35
ZHOU ENLAI AND THE FUTURE OF TAIWAN

I nervously paced the floor of our Peking hotel room concerned about the absence of any word from Abe Rosenthal as to the status of our Pentagon Papers project. It was June 11, 1971, three days before the date we had set for publication of the Papers, and there had been only one message from him. As Audrey’s and my China dispatches began appearing in the Times, Rosenthal cabled: “Audrey on Friday and Seymour on Saturday. But what’s holding up copy from Joanna.” Joanna was our four-year-old daughter. Rosen-thal’s silence persuaded me that publication of the Papers must have been stymied. I decided to return to New York.

Audrey was sitting on a sofa frowning as she watching my antics. I sighed and said to her, “Come, please.” Then, to her puzzlement, I led her up to the roof of the Xin Jiao Hotel, where there would be no chance that we would be overheard, and as we sat in the hot sun leaning against a revetment wall, I related to her for the first time details of the Pentagon Papers project. I said it was hard for me to conceive that the publisher would balk at publication, but the pressures on him to desist were enormous and probably had increased since I left New York. I told Audrey I intended to leave straight away for New York, and if I found on arrival that a decision had been taken not to print the Papers, I might resign. Audrey approved of my plans without hesitation. We decided that she would go on to Yan’an, as she had planned to photograph Mao Zedong’s old wartime haunts, and that we would meet in New York.

On the morning of June 13, as I was packing, a Chinese porter brought a telegram from Rosenthal. We had gone to press with the Papers. I sat for a long time on our hotel bed, face in my hands, silently giving thanks. Punch had decided to publish despite all the risks. Rosenthal, backed by Reston and others, had stood like a rock throughout. He had insisted, as he and I had agreed to print not only the articles written by Times staffers based on the Papers but also the pertinent texts. The first installment was published that morning, six pages of news stories and documents. Publishing the texts of the classified documents had made the Times more vulnerable to government prosecution.

It was Sunday, and in the evening Audrey called from Yan’an over a creaky telephone line and shouted “Great” when I told her the news. I told her I still intended to return to New York. Tied up with the Pentagon Papers, Rosenthal would need me back at my job of running the news operation. On Tuesday morning I went to the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry to say good-bye. I was received by Ji Mingzhong, the official who had escorted me to the cable office to correct my dispatch on the trial of Yao Dengshan, and Ji’s superior, Ma Yuzhen, an urbane but very tough diplomat. I explained that my presence was required in New York because of the repercussions anticipated from publication of the Papers. Although the Chinese media had not, and would not, make mention of the Papers, senior Chinese officials were cognizant of the Papers controversy from Reference News, a compendium of monitored foreign news agency reports distributed to specified offices by the Chinese on a need-to-know basis.

Then Ji casually expressed surprise that I would not be going to Nanjing. His eyebrows arched, and he made no reply when I noted that this was the first time that I had been told, despite numerous requests, that I would be permitted to visit Nanjing. Obviously, for some reason, the Foreign Ministry did not want me to leave the country, and a Nanjing visit was now being offered as an inducement to delay my departure. I agreed to stay on for several days. I was eager return to Nanjing with Audrey, the city where we had courted, but there was also the other compelling reason. On our arrival in Peking, I had asked to see Premier Zhou Enlai. Now my hopes were aroused by the games the Information Department was playing with me. No American correspondent, other than Edgar Snow, had interviewed Zhou Enlai since 1949.

When I returned to our hotel, there was a message from Rosenthal: “Please keep in mind I would like you to return as soon as feasible stop Everything well under control stop Enormous reaction to Sheehan Project but our fan is in good working order Regards.”

