CHAPTER 9
Resumption of Relations: First Encounters with Mao and
Zhou
THE MOST DRAMATIC EVENT of the Nixon presidency
occurred in near obscurity. For Nixon had decided that for the
mission to Beijing to succeed, it would have to take place in
secrecy. A public mission would have set off a complicated internal
clearance project within the U.S. government and insistent demands
for consultations from around the world, including Taiwan (still
recognized as the government of China). This would have mortgaged
our prospects with Beijing, whose attitudes we were being sent to
discover. Transparency is an essential objective, but historic
opportunities for building a more peaceful international order have
imperatives as well.
So my team set off to
Beijing via Saigon, Bangkok, New Delhi, and Rawalpindi on an
announced fact-finding journey on behalf of the President. My party
included a broader set of American officials, as well as a core
group destined for Beijing—myself, aides Winston Lord, John
Holdridge, and Dick Smyser, and Secret Service agents Jack Ready
and Gary McLeod. The dramatic denouement required us to go through
tiring stops at each city designed to be so boringly matter-of-fact
that the media would stop tracking our movements. In Rawalpindi, we
disappeared for forty-eight hours for an ostensible rest (I had
feigned illness) in a Pakistani hill station in the foothills of
the Himalayas. In Washington, only the President and Colonel
Alexander Haig (later General), my top aide, knew our actual
destination.
When the American
delegation arrived in Beijing on July 9, 1971, we had experienced
the subtlety of Chinese communication but not the way Beijing
conducted actual negotiations, still less the Chinese style of
receiving visitors. American experience with Communist diplomacy
was based on contacts with Soviet leaders, principally Andrei
Gromyko, who had a tendency to turn diplomacy into a test of
bureaucratic will; he was impeccably correct in negotiation but
implacable on substance—sometimes, one sensed, straining his
self-discipline.
Strain was nowhere
apparent in the Chinese reception of the secret visit or during the
dialogue that followed. In all the preliminary maneuvers, we had
been sometimes puzzled by the erratic pauses between their
messages, which we assumed had something to do with the Cultural
Revolution. Nothing now seemed to disturb the serene aplomb of our
hosts, who acted as if welcoming the special emissary of the
American President for the first time in the history of the
People’s Republic of China was the most natural
occurrence.
For in fact what we
encountered was a diplomatic style closer to traditional Chinese
diplomacy than to the pedantic formulations to which we had become
accustomed during our negotiations with other Communist states.
Chinese statesmen historically have excelled at using hospitality,
ceremony, and carefully cultivated personal relationships as tools
of statecraft. It was a diplomacy well suited to China’s
traditional security challenge—the preservation of a sedentary and
agricultural civilization surrounded by peoples who, if they
combined, wielded potentially superior military capacity. China
survived, and generally prevailed, by mastering the art of
fostering a calibrated combination of rewards and punishments and
majestic cultural performance. In this context, hospitality becomes
an aspect of strategy.
In our case, the
ministrations began not when our delegation reached Beijing but en
route from Islamabad. To our surprise, a group of English-speaking
Chinese diplomats had been sent to Pakistan to escort us on the
journey and ease any tension we might have felt on a five-hour
flight to an unfamiliar destination. They had boarded the plane
before us, shocking our accompanying security people, who had been
trained to treat Mao suits as enemy uniforms. On the journey, the
team was also able to test some of their research, practice aspects
of their conduct, and collect information about their visitors’
personal characteristics for their Premier.
The team had been
selected by Zhou two years earlier when the idea of opening with
the United States first was mooted in the aftermath of the report
of the four marshals. It included three members of the Foreign
Ministry, one of whom, Tang Longbin, later was part of the protocol
team for the Nixon visit; another was Zhang Wenjin, a former
ambassador and specialist in what the Chinese termed “West
European, American, and Oceania Affairs” and, as it turned out, an
awesome linguist. Two younger members of the delegation, in effect,
represented Mao and reported directly to him. They were Wang
Hairong, his grand-niece, and Nancy Tang, an exceptionally capable
Brooklyn-born interpreter, whose family had emigrated to China to
join the revolution and who also acted as a kind of political
advisor. All this we learned later, as well as the fact that, when
first approached, the Foreign Ministry officials reacted like the
marshals had. They needed Zhou’s personal reassurance that the
assignment represented a Mao directive rather than a test of their
revolutionary loyalty.
