Nixon in China Read online

  At first, Mao had lived in the Hall of Beneficent Abundance, a library built in the eighteenth century by the Qianlong Emperor. Its main entrance still bore a sign in the Emperor’s own calligraphy. From its chambers and courtyards, Mao had planned the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and had laid the groundwork for the Cultural Revolution. After he had discovered that his study had been bugged by overzealous colleagues, he never lived there again. In 1966, he had his private indoor swimming pool converted into a house.

  Nixon’s car was waved through the red walls and drove for a mile past walled houses, past the lakes and past groves of trees. Mao’s house stood alone, ‘simple and unimposing’, in Kissinger’s words. ‘It could have belonged to a minor functionary.’13 There did not appear to be any special security as the car halted at the front door. In fact, Mao and all the top leaders were constantly under an elaborate and intensive guard.

  The Nixon party walked into a hallway which contained a pingpong table. Mao’s doctor motioned them towards the Chairman’s study and then waited anxiously outside the open door in case his patient collapsed again. Only Chinese photographers were on hand to record the scene as Nixon and Mao met for the first time. Mao shuffled towards Nixon, supported by one of his corps of pretty, young assistants. He took the President’s hand in his own and shook it warmly for a long time. The photographers made sure that they caught this handshake too.

  Another photograph shows the party seated with piles of Mao’s books around them and, on the floor, white porcelain spittoons, standard furnishings in many Chinese offices to this day. Chou and Kissinger sit attentively on the edges of a semi-circle, overshadowed now by their masters. Although the photograph does not show him, another man sat beyond Kissinger. Winston Lord had worked on the China file at the National Security Council and had been on Kissinger’s earlier trips to China. Kissinger brought him along to this historic meeting, so Lord thought, as a reward for all his hard work. Since even Kissinger realized that taking along a junior official rather than the Secretary of State was odd, he asked the Chinese to crop Lord out of any photographs.14 To keep the discussions from leaking to the press or to the rest of the United States government, the only interpreter was the Chinese one. Beside Chou in the photograph is a demure young woman, Tang Wensheng, Mao’s interpreter, who was able to make sense of his slurred speech and heavy Hunanese accent. She was also an influential player in the dance to gain his ear. The Americans knew her better as Nancy, the name she had acquired when she lived in Brooklyn as a child. In the middle, a beaming Mao sits back, looking supremely comfortable. On his left, Nixon leans forward with an intent expression.

  The conversation, which was originally meant to last for fifteen minutes, continued for just over an hour. The tone was amicable and, at times, jocular. Mao spoke with difficulty; his words came out in harsh bursts. The Americans assumed that he must have had a stroke. Partway through, Mao seized Nixon’s hand again and held it for almost a minute. Nixon was delighted. ‘The most moving moment,’ he told his diary. The President started by praising Mao’s impressive learning: ‘You read a great deal.’ He expressed his admiration for Mao’s essays and for his poetry. ‘Those writings of mine aren’t anything,’ Mao said. ‘There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.’ (Yet millions of copies of Mao’s collected works, and even more millions of the Little Red Book which contained his aphorisms, had been printed during the Cultural Revolution.) Nixon insisted: ‘The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed a world.’ Mao demurred: ‘I’ve only been able to change few places in the vicinity of Beijing.’ That remark, Kissinger thought, was ‘not without pathos’. Did Mao fear that China was slipping back into its old bureaucratic ways? ‘The aging Chairman railed against a fate that so cruelly mocked the suffering and meaning of a lifetime of struggle.’15

  Of Nixon’s own writings, the Chairman said generously, ‘Your book, The Six Crises, is not a bad book.’ And of Nixon himself he remarked, ‘I voted for you during your election,’ and added, ‘I like rightists.’ In 1793, the Qianlong Emperor, whose grounds they were in, sent a letter to George III of England by Lord Macartney replying to the English request for diplomatic and trading relations: ‘On perusing your memorial, so simply worded and sincerely conceived, I am impressed by your genuine respectfulness and friendliness and greatly pleased.’ He went on to instruct George III on proper behaviour. Two hundred years later, Mao dealt briskly with Nixon’s complaint that American backing for Pakistan in the recent war with India had cost the Republicans politically: ‘As a suggestion, may I suggest you do a little less briefing!’ When Mao reminded Nixon that the Democrats might well come into office again, there was perhaps a hint that his own position was much stronger than the President’s.16

