rival Red Guard groups, and the party and government structure had col-
lapsed. The military was called into the cities to restore order. With Mao’s
support, they proceeded to transport the millions of Red Guards from the
cities and to disperse them into various areas in the Chinese countryside,
where they were compelled to stay and work for the indefinite future. 66
The disaster and disruption seen in domestic affairs was duplicated in the
shift toward radicalism in Chinese foreign relations. The Chinese public split
with the Soviet Union deepened and broadened in the 1960s. Beijing not only
opposed the Soviet Union on ideological grounds but also strongly attacked
Moscow’s willingness to cooperate with the United States in international
affairs. Chinese leaders saw the newly independent Asian and African states
providing an important arena for struggle with Moscow as well as the United
States. Though weak economically and having little to spare following the
Relations during World War II, Civil War, Cold War
59
deprivations of the Great Leap Forward, China provided economic and mili-
tary aid to left-leaning governments and provided training, military assis-
tance, and financial support to armed insurgents struggling against colonial
powers or right-leaning governments of developing countries. 67
Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai visited Africa in 1964 and said it was “ripe
for revolution.” China endeavored to compete with the Soviet Union in sup-
port of various anticolonial insurgencies and to supply significant aid to
African governments prepared to align closer to China than the Soviet Union
or the West. In Asia, China strongly supported the Vietnamese Communist
forces directed by the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi in the face of
increased American military involvement in South Vietnam and other parts
of Indochina. The Chinese government also organized and/or strengthened
support for Communist-led insurgencies against governments in Southeast
Asia that were seen by China as pro-American or insufficiently accommodat-
ing to Chinese influence and interests. The left-leaning Sukarno government
of Indonesia, the largest country in Southeast Asia, was a focus of Chinese
support until the military coup in 1965 smashed Communist and Chinese
influence in the country through mass killings and arrests. 68
Maoist China sacrificed conventional diplomacy in pursuing revolution-
ary fervor during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. The foreign
minister and much of the senior foreign policy elite were purged. Ambassa-
dors were recalled and forced to undergo extensive ideological retraining.
Lower-level embassy officials often endeavored to show their loyalty to Mao
and his revolutionary teaching by unauthorized demonstrations and prosely-
tizing to often unreceptive and hostile foreign audiences. They and the staff
of foreign policy organs in Beijing followed a radical line that alienated
China from most foreign governments.
The nadir of Chinese diplomacy seemed evident in several developments
in 1967. Huge Red Guard demonstrations were mobilized against the Soviet
embassy in Beijing, which was kept under siege in January and February.
Later in 1967 Red Guards invaded the Soviet Embassy’s consular section
and burned its files. When Moscow withdrew its diplomats’ dependents in
February 1967, some were beaten or forced to crawl under pictures of Mao
Zedong on their way to planes to take them home. When Red Guard demon-
strators in Hong Kong were arrested by British authorities for public disrup-
tion and disorder, a major crisis in Chinese-British relations ensued. A mob
of thousands of Chinese surrounded British diplomatic offices in Beijing and
set fires in the building. Escaping British diplomats came into the hands of
the Chinese mob. 69
The life-or-death struggles for power and attendant violent mass cam-
paigns inside China, combined with militant Chinese policies in support of
the Vietnamese and other Communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia and a
rigid Chinese stance on Taiwan, Korea, and other issues, continued to divide
60
China and the United States. US leaders saw little prospect for any signifi-
cant movement in relations with the PRC as they grappled with consuming
preoccupations associated with the failing US effort against Communist in-
surgents in Vietnam. 70
Chiang Kai-shek endeavored to deepen the alliance relationship with the
United States but found the Johnson administration reluctant to take actions
that might embroil China more deeply in the Vietnam War. Despite China’s
radical and xenophobic posture, the newly independent developing nations
tended to be supportive of China being diplomatically recognized by them
and by international bodies, notably the United Nations. Sentiment in the
West also shifted somewhat in support of recognition of China, even if it
came at the expense of past ties with Taiwan. France set the precedent by
establishing ties with Beijing in 1964. The successful Chinese nuclear weap-
ons test that year was followed by many more, underlining the rationale for
formal relations with the Asian power.
As Chiang aged, he incrementally passed administrative authority to his
son Chiang Ching-kuo, who focused less on plans for attacking the mainland
and more on strengthening the economy and the KMT’s support on Taiwan.
