President Nixon’s visit to China has come to be viewed by historians as one of the most important geopolitical events since the Second World War. It also had a profound impact on the lives of many young Chinese and Americans who have since become eminent in their fields, from diplomacy and academia, to the arts and sports. As part of our edition marking the 50th anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to China, which prepared the way for Nixon’s trip in 1972, The Wire spoke to several individuals about the impact of the event on their lives — whether they were directly involved or far removed from the action — and their views on how relations between the U.S. and China have since developed.
Wei Jingsheng
Wei Jingsheng, 71, is a Chinese dissident and human rights activist who spent 18 years in prison before being allowed to emigrate to the United States. He is now head of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation and resides in Washington, D.C.
In July 1971, I was a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, and stationed in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province. We were part of a division that was close to Lin Biao, and we were awaiting orders to move to Beijing, apparently to take part in a coup. Supposedly, we had been stationed there in preparation for an invasion by the Soviet Union. We didn’t hear anything about Kissinger’s trip but we did hear about Nixon’s visit. The Chinese papers were flooded with this news, and it confused a lot of people, since the Chinese Communist Party had published anti-American propaganda for decades.
At the time, we’d drink a lot of alcohol and discuss things like that, and this visit greatly reduced people’s respect for the regime. We weren’t so much concerned with whether this was good or bad [for the world at large] but what this would mean for the regime. Would we be going against the Russians? I thought it was a positive thing in that, if the U.S. and China stood together it was less likely there’d be a confrontation with Russia. Everyone knew that if there was a battle, we’d likely lose to Russia. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. tried to grow China into its major rival. This was a stupid strategy. It turned out only to be good for the capitalists. Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin skillfully developed the Chinese economy by using the Americans. Unfortunately, this strengthened the Communist regime, which is not a good thing for the Americans or the Chinese. The Communist regime strongly suppresses the Chinese, and the Americans have lost a lot of jobs. The U.S. should not be giving a blood transfusion to China anymore. Don’t listen to American businessmen who just want to do business in China.
Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei, 63, is an acclaimed artist and provocateur. Born in China, the son of the renowned poet Ai Qing, he has fused art, performance, film-making and powerful prose to challenge his country’s authoritarian leaders. He left China in 2015, and now lives in Portugal and Cambridge, England.
I was 14 years old. My father and I were in the 2nd Company, 3rd Battalion, 23rd Regiment of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps [a quasi-military organization]. My father was a poet and was already exiled for 14 years by that time. In the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, he was labelled as the most important rightist in the literary world and was sent to Xinjiang for reform through labour. In the corps he was responsible for cleaning 13 latrines, the most rudimentary kind of toilet, on his own. In July 1971, I was in junior high school in the corps [complex], where I lived with my father. For someone like my father, who was exiled from Beijing to Xinjiang and from the political center to the most marginalised region, next to the Soviet border, information was completely inaccessible. When we heard of Nixon’s visit, it was bigger news than hearing of the development of the atomic bomb in China. The repercussions were very strong in China. The reason is the oneness of Chinese politics, which does not allow for any individual thinking. This event of Nixon’s visit was stronger than any fantasy in China. No one thought this would happen because American Imperialism was our No. 1 enemy. All our plight was supposedly caused by American Imperialism.
But eventually, the change in U.S.-China relations resulted in a change for our family in 1972, when we received a notice saying that we could move to a small city called Shihezi. According to hearsay, it was thanks to the visit of Edgar Snow, the American writer who wrote Red Star Over China, after Nixon’s visit. Edgar Snow had kept in close contact with China since his stay in Yan’an [during World War II]. His book, Red Star Over China, recounts the story of Chinese communists in Yan’an and the Long March. It was the first time that Chinese Red Army has been introduced to the Western readers. He is an important author and had a very good relationship with the higher-level politicians in China. After Nixon’s visit, he came to China and posed a question to Zhou Enlai: “Where is Ai Qing?” Zhou’s answer was, “Ai Qing is in the border areas to participate in the labor force,” something along this line. After that, a truck took us to a small city unexpectedly. Since then, our life has been under a certain level of protection. So, thanks to Nixon’s visit, the conditions of many intellectuals, not only my father, have been changed. It was a key event. Later, I went to the United States. The date was February 11, 1981. I was one of the first self-funded students to study abroad after the U.S.-China navigation started.
The relations are very different now, as the Chinese idiom goes, “a mountain cannot accommodate two tigers.” Now on the mountains there are two tigers. This world doesn’t have another mountain.
Historically, Chinese leaders, from Mao Zedong until today, have been fond of the United States. In their understanding, the U.S. is a naïve, big country, with some idealism. There are historical causes for the deteriorating China-U.S. relations. The reason is that when the economic and political position of the U.S. is challenged, the national security of the U.S. is also threatened. The challenge is coming from China, which is becoming the number one economic superpower. This is a strategic problem for them. In fact, it is because of the support of the U.S. during the past 30 to 40 years that China has become what it is now. China has been treated in a special way for a long time, since the time of Nixon and Kissinger. It is a kind of a double standard. We can see that during the Cold War, the U.S. was very harsh to the Soviet Union, but towards China, the U.S. government and the people were very easygoing. The relations are very different now, as the Chinese idiom goes, “A mountain cannot accommodate two tigers.” Now, on the mountain there are two tigers. This world doesn’t have another mountain. So, I think both sides could get hurt. As for whether there could be real collaboration, I don’t think it’s possible.
