The first time I spoke about my book in Washington it was the opening night of impeachment and an ice storm so I can truly say I've had a warmer reception in Los Angeles.

The first point I want to make as a caution about my book is that this is a history. It says right on the title "a history of America's relationship with China." Why do I emphasize this? Because I found in initial interviews about the book that everybody seems to think that China books are supposed to predict the future. This one doesn't do it. It's enough to try to figure out how we've gotten to where we are. There are so many books around that want to tell you and I find them very speculative about what's going to happen between the United States and China. Everybody's speculating. My initial impression is that if William Schirer were to finish his classic book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, today, the first question everybody would ask would be "tell us about the Fourth Reich." So, again, this is the past. What is this history? This book is an attempt to put together and synthesize what are often thought of as two separate periods between China and the United States: one, the opening to China in the 1970s and early '80s--the Nixon-Kissinger opening; and second, the period since 1989--the crackdown on democracy protests at Tiananmen Square and what's happened since then.

Why do this? Because I think you need to look at these two periods together. You can't really understand the '90s without knowing what happened in those decades before 1989, the period when the United States was really trying to develop China, to help China. And you can't understand the Nixon opening without understanding what came afterwards. Let me give you just one example. You hear a lot, and it's a legitimate American complaint through the 1990s, about China's arm sales in the Middle East. And you hear this line: "Well, China's in the business of selling arms for money." All true. What people leave out is what happened before 1989. What they fail to say, because it's not really recognized, is that China's first real commercial client was the U.S. government, the Central Intelligence Agency, in the 1950s, '60s, '70s. To the extent that China exported arms overseas, it wasn't for money. It was to its allies, North Korea, for example, North Vietnam, Pakistan. The first time you get a Chinese commercial arms business is in response to CIA efforts to find arms to give to the Afghan guerillas in the early 1980s. That's what really got the Chinese interested in developing, and the People's Liberation Army and it's exporting agencies interested in, selling arms overseas. So the two periods are juxtaposed with one another.

How did I come to write this book? There are really three factors. First of all, I was a correspondent and I came in, you might say, in the middle of this 30 years of history. I arrived in China in 1984 and was there in the mid-1980s. It was a very curious period. The years leading up to the Tienanmen crackdown. The life of an American correspondent in many ways was different from correspondents in other locations overseas. Correspondents in Beijing lived in a diplomatic compound along with the American diplomats, and I noticed back then that there was something odd about this relationship between the United States and China. American diplomats would talk about it. We used to joke, correspondents among ourselves, that American diplomats talked about it like someone in about their thirteenth year of psychoanalysis: I think the relationship is OK, and I hope the relationship is OK, oh, oh, what's going on here? It was secretive, it was special in every sense of the word. An American diplomat would say, "What are you doing tomorrow?" "Well, tomorrow I'm going to go get China's list of who are going to be the Fulbright scholars for next year." You know, there were eight or ten scholars sent to the United States as part of the Fulbright program, the worldwide program. "Wait a minute. I thought the United States picked the Fulbright scholars. That's the way it works around the world." "Well, that's the way it works in most countries. Actually, the Chinese give us a list and then we pick them." That was the relationship. China was able to get arrangements that other countries couldn't get -- obviously because of this Cold War relationship and America's need for China's help in the Cold War.

Back home ordinary Americans thought all through this period that the Soviet Union was the evil empire and that China was changing, and by that they meant, they thought, politically as well as economically. On the ground in China then, I thought that some of those perceptions were wildly out of context with reality. I can remember well covering what in retrospect would be the first precursors to the Tienanmen Square demonstrations, much smaller demonstrations, in 1986 in Beijing and in Shanghai. Walking up to kids at Tienanmen Square and asking them what their grievances were and then asking them to identify themselves, and they'd be so scared they'd be shaking and wouldn't identify themselves and we wouldn't, of course, press them. When I left China, by contrast, I left with my family. We got on the Trans Siberian railroad, we rode to Moscow, this was now strictly off work, but (we were) staying with an American L.A.Times correspondent in Moscow and watching some Soviet dissidents who were making the rounds of people's apartments, handing out their positions, giving out their names, talking freely, contrary to American perceptions at that time. In that period, by any objective standards, the Soviet Union was more open than I found China to be. So I wanted to understand what was this relationship and how did it develop. And then the second of the three factors: I was back in Washington in 1988 to '96 covering American policy towards China on a day-to-day basis at the time of the Tienanmen Square crackdown and its aftermath. I watched George Bush struggle with how to deal with China, trying his secret Scowcroft mission findings that were politically unsuccessful, watching Bill Clinton campaign against the Bush policy and take office, and several of his attempts at China policy. So, inevitably, I wanted to recount that and look at it in some greater detail as I have in this book.

