For half a century, Richard Nixon's opening to communist China has been viewed by many Americans as a diplomatic masterstroke, with successive presidents of both parties following his course.

US hawks have now revived an alternative view -- that normalization was a mistake that, in the view of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, set the stage for an aggressive China and soaring tensions between Washington and Beijing.

It all began in 1971 with secret trips to Beijing by Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security advisor.

Nixon stunned the world when he announced his own 1972 visit to China to see supremo Mao Zedong. This time the trip was anything but quiet, with the pageantry broadcast back home to US television viewers in an election year.

Nixon had built his career as a staunch hardliner on communism, leading to what became a US political axiom that only Nixon could establish relations with communist China.

- Ending 'old paradigm' -

Pompeo last week delivered a rebuke -- all the more stinging as he spoke at the Nixon library and museum in southern California where the Republican president is buried.

"President Nixon once said he feared he had created a Frankenstein by opening the world to the CCP, and here we are," Pompeo said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

"The old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won't get it done," Pompeo said.

Calling for a "new alliance of democracies," Pompeo said that Chinese President Xi Jinping "is not destined to tyrannize inside and outside of China forever, unless we allow it."

Stapleton Roy, who took part in the secret negotiations in the 1970s before becoming US ambassador to China two decades later, said that Pompeo's "old paradigm" was never the basis for US policymakers.

"It is historically inaccurate to say that the US policy of engagement with China was based on a naive expectation that China was bound to liberalize politically," said Roy, who later headed the Wilson Center's Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.

According to Roy, Nixon and Kissinger were "totally pragmatic" in their objectives with China.

"The original purpose of the Nixon/Kissinger breakthrough to China in 1971/72 was to strengthen our position in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and secondarily to get China's assistance in winding up the Vietnam War," he said.

"The main purpose was decisively achieved. The second was not."

Even with Nixon's anti-communist bona fides, many US conservatives as well as some liberals were livid at the prospect of abandoning ally Taiwan, where the mainland's nationalists had fled upon defeat in 1949.

It was not until 1979 that Jimmy Carter switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, with Congress requiring that the United States still provide for the defense of Taiwan, which has since transformed into a vibrant democracy.

- Economic interests prevail, then frighten -

Mira Rapp-Hooper, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called Pompeo's account a "very crude representation" of how normalization took place.

"Diplomats never believed that China was going to become Jeffersonian democracy," she said.

"While there was optimism for progress, there was not hope that the simple fact of American engagement was going to radically change the nature of the Chinese party's state," she said.

Any hopes that rose with Deng Xiaoping's opening of the Chinese economy were shattered in 1989 with troops' deadly repression of massive pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 after vowing to get tough on what his campaign called the "butchers of Beijing" -- but he eventually ended the link between China's trading privileges and human rights.

"Economic interest did ultimately prevail," Rapp-Hooper said.

"There was a sense of China sort of inexorably rising in a way that had positive benefits for the United States."

With China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the billion-plus nation witnessed soaring growth and its manufacturing-driven economy became intertwined with the world.

In the words of Pompeo, Western policies "resurrected China's failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it."

A turning point came with the 2008 financial crisis when Chinese leaders came to believe "that the US democratic liberal model was faltering, and that China increasingly had an opportunity to assert itself on the global stage as a great power," Rapp-Hooper said.

Xi has amassed power since becoming president in 2013, suppressing dissent and clamping down both on the Uighur minority and in semi-autonomous Hong Kong.

Relations keep deteriorating with the United States, with President Donald Trump's administration, flexing muscle ahead of elections, slapping sanctions on Chinese officials, arresting Chinese nationals on espionage charges and closing down Beijing's consulate in Houston.

"China has taken on the characteristics of other rising powers by becoming more arrogant and demanding in advancing its interests," Roy said. "That is a problem that good diplomacy can deal with, without threats and bluster."

US-China: clash of the titans
Paris (AFP) July 27, 2020 - A look at how the two superpowers compare in a range of sectors, from the economy and technology to the environment and the space race.

- Vast territories, massive populations -

The United States, with an area of 9.8 million square kilometres (3.7 million square miles) and China, which covers 9.6 million square kilometres, are among the four largest countries in the world, after Russia and Canada.

China has the world's biggest population, with nearly 1.4 billion inhabitants, while the US is the world's third most populous country with 328 million (World Bank, 2019).

- Economic powerhouses -

The US is the world's leading economy, with a GDP of $21.428 trillion in 2019, followed by China with $14.343 trillion (World Bank, 2019).

China's economy grew by 6.1 percent in 2019, its lowest rate in nearly three decades, while US growth was 2.3 percent, according to the World Bank.

Both economies have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

Although their economic systems are different, the levels of inequality are comparable in both countries. According to the World Bank in 2016, the richest 10 percent enjoy around 30 percent of the income in both.

- Military clout -

The US leads the world in military expenditure, spending $732 billion in 2019, ahead of China, which spent $261 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The US has some 5,800 nuclear warheads, well ahead of China's 320.

Beijing has a new intercontinental ballistic missile that is said to be capable of hitting any location in the US.

Apart from a military base in Djibouti and its involvement in United Nations missions, China's army has little international presence, in contrast to the US.

- Tech giants -

The big tech players Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have all come from the US.

China has its own homegrown tech giants, notably search engine Baidu, e-commerce titan Alibaba, cellphones brand Xiaomi, and Tencent, one of the world's biggest online gaming companies and also owner of China's main messaging app, WeChat.

The US considers the Chinese telecom giant Huawei a threat to national security and has slapped sanctions on the firm, encouraging other countries to isolate it also.

- International patents -

In 2019 China became the top filer of international patents, displacing the US, which had come first since the creation of the ranking in 1978, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.

- Big polluters -

China is the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases, responsible for 26.8 percent of total global emissions, followed by the US with 13.1 percent.

Beijing has set a goal for carbon dioxide emissions to peak by 2030, and the US, under former president Barack Obama, committed to reducing its emissions by 26-28 percent by 2025 compared with 2005 levels.

However, President Donald Trump announced in 2017 he would quit the historic Paris agreement signed two years earlier which set the original goal.

- Space race -

China is pouring billions of dollars into its space programme.

In 2003 it became the third nation after the US and Russia to send a human into space.

And in 2020 Beijing achieved a series of key advances, including the launch of the final satellite in its homegrown geolocation system, Beidou, completing a network designed to rival the American GPS, and the launch of its first probe to Mars.

It plans to complete a large space station in 2022.

The US meanwhile is preparing at the end of July to launch NASA's most advanced Mars rover, Perseverance, and Trump has ordered the space agency to speed up its return to the moon to 2024 rather than 2028.

- 'Soft power' at UN -

Both countries are permanent members of the UN Security Council and have veto power.

China is progressively extending its influence in UN agencies, taking advantage of US disengagement under Trump.

Beijing increasingly supplies peacekeepers to international missions and has become the second biggest financial contributor to the UN after the US.

The US has quit UNESCO, while the number two there is China's Xing Qu and Beijing is the first mandatory net contributor.

Washington has also announced it will leave the World Health Organization, effective in July 2021, having accused the UN agency of bias in favour of Beijing during the coronavirus pandemic.

Related Links
Learn about the Superpowers of the 21st Century at SpaceWar.com
Learn about nuclear weapons doctrine and defense at SpaceWar.com

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US calls on India to reduce dependence on China
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