前言

 Prologue 

IN THE GLOOM OF AN empty restaurant, Winston Lord looked and IN sounded depressed. He had visited Beijing for nearly 15 years, always as an honored guest. Now, he was for the first time living in China, and the country seemed profoundly different from the one Lord first encoun-tered in the days when he played the role of Henry Kissinger's one-man Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 

It was the beginning of 1986. Lord had arrived a few weeks earlier to take up his new job as American ambassador to China. He was sitting over lunch in Maxim's, a new Beijing restaurant opened by the French fashion designer, Pierre Cardin, as a replica of the Paris original. Maxim's interior included gilded doors, ornate mirrors, plush carpets, dark wood furnishings almost everything but Chinese customers. For that matter, on this gray, chilly afternoon, there weren't many non-Chinese diners, either. 

Lord had been invited by two American correspondents who wanted to talk about China, the country they were covering. But the new ambassador seemed to be having trouble making much of a connection with his new environs. Outside, the Beijing winter was closing in: The days were sunless, the air heavy with soft-coal grime. Inside, Lord returned the conversation again and again, wistfully, to the familiar terri-tory of the America he had just left. The Mets, his favorite baseball team, had just finished their best season in 16 years, and the team's prospects for the coming year were bright. 

Starting the new job in China was something of an anticlimax for Lord. He had been one of only three staff aides to accompany Henry Kissinger on Kissinger's secret mission to Beijing for Richard Nixon in 1971. Just before the Pakistani plane carrying the party had crossed into Chinese territory, Lord, the youngest member of the group, had rushed to the front of the plane. By doing so, he had been able to brag that he had been the first American official to visit China since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. 

Lord had been present, too, during President Nixon's meeting with Mao Tsetung the following year. Kissinger had furtively brought him along to take notes. Lord was thus the only American in the room with Mao besides Nixon and Kissinger; he occupied a seat that might other-wise have been taken by Secretary of State William Rogers, Kissinger's adversary within the Washington bureaucracy. When the pictures of that historic meeting had been released to the world, Lord's face was cropped out; Kissinger didn't want to remind the secretary of state that he had lost his seat to a 34-year-old functionary. The following year, in a gesture of kindness, Chinese officials had quietly presented Lord with his own, uncropped copy of the picture. 

Accompanying Kissinger, Lord had returned to Beijing several times during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Afterward, he worked in New York City as president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, always waiting for a chance to return to government. Even after Ronald Reagan had nominated him as ambassador to China in 1985, he had been forced to wait a little longer. Senator Jesse Helms had held up the vote on Lord's confirmation for several months, until Reagan promised Helms in writing to cut off all American help for the United Nations agency that supported population control in China. 

Like most other American officials, Lord had come to know China only on brief visits. American delegations would stop in Beijing for two or three days, with a full itinerary. They were lodged at Diaoyutai, the Chinese state guest house, or in one of the well-guarded downtown hotels for foreigners. They spent their days in meetings with senior Chi-nese officials and their evenings at banquets. Their trips were a series of rituals. After a couple of days and a bit of sightseeing, they either resolved or smoothed over conflicts with Chinese officials. Finally, the American visitors would hold a press conference at which they would exaggerate the points of agreement and minimize the differences between the United States and China, and then depart for the airport. The China they saw on these brief trips was gracious, orderly, controlled and resolute. 

Now, Lord was beginning to deal with day-to-day China, the coun-try that endured before and after the excitement and artificiality of the occasional visits by American presidents and secretaries of state. It was a more frustrating place. The bureaucracy was pervasive. American officials, even the U.S. ambassador, didn't get the sort of treatment reserved for short-term visitors from Washington. Everything moved more slowly. The promises made on the high-level trips weren't always carried out. 

Finally, after the waiters at Maxim's had delivered the coffee, the new American ambassador turned the conversation from baseball to China itself. Awkward and formal with strangers, Lord was groping to figure out some way in which he might make this lunch useful to his new assign-ment. 

How can we come into contact with a younger generation in China, the sort of people who might be future leaders of the country? Lord asked the journalists. This was, he said, one of the things he most wanted to do during his time in China, something U.S. officials in Washington also wanted him to do. 

A younger generation of Chinese leaders: Lord's question was mundane and yet startling. 

In an interview many years later, Lord insisted that if he had been sent to any other country, he would have asked the same question.' He believed it was part of the job of an American ambassador to meet people on their way up, in or out of power, and to cultivate them in such a way that the United States could influence the future leadership of the coun-try. It would have been the same in Brazil or Switzerland. 

And yet China was not just any other country. Indeed, the relation-ship the United States had worked out with China's Communist Party leadership had been based on the unstated premise that China was unique, that it would not be subjected to the standards and principles applied to other countries. China was America's partner in fighting the Cold War; the United States secretly shared intelligence with Chinese officials and helped to arm the People's Liberation Army. For America's policymaking elite, China was considered a special relationship. The United States chided countries like South Korea and Taiwan about human rights abuses, but it refrained from similar criticism of China. In Washington, Soviet dissidents were often honored, sent personal messages and welcomed to the White House; Chinese dissidents were all but ignored. 

In the decade and a half after Kissinger's secret mission of 1971, America had dealt with China almost exclusively from the top down. The people who counted above all were China's most senior leaders, Mao Tsetung, Chou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, and their associates in the Defense Ministry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This may have been a narrow base on which to build a relationship with a country of  more than a billion people; but it had been crucial in achieving the ulti-mate American objective, which was China's cooperation with the United States and against the Soviet Union. 

In the mid-1980s, at the time of Lord's arrival, China seemed to be changing, and the United States was trying to adapt its policy to suit the times. Deng was beginning to open up parts of the economy to market forces. On the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, Chinese were wearing new clothes with some color and flair. Residents of cities who had once owned only a bicycle were buying new consumer goods: telephones, television sets, refrigerators. The changes even seemed to reach some of the leaders: Deng's carefully selected successors, Communist Party Secre-tary Hu Yaobang and Premier Zhao Ziyang, were appearing in public in Western suits and ties. 

Nevertheless, from the distance of Washington, American officials had trouble grasping exactly what was changing in China and what wasn't. During the mid-1980s, American policy toward China was based on a series of beliefs and assumptions, many of which turned out to be tragically inaccurate. 

The first of these assumptions was that China's political system was being opened up and reformed along with its economic system. Deng Xiaoping's record as a political leader, both under Mao Tsetung and on his own, was that of a dedicated Leninist, yet in Washington, this fact was usually overlooked or deemed inconvenient. After visiting Beijing in 1984, President Reagan referred to the country as "so-called Communist China," suggesting that its political structure had somehow been altered. One of America's most widely recognized China scholars, A. Doak Bar-nett of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, proclaimed that the Politburo and its six-member Standing Committee, the institutions through which the Communist Party had ruled the country since 1949, didn't have much influence over policy anymore. "A new generation of leaders now manages policy making in both domestic and foreign affairs," Barnett wrote in the New York Times. "Most older leaders have been eased into the background."4 

The second American assumption was that Deng Xiaoping was steadfastly in control of the changes to which Chinese society was being subjected. In the United States of the 1980s, Deng was often perceived as all-wise, all-powerful and all-knowing. In 1985, after its editor, Henry Grunewald, led a group of corporate advertisers on a visit to China, Time proclaimed Deng to be its Man of the Year. 

Inside China itself, the picture looked considerably less harmonious. In 1985, the very year Time beatified Deng, there had been, for the first time, signs that his economic reform program was in trouble, inciting passions that were difficult to control. Price increases were imposed, then suspended. Citizens were encouraged to buy consumer goods, then told to stop doing so after massive purchases of foreign goods caused China's foreign-currency reserves to drop. Most important, the reforms were stirring a wave of political reactions and counterreactions. Chinese stu-dents launched small-scale demonstrations to protest corruption, infla-tion, privileges for high-ranking officials, and what was called Japanese exploitation of China. Some Communist Party leaders-led by Chen Yun, a party figure with nearly as much seniority as Deng-questioned the wisdom of moving toward a market economy. 

The third assumption was that the warm relationship between China and the United States dating back to the Nixon-Kissinger era had become so firmly entrenched that it would and could endure. Chinese leaders might occasionally proclaim their independent foreign policy, but on the whole, it was thought, China was firmly aligned with the United States. 

At one point in the late 1980s, Morton I. Abramowitz, head of the State Department's intelligence unit and one of the government's bright-est and most respected officials, was asked to testify before Congress about American relations with China in the coming decade. Abramowitz assured Congress that there would be little change. "Political stability in Beijing will continue, and we expect no dramatic shifts in China's domestic or foreign policies for the foreseeable future," he asserted. "We do not anticipate major changes in either the political or the military dimensions of U.S.-China relations."s 

Within barely a few years, these confident American assumptions would be proved wrong. The elderly Communist leaders whom Barnett had written off as increasingly irrelevant turned out to be powerful enough to force the dismissal of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, the two younger party leaders being groomed as Deng's successors. When stu-dents and ordinary citizens massed on the streets of Beijing in 1989, Deng called in the army to remove them with terrorizing force, proving to all doubters that he was indeed an orthodox Leninist. 

In the aftermath of the Tiananmen demonstrations and the breakup of the Soviet Union, Chinese foreign policy changed to the point where, by the mid-1990s, the United States was being characterized once again, as it had been in the 1950s, as the principal obstacle to the achievement of China's interests and ambitions. China was challenging American foreign policy both in Asia and the Middle East. 

By that time, Winston Lord's hopes of transferring the Sino-American relationship of the 1970s to a new generation of Chinese lead-ers seemed quaintly out of place. 

THE RELATIONSHIP between the United States and China established by Nixon, Kissinger and their successors in the Carter and Reagan administrations was, in many ways, the strangest, most extraordinary rela-tionship America has had with any nation in this century. In the midst of America's Cold War ideological struggle against the Soviet Union, the United States formed a close partnership with China, a country whose leadership was no less dedicated to Leninist political principles than the leaders of Moscow. Washington proceeded to support, arm, share intelli-gence with and nurture the economy of a Chinese government it had previously attempted to overthrow. 

It was a relationship beset with contradictions, a strategic marriage of convenience and the classic example of Kissinger's obsession with geo-politics. Two countries with fundamentally different political and eco-nomic systems worked together to defeat a third nation, the Soviet Union, perceived as a more immediate threat to themselves. Such an affiliation was hardly without precedent in American history; after all, the United States had joined hands with Stalin's Soviet Union during World War II. 

The archives show that in private, some American leaders, particu-larly Nixon, could be candid about the regime they were dealing with. Talking in the Cabinet room of the White House three weeks before Kissinger's groundbreaking mission, Nixon said he felt Chinese leaders were "more dedicated to Communism than the Soviets," because China was at an earlier, lower stage of development. 

Yet in public, American leaders presented their new relationship with China as something different from and greater than their wartime associ-ation with Stalin. Washington's Cold War partnership was colored by romance and sentimentalism, a legacy of the American experience in China dating back to the trader ships and the missionaries. Americans wanted to believe, once again, that they were changing China. 

There were other contradictions, too. During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States forged a network of societal ties with China far more extensive than with any other Communist nation indeed, broader even than with Eastern European nations such as Poland, Hungary or Yugo-slavia. Chinese students came to America by the tens of thousands, and American tourists visited China in still greater numbers. American com-panies did far more business in China than with any other Communist country. 

Nevertheless, despite this web of contacts, America's governmental links with China were probably more secretive and more narrowly based than those with any other major nation in the world. The real business between Washington and Beijing was carried out by a remarkably small number of people, an elite group of U.S. officials often fearful of what might happen if Congress or the American public learned or thought too much about what the United States was doing with China or about the nature of the Chinese leadership. 

For nearly two decades, these contradictions in American policy didn't seem to matter much. But after the tumultuous upheavals from 1989 to 1991, the contradictions became overwhelming. When Chinese rulers were willing to use troops to shoot citizens on the streets of its cap-ital, then America's ties to Beijing could be justified only as geopolitics, not as a means of helping or changing the country. When the Soviet Union no longer posed a threat to China or the United States, then the original, strategic basis for the relationship with China evaporated, too. Small wonder that throughout most of the 1990s, Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton attempted to come up with a new rationale and framework for American policy toward China. Bush tried, futilely, to pre-serve the old American relationship with Beijing, while Clinton fumbled in efforts to create something new. 

The purpose of this book is to investigate the relationship the United States formed with China in the Nixon era; to examine how those ties developed in the late 1970s and 1980s; and to describe how the Cold War association then unraveled in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square upheavals of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. What drove the two countries together? What happened between the leaders of the two countries, and what bargains were struck? Why and how did the relation-ship change so dramatically after 1989? 

I first decided to write this history because, as a newspaper corre-spondent based in Beijing during the 1980s, I became intrigued by the extraordinarily secretive nature of the associations between the United States and China and by the contradictions raised by the Cold War part-nership. Later, working in Washington in the late 1980s and the 1990s, I watched as year by year and sometimes week by week the ties between the two countries eroded and became more contentious. In Washington, China was transformed in the 1990s from a sideshow of American for-eign policy, about which few questions were asked, into a preoccupation. 

I had several other reasons for undertaking this historical examina-tion. The first is simply that enough time has passed for greater perspec-tive. Several worthy books have been written about the American opening to China, but they were published too early to take into account the Tiananmen Square period and the subsequent upheavals during the Bush and Clinton administrations.7 

Moreover, many early accounts of the American opening were based, necessarily, on the information provided by U.S. officials themselves, par-ticularly the memoirs of Kissinger, Nixon, Carter and his national secu-rity advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. However, over the past few years, a wealth of new material has come to light, providing information not included in these memoirs. Some of the other U.S. officials involved have written their own memoirs or are now willing to be interviewed. Docu-mentary material of the period has been declassified, such as, for exam-ple, transcripts of some of the top-level meetings and Nixon's own handwritten notes before and during his trip to China in 1972. In addi-tion, using the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained a classified his-tory of U.S.-China relations done for the Central Intelligence Agency by the Rand Corporation; this study summarizes all of the high-level meet-ings between America and China from 1971 to 1985.* 

Another reason for writing this book is that it may help to bring up to date the longer history of America's relationship with the world's most populous country. Over the past two centuries, U.S. attitudes to China have fluctuated between attraction and revulsion such as, in this cen-tury, the romance and then disillusionment with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China. In a sense, the quarter-century period from the Nixon opening through the late 1990s represented merely a new, modern-day swing of the cycle. 

Yet this most recent swing had its own special qualities, infused with the unique characteristics of the Cold War. Virtually everything that took place in U.S. policy toward China after 1989 flowed directly from what happened during the two previous decades. 

The weak hold on American public opinion that bedeviled President Bush in dealing with China was a direct consequence of the secretive, narrowly based, elitist nature of the U.S. relationship with the Chinese leadership worked out by Kissinger and his successors. The broad scope of the conflict between America and China after 1989-over Chinese students, over cultural exchanges, trade and economic ties was an out-growth of the extensive web of ties between the two societies over the previous two decades. So, too, the fears in the 1990s that China might become a military superpower were the mirror image of America's eagerness, during the previous two decades, to strengthen China's ability to resist the Soviet Union. Indeed, examining America's relations with China in the 1970s and 1980s provides some perspective on the Cold War itself; China became a crucial part of American strategy toward the Soviet Union. 