I knew it was as close to a summons home as Rosenthal would send me. I read the reference to the fan as meaning that the Times was fighting off attacks as a consequence of its publication of the Papers. I ran out of the hotel, jumped into a taxi, and returned to the Foreign Ministry, catching Ji and Ma before they left for lunch, and told them I must leave the next day. That night, in a private dining room of the Peking Hotel, the Information Department gave a farewell dinner for me at which I completed negotiations for the future entry of Times correspondents into China. I then cabled Rosenthal to “keep fan running,” and the next morning at 6:30 A.M., I boarded a plane bound for Guangzhou en route to New York.

Not long in the air, my Chinese jet airliner was diverted to Changsha in Hunan Province. I was told there was engine trouble. We landed at an air force base in the midst of a training exercise for new Chinese fighter planes of the Russian MIG model. Hours later, we were transferred to another plane, which took us to Guangzhou. I was on the tarmac of the Guangzhou airfield, trudging wearily to the terminal, when I was separated from the other passengers and led into a small waiting room. As I sat sipping tea, I was introduced to a Mr. Yang of the Foreign Affairs Section of the Guangzhou Revolutionary Committee. Without preliminaries he said: “Premier Zhou Enlai would like to see you. Will you return to Peking?” I looked at him dazed, nodded and asked: “When?”

“The plane leaves at 5 o’clock,” Mr. Yang said. It was then 4:25 P.M. When I insisted that I must telephone the Times office in Hong Kong to report the postponement of my departure, I was driven at high speed to a hotel to make my call and then back to the airport. Never mind that the plane was delayed and disgruntled passengers were waiting on the tarmac. A China Travel agent led me to a counter to buy a return ticket to Peking. I grumbled only when asked to pay once again the excess baggage charge.

At the Peking airport I was greeted by Mr. Ji, and as I was going through the entry formalities, he asked me casually: “What would you like to do over the next several days? “ I looked at him in stunned disbelief. In my Walter Mitty comedy reveries aboard the plane, I imagined myself whisked from the airfield into the presence of Zhou Enlai for that exclusive interview during which he would impart some great headline-making news. Now, reality intruded, and I understood that I had been summoned to await the pleasure of the premier. Back at the Xin Jiao Hotel, my aspirations were dealt another blow. I encountered William Attwood, publisher of the Long Island newspaper Newsday, and his wife, Sim. They had been the guests of Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk at his Peking residence. Attwood and I took the measure of each other and decided that candor would serve us best. I told my story, and he disclosed that he was promised an audience with a responsible official if he delayed his departure. Yet more. Bob Keatley of the Wall Street Journal, who had been exploring Yan’an with his wife, Ann, was in a high state of excitement, with visions of his own exclusive interview with Zhou Enlai dancing in his head. He too had been persuaded to rush back to Peking. The Chinese provided a special plane for the Keatleys and persuaded Audrey to accompany them. She had been photographing the old Mao cave in Yan’an when it was suggested to her coyly by Yu Zhangjing, the interpreter assigned to us by the Foreign Ministry, that she telephone me in Peking, notwithstanding her assumption that I was in New York. By the next day, the Keatleys, Attwoods, and Toppings had been shepherded into the Xin Jiao Hotel and asked to stand by. We were told not to stray, since the summons from Zhou Enlai, who often worked through the night until 5 A.M., might come at any hour. We waited three days.

As I waited, I wrote and cabled on June 19 the first article of a major four-part series based on the five-week tour of China from Manchuria to the southern provinces which we had just completed. It was front-paged on June 25. I would have been disconcerted if I had known that the lead of the paper that day was a story under a four-column headline which said: “Times Asks Supreme Court to End Restraints on Its Vietnam Series.” I was unaware that publication of the Papers had stalled.

In my summary series for the Times I introduced the first article with these lead paragraphs:

PEKING, June 19—The doctrines of the Cultural Revolution have been translated into new Communist dogma. Under Mao Zedong that dogma has propelled China into a continuing revolution that is producing a new society, and a new “Maoist man.”

Relative stability, prosperity and a surface tranquility have been restored with the end of the convulsive mass conflicts and great purge generated by the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 as a power struggle between Chairman Mao and Liu Shaoqi, then head of state and since deposed amid charges that he had deviated from revolutionary principles. Mao believes that he has interrupted an evolution that was turning China into a society on the Soviet model characterized by a privileged bureaucracy and tendencies toward the rebirth of capitalism in industry and agriculture.

The gigantic Maoist thought remolding program has profound implications not only for the 800 million Chinese but also for the world. It is producing a highly disciplined, ideologically militant population that is taught that Mr. Mao is the sole heir of Marx and Lenin and the interpreter and defender of their doctrine and that each Chinese must be committed to fostering a world Communist society.

Even so, underlying tensions persist in the party hierarchy and at the grass roots as the ideological struggle to resolve what Mr. Mao describes as “contradictions among ourselves” goes forward. “We have won a great victory.” the leader says, echoed by his designated successor, Vice-Chairman Lin Biao. “But the defeated class still struggles. These people are still around and this class still exists. Therefore, we cannot speak of final victory, not even for decades.”

While I was at work three days later on my series, which was running front page in the Times, Ji phoned to say that the Toppings in company with the Keatleys and the Attwoods would dine with Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People at 6:15 P.M. As our motorcade sped through Tiananmen Square to the Great Hall of the People, we were not were aware that Henry Kissinger would be arriving secretly in Peking eighteen days hence. Nor were we yet aware that our interview was intended by Zhou Enlai as a stage setter for the visit of President Nixon.

The Chinese were awaiting Kissinger with some uncertainty as how to contend with him. At the conclusion of the dinner which Zhou gave for Ronning earlier in May in the Great Hall of the People, the premier asked my father-in-law to remain for a private talk. Seated in another reception room, the premier told Ronning of the impending visit of Henry Kissinger. “Can we trust Kissinger?” the premier asked. A critic of American policy in Vietnam, Ronning could only bring himself to reply: “All Chinese contacts with Americans are useful.” It was obvious that Zhou was looking to the meeting with Kissinger with the intention of reaching an understanding with Nixon that would serve as a counterweight in the sharpening dispute with Moscow. During the dinner Zhou had spoken of the possibility of war with the Soviet Union and said that the Chinese as a precaution were building air raid shelters nationwide. He said the work on the shelters began in the aftermath of a deadly clash in Manchuria on March 2, 1969, over the border demarcation on Zhenbao (“Treasure”) Island in the Ussuri River. Zhou unhesitatingly invited Audrey to report his remarks about the confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Ronning did not share with Audrey or me the information given to him by Zhou in confidence about the Kissinger visit. In the days immediately preceding our dinner with Zhou Enlai, Chinese officials had casually questioned us about Kissinger, asking about his background, his personality, and influence. We had become so inured to Chinese curiosity about American leaders that it did not occur to us that the visit of a presidential envoy was imminent. There was no reason to assume that was in the offing. There had been no slacking in the Chinese press of attacks on the United States, especially on the central issue of Taiwan. The Seventh Fleet was still patrolling the Taiwan Straits. There were American troops on the island, their bases being used for support of the war in Vietnam.

The Chinese maneuvers which brought Kissinger to Peking were put into play as early as November 1968 when Zhou Enlai proposed a meeting in Warsaw with delegates of the incoming Nixon administration. The forum was to be the private ambassadorial talks which had begun in 1955 on settlement of outstanding issues between the two countries and had continued for 134 fruitless meetings, first in Geneva and then in Warsaw. The Zhou Enlai gambit was undertaken for a complex of reasons. The turbulent phase of the Cultural Revolution in which Zhou Enlai had been personally threatened was coming to an end, and he could safely turn his attention to foreign affairs. Peking was eager to extricate itself from the isolation into which it had blundered as a consequence of the militant revolutionary policies it had pursued abroad during 1964–65. Relations with the Soviet Union were rapidly deteriorating, and there was a deep concern that the Russians might do a repeat on the Chinese of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 in reaction to Peking’s ideological quarrels with Moscow and the border disputes. The Chinese also had been intrigued by an article under the title “Asia After Vietnam” in the October 1967 issue of Foreign Affairs under Nixon’s byline which stated that “taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside of the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.”