  Nixon, who had prepared carefully for this moment, did his best to talk about the relations between their two countries and about the international scene, but Mao waved him off. ‘Those questions are not questions to be discussed in my place. They should be discussed with the Premier. I discuss philosophical questions.’ When Nixon tried to bring the conversation around to the specific issues affecting the United States and China such as Taiwan, Vietnam and Korea, Mao was dismissive: ‘all those troublesome issues I don’t want to get into very much’. On Taiwan, he would only say that Chiang Kai-shek, ‘our common old friend’, did not approve of his meeting with Nixon. Mao also brought up a popular Chinese theme, that China was never an aggressor. ‘You want’, he said pointedly to Nixon, ‘to withdraw some of your troops back on your soil; ours do not go abroad.’17

  Both men had fun with Kissinger. ‘What about asking him to be the main speaker today?’ asked Mao. The doctor of philosophy (‘a doctor of brains’, interjected Nixon) should be ready to discuss the philosophic questions. ‘We two must not monopolize the whole show. It won’t do if we don’t let Dr Kissinger have a say. You have been famous about your trips to China.’ When Kissinger replied that he was only doing as the President wished, Nixon got a laugh from Mao and Chou by describing him as a ‘very wise assistant’. Kissinger, Nixon added, was the only man who could make secret trips to Paris and Beijing without anyone finding out beyond a couple of pretty girls. When Kissinger replied that he had used the girls as a cover, Mao was intrigued: ‘So your girls are often made use of?’18 Was it significant that, although Mao asked Kissinger for his opinion a couple of times, he did not do likewise with his own subordinate, Chou? Was it perhaps a subtle way of undercutting Nixon?

  In the record made by Lord, which is the only one so far made public, there is only a fleeting reference to the thorny issues of Taiwan and of the Soviet Union. Dr Li, who heard everything from his post outside the door, thought he heard Mao say that Taiwan would be a continuing problem. According to Li, as well, Mao warned the Americans that the Chinese press would continue to have articles attacking the United States and he expected that American papers might do the same to China. It would take time for the peoples of their two countries to become friends.19

  As the hour went by, Chou kept looking at his watch. Nixon made one last attempt to get Mao to talk about the big issues. Neither China nor the United States, he said, had plans to dominate the world or each other. ‘Therefore we can find common ground, despite our differences, to build a world structure in which both can be safe to develop in our own ways on our own roads.’ The same, he added pointedly, could not be said about ‘some other nations’. Mao said merely that China did not threaten Japan or South Korea and then turned to Chou. ‘Do you think we have covered enough today?’20

  Nixon hastened to add a few last warm sentiments. Mao had taken a great risk in inviting him to China. And, he pointed out, it had been a difficult decision for the Americans as well. The Chairman was the sort of person who could see an opportunity. As Mao himself had written, ‘You must seize the hour and seize the day.’ The President wanted Mao to know that Richard Nixon was a man of his word – and more. ‘You will find that I never say something I cannot do. And
I always will do more than I can say.’ Mao gestured at Kissinger and repeated enigmatically, ‘Seize the hour and seize the day.’ It was true, he admitted, that he made a lot of noise about overthrowing reactionaries and establishing socialism, but he hoped that Nixon himself would not be overthrown. Mao’s last statement was equally enigmatic: ‘It is all right to talk well and also all right if there are no agreements, because what use is there if we stand in deadlock? Why is it that we must be able to reach results?’ People might say they had failed, but if they succeeded in getting agreements on a second attempt, what then?21

  As they parted, Mao told Nixon that he was not very well. Nixon reassured him that he looked good and Mao replied that appearances could be deceiving. A Chinese cameraman who had been filming the meeting had been worried about Mao’s unhealthy pallor at the outset but was delighted to notice that, as the conversation went on, his face glowed to give the appearance of good health.22 With a last round of handshakes and photographs, the Americans took their leave. The historic conversation had been a curiously inconclusive one, with Nixon trying to lay the groundwork for future talks and Mao meandering about.

