On China (33 page)

Strain was nowhere apparent in the Chinese reception of the secret visit or during the dialogue that followed. In all the preliminary maneuvers, we had been sometimes puzzled by the erratic pauses between their messages, which we assumed had something to do with the Cultural Revolution. Nothing now seemed to disturb the serene aplomb of our hosts, who acted as if welcoming the special emissary of the American President for the first time in the history of the People’s Republic of China was the most natural occurrence.

For in fact what we encountered was a diplomatic style closer to traditional Chinese diplomacy than to the pedantic formulations to which we had become accustomed during our negotiations with other Communist states. Chinese statesmen historically have excelled at using hospitality, ceremony, and carefully cultivated personal relationships as tools of statecraft. It was a diplomacy well suited to China’s traditional security challenge—the preservation of a sedentary and agricultural civilization surrounded by peoples who, if they combined, wielded potentially superior military capacity. China survived, and generally prevailed, by mastering the art of fostering a calibrated combination of rewards and punishments and majestic cultural performance. In this context, hospitality becomes an aspect of strategy.

In our case, the ministrations began not when our delegation reached Beijing but en route from Islamabad. To our surprise, a group of English-speaking Chinese diplomats had been sent to Pakistan to escort us on the journey and ease any tension we might have felt on a five-hour flight to an unfamiliar destination. They had boarded the plane before us, shocking our accompanying security people, who had been trained to treat Mao suits as enemy uniforms. On the journey, the team was also able to test some of their research, practice aspects of their conduct, and collect information about their visitors’ personal characteristics for their Premier.

The team had been selected by Zhou two years earlier when the idea of opening with the United States first was mooted in the aftermath of the report of the four marshals. It included three members of the Foreign Ministry, one of whom, Tang Longbin, later was part of the protocol team for the Nixon visit; another was Zhang Wenjin, a former ambassador and specialist in what the Chinese termed “West European, American, and Oceania Affairs” and, as it turned out, an awesome linguist. Two younger members of the delegation, in effect, represented Mao and reported directly to him. They were Wang Hairong, his grand-niece, and Nancy Tang, an exceptionally capable Brooklyn-born interpreter, whose family had emigrated to China to join the revolution and who also acted as a kind of political advisor. All this we learned later, as well as the fact that, when first approached, the Foreign Ministry officials reacted like the marshals had. They needed Zhou’s personal reassurance that the assignment represented a Mao directive rather than a test of their revolutionary loyalty.

Marshal Ye Jianying, the Vice Chairman of the Military Commission—one of the four marshals who had been seconded by Mao to analyze China’s strategic options—welcomed us at the Beijing airport when we landed at noon, a symbol of the support of the People’s Liberation Army for the new Sino-U.S. diplomacy. The marshal took me in a long Chinese-made limousine with drawn blinds to Diaoyutai, the State Guesthouse in a walled-off park in the western part of the city. The compound had formerly served as an imperial fishing lake. Ye suggested that the delegation take a rest until Premier Zhou would come to the guesthouse four hours later to welcome us and for a first round of discussions.

Zhou’s coming to call on us was a gesture of considerable courtesy. The normal diplomatic procedure is for a visiting delegation to be received in a public building of the host country, especially when the difference in protocol rank of the head of the two delegations is so great. (In contrast to Zhou, the Premier, my protocol rank as National Security Advisor was equivalent to that of a deputy Cabinet secretary, three levels down.)

We soon discovered that our Chinese hosts had designed an almost improbably leisurely schedule—as if to signal that after surviving more than two decades of isolation, they were in no particular hurry to conclude a substantive agreement now. We were scheduled to be in Beijing for almost exactly forty-eight hours. We could not extend our stay because we were expected in Paris for talks on Vietnam; nor did we control the schedule of the presidential plane of Pakistan, which had taken us to Beijing.

When we saw our program, we realized that, in addition to this pause before Zhou’s arrival, a four-hour visit to the Forbidden City had been planned. Thus eight hours of the available forty-eight hours had been provided for. As it turned out, Zhou would be unavailable for the next evening, which had been reserved for a visit by a North Korean Politburo member, which could not be rescheduled—or perhaps was not as a cover for the secret trip. If one allowed for sixteen hours for two nights’ rest, there would be less than twenty-four hours left for the first dialogue between countries that had been at war, near war, and without significant diplomatic contact for twenty years.

In fact only two formal negotiating sessions were available: seven hours on the day of my arrival, from 4:30 P.M. to 11:20 P.M.; and six hours on the next, from noon until about 6:30 P.M. The first meeting was at the State Guesthouse—the United States acting as host by the conceit of Chinese protocol. The second was at the Great Hall of the People, where the Chinese government would receive us.

It could be argued that the apparent Chinese nonchalance was a form of psychological pressure. To be sure, had we left without progress, it would have been a major embarrassment to Nixon, who had not shared my mission with any other Cabinet member. But if the calculations of two years of China diplomacy were correct, the exigencies that had induced Mao to extend the invitation might turn unmanageable by a rebuff of an American mission to Beijing.

Confrontation made no sense for either side; that is why we were in Beijing. Nixon was eager to raise American sights beyond Vietnam. Mao’s decision had been for a move that might force the Soviets to hesitate before taking on China militarily. Neither side could afford failure. Each side knew the stakes.

