Nixon's China visit, 50 years on

Early reading on one of 2022's most important anniversaries, that of Richard Nixon's visit to China on February 21-28 1972, following Henry Kissinger's initial visit in 1971

Last year my friend Sanjaya Baru and his colleague Rahul Sharma assembled a book, “A New Cold War: Henry Kissinger and the Rise of China”, for which they asked 19 writers from 10 countries, to write essays reflecting on America’s momentous opening to China half a century ago, ending more than two decades during which the US and much — but not all — of the West refused to recognise the People’s Republic of China. The book was published by Harper Collins in India last August, but will not be released in hardcover in the US or Europe until February 2022, just ahead of the anniversary. Here is the Amazon UK link and here is the cover:

Meanwhile, for your holiday reading here also is the essay I contributed, which looked at why Britain did recognise Mao’s PRC in 1950 but America did not. Looking back, America’s failure to do so looks both like a huge strategic mistake during the real Cold War but also as a mistake whose shadow now hangs over today’s US-China version in the form of the failure to settle Taiwan’s status when conditions for doing so were much more favourable than they are today.

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Nixon's Outreach: Coming to Terms with Reality

Bill Emmott

Whatever you may think of Britain’s wartime leader and keen imperialist, it is hard to deny that Sir Winston Churchill left behind a marvellous stock of quotations. A favourite Churchillism for any English person writing about the United States is this: ‘You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.’ [1] Given that as well as having a gift with words Churchill was also a far-sighted strategic thinker, it feels likely that had he still been alive in 1971, Sir Winston would have applied his own maxim to President Richard Nixon’s opening of relations with Mao Zedong’s China, adding, perhaps, ‘But what on earth took you so long?’

The United Kingdom, albeit under the Labour government that so brutally displaced Churchill’s Conservatives in office in 1945, was among the first countries to recognize the new People’s Republic of China (PRC, commonly known as ‘China’), doing so on 6 January 1950, just behind India and Pakistan but ahead of all other western nations. From Britain’s point of view, then and with hindsight now, America’s failure to do the same until more than two decades later represented a historic strategic mistake. Nixon’s opening to China was not the act of courage or brilliance that it is often depicted as, but rather a belated acceptance of failure, a correction of a long-running error.

            Recognition of a country’s actual government, connecting legitimacy to the reality of holding power, is a basic tool of diplomacy and a simple fact of international relations. David Wolf, writing [2] in the Journal of Contemporary History in 1983 about the decision to confer recognition to the Communist government, opens with another Churchill quotation which feels just as apt: in a speech in the House of Commons on 17 November 1949 Churchill said, ‘The reason for having diplomatic relations is not to confer a compliment but to secure a convenience.’ What is extraordinary and consequential is not that Britain secured this convenience in the case of the People’s Republic (PRC) but rather that America did not.

The then Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, evidently agreed that to switch British recognition from the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek to Mao’s Communists following their victory in the Chinese civil war was just such a convenience. This was despite a strong antipathy in the Labour Party against the Chinese Communists, and despite the fact that the decision broke Britain away from the China policy of the United States, a divergence that then lasted for a further twenty-one years.

America’s refusal to accept reality in Asia’s largest country proved a severe inconvenience during those decades for Britain, but also for other allies. To see how, it may be useful to compare the impact on Britain with the impact on another US ally, Japan, which has since defeat and occupation in 1945-52 been the US’s closest ally in the Pacific. Both countries’ experience leads one to see American policy and behaviour towards China as being inherently selfish, conducted in a way that disregarded the interests and sensitivities even of its closest allies. Britain’s refusal to support the US militarily during the Vietnam War is surely not unrelated to a reaction during the 1950s and 1960s against perceived American selfishness. Japan, in its turn, was shocked by Nixon’s sudden overtures to China and shaken by America’s decision not to consult or even inform its closest Asian ally about its change of mind and tack. Yet despite bearing such costs and such wounds, each has nevertheless stuck to their intransigent Yankee friends before and after the watershed of 1971, even during the past four years when then-President Donald Trump made doing so more embarrassing than at any stage since 1945. Neither, really, can afford to turn their backs on the United States.

Nonetheless, looked at from the standpoint of those two island nations, on opposite sides of the world, American stubbornness over China can be taken to confirm that it is really the United States that should be called insular, not either Britain or Japan. It is the great insular continental power protected, by two oceans and the world’s most formidable economy, from the need to face up to reality or, many times, to make awkward choices.

