J Mohan Malik

During 21-28 February 1972, US President Nixon spent one full week in China – “the week that changed the world”, as Nixon himself later put it. This was the first visit by an American president to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nixon was instrumental in opening up a new political relationship with Communist China after decades of mutual estrangement, hostility and conflict. The highlight of Nixon’s visit was his meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong but substantive discussions on international security issues took place in a series of conversations with Premier Zhou Enlai. These conversations, classified as “Top Secret/Sensitive/Exclusively Eyes Only” up until recently, have had great bearing on how the events in the last three decades shaped up in the world in general and in South Asia in particular. Fortunately, the records of former President Richard Nixon and his then National Secretary Adviser Henry Kissinger’s conversations with Chinese Permier Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao Zedong have now been made available online at the National Security Archives of George Washington University website following a mandatory declassification review request made by the National Security Archive in 1994.[1] Nonetheless, significant excisions appear in the Nixon-Zhou discussions of India, the Soviet Union, Japan and Taiwan which show that even today some of the information is regarded as sensitive by the US government agencies.

Notwithstanding the excisions, the value of these documents lies in the fact that they go well beyond the accounts of the talks that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger provided in their memoirs.[2] The focus of their memoirs was on the Vietnam War and the Soviet threat, and they failed to reveal much on India-Pakistan-China relations. This article focuses primarily on Nixon and Kissinger’s conversations with Zhou Enlai dealing with South Asia in general and the Sino-US perspectives on India in particular.

These never-before-published verbatim transcripts (a total of seven documents) are useful for several other reasons as well. First of all, they make for compelling reading, despite the wealth of new material that has appeared recently on this subject, primarily by filling in major gaps in the existing literature on Chinese views on India as well as on Washington’s triangular diplomacy with Beijing and Moscow. They reveal the Nixon administration’s secret attempt to create a “tacit alliance” with China while deceiving the Soviets about the relationship.[3] A look at the historical origins of the triangular diplomacy (Washington-Beijing quasi-alliance to counter the Soviet threat) in the early 1970s is timely and useful at a time when the United States seems to be engaged in triangular diplomacy (or classic balance-of-power game) of a different kind (Washington-New Delhi quasi-alliance to counter the perceived China threat) in the early 21^st century. Any long-term assessment of bilateral ties must be based on a sound understanding of the perceptions and attitudes of the past. Secondly, these transcripts provide scintillating details on the personalities of leaders like Khrushchev, Mao, Nehru, Nixon, Kissinger, Indira Gandhi and Yahya Khan. Some of the transcripts conversations would not only irritate or disappoint the Indians, Pakistanis, Japanese and Taiwanese but could also prove embarrassing to the Chinese and the Americans themselves.[4] They provide first-hand account of their personal likes and dislikes and biases and prejudices that helped shape inter-state relations and Asian geopolitics during the Cold War era. They also show how State Department officials were kept out of the decisionmaking process by a determined Nixon-Kissinger duo in the early 1970s. And finally, these transcripts serve as a useful reminder of the games great powers play, more often than not, at the expense of small and weak states in the international system. Policymakers and opinionmakers will benefit a great deal if these transcripts are read together with William Burr’s The Kissinger Transcripts (1999), John Garver’s recently published study on India-China Rivalry in the Twentieth Century (2001) and Steven Hoffman’s 1990 seminal work, India and the China Crisis.[5]

The Historical Context

Before subjecting Nixon’s conversations with his Chinese interlocutors to critical scrutiny, it is important to keep the international and domestic political context and the motives, interests and aspirations of key actors involved in mind to understand the full import of Nixon-Zhou talks held in Beijing in February 1972. Since this visit took place two months after the India-Pakistan War of 1971, which led to the dismemberment of Pakistan (an ally of both the United States and China and a facilitator of the Sino-US rapprochement) and the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state with the help of India backed by the Soviet Union, it was but natural that the two sides spent considerable amount of time discussing the new security situation in South Asia and the need to coordinate their responses. This was also the time when the Vietnam War was at its peak despite the Nixon Administration’s plans to bring a negotiated end to it. The Soviet Union was seen as a rising, expansionist power, lending its military and diplomatic support to allies such as India and Vietnam. On top of it all, the Nixon-Zhou meeting was preceded by a tense stand-off between China and the Soviet Union following several bloody skirmishes on their disputed border and the Soviet threat to take out China’s nuclear arsenal in a pre-emptive strike. The domestic situation in China was volatile as the turmoil and chaos unleased by the Cultural Revolution had brought economic and social development to a standstill. Power struggle between moderate and radical factions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was still raging.

