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This chapter traces and offers some explanations for the transition, in practice, from a rapprochement relationship in which China was characterized as a “former enemy” – a fellow realist power with whom the United States cultivated a mutual distrust of the Soviet Union, and toward whom the United States “tilted” covertly while pursuing a superpower détente – to a relationship that encompassed more intimate diplomatic and military ties with a China represented as a “tacit ally.” The latter contained a much more overt anti-Soviet focus, within which Kissinger emphasized offering strategic reassurance to the Chinese and the development of conceptual and domestic opinion bases for a closer security relationship, while bargaining for more favorable terms of diplomatic normalization. After the Beijing summit, the negotiation of the U.S.–PRC rapprochement was closely influenced both by triangular politics and by domestic politics. At the same time, the sustained interaction between the two sides had a significant impact upon the development of the discursive context and resulting policy actions. Interestingly, this process was again characterized by competing discourses: this time, Kissinger's representation of the Soviet threat and U.S.–PRC relations versus that of the Chinese leaders. Kissinger portrayed the Chinese not just as former adversaries or friends but as tacit allies, whose strategic viewpoint increasingly coincided with that of the United States and who placed their priority on anti-Soviet aspects of the relationship rather than on bilateral issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instead of asking, “Why did the U.S.-China rapprochement happen in 1972?,” this study began by posing the broader question, “How did China, after having been America's most implacable enemy, become its friend and even tacit ally during the Nixon administration?” It sought the origins of the policy of bilateral rapprochement in American officials' ideas about reconciliation with China in the decade preceding Nixon's presidency, and it investigated the creation and implementation of rapprochement during the Nixon administration. At the heart of this attempt to situate the U.S.–China rapprochement within the wider discursive and policy-making context of the time is a skepticism about the orthodox realist balance-of-power explanation of events and its ability to account for the process of change. These doubts, in turn, reflect and build upon recent developments in two disciplinary fields – the increasing engagement with theory on the part of some diplomatic historians, and the rise of constructivist approaches in political science and international relations. The last two decades have produced a greater awareness of the utility of theory within the discipline of history, so that there has developed a steady stream of historical works informed by various theoretical stances derived from the humanities and social sciences. Diplomatic historians have readily employed the political science concepts of bureaucratic politics, public opinion, and ideology and have more recently introduced into their works theories of corporatism, cognitive psychology, world-systems, and dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kissinger to Nixon: “The crucial factor … will be the Chinese judgment of our seriousness and reliability: this litmus test will determine their future policy. … Our essential requirement is to demonstrate that we are serious enough to understand the basic forces at work in the world and reliable enough to deliver on the commitments we make.” Zhou to Nixon: “… in view of the current interests of our two countries … we may find common ground. But this common ground must be truly reliable. It should not be a structure built upon sand, because that structure will not be able to stand.” In the process of constructing a new relationship with Beijing, Washington had not only to cultivate a convergence in worldviews and in the appreciation of certain common national interests, but also to demonstrate its willingness to act in accordance with the basic principles governing the relationship. The latter included the agreement to counter hegemony in Asia and the aim of working toward normalization of relations. Between 1971 and 1972, the two sides established regular high-level channels of contact that would allow bilateral communication and policy coordination. This took two forms: Kissinger's occasional trips to Beijing and, in between, his secret meetings, first with the Chinese Ambassador Huang Zhen in Paris and then with the Chinese UN Representative Ambassador Huang Hua in a CIA “safe house” in New York after the PRC gained UN representation in October 1971. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consummate politician, Nixon was keenly aware of the imperatives of policy advocacy and the need to present his policies in a way that was palatable to his key constituencies. Indeed, in contrast to the Democratic administrations that preceded it, the Nixon administration was remarkably proactive and firmly led public opinion on China policy. As discussed in Chapter 4, Nixon was forthcoming about his approach to China in public statements and policy gestures, and he paid particular attention to locating his moves toward China within the context of a “grand strategy” of peace through strength and negotiation. All of these moves were undertaken before it was clear that public opinion had moved decisively in favor of China. Once actual policy changes had been made and the Chinese began to respond, the White House moved assiduously toward a carefully managed campaign to convince various domestic and international audiences of the rationality of Nixon's departures in China policy. This was necessary because public distrust of China was deeply entrenched: for example, even after the announcement of Kissinger's secret trip to Beijing in July 1971, a 56 percent majority of the public still regarded China as the world's most dangerous country. Thus the Nixon administration worked to disseminate the new image of China as a “Former Enemy,” with an emphasis on the potential areas for constructive