The elder Chiang precluded compromise in the zero-sum competition with
China for diplomatic recognition and representation in the United Nations.
At one level, Taiwan seemed sure to lose this competition, but in 1968, with
China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and all its radical excesses,
such losses seemed far off. 71
Chapter Four
Rapprochement and Normalization
STRATEGIC IMPERATIVES OPENING US-CHINA RELATIONS
The roots of the contemporary, closely intertwined Sino-American relation-
ship began in what appeared to be very adverse circumstances. Maoist China
had descended through phases of ideologically driven excess in foreign and
domestic affairs, reaching a point of unprecedented international isolation,
ideological rigidity, and wariness in foreign relations bordering on xenopho-
bia. The United States had more than five hundred thousand troops in Viet-
nam fighting a Communist-led adversary supported by China with supplies,
financing, and provision of many thousands of Chinese troops. US leaders
were particularly fearful of an escalation of the prolonged and increasingly
unpopular conflict that would somehow bring China more directly into a war
that they were unsure how to win under existing conditions. The US contain-
ment effort along China’s periphery continued, as did US political isolation
and economic embargo against the Beijing regime. Nascent US efforts to
consider greater flexibility in relations with China ran up against Maoist
hostility, disinterest, and contempt, and were overshadowed by the broad
implications of the Vietnam quagmire. 1
The dramatic turnabout leading to the opening in US-China relations at
the end of the 1960s and early 1970s has been subject to some different
scholarly interpretations. One view sees a flagging of Mao’s revolutionary
drive and vigor, opening the way for the Chinese leader to consider and
ultimately pursue pragmatic understanding with the United States. 2 Another sees a reconfiguring in the US calculus of China’s position in world politics
and its implications for the United States. This view highlights the impor-
tance of an apparent trend whereby US leaders privately came to see China in
the late 1960s as less threatening than in the past; eventually they came to
61
62
Chapter 4
view the Maoist regime as a potential asset in American strategy focused
increasingly on dealing with a rising and threatening Soviet Union. 3
Despite these and other divergent views, assessments of this period and
the opening in Sino-American relations find it hard not to give primacy to
interpretations, broadly in line with the realist school of thought in interna-
tional relations (IR) theory, that focused on the acute strategic necessities of both the United States and China amid circumstances of regional and international order featuring a rising and powerful Soviet Union challenging their
core national interests. Only the threat of nuclear war with a domineering
Soviet Union at a time of acute Chinese internal disruption and weakness
appears sufficient to explain the remarkable turnabout in China’s foreign
policy calculus and approach to the United States. Given China’s size and the
preoccupation Chinese rulers have long given to the tasks of managing the
complicated internal affairs of this vast country, China historians and specialists of contemporary affairs often have given pride of place to Chinese do-
mestic determinants in Chinese foreign policy. There was no better example
during Maoist rule of the way domestic Chinese policies and practices deter-
mined Chinese foreign policy than during the violent and disruptive early
years of China’s Cultural Revolution. Moving Chinese leaders out of their
self-initiated isolation probably would have taken many years under more
normal circumstances. But circumstances in the late 1960s were far from
normal, giving rise to the real danger of the Soviet Union militarily invading
China, destroying its nuclear and other strategic installations, and forcing
China to conform to Soviet interests. 4
For their part, US leaders faced an unprecedented situation of Soviet
military power seeming to reach parity with and in some critical areas sur-
passing that of the United States. The concurrent Vietnam quagmire drained
American resources, and Moscow pumped up support for the Vietnamese
Communist resistance, seeking to further weaken the United States and
strengthen the changing balance of power in Asian and world affairs. Finding
a way to break this trend and deal more effectively with the Vietnam situa-
tion became critically important issues in American politics. 5
It was fortuitous that strong strategic imperatives, which drove Chinese
and US leaders toward one another, developed at the same time. Otherwise,
Maoist China in particular seemed positioned to continue resistance to the
United States, while US interest in greater flexibility toward China appeared
likely to be overwhelmed by opposing US interests and political inclinations.
