On China (31 page)

In the case of the Warsaw talks, American proclivities had the opposite effect. China had returned to the Warsaw talks because Mao had made a strategic decision to follow the four marshals’ recommendations to seek a high-level dialogue with the United States. But American diplomats (in contrast to their President) did not envisage—or even imagine—such a breakthrough; or rather, they defined a breakthrough as breathing life into a process they had been nursing through 134 meetings to date. On that journey, they had developed an agenda reflecting the pragmatic issues that had accumulated between the two countries: settlement of financial claims the two sides had against each other; prisoners held in each other’s jails; trade; arms control; cultural exchanges. The negotiators’ idea of a breakthrough was China’s readiness to discuss this agenda.

A dialogue of the deaf developed at the two meetings of the resumed Warsaw talks on February 20 and March 20, 1970. As National Security Advisor in the White House, I had urged the negotiating team to repeat what our envoys had tried to say to the fleeing Chinese diplomats, that the United States “would be prepared to consider sending a representative to Peking for direct discussions with your officials, or receiving a representative from your government to Washington.” Chinese negotiators formally repeated the standard position on Taiwan albeit in a mild form. But wrapped inside the formulaic response on Taiwan was an unprecedented move: China was willing to consider talks outside the Warsaw channels at the ambassadorial level or through other channels “to reduce tensions between China and the US and fundamentally improve relations.”
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It did not make such talks conditional on the settlement of the Taiwan issue.

The American negotiators in Warsaw sought to avoid this broader approach. The first time it was made, they did not respond at all. Afterward they developed talking points to deflect the Chinese proposition of an overall review of relationships into an opportunity to address the American agenda developed over two decades of desultory conversations.
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Nixon was no less impatient with this approach than Mao must have been. “They will kill this baby before it is born,” Nixon said when confronted with a plan put forward by the negotiating team. But he was reluctant to order them to engage in a geopolitical dialogue for fear that the briefing system would produce a firestorm and a need for multiple reassurances, all before the Chinese attitude was clear. Mao’s attitude was more ambivalent. On the one hand, he wanted to explore rapprochement with the United States. But these exchanges were taking place in early 1970, when the Nixon administration faced massive demonstrations protesting the decision to send forces into Cambodia to disrupt the bases and supply chains supporting Hanoi’s offensives into South Vietnam. The question for Mao was whether the demonstrations marked the beginning of the genuine world revolution so long expected by the Marxists and as often disappointed. If China moved closer to the United States, would it be doing it just when the world revolutionary agenda was being fulfilled? To wait out these prospects consumed much of Mao’s planning in 1970.
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He used the American military incursion into Cambodia as a pretext to cancel the next session of Warsaw talks scheduled for May 20, 1970. They were never resumed.

Nixon was looking for a forum less bureaucratically constraining and more under his direct control. Mao sought for a way to break through to the highest levels of the United States government whenever he had made a firm decision. Both had to move carefully lest a premature disclosure trigger a Soviet onslaught or a rejection by the other side thwart the entire initiative. When the Warsaw talks foundered, the operating level of the U.S. government seemed relieved to be freed of the perplexities and domestic risks of a negotiation with Beijing. During the year that Nixon and Mao were searching for venues for a high-level dialogue, lower levels of the American diplomatic establishment never raised the question at the White House of what had happened to the Warsaw talks or suggested reconvening them.

For nearly a year after the Chinese cancellation of the proposed May 20 meeting, both the American and Chinese leaders agreed on the objective but found themselves thwarted by the gulf of twenty years of isolation. The problem was no longer simply the cultural differences between the Chinese and the American approaches to negotiations. It was that Nixon’s approach differed more from that of his own diplomats than from Mao’s. He and I wanted to explore the strategic situation produced by the triangular relationship between the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. We strove for an occasion not so much to remove irritants as to conduct a geopolitical dialogue.

As the two sides were circling each other, their choice of intermediaries conveyed a great deal about their perceptions of the task at hand. Nixon used the occasion of an around-the-world trip in July 1970 to tell his hosts in Pakistan and Romania that he sought high-level exchanges with Chinese leaders and that they were free to communicate this to Beijing. As National Security Advisor, I mentioned the same point to Jean Sainteny, the former French ambassador in Hanoi, a friend of many years who was acquainted with the Chinese ambassador in Paris, Huang Zhen. In other words, the White House chose a nonaligned friend of China (Pakistan), a member of the Warsaw Pact known for its quest for independence from Moscow (Romania), and a member of NATO distinguished by its commitment to strategic independence (France—on the assumption that Sainteny was bound to pass our message to the French government). Beijing passed hints to us via its embassy in Oslo, Norway (a NATO ally), and, strangely enough, in Kabul, Afghanistan (perhaps on the theory that the venue was so improbable as to be sure to gain our attention). We ignored Oslo because our embassy was not equipped for the necessary staff support; Kabul, of course, was even more remote. And we did not want to conduct the dialogue once again through embassies.

China ignored the direct approach via Paris but eventually responded to the overtures via Romania and Pakistan. Before that, however, Mao communicated with us but so subtly and indirectly that we missed the point. In October 1970 Mao granted another interview to Edgar Snow, considered by the Nixon White House to be a Mao sympathizer. To demonstrate the importance Mao attached to the occasion, he placed Snow next to him on the reviewing stand during the parade celebrating the Communist victory in the civil war on October 8, 1970. The mere presence of an American standing next to the Chairman symbolized—or was intended to symbolize to the Chinese people—that contact with America was not only permissible but a high priority.

The interview proceeded in a complex manner. Snow was given a transcript of the interview with the restriction that he could use only indirect quotations. He was also instructed to delay any publication for three months. The Chinese reasoning must have been that Snow would submit the actual text to the U.S. government and that the published summary would then reinforce a process already in train.

