plausibility. After all, inferior forces do not usually invite defeat by making unprovoked attacks. Over two years later, as I have mentioned, Chou En-lai claimed that the Soviets deliberately started the incidents to distract attention from their failure to block the West German election of the Federal President in West Berlin. Whatever the real cause, Communist diplomats saw to it that we could not ignore the clashes. In mid-March, in Budapest, the Soviets reportedly sought Warsaw Pact condemnation of China as the aggressor in the Ussuri incidents. They also appealed to each Warsaw Pact ally to send “symbolic military detachments” to the Sino-Soviet border area. The Romanians blocked both moves.
At the first private meeting of our new Paris negotiators with the North Vietnamese on March 22, Xuan Thuy volunteered the surprising outburst that the United States had nothing to gain by seeking to take advantage of the divisions between the Soviet Union and China. The Vietnamese would rely on themselves, he declared. The United States had raised no such issue either in Washington or Paris (although I had speculated about it in my Foreign Affairs article). But Xuan Thuy insisted that both Moscow and Peking had aided North Vietnam for years in spite of disputes lasting nearly a decade; he had no doubt that they would continue to do so.
On March 28, in a directive calling for a review of restrictions on trade with Communist countries, I specifically requested a reexamination of our embargo on trade with “Asian Communist countries.”
On April 3, Dobrynin returned to the charge. He had read a press account that I was heading up a review of China policy (presumably the study directive of February 5). He wanted to learn more about it. Even though we had not had any communication with the Chinese, I gave an evasive reply which implied that the choice of rapprochement was up to us. Dobrynin suggested that there was still time for the two superpowers to order events, but they might not have this power much longer. He added that it seemed to many in the Soviet Union that Taiwan might well become an independent state. Summoning all my power to seem enigmatic, I did not respond.
On April 22 our Ambassador to Moscow, Jacob Beam, delivered a letter from President Nixon to Premier Kosygin covering a wide range of subjects in US-Soviet relations; China was deliberately not mentioned. However, we had instructed Beam to add orally that we did not intend to exploit Sino-Soviet difficulties—implying, of course, that we had the capacity to do so if we chose. The Soviets took the bait. On May 27, Foreign Minister Gromyko called in Beam to deliver Kosygin’s reply. Gromyko added orally that the Soviet Union would not exploit our troubles with China either, and that in general US-Soviet relations should be based on “long-range considerations.”
The triangular relationship, still highly tenuous, had shown its first tremor.
In the meantime, China had not been dormant. On April 1, Lin Piao, soon to be named Mao’s heir, gave his political report to the Ninth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party:
We must on no account relax our revolutionary vigilance because of victory and on no account ignore the danger of U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism launching a large-scale war of aggression… Chairman Mao said long ago we will not attack unless we are attacked; if we are attacked, we will certainly counter-attack. If they insist on fighting, we will keep them company and fight to the finish. The Chinese Revolution was won on the battlefield.
Despite its belligerent tone the speech had interesting, indeed tantalizing, innuendos. It emphasized that China would not attack unless attacked first, thus easing our fear of Chinese intervention in Indochina. It listed the Soviet Union and the United States as equal threats to the People’s Republic, fulfilling one of the preconditions of triangular diplomacy, that the United States should not be the principal enemy.
On April 29, I sent the President a wrap-up of the Chinese Party Congress. The Congress seemed to reflect a continuing struggle in China over domestic, economic, and social policy and political control. Foreign policies seemed equally uncertain, but Chinese preoccupation with the Soviet, rather than the American, danger seemed to be growing. I informed Nixon:
The direction of policy was not determined… Support for class struggles in SouthEast Asia, India and Israel was reaffirmed by Lin Piao, but given little emphasis.
Denigration of the US was pro forma.
Lin Piao mentioned that the Chinese had refused an urgent Soviet request to discuss the border issue, but he indicated that China was considering whether to engage in border discussions…
The public statements did not manifest any Chinese concern that war with the US or the USSR is imminent.
Treatment of Vietnam was perfunctory, and the Chinese have not endorsed the North Korean position during the recent tension. [Referring to the North Korean shootdown of a US EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft. See Chapter IX.]
… The Congress had kind words for no governments and for only one Party, the Albanian. A combination of moralistic rigidity towards other Communists, together with a professed desire to see the overthrow of non-Communist neighbors, would appear likely to earn the hostility of both.
Whatever the long-term significance of my analysis, a reference in it to Mao’s continuing battle to revamp educational policy caused Nixon to discover a community of purpose with his erstwhile nemesis. He wrote in the margin: “HK: Note Mao [too] fights the educational establishment!”
While the Party Congress was going on in Peking, more fighting broke out along the Sino-Soviet border on April 16-17—this time twenty-five hundred miles to the West on the frontier between Sinkiang and Kazakhstan. Another clash occurred there on April 25, and yet another on May 2. On April 26, the USSR publicly proposed to China the resumption of the meetings of the Joint Commission for Navigation on Boundary Rivers, which had been suspended since 1967. On May 8, the Soviet press disclosed military maneuvers by Soviet forces near the Chinese border. On May 9, Defense Minister Marshal Andrei Grechko’s Order of the Day commemorating the twenty-fourth anniversary of V-E Day ranked China with the United States and West Germany among the USSR’s major foes.
