I WRITE with sadness about the last exchanges I had with the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai. They took place about three months later than we had planned, and when they did, Zhou was on the way out of office, though we did not know it then.
As I have described in Chapter VIII, Zhou had agreed in late May and June to lend China’s weight to an American compromise proposal to end the war in Cambodia; the formula envisioned a cease-fire, an end of American bombing, and immediate negotiations with Prince Norodom Sihanouk to set up a coalition government under the Prince’s neutralist rule. Zhou would not have committed himself this far unless he had reason to believe that the Khmer Rouge could be brought to go along with the plan; and they could not have come to this uncharacteristic posture other than because our bombing had prevented the unconditional victory they sought. The scenario was to unfold once Sihanouk returned to Peking from a lengthy trip during the first week of July. I was to visit Peking in August 1973 for regular consultations and for a meeting with Sihanouk to begin a political dialogue.
A few days before Sihanouk’s return, Congress voted to prohibit all American military action in Indochina; we had to agree to cut off the Cambodian bombing by August 15. Our principal bargaining leverage was lost. The Khmer Rouge saw no reason to negotiate a cease-fire we had already legislated. Zhou Enlai, politically wounded at home by our failure, dropped the initiative with Sihanouk and pointedly postponed my trip to August 16, the day after the bombing halt. It was a slap in the face and Zhou could have no doubt I would refuse. I did so on July 25.
After that misfortune, little passed between Peking and Washington. Both sides were frustrated; each sulked about the other’s reaction. And Zhou’s difficulties at home were mounting. There were long delays in our exchanges attempting to set up another visit. The Chinese, preoccupied with a National Party Congress, let us wait until August 17 before accepting September 6. But on August 22, my nomination as Secretary of State was announced. Since I could not travel while my confirmation was pending, I postponed my visit to the end of October. On the day after my nomination, I sent a personal message to Zhou saying that I considered Chinese-American relations “a cornerstone of US foreign policy.” I informed him that I was calling Ambassador David Bruce home from Peking to help with the transition to my new assignment. Bruce had been instructed to request an appointment with the Premier and with Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua, then acting head of the Foreign Ministry, to obtain their assessment of the state of Chinese-American relations.
On August 29, Qiao received Bruce at the Foreign Ministry. He made no reference to Zhou except to convey the Premier’s congratulations on my appointment. The Chinese “welcomed” my forthcoming visit. But pending it they had in effect nothing to communicate. Qiao considered the development of our relations to be “normal.” The Liaison Offices set up in each other’s capitals were creating an objective reality. In other words, there was no reason to be concerned; our relations now had their own dynamics. To be sure, on many aspects of these relations I had my own views and “the Chinese had theirs” — an oblique reference, no doubt, to my bitter response when Zhou broke off the talks on Cambodia. (“This is the first time in the development of our new relationship that the Chinese word has not counted.”) But Qiao referred to the differences primarily to emphasize the underlying community of interests. The new style introduced into diplomacy by the Sino-American relationship and the Shanghai Communiqué, he said, was “not to attempt to hide our differences but to admit them frankly.” In Bruce’s laconic words: “Although Ch’iao [Qiao] was as usual polite and amiable it was clear that he had no desire to prolong a conversation that was degenerating into pleasantries.”
There were many explanations for Chinese aloofness. They were undoubtedly smarting at my harsh reaction to their cancellation of the Cambodian initiative. The fact was, after all, that it was not the Chinese who had changed their minds but the United States Congress that had destroyed the premise on which the negotiations were based. The Chinese were surely confused by our domestic turmoil and no longer sure how steady or reliable a partner we would prove to be. And the collapse of the Cambodian negotiations accelerated the internal attacks on Zhou Enlai, who apparently found himself accused of having been taken in while we sought to play off the Soviet Union against China.
During September we noted confusing signals in statements that senior Chinese diplomats were making in various capitals around the world. For the first time in our experience, the hitherto coherent and uniform line was missing. This almost surely reflected an internal struggle in China that made Chinese representatives unsure of which side was going to prevail and caused them to adjust their pronouncements to their estimates of the probable outcome. Some claimed that US–Chinese relations were “stalemated,” largely on the issue of Taiwan. Others hinted that progress would be easy if only the United States recognized the “principle” of one China — which sounded more like a face-saving formula than an operational policy. Since there had been no recent discussion of Taiwan with us and surely no controversy, the issue must have been raised as part of a domestic power struggle over the value of the rapprochement with the United States. We heard a report that the reason for the postponement of my August visit was that Zhou Enlai lacked the support of the Central Committee for his policy and needed to build up his domestic base first. This was reinforced by the sudden transfer of one of Zhou’s principal aides to the ambassadorship in Ottawa because he allegedly criticized the United States for trying to manipulate the Sino-Soviet rivalry. All this, it must be stressed, became clear only in retrospect. At the time all we noted were confusing signals.
Another puzzling phenomenon was the “anti-Confucian campaign” building in the Chinese media. There were several schools of thought in the West as to the purpose of attacking a philosopher dead nearly 2,500 years, however influential he had been in shaping Chinese culture and turning the state into an all-pervasive educational institution. The Aesopian indirectness in Chinese media gave few clues; there was even a dispute among our analysts whether the campaign was pro- or anti-Zhou in its aim. Considering that Confucius was an aristocrat whose style and philosophy of restraint had dominated Chinese public life for so many centuries, the weight of the evidence suggested that Zhou was the target. The brilliant China scholar on the NSC staff, Richard H. Solomon, called my attention to a significant article in the Chinese party journal Red Flag in November, criticizing an “aristocrat” of ancient times who had favored a policy of making friends with “distant countries” to deal with menacing neighbors but found himself sitting on a volcano.I
Even Zhou Enlai seemed to be seized by doubts. He told one visiting diplomat of his uncertainty about how US–Chinese relations would develop in the future. If the two superpowers reached an accord, Zhou felt, the China card would not have as much value for the United States as it did before. But Zhou Enlai was too astute to rail against reality. It was clearly not in the American interest to side with one of the Communist giants against the other; it was even more against our interest to permit the Soviet Union to overwhelm or to humiliate Peking. Therefore Zhou added what sounded like a non sequitur. Despite his doubts he would continue to improve relations with the United States. But there were objective limits to what China could do, Zhou indicated; on Cambodia it could not support American policies, however much importance it attached to its ties with Washington.
