The Dragon and the Snake: An American Account of the Turmoil in China, 1976-1977

By Millicent Anne Gates, E. Bruce Geelhoed and Gerald R. Ford

The United States Liaison Office (USLO) served as the diplomatic contact for Sino-American relations between the time of the Nixon-Kissinger opening of China in 1971-1972 and the achievement of full normalization in 1979. This book presents the importance of the USLO to American foreign policy in the 1970s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781512802238

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INTRODUCTION

Everything Seemed to Happen in 1976 and 1977

On May 6, 1976, Thomas Gates arrived in Peking to begin his tenure as chief of the United States Liaison Office (USLO) to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nominated to this post the previous March by President Gerald R. Ford and subsequently confirmed by the Senate with the rank of ambassador, Tom thus became America’s official representative to the largest nation on earth. His service as the presidential envoy to China lasted until May 1977, when President Jimmy Carter replaced him with Leonard Woodcock. Tom’s year of diplomatic experience in the PRC therefore included a good portion of both 1976 and 1977, the Year of the Dragon and the Year of the Snake, respectively, in the Chinese lunar calendar.

Tom Gates had been very active in public life prior to his departure for China in the spring of 1976, although he had not held a full-time position in Washington since leaving the Eisenhower administration in 1961. Throughout the 1950s, he occupied several high-level posts in the Defense Department, first as under secretary of the navy (1953 to 1957), then as secretary of the navy (1957 to 1959), deputy secretary of defense (May to December 1959), and finally as secretary of defense (1959 to 1961). As secretary of defense during the last fourteen months of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, Tom sat on the National Security Council and served as the president’s principal adviser on military affairs. When combined with his other duties at the Pentagon, these responsibilities brought him into frequent contact with Secretary of State Christian Herter; Gordon Gray, Eisenhower’s national security adviser; Allen Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and other representatives of the diplomatic community and the national security establishment. As a result, Tom became vitally involved in the national security planning process during the 1950s and retained a strong interest in international affairs even after he left the Cabinet in 1961 to return to his banking career with the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company in New York.

By virtue of his experience in the Eisenhower administration, Tom Gates felt no professional reluctance in accepting Gerald Ford’s offer to serve as chief of the United States Liaison Office in China. By agreeing to serve as presidential envoy to the PRC, he became responsible for keeping both President Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger informed on developments in China which affected American foreign policy and, in addition, working for improved relations between the two countries. In that regard, the chief of USLO worked for the president in addition to overseeing the operation of the American mission in China. Indeed, the opportunity to represent President Ford, rather than the administrative responsibilities of supervising the USLO operation, ultimately became the determining factor in Tom’s decision to re-enter public service.

Between the time of his Senate confirmation and the date for the actual departure to China, Tom Gates conscientiously studied the history, culture, and political traditions of the People’s Republic of China as part of a cram course in Sinology administered to him by the State Department. No amount of study, however, could have sufficiently prepared anyone for the events which unfolded in China during his tenure. Between January 1976 and August 1977, the People’s Republic of China witnessed the most tumultuous period in its history. During this short time, the PRC withstood a virtually incomparable series of political, economic, and social dislocations. Three heroes of the Chinese Revolution, Premier Zhou Enlai, veteran Field Marshall Zhu De, and Chairman Mao Zedong, all died in 1976. Their deaths left gaping holes in the Chinese national psyche and, just as important, in the apparatus of the state and the Chinese Communist Party. The deaths of Premier Zhou and Chairman Mao accelerated the intense power struggle then under way between the PRC’s rival political factions for control of post-Mao China, a struggle which took what to most Western observers were completely unpredictable turns. This fascinating struggle began with Deng Xiaoping’s purge from his posts in the Party and government and the subsequent elevation of the almost-unknown Hua Guofeng as premier in the winter-spring of 1976. Then, amazingly, the struggle continued with the purge of Deng’s radical foes, the Gang of Four, in October and ended with Deng’s rehabilitation (for the second time in his career) in the spring of 1977. It has since become clear that the deaths of Zhou and Mao, and the purge of Deng, in 1976 provided an opening for the entrance of other Chinese leaders onto the stage of China’s political drama. More specifically, three relatively unknown Chinese leaders, Hua Guofeng, Marshall Ye Jianying, the PRC’s veteran defense minister, and Li Xiannian, one of China’s respected civilian vice premiers, dominated the politics of the Year of the Dragon and the Year of the Snake. After two and one-half decades of analyzing Chinese policy from the standpoint of the pronouncements of Mao and Zhou, officers of the USLO and Western observers in general began to get a glimpse of how the PRC would conduct its affairs in the absence of its historical giants.

