“NIXON IS IN CHINA”. So, in big letters, was the headline of this sheet 50 years ago, in February 1972. For days on end, then US President Richard Nixon’s trip to the Asian giant occupied the most important space in the newspaper with adjectives such as historic. On February 28, the biggest headline on the front page read: “Yesterday was the day that changed the world.”
That was the perception of anyone who saw an American leader go to Beijing — especially “a well-known anti-communist”, as the Richard Nixon Foundation itself puts it — to meet Mao Tse-tung, leader of the Chinese Revolution, which seemed to change significantly the geopolitical order.
The world, after all, was in the midst of the Cold War, and the leader of the capitalist bloc was entering supposedly enemy soil to see the head of the most populous communist nation in the world, closed after more than two decades of isolation that followed the 1949 Revolution.
Analysts point out that the American president’s trip, between February 21 and 28, 1972, helped to reopen China to the world and, in the limit, kick-started the country to become the superpower it is today.
“Were it not for this milestone, China’s reforms and opening up to the outside world would not have been possible,” says Professor Ren Xiao, director of the Center for Chinese Foreign Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai. “President Nixon’s historic visit and the efforts of the leaders of both countries together made this outcome possible.”
But Gina Anne Tam, a researcher at the National Committee on US-China Relations and a professor at Trinity University in Texas, is more measured about the importance of the American. “While it was an important moment, perhaps we are giving the US too much credit in what was a multi-layered transitional moment for China itself.” She says she believes that the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping at the end of that decade would happen one way or another.
If the trip sounds strange because it brought two antagonistic countries together in the midst of the Cold War, it is precisely in the eyes of the conflict that it is justified. That’s because the Americans took advantage of obstacles between the Chinese and the Soviet Union to try to co-opt Beijing and reduce the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.
The American had already been trying to get closer to China even before he was elected, and in 1967 he wrote in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the American foreign policy establishment, that “there is no place on this small planet for 1 billion of its potentially more able citizens to live in rabid isolation”.
Nixon — who would become best known in history for resigning in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal — had taken over in 1969 amid pressure against the Vietnam War and a society boiling over with mass protests and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. .
On the other side of the Pacific, Mao’s China was experiencing the turbulent Cultural Revolution, which tried to found a new society based on communist values ​​through the extinction of any bourgeois cultural trait, but ended up plunging the country into chaos, a decade after the so-called Great Famine — which left tens of millions dead, with no consensus on the exact number.
Preparations for the unlikely meeting included a secret visit to China by Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger, one of the most important names in the history of American diplomacy.
After a week, the two countries would open diplomatic channels. On the occasion, the Shanghai Communiqué was signed, which preached the normalization of relations and, above all, the recognition that Taiwan is part of China, which would pave the way seven years later for the US to formally recognize the legitimacy of the Communist Party in charge — something regarded as treason by nationalist refugees in Taiwan.
Today, five decades later, China and the US find themselves at the most distant diplomatic moment since that trip, as rivals accusing each other of human rights violations, in an open battle for the expansion of their respective zones of influence and leading a kind of new war. Cold.
Experts say Beijing and Washington could learn lessons from that meeting to improve the global environment — but they probably won’t.
“Nixon’s visit to China shows the importance diplomacy can play in a country’s strategy,” says Neil Thomas, a China expert at risk analysis group Eurasia. “Both the US and China would benefit from an ongoing dialogue that at least ensures direct communication and increases clarity about each other’s policies, preferences and limits. But the chances of a Biden-Xi meeting having a similar positive impact as the Nixon-Mao meeting are remote.”
At the time, the two countries had as their main motivation to contain the Soviet Union, and, today, without a common threat to both, it is difficult to think about this approximation. (The main heir to the USSR, that is to say, has recently forged a “boundless friendship” with Beijing.)
In fact, there is even one that affects all of humanity: climate change, which has caused destruction in extreme events in both countries. “It is possible that the climate crisis will force the two countries to work more closely together, but the domestic politics of both sides throw these existential problems into the arena of geopolitical competition,” says Thomas.
For Gina Tam, Nixon’s trip shows how important personal interactions are in diplomacy. “Even before the pandemic, the policies of both the US and China closed the door to these interactions — journalists, academics, students, travelers,” she says. “This is crucial for engagement and for a more productive foreign policy.”
The current scenario, however, is completely different from that of five decades ago. And who says that is one of the people who saw the meetings between Nixon and Mao in 1972 more closely. Chas Freeman, then Nixon’s interpreter who would later become the US ambassador to China, compared the two moments in a recent seminar on the relations between the two countries.
In 1972, the US was concerned about China’s weakness and backwardness; “Now, we are apprehensive about its strength and technological advancement.” At the time, Americans were in a superior position in the negotiations; now, they must talk as equals, which brings “problems for the two to adjust”.
Furthermore, the concern was the result of China’s exclusion from the world model proposed by Washington. “Today, the US is obsessed with the consequences of including China in global and regional governance.”
For Freeman, relations between the two countries “are close to returning to the false stereotypes and irrational hostility that Nixon and Mao tried to put aside five decades ago. This promises to make the world a much more dangerous and less prosperous place.”
