On China (38 page)

Such a state of affairs was inherent in the nature of China’s perception of international relations. Having proclaimed that China had “stood up,” Mao would reach out to the United States but never admit that China’s strength might not be adequate for whatever challenge it might confront. Nor would he accept an abstract obligation to render assistance beyond the requirements of the national interest as it appeared at any given moment. China in the early stages of Mao’s leadership made only one alliance: that with the Soviet Union at the very beginning of the People’s Republic, when China needed support as it felt its way toward international status. It entered into a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with North Korea in 1961, containing a clause on mutual defense against outside attack that is still in force at this writing. But that was more in the nature of the tributary relationship familiar from Chinese history: Beijing offered protection; North Korean reciprocity was irrelevant to the relationship. The Soviet alliance frayed from the very outset largely because Mao would not accept even the hint of subordination.

After Nixon’s visit to China, there emerged a partnership not by way of formal reciprocal assurances enshrined in documentation. It was not even a tacit alliance, based on informal agreements. It was a kind of quasi-alliance, growing out of understandings that emerged from conversations with Mao—in February and November of 1973—and long meetings with Zhou—hours of them in 1973. From then on, Beijing no longer sought to constrain or check the projection of American power—as it had before President Nixon’s visit. Instead China’s avowed goal became to enlist the United States as a counterweight to the “polar bear” by means of an explicit strategic design.

This parallelism depended on whether Chinese and American leaders could come to share common geopolitical aims, especially with regard to the Soviet Union. American leaders were treated by their Chinese counterparts to private seminars on Soviet intentions—often in uncharacteristically blunt language, as if the Chinese feared this topic was too important to be left to their customary subtlety and indirection. The United States reciprocated with extensive briefings about its strategic design.

In the early years of the new relationship, Chinese leaders would continue occasionally to fire ideological “cannons” against American imperialism—some of them involving well-practiced rhetoric—but in private, they would criticize U.S. officials for being, if anything, too restrained in foreign policy. In fact, throughout the 1970s, Beijing was more in favor of the United States acting robustly against Soviet designs than much of the American public or Congress.

For a year what was lacking in this design was Mao’s imprimatur. He had blessed the general direction in the conversations with Nixon but he had ostentatiously refused to discuss either strategy or tactics, probably because what became the Shanghai Communiqué was still unsettled.

Mao filled this gap in two extensive conversations with me: the first one, late at night on February 17, 1973, lasted from 11:30 P.M. to 1:20 A.M. The second occurred on November 12, 1973, and lasted from 5:40 P.M. to 8:25 P.M. The context of the conversations explains their scope. The first took place less than a month after Le Duc Tho—the principal North Vietnamese negotiator—and I had initialed the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War. This freed China from any further need to demonstrate Communist solidarity with Hanoi. The second occurred following the decisive U.S. role during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the resulting switch in Arab reliance from the Soviet Union to the United States, especially in Egypt.

On both occasions, Mao warmly endorsed the Sino-American relationship in front of assembled media. In February he noted that the United States and China had once been “two enemies,” but that “[n] ow we call the relationship between ourselves a friendship.”
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Having proclaimed the new relationship as friendship Mao proceeded to give it an operational definition. Since he liked to speak in parables, he chose a subject that we were least worried about, possible Chinese intelligence operations against American officials visiting China. It was an indirect way of proclaiming a kind of partnership without making a request for reciprocity:

The least plausible prospect was that China and the United States would abandon collecting intelligence on each other. If the United States and China were indeed entering a new era in their relationship, it was important for each side to be transparent with the other and to elaborate parallel calculations. But limiting the activities of their intelligence services was an unlikely way to start. The Chairman was conveying an offer of transparency but also a warning that he was beyond being tricked—a point with which Mao led into the November conversation as well. As an introduction he recounted with a blend of humor, contempt, and strategy how he had amended his promise to wage ten thousand years of ideological struggle against the Soviets:

The basic message was the same: cooperation if possible and no tactical maneuvering, for it would not prove possible to deceive this veteran of every kind of conflict imaginable. On a deeper level, it was also a warning that, if thwarted in conciliation, China would turn into a tenacious and forbidding enemy.

When talking to Nixon a year earlier Mao had omitted any substantive reference to Taiwan. Now to remove any element of threat Mao explicitly delinked the issue of Taiwan from the overall U.S.-China relationship: “The question of the U.S. relations with us should be separate from that of our relations with Taiwan.” The United States, Mao suggested, should “sever the diplomatic relations with Taiwan” as Japan had done (while maintaining unofficial social and economic ties); “then it is possible for our two countries to solve the issue of diplomatic relations.” But as for the question of Beijing’s relations with Taiwan, Mao warned, “[T]hat is quite complex. I do not believe in a peaceful transition.” Mao then turned to Foreign Minister Ji Pengfei and asked, “Do you believe in it?” After further colloquy with the other Chinese in the room, Mao made his principal point—that there were no time pressures of any kind:

In Mao’s typical paradoxical style, there were two principal points here of equal importance: first, that Beijing would not foreclose its option to use force over Taiwan—and indeed expected to have to use force someday; but second, for the time being at least, Mao was putting off this day, indeed he spoke of being willing to wait for a hundred years. The banter was designed to clear the way for the dominant theme, which was a militant application of the containment theory of George Kennan to the effect that the Soviet system, if prevented from expanding, would collapse as a result of its internal tensions.
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But while Kennan applied his principles primarily to the conduct of diplomacy and domestic policy, Mao argued for direct confrontation across the range of available pressures.

The Soviet Union, Mao told me, represented a global threat that needed to be resisted globally. Whatever any other nation might do, China would resist an attack, even if its forces had to retire into the interior of the country to fight a guerrilla war. But cooperation with the United States and other likeminded countries would speed the victory in the struggle whose outcome was predetermined by the long-term weakness of the Soviet Union. China would not ask for help nor make its cooperation conditional on the cooperation of others. But it was prepared to adopt parallel strategies, especially with the United States. The bond would be common convictions, not formal obligations. A policy of determined global containment of the Soviets, Mao argued, was bound to prevail because Soviet ambitions were beyond their capacities:

The cooperation Mao encouraged was not limited to Asian issues. With no trace of irony, Mao encouraged U.S. military involvement in the Middle East to counter the Soviets—exactly the type of “imperialist aggression” that Chinese propaganda had traditionally thundered against. Shortly after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and following Saddam Hussein’s visit to Moscow, Iraq attracted Mao’s attention and was presented as part of his global strategy:

Zhou was suggesting that it was necessary for a coordinated policy to make Iraq’s reliance on the Soviet Union so costly that it would have to change its orientation—much as Egypt was doing. (It may also have been a wry comment on how allies would eventually tire of Moscow’s overbearing treatment, as China had.) In this manner Mao reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of various states in the Middle East, almost country by country. He stressed the importance of Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan as barriers to Soviet expansion. In addition to Iraq, he was uneasy about South Yemen.
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He urged the United States to increase its strength in the Indian Ocean. He was the quintessential Cold Warrior; American conservatives would have approved of him.

Japan was to be a principal component for Mao’s coordinated strategy. At the secret meeting in 1971, the Chinese leaders still professed considerable suspicion about U.S.-Japanese collusion. Zhou warned us to beware of Japan; the existing friendship, he said, would wither once economic recovery had put Japan into a position to challenge us. In October 1971 he stressed that Japan’s “feathers have grown on its wings and it is about to take off.”
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I replied, and Nixon elaborated during his visit, that Japan would be much more problematical if isolated than as part of an international order, including an alliance with the United States. By the time of our conversations in November 1973, Mao had accepted that point of view. He was now urging me to pay
more
attention to Japan and spend more time cultivating Japanese leaders: