
SOME MISTAKES are repeated over the course of generations. For more than four decades, American presidents sought a closer relationship with China, working to “engage” that country so as to “enmesh” it into the international system. Richard Nixon, in his landmark Foreign Affairs article in 1967, provided the rationale for engagement, arguing the Chinese state could not be isolated. “Taking the long view,” he famously wrote then, “we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.”
Since the early 1970s, American policymakers believed they could avoid such nurturing, cherishing and threatening by making the success of the Communist Party of China a goal of U.S. foreign policy. With interests defined this way, American presidents helped China’s communists at crucial moments.
The first of those moments came in 1972, during the latter stages of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Years of internal fighting and chaos—essentially civil war—had weakened China’s ruling organization, but Nixon’s visit that year signaled support for Mao’s tottering regime. “We’re damned,” said Shanghai banker Wu Yaonan at the time, as recounted by democracy activist Chin Jin. “The United States is coming to the rescue of the Communist Party.”
Another rescue was secretly mounted by President George H.W. Bush in the wake of protests in 371 Chinese cities in the spring of 1989 and the slaughter in Beijing in early June. Bush sent emissary Brent Scowcroft on an unannounced trip to the Chinese capital in July to assure paramount leader Deng Xiaoping that Washington would stand with the Party and help it outlast withering criticism from abroad. Bush then made sure that America’s Tiananmen sanctions, which he was forced to accept, were ineffective and lifted quickly.
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