Nixon in China Page 12

  In 1945, as he was poised to seize power over the whole of China, Mao was in his prime. Agnes Smedley an American Communist who got to know him during the war, was both attracted and disturbed when she met him for the first time in his temporary home of a cave. ‘His dark inscrutable face was long, the forehead broad and high, the mouth feminine. Whatever else he might be he was an aesthete. I was repelled by the feminine in him and the gloom of the setting. An instinctive hostility sprang up inside me and I became so occupied with trying to master it that I heard hardly a word of what followed.’ His hands, she noted, were ‘long and sensitive as a woman’s’. She later warmed towards him and decided that what she had seen in him was a deep spiritual aloofness. ‘I had the impression that there was a door to his being that had never been opened to anyone.’21

  Perhaps it had been opened to his wives and to a few old comrades. Possibly, too, he had revealed a little to his children, although Mao’s attitude to his two surviving sons, from his first marriage, and his two daughters, from his two later ones, was ambivalent. He saw little of them when they were young, and as adults he found them troublesome. An-ching, his younger son, developed a mental illness, possibly schizophrenia, and both his daughters had severe depression. His elder son, An-ying, was killed in the Korean War. Mao sat silently for some moments when he heard the news and then said merely, ‘In any revolutionary war, you always pay a price. An-ying was one of thousands.’ According to Mao’s daughter-in-law, he was in such agony when he broke the news to her that his hands turned as cold as ice. One of his bodyguards noticed that he lost his appetite for some time afterwards. An-ying was perhaps the last person with whom he had a close affectionate relationship. After his death, said one of the inner circle, ‘Mao gradually became ever more reclusive and ever more suspicious of almost all those around him.’22

  From his earliest days in power, he subjected the party to repeated purges and inquisitions to hunt out those who were disloyal. And often disloyalty simply meant disagreeing with him. According to Lin Biao’s son, Mao preferred to eliminate those he suspected. ‘Every time he liquidates someone, he will put them to death before he desists; once he hurts you, he will hurt you all the way.’ In the course of his life, Mao lost, pushed away or betrayed many who had once been close to him. He made the Revolution in the name of the peasants, yet they suffered more under his rule than they had under the Guomindang as he forced them into collectives and squeezed resources out of the countryside. ‘Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel,’ he ordered.23 He urged intellectuals to lend their talents to building the new China, but when they ventured to express their opinions he had them tortured and jailed, or sent to the countryside for re-education.

  Although he wrote one of his most lovely poems about her and in old age described her as the love of his life, Mao abandoned his first wife and their young sons in the turbulent days of the late 1920s without any apparent regret. Yang Kaihui moved back to Changsha to be near her family and Mao made no attempt to keep in touch with her. In a series of letters which miraculously survived, she wrote with increasing desperation of her continuing love for Mao, her misery at being abandoned and her fears for herself and her children as the Guomindang tightened its grip. In 1930, in retaliation for Communist attacks on Changsha, the local nationalist general had her executed. She was only twenty-nine.24

  In 1928, while Yang was still alive, Mao got married again, to a young girl from the countryside, He Zizhen, who agreed, rather reluctantly, to become his ‘revolutionary companion’. She paid heavily, suffering through the Long March and repeated pregnancies and miscarriages until Mao abandoned her, in turn, for a younger, more glamorous woman. His last and final marriage was to the Shanghai actress Jiang Qing. When that marriage, too, soured, he preferred to avoid a divorce and simply had a series of mistresses, sometimes several at once. It was easy enough for Mao to get them, from among his nurses and assistants or from a special army company of dancers and singers. ‘Selecting imperial concubines’ was how a senior general described it. Mao preferred young, simple girls who felt deeply honoured to be chosen by the great man, even to the point of taking pride in catching venereal disease from him. When his doctor suggested that the Chairman might want to stop his sexual activities while the disease was treated, Mao refused. ‘If it’s not hurting me,’ he said airily, ‘then it doesn’t matter.’ As far as hygiene was concerned, Mao’s solution was more sex. ‘I wash myself inside the bodies of my women.’25