The 1971 India-Pakistan War

If armed clashes on the Sino-Soviet border in 1969 prompted Beijing and Washington to set up secret channels of communication, the 1971 India-Pakistan War brought them out of the closet and paved the way for a public USA-PRC-kiss-and-make-up. It was the Nixon administration’s decision to tilt US policy towards Beijing at the height of the 1971 India-Pakistan War which convinced the Chinese leadership of Washington’s “seriousness and reliability” as an ally and commitment to rapprochement.[6] This tilt, engineered secretly by Nixon and Kissinger who saw India as a Soviet proxy and China as an ally against the Soviet threat, however, drew widespread opposition within and without the Nixon administration. It was based partly on the assumption that Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi aimed to destroy West Pakistan after dismembering its eastern wing and was partly an expression of gratitude to Beijing’s ally, President Yahya Khan of Pakistan, for playing an important role in facilitating secret communications with China during 1970 and 1971. The transcripts reveal that the Chinese Premier was quite impressed with the Pakistanis’ military prowess and fighting spirit but was scathing in his criticism of General Yahya Khan’s leadership qualities. Zhou told Nixon:

Yahya really did not lead his troops in East Pakistan well. Even though we assisted with armaments…At the time of the ceasefire, they [the Pakistanis] still had 80,000 troops in East Pakistan. It was not a situation in which they couldn’t keep fighting. We know the Pakistanis are good fighters, and the men wanted to keep on. The trouble was the Commanders were terrible – they really just scattered the troops…Yahya should have concentrated his troops to win a victory, and once the Indian side had suffered a defeat they would have stopped because West Bengal was not very secure either…[with] a force of 40,000 against one Indian division, they would have been able to win and that would have demoralized the Indians...Yahya was a good man, but did not know how to lead an army, how to fight.[7]

Then Zhou refers to Kissinger’s secret meeting with China’s UN ambassador Huang Hua on 10 December 1971 in New York. The remaining part is censored but the full account is presented in William Burr’s The Kissinger Transcripts.[8] It was at this meeting that Kissinger provided sensitive intelligence information, derived from reconnaissance satellites, on Soviet military deployments along the Sino-Soviet border.[9] Kissinger told Ambassador Huang (who later visited India as Foreign Minister in 1981) how the White House was sustaining its tilt towards Pakistan with veiled threats to the Soviets, secret requests to Middle Eastern governments to provide military equipment to Pakistan, and instructions to send an aircraft carrier fleet through the Straits of Malacca into the Bay of Bengal “to ensure ‘maximum intimidation’ of India and the Soviet Union”.[10] At this meeting, Huang launched a strong anti-India tirade which led Kissinger to conclude incorrectly that the Chinese were about to enter the conflict as Indian military moved in to decimate West Pakistan. Demanding strongest condemnation of India, Huang said:

Because if India, with the aid of the Soviet Union, would be able to have its own way in the subcontinent then there would be no more security to speak of for a lot of other countries, and no peace to speak of. Because that would mean the dismemberment of and the splitting up of a sovereign country and the creation of a new edition of Manchukuo, the Bangladesh…The Soviet Union and India now are progressing along on an extremely dangerous track in the subcontinent. And as we have already pointed out this is a step to encircle China.[11]

Kissinger fully agreed with Huang Hua saying that if nothing was done to stop India, then East Pakistan will become a Bhutan and West Pakistan will become a Nepal and India with Soviet help would be free to turn is energies elsewhere (read, Tibet).[12] Though Huang did not mention Tibet, “but since the discussion was about Soviet-Indian collusion to partition other countries, the implication was obvious.”[13]

