Nixon and Mao (15 page)

Although the Chinese Communists had far more access to material on American society, it is not clear that they were able to benefit from it, given their own ideological blinders. None of the top party leadership had ever been to the United States, and even a man as knowledgeable and sophisticated as Chou En-lai had naive views of Americans. “If American troops really invade China,” he said in a 1949 speech, “we will surround them from the countryside, forcing them to ship all military supplies, including toilet paper and ice cream, from the United States.”
³³
Zhang Wenjin, one of the Foreign Ministry officials involved in planning Nixon’s trip, later told an interviewer, “Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou actually knew very little about the United States; they had to rely upon us.”
³⁴

American society, so the Chinese people were told for years, was deeply corrupt. In 1950, a Chinese pamphlet entitled
Look, So This Is the American Way of Life!
painted a lurid picture of the United States: “It is a nation that is thoroughly reactionary, thoroughly black, thoroughly corrupt, and thoroughly cruel. It is heaven for a handful of millionaires and hell for countless millions of poor people. It is a paradise for gangsters, swindlers, hooligans, special agents, fascist vermin, profiteers, debauchers, and so on and so forth—all the dregs of humanity.” Chinese propaganda showed Uncle Sam as an avaricious millionaire, his teeth and hands dripping with blood. Chinese newspapers played up American racial tensions and American crime.
³⁵

The American public and, indeed, many policy makers back in Washington had an equally simplistic view. The China lobby and publications such as
Time
and
Life
(owned by Henry Luce, a child of American missionaries in China) enthusiastically painted a picture of a sterile and dreadful world behind the Bamboo Curtain, with the Chinese people turned into a horde of red ants. The entry of China into the Korean War was taken as more evidence of Communist treachery, and the appearance of brainwashed American prisoners of war in Beijing caused a thrill of horror back in the United States. On the right, Senator McCarthy and his supporters, who included a young Richard Nixon, made much of the fact that many American diplomats in China had predicted the collapse of the Guomindang, evidence enough for conspiracy theorists that such men had actively worked for the Communist victory. The diplomats were summoned to congressional hearings, where their motives and loyalty were freely impugned.

The impact on the State Department and on the capacity of the United States to understand what was going on in Asia was huge. Seasoned and knowledgeable experts were driven out or resigned in disgust. Those who survived were kept away from anything to do with Asia; one of the department’s leading China specialists ended up as ambassador in Iceland. The department as a whole was shell-shocked and became increasingly timid in offering unpalatable advice to its political masters. A young man who started out as a junior diplomat in Hong Kong in the late 1950s remembered older colleagues who were careful about what they sent back to Washington. “I don’t think it meant not reporting facts,” he said; “it’s just that one was cautious.”
³⁶

On the other hand, the experience of being in Hong Kong tended to make the American China watchers more pragmatic than their superiors back in Washington. The lack of relations between two such big countries seemed absurd, an anomaly that they assumed must be temporary. “Well, you know,” said an American diplomat, “what the hell, China’s there, we’re going to have to recognize it. I mean, it was a fact of life. It wasn’t through admiration, it was just, well, let’s get on with it.”
³⁷

Nor were the Chinese Communists yet ready to look for friends among the enemies of the Soviets. In China, no one dared openly suggest that one day relations with the United States might be reestablished. Except for one man. “If there is no war,” Mao told a party conference in 1956, “the capitalist countries will face economic difficulties. Our door is open. In 12 years, Britain, America, West Germany and Japan will all want to do business with us.”
³⁸

The door remained open, just a crack. In the aftermath of the Geneva conference, representatives of China and the United States had to talk to one another from time to time—about the exit visas for Americans still in China or the exchange of prisoners of war, for example. The main contacts were through Warsaw, where Chinese and American diplomats met quietly over the years, right up until 1970. The Communist Polish government obligingly provided a magnificent old palace for the talks, which it equally obligingly bugged for its Soviet masters. The Americans found the bugging useful, both as a way of communicating with the Soviets and because they were able to tap into the bug, which saved them from making extensive notes.
³⁹

