China wasn’t on an inevitable path to superpower status
Nixon’s visit did not take place at a quiet time for Chinese politics. In 1972, China was still firmly in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and there were clear divisions about the significance of the Nixon visit.
One faction, led by premier Zhou Enlai, had come to realise that China’s inward-looking take on economics and culture was not sustainable; they believed that the country would have to reform if the CCP was to stay in power. A world in which China was isolated both from the Soviet bloc and the western world was unsustainable and, since relations with Moscow continued to be scratchy following China’s denunciation of Soviet policy from the late 1950s, a pivot towards the huge market that the US offered was a logical step for an economy aiming to re-enter the world of international trade.
That view was firmly opposed by the Cultural Revolution hardliners, most notably the leaders later dubbed the “Gang of Four”, including Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. They regarded ideological purity as the most important element of China’s politics, so the idea of opening up to the capitalist US proposed by “running dogs” (lackeys) was anathema.
During Nixon’s visit, the faction in favour of opening up was in the ascendant, and Jiang Qing even greeted the Americans. But on the evening before the Shanghai Communique was released, Zhang Chunqiao – one of the Gang of Four – made a speech at the banquet for Nixon’s party, declaring that Shanghai was “maintaining independence” and “relying on our own efforts”. It was a not particularly subtle reminder that not all of the Chinese leadership was happy to see the US president enter the world’s most populous communist state.
In retrospect, it sometimes seems as if China was on an inevitable path to economic superpower status after Nixon’s visit opened up the country. In fact, the years that followed were turbulent. In 1973, Zhou’s enemies launched a campaign obliquely criticising his willingness to open up to the US. By then, he was dying of cancer, passing away just a few months before Mao in 1976. Shortly afterwards, Zhou’s protege Deng Xiaoping was sidelined by the Gang of Four.
Mao’s successor, Hua Guofeng, rapidly moved to have the Gang of Four arrested, and the Cultural Revolution was declared over. The next year, 1977, writers and artists were allowed to produce accounts of the horrors they had suffered during the worst years of the Cultural Revolution.
By July of that year, Deng had used his formidable political network to return to power. From 1978, he began implementing major market-oriented reforms and pushed forward with efforts to improve relations with the US. In 1979, following Carter’s recognition of China, he also broke with precedent and travelled to the US – a visit epitomised by a moment in Texas when the diminutive Deng donned a large Stetson hat. The US-China relationship may have been secured diplomatically with the establishment of embassies earlier that year, but the emotional relationship was sealed at that rodeo, signalling a decade of closer ties.
Liberalising culture
During the 1980s, the relationship between the US and China was the warmest it had been since the latter’s communist revolution. American writers and intellectuals were invited to share their ideas to help influence China’s new, liberalising culture. That decade was also the era of Reagan’s confident US, as well as a sclerosis that augured the ultimate end of the Soviet Union and Europe’s communist eastern bloc.
China wanted access to the US market, and was keen to benefit from the sense of possibility that it saw in New York and California. Despite their communist links, the Chinese saw little to tempt them in the Soviet world of Brezhnev and his successors, who were mired in a war in Afghanistan and whose eastern European allies such as Poland were increasingly afflicted by strikes and economic woes.
In one of the most remarkable gestures of affinity, the 1988 television programme River Elegy, broadcast to millions of Chinese viewers, proudly showcased icons of American life including the Statue of Liberty. This wave of almost naive pro-Americanism came crashing to a halt with the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Yet despite that bloody crackdown, recent evidence reveals that president George Bush sent national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to visit Deng Xiaoping in secret just a month after the killings, to assure China that the US still wanted to keep the relationship alive. The tradition of angry rhetoric on the surface but an understanding about shared interests in private – evident in the Nixon-Kissinger visit of 1972 – was still very much alive.
Is that still true today? The jury is out. The US and China are now clear rivals, rather than the “frenemies” they became during the Nixon era. In July 2020 Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, declared that the “noble” policies Nixon had attempted to implement in relations with China had failed, and that the US must now treat China as a hostile power. That visit of 1972 remains a moment of historic importance – but its significance seems very different today from how it did in that cold February week in Beijing, half a century ago.
Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford, and presenter of Archive on 4: The Great Wall, examining US-China relations since the Nixon visit. Listen at BBC Sounds: bbc.co.uk/ programmes/m0013hb1
The US and China are now clear rivals, rather than the “frenemies” they became during the Nixon era