As John Garver points out, the Chinese view of India was that of a neo-colonialist regime propped up by Anglo-American imperialism and/or the Soviet revisionists as a way of encircling China and that the Soviet-supported Indian intervention in Bangladesh could serve as a precedent for possible intervention in Tibet.[14] While India could create difficulties in Tibet, the Soviet Union could pose problems for China’s only Muslim majority province of Xinjiang, formerly known as East Turkestan. Zhou himself acknowledged China’s nightmare scenario in February 1972: “The worst possibility is what I told Dr Kissinger…the eventuality that you all would attack China – the Soviet Union comes from the north, Japanese and the U.S. from the east, and India into China’s Tibet.”[15] Zhou recalled the conversation that Soviet Foreign Minister had had with Japanese leader Fukuda regarding the possibility of a greater conflict between China and the Soviet Union than there was at Chen Bao within the next five years: “Perhaps they want to do as they did in Bangladesh, and may be they will try to create a Republic of Turkestan...”[16]

It was in this context that Kissinger offered the US support to deter the Soviet Union in case China decided to mount an attack on India in support of Pakistan. Kissinger told Huang Hua on 10 December 1971: “…if the People’s Republic were to consider the situation on the Indian subcontinent a threat to its security, and if it took measures to protect its security, the US would oppose efforts of others [read, the Soviet Union] to interfere with the People’s Republic…”[17] This assurance of US support for Chinese intervention in the war was carefully omitted by Kissinger from his memoirs. He later argued that this action had been “the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship.”[18] (Fortunately, a week after this meeting, on 17 December, India accepted Pakistan’s offer of an unconditional cease-fire.)

Nixon also confirmed this account by saying: “In December, when the situation was getting very sensitive in the subcontinent – I’m using understatement – I was prepared…”[19] The rest of the statement is blacked out but its content is no longer a secret as it was alluded to in Nixon’s memoirs and numerous other works. He was referring to the dispatch of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal and the plans to use nuclear weapons if India had continued its advance into West Pakistani territory and if the Soviet Union had not pressured India to halt its aggression after the liberation of Bangladesh. The Chinese were also keeping a close watch on the US-Soviet moves and counter-moves. As Zhou told Nixon: “When your navy ships were moving toward the Indian Ocean they [USSR] also very quickly sent nuclear subs down from Vladivostok to the Indian Ocean.”[20] The next paragraph is blacked out wherein the two sides apparently discussed their support for each other’s intimidation of India and the Soviet Union to bring a quick end to the war. Nixon describes himself as a “hardliner on India” (and this was music to his hosts’ ears) saying “all the Indian decisions were mine…[though] Dr Kissinger was a [co-] conspirator with me.”[21]

To allay Beijing’s concerns about any future US-Soviet deals detrimental to China’s interests, Nixon and Kissinger also repeatedly assure Zhou that “we will make no, have no understandings with the Soviet Union…[without] informing your government.”[22] Both sides also agreed to coordinate their stance on the recognition of Bangladesh and delay it as long as possible because, as Zhou put it:

Both of us owe something to Yahya, although he didn’t show much statesmanship in leading his country, for bringing the link between our two countries…As for us, our recognition of Bangladesh will be later than yours and we may be the last. But that does not mean that we will refuse to have any contact whatsoever with an area with so huge a population…Islamic countries haven’t recognized Bangladesh, and we must respect their views.[23]

This stance demonstrates that Beijing has long recognized the need to keep the Islamic world on its side. The transcripts show the Nixon administration’s reluctance/failure to judge the issue of military’s brutal repression in East Pakistan purely on its own merits (e.g., its refusal to transfer power to a popularly elected leader), that is, without looking at it from prism of the global US-Soviet-China Cold War rivalry. In their very first day of discussions, both Nixon and Zhou agreed that “a critical area like South Asia and India cannot be discussed without evaluating the policy of the Soviet Union toward that area. And the same can be said of the whole problem of arms control.”[24]  As Nixon explained: “One reason we took a strong stand on the India-Pakistan matter was to discourage Soviet adventuristic policy in a place like the Middle East.” Nixon then offers to share intelligence on the Soviet forces deployed on the Sino-Soviet border. The whole paragraph is censured except the last line: “When we took a hard line against India and for Pakistan, we were speaking not just to India or Pakistan but also – and we made them well aware of it – to the Soviet Union”.[25]