By early October, Chinese internal controversies seemed to us (erroneously) to be on the way to being ended. Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua arrived in New York as head of the Chinese delegation to the United Nations General Assembly to deliver the standard Chinese fire-breathing speech and (on October 3) to join me in the by-now equally standard amiable dinner in my suite at the Waldorf Towers.
Qiao was full of good cheer. He thought his speech at the UN had “rendered [us] quite a bit of help,” which given his revolutionary rhetoric was not self-evident to me.
“Not everywhere,” I objected politely.
“If I rendered you help everywhere, then I could not do it anywhere,” replied Qiao, who was a Hegelian scholar. He used this occasion to clear the books on Cambodia. Speaking “as a philosopher,” Qiao said he had come to the conclusion that we had both erred in getting involved with Cambodia — a rare admission of Chinese fallibility. Even more striking was his assertion that China was basically indifferent as to who won in Cambodia:
Whether Cambodia turns red, pink, black, white or what, what difference will this make in the end for world history? The best way out is for neither of us to get involved in Cambodia. You have some difficulties which we do not have, I know. Your difficulties with Congress and with the press.
In other words, China absolved the Administration of blame for the fiasco; it was the fault of the Congress and the media. I had suggested that Chinese and North Vietnamese interests were not the same with respect to Cambodia. Qiao evaded this by putting his Hegelian training to good use once again: “I would not say that it is a question of our interests being different, but rather that our circumstances are not the same.” It was a distinction without a difference, which admitted that there were clashing perceptions between Hanoi and Peking. But the clever Qiao also preempted any American temptation to lure China again into the Cambodian bog. It did not really matter, he said. China had not known anything about Cambodia before 1954; it was beyond its historical horizon — the implication was that China would cultivate its traditional indifference. The best course for both China and the United States was to forget about it, averred the Chinese Foreign Minister:
The Cambodian problem is in some respects the same to both of us. You have not asked for our help, and we have not asked for yours. What I wish to emphasize is that, considering the overall situation, the Cambodian issue is very definitely only a side issue.
Peking, the fount of revolutionary orthodoxy, was clearly washing its hands of Cambodia. It expressed no preference as to the outcome; it subjected our policy to no harangues. The Chinese as shrewd analysts could have very few doubts indeed about the future course of events in Cambodia; nor could they fail to understand that a collapse of Cambodia would precipitate the same result in South Vietnam. They had miscalculated our perseverance and our geopolitical insight. They had thought that the United States would understand the impact of defeat on its global position. Therefore they believed we would stay the course in Indochina, sustaining the existence of four independent states in the former French colonial territory, the outcome that suited Peking’s national interest best. That would have avoided one of China’s strategic nightmares: the emergence on its southern border of a powerful unified state controlling all of Indochina and closely allied with the Soviet Union. Now that our domestic divisions had brought the hitherto-unthinkable into view, China’s only course was to deprecate the importance of the almost certain outcome without really believing it. Zhou Enlai saw no sense in compounding his geopolitical setback by having it encumber the overall relationship with the United States. Qiao’s remarks suggested that we understand each other’s dilemmas on Indochina; they must not be permitted to magnify the disaster by impeding the overriding common objective of containing Soviet military power.
So the meeting ended on a conciliatory and friendly note. Qiao advised a more “two-handed” American policy in the Middle East, dealing evenly with both Israel and the Arab states; as friends “now for quite a number of years, we can talk frankly,” he said. He might be obliged to criticize some of our policies from time to time; he would as a friend never criticize me as an individual. Apparently the struggle in Peking had ended with a victory for the line of conciliation. The switches had been thrown in the direction of continued elaboration of Chinese-American rapprochement.
Before my visit to Peking — delayed yet again to November by the Mideast war — there was one more opportunity for a show of goodwill. Its locus ironically was Cambodia, the country that would not let us go, however the Chinese and we might wish to minimize its significance. On October 15, Huang Zhen, Chief of Peking’s Liaison Office in Washington, brought me a message from Zhou Enlai: Prince Sihanouk’s mother was gravely ill in Phnom Penh; Sihanouk wanted to see her once more before she died. He promised not to make use of the Queen Mother in his political struggle. On October 16, I replied that we had made the necessary arrangements: The Queen Mother and her doctors could leave for China on a special Air France flight. To Sihanouk’s credit, he meticulously kept his promise not to exploit his mother’s presence in China.
I reached China toward the end of my round-the-world flight. Bhutto had seen me off at Islamabad airport with a flattering parade of horse guards normally reserved for heads of state. Bhutto explained on television that given the number of “nincompoops” occupying that office who had visited Pakistan, it was only fair to the horses that they get to see an intelligent example of the human species.
We retraced the route of my secret journey. Once again we crossed the Himalayas; Zhou had sent almost the same welcoming party to escort me into China. One can, of course, never repeat an experience; the thrill of the unknown could not be recaptured. And as Secretary of State I was surrounded by much more machinery than on that essentially solitary venture. But this was balanced by the knowledge that in the little more than two years since the first journey, we had built solidly. We were visiting a country that shared a comparable view of our major security problem and whose leaders possessed an acute insight into world affairs.
I arrived for my sixth visit to Peking to an extraordinarily warm welcome, late Saturday afternoon, November 10, 1973. Premier Zhou Enlai greeted us in the Great Hall of the People prior to a banquet for almost two hundred guests (modest by Chinese standards). Zhou and I had already met informally, with only a few advisers each, for about half an hour. Zhou congratulated me on my “whirlwind diplomacy” in the Middle East — the term “shuttle diplomacy” not yet having been invented. He urged me to convey his good wishes to President Nixon (a hint that Watergate had not altered China’s high regard for him) and his admiration for the resolution shown during the October alert. He applauded our efforts to reduce Soviet influence in the Arab world. He confessed that he had originally thought that we had missed the opportunity represented by Sadat’s expulsion of Soviet personnel. He now understood our strategy to wait for a propitious time when decisive action was possible.