The third factor, as was mentioned before, was getting hold of this classified study of America's relations with China. This study was done for the CIA in the mid-1980s. The motivating factor within the government at the time was, how does China negotiate so successfully with the United States - how do they do it? And the study itself has a bunch of conclusions, themselves very interesting. China sets artificial deadlines and creates a sense of crisis in Washington, trying to play off one part of the government against the other. What was particularly useful to me, and to any historian, was that (the study) came with an appendix which listed every single high level meeting from the Nixon era into the time of the study, the mid-80's. What was said, some of the quotes, what really happened. That was the historical gold mine, I think, that got me interested in doing this book. So what do the records and archives and interviews and other research really show? Let's focus on the Nixon Administration in some greater detail. First of all, it really was Richard Nixon's opening. In the aftermath of Nixon's resignation and Watergate and a bunch of other factors, among them that Henry Kissinger is not a modest man, the notion took hold that Kissinger was the driving force, but if you really look back and you look at the archives and interviews, the driving force was Richard Nixon. Nixon himself, at the time of the '72 trip, would always refer people back and say, "go look at this article I wrote for Foreign Affairs in 1968 during my campaign." That's where the whole thing started.

Actually, I found interviews that really go back before that. I had someone come up to me tonight and say that they worked for Governor Pat Brown, (who) had a big poster of Nixon attacking Brown for being soft on Chinese communism. That, of course, as we all know, was Nixon's record. After Nixon lost that race in '62 he was in political exile. He was traveling as a private citizen in Asia in the mid '60s and I found a bunch of foreign service officers out there at the time who recounted conversations with Nixon saying, thinking out loud but saying, "We really need some kind of new China policy." When I first heard these interviews I was a little skeptical. After some major event happens, we can all think back and see some conversation that meant more than we realized, but these memories are twenty years later. But I found precisely the same kind of memories of the account written in 1967, I think, with no knowledge of what was going to happen later on, by the American Ambassador to India, Chester Bowles. (He cabled) home to Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, (saying) we had former Vice President Nixon come through and we had a talk and he seemed solid on many other things, except he's got these crazy ideas about China, and that persuaded me that these other reminiscences were in no way off base. Nixon was sort of thinking through the need for a new Asia policy.

So in the book I trace through the Nixon openings, Nixon as the driving force, and look at his motivations--and really there were three. The main one was Vietnam; that was what really gave an impetus to the policy. Nixon and Kissinger were looking for China's help in bringing about a peace settlement, and so several accounts, including the RAND study that I had released to me, show that they even secretly tried to get Vietnam's main peace negotiator, Le Duc Tho, to come to Beijing during Nixon's trip there to see if they could work out either some settlement or progress toward the settlement during Nixon's trip. The Chinese weren't interested. The Vietnamese wouldn't have been interested, but Vietnam was a constant during the move towards the opening. The second one, the larger factor, was the Soviet Union. Certainly the border skirmishes between China and the Soviet Union in early 1969 helped prompt the United States towards China. Kissinger himself wasn't really focused on these border skirmishes until the Soviet Ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, came to him. It was one of these conversations – "I hope you don't try and delay anything with the Chinese. They're very evil people." That set Kissinger and Nixon to thinking about the possibilities. And the border skirmishes with the Soviets also prompted the Chinese to be more interested in a relationship with the United States.

The third factor, which really isn't mentioned in any of the Nixon-Kissinger memoirs, was an intrinsic part of the diplomacy. Part of the preconditioning in the negotiations for President Nixon to come to China was "we don't want you to invite any Democratic leader to China, no Ed Muskie, no Mike Mansfield, no Ted Kennedy." Even that wasn't broad enough, so Nixon and Kissinger sent a message back saying it's OK, we got that promise, but no leaders of the anti-war movement either. They wanted a franchise on this opening to China and they got it. Nixon carried out his politics in his China opening, sometimes with some hardball for which he was famous. After Henry Kissinger's secret trip to China in 1971 some Democrats came out with statements of support for the opening. Ted Kennedy didn't say anything, so Nixon called up his political hatchet man, Chuck Colson, and had Colson call a few reporters and plant the question "Are you against Nixon's opening to China. Are you against this Kissinger trip?" Within three days Ted Kennedy came on board as well. At the same time, Nixon, far more than anyone realized at the time, was really courting and bringing along what was called the "China Lobby," the lobby for Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist China. I was stunned to find, for example, a memo in the fall of 1969 at a time when really there had been no direct conversation between the United States and China at any level at all yet, no indirect conversations before the Pakistanis were sent back and forth, and even that early Nixon is instructing Kissinger: "I want you to go talk to Walter Judd, who was the Congressional leader at the time of the lobby." Tell him what we're doing in our policy toward China. Tell him how it's developing. Mention several other leaders." He was bringing along the right wing very skillfully all along the way. After he went to China he managed to get the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, to make a trip to Taipei on his behalf and, although Reagan's people said he later regretted the trip, he made it.

