Mr. Knaus provides a concise history of the "tangled, sporadic, fluctuating, yet strangely persistent" relationship between Tibet and the United States. He then argues that since the Nixon era, the Executive Branch of the US government has tended to concur with China’s stance toward Tibet. Congress, on the other hand, has kept the Tibetan issue alive and has pressed the Executive Branch to include Tibet in its negotiations with China.

John Kenneth Knaus is the author of the recently published book, Orphans of the Cold War, which is a history of the US government's role in supporting the Tibetan resistance. He is currently an associate at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University.

Fifty years ago last October a victorious Mao Zedong proclaimed the inauguration of the Chinese People's Republic to the millions gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Within weeks his field commanders in southwest China announced that the "liberation of Tibet" was soon to come. A panic stricken government in Lhasa emerged from its self-imposed isolation to make belated and futile appeals to the outside world for help in staving off the pending invasion.

It was too late. By the following autumn Chinese troops had pushed aside the pathetically inadequate Tibetan border forces and imposed their presence in eastern Tibet. It was the beginning of the end of the independence that the Tibetans had enjoyed since they chased Mao's predecessors from Lhasa almost forty years before. In the ordinary course of events this would have been the end of the story, and this remote and isolated country would have been only one more casualty of the Cold War. The Western powers had watched without mounting a military challenge as one neighboring country after another fell behind the Iron Curtain. Tibet could easily have become just another regrettable footnote in world history.

Yet today the cause of its people in the international community is more alive than it was a half century ago, and Tibet remains an important issue in this country's foreign policy concerns. The intense debate over charges raised this spring at the UN Human Rights Commission at Geneva by the European community and the United States over China's violation of the human rights of the Tibetans is evidence of the lasting nature of the Tibet Question. It is on the conscience of the world, and it will not go away. Equally apparent was the ambivalence which has characterized the mixed objectives, motivation and commitment of the US government's involvement in Tibetan affairs. The US relationship with Tibet has been tangled, sporadic, fluctuating, yet strangely persistent, and US policy toward the Dalai Lama and his country has reflected this uneven history.

The Dalai Lama and the Diplomat

Prior to 1950 the US government had taken notice of what was taking place in this vast central Asian country on only two occasions. The first was when the British Government sent an expeditionary force to Lhasa in 1904 to secure settlement of local border issues and trading rights in southern Tibet. The present Dalai Lama's predecessor, Thubten Gyatso, had fled his capital before the British troops arrived, first to Mongolia and later to China where he had been summoned by his Manchu overlords. In one of those fortuitous events of history the American Minister to China at that time was William W. Rockhill, a scholar diplomat with a keen interest in the ethnography and history of Tibet, where he had made two unsuccessful efforts to reach Lhasa. The fugitive Dalai Lama had learned Rockhill's interest in his country, so he sought the American Minister's advice on how he might return to Lhasa to reclaim the authority he had been exercising there in the waning days of the Manchu Empire.

Rockhill was not the man to give the Dalai Lama the advice that he wanted to hear. As a senior advisor to John Hay he had drafted the Open Door policy that Hay had proclaimed in 1899. Rockhill had successfully promoted this initiative to Hay as a means of protecting US business interests by ensuring equal access to the China market for all the Great Powers trading there. His primary interest, however, was to preserve the territorial integrity of China, which had been a cardinal principle of US policy toward China since the days of Anson Burlingame, who had been Abraham Lincoln's minister to the Manchu court. (Burlingame had served there during the Civil War when his President was particularly keen on the principle of territorial integrity.) Rockhill fully appreciated the corruption, inefficiency, and decadence being displayed by the Manchus in their final days. He believed, however, that if the tottering Empire could be held together the Manchu rulers and their officials would recognize the need for initiating reforms in order to survive.

Rockhill was flattered by the Dalai Lama's having sought him out as an advisor. But any further dismemberment of the Empire, even of an area where the Manchus had exercised only nominal authority for the past hundred years, was not something Rockhill could endorse. Quite the contrary, he could only encourage the wandering Tibetan ruler in 1908 to accept his "vassal" status and return to Lhasa, reassuring him that he would not find the reforms which the Manchus proposed to initiate there to be too onerous. Two years later, when the Dalai Lama had accepted this advice and returned to his capital only to be forced to flee again, this time from a Chinese punitive force, Rockhill again could only counsel the itinerant ruler that "Tibet is and must remain a portion of the Ta Tsing [Ch'ing] Empire], for its own good." He rationalized that his prescription was "because the Great Powers of the world deem it necessary for the prosperity of their own peoples."