Clearly, from Nixon’s perspective, the use of threats and intimidation of India and the Soviet Union during the December 1971 War was meant to send a signal to the Soviets to refrain from helping Washington’s adversaries in regional or internal conflicts in the Third World. It was also meant to demonstrate the United States’ reliability to the Chinese as a prelude to Nixon’s talks with Zhou and Mao.[26] Interestingly, the transcripts reveal that Zhou Enlai was considering restoring ambassador-level ties (severed since the 1962 war) with India in 1971 (that is, just before the Bangladesh crisis erupted) and the Indian Government was informed of this move. However, the Sino-US rapprochement and the Bangladesh War in 1971 served to delay the normalisation of Sino-Indian relations by almost a decade, though ambassador-level ties were eventually restored in 1976.

The 1962 China’s India War and the Territorial Dispute

Recalling the origins of the 1962 war with India, Zhou Enlai noted that “the events actually began in 1959.” However, he went on to attribute it to the US-Soviet summit at Camp David in June 1959 and Khrushchev’s unilateral decision to tear up the nuclear agreements between China and the Soviet Union prior to his departure for Camp David. Zhou observed: “And after that there were clashes between Chinese and Indian troops in the western part of Sinkiang [Xinjiang], the Aksai Chin area…India was encouraged by the Soviet Union to attack. We fought them and beat them back, with many wounded. But the TASS News Agency said that China had committed aggression against India.” The then Chinese Foreign Minister Marshal Chen Yi took Khrushchev to task for endorsing the Indian version of events. He asked Khrushchev: “Why did you rely on the Indian press over the Chinese press? Wasn’t that a case of believing in India more than us, a fraternal country (that is, China)?” Zhou told Nixon that “the TASS Agency account had the effect of encouraging India. And also Neville Maxwell mentioned in the book that in 1962 the Indian Government believed what the Russians told them that we, China, would not retaliate against them.”[27]

In reality, Zhou’s account of the origins of the Sino-Indian war in 1962 as narrated to Nixon is at best subjective and incorrect and at worst a complete distortion of historical facts. Zhou was right in saying that “the events actually began in 1959” but they had little or nothing to do with the Camp David summit (held in June 1959) or the Soviet decision to renege on its promise to provide China with a nuclear bomb. Its origins lay in an event that had occurred 3 months earlier – in the March 1959 Tibetan uprising which ended with the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile in India and the renunciation of the Seventeen-Point Agreement which had “legalised” China’s annexation of Tibet in 1950. Zhou, however, cleverly sidestepped the single most important issue of national uprising in Tibet and Mao’s subsequent decision to punish Nehru for granting asylum to Tibet’s spiritual leader, and blamed it all on the Soviet Union apparently to emphasize the common security concerns that Beijing now shared with Washington vis-à-vis Moscow.

Zhou cited Maxwell[28] in support of his claim that “in 1962 the Indian Government believed what the Russians told them that we, China, would not retaliate against them.”[29] However, it was not just the Russians who told the Indians so. The Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi had himself said so twice, once in response to a question in Karachi. As Steven Hoffman argues, the Indian leadership relied too much on a private assurance given to Defence Minister Krishna Menon by Foreign Minister Chen Yi in July 1962 that “there may be skirmishes between forces of the two countries along the border, but full-scale hostilities were unthinkable.”[30]

Zhou later himself acknowledged the real reason behind China’s decision to up the ante on the border dispute: “We sent three open telegrams to Nehru asking him to make a public reply, but he refused. He was so discourteous; he wouldn’t even do us the courtesy of replying, so we had no choice but to drive him out.” Zhou also claimed that “actually the five principles were put forward by us, and Nehru agreed. But later on he didn’t implement them.”[31] Obviously, Nehru had incurred Zhou’s wrath for being discourteous and arrogant, and a punitive military action against India, from Beijing’s perspective, was a logical step.[32] That is how the Celestial Emperor of the Middle Kingdom had traditionally reacted to tributary states and hostile regimes in Chinese history.