It did not work out that way for the same reason that the 1965 interview failed to influence the U.S. government. Snow was a friend of the PRC of long standing; that very fact caused him to be written off in the American foreign policy establishment as a Beijing propagandist. No transcript of his interview reached high levels of government, still less the White House, and by the time the article appeared months later, it had been overtaken by other communications.

It was a pity the transcript did not reach us, because the Chairman had made some revolutionary pronouncements. For nearly a decade, China had cut itself off from the outside world. Now Mao announced that he would soon start inviting Americans of all political persuasions to visit China. Nixon would be welcome “either as a tourist or as President” because the Chairman had concluded that “the problems between China and the U.S.A. would have to be solved with Nixon”—because of the upcoming presidential election within two years.
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Mao had moved from vilifying the United States to inviting a dialogue with the American President. And he added a startling comment about the Chinese domestic situation, which hinted that the dialogue would take place with a new China.

Mao told Snow that he was ending the Cultural Revolution. What he had intended as a moral and intellectual renovation had turned into coercion, he said. “When foreigners reported that China was in great chaos, they were not telling lies. It had been true. Fighting [between Chinese] was going on . . . first with spears, then rifles, then mortars.”
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Mao, as Snow reported, now deplored the cult of personality built around his person: “It was hard, the chairman said, for people to overcome the habits of 3,000 years of emperor-worshipping tradition.” The titles ascribed to him such as “Great Helmsman . . . would all be eliminated sooner or later.” The sole title he wished to retain was “teacher.”
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These were extraordinary assertions. After having convulsed his country with upheavals that destroyed even the Communist Party so that only a cult of personality was left for cohesion, Mao now pronounced the end of the Cultural Revolution. It had been proclaimed so that the Chairman could govern without doctrinal or bureaucratic inhibitions. It had been sustained by shredding existing structures and by what Mao now described as “maltreatment of ‘captives’—party members and others removed from power and subjected to reeducation.”
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Where did all this leave Chinese governance? Or was it being told to a foreign journalist in Mao’s characteristic elliptically wandering way, in pursuit of its principal purpose, to encourage a new phase in the relationship between China and the United States and the world by conveying an altered governance? As Snow recorded, Mao announced that “between Chinese and Americans there need be no prejudices. There could be mutual respect and equality. He said he placed high hopes on the peoples of the two countries.”
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Nixon, in a break with American foreign policy tradition, had urged a relaxation of tensions on the basis of geopolitical considerations in order to return China to the international system. But to the China-centered Mao, the principal vision was not the international system so much as the future of China. To achieve its security, he was willing to shift the center of gravity of Chinese policy and bring about a reversal of the alliances—not, however, in the name of a theory of international relations but rather of a new direction for Chinese society in which China could even learn from the United States:

Mao, in short, reaffirmed classic principles of Chinese governance cast in Confucian principles of moral rectitude. He devoted a part of his interview to castigating the habit of lying, which he blamed not on the Americans but on the recently disempowered Red Guards. “If one did not speak the truth, Mao concluded, how could he gain the confidence of others? Who would trust one?”
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Snow recorded. The fire-breathing, radical ideologist of yesterday now appeared in the garb of a Confucian sage. His concluding sentence seemed to express a sense of resignation to new circumstance if not without, as always, taunting double meanings: “He was, he said, only a lone monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella.”
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There was more to the last line than Mao’s habitual mockery in presenting the creator of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as returning to his original philosophic vocation as a lonely teacher. For as several Chinese commentators later noted, the quotation in Snow’s English text was but the first line of a familiar Chinese couplet.
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If completed, the couplet is not so much mocking as ominous. Left unspoken, or at least untranslated, was the second line of the couplet: “
wu fa wu tian.
” As written, the Chinese characters mean “without hair, without sky”—that is, the monk is bald, and because he holds an umbrella, he does not see the sky above him. But in the tonal Chinese language, the line is a pun. Pronounced slightly differently, the line takes on a new meaning: “without law, without heaven”—or, less literally: “defying laws both human and divine”; “neither God-fearing nor law-abiding”; “trampling law underfoot without batting an eyelid.”
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Mao’s closing salvo was, in other words, even further reaching and more subtle than initially apparent. Mao cast himself as a wandering classical sage but also as a law unto himself. Was Mao toying with his English-speaking interviewer? Could he possibly think Snow would understand the pun, which is, for a Western ear, almost impossibly obscure? (Mao did sometimes overestimate Western subtlety even as the West sometimes exaggerated his.) Given the context, the probability is that Mao’s pun was directed to his domestic audience, particularly those leaders who might oppose rapprochement with the heretofore hated United States and whose opposition later culminated in the crisis—and alleged coup—of Lin Biao shortly after the U.S. opening to China. Mao was effectively announcing that he was about to turn the world upside down again. In that mission, he would not be bound by “laws human or divine,” not even the laws of his own ideology. It warned doubters to get out of the way.

The text of Mao’s interview was surely circulated in high levels of Beijing even as it was being ignored in Washington. Snow had been asked to delay publication so that China could develop an official initiative. Mao decided to cut through the minuet of third-party communications by addressing the American administration directly at the highest level. On December 8, 1970, a message was delivered to my office in the White House from Zhou Enlai. Reviving a diplomatic practice of previous centuries, the Pakistani ambassador brought it from Islamabad, where it had been delivered as a handwritten communication. Beijing’s missive formally acknowledged the messages received through intermediaries. It noted a comment made by Nixon to President Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan of Pakistan, when Yahya called at the White House a few weeks earlier, to the effect that America, in its negotiations with the Soviet Union, would not participate in a “condominium against China” and would be prepared to send an emissary to a mutually convenient place to arrange high-level contacts with China.
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