How Time Took The Shine Off Nixon's China Deal

In the short term, Nixon’s eight-day visit was an unambiguous success. Chinese leaders agreed to help spy on the Soviet Union. Nixon won re-election. The stage was set for China’s eventual integration into the global economy.

But as we mark the 50th anniversary of that visit, some U.S. officials and foreign policy analysts have second-guessed the wisdom of partnering with Beijing. Even Nixon apparently looked back on the strategy with mixed feelings, and possibly some regret. Russia was a military threat, but never an economic rival. China, however, is becoming the first power in a century capable of challenging American dominance on both economic and military terms.

Some American policymakers felt that China would eventually rise, with or without U.S. help. If you take that view, then welcoming China as a friendly partner, instead of a hostile power, made sense. Today, China has a far bigger stake in the international system and the U.S. economy than Nixon could have imagined possible.

After the turn of the Millennium, however, Nixon confessed to real fears about China’s direction.  In an interview with his former speechwriter, he was asked whether economic engagement and “our strengthening of [the Chinese] regime [had] brought political freedom.” Nixon’s response was a chilling acknowledgement that his visit to China, which he had proclaimed in his Beijing toast as “the week that changed the world,” may have changed it for the worst. “That old realist,” as William Safire described Nixon in an essay in the New York Times, “who had played the China card to exploit the split in the Communist world, replied with some sadness that he was not as hopeful as he had once been: `We may have created a Frankenstein[‘s monster].’”

A decade-and-a-half later, the evidence has mounted that the older Nixon’s pessimism and regret were justified—and it was precisely because Nixon’s expectations of what change would accomplish in China were badly frustrated by Beijing’s skillful management of that change.  China’s Communist leaders certainly followed Nixon’s advice in Foreign Affairs to focus on domestic development.  But they used that progress (a) to build loyalty to the government that otherwise lacked political legitimacy, and (b) to finance a massive military buildup that stirred Chinese nationalism and now intimidates all China’s neighbors.

While economic progress had created a vibrant middle class in other formerly-authoritarian Asian societies—South Korea and Taiwan—which then led to demands for political change, Nixon and Kissinger knew that Communist dictators are a different breed from other more transitory authoritarians. With ideological and institutional traditions going back to 1917, they have a staying power lacking in tyrannies built only on an individual’s or family’s hold on power.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who would know about such things, once told Nixon that “Chinese policies would not change, even after Mao’s death; he was certain that the entire Chinese leadership was instinctively aggressive.”[ix] Deng, China’s great reformer, demonstrated the point. While he energetically followed Nixon’s advice to open China’s economy, he never forgot Mao’s teaching that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”—in both the domestic and international realms. He “taught a lesson” to Vietnam in 1978 and to Chinese students in 1989.