US-China relations in 1980s

By Lee Seong-hyon

Michael Pillsbury, a former Pentagon adviser, mentioned the substantial military and intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and China during the Cold War era. That unusual experience, looking back, partially led the U.S. intelligence community to misjudge and downplay China's ambition to displace the U.S. as the world's superpower, he argued.

It may be hard to imagine, indeed, amid today's ever worsening Sino-U.S. relationship, that there was any significant cooperation between the two former Cold War adversaries. But Charles Freeman, a distinguished American diplomat who worked as an interpreter for Richard Nixon during his 1972 China visit, shed some interesting light on this almost little known history in a recent podcast.

It's true Washington and Beijing were adversaries during the Cold War era. However, they had a bigger common rival: the Soviet Union. This commonality helped them to forge an unusual Cold War-era partnership.

For instance, the U.S. operated listening posts in Xinjiang, a vast region of deserts in northwest China, and Liaoning, a northeastern province, to monitor Soviet military movement. The U.S. provided the Chinese with the necessary equipment and trained Chinese soldiers for that purpose.

This Sino-American "joint snooping" in on the Soviets was triggered by the latter's invasion of Afghanistan in December, 1979. Both Washington and Beijing regarded it as a direct challenge to their geopolitical interests. In January 1980, Harold Brown, then secretary of defense, visited China where he said that the U.S. and China should show they could respond effectively to the challenges to their "shared interests." Throughout the 1980s, the joint eavesdropping program expanded tremendously.

The U.S. also became the major purchaser of Chinese weaponry for the Afghan Mujahidin. Codenamed "Operation Cyclone," the CIA supplied Chinese small arms, ground-to-air missiles, training, and even mules from Xinjiang for the Afghan Mujahidin. The peak of this trade was reached in 1987 when the annual total reached $630 million, according to Freeman, who underscored that this classified information was later all publicly documented.

Another fascinating U.S.-China "joint" program that began in the 1980s, after Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger (term: 1981-87 under Reagan) visited Chin,a was the purchase of Soviet supersonic MiG-21 jet fighters from the Chinese military.

The reasoning behind this was due to the U.S. air fighting performance during the Vietnam War. The Soviet aircraft turned out to be better in that war than the Americans anticipated. Many of the American pilots flying their first combat missions against the Soviet aircraft were nervous. So the U.S. Air Force decided that what was needed was to give them some dogfighting practice in the skies over Nevada. The Chinese obliged by supplying the means for that purpose.

The close military and intelligence ties with the mainland China also critically influenced U.S. relations with Taiwan. As a presidential candidate, in 1980, Ronald Reagan stated that if elected president, he would restore official ties with Taiwan. After he took power, he quickly distanced himself from his campaign pledge after being briefed on the robust U.S.-China cooperation against the Soviet Union.

Reagan was stunned to find out the level of cooperation that the U.S. and China had achieved in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Military and intelligence cooperation blossomed under Reagan.

The 1980s were a time when the U.S. and China were getting close to each other, through phases of initial familiarization and proceeded to broadening cooperation, thanks to their mutual cooperation against the Soviet Union.

That all came to a halt in 1989 and afterwards. Freeman notes there were three reasons. First, the Tiananmen crackdown. It drained the warmth from the U.S.-China relationship. Second, Taiwan's democratization after the death of President Chiang Ching-kuo a year earlier from a heart attack. Suddenly, human rights, which had not been a factor in balancing Taipei and Beijing, became a factor in the Washington politics. Third, most importantly, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It deprived the U.S.-China relationship of its strategic rationale. These three things have altered the trajectory of U.S.-China relations considerably since.

Diplomacy historians debate on what makes two countries become friends and foes. Shared ideology, political systems, cultural canopy, political values, and religion ― they all count. The U.S. and China don't share any of them. For them, it was their shared interest.

Lee Seong-hyon (sunnybbsfs@gmail.com), Ph.D., is director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the Sejong Institute.

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