  The long years of struggle and the exercise of supreme power had turned the idealistic young student into someone as indifferent to others as the first great emperor of China himself. (Indeed Mao liked the comparison.) Khrushchev, who got to know Mao over the years, thought he was like Stalin. ‘He treated the people around him like pieces of furniture, useful for the time being but expendable. When, in his opinion, a piece of furniture – or a comrade – became worn out and lost its usefulness, he would just throw it away and replace it.’ The mature Mao had perhaps been foreshadowed by the young one. In 1915, he had written in his journal, ‘You do not have the capacity for tranquillity. You are fickle and excitable. Like a woman preening herself, you know no shame. Your outside looks strong but your inside is truly empty. Your ambitions for fame and fortune are not suppressed, and your sensual desires grow daily.’26

  According to Chinese astrology, Mao was born in the Year of the Snake. His sign meant that he should have been charming and seductive, which Mao could certainly be. Snakes were also meant to be introverted. As Mao once said of himself, ‘I have self-confidence but also some doubt.’ Snakes, it was also said, relied on their intuition. It was always wise to be careful of them because they could suddenly bite. Mao preferred other signs in Chinese astrology, and described himself as two-thirds tiger and one-third monkey, with the tiger as the dominant force. The tiger, in Chinese popular belief, is fearless and always on the attack, while the monkey, is clever, playful, unpredictable and ready to take chances.27 Tigers are also cruel, and Mao had learned to embrace cruelty.

  Like other great dictators, Stalin for example, Mao could also be sentimental at times. He was saddened by the sight of a dead sparrow and he wept regularly at his favourite opera, which told the story of an immortal female snake who fell in love with a human only to be imprisoned for all eternity by a wicked monk. His doctor, however, thought he was incapable of genuine human affection or compassion. Once during a performance in Shanghai, a child acrobat slipped and was badly hurt; Mao kept laughing and talking. He took pain and death, except for his own, lightly, even cheerfully. When widespread famine came with the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao was unconcerned. People ate too much, he declared. ‘Best halve the basic ration, so if they’re hungry they have to try harder.’ When the persecutions during the Cultural Revolution drove many Chinese to despair, Mao was unmoved. ‘One should never attempt to save people who try to commit suicide. It’s they themselves who want to die, so why try to save them? China has such a large population, it is not as if it cannot do without these people.’28

  Years before, while he was still a student, he had written, ‘The birth of this is necessarily the death of that, and the death of that is necessarily the birth of this, so birth is not birth and death is not destruction.’ He believed that out of the destruction a new China would come – or a new universe. ‘I very much look forward to its destruction, because from the demise of the old universe will come a new universe, and will it not be better than the old universe?’ He mused to the Finnish ambassador in 1955 that, even if China or the earth were blown to pieces, ‘this might be a big thing for the solar system, but it would still be an insignificant matter as far as the universe as a whole is concerned’.29

  For Mao, destruction was not only necessary, but exhilarating. In 1927, he went to observe spontaneous and violent peasant revolts in his own province of Hunan. He wrote admiringly, in a passage that was much quoted during the Cultural Revolution, ‘A revolution is not the s
ame as inviting people to dinner or writing an essay or painting a picture or embroidering a flower.’ The peasants were turning their world upside down. ‘A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the authority of another.’ In 1958, as he prepared to start the Great Leap Forward, Mao described how the remnants of the old China were being cleared away like so much garbage. China, he said, was like a piece of blank paper. ‘A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.’30

  What was written was not beautiful but hideous for China, but it was very difficult for his colleagues, even the bravest, to stand up to Mao. Chen Yi, a tough and experienced general who had been with Mao from very early days, once burst out as Mao made yet another arbitrary decision, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on! Mao does whatever he wants to do.’31 After 1949, when the People’s Republic was established, the atmosphere around Mao became, in some respects, eerily similar to that of the old imperial court. He was increasingly inaccessible to the general public. When he travelled it was on private trains or aircraft. His houses, and there were many, were usually built especially for him, with his beloved swimming pools, his auditoriums for watching operas and his bomb shelters. Local inhabitants were cleared away and tight security was imposed.

  Within his small circle, his underlings, secretaries, security guards and the ever-present pretty nurses were utterly dependent on him and vied for his favour. ‘I had not worked long for Mao’, said his doctor, ‘before realizing that he was the center around which everything else revolved, a precious treasure that had to be protected and coddled and wooed.’ His staff watched his every mood and waited for his every command. They listened for the bell from his large bed where he lay with his books and, frequently, with his women. Mao hated new clothes, so they patched his old ones carefully and made sure that the patches were always the same colour. His bodyguards broke in new shoes for him. If he wanted to eat (and he rarely ate at regular mealtimes), they had his favourite foods ready for him. They rubbed him down with hot towels when he wanted to be cleaned. If he was ready to sleep, they massaged his feet and waited for his increasingly strong doses of sleeping pills to take effect. When he got more than thirty hours of sleep per week or when he had a regular bowel movement, they noted it in their logs and rejoiced.32

  In some respects, Mao remained the peasant he had been so many years before. He still spoke in a thick Hunanese accent and his speech was larded with coarse country expressions. True to the customs of his youth, he slept naked at night and preferred rinsing his mouth with green tea to brushing his teeth. He never really got accustomed to indoor lavatories. When he moved into the Zhongnanhai after 1949, an orderly followed him around the grounds with a shovel until Chou En-lai finally arranged for a special toilet by his bedroom where he could squat.33

  His colleagues came and went at his command; since he liked to work in the middle of the night, they learned to go without sleep. And they tried, as Mao became ever more capricious, to adjust themselves to his thinking. ‘We were terrified’, said one, ‘of saying something wrong in case he took it as an error.’ Chou En-lai, so admired for his subtle intellect and his extraordinary capacity for work, worked like a lackey for Mao. He always, even when he was prime minister of China, acted as Mao’s majordomo. He arranged his houses and looked after his family, even leaving Politburo meetings to go off and deal with Jiang Qing’s endless medical crises. In Mao’s presence, he was, as Lin Biao once said, ‘the obedient servant’, attentive to the point of subservience and rarely showing emotion, even in response to his master’s most outrageous actions. Yet, when Mao lapsed into unconsciousness shortly before Nixon’s visit, Chou was so upset, according to the Chairman’s doctor, that he completely lost control of his bladder and bowels.34

  Perhaps over the years Mao became a bit mad. Being in a position where every whim is law, virtually every wish can be fulfilled and every dream is apparently realizable cuts the ropes, of family, society or morality, that tie us all to reality. Think of other dictators: of Hitler raving to the last in his bunker under Berlin that he had a secret weapon; or of Stalin in his final paranoid days preparing yet another purge of his supposed enemies. Mao’s own immediate family had a history of mental troubles and, throughout his life, particularly at difficult moments, he had periods when he took to his bed in depression. By the late 1950s, according to his doctor, he was increasingly paranoid. He refused to swim in a new pool because he thought it had been poisoned; he abandoned a newly built house because he felt there was something wrong with its air; and he became convinced that he was surrounded by spies.35 His dependence on sleeping pills, always heavy, intensified to the point where, by the mid-1960s, he was taking ten times the normal dose.

  Zhang Hanzhi, one of Chou En-lai’s interpreters, had known Mao for most of her life and thought that, until that time, he was still a normal human being. ‘In the 1970s he changed psychologically and physically. He was put into a role where everything he said was law. Yours was to obey. He became more and more prejudiced.’36 The Mao that Nixon and Kissinger met had not been born a heartless tyrant, but untrammelled power had turned him into one. He had, when he chose, complete authority over Chinese policies, whether domestic or foreign. He remained, ill as he was, the final arbiter of any changes to the relations between China and the United States.

