Jimmy Carter played a major role in opening US-China ties

Critics say the 39th American president should have been tougher on Beijing’s human rights practices.
Jane Tang and Paul Eckert for RFA
2024.12.30
Jimmy Carter played a major role in opening US-China ties Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and China's Deng Xiaoping hug each other in Beijing, June 29, 1987.
John Giannini/AFP

UPDATED at 9:36 a.m. ET on 2024-12-31

Former United States President Jimmy Carter, who has died aged 100, will be remembered in Asia for establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing, a strategic Cold War 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” to the U.S.  

“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,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning at a regular media briefing Monday.                                                        

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U.S. President Jimmy Carter (left) and China’s then-Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping at the White House in Washington, Jan. 30, 1979. [AP]

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 (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 opening to China by [former U.S. President Richard] 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.

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China's then-Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping (left) applauds U.S. President Jimmy Carter after Carter welcomed the foreign leader in a South Lawn ceremony at the White House in Washington, Jan. 29, 1979. [AP]

Mann said Carter “fleshed out” the 1971-72 opening made by the Nixon administration with stronger military and intelligence ties to counter what was then 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 a 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 Radio Free Asia, a news service affiliated with BenarNews.

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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn walk at the Great Wall of China, Aug. 26, 1981. [Peter Bregg/AP]

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.

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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (left) and former President Richard Nixon (second from left) speak with China's then-Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping during a state dinner at the White House, Jan. 29, 1979. [National Archives and Records Administration]

In 1982, Carter and his wife Rosalynn, who died in November 2023, founded the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a non-profit focused on peace negotiations, and spreading health and democracy.

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.

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Leader of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping (right) gestures to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a meeting at the Zhongnanhai, the central government compound in Beijing, Dec. 13, 2012. [China Daily/via Reuters]

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 of the China Project.

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.”

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.

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.

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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (left) and wife Rosalynn (second from left) attend an exhibit on 30 years of China-US diplomatic relations in Beijing, Jan.12, 2009. [Elizabeth Dalziel/AP]

“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.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a news organization affiliated with BenarNews. This report was updated to change the main photo.

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