Enduring value seen in spirit of 1972

Farsighted US response to China's rise can take cue from Nixon, diplomat says

A core member of Richard Nixon's team on his 1972 trip to China believes the United States should draw lessons from the groundbreaking visit and respond to China's re-emergence with farsighted actions of the kind taken by the US president half a century ago.

"China is back… as a major participant in global affairs. This requires a response from the US," said Chas Freeman Jr, the chief interpreter for Nixon on the trip and a career diplomat.

"I would like to see the US respond with foresight and farsighted actions to the reemergence of China as a great civilization state," Freeman told China Daily in a recent interview. However, "that has yet to come".

Freeman was involved in every phase of the opening of Sino-US relations, and later became the deputy chief of mission in the US embassy in Beijing between 1981 and 1984. He was assistant secretary for international security affairs for the US Department of Defense in 1993 and 1994.

Freeman described Nixon's visit 50 years ago as "an American initiative" to moderate US-China relations.

"Nixon, who was a successful politician, showed that he was also a statesman," Freeman said. "He was able to understand the changes in the geopolitical situation globally and formulated a dramatic response to them."

In Freeman's view, the Sino-US relationship is now in a "bad period".

But he also said that "the economic relationship, despite some problems, is healthy", and "the business communities in China and the US continue to see merit in cooperating with each other".

According to China's General Administration of Customs, China's trade with the US in 2021 amounted to $755 billion, an increase of nearly 30 percent year on year. The 2020 Annual Business Survey Report on Chinese Companies in the US, conducted by the US Chamber of Commerce in China, showed that more than 95 percent of respondents said they would continue to operate in the US, and nearly 70 percent said they would stick to their investment plans.

However, the bilateral relationship is now "terrible", and "the military relationship is the worst it has been since the 1950s", Freeman said.

He said the 1972 visit was "a victory for China" and "a very positive event".

He said that people in the US should celebrate the anniversary, too, but the attitudes of people toward the visit "are very divided".

He said there is a large anti-China group that sees Nixon's visit and the opening to China as a mistake, because of China's subsequent rise.

Freeman said that to the critics, China's success has created a powerful adversary for the US.

But Freeman said he does not believe that the US made China successful, nor is China's development a negative for the US.

He said that there are issues the two countries should rightly be concerned about, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.

"These are long-term issues that require a great deal of effort, which simply cannot be addressed without efforts by both China and the US, given our size and importance in world affairs," Freeman said.

He also stressed the necessity of US-China cooperation in science and technology, a relationship that may be changing.

"China has been a consumer of American knowledge and knowhow. I think this is going to become more equal," he said. "And there will be many things that the Chinese scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians come up with. The Americans will want to learn from them and import (them)," he said.

"And the question is whether our leaders can find a way to translate that into a more productive dialogue."