  Though the night of Nixon’s first day in Beijing the lead item on the Chinese television news was about a group of heroic women workers, and Nixon’s arrival was dropped in at the end, almost as an afterthought, the news coverage changed overnight when it became official that the US President had been granted an audience with Mao. The next day, the front page of the People’s Daily had large photographs of Mao greeting Nixon; a group shot of Mao, Nixon, Chou and Kissinger; and a shot of Chou welcoming Nixon at the airport. Inside there were more photographs and several stories as well as texts of the toasts that Chou and Nixon had exchanged at the previous evening’s banquet.37

  7

  The Long Freeze

  AFTER HIS MEETING with Mao, Nixon and his advisers, including William Rogers this time, went off in the late afternoon to a formal session with Chou and his colleagues. Now that Mao had given his audience, the Chinese were genial and friendly. Chou praised the Americans’ pioneer spirit. And how nice, he said, that the Americans had so many young people in their delegation. ‘We have too many elderly people in our leadership.’ He apologized for the fact that the meeting with Mao had come so quickly that the American press had not been able to cover it. He promised, though, that the announcement and photographs of the meeting would be given to the Americans so that they could release the story first. Nixon was ecstatic: ‘That is unprecedented. No other nation we have ever dealt with has been so generous.’ As far as briefing the press went, Chou said, he regretted that he was not as skilled as Mr Kissinger. Nixon disagreed: ‘Having read the transcripts of conversations the Prime Minister had with Dr Kissinger, I think the Prime Minister can handle himself with anyone in the world.’ It was so refreshing, the President commented, to deal with Chairman Mao and Chou, who talked ‘directly and honestly, and candidly’.1

  None of the other Chinese talked in the plenary session. On the American side, William Rogers made a couple of brief comments, while Kissinger remained silent. There was no need for the latter to say anything because it had already been arranged that he would sit in on the meetings between Nixon and Chou where substantive issues would be discussed. Rogers and his State Department entourage were relegated to dealing with the Chinese Foreign Minister and his officials and discussing, as Kissinger put it contemptuously in his memoirs, ‘the obsessions of our East Asian Bureau; the promotion of more trade and exchanges of persons’.2

  Nixon talked, as he had with Mao, about how neither China nor the United States was a threat to the other, and how, if they worked together, the world could be a more peac
eful place. ‘Yes,’ said Chou, ‘we hope so.’ The following day, the two men agreed, they would start in on the difficult issues dividing them. Chou singled out one in particular, ‘the Taiwan situation’. Nixon agreed but pointed out that there were many other issues, from Korea to the Soviet Union. It was unlikely that they would be able to solve everything in these first meetings, but they were setting in motion a process. ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Chou, ‘in spite of the fact that there exist now such great differences between us and in the future there will still be differences.’ Nixon expressed optimism: ‘We will have a chance to know each other as peoples and also to communicate as governments’.3

  Though in 1972 Americans and Chinese knew each other only second hand and through the distorting lenses of fear and suspicion, it had not always been like that. Before 1949, Americans and Chinese had come to know quite a lot about each other. In the nineteenth century considerable numbers of Americans had come to China to do business or to do good. Americans were fascinated by China, whether it was the China of the ‘yellow hordes’ and the ancient wisdom and arcane powers of Dr Fu Manchu or the heartbreakingly simple and noble peasants of Pearl S. Buck in the 1930s. American businessmen down the decades dreamed of the markets that lay waiting there, whether for Yankee steel in the nineteenth century or Pepsi-Cola in the 1970s. Missionaries dreamed rather of souls and an immense field in which to do good. From the nineteenth century on, Americans made up one of the largest groups of foreign missionaries in China. They built churches, founded schools and started printing presses. Many of China’s great universities of today started out as branches of, for example, the Yale Medical School. Missionary letters home, their books and magazines and their illustrated talks to their home congregations, helped to create a China for Americans that was weak and helpless and in need of American assistance. Americans found something intriguing too in the idea of a relationship between the old civilization and their new one.