The initial Chinese probe of the Nixon Administration’s intentions foundered on February 18, 1969 two days before an exploratory meeting was to take place. Peking cancelled the meeting after lodging a complaint, charging that a Chinese diplomat, Liao Heshu, had been incited to defect by the Central Intelligence Agency. It was more likely that the Liao affair was used as a pretext for delaying the discussion until after the CCP’S Ninth Party Congress, which was summoned into session on April 1, 1969 to legitimize the shifts in power and policies stemming from the Cultural Revolution. Peking agreed the following year to resumption of the Warsaw talks for compelling reasons. The military confrontation with the Soviet Union continued to sharpen in 1969 in the aftermath of the border clashes in Central Asia and Manchuria. In February, Nixon offered to send a senior American official to Peking to discuss means of bettering relations. Then, on May 19, 1969, twenty-four hours before delegates were to meet in Warsaw, Peking once more canceled the session citing “the increasingly grave situation created by the United States government, which brazenly sent troops to invade Cambodia and expanded the war in Indochina.” The disruption was part of the price paid by the Nixon administration for mounting the military strike into Cambodia designed to root out North Vietnamese bases. However, in a few weeks time, while lending support to the ousted Cambodian regime of Prince Sihanouk, the Chinese let it be known that they would resume contacts at a suitable time. In the next months, Nixon sent a series of secret messages to Peking in which he persuaded the Chinese it was his intention to withdraw from Vietnam and that he was committed to normalizing relations with Peking.

This is where matters stood in the realms of high diplomacy when the six American innocents entered the Great Hall of the People. Surrounded by a cluster of officials, Zhou Enlai, erect and smiling, awaited us at the end of a thickly carpeted hallway. The premier wore a well-tailored gray tunic with a Mao emblem inscribed “Serve the People” above the left breast pocket, matching trousers, and brown sandals over black socks. His right arm, slightly stiff from an old injury, was held bent at his side. He was grayer and thinner than when I last saw him, but the bushy eyebrows were still bold and black. His finely boned features radiated an incandescent personality. My last view of him had been in July 1954 at the conclusion of the Geneva Conference when he went to the airport to say good-bye to Soviet foreign minister Molotov. He was impassive and unsmiling when he bid farewell to the burley Russian bound back to Moscow. At the conference Zhou had been the most dramatic figure, striding about wearing a long, narrow black coat and broad-brimmed black hat. At the Great Hall of the People, the premier led us into the Fujian Room, where we were to dine, notebooks on our laps. The brown and cream furnishings of the spacious room were dominated by a huge painting of a group of Chinese, their red banners fluttering, atop a Gansu mountain peak overlooking a cloud-shrouded valley. We were guided past an exquisite lacquer screen to a round table set with blue and white porcelain, silver knives and forks, ivory chopsticks, and an assortment of glasses for Chinese wine, beer, and the 120-proof maotai. Among the six officials accompanying the premier at the table were two interpreters, Ji Jiaozhu, a former Harvard student, and the American-born Nancy Tang. The two served as interpreters for both Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. Zhou revealed some understanding of English during the dinner conversation by reacting to our remarks before they were translated, and in several instances he corrected the interpreters in Chinese.

As we walked into the room, Zhou said to Audrey: “The last time you were here we had dinner with your father, Chester Ronning.” Then to me, smiling: “At that time she made use of the opportunity to note some words of opinion and wrote a story about it. It goes to show the prowess of a correspondent’s wife.” At the table he apologized for recalling me from Guangzhou, noting that I was hurrying home because of the Pentagon Papers. He compared publication of the Papers to the release by the State Department in 1949 of the White Paper on China, which reviewed U.S. involvement in the Chinese Civil War in the period 1944–49. “They published the White Paper on China to defend themselves, but it was great shock to the world,” the premier commented. When I said the Times had published the Papers despite the opposition of the government because we felt it was in the interest of the United States, Zhou commended the Times and raised his glass in a toast to the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.