With that Zhou escorted me into dinner, which for protocol reasons was hosted by Foreign Minister Ji Pengfei. And in Chinese fashion, everything was orchestrated to suggest approval and cooperation. For the first time on one of my visits a military band was playing (it had, of course, during Nixon’s), alternating American and Chinese songs. The Foreign Minister’s toast applauded the progress in our relationship, mentioning particularly the Liaison Offices and expressing confidence that normalization would be achieved. My response proved that I was loath to let go of a good line. For the fourth time on my six trips I referred to the fact that China had once appeared to us as a mysterious country but was so no longer. Zhou, who had first put that idea forward, hid his boredom behind an indulgent smile.
The friendly atmosphere set the tone for the rest of the visit. Our discussions were conducted at two levels. A group of experts reviewed bilateral problems, especially the expansion of exchanges and trade and a residue of the period of conflict: the unfreezing of blocked Chinese assets in return for a settlement of claims of American citizens. On previous visits we had kept the State Department personnel occupied with technical issues while I conducted political talks. Now that I was Secretary of State, we no longer needed to play such games. But the procedure had meanwhile proved efficient and was therefore continued — proving, I suppose, that some bureaucratic maneuvers can even have substantive merit.
Following the now well-established practice the heart of the visit was a detailed review of the international situation by Zhou and me, together with our senior associates. My opening comment — that we had developed between us a habit of candor, honesty, and long-range thinking — was not a diplomatic courtesy; it had, in fact, become the key to the Chinese-American relationship at a point when few concrete results were achievable and our bonds depended on intangibles. Our ties were cemented not by formal agreements but by a common assessment of the international situation. The media, which for the first time had accompanied me to China, tended to judge the visit in terms of progress on Taiwan. Zhou understood that what was then possible on Taiwan was not desirable, because it would make US–Chinese ties controversial in both countries, though for obvious reasons of Chinese domestic politics he could not say so. Most of our conversations, as usual, traced our shared analysis of the world situation, though for the equally obvious reason of Soviet sensitivities we could not announce that fact either. So what was perhaps the most cordial of all my visits to China took place against a backdrop of media comment on a stalemate in our relationship.
In contrast to my February visit and to what we knew of China’s internal debates, Zhou did not raise the issue of the US–Soviet relationship. Nor did he inquire, as he had earlier in the year, whether our policy was to “push the ill waters eastward.” Perhaps he had won this particular internal debate; perhaps, more likely, his domestic position had so weakened that he did not dare legitimize the arguments of his critics by raising questions about them with me.
So it happened that, for the first time, I volunteered an analysis of our strategy toward the Soviet Union. It added little to what I had told him nine months earlier (see Chapter III). Nor could it. After all, strategies do not change every few months, and if they do, it undermines confidence. Statesmen prize steadiness and reliability in a partner, not a restless quest for ever-new magic formulas.
I chose to meet head-on the conventional criticisms of détente. I did not doubt, I said, that the Soviet Union sought to use a period of relaxation of tensions to erode the unity of the West and to weaken its defense. This only meant that the Soviet leaders had purposes of their own, as was to be expected in the policy of a great power. We, in turn, thought that time was on our side. We could stand a relaxation of tensions better than the Soviet system, which seemed to depend on an artificial sense of crisis. The disintegrating tendencies in the Soviet bloc already evident in Hungary and Czechoslovakia would inevitably recur. I reminded Zhou that in my Pacem in Terris speech on October 8 I had warned that we would not permit détente to undermine our relationship with friendly nations, and that we would resist any attempts by the Soviet Union to use international crises to expand its influence:
When aggressive action occurs, we will act decisively, and if necessary brutally, but we require the prior demonstration that we have been provoked. And I think we have proved this in our handling of the Middle East crisis.
Zhou did not challenge these propositions. Either he had been persuaded or, more likely, thought our policy too settled to be altered by debate. He was baffled by the uncertain attitude of our European allies. He could not understand their ambivalence either about the alert or about my trip to the Middle East. After all, he said, China had not been consulted about the alert either, yet it had applauded our action. It was symptomatic of the strained state of US–European relations (see Chapter XVI) that I replied without an excess of generosity, if accurately:
If you want to play for high stakes with very little risk, then you are likely to be in a continued state of dissatisfaction. The secret dream of our Western allies in the Middle East is to restore their position of 1940 without any risk or effort on their part and therefore, to the extent that we are more active, there is a vague feeling of jealousy and uneasiness.
Moreover, European leaders had become used to posing as mediators between East and West. They pretended to their publics that they were more peace-loving than the United States, secure in the knowledge that we would continue to hold the ring against the Soviet Union:
[E]ach of them faces the problem that for domestic reasons he has to say one thing while deep down he understands that what we are doing is essentially correct. Therefore, they very often, particularly after the event is already over, take a public position which is at variance [with] their understanding of the real situation.
A more flexible American policy deprived European leaders of this luxury. It forced them to take their own defense more seriously and to assume responsibility for their own proposals. In another session on the same topic the next day, I said:
[I]f in these efforts we keep slightly to the left of the West Europeans, this is a means to prevent them from going further because then they will be afraid we will make a separate arrangement with the Soviet Union and that will worry them sufficiently so that they start thinking about their own defense.
Zhou nodded understanding. But he raised a point that over time proved unanswerable: “[A]s for this point, the people would not be able to comprehend it.” This was indeed our dilemma. If we were to sustain prolonged crises, we had to demonstrate our peaceful intentions to our public. To maintain allied unity, we could not permit our European associates to claim a monopoly on détente. But if we went too far down that road, we might confuse our public about Soviet purposes or start a race to Moscow among our allies. The Watergate era proved inhospitable to a policy based on such complicated maneuvers. Nor has the West as a whole squared the circle at this writing; yet its cohesion and purposefulness, its security and its self-confidence, will ultimately depend on its ability to do so.