From time to time when there was a crisis, one side or the other would break off, but the talks always resumed. Although the issue of Taiwan remained, for the time being, insoluble, both sides saw an advantage in keeping some sort of contact, if only as “a kind of mailbox,” as one American put it.
⁴⁰
“Even then,” recalled John Holdridge, who was to return to China with Nixon, “we always had this feeling in the back of our minds—through the Geneva talks, the ambassadorial-level talks, and in various ways—that we didn’t want to foreclose any opportunities which might open in the future. We wanted some kind of a relationship.”
⁴¹
The Chinese had much the same view. In 1958, after one hiatus, the foreign minister, Chen Yi, told his ambassador in Warsaw that the talks might produce some useful results: “You may shake hands with, say hello to, and chat with the American ambassador. You may have a dinner with him.” China was not begging for negotiations nor refusing them. “The manner of a great country should be neither haughty nor humble,” he said.
⁴²

For the most part, the conversations were stilted and formal as both sides presented prepared statements. During the Cultural Revolution, an American remarked casually on an attractive view to a Chinese diplomat, who promptly answered, “Yes it is but not as beautiful as it is in Beijing where the glorious sun of Chairman Mao Tse-tung shines upon the Chinese people twenty four hours a day.” Years later, after Mao’s death, the two men met again in Tanzania. The Chinese looked at the American and said, “It is a beautiful day, but not as beautiful as it is in Beijing where the glorious sun of…” and started to laugh. “I look back often on that conversation,” he said. “By god, how stupid it was.”
⁴³

CHAPTER 8

BREAKING THE PATTERN

I
N HIS CONVERSATION WITH NIXON THAT FEBRUARY AFTERNOON
in Beijing, Chou En-lai returned, yet again, to the famous snub at the Geneva conference in 1954: “As you said to Chairman Mao this afternoon, today we shook hands, but John Foster Dulles didn’t want to do that.” Nixon extended his hand, and he and Chou solemnly shook hands again. “We couldn’t blame you,” Chou said, “because the international viewpoint was that the socialist countries were a monolithic bloc, and the Western countries were a monolithic bloc.” The Chinese knew better now. Nixon agreed: “We have broken out of the old pattern.”
¹

Nixon would not have been in Beijing if both sides had not been prepared, for their own reasons, to break out of the old patterns. The timing had never been quite right before. In 1949, when the Truman administration considered trying to establish relations with the new Communist regime, the Chinese Communists were not prepared to negotiate. In the mid-1950s, when Chou En-lai offered a settlement of outstanding issues, especially Taiwan, in talks at Geneva, it was the Americans’ turn to be intransigent.

The start of the 1960s brought the best chance in over a decade to end the impasse between the two powers. In China, the failure of the Great Leap Forward temporarily sidelined Mao and brought more pragmatic leaders such as Liu Shaoqi to the fore.
²
In the United States, the inauguration of a young, new Democratic president, John F. Kennedy, promised a fresh approach to the foreign policy and to the troubling China question. Adlai Stevenson, the respected ambassador to the United Nations, published an article in
Foreign Affairs
at the end of 1960 in which he argued that the People’s Republic of China should be admitted to the U.N. The secretary of state, Dean Rusk, who was later to become more hard-line, agreed that existing U.S. policy on the admission of China to the U.N. was “unrealistic.” Reaction from the China lobby and the right was surprisingly muted.
³

China seemed ready to shift its policies as well. Although the situation in Indochina, particularly in Laos, was deteriorating by 1961, Chou En-lai indirectly let the Americans know that his government hoped to find a way of keeping Laos neutral. In 1962, the United States responded in kind when it used indirect channels to let China know that it was discouraging Taiwan from attacking the mainland.
⁴
As China watchers in Hong Kong scrambled to translate the scatological terms the Chinese Communists were using about the Soviets, the split between China and the Soviet Union also promised new opportunities for ending the long freeze between the United States and China.

