“There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.” Richard Nixon, after his election in 1968, pushed for better relations with China despite historical tensions and hostilities. In 1971, National Security Advisor and future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger took two trips to China – the first made in secret – to consult with Premier Zhou Enlai. After more than two decades of icy relations, Nixon embarked on a trip to China starting on February 22, 1972. Not only did this visit strengthen Chinese-American relations, but it also served to encourage progress with the USSR. Winston Lord was a member of the National Security Council's planning staff and accompanied Nixon on his visit to China. He later became a top policy advisor on China, Ambassador to China, and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In these excerpts from his oral history, Lord discusses the geopolitical rationale for the trip, working with Nixon and Kissinger, meeting Mao Zedong, and negotiating the Shanghai Communiqué over concerns regarding Taiwan.
LORD: Nixon and Kissinger each came into office placing a high priority on making an opening to China. They had independently come to this conclusion. Nixon had indicated this in his article in Foreign Affairs. We know, in retrospect, that he felt that this was a high priority. Kissinger felt the same way, primarily because of the Soviet dimension, but for a variety of other reasons.
Kissinger's rationale, and Nixon's, included the following. First, an opening to China would give us more flexibility on the world scene generally. We wouldn't just be dealing with Moscow. We could deal with Eastern Europe, of course, and we could deal with China, because the former Communist Bloc was no longer a bloc. Kissinger wanted more flexibility, generally. Secondly, by opening relations with China we would catch Russia's attention and get more leverage on them through playing this obvious, China card. The idea would be to improve relations with Moscow, hoping to stir a little bit of its paranoia by dealing with China, never getting so engaged with China that we would turn Russia into a hostile enemy but enough to get the attention of the Russians. This effort, in fact, worked dramatically after Kissinger's secret trip to China.
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