Nixon and Mao (26 page)

By this point, Nixon and Kissinger, partly because they did not trust the State Department to manage the contacts through Warsaw, had decided to establish their own, highly secret channels of communication. One, they hoped, would be through Paris. General Vernon Walters, the military attaché in Paris, who had been standing by for over a year, got orders in the summer of 1970 to pass word from Nixon to the Chinese embassy that the United States was prepared to hold secret talks and that Nixon would send a high-level official to Paris if necessary. At some point—it is not clear from his memoirs exactly when—Walters found himself standing alone with his Chinese opposite number, Fang Wen, as they waited for their cars after a reception at the Polish embassy. He took the opportunity to say in French that he had a message from the president for the Chinese government. Fang’s jaw dropped, and he hastily said, “I’ll tell them; I’ll tell them; I’ll tell them.” He jumped into his Mercedes limousine and drove off before Walters could hand over his letter.
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Walters finally delivered it a few days later. The Chinese greeted him cautiously but courteously.

The channel did not immediately produce results. It took until the following summer, and only after he had made his secret trip to Beijing, for Kissinger to be able to talk to the Chinese ambassador in Paris. For some reason, perhaps because secrecy had become second nature, he flew in and out of Paris incognito and had himself smuggled in and out of Walters’s apartment and the Chinese embassy. Over time Walters himself became very friendly with Fang, also a retired general. They conducted much detailed business about the arrangements for Nixon’s trip and compared notes about the Soviets—a menace—and about how they would deal with drug dealers—execution.
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The Chinese invariably gave Walters a present of preserved apricots as he left; he could not bear their taste and, for fear of compromising security, filled up his safe with them.
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The other secret channel Nixon and Kissinger opened up was through Pakistan, and this is the one that finally produced the dramatic breakthrough they were looking for. Nixon had been using Yahya Khan to send indirect messages to Beijing since 1969. In the autumn of that year, for example, the Americans asked Yahya to let the Chinese know that they were canceling the Seventh Fleet’s patrols in the Taiwan Straits.
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According to Chinese sources, the direct channel was opened in the early spring of 1970 but did not become really active until late in the year. Modern technology was bypassed as the two sides used only trusted emissaries in a way that would have been familiar to the ancient Greeks or the great Venetian diplomats of the Renaissance. If Nixon wanted to contact Beijing, he or Kissinger passed a message, typed on ordinary paper and unsigned, to Agha Hilaly, the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, who in turn took it himself to Yahya. In Pakistan, Yahya called in the Chinese ambassador and read the message to him. The two men then carefully checked the Chinese diplomat’s handwritten notes, and the contents of the American message went on to Chou and Mao in Beijing. Eventually a reply would come back through the same circuitous route. Hilaly would arrive at the White House with a handwritten note from Yahya and would dictate its contents to Kissinger and then carefully carry the paper away again.
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The messages sometimes took several days and, in one case, three weeks to reach the other side. The Chinese never entirely understood why Nixon insisted on such secrecy. It was all a bit mysterious, Mao told his old friend Edgar Snow, how Nixon wanted to keep all contacts with China secret, even from the State Department.
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Nixon and Kissinger tried to explain that if word of the negotiations leaked out, the resulting political uproar in the United States would make it difficult to carry on.
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On October 1, the Chinese sent what they considered a very public message to the Americans when Mao invited Snow to stand with him on the reviewing stand in Tiananmen Square on China’s National Day. A picture of the two was published in the
People’s Daily.
Snow, who had first met Mao when the Communists were holed up in Yan’an in the late 1930s, stayed on in China for a couple of months more and had a long conversation with Mao. He was glad, the chairman said, that Nixon had won the election: “If he wishes to come to Beijing, please tell him he should do it secretly, not openly—just get on a plane and come.” Nixon had made it clear that he wanted to talk directly to the Chinese and not through the Warsaw talks. Mao told Snow, “Therefore I say I am ready to hold talks with him if he is willing to come. It doesn’t matter if the negotiations succeed or fail, if we quarrel or not, if he comes in the capacity of a tourist or the President.” Taiwan was clearly an issue between them, but what did it really have to do with Nixon? Mao asked. The situation had been created by earlier administrations. Ten million people in Taiwan were nothing compared to the billion in the rest of Asia. “Will China and the U.S. remain for 100 years without establishing relations? After all, we haven’t occupied your Long Island!”
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Unfortunately, the United States missed the significance of Snow’s visit, partly because he himself took several months to find a publisher for his story about his visit and partly because official Washington tended to write him off as a fellow traveler, so that no one went to see him at his home in Switzerland. Snow, who was old and ailing, seems not to have made any attempt to brief the government.
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Nixon claims in his memoirs that the Americans knew about the interview a few days after it took place. Kissinger, on the other hand, says the Chinese overestimated American subtlety and intelligence gathering and that Washington did not know about the interview for several months, by which time the channel through Pakistan was producing results.
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Although Yahya was increasingly preoccupied with the growing threat of secession by East Pakistan and the resulting tensions with India, he continued to act as intermediary. In October 1970, while he was in the United States for the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations of the United Nations, he paid a visit to Nixon and Kissinger in Washington. Nixon asked Yahya to carry word to the Chinese that the United States was eager to normalize relations. Yahya flew to China on a state visit in November and duly conveyed his message to Chou En-lai. “This is the first time,” the Chinese prime minister remarked, “that a proposal has come from a Head through a Head, to Head! The United States knows that Pakistan is a great friend to China and therefore we attach great importance to it.” Chou also made it clear, however, that the Chinese would only accept a special envoy in order to discuss the withdrawal of American forces from Taiwan.
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Yahya, possibly because he was trying to cope with cyclone damage in East Pakistan and coming elections in both halves of his country, took several weeks to deliver Chou’s reply, which the Americans finally received on December 8. Kissinger found it encouraging and downplayed the Chinese linking of the Taiwan issue to a visit by an American representative. In fact, the Chinese demand for American withdrawal from Taiwan was an obstacle, and the American message that went back on December 16 said firmly, “The meeting in Peking would not be limited only to the Taiwan question but would encompass other steps designed to improve relations and reduce tensions.” As for the American presence on Taiwan, it was the general policy of the United States to “reduce its military presence in the region of East Asia and the Pacific as tensions in this region diminish.”
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The Americans apparently sent a copy through their Romanian channel as well, which the Soviets in time picked up. At some point, Nixon and Kissinger also considered, but rejected, establishing another channel through Ottawa, where the Chinese had had an embassy since February 1971. But the danger of the contacts being noticed were thought too great; in addition, Nixon could not bear Trudeau.
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The State Department remained unaware of all these developing contacts.
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The Chinese duly received the American reply, and the channel then went silent for several months. Nixon gave his second foreign policy report to Congress in February and spoke of how the United States hoped to remove the obstacles on its side to greater contacts between the Chinese and American peoples: “We hope for, but will not be deterred by a lack of, reciprocity.” On March 15, the United States ended all restrictions on travel by Americans to China.
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Still Beijing remained silent. Kissinger took the time to educate himself, partly through meetings with academic experts. “It would be satisfying to report that my former colleagues conveyed to me flashes of illuminating insight,” he said in his memoirs. The academics, however, proved incapable of providing advice on strategies for the next few years or on immediate issues. “I listened politely,” Kissinger claimed, “chastening any impatience with the recognition that I could hardly have been more relevant when I served as an academic consultant to two previous administrations.”
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On April 6, 1971, the Chinese government suddenly invited an American table tennis team, which was competing in the World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, to visit China. The decision to initiate what became known as “ping-pong” diplomacy had been made at the highest levels, indeed by Mao himself, after chance encounters brought Chinese and American table tennis players together. Chinese athletic teams, which had been condemned during the wildest days of the Cultural Revolution as “sprouts of revisionism,” were only just starting to take part in international events again. The tournament in Japan was the first one that had seen a Chinese team for several years. Mao had agreed that the Chinese could take part, but the team was sent off with orders to report back to Beijing three times a day and issued strict instructions as to how to behave: “During the contest, if we meet with officials of the US delegation, we do not take the initiative to talk or exchange greetings. If we compete with the US team, we do not exchange team flags with them beforehand, but we can shake hands and greet each other.”
