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Published by Random House- February 2007
Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World
By Margaret MacMillan
Review by Allen Kupetz, Rollins China Committee Member, Executive in Residence, Crummer Graduate School Allen H. Kupetz
Grand Vision and Petty Deceit When Nixon Met Mao
RICHARD NIXON'S visit to China in 1972, stage-managed by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, was a diplomatic coup de maître. It all but guaranteed Nixon's re-election, transformed superpower politics, opened China to the outside world and dazzled the media. It has even been celebrated in an opera. A third of a century later, however, the visit looks less bright than it did at the time. Nixon himself survived politically for little more than two years. More to the point, the gambit failed to relieve the pressure on America in Indochina, which was one of its chief purposes. Within three years, with Chinese aid pouring in to help the Vietcong, America had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger tried to avoid betraying their ally, Taiwan, but could not resist making grand statements to impress their Chinese hosts. There is one China, Nixon told the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai, at their first private meeting, and Taiwan is part of China. Today China loudly asserts that Taiwan is indeed a part of China, but it manifestly is not governed as such. Though the fiction is observed, it is still a fiction. China remains a Communist state; albeit one that has embraced capitalism. Yet the American president's visit acknowledged that China was a great power, encouraged American companies to do business there and helped China in its relations with the Soviet Union. On balance, China gained more from the transaction than America. Mr. Kissinger was not good at economics. This was never more clearly shown than by his dismissive judgment that the maximum amount of bilateral trade possible between us, even if we make great efforts, is infinitesimal in terms of our total economy. Today America's trade deficit with China is running at about $215 billion a year, and America's debt to China is increasingly seen as a problem. However mistaken many of the assumptions made by all four principals at the Beijing poker table Mao Zedong, the dying emperor surrounded by pretty, scheming nurses, the urbane Zhou, grumpy Nixon and the neurotic Mr. Kissinger this was international politics on a grand scale. Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian historian whose masterly evocation of the Paris peacemakers of 1919 has been a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic since it was published in 2001, has now done fitting justice to another great diplomatic episode. With a sharp eye for the ironic and the bizarre, she describes the intrigues, the insults and the betrayals of her characters. Mr. Kissinger, for example, preferred to use Chinese interpreters because they could be trusted not to talk to the American press. He handed over reams of classified American intelligence about the Soviet Union to its Chinese enemies. Ms MacMillan gives abundant examples of the spite with which he sidelined the secretary of state, William Rogers, who was kept ignorant of America's secret talks with the Chinese for over two years, until Mr. Kissinger had returned from his first visit to Beijing. Yet Mr. Kissinger's intelligence, and his excitement at the sheer scale of his undertaking, shine through the narrative. Nixon emerges as an ungracious figure, but also as the original architect of the whole daring project. He also comes across as a shrewd analyst of the great game. Some of the most revealing discoveries Ms MacMillan has made in her researches are the haiku-like memos Nixon wrote on his yellow pads. One, which he scribbled before the talks started, begins: What they want:
2. Taiwan 3. Get out of Asia
2. Communication to restrain Chinese expansion in Asia 3. In future reduce threat of confrontation by China Super Power
2. A more stable Asia 3. A restraint on USSR The question-mark against Indochina alone deserves a volume of explanation. This is a great story, entertainingly told.
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