  Once Nixon had gone, Mao changed out of his new suit into his dressing gown and chatted happily with his doctor, who checked his pulse to find it steady and strong. Mao approved of Nixon: ‘He speaks forthrightly – no beating around the bush, not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.’ He liked the way Nixon talked frankly about the benefits to the United States of an improved relationship with China. And, in a reference to his estranged Communist ally, the Soviet Union, he said, ‘He is much better than those people who talk about high moral principles while engaging in sinister intrigues.’ In their subsequent meetings, Mao’s admiration increased. ‘There is a man who knows what he stands for, as well as what he wants,’ he told the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, in 1974, ‘and has the strength of mind to get it.’ He was never as impressed by Kissinger. ‘Just a funny little man. He is shuddering all over with nerves every time he comes to see me.’23

  The Americans were equally, if not more, pleased. ‘The P called me up,’ Haldeman wrote in his diary. ‘Obviously he was very impressed with the whole thing, but didn’t get into any details at that time.’ What Nixon did want to talk about was how to deal with Rogers. He asked Haldeman to say that Chou had come by unexpectedly and asked specifically for Nixon himself and Kissinger to have a chat with Mao before the plenary session scheduled for later that afternoon. Lord later claimed that Nixon and Kissinger had assumed that there would be a second meeting with Mao, so there would be an occasion for Rogers to meet him. Whether any of this convinced Rogers is doubtful. He was very angry and humiliated but took the attitude, according to one of his State Department subordinates, that ‘Well, the President needs this, and he can decide who he wants.’ Kissinger in his memoirs admitted that he should have insisted that Rogers be included. ‘The neglect was technically unassailable but fundamentally unworthy.’24

  The Americans were deeply impressed with Mao. In his memoirs Nixon talks about his ‘remarkable sense of humour’ and how his mind was moving ‘like lightning’. Mao was a man, Nixon told White House staff on his return, ‘who sees strategic concepts with great vision’. Kissinger was even more effusive. Mao was a colossus among men. ‘I have met no one, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, who so distilled raw, concentrated will power.’ As both Kissinger and Lord were fond of saying later, if they had walked into a cocktail party they would have known at once that Mao was the most important man in the room.25

  Although the Americans were at first a little disappointed with the actual conversation, as time went by it began to take on mythic proportions and even the most commonplace of Mao’s observations seemed to have a deeper meaning. ‘The more we began to think about it,’ Lord recollected, ‘the more we examined the transcript of the meeting, we realized that Mao had hit the key issues – the Soviet Union, Taiwan and Vietnam – in just a few sentences, sometimes directly and sometimes in an allegorical way, stating the basic Chinese positions, which gave us a framework to enlarge and flesh out over the next few days.’ For Kissinger, Mao’s scattered remarks were like the composer Richard Wagner’s use of motifs in his overtures which he intended to develop later on. Or like the heart of China itself. ‘Later on, as I comprehended better the many-layered design of Mao’s conversation, I understood that it was like the courtyards in the Forbidden City, each leading to a deeper recess distinguished from the others only by slight changes of proportion, with ultimate meaning residing in a totality that only long reflection could grasp.’ Mao, he told one of his biographers, was a visionary and Nixon a pragmatist, but those differences had faded into insignificance.26

  6

  Mao Tse-tung

  JUST BEFORE HIS MEETING with Mao ended, Nixon paid one last carefully crafted compliment. ‘The Chairman’s life is well known to all of us. He came from a very poor family to the top of the most populous nation in the world, a great nation. My background is not so well known. I also came from a very poor family, and to the top of a very great nation. History has brought us together.’ Nixon liked to stress how he and Mao came from similar humble origins. Like Mao, it is true, he was a consummate politician. Like Mao, too, he liked the great policy issues and was bored by day-to-day administration. When he saw in a memorandum that a Washington paper had compared him to Mao, Nixon scrawled a delighted ‘K – Note!’1

