Margaret MacMillan - Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World

INTRODUCTION

O N A COLD FEBRUARY MORNING OVER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY ago, Richard Nixon entered Mao Tse-tungs study in Beijing. The conversation that followed was slow and fitful because it went through interpreters. It was as one might expect of two people who were strangers but who had heard a lot about each other. They said how pleased they were to meet and exchanged polite compliments. They talked about mutual acquaintances: Chiang Kai-shek, the president of that other China in Taiwan, for example, and the former president of Pakistan, Mohammad Yahya Khan, who had helped arrange for their meeting to take place. And they talked briefly about their mutual foe, the Soviet Union. They made some jokes, mainly at the expense of Nixons companion Henry Kissinger, but they were generally serious.

Nixon tried to raise some matters that he felt were important. Mao waved him off and spoke vaguely in what he called philosophical terms. After about an hour, he looked at his watch and suggested that they had talked long enough. After a last exchange of pleasantries, Nixon took his leave. Neither man had said anything that surprised the other, and they had not come to any momentous conclusions. Yet their conversation was one of the most important occurrences in the recent past.

President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Tse-tung were well aware that they were making history that day in 1972. Both understood that their meeting and, indeed, Nixons whole visit to China were important above all else for their symbolism. It was, after all, the first ever visit of an American president to China, an end to the long standoff where neither country had recognized the other. It was an earthquake in the Cold War landscape and meant that the Eastern bloc no longer stood firm against the West.

One of the things the two men talked about was the past, particularly the events and the issues that had kept their two countries apart ever since the Communists took power in 1949. They also talked about politics, about Nixons problems with his own right wing and the threat to his administration from the Democrats, and about the recent upheaval in China when Maos chosen successor, Lin Biao, it was claimed, had tried to stage a coup. They did not discuss the much greater turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, which had started in 1966 when Mao called on the young to attack the oldwhether values, traditions, or peoplein order to make Chinese society properly socialist. Nixon, like an importunate guest, tried to bring the conversation around to his favorite topics, such as the future balance of power in Asia and, indeed, the world as a whole. Mao, the affable host, refused to be drawn in and insisted on speaking in vague generalities. They parted, with more polite words, both apparently expecting that they would meet again in a few days. They did not, in fact, meet again that time, although they would on Nixons subsequent visits to China.

International relations are about treaties, arms control, economic structures, courts, and bilateral and multilateral deals, but they also involve gestures. Exchanges of ambassadors, public statements, state visitsall of these indicate the ways in which nations see themselves and how they see others. The meeting itself and Nixons week in China that followed were partly about confirming what had already been negotiated, but they were also intended to underscore that there was a new era in the long and often stormy relationship between China and the United States and, indeed, between Asia and the West. The visit shook American allies such as Japan and Taiwan; it infuriated Chinas few friends in the world; and it worried the Soviet Union. We have been debating exactly what it really meant ever since.

The relationship between China and the West and, more specifically, between China and the United States has seen many stages. Long before the thirteen colonies revolted against the British Empire, China had had indirect contact with the West in the shape of trade through central Asia with the Roman Empire. In Europes Middle Ages, a few brave or foolhardy travelers, Marco Polo among them, had managed to survive the overland route and see China for themselves. Later still, Jesuit missionaries had gone to China to convert the Chinese court to Catholicism, only to end up becoming quite Confucian in their outlook. They were followed by tradersimpertinent bandits, in the Chinese point of viewwho clustered around the south coast of China to buy its silks, teas, and porcelains and, eventually, to sell the Chinese opium in return. American traders joined in enthusiastically. And missionaries, among them many Americans, arrived to save Chinese souls.

Until the start of the nineteenth century, the Chinese dealt with Westerners, to their own satisfaction at least, as inferiors who were fortunate if they even had contact with the Middle Kingdom (the name the Chinese used for themselves), if they even enjoyed the Middle Kingdoms superior products. That calm assumption of superiority was shaken and then shattered (although perhaps not irrevocably) when Western powers, strengthened by the products of the Industrial Revolution, forced their way into China and, in the end, helped destroy the old order. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ruling dynasty was on the point of collapse and China itself appeared to be on the edge of disappearing into one empire or another.

The United States had been part of that sorry story, but it had sometimes shown itself to be friendly. It had supported the continuation of a Chinese state. American missionaries who were actively founding schools and hospitals provided a growing constituency of support back home for a beleaguered China. There were other views of China in the United States, though: from the repository of the wisdom of the ages to the Yellow Peril, or the source of powerful Oriental plots to overthrow American power and the American way of life. American attitudes toward China continue to this day to oscillate between those two poles of fascination and sympathy, on the one hand, and fear and repugnance, on the other.