On China (36 page)

Fifth, Mao favored accelerated bilateral cooperation and urged technical talks on the subject:

Sixth, he stressed his personal goodwill to Nixon, both personally and because he said he preferred dealing with right-wing governments on the grounds that they were more reliable. Mao, the author of the Great Leap Forward and the Anti-Rightist Campaign, made the astonishing remark that he had “voted for” Nixon, and that he was “comparatively happy when these people on the right come into power” (in the West at least):

Nevertheless, he warned that if the Democrats gained power in Washington, China would establish contacts with them, too.

At the beginning of the Nixon visit, Mao was prepared to commit himself to the direction it implied though not yet to the details of the specific negotiations about to begin. It was not clear whether a formula on Taiwan could be found (all other issues having been essentially settled). But he was ready to endorse a substantial agenda of cooperation in the fifteen hours of dialogue that had been scheduled between Nixon and Zhou. The basic direction having been set, Mao counseled patience and hedged should we fail to come up with an agreed communiqué. Rather than treat that setback as a failure, Mao argued it should spur renewed efforts. The impending strategic design overrode all other concerns—even deadlock over Taiwan. Mao advised both sides not to stake too much on one set of negotiations:

In other words, even if for some unforeseen reason the talks about to begin were to deadlock, China would persevere to achieve the desired result of a strategic cooperation with America in the future.

As the meeting was breaking up, Mao, the prophet of continuous revolution, emphasized to the President of the heretofore vilified capitalist-imperialist society that ideology was no longer relevant to relations between the two countries:

Mao laughed uproariously at the implication that anyone might have taken seriously a slogan that had been scrawled for decades on public surfaces all over China. He ended the conversation with a comment characteristically sardonic, mocking, and reassuring:

With our long-term personal safety thus assured and the nonideological basis of their relationship certified by the highest authority on that subject, the two sides commenced five days of dialogue and banquets interspersed with sightseeing trips.

The substantive issues had been divided into three categories, the first being the long-term objectives of the two sides and their cooperation against hegemonic powers—a shorthand for the Soviet Union without the invidiousness of naming it. This would be conducted by Zhou and Nixon and restricted staffs, which included me. We met for at least three hours every afternoon.

Second, a forum for discussing economic cooperation and scientific and technical exchanges was headed by the foreign ministers of the two sides. Lastly, there was a drafting group for the final communiqué headed by Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua and myself. The drafting meetings took place late at night after the banquets.

The meetings between Nixon and Zhou were unique in encounters between heads of government (Nixon, of course, was also head of state) in that they did not deal with
any
contemporary issues; these were left to the communiqué drafters and the foreign ministers’ panel. Nixon concentrated on placing a conceptual roadmap of American policy before his counterpart. Given the starting point of the two sides, it was important that our Chinese interlocutors would hear an authoritative and reliable guide to American purposes.

Nixon was extraordinarily well equipped for this role. As a negotiator, his reluctance to engage in face-to-face confrontations—and indeed his evasion of them—tended to produce vagueness and ambiguity. But he was a great briefer. Among the ten American Presidents I have known, he had a unique grasp of long-term international trends. He used the fifteen hours of meetings with Zhou to put before him a vision of U.S.-China relations and their impact on world affairs.

While I was en route to China, Nixon had outlined his perspective to the U.S. ambassador in Taipei, who would have the painful task of explaining to his hosts that America in the years ahead would be shifting the emphasis of its China policy to Beijing from Taipei:

Nixon forecast that despite China’s turmoil and privation, its people’s outstanding abilities would eventually propel China to the first rank of world powers:

Now in Beijing, Nixon was in his element. Whatever his long-established negative views on Communism as a system of governance, he had not come to China to convert its leaders to American principles of democracy or free enterprise—judging it to be useless. What Nixon sought throughout the Cold War was a stable international order for a world filled with nuclear weapons. Thus in his first meeting with Zhou, Nixon paid tribute to the sincerity of the revolutionaries whose success he had earlier decried as a signal failure of American policy: “We know you believe deeply in your principles, and we believe deeply in our principles. We do not ask you to compromise your principles, just as you would not ask us to compromise ours.”
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Nixon acknowledged that his principles had earlier led him—like many of his countrymen—to advocate policies in opposition to Chinese aims. But the world had changed, and now the American interest required that Washington adapt to these changes:

