On what precipitated the beginning of the Nixon administration’s efforts to engage China:
At the beginning of the administration, during the first three or four months, we were preoccupied with Vietnam and with Soviet relations. But then the Soviet ambassador kept coming to the White House to brief me on the clashes (between Soviet and Chinese forces) that were taking place at the Ussuri River. Now, it was not the habit of Soviet diplomats at the time to be transparent about events in which they were engaged. That caused us to study the location of these incidents, which turned out to be close to Soviet bases and far from Chinese ones.

The Soviets did a number of other things, like inquiring how we would react to certain readiness measures on their part vis-à-vis China. So Nixon and I discussed this situation, and he decided that we should move to convey to the Chinese that we were observing this and that we were also willing to improve relations. We decided to warn the Soviets that we would not be indifferent to military action in Northeast Asia.

On early efforts to make contact and the mood at the time:
The Chinese had tried to convey their thinking to us through Edgar Snow, whom we considered a left-wing apologist for them, so we didn’t take it seriously enough. The working level on China in the State Department was, of course, very much in favour of opening to China. But the high-ranking foreign service officers, who were mostly Soviet experts, were very concerned about that possibility. They were experienced enough to understand what we were trying to do. At one point, the four leading Soviet experts in the State Department formally warned Nixon that an opening to China would risk war with the Soviet Union.

One of the dominant feelings we had, and to which especially the younger people on my staff were deeply committed, had to do with the crisis we were going through in Vietnam. That led to huge divisions in our country. And we felt that it was important to demonstrate to the American people – to the young people, especially – that whatever the divisions might be on Vietnam, we had a vision of peace and a sense of constructing a new international system.

On fear of failure:
It’s very rare in public life that you have an opportunity to do something that is totally new. So, of course, Nixon took a big risk in sending me in the first place. On my first trip, there were moments when we didn’t quite know what was going on. Later on, it turned out that while we were there (in Beijing) the North Korean President (Kim Il Sung) was in China and that Chou En-Lai had to go to a dinner in his honour. And so there was a gap of several hours where there were no Chinese interlocutors.

But, if you looked at the exchange of correspondence that had preceded the trip, it was clear that the result of the first visit would be an invitation to Nixon. We were on a road on which it would have been very unwise for either side to blackmail the other. Of course, if we had been sent packing or been humiliated, since Nixon did it largely alone, it would have been a huge political disaster.

On Mao Zedong:
He exuded will power. So do a lot of people who have achieved dominance. He had an extraordinary ability to analyse international affairs. David Bruce (a US diplomat) had known Adenauer and Churchill and de Gaulle, and he said none of them had a grasp of international affairs that exceeded Mao’s. None of this excuses the suffering he imposed on millions.

On engagement and the human rights problem:
The relationship between our capacity to produce democracy in the world and our concept of foreign policy is one of the perennial challenges of foreign policy. Sometimes we don’t do enough, and sometimes we do too much. And one has to look at it in terms also of a historic evolution. As Americans, we have to be committed, and we are committed as a society, to democratic values. But the time in which they can be implemented and the degree of influence we can have must be related to circumstances. And when one doesn’t do that, then one gets into a missionary kind of effort. That can destroy the ability to move toward peace. If one does too little in promoting democracy, then one falls into a kind of stagnation. Where to find the right balance? That’s something that I do not find easy to define. But it surely was not found at the beginning of our relationship with China where the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, refused to shake hands with Chou En-Lai.

 On Taiwan:
China has been very insistent on reclaiming Hong Kong and Macao and Taiwan. I have experienced it as an enduring reality of Chinese conviction. But one also has to say that we are now in 2007, 36 years later, and the US and China have managed to develop their relationship by respecting each other’s principal concerns on this issue, the Chinese concern being that there’s only one China, our concern being that we want a peaceful solution.

One can also hope that the evolution of economic relations, of the internal structures of both countries, both societies, will make it possible to create a one-China solution that respects the autonomy of Taiwan. But that is something that may have to wait. In the meanwhile, one should be careful that nobody wrecks the current restraint. One should have one vision of how this process might lead to a solution.