Apparently feeling the heat, the Chinese on May 11 accepted the Soviet proposal to resume discussions on river navigation. But there was more fighting all along the Amur River on May 12, 15, 25, and 28; and further clashes on May 20 and June 10 on the Sinkiang border (see the map above). The hostilities in Sinkiang tipped the scales in my mind as to the probable aggressor. Originally I had accepted the fashionable view that the Chinese were the more militant country. But when I looked at a detailed map and saw that the Sinkiang incidents took place only a few miles from a Soviet railhead and several hundred miles from any Chinese railhead, it occurred to me that Chinese military leaders would not have picked such an unpropitious spot to attack. After that I looked at the problem differently. If the Soviet Union was the aggressor, however, we had a problem as well as an opportunity. The problem was that a full-scale Soviet invasion of China might tip not only the geopolitical but also the psychological equilibrium in the world; it would create a momentum of irresistible ruthlessness. But it was not an easy matter to resist such aggression on behalf of a country with which we had neither diplomatic relations nor effective communication at any level.
The opportunity was that China might be ready to reenter the diplomatic arena and that would require it to soften its previous hostility toward the United States. In such circumstances, the Chinese threat against many of our friends in Asia would decline; at the same time, by evoking the Soviet Union’s concerns along its long Asian perimeter, it could also ease pressures on Europe. But for such possibilities to be clearer, we needed some communication with the Chinese leaders. If we moved too quickly or obviously—before the Cultural Revolution had fully run its course—the Chinese might rebuff the overture. If we moved too slowly, we might feed Chinese suspicions of Soviet- American collusion, which could drive them into making the best deal available with Moscow. As for the Soviets, we considered the Chinese option useful to induce restraint; but we had to take care not to pursue it so impetuously as to provoke a Soviet preemptive attack on China. And at home we had to overcome a habit of mind that had seen in the People’s Republic either an irreconcilable enemy or a put-upon country concerned only with the issue of Taiwan.
My major concern at this stage was to make sure that the right questions were being asked in our government. My directive of February 5 had produced an interagency paper on China, which the NSC Review Group met to discuss on May 15. The paper paid heavy attention to the conventional Chinese-American bilateral problems: Taiwan, admission to the United Nations, trade and travel, and various disarmament schemes; it also discussed our opposing interests in Asia. All these concerns were treated as if they existed in a vacuum. No reference was made to the global implications of Sino-Soviet tensions and the opportunities for us in the triangular relationship. At the meeting I challenged what seemed to me excessive emphasis on China’s ideology and alleged militancy; I thought the issue should be posed differently. The interagency paper assumed that American policy had the essentially psychological goal of changing the minds of the Chinese leadership, to turn Chinese minds from militancy toward conciliation. This ignored China’s role in the power equation. A nation of 800 millions surrounded by weaker states was a geopolitical problem no matter who governed it. Which of our problems with China were caused by its size and situation and which by its leadership? What did we want from China and how could we reasonably influence its decisions? How did we view the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations; how much could we influence them and which side should we favor? I also questioned the view of most Kremlinologists that any attempt to better our relations with China would ruin relations with the Soviet Union. History suggested that it was usually more advantageous to align oneself with the weaker of two antagonistic partners, because this acted as a restraint on the stronger.
On June 8, the Soviets resumed their diplomatic offensive. Brezhnev, in a speech to the International Conference of Communist Parties in Moscow, denounced Mao and floated the concept of “a system of collective security in Asia.” He did not elaborate, but such a “system” could only be directed against China. In late June, Soviet ambassadors made coordinated efforts to “expose” Chinese policy to their host governments and to discourage various West European nations from recognizing Peking. The Soviet Union sought to expand its contacts with non-Communist Asian nations; feelers were even extended to Taiwan. In a campaign to thwart any Chinese effort to break out of its isolation, Soviet diplomats hinted that in order better to isolate China the Soviet Union was prepared to avoid complicating relations with the United States. I summed up these accumulating signs in a report to the President:
I believe this is solid evidence of the growing obsession of the Soviet leaders with their China problem… at least it suggests that the Soviets may become more flexible in dealing with East-West issues… Thus, Soviet concern may have finally reached the point that it can be turned to our advantage, if they are in fact attempting to ensure our neutrality in their Chinese containment policy, if not our active cooperation.
The President made enthusiastic comments in the margin, such as, “This is our goal.” He suggested we “subtly encourage” all the countries being urged by the Soviets not to establish relations with Peking to proceed (a dramatic shift from his complaints about our Ambassador in Europe five days after his Inauguration).
We now redoubled our own efforts to establish contact with Peking. On June 26 the President sent me a message that we should encourage Senator Mike Mansfield, who had long been interested in China, to go through with his plan to seek a visa to visit China. I took the President’s instructions a step further by urging Bryce Harlow, then in charge of Congressional relations at the White House, to encourage Mansfield to make his initiative public. But a more explicit gesture was necessary. The time had come to modify our trade embargo against China. The actual change was unimportant but the symbolism was vast. The worried deliberations necessary to bring about this relatively minor step are a measure of the distance we have traveled since. The decision grew out of an overall study of trade restrictions ordered on March 28. We decided to deal with Chinese trade as a special case. On June 26 I signed a directive to the agencies that: “The President has decided, on broad foreign policy grounds, to modify certain of our trade controls against China.” The NSC Under Secretaries Committee, ably chaired by Elliot Richardson, was asked to prepare detailed recommendations to implement the Presidential decision.
It was at first assumed that any actual implementation had to await passage by the Congress of the revised Export Control Act expected in September. But Richardson and I soon realized that if we waited until then we might be overtaken by events in Asia, which seemed to be building to a climax. I pointed out to Nixon that the directive of June 26 was sure to leak and perhaps start a domestic debate that would dilute the favorable impact in Peking. Then there was the problem of US- Soviet relations. We expected at any time to announce the commencement of the SALT talks; if we coupled this with a relaxation of China trade restrictions, we would be open to charges by proponents of US-Soviet relations that it was a gratuitous slap at the Soviets and we would be held to blame for any deadlocks in SALT. Similarly, if the decision were announced after the President returned from his forthcoming trip to Romania (a friend of China), that trip would take on an “overly overt anti-Soviet significance.”