This is not to argue that relations with Communist China would have been particularly straightforward for any of the three—Britain, Japan and the United States—if the Americans had done the right and sensible thing by conferring recognition on Mao’s government in 1950. American stubbornness nevertheless imposed a cost both on Britain, whose China policy did diverge from that of America, and on Japan, which stuck loyally to the American line until 1971–72. Both countries were caught in a sort of limbo by American intransigence.

Britain’s formal request in 1950 to open diplomatic relations with the PRC was refused, meaning that the countries did not exchange ambassadors but rather established semi-diplomatic relations by sending Chargés d’Affaires, deputy ambassadors, instead and Britain opened an embassy in Beijing that was officially known just as a “legation”. This was because the UK was unwilling, or in truth thanks to American obstruction, unable, to fully denounce the Nationalist ‘government-in-exile’ in Taipei, Republic of China (ROC, now commonly called ‘Taiwan’). Despite having their own permanent seat on the Security Council of the newly born United Nations, the British stood no chance of forcing the Republic of China to relinquish the Chinese seat it had occupied since 1945, given American objections. This inevitably tarred the British with the sins, in Communist Chinese eyes, of their US allies. Only in 1972, once the PRC took over the UN Security Council seat, was Britain granted full diplomatic relations and the exchange of ambassadors. The nastiest consequence came in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards laid siege to and then burned down the British  legation.

In the case of Japan, recognition in 1949–50 would have been impossible given that the country was and then remained under US occupation for a further two years. Early diplomatic recognition could anyway hardly have salved the wounds of history, for Japan had been fighting the Chinese in varying degrees of intensity since 1931, and had left behind a legacy of atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre of 1937 where an alleged 300,000 Chinese were killed by Japanese soldiers. Those wounds continue to fester to this day.

Japan did engage with China’s new rulers in the 1950s to negotiate the repatriation of Japanese residents of the former colony of Manchuria and to resume trading links, albeit at a modest level. However, under American pressure as well as tempted by the scent of commercial opportunity, the Japanese government and Japanese businesses then spent two decades establishing stronger trading links and closer ties with their other former colony, Taiwan, the economy of which was beginning to industrialize, especially during the 1960s. Any real restoration or renovation of Sino-Japanese (Sino here referring to PRC) relations following their decades of bitter conflict was thus both delayed and distorted by the effect of America’s decision.

Why Britain did recognize the PRC

It seems natural to ask why the United Kingdom chose to move so swiftly to ‘secure a convenience’ by recognizing the PRC. Yet, with hindsight, the question seems upside-down: what really requires explanation is the decision of other western countries to follow the United States by refusing to acknowledge what an Englishman might term ‘the bleedin’ obvious’, namely that the People’s Republic, and not the Republic of China on Taiwan, was the established, legitimate and for all intents and purposes, permanent government of China. The natural thing for all western powers to have done would have been to recognize the new government, as Churchill said, not as a compliment but as a convenience.

            Few, if any, can have seriously believed that Chiang Kai-shek still stood a chance of fighting on and prevailing. Some might have believed that the Communist regime was weaker than it seemed, but that belief became untenable after Mao’s successful intervention during the Korean War in October 1950, inflicting a major defeat and humiliation on the United Nations’ forces led by the Americans. As the decade went on, it became even more untenable when the PRC successfully turned its 1950 intervention in Tibet into full annexation in 1959, and then in 1962 prevailed in its border war with India. Even so, among major western powers, only France also broke ranks but after a long delay, opening diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1964.

            Various hypotheses can be put forward as explanations for why Britain acted in the way that it did to try to open full diplomatic relations in 1950, against American policy. One is that it represented a continued British imperialist pride, a desire to show it could still strut its own stuff on the world stage, regardless of its post-war dependence on the United States. Another is that it may have been driven by a desire to protect British commercial interests in China, which were much larger than those of the Americans or other western powers: from ‘treaty ports’ such as Shanghai, Tientsin, Tsingtao and Guangzhou, British traders had been active and prosperous for more than a century. British commercial property and investments in China in 1948 had an estimated value of £300 million,[3] which in 2020 pounds was equivalent to £11 billion. That is not a fortune, but is significant enough to give its owners some lobbying power with government.