In a rare symbiosis of analyses, both sides decided to spend most of the time on trying to explore each other’s perception of the international order. Since the ultimate purpose of the visit was to start the process of determining whether the previously antagonistic foreign policies of the two countries could be aligned, a conceptual discussion—at some points sounding more like a conversation between two professors of international relations than a working diplomatic dialogue—was, in fact, the ultimate form of practical diplomacy.

When the Premier arrived, our handshake was a symbolic gesture—at least until Nixon could arrive in China for a public repetition—since Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake hands with Zhou at the Geneva Conference in 1954, a slight that rankled, despite the frequent Chinese protestations that it made no difference. We then repaired to a conference room in the guesthouse and faced each other across a green baize table. Here the American delegation had its first personal experience with the singular figure who had worked by Mao’s side through nearly a half century of revolution, war, upheaval, and diplomatic maneuver.

In some sixty years of public life, I have encountered no more compelling figure than Zhou Enlai. Short, elegant, with an expressive face framing luminous eyes, he dominated by exceptional intelligence and capacity to intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number. When I met him, he had been Premier for nearly twenty-two years and an associate of Mao for forty. He had made himself indispensable as the crucial mediator between Mao and the people who formed the raw material for the Chairman’s vast agenda, translating Mao’s sweeping visions into concrete programs. At the same time, he had earned the gratitude of many Chinese for moderating the excesses of these visions, at least wherever Mao’s fervor gave scope for moderation.

The difference between the leaders was reflected in their personalities. Mao dominated any gathering; Zhou suffused it. Mao’s passion strove to overwhelm opposition; Zhou’s intellect would seek to persuade or outmaneuver it. Mao was sardonic; Zhou penetrating. Mao thought of himself as a philosopher; Zhou saw his role as an administrator or a negotiator. Mao was eager to accelerate history; Zhou was content to exploit its currents. A saying he often repeated was “The helmsman must ride with the waves.” When they were together, there was no question of the hierarchy, not simply in the formal sense but in the deeper aspect of Zhou’s extraordinarily deferential conduct.

Later on, Zhou was criticized for having concentrated on softening some of Mao’s practices rather than resisting them. When the American delegation met Zhou, China had just undergone the Cultural Revolution, of which he was—as a cosmopolitan, foreign-educated advocate for pragmatic engagement with the West—an obvious target. Was he its enabler or a brake on it? Surely Zhou’s methods of political survival involved lending his administrative skill to the execution of policies that he may well have found personally distasteful; perhaps because of this, however, he was spared the purges that were the fate of most of his contemporary leaders in the 1960s (until he eventually came under increasing attack and was in effect removed from office in late 1973).

The advisor to the prince occasionally faces the dilemma of balancing the benefits of the ability to alter events against the possibility of exclusion, should he bring his objections to any one policy to a head. How does the ability to modify the prince’s prevailing conduct weigh against the moral onus of participation in his policies? How does one measure the element of nuance over time against the claims of absolutes in the immediate? What is the balance between the cumulative impact of moderating trends against that of a grand (and probably doomed) gesture?

Deng Xiaoping cut to the heart of these dilemmas in his subsequent assessment of Zhou’s role in the Cultural Revolution, in which Deng and his family suffered considerably: “Without the premier the Cultural Revolution would have been much worse. And without the premier the Cultural Revolution wouldn’t have dragged on for such a long time.”
¹
Publicly at least, Deng resolved these issues on behalf of Zhou. In an interview Deng gave to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1980, after his return from exile, he stated:

Contrary views have had their hearing; not all analysts share Deng’s ultimate appraisal of the exigencies of Zhou’s political survival.
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In my dealings with him, Zhou’s subtle and sensitive style helped overcome many pitfalls of an emerging relationship between two previously hostile major countries. The Sino-U.S. rapprochement started as a tactical aspect of the Cold War; it evolved to where it became central to the evolution of the new global order. Neither of us had any illusion of changing the basic convictions of the other. It was precisely the absence of any such illusion that facilitated our dialogue. But we articulated common purposes that survived both our periods in office—one of the highest rewards to which statesmen can lay claim.

All that was still in the distant future when Zhou and I sat down around the baize table to explore whether a beginning of reconciliation was truly possible at all. Zhou invited me, as the guest, to make the opening statement. I had decided not to detail the issues that had divided the two countries but rather to concentrate on the evolution of Sino-U.S. relations from a philosophical perspective. My opening remarks included the somewhat florid phrase “Many visitors have come to this beautiful and, to us, mysterious land . . .” At this point, Zhou interrupted: “You will find it not mysterious. When you have become familiar with it, it will not be so mysterious as before.”
⁴

Unraveling each other’s mysteries was a good way of defining our challenge, but Zhou went further. In his first comments to an American envoy in twenty years, he stated that restoring friendship was one of the principal goals of the emerging relationship—a point he had already made when he met with the American Ping-Pong team.

On my second visit three months later, Zhou greeted my delegation as if the friendship were already an established fact:

In February 1973, Mao made the same point: the United States and China had once been “two enemies,” he offered in welcoming me to his study, but “[n]ow we call the relationship between ourselves a friendship.”
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It was, however, a hardheaded, unsentimental perception of friendship. The Chinese Communist leadership retained some of the traditional approach to barbarian management. In it, the other side is flattered by being admitted to the Chinese “club” as an “old friend,” a posture that makes disagreement more complicated and confrontations painful. When they conduct Middle Kingdom diplomacy, Chinese diplomats maneuver to induce their opposite numbers to propose the Chinese preference so that acquiescence can appear as the granting of a personal favor to the interlocutor.