The Nixon-Zhou Dialogue
The substantive
issues had been divided into three categories, the first being the
long-term objectives of the two sides and their cooperation against
hegemonic powers—a shorthand for the Soviet Union without the
invidiousness of naming it. This would be conducted by Zhou and
Nixon and restricted staffs, which included me. We met for at least
three hours every afternoon.
Second, a forum for
discussing economic cooperation and scientific and technical
exchanges was headed by the foreign ministers of the two sides.
Lastly, there was a drafting group for the final communiqué headed
by Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua and myself. The drafting
meetings took place late at night after the banquets.
The meetings between
Nixon and Zhou were unique in encounters between heads of
government (Nixon, of course, was also head of state) in that they
did not deal with any contemporary
issues; these were left to the communiqué drafters and the foreign
ministers’ panel. Nixon concentrated on placing a conceptual
roadmap of American policy before his counterpart. Given the
starting point of the two sides, it was important that our Chinese
interlocutors would hear an authoritative and reliable guide to
American purposes.
Nixon was
extraordinarily well equipped for this role. As a negotiator, his
reluctance to engage in face-to-face confrontations—and indeed his
evasion of them—tended to produce vagueness and ambiguity. But he
was a great briefer. Among the ten American Presidents I have
known, he had a unique grasp of long-term international trends. He
used the fifteen hours of meetings with Zhou to put before him a
vision of U.S.-China relations and their impact on world
affairs.
While I was en route
to China, Nixon had outlined his perspective to the U.S. ambassador
in Taipei, who would have the painful task of explaining to his
hosts that America in the years ahead would be shifting the
emphasis of its China policy to Beijing from Taipei:
We must have in mind, and they [Taipei] must be prepared for the fact, that there will continue to be a step-by-step, a more normal relationship with the other—the Chinese mainland. Because our interests require it. Not because we love them, but because they’re there. . . . And because the world situation has so drastically changed.33
Nixon forecast that
despite China’s turmoil and privation, its people’s outstanding
abilities would eventually propel China to the first rank of world
powers:
Well, you can just stop and think of what could happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland. Good God. . . . There’d be no power in the world that could even—I mean, you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system . . . and they will be the leaders of the world.34
Now in Beijing, Nixon
was in his element. Whatever his long-established negative views on
Communism as a system of governance, he had not come to China to
convert its leaders to American principles of democracy or free
enterprise—judging it to be useless. What Nixon sought throughout
the Cold War was a stable international order for a world filled
with nuclear weapons. Thus in his first meeting with Zhou, Nixon
paid tribute to the sincerity of the revolutionaries whose success
he had earlier decried as a signal failure of American policy: “We
know you believe deeply in your principles, and we believe deeply
in our principles. We do not ask you to compromise your principles,
just as you would not ask us to compromise ours.”35
Nixon acknowledged
that his principles had earlier led him—like many of his
countrymen—to advocate policies in opposition to Chinese aims. But
the world had changed, and now the American interest required that
Washington adapt to these changes:
[M]y views, because I was in the Eisenhower Administration, were similar to those of Mr. Dulles at that time. But the world has changed since then, and the relationship between the People’s Republic and the United States must change too. As the Prime Minister has said in a meeting with Dr. Kissinger, the helmsman must ride with the waves or he will be submerged with the tide.36
Nixon proposed to
base foreign policy on the reconciliation of interests. Provided
the national interest was clearly perceived and that it took into
account the mutual interest in stability, or at least in avoiding
catastrophe, this would introduce predictability into Sino-U.S.
relations:
[S]peaking here, the Prime Minister knows and I know that friendship—which I feel we do have on a personal basis—cannot be the basis on which an established relationship must rest, not friendship alone. . . . As friends, we could agree to some fine language, but unless our national interests would be served by carrying out agreements set forward in that language, it would mean very little.37
For such an approach,
candor was the precondition of genuine cooperation. As Nixon told
Zhou: “It is important that we develop complete candor and
recognize that neither of us would do anything unless we considered
it was in our interests.”38 Nixon’s critics often decried these and
similar statements as a version of selfishness. Yet Chinese leaders
reverted to them frequently as guarantors of American
reliability—because they were precise, calculable, and
reciprocal.
On this basis, Nixon
put forward a rationale for an enduring American role in Asia, even
after the withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. forces from Vietnam. What
was unusual about it was that he presented it as being in the
mutual interest. For decades, Chinese
propaganda had assailed the American presence in the region as a
form of colonialist oppression and called upon “the people” to rise
up against it. But Nixon in Beijing insisted that geopolitical
imperatives transcended ideology—his very presence in Beijing
testified to that. With one million Soviet troops on China’s
northern border, Beijing would no longer be able to base its
foreign policy on slogans about the need to strike down “American
imperialism.” He had stressed America’s essential world role to me
before the trip:
We cannot be too apologetic about America’s world role. We cannot, either in the past, or in the present, or in the future. We cannot be too forthcoming in terms of what America will do. Well, in other words, beat our breasts, wear a hair shirt, and well, we’ll withdraw, and we’ll do this, and that, and the other thing. Because I think we have to say that, well, “Who does America threaten? Who would you rather have playing this role?”39
The invocation of the
national interest in the absolute form as put forward by Nixon is
difficult to apply as the sole organizing concept of international
order. Conditions by which to define the national interest vary too
widely, and the possible fluctuations in interpretation are too
great, to provide a reliable single guide to conduct. Some
congruence on values is generally needed to supply an element of
restraint.
When China and the
United States first began to deal with each other after a hiatus of
two decades, the values of the two sides were different, if not
opposed. A consensus on national interest with all its difficulties
was the most meaningful element of moderation available. Ideology
would drive the two sides toward confrontation, tempting tests of
strength around a vast periphery.
Was pragmatism
enough? It can sharpen clashes of interests as easily as resolve
them. Every side will know its objectives better than the other
side’s. Depending on the solidity of its domestic position,
concessions that are necessary from the pragmatic point of view can
be used by domestic opponents as a demonstration of weakness. There
is therefore a constant temptation to raise the stakes. In the
first dealings with China, the issue was how congruent the
definitions of interests were or could be made to be. The
Nixon-Zhou conversations provided the framework of congruence, and
the bridge to it was the Shanghai Communiqué and its much debated
paragraph about the future of Taiwan.