Nixon proposed to base foreign policy on the reconciliation of interests. Provided the national interest was clearly perceived and that it took into account the mutual interest in stability, or at least in avoiding catastrophe, this would introduce predictability into Sino-U.S. relations:

For such an approach, candor was the precondition of genuine cooperation. As Nixon told Zhou: “It is important that we develop complete candor and recognize that neither of us would do anything unless we considered it was in our interests.”
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Nixon’s critics often decried these and similar statements as a version of selfishness. Yet Chinese leaders reverted to them frequently as guarantors of American reliability—because they were precise, calculable, and reciprocal.

On this basis, Nixon put forward a rationale for an enduring American role in Asia, even after the withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. forces from Vietnam. What was unusual about it was that he presented it as being in the
mutual
interest. For decades, Chinese propaganda had assailed the American presence in the region as a form of colonialist oppression and called upon “the people” to rise up against it. But Nixon in Beijing insisted that geopolitical imperatives transcended ideology—his very presence in Beijing testified to that. With one million Soviet troops on China’s northern border, Beijing would no longer be able to base its foreign policy on slogans about the need to strike down “American imperialism.” He had stressed America’s essential world role to me before the trip:

The invocation of the national interest in the absolute form as put forward by Nixon is difficult to apply as the sole organizing concept of international order. Conditions by which to define the national interest vary too widely, and the possible fluctuations in interpretation are too great, to provide a reliable single guide to conduct. Some congruence on values is generally needed to supply an element of restraint.

When China and the United States first began to deal with each other after a hiatus of two decades, the values of the two sides were different, if not opposed. A consensus on national interest with all its difficulties was the most meaningful element of moderation available. Ideology would drive the two sides toward confrontation, tempting tests of strength around a vast periphery.

Was pragmatism enough? It can sharpen clashes of interests as easily as resolve them. Every side will know its objectives better than the other side’s. Depending on the solidity of its domestic position, concessions that are necessary from the pragmatic point of view can be used by domestic opponents as a demonstration of weakness. There is therefore a constant temptation to raise the stakes. In the first dealings with China, the issue was how congruent the definitions of interests were or could be made to be. The Nixon-Zhou conversations provided the framework of congruence, and the bridge to it was the Shanghai Communiqué and its much debated paragraph about the future of Taiwan.

Normally, communiqués have a short shelf life. They define a mood rather than a direction. This was not the case with the communiqué that summed up Nixon’s visit to Beijing.

Leaders like to create the impression that communiqués emerge full-blown from their minds and conversations with their counterparts. The popular idea that the leaders write and agree on every comma is not one they discourage. Experienced and wise leaders know better. Nixon and Zhou understood the danger of obliging leaders into drafting sessions on the short deadlines inherent in a summit. Usually men of strong will—why else would they find themselves where they are—may not be able to resolve deadlocks when time is short and the media insistent. As a result, diplomats frequently arrive at major meetings with communiqués already largely drafted.

I had been sent to Beijing by Nixon in October 1971—on a second visit—for that purpose. In subsequent exchanges, it was decided that the code name for this trip would be Polo II, our imaginations having been exhausted by naming the first secret trip Polo I. The chief purpose of Polo II was to agree on a communiqué that the Chinese leadership and the President could endorse at the conclusion of Nixon’s trip four months later.

We arrived in Beijing during a time of upheaval in the Chinese governmental structure. A few weeks earlier, Mao’s appointed successor, Lin Biao, had been accused of a plot whose full dimensions have never been officially revealed. Different explanations exist. The prevalent view at the time was that Lin Biao, the compiler of the “Little Red Book” of Mao’s sayings, seemed to have concluded that China’s security would be better assured by returning to the principles of the Cultural Revolution than by maneuvering with America. It has also been suggested that, by this point, Lin actually opposed Mao from something closer to the pragmatist position of Zhou and Deng, and that his outward ideological zealotry was a defensive tactic.
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