The most interesting thing I found for the Nixon period were Nixon's own handwritten notes which he made on the eve of and during his visit to China. Just sitting there in the handwritten file in the National Archives. What they show is the whole full scope of the Nixon opening, that the strategic negotiations between the U.S. and China at the time were much broader than anybody realized. This wasn't just about Taiwan or about the Soviet Union or Vietnam. They were really talking about all of Asia in ways they didn't want anybody to know about. They talked about Japan. The Japanese didn't realize it at the time -- and the Japanese press has picked up on this from this book--Nixon told the Chinese he would do his best to try to limit Japanese power and influence in Asia, to limit influence in places like Indonesia, South Korea. At the time, the United States was beginning to withdraw forces from Taiwan [he] promised to do his best to make sure that Japan didn't come into Taiwan as the United States was drawing its troops out. You get a very, very broad working out of future relations for all the countries in and around East Asia.

Nixon's notes also provide a look at some of the strategic considerations. What he thought. He wrote down to himself [that] actually China's interests required that there be two super powers, United States and the Soviet Union. If there was only one superpower for China to deal with, China wouldn't like it. China would be unsettled, and that certainly was the way things worked out in the 1990s.

Having said all this, I also believe you've got to look at the darker side of the Nixon legacy. It was secretive; it set a model for secret diplomacy that other administrations tried to follow not always with the same political success. So if you look at the number of failed imitations of Kissinger's secret trip to China you find that in the early 1980s Ronald Reagan sends emissaries to Iran on a secret mission that doesn't work out. You find George Bush sending Brent Scowcroft on a secret mission that doesn't work. Nixon had the domestic politics of his opening worked out much better than his successors. The Nixon opening to China became much too personalized, so Henry Kissinger particularly reveled in the personalized diplomacy and China got the idea that it was dealing with people and not institutions. They were, for example, terribly threatened by Watergate because here Nixon and Kissinger had been telling them for two or three years by that time, "Just pay attention to us. Pay attention to what we say and have faith in us. Never mind what the official statements of the United States government are, never mind what the State Department says." When Nixon resigned China went to great lengths to get assurances that all the promises it had gotten from the Nixon administration would stick and then finally on the negative side of the legacy you get the issue of human rights.

Nixon and Kissinger gave the Chinese the message that the U.S. really wasn't going to be involved in China's domestic politics. There's a point early on when Chou En-lai tries to talk to Kissinger about the Cultural Revolution—"Let me tell you about the cultural revolution," and Kissinger says "we have no interest in your domestic affairs." That might have been the basis for an early opening, but it set a tone that lasted for decades, even though we can all debate when exactly the U.S. should have let China know that the U.S. had an interest in human rights questions. My own belief is that certainly by 1979 after the end of the Cultural Revolution when Deng Xiaoping was in power and was wiping out, trying to expose, a real democracy movement, the Carter Administration should have stepped in and said a lot more than it did. It didn't, and so Chinese leaders can now claim and from their prospective it's a fair argument "You Americans are a bunch of hypocrites. You didn't say much about human rights during the Cold War. It was only after the Cold War ended that you're talking to us about that."

Now let me make one last point, and then I'm going to wrap it up and I'll probably talk about the Clinton Administration and questions that I know you'll ask. This applies not just to the Nixon Administration but to the entire relationship between America and China during the last two decades of the Cold War. If you listen around this country now whenever anybody criticizes China or its policies one of the lines you hear in this country is "that's a Cold War mentality." People in the United States are looking for another enemy and China is the enemy of choice. There's a degree of validity in that argument, but the point I make in this book is that that's about half of the story. Both sides, or all sides, in American discussions or debates about China are effected by the dynamics of the Cold War. For example, the idea that China is America's friend or that all conflicts between the United States and China should be minimized or swept aside whether they're conflicts about human rights, arms sales, or trade or whatever, this idea of a fragile relationship that has to be nurtured whatever the cost, that's a legacy from the Cold War, too. It's a leftover from the idea that the U.S. needs China's help in the Cold War. And so if my book helps us deal with this past and simply look at China with fresh eyes today, I hope it will serve its purpose.

Thanks.