Richardson and I finally settled on three recommendations: (1) permitting American tourists to purchase up to $100 of Chinese-made noncommercial goods; (2) eliminating the ban on travel to the People’s Republic; and (3) allowing shipment of grain. The President agreed to the first two items, but on the advice of conservative Senators disapproved the third. Just as we were ready to make the announcement there occurred one of those trivial unforeseen events that can wreck the best- laid plans. On July 16, a yacht crewed by two Americans had capsized off Hong Kong; their lifeboat drifted into Chinese waters and they were captured by the Chinese. Richardson and I decided to postpone the announcement for a few days to see whether the Chinese would play the incident into an anti-American campaign. But Peking remained silent. On July 21, 1969, just before the President’s departure for his around- the-world trip, the State Department made a low-key, matter-of-fact announcement that eased (but did not eliminate) restrictions on trade and travel to the People’s Republic. The announcement asked for no reciprocity; the Chinese could consider it without reacting formally. On July 24 the Chinese released the American yachtsmen. Chou En-lai, too, knew how to make moves that required no reciprocity. Peking had understood.
By this time Nixon had set off on the trip round the world, during which he intended leaving visiting cards for the Chinese at every stop. Nixon began at once spreading the word of our readiness to open communication with Peking. In Indonesia and Thailand he told leaders that we would have nothing to do with the Soviet proposal for an Asian collective security scheme. This was an indirect reassurance to the Chinese, as well as a warning that we would resist the extension of Soviet influence to SouthEast Asia. As he pointed out to the Thai Prime Minister: “A condominium is out of the question. “
Nixon spoke more freely to Yahya Khan of Pakistan and Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania, because he knew that both of them were friendly with the Chinese. On August 1, Nixon told President Yahya in Lahore that it was his personal view—not completely shared by the rest of his government or by many Americans—that Asia could not “move forward” if a nation as large as China remained isolated. (Nixon seemed to think that it enhanced his stature with foreign leaders if he indicated that he acted contrary to the advice of his subordinates—indeed, that if they knew what he was doing they would oppose him. What these leaders, used to more hierarchical arrangements, thought about such confessions will have to await their own memoirs.) He stressed that the United States would not be a party to any arrangements to isolate China. He asked Yahya to convey his feeling to the Chinese at the highest level. Yahya later that day arranged a briefing for me at the State Guest House in Lahore by Air Marshal Sher Ali Khan, who had recently visited China. The Marshal believed that China’s domestic upheaval was winding down, and that China would soon seek to end its self-imposed diplomatic isolation. He also described the Chinese leaders in terms quite contrary to our then widespread stereotypes of almost irrationally fanatic ideologues. He considered them disciplined, pragmatic, and reliable once they gave their word.
The next two days, August 2 and 3 in Bucharest, Nixon returned to his theme with President Ceauşescu. Once again he emphatically rejected the Asian security system on the ground that it was wrong for the Soviet Union to arrange a cabal in Asia against China. In twenty-five years China would have a billion people, Nixon argued. If isolated by others, it might turn into an explosive force. Our policy was to have good relations with the Soviet Union as well as with China. He hoped that Romania would agree to act as a channel of communication to the Chinese. Ceauşescu indicated that he was prepared to act as messenger; he promised to convey our views and report any Chinese response.
Contrary to our expectations, the Romanian channel turned out to be one-way. We had thought that the Chinese might prefer to deal with us through Communist intermediaries. In fact, they proved too wary for that, perhaps fearful of Soviet penetration of even a country as fiercely independent as Romania.
Back in Washington, I called in Pakistan’s Ambassador, Agha Hilaly, to keep the Pakistanis in play and to establish a secure channel. Hilaly was an able professional, from an old Pakistani family, long active in public service. His brother at that time was Ambassador to China and later became permanent head of Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry; in the 1950s, Hilaly’s sister—an early advocate of women’s rights in an inhospitable society—had been a student of mine at Harvard. Hilaly was meticulous and discreet. I asked him to reiterate to President Yahya that we thought Nixon’s message should be delivered to the Chinese only at the highest level; in the meantime Pakistan could pass on our basic attitude in a low-key manner whenever a natural occasion presented itself. I told Hilaly of Nixon’s preference that the Hilaly channel with me be the single confidential point of contact for any further discussion of this subject. Hilaly suggested that Yahya would reserve Nixon’s detailed views for a conversation with Chou En-lai, who was expected to visit Pakistan in the near future.
