Nixon in China Read online

  ‘I know of no Presidential trip’, wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, ‘that was as carefully planned nor of any President who ever prepared himself so conscientiously.’ Nixon summoned from Paris the venerable and mendacious André Malraux, who, after a brief encounter with Mao, claimed to be a China expert. Malraux assured Nixon that, if de Gaulle stood in his place, he would salute him as well for the step he was taking: ‘You are about to attempt one of the most important things of our century.’ Kissinger was less impressed. ‘Unfortunately Malraux was grossly out of date about China.’ He did admit, with the respect of a connoisseur, that Malraux was wonderfully eloquent. John Scali, a press adviser on foreign affairs in the White House, was blunt: ‘I felt I was listening to the views of a romantic, vain old man who was weaving obsolete views into a special framework for the world as he wished it to be.’ Nixon, however, was enthralled, even though the sage’s severe facial tic made his every statement painful to listen to: ‘Time had not dimmed the brilliance of his thought or the quickness of his wit.’31 And Malraux had been a friend of the Kennedys.

  The CIA gave the President analyses of Mao’s and Chou’s personalities. Old China hands sent in lots of unsolicited advice. The State Department drew up background papers on all the outstanding disputes, on property for example, between the United States and China and on major policy issues. (It is not clear Nixon ever saw these, because they had to go through Kissinger, who had no love for the Department.) Kissinger and his NSC staff prepared their own briefing books and sent the President extracts from books and articles which they felt he should read. Nixon did his homework meticulously, bearing down particularly hard in the week just before his trip.32

  On the plane, Nixon and Mrs Nixon, along with his close advisers including Henry Kissinger, sat in comfort at the front; the State Department officials were relegated to the back of the plane. The flight to China was carefully planned so that Nixon would arrive as well rested as possible. He also took advantage of the time to go over his papers and practise using chopsticks. While two planeloads of journalists went on ahead to Shanghai, Air Force One (or, as Nixon preferred to call it, especially for this trip, the Spirit of ‘76) stopped in Hawaii at an air force base for a couple of days. The President’s party, including Kissinger, went off to stay with the commanding officer while the lower ranks stayed in the greater comfort of a local luxury hotel. Clare Booth Luce, who with her husband, Henry Luce, had used their publications such as Time to support the other China, the one in Taiwan, gave a dinner for some of the party at her spectacular house overlooking the Pacific. ‘You liberals’, she said, ‘don’t really understand this trip.’ But, she added, times were changing and the Communist Chinese would recognize that the United States had always been a friend to China.33 On 21 February, with military music and hula girls, the plane took off for Guam, where there was another overnight stop. That left a short flight to Shanghai for the next day. In Shanghai, after a brief welcome and a rapid breakfast, Chinese pilots came on board (this had been the subject of intensive negotiations) and piloted the plane for its final leg.

  The presidential plane landed at the civilian airport in Beijing at 11.30 a.m., an hour chosen carefully to ensure that Nixon’s arrival would make prime-time television news in all time zones back in the United States. Nixon had been worrying about his first moments in China for days. On the flight earlier that day from Guam to Shanghai he had gone over the details yet again with his chief of staff. ‘He’s very concerned’, wrote Haldeman in his diary, ‘that the whole operation at Peking airport be handled flawlessly since that will be the key picture of the whole trip.’34

  2

  Arrival

  ON THE MORNING of Monday, 21 February 1972, Air Force One flew northwards from Shanghai towards Beijing. Nixon anxiously went over the arrangements for his arrival and pestered Kissinger with questions about the Communist Chinese. In the heart of Beijing, an old and sick Mao Tse-tung woke up early and had his first shave and haircut for months. As the plane neared the Chinese capital, Mao’s subordinates phoned him repeatedly to report its progress.