dialogue between the United States and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kissinger: “Many visitors have come to this beautiful, and to us, mysterious land. … All have departed with new perspectives. …” Zhou: “You will find it not mysterious. When you have become familiar with it, it will not be as mysterious as before.” As the president's personal envoy, Henry Kissinger flew secretly to Beijing from Pakistan on 9 July 1971 and stayed for two days of talks with Zhou Enlai. Upon his return, Kissinger characterized those discussions as “the most searching, sweeping and significant … I have ever had in government.” These meetings, he reported to Nixon, marked a “major new departure in international relations,” and the Nixon administration now had the opportunity to “transform the very framework of global relationships.” In spite of the prior back channel messages, Kissinger's first trip was in some ways a step into the unknown, and his fundamental task was to establish whether the Chinese leaders were indeed ready to relate to the United States in a nonhostile and nonmilitant fashion. Kissinger found that the small coterie of Chinese leaders he met were people whom he could deal with. More than that, he was clearly in awe of Zhou, and drawn to admiration and respect for the man whom he felt “ranks with Charles De Gaulle as the most impressive foreign statesman I have met.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the Nixon administration, the period from 1969 into the first half of July 1971 constituted the initial phase of transition toward a new conception of China and China policy. It was a contested process, with a number of different strands moving ahead at varying speeds within the bureaucracy, in the public discourse, and through secret channels. In contrast to the previous chapter on Nixon's China discourse and broad foreign policy strategy before and shortly after taking office, this chapter focuses on the official China policy discourse in the State Department, the intelligence agencies, and the Defense Department, as well as in the National Security Council and the White House, at a time when the new administration was debating, deliberating, and defining the shape of its China policy. This analysis sheds particular light on the much-vaunted difference between the State Department's approach to China and the White House's strategy and preferred paths. The received notion – from the accounts of Kissinger and other NSC staff members – is that State Department officials were obsessed with issues of secondary importance, such as trade and Taiwan, and missed the larger geopolitical picture, while Kissinger and Nixon were very much alive to the opportunity offered by China's strategic need for better relations with the United States, given the threat of a Soviet attack. Contemporary documents reveal, however, that most officials did recognize the potential advantages of triangular politics after the outbreak of Sino-Soviet hostilities in March 1969. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Great ideas can change history, but only if great leadership comes along that can give those ideas force. … What lifts great leaders above the second-raters is that they are more forceful, more resourceful, and have a shrewdness of judgment that … enables them to identify the fleeting opportunity. Richard Nixon's opening to China in 1972 has been indelibly associated with balance-of-power politics and its attendant assumption of a sudden, almost automatic realist reaction to structural changes from 1969 onward. Yet Nixon had been a prominent figure in the U.S. government since the 1950s and had maintained a high-profile involvement with communist and Asian affairs during the 1960s, when he was out of office. This chapter traces Nixon's thinking about China policy prior to, and during the first two years of, his presidency and investigates its relationship to the developing discourse of reconciliation in official and informed public circles during the 1960s. Did Nixon, in keeping with his front-line Republican conservative position, perceive China as a “Red Menace” to be ruthlessly contained and isolated? How then did he turn to the discourse of reconciliation with China that accompanied his moves toward rapprochement when he took office? “TOUGH COEXISTENCE”: NIXON'S CHINA POLICY THINKING AS VICE PRESIDENT, 1952–1960 Nixon's early political career was built significantly upon anticommunist foundations. Shortly after being elected a congressman from California in 1947, he was appointed to the Herter Committee, which undertook a study tour of Europe in preparation for the Marshall Plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the hostile policy discourse toward Communist China evolved and became more acute and yet also more ambiguous during the 1960s, a parallel revisionist discourse was developing both in reaction to events and as a result of personal convictions. Throughout the decade, a number of officials within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations worked to convince their colleagues of the need to alter the official U.S. position toward the PRC. This group combined liberal Democratic stalwarts such as Chester Bowles, Averell Harriman, and Adlai Stevenson; “old China hands” such as Edward Rice; and Asian and China specialists such as Roger Hilsman, Edwin Reischauer, James Thomson, and Robert Komer. They variously occupied the main China advisory positions in the State Department and the White House and headed key diplomatic posts. These officials pushed for the relaxation of China policy and accumulated a “shopping list” of possible American initiatives that included lifting the travel ban on Americans wishing to visit China, removing trade restrictions on nonstrategic goods, inviting the Chinese to disarmament negotiations, and ending Beijing's exclusion from the UN on the basis of various “two Chinas” arrangements. They advanced arguments that were based on two central revised images of China, focusing in turn on its weakness and poverty, and on its pride and potential strength. Together, these two images identified China in ways that revealed potential common areas of