Ma Jian
Ma Jian, 67, is an acclaimed, Chinese-born writer who lives in exile in London. His debut novella, Stick Out Your Tongue, published in 1987, led to the permanent ban on his books being published or sold in China. In July 1971, the writer was 17 years old.
In 1970, I was transferred from Qingdao’s 24th middle school to Qingdao’s radio factory to work for a year. The main work was digging air raid shelters. That was in accordance with Mao Zedong’s instructions: “Prepare for war, prepare for disasters, and do everything for the people” [备战备荒为人民]. In order to defeat Soviet revisionism and the ambitions of American imperialism, the whole country had to prepare for war. As well as digging air raid shelters, all of the work-units were also supposed to establish militia-type weapons units. We practiced shooting and studied military affairs, such as how to identify an American U-2 surveillance aircraft and how to shoot it down. At the time of the Kissinger and Nixon visits, I was living in Qingdao. We still didn’t have television broadcasts then, only radio and newspapers. When I heard about the visit, I just thought American imperialism had come to ingratiate itself with China. [讨好中国了] My only memory of that time was Taiwan being kicked out of the United Nations. I hoped that we could soon retake Taiwan and liberate our compatriots that were suffering hardship there. My uncle was a Kuomintang soldier. After he died, our family was no longer burdened with suspicion of being involved with a Taiwanese spy, so we could attend university and the army. At the time, the content of our political studies was based on Mao’s statement of 20 May 1970: “People of the world unite, and defeat the American aggressors and their running dogs” [全世界人民团结起来，打败美国侵略及其一切走狗]. This was Mao’s biggest challenge to Nixon after Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk had gone into exile in China.
When I heard about the visit, I just thought American imperialism had come to ingratiate itself with China.
I did not predict that China-U.S. relations would improve. However, an evident difference was the change from working to prevent American imperialists from invading China, as they had invaded Vietnam, to efforts to prevent Soviet revisionists, who were planning to drop atomic bombs on China. On top of that, Lin Biao defected a few months later and died in the plane crash, and after that came the death of Khrushchev [the Soviet leader]. This became Mao’s long-term war strategy: to begin uniting with the people of the United States to together oppose hegemonism. Only then would China be able to defeat the American paper tigers. We unquestioningly believed Mao’s strategy: to first bring the United States onto our side to defeat the Soviet Union, and once the Soviet Union was finished, then defeat the United States.
Today, the Chinese Communist Party has taken control of the United Nations and changed the international order. The devouring of America has already begun. Looking back on these past fifty years, the American military failures in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, as well as the thirty years since the end of the Cold War, are all smaller defeats in this process. In more recent decades, America’s openness and its embrace of the CCP has damaged the country’s central values of freedom and human rights, as well as causing the decline of its own position in the global economy.
Dwight L. Chapin
Dwight L. Chapin, 80, was a special assistant to President Richard M. Nixon beginning in 1969. Before the President, and Chapin, were caught up in the Watergate scandal, Chapin helped arrange the President’s historic 1972 trip to China.
That July we were in San Clemente, California. I can recall Nixon being antsy and asking about Kissinger all the time [while he was on the secret trip to China]. I had no knowledge of the trip until the press conference [announcing it on July 15]. [Nixon’s chief of staff Bob] Haldeman knew, and [former deputy National Security Advisor Al] Haig knew obviously, but I knew nothing about the secret trip, and I had an office next to Nixon’s. The number of people who really knew about the trip was very small. I also remember that when we came back from China in October 1971 [to prepare for President Nixon’s visit in February 1972], Haldeman called me and said, “There’s a spy ring spying on Nixon and Kissinger!” And the spy ring started because of the secrecy surrounding that trip, because there was foreign policy being conducted out of the White House. There were two admirals in the liaison office linked to the National Security Council. Also, the stenographer who was on the trip [to Beijing]. He copied documents and they went to the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nixon called it “treason.” Nixon wanted to prosecute but [Attorney General John] Mitchell intervened.
In any case, in October 1971, I made the trip to China with Kissinger to tie up loose ends. Kissinger had to work on the Communique and there was the open question of how to handle Taiwan; we went again in January 1972, Haig and I, to work on the [Shanghai] Communique. I had dinner with Zhou Enlai. I sat on his left and Kissinger was on his right. By this time I was invited into this action by Haldeman. I was in charge of the advance office. Initially, the President was thinking of going on the trip with just six people, and a couple of press people, and not even on Air Force One. But the size of the group kept growing as we came to a realization about the importance of the opening.
The President also overruled everyone on the Chinese request that he fly on a Chinese airplane with Chinese pilots. The Chinese were very insistent on this. So he went with it… It looked like something out of a B movie.
At the time, the conservative wing of the Republican Party was against it. That was a given. But the masses of the country were clueless. People didn’t think much about China. But the Bill Buckleys and Pat Buchanans (Pat was in the White House by then) were apoplectic. They were anti-communists, and what about our friends in Taiwan? This was a geopolitical earthquake. The ramifications with the Russians were huge, and we had a war in Vietnam. It was dramatic. There was a sense of something important happening. We were all working with our best diplomatic skills. We were conscious that we had to give things a chance to mature. We went on advance trips to see how things would work. How would journalists file stories? How were we going to get satellite communications? We were going to bring the press. This is a country with a free press. So we had to explain to the Chinese why this was important. I was the acting chief of protocol. And my counterpart was Han Xu, who later served as Chinese ambassador to the United States.