The American envoy undoubtedly correctly read the sentiments of his peers in Washington. Continuing access to the markets and investment opportunities of China required maintenance of the status quo. This meant preservation of the territorial integrity of China, which ruled out any reconsideration of the status of Tibet no matter how thin the fiction of Peking's claim to sovereignty over the country he ruled had become. Rockhill did publish at this time a detailed history of the relationship between the Dalai Lamas and the Manchu Emperors, which in his words "made clear the real nature and the extent of the autonomy enjoyed by Tibet for the last hundred and fifty years, and with which the Tibetans are, I believe, perfectly satisfied." Furthermore, the Tibetans had raised no claim for "total or even greater independence of China, no wish to deprive themselves of the aid and guidance of China, no dissatisfaction with the reforms of 1793, which were well suited to the requirements of the country and the customs of the people." For Rockhill there was nothing wrong with the relationship, but only in its implementation which required reforms by its administrators. He died in 1914 on his way back to China to counsel the necessity of these reforms as advisor to the Manchu's successor Yuan Shih-k'ai.

Tibet and the Republic of China

For the next four decades US administrations continued its dedication to the territorial integrity of China with its corollary of ignoring the independent rule and authority being exercised in Tibet by the Dalai Lamas and their governments. The XIIIth Dalai Lama had finally returned to Lhasa in 1913 and had taken advantage of the power vacuum in Peking to reclaim and exercise fully his temporal powers to rule Tibet until his death in 1933. Although the Republican government, first under Yuan Shih-k'ai and later under Chiang Kai-shek, had assumed the claims of their Manchu predecessors that the people and territory of Tibet were part of China, they were unable to challenge the Dalai Lama's rule and impose their authority over Tibet. Washington found no need to take note of this situation.

When the XIIIth Dalai Lama died in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, despite the urging of his old friend Suydam Cutting and his relative Kermit Roosevelt, accepted the advice of the State Department and decided against sending a message of condolence to the Tibetan Government. The Department persuaded the President that this act might imply recognition of a fellow chief of state. He showed similar deference four years later when Under Secretary Summner Welles advised against permitting their mutual friend Suydam Cutting to carry a gift from him to the Tibetan Cabinet. Welles warned that Tibet is "still technically under the suzerainty of China" and that his gift would be "liable to misconstruction " by the Chinese Nationalist Government. He added a surprisingly outdated caution that "the British and Russians are still intriguing in Tibet" and such gifts "would create a good of unnecessary conjecture" on their part. Roosevelt knew Tibet at that time only as a remote area where his more venturesome explorer friends went in search of museum specimens. It was not a place of sufficient political interest to the U.S to raise any issues that Chiang Kai-shek, then confronting both a civil war and a Japanese invasion, might find threatening.

This official blindness held even when Tibet had acquired a new strategic interest as a possible backdoor supply route to a wartime ally eight years later. Roosevelt again yielded to the State Department's insistence that he address the Dalai Lama as "Your Pontificate" in his letter introducing Ilya Tolstoy, the OSS officer sent to survey possibilities for such a route. The emphasis on the Tibetan ruler's spiritual, rather than his temporal, role was done to avoid "giving any possible offense to the Chinese Government which includes Tibet in the territory of the Republic of China."

Washington Takes New Look at Tibet

The Communists' victory in October 1949 caused a dramatic reversal of US policy toward both China and Tibet. Earlier that spring Ambassador Loy Henderson had suggested from New Delhi that if Mao's forces succeeded in controlling all of China the US "should be prepared to treat Tibet as independent to all intents and purposes." His proposal triggered a review which produced a temporizing conclusion. Washington was not yet ready to take on the overall political and logistical difficulties involved in backing a declaration recognizing Tibet's independence. There was the even more pressing concern not to be seen as hastening the demise of the Nationalist government's authority over the mainland, particularly at a time when opponents of the administration were already attacking it for "losing China."

It was only a year later that Washington confronted the question of the legal status of Tibet. By that time the Chinese had entered the Korean war and crossed the Yangtze to liberate Tibet, and the Cold War had come to Asia. In an aide-memoire delivered to the British Embassy, the Department of State noted that "it does not appear that the United States has ever taken an official public stand in respect to the legal status of Tibet." The notification went on to declare that "The United States, which was one of the early supporters of the principle of self-determination of peoples, believes that the Tibetan people has the same inherent right as any other to have the determining voice in its political destiny. It is believed further that, should developments warrant, consideration could be given to recognition of Tibet as an independent state." While not willing to formulate a definitive legal position "at this time," it "would appear adequate for present purposes to state that the United States government recognizes the de facto autonomy that Tibet has exercised since the fall of the Manchu Dynasty, and particularly since the Simla Conference [1914]."

This working formula provided sufficient legal sanction for the policy decision by the US government to propose in the early summer of 1951 an ambitious program of both overt and covert support to the Tibetans. For almost a century the US policy objective in China had been to protect its territorial integrity. Now its goal was to contain China with no holds barred, and Washington saw a role for the Tibetans to play in its new strategy. The Dalai Lama was at that time staying at a monastery at the village of Yatung in southern Tibet a short distance from the Sikkimese and Indian borders. He had fled there when the Chinese troops moved into eastern Tibet, and was weighing the divided counsel of his advisors whether he could best serve his people by seeking asylum abroad or by returning to Lhasa. In May the Tibetan government officials that he had sent to negotiate with the Chinese in Peking had been induced to sign an agreement that effectively ended the de facto independence of Tibet, thereby adding another factor of uncertainty to his deliberations.

The US government inserted itself into the debate at Yatung, initiating a vigorous round of cross border diplomacy with offers of support to persuade the young Tibetan ruler to disavow the treaty his negotiators had signed without reference to him and seek asylum abroad. Washington believed that such a dramatic flight could be used as a symbol to rally the Dalai Lama's fellow Asian Buddhists against Chinese Communist expansion. Dean Rusk, then an Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, was calling the shots. He said that he and his colleagues believed that "the young man just might make a go of it" in his claim for independence if his exodus provoked sufficient international reaction to cause the Chinese Communists to reconsider their occupation of his country. In any event, it would serve the US purpose of doing anything possible "to get in the way of the Chinese Communists." Rusk reaffirmed his belief that American support of Tibetan independence fit within the prevailing Truman Doctrine in Europe and that both Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a realist, but staunchly anti-Communist, and President Truman approved of the extension of this doctrine to the Tibetans. The anticipated objections from the Chinese Nationalist government then going into its second year of exile in Taiwan and its supporters in the US Congress could be answered with the arguments that these initiatives would challenge the Chinese Communists. It was a policy mix of containment with a coating of Wilsonian idealism and an ingredient of domestic political protection against charges of "being soft on Communism."

The package finally hammered out with the Dalai Lama's advisors, who were tough bargainers, contained four major commitments to be delivered if the Tibetan leader sought asylum abroad.

The first promised that an "essential part of our cooperation would be a public announcement by the United States that it supports the position of the Your Holiness as head of an autonomous Tibet. The United States would also support your return to Tibet at the earliest practicable moment as head of an autonomous and non-Communist country." The translator warned the Americans who delivered these assurances that Tibetan lexicon of that time made no distinction between the words autonomous, sovereign, suzerain or independent. The imprecision of the US position may therefore have been conveyed more accurately than it intended. "Strategic ambiguity" served the US purpose by providing some wiggle room with its Nationalist allies should the promised announced be made.

The other three commitments promised to provide funds for the Dalai Lama to maintain himself and a limited retinue outside Tibet, to support any appeal that the Tibetans might make to the United Nations, and to support any resistance movement that might develop inside Tibet following his departure. Although they were hedged with qualifying phrases limiting their implementation to what was feasible under prevailing political conditions, the pledges clearly envisaged a Tibet enjoying the de facto independence that the Department acknowledged had existed prior to its "liberation" by the Chinese Communists.

Washington Moves Ahead

All of the commitments made to the Dalai Lama that summer were put on the shelf when he decided to return to Lhasa in August 1951. It wasn't for another eight years when the Tibetan ruler fled to India that the US government reviewed its position on the legal status of Tibet. In the intervening period it had undertaken a full scale program of training and providing arms support to the grass roots resistance movement that had arisen spontaneously in the mid-50's. The other two commitments were also honored. The subsidy promised for the maintenance of the Dalai Lama and his retinue was begun after his arrival in India in 1959 and continued for another fifteen years. Due to the hospitality of the Indian government a good portion of these funds were available for political activities in obtaining international recognition of his cause. The US government also undertook an active behind-the- scenes program to obtain a hearing for his case at the United Nations.

Only the issue of the legal status of Tibet remained to be dealt with now that the country's leader was free to claim the attention of the world community. Although the commitments had been made by the Truman government, the Eisenhower administration had honored them and was prepared to move even a bit further. On November 3, 1959, a senior State Department officer informed the Chinese Nationalist Ambassador George Yeh that the "United States had made a decision to go somewhat beyond its previous position with regard to Tibet, namely that it is an autonomous country under the suzerainty of China." The US government was now "prepared to apply the principle of self-determination to the people of Tibet." He reminded the Ambassador that President Chiang had made a similar pledge earlier that spring when the Dalai Lama had fled Tibet. He also reassured him that when the Department informed the Dalai Lama's brother of its intention to take this action that the word "independence" was not used at any time. When Secretary Herter issued the promised declaration in an exchange of letters with the Dalai Lama on February 29, 1960, the Nationalist government swallowed hard and merely protested the use of the word "country" as applied to Tibet in his statement. The idea that Tibet was merely an unruly province of China died hard even with an absentee landlord who had never controlled the property. It is one of those historic ironies that Beijing is today demanding that the Dalai Lama acknowledge that Taiwan is part of China as the price of a settlement with his country.

The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and Tibet

The new president saw no merit in changing the policies of his predecessors concerning China and therefore by derivation Tibet. His secretary of state Dean Rusk said that Kennedy was "uninterested in any changes in China policy" because it was "one of those things where there was no opportunity to get anywhere because of the attitude of Peking and, therefore, he'd prefer not to stir it up." When Rusk was briefed on the support that the CIA was then providing to the Tibetan rebels he gave his approval for its continuance. He also gave his full support to the campaign that the Tibetans were conducting at the United Nations under the guidance of his old colleague and friend former Ambassador Ernest Gross.

This business as usual policy concerning the overt and covert support being given to the Tibetans was reinvigorated in late 1962 when the Chinese troops crossed from Tibet into India's northeast borders after a series of provocative skirmishes of still- contested origin. The Tibetans became valuable assets to the Indians in their border defense, and the secret training and arms drops being provided by the United States to which the Indian government had been turning a blind eye now became elements of a common defense against the Chinese. The anti-US Indian Defense Minister Krishna Menon had been sacked and was no longer on the scene at the UN to lobby against resolutions supporting the Tibetans' right of self-determination, which India finally came to support.

This relationship of common cause with the Indians concerning China and Tibet was to continue throughout the succeeding Johnson administration. The whole US government was preoccupied with Vietnam, where China was seen as an ally of the enemy. There was no inclination in Washington to undertake any new initiatives toward normalization of relations with China, which was in turmoil as a result of the Cultural Revolution that Mao had unleashed. William Bundy, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian affairs noted that, quite to the contrary, Dean Rusk had asked him following the Tet offensive in early 1968 to revise a speech that he planned to make in February in which he was going to hint that some form of normalization might be possible. Rusk feared that the Chinese might interpret such a signal as a sign of weakness. Meanwhile the CIA and their Indian counterparts had formed a combined operations center to conduct intelligence and harassing guerrilla raids against Chinese inside Tibet. The Tibetans had also opened with US support their first offices abroad to begin their campaign to keep their cause alive in the international community. This was to be the high-water mark in relations between the Tibetans and the Executive branch of the US government.

Kissinger, Nixon and China

In thanking the Dalai Lama for his message of congratulation on his inauguration, President Nixon assured the Tibetan ruler that his "prayers would strengthen him" as he assumed his new responsibilities. His new National Security advisor, Doctor Henry Kissinger, however, soon began crafting a policy course on China that would eventually foreclose any role for the Tibetans. His strategy culminated in President Nixon's dramatic and historic trip to China in February 1972 to meet with Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai. American policy had come full circle since the days when encouraging Tibetan resistance was part of an overall of the effort to do "anything we could to get in the way of the Chinese Communists." After their journey to Beijing Dr. Kissinger told his chief that "We are now in the extraordinary situation that, with the exception of the United Kingdom, the People's Republic of China might well be closest to us in its global perceptions."

