Winston Lord, in the room with Mao and Nixon, examines US-China relations then and now
- ‘We
opened up for geopolitical, economic reasons, and we hoped this would
loosen up the Chinese political system. But engagement was not
preconditioned on that’
- A
former registered Republican, Lord says the Republican Party’s embrace
of Trumpism represents ‘single biggest threat to our China policy’
In February 1972, US president Richard Nixon defied conventional foreign policy wisdom when he arrived in Beijing for meetings with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. In recognition of the trip’s historical significance, the South China Morning Post is running a multimedia series exploring interesting points of the past 50 years in US-China relations. This second piece in the series, by Owen Churchill, explores the perspectives of Winston Lord, the veteran diplomat who was in the room for that historic first meeting.
Winston Lord, one of the architects of Richard Nixon’s efforts to forge ties with Beijing, would like to correct the record.
Contrary to popular belief, it was Lord – not Nixon’s then-national security adviser, Henry Kissinger – who was the first American official to enter the People’s Republic of China more than 50 years ago.
“I was in the front of the plane, Kissinger was in the back,” Lord, who was Kissinger’s special assistant, said of their secret trip to Beijing in 1971. Breaking into a grin, he added, “So I got into China’s airspace and territory to be the first American official after 22 years to visit China.”
Humour and nostalgia permeate many of Lord’s recollections of that trip to China, the subsequent groundbreaking presidential visit by Nixon in 1972, and Lord’s years as US ambassador to Beijing in the 1980s.
But turning to the present day, the 84-year-old is – in his own words – both saddened by the turn that US-China relations have taken in recent years and concerned that Washington is squandering the very assets it must lean on in its “long-range competition” with Beijing.
Winston Lord, then-special assistant to Kissinger, recalls Nixon's historic China summit
In a wide-ranging interview, Lord reflected on his role in the “geopolitical earthquake” of that trip; addressed criticism that Nixon’s engagement effort emboldened an increasingly assertive Chinese government; and warned that the Trumpian turn of the Republican Party – his former political home – is endangering Washington’s ability to counter Beijing.
Lord’s participation in the unprecedented meeting between Nixon and Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on February 21, 1972, almost never made it into the history books.
Nixon, who had often sidelined the State Department in favour of the National Security Council, did not invite secretary of state William Rogers into the meeting, despite him being on the trip, Lord recalled. Kissinger, on the other hand, requested that Lord be there, given that he had been in charge of Nixon’s briefing books.
But the inclusion of a young aide and exclusion of the secretary of state “was too much humiliation” for Rogers, said Lord, leading Nixon and Kissinger to request from the Chinese side that all photos of and statements about the meeting not include him.
“For years, everyone in the world except my wife [the writer Bette Bao Lord] thought only Nixon and Kissinger were at this meeting,” he said.
On a subsequent visit to China, Zhou, then China’s premier, set the record straight, gifting Lord a wide photograph of the summit, proving that Lord – seen taking notes as Nixon and Mao conversed – was in fact present.
Being in the room for that meeting makes Lord one of just a handful of living former US officials to have engaged directly with Mao and Zhou, giving him first-hand insight into how the Zhongnanhai of 1972 operated, and how it might compare to today’s.
Mao, for instance, was somewhat tight-lipped, speaking occasionally only to lay out Beijing’s position in broad brushstrokes that gave a framework for subsequent talks headed by the “eloquent” Zhou.
“Mao tended to delegate day-to-day affairs to Zhou Enlai and others,” said Lord. That is in stark contrast to China’s current president, Xi Jinping, a leader Lord said appeared “increasingly in control of absolutely everything”.
But there are similarities between the two leaders, too, said Lord, particularly Xi’s resurrection of the cult of personality and the iron fist with which he has governed.
“We’ve seen no crackdown in China anywhere near this since Mao’s days, and it’s getting worse,” said Lord, pointing to Beijing’s internment of ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang, its tightening control over Hong Kong and mounting pressure on Taiwan.
Such actions have pushed US-China tensions to new highs, said Lord, even to the point where he thinks that a presidential visit to China today, 50 years since Nixon’s, would be doomed to fail.
“I don’t see how we can have an immediate breakthrough that is reflected in a summit,” said Lord. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying to stabilise the relationship … But I think it’s going to have to take place more incrementally.”
Amid the souring of bilateral relations in recent years, a growing number of China hawks in the US have sought to portray engagement efforts with China as a failed experiment, ranging from its accession to the WTO in 2001 all the way back to Nixon’s initiative itself.
