Nixon and Mao (20 page)

The group’s leader, the former foreign minister Chen Yi, was chosen by Mao himself. Marshal Chen, who had been a Communist for almost as long as Mao himself, was also a poet. He was one of the revolution’s outstanding generals and one of the few men Mao called a friend. Chen was brave and outspoken, and these qualities had got him into trouble during the Cultural Revolution—when, for example, he told a meeting of radical students that they were acting senselessly. What, he demanded, was the point of parading the older generation—the very people who had made the revolution—in dunces’ caps and accusing them of all sorts of improbable crimes? He refused to believe that the party was riddled with traitors, as the Red Guards claimed. “Pick on me,” he shouted defiantly, “and expose me to the public! A member of the Communist Party, he’s worth nothing if he dare not stand up and speak the truth.” They had responded to his challenge with a series of meetings to denounce him. At one point, in the summer of 1967, Chen was trapped in the Foreign Ministry building for several hours, until Chou managed to rescue him and send him out of harm’s way.
⁸¹

In December 1968, in spite of his own precarious position, Chen had bravely written a report contradicting official propaganda and arguing that the United States was focused on the Americas and Europe, rather than on the Far East, and that the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States suggested, although he did not say so explicitly, an opening for China.
⁸²
Between the two superpowers, Chen probably favored the United States. “If the US could change its current hostile attitude towards us,” he had commented in the late 1950s, “there would be a future for the bilateral relationship.”
⁸³
Chen was a devout Communist but also a strong Chinese nationalist, and he found it difficult to forgive the Soviet Union for its abrupt cancellation of all its aid agreements in 1960. “What kind of Marxist-Leninism is this?” he asked. “Even capitalist countries would not do something like this!”
⁸⁴

The four old marshals were allowed to read virtually anything they wanted, including translations from foreign newspapers. They were also given unlimited green tea and a couple of younger colleagues—“strong laborers,” as Chen described them—to help with their research. In their discussions, they cautiously started to question one of the main assumptions of China’s foreign policy: that the Soviet Union and the United States were equally hostile to China. Perhaps China could maneuver between them. Chen Yi, as always, was the boldest. “Due to strategic necessity, Stalin signed the non-aggression treaty with Hitler,” he noted. “Why can’t we play the America card?” American policy, he pointed out, had been changing subtly. He wanted to suggest to the leadership that China and the United States resume the Warsaw talks, which had temporarily been broken off the previous year.
⁸⁵

In July, the four marshals submitted their first report. While it contained the standard abuse of American capitalists and Soviet revisionists and the usual praise for the “invincible Mao Tse-tung Thought,” it also daringly pointed out the conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union. The marshals argued that a major attack on China was not imminent. The United States had been too badly burned in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union was deterred by fear of what the United States might do.
⁸⁶

In September, with the fear of a Soviet attack building, the marshals sent Chou En-lai a second report, which underlined their earlier conclusions: “The last thing the U.S. imperialists are willing to see is a victory by the Soviet revisionists in a Sino-Soviet war, as this would [allow the Soviets] to build up a big empire more powerful than the American empire in resources and manpower.” Although in the long term China was struggling against both powers, they argued, its strategy should be to use the one against the other.
⁸⁷
In some “further thoughts,” Chen Yi spelled out what this could mean: “It is necessary for us to utilize the contradiction between the United States and the Soviet Union in a strategic sense and to pursue a breakthrough in the Sino-American relations.”
⁸⁸
He had some “wild” ideas about how to do this. For instance, China should use the Warsaw talks to propose to the Americans that their two sides hold meetings “at the ministerial or even higher levels” to discuss the major issues. When Foreign Ministry officials quailed at passing on such heresy to Chou and Mao, Chen insisted.
⁸⁹

Mao apparently did not say anything at all when he saw the reports. He was in the process of working out his own thoughts on the correct strategy for China.
⁹⁰
It was clear that China could not continue to sustain the enmity of the two superpowers as well as of most of its neighbors. Chou, as always, waited for direction from the chairman. When the Swedish ambassador asked Chou that June whether the Soviet Union or the United States was the greater threat to China, Chou was curiously vague: “Now the situation is changing; we should wait and see.”
⁹¹
Could the fences with the Soviet Union be mended? Was it in China’s interest to do so? Or was there an alternative? Chinese history, which still held the Communist leaders in its thrall, offered an instructive lesson. In the third century
A.D.,
in a period of disunity, one of China’s greatest strategists had allied his kingdom with a second to defeat a third.

That autumn, Mao asked his doctor to consider a problem: “We have the Soviet Union to the north and the west, India to the south, and Japan to the east. If all our enemies were to unite, attacking us from the north, south, east, and west, what do you think we should do?” Dr. Li confessed that he was at a loss. “Think again,” Mao said. “Beyond Japan is the United States. Didn’t our ancestors counsel negotiating with faraway countries while fighting with those that are near?” The doctor, not surprisingly, was dumbfounded. How, he asked Mao, could China negotiate with the United States? It was easy, Mao replied. Unlike the Soviet Union, the United States had never occupied Chinese territory. And its new president, Richard Nixon, was a right-winger. “I like to deal with rightists,” Mao said. “They say what they really think—not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.”
⁹²
(Although Mao could not know it, Nixon had just startled his cabinet in Washington by saying that it was not necessarily in the best interests of the United States to see the Soviet Union crush China.)
⁹³
Another Chinese statesman was also watching and waiting. “Once China and the Soviet Union have any contact,” said Chen Yi, “the US will get impatient just like an ant on top of a hot pot. Nixon will not be satisfied at being left behind and will try to catch up.” The world had been surprised when Kosygin and Chou met in Beijing that fall. “If a Sino-US summit meeting could be held, it would shock the world even more!”
⁹⁴

CHAPTER 10

THE OPENING BANQUET

T
HE RIGHTIST WAS NOW IN BEIJING. THE FIRST NIGHT OF THE
visit, Chou En-lai invited Nixon, as the Chinese always did special guests, to a banquet given in his honor at the Great Hall of the People, that monstrous Stalinist structure that ran along one side of Tiananmen Square. Banquets, toasts, the exchange of gifts—all have been part of diplomacy as far back as anyone can remember. The Chinese Communists took such protocols as seriously as their predecessors had. “Their whole idea,” said Winston Lord, Kissinger’s assistant who would later return to China as the American ambassador, “is to inculcate in outsiders coming to the Middle Kingdom a sense of obligation for their hospitality and friendship. In effect, they seek to create ties of alleged friendship. They want us to feel that friends do favors for other friends.”
¹

The Americans—all of them, from the President and Mrs. Nixon to the crew of their aircraft—gathered in the foyer of Nixon’s villa at the Diaoyutai, along with Chinese protocol people and translators, before the motorcade took them into the center of the city. At the Great Hall, they walked into an enormous lobby two stories high with polished floors and massive chandeliers, where Chou En-lai and his colleagues waited to greet them. (Mao did not come out to such occasions.) The guests made their way up a huge grand staircase for a series of photographs, carefully posed according to rank, and then were ushered into a massive, somber hall filled with round tables and decorated with Chinese and American flags. It could hold up to three thousand people for a banquet; this evening there were perhaps a thousand. As the Americans entered, a Chinese military band started playing a medley of American folk songs. (In imperial China, officials had always believed in using music to soothe visiting barbarians.)

Mao himself had apparently approved the guests on the Chinese side. While there were representatives from the Beijing revolutionary committee, one of the new organs created during the Cultural Revolution, none of the leading radicals was present, not even Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. (She later told the Nixons that she had been too ill to come.)
²
The Chinese who were assembled were largely officials, from the government, the Communist Party, and the People’s Liberation Army. Ye Jianying, one of the four marshals who had written the bold reports urging China to rethink its views on the world, was present, as was Ji Pengfei, the ineffectual foreign minister, and his much more competent deputy, Qiao Guanhua.

On the other side of the world, Americans watching the morning television shows saw the band play the Chinese and American national anthems and the banquet begin. The Nixons and the top-ranking Americans sat with Chou En-lai at a large table for twenty, while everyone else was at smaller tables of ten. Each person had an ivory place card embossed in gold English and Chinese characters and chopsticks engraved with his or her name.
³
The Americans had all been briefed on how to behave at Chinese banquets. Everyone had been issued chopsticks and urged to practice ahead of time. Nixon had managed to become reasonably adept, but Kissinger remained hopelessly clumsy. The distinguished television reporter Walter Cronkite shot an olive high into the air. “The Chinese take great pride in their food,” said a White House memo, “and to compliment the various courses and dishes is also recommended.”
⁴

As the band played on—“Oh! Susanna,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and that Cultural Revolution favorite “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman”—teams of waiters brought dish after dish. Nixon, who had once ordered a banquet at the White House timed by stopwatch and who had been delighted when it came in under an hour, had no complaints this evening as the two former enemies celebrated a new relationship and the American networks covered it live for four hours. The huge lazy Susans at each table spun, laden with duck slices with pineapple, vegetarian ham (according to the English menu), three-colored eggs, carp, chicken, prawns, shark fin, dumplings, sweet rice cake, fried rice, and, in a nod toward Western tastes, bread and butter.

Some of the Americans, including John Holdridge from the State Department, spoke Chinese well, and a few of the Chinese spoke English. Otherwise, conversation was through interpreters. At the head table, Nixon and Chou En-lai exchanged desultory remarks through Mao’s favorite interpreter, Tang Wensheng, also known as Nancy. William Rogers told long stories about his hero, the great golfer Sam Snead, to the Chinese foreign minister, a tough old revolutionary who had no idea what golf was. Mrs. Nixon chatted away politely, asking her Chinese hosts such questions as how many children they had.
⁵

Chou En-lai, who was smoking Chinese cigarettes, turned to Mrs. Nixon and gestured to the picture of two pandas on the package. “We will give you two,” he said. According to Chinese sources, Mrs. Nixon screamed with joy. Although the Americans had dropped some hints, the Chinese had been noncommittal on the pandas. Like banquets, the exchange of presents has always been important in diplomacy, and giving the right presents, not too lavish and not too simple, has been an art, one that the Chinese had traditionally excelled at. In imperial China, the emperors had sent gifts—silks, brocades, or porcelain, for example—to other rulers as a mark of imperial favor and, often, to keep them quiescent. Communist China had continued to send gifts abroad—often, as before, porcelain or cloth but now, as an indication of its revolutionary nature, to peoples and not rulers. In special cases, it also sent pandas, just as its predecessors had. Placid bears that spend most of their time eating or sleeping, they were perhaps meant to signal a placid relationship. The famous Empress Wu sent a pair to the emperor of Japan in the seventh century, and Chiang Kai-shek gave a pair to the United States during the Second World War. After 1949, the Communist sent pandas to the Soviet Union and North Korea as marks of friendship. Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing were now destined for the National Zoo in Washington.
⁶

The presents issue had caused much anxiety in the White House, both as to what to expect from the Chinese and what to give them. On Kissinger’s secret trip in July 1971, he had taken along a piece of rock brought back from the moon by American astronauts. The Chinese had received it much as the Qianlong emperor had received British woolens brought by Lord Macartney—with a certain amount of disdain. This time, medals in Lucite were considered and dropped, and finally ceramic models of American birds were made for senior officials, while more junior ones got silver bowls, cigarette lighters, or cuff links with the presidential seal. Nixon also presented a pair of musk oxen and two large redwood trees from California. The trees, in particular, proved awkward to transport; once in China, one promptly got worms and languished, while the other flourished. (The Canadians, when they cemented their new relationship with China, chose to send their national animal. A pair of beavers were loaded into an Air Canada washroom to splash about on their way to China.)
⁷

At their places at the banquet, each person had three glasses: one for water or orange juice, one for wine, and one for China’s famous mao-tai, “white lightning” to the American journalists or, as Dan Rather put it, “liquid razor blades.”
⁸
At their table, Chou En-lai said proudly to Nixon that mao-tai, with its alcohol level of more than 50 percent, had been world famous since the San Francisco World’s Fair of 1915. Chou took a match to his cup, saying, “Mr. Nixon, please take a look. It can indeed catch fire.” (Back in the United States, Nixon tried a similar demonstration by setting a bowlful on fire; he nearly burned down the White House.) Nixon said he understood that Red Army soldiers had once drained dry the town where mao-tai was produced. “During the Long March, mao-tai was used by us to cure all kinds of diseases and wounds,” Chou answered primly. “Let me make a toast with this panacea,” said Nixon. (Alexander Haig, who had experienced mao-tai on his advance trip to Beijing in January, had worried about its effect on the notoriously weak-headed Nixon: “
UNDER NO REPEAT NO CIRCUMSTANCES,
” he had cabled, “
SHOULD THE PRESIDENT ACTUALLY DRINK FROM HIS GLASS IN RESPONSE TO BANQUET TOASTS.
”)
⁹