For the Nixon trip I remember that we landed and went to the guest house. Zhou greeted us with tea. Then we went to our rooms, and Premier Zhou came back to get the President. He told us that the President could go and meet the Chairman [Mao]. We had no advance warning that was going to happen. When Nixon went to see Mao only Bob Taylor [our single secret service agent] went with him. Usually, even if the President was in [D.C.] the capital, two dozen agents would typically travel with him. The President also overruled everyone on the Chinese request that he fly on a Chinese airplane, with Chinese pilots [on a trip from Beijing to Hangzhou]. The Chinese were very insistent on this. So he went with it. It was a prop plane, and the cabin pressure system wasn’t that great. I remember I shot some footage of them [Nixon and Kissinger] having tea, and all the steam shooting up. It looked like something out of a B movie.
Chas W. Freeman Jr.
Chas W. Freeman Jr., 78, a longtime American diplomat, was at the time a young State Department official. Freeman had studied Mandarin in Taiwan, and his exceptional language skills soon brought him to the attention of the State Department’s China desk. Before long, he was serving as an interpreter at the Warsaw Talks between American and Chinese officials.
There had been an effort by the Nixon administration to reach out to China directly and indirectly. They had asked the U.S. Ambassador to Poland [Walter J. Stoessel Jr.] to reach out to the Chinese. Stoessel led talks at the Chinese and American embassies in Warsaw that led to an initial proposal by the U.S. that evolved into the “One China” formula for the Shanghai Communique, as well as a proposal to send an American presidential envoy to Beijing. I was to go in May ‘70 to the Warsaw talks but these were called off because of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. China was the foreign protector of the Khmer Rouge. They canceled for that reason as well as the defection of their chargé in the Netherlands but in late March of 1971, I was summoned back to the State Department’s China desk. I found myself writing papers for an undisclosed purpose. But I had read the record of the Warsaw talks and understood what was in prospect.
At the State Department, I was ghostwriting for Al Jenkins, who was the head of the China desk and a channel to Kissinger. Paul Kreisberg, Al Jenkins’ predecessor at State, had earlier come up with the formula that eventually finessed the Taiwan issue. I knew what was going on but I didn’t know who was going to go [to Beijing as the presidential envoy]. Kissinger visited on July 9 to 11 [1971]. Nixon announced it on the 15th; I listened to that with great interest. I had been telling foreign diplomats that, for strategic reasons, we were looking at a different relationship with China. A rapprochement with China would be a bulwark against Soviet aggression. The idea was really Nixon’s, not Kissinger’s. Kissinger was initially skeptical. Still, Kissinger had studied Metternich and how to reintegrate a revolutionary state into a stable balance of power. After he met the Chinese he said it was the only time he had ever met with someone with an understanding of statecraft and history as broad as his own.
That was then. Now, we’re in a much different situation. Today, there is no strategic challenge of the sort there was then to produce a rearrangement of global politics and the U.S.-China relationship. I would argue that we shouldn’t be doing the stupid things we are doing. We’re framing this as a military battle but the real sphere is economics. The Biden administration, unlike the Trump administration, knows how to run the government but they don’t know how to drive it. They have staffers rather than statesmen. They are stuck in the past. I don’t see any motivation for the kind of grand diplomatic opening that occurred in 1971 and 1972. We’re confronting the China of our imagination, not the China that exists in the real world. This is like the McCarthy era. We have a powerful, pseudo-patriotic attitude. “Get on the team! If you don’t, you’re a subversive or a sleazebag.” I wish I could say there was something we could do. In our own interest, we need to rebuild the relationship with China, brick by brick. We have a Leninist Republican Party that is conducting a scorched earth policy against Biden. They’re not going to let him achieve anything. Like Facebook, they want to slice and dice the public and exploit its disparate prejudices.
Jerome A. Cohen
Jerome A. Cohen, 91, is a distinguished scholar and one of America’s foremost authorities on China’s legal system. He has taught at Harvard, Berkeley and New York University, and in the late 1960s was part of a group of scholars centered around Harvard and M.I.T. that pressed the U.S. to improve relations with China.
Kissinger’s secret trip came to me as a great surprise. I had talked to [Henry] Kissinger at the end of May [1971] about making a secret trip to Ottawa to meet PRC ambassador Huang Hua. This was before his mid-July secret trip to Beijing. I had met Huang Hua with [Senator] Ted Kennedy and said: “Henry, you could meet Huang Hua.” And he replied: “Do you really think I could go up there secretly?” I was preparing my first piece for Foreign Affairs, and I had just appeared on [NBC TV’s] “Meet the Press” with [the Harvard China scholar] John King Fairbank to advocate for the PRC’s replacement of Taiwan in the UN and normalization [of relations between the U.S. and China]. In 1968, I had also written a memo with [James C.] Jim Thomson and others at Harvard and M.I.T. about finding an opening to China.