A third, arguably more significant, explanation can be found in Hong Kong. That British Crown Colony, held since 1841 and with part of it held on a 99-year lease from the then Chinese imperial government in 1898, gave Britain what seemed at the time to be a continued opportunity to influence events in Asia and, in particular, to own a beacon of capitalism and trade. With America promising to retain a dominant position from its base in Japan, the United Kingdom could hope to prove its importance as well as its influence from its possession of Hong Kong, as well, at that moment, as its hold on Malaya. The fall of both Singapore and Hong Kong to Japanese forces in 1941 had been a humiliation. At least at that time in 1950, even as imperial possessions such as India and Burma were gaining independence, there was no acceptance in London that the British Empire as a whole was at an end, either in Asia or elsewhere. There were, however, understandable fears that Communist Chinese forces might seek to emulate the Japanese and take control of Hong Kong. This provided a motive for securing the convenience of a negotiating channel to the new PRC government and for making the positive, peace-making gesture that the offer of recognition represented.

What all these hypotheses add up to, however, is a more general point: for more than a century, Britain had been the most influential foreign power in Asia and so had developed habits as well as interests that it was unlikely to shake off in a hurry. One of those habits was to think strategically and with a global perspective, even if with no longer the true power or reach to match thoughts with actions. David Wolf’s paper in the Journal of Contemporary History in 1983, on which much of this chapter is based, benefited from the opening up of British government records from 1950 and surrounding years, under the thirty-year rule. What those records show is that as early as 24 October 1949, the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, presented a position paper to Cabinet in which he argued that although continued recognition of the Republic of China provided the Allies with a favourable vote in the United Nations Security Council, this was ‘an advantage which cannot be maintained indefinitely’. He argued that the longer the UK delayed recognition of the PRC, the harder it would be to maintain British trade with China. Most tellingly, however, Bevin also argued that, in Wolf’s words, ‘A delay in recognition . . . improved the chance that the Communist government would turn to the Soviet Union.’

That, of course, is exactly what did happen. Nevertheless, proven right though it was by history, British recognition failed to deliver many of the hoped-for benefits, even if it did symbolize the country’s continued independence of mind and the perceived importance that an influential position in Asia played in Britain’s foreign policy. British commercial assets in China were expropriated by the Communist government. British trade with and from China dwindled, although perhaps thanks to recognition or to historical ties, British firms proved able to be among the first allowed to get involved again with the modest amount of trade that did resume, with what was then called the 48 Group of Companies being formed in 1954, alongside the British government’s own Sino-British Trade Council, which many years later merged to become what is now the China-Britain Business Council.

Why America didn’t recognize the PRC

While Britain, India, Burma, Pakistan and a handful of other western or non-aligned countries did recognize the new People’s Republic of China, the United States considered doing so, according to British cabinet papers, but then chose not to. The decision not to do so became more understandable after the Korean War, yet less meaningful since by destroying General Douglas Macarthur’s reputation the Red Army had surely proven the new regime’s viability. In the light of that conflict, there was no prospect that American aid would or could have been offered to Communist China, making it arguably inevitable that Mao’s government sought aid from the Soviet Union. The rush of events in that period of the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the Cold War getting under way, the Berlin Blockade by the Soviet Union having just occurred in 1948–49, were hardly conducive to risk-taking or even, perhaps, to cool strategic thinking.

            Nevertheless, George Kennan had already in 1946 sent his famous ‘long telegram’ to the State Department from the embassy in Moscow, laying out the case for what became the strategy of containment. The huge question this leaves hanging is why, in 1949 when the Communists prevailed in China’s civil war, without yet having been truly intimately connected to the Soviets, America did not choose to at least try to choose China as one component of that containment. If there was a strong case for doing so two decades later, wasn’t there an even stronger case for doing so in 1949–50? 

            From a British standpoint, the failure to do so was and is a historic strategic mistake. More even than that, it is a mistake that took an enormously long time to be acknowledged and corrected. How to explain it? Three main hypotheses come to mind, although they inevitably overlap to some extent.

            The first is ideological. The birth of the Cold War and the shock to both America and Britain of the complete fracture of their wartime alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union, turning allies into adversaries, generated a much more ideological reaction in Washington than it did in London. The British viewed it pragmatically, albeit with dismay. So did America at first, but then the febrile world of American politics turned the Communist threat into an existential one. Under the Moscow Declaration of December 1945, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union had all pledged themselves to a policy of non-interference in China, and hence to recognition of the Nationalist government in Nanking as, at that time, the legitimate authority. Logically, such a pledge of non-interference should have led automatically to the recognition of the PRC, when it became plainly the new established authority. But while Britain and the Soviet Union followed that logic, in the United States fear of and hostility to communism had taken hold.

