Nixon and Mao (14 page)

Mao was at once a revolutionary and a nationalist, and it was never easy to separate the two. He wanted and needed help from the Soviet Union, and he confidently expected that, in building socialism, China would make rapid progress. “We have stood up,” he said in a famous speech in September 1949. “The Chinese have always been a great, courageous, and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And it was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments.” That era, when China could be insulted and humiliated, when its people were regarded as uncivilized, was now over: “We shall emerge in the world as a nation with an advanced culture.” And one with power: “No imperialists will ever again be allowed to invade our land.”
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Yet he also assumed that they would try, especially the leading ones. With the confidence of a civilization that had seen itself for centuries as the Middle Kingdom, Mao took for granted that out of all the world, China was the center of the Americans’ attention: “By seizing China, the United States would possess all of Asia. With its Asian front consolidated, U.S. imperialism could concentrate its forces on attacking Europe.”
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The United States—or, rather, the reactionaries and capitalists who ran it—was determined to destroy the Chinese people’s great revolution: “they will smuggle their agents into China to sow dissension and make trouble.”
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(Branding opponents of the new regime as the dupes and collaborators of the Americans was, of course, also a convenient way to eliminate them.)

The foreigners still in China, among them American diplomats, journalists, businessmen, and missionaries, were ordered to leave. They were probably spies in any case, Mao said. As he put it, the house must be cleaned before guests could be invited in.
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In its foreign relations, China was starting over, turning its back on the old shameful pattern of unequal treaties, punitive fines, and foreign meddling. China, Mao said, in another of those folksy metaphors he liked so much, was building a new cooking oven. Even though other Western nations—Great Britain, for example—were prepared to extend recognition to the new government in China, even at the risk of serious disagreement with the United States, the Chinese Communists were in no hurry to establish relationships with the enemy camp.
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On the American side, as it became clear in the late 1940s that the Communists were bound to win, there was a debate over how to deal with the new reality in China. Even the die-hard supporters of Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang were disheartened as he prepared to move his government and his remaining forces to Taiwan. Nevertheless, what was to become known as the China lobby insisted that the United States must not recognize the Communist seizure of power in China. The lobby’s opponents, some within the Truman administration, argued that it was important for the United States to establish ties to Communist China. Given the past tensions between China and Russia, it was possible that at some point in the future, the two Communist regimes would fall out. By 1948, those in favor of recognizing Communist China could point to the encouraging case of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, which had broken off relations. The Soviet leader had ordered other Communist countries in Eastern Europe to follow the Soviet lead and cut diplomatic and economic ties with Yugoslavia. Stalin was also doing his best to remove Marshal Tito permanently by sending teams of assassins into his country. Tito’s offense was that although he was a Communist, he was not Stalin’s Communist. The Yugoslavs had made their own way to power, like Mao, and perhaps as a result, Stalin had never been able to trust Tito. Was it not likely that Mao would one day be an Asian Tito? And that China and the Soviet Union would also find themselves enemies?
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These were sensible questions, but few Americans cared to hear them in those early days of the Cold War. In early 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy discovered that charges of Communist traitors riddling the Truman administration was a marvelous way to revive a failing political career. He found a ready-made audience, and his attacks helped harden American attitudes toward the Chinese Communists. Anti-Communists in the United States were already talking about the red tide rising in Asia, of which the Soviet “puppet regime” in Beijing was only the first wave. Although their allies such as the British thought these American reactions absurd and still hoped to establish relations with the People’s Republic of China, Truman and his administration found themselves being pushed in the direction of a harder line. Dean Acheson, the American secretary of state, who had been trying to make up his mind about the best long-term policy toward the Communist regime in China, publicly denounced the Sino-Soviet treaty in March 1950 as “an evil omen of imperialistic domination” and warned the Chinese people that they were abandoning their loyal old American friends for the voracious Soviets.
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In Congress, Walter Judd, a leading Republican supporter of Taiwan, approved; Acheson had finally recognized the extent of the Communist conspiracy for domination of the world: of “Asia, then of Europe, then of ourselves.”
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Talk of reaching out to the Chinese Communists and trying to detach them from the Soviets became difficult, even dangerous for careers.