So by 1971, the quest for improvement in relations with China was in the air. China was going to get into the U.N., as Nixon and Kissinger knew but nevertheless they had [George H.W.] Bush publicly fighting to keep the PRC out of the U.N.! I had been working with Senator Kennedy since ‘66 to advocate for a new China policy. Teddy [Kennedy] was eager to make China policy a platform to run against Nixon in ‘72. There was kind of a race on to see whether Democratic leaders could get to China before Nixon. Teddy and I were trying to go to China but we didn’t get anywhere. If Teddy had been prepared to say that Taiwan is part of China, we would have had a chance to get there even before Nixon. But [in the spring 1971] meeting with Huang Hua [in Ottawa] Kennedy refused to say that Taiwan was part of China. Huang Hua was very disappointed.
It was, of course, extremely difficult to get into China before Kissinger’s secret visit and Nixon’s highly publicized 1972 visit, though the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) had gone in 1971 and before them the ping-pong group. At the time of the secret Kissinger visit, there was a lot of focus on the topic. Fairbank was pushing for normalization but he had been burned during the McCarthy era, so he was cautious [about saying that publicly]. Harvard’s other distinguished scholar [Edwin O.] Reischauer, an authority on Japan, was worried about selling out Taiwan, although he too favored normalization. He wanted us at least to alert Japan in advance of our public move toward China or preferably consult with the Japanese in advance.
…This is perhaps a good opportunity to think back about what happened in 1971 and 1972 and to stem a tide of U.S.-China vitriol that is going to take us back to the pre-1971 era.
Today, of course, we’re in a very different era. And this is perhaps a good opportunity to think back about what happened in 1971 and 1972 and to stem a tide of U.S.-China vitriol that is going to take us back to the pre-1971 era. Do you know what American attitudes toward Mao’s China were in the 1950s and 1960s? Now, we’re witnessing a growing tide of anti-China policies at home, while China has its own domestic politics and rising nationalism full of anti-U.S. feeling. Neither side wants to appear too open to moderation of hostility because of domestic public opinion. So it’s a wonderful occasion to ask: “Are we going too far in the current hostility?” We don’t want to go back to the Cold War or embrace an unthinking hostility to everything in China. We have to be concerned about the wonderful Chinese people, and also the Chinese elites who are not so happy about what is taking place there under Xi Jinping’s increasingly oppressive rule. We don’t want to abandon them. What we need to think about is how we cope with Xi’s assertiveness without going too far.
Photo credit: Axel Springer/AP Photo, National Committee on U.S. China Relations
Judy Hoarfrost
Judy Hoarfrost, 65, was on the U.S. national ping-pong team, which in the spring of 1971 traveled to Nagoya, Japan for the world championship tournament. Before the end of the tournament, they were invited to visit China, for a friendship tour that included a meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai — a trip that help coin a phrase: “ping-pong diplomacy.”
I was 15 years old in April 1971. We were at the World Championships in Nagoya, Japan. It was a two week long tournament that takes place every two years. It was my first world championships. We got the invitation on my last day, and ten days later we were there. In our American passports, mainland China was listed as one of the places you could not go. We got our passports and they blackened that out. We flew to Hong Kong, and from there walked across the bridge [into mainland China]. Then we took the train to Guanzgzhou, then flew to Beijing. We played matches and met Zhou Enlai. We played at big stadiums in Beijing and in Shanghai.
I knew this was a big deal. It was the first time since ‘49 that Americans had visited China. We knew about the isolation and communism but we didn’t know about the Cultural Revolution. It was a red carpet tour, and relatively peaceful. We didn’t know it but there were a few from the American press with us. One of the journalists with us was John Roderick, who had worked for the AP in China before ‘49. There was a photo of me with Zhou Enlai. Our pictures were in Life magazine. I lived in Eugene, Oregon and had never been outside North America.
In China, everyone was riding bicycles. We stayed at the Peking Hotel. To the people there, we were oddities. There were no other Americans and very few Europeans [tourists in China at the time]. In Beijing, there was a big crowd for the match, maybe 17,000 people. At that time, they all seemed to clap in unison. We were playing players that greatly outmatched us. But their motto was “Friendship first; competition last.” Although I won 3 of the 4 matches, that wasn’t the point of the trip. At the Great Hall of the People, I shook hands with Zhou Enlai. He said, “Ni hao” and I said, “Ni Hao.” We sat in a room and Nancy Tang [who grew up in New York City and later returned to China to work as an interpreter] was the translator. Still, Zhou Enlai would often make corrections to her in English. The trip was important because our team president Graham Steenhoven said that we’d like to invite the Chinese team to do a reciprocal trip to the United States. And my teammate on the ping-pong team, Glenn Cowan, asked Zhou Enlai what he thought of the hippie movement. We also asked about Chairman Mao. Where is he? we asked. We were told that he had a cold.
In 2021 the World Championships were supposed to be held in Houston and then next year in China. We’ll see if it happens this year in Houston. Right now, we’re going through a rough patch. The political climate has been adversarial. There’s still a lot of people who want to blame others for everything. The way to solve this is to roll up your sleeves and work it out. That was the idea behind ping-pong diplomacy.
