Henry Kissinger's Secret trip To China

September 1970-July 1971  National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 66  Edited by William Burr,  February 27, 2002

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Last week, President Bush visited Beijing on the anniversary of Richard Nixon's visit in February 1972, the first presidential trip to China.(1)  To commemorate further the Nixon trip, the National Security Archive and the George Washington University's Cold War Group of the Elliott School of International Affairs are publishing recently declassified U.S. documents on the Sino-American rapprochement.  This material documents Nixon's efforts to make contacts with Beijing during 1970-1971 as the basis for rapprochement after decades of hostility.  Most of the documents, held in the files of the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives, were released in April 2001; they are only the tip of an iceberg of very rich material in the Nixon papers.  The new releases make it possible to publish here for the first time, a nearly-complete record --some pages are still classified--of the historic talks between Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger during the latter's secret trip to China in July 1971.    This collection opens up with documentation on Nixon's and Kissinger's efforts to establish communication with China in the fall of 1970.  Since the beginning of his presidency in early 1969, and even earlier, Nixon had been interested in changing relations with China, not least to contain a potential nuclear threat but also, by taking advantage of the adversarial Sino-Soviet relationship, to open up another front in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.  It took time, however, for Nixon and Kissinger to discover how to carry out a new policy toward Beijing and such complications as the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970 created detours in White House efforts to sustain a dialogue with Beijing.(2)
     Earlier efforts to make contact with China having gone nowhere, in September 1970 Nixon directed Kissinger to renew the effort.  An October 1970 meeting with Pakistan's ruler Yahya Khan (see document 3) had some potential for expediting contacts because Pakistan had provided a channel for earlier Sino-American communication in 1969.(3)  Nevertheless, as the documents show, Kissinger was also trying other channels, such as the Romanian government and an old friend, Jean Sainteny, who had connections at the Chinese embassy in Paris.   The Pakistani channel produced an important message from Zhou in December 1970, which quickly generated a White House response (see documents 5 and 7).  In April 1971, both sides were engaged in important signaling---the Chinese with "Ping Pong diplomacy" and Nixon with public statements of interest in visiting China--while Kissinger was waiting for Beijing's response to the message sent in December.  On 27 April 1971, he was about to make another effort to contact Sainteny when the Pakistani ambassador delivered Zhou Enlai's belated reply (seedocument 16).  Mao Zedong's and Zhou's interest in receiving a visit from Nixon laid the way for Kissinger's secret trip in July 1971 and the beginning of the U.S.-China effort to discuss the issues that had divided them over the years.
     The documents show that general agreement on the Taiwan problem was the sine qua non for Nixon's trip and diplomatic normalization generally, although Kissinger elided that issue altogether in his memoirs.  Nixon was reluctant to give up too much on Taiwan (see item 32), but he knew that the success of the trip depended on U.S. admission that it did not seek "two Chinas or a "one China, one Taiwan solution." In his talk with Zhou on 9 July, Kissinger did not use Zhou's formulation that "Taiwan was a part of China" but he nevertheless acknowledged it when he declared that "we are not advocating a `two Chinas' solution or a `one China, one Taiwan' solution."(4)  Kissinger's declaration prompted Zhou to say what he had not yet said, that he was optimistic about Sino-American rapprochement: "the prospect for a solution and the establishment of diplomatic relations between our two countries is hopeful" (see document 33 at p. 13).  As important as this exchange was, in his 1979 memoir Kissinger misleadingly wrote that "Taiwan was mentioned only briefly during the first session."(5)  Yet some 9 pages, nearly 20 percent, of the 46-page record of the first Zhou-Kissinger meeting on 9 July 1971, include discussion of Taiwan, with Kissinger disavowing Taiwanese independence and committing to withdraw two-thirds of U.S. military forces from the island once the Vietnam War ended.  Moreover, Kissinger told Zhou that he expected that Beijing and Washington would "settle the political question" of diplomatic relations "within the earlier part of the President's second term."  Kissinger did not say what that would mean for U.S. diplomatic relations with Taiwan but undoubtedly Zhou expected Washington to break formal ties with Taipei as a condition of Sino-American diplomatic normalization.
    Undoubtedly, Kissinger hoped that the Taiwan problem would gradually fade away, with peaceful "evolution" uniting China and its wayward province, but Taiwan proved resilient and the downgrading of the U.S.-Taiwan relationship remained a sore point for Republican Party conservatives during the 1970s.  Indeed, Nixon's resignation in 1974 and the political weaknesses of his successor, Gerald Ford, made it impossible for Kissinger to complete the U.S.-PRC normalization process.  Ford could not break ties with Taiwan without raising the ire of the Republican right.  Undoubtedly, when Kissinger published his memoir he did not want to provoke the conservatives, much less Taipei, by disclosing what he had said to Zhou about Taiwan.
   The U.S. documentation represents only a partial record of a more complex reality.   While Chinese archival sources are largely unavailable, a growing body of scholarship in China and the United States draws upon Chinese language sources to show that Beijing was just as energetic as Washington in trying to signal interest in a new relationship.  For example, in his recent book, Mao's China and the Cold War, University of Virginia historian Chen Jian discusses in fascinating detail the internal deliberations in Beijing during the late 1960s and early 70s.(6)  One intriguing episode in Chen's account is the story of the four marshals whom Mao instructed in 1969 to report on trends in world politics, especially U.S-Soviet, Sino-Soviet, and Sino-American relations.  Worried about a dangerous confrontation with Moscow, two of the marshals, Chen Yi and Ye Jianying, proposed that Beijing play "the card of the United States" to provide leverage with Moscow.  During the last decades of the Cold War, top U.S. officials would sometimes recommend playing the "China card," but it is a rare policymaker who understands that the United States may also be the object of other nations' card playing.(7)
   As useful as the new Chinese materials are in elucidating the story of the rapprochement, for the most part Bejing's archives are closed to all but party insiders.  It may be too optimistic to hope that the availability of U.S documentation from the highest levels of the Nixon administration will induce Chinese authorities to disclose their record of these historic developments.  Whether archival openness will depend on other steps toward a more politically open society remains to be seen, but until a new archival regime emerges in Beijing, both American and Chinese historians will have to rely on an incomplete U.S. record.