Over the course of the next few days, Zhou and I systematically reviewed a wide range of international issues. Zhou had correctly analyzed our basic Middle East strategy before we arrived. I told him on November 11 that the significance of the six-point plan — which happened to be signed by Egypt and Israel that very day — resided not in its specific terms, important as they were, “but that it was negotiated between Egypt and the United States without the Soviet Union.” Zhou had already grasped the point: “I had thought of toasting you on that last night, but I was afraid the correspondents would hear us.” I explained our strategy with respect to the Geneva Conference: We would use the plenary sessions for the formal reiteration of the familiar; the real negotiations would take place under our aegis outside the conference on a bilateral basis between the various Arab countries and Israel.
With respect to Indochina I repeated our policy toward Sihanouk:
[W]e are not, in principle, opposed to Sihanouk. In many of his private statements and public statements, he seems to be under the misapprehension that the United States government is, in principle, opposed to him. That is absolutely incorrect. If he could return to Cambodia in a position of real independence for himself, we would be very interested in him as a leader. We are not interested in him if he is a captive of one particular faction that is simply using him for a very brief period of time in order to gain international recognition.
But Zhou, once burned, would not get involved again. He replied that Cambodia could not be discussed except in the context of all of Indochina, and in that case, we should devote an entire session to it later on during my visit. In fact, he did not return to the subject except to tell me that his conversations with North Vietnamese leaders indicated they had “no intention of launching a major offensive now” — a judgment that, by a strict definition of “major” and “now,” proved correct.
Zhou abandoned his passive role only on Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Zhou’s analysis, the Soviets after their expulsion from Egypt had made Iraq the pivot of their Middle East policy. The United States needed to take great care to prevent radical Iraq from achieving hegemony in the Persian Gulf; the Shah of Iran, in contrast, was a farsighted leader who understood the world situation — illustrating once again that for Peking geopolitics took precedence over ideology. As for Afghanistan, Zhou was gravely concerned about the coup that had brought Mohammed Daoud to power. The officers close to Daoud were pro-Soviet; we probably had not yet seen the last of Afghan upheavals. Afghan irredentism against neighboring Pakistan and Iran, even if not Soviet-inspired, would serve Soviet designs. It would weaken Pakistan and Iran and give Moscow a corridor to the Indian Ocean. The United States should strengthen Pakistan, which found itself in dire peril.
Unfortunately, Zhou and I, however much we respected each other, had diametrically opposite problems. Zhou represented a country capable of a powerful intellectual analysis but without the physical means to implement it. I was the foreign minister of a country that had the physical means and shared the geopolitical analysis but in post-Vietnam, Watergate conditions lacked the domestic consensus to execute its conceptions. Much as I agreed with Zhou’s recommendations, I knew there was no chance of Congressional approval of a serious effort to strengthen Pakistan. Military assistance was out of vogue; the predominant conviction in the Congress was that India was more important to us and would be irritated by a military relationship with Pakistan. The best we could do, I told Zhou, was to strengthen Iran to back up Pakistan. Thus the Shah’s role as protector of his neighbors was impelled in part by our internal disarray.
By all standards of ordinary diplomatic exchange, the dialogue with Zhou Enlai was of a high order. But those of my colleagues who had been with me on previous visits, especially Winston Lord, noticed that the old bite and sparkle were missing. Zhou asked penetrating, clarifying questions; he made intelligent comments on our presentations. And yet something was missing. For the first time he avoided the long, brilliant analyses that had made previous encounters so stimulating intellectually. Had he lost authority? Or were our approaches so comparable that it was no longer necessary?
Zhou seemed uncharacteristically tentative — as if he knew he needed to plant as many seeds as possible on this visit without being sure that he would be there for the harvest. He seemed eager to remove Taiwan as a rallying point for the anti-American faction in Peking. He listened patiently while I explained the impossibility of the “Japanese formula” for Taiwan — whereby the United States would have to break diplomatic relations with Taipei as a condition for normalization with Peking. I suggested that perhaps normalization was possible short of the Japanese formula so long as the United States recognized “the principle of one China.” Zhou did not reject this approach. To my astonishment, he asked me the next day whether I had a precise formula for it. It seemed almost like a replay of the exchanges that had established the Liaison Offices. Zhou even included a sentence in the communiqué to the effect that normalization required that the United States recognize the “principle” of one China — something that had never been at issue. We were never to find out what exactly Zhou had in mind, for he was removed from office or incapacitated before we had a chance to learn what the phrase meant in practice.
In this mood of almost anxious goodwill, the group dealing with bilateral issues made considerable progress. There was agreement to expand the staffs and the functions of the Liaison Offices. Additional cultural exchanges were arranged; trade was increased. The claims and assets issues approached a solution — though Zhou could not avoid pointing out that our threat of legal action to vindicate claims was empty: How could one sue a government one did not recognize? Yet strangely enough, all this progress on what is normally the standard fare of diplomacy made us slightly uneasy. We could not tell why Zhou seemed so eager to get things settled; he did not supply, as was his wont, the rationale or the ultimate objective. One was put in mind of a brilliant, slightly stifling summer day whose beauty is the harbinger of a distant thunderstorm.
THAT this time the authoritative line on foreign policy would not be laid down by Zhou Enlai became clear on Monday, November 12, when late in the afternoon we were invited to see Chairman Mao Zedong. The summons came as peremptorily as it had on all previous encounters with the Chairman, in the midst of a regular review session. We traveled in Chinese cars, I with Zhou, along the now-familiar route to the simple residence in the Imperial City where Mao lived. The entrance hall with its Ping-Pong table and the booklined study with its semicircle of easy chairs had become almost familiar. But one could never become accustomed to that incarnation of willpower who greeted us with his characteristic mocking, slightly demonic smile. Mao looked better than I had ever seen him, joking with my companions David Bruce and Winston Lord about Bruce’s age, Lord’s youth, and his own seniority over both of them. He was eighty.
