Analysis Of Nixon Administration's Success In China-US Relationship

Analyse how successful Nixon administration was or was not in achieving its aims.

The essay focuses on the American president Richard Nixon’s decision to visit The People’s Republic of China during !972. It was a very important strategic as well as diplomatic visit that ensured culmination of rapprochement of Nixon between China and the USA. Before this visit, there were no communication, diplomatic ties between these two countries for long 25 years (Barney 2014). Before, 1968, Nixon was the Vice President and hinted to the diplomatic relationship with China. After he became the President, he sent specific proposals for increasing tie with China through Henry Kissinger his National Security Adviser. To Nixon it was the visit that changed the world.

In his visit to the Peoples Republic of China, Nixon visited the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. These two leaders had agreed to expand the cultural contacts as well as diplomatic ties between the two nations. Nixon’s this visit ensured the plans for the permanent United States trade mission and connection with China (Harris 2017). Under the leadership of the cotemporary President Nixon, the U.S. had become primary interested to establish a strong political along with economic ties with the PRC in the 19th century.

The idea was to remind all the support that the US provided to China when it was in crisis. In 1894, when Japan attacked China, Germany, Russia, France along with Great Britain sought to protect their own interests in the PRC. They took the advantage and carved up the country as well as controlling their own dominating areas (Carney and Prasch 2017). However, the USA went against the issue of the division as well as control of China by Germany, Russia, France and Great Britain. In 1900, the USA established the famous Open Door Policy that aimed to ensure that all the nations would get an equal trading rights with China. The U.S. was able to make this policy and enjoyed a good relation with China (Heidt 2013). However, after the foundation of the People’ s Republic in 1949, the USA and China had a bitter relationship as the US regarded China as a section of communist bloc therefore an object of containment. After 1960s both the nations demonstrated interest in developing relations.

Nixon made the most impossible thing to happen in the history of world. It ensured the concentration of supremacy which was ascribed to the executive branch of administration of Nixon. The ties were improving between Washington and Beijing. According to Kyodo News Service the relationship with China had a great impact on the US relation with other Asian countries. Beside normalising process of relationship with China, Japan was getting involved also (Komine 2016). According to Kissinger, the idea of the United State was to approach China after the great fall of Vietnam War.

Triangular Diplomacy

Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin provided all necessary assistance to the Mao Zedong’s Communist party in revolution. Without the support from Moscow, Mao might not have had the occasion to build the People’s Republic because there was a turning over of weapons as well as territory to the insurgents after surrender, of Japan in August 1945 (Li and McCarron 2014). However, after few decades these two nations became rival over ideologies gradually. Richard Nixon, expertise in foreign policy by introducing new trends in the diplomatic situations. Despite the fact that he was occupied with the Vietnam War, he tried to gain control over the other emerging communist super power China (Gordon and Schneider 2014). At that time, China had a bitter relationship with Soviet Union. Therefore, Nixon with his adviser Kissinger, exploited the most available advantages of this rivalry. It was called the ‘Ping-Pong Diplomacy of Nixon. As mentioned before, since the establishment of People’s Republic in 1949 with the emergence of Mao Zedong, America refused recognising the communist government and blocked from entering to the US territory (Song and Lee 2014). After the Cold War finished the relations between China and Russia improved as their ideological conflicts diminished though the pressures remained real. Beijing started to show little respect for the intellectual property about the Russian weapons same as they did for the Western consumer goods. The Central Asian nations were dominated by the ideology of the Soviet Union, but gradually were drawn to China for economy but it showed greater cooperation on the parts of both China and Russia (Lo 2017). They did not form formal martial allies, but found common dislike as well as distrust of the USA to be more important than the bilateral disagreements between them. They ensured cooperation for limiting American influence in Asia. Only after the visit of the American President in 1972, the diplomatic relationship was established with China. This sudden transformation bothered the Soviet Union and their relationship deteriorated.

Nixon however hoped to mitigate all the problems emerged from the cold war between the USA and the USSR. Therefore, in May 1972, he again visited to Moscow for supporting the nuclear arms agreement (Li and McCarron 2014). The consequences of this agreement was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty or SALT I. Through this agreement, both USA and Soviet Union pledged to decrease the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and prevented the development of anti-ballistic missile systems (DuBois 2017). The two heads of both the nations Nixon and Brezhnev, agreed for joint venture in the space exploration named Apollo-Soyuz. They also got involved in the wheat trade where US wheat was shipped to the Soviet Union.

Impact on Economy

However, this agreement between the USA and Soviet Union ignited criticism. According to the researchers, Nixon was the only President who could make such decision as well as build relationship with the contemporary rival. Anti-communism was getting intense in the United States and the US citizens were viewing the relationship with suspicion (Lee 2016). The journalists were suspecting any peace agreements with either China as well as the Soviet Union. During that time Cold War was still burning across the polity of world but these agreements by the president and his advisor Kissinger led a temporary thaw and the overtures with China and USSR was accepted by the common people of America (Pechlivanis 2017).

The decade after the visit of the American President Nixon, witnessed a rapid abolition of the barriers to the exchange of goods, people as well as technology. It also ensured the establishment of various trade institutions. These changes were the consequences of the US China relationship both political as well as economic. This relationship also supported China’s place in the world’s economy (Komine 2016).

Before the visit of Nixon, China had been marginalised from the world economy. According to the New York Times, the news of the coming trip of the President Nixon to the Communist China had a deep sensational as well as a political effect. Despite this visit, it had produced no effect on the stock market. In order to redress inflation and unemployment in the USA, the administration under the president Nixon, devaluated the Dollar by 8% by imposing wage and price control system as well as fixed the exchange rate of American currency. This resulted in the dollar crisis and every country was floating its currencies against dollar. In China the scenario was different. The dollar crisis had no impact on the country. Neither the people nor the China government was concerned with the change. This was because the cultural and economic exchange was totally stopped between the USA and China so the new economic policy had nothing to do with China and its people. It was due to the fact that there was a huge limited liberalization of the commercial activity between these two nations. In 1971, after his visit, Nixon officially abolished the U.S. trade embargo on China, and swept aside all the legal barriers that had once hindered substantial economic interactions between the USA and China since 1950. After all the restrictions lifted the U.S. business companies were allowed for exporting different non-strategic goods to China directly and haul the Chinese cargo between the non-Chinese ports. Nixon also eradicated the Foreign Assets Control prerequisite that required a Treasury license and host country license for the subsidiaries of American firms in Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls countries. These enabled for the export of the strategic goods as well as technology to the mainland China. The United States under Nixon approved the export of eight inertial navigational systems (INS) for four Boeing 707 aircraft, in addition to the three Anglo-French Concorde aircraft (Gordon and Schneider 2014).

Therefore, it can be concluded that the historic visit of Richard Nixon to China in 1972 served as the most important phenomenon on the part of the USA as well as China. There was effect on the international politics mostly on the agreements between the USA and Soviet Russia.  Through this visit, a complete diplomatic relations were established between China and the USA in 1979, and both the governments took initiatives to eliminate all the remaining legislative as well as administrative hurdles that proved to be impediment for their commercial relations.

References:

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