SPECIAL SECTION: A Guide to Nixon's China Journey

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Offsetting the harm done to U.S. alliances, most notably with Japan, is the fact that the opening to Peking undercuts what was a Soviet advantage in world politics. In the past, the Soviets profited from an unequal arrangement whereby they were dealing with Washington and Peking but neither of those capitals was in contact with the other. The lack of communication with Peking had denied the U.S. the option of supporting China, if it wished, and thus checkmating the Soviet Union. By the same token, the lack of a Peking-toWashington leg in the triangular relationship gave the Soviets an advantage over China, which lacks a nuclear arsenal large enough to make its own military strength credible against Moscow's overpowering array of strategic weapons.

Cultural Shock. It was a deep fear of the Soviet Union that caused China to make the drastic diplomatic shift that has made a Peking summit possible. As China began to recover from the xenophobic frenzy of the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution, Chou and other Chinese leaders, mindful of Moscow's 1968 actions in Czechoslovakia, were deeply alarmed by the threats of a Soviet pre-emptive nuclear strike and Russia's million-man buildup on China's northern border.

The Chinese leaders were equally alarmed that many countries, frightened by China's internal convulsions and irrational behavior, might indeed have regarded a Russian intervention as a laudable public service. Under Chou's leadership (see following story) China began to reassert the image of sane and responsible world power. Chinese embassies, which had ceased to function during the Cultural Revolution, were restaffed, and China began to search for alignments that would offset the Soviet threat.

During that search the Chinese became intrigued by the diplomatic potentialities created by Richard Nixon's conduct of U.S. policy in Asia. As long as the U.S. had been building up its military power on the Asian mainland, Peking had regarded the U.S. as a dangerous threat. But the Nixon Doctrine, with its emphasis on U.S. disengagement in Asia, as well as the President's efforts to wind down the war, made an opening to Washington an attractive line of action for Peking.

For the U.S., the shaping of a new relationship with Peking also made eminent good sense. In seeking to extricate the U.S. from the war, Nixon became convinced that the old strategy of applying U.S. force to resist Communist inroads at all points no longer was a wise or feasible policy. If nothing else, the Sino-Soviet split had made Communist aggression far less likely in Asia. If the U.S. no longer felt compelled to combat Communism at every point, it followed that there was little sense in treating China as an enemy or in denying it a legitimate sphere of interest in Asia. And so the dialogue began.