But Americans don’t naturally welcome relationships with tyrants. The cliché holds that only Nixon could go to China, because only a politician who had established a consistent record of strong anti-communism could sell a deal with such an evil regime. That’s why California governor Ronald Reagan supported Nixon’s plan: because he said Nixon had proven he knew how to deal with communists.10 Reagan cited as evidence the 1959 “kitchen debate” in which then–vice president Nixon had argued the merits of the U.S. and Soviet systems with Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev.11
Not everyone was buying. When Nixon flew to China in February 1972, he brought along the usual mainstream media folks but also the conservative magazine editor William F. Buckley Jr. Perhaps Nixon was thinking that if he could win over Buckley, he could win over the right. In a 2008 essay published by the Richard Nixon Foundation, David Stokes wrote, “It didn’t work. Buckley didn’t budge. In fact, quite the contrary—he was emboldened in his anti-communism.”12 Buckley was especially appalled at one evening event at which Nixon and his hosts began taking turns toasting one another. Nixon ended up raising his glass to leaders who had presided over the murder of millions of their countrymen.
Wrote Buckley: “It is unreasonable to suppose that anywhere in history have a few dozen men congregated who have been responsible for greater human mayhem than the hosts at this banquet and their spiritual colleagues, instruments all of Mao Tse-tung. The effect was as if Sir Hartley Shawcross had suddenly risen from the prosecutor’s stand at Nuremberg and descended to embrace Goering and Goebbels and Doenitz and Hess, begging them to join with him in the making of a better world.”13
Buckley believed that Nixon had received nothing of substance in return for granting China’s communists a propaganda coup and a path to normalized relations. As for the United States, Buckley concluded, “We have lost—irretrievably—any remaining sense of moral mission in the world.… Mr. Nixon is so much the moral enthusiast that he alchemizes the requirements of diplomacy into the coin of ethics; that is why when he toasted the bloodiest, most merciless chief of state in the world, he did so in accents most of us would reserve for Florence Nightingale.”14
Buckley was a media outlier, but many conservative members of Congress remained skeptical of the Nixon policy. Later, the Watergate scandal didn’t encourage anyone to give Nixon the benefit of the doubt. Official diplomatic relations between the United States and China wouldn’t happen for nearly seven years after Nixon’s historic visit.
On January 1, 1979, the United States, now led by President Jimmy Carter, recognized the communist People’s Republic as the sole legal government of China and withdrew diplomatic recognition from our friends in Taiwan (also known as the Republic of China).15 The Chinese nationalist government had fled to the island of Taiwan in 1949 as the communists took over the mainland.
Conventional wisdom has long held that Nixon’s surprise opening to China was a strategic masterstroke. And in the years since, the progress in China has been amazing, with a more open society and hundreds of millions of people pulled out of poverty. After the death of Mao eventually led to the ascension of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China’s communist government became increasingly open to profit-seeking business activity as a way to enrich the party and the nation.
This was a welcome development in the West, as was China’s continuing role as a Soviet rival in Asia. In 1980 the United States granted China most-favored-nation trade status, which minimized U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods and allowed Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) financing of Chinese purchases. American trade with China more than doubled from the previous year.16 Then, in 1981, the new Reagan administration expanded the list of technologies China could buy from the United States.17
But was China’s strange marriage of a communist government and an increasingly capitalist economy built to last? Some had their doubts. Writing at the dawn of China’s era of market experimentation, the great economists Milton and Rose Friedman wrote:
The intellectual apologists for centralized economic planning sang the praises of Mao’s China until Mao’s successors trumpeted China’s backwardness and bemoaned the lack of progress during the past twenty-five years. Part of their design to modernize the country is to let prices and markets play a larger role. These tactics may produce sizable gains from the country’s present low economic level.… However, the gains will be severely limited so long as political control over economic activity remains tight and private property is narrowly limited. Moreover, letting the genie of private initiative out of the bottle even to this limited extent will give rise to political problems that, sooner or later, are likely to produce a reaction toward greater authoritarianism. The opposite outcome, the collapse of communism and its replacement by a market system, seems far less likely, though as incurable optimists, we do not rule it out completely.18
Four decades later the communist regime certainly hasn’t collapsed. As for the possibility of greater authoritarianism in reaction to private initiative, in recent years there has been increasing pressure on entrepreneurs to embed the Communist Party within their businesses and to comply with burdensome new regulations.19 Meanwhile state-owned enterprises have been staging a comeback and taking market share from independent firms started by Chinese entrepreneurs.20 Did the Friedmans predict the rise of Xi Jinping decades before he took power in Beijing?
In another passage with great resonance for our