Economically, China continued in 1976 and 1977 to wrestle with the gigantic tasks of feeding its population and modernizing its industry. But severe drought in some regions of China, and cold, wet weather in others, combined to produce poor harvests in both years. Industrial production also suffered as political factionalism and provincial strife resulted in strikes, sabotage, and even violence at several vital factory complexes. To further complicate the Chinese economy, the worst earthquake in history devastated the industrial city of Tangshan in late July 1976, taking a terrible toll in human life and also disrupting transportation, coal, iron, and steel production, and communications throughout north China. In meeting the herculean task of providing relief and reconstruction assistance to the beleaguered Chinese in Tangshan and Tianjin, the central authorities diverted resources from other provinces, a necessary action but nevertheless one which created shortages and economic bottlenecks throughout the country.

Socially, the Year of the Dragon and the Year of the Snake witnessed the emergence of a genuine, visible expression of public opinion in China which rival Chinese political factions sought to manipulate for their own purposes. When Tom Gates arrived in Peking, the radical campaign to deepen the criticism of Deng Xiaoping had exploded with great ferocity throughout China. The radical faction’s control of the media reflected this attempt by Deng’s foes to turn the Chinese masses against the individual widely believed to be the late Premier Zhou’s choice for a successor.

In early April, however, one month before Tom’s arrival, tens of thousands of Chinese in Peking and across the country indicated their displeasure with the anti-rightist campaign. During the days of the Qing Ming festival, from March 30 to April 5, throngs of Chinese assembled in Tienanmen Square to place memorial wreaths at the Martyr’s Monument in honor of the beloved Premier Zhou. More pro-Zhou, and by extension pro-Deng and anti-Mao, demonstrations also occurred simultaneously in other parts of China. Knowledgeable Chinese observers immediately grasped the significance of these demonstrations; they were not only a tribute to the late premier but also a warning to the radicals that China’s masses well understood their ill treatment of Zhou during his final years and also disapproved of the anti-Deng campaign. When Peking’s authorities sought to disperse the demonstrators in the capital on April 5, a riot broke out which resulted in considerable mayhem, several deaths, and scores of injuries. American officials who reported the scene to Washington even recalled seeing the almost unheard-of sight of several demonstrators assaulting an armed officer of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).¹ The PLA responded to these so-called Tienanmen riots by restoring order in a display of force which remained effective for the remainder of the year and well into 1977.

Six months later, in October, China witnessed an outpouring of relief, celebration, and sheer joy when the Party Center, nominally led by Hua Guofeng, arrested and thereby purged the leaders of China’s radical faction, the so-called Gang of Four which included Jiang Qing, Mao’s widow, and her Shanghainese cohorts Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan. Huge demonstrations, both spontaneous and organized, again erupted in Peking, Shanghai, and at provincial levels throughout the country. The downfall of the Shanghai clique meant the end of the Cultural Revolution, experienced Chinese observers again assumed. Yet, even with the Gang of Four imprisoned, the Hua regime maintained a decidedly neo-Maoist profile in November and December. Once again, the Chinese masses expressed their displeasure with the leadership and pressed for the prompt rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping. A well-organized campaign by Deng’s supporters to rehabilitate the twice-deposed vice premier climaxed during the winter and early spring of 1977 and resulted in the Politburo’s decision to restore Deng to the posts which he had held prior to his ouster by the radicals almost a year earlier.

In summarizing all these remarkable events, Tom Gates once wrote that everything seemed to happen in 1976 and 1977 in China. Indeed the Chinese, who possess a legendary ability to take the historically long view, considered this period the most eventful of any in several centuries.² The dramatic events of the Year of the Dragon and the Year of the Snake possessed their own singular importance but, more important, collectively represented the transition from a China governed by revolutionary heroes preoccupied with questions of ideology to one managed by Communist administrators who confronted the domestic and international problems of a major world power as it attempted to adjust to the realities of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The breakup of the Long March generation in 1976 and 1977 ushered in a new era in the PRC’s history.³ In a real sense, Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying, and Li Xiannian faced the immense task of carrying the initial burden of Chinese leadership during a period in which the entire nation was beginning a process of transformation.

Watching the unfolding drama in China proved fascinating for Tom Gates and the other Americans living in Peking in 1976 and 1977. Reporting these events to Washington and trying to interpret their significance, however, represented only one aspect of the American responsibility in Peking. A greater concern involved the future of the Chinese-American relationship and the degree to which the USLO could promote progress in this vital area of foreign policy. By 1976, this concern loomed large indeed in the minds of America’s China-watchers, especially since the relationship had developed some worrisome strains over the previous three years.

