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Nixon’s China trip opened economic ties

40 years later, U.S. and China depend on each other more than ever.

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By Jack Torry, Washington Bureau 12:27 AM Sunday, February 5, 2012

WASHINGTON — First, they had to get the handshake right. Two decades earlier in Geneva, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had been mortally offended when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spurned his offered hand.

As TV cameras flashed the scene worldwide, President Richard Nixon and first lady Pat Nixon descended the steps of Air Force One to a waiting Zhou on a Beijing runway. Nixon paused to clap before extending his hand, which Zhou vigorously shook for 14 seconds.

That handshake 40 years ago this month abruptly ended more than two decades of U.S. and Western isolation of China. It ushered in a new era as China emerged from what Nixon called “its angry isolation’’ to transform itself into the world’s second largest economy and a political giant with a say in international affairs.

The gesture opened a week of unimaginable TV images: A Chinese Army band playing the Star Spangled Banner, Nixon visiting the Great Wall, and the president and White House National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger chatting amiably with aging revolutionary Mao Zedong — sworn foes who opted to forge a less contentious relationship.

“This was a phenomenal diplomatic coup,’’ said Marvin Kalb, who reported on foreign affairs for CBS News during Nixon’s presidency.

It also marked the beginning of a competitive, and at times, tense relationship between the U.S. and China. The two today are deeply divided over China’s booming export economy and have yet to resolve the thorny issue of Taiwan, which has maintained a quasi independence from the mainland.

There is not “a simple word that captures the nature of this relationship,’’ said Samuel R. Berger, who served as President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser. “We’re not enemies. We’re not rivals. But we’re not yet partners.’’

Today, the China that Nixon visited exists only in the history books. In 1972, Max Frankel, who covered the trip for the New York Times, found a nation that “was poor, poor, poor, poor. You could not imagine how poor.’’ People relied on bicycles in the city and primitive plows in the country.

Now China is a modern manufacturing giant as well as a magnet for scores of American companies — Ford Motor, Apple, Nike, General Motors, H.J. Heinz, Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

Ohio, too, has strong economic ties to China. In 2010, Ohio sold $2.3 billion worth of goods to China, making it the 10th largest exporting state to China in the United States.

Eaton Corp. of Cleveland, a manufacturer of electrical components, has 10,000 employees and 27 operations in China, and its Asia-Pacific headquarters is in Shanghai.

Procter and Gamble of Cincinnati, which entered the China market in 1988, has annual sales of $2.5 billion in China. Goodyear Tire and Rubber has nearly 1,000 stores in China and when it completes a new $700 million plant in May, the company will produce 11.5 million tires a year in China.

Other Ohio companies with operations in China include Diebold of North Canton, the Timken Corporation in Canton, and Sherwin-Williams Paint in Cleveland.

Yet its very economic success and its booming trade surplus with the United States has prompted sharp complaints from Democrats such as Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney.

Brown authored a bill that cleared the Senate last October, which if it passes the House, would allow the U.S. to treat currency manipulation as an unfair subsidy. Romney has assailed the Chinese for manipulating their currency to make their exports cheaper, and vowed to slap tariffs on some Chinese goods.

“Romney leveled a diatribe against China, which was one of the toughest I have ever heard by a mainstream politician,’’ Berger said. “In most campaigns, the rhetoric against China goes to the extreme and that’s true on both sides. But after a president is elected, the reality is we need each other.’’

“There are real grievances,’’ Berger said. But they must be resolved “in the context that this is a relationship that we don’t want to destroy.’’

For Nixon, the 1972 China trip was the beginning of a dizzying five months. In May, he traveled to the Soviet Union to sign the world’s first nuclear arms limitation treaty. Then in June, Nixon schemed to try and convince the CIA to block an FBI investigation into the break-in of the Democratic National Committee in Washington by Nixon campaign operatives.

Those five months symbolized the lofty heights and sordid depths of Nixon’s tumultuous presidency: First president to visit China; first president to visit Moscow, first president to resign from office.

He was capable of grand diplomatic gestures that had enduring impact. And yet, as his White House taped conversations show, he could be a small-minded and deeply vindictive man who conspired to lash back at his real and perceived enemies.

“To be fair to him, he had a great sense of international strategy,’’ said Frankel, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the trip. “He thought in big global terms and about historical alignments. Once an election liberated him from crass campaigning, he could indulge those insights.’’

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