These global perceptions did not include the Tibetans. The participants in President Nixon's talks with Mao and Zhou and Dr. Kissinger's follow-up conversations with the Chinese leaders agree that the subject of Tibet or the support that the US was providing to the resistance did not come up in these discussions. By this time the CIA was in the process of phasing out its support for the guerrilla groups that it had maintained in the Mustang peninsula of Nepal since 1960. This was done for operational, not policy reasons. The mission for which this group had been created was considered no longer viable. Moreover, the Indians had assumed the major responsibility for utilizing the pool of Tibetans living in India who were ready and willing to join Indian border defense units, where they still constitute the majority of that country's border defense against the Chinese. Of the 1951 commitments thee remained only the subsidy out of which the Office of Tibet in New York had been set up a decade earlier and was functioning as an unofficial embassy of the Dalai Lama. The subsidy was terminated, but when the State Department in accordance with Dr. Kissinger's new policy toward China tried to shut this office down in 1974 the Tibetans refused. It remains open and functioning today.

It was Gerald Ford who made the final disavowal of support to the Tibetans. When Ford made his prescribed visit to Beijing in December 1975 Deng Xiaoping, after laying down his dictum that "we do not believe in peaceful transition" in regard to Taiwan, also took a shot at the US relationship with the Tibetans. He raised the "small issue" of the Dalai Lama's "small office" in New York. Although Deng belittled it as a matter like "chicken feathers and onion skin," Ford solemnly reaffirmed that "we oppose and do not support any governmental action as far as Tibet is concerned." In response to Deng's suggestion that the US Government might have refused visas to the Tibetans, Ford denied that any "governmental action" was taken, saying it was "done privately." Kissinger interposed to banter that "when they [the Tibetans] become Communists, then we will have a legal basis to refuse them visas." It was obvious that the Dalai Lama's escape from Lhasa still rankled with the Beijing leaders. Deng volunteered that "it was entirely within our capacity to stop him from leaving. But Chairman Mao said it is better to let him go." Deng seemed prepared to drop the Tibet issue at this point when the President gratuitously asserted: "I may just add that we do not approve of the actions that the Indians are taking as far as Tibet is concerned." This led to an exchange of locker room humor, with Deng joking that the Dalai Lama was now a "burden" that India might have to carry for another 60 years and Ford responding the he didn't believe Deng wanted to "relieve India of any extra burdens that it has." The Ford administration was making its final disavowal of both the commitments that his predecessors had been carrying out with the Tibetans and the Indian Connection that had grown out of this common endeavor.

Congress Assumes the Initiative

Having divested itself of the ties it had acquired over the previous 25 years to the Tibetans, the Executive arm of the US government reverted to its traditional policy of deferring to China's stance on Tibet. The Tibet issue therefore lay dormant in Washington for the next decade. The Carter administration was preoccupied with the normalization of ties with Beijing that its predecessors had been unable to complete. Despite its advocacy of human rights as a principle of foreign policy, there was no interest in reestablishing the US ties to the Tibetan cause.

It was to be the US Congress that revived and has maintained the keen interest which the Tibet cause has in the United States today. One of the participants attributes this takeover by Congress of the Tibet issue to a unique combination of personalities and circumstances that came together in 1987. The Dalai Lama spoke before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on September 21 and announced his Five Point Peace Plan as the kickoff to the Tibetan campaign to win international support for their position. He succeeded in winning the enthusiastic support of a bipartisan group of key Senators and Congressmen, which was confirmed when a full scale demonstration broke out in Lhasa that same week in which several Tibetans were killed by the Chinese police. The Congressional recruits were a diverse group, attracted to the cause of the Dalai Lama by anti-Communism, the parallel of the Holocaust, an interest in human rights, and, most of all, by the personality of the Dalai Lama. They also controlled the principal committees in both the Senate and the House that dealt with foreign affairs. Their newly found interest was reinforced with even greater fervor by several staff aides who had long wanted to see the US government take a more active role in Tibetan affairs. They took on the mission of translating their members' concerns into legislation supporting the Tibetans.