On August 8, Secretary of State Rogers made a major speech in Canberra declaring our desire to improve relations with China:
We recognize, of course that the Republic of China on Taiwan and Communist China on the mainland are facts of life. We know, too, that mainland China will eventually play an important role in Asian and Pacific affairs—but certainly not as long as its leaders continue to have such an introspective view of the world…
This is one reason why we have been seeking to open up channels of communication. Just a few days ago we liberalized our policies toward purchase of their goods by American travelers and toward validating passports for travel to China. Our purpose was to remove irritants in our relations and to help remind people on mainland China of our historic friendship for them…
Thus by the end of August we had communicated with the Chinese by unilateral steps, intermediaries, and public declarations. All this had occurred through a series of ad hoc decisions. There had been no formal consideration of China policy at the Cabinet level. The National Security Council did not meet on this topic until August. Before it met I gave the President my analysis of the different views within the government of how we should play our relations with China in light of our relations with the Soviet Union. One view (which we might call the “Slavophile” position) argued that the Soviets were so suspicious of US-Chinese collusion that any effort to improve relations with China would make Soviet-American cooperation impossible. Those who held this view believed that we should give top priority to improving relations with the Soviet Union and, for this reason, should avoid efforts to increase contact with Peking. An opposing view (a kind of “Real- politik” approach) argued that the Soviets were more likely to be conciliatory if they feared that we would otherwise seek a rapprochement with Peking. This school of thought urged that we expand our contacts with China as a means of leverage against the Soviet Union. A third “Sinophile” group argued that our relations with the Soviet Union should not be a major factor in shaping our China policy. Marginal actions to increase Soviet nervousness might be useful but fundamental changes in the US-China relationship should be guided by other considerations .
Not surprisingly, I was on the side of the Realpolitikers.
When the NSC meeting discussed these issues on August 14, 1969, little was decided, but the President startled his Cabinet colleagues by his revolutionary thesis (which I strongly shared) that the Soviet Union was the more aggressive party and that it was against our interests to let China be “smashed” in a Sino-Soviet war. It was a major event in American foreign policy when a President declared that we had a strategic interest in the survival of a major Communist country, long an enemy, and with which we had no contact. The reason a Sino-Soviet war was on his mind was that a new increase of tensions along the border caused us grave concern. It also reinforced our conviction that the need for contact was becoming urgent.
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N August 8, the same day as Rogers’s Canberra speech, the USSR and the People’s Republic ended the talks that had proceeded since June in Khabarovsk and signed a protocol on the improvement of navigation on boundary rivers. Far from easing tensions, this seemed to spur them. A few days later, new and bloody fighting broke out along the frontier between Sinkiang and Kazakhstan. Pravda on August 14 reported on civil defense preparations in Kazakhstan; the New China News Agency on August 15 accused the USSR of preparing for war and exhorted the Chinese people to do the same.
Signals of tension multiplied. On August 18 a middle-level State Department specialist in Soviet affairs, William Stearman, was having lunch with a Soviet Embassy official when, out of the blue, the Russian asked what the US reaction would be to a Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear facilities. I took this sufficiently seriously to convene a meeting in San Clemente on August 25 of the Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG), the NSC subcommittee for contingency planning and crisis management. I asked them to prepare contingency plans for American policy in case of a Sino-Soviet war. When the WSAG papers proved inadequate, I had a group from my staff attempt a better analysis. As will be discussed in Chapter XVIII, an excellent paper was done in early 1970, cold-bloodedly analyzing our potential for either preventing a war or influencing its outcome. The President’s conviction expressed at the August 14 NSC meeting that we could not allow China to be “smashed” was no longer a hypothetical issue. If the cataclysm occurred, Nixon and I would have to confront it with little support in the rest of the government—and perhaps the country—for what we saw as the strategic necessity of supporting China.
The Sino-Soviet propaganda war intensified markedly at the end of August. On August 28, Pravda warned China against further armed provocations and appealed to the rest of the world to recognize the danger of China before it was too late. Pravda added ominously that “no continent would be left out if a war flares up under the present conditions, with the existing present-day technology, with the availability of lethal weapons and the up-to-date means of their delivery.” The same day, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee issued a public order exhorting the population again to war preparations, including accelerated construction of underground shelters in the cities. In late August we detected a standdown of the Soviet air force in the Far East. Such a move, which permits all aircraft to be brought to a high state of readiness simultaneously, is often a sign of a possible attack; at a minimum it is a brutal warning in an intensified war of nerves. The standdown continued through September.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II two prominent Soviet generals rattled sabers at Peking. Writing in Izvestia, the Soviet government newspaper, on September 1, Soviet Chief of Staff and First Deputy Defense Minister Marshal Matvey Zakharov pointedly recalled the Soviet onslaught that destroyed the seven-million- man Japanese army in twenty-five days. General S. P. Ivanov, commandant of the General Staff’s Higher Military Academy, sounded the same theme in an article in the newspaper Red Star on September 2.
We therefore raised our profile somewhat to make clear that we were not indifferent to these Soviet threats. On August 27, CIA Director Richard Helms had spoken at a background luncheon for a group of diplomatic correspondents and disclosed that the Soviet Union seemed to be sounding out its European Communist brethren on the possibility of a Soviet preemptive attack on Chinese nuclear installations.[42] On September 5, Under Secretary Elliot Richardson told a New York convention of the American Political Science Association:
In the case of Communist China, longrun improvement in our relations is in our own national interest. We do not seek to exploit for our own advantage the hostility between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic. Ideological differences between the two Communist giants are not our affair. We could not fail to be deeply concerned, however, with an escalation of this quarrel into a massive breach of international peace and security.
It was another revolutionary step for the United States to take such public note of a threat against a country with which it had been in a posture of hostility for twenty years and with which it had had no kind of exchange since the advent of the new Administration.
There was no immediate impact. On September 10 a member of the Soviet mission at the United Nations remarked nonchalantly to a US delegate that the Soviets were militarily overwhelmingly superior to the Chinese and that if current Chinese hostility continued, a military engagement might become unavoidable. On the same day, the Soviet news agency TASS charged the Chinese with 488 premeditated violations of the Soviet border and with provoking armed clashes involving 2,500 Chinese in the period from June to mid-August 1969.
