Why did Mao welcome Nixon to Beijing in 1972?

The short answer

• Mao and Khrushchev read 1956 differently. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and his policy of peaceful coexistence with the West struck Mao as a retreat from revolution. Mao’s own speech in Moscow in 1957, in which he said that even a nuclear war that killed half of humanity would leave socialism victorious, alarmed the Soviet leaders. Each side began to suspect the other’s judgement, and every later disagreement was read through that suspicion. Because both claimed to speak for the same doctrine, a difference of policy became a question of who was the true heir of Lenin.
• National interests collided. Moscow wanted naval facilities in China and a voice in its defence; Beijing wanted the atomic bomb and full independence. In 1958 Mao rejected a joint fleet and shelled Kinmen without warning Moscow; in 1959 the Soviets withdrew the promise of a sample bomb and stayed neutral in China’s border dispute with India. The alliance had stopped serving either side’s interests well before it formally ended. Each concession one side asked for looked to the other like an attempt at control.
• The Leap divided the comrades. Khrushchev mocked the communes as a mistake the Soviet Union had tried and abandoned decades earlier, and Mao believed that Soviet leaders had encouraged Peng Dehuai’s criticism at Lushan. The withdrawal of the experts in July 1960, at the height of the famine, convinced many Chinese that Moscow had abandoned them when they were weakest, and Beijing later blamed the famine partly on Soviet “perfidy”. Blaming Moscow also helped the leadership avoid blaming itself.
• The Brezhnev Doctrine frightened Beijing. Soviet tanks crushed the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and Moscow claimed the right to intervene in any socialist country that strayed. Beijing, which Moscow regarded as having strayed far, took the doctrine as a threat to China itself. With Soviet divisions massing on the border and in Mongolia, the Cultural Revolution’s anti-Soviet rhetoric turned into real military fear. China had a small nuclear force and a vast but poorly equipped army, so the threat could not be met by China alone.

What it changed

Nixon in Beijing. Nixon’s week in China in February 1972 ended two decades of American refusal to deal with the People’s Republic. The Shanghai Communiqué stated each side’s views openly and found a formula on Taiwan, and the two countries opened liaison offices in 1973. Full diplomatic relations followed in January 1979, under Deng Xiaoping. American trade, technology and students then became central to the reforms that followed Mao.

China takes its seat at the UN. On 25 October 1971 the General Assembly voted 76 to 35 to give China’s seat, including a permanent place on the Security Council, to the People’s Republic, and the representatives of the Republic of China left. The vote showed how many governments had been waiting for an American signal. For Beijing it was the formal end of two decades of isolation, and for Taipei the beginning of a long loss of recognition.

The ring opens. Japan established relations with Beijing in September 1972 and broke them with Taiwan; West Germany, Australia and many others followed within months, and the Philippines and Thailand in 1975. On the map, the blue ring of 1964 breaks open on the east, while the Soviet border remains a front line. China had escaped encirclement without ending its quarrel with Moscow.

A Cold War triangle. With Washington, Moscow and Beijing each able to play the other two against each other, the Cold War became a triangle. The Soviet Union hurried into arms agreements with the United States in May 1972, and Vietnam, angered by China’s dealings with its enemy, drifted towards Moscow, a rift that led to war between China and Vietnam in 1979. The triangle gave China more room to manoeuvre than either alliance or isolation had done.