When the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, it was a fragile state, and most policies under Mao Zedong’s leadership concentrated on domestic reform. Deng Xiaoping later introduced a policy of “looking toward the outside world,” after which China’s economic growth accelerated rapidly in the 1980s. One of the most significant developments of this period was President Richard Nixon's decision to open relations with China, which I regard as an American diplomatic masterstroke. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger believed that closer relations with China would enhance the United States’ international standing and strengthen its strategic position against the Soviet Union. In this article, we will examine whether American leaders accurately understood China’s long-term ambitions ?
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Why America Engaged with China
President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought to establish relations with China mainly to contain the Soviet Union, but also to correct what they saw as a historical imbalance. Nixon did not want to provoke the Soviet Union by choosing China; rather, he wanted better relations with both, even though the two communist powers were rivals. In the words of Michael Pillsbury in The Hundred-Year Marathon (p. 73), “it was not the Americans who chose China, but China that went to Nixon.”
To understand why China approached Nixon in the late 1960s, we need to look at its confrontation with the Soviet Union. The two countries were on the brink of war, and China needed a way to improve its security. In looking for a new partner, Mao Zedong turned to his military leaders rather than his diplomats, and the military secretly designed China’s opening to America. This raises a question: why did China move toward America? Let’s look at the main reasons.
The 1969 border tension with the Soviet Union led Mao Zedong toward America. First, he invited President Richard Nixon to Beijing. Secondly, he tested Two Hydrogen Bombs near the Soviet border and gave two messages: one to the Soviet Union that China was ready to defend itself, and the other to the United States that China was out of the Soviet camp. Mao continued to communicate with Americans. For example, on 1 October 1970, he invited the famous American journalist Edgar Snow to stand beside him during a public ceremony in Beijing. Mao wanted the American people to see and understand that the United States president was welcome to visit China. That is why it is not entirely accurate to say that Nixon alone approached China, since China had shown interest before him.
Where American Strategic Thinking Went Wrong
American policymakers viewed China as a weak country that needed American help, especially economic help. From the beginning, Americans believed that helping China take these steps would make China more democratic. This way of thinking made America less likely to question China. As a result, American leaders risked confusing their own hopes for China with China’s actual goals.
American experts thought that cooperation with China would align China more closely with Western countries, but this expectation was not fulfilled. Americans wanted Chinese views to become similar to those of the United States on both global and regional affairs, but this was also not fulfilled. American experts misunderstood China’s long-term plan to surpass the United States as the world’s superpower.
Another mistake was that some American experts underestimated China's long-term economic potential. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, several publications predicted that China would face serious economic problems or even collapse. Michael Pillsbury discusses a RAND Corporation study that identified factors that could slow China's growth or cause its decline. However, China’s economy continued to expand. This suggests that some American observers focused too much on China's problems and did not fully consider its ability to grow.
Another issue was the difference between the strategic thinking and mindsets of Americans and Chinese people, who viewed strategy from different angles. In the 1940s, a U.S. government-funded research effort examined Chinese ways of thinking, including a study in which 150 Chinese immigrants in New York’s Chinatown were shown Rorschach inkblot cards. The study found that Americans tended to understand strategy as reaching a goal directly and straightforwardly, while the Chinese respondents tended to favor indirect approaches and deception.Many of these strategies can also be found in The Art of War by Sun Tzu. For example, one strategy in his book is deception and surprise.
Rethinking American Strategic Assumptions
In my view, the American decision to improve relations with China was not, in itself, a mistake. During the Cold War, the United States sought to contain Soviet influence, and closer ties with China served that strategic objective. At the time, cooperation with Beijing had a clear geopolitical rationale. The deeper error lay in the assumption that economic assistance, trade, and access to technology would inevitably make China more democratic and align its political outlook more closely with that of the United States. Economic development does not necessarily produce political liberalization, and states may cooperate in certain areas while pursuing fundamentally different long-term objectives. American policymakers therefore needed to understand China on its own terms rather than assume that it would eventually follow an American path. In this sense, the central mistake was not engagement itself, but the expectation that engagement would transform China according to American preferences.
China’s rise shows why it matters to understand a country’s long-term objectives. The mistake was not engagement itself, but the assumption that engagement would reshape China’s political values and strategic ambitions.