Steven Hoffman, however, gives another explanation for Nehru’s intransigence and angst over Zhou’s negotiating stance in his authoritative study on India and the China Crisis.[33] A theme pursued in this book, and one which has largely been ignored in the earlier studies of China-India conflict, is the importance of Indian nationalism which influenced Indian leadership’s basic worldview and its response to Chinese demands for territorial concessions from India. He argues that the “Nehru government…perceived in the Chinese negotiating stance an attempt to denigrate the historical authenticity of the Indian nation.”[34] In other words, the view that unlike China, India was an artificial construct put together by the departing British colonialists. That is why, “China never understood the psychological dimension of India’s handling of the border dispute.”[35] Coming as it did soon after India’s independence from centuries of colonialism, the Chinese demand for territorial concessions was seen as demeaning and humiliating.

Talking about the Sino-Burmese boundary settlement which required China’s acceptance of the McMahon line, Zhou outlined the underlying principle of China’s boundary settlements: China tends to be more accommodative towards smaller countries than towards big powers. Zhou told Nixon: “The boundary settlement of the Sino-Burmese boundary line was one of mutual accommodation, but actually the result was that Burma gained a bit more, which was reasonable. Since they are a smaller country than us we gave them the benefit of the doubt.”[36] In other words, Beijing’s policy is to settle borders with smaller and weaker states, and if need be, make territorial concessions to them but refuse to compromise with big countries perceived either as threats to China or as China’s rivals (such as India) and force them to make territorial concessions. He also believed that the two big countries, the Soviet Union and India, were not keen on settlement and were cooperating against China: “They want to leave a pretext so that they can take the opportunity to make provocations against us when they need it.” He then let the cat out of the bag by implying that China had provoked border incidents to pressure the Soviet Union to start boundary question negotiations in the late 1960s.[37] Now that Beijing has settled its land border disputes with all its neighbouring countries including Moscow, it remains to be seen whether Beijing will adopt the same strategy of deliberate border provocations to persuade “intransigent India” to make territorial concessions.

India and its leaders: In the Eyes of Nixon, Mao and Zhou

Nixon’s personal dislike of India and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is too well-known and documented. Document 4 of the Nixon-Zhou transcripts further confirms this fact and happens to be one of the more heavily excised documents. Among the excisions is an aspersion by Nixon against the Indians.[38] Comparing the Germans, the Japanese and the Chinese who have the qualities of drive and hard work, Nixon made derogatory remarks about the Indians’ breeding habits, laziness, lack of sense of purpose and determination. Not surprisingly, the rest of the statement is censored. Nixon opined that “the money goes down a rathole in countries like India” and regretted that “the more aid we have given, the less influence we have.” Zhou echoed Nixon: “And India actually is a bottomless hole.”[39] This point about the futility of US economic assistance to India was also taken up by Mao Zedong in his conversations with Nixon and Kissinger, and was reproduced in The Kissinger Transcripts.

That Nixon was also largely ignorant of Indian history is evident from this remark: “As I look at India’s brief history, it has had enough trouble trying to digest West Bengal. If now it tries to digest East Bengal, it may cause indigestion which would be massive.” His host, Zhou Enlai, approvingly concurred:

That’s bound to be so. It is also a great pity that the daughter [Mrs Gandhi] has also taken as her legacy the philosophy of her father embodied in the book Discovery of India. Have your read it?…Yes, he [Nehru] was thinking of a great Indian empire – Malaysia, Ceylone etc. It would probably also include our Tibet.…Chen Yi called it to my attention. He said it was precisely the spirit of India that was embodied in the book.[40]