  The morning was cold and grey and slightly hazy. At the last moment before the plane’s wheels touched down, Chou En-lai, China’s Prime Minister, dressed in a dark blue overcoat over a grey Mao suit, appeared on the runway with a party of about twenty-five officials. An honour guard, some in the drab green of the People’s Liberation Army and others in the blue of the navy, marched out to join them together with a military band. The red stars which glinted in their caps were the ubiquitous symbol of the new order in China. Two solitary flags, one the American, the other the Chinese, hung limp in the still air. The only other witnesses to the historic arrival were American journalists, who had been sent on ahead. Otherwise the airport was largely empty. A Canadian diplomat, one of the handful of foreign representatives in Beijing, had asked whether he could attend the welcoming ceremonies. A Chinese official told him that it would be necessary to get a special pass. How, asked the Canadian, was he to get his pass? ‘Special passes will not be issued.’1

  On the terminal building, one of the ubiquitous big character signs carried a famous phrase from an article Mao had written in 1949 attacking the United States: ‘Make Trouble Fail, Make Trouble Fail Again, Until Their Doom/This is the nature of all imperialists and capitalists and they cannot go against it.’ Another said simply, ‘China 5 US 1’; it was not clear whether this referred to war or to the recently completed ping-pong tournament which had been held in Beijing. From inside the plane, the head of the President’s security radioed his agent who had come with the advance party to ask his usual question on presidential visits: ‘What about the crowd?’ The answer came back, ‘There is no crowd.’ ‘Did you say, “No crowd”?’ ‘That is an affirmative.’ Nixon, joked one reporter, was enjoying his best reception since he went to the annual meeting of American trade unionists.2

  The Chinese were making a point, but what it was remained obscure. Perhaps it was to show that even the head of the most powerful nation in the world did not impress them. Perhaps because they feared that the Americans would be cool. Perhaps to demonstrate that the trip was strictly about business and not friendship. After all, the authorities could summon up pliable crowds when they wished. Haile Selassie, soon to be deposed from the throne of Ethiopia, had visited Beijing in October 1971. For him, the airport had been alive with dancers and workers and schoolchildren, all waving enthusiastically. The Emperor’s drive into the city had been seen by some 250,000 people waving Ethiopian flags and the Little Red Books which contained Mao’s wisdom, banging drums and clashing cymbals, and cheering as though they actually knew where Ethiopia was and why its friendship mattered to China. Tiananmen Square, the monumental parade ground in the heart of the city, had been draped with banners of welcome in English and Chinese and in the stands teenagers had spelled out ‘Haile Selassie’ in red and yellow paper flowers.3

  Inside the plane Nixon’s staff peered out to see whether Chou En-lai was wearing an overcoat. When they reported to Nixon that indeed he was, the President kept his own coat on. It would not do to appear to be trying to show American superiority in braving the cold. The door of the plane opened and the President emerged to faint applause from the small crowd on the ground. Partway down the steps, he paused and briefly returned the claps. Inside the aircraft, Haldeman and the Secret Service men held everyone else back so that Nixon would savour this moment by himself – and so that the American newsmen assembled on the ground would catch it. Nixon, in a dark blue suit and grey overcoat, looked solemn. What one journalist called ‘those famous twitching hands’ were for once still.4 Nixon’s wife, Pat, then emerged, wearing a vivid red coat. She had ignored the warnings of American China specialists that only prostitutes wore red in China; but then their knowledge, like so much of what Americans knew about China, was probably out of date. Mrs Nixon gave a tentative little wave at the top of the steps and hastened down to join her husband.

  As Nixon reac
hed the last steps, he thrust his arm out towards Chou and the two men shook hands, seemingly for longer than usual. The press cameras homed in on the clasped hands. Chou, who spoke several languages, said a few words to Nixon in English. How was Nixon’s flight? ‘Very pleasant,’ said Nixon. As the rest of the American party clambered down, Chou noticed Kissinger and said, with what seemed like genuine warmth, ‘Ah, old friend.’5 The two men had met twice already when Kissinger had come to pave the way for Nixon.