Jan Berris
Jan Berris, 77, was a young foreign service officer in the U.S. Information Agency, considering taking a job at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. In 1972, Berris took part in the U.S. visit of the Chinese ping-pong team, which followed Nixon’s historic trip to China. Berris is now vice president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
I had just come back from two years serving as the assistant cultural affairs officer at the American consulate in Hong Kong. My next post was going to be running the U.S. Information Agency office in Surabaya, Indonesia. However, while on home leave in Michigan, two former professors — Alex Eckstein and Richard Solomon — asked me to consider taking a year’s leave of absence to work in New York at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (whose board they were both on). The Committee was going to be co-hosting, along with the U.S. Table Tennis Association, a visit of the Chinese national ping-pong team in 1972. So I had stopped off in New York in early July for an interview at the Committee on my way to D. C., where I was to begin Indonesian language training. The interview was successful and I was offered the job – but wasn’t quite sure I wanted to take it. The Committee gave me the summer to make up my mind.
It was about two weeks after the interview that Nixon made his surprise announcement on July 15. I was dumbfounded that the Kissinger trip happened – and then I got caught up in how it affected me personally. The next day, when I got into the USIA office, my colleagues, bosses, everyone who knew that I was contemplating the year off to work at the National Committee, urged me to take it. Up until then, they had been non-committal. But now, we all recognized that Dr. Kissinger’s trip had been a game-changer, and that the announced trip for President Nixon only increased the chances that real movement in the relationship was possible and that the National Committee was going to be in the thick of things. On July 16, I called the National Committee and told them I would take the job. On February 21, 1972, the day that Nixon landed in China, I was at the wedding of Susan Shirk and Sam Popkin. It was a wonderful event in the M.I.T. chapel, with the added excitement of a call coming in from Air Force One in the middle of the wedding requesting Richard Solomon’s assistance with Nixon’s toast. As I recall, he came up with the “seize the hour, seize the day” reference, quoting Chairman Mao. The opening to China changed my life. That year’s leave of absence from the Foreign Service turned into a half century of working at the National Committee, and the opportunity to be part of an extraordinary relationship and to have known amazing Americans and Chinese at all levels and from, as the Chinese like to say, all walks of life.
Richard Bernstein
Richard Bernstein, 77, opened Time magazine’s Beijing bureau in 1973. He went on to become a longtime correspondent for The New York Times. In 1971, he was a 27-year-old graduate student at Harvard doing a Ph.D.in History and East Asian Languages.
When the press conference announcing Kissinger’s secret trip to China took place I was in Hong Kong, on my way to Taiwan to study Chinese and start work on my dissertation. What I remember is less the announcement that Kissinger had been to China and that Nixon would go in a few months, and more a press conference attended by the entire Anglo-American journalist corps in Hong Kong. It was held by fifteen members of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, (CCAS), who had just emerged from a “friendship visit” to China, the first American group allowed into the country since the ping-pong team a couple months before.
You have to remember the context. The Vietnam War was still the preoccupying event of the time. I had been at Harvard during the student uprising there that followed the invasion of Cambodia in 1969 and had been an early member of CCAS, helping to write a book, The Indochina Story, intended as a sort of guide to activists in making their anti-Vietnam war arguments. The atmosphere meant a certain worshipfulness toward China, the great Asian revolutionary power, and the fact that some fellow students and faculty members had actually been able to go there was far more exciting to me than the visit of a mere American national security advisor and president. Needless to say, my views on all of that have changed a great deal in the intervening years. At the time, I certainly didn’t appreciate the Kissinger-Nixon initiative in terms of strategy, as a move to isolate North Vietnam and contain the Soviet Union. For me and my fellow grad students, the opening to China signalled an opportunity to build a kind of people-to-people relationship with the revolutionary Maoist Holy Land, to learn about it, and, yes, to present it in highly favorable terms to the public.
It was tremendously important to me professionally, as things turned out. While I was in Hong Kong, I arranged with Lee Lescaze, The Washington Post bureau chief in Hong Kong, to write some stories from Taiwan on the reaction there to the Kissinger-Nixon initiative, which was deemed a tremendous betrayal to the Republic of China, still under the dictatorial control of Chiang Kai-shek. Writing a few pieces for The Washington Post on that topic was the start of my journalistic career. Then, a few weeks after the Nixon trip, I was on the second CCAS delegation invited to China, spending five weeks there in March and April 1972, with my fellow anti-war, pro-China activists, visiting factories and people’s communes, and even having a late-night, early morning meeting with Zhou Enlai (where, I’m embarrassed now to report, we sought reassurance that in its opening to the U.S., China was not abandoning the North Vietnamese).
After the trip, Lescaze sat me down in The Washington Post office, where I wrote a five-piece series on my trip to China. Up to then, The Post, unlike the rival New York Times, had never had a reporter in China (except for the coverage of the Nixon trip itself), so it gave my pieces prominent space. It was an important moment for me, the first “big story” in my career as a reporter that continued for the next 35 years, first at Time magazine and then The New York Times.
I’m sure my stories in The Post reflected the uncritical breathlessness of most writing about China in that early period, where everybody all over the political spectrum was rhapsodic about the great China breakthrough. But my five weeks in the country were for me the beginning of a political transformation. I was deeply disillusioned by what I witnessed in China — the utter, enforced adulation of Mao, the poverty, the conformity, the propaganda, the loudspeakers, the obvious, inescapable control over every aspect of life, the sadness in the eyes of the university professor who ritualistically lied to to us about how much he’d learned being sent down to the countryside and learning from the peasants who loved Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Far from pushing me toward admiration for the Maoist experiment, that first visit to China turned me into a lifelong skeptic of revolutionary actions and political radicalism in general.
