On China (35 page)

Zhou began by outlining China’s defiance, even should all conceivable enemies unite against it:

According to recent Chinese historical accounts, Zhou had been specifically instructed by Mao to “brag” that “although all under the heaven[s] is in great chaos, the situation is wonderful.”
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Mao was worried about Soviet aggression, but he did not want to express concern, even less appear to ask for help. The narrative of turmoil under the heavens was his way of eliciting American attitudes without the implication of concern involved in asking for them: to sketch both the maximum conceivable threat and China’s fortitude in resisting even it. No American intelligence estimate had ever conceived so cataclysmic a contingency; no American policymaker had considered so global a confrontation. Yet its sweep did not specify the specific dominant concern—which was a Soviet attack—and thus China avoided appearing as a supplicant.

Despite its apparent explicitness, Zhou’s presentation was a subtle approach to a discussion of strategic cooperation. In the Atlantic region we were allied with friendly countries under a looming threat. They would seek reassurance by transforming oral pledges into a legal obligation. The Chinese leaders took the opposite course. How China was prepared to stand alone, even in the face of a nuclear threat, and fight a protracted guerrilla war on its own against a coalition of all major powers became a standard Chinese narrative over the next decade. Its underlying purpose was to turn self-reliance into a weapon and into a method of mutual assistance based on parallel perceptions. Reciprocal obligations between China and the United States would not be established in a legal document but in a shared perception of a common threat. Though China made no claim for outside assistance, it would spontaneously arise from shared perceptions; it would be dispensed with if the other party did not share—or no longer shared—the Chinese view of the challenge.

At the very end of the second day’s session and with the evening blocked for Zhou by the visit of the North Korean dignitary—with about eighteen hours before our unbreakable departure deadline—Zhou raised the issue of a visit by President Nixon. Both Zhou and I had made glancing references to it but had avoided being specific because neither of us wanted to deal with a rebuff or to appear as a supplicant. Zhou finally adopted the elegant solution of moving into the topic as a procedural issue:

As it happened, the communiqué could not be finished that night because of a deadlock over who would be said to have invited whom. Each side wanted the other to look more eager. We split the difference. The draft needed the Chairman’s approval, and Mao had gone to bed. Mao finally approved a formulation in which Zhou, “[k]nowing of President Nixon’s expressed desire to visit the People’s Republic of China,” was said to have “extended an invitation,” which Nixon had then accepted “with pleasure.”

We finished drafting the terms of a statement for the visit of President Nixon just before the deadline for our departure on the afternoon of Sunday, July 11. “Our announcement will shake the world,” said Zhou, and the delegation flew back, concealing its excitement for the hours before the world could be shaken. I briefed Nixon at his San Clemente “Western White House.” Then, simultaneously on July 15, from Los Angeles and Beijing, the secret trip and the invitation were both made public.

Seven months after the secret visit, on February 21, 1972, President Nixon arrived in Beijing on a raw winter day. It was a triumphant moment for the President, the inveterate anti-Communist who had seen a geopolitical opportunity and seized it boldly. As a symbol of the fortitude with which he had navigated to this day and of the new era he was inaugurating, he wanted to descend alone from Air Force One to meet Zhou Enlai, who was standing on the windy tarmac in his immaculate Mao jacket as a Chinese military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The symbolic handshake that erased Dulles’s snub duly took place. But for a historic occasion, it was strangely muted. When Nixon’s motorcade drove into Beijing, the streets had been cleared of onlookers. And his arrival was played as the last item on the evening news.
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As revolutionary as the opening itself had been, the final communiqué had not yet been fully agreed—especially in the key paragraph on Taiwan. A celebration would have been premature and perhaps weakened the Chinese negotiating position of studied equanimity. Too, the Chinese leaders knew that their Vietnamese allies were furious that China had given Nixon an opportunity to rally the American public. A public demonstration for their enemy in the capital of their ally would have proved too great a strain on the ever-tenuous Sino-Vietnamese relationship.