“Can you all drink maotai?” Zhou asked as he did a ganbei, or bottoms-up, with the small glass. “Oh, yes,” I replied. “We believe when trade develops this will be one of your most successful exports.” “Well, we probably won’t be able to supply so much maotai,” Zhou said laughing, “because it is produced only in a certain locality.” He recalled that it was the Red Army during the Long March which found the Chishui River in Guizhou Province and discovered its waters were ideal for making the clear sorghum liquor. “This liquor won’t go to your head,” Zhou assured his dubious audience, “although you can light it with a match.”

The premier’s demeanor became cold and deliberate when inevitably we came to the central topic of the evening, Taiwan—the issue that had separated China and the United States for two decades—and he was asked if China intended to unite the island with the mainland by negotiation or force. At the farewell dinner given to me by the Information Department, I had contended—without getting a reply—that the American people would never be persuaded to favor Peking’s takeover of the island until they knew what the fate of the Taiwanese would be. There had been talk, I told them, in the United States of a bloodbath if the Communists occupied the island. Zhou now undertook to answer my question. In effect, he elaborated for the first time for publication what was to be the government’s long-term policy. Taiwan was to be united with the mainland by a policy of peaceful attraction. Although the Chinese government has never stated categorically that force would never be used, the policy as described by Zhou that night remains in effect.

Zhou began by saying that it was difficult to answer a question about the future of Taiwan if “one puts a time limit on it.” He elaborated: “In the first place, Taiwan is Chinese. Historically, it has been a province of China for a long time. Because of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, Taiwan was occupied following the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. But in 1945, at the conclusion of the Second World War, in accordance with the Potsdam and Cairo declarations, Taiwan was returned to the embrace of its motherland and once again became a province of China. Topping and Ronning were in Nanjing for our entry there. They saw the new replace the old in April 1949.” Zhou continued: “In January 1950, President Truman acknowledged these facts in a statement. Truman recalled that Taiwan had already been returned to China, that it was an internal Chinese affair, and that the United States had no territorial ambitions in regard to Taiwan. Truman said further the question between the mainland and Taiwan could be solved by the Chinese people themselves. Thus we can say that the position of the American government toward the new China was defined before the whole world. Then suddenly, in June 1950, the position was changed, and the Seventh Fleet was dispatched to the Taiwan Straits.”

Zhou was referring to the statement made by President Truman on June 27, two days after the North Korean invasion of the South. Altering the U.S. position, which previously had been unequivocally that Taiwan belonged to China, the president stated: “The determination of the future status of Formosa [Taiwan] must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations.” The Seventh Fleet took up position in the Taiwan Straits as Chen Yi was preparing his Third Army in the South China ports for an invasion of the island.

The premier asserted: “At that time, China had nothing to do with the Korean War. It was interference in China’s internal affairs.” (During the Korean War, Chinese troops did not cross the border into North Korea to engage advancing American troops until October 25, 1950.)

Now we demand that all American forces be withdrawn from Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits, that the United States respect the sovereign independence and territorial integrity of the People’s Republic of China and there be no interference in our internal affairs . . . As to how Taiwan will be returned to China and how it will be liberated that is our internal affair. Mr. Topping knows that when I was about to leave Nanking [in 1946], they asked if we would come back. I said we surely would. Since then we have returned to Nanjing. We will also return to Taiwan. It will not be all that difficult . If Taiwan returns to the motherland, the people will be making a contribution, so the motherland, far from exacting revenge on them, should reward them, and we will reward them.