All this was standard. What was new was that Mao, while continuing the elliptical Socratic dialogue of my first two encounters with him, substituted precision for his usual characteristic allusions. On this occasion Mao would not leave it to Zhou to give texture to his indirections; he would take over Zhou’s role of articulating policy. He was not content with indicating a general direction; he intended to fill in the road map. He began by asking what Zhou and I had been discussing.
“Expansionism,” replied Zhou, making clear that containing the Soviet Union remained the top priority for China.
“Who’s doing the expanding, him?” inquired Mao, pointing at me — as if all this were new to him and Zhou had not been reporting daily.
“He started it,” answered Zhou, “but others have caught up.” Mao went along cheerfully with Zhou’s implication that the Soviets were now the principal threat, but he used it to discourage any undue sense of danger that might tempt accommodation. Soviet expansionism, he retorted, was “pitiful”; the Soviets’ courage did not match their ambitions, as had been demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis and America’s recent alert. He illustrated his contempt for Soviet leaders once again by the story of his encounter in 1969 with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, who had come uninvited to Peking airport to discuss the easing of Sino-Soviet tensions:
I said that I originally said this struggle was going to go on for ten thousand years. On the merit of his coming to see me in person, I will cut it down by one thousand years. [Laughter] And you must see how generous I am. Once I make a concession, it is for one thousand years.
And then there was another time [a Romanian official] came also to speak on behalf of the Soviet Union. This time I again made a concession of a thousand years. [Laughter] You see, my time limit is becoming shorter and shorter.
And the fifth time the Romanian President Ceauşescu came again — that was two years ago — and he again raised the issue, and I said “this time no matter what you say, I can make no more concessions.” [Laughter]
Committed now to a struggle of eight thousand years, the Chairman saw no point in tactical maneuvers. American diplomacy depended too much on “shadowboxing,” he said; his strategy was based on more direct blows. Of course, it was also true that he had no choice; a million Soviet troops right up against the Chinese border discouraged thoughts of flexibility. But I saw no sense in arguing tactics. I said that however different our tactics we had proved our determination to resist challenges. On that point he and I could meet. He replied: “I believe in that. And that is why your recent trip to the Arab world was a good one.”
It turned out that Mao’s principal concern was not our Soviet policy but our domestic situation, specifically Watergate. What good was a strategy of containment if at the same time we sapped our capacity to implement it by our domestic divisions? He simply could not understand the uproar over Watergate; he contemptuously dismissed the whole affair as a form of “breaking wind.” The incident itself was “very meager, yet now such chaos is being kicked up because of it. Anyway we are not happy about it.” He saw no objective reasons for an assault on a President who had done a good job:
[I]t seems that the number of unemployed has been cut down by an amount and the U.S. dollar is relatively stable. So there doesn’t seem to be any major issue. Why should the Watergate affair become all exploded in such a manner?
It was not possible to explain to the absolute ruler of the Middle Kingdom the finer points of a constitutional system of checks and balances, which placed even the highest officials under the rule of law. At the same time, Mao had a point. He was not concerned with the intrinsic merits of our domestic drama. Watergate interested him primarily for its impact on our fitness to resist Soviet expansionism. And with respect to that, the geopolitical consequences threatened to dwarf the original offense.
Zhou had avoided articulating Chinese anxieties about our long-term policy toward the Soviet Union; he had not raised the dreaded US–Soviet condominium. Mao was not so delicate, though he was far too proud to seek reassurance directly. He chose the elliptical route of implying that there might be secret arrangements between us and Moscow. Once upon a time, he said, he had doubted our ability to keep secrets. Now he was confident that we could do so; my first visit to China had, after all, remained secret. And finally his real point: “And another situation would be your recent dealing with the Soviet Union.” There were no secret dealings with the Soviets, and I said so; we would not give a hostage to the Kremlin by conducting talks that, if leaked, might leave us isolated. Peking was being fully briefed about any discussions.
I knew well enough that my reassurance was no more credible than protestations of affection to a person racked by jealousy. The very insecurity that engenders the suspicion discounts the value of the assurance. Still, Mao chose to treat my remarks at face value, using them as a point of departure for a brilliant analysis of the overall strategic position of the Soviet Union.
Moscow, according to Mao, looked strong but it was actually overextended. It had to be wary of Japan and China; it had to keep an eye on South Asia and the Middle East; and it faced another front in Europe, where it had to maintain forces larger than those facing China. In fact, only a fourth of the entire Soviet military forces were deployed against China — something of an underestimate. Hence, Mao concluded, the Soviet Union could not attack China “unless you let them in first and you first give them the Middle East and Europe so they are able to deploy troops eastward.” And the converse was, of course, also true. We were thus the key to global security. The real danger was the potential victims’ lack of understanding of the requirements of the geopolitical balance. If all those threatened by Soviet aggression cooperated, each of them was safe and the Soviets would confront increasing difficulties; if they did not, each was in peril. In other words, containment.
Mao then reviewed the attitudes of various European countries in these terms. It was astonishing how much the aged leader knew about the domestic politics of faraway countries and how he could move inexorably to his conclusions without a note in front of him. It was Mao’s core conviction that while our European allies were wavering for various reasons, they would not in the end abandon their vital interests by succumbing to Soviet blandishment. It was important, therefore, not to confuse temporarily irritating tactics with long-term trends. We must stick to a firm line even if some of our friends seemed hesitant, and in time they would gain courage from our leadership.
Mao did not put forward these ideas in a single presentation. Instead, he spoke in lapidary sentences each of which required physical effort to articulate. Perhaps his stroke-induced infirmity imposed the need for the dialogue form to give him the chance to regroup. Perhaps he had always preferred to involve his opposite number in a dialogue. Whatever the reason, Mao spoke in short paragraphs, each of which tended to end in a query that implied its own answer — indeed, permitted no other conclusion — yet nevertheless forced me to become a partner in the journey to his intellectual destination.