There was a brief interlude while a dramatic meeting took place on September 11 between the two Prime Ministers, Kosygin and Chou En-lai. Both Kosygin and Chou had visited Hanoi separately to pay their respects on the death of Ho Chi Minh. The strain between their countries was reflected in the fact that Kosygin flew to Hanoi via India instead of the much shorter route through China, and that he left Hanoi before Chou’s arrival. TASS reported that he had departed for Moscow. He got as far as Dushanbe in Soviet Central Asia when his plane suddenly altered course and headed for Peking by what must surely be the longest route from Hanoi. His brief encounter with Chou at Peking airport was the first summit-level meeting between the two countries in four and a half years.
It is a common myth that high officials are informed immediately about significant events. Unfortunately, official information must almost invariably run the obstacle of bureaucratic review or the need for a cover memorandum to put the event into somebody’s perspective. It happens not infrequently—much too frequently for the security adviser’s emotional stability—that even the President learns of a significant occurrence from the newspapers. So it was with the Kosygin-Chou meeting. To my embarrassment the President read about it in the Washington Star before I could send him an analysis. He called me and asked for my reaction. I told him that at first blush the joint announcement of the meeting seemed rather cool. The absence of the standard adjective “fraternal” in describing the conversation implied a serious rift. The Chinese may have invited Kosygin to stop by, I speculated, because they thought it in the Chinese interest to “cool this off.” The President wondered if this meant a “détente” between them. I thought not; it seemed to me an effort by both sides to position themselves for the next round of their conflict.
The origin of the meeting was capable of varied interpretations. The diversion of Kosygin’s flight could suggest that the visit was a last- minute Chinese invitation. On the other hand, the minimal respect accorded to Kosygin, who was not permitted to leave the airport, and the fact that the Soviets announced the meeting first, could imply a Soviet move. Whether it was a Chinese approach toward accommodation or a last Soviet warning to Peking, it was clear that Sino-Soviet relations were approaching a crisis point.
On September 16, an ominous article appeared in the London Evening News, bearing out my analysis. Victor Louis, a Soviet “freelance journalist” whom we believed to be a spokesman for the Soviet government, often floated trial balloons. He now wrote that “Marxist theoreticians” were discussing the possibility of a Sino-Soviet war and suggesting that, if it took place, “the world would only learn about it afterwards.” Louis mentioned the possibility of a Soviet air strike against the Chinese nuclear testing site at Lop Nor in Sinkiang. He claimed that a clandestine anti-Mao radio station was operating in China, which revealed the existence of anti-Mao forces who, it was “quite possible,” might produce a leader who would ask other socialist countries for “fraternal help.” “Events in the past year,” Louis noted, “have confirmed that the Soviet Union is adhering to the doctrine that socialist countries have the right to interfere in each other’s affairs in their own interest or those of others who are threatened.”
A Soviet attack on China could not be ignored by us. It would upset the global balance of power; it would create around the world an impression of approaching Soviet dominance. But a direct American challenge would not be supported by our public opinion and might even accelerate what we sought to prevent.
On September 29, I brought the President up to date on the Soviet maneuvering over the previous month and urged that we do still more to respond:
I am concerned about our response to these probes. The Soviets may be quite uncertain over their China policy, and our reactions could figure in their calculations. Second, the Soviets may be using us to generate an impression in China and the world that we are being consulted in secret and would look with equanimity on their military actions… I believe we should make clear that we are not playing along with these tactics…
Before the President could act on this recommendation, on October 7 the New China News Agency suddenly announced that China had agreed to reopen the border negotiations with the USSR at the Deputy Foreign Minister level. In a conciliatory statement China affirmed its desire for a peaceful settlement; it denied that it was demanding the return of territories seized by tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century. The next day, China published a five-point proposal calling for a mutual troop pullback from disputed areas. On October 20, border negotiations resumed in Peking, conducted by Deputy Foreign Ministers Vasily V. Kuznetsov and Ch’iao Kuan-hua.
It seemed to me that in the war of nerves China had backed down. I wrote the President that in my view the shift in the Chinese position was due to two factors: a growing concern over a Soviet attack and the possible reassertion of control over foreign policy by the more pragmatic faction represented by Chou En-lai. But I did not believe that any fundamental change had occurred; the underlying tensions could not be reversed by procedural agreements. With his approval I proposed exploring some new administrative moves toward China with Elliot Richardson. Nixon agreed.
At this point—not surprisingly—the Pakistani channel suddenly began to show signs of life. On October 10, Air Marshal Sher Ali Khan, who had briefed me in Lahore, visited me in my office in the White House. He reported that Yahya had passed a general message to the Chinese about our willingness to improve relations but now felt he needed something more specific to convey when Chou En-lai came to Pakistan. I told Sher Ali of a step that Elliot Richardson and I had worked out a few days earlier. Since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, two American destroyers had been assigned to patrol the Strait of Taiwan to symbolize our commitment to the defense of the Republic of China. The destroyers were not, in fact, part of the defense of the island; their role was primarily symbolic. Richardson and I obtained the President’s assent to withdraw a permanent patrol; we would show our continuing commitment to the defense of Taiwan by fifteen transits per month of other American warships. President Yahya was free to communicate this decision confidentially to the Communist Chinese Ambassador. He should ensure, however, that Peking did not misunderstand; our basic commitment to Taiwan’s defense remained unchanged; this was simply a gesture to remove an irritant. I told Sher Ali that I would be in touch with Ambassador Hilaly when the President had decided upon something more precise to say to the Chinese. I reported all this to Nixon, who wrote at the end of my report: “K—also open trade possibilities.” Since Sher Ali had already left Washington, and since I wanted to avoid the impression of overeagerness, I decided to hold this prospect for the next round.