Inside the State Department, retirements removed some of the older Cold Warriors and brought younger, more open-minded Asian specialists to responsible positions. At the end of 1961, the existence of two Chinas was accepted when what were called “mainland China affairs” began to be dealt with separately from those of Taiwan. Shortly after, a new office, that of Asian Communist Affairs, was created. “There was a feeling in the air,” remembered one of the specialists appointed to it, “that Kennedy would like to do something about China, but they hadn’t really focused on it, so it was a wonderful time, in a way, the sense that people wanted something done, but didn’t know quite what they wanted.”
⁵

Kennedy himself talked of change, and his defenders have claimed that had he lived, he would have made the sort of breakthrough that only came with Nixon. We will never know. In his tragically short term in office, though, Kennedy seems to have regarded the People’s Republic of China with as much mistrust as John Foster Dulles himself. The deepening conflict in Indochina and the growth of Communist influence in Indonesia helped harden Kennedy’s attitudes toward the Chinese Communists, whom he saw, not entirely incorrectly, as behind much of what was happening. It did not help that China attacked India in the autumn of 1962. The Americans frequently found the Indians infuriating, but they did not like, as they saw it, unprovoked aggression by a Communist power against a democracy. In a speech in the summer of 1963, Kennedy spoke of the dangers posed by a warlike China, which might shortly get its own nuclear weapons, calling the situation “more dangerous…than any we have faced since the end of the Second World War.”
⁶
China tested its first bomb in 1964.

After 1964, when Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, made the decision to send greatly increased numbers of American troops to South Vietnam and to start bombing the North Vietnamese, there was little hope that Chinese-American relations were going to thaw. The war brought American forces perilously close to China’s borders and awakened American memories of how Chinese troops had attacked in Korea. Would they do the same in Vietnam? Allen Whiting, a senior China specialist in the State Department, kept warning his superiors, “The Chinese are coming. The Chinese are coming.” And he found a receptive audience right up to Dean Rusk, the secretary of state.
⁷

From China, Mao issued a series of pronouncements to the Chinese people and to the world. Returning to an idea he had formulated a decade before, he talked about “intermediate zones,” those parts of the world between China and the great powers. China had an obligation to the oppressed, whether in the intermediate zones of Europe or of Asia, to encourage them to take up revolutionary war against their oppressors, in particular the United States. “The raging tide of the people of the world against the U.S. aggressors is irresistible,” he told journalists from the
People’s Daily
at the start of 1964. In 1965, Lin Biao, his handpicked lieutenant and China’s defense minister, made a major policy statement, which must have had Mao’s approval. “Long Live the Victory of People’s War” talked with relish about the coming destruction of American imperialism, “the most ferocious common enemy of the people of the world.”
⁸

Although the Chinese urged the peoples of Indochina, including the North Vietnamese, to stand on their own feet, China continued to ship significant amounts of aid southward, and Chinese military advisers continued to help the North Vietnamese war effort.
⁹
And, of course, revolutionary wars like the one raging in Vietnam could also help protect China by tying down the United States.
¹⁰
It was a gamble, though, because it also brought American forces to China’s doorstep. Mao perhaps tried to signal the United States that China hoped to avoid a repeat of the confrontation in Korea. In January 1965, he had a long chat with his American biographer and old friend, Edgar Snow. “We shall not make war beyond China, and we shall fight in defense only if the U.S. comes and attacks us,” he said.
¹¹
China, he told Snow, was obliged to show its support for revolutions, but it preferred to do so by issuing statements and holding meetings: “We are fond of prattle and empty talk, but send no troops.”
¹²

By 1966 Mao was less inclined to make reassuring noises. American escalation in Vietnam coincided with his vengeful return to full power. He was bent on destroying his enemies, a very large and eclectic group; on rooting out “bad ideas,” including foreign ones; and on transforming Chinese society. The Cultural Revolution made chauvinism, always a strand in Chinese thinking, respectable, even essential for good Maoists. As the Red Guards set about enthusiastically destroying traditional Chinese culture, they also turned on foreign influence and foreign powers. They burned books in foreign languages and tried to ban all foreign music. In 1967 a mob burned down the British mission in Beijing and beat up British diplomats. Screaming crowds surrounded the Soviet embassy for days on end. It was at this time that the Soviet women and children who were being sent home for safety had to crawl under an arch at the airport while Red Guards beat and spat at them.

