1 DOUBLE DÉTENTE the Role of Gaullist France and Maoist China In
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DOUBLE DÉTENTE The Role of Gaullist France and Maoist China in the Formation of Cold War Détente, 1954-1973 by Alice Siqi Han A thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors Harvard University Cambridge Massachusetts 10 March 2016 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Détente in Three Parts: The France-China-U.S. Triangle ........................................ 3 1. From Paris to Pékin .................................................................................................................. 17 2. “Opening” the China Box ......................................................................................................... 47 3. The Nixon Administration’s Search for Détente ...................................................................... 82 Conclusion: The Case for Diplomacy ......................................................................................... 113 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 122 2 Introduction Détente in Three Parts: The France-China-U.S. Triangle Did the historic “opening to China” during the Cold War start with the French? Conventional Cold War history portrays President Richard Nixon and his chief national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, as the principal architects of the U.S. “opening to China.”1 Part of the Nixon administration’s détente strategy, the China initiative began in 1971 with Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing and was designed to improve relations with the Chinese communists in order to exploit the growing Sino-Soviet split and facilitate Nixon’s promised “peace with honor” exit from Vietnam.2 What, then, did the French have to do with this world-shaping meeting between President Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong in February 1972? Part of the answer lies in another top-secret visit to Beijing that occurred eight years before Kissinger’s mission in 1971. On the evening of October 19, 1963, former French Minister of State, Edgar Faure, landed in Beijing, acting as President Charles de Gaulle’s secret envoy. In his hands he held a handwritten letter from the French president addressed to Chairman Mao, expressing his interest in improving relations with the Chinese communist regime in “all domains.”3 Under de Gaulle’s express instructions, Faure pursued talks concerning the 1 The prevailing narrative is also that the Nixon administration catalyzed Cold War détente through their détente strategy. For a standard account of this, see Jussi M. Hanhimäki. The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War. (Washington: Potomac Books, 2013). H.W. Brands notes that the Nixon administration’s euphemism for détente was its “structure of peace” policy. H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 130. 2 The strategy also had domestic political motivations for Nixon’s re-election in 1972. 3 “Report Sent to General de Gaulle, President of the French Republic, by Edgar Faure, on his Mission to China,” November 07, 1963, Documents Diplomatiques Français, 1963, Tome II, ed. Maurice Vaïsse, (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 2001), 469-478 (hereafter cited as DDF). 3 prospective establishment of official diplomatic relations between the French Republic and the People’s Republic of China. After two or so weeks of high-level discussions with Beijing foreign policy elites, Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai, an agreement was struck that would involve full diplomatic recognition of the PRC and the exchange of Ambassadors in Beijing and Paris. This would make France the first major Western nation to establish full ambassadorial relations with the PRC.4 In a rapid span of three months, Faure and de Gaulle were able to achieve the full normalization of relations without having to withdraw recognition of Chiang Kai-shek’s government (ROC). The result was an astonishingly brief two-sentence joint communiqué announcing the full normalization of Sino-French relations on January 29, 1964.5 Shocking in its subtext as much as in its brevity of content, the joint announcement astonished the world and, in particular, many Americans who viewed it as a betrayal of “Atlantic values.” Within the Johnson administration, this French diplomatic démarche, committed with little forewarning to Washington, was “against security and political interests of free world” and risked “further degrading U.S.-France relations.”6 4 While Great Britain recognized China in 1950, it only enjoyed semi-diplomatic status with a chargé d’affaires in Beijing. One reason was that Britain refused to formally break ties with Taiwan. The only two other Western countries to have complete diplomatic relations with China by 1964 were Sweden and Finland. The French feared that the Chinese would place the same conditions on France as they had on Great Britain by insisting that the French sever diplomatic relations with the Republic of China before establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC. 5 Text of the joint communiqué announced on January 27, 1964: “The Government of the French Republic and the Government of the People's Republic of China have jointly decided to establish diplomatic relations. To this effect, they have agreed to designate Ambassadors within three months.” “Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the People's Republic of China and the French Republic,” Beijing Review 7 (1964): 10. 6 The Johnson administration was noticeably angered with the French recognition, describing it as a move that would only “damage free world interests,” born out of a “total disregard of important U.S. interests. France will be throwing away a great deal of good will and affection here in the U.S. only for the sake of demonstrating its independence of U.S. policy.” Telegram From the Department of State to the Embassy in the Republic of China, 16 January 1965, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968 (Washington: 4 What then, it is worth asking, compelled France to make such a bold strategic move when there was so much pressure from Washington against it? More importantly, what interests did Gaullist France have vis-à-vis “Red China” when a decade before 1964 the French had packed up its empire in Indochina and seemed focused on building and dominating a fledgling Europe? To understand why France pursued normalizing relations with China in 1964 and why, perhaps more surprisingly, it sought to facilitate a rapprochement between the U.S. and PRC in the late 1960s, it is necessary to consider the historical backgrounds of each country in brief succession. In the 1960s, all three leaders - de Gaulle, Mao, and Nixon - confronted their own sets of challenges and limitations. They each looked to “grand diplomacy” where military coercion or displays of material power were either unfeasible or prohibitively costly. Moreover, they all considered the construction of some kind of “third force” for the design of an architecture of “political multipolarity” to be a more stable structure of world order than the bipolarity of the status quo.7 All these similarities point to the central argument of this thesis: that the convergence of Gaullist and Maoist foreign policy strategy in the 1960s facilitated the shift toward greater multipolarity and détente in the 1970s. In other words, the French and the Chinese were important shapers of the global architecture of Cold War détente. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998), XXX, 611 (hereafter FRUS, with appropriate year, volume, and page numbers). 7 Both Mao and de Gaulle recognized that the bipolar US-USSR dominated world they lived in was neither stable nor fair. There each saw their own nations as the “third alternative” or an “anti-hegemonic third force” counterbalancing the bipolar hegemons. For France, this initial vision was to be a Europe led by a a Franco-German axis. For China, it was China-led “third world.” Although, over time, there was greater convergence between these two visions. For the French perspective, see Marc Trachtenberg, “The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy during the Nixon-Pompidou Period, 1969–1974,” Journal of Cold War Studies 13 (2011): 4-59. For the Chinese perspective, see Zhai Qiang, "Seeking a Multipolar World: China and De Gaulle's France” in Globalizing De Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, ed. Christian Neunlist et al. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 181-202. 5 France’s position from 1954 to 1974, the subject of chapter one, helps to explain de Gaulle’s bold China strategy. The French Republic’s state of economic, political, and military fragility throughout the 1960s was reinforced by the liquidation of its empire in Indochina in 1954 and in Algeria in 1962 as well as its dependence on U.S. financial and military support for post-war reconstruction. At the height of the Cold War, de Gaulle was caught between two superpowers - the U.S. and USSR - but fundamentally trusted neither. Instead, he sought to secure French prestige (or grandeur) and establish a “European Europe” as the “third alternative force” that could check and bypass the twin hegemonies of the Americans and the Soviets. This was “Gaullist” grand strategy at its core and its expression was a fiercely independent foreign policy, acquisition of nuclear arms capability, leadership of Europe, and acts of “grand diplomacy.” Half-way across the world in Beijing,