On the number of books about you and the documentation and scrutiny of the Nixon era:
It never occurred to me that it would reach the current point! Whereas we may have produced too much material, now there’s very little material for historians. Most top policymakers, knowing our experience, are writing a minimum number of memoranda and are not very revealing in the memoranda of conversations that they leave to their successors.

What happened, especially in relation to China, is that there’s a school of thought that thinks it knows exactly what we should have done. And then they criticise us for not doing what they think we should have done, which we never intended to do. But we were not going to China to try to solve every conceivable problem. We thought everything depended on establishing confidence and a relationship between these two societies that had had no contact with each other for larger geopolitical ends.

On Deng Xiaoping versus Mao Zedong:
Mao was a figure hovering above the day-to-day contact. He would speak in sort of cryptic sentences and conduct his conversations as a kind of Socratic dialogue, in which he would throw out a proposition, then you’d comment, and he would reply. But Deng was focused on seemingly pragmatic problems, raising specific issues. He always had a spittoon in front of him and spit into it from time to time.

On one occasion, Deng had what he called private banquet for about 70 people – I was sitting with him, and I asked him a sort of political science question: How was he going to reconcile centralisation and decentralisation? He began to talk in a very soft voice. It got very quiet in the room, and everybody wanted to hear what he had to say. He wound it by saying, ‘Well, we can’t afford another mistake, because we’ve already made too many.’ And he stuck to that notion for all the time that I knew him.

On Tiananmen:
It was a tragedy and introduced a tenseness into the political side of the reform that might have been avoided, if it could have evolved in a more gradual manner.

On China and Russia’s divergent paths to development:
The Chinese Communist system had not been in power as long as it had been in Russia. China had the advantage of Deng Xiaoping, who had a vision and who concentrated first on economic reform. And it may also be that in China there is now more self-confidence in the society than there is in Russia. If one tells the Chinese people that with great effort they can be the greatest people in the world, they tend to believe it. In Russia, the feeling about the role of the national mission is more ambivalent.

On China versus India:
I know there’s the idea that one can use India to balance China. I think it’d be a grave mistake for the United States to conceive of our role in that manner. India will pursue its own policies. They represent their own way.

On the potential for an arms race:
If China were to go the route of the Soviet Union and to amass long-range missiles by the thousands, it would create enormous anxiety and repeat much of the same pattern that existed in the relations with the Soviet Union. I think this is unlikely.

On the present state of US-China relations:
When we started the relationship with China, it was a world of states, and there was a Cold War. So there were dominant themes in international affairs that could be viewed in terms of the power politics of historical experience. Now we’re in a world in which the state, as it was formed in the 17th century, is beginning to disintegrate in many parts of the world. Secondly, there are now issues that were not thought of when the relationship was created. We were not concerned with the environment as a global, international issue.

Moreover, I think the competition for resources, when you have limited supplies and growing demand, can lead to a kind of competition similar to the colonial rivalry of the 19th-20th centuries. Through the Cold War, the prospect of war between countries had to at least be considered part of a strategic assessment. Today, wars between major countries would be a catastrophe for everybody and have no conceivable political objective. So one has to think of organising the world without some of these traditional pressures of historic diplomacy and include subjects that didn’t used to be diplomatic issues. And in this effort, I think China and the United States can play a key role, not an exclusive role, but a key role.

On what the relationship will look like on the 50th anniversary of his first visit (14 years from now):
I’m optimistic, because I’ve seen now a succession of American presidents committing themselves to the importance of the relationship and to make the adjustments that were needed. And I’ve seen a succession of Chinese leaders who have moved in a parallel direction. So I’m basically optimistic. But, of course, we are now coming into a period where new types of people — more attuned to the current technology, less conceptual, more geared to Internet-type of cognition — are getting into power on both sides. And how that trend will be related to long-term policy is, to me, going to be a big challenge.

© 2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc