Jimmy Carter played a major role in opening US-China ties
Critics say he should have been tougher on Beijing's human rights practices.
By Jane Tang and Paul Eckert 2024.12.29 -- Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who has died aged 100, will be remembered in Asia for establishing diplomatic relations with China, a Cold War strategic move that reflected his lifelong concern for the Chinese people.
Carter died on Sunday, nearly two years after he entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia, his family announced.
China expressed "deep condolences," with foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning telling a regular media briefing Monday: "As U.S. president Jimmy Carter facilitated and oversaw the establishment of diplomatic ties with China and made vital contributions to promoting the development of Sino-US relations and friendly exchanges and cooperation between the two countries."
Carter's 1977-81 tenure in the White House was marked by the Camp David Accords peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, the Iran hostage crisis - and the rapprochement with China at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
In a speech at the White House in December 1978, Carter announced the severance of diplomatic relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan and recognition of the People's Republic of China, effective Jan. 1, 1979.
"The normalization of U.S.-China relations has no other purpose than to promote peace," Carter said.
Recognition of Beijing meant the termination of diplomatic relations and a mutual defense treaty with the Republic of China in Taipei.
In response Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979, which was signed and implemented by Carter.
The legislation committed Washington to provide Taiwan with arms for defense, and "to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan."
"The opening to China by Nixon and Kissinger is what's remembered. But it was Carter who established diplomatic relations when Nixon and Kissinger and Gerald Ford couldn't politically," said author and China expert James Mann.
Mann said Carter "fleshed out" the 1971-72 opening made by the Nixon administration with stronger military and intelligence ties to counter the Soviet Union, as well as student exchanges that brought hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to the U.S.
The opening to China was promising at a time when the U.S. was facing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Middle East oil crisis and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
Line of defense
Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping saw opening up to the outside world and improving relations with the West as way to get technology and resources for his impoverished country.
"What was more important at the time was that the People's Republic of China and the United States jointly established a line of defense against the former Soviet Union," Yang Dali, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, told RFA.
Carter's earliest impression of China came from accounts he heard from Baptist missionaries in rural Georgia and his uncle who served in the U.S. Navy.
Moved by stories about dire poverty in China, the young Carter donated 5 cents every week to a church program that built hospitals and schools for Chinese children, according to the Carter Center.
Carter set foot in China for the first time in 1949, before the communist takeover, during a port call as a U.S. Navy submarine officer.
The wartime destruction suffered by China left a deep impression on him and motivated him to seek peace, said Liu Yawei, director of the China Project at the Carter Center.
"When he negotiated with Deng Xiaoping to establish diplomatic relations, the contradictions between China and the United States were far greater than the current contradictions between China and the United States," he told RFA.
In 1982, Carter and Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years who died in November 2023, founded the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a non-profit focused on peace negotiations, and spreading health and democracy.
Carter's most notable peacemaking effort came in June 1994, when he traveled to Pyongyang for talks with leader Kim Il Sung to head off a conflict over North Korea's nascent nuclear weapons program.
The first former U.S. head of state to travel to North Korea, visiting as Washington was gearing up to take military action against Pyongyang over the North's withdrawal from the International Atomic Energy Agency and rejection of nuclear inspectors, Carter convinced Kim to reverse course.
Negotiations that followed led to a nuclear freeze-for-reactors deal that averted the crisis but collapsed early in this century.
The Carter Center's China project began in the 1980s, making prosthetics for disabled people in rural China and providing educational opportunities for deaf and blind children.
Until his health started to decline, Carter went to China almost every year and often traveled deep into the countryside, visiting earthquake zones and other disaster areas after to assist relief efforts.
From 1996 to 2012, the Carter Center's China Project worked to help promote political reform through grassroots democratic elections in rural China, providing technical assistance and training election officials, said Liu.
Human rights questions
The election program, like all foreign NGO activity in China, came under scrutiny when authoritarian leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012, and the Carter Center "began to withdraw from China's internal affairs and only focus on Sino-U.S. relations," he said.
As the leader of the Carter Center, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his "unremitting efforts to promote the peaceful resolution of international conflicts, democracy and human rights."
Carter set an "example to us all of how to live our lives in the service of others," the Dalai Lama said in a letter to Carter's son, Chip.
"The Tibetan people and I remain ever grateful to President Carter for his deep interest in and concern for the situation in Tibet and for undertaking initiatives to help alleviate the plight of our people," wrote the the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, whose first visited the U.S. in 1979, during Carter's presidential term.
"President Carter lived a truly meaningful life, with decades of untiring efforts to help the poor and downtrodden, to seek peaceful solutions to conflicts and to advance democracy and human rights throughout the world," and fellow Nobel laureate added.
In 1987, after his first visit to China, Carter said he had urged the Chinese leadership to resume peaceful negotiations with the Dalai Lama and his representatives, and advocated for the Dalai Lama's return to Tibet.
Carter is not without his critics when it comes to his handling of human rights in China. They say he pulled his punches on conditions in China during his time in office and in his long post-presidential career.
"Human rights was his issue around the world, but he paid little to no attention to human rights issues in China," said Mann, author of three books on U.S.-China relations.
Carter resisted calls to raise specific jailed dissidents or condemn crackdowns on nascent democracy movements in the late 1970s, he said.
"I think he thought it was an important issue that China had come out of the Mao years and was changing," Mann added.
"Carter has never embarrassed China on key issues," said Xia Ming, a professor of political science at the City University of New York.
"Perhaps in the eyes of some people, (humanitarians like Carter) do not understand the toxicity of the Chinese Communist Party's autocracy and communism enough -- especially today when we see China, Iran and Russia hugging together again," he said.
Asked about the critics, Liu of the Carter Center said Carter felt he had bigger fish to fry.
"For President Carter, reducing and relieving the misery of the great masses of the people are probably more important than one or two individual cases," he said.
Updated to add Chinese foreign ministry reaction, comments from the Dalai Lama.
Additional reporting by RFA Tibetan. Edited by RFA Staff.
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