Our hosts made up for the missing demonstrations by inviting Nixon to a meeting with Mao within hours of our arrival. “Inviting” is not the precise word for how meetings with Mao occurred. Appointments were never scheduled; they came about as if events of nature. They were echoes of emperors granting audiences. The first indication of Mao’s invitation to Nixon occurred when, shortly after our arrival, I received word that Zhou needed to see me in a reception room. He informed me that “Chairman Mao would like to see the President.” To avoid the impression that Nixon was being summoned, I raised some technical issues about the order of events at the evening banquet. Uncharacteristically impatient, Zhou responded: “Since the Chairman is inviting him, he wants to see him fairly soon.” In welcoming Nixon at the very outset of his visit, Mao was signaling his authoritative endorsement to domestic and international audiences before talks had even begun. Accompanied by Zhou, we set off for Mao’s residence in Chinese cars. No American security personnel were permitted, and the press could be notified only afterward.

Mao’s residence was approached through a wide gate on the east–west axis carved from where the ancient city walls stood before the Communist revolution. Inside the Imperial City, the road hugged a lake, on the other side of which stood a series of residences for high officials. All had been built in the days of Sino-Soviet friendship and reflected the heavy Stalinist style of the period similar to the State Guesthouses.

Mao’s residence appeared no different, though it stood slightly apart from the others. There were no visible guards or other appurtenances of power. A small anteroom was almost completely dominated by a Ping-Pong table. It did not matter because we were taken directly to Mao’s study, a room of modest size with bookshelves lining three walls filled with manuscripts in a state of considerable disarray. Books covered the tables and were piled up on the floor. A simple wooden bed stood in a corner. The all-powerful ruler of the world’s most populous nation wished to be perceived as a philosopher-king who had no need to buttress his authority with traditional symbols of majesty.

Mao rose from an armchair in the middle of a semicircle of armchairs with an attendant close by to steady him if necessary. We learned later that he had suffered a debilitating series of heart and lung ailments in the weeks before and that he had difficulty moving. Overcoming his handicaps, Mao exuded an extraordinary willpower and determination. He took Nixon’s hands in both of his and showered his most benevolent smile on him. The picture appeared in all Chinese newspapers. The Chinese were skillful in using Mao photographs to convey a mood and a direction of policy. When Mao scowled, storms were approaching. When he was photographed wagging a finger at a visitor, it indicated reservations of a somewhat put-upon teacher.

The meeting provided us our first introduction to Mao’s bantering and elliptical style of conversation. Most political leaders present their thoughts in the form of bullet points. Mao advanced his ideas in a Socratic manner. He would begin with a question or an observation and invite comment. He would then follow with another observation. Out of this web of sarcastic remarks, observations, and queries would emerge a direction, though rarely a binding commitment.

From the outset, Mao abjured any intention to conduct either a philosophical or strategic dialogue with Nixon. Nixon had mentioned to the Chinese Vice Foreign Minister, Qiao Guanhua, who had been sent to escort the presidential party from Shanghai to Beijing (Air Force One had stopped in Shanghai to take a Chinese navigator aboard), that he was looking forward to discussing philosophy with the Chairman. Mao would have none of it. Asserting that I was the only doctor of philosophy available, he added: “What about asking him to be the main speaker today?” As if by habit, Mao was playing at the “contradictions” between his guests: this sarcastic evasion could have served the purpose of creating a potential for a rift between the President and the National Security Advisor—presidents being generally unappreciative of being upstaged by their security advisor.

Nor was Mao willing to take a Nixon hint to discuss challenges posed by a number of countries he enumerated. Nixon framed the main issues as follows:

Mao refused the bait: “All those troublesome questions I don’t want to get into very much.” He suggested they be discussed with the Premier.

What, then, did Mao wish to convey through his apparently meandering dialogue? The perhaps most important messages were things that did not happen. First, after decades of mutual recrimination over Taiwan, the subject in effect did not come up. The sum total of discussions devoted to it was as follows:

No threats, no demands, no deadlines, no references to past deadlock. After a war, two military confrontations, and 136 deadlocked ambassadorial meetings, the Taiwan issue had lost its urgency. It was being put aside, at least for the time being, as first suggested by Zhou at the secret meeting.

Second, Mao wanted to convey that Nixon was a welcome visitor. The photograph had taken care of that. Third, Mao was eager to remove any threat from China to the United States:

This cryptic sentence that Chinese troops stayed at home removed the concern that Vietnam might end like Korea with massive Chinese intervention.

Fourth, Mao wanted to convey that he had encountered a challenge in pursuing the opening to America but that he had overcome it. He offered a sardonic epitaph to Lin Biao, who had fled the capital in September 1971 in a military airplane that crashed in Mongolia, in what was reportedly an abortive coup: