On February 28, 1972, the SAM 26000 Spirit of 76 aircraft carried the American president, Richard Nixon, from Shanghai Hongqiao Airport to Elmendorf Air Base in Anchorage, Alaska. He finished a tour that began on February 21 and whose milestone was to meet the Chinese president, Mao Zedong. In his personal journal, Nixon wrote: “This week changed the world.”
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The meeting was the result of months of work by Henry Kissinger, national security adviser, with Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in a behind-the-scenes meeting that included rapprochements in Warsaw and Bucharest, games of ping pongSoviet and Taiwanese sabotage, secret trips to China via Islamabad (Pakistan), messages sent by Mao to Nixon through Pakistani President Yahya Khan and his ambassador to Washington, Agha Hilaly, saying that he would be pleased to receive Nixon “for talk about the Taiwan issue.
“After messages from many different sources, there is a message from one head to another head through one head,” Zhou Enlai told Khan, stressing the importance of the message and the messenger. Nixon told Kissinger: “This is the most important message a president of the United States has received since the end of World War II.”
Both sides recognized its importance in world affairs. In 1967, Nixon wrote an article for foreign affairs entitled ‘Asia after Vietnam’, saying that the United States could not admit that “China is outside the community of nations, excluding millions of the most capable inhabitants of the planet”. For Mao it was impossible to isolate China, which was advancing rapidly in its diplomatic recognition, with countries that adhered to the principle of one China represented by the People’s Republic and that Taiwan is part of China, admitting that it is a problem left by the war completed in 1949, which is up to the Chinese to solve.
(Also: The Cold War, half a century of dangerous confrontations).
By 1972, China had regained representation in the United Nations and had diplomatic relations with 80 countries (today there are 185). However, he was also clear about the role of the United States in the separation.
Dialogue and compromise were in the interest of both countries. China was seeking a political commitment from the most important Western power regarding the reunification of Taiwan. The United States wanted to take advantage of the fissures of the Sino-Soviet split to get out of the indirect confrontation of the proxy war in Vietnam and prevent China from getting closer to the Soviet Union by persisting in the policy of containment.
“In 1972, China was a weak and poor but assertive country; today he is rich, very powerful and assertive. Since then the challenge is knowing
how to compete with China without provoking
a holocaust.”
After the meeting with Mao, Nixon and Kissinger worked with the Chinese on the Shanghai Communiqué in which the United States recognized that the Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait declared that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of it and seek the normalization of relations, despite the differences in political systems and ideology, through a dialogue that would reduce “the risks of confrontation by accident, miscalculation or misunderstanding”.
In the early 1980s, China reframed the reunification policy to emphasize the peaceful path with the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ proposal, without giving up the military option but limiting it to extreme events such as a declaration of independence or foreign intervention.
In recent years, the US has acted against the spirit of the Shanghai Communiqué, exacerbating independence claims in Taiwan and generating a situation of extreme danger in Asia, where it has lost the three major military interventions in which it has been involved after World War II: Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The Nixon-Mao meeting lasted one hour and five minutes, behind closed doors, and only Mao, Zhou Enlai, Nixon and Kissinger were present. However, its effects were transcendental for the world order.just as its protagonists had foreseen, changed the world, being the pillar of what was already foreseen as one of the most important bilateral relations on the planet.
The Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 is considered inside and outside China as the fundamental diplomatic piece for the preservation of stability in Asia. When the United States deviates from the tradition born of the Nixon-Mao meeting, it creates friction with China and damages a relationship essential to the world.
Both countries had to work hard to achieve domestic political consensus in support of the engagement strategy. Today in China this consensus continues to prevail, but not in the United States, where sectors of the political parties have turned attacking China into a short-term electoral weapon.
(Keep reading: A meeting about the past and the future).
When referring to good relations in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping said: “When we cross the bridge, let us not forget those who built it.” Henry Kissinger, the only living protagonist, today 98 years old, said in November 2021 to CNN: “In 1972, China was a weak and poor but assertive country; today he is rich, very powerful and assertive. Since then, the challenge is to know how to compete with China without causing a holocaust”.
The benefits of the diplomatic legacy of Nixon, Mao, Kissinger and Zhou Enlai for the United States, China and the world have been evident. The deterioration was started by Barack Obama, intensified by Donald Trump and has been aggravated by Joseph Biden, bringing danger and instability to the world and the return of the ghost of a Cold War that had been exorcised in that meeting of one hour and five minutes 50 years ago.
GUILLERMO PUYANA RAMOS
FOR THE TIME
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