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Early on in the tournament, when an American player casually said at a banquet, “Hi, Chinese, long time no see. You guys played well,” the incident was immediately reported. And when the Americans asked jokingly about why they had not been invited to play in China along with Mexico and Canada, the lights burned late in Beijing as the Chinese tried to work out what this meant.
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Chou En-lai submitted a cautious report to Mao that reflected the views of both the Foreign Ministry and the State Sports Commission that the time was not yet ripe to invite an American team to China, although there might well be opportunities in the future. The Americans could leave their addresses, said Chou, but it must be made clear to them that the Chinese people were firmly opposed to “the conspiracy of ‘Two Chinas.’” (The People’s Republic always insisted that there was only one China and that Taiwan was part of it.)
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On April 4, 1971, as the tournament was winding down, a pair of players, one American, the other Chinese, caused a fresh incident to perturb Beijing. The American competitors were generally clean-cut athletes, “the kinds of Americans that you pray to be involved in something like this,” an American diplomat remembered.
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Glenn Cowan, though, the U.S. junior champion, came from California and liked to consider himself part of the counterculture. “He’s apt to wear a purple passion shirt with tie-dye leopard-like pants,” a long-suffering team official recalled. “He has long Dartaganian [
sic
] locks, he [has] a floppy hat that he wears and he’s sort of a hippy.” By chance, Cowan found himself out at the practice center without a ride back to the main tournament hall. A Chinese player beckoned him toward a bus, where he found most of the Chinese team, all smiling at him. Cowan was babbling cheerfully on to the uncomprehending Chinese about how they were all oppressed when Zhuang Zedong, a world champion and one of the Chinese stars, came forward and presented Cowan with a silk brocade scarf. When the head of the Chinese team tried to stop his player, Zhuang brushed him aside, saying, “Take it easy. As head of the delegation you have many concerns, but I am just a player.” As the players got off the bus, a crowd of journalists recorded the scene. To his embarrassment, Cowan did not have anything to give in return. He managed to find a red, white, and blue shirt with a peace emblem and the words of the Beatles’ song “Let It Be,” and he presented it the following day, with maximum publicity, to the Chinese athlete. “Hippy opportunist,” said the American official.
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Mao, who had been following the events in Japan with intense interest, sat chain-smoking for the next two days in Beijing while Chou’s report lay on his desk. The tournament in Japan would be over on April 7, and he still had not made up his mind on whether or not to invite the Americans to China. On April 6, he approved Chou’s recommendation that they do nothing. That night, as usual, his nurse read him the news stories about the tournament. Mao said approvingly, “Zhuang Zedong not only plays good Ping-Pong but knows how to conduct diplomacy as well.” At midnight, after he had already taken his customary heavy dose of sleeping pills, he suddenly sat up and ordered his nurse to contact the Foreign Ministry at once with orders to invite the Americans. It was only after she made the call that he allowed himself to fall asleep.
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As Mao subsequently described his decision, the small ping-pong ball could be used to move the large ball of the earth.
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The invitation that reached the Americans the next day had more than a ring of the Middle Kingdom about it. Since the Americans had requested an invitation “so many times,” China had agreed to accede to their request. “If they are short of travelling expenses, we can render them assistance.”
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The first American diplomat to hear on the ground in Japan replied simply that if the team decided to go, it would not be against current American policy. He then dashed to his records and found, with relief, several of Nixon’s statements expressing hope that contacts would be resumed between China and the United States. In Washington, the desk officer at the State Department had the same reaction: “Go for it, do it.” He then went home and told his wife that if he was wrong, he would be out of a job.
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