Entrance to the Forbidden City

Photo of Mao outside the Forbidden City

For a variety of complex reasons, America and China had made little progress between 1973 and 1976 in resolving the outstanding issues which blocked each country’s diplomatic recognition of the other. The dramatic initiatives which had occurred in Chinese-American relations between 1971 and 1973—Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to China in 1971, Richard Nixon’s trip to Peking and his meetings with Mao and Zhou in 1972 which resulted in the issuance of the Shanghai Communique, and the agreement in 1973 reached by Kissinger and Zhou to establish respective liaison offices in Washington and Peking—all belonged to the past.⁴ The momentum generated between 1971 and 1973, which many knowledgeable observers believed would lead to normalization within a relatively brief time, slowed to a virtual snail’s pace by 1976 as difficult international differences between America and China and, more significantly, domestic upheavals in each country, prevented the kind of diplomatic progress contemplated just five years earlier by both American and Chinese leaders.

Despite these problems, neither nation had retreated from the objective of full normalization, a goal which Tom affirmed upon his arrival in China. When he announced his intention to work for the normalization of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, he correctly described the Ford administration’s China policy⁵ but did not ignore the unsteady diplomatic situation which then existed between the two countries. Tom was not in Peking long before he discovered the extent of China’s impatience and even disapproval of the direction of American foreign policy since 1973. The Chinese reserved most of their frustration for America’s continued reluctance to recognize the PRC, and not the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, as the legally constituted government of China. In that regard, the Chinese insistently demanded that America withdraw its troops and recall its ambassador from Taiwan, in addition to abrogating the 1954 defense treaty with the ROC, as the price for any future diplomatic progress. Discreet suggestions to PRC officials that they might help American policy-makers on this issue by resolving to settle their Taiwan dispute by peaceful means and without the use of force inevitably produced the curt response that such remarks constituted an unacceptable American attempt to meddle in China’s internal affairs.

The Chinese behavior on the Taiwan issue continued to fascinate Tom Gates and the USLO officials throughout their tenure in China. Undeniably, the matter became a point of contention between the Americans and their hosts. More curiously, though, the Chinese appeared content to make their position clear on this subject without prescribing any particular timetable for a favorable American response. While the Chinese insisted that they had spelled out their position on the Taiwan issue in the Shanghai Communique (and thus no further clarifications were necessary) and regarded America’s refusal to break with the ROC as irresponsible, the PRC’s officials repeatedly indicated a willingness to wait and show patience until the United States found a convenient time to meet China’s conditions. Tom soon grew accustomed to the strange policy ambiguity whereby the Chinese insisted for the record that America sever its relations with Taiwan immediately as the price of complete normalization at the same time that they were conducting a semi-normal practice of diplomacy with USLO officials. The PRC appeared willing to wait indefinitely for the United States to see what it considered the reasonableness of the Chinese position, but indefinitely did not mean forever. As one Chinese radical reputedly said, How can Kissinger be sure we will have patience?⁶ On another occasion, Tom encountered a similar expression as one senior Chinese diplomat reminded him that the PRC had been waiting for twenty-seven years for the United States to break with Taiwan. To emphasize their concern, Chinese officials frequently informed Tom that Taiwan is an American problem and the United States should not expect to enjoy the luxury of a two-China policy permanently.⁷

Continued American involvement in Indochina between 1973 and 1975 also complicated the Chinese-American relationship in 1976. Had not Premier Zhou informed President Nixon in 1972 that future progress in relations between America and China depended upon a resolution of the conflict in Indochina? Chinese officials inquired. Yet after signing the 1973 Paris accord, the United States continued to support the Thieu regime in South Vietnam. When added to the lack of progress on the Taiwan issue, continued American involvement in Southeast Asia created internal political difficulties for both Mao and Zhou, both of whom attached much importance to China’s new relationship with the United States. The American opening represented a profound break with the course of the PRC’s foreign policy, and if the initiative proved to be too great a domestic political liability for Mao and Zhou, who could predict the future course of relations between the two countries?⁸

The Chinese also reacted strongly to the recent course of Soviet-American relations and, on this matter, they showed no ambiguity. Chinese distrust, and even contempt, of the Soviet Union appeared limitless, even reaching the point where the PRC prohibited any of its people from working in the Soviet Embassy. According to PRC officials, the Soviets were paper tigers and social imperialists. Unlike the Chinese who practiced self reliance in order to feed, house, and clothe their population, the Soviets humiliatingly crawled to the West and begged for grain, technology, and capital. We stand for independence and self-reliance, the Chinese repeatedly stated. This does not mean we decline to study foreign experience, neither does it mean we lock the door against the world and refuse to develop foreign trade or to introduce from abroad certain techniques and equipment really useful to China. But this is entirely different from . . . depending on foreign technologies and equipment for developing China’s economy.⁹