Abroad, Chinese students and those representatives who had not yet been called back to China to be reformed denounced the authorities in their host countries and did their best to spread the thought of Chairman Mao. In one African country, workers at the Chinese embassy recited Mao’s sayings on local buses and tried to present bewildered locals with copies of the Little Red Book and Mao buttons.
¹³
When some photographs of Mao were vandalized outside the Chinese embassy in Paris, the reaction in Beijing was hysterical, with a massive demonstration against the French embassy. The People’s Republic had diplomatic relations with about forty nations in 1966; within a year of the start of the Cultural Revolution, it had disputes with thirty of them.
¹⁴
As the leading capitalist power in the world, the United States, of course, was not only China’s mortal enemy but the leading source of foreign poison. Unfortunately for the radicals during the Cultural Revolution, they could only get at it indirectly. Chinese who had worked for Americans or American-owned companies in the past and the handful of American fellow travelers who had stayed on in China after 1949 were all attacked as imperialist spies.
¹⁵

In 1969, Marshall Green, one of the State Department’s leading China experts, toured Asian capitals and reported back on the general feeling: “China had never been in such a negative, truculent mood as it was at that time. Asian leaders felt that any hope of progress in establishing a constructive dialogue with China was out of the question until the Cultural Revolution subsided.” (Nixon noted, “This is great” on the report.)
¹⁶
In fact, that is precisely what was happening.

Even Mao, living amid his layers of protection, surrounded by courtiers eager to please him, was now realizing how dangerously isolated China was in the world and how weakened by the Cultural Revolution. When he addressed a meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in the spring of 1969, he called for an end to the violent stage of the Cultural Revolution, asking, “Is this endless quarreling necessary?”
¹⁷
Some people, he said, had gone too far: “It is not good to be crude and careless, which often leads to mistakes.”
¹⁸
By that point, virtually all universities and many schools were closed. Factories repeatedly shut down while workers debated arcane political points. Hospitals ran with a skeleton crew of barely educated staff, while trained doctors and nurses languished in the countryside to “learn from the peasants.” Much of the army was scattered about China’s cities and towns keeping peace between angry factions, all claiming the blessing of Chairman Mao. Yet China still had many external enemies. Since the war in 1962, it was barely on speaking terms with India. Japan—even the peaceful post-1945 Japan—could not be trusted. Taiwan was still run by a government that claimed authority over the whole of China. The United States was present in force in Vietnam, just to the south. Might it not be tempted to take advantage of China’s turmoil either to finish off China’s ally of North Vietnam once and for all or to do something worse? And along China’s northern and western borders, Soviet troops were massing.

The United States was a much stronger power, but its confidence, too, had been shaken by recent events. The 1960s were turbulent—not as turbulent as in China, but in terms of American history an extraordinarily troubling decade, with turmoil at home and the loss of prestige abroad. A wave of assassinations—President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy—shook Americans’ confidence in their own society. President Johnson’s War on Poverty did much good, but it also exposed the dreadful slums in some of the United States’ richest cities. Many young people and sometimes their elders talked of the need for radical change. Had the United States become “Amerika” out of a Kafka novel or, worse, a fascist state? Cities grew used to demonstrations, against poverty, injustice, and, of course, the war in Vietnam. University campuses saw teach-ins and sit-ins and protests.

In the South, a black civil rights movement, supported by white liberals, exposed to Americans and to the world the underside of American society. It became clear that southern blacks lived under a system not that different from apartheid, barred, as they were, from using restaurants or white-only water fountains. Moreover, they were denied the most basic of rights, such as that to vote. By the 1960s, southern blacks and their supporters from the North were challenging the system at all points. Freedom riders sat in the white sections of buses. Blacks sat at white-only lunch counters. In the spring of 1963 Martin Luther King called for civil disobedience against unjust laws. That summer he spoke to a huge demonstration in Washington, saying, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’” The next year, during Freedom Summer, a huge drive started to register black voters in the South. In Washington, President Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress.

Southern whites resisted any changes with ferocity. School integration was marked by riots and tear gas. The first black student at the University of Mississippi had to be escorted there by troops with guns. A police chief in Birmingham, Alabama, used fire hoses and dogs on black demonstrators. In 1963 a bomb placed in a church killed four young black girls. A civil rights worker was murdered in Mississippi. (It took thirty years to bring his killers to justice.) The following year three civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Violence in the South touched off violence in the North as blacks rioted in their ghettos. Watts, in Los Angeles, went up in flames in 1965, Newark and parts of Detroit in 1967. After King’s shooting, riots broke out in more than 120 cities. In the center of Washington, the police lost control of the streets and watched helplessly while rioters looted and burned. The army had to be called in to restore order and patrol the city.