In Seize the Hour, Margaret MacMillan’s excellent book about the first meeting between then-US president Richard Nixon and Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong (毛澤東) in Beijing, the historian enumerated some of the profound implications of this extraordinary encounter.
The meeting, which took place 50 years ago this month, ended a long political standoff between the US and China, and marked the beginning of a new geopolitical era. It indicated, perhaps, that there could be no permanent peace in the world unless the US and China were able to work together.
What should be the basis for a US-China relationship? For Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, the meeting was to undermine the Soviet Union’s global influence by driving a wedge between the world’s two most important communist countries.
Illustration: Yusha
Nixon’s visit also enhanced his reputation as a global statesman, despite his domestic reputation in the US. As then-Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) said, “a farsighted man” who knew how to steer the helm of the ship of state through stormy waters had fundamentally changed the way China and the US dealt with each other.
There were also short-term consequences, of course. Nixon’s visit might have encouraged North Vietnam to be more responsive to the US’ efforts to end the Vietnam War.
The Soviet Union certainly was concerned about the historic US-China rapprochement, and some of the US’ Asian allies — Japan and Taiwan, for example — worried that the US might push them to one side.
Arguably the most important legacy of the Nixon-Mao meeting is that it made possible some of the other major developments that followed.
Nixon’s fall in 1974 came two years before the deaths of Mao and Zhou. Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng (華國鋒), aided by the armed forces, swiftly ousted the so-called Gang of Four, Mao’s main radical allies during the Cultural Revolution. This cleared the way for the eventual return to power of Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), which triggered the beginning of China’s economic opening to the world. This would never have happened had China remained cut off from the US and the rest of the world.
China’s economic rise in the subsequent decades, driven largely by exports to open world markets, has been phenomenal, transforming the country and its prospects. The economic and trade environment that enabled the Chinese miracle was created largely by the international policies of the rich world’s democracies. In one 15-year period covering the 1990s, China’s exports to the US increased by 1,600 percent.
While the world’s markets have been largely open to Chinese goods and investment, China has done relatively little to reciprocate.
It has stolen intellectual property from the US and Europe, and demanded that other countries kowtow politically in exchange for frequently illusory trade benefits.
China persuaded other countries to admit it to the WTO in 2001, but has since regularly bent and circumvented the organization’s rules.
Under President Xi Jinping (習近平), China has emerged as a more brazen bully. Xi’s China has broken its promises on economic, security and political issues, handcuffed Hong Kong, militarized islands and atolls in the South China Sea, threatened Taiwan, and been accused of pursuing genocidal policies against Uighurs in Xinjiang.
It is regarded across the US political spectrum as an increasingly dangerous surveillance state that poses a threat to open societies everywhere, and to efforts to create a balanced global order.
The challenge for the US and other democracies is to manage the relationship with a menacing China, while involving it — as we must — in efforts to address issues affecting the future of the planet, above all climate change.
Xi’s regime does not accept that it should act in accordance with international agreements, and it rejects the views of open societies on what constitutes acceptable governance. While we need to constrain China, and deter it from behaving badly, we must avoid isolating it.
If Nixon was on the world stage today, I hope he would remind us that China’s communist regime fears the strength of democratic societies as an existential threat.
After all, open societies have free press, accountable governments answerable to informed citizens and education systems that encourages critical thinking rather than indoctrination. When democracies understand and live by their principal governing values, they have nothing to fear in standing up to China.
Fifty years after Nixon’s historic visit to China, those values remain a better long-term bet than totalitarianism. Democracies should not be dazzled by China’s undoubted technological advances; it is the most populous country in the world and has many able citizens.
The surprise is that it has not done even better. In any case, we must hope that Chinese successes will benefit all of humanity, just as open societies’ advances have benefited China.
What China in the modern era has never succeeded in doing is finding an acceptable long-term governance model. Standing up for the values of open societies might be the best way to help the country — and ourselves.
Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs, is chancellor of the University of Oxford.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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