Ted Koppel
Edward Martin James Koppel “Ted,” 80, was a longtime broadcast journalist best known as the anchor of “Nightline,” a late night news program that began in 1979 on ABC News during the 445-day long Iran hostage crisis. Koppel reported from Saigon and Hong Kong and covered the U.S. State Department.
I had spent three years in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and I came back to the U.S. in the fall of 1971. I was the Hong Kong bureau chief for ABC News. I was responsible for covering China but most of the time I spent in southeast Asia, in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. I could not get into China, so we’d drive to the border and set up a gigantic antenna and with that antenna we could pull the signal of the TV station in Guangzhou [across the border in mainland China]. It was called kinescoping. We’d set up the antenna and a TV set and film the output of the TV set. That was the only way we could get video. At that time, there was something called the “caliper man”. The caliper is that device you used in high school geometry to measure distances, and the caliper man would get new photos of Mao and measure the distance between the mole and his lower lip. They knew Mao had doubles. So they would ask: Is this Mao or a double?
At that time, we were grateful for anything we saw; anything we could record [for television]. About the Kissinger and Nixon visits in ‘71 and ‘72, we had a hint that something was in the works. The American ping-pong team had been invited. I went to the Hong Kong train station to meet them when they came out. That was a big deal at the time. Also, Nixon referred to China for the first time as the People’s Republic of China. These were the little strands we were clawing at. It was just as radical as you might think it was. One of the allusions made at the time was that it was like visiting the dark side of the moon. Remember, in 1971 China was still in the role of a tertiary world power that was almost in the position of a petitioner. They would never put it that way but it was more of what was then called a “third world country,” and in the years since then they have grown into a rival of the United States. If you see it the way China might look at it, it’s not at all odd that the relationship would change dramatically.
Nicholas R. Lardy
Nicholas R. Lardy, 75, is a distinguished economist and an authority on China’s economic system. He is now the Anthony M. Solomon Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington.
I was 25 years old in 1971, and enrolled in the economics PhD program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Having started Chinese language classes as an undergraduate several years earlier, I was already aiming for a career of research and teaching on the Chinese economy. I had no premonition of [Kissinger or] Nixon’s trip but was excited when it was announced. My wife and I rushed out to buy our first television so we could watch all of the promised live coverage. The Nixon trip for me was a breakthrough. Previously I had accepted the likelihood that I would always be trying to understand China from a distance. The trip foretold the likely opening of relations and the eventual possibility of travel to China. I made my first trip to China in 1978. I spent three weeks tagging along with my wife, who was a member of a delegation of the Hong Kong Family Planning Association.
Minxin Pei
Minxin Pei, 63, grew up in Shanghai, moved to the U.S. in the 1980s and attended Harvard University, where he earned his PhD. He is now a professor of political science at Claremont College and one of the country’s leading experts on Chinese politics.
Like everyone else in China, I was very surprised [by Kissinger’s secret visit and Nixon’s opening to China]. But I was too young to understand its implications. In July 1971, I was 14 years old and attending middle school in Nanhui county, a suburb of Shanghai. The only thing I felt at that time was it had to be a good thing for China because the U.S. was paying attention to us. Although I wasn’t aware of Kissinger’s visit, I soon learned about Nixon’s forthcoming visit because the announcement made by China and the U.S. referred to Nixon’s acceptance of Zhou Enlai’s invitation. The Chinese government then began to “prepare” its people for the event. We were told that, in case we saw foreigners, we should behave “properly” — be neither humble nor arrogant (不卑不亢). In retrospect, this was quite ridiculous because the chances of us meeting Westerners were practically zero at that time. China was isolated from the rest of the world during the Cultural Revolution.
Of course, the Nixon-Kissinger opening did not change things immediately, but it did pave the way for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. The opening that Nixon and Kissinger helped create made things a lot easier for Deng. All he needed to do was to get the bilateral relationship “normalized.” In 1979, by the time China announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with the U.S., I was in college. I remember where I was when I heard the news (on the sidewalk in front of the main building of the college). We were all excited because the future suddenly looked brighter — personally and professionally. I benefited directly from the opening and the subsequent four decades of engagement between the U.S. and China. In China, I had American professors teaching me at college. They also helped me win a scholarship to study in the United States. My life was totally changed after 1979 even though it would take another five years before I came to the U.S. to start a new life.
Susan Shirk
Susan Shirk, 76, is a former U.S. government official and one of America’s leading scholars of modern Chinese politics. She is a research professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, where she chairs the 21st Century China Center. In 1971, she was a 26-year old graduate student at M.I.T., doing research for her PhD dissertation in Hong Kong, interviewing refugees from the mainland.
Our delegation from the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars – an organization opposed to America’s role in the Vietnam War – consisted of fifteen American graduate students doing their dissertation research at the Universities Services Centre in Hong Kong. I was interviewing refugees who had attended middle school in China. Suddenly we were invited to visit China for a month in June-July 1971, the first American group to visit China after the ping-pong team. We discovered while we were in Beijing that Kissinger had been there at the same time because The New York Times contacted us and asked us to report the big news since James “Scotty” Reston, their correspondent who was also visiting Beijing, had been incapacitated by an emergency appendectomy. Then Premier Zhou Enlai asked our delegation to meet with him and bring our tape recorders so he could communicate internationally about why China had made the surprising decision to meet with Kissinger and invite President Richard Nixon to visit China. In that four-hour conversation, Premier Zhou said that they were inviting the U.S. president because for the people of the two countries to become friends, the two governments and the two presidents had to talk. Out of the blue he said he wished Susan Shirk had been president of the United States, but since she wasn’t, they had to invite President Nixon. (I had been chatting with his interpreter, Tang Wensheng (Nancy) that afternoon and she may have mentioned me to him.) Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao, two of the Cultural Revolution Gang of Four, sat beside Zhou like Mao’s watchdogs to make sure he didn’t deviate from the script.