In an obvious gesture to officials of the Chiang Kai-shek government on Taiwan, Zhou said:

You may know that we gave the last emperor of China, Pu Yi, his freedom in Peking as a free citizen. Unfortunately, he died three years ago, but his wife and younger brother, who is married to a Japanese, are still in Peking. Then there are the high-ranking officers of Chiang Kai-shek’s army who were captured during the Civil War. They are now in Peking and looked after well. So we can say, returning to the motherland, Taiwan will receive benefits, and not be harmed, and relations between the United States will be bettered. If American forces were withdrawn from Taiwan, and the Taiwan Straits, it would be glorious. This action would be acclaimed and friendship would result. Under these circumstances, the world would change.

At the conclusion of the dinner, the premier walked with us to the side door by which we had entered the Great Hall of the People and warmly bade us goodnight. Before the dinner, Ma Zhuzhen of the Information Department told me privately that at the end of the evening I would be handed the premier’s answers to a list of sixteen questions, many of which related to Taiwan, which I had submitted three weeks earlier appended to my request for an interview. As we waited on the steps of the Great Hall, I asked Ma for the written replies to my questionnaire, and he told me that he would contact me later in the evening. Near midnight as I was writing my dispatch, Ma telephoned: “The premier in his replies at dinner went much further than expected, and we see no point in giving you the written answers to your questions.” He also told me that what Zhou had said at dinner about Taiwan was to be considered to be of the greatest importance. Another surprise awaited me. We had agreed before dinner to allow Ma to check direct quotes against the Chinese transcript prepared by the Chinese secretary at the table. About 1 A.M. I went to the Foreign Ministry with my dispatch, only to be told that the copy would not be cleared until the next afternoon. Presumably Zhou wanted to see the quotes himself. All the dispatches were cleared the next day without any changes.

In Peking, the news that we had a “friendly conversation” with the premier was published in a six-line item at the bottom of the front page of People’s Daily, the official Chinese Communist newspaper. It was in the same format and space that was later assigned to the visit of Henry Kissinger.

The following morning Audrey and I boarded a plane for Guangzhou and the next day walked across the railway bridge at Lo Wu to a car that took us to Hong Kong en route to New York. Zhou Enlai was still very much in my mind. His features, since the advent of ping-pong diplomacy, had become the visage of China for many Americans. I found him to be the only one among the top leaders who had the stature, talent, and experience to negotiate an understanding with the United States after two decades of separation and hostility. The Shanghai Communiqué which Zhou did sign with President Nixon on February 18, 1972, was in keeping with the conditions he had outlined in our interview, specifically withdrawal of American troops from Taiwan and recognition that “there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” Implicitly, Zhou committed Peking to a policy of peaceful attraction of Taiwan. Yet when we met with Zhou in the Great Hall of the People, he was not wielding ultimate power in Peking, nor did he pretend to. Even at the time, as Kissinger embarked by a devious route for Peking from Pakistan, Zhou Enlai was being confronted with an internal crisis that might diminish his power.

Up until 1965, Zhou walked behind Liu Shaoqi, the head of state and heir apparent to Mao Zedong. When Liu was toppled, although Zhou had been in the forefront of the Cultural Revolution, he bowed to Mao’s designation of Lin Biao as his “closest comrade-in-arms and successor” and stood by dutifully as this commitment was written into the new party constitution at the Ninth Congress in April 1969. Thereafter, on ceremonial occasions, Zhou Enlai walked two or three steps behind Lin Biao.