There had been earlier occasions when one side or the other saw their
interests served by a possible improvement in Sino-American relations. But
it turned out that when one side showed some interest in improved contacts,
the other rebuffed or ignored it. Thus, despite deeply rooted differences
between the US government and Chinese Communist leaders on ideological,
economic, and international issues, United States–Chinese Communist inter-
Rapprochement and Normalization
63
change since the start of World War II witnessed a few instances where one
side or the other saw their interests served by reaching out and seeking
reconciliation and better ties with the other party. The Chinese Communists
in particular tried a moderate and accommodating approach to the United
States in greeting the American Military Observer Group to Yenan in 1944,
and in the initial ambassadorial talks following Zhou Enlai’s moderate over-
ture at Bandung in 1955. The Americans tried more tentative overtures to
Beijing in 1949 and showed interest in more flexibility toward China by the
1960s. Unfortunately, these initiatives and overtures failed, as there were
never occasions when both sides sought improved relations at the same time,
until internal and international weaknesses in 1968 and 1969 drove the Unit-
ed States and China closer together in a pragmatic search for means to deal
with difficult circumstances, which appears best understood through the real-
ist lens of IR theory. 6
ENCOUNTERS AND INTERACTION, 1968–89
Opening Contacts
Difficulties in the United States in 1968 were profound. It is hard to recall a one-year period since the start of the Cold War with so many shocking and
adverse developments for American leaders and their constituents. The string
of calamities and reversals began in January with the communist Tet Offen-
sive throughout South Vietnamese cities. The assault often was carried out
by Vietnamese who were thought to be supporting the American war effort.
The US and Allied forces counterattacked against the guerrillas in their own
ranks and elsewhere in the supposedly pacified cities of South Vietnam,
killing many thousands, but the uprising and mass killings shattered the
Lyndon Johnson administration’s predictions of progress in the increasingly
unpopular Vietnam War. 7
US commanders called for two hundred thousand more US troops in
addition to the more than half million US forces in the country. The vast
majority of these American forces were draftees. They and their families and
friends tended in growing numbers to question the purpose of the US com-
mitment to Vietnam and the massive costs in terms of American casualties
and economic and military support. Antiwar demonstrations in the United
States grew in size and frequency. Protest marches of two hundred thousand
or more along the Mall in Washington, DC, became more regular occur-
rences. Providing security for the White House compound adjoining the Mall
became an increasing concern given the size of the demonstrations and the
uncertainty over whether they would stay on the Mall or turn against the
nearby White House.
64
Chapter 4
The rising antiwar sentiment in the United States changed the course of
the 1968 presidential election campaign. President Johnson’s mandate ap-
peared to collapse when he did poorly in the New Hampshire primary in
February. He ran against Senator Eugene McCarthy, an otherwise unexcep-
tional opponent who emphasized an antiwar platform. Johnson pulled out of
the race and redoubled peace efforts in talks with the Vietnamese Commu-
nists in Paris.
Civil rights leader and antiwar proponent Martin Luther King Jr. traveled
to Memphis in March in support of a strike by cit
y trash handlers. While
standing outside his motel, King was killed by a rifleman. The assassination
set off a rampage of urban looting and burning that afflicted several
American cities. Washington, DC, was closed for days as major parts of the
city burned out of control. The fire service was prevented by snipers and mob
violence. Order was restored only after the imposition of martial law by US
Army combat troops.
Amid this turmoil over the Vietnam War and race relations in the United
States, the contentious Democratic primaries reached a conclusion in Califor-
nia in June, where Senator Robert Kennedy won. Kennedy was critical of the
conduct of the war and drew vast crowds of African Americans and others
hopeful for government policies to heal fractured race relations in the United
States. Like King three months earlier, Kennedy was assassinated, just after
the California victory was secured.
With Kennedy dead, antiwar advocates gathered in Chicago in August to
protest the likely selection of Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as
the Democratic standard-bearer. Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley and his
police officers promised tough measures to deal with unauthorized demon-
strations. They delivered on their promise: As American television audiences
watched in shock, police officers clubbed and beat demonstrators, reporters,
and others they deemed to be obstructing the smooth flow of the convention
and nearby hotel receptions.
The Republicans at their convention that summer nominated Richard Nix-
on. In a political comeback after retreating from public life in the early
1960s, Nixon said he had a plan to deal with the Vietnam morass. He did not
speak very much about an opening to China. Nixon won the election and
took office amid unprecedented tight security for fear of violence from anti-
war protesters and others. Upon entering office, Nixon moved quickly to
begin what would turn out to be the withdrawal of more than six hundred
thousand US troops from around China’s periphery in Asia. In his first year
in office, he announced what later was called the Nixon Doctrine, a broad