            The second hypothesis is about the power of vested interests in creating inertia in American policy-making. Some of that power and inertia was already there in Washington, DC, in the 1940s, following years of political and material support for Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Kuomintang. While Chiang, his entourage and above all his wife, Soong Mei-ling, were well-known in America, Chairman Mao and his Long Marchers were far more remote figures, known through the writings of Edgar Snow and other journalists, but not directly. Madame Chiang even made an eight-month speaking tour of the United States during 1943 to rally support. Then, once the Nationalists became a government-in-exile, really the de facto government of Taiwan, the cause of industrial development on that island and the support of its defence became strong vested interests of their own.

            Once such interests take hold, especially if buttressed by ideology, a policy can become remarkably difficult to change in Washington. The nearest equivalent, albeit of far lesser strategic importance, is that of the US embargo on Cuba. It is many decades since that embargo made any political or security sense for the United States. Yet it took until the administration of President Barack Obama in 2008–16 for the trade embargo and travel ban to be relaxed and for diplomatic relations to be established, and even then President Donald Trump was able to partially rescind in 2017 what he saw as US concessions.

            This brings in the third hypothesis. This is that in foreign affairs, such intransigent, self-harming, ideologically and vested-interest-driven policies can be maintained for decades simply because America is powerful enough and secure enough to absorb such mistakes without undue pain or concern. The United States could maintain what now looks like the absurd fiction that the Republic of China was the true government of China, that it would in due course return, and that it deserved to hold China’s permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations, simply because it could do so without apparent consequence. Post-1945 America was not at all isolationist. But it could nevertheless be extraordinarily insular.

The consequences of this mistake

We cannot of course know how history might have evolved if the United States had followed Britain’s example by recognizing the PRC and had accepted the Communist Chinese as the legitimate wielders of a vote on the Security Council. It is reasonable, however, to speculate that by providing Mao and his government with another option, with more leverage over the Soviet Union and with some more incentives to play an official role in world affairs, the evolution both of China and of the Cold War could have been different. Perhaps not greatly different, but different nevertheless. More securely, we can speculate that some processes would have been accelerated, or at least brought forward.

            This can be well seen from the British and Japanese points of view. Britain had a declining interest in Asia thanks to the dismantling of empire and so perhaps endured the costs of American intransigence fairly easily. But still, earlier and less rancorous communication channels between London and Beijing could have allowed the two countries to achieve earlier understandings on the status of Hong Kong. Japan had a rising interest in Asia commensurate with its economic and political rehabilitation in the 1950s and 1960s. The chance to establish diplomatic channels with China at an earlier stage, when China too was weak economically and politically, could have enabled Japan to make early amends for its wartime conduct and to open up a more balanced commercial relationship. The fiction of Chiang Kai-shek as the once and future rightful leader of China did Japan no favours.

            But then, America didn’t care about the consequences of its China policy for either Britain or Japan because it had no need to care. It retained Japan as home to its principal military bases in Asia–Pacific, and even retained its occupation of Okinawa until 1971. Britain was no longer a significant influence in Asia, and in any event British and American policies in Asia had clashed repeatedly, with the UK notably refusing to lend military support to US forces during the Vietnam War. At least in Asia, the US owed the British no favours.

            It did, however, owe favours to itself. Few if any future historians will conclude that by maintaining the Kuomintang Nationalist fiction for twenty-one years the Americans did the right thing, or even helped their own interests. The counterfactual must always remain unknown. But what can be known is that this fiction served no useful purpose, made American policy look vindictive as well as unrealistic, and threw away all chance of using China as early leverage against the Soviet Union. When Henry Kissinger and then President Richard Nixon finally went to China, they were correcting a historic failure.

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Notes

[1]. https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/10-07-13-lets-hope-churchill-was-wrong-about-americans.html.

[2]. David C. Wolf,  ‘“'To Secure a Convenience”: Britain Recognizes China – 1950’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 18, no. 2 (1983), pp. 299–326. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/260389. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.

[3]. David C. Wolf, op cit.