Anxious to assert their own influence with the developing nations of the Third World, the Chinese always renounced any ambitions to reach superpower status and were therefore critical of the direction of Soviet foreign policy in the mid-1970s. Was America willing to stand by helplessly while Cuban proxies of the Soviet Union undermined the stability of emerging African nations? Chinese officials repeatedly asked. What about the Helsinki Declaration and the so-called Sonnenfeldt Doctrine; did these not signify a Munich mentality and appeasement? Did the United States not realize that the Soviet Union sought global hegemony and was attempting to intimidate Western Europe and Japan with its military buildup? Throughout his year in Peking, Tom repeatedly reassured the Chinese that the United States government fully intended to fulfill its diplomatic commitments and also maintain a strong national defense. Despite such assurances, the Chinese continued to warn virtually every visiting American Congressional delegation about their assessments of Soviet intrigue, with the parallel assertion that the United States would become a declining power and the Soviet Union a rising power if the current international trend continued.

Differences in outlook between China and the United States over the international situation, serious though they were, did not constitute the major barriers to normalization, however. In retrospect, it became apparent that both nations could have moved more rapidly toward normalization between 1973 and 1976 if domestic factors in both countries had not greatly hampered the effective conduct of foreign policy. In the United States, progress toward improved relations with China became stalled when the Watergate scandal, and then the presidential campaign of 1976, made any continuation of the strong initiatives of 1971–73 too politically risky for Presidents Nixon and Ford. In China, Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou fell into steadily deteriorating health after 1972, the year in which Zhou’s physicians informed him that he had cancer of the bladder. In the autumn of 1973, Zhou himself came under vigorous attack from the radical faction within the Politburo, especially for his conduct of foreign policy.¹⁰ Nor did the radicals cease their campaign against Zhou once he fell ill; in fact, they intensified their efforts to gain control of China’s political apparatus in anticipation of his demise, and when Zhou died in January 1976, the radical faction used its control of the national media to sharply limit the extent of the masses’ mourning for the late premier. According to one account, Yao Wenyuan (the radical Politburo member who controlled the media) personally forbade the nation’s propaganda organs to broadcast the list of names on Zhou’s funeral committee, to televise any popular expressions of grief over the premier’s death, or to broadcast any pictorial history of Zhou’s life. In addition, the radicals organized the mourning in such a fashion that Zhou’s body, as it lay in state, was placed in a room where any television cameraman would encounter difficulty recording scenes of the leadership paying its respects to Deng Yingchao, Zhou’s widow.¹¹ Thus, both American and Chinese domestic considerations prevented diplomatic progress more than did any major international differences between the two countries.

To a great extent, Tom Gates realized that domestic factors in the United States strongly affected the diplomatic environment in which he operated. At first glance, one would not suspect that the Watergate scandal exerted much influence on America’s policy toward the PRC. But when Watergate exploded in full fury during the summer and autumn of 1973, it exposed Richard Nixon’s political weakness and invited attack on all the policies of his administration, including his foreign policy.¹² The carefully prepared achievements of Nixon’s first term—the opening to China, the SALT I Treaty with the Soviet Union, indeed the entire policy of detente—became objects of attack once Watergate embraced his presidency. By the middle of 1974, Nixon faced the likelihood of impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate, an action which would have meant removal from office. Confronting that dilemma, Nixon sought to preserve the full extent of his conservative support in Congress throughout the Watergate crisis. He well understood that if he raised the China issue, he was certain to alienate his conservative backers, and therefore, wishing to avoid the charge of selling out Taiwan, he relegated progress on normalization with the PRC to a lesser role.

Gerald Ford’s accession to the presidency in August 1974 briefly changed the foreign policy environment as it affected America’s future relations with the PRC. Shortly after taking office, Ford addressed a joint session of Congress and reaffirmed his support of the objectives of Nixon’s foreign policy. China-watchers, both in the Ford administration and elsewhere, presumably applauded the course laid out by the new president. Not forced to govern under the burden of a major scandal, Ford stood on firmer ground than his Watergate-stricken predecessor on the question of improved Chinese-American relations. Furthermore, Ford’s knowledge of foreign policy extended well beyond the range assumed by his critics. With over two decades of experience on the House Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations, Ford had followed the trend of America’s postwar foreign and defense commitments. On the matter of America’s policy toward China, Ford strongly supported improved relations with the PRC and was one of the few Americans (along with Nixon and Kissinger) to meet personally with both Mao and Zhou in the 1970s. That meeting occurred in July 1972 when he visited China while he was minority leader of the House of Representatives.¹³

