Grand Strategy, Power Politics, and China’s Policy toward the United States in the 1960s

The 1960s marked a critical juncture in the history of the Cold War, and the history of international politics in general. The rise of Communist China as a nuclear power, the Sino-Soviet split, and the beginning of Sino-American rapprochement in late 1969 led to a significant re-configuration of global strategic and geopolitical landscapes, resulting in the gradual dissolution of bipolarity and the emergence of triangular politics. The balance of power theory predicts that China, as a weak power, would have sought American assistance in countering the threat from Moscow as the relationship between the two communist powers deteriorated. In contrast to what realist theory suggests, however, Beijing refused to seek rapprochement with Washington and pursued an antagonistic policy toward the United States throughout the 1960s. Why did China refuse reconciliation with the United States? How is China’s anti-U.S. strategy to be understood? Despite its importance, China’s policy toward the United States in the 1960s has not been well studied.1 Most of the scholarship focuses on the Sino-American rapprochement that took place after 1969. One of the most widely accepted explanations of the Sino-American rapprochement holds that Beijing and Washington came together to balance against the common threat from the Soviet Union.2 However, the balance-of-power and balance-of-threat arguments fail to explain why there was no rapprochement prior to Richard Nixon’s visit to China despite the fact that the Cold War world was similar both before and after 1972.3 If one looks at the distribution of power in the international system throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union remained the dominant superpowers and the system was predominantly bipolar. If bipolarity and the Soviet threat led to Sino-American rapprochement, why did these factors not push China and the United States in this direction in the 1960s?