  Nixon might not have been as pleased at some other comparisons that could have been drawn. The difficulties both men had, for example, in dealing with people, especially as equals. Where Nixon was most at ease with the attentive Bebe Rebozo, Mao seemed happiest with his undemanding and unsophisticated bodyguards and nurses. Both had difficult relationships with their wives. Nixon usually ignored Pat; Mao gave orders that his wife was not to be admitted to his presence. And both men were deeply suspicious, even paranoid. The Nixon tapes reveal a man who peered out to see a world full of enemies – Jews, liberals, homosexuals, the establishment, the press. Mao also saw threats everywhere, whether from Taiwan or the Soviet Union or from inside his own party. By the 1960s, although he was surrounded by layers of protection, he was convinced that unnamed enemies were trying to poison him. As a consequence, he moved restlessly around China from one house to another.2

  There were also profound differences between the two men. Nixon, for all the abuses of office, accepted and believed in democracy; Mao was a dictator. And the two men’s paths to their momentous meeting had been very different. When Nixon was born in his quiet California town in 1913, Mao was twenty years old. He had already taken part in a revolution, when China got rid of the Qing dynasty to become a republic. While Nixon was going to college in the 1930s, Mao was manoeuvring his way into power in the internecine struggles of the Chinese Communist Party and trying to stay out of the clutches of the Guomindang. In 1937, the year Nixon started practice as a lawyer in the placid town of Whittier, near Los Angeles, Mao was living in a cave in north-west China and consolidating his hold over the party. That year, the Japanese invaded China. While Nixon prepared for a career in politics by talking to local service clubs, Mao dealt with great strategic issues and negotiated with the Guomindang for a common front against Japan. Nixon spent most of the Second World War as a supply officer in the Pacific; Mao was positioning the Communists to seize power in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat.

  As Nixon was laying the foundations of his political career, Mao was leading the Chinese Communists in a civil war against the Guomindang. By 1949, as the new Congressman Richard Nixon was making a name for himself as the scourge of Communists, Mao was the undisputed leader of both China and his party. When Nixon was going after Alger Hiss in the early 1950s as a suspected Communist, Mao was purging and killing millions of landlords, Guomindang supporters and – a usefully vague term – ‘rightists’. By the time Nixon finally achieved the presidency of the United States, Mao had been ruler of China for two deca
des.

  Five years after Mao’s death, in 1981, his own party ruled that he had been correct 70 per cent of the time and wrong for the other 30 per cent, and that most of his mistakes had occurred after 1949. It was a way of, or at least a start at, trying to deal with his legacy. On the one hand, there was the triumph of the Communist Party over the Guomindang and the unification of China under one rule; on the other, the secret police, the purges, the destruction of many of China’s cleverest and most talented people, and, above all, the dreadful cost of his utopian schemes. The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, which was supposed to turn China into a developed country right away, ruined much of China’s agriculture and industry and led to a famine which may have killed as many as 40,000,000. Then, as China was recovering from that horror, Mao visited the anarchy and cruelty of the Cultural Revolution on its people.

  He was not born a ruthless dictator but his background, the times and his own character combined to make him one. By nature selfabsorbed, headstrong and impatient of authority, whether that of his father or that of the government, he lived in a time in China’s history when such qualities were useful. As the old order disintegrated, partly under its own weight but also because of the challenges from the outside world, those who were bold and iconoclastic had the best chance to survive and flourish. In 1917, in one of his earliest published articles, Mao wrote: ‘A long period of peace, pure peace without any disorder of any kind, would be unbearable.’ History, he said, taking a theme popular in Chinese traditional historiography, alternated between order and chaos. ‘It is the times when things are constantly changing and numerous men of talent are emerging that people like to read about.’ He had never intended to become a Communist or make revolution, he told his old friend the American journalist Edgar Snow in a conversation in 1964, but China was oppressed and in turmoil. ‘In short, this was independent of our will.’ The fact that he survived at all helped to persuade him that he had been chosen by fate. ‘On many occasions death seemed to be at my elbow.’ Often he had narrowly escaped. ‘Once a guard who was at my side was killed by a bomb and his blood splashed on me.’3