Lessons of the 40 Years Since Nixon Went to China
Pretty much everything has changed in U.S.-China relations since Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai signed the Shanghai Communiqué 40 years ago on February 21, 1972.
Nixon’s goals were purely geostrategic. By cultivating China, he sought most of all to put pressure on North Vietnam to come to terms to achieve his promised “peace with honor” there, hopefully before the November election. He also sought, through China, to pressure Moscow to embrace détente and thus put America in the catbird seat in relations with the two communist behemoths.
China had different priorities — most of all, Beijing wanted to stiffen President Nixon’s spine to oppose Soviet aggression and therefore to reduce Moscow’s threat to China.
In the 1980s, Beijing got its way with Ronald Reagan, who came into office as an anti-Soviet crusader. Indeed, President Reagan aligned U.S. strategic interests with China so closely that America began military sales to Beijing. But in 1989 everything changed. President George H.W. Bush, just inaugurated and planning to move U.S.-China relations to a new level, saw this goal cut short by the brutal suppression of demonstrators at Tiananmen on June 4, 1989. As China transitioned from being America’s darling reforming communist country to being its poster child for communist repression, the Soviet Bloc (and soon afterward, the Soviet Union itself) unraveled.
Not only did the Soviet collapse rob U.S.-China relations of their underlying strategic rationale, post-Tiananmen repression in China introduced human rights as a major political factor in the relationship. Every American human rights organization expended much effort in the 1990s to attach China somehow to that agenda and thus increase its own visibility and emotional power.
This made it far more difficult to deal with Beijing, especially as the Chinese connected this human rights agenda directly to an American objective to bring down the Communist Party’s rule. The result was deep mutual distrust.
Deng Xiaoping in 1992 set the country again on a course of reform to generate rapid growth, which he viewed as critical to maintain the party’s rule. Economics now moved to the center of U.S.-China relations.
Where in the 1970s the Nixon administration could ignore China’s horrendous human rights abuses under Mao to achieve American geopolitical ends, starting in the 1990s, America pursued economic gains in China in part with the hope that these would also lay the foundation for democratic evolution there. This took place in the context of overwhelming American economic and technological superiority, further enhanced by the information revolution that America also led.