254 { China’s Quest
relations with the United States came on the October 1, 1970, National Day
celebrations when Mao invited American journalist Edgar Snow to stand be-
side him atop Tiananmen Gate.
In December 1970, Beijing shifted positions on the US-DRV peace talks in
Paris. Beijing endorsed a peace plan proposed at the Paris talks by the NLF’s
government, the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG). In March the
next year, a DRV-PRC joint communiqué also endorsed the PRG peace plan.^43
On July 1, 1971, the PRG issued another slightly revised Seven Point Peace Plan
which the VWP intended to be the centerpiece of a global peace campaign to
pressure Nixon. Hanoi’s friends around the world, from the Soviet Union and
its allies to the antiwar movement in the United States to the PRC, endorsed
the Seven Point Plan and called for the United States to accept it. Hanoi’s ob-
jective was to mobilize strong international pressure on Nixon. Renmin ribao
endorsed the plan on July 4, 1971. This was Beijing’s first endorsement of a
“peaceful settlement” of the Vietnam conflict since 1965. The practical polit-
ical significance of Beijing’s endorsement of VWP peace proposals was over-
whelmed, however, by the immense political significance of Beijing’s opening
to the United States.
On July 15 came the bombshell announcement by President Nixon that his
national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, had been in Beijing for talks, and
that Nixon himself would visit China early the next year. News of this revolu-
tion in world affairs immediately displaced the PRG’s Seven Point Peace Plan
in news headlines. The blossoming of a new Sino-American relation imme-
diately became the center of global media attention. Kissinger believed that
Beijing’s opening to the United States would demoralize North Vietnam’s
populace by raising the specter of diminished Chinese support. He believed
too that it would ameliorate the deep divisions in the United States that had
emerged over the Vietnam War—and which had become a major component
of VWP political strategy by 1971. It would also, again in Kissinger’s view,
undercut the VWP’s belief that it could exhaust the United States. Nixon had
attempted to exacerbate VWP apprehensions by hinting in his announce-
ment that Vietnam would be a topic during his upcoming talks in Beijing.^44
Nixon’s breakthrough with China also conflicted with VWP planning for a
major military offensive in early 1972 prior to the US presidential election in
November. Nixon’s opening to China considerably strengthened his bid for
re-election, undermining Hanoi’s political strategy of mobilizing maximum
pressure on Nixon.
Hanoi was outraged by Beijing’s disregard for VWP political warfare
against Nixon. The VWP’s newspaper Nhan Dan used the metaphor of throw-
ing a life preserver to a drowning man to characterize a policy of unprincipled
reconciliation with imperialism based on “the narrow interests of one’s coun-
try,” which violated the “common interests of the world revolution.”^45 The