understanding between the United States and China. Initially, the revisionist discourse was submerged within internal memoranda, waged as personal campaigns by midlevel officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two preceding chapters analyzed the China policy debate within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and traced American officials' arguments for and against relaxing China policy in the 1960s. They demonstrated that four distinct subdiscourses about China existed within the internal official discourse, each a representation of the perceived identity and characteristics of China, of the Sino-American relationship, and of resulting U.S. interests and policy stances. These are summarized in Table 4.1. Table 4.1 highlights how each discourse focused on particular aspects of China's identity, used separate frames of reference, and made distinct policy recommendations. The Red Menace image emphasized China's aggressive hostility toward the noncommunist world, working from the 1950s international framework of two opposing rigid blocs in a Cold War. The second hostile discourse based on the image of China as Revolutionary Rival used the less rigid international framework resulting from the Sino-Soviet split to suggest selective opposition to the more militant Chinese brand of communism. The two revisionist subdiscourses of China, on the other hand, stressed indigenous aspects of Chinese identity. The Troubled Modernizer image was concerned with China's poverty and “basic needs” crises, viewed through the lens of Western models of socioeconomic development. The policy recommendation was that Washington should try to encourage the ascendance of the moderate elements of the Chinese leadership that wanted to concentrate on these internal problems, thereby muting China's external hostility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world – twenty-five years of no communication. It was the week that changed the world. President Richard Nixon's historic visit to the People's Republic of China in February 1972 marked a Sino-American rapprochement and the beginning of the route to normalization of relations. This came more than twenty years after mainland China was “lost” to the communists and, less than a year later in 1950, attacked American-led United Nations forces in Korea. Thereafter, a key tenet of U.S. Cold War strategy was to “contain” Communist China by means of bilateral alliances and military bases in East Asia, and to isolate it by severing trade, travel, and diplomatic contacts and refusing to recognize the communist regime. The next twenty years were characterized by American opposition to UN membership for mainland China, three crises in the Taiwan Straits, offensive rhetoric, threats of nuclear attack, and the fighting of a proxy war in Vietnam. In ending this hostile estrangement in 1972, Nixon thus executed a dramatic reversal of U.S. China policy. The U.S.–China rapprochement was the most significant strategic shift of the Cold War prior to 1989, more so than the Sino-Soviet split. As Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger claimed, the rapprochement “changed the world” by transforming a Cold War international system made up of two opposing ideological blocs into a tripolar one in which great-power foreign policy was conducted on the basis of “national interest” and power balancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… a great, powerful force in China, organized and directed by the government along Stalinist lines, surrounded by weaker countries … this we regard as a menacing situation. We are facing the greatest menace to our freedom. This Assembly would face the greatest menace to its future if it … admitted the … People's Republic [of China]. American attitudes toward China from the nineteenth century until the Second World War had been broadly paternalistic, assuming a “special friendship” with the Chinese people. However, the situation altered dramatically in 1949 and 1950, when the communists won control of the mainland in the civil war and “Red” China subsequently allied itself with the Soviet Union. The communist victory seemed to signify Chinese rejection of American values and the American model of civil society, a rejection that gained enormous salience in the context of the rapidly developing Cold War. The Sino-Soviet alliance dramatically confirmed America's “loss” of China to its main enemy. After the Second World War, the Soviet Union was the only power capable of challenging American hegemony; and the communist leadership in Moscow coupled its rhetoric about a communist world revolution with action, expanding domination over its neighboring Eastern European states by setting up Soviet-backed communist regimes in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book is important for three main reasons. First, it enhances our understanding of one of the most important bilateral relationships of our era. Sino-American relations have moved in regular cycles between periods of hostility and somewhat grudging coexistence since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Most of the rest of the world has been affected by the changing state of those relations: they have had a major impact on regional security, on great power alignments, and on the central norms of the global system that involve matters of war and peace. In the early twenty-first century, we have arrived at a point where the relationship is perceived to have stabilized. For some, it warrants the description that it is the best it has ever been, or at least the best since President Nixon's landmark visit to China in 1972. Dr. Goh's study offers an opportunity to reflect on that comparison, usefully reminding us of some of the factors that contribute to a continuing fragility in those bilateral ties. Above all, her work helps us to understand what has made it possible for negative U.S. images of China to be transformed into descriptions of the country that are positive enough to permit bilateral cooperation in the three major domains of security, economics, and culture. Second, the study is particularly valuable because of its approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]