Lin Biao preferred seclusion, like Mao, emerging with him only on important public occasions. I had glimpsed Lin during the welcoming ceremonies in Peking for President Ceauescu of Romania. He was a thin, frail-looking man, sixty-four years old, largely bald, which is unusual for a Chinese, with heavy black eyebrows and dark beard showing through pale skin. He wore a baggy army uniform as did his wife, Ye Qun, whom we saw at a banquet for the Romanian leader. Mao and Lin, closely associated since the Long March in the 1930s, were alike in many ways. They blended peasant earth-iness with the mystic qualities of a guerrilla leader, ascetic revolutionary, and ideologue with a world outlook, although they spoke no foreign language and had not traveled abroad except to the Soviet Union. Lin went to the USSR in late 1938 or early 1939, remaining three years for treatment of a battle wound and chronic tuberculosis. Given his age, only fourteen years junior to Mao, who was seventy-seven, and in poor health, some Chinese in Peking privately expressed doubt about the wisdom of relying on Lin Biao for the succession.

Although Lin was dubbed Mao’s “closest comrade-in-arms,” the Chairman entrusted daily management of the country to Zhou Enlai. Mao, the visionary, the ideologue, and the strategist, worked comfortably with Zhou, the pragmatist, the administrator, the tactician. While loyal to Mao during the Cultural Revolution, Zhou exercised a moderating influence in defiance of Jiang Qing’s extremism. He was instrumental in rescuing many of the old guard who had served China well, such as Chen Yi, from the purges inspired by Jiang Qing’s radicals. When the Red Guards were carrying on their destructive rampages in keeping with Lin Biao’s injunction to eliminate the “Four Olds,” Zhou Enlai safeguarded many of China’s treasured archaeological sites, imperial temples, and palaces.

In June, as we were leaving China, many in Peking were waiting to see whether Lin Biao and his military supporters, many of whom had served in his Fourth Field Army during the Civil War, would continue to tolerate a leadership constellation in which, although anointed as successor, Lin did not head the party or the government. An event was impending that would test the cohesion of the leadership. On New Year’s Day the Peking press had proclaimed 1971 as the important year in which “we are going to greet the Fourth National People’s Congress.”

In name, the NPC is China’s highest organ of state authority, but, in fact, it is a rubberstamp parliament controlled by the Communist Party. The importance of the Congress, which was to take place in the fall, the first since the Cultural Revolution, was that it would provide the platform for proclamation of the crucial decisions taken secretly by the party’s Central Committee. A new state constitution was to be approved to replace the 1954 constitution, denounced during the Cultural Revolution as a “bourgeois document.” The NPC had the authority to elect a new head of state to replace the purged Liu Shaoqi, and it was on this question that conflict within the ruling hierarchy was likely to erupt.

If he were to replace Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao would head the government and be the superior of Zhou Enlai. This would not only subordinate Zhou, but it would also put Lin Biao in charge of two of the three pillars of power in China, the government and the army, which he already controlled as defense minister. Once before, Mao had in effect yielded two pillars of power— control over the apparatus of both the party and the government—to a potential rival leader, Liu Shaoqi, and his collaborator, Deng Xiaoping. Liu was then instrumental in pushing Mao aside prior to the Cultural Revolution. It was uncertain that Mao would be willing to once more risk assigning so much power to another by giving Lin Biao control of both the government and the army.

In June, when I spoke to the diplomats who read the political tea leaves in Peking, I found they could only speculate as to the ambitions of Lin Biao and his comrades from the old Fourth Field Army. It was Jiang Qing and the other Maoists who saw ominous signs. Systematically, the army had expanded its administrative power in the provinces, forcing aside Jiang Qing’s radicals, and was now in effective control of the party apparatus on the local level. In Peking, at the center of power, the military was also strongly entrenched. Huang Yongsheng, the chief of the General Staff, was ranked fourth after Mao, Lin Biao, and Zhou Enlai in the Politburo. He had edged past Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, with whom he had quarreled during the Cultural Revolution when she had insisted on giving the radical Red Guards free rein. It was Lin Biao who had appointed Huang, his long-standing protégé, as chief of the General Staff.

The lines seemed drawn for a showdown between the Maoists and the military when the National People’s Congress convened. I would be in New York when the drama unfolded, knowing that the future of China would turn on the outcome.