between the United States and China (especially Vietnam and the future of Taiwan) on which Beijing and Washington appeared irreconcilable. So help that Washington gave to strengthen Beijing’s hand had to be subtle, more to be thought of as “signals” than as a genuine relaxation of the long feud between China and the United States.7
The Mating Dance Begins
None of us were privy to the operational details of White House secret diplomacy, but public signals were indeed sent and received.
In late 1969, the United States announced limited relaxation of travel and trade restrictions with China. In January of 1970, the Warsaw talks started again after years on hold. In previous years the venue had been an old palace in downtown Warsaw so compromised electronically, wags said, that taxis passing in the street could tune in the talks. The new arrangements, alternate sessions in each other ’s embassies, were serious and secure. In his Foreign Policy Message to Congress in February 1970, President Nixon called for “a more normal and constructive relationship with Communist China.”
China and UN Representation
These years also marked China’s worldwide campaign to replace Taiwan as China’s representative in the United Nations. We reported extensively on Beijing’s progress, as country after country recognized the People’s Republic and broke formal ties with the Republic of China on Taiwan. As early as December 1969, we were asked for our views on what kind of UN member the PRC would make.
We replied in a memorandum that UN membership would not tame the PRC but would force its representatives to exercise discipline. As a Security Council member, we guessed that Beijing would not be a helpful influence on peacekeeping but would be less negative than many observers now thought. Beijing would champion the underdog against the superpowers and generate a larger number of Security Council meetings, but it would be careful in exercising its veto, assessing net impacts as other countries did.
We thought the PRC would be a baleful influence in the General Assembly for the former colonial powers and those like the United States that had bases overseas. It would oppose waste, slipshod procedures, and high-cost measures, and lobby for larger representation on the Secretariat. We estimated that China would observe our security and espionage rules sufficiently to avoid being thrown out of New York. The PRC presence at the UN would provide a convenient point of contact for the U.S. government. Perhaps most significant for U.S. diplomats who devoted months each year to lobbying in capitals worldwide on the issue, the Chinese representation question would be over, although Beijing would maintain pressure to prevent Taiwan’s participation throughout the UN system.
The vote that seated the PRC in the UN occurred in October 1971 and helped set the stage for Nixon’s visit in February 1972.
Comparing Notes Abroad
In addition to managing the preparation of reports and analyses, an important part of my job involved travel to Asia and Europe to compare our findings with other governments and our own Foreign Service analysts. During a “parish visit” to Hong Kong at the end of 1969, I found the Mainland section downright boring after years at the center of attention. The long slow process of picking up the pieces after the Cultural Revolution was vitally important to track. But what had been a daily diet of juicy wall posters and hot Red Guard news was now, once again, dry rusks from the Communist press and radio. Divisions within the leadership, still very much there, had gone back underground.
The most exciting thing about Hong Kong was the change in climate for Sino-American contact. The Communists in Hong Kong were extremely interested in recent American moves and clearly under instructions to adopt a more relaxed attitude toward contact with Americans. Local officials from the New China News Agency, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and other go-betweens were striking up conversations with consulate general officers and expressing their own views in surprisingly cool and objective ways. All this was absolutely new and reflected the changes we had noted elsewhere.
The rest of Asia remained intensely interested in PRC developments. Japanese and Korean government officials as well as U.S. ambassadors and their staffs pumped me hard during stops on my way back from Hong Kong. Europe was also intrigued. In March 1970, the Allied Planning Advisory Group in Brussels met to discuss the implications for NATO of Sino-Soviet tension. I attended as the resource person on China in a delegation led by William Cargo, director of the department’s Policy Planning and Coordination staff.
A newcomer to multilateral diplomacy, I was unprepared for the pace of the deliberations. We spent three days discussing the SinoSoviet dispute, what course it was likely to take, what adjustments two days we drafted a seven-page document summarizing our conclusions and recommendations. Discussion rambled painfully. Counting alliance members and NATO staff, there must have been sixty people in the great conference room. I thought of a large dairy barn with dignified cows locked in stanchions around the table, chewing the same cud, mooing at different intervals.
The substance of our discussions and conclusions was simple. We examined three contingencies: (a) continued Sino-Soviet antagonism short of war, (b) major hostilities, and (c) a major reconciliation. All agreed that continued Sino-Soviet antagonism short of war was the most likely, and the most advantageous to the Western alliance, although there was little that we could or should do to exploit the situation. All agreed that major hostilities would be dangerous because of the possibility that other countries could be dragged in or nuclear weapons used, and a host of other imponderables. There were some kinds of hostilities that would be of more advantage to the West than others, such as a protracted conventional land war limited to Asia that would exhaust both the Soviets and the Chinese. All agreed that the Soviets would work to avoid this kind of conflict.
In any case, all agreed that we had no control over the situation. An outbreak of major hostilities was undesirable. Genuine reconciliation, putting the Sino-Soviet relationship back on the same basis of close ideological and national cooperation that prevailed during the 1950s would be disadvantageous to NATO; but this was so unlikely, even after Mao’s death, as to warrant little real consideration. Under the circumstances, the NATO allies concluded that they should sit tight, behave in an impartial manner towards both the Chinese and the Soviets, watch the situation, and keep each other informed.
This summary of the proceedings took me twenty minutes to write, and I could have done it before going to Brussels. Was it worth five whole days? There were times when I wondered. At one critical point during the proceeding, I had a flash of revelation: all the disjointed utterances and clarifications arising around this enormous table represented an alliance thinking aloud, something quite marvelous. Getting countries to do anything together is hard enough under any circumstances. Here were fifteen governments focusing on one problem, and making sense.
In November of 1970, I traveled to Paris and London with Marshall Green and Alfred L. Jenkins, then head of Mainland China Affairs at State (and later a close colleague in Beijing), to exchange assessments with the French and the British. Our talks, conducted in genteel, ornate chambers of the Quai D’Orsay and Whitehall, covered the Sino-Soviet stalemate, the impact of Vietnamization on our Asian relationships, and the growing strength of China’s position vis-à-vis Taiwan in the UN. French President De Gaulle died just before we left Paris, bringing to my mind our secret toast to him seven years before in Taiwan when he recognized the PRC.
The French remained irate about the U.S. military intervention in Cambodia, which had occurred in May 1970. Green’s opposite number, Henri Froment-Meurice, repeatedly called our action ”deplorable,” helpful to China’s position in Indochina, and harmful to the prospects for the peace talks with North Vietnam underway in Paris. Less visible to the French, the incursion into Cambodia had also stopped our private mating dance with the Chinese in its tracks.