Having established the basic analysis of the international situation in about an hour, Mao suddenly turned to the issue of Taiwan, and then not to state a challenge but to hint obliquely at a solution. He had heard that the three Baltic states still had embassies in the United States, he said. I affirmed it. “And the Soviet Union did not ask you first to abolish those embassies before they established diplomatic relations with you?” That was not exactly accurate, since at the time relations were established the Soviet Union recognized the Baltic states. But if Mao was implying that relations with Taiwan were no necessary obstacle to normalization with China, I saw no reason to draw fine historical distinctions; so I assented to his proposition. Zhou helpfully chipped in that though maintaining diplomatic relations with the United States, the Baltic states did not have access to the United Nations. Did all this mean, I wondered, that China might acquiesce in a separate legal status for Taiwan, contenting itself with excluding Taiwan from the UN?
Mao veered in another direction that hinted at the same thing in a more convoluted way. A believer in the unity of opposites, he began by affirming a contradiction. As a matter of principle we had to sever relations with Taiwan if we wanted diplomatic relations with Peking. Nor did he believe in peaceful transition; after all, Taiwan’s leaders were “a bunch of counter-revolutionaries.”
But this was not an insoluble dilemma. He was in no hurry about implementing his unshakable principles: “I say that we can do without Taiwan for the time being, and let it come after one hundred years. Do not take matters on this world so rapidly. Why is there need to be in such great haste?” At the same time, relations between Peking and Washington need not march to the slow drumbeat of internal Chinese disputes; there was no need to wait so long: “As for your relations with us, I think they need not take a hundred years. . . . But that is to be decided by you. We will not rush you.”
What did all this mean? Was it another hint that normalization could be separated from the issue of Taiwan? And that the rate of normalizing relations was up to us? At a minimum, it suggested that China would not attempt to swallow Taiwan quickly afterward; certainly, that the Taiwan issue would not be an obstacle to our relations, that contrary to public perception we were under no pressure with respect to it. I am inclined to believe that like Zhou on the day before, Mao was indirectly inviting a proposal that combined the principle of a unified China with some practical accommodation to the status quo. We cannot know, because the domestic situation in China changed too rapidly to permit an exploration of all the implications of Mao’s remarks. And for the immediate future it made little difference. Mao had made clear that for “a hundred years” China would draw no political conclusions from his general principles. And lest we miss the point — one could never be too sure about Westerners’ acuteness — he compared the situation in Taiwan with that in Hong Kong and Macao, where China was in no hurry either (and had, in fact, diplomatic relations with the countries “occupying” them). Taiwan was not an important issue, he said: “The issue of the overall international situation is an important one.”
Taiwan being thus disposed of, not only with no hint of pressure but with its explicit renunciation, Mao turned to the Middle East, embedding Taiwan, as it were, between two treatises on how to contain Soviet power in different areas of the world. He demonstrated the attention he paid to relations with America by recounting his reaction to a conversation I had had with the head of the Chinese Liaison Office on the day of the alert. The unfortunate Huang Zhen had been taken by surprise when I briefed him; he therefore responded with boilerplate Chinese support of the Arab position. Mao took pains to put the conversation in perspective. Huang Zhen had been correct in mentioning Chinese support of the Arab goals, but “he didn’t understand the importance of US resistance to the Soviet Union.” China “welcomed” our “putting the Soviet Union on the spot, and making it so that the Soviet Union cannot control the Middle East.” In other words, containment had priority over all other considerations — including Chinese courtship of the Arab countries.
Mao then launched on another review of the strengths and weaknesses of various states in the area, almost country by country. He stressed the importance of Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan as barriers to Soviet expansion. He was uneasy about Iraq and South Yemen. He urged us to increase our strength in the Indian Ocean. He was the quintessential Cold Warrior; our conservatives would have been proud of him. All this without notes or any prompting by his colleague, who maintained a deferential silence.
Mao concluded his tour d’horizon by turning to Japan. He applauded my decision to spend a few days in Tokyo on my way home. Japan must not feel neglected by the United States; Japan was inherently insecure and sensitive. He would see to it that China did not force Tokyo to choose between the United States and China. That might polarize Japanese politics; it would surely enhance Japanese insecurity and might give rise to traditional nationalism. “Their first priority is to have good relations with the United States,” he said approvingly. “We only come second.” The apostle of world revolutions would do his best to keep Japanese priorities that way; he did not want a free-floating Japan playing off other countries against each other, for that would whet chauvinistic appetites. We should do our part by staying in close touch with Japan. As one of the architects of the first “Nixon shock” — my secret visit to China — I personally had an important task: “They are afraid of you and you should try to lessen their fear.” The incongruity was almost palpable: China’s enthusiastic support for the US–Japanese alliance was a complete reversal of the suspicions displayed during my first visit. Barely two years after establishing contact, the grizzled revolutionary was giving a tutorial to the American Secretary of State on how to keep America’s alliances together. Starting from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, we had become tacit partners in maintaining the global equilibrium.
After two and a half hours, Zhou indicated that it was time to leave. But the Chairman had to put his mind at rest about America’s domestic situation. The last thing Mao wanted at that point was the very domestic upheaval in America that his political theory foresaw and advocated. Like the composer of a symphony, he ended by returning to his opening theme: Would Watergate sap the authority of a President with whom he more or less agreed? What kind of a new President might emerge from all this turmoil? He was “suspicious” that isolationism might return if a Democratic President came into office; what did I think? My conviction was that it could not be in America’s interest to pretend that only a single personality whose term of office could not run beyond 1976 in any event — and might end sooner — was capable of guaranteeing American policy toward China. I said that reality would impose the main lines of our policy regardless of which party was in office; there might be some hiatus while this lesson was being learned, however. Mao missed no nuance. “Then you seem to be in the same category as myself. We seem to be both more or less suspicious,” shot back the Chairman.
