Chas Freeman: The China Bluff
Chas Freeman, chairman of Projects International, is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This article is adapted from remarks delivered at The Center for the National Interest on February 16, 2012.
Forty years ago, on a clear, cold afternoon in Beijing, I followed President Nixon onto the tarmac at Beijing’s Capital Airport. I have a belated confession to make. When I tried to sleep on Air Force One on the way to Beijing, I was jolted awake by a nightmare. I dreamed that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would be standing there with his old political sparring partner and secret pen pal, Zhou Enlai. In my dream, Chiang stepped forward to greet his former friend and political backer Richard Nixon with a loudly sarcastic "long time, no see!" As we pulled up to the shabby old structure that was then the only terminal at Beijing’s airport, I peered anxiously out the window. Others were elated to see Premier Zhou emerge to greet us. I was merely relieved that he was there pretty much by himself.
It’s almost impossible today to recall the weirdness of that moment, when an American president who had made a political career of reviling Chinese communism strode without apology into the capital of the People’s Republic of China—a state and government the United States did not recognize—to meet with leaders that Chiang Kai-shek—whom we officially viewed as the legal president of all China—called "bandits at the head of a bogus regime." I had entered the foreign service of the United States and learned Chinese because I thought we would eventually have to find a way to recruit China geopolitically. I was thrilled to be the principal American interpreter as our president led an effort to do exactly that. My job was to help him and his secretary of state discuss with China’s communists what to do about other, even more problematic communists.
Last Tuesday, on the precise anniversary of that February 21, 1972, personal introduction to Beijing, I was back there—not to try to rearrange the world again but to make Chinese financiers aware of specific investment opportunities in the United States. In 1972, it was necessary for the leader of the capitalist world to save China from Soviet communism. In 2012, the world looks to China to save capitalism, and the world’s capitalists flock to China in search of funds. How very much was changed by the forces Nixon and Mao put in motion that afternoon forty years ago...