330 { China’s Quest
Throughout the effort to build an anti-Soviet coalition together with the
United States, Mao feared that the United States would use its new relation
with China to strike a better deal with the Soviet Union. Perhaps the real
US purpose, Mao feared, was to use its link with China to pressure Moscow
to accommodate US interests as a quid pro quo for US support for Moscow
against China. Perhaps the US intention was to encourage the Soviet Union
to attack China. Both Soviet and Chinese positions would thus be greatly
weakened.^32 Henry Kissinger speculated that Mao had expected China’s
rapprochement with the United States in 1971–1972 to torpedo US-Soviet
détente. When that did not happen and Moscow-Washington ties instead
continued to advance, Mao was deeply troubled. If the United States joined
a Soviet-organized anti-China campaign, Beijing’s position would have
been dire. Ford and Kissinger attempted to assuage these Chinese fears by
reiterating that further strengthening the Soviet Union was simply not an
American interest.Normalization of Relations with JapanStarting about 1969, a central theme of Chinese commentary about Japan be-
came the dire danger posed by the revival of Japanese militarism.^33 While
highly exaggerated, this was not entirely groundless. Following Nixon’s an-
nouncement of his “Guam Doctrine” in July of that year, leaders in both Japan
and the United States contemplated Japan playing a greater security and de-
fense role in East Asia.^34 Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said at one point in
1970, for example, that the United States might not oppose Japan’s acquisition
of nuclear weapons, while the head of Japan’s Self Defense Agency, Yasuhiro
Nakasone, sparked comment by saying that Japan did not “at present” de-
sire nuclear weapons. Japan’s entry into the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
was underway, and negotiations took six years largely because Japan insisted
on acquiring its own, independent plutonium reprocessing capability.^35 With
its heavy utilization of nuclear-generated electricity, Japan developed a large
stockpile of unprocessed plutonium. With an independent reprocessing capa-
bility, that plutonium could be turned relatively quickly into fissile material,
the essential ingredient for atomic bombs.
The July 1971 announcements that Kissinger was in Beijing and that
President Nixon would soon visit China took Japanese leaders by surprise and
was a deep shock. In their quest for secrecy, Nixon and Kissinger had not kept
Japan apprised of steps toward rapprochement with the PRC. Prime Minister
Eisaku Sato was informed of the Kissinger and Nixon visits only hours before
those visits were publicly announced. This “Nixon shock” caused serious
Japanese doubts about the reliability of the United States. A year later, in July
1972, Kakuei Tanaka, a somewhat unusual Japanese leader known for his