If Zhou found Nehruvian interpretation of Indian history so difficult to digest, one wonders what he (and the current Chinese leaders) would make of the ultra-nationalist RSS/BJP’s view of Indian history.[41]

Furthermore, Zhou is reported as saying that “[t]he biggest challenge after the Second World War was the liberation of China.”[42] In other words, the independence of India or Indonesia from colonial rule was a non-event. This was not surprising because Chairman Mao Zedong used to harbour doubts about India’s independent status more than two decades after the British had left. Mao told Kissinger on 12 November 1973: “India did not win independence. If it does not attach itself with Britain, it attaches itself to the Soviet Union. And now, more than one-half of their economy depends on you (United States).”[43] For the Mao-Zhou duo, Nehru was first a British and then a Soviet stooge, incapable of acting on his own and India was first a British colony and later a Soviet colony.[44] Mao and Kissinger also used to make light of Gandhi and Indian philosophy which “was never meant to have a practical application.” As noted earlier, Nixon was a self-confessed “hardliner on India” and took credit for all the anti-India decisions during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War. In other words, it was a complete meeting of minds among known India-baiters at the time. Nixon later summed up the Chinese attitudes towards their neighbours: “the Russians they hate, the Japanese they fear and as for the Indians, they feel contempt.”[45]

Interestingly, in the course of conversation, Zhou went on to make an important point about India’s inability to exercise hegemony:

From our point of view, even if the subcontinent were under one country there would still be turmoil there, because they have nationality problems there even more complicated than yours [USA] which are now covered up. If India took over all of the subcontinent, there would be even more trouble. India is not able to exercise hegemony – this is our philosophy.[46]

This view contrasts sharply with official China’s frequent warnings about India’s hegemonic designs since the early 1960s. In their bilateral meetings with smaller South Asian countries, Chinese leaders and policymakers continue to bemoan India’s “hegemonic aspirations” and “big brotherly attitude” especially when compared with China’s “peace-loving and good-neighbourly attitude.” It also shows that debate within Chinese policymaking community about India’s future and intentions is far from over. On the one hand are those in the Chinese national security bureaucracy who entertain serious doubts about the prospects of India’s survival as a nation-state over the long term, seeing it as a “soft state characterized by religious, linguistic and regional fault lines” and caution against any initiative that will augment India’s power. On the other hand are those who want to hedge their bets by strengthening the China-Pakistan-Burma axis so as to contain India if it indeed emerges as China’s rival.[47] They believe that India’s emergence as a powerful economic and military power is not in China’s interests because acceptance of South Asia as India’s sphere of influence would undermine China’s role and stature as the pre-eminent power in Asia.[48] Thus the root cause of the volatile and strained Sino-Indian relationship lies in Beijing’s determination to prevent India from playing a role it once played as a civilisation and empire from Central Asia to Southeast Asia, and in New Delhi’s counter-containment strategies. A recent study on the contemporary Chinese perceptions of India further lends support to this view: “China’s rivalry with India may also be based on other historical factors, like the challenge of Buddhism to Chinese core beliefs, jealousy about the achievements of India’s ancient empire, or India’s large population and territory.”[49]

On the Origins of the Sino-Soviet Conflict

Zhou Enlai confirmed what is now widely known about the beginning of the end for the socialist bloc solidarity. The Sino-Soviet alliance began unravelling in 1956, at the time of the 20^th Congress of the CPSU and two years after the Sino-Indian agreement of 1954. It was triggered by Mao Zedong’s strong disapproval of Khrushchev’s attempt to write off all of Stalin’s achievements at one stroke. Mao made the remark that 30 percent of what Stalin did was wrong but 70 percent was right.[50] Ironically, the CCP under Deng Xiaoping made an exactly similar assessment of Mao’s achievements after the great helmsman’s death in 1976.

Zhou told Nixon that after the complete rupture in Sino-Soviet relations in 1960, the Chinese used to convey their messages to Moscow (during 1964-1965) through Pakistani military ruler Ayub Khan.[51] This is an interesting revelation insofar as it shows that General Yahya Khan was not the first Pakistani leader to act as an intermediary for the Chinese. His predecessor Ayub Khan’s services were also used in a similar capacity to keep the channels of communication open with the Soviet Union. General Ayub Khan might have acted as a messenger during the Tashkent Agreement facilitated by Khrushchev after the 1965 India-Pakistan War. This earns Pakistan the unique distinction of acting as an intermediary for the Chinese in their secret dealings with both the superpowers – the Soviet Union and the United States: a fact that should make Pakistani diplomacy an object of envy for the leader of the “non-aligned” movement and arch-rival, India.

As regards the 1969 clashes on the Sino-Soviet border, Zhou made no mention of the border provocations by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution who instigated border incidents.[52] He complained to Nixon that “though a so-called hot line existed between the Soviet Union and China, it had become cold because the Kremlin hadn’t called us. Their line existed, but they didn’t use it.”[53] Thirty years later, following the accidental NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, it was President Clinton’s turn to complain that the Chinese did not use the hot-line between White House and Zhongnanhai either as his repeated calls to President Jiang Zemin went unanswered. In an interesting parallel, Zhou dismissed the Soviet anger over the U-2 spy plane incident over the Soviet territory as “a very good pretext”.[54] One wonders how Beijing would react to any suggestion that by the same token, the Chinese anger over the EP-3 spy plane incident in April 2001, which occurred in the international airspace, not over the Chinese territory, was nothing but “a very good pretext” too.

The Sino-US Rapprochement: Winners and Losers

In the course of their conversations, both leaders repeatedly emphasize the need for confidentiality and utmost secrecy of talks concerning the Soviet Union, India and Japan, with Nixon warning about his own State Department which “leaks like a sieve”.[55] He seemed to be lamenting the democratic process for its inability to keep secrets while lauding the Communist system. While Nixon took great delight in taking a dig at his domestic political opponents (both Republican and Democrat) in his private conversations with Zhou, the Chinese Premier, true to his form, did not utter a word about the deteriorating health of Chairman Mao, the domestic political situation or the intense power struggle that was going on in the faction-ridden CCP.

Archival documents illustrate that there was strong opposition to the US-China détente from what Nixon and Zhou described as an “an unholy alliance of the far right, pro-Chiang Kai-Shek, pro-Japan elements, the pro-Soviet left, and pro-Indian left.”[56] In their zeal to counter the exaggerated fears of perceived Soviet threat, both had decided to put the Taiwan issue on the backburner with the US side making significant concessions to the Chinese side. The compromise reached on Taiwan in the early 1970s has now emerged as the single most important issue bedevilling China’s relations with the United States in the 21^st century.

Emphasizing that “both China and the U.S. have had very difficult experiences with Japanese militarism,” Nixon expressed the fear that should the US get out of Japan, Japan could go nuclear.[57] He also offered to take on the responsibility of protecting China’s interests vis-à-vis Japan and India. On several occasions, Nixon conceded the primacy of Chinese interests in the Indian subcontinent (“we believe your interest here is greater than ours”), thereby effectively acknowledging South Asia as China’s sphere of influence.[58] What goes around comes around, as they say. Zhou derided the Soviet support for the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963 as an attempt “to exert pressure on us at a time when we didn’t have nuclear weapons.”[59] Three decades later, Indians were levelling the same accusation at China, describing Beijing’s support for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as an attempt to “exert pressure on us at a time when we didn’t have nuclear weapons.”[60]

The tragedy of great power politics is that the more things change the more they remain the same. In 1972 Nixon was telling Zhou that “in terms of world peace…a strong China is in the interests of world peace at this point…a strong China can help provide the balance of power in this key part of the world – that is desperately needed.”[61] Three decades later, concerned with the rise of a Chinese behemoth following the collapse of the Soviet Union, another Republican President, George W. Bush, is now conveying the same message to India’s Prime Minister Vajpayee: “A strong India can help provide the balance of power in the entire Asian region.” Realpolitik rules! Understandably then, China is now as critical and apprehensive of the Indo-US-kiss-and-make-up as India and the Soviet Union were then of the Sino-US rapprochement.[62] Already, some in India’s strategic circles see in the emerging Indo-US quasi-alliance as providing an opportunity for “payback” as far as China is concerned. As former ambassador to Pakistan and Burma, G. Parthasarthy, put it: “whether it was the Bangladesh conflict of 1971, or in the Clinton-Jiang Declaration in the aftermath of our nuclear tests, China has never hesitated to use its leverage with the Americans, to undermine our security.”[63]