  Everyone stood to attention while the band played the national anthems of China and the United States, and then, while it moved on to revolutionary favourites such as ‘A Song to Our Socialist Motherland’, Chou and Nixon inspected the honour guard. Mrs Nixon came in the rear with her escort, an American military aide. It was the first time since 1950 that an American in uniform had walked freely in the People’s Republic of China. They were trailed by a group of American and Chinese officials: the American Secretary of State, William Rogers, and his aides; Kissinger and his staff; Marshal Ye Jiangying, one of the old heroes of the Communist victory; Ji Pengfei, the Chinese Foreign Minister; and their Chinese colleagues. Joseph Kraft, the distinguished journalist, noticed how many acting and deputy ministers there were among them, filling in for all those officials who had lost their jobs during the recent Cultural Revolution.6

  The airport ceremonies, perfunctory by Chinese standards, were over in fifteen minutes. The party climbed into big black Chinese limousines with lace-curtained windows and disappeared towards the city with the press following in buses. The Americans had a brief glimpse of the north China countryside. The shabby farm buildings, the peasants and their animals brought home China’s poverty and weakness. There were no other cars on the roads, only buses and hordes of bicycles. The photographers leaned out of the windows to snap workers sweeping up fresh snow and passers-by who seemed curiously uninterested in the convoy dashing past. The convoy passed the diplomatic quarter, where the Chinese authorities kept foreign diplomats carefully segregated, and turned left at the Workers’ Stadium. Some of the more observant Americans caught sight of barricades holding back traffic in the side streets and police discouraging pedestrians from taking a closer look. Haldeman, himself a master of stage management, wondered whether the Chinese authorities had chosen not to assemble a huge crowd in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing as a dramatic display of the indifference of the Chinese people to their foreign visitor. Diplomats in the British mission learned that the Communists had given extensive briefings; the locals were told to ride their bicycles or walk by without showing any curiosity. That night on the Chinese news the lead item was about a group of women workers. The last item mentioned that the American President had dropped by7

  As they entered Beijing, the Americans were struck by the ubiquitous smell of burning coal and by how drab it all was, from the buildings to the monotonous blue of the locals’ clothing. Most of the Americans had read their briefing notes and their guidebooks on the plane and they knew that they were entering one of the great cities of the world. For seven centuries, China’s rulers had made it their capital, erecting its massive walls and gates, dotting it with monuments, and, in its heart, creating the series of palaces, temples and courtyards which made up the Forbidden City. Chinese noblemen, bureaucrats, merchants and scholars had built their own palaces, arranged around a series of courtyards, and the lower classes had followed suit in their own more modest dwellings. Ceramic dogs stood guard outside the entrances to important houses and smaller dogs and other beasts fixed on the points of the tiled roofs warded off evil spirits.

  Beijing was a network of alleyways – the hutong – whose walls hid both crowded slums and serene gardens. In the spring, if you stood on one of Beijing’s few hills or climbed a pagoda, you could see a forest of soft green and flowering trees. Running north and south through the city, a series of lakes brought fresh water in from the hills to the north and helped to keep the city cool in the summer. Beijing’s climate was as extreme as Chicago’s or Toronto’s: stiflingly hot and humid in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. Because of earthquakes, most buildings were only one storey.

  Foreign incursions, invasion, civil war had all taken their toll on the city, but it had survived largely unchanged into the twentieth century, with only a few signs of the new world in which China found itself: a railway station, a handful of Western churches and embassies, a few universities, some office buildings. In 1949, when the People’s Republic was proclaimed, Beijing had the largest area of medieval buildings in the world. The new Communist rulers were indifferent both to the city’s charms and to its past. They were revolutionaries who had spent the past two decades in the countryside. Many of them had never seen a city before and what they saw they did not approve of.

  What the Nixon party saw was an ancient city in the process of being turned into a new Communist one, worthy of a centre of world revolution. Beijing was to become modern, and the model the Communists had first had in mind was the capital of the Soviet Union, in those early days one of the new China’s few friends. And so the arches over the main streets which had been erected over the centuries to virtuous people – upright civil servants, for example, or loyal widows – were removed. Acres of the old city were bulldozed to build gigantic avenues and immense squares. Tiananmen Square itself was laid over the ruins of part of the Forbidden City. The great walls which had encircled the city for centuries were torn down to make a multi-lane ring road. Their magnificent gates went as well.