On October 20, Ambassador Dobrynin, in the conversation with Nixon in which he conveyed the Soviet readiness to open SALT talks, also formally warned against any attempt to profit from Sino-Soviet tensions. Nixon told him that our China policy was not directed against the Soviet Union. At the same time, the United States did not intend to be a permanent enemy of the People’s Republic of China any more than of the Soviet Union. We expected to accelerate trade, the exchange of persons, and eventually diplomacy. After this conversation I wrote Nixon my assessment:
The Soviets again give vent to their underlying suspicion that we are trying to flirt with China in order to bring pressure on them. They warn us “in advance“ that any such idea can lead to grave miscalculations and would interfere with the improvement of US-Soviet relations. You have already answered this point and I believe there is no advantage in giving the Soviets excessive reassurance. In any case we should not be diverted from our China policy.
Nor were we. To be certain that our meaning had been understood, on November 26 I authorized an additional signal, proposed by the State Department, by which the decision to end the destroyer patrol would be leaked to Chinese officials in Hong Kong.
Thus began an intricate minuet between us and the Chinese so delicately arranged that both sides could always maintain that they were not in contact, so stylized that neither side needed to bear the onus of an initiative, so elliptical that existing relationships on both sides were not jeopardized. Between November 1969 and June 1970 there were at least ten instances in which United States officials abroad exchanged words with Chinese officials at diplomatic functions. This was in sharp contrast to earlier practice in which the Chinese would invariably break off contact as soon as they realized they were encountering Americans. On at least four occasions Chinese officials initiated the contact. Then contacts started to go beyond social banter. In December 1969 our Deputy Consul General in Hong Kong heard through a reliable intermediary the “private” view of a Chinese Communist official that while all the differences between the United States and the People’s Republic would take years to resolve, some form of relationship could be established before 1973.
We tried an initiative of our own. On September 9, at the height of the war scare, our Ambassador to Poland, Walter Stoessel, called on the President for a routine courtesy call. I had known Stoessel since 1959 when he was assigned as a postgraduate fellow to the Center for International Affairs at Harvard. I considered him one of the very best Foreign Service Officers—expert, thoughtful, disciplined. While we were waiting to see Nixon I urged Stoessel to walk up to the Ambassador of the People’s Republic at the next social function they both attended and tell him that we were prepared for serious talks. [As it turned out, the Cultural Revolution had claimed this Ambassador; the highest-ranking official in Warsaw was the chargé d’affaires.]
Nothing happened for three months. Then on December 3, Stoessel spotted Lei Yang, the Chinese chargé d’affaires, at a Yugoslav fashion show held at the Warsaw Palace of Culture. When Stoessel approached, Lei Yang retreated down a flight of stairs. Stoessel pursued him and delivered his message through Lei’s Polish-speaking interpreter. To convey to the Chinese that Stoessel’s approach had not been a personal idiosyncrasy, we had the State Department spokesman announce at the next regular noon briefing that Stoessel and Lei had exchanged a few words. Chou En-lai told me many years later that we had nearly caused his worthy charge a heart attack, and that Lei Yang, totally without instructions for such a contingency, had fled from Stoessel because he did not know how to respond.
But Chou En-lai knew. On December 6 the People’s Republic released two other Americans who had been held since February 16 when their yacht had strayed into Chinese waters off Kwangtung province. [This was a separate incident from the July episode described earlier.]
On December 11, 1969, to our amazement, Ambassador Stoessel was invited to the Chinese Embassy—the first such invitation in any Sino- American contact since the Communists had taken power in China. Stoessel responded that he would be happy to arrive discreetly at the rear door; he was told that such delicacy was unnecessary; the main entrance was eminently suitable (presumably to avoid any chance that Soviet intelligence might miss the occasion). Stoessel indeed went through the front door and met his Chinese counterpart in a “cordial” atmosphere, as State Department spokesman Robert McCloskey announced the next day. Stoessel proposed the resumption of the Warsaw talks; no other subjects were covered. It was agreed that another meeting would take place within the month.
This contact by Stoessel was the first operational involvement of the regular State Department machinery in China diplomacy. Under Secretary Elliot Richardson, Assistant Secretary Marshall Green, their staffs, and high-level analysts had made a vital contribution to the various studies done in the NSC system; they had ably worked out the various schemes to ease trade restrictions. But the State Department as an institution had not been involved in the overall strategy and had had little diplomacy to conduct. Now its bureaucracy began to become active, for it thrives not on analysis but on negotiations. Having seen studies come and go, it is inclined not to argue over planning papers; it will fight to the death, however, over instructions to ambassadors. It is convinced that policy is made most efficiently by cable. Given the relatively short response time allowed by most negotiations, this has the added advantage of keeping to a minimum the intervention by outsiders (such as the President, or even the Secretary of State).
The Warsaw talks triggered all the latent reflexes of the State Department establishment. First to be heard from was the group that specialized in US-Soviet relations. Convinced that the nuclear superpowers held the key to peace and war, they wanted to run the minimum risks to this relationship; they saw little compensating advantage in a rapprochement with China. On the contrary, a triangular relationship would, they thought, upset all predictability in their sphere of policy. The argument that better relations with China might actually improve relations with the Soviet Union was considered by this group either absurd or reckless. [This was expressed as follows in a State Department paper submitted to the NSC Review Group in September: Soviet tolerance of U.S. overtures to Peking may be substantial—but these overtures will nevertheless introduce irritants into the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Moreover, if a significant improvement in the Sino-American relationship should come about, the Soviets might well adopt a harder line both at home and in international affairs. It is impossible to foresee the point at which the advantages in an improvement in Sino-U.S. relations might be counterbalanced by a hardening in U.S.-Soviet relationships. The fact that such a point almost certainly exists argues for caution in making moves toward better relations with China…] Their intellectual leader was the brilliant and dedicated former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, the State Department’s foremost expert on Soviet affairs. As early as June he and his equally distinguished colleague Charles (Chip) Bohlen had, on their own initiative, called on Nixon when they had heard that we were planning to ease trade restrictions against China. Courageously, they warned the President against any attempt to “use” China against the Soviet Union. This could have nothing but dire consequences for US-Soviet relations and for world peace. Of course, we envisaged nothing so crude as “using” the People’s Republic against the Soviet Union; we wanted to create an incentive for both to improve their relations with us. Nixon performed in classic fashion—implying sympathy in their presence and then mocking what he considered the incorrigible softheadedness of the Foreign Service as soon as they left the room.
Learning of the imminent resumption of the Warsaw talks, Llewellyn Thompson now suggested that we keep Dobrynin informed of all our contacts. Rogers passed this proposal on to me, with the argument that he did not endorse it but wanted to “give the President the chance to think about it.” I strongly disagreed. Since the Soviet Union did not brief us about its contacts with the Chinese or any other nation, I saw no reason to extend to it an unreciprocated courtesy or gratuitous reassurance. And I saw no point in giving the Russians the opportunity to gloat to Peking that they were being kept informed, thus heightening Chinese suspicions from the start. Nixon agreed with me. On December 12 I informed Rogers: “The President… has asked that under no circumstances should we inform Dobrynin of the talks or their content. If Dobrynin questions, we should respond with nonchalance that they concern matters of mutual interest but not go beyond that. The President is concerned that lower-level offices not go beyond this in informal conversations.”
Unfortunately, another cog of the bureaucratic machinery was also working overtime. The State Department functions through a wondrous system of clearances by which the various offices of the Department as well as foreign governments are informed, more or less automatically, of important events. The motives are various: to make certain that key officials are aware of matters that may affect them in the discharge of their responsibilities; to generate a sense of participation; to reassure nervous allies; and sometimes—in a profession where information is power—to create an obligation for the reciprocal sharing of information. The difficulty is that these worthy criteria are too often subordinated to very short-run considerations of vanity or bureaucratic prestige, and are implemented so routinely that senior officials find it hard to control them. Within days it became apparent that the State Department had sent accounts of the Warsaw meeting to our embassies in Tokyo, Taipei, and Moscow and to our Consulate General in Hong Kong. The governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, and New Zealand had been briefed either before or after Stoessel’s meeting. While everybody was warned against public comment, such dissemination of a fairly juicy piece of news was bound to radiate through the diplomatic world. When I mentioned what had been done, the President sighed, “We’ll kill this child before it is born.” The difficulty of controlling the enormous bureaucratic communications machinery was a principal reason why control of China diplomacy was gradually moved into the White House.
On December 19 we took yet another initiative. A low-key announcement in the Federal Register announced a new easing of trade restrictions: lifting of the $100 ceiling on tourist purchases; permitting US- owned foreign subsidiaries to do business with the People’s Republic of China; and shifting to the government the burden of proof with respect to what was Chinese-manufactured, thus easing imports of art objects.
Suddenly all channels seemed to spring to life. On December 17, Romania’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Gheorghe Macovescu had called on me to report the Chinese reaction to Nixon’s conversation with Ceauşescu. The Chinese had listened politely, they said they were interested in normal relations with the West; they had nothing specific to communicate. The People’s Republic seemed to be saying two things: It was ready for contact, but not necessarily through the Romanian channel. Two days later, Ambassador Agha Hilaly conveyed the latest news of the Pakistani channel. He had much more to say. Reading from a handwritten letter—the way all Pakistani messages in the channel were transmitted, for security reasons—Hilaly reported that Yahya had told the Chinese Ambassador of both our general interest in improving relations and our decision to withdraw two destroyers from the Taiwan patrol. The Chinese Ambassador had first reacted very coolly, casting aspersions on American motives, but after a few days—obviously on receiving his instructions from Peking—had returned with a more conciliatory reply. He now expressed Peking’s gratitude for Pakistan’s role and efforts. The Chinese release of the two American yachtsmen on December 6 had been a tangible response to our overture, said Hilaly.
The President kept the ball in play with a long letter to Yahya on US- Pakistani relations. On China, Nixon wrote: “You know of my interest in trying to bring about a more meaningful dialogue with Chinese leaders. This is a slow process at best, but I have not abandoned it.” When I handed this letter to Hilaly on December 23 he had already received another message. Yahya now informed us of his “impression” (in diplomatic vernacular, a nonattributable communication from a high Chinese official) that the Chinese were willing to resume the Warsaw talks without preconditions. It was clear that the Chinese attached special value to the Pakistani channel, Pakistan being in a less complicated position vis-à-vis Sino-Soviet relations than Romania.
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hus by the end of 1969, America’s relationship with the Communist world was slowly becoming triangular. We did not consider our opening to China as inherently anti-Soviet. Our objective was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality. There was no reason for us to confine our contacts with major Communist countries to the Soviet Union. We moved toward China not to expiate liberal guilt over our China policy of the late 1940s but to shape a global equilibrium. It was not to collude against the Soviet Union but to give us a balancing position to use for constructive ends—to give each Communist power a stake in better relations with us. Such an equilibrium could assure stability among the major powers, and even eventual cooperation, in the Seventies and Eighties.
