Wang Bingnan Ordered to Defy US Demands for American Nationals
By Marcus Boone ·
Top Secret midnight orders stayed hidden, directing Wang Bingnan to use Xinhua articles on persecuted students to counter US pressure for the release of all American nationals in China.
The midnight cable from the Chinese Foreign Ministry to Ambassador Wang Bingnan on August 19, 1955, is a study in controlled friction. Written in the stark, instructional tone of the period and marked Top Secret, the document outlines the strategy for the ninth meeting of talks between the People's Republic of China and the United States. It is an English translation provided by the Cold War International History Project.
At the center of the correspondence is the management of perception. The Foreign Ministry is concerned that the Americans have developed a "misperception of the other side that we are eager to reach an accord." To correct this, the instructions to Wang Bingnan are explicit: he is to be "resolute" and "vigorously criticize various arguments from the other side."
Let the Other Side Speak First
The cable details a specific tactical sequence for the ninth meeting. Wang is told to let the Americans speak first. The logic is one of reactive aggression; if the American representative repeats the positions held during the eighth meeting, Wang is ordered to "refuse to yield an inch and struggle against him."
The core of the dispute, as identified in the text, centers on "Agenda I." According to the Foreign Ministry, the American objective is to secure a promise that China will "release all American nationals in China." The Ministry notes that while the US has proposed "divergent formulations" as the talks evolved, the Chinese side has reached its limit. Regarding the first item in the agreed announcement, the cable states that they "have made our greatest efforts and cannot make further concessions."
This reveals the narrow corridor in which Wang Bingnan—a veteran diplomat and foreign affairs official of the Chinese Communist Party, according to the public record—was required to operate. He was not sent to negotiate a compromise, but to maintain a wall of resistance while managing the optics of the encounter. The use of the word "struggle" reflects the ideological language of the time, framing a diplomatic meeting not as a search for common ground, but as a confrontation of wills.
Xinhua and the Student Question
Diplomacy in 1955 was not confined to the meeting room; it was synchronized with the press. The Foreign Ministry informs Wang that the Xinhua News Agency has already begun publishing articles concerning Chinese students who were "prevented from leaving the US and [were] persecuted."
This was not a coincidence of timing but a deliberate effort to "coordinate with your struggle at the meeting." The Ministry views this as a necessary counter-weight to what they term "US counter-propaganda." Specifically, the Chinese government intended to strike back against American narratives regarding the "eleven released convicted US nationals."
By leveraging the plight of students in the United States, the Foreign Ministry sought to create a reciprocal pressure point. The strategy was to move the conversation away from the detention of Americans in China by highlighting the perceived persecution of Chinese nationals in the US. Wang was told that these materials would be sent to him for reference once published, ensuring that the ambassador's talking points were mirrored in the state media's output.
24:00, 19 August 1955
The cable, timestamped at midnight, leaves little room for ambassadorial discretion. The Ministry's tone is that of a command center directing a field agent. The instructions regarding the text of the speech—which the Ministry promised to send "soon"—suggest that the Ambassador's role was largely to deliver a predetermined script while reacting to the Americans' openings with a predetermined level of hostility.
While this specific cable provides a snapshot of a single moment of tension, the broader scope of these interactions is touched upon in other archival collections. The US State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series contains records of US-China ambassadorial talks from 1955 to 1970, and the National Archives holds files related to the same talks. Additionally, the NSArchive has published various threat assessments and reports on Chinese military and security developments, though those documents focus on a different era of the relationship. A 1998 memoir, The footprint of a veteran diplomat : Wang Bingnan, exists in the Internet Archive, providing a retrospective look at the man who received these midnight orders.
There is a final, lingering point of caution in the cable. Despite the coordinated effort to use Xinhua to influence the atmosphere, the Foreign Ministry was not yet ready to pull back the curtain on the negotiations themselves. Regarding the possibility of making the talks public, the instructions are brief and dismissive: "it is not suitable to raise this issue. Please wait and see."
Whether the "struggle" in the ninth meeting succeeded in shifting the American perception of Chinese eagerness, or whether the Xinhua articles shifted the needle on the release of nationals, the cable does not say. It ends on that directive of silence: wait and see.