  The Americans were also struck by the silence. Bicycle bells tinkled gently and occasionally a truck or bus honked its horn, but there was none of the usual hubbub of a great city. John Holdridge, from the State Department, who had known Beijing before the Second World War when it was, like all Chinese cities, noisy and bustling, was startled at the change: ‘When I peeked at Beijing through the car curtain, it appeared to be almost a ghost city. The few pedestrians moved slowly, their faces impassive, as if they were suffering some form of combat fatigue as a result of the Cultural Revolution, which was then winding down.’8

  Few outsiders knew much about the Cultural Revolution. China had virtually shut down for three years between 1966 and 1969. Most of its embassies were closed or scaled back as Chinese officials were summoned home to get their thoughts purified. Foreign visitors were discouraged, apart from a handful of sympathizers like the everadaptable writer Han Suyin, who wrote admiringly of the wonderful way the Chinese were throwing off old, outmoded ways of thought and launching themselves enthusiastically into the future. The young were challenging their elders and all were working together, or so official propaganda said, to build a truly democratic and socialist China. Only a handful of foreign journalists and diplomats had remained in Beijing and their movements had been severely limited, or worse. The British mission was ransacked and burned by Red Guards. Soviet diplomats were penned in their embassy by days of demonstrations; when the Soviet Union finally withdrew their families in 1967, women and children were beaten or forced to crawl under pictures of Mao on their way to their planes.

  The Chinese press was filled with wild attacks on some of the leading figures of the Revolution. Could it really be true that the President, Liu Shaoqi, had been planning to restore capitalism in China? That the great revolutionary general Peng Dehuai had spent years plotting against the Revolution? Glimpses of curious events reached the outside world: millions of ecstatic Red Guards jamming Tiananmen to wave their Little Red Books, weeping and cheering as their idol, Mao, appeared on the reviewing stand; mass rallies to denounce elderly men and women; provincial governors paraded through the streets with dunces’ caps and placards around their necks; a steady stream of vitriol against the enemies of the Revolution from Chinese radio, along with extraordinary claims of miracles performed by Mao’s words. Party officials, it was announced, were being re-educated in factories or on farms. The universities and many of the high schools were closed so that the students could take part in the new revo
lution and their teachers go off for their own re-education.

  Then, suddenly it seemed, the whole thing was over. In the fall of 1968 the authorities ordered the students to stop rampaging about and head for the countryside. Slowly and cautiously the schools and universities reopened. Mao remarked, with his customary insouciance, that it would probably be necessary to have another cultural revolution ‘in a few years’. In the event, the factional fights let loose by the years of turmoil went on, in some cases until Mao’s death seven years later. In 1969, the Ninth Party Congress officially ended the Cultural Revolution, declaring it a triumph.

  The Chinese who had suffered through the Cultural Revolution had a different view. The bill for that hideous event is still being totted up and may never be completely known. An entire people were encouraged to turn on their own society and culture, and on each other. Any cruelty, any excess, was permitted as long as it was done in the name of Mao and the Revolution. Being descended from the wrong class – being a landowner, for example – owning a foreign book or old porcelain, or saying something that appeared to criticize Mao, all were grounds for persecution. Teachers, blamed for transmitting old values, were arrested by their students and, in many cases, tortured to death. Children were told to denounce their parents. Neighbours and colleagues turned on each other.

  It was dangerous to work for the government or to be a member of the party, and it was particularly dangerous at the higher levels. Marshal Peng, who had contributed so much to the Communists’ survival and eventual victory, was beaten until his ribs broke and he could no longer lie down; his lingering death was made worse because he was denied medical treatment until it was too late. Liu Shaoqi was publicly humiliated and tormented, and then placed in solitary confinement where his guards and medical attendants had strict orders to treat him harshly. He went mad and died in squalid misery. The persecution did not spare family members. Deng’s son was thrown out a window and became a paraplegic. (Deng Xiaoping would later recover his position and, after Mao’s death, become the most powerful man in China, and his son received medical treatment in Canada.) Young children were turned out of their homes and left to wander the streets. All over China, at all levels of society, there were similar tragedies. A recent estimate is that between 1966 and 1976 three million Chinese died as a result of the Cultural Revolution. That is not counting the many millions more, by the admission of the Chinese authorities themselves, who were brutalized and victimized. An Italian psychiatrist who visited China shortly before Nixon’s visit was astonished at the prevalence of facial tics.9