“At banquets,” the White House had warned, “the wine and Mao Tai are for toasting only. These glasses should not be raised without toasting one of your Chinese friends.”
¹⁰
With Chinese sitting at each table, the toasting started early on. Haldeman, who was a teetotaler, tried repeatedly to explain to his incredulous hosts that he could not drink alcohol.
¹¹
John Holdridge found himself playing an old drinking game of counting fingers with the minister of electric power. The loser had to drain his glass to a shout of “
ganbei.
” “Aided only in part by the
mao tai,
” Holdridge remembered, “the atmosphere in the Great Hall was electric. Surely everyone there, and every TV watcher, must have sensed that something new and great was being created in the U.S.-China relationship.”
¹²

From their tables at the far end of the hall, the journalists, most of them American, stood on their chairs and used field glasses to see the historic scene.
¹³
Nixon wanted them there, just as he wanted the live television coverage, because he understood their power so well. He always read the thick daily summaries of press coverage and filled their margins with comments and orders. He wanted the journalists’ attention but not too much; as he told Haldeman, his image should be “more aloof, inaccessible, mysterious.”
¹⁴
Yet he also delighted in showing the press his boorish side; as he once told an aide, “So much for their fucking sophistication.”
¹⁵

Nixon despised most journalists as “clowns” who were irredeemably liberal in their bias. And he was convinced that they hated him in return “because I have beaten them so often.” They had been wrong and he had been right on a whole range of issues, from Alger Hiss to what the American people wanted.
¹⁶
(Early in his presidency, he ordered his senior staff to prepare lists of friends and foes among the press; the latter was much the longer list.)
¹⁷
He intended to circumvent what he saw as the liberal establishment in the media and reach out directly to Middle America, where his support lay. With the powers of the presidency he could make news, whether by creating photo opportunities or going on the networks with major policy statements. (He could also, and did, place wiretaps on reporters to see where they were getting their stories.) The camera, Nixon believed, was more effective for him than print. As Kissinger said unkindly, “Television in front of the President is like alcohol in front of an alcoholic.”
¹⁸

In Haldeman, he found the man he needed. With his background in advertising, Haldeman was quick to see the possibilities of television. As he told Nixon in the run-up to the presidential election, the time had come “to move out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of the omnipresent eye.”
¹⁹
With Haldeman’s help, Nixon reorganized, creating a new office of communications and a separate office for television. The White House generated a stream of material. A presidential photographer and a navy film crew stood by to catch Nixon being presidential or playing with his dog, King Timahoe. Staff writers sent editorials and news releases not just to the major papers but to thousands of small-town papers across the United States.
²⁰
Washington reporters complained that they no longer had access to the president and no way of finding out what that remote and isolated figure was thinking. That was the way Nixon and Haldeman wanted it. When the press criticized the president—over his failure to bring the Vietnam War to an end, for example—the administration fought back. In late 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew was unleashed; in a series of speeches overseen by Nixon himself he excoriated the media as “a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one.”
²¹
Journalists seen as particularly hostile found they were no longer included on presidential trips or given background briefings. In some of the worst cases, the tax people or the FBI turned up to investigate them.
²²

Though Chou En-lai had suggested to Kissinger, in their discussions on the president’s visit, that ten journalists might be about the right number to accompany Nixon, the Americans had negotiated the number upward until they got permission to bring approximately ninety.
²³
When some two thousand applications came into the White House press office, the White House announced criteria for selection. In fact, Nixon himself picked the journalists, making sure that the television networks got many more spaces than print journalism. He also took great pleasure in refusing places to papers like the
New York Times.
²⁴
(On his first trip to China, Kissinger managed to warn Chou En-lai obliquely about talking to James Reston from the
Times,
who was about to arrive in Beijing.)
²⁵
A reporter from the Long Island, New York, paper
Newsday
who had just written a series investigating the complicated financial relations between Nixon and Bebe Rebozo, and who apparently met the criteria for going, was told simply “no room.”
²⁶
Several of the top network brass managed to get themselves accredited as technical staff, much to the annoyance of the beleaguered print journalists. Few of them, apart from the writer Theodore White, had ever been to China or had any particular knowledge of it.