An Appraisal

The week-long visit in February 1972 was successful in putting the tentative Sino-US rapprochement on much firmer ground with formals understandings on “global and regional hegemony” (code-words for the former Soviet Union and India) and Taiwan. It was a Kissingerian exercise in classic balance-of-power diplomacy with two powers pooling their resources together to meet the perceived common security threat emanating from the Soviet Union. As Kissinger advised Nixon, it was Mao’s and Zhou’s pragmatism that led them to deal with one “barbarian” nation (the United States) in order to control another “barbarian” nation (the Soviet Union)! From Nixon’s perspective, it was not his new-found love for Red China or Maoist version of communism but China’s geostrategic location and its ability to pin down half of the Soviet Red Army in the East so as to present Moscow with multiple security concerns on several fronts that prompted him to undertake significant policy shifts on India, Taiwan and Japan. The Nixon-Kissinger duo did a superb job competing with each other in humouring Zhou by denigrating the Indians and Russians. If Zhou’s narration of events leading up to the 1962 India-China War and the 1969 Sino-Soviet clashes is full of half-truths and misrepresentation of historical facts, it is so because his primary objective at the talks was to emphasize the commonality of interests between the United States and China vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The Nixon-Zhou transcripts reveal two major reasons for their distrust and dislike for India: New Delhi’s close relations with the former Soviet Union and Beijing’s alliance with Pakistan, especially Islamabad’s pivotal role in putting Chinese leaders in touch with the Americans. They also demonstrate that much like the Americans, the Chinese have long underestimated India’s determination to emerge as an independent regional and global actor on the international stage.

Sudden, dramatic changes in major powers alignments are bound to have unintended consequences for other actors in the international system. The Sino-American rapprochement was no exception. The state of Sino-US relations has always impacted heavily upon India’s foreign policy orientation. President Nixon’s courting of Mao’s China in 1971 increased India’s need to avoid international isolation in its looming war against Pakistan and pushed non-aligned India firmly into the Soviet embrace leading to the signing of the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Peace and Cooperation in August 1971 as a guarantee against Chinese intervention or nuclear blackmail. A gradual deterioration in Sino-US relations since mid-1999 has been accompanied by a dramatic improvement in Indo-US relations.[64] However, it is hoped that the Indo-US rapprochement is not motivated merely by Washington’s desire to pin down half of the PLA divisions on the India-China border. The détente between the world’s most powerful and largest democracies has the potential to prove more durable than was the Sino-US rapprochement based as it is not just on shared security interests (with regard to China, Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, missile defence, and the safety of vital sea lanes of communication), but also on the growing economic synergy and near identical worldviews on world order and shared values of pluralism, rule of law, democracy and human rights.

The Nixon-Zhou transcripts may conceal as much as they reveal and there is reason to believe that theirs’ is certainly not the last word on this subject. Like most of the existing literature on this subject, these conversations illuminate elite attitudes and perceptions in Washington and Beijing during the early 1970s. It has been recently reported that India’s Defence Ministry has finally recommended releasing into the public domain the official history of the 1962 border war with China along with other official accounts of India’s wars with Pakistan in 1947, 1965 and 1971. Hopefully, the official account will further enhance our understanding of the key dynamics underlying India’s relations with major powers and illuminate key events in the lead up to the wars of 1962 and 1971. One also hopes that Chinese archives and perhaps the memories of former Chinese officials may someday provide insights as to why the Chinese reacted the way they did. But for that account we have to wait until a democratic regime comes to power in Beijing which is willing to provide free access to its classified party and state archives.

The author is Professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, USA. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Asia-Pacific Center, the Department of Defense or the US government.