From ping-pong to pandas, China's diplomatic opening to the West in the Long 1970s proved as colorful as it was successful. This was all the more remarkable in that communist rule had revealed little prior readiness to forgo radical militancy. Communist China's first steps to improve its diplomatic options and alleviate its dependence on trade with the Soviet bloc had yielded one major breakthrough: recognition by Charles De Gaulle's France in 1964. But despite both countries’ interest in challenging the Cold War's bilateral architecture, the subsequent Cultural Revolution reisolated China. Meanwhile, tensions with the Soviets nearly led to a major war.
Needing both to balance Soviet power and to rescue a failing economy, Mao Zedong himself began the opening to the West that was to transform his country. With this book, Martin Albers complements the extensive literature on the Sino-Soviet rift and the Sino-American rapprochement by offering an overview of the West European dimension. The Europeans, he argues, played a crucial role between Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972 and Jimmy Carter's decision to extend diplomatic recognition in 1979. In the meantime, as Sino-American normalization “stalled” (212), the Chinese tried vigorously to enlist the Europeans in an anti-Soviet front. Mao particularly courted British prime minister Edward Heath, whose fervent Europeanism and suspiciousness regarding superpower détente seemed to match the Chinese desire to maintain a European counterbalance to Soviet power. Chinese ties with Britain, France, and West Germany continued to advance under Deng Xiaoping, whose reform team eagerly sought to apply European economic expertise by undertaking high-level study visits to Europe and welcoming European consultancy missions to China. Yet, while all three European states sought trade, they envisioned China primarily as a source of raw materials and a market for their industrial technologies. None foresaw China's potential to provide consumer goods.
Different historical obstacles impeded Britain, France, and West Germany from developing closer diplomatic and trade relations with China. Whereas the French were constrained in 1950 by the adversarial relationship with China in their rebellious colonies in Indochina, the British quickly granted the communist Chinese government nominal diplomatic recognition. But with the onset of war in Korea, Sino-British diplomacy stalled, and the two powers did not exchange ambassadors until the 1970s. Lingering tensions over the Crown Colony of Hong Kong continued to roil relations, and ideological as well as commercial priorities further split British business circles. Meanwhile, Gaullist diplomacy eventually helped persuade Beijing to reconsider its suspicions regarding American encirclement. Yet French businessmen long remained disdainful of commercial possibilities in China.
The imperialist legacy was less burdensome for the Germans, but with the country divided and dependent on the rival superpowers, Bonn had to await the turn in Washington's China policy before following suit. Unlike other Western states, the Federal Republic of Germany had never recognized the competing Chinese government on the island of Taiwan, and the absence of this dispute facilitated the early postwar recommencement of Sino-German trade. But in the détente era, Bonn's priority was to protect its policies of rapprochement with the Soviet Union. As a result, German businessmen rather than politicians continued to take the lead with China. In contrast to France, writes Albers, “the flag clearly followed trade and not the other way round” (83).
Competing at times with one another, the Europeans used trade talks to promote those sectors of their domestic economies that seemed to match up best with Chinese needs. Yet neither the British nor the French managed to parlay their diplomatic head starts into a lasting commercial advantage. Impressed by German technology and capitalizing on the decentralized opportunities afforded by German federalism, China's increasingly decentralized economic decision-makers directed more of their European trade to the Germans. With American diplomatic recognition in 1979, the American share of Chinese trade, although still trailing the Japanese share, pulled lastingly ahead of the European share.
Chinese preferences when dealing with Western politicians illuminate some of Albers's themes. The order of official visits, as well as the awarding (or not) of personal audiences with Mao and of the much-coveted pandas, offer a rough guide to the evolution of Chinese strategy and signals. Thus there were two pandas and a Mao for presidents Nixon (1972) and Pompidou (the bearer of De Gaulle's legacy, 1973); two surprise pandas, two visits, and two Maos for the recently deposed Edward Heath (1974 and 1975—to the consternation of Heath's housebound successor, the pro-détente and Euro-wavering Harold Wilson); a Mao (but no panda) for the Ostpolitik’s most vehement critic, Franz-Joseph Strauss (early 1975); and, after a good word put in by Henry Kissinger, a course correction: a Mao, followed four years later by two pandas, for Willy Brandt's more Soviet-cautious successor, Helmut Schmidt (late 1975, and Premier Hua Guofeng's return visit in 1979).
Remarkably, Schmidt's belated pandas came despite Bonn's (and eventually Paris’s) refusal to take the leap of selling arms to China. By 1979, however, superpower détente was on its death bed, and with Deng Xiaoping in charge, China's economic reforms were in full swing. Ironically, writes Albers, European caution about selling arms to China reassured the Soviets but also helped provide the peaceful interlude that Deng himself had once stated was essential to the success of his reforms. Only one European leader now remained a China-skeptic: Margaret Thatcher. Her unsuccessful attempt to retain a formal British role in Hong Kong stymied a closer personal relationship with Deng that should have been possible on the basis of their shared economic interests and aversions to the Soviets.
In addition to elucidating the Europeans’ commonalities and differences, Albers profiles the Chinese leadership's fierce rejection of symbolic as well as strategic constraints on Chinese sovereignty. Having grown up under the shadow of imperial dominance, both Mao and Deng considered sovereignty to be an indivisible matter of both pride and prudence. This concern encompassed not just territorial questions—Hong Kong and Taiwan—but also economic matters. For the Chinese, sovereignty hinged upon avoiding economic reliance on a single source of technology. Both the formerly exclusive trade relationship with the Soviets and the West's lingering security restrictions on civilian technology transfer were perceived in Beijing as impediments to Chinese sovereignty. All aspects of China's opening therefore involved tests of each partner's reliability. Since sovereignty depended upon modernization, territorial issues entailed finding diplomatic formulas that would facilitate the needed technological infusions. As Albers details, those formulas could be quite varied. Thus, despite his admittedly “Eurocentric” sources (4), Albers succeeds in illuminating common motives behind such divergent Chinese policies as Mao's “autarchy and import substitution” (62) and Deng's international market-oriented development.
