“Nixon is coming to China!”
Fifty years on, I can still recall how surreal this sounded to my ears back in the summer of 1971. I was 11 years old, about to enter middle school in Beijing that fall and, like everyone else around me, completely stunned by the recent official announcement.
Cut off from the outside world for over two decades, China was then dirt poor and in the depth of the Cultural Revolution. The educational system was in shambles. School curriculum and teaching were slapdash and saturated with Party propaganda. Libraries remained closed to the public; bookstores chiefly offered Chairman Mao’s writing and political study material. Millions of high school graduates and intellectuals were sent from the cities to rural backwater where they languished for many years with no hope of return. In 1971, my father was in a labor camp in Henan, my older brother on a farm in Inner Mongolia.
Despite this impoverished, shabby life in which all of us were trapped, many of us existed, at least in certain aspects, in a mental state of blissful ignorance. This was both the consequence and the condition of the totalitarian politics that thrived in our country’s isolation. Even though I, like the vast majority of my countrymen, had never set eyes on a real American — or any foreigner for that matter — I viewed Americans as a people we would liberate in the future.
I grew up with a daily flood of virulent anti-U.S. propaganda. Even after we fell out with our Soviet Big Brothers, the U.S. imperialists (美帝) still beat the Soviet revisionists (蘇修) to top our enemy list. In my memory, this propaganda remained constant in the official media around Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s visits. But in fact, there was a short break in programming thanks to meticulous, behind-the-scenes Party directives on the exact degrees and dates such anti-U.S. propaganda was to be tuned down during Nixon’s week-long visit. Business returned to normal right after his departure; even before some of Nixon’s delegates had left China, CCTV was already airing 奇襲白虎團, a rabidly anti-U.S. “Revolutionary Model Opera.”
The official manufactured image of America, however, was extremely cartoonish. Even as a brainwashed school child, I could tell, for example, that those American soldiers in Heroic Sons and Daughters, a hugely popular Korean War movie I had watched at least a dozen times, were played by Chinese actors with fake big noses and white face powder. They always looked not just evil, but scared, stupid and ridiculous, and they showed up just long enough to get mowed down by our “volunteer troops.” How much can you really hate such a paper tiger? Is it really surprising that my hostility was not only abstract but also mixed with a measure of mirth?
Against this backdrop, and seemingly out of the blue, Nixon was coming!
When the state media rather curtly announced the news, you can imagine how the Party’s sudden decision to welcome the leader of the western hegemon shocked us all. But disbelief and bewilderment soon turned into a mood of excited curiosity. In the ensuing months, Beijing was full of speculative whispers; even my father in his letters home couldn’t resist asking for some Nixon gossip. The government issued guidelines on the proper attitude we should all display toward the American visitors, such as the catch phrase “不卑不亢, 不冷不熱” — “not obsequious, nor arrogant; not cold, nor hot.”
Then, on a frigid winter morning in February 1972, the aircraft carrying Nixon and his entourage touched down in Beijing airport. The next day, Nixon and Mao shook hands. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
But change, of course, didn’t happen overnight. The Cultural Revolution did not end until Mao finally died in 1976, and the U.S.-China diplomatic relationship wasn’t normalized until 1978. Chinese life remained largely the same for years after Nixon’s visit. But while I wasn’t able to articulate it at the time, I had a vague yet powerful sense that the visit was the beginning of something — something that would affect my future, too. In the hearts of countless ordinary Chinese living in the giant, iron house that was Mao’s China, it was like a window had opened just a crack, briefly letting in a beam of light. It was the moment when something like hope germinated.
Indeed, once the ice was broken, it was only a matter of time before the spring tide would overflow. After Deng came to power and initiated the Reform and Open Up in 1978, “Emancipating the mind” became a national slogan. The college entrance exam was reinstalled, and I was among the first batch of students to be admitted into Peking University. With the floodgate reopened, a torrent of foreign books poured out; classics were reprinted, new translations introduced, libraries packed, and long lines formed outside bookstores before each new publication. Suddenly, everyone around me was reading hungrily, joyfully.
I can still recall my friends’ envy for a new set of western classical music recordings I bought, after standing in line for hours. They were the very first music recordings I owned: 30 cassettes in plastic cases wrapped with verdant paper flaps. I must admit that, lying on a stretch of spring grass by the Weiming Lake on Peking University campus, with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 booming out of my small, crude cassette player, it felt like paradise.
There were poetry readings in the parks and literary and intellectual salons at people’s cramped homes. In this enthralling moment of a nation opening up and embracing the world, a “Democracy Wall” covered with samizdat briefly came to life in downtown Beijing. Oh, what a sweet age of innocence!
In 1979, Deng suspended the Democracy Wall and sentenced Wei Jingsheng, a dissident who called him a dictator, to 20 years in prison. And throughout the 1980s, Party hardliners repeatedly lashed out against liberalism. Yet periodical chills couldn’t freeze the surging spring water. No force could put an entire people back to slumber.
Chinese students kept on arriving in the United States. I was among the first of a swelling flock of wide-eyed, gauche, eager students on American campuses who wanted to learn everything possible and then return to help change our homeland. We were convinced that China would one day become not only more prosperous but also freer and more democratic.
Today, my generation of Chinese is known as both “the Cultural Revolution Generation” and “the 1980s Generation” — the former marking our Maoist-style coming of age, the latter our romance with western liberal democracy. In 2006, I published a book on 1980s China — a cultural retrospective on a passionate decade of learning, exploration and intellectual and artistic fermenting, which climaxed at Tiananmen Square.
But if we look further back, if we train our lens on a wider geopolitical Cold War landscape, we would see that the story really started with Nixon and Kissinger’s momentous trips to China. Those dialogues and negotiations opened the door. Intentionally or not, engagements have led to enormous opportunities for both sides, and the process has benefited millions of Chinese lives, mine included.
Having lived in the U.S. for many years, I’ve learned a good deal more about those secret trips and conversations. Indeed, I even felt ambivalent when I first read The Kissinger Transcripts, a thick tome published in 1999 by André Schiffrin (who happened to be the editor and publisher of my own books). It’s clear that neither Nixon nor Kissinger ever harbored any fantasy or interest in nudging China toward a democracy. For them, it was a strategic game of grand design, all about balancing Soviet power, maintaining American advantage and pulling out of the Vietnam War — nothing to do with moral values or changing political systems. For them, such sentimental wishful thinking deserved nothing but mockery. It all seemed so coldly calculative, a cynical transaction.
For [Nixon and Kissinger], such sentimental wishful thinking deserved nothing but mockery. It all seemed so coldly calculative, a cynical transaction.
But it should also be acknowledged that, at least for a period, hope of deeper changes in China was serious and exhilaratingly alive. Indeed, few of us would have expected that, half a century after Nixon’s trip, the U.S.-China relationship would be standing at such a disastrously chilling crossroad. The dark side of globalization, the deteriorating record of the “engagement policy,” China’s resurrection of totalitarian politics under Xi Jinping — all of these have made many of us bitterly disappointed, outraged, and alarmed. We feel hoodwinked and cheated out of our cherished dreams about a better, friendlier China.
So, how should we assess this long, treacherous bilateral journey? Fifty years ago, in 1971, a few shrewd leaders sat down to play a geopolitical game that was cheered on by many. In its many twists and turns since, the game has been driven chiefly by economic interests while being morally ambiguous and politically unpredictable.
If we are now approaching something resembling an end to this game, the least we should do is place the events that initiated it back into their full historical contexts, acknowledging debt and credit where it’s due. Perhaps then we may commemorate them properly while also gleaning some badly needed insights for what comes next.
Jianying Zha is a writer and a contributor to The New Yorker. She has published eight non-fiction and fiction books in English and Chinese and resides in New York City and Beijing.