In July 2020, then secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave the most prominent platform yet to such critiques, when he said that the kind of engagement the US had pursued “has not brought the kind of change inside of China that president Nixon had hoped to induce”.
“The truth is that our policies – and those of other free nations – resurrected China’s failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it,” Pompeo said in a speech.
Those comments saddened Lord, he said, in part because Pompeo delivered them at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, his lectern a stone’s throw from the former president’s grave.
“Secretary Pompeo’s made a lot of asinine comments, and that ranks near the top,” said Lord. “He was dumping on all Republican presidents beforehand, and he exhibits the kind of hysteria about the Chinese threat when we ought to be more self-confident.”
Criticism of the Nixon administration’s efforts also failed to acknowledge that the primary drivers for rapprochement were to strengthen Washington’s hand against the Soviet Union, to seek help in negotiating an end to the Vietnam war and to be able “to speak with one quarter of the world’s people”, according to Lord.
“None of us were naive enough to think that just because we opened up with China that this was going to make them a Jeffersonian democracy,” he said. “We opened up for geopolitical, economic, security reasons, and we hoped – as an added plus – this would loosen up the Chinese political system … But engagement was not preconditioned on that.”
Nevertheless, Lord acknowledged that there needs to be an adjustment in Washington’s position today, in light of a Chinese government that has become “much more repressive at home [and] much more aggressive abroad”.
“The first pillar has to be: restore a functioning democracy in America,” said Lord, both for the “hard power” – to improve US competitiveness through better infrastructure and technological innovation – and for the “soft power” – to prove that democracies can function.
“We’ve got to have a much stronger domestic foundation in order to deal with the Chinese from a position of strength rather than weakness,” said Lord.
But that effort has proven a challenge for US President Joe Biden, whose first year in office was marked by stubborn opposition to many of his major initiatives from congressional Republicans. Even amid broad bipartisan concern about Beijing’s actions, Republicans have largely opposed sweeping bills in both the House of Representatives and Senate to strengthen US competitiveness with China.
“I still believe in bipartisanship, working together, putting national interests ahead of party interests,” said Lord. “But with Republicans, it’s impossible.”
Lord was a registered Republican for most of his life, and forged his political name under Republican presidents – in Nixon’s National Security Council and later as Ronald Reagan’s envoy to Beijing from 1985 to 1989. But now, as a registered independent, he is critical of the party’s “fire-breathing” on China, its approach to the coronavirus pandemic and its embrace of former president Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.
This month, the Republican National Committee declared the violent events of January 6, 2021, “legitimate political discourse,” and formally censured two Republican members of Congress for sitting on a panel tasked with investigating that day’s storming of the Capitol building by Trump supporters.
“Nixon, Reagan, maybe Lincoln, would be pariahs in today’s party,” said Lord. “Its leadership, in cowardly thrall to Trumpism, promotes or tolerates lies, racial inequities, the erosion of democracy and the rule of law.”
In November, the US was labelled a “backsliding democracy” for the first time by the European think tank International IDEA, which cited declining civil liberties, inadequate checks on government and the violent contesting of the 2020 election results.
Beijing, meanwhile, has seized on the Capitol riot as grist for arguments that American democracy has failed, and that any criticism of China’s own model of governance from US actors was therefore hypocritical.
“The [Republican] Party’s support for a firm stance on China notwithstanding – albeit with machetes, not scalpels – its defacing and dividing of America is the single biggest threat to our China policy, indeed our role in the world,” said Lord.
While crediting the Trump administration for having recognised China as a strategic competitor, Lord expressed particular concern that hawkishness on the right had become “so vociferous” that any move by Biden to try to stabilise relations would be considered weak, leaving him little political room to manoeuvre.
That much was clear in November, when a commitment from Washington and Beijing to deepen collaborative efforts to fight the climate crisis prompted a torrent of criticism from Republican figures, including former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Marco Rubio.
Above all, Lord said that those on both sides of the aisle should be more self-confident about US strengths as they pertain to competition with China, including energy, food and water security, military might and the calibre of higher education.
On top of that, China faces demographic challenges because of its rapidly ageing population, said Lord, a trend that had “major implications for the economy and stability”. The US, meanwhile, had “the huge advantage of immigration, which is one of many assets that Trump trashed”.
“We’ve got to get our act together, but our assets compared to the Chinese should give us a feeling that we can compete,” said Lord. “We ought to treat this as a Sputnik moment, in which a challenge technologically from an adversary wakes us up to what we have to do.”