By June 1950, it became impossible. With the outbreak of the Korean War, when Soviet-backed Communist North Korea attacked South Korea, the Cold War reached a new, acute stage, and the battle lines between the Eastern bloc and the West appeared to be firmly fixed. Although new evidence shows that Mao and the Chinese were unenthusiastic about the attack, they had no choice but to side with the Soviets and the North Koreans. From the American perspective, one in which nuances no longer seemed to make much sense, world Communism was on the move. “There can be little doubt,” Acheson wrote to the British foreign minister, “but that Communism, with Chi[na] as one spear-head, has now embarked upon an assault against Asia with immediate objectives in Korea, Indo-China, Burma, the Philippines and Malaya and with medium-range objectives in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Siam, India and Japan.”
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American public opinion, already concerned by the ease with which the Soviet Union had taken over so much of the center of Europe and by revelations of Soviet spies stealing American atomic secrets, became firmly anti-Communist. Congress moved further to the right as Republican gains whittled away the Democrats’ majority. The Truman administration, unfairly castigated for being soft on Communism, was already upping defense spending and moving the United States onto a war footing. When the news came in from Korea of the outbreak of war, Truman responded immediately. Even before the United States got a mandate from the United Nations to assemble a force to defend South Korea, he had ordered American forces to that country and had sent the Seventh Fleet to protect the straits between mainland China and Taiwan, just in case the Chinese Communists were planning to invade.

Mao had perhaps been thinking of doing just that. Certainly the Communists had concentrated some of their best forces just across from Taiwan. They had few troops in the north near China’s border with North Korea. The Chinese Communists also had a huge task ahead of them in China, both to consolidate the Communist victory and to begin the long process of setting the war-torn country on the path to recovery. A war with the United States was the last thing they wanted at that point. Events, however, left them little choice. The United Nations forces, predominantly American and under the command of the American general Douglas MacArthur, landed in South Korea and pushed the North Koreans back toward the border with China. American planes flew increasingly close to Chinese airspace, and American hawks, including MacArthur himself, made no secret of the fact that they saw an opportunity to get rid of the Communists (or as they preferred to see it, to retrieve the loss of China), possibly by using atomic bombs on Chinese industrial sites. In late November 1950, Chinese Communist “volunteers” poured down over the border, and it was the U.N. forces’ turn to retreat. The fighting dragged on for another three years as both sides continued to hope for victory. Even when talks started, the mutual suspicions between Communist China and the United States meant that every issue, whether the withdrawal of forces to either side of the thirty-eighth parallel or the exchange of prisoners of war, took months to settle.

The Korean War finally ended in a truce, with a divided Korea and a deep gulf between the People’s Republic of China and the United States. The strategic map of Asia was also altered. Japan, its economy starting to revive thanks to spending from the Korean War, was independent again and firmly in the American camp; the United States was committed to the defense of Taiwan; and the Cold War had spread to French Indochina, on China’s southern borders, where the French, with copious American aid, were fighting a Communist-led nationalist movement.

In Washington, a Republican administration had taken office at the start of 1953 amid charges that the Democrats had not been tough enough on Communism. Senator McCarthy was reveling in his newly acquired fame as the scourge of Communists and other subversives. President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, talked, perhaps too much, about rolling back Communism. At the Geneva conference of 1954, Dulles was in the bath when a State Department official rushed in to say that the Chinese Communists were prepared to release their remaining American prisoners of war and move toward normalizing relations. While his subordinate perched on the toilet seat, Dulles lay back in the tub and said firmly, “No, we will not do it.”
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Dulles tried to build an anti-Communist alliance in Asia to contain China, just as NATO was containing the Soviets in Europe. The CIA tried, in vain, to stir up trouble within China by supporting Tibetan nationalists. At the United Nations, the Americans used their dominance to block China’s entry. Taiwan kept the China seat and China’s membership in a whole range of international organizations.