Gerald Ford’s best intentions to normalize relations with the PRC, however, soon ran afoul of the 1976 presidential primaries and the general election campaign. The conservative challenge to the Ford presidency is a familiar story but parts of it bear repeating because of their impact upon the administration’s China policy. As the primaries unfolded in February and March 1976, Ford won close victories over Ronald Reagan, his conservative challenger, in New Hampshire and Florida. He followed that with a more substantial victory in Illinois and seemed well on the way to locking up the GOP nomination. With his campaign in some disarray, Ronald Reagan badly needed a victory over Ford in the North Carolina primary on March 23. After well over two months of active campaigning, Reagan had discovered that a surefire way to energize his audiences was to attack the Ford administration’s foreign and defense policies. Reagan reserved most of his ammunition for charges that Ford and Kissinger intended to give away the Panama Canal. Yet, he was also sharply critical of detente (placating our adversaries) and skeptical about America’s improved relations with the People’s Republic of China.¹⁴ Reagan’s critique of the Ford/Kissinger foreign policy struck an especially responsive chord with conservative voters in the South and West. When Reagan won an upset victory over Ford in North Carolina, his campaign received the lift which galvanized his candidacy and guaranteed a continuation of the attack on the administration’s foreign policy right up to the Republican National Convention in August. In April and May, published reports also began circulating that the State Department was considering the discussion of possible arms sales to the PRC. Reagan immediately saw this development as detrimental to the interests of Taiwan, although he conceded that it may have been an example of our developing relationship with the PRC.¹⁵ Reagan’s comments on the issue, however, proved that China policy was a potential political liability for the Ford administration and the entire discussion soon collapsed.

Gerald Ford successfully overcame Ronald Reagan’s challenge at the Republican Convention in Kansas City in August 1976. Even so, Reagan’s conservative followers still prevailed in writing an essentially anti-administration foreign policy plank into the GOP platform. The Party’s position on Chinese-American relations supported a continuation of the two-China policy which had been in effect since 1972.

Tom Gates considered these partisan political developments unfortunate and often asked himself whether real progress in Chinese-American relations was possible when the two nations remained far apart on the Taiwan issue and domestic controversies raged on in each country. Yet he soon discovered, early in 1976, primarily in conversations with President Ford, that America and China still had much of a worthwhile nature to say to each other. In December 1975, Ford himself had visited China for the second time. On that occasion, he met again with Mao Zedong but, more important, held extensive discussions with Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping. Because of the uncertain domestic situations in each country, Ford’s visit failed to produce either the substantive results or the boost to public relations that the Nixon trip had three years earlier. Even Kissinger described the second Ford visit as a holding action.¹⁶

For some valid reasons, however, the president did not share the pessimistic assessments of his trip. First, every presidential visit to a foreign nation is a high-level affair. When compared to the effort which the Chinese put forth for Nixon in 1972, their treatment of Ford was well in keeping with the importance which they attached to relations with the United States. Second, Ford’s journey to Peking underscored a sense of continuity in America’s China policy. In briefing the press on December 4 after Ford’s meetings with Mao and Deng, Kissinger noted that the visit served to put the relationship of 1972 into a more mature framework. In that sense, each country took another step forward in dealing positively with the other.¹⁷

Ford’s discussions with Deng, moreover, clarified the extent of existing Chinese-American disagreements as well as the areas of common interest. Both countries were concerned about recent examples of Soviet adventurism, both sides were interested in keeping Western Europe and Japan economically strong and militarily secure, and both sides continued to be divided on the Taiwan issue. In his discussions with Deng, however, Ford pressed for an expansion of the various bilateral arrangements which existed between America and China in such areas as trade, science, and cultural exchanges. Deng backed off; he wanted the Taiwan issue settled first before agreeing to progress in the other fields.¹⁸ In retrospect, one suspects that Deng’s hesitation to pursue a new negotiating path stemmed from his knowledge of the recent radical attacks on Zhou’s foreign policy as well as his own then-precarious position within the Chinese hierarchy. Not wishing to risk his place in the leadership on any new initiatives toward the United States, Deng kept strictly to the record of the Chinese position as outlined in the Shanghai Communique. Even so, Ford left Peking with an admiration for Deng and the belief that America’s interests in China were better served with him in power than with a member of the radical faction.¹⁹

In conclusion, Tom Gates soon realized that America’s new relationship with China was of great strategic importance. The Ford administration acknowledged this