Marshal Ye Jianying,
the Vice Chairman of the Military Commission—one of the four
marshals who had been seconded by Mao to analyze China’s strategic
options—welcomed us at the Beijing airport when we landed at noon,
a symbol of the support of the People’s Liberation Army for the new
Sino-U.S. diplomacy. The marshal took me in a long Chinese-made
limousine with drawn blinds to Diaoyutai, the State Guesthouse in a
walled-off park in the western part of the city. The compound had
formerly served as an imperial fishing lake. Ye suggested that the
delegation take a rest until Premier Zhou would come to the
guesthouse four hours later to welcome us and for a first round of
discussions.
Zhou’s coming to call
on us was a gesture of considerable courtesy. The normal diplomatic
procedure is for a visiting delegation to be received in a public
building of the host country, especially when the difference in
protocol rank of the head of the two delegations is so great. (In
contrast to Zhou, the Premier, my protocol rank as National
Security Advisor was equivalent to that of a deputy Cabinet
secretary, three levels down.)
We soon discovered
that our Chinese hosts had designed an almost improbably leisurely
schedule—as if to signal that after surviving more than two decades
of isolation, they were in no particular hurry to conclude a
substantive agreement now. We were scheduled to be in Beijing for
almost exactly forty-eight hours. We could not extend our stay
because we were expected in Paris for talks on Vietnam; nor did we
control the schedule of the presidential plane of Pakistan, which
had taken us to Beijing.
When we saw our
program, we realized that, in addition to this pause before Zhou’s
arrival, a four-hour visit to the Forbidden City had been planned.
Thus eight hours of the available forty-eight hours had been
provided for. As it turned out, Zhou would be unavailable for the
next evening, which had been reserved for a visit by a North Korean
Politburo member, which could not be rescheduled—or perhaps was not
as a cover for the secret trip. If one allowed for sixteen hours
for two nights’ rest, there would be less than twenty-four hours
left for the first dialogue between countries that had been at war,
near war, and without significant diplomatic contact for twenty
years.
In fact only two
formal negotiating sessions were available: seven hours on the day
of my arrival, from 4:30 P.M. to 11:20 P.M.; and six hours on the
next, from noon until about 6:30 P.M. The first meeting was at the
State Guesthouse—the United States acting as host by the conceit of
Chinese protocol. The second was at the Great Hall of the People,
where the Chinese government would receive us.
It could be argued
that the apparent Chinese nonchalance was a form of psychological
pressure. To be sure, had we left without progress, it would have
been a major embarrassment to Nixon, who had not shared my mission
with any other Cabinet member. But if the calculations of two years
of China diplomacy were correct, the exigencies that had induced
Mao to extend the invitation might turn unmanageable by a rebuff of
an American mission to Beijing.
Confrontation made no
sense for either side; that is why we were in Beijing. Nixon was
eager to raise American sights beyond Vietnam. Mao’s decision had
been for a move that might force the Soviets to hesitate before
taking on China militarily. Neither side could afford failure. Each
side knew the stakes.
In a rare symbiosis
of analyses, both sides decided to spend most of the time on trying
to explore each other’s perception of the international order.
Since the ultimate purpose of the visit was to start the process of
determining whether the previously antagonistic foreign policies of
the two countries could be aligned, a conceptual discussion—at some
points sounding more like a conversation between two professors of
international relations than a working diplomatic dialogue—was, in
fact, the ultimate form of practical diplomacy.
When the Premier
arrived, our handshake was a symbolic gesture—at least until Nixon
could arrive in China for a public repetition—since Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake hands with Zhou at
the Geneva Conference in 1954, a slight that rankled, despite the
frequent Chinese protestations that it made no difference. We then
repaired to a conference room in the guesthouse and faced each
other across a green baize table. Here the American delegation had
its first personal experience with the singular figure who had
worked by Mao’s side through nearly a half century of revolution,
war, upheaval, and diplomatic maneuver.