The People’s Republic, for its part, sent aid to anti-Western and left-wing movements throughout Asia—for example, in Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. It also involved itself in the attempt among what were called Third World countries—a growing number as the old Western empires folded—to create a nonaligned movement that would steer a middle course between the two great antagonistic blocs in the Cold War. This, of course, was regarded with the deepest suspicion by Dulles, who felt that neutrality was a cover for Communist sympathies.

Dulles’s hard-line stance was echoed in the senior levels of the State Department, where Walter Robertson headed the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs. According to a junior colleague, “There was no question in Robertson’s mind that we should be 100 percent pro-Nationalist government on Taiwan and 100 percent anti-Communist government in Peking.” Recognition of the new regime in Beijing was quite simply out of the question, said this official: “As far as I could make out, the Communists would have had to have ceased being Communists to make him shift.”
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From 1949 to the start of the 1970s, China and the United States had virtually no diplomatic relations, no summits, no joint meetings, and no exchanges of tourists, business leaders, or academics. Chinese and American athletes did not compete against one another. Chinese and American journalists did not report from one another’s countries. China and the United States did not trade directly with each other, and their planes and ships did not land at each other’s airfields and ports. American officials would not use the term “People’s Republic of China” and insisted on calling the capital Beiping, as the Guomindang still did. Indeed, young diplomats were warned that they could damage their careers by the careless use of “Beijing,” which is what the Communists had chosen.
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The United States set up a huge consulate in Hong Kong, still a British colony, partly to ensure that there would be no leakage, that goods from the mainland would not move on to the American market under the British flag. The American owners of the new Hong Kong Hilton had to get rid of the expensive Chinese antiques they had just bought because these came from the mainland.
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The effort to keep goods from Communist China away from Americans produced much work and increasingly arcane debates. If an egg came from Communist China but hatched in Hong Kong, was the chicken Communist or not? Was an egg laid in Hong Kong by a hen from the mainland a Communist one? The Americans were also concerned that important strategic goods not move into China through Hong Kong. A junior American consular officer once had to spend considerable time on condoms. “I had to go all around Hong Kong, talking to importers of prophylactic rubbers and asking: How many do you think Hong Kong uses? And how many are reexported to China?” he said. His lengthy report garnered commendations in Washington, and he then received an urgent follow-up question: “Please update this carefully. We have heard that the Chinese Communists are using prophylactic rubbers to protect the muzzles of their guns from moisture.” The brief panic ended when the Pentagon got in on the act and a final message came from Washington: “Our experts have said that if you do try to protect your gun muzzles that way, it will simply rust and pit-out the muzzles themselves because moisture will collect; there is no air in the muzzle. So any prophylactic rubbers that want to go to Communist China, okay.”
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The other mission of the American establishment in Hong Kong was to try to gaze over the border into China. The China watchers interviewed refugees and those foreigners and Chinese who were able to travel into China. They pored over Chinese Communist publications when they could get them. They gathered scraps of information in whatever ways they could. Herbert Levin, who later worked for Kissinger on the National Security Council, used to monitor shipments of live pigs from China into Hong Kong. “When there were suggestions that there were food shortages and crop failures and so forth in China,” he recalled, “you could see what provinces the carloads of pigs were coming from, whether they were coming like previous years, whether they were thinner or fatter, and all that kind of thing.”
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The Americans gained general impressions of what was going on inside China. They knew something about the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward because streams of desperate refugees forced their way into Hong Kong. They learned about the Cultural Revolution firsthand when Red Guards tried to stir up trouble for the British authorities. But the Americans had almost no idea of who was really in power and what the great internal debates were. (Of course, neither did the Chinese people.)