How secret talks between the U.S. and China led to “the week that changed the world.”
Even before China became a military superpower, Nixon knew isolation was dangerous.
On the evening of July 15, 1971, from the NBC studios in Burbank, California, President Richard Nixon delivered a dramatic national television and radio address to the nation for what he called “a major development in our efforts to build a lasting peace in the world.”
The president said that he had been sending Henry Kissinger, his assistant for National Security Affairs, for secret talks in Peking with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai as a matter of pursuing the normalization of relations between the two countries that had been at odds since the Chinese Revolution of 1949.
In China and in the U.S., the two leaders read the following statement simultaneously to show their unity in embarking on the new diplomatic track: “Premier Chou En-lai and Dr. Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, held talks in Peking from July 9 to 11, 1971. Knowing of President Nixon’s expressed desire to visit the People’s Republic of China, Premier Chou Enlai, on behalf of the Government of the People’s Republic of China, has extended an invitation to President Nixon to visit China at an appropriate date before May 1972. President Nixon has accepted the invitation with pleasure.”
But Nixon also had to quell speculation as to what that meant for global affairs, especially for Taiwan, a major American ally in the region. “Our action in seeking a new relationship with the People’s Republic of China will not be at the expense of our old friends,” Nixon said. “It is not directed against any other nation. We seek friendly relations with all nations. Any nation can be our friend without being any other nation’s enemy.”
The announcement marked a major turning point in American-Chinese relations, which had been frozen since 1949 when the Communist insurgents defeated the U.S.-backed Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek following a costly, full-scale civil war, which broke out immediately following World War II and had been preceded by on and off conflict between the two sides since the 1920s. The creation of the People’s Republic of China also completed the long process of governmental upheaval in China begun by the Chinese Revolution of 1911. The “fall” of mainland China to communism in 1949 led the United States to suspend diplomatic ties with the PRC for decades.
At the outset of Nixon’s political career, which began with his election to the House in 1946, he remained a vociferous critic of any move to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. Over the years, he built his political reputation largely on his unwavering anti-Communist credentials. As a congressman and then a senator, Nixon emerged as a major figure in the Red Scare, which triggered official investigations into possible Communist subversion in the federal government and in other sectors of U.S. society, the product of which was a culture of fear and repression.
But even if Nixon was a Cold Warrior, he also viewed China differently and saw opportunities. In 1967, before his presidency, he wrote in Foreign Affairs that “we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish 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.”
Even if Nixon rarely articulated that view throughout his campaign to take the White House, he maintained that view all the way through inauguration. Within 30 days of landing in the Oval Office, he wrote a memo to Kissinger, saying, “I think we should give every encouragement to the attitude that this Administration is ‘exploring possibilities of rapprochement with the Chinese.’ This, of course, should be done privately and should under no circumstances get into the public prints from this direction.”
Within days, Kissinger notified the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department that his office in the National Security Council had been directed to prepare a study on U.S. relations with China that would include alternative approaches and risks.
By 1971, however, Nixon came to believe that the road to extricating U.S. forces from the Vietnam War ran through Beijing. Under the advisement of Kissinger, Nixon hoped the Chinese leadership would be willing to pressure its North Vietnamese allies into negotiating a peace bargain with the anti-Communist South, in return for eventual diplomatic relations with the United States and the potential of vastly expanded trade. Nixon and Kissinger also believed China could serve the West as a blockade against the Soviet Union, the primary antagonist for America.
Nixon waited until February 1972 to undertake what he termed a historic “journey for peace.”
Nixon, his wife Pat, his diplomatic team, and a large press entourage arrived in Beijing on Feb. 21, 1972 for what Nixon would later dub “the week that changed the world.” Indeed, the thawing of relations averted conflict with China over Taiwan, greatly improved the United States’ Cold War positioning with the Soviet Union and may have contributed to ending the Vietnam War.
Besides Beijing, Nixon traveled to Hangzhou and Shanghai. Almost as soon as he arrived in the Chinese capital, Chairman Mao Zedong summoned him for a meeting. Secretary of State William Rogers was excluded; the only other American present besides Kissinger was Winston Lord, a member of the National Security Council planning staff, who served as a note taker.
The South China Morning Post offered a glowing review: “President Nixon broke two decades of hostility and isolation between the United States and China, arriving in this wintry capital to a reception that was proper and cordial and all but ignored by Peking’s four million people.”
“Standing in brilliant winter sunshine at the Great Wall of China,” the South China Morning Post reported, “a relaxed President Nixon said that his search here for ‘an open world’ may result in the destruction of the walls that divide mankind. ‘We do not want walls of any kind between peoples, and I think one of the results of our trip — we hope — may be that the walls that are erected, whether they are walls of ideology or philosophy, will not divide the peoples of the world.”
In between meetings with various Communist Party leaders, including Chairman Mao Zedong, Nixon traveled the country, touring the great sights of China. The massive news coverage gave Americans their first good peek into communist China’s physical and cultural landscape.
Upon his return, Gallup found that more than two-thirds of Americans believed the trip was successful, with 18 percent predicting it would be very effective at improving world peace and 50 percent predicting it would be fairly effective.
Gallup asked Americans which of 23 favorable or unfavorable descriptions applied to the Chinese people. The March 1972 survey showed a considerable increase in positive perceptions compared with the previous measure in 1966. In those six years, the impressions jumped: “hardworking” from 37 percent to 74 percent; “intelligent” from 14 percent to 32 percent; “practical” from 8 percent to 27 percent; and “honest” from less than one percent to 20 percent.
Nixon also gained from the publicity surrounding the trip. His presidential job approval rating rose from 49 percent in January 1972 and 53 percent before the trip in February to 56 percent upon his return.
Although Nixon had succeeded in initiating a long and gradual process of normalizing relations between Washington and Beijing, the opening failed to influence Hanoi’s negotiating stance and the Vietnam War dragged on for another year.
Nixon also received some criticism for not disclosing his intentions with China earlier and for not allowing public debate on the matter.
In subsequent disclosures of records from the Nixon administration, it became clear that Nixon saw confidentiality of the talks to be not only a matter of planting the seeds of good relations with China, but also a matter of national — if not global — security and peace.
“Without secrecy, there would have been no invitation or acceptance to visit China. Without secrecy, there is no chance of success in it,” Nixon told his White House inner circle. “The China meeting will abort if there is not total secrecy….They’re not a military power now but 25 years from now they will be decisive. For us not to do now what we can do to end this total isolation would leave things very dangerous.”