Understanding America's conflicted dealings with China of the 1990s is impossible without knowing what happened in the last half of the Cold War from the time of the Nixon administration until the Tiananmen crackdown. And it is equally impossible to grasp and evaluate America's opening to China in the 1970s without looking at its con-sequences in the years beyond 1989. Each period is part of the same history; each one sheds light on the other. 

The final reason for this book is that it may help illustrate how Amer-ican foreign policy is made. Decisions about China were often reached in ways and under circumstances that do not conform to civics textbooks. American presidents, the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, Con-gress, the U.S. embassy in Beijing, economic and trade officials, leading American corporations, organized labor, the Republican and Democratic Parties, the government of Taiwan, Tibetan exiles, human rights groups, right-to-life organizations, Asian business leaders, the former British gov-ernment in Hong Kong-all played a role, working with and against one another from issue to issue. 

Within most administrations, intense infighting erupted among high-level officials and within executive-branch departments over how to deal with China. In theory, decisions should be part of a careful, delib-erative process, carried out by the formal structures of the State Depart-ment and the White House, arriving at a unified judgment. In practice, the process of dealing with China was intensely personalized. Often, no more than one or two officials within an administration were entrusted to handle dealings with China. Sometimes, not even the secretary of state knew what was happening. The secret CIA study found that leaders in Beijing were often able to exploit or manipulate the differences in Wash-ington, rewarding and flattering China's friends, instilling a sense of obligation, freezing out those U.S. officials who were considered less sympathetic. 

China policy demonstrated that Congress doesn't conform to the civics texts, either. In theory, Congress is a passive force on foreign policy, one that merely confirms appointments, enacts legislation, passes budgets and oversees the executive branch. But especially after 1989, Congress's involvement in China policy was far more pervasive. American decisions about Chinese students, grain sales, human rights, arms-control policies, business contracts and transfers of technology were not only influenced but, in some cases, initiated by Congress. In some cases, Congress was merely responding to American public opinion, at times when the exec-utive branch was not. In other instances, individual congressmen, or staff members, were able to wield surprising power on their own initiative. 

Ideas about how America should deal with China originated almost haphazardly. The military relationship during the final decade of the Cold War grew out of the work of a single idiosyncratic consultant who attracted the interest of patrons in the Pentagon. The congressional effort during the 1990s to use most-favored-nation benefits as the vehicle for seeking changes in China's human rights practices grew out of the casual meetings of a few Chinese students. 

One limitation should be made clear: This book is a history of Amer-ican policy toward China. That task is arduous enough. The book is not and does not attempt to be the full account of relations between America and China, because not nearly so much information is available about the Chinese government as about the American side. For example, I was able to learn, primarily through interviews, about the tensions within the Bush administration in February and June 1989 over dealing with the Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi. There were probably tensions within the Beijing government, too, but China's internal processes remain cloaked in secrecy. I once asked a Chinese ambassador whether I might interview him for this book. He replied with a careful smile, "You want to put me in jail?" Chinese archives are not available to outsiders. We await the work of some astute Chinese researcher who may be able some day to publish, for example, the internal memos that Lin Biao wrote to Mao Tsetung or that Hu Yaobang sent to Deng Xiaoping. 

American policy itself was often shrouded in secrecy. The leaders of a new administration usually came to office without knowing much of what had transpired before their arrival. In some instances, such as the Carter and Reagan administrations, U.S. officials found themselves rum-maging through old archives, trying to figure out what their predecessors had promised China and what they hadn't. (The Chinese made use of this American foible of changing governments every four or eight years, too: They sometimes told new administrations they had been secretly promised more than they actually had.) 

The ultimate goal of this book is to explore, describe and interpret American policy toward China over the past quarter-century, in hopes that we may overcome our collective ignorance and see what has taken place in our very recent past.