Over a half a century, the interdependence of China and the U.S. became the linchpin of globalization and scientific advances, but now both countries have turned inward in pursuit of that Mao-era objective of “self-reliance.”
As young China scholars we felt as if our lives and careers were about to become much more exciting because the opportunity to study China directly on the ground had suddenly opened up. From that time on, I spent a lot of time doing research field work in China, making many friends in China, and trying to understand how China actually works. It’s been a very positive experience to observe at close hand how Chinese people have drastically improved their lives compared to the Mao era poverty and totalitarianism we saw on that first visit. But recently it’s been painful to see China (and Hong Kong) returning to some of the Mao-era practices that I studied fifty years ago, such as political selection criteria for school admission and jobs (I called it “virtuocracy”). After achieving the regular peaceful turnover of top leadership, the CCP has now gone back to Mao-style personality cult and dictatorship for life. Over a half a century, the interdependence of China and the U.S. became the linchpin of globalization and scientific advances, but now both countries have turned inward in pursuit of that Mao-era objective of “self-reliance” (自力更生). It’s a depressing time for old China hands like me as well as for my Chinese friends of similar age who remember the Mao era.
Anthony Saich
Anthony Saich, 68, is a distinguished scholar at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is also director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. In 1971, he was 18 years old and had just completed high school in London.
Being in the U.K., it [the U.S. opening to China] was not something that impacted me initially. I had been involved in the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and some wondered if this might have ramifications for the ongoing conflict. Little did I realize at the time that this would have major implications for myself personally and professionally.
The visit opened the way for student exchanges between Europe and China to begin. With the flow between the U.S. and China still blocked by the lack of diplomatic relations, other nations in Europe and elsewhere became surrogates. The British negotiated a reciprocal program for fifteen students from each country to study in the other for a period of one year. This permitted U.K. students to experience the reality of studying and living in China long before such a path was open to those in the United States. It had a profound effect on my understanding of China and helped us to get beyond the propaganda that was put out from Beijing to see the harsh conditions that existed in the country. The experience taught me how seriously the Chinese Communist party took language and its control, and to look beyond the rhetoric to see what was actually happening on the ground. It also launched me on a professional engagement with the study of China that has persisted, to my surprise, until the present day. I received a British Council scholarship to study in China starting in early September 1976. Going the other way were luminaries such as Yang Jiechi, Wang Guangya and Lu Yongtu. I was an experiment, as virtually all the other students were language and literature majors. But I was one of the first, if not the first, to study the social sciences. It was a dramatic time in Beijing following the Tangshan earthquake. And shortly after my arrival, I witnessed the events following the death of Mao Zedong, including the arrest of the “Gang of Four.” Subsequently, there were four of us lucky enough to be named the first students since 1949 from “bourgeois” countries to be selected to study at Nanjing University.
Robert A. Kapp
Robert A. Kapp, 78, is the president of Robert A. Kapp & Associates and a former president of the U.S.-China Business Council. At the time of Kissinger’s secret visit, he was a 28-year-old assistant professor at Rice University in Houston, having just completed his PhD at Yale in modern Chinese history.
The dominant “given” from the time I started graduate school in East Asian Studies in 1964, was that China was going to be an increasingly pressing American concern (Vietnam alone made that clear), and that it was utterly and physically inaccessible because of the rupture of all relations in 1949 and the hostilities that immediately followed in Korea. And so, when news of the Kissinger trip emerged, and then the Nixon trip took place, I was transfixed and delighted that perhaps the remote and secluded object of my personal and professional attention — and ambitions, truth be told — might become a little less out of reach. It was a big moment. Now, there’s been a sharp reassessment of our relations. But it is ridiculous to assert today that a blossoming of relations between the U.S. and China — which came to be called “engagement” — was a mistake or the cause of today’s frictions. People should remember this: where would we be if the U.S. had not broken the ice with China in 1971 and 1972? Where would we be if Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping had not established regular diplomatic relations in 1979, and the two countries had not signed a commercial normalization agreement in 1980? Where would we be if America had not negotiated the stringent terms that China accepted in order to participate fully in the world’s trading regime embodied in the WTO? In other words, the first question to ask is, what if we had chosen not to engage with China? And the answer is that America and the world would have been far worse off. A policy of keeping China “barefoot and pregnant” would have been a recipe for disaster.
J. Stapleton Roy
J. Stapleton Roy, 86, was a senior American diplomat, at one time the U.S. ambassador to China and is the founding director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. Roy was born in Nanjing, China, and at the height of the Cold War served as a Soviet specialist in Moscow.
