On China (40 page)

Mao, ever carrying ideas to their ultimate conclusion, sometimes ascribed to the United States a dialectical strategy as he might have practiced it. He argued that America might think of solving the problem of Communism once and for all by applying the lesson of Vietnam: that involvement in local wars drains the big power participant. In that interpretation, the horizontal line theory or the Western concept of collective security might turn into a trap for China:

Mao had a point. This was a theoretically feasible strategy for the United States. All it lacked was a leader to conceive it or a public to support it. Its abstract manipulation was not attainable in the United States, nor was it desirable; American foreign policy can never be based on power politics alone. The Nixon administration was serious about the importance it attached to China’s security. In practice the United States and China exchanged a great deal of information and were cooperating in many fields. But Washington could not abdicate the right to determine the tactics of how to achieve its security to another country, however important.

At a point when American and Chinese strategic thinking was striving for congruence, the Watergate crisis threatened to derail the progress of the relationship by enfeebling the American capacity to manage the geopolitical challenge. The destruction of the President who had conceived the opening to China was incomprehensible in Beijing. Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974, and the assumption of the presidency by Vice President Gerald Ford led to a collapse of congressional support for an activist foreign policy in the subsequent congressional elections in November 1974. The military budget became controversial. Embargoes were placed on a key ally (Turkey); a public investigation of the intelligence community was launched by two congressional committees (the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House), hemorrhaging classified intelligence information. The American capacity to prevent Soviet adventures in the developing world was reduced by the passage of the War Powers Act. The United States was sliding into a position of domestic paralysis—with an unelected President facing a hostile Congress—producing an opportunity for the Soviets that some Chinese leaders were tempted to believe had been our design in the first place. In early 1975 the congressional action that stopped a joint U.S.-China effort to establish a coalition government in Cambodia came to be interpreted in Beijing as weakness in the face of the Soviet encirclement of China.
²²
In that atmosphere, in the Chinese view, the policy of détente threatened to turn into what Mao called shadowboxing, creating the illusion, not the reality, of diplomatic progress. Chinese leaders lectured the Americans (and many other Western leaders) about the dangers of appeasement. The Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation was a special candidate for Chinese criticism on the grounds that it created the illusion of stability and peace.
²³

The basis for the quasi-alliance had been the Chinese conviction that the United States’s contribution to global security was indispensable. Beijing had entered the relationship looking to Washington as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Now Mao and Zhou began to hint that what looked like feebleness in Washington was in reality a deep game—trying to set the Soviets and Chinese against each other in a war designed to destroy them both. Increasingly, however, the Chinese accused the United States of something worse than treachery: ineffectualness. This is where matters stood when, at the end of 1973, China’s domestic travail began to parallel our own.

A
T EVERY STAGE of China’s diplomatic revolution, Mao was torn between Sinocentrist pragmatism and revolutionary fervor. He made the necessary choices and opted for pragmatism cold-bloodedly though never happily. When we first met Mao in 1972, he was already ill and speaking—with some irony for an avowed atheist—about having received an “invitation from God.” He had destroyed or radicalized most of the country’s institutions, including even the Communist Party, increasingly ruling by personal magnetism and the manipulation of opposing factions. Now, as his rule was nearing its end, Mao’s grip on power—and his capacity to manipulate—were both slipping away. The crisis over Lin Biao had destroyed Mao’s designated successor. Now Mao had no accepted heir, and there was no blueprint for a post-Mao China.

Instead of choosing a new successor, Mao attempted to institutionalize his own ambivalence. He bequeathed to China an extraordinarily complex set of political rivalries by promoting officials from both sides of his vision of China’s destiny. With characteristic convolution, he fostered each camp and then set them against each other—all while fomenting “contradictions” within each faction (such as between Zhou and Deng) to make sure no one person became dominant enough to emerge with authority approaching his own. On the one side stood a camp of practical administrators led by Zhou and subsequently Deng; on the other were the ideological purists around Jiang Qing and her faction of Shanghai-based radicals (to whom Mao later applied the derisive label “the Gang of Four”). They insisted on a literal application of Mao Zedong Thought. Between them stood Hua Guofeng, Mao’s immediate successor—to whom fell the awesome (and eventually unmanageable) task of mastering the “contradictions” that Mao had enshrined (and with whose brief career the next chapter will deal).

The two principal factions engaged in numerous disputes over culture, politics, economic policy, and the perquisites of power—in short, on how to run the country. But a fundamental subtext concerned the philosophical questions that had occupied China’s best minds in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: how to define China’s relationship with the outside world and what, if anything, it could learn from foreigners.

The Gang of Four advocated turning inward. They sought to purify Chinese culture and politics of suspect influences (including anything deemed foreign, “revisionist,” bourgeois, traditional, capitalist, or potentially anti-Party), to reinvigorate China’s ethic of revolutionary struggle and radical egalitarianism, and to reorient social life around an essentially religious worship of Mao Zedong. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a former actress, oversaw the reform and radicalization of traditional Beijing opera and the development of revolutionary ballets—including
The Red Detachment of Women,
performed for President Nixon in 1972, to the American delegation’s general stupefaction.

After Lin fell from grace, Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four survived. Ideologues under their sway dominated much of the Chinese press, universities, and the cultural sphere, and they used this influence to vilify Zhou, Deng, and China’s supposed tendency toward “revisionism.” Their conduct during the Cultural Revolution had made them a number of powerful enemies, however, and they were unlikely contenders for succession. Lacking association with the military establishment or the Long March veterans, they were unlikely aspirants for the top position: an actress and theatrical producer seeking posts that only a small handful of women had reached in all of Chinese history (Jiang Qing); a journalist and political theorist (Zhang Chunqiao); a leftist literary critic (Yao Wenyuan); and a former security guard, plucked from obscurity after agitating against his factory’s management and possessing no power base of his own (Wang Hongwen).
¹

The Gang of Four stood opposite a camp of relative pragmatists associated with Zhou Enlai and, increasingly, Deng Xiaoping. Though Zhou himself was a dedicated Communist with decades of devoted service to Mao, for many Chinese he had come to represent order and moderation. Both to his critics and to his admirers, Zhou was a symbol of China’s long tradition of mandarin gentleman-officials—urbane, highly educated, restrained in his personal habits and, within the spectrum of Chinese Communism, his political preferences.

Deng possessed a blunter and less refined personal style than Zhou; he punctuated his conversations by spitting loudly into a spittoon, producing occasional incongruous moments. Yet he shared, and went beyond, Zhou’s vision of a China that balanced its revolutionary principles with order and a quest for prosperity. Eventually he was to resolve Mao’s ambivalence between radical ideology and a more strategically based reform approach. Neither man was a believer in Western principles of democracy. Both had been uncritical participants in Mao’s first waves of upheaval. But in contrast to Mao and the Gang of Four, Zhou and Deng were reluctant to mortgage China’s future to continuous revolution.

Accused by their critics of “selling out” China to foreigners, both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century sets of reformers sought to use Western technology and economic innovations to bolster China’s strength while preserving China’s essence.
²
Zhou was closely identified with the Sino-U.S. rapprochement and with the attempt to return Chinese domestic affairs to a more normal pattern in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, both of which the Gang of Four opposed as a betrayal of revolutionary principles. Deng and likeminded officials, such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were associated with economic pragmatism, which the Gang of Four attacked as the restoration of aspects of the capitalist system.

As Mao grew increasingly frail, the Chinese leadership was locked in a power struggle and a debate over China’s destiny, profoundly affecting Sino-U.S. relations. When China’s radicals gained in relative power, the U.S.-China relationship cooled; when America’s freedom of action was limited by domestic upheavals, it strengthened the radicals’ arguments that China was unnecessarily compromising its ideological purity by tying its foreign policy to a country itself riven by domestic disputes and incapable of assisting China’s security. To the end, Mao attempted to manage the contradiction of preserving his legacy of continuous revolution while safeguarding the strategic rapprochement with the United States, which he continued to deem important for China’s security. He left the impression that he sympathized with the radicals even as the national interest impelled him to sustain the new relationship with America, which, in turn, frustrated him with its own domestic divisions.

Mao, in his prime, could have overcome internal conflicts, but the aging Mao was increasingly torn by the complexities he had created. Zhou, the Mao loyalist for forty years, became a victim of this ambivalence.

Political survival for the second man in an autocracy is inherently difficult. It requires being close enough to the leader to leave no space for a competitor but not so close as to make the leader feel threatened. None of Mao’s number twos had managed that tightrope act: Liu Shaoqi, who served as number two with the title of President from 1959 to 1967 and was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, and Lin Biao had both been destroyed politically and lost their lives in the process.

Zhou had been our principal interlocutor at all meetings. We noticed on the visit in November 1973 that he was a shade more tentative than usual and even more deferential to Mao than customarily. But it was compensated for by a conversation of nearly three hours with Mao, the most comprehensive review of foreign policy strategy we had had yet. It ended with Mao escorting me to the anteroom and an official release announcing that the Chairman and I had had “a far-ranging discussion in a friendly atmosphere.”

With Mao’s apparent imprimatur, all negotiations ended rapidly and favorably. The final communiqué extended the joint opposition to hegemony from “the Asia-Pacific region” (as in the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972) to the global plane. It affirmed the need to deepen consultations between the two countries at “authoritative levels” even further. Exchanges and trade were to be increased. The scope of the liaison offices was to be expanded. Zhou said he would recall the head of the Chinese Liaison Office from Washington to instruct him on the nature of the agreed intensified dialogue.

Contemporary Chinese historians point out that the criticisms of the Gang of Four against Zhou were reaching a crisis point at this time. We were aware from the media that an anti-Confucian campaign was taking place but did not consider that it had any immediate relevance to foreign policy or Chinese leadership issues. In his dealings with Americans, Zhou continued to exhibit unflappable self-assurance. On only one occasion did his serenity leave him. At a banquet in the Great Hall of the People in November 1973, in a general conversation, I made the observation that China seemed to me to have remained essentially Confucian in its belief in a single, universal, generally applicable truth as the standard of individual conduct and social cohesion. What Communism had done, I suggested, was to establish Marxism as the content of that truth.

I cannot recall what possessed me to make this statement, which, however accurate, surely did not take into account Mao’s attacks on Confucians who were alleged to be impeding his policies. Zhou exploded, the only time I saw him lose his temper. Confucianism, he said, was a doctrine of class oppression while Communism represented a philosophy of liberation. With uncharacteristic insistence, he kept up the argument, no doubt to some degree so as to have it on record for the benefit of Nancy Tang, the interpreter who was close to Jiang Qing, and Wang Hairong, the grand-niece of Mao, who was always in Zhou’s entourage.