He was particularly uneasy about possible American troop withdrawals from Europe, a perennial proposal of Senate Democrats. I said there was also a difference between our two parties in the willingness to be “very brutal very quickly in case there is a challenge.” Mao mused that it was not necessary to put up a diplomatic front; what I really meant was the willingness to risk war. Though he was known as a warmonger, he added, laughing, he hoped that a war would be confined to conventional weapons. I sought to curb the speculation: “We will not start a war in any event.” Mao was not all that pleased with such a reassurance. It elicited a parting warning: “As for the Soviet Union, they bully the weak, and are afraid of the tough.” In other words, do not deprive Moscow of the fear that we might prove bellicose.
We were stirring in our easy chairs on the verge of leaving when Mao suddenly reverted to the theme of our conversation in February, that we should be wary of China’s women — meaning his wife’s machinations. “And you shouldn’t try to bully either Miss Wang or Miss TangII because they are comparatively soft.” I denied that I had detected any softness in either. But Mao persisted mystifyingly: “She [Miss Tang] is American, while she [Miss Wang] is a Soviet spy.” He laughed again. And so the meeting ended after nearly three hours. The Chairman rose ponderously, though without assistance, and with slow shuffling steps escorted us to the outer reception room — a signal honor. As he bade us goodbye, more pictures were taken. He told me: “And please send my personal greetings to President Richard Nixon.”
Zhou took me aside to agree on an announcement that spoke of a “wide-ranging and far-sighted conversation in a friendly atmosphere” and mentioned the Chairman’s greeting to Nixon. This by Chinese standards came close to exuberance in putting Mao’s imprimatur on US–Chinese relations.
It was an astonishing performance. David Bruce, who had met all the great leaders of Europe over a period of thirty years, said that we had witnessed the most extraordinary and disciplined presentation he had ever heard from a statesman — all the more impressive for seeming so spontaneous and random.
But what did it all mean? Why did Mao consider it necessary to place his enormous authority behind so detailed an assessment of the international situation? There was no doubt that the Chinese attached great importance to the encounter. This was reflected in its unusual length (doubly significant for someone not a head of state), in the warmth of the announcement, in the attention it was given in the Chinese press, and in the choice of pictures that accompanied the news stories, showing a beaming Mao clasping my hand in both of his with a more solemn Zhou distinctly in the background.
Even the scheduling was bound to attract attention. For it coincided with a reception David Bruce had planned in my honor at the Diplomatic Club for the diplomatic corps. The meeting with Mao went on so long that the guests had given up by the time I appeared. From the Chinese point of view, that had the advantage that each ambassador was forced to report on the lengthy meeting to his capital — a meeting considered sufficiently weighty by the Chinese to stand up the entire diplomatic corps. Nor was it unconscious, for toward the end of the meeting Mao apologized to David Bruce for having “taken up time originally set aside for other activities.” (Was a secondary purpose to teach Bruce that as only Chief of a Liaison Office he should not have invited accredited ambassadors to a semipublic event?)
Undoubtedly, there were many motives behind the actions of our multifaceted hosts. I think now that Mao’s extended dialogue had two basic and perhaps related causes: the depth of the internal controversy and the imminent retirement of Zhou. It is possible that Mao’s overwhelming authority was needed to end the debates over Chinese foreign policy that had been raging since the summer and had been fueled by the Cambodian fiasco. But Mao rarely put himself unambiguously behind one faction; he usually maintained freedom of maneuver. He might well have adopted Zhou’s policy while personally favoring some, at least, of Zhou’s opponents. This would explain why in the middle of the conversation Mao suddenly asked me whether I had met Guo Moro, “who understands German” — hardly a prerequisite heretofore for an encounter with me. When I said that I had never met the gentleman, Mao said: “He is a man who worships Confucius, but he is now a member of our Central Committee.” Why would I meet a worshipper of Confucius in the midst of an anti-Confucian campaign? And who in China would have the temerity to arrange such an encounter? Or did it imply that being a Confucian was no obstacle to serving on the Central Committee of the Communist party, hence that the anti-Confucian campaign was over? And there was another brief flare-up when I referred to the dinner conversation I had had with Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua. “Lord Qiao,” replied Mao, jocularly or menacingly, implying that Qiao came from the soon-to-be eliminated upper class — the very charge being made against Confucius.
Whatever the state of Chinese domestic play during my visit, Premier Zhou Enlai disappeared from the direction of affairs within two months. The official explanation was illness. Was the Premier’s tentativeness due to the knowledge that his cancer was drawing his physical life to a close? Or was it the result of his imminent political demise? Did Mao engineer it as he had with every other deputy, or did he yield to the inevitable, either political pressures or the specter of mortality? Was the reference to the women a warning, or was the statement that they were soft intended as a reassurance? The one thing of which one could be certain was that Mao never spoke at random; he always had a purpose even if we were not able to divine it.
I was never to have another serious talk with Zhou Enlai. A year later I visited him with my wife and children in what was called a hospital but looked like a guest house. We chatted casually; Zhou looked unchanged to my amateur eye. But whenever I raised a serious topic, Zhou changed the subject. His doctors, he said, had prohibited him from discussing such problems. Why political problems impaired his health more than small talk was never explained. It was a painful session — probably for both of us.
Before my November 1973 trip ended, I caught a glimpse of the pressures closing in on Zhou. At the final dinner, a festive atmosphere and lavish toasts tempted me to raise the subject of Confucius. My mind must have been addled by the many changes of time zones. Or maybe the toasts of mao-tai had finally gotten to me. I cannot now explain what caused me to raise the explosive topic. China had always been Confucian, I ventured, in the sense that it seemed natural for the Chinese to see the state as a vast educational institution, regulating conduct, morality, and politics. This concept seemed to have survived, I argued, though of course the content of what was being taught now was diametrically the opposite of Confucian.
