Jottings from the Granite Studio

I guess I’ve been shirking my responsibilities as a blogger lately. This past week marks 35 years since Nixon traveled to China to shake hands with Mao in a meeting that “shook the world.” Up to now, I’ve relegated this monumental event to a series in the “Image of the Day” section of the blog (see top right). Other writers have stepped into the breach with far more insight and ability than I could have mustered, most notably Ben Landy at China Redux, who has written a fine retrospective on the event.

Frankly, my specialty is the 19th century, and even 35 years later I think the full legacy of Nixon and Mao remains to be seen. But if nothing else, the rapprochement between the USA and the PRC paved the way for China’s opening to the world. This in turn brought the foreign investment, capital, and access to markets necessary for Deng Xiaoping and the CCP to embark on a series of spectacular reforms that have transformed China–and the world–over the past three decades. While not without serious problems, these policies and the integration of the PRC into the global economic community have lifted millions out of poverty and improved living conditions in many parts of the world’s most populous nation.

Nor can the geopolitical shift that followed Nixon’s historic trip be underestimated. In his review of Margaret McMillan’s new book, Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World, John Lewis Gaddis writes:

With this single act, Nixon and Kissinger dazzled their domestic critics, rattled the Soviet Union, impressed allies (despite their exasperation at not having been consulted) and set up an exit strategy for a war that had become unwinnable: the United States might indeed “lose” South Vietnam, but it would “gain” China. Despite its implications for the unfortunate Vietnamese, this was an outcome with which it was hard to argue.

At the time, China too faced huge problems, and in contrast to Nixon, Mao had created most of them. He did so through disastrous economic policies — his “Great Leap Forward” had led to the death by famine of as many as 30 million Chinese between 1958 and 1961. His provocations had made China’s only major ally, the Soviet Union, a dangerous adversary. And by unleashing a violent Cultural Revolution against his own regime, Mao had turned China into an isolated, exhausted, unpredictable state run by an apparent madman — one armed with nuclear weapons. During the summer of 1969, Soviet diplomats quietly began asking how the United States would respond if Moscow should decide to launch a preventive war, presumably nuclear, against the Chinese.

Nixon’s unexpected reply — that the United States regarded China’s security as vital to its own — was therefore of great interest to Mao when the Americans found ways to convey it to him. The Great Helmsman may have been “a heartless tyrant,” as MacMillan says, but he was also a crafty realist. Drawing on recently released Chinese sources, she shows that it was Mao himself who steered the course toward rapprochement with Washington, overruling the hesitancies and objections of his subordinates. Mao’s micromanagement extended to the point of personally authorizing the visit of an American table tennis team to Beijing in April 1971. It had all started when one of the Americans greeted a member of the Chinese team at a match in Japan: “Hi, Chinese, long time no see.”

Whatever Nixon’s sins might have been, and there were many, by taking a chance, leaping at an opportunity that seemed all too chimerical at the time, he personified what a statesman should be. Mao, despite his much greater sins, knew that the future of his country lay not in the isolation, chaos, and failed economic policies of the past, but in rejoining the family of nations, even if that meant reaching out to a bitter enemy.

What struck me most, in reading the excerpts from MacMillan’s new book, was the insatiable intellectual curiosity of Nixon, asking questions, engaging in debate with staff, and trying to untangle, as best he could, the Gordian knot of a planet divided. The world today has so many problems of ever greater complexity and there are far too few statesmen and stateswomen left to deal with them. Instead our leaders are too often demagogues, hacks, and career politicians who prattle and preen while the 24-hour cable media parses the day’s soundbites and the rest of us wait patiently so as to not miss the latest on bald Britney or Anna Nicole. It is a sad state of affairs. Ben Landy, at China Redux posted:

A great quote from Nixon’s 1967 Foreign Affairs article, courtesy of the WaPo review:

Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.

Can you imagine President Bush publishing an article in Foreign Affairs? Or a world without that fateful meeting between Nixon and Mao?

Whatever we make Nixon the politician, we need also to remember Nixon the statesman.