During the 1950s, we referred to the Sino-Soviet bloc because our two principal antagonists were the Soviet Union and Communist China. But by the end of the 1950s, we were beginning to pick up indications that there were serious disputes between Moscow and Beijing, sufficiently so that when President Kennedy came into office, he began to speculate about possible ways of finding an opening to China. He looked at the possibility of providing famine relief, or things like that, but the opportunity never occurred. Also, the political base didn’t exist in the United States for these types of gestures. And by the time that President Johnson moved into the White House, we were focused on the Vietnam War, where China was, again, aiding our enemy. So we were frustrated because Sino-Soviet relations were deteriorating. But by the late ‘60s, it appeared that the ideological dispute with Moscow was much more severe than the dispute with the United States. Moscow, after all, was asserting the ideological right to be the arbiter of legitimacy within the communist world. This is what Beijing was not accepting. The Americans clearly were not in that game. In 1968, a year before the [Russia-China] border clashes, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and set up a more friendly government there. The justification was that, while the Soviet Union was not talking about using military force to expand the communist empire, the concept behind the Brezhnev doctrine was that they would not permit the roll back [of the communist bloc]. Once a country became communist, the Soviet Union would have an interest in preventing it from being ousted.
Well, how are the Chinese supposed to read this? The ideological dispute between the two had reached the point where it would have been quite credible for the Soviet Union to declare that China was no longer a communist country. And under the Brezhnev doctrine, that raised the risk that the Soviet Union would try to oust the government in Beijing and restore a friendly government. It wasn’t simply the fact that the border clashes had already occurred; it was that there was an ideological justification for intervention in China by the Soviet Union. And yet, we had no way to turn that deterioration into an advantage for the United States. It was better to have Moscow and Beijing not cooperating against us. But we still faced two separate antagonists, both of whom were formidable in their own ways.
That was the context. And that’s why my reaction to Dr. Kissinger showing up in Beijing was, “Wow, maybe we’ll be able to finally discover that opening to China that had previously not existed.” At the time, it seemed inconceivable. Our intelligence estimates from that time have all now been made public. And you will see that C.I.A. intelligence estimates accurately found that relations between the Soviet Union and China were getting worse. The military clashes on the Ussuri River had occurred in the late spring of 1969. So there was no misunderstanding of the fact that the relationship between Moscow and Beijing had broken down. But what was missing was a catalyst that could somehow produce an opening. And the idea that an American president would be willing to go to the capital of one of our principal antagonists simply didn’t cross anybody’s mind, except for President Nixon. [By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the U.S. and China began sending one another signals of warmer ties.] The Chinese had read the hints. For example, they had paid attention to Richard Nixon’s 1967 article in Foreign Affairs, when he talked about the need to integrate China into the global community. And the small gestures would be like permitting $50 of purchases in Hong Kong of oddities that might have been produced in Communist China. Those were not producing any visible change. But on the other hand, they were signals.
Henry Kissinger can talk at length about the difficulties the American side had in finding a credible channel to communicate with the Chinese. We tried various methods. Romania was looked at but the Chinese had no confidence that the Romanians could maintain secrecy because of the fear that they were penetrated by the Soviet intelligence services. This is why we ended up with Pakistan as the intermediary. There’s a story about one of our ambassadors chasing the Chinese ambassador in Warsaw, to try to convey a message, and the Chinese ambassador was afraid to even have any contact with him. It wasn’t a simple process.
Fox Butterfield
Fox Butterfield, 82, is a long time foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Butterfield studied at Harvard University with the scholar John King Fairbank, was part of the team at The Times that won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for the Pentagon Papers, and reported from Saigon and Hong Kong. In 1979, he opened The Times Beijing bureau, which made him the first correspondent from the paper stationed in China since 1949.
I had just finished working on the Pentagon Papers project for The New York Times. I was about to be sent off to Saigon to cover the Vietnam War for the next four years. I ended up there from July 1971 to April 29, 1975, when the U.S. ordered the evacuation of Saigon. During the Vietnam War, the Chinese offered a lot of assistance to North Vietnam. They sent soldiers there to do road repairs and keep the lines running. The North Vietnamese were often running out of manpower, so China provided a lot of construction work, much of which was done by the military. They also armed some anti-aircraft positions. U.S. pilots had to be very careful flying at high speeds not to venture into Chinese airspace. Hanoi is really not that far from the Chinese border. The entire time I was in Vietnam, the issue of the new U.S.-China relationship [following Kissinger’s secret mission to China] was really important, and it had contradictory consequences. The South Vietnamese thought about it on their own terms. They thought the U.S. would get out of Vietnam and hand it over to North Vietnam. In other words, the U.S. was going to sell them out to the North Vietnamese or China. For a long time before that, things had been relatively clear cut. But when Nixon tried to establish relations with China [in 1971] that created a different situation. In the end, of course, it didn’t make any difference because North Vietnam had enough support from the Russians and China to finish off South Vietnam. I got airlifted out of Saigon on Tuesday, April 29, 1975. I can still remember that day. I was airlifted out by helicopter into the South China Sea and went aboard the USS Mobile. Once onboard, we were allowed a single phone call of about three minutes. I called the foreign editor of The Times, James Greenfield. I told him where I was, and he said, “I’m glad we were able to reach you because when you get off that ship you’re going to Hong Kong to cover China.”
David Barboza is the co-founder and a staff writer at The Wire. Previously, he was a longtime business reporter and foreign correspondent at The New York Times. @DavidBarboza2