On December 18 in a year-end press briefing in the East Room, I tried to sketch our general approach to both of the major Communist countries: “We have always made it clear that we have no permanent enemies and that we will judge other countries, including Communist countries, and specifically countries like Communist China, on the basis of their actions and not on the basis of their domestic ideology.” I spoke favorably of the matter-of-fact style that had developed in our relations with the Soviet Union, of the absence of the tendentious propaganda that had characterized previous exchanges. We were ready for serious negotiations. We would prepare ourselves meticulously. But we would insist on reciprocity. We were prepared to have a summit meeting with the Soviet leaders, but we would prefer to have the summit register considerable progress, not be an end in itself. I spoke of China in a more philosophical vein, since we had so much farther to go to awaken that relationship:
The Chinese people are obviously a great people. They have the longest unbroken record of government in one area of any of the existing civilizations; and secondly, 800 million people representing 25 percent of the human race are a factor that cannot be ignored. They will influence international affairs whatever we intend to do and declaratory policy we adopt. They are a reality. And their policy, for good or ill, will determine the possibilities for peace and progress. And that is irrespective of what we do.
… if it is true that the big problem of the immediate post-World War II period was to avoid chaos, and if it is true that the big problem of the next 20 years is to build a more permanent peace, then it seems to us impossible to build a peace, which we would define as something other than just the avoidance of crisis, by simply ignoring these 800 million people. …
Nor do we over-estimate what we can do by unilateral actions towards them.
They will make their decisions on the basis of their conceptions of their needs, and of their ideology. But to the degree that their actions can be influenced by ours, we are prepared to engage in a dialogue with them.
On December 22 I had a private year-end review with Dobrynin. I was so certain that he would bring up China that I wrote out my response for the President’s approval, which he gave. I wrote:
I will reiterate that
1. we do not accept the proposition that permanent hostility is the iron law of US-Chinese relations;
2. our policy is not aimed against the USSR;
3. we take no sides in the Sino-Soviet dispute.
I was not to be disappointed. Dobrynin raised the subject of China yet again, asking what we were up to and what the Chinese had responded. I sidestepped the question, giving only the general assurances I had prepared.
By the end of 1969 it was apparent that China, too, had made a strategic decision to seek rapprochement with us, even while it fended off the Soviet Union by resuming an intermittent dialogue on the border dispute. As 1970 began, the Chinese agreed to another informal meeting at which Stoessel was to propose the formal resumption of the Warsaw ambassadorial talks. The meeting was to take place at the American Embassy on January 8. Preparing for it led to another minor dispute with the State Department. The President and I were anxious to use the occasion to tell the Chinese that we would not participate in a US- Soviet condominium in Asia or anywhere else. We wanted to have the Chinese hear directly what had until now been said to them only through third parties. There was also the danger that we would undermine the credibility of our private channels if American diplomats did not reiterate what the President and I had repeatedly said through intermediaries.
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Marshall Green resisted, arguing that we should avoid substance at a meeting devoted to procedure. There were undoubtedly deeper reasons for this resistance: irritation at White House interference; a feeling among East Asian specialists that introducing a geopolitical consideration having to do with the Soviet Union was gratuitous; and perhaps still caution toward the China opening among experts accustomed to view China as a major threat, or else inhibited by painful memories of the penalties exacted for bold steps toward Communist China during the McCarthy era.
In the event, the Warsaw meeting of January 8 went extraordinarily well. The Chinese charge arrived flamboyantly at the US Embassy in a limousine flying the Chinese flag. Procedural issues were amicably settled. It was agreed to resume the formal and regular Warsaw meetings between ambassadors. And the President’s message about condominium was conveyed. Both sides avoided polemics (even though the Chinese press was still informing its public of the “iniquities” of the Nixon Administration). The Chinese accepted the principle of meeting alternately in the two embassies. The next meeting was set for January 20, in the Chinese Embassy. Lei Yang proposed that the meeting be announced.
Thus, one year to the day after the Inauguration of the President, the People’s Republic of China and the United States were to engage in substantive talks again for the first time in over two years. But these were to be different from any of the 134 meetings that had preceded them. They had been painstakingly prepared over months by messages, first indirect but growing increasingly explicit, of a willingness to bring about a fundamental change in our relationship. We still had a long way to go. But we were at last in the foothills of a mountain range that it would take us another eighteen months to traverse.
It was a moment of extraordinary hope. Beyond the advantages of triangular diplomacy, there were other reasons. One was Vietnam. An opening to China might help us end the agony of that war. Xuan Thuy’s outburst of March 22 had vividly shown Hanoi’s sensitivity to the escalating feud between its two major allies. This Sino-Soviet conflict complicated North Vietnam’s position, for (among others) the simple practical reason that much military aid from the Soviet Union came overland by rail through China and therefore required some minimal Sino- Soviet cooperation. Hanoi might have sensed the maneuvering room the feud would give us as it did in 1972. And any initiative that helped heal our domestic divisions also deprived Hanoi of one of its major assets.
The domestic impact in America of our China initiative had a far deeper significance. The agony of Vietnam seemed to bring on a despair about the possibility of creative policy, an abhorrence of foreign involvement, and in some quarters an insidious self-hatred. The drama of ending estrangement with this great people, in human terms and for what it meant to the global prospects of peace, would be a breath of fresh air, a reminder of what America could accomplish as a world leader. To do so in the midst of a divisive war would prove to ourselves and others that we remained a major factor in world affairs, able to act with boldness and skill to advance our goals and the well-being of all who relied upon us.
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