Three months after the Dalai Lama's appearance on Capitol Hill, the Congress included financial aid and Fulbright scholarships for Tibetan refugees in that year's Foreign Relations Authorization Act. The following year the Congress passed a resolution supporting the Dalai Lama's Five Point Peace Plan and the next year the Senate enacted legislation establishing a Voice of American Tibet Service while renewing the Fulbright scholarships. In 1991 the Congress moved even further into the foreign policy field by including a provision in that year's Authorization Act declaring Tibet an illegally occupied country whose true representatives are the Tibetan government in exile and the Dalai Lama. This provision had been husbanded by the shadow group of aides whose members were quite prepared to endorse this foray into what the State Department likes to regard as its exclusive territory. Once there the Congress has remained.

The State Department has attempted to reclaim its prerogative to define the US position on the legal status of Tibet, inserting into the 1994 Congressionally mandated annual report on Relations of the United States with Tibet the declaration that "since at least 1966, US policy has explicitly recognized the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of the People's Republic of China." It has been aided in its move to regain the initiative for the Executive Department on the Tibet issue by the "drop-in" meetings between the President and the Dalai Lama, which were initiated by George Bush and continued by President Clinton. Similarly the President, who had come into office after charging his predecessor of "coddling tyrants," among them "the butchers of Beijing," responded to Congressional pressure and made an improvement in Beijing's relationship with Tibet a condition for renewal of its most favored nation status. This condition became a casualty of the pressure for trade the next year. Secretary Albright did work out an agreement with Senator Helms to appoint a Special Coordinator for Tibetan Affairs instead of the special envoy for Tibet which was being promoted by Congress. The incumbent Julia Taft, like her predecessor Gregory Craig, faces the daunting challenge of trying to find a way to move the increasingly intractable Chinese leaders to hold the dialogue with the Dalai Lama that President Jiang teasingly hinted to Clinton might be a possibility. She does that while negotiating the hurdles set up by the pressure for resolution of the larger issues of the perennial Taiwan crisis and China's entry into the World Trade Organization – and while representing a Department and National Security Council divided between those who see the Tibet Question as an obstacle to the old acceptance of a China with flaws to be reformed through commerce and exchange and those who would demand remedy of these flaws as the price for a stable relationship. The Tibet issue may well get lost again in these conflicting positions and in the intransigence of the Chinese leadership. The Tibetans have learned, however, how the policy of their uncertain ally is formed and will look to the US Congress to resurrect and maintain their case for consideration in whatever strategy a new administration may decide upon for China.

References

1. Letter to the Dalai Lama from Rockhill, who was then the US Minister to Russia, September 39, 1910.
2. The Dalai Lamas of Lhasa and Their Relations with the Manchu Emperors of China, 1644-1908, T'oung Pao II, Volume 11, p. 90.
3. ibid.
4. Note to the President, April 27, 1937, Presidential Papers, Roosevelt Library.
5. Secretary of State to President Roosevelt, memorandum, July 3, 1942., FRUS, China, p. 625.
6. FRUS, 1949, Vol. IX, p. 1065.
7. FRUS, 1950, Volume VI, p. 612.
8. Interview with the author May 27, 1994. He did not define what his concept of independence for Tibet encompassed.
9. New Delhi Embassy, airgram 662, September 10, 1951, National Archives, RG59, box 4227.
10. Memorandum of Conversation, J. Graham Parsons, George K.C. Yeh, November 3, 1959, NARA 793b.00/11-359.
11. Recorded interview with D.J. O'Brien, March 30, 1970, Oral History project, Kennedy Library.
12. Interview with the author previously cited.
13. Interview with the author December 18, 1996.
14. Department of State telegram 447, February 7 1969, NARA, Nixon papers, WHCF, CO 149, box 69.
15. Kissinger to Nixon, memorandum, My Trip to China, March 2, 1973, NARA Nixon Documents.
16. Amit Pandya who was then an administrative aide to Congressman Howard Birman, described this Congressional discovery of the Tibetan cause as a classic case of Cleopatra's nose in an interview with the author on 14 April 2000.
17. In response to inquiries the Department can cite no evidence to document this ex post facto dating of this recognition to a time when China was in the midst of the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and the US government was preoccupied with the war in Vietnam.