At this statement, which — with rare absence of tact — in effect called Mao a Confucian, Zhou lost his composure, the only time I knew him to do so. Although only the interpreter had heard my remarks, he insisted in an extremely agitated fashion on the absurdity of my parallel. Nor would he accept my disclaimer that he should ascribe any misunderstanding to ignorance. Zhou persisted, making certain that the ubiquitous Nancy Tang — later accused of radical sympathies — had a detailed record.
Whatever the cause of Zhou’s decline, his name was never mentioned by any of my Chinese interlocutors after this trip. Whenever I referred to a previous discussion with him, the Chinese would reply by invoking Mao’s conversation, which as it turned out had covered every area and practically every country of mutual interest. In that sense the meeting with Mao served both an immediate and a long-range purpose, though the latter remained obscure to me for quite a long time. For the remainder of my term in office, this dialogue with Mao became for the Chinese the bible of US–Chinese relations. And from our point of view it was a constructive one. While it did not prevent the rise of the radical faction, later called the Gang of Four, it provided a floor below which they could not drag Zhou’s work even when our relations became temporarily stagnant under by the increasing influence of the radicals over the daily management of affairs.
None of this, of course, was apparent to me in those heady days when I seemed to travel from success in Cairo to acclaim in Peking. With Mao’s apparent imprimatur, all negotiations ended rapidly and favorably. The claims issue was resolved, pending only some technical and legal details not expected to prove an obstacle. We agreed on a final communiqué that represented a major step forward; only the media’s preoccupation with Taiwan caused its significance to be underrated: It extended the joint opposition to hegemony from “the Asia-Pacific region” (as in the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972) to the global plane. It affirmed the need to deepen consultations between the two countries at “authoritative levels” to this end. Exchanges and trade were to be increased. The scope of the Liaison Offices was to be expanded. Zhou Enlai added a sentence that “the normalization of relations between China and the United States can be realized only on the basis of confirming the principle of one China.” After we had completed the text, Zhou almost playfully suggested that we review what was new in the communiqué. He called the sentence about Taiwan to my special attention — on the theory that subtle hints were likely to elude barbarians. “Confirming the principle” was not an impossible requirement; we had gone far toward it in the Shanghai Communiqué. We had indeed not challenged it at any phase of our China policy. Mao’s and Zhou’s elliptical references were clearly openings, but toward what was as yet obscure. Zhou said that he would call back Huang Zhen to instruct him on the nature of the intensified dialogue that should flow from the communiqué.
No wonder that the visit ended on a note of extraordinary goodwill. At our last session, Zhou thanked me for our help in facilitating the departure of Sihanouk’s mother from Phnom Penh. He also told me that his protocol officers had handed him a list of Western newsmen missing in Cambodia — which I had left deliberately on a table in the guest house to spare us both the embarrassment of having to debate whether China had any influence with the Khmer Rouge. Zhou said that he would do what he could, though I knew it was not much. And so our last official meeting ended with a sense of hope that a new course had been set and yet, on a mellow note, as if there were a premonition that somehow things would never again be the same:
ZHOU: Perhaps it is the national character of the Americans to be taken in by those who seem kind and mild. [He was referring to India.]
KISSINGER: Yes.
ZHOU: But the world is not so simple. . . . We wish you success and also success to the President.
KISSINGER: Thank you and thank you for the reception we have received as always.
ZHOU: It is what you deserve. And once the course has been set, as in 1971, we will persevere in the course.
KISSINGER: So will we.
ZHOU: That is why we use the term farsightedness to describe your meeting with the Chairman.
Zhou had compared the visit with my secret one; he saw it as the starting point of a major advance. It was not to be. Both Zhou and I were engulfed by our nations’ domestic dramas. Huang Zhen was recalled to Peking as Zhou had promised. But he did not return to Washington for over four months and when he did he had nothing to say. The claims-assets talks were broken off by the Chinese under transparent pretexts. Exchanges languished. The overall orientation of the policy was maintained but its substance was substantially frozen. Subsequent trips in 1974 and 1975 either were downright chilly or were holding actions — through relations never went backward.
Two concurrent domestic crises contributed to this state of affairs. A Washington riven by strife was a less interesting partner for China. Our credibility was bound to decline with the evaporation of Presidential authority, whatever my brave words to the contrary. At a minimum, even a cohesive China would have had every incentive to hedge its bets until our Watergate drama had played itself out.
We know now that China was going simultaneously through its own leadership crisis. And while Mao’s conversation with me laid down the main lines of the policy, no single document could encompass all the shades of interpretation, which increasingly fell into the control of the radical Gang of Four.
But if the hopes of the end of 1973 were not to be fulfilled, at least the philosophical premises of the dialogue with Zhou and Mao were maintained. In that sense the aged Chairman had in his conversations with me bought insurance against his own propensity to radicalism. There were periodic high-level exchanges of view with Zhou’s de facto successor, Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, and with Qiao Guanhua, soon elevated to Foreign Minister. They lacked the warmth of the previous conversations but did not alter their substance. We preserved the essence of a relationship crucial to world peace amidst the turmoil of the times and the stresses in both countries unrelated to our foreign policy design. Statesmen have often done much worse.
I. This transparent allegory is an example of the style of the Chinese debate. The Zhou figure criticized his opponents
for advocating the policy of “making friends with neighboring countries [i.e., the Soviets] and attacking the distant ones [the U.S.]” in order to preserve their own hereditary prerogatives, and went further in putting forward the policy of “making friends with distant countries and attacking the neighboring ones.” San Sui’s [Zhou’s] line won the approval of King Chao [Mao], and he was accordingly appointed as a guest minister in charge of military affairs.
However, although San Sui [Zhou] had become Prime Minister, he was actually perched on the top of the crater of a volcano that could erupt at any time. In the Chu state the power of the old aristocrats [the regional military commanders?] was still rather powerful.
II. This referred to Miss Wang Hairong, Assistant Foreign Minister and reported to be Mao’s niece, and Miss Tang Wensheng, or Nancy Tang, the American-born interpreter.