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Zhou Enlai

In some sixty years of public life, I have encountered no more compelling figure than Zhou Enlai. Short, elegant, with an expressive face framing luminous eyes, he dominated by exceptional intelligence and capacity to intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number. When I met him, he had been Premier for nearly twenty-two years and an associate of Mao for forty. He had made himself indispensable as the crucial mediator between Mao and the people who formed the raw material for the Chairman’s vast agenda, translating Mao’s sweeping visions into concrete programs. At the same time, he had earned the gratitude of many Chinese for moderating the excesses of these visions, at least wherever Mao’s fervor gave scope for moderation.

The difference between the leaders was reflected in their personalities. Mao dominated any gathering; Zhou suffused it. Mao’s passion strove to overwhelm opposition; Zhou’s intellect would seek to persuade or outmaneuver it. Mao was sardonic; Zhou penetrating. Mao thought of himself as a philosopher; Zhou saw his role as an administrator or a negotiator. Mao was eager to accelerate history; Zhou was content to exploit its currents. A saying he often repeated was “The helmsman must ride with the waves.” When they were together, there was no question of the hierarchy, not simply in the formal sense but in the deeper aspect of Zhou’s extraordinarily deferential conduct.

Later on, Zhou was criticized for having concentrated on softening some of Mao’s practices rather than resisting them. When the American delegation met Zhou, China had just undergone the Cultural Revolution, of which he was—as a cosmopolitan, foreign-educated advocate for pragmatic engagement with the West—an obvious target. Was he its enabler or a brake on it? Surely Zhou’s methods of political survival involved lending his administrative skill to the execution of policies that he may well have found personally distasteful; perhaps because of this, however, he was spared the purges that were the fate of most of his contemporary leaders in the 1960s (until he eventually came under increasing attack and was in effect removed from office in late 1973).

The advisor to the prince occasionally faces the dilemma of balancing the benefits of the ability to alter events against the possibility of exclusion, should he bring his objections to any one policy to a head. How does the ability to modify the prince’s prevailing conduct weigh against the moral onus of participation in his policies? How does one measure the element of nuance over time against the claims of absolutes in the immediate? What is the balance between the cumulative impact of moderating trends against that of a grand (and probably doomed) gesture?

Deng Xiaoping cut to the heart of these dilemmas in his subsequent assessment of Zhou’s role in the Cultural Revolution, in which Deng and his family suffered considerably: “Without the premier the Cultural Revolution would have been much worse. And without the premier the Cultural Revolution wouldn’t have dragged on for such a long time.”¹ Publicly at least, Deng resolved these issues on behalf of Zhou. In an interview Deng gave to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1980, after his return from exile, he stated:

Premier Zhou was a man who worked hard and uncomplainingly all his life. He worked 12 hours a day, and sometimes 16 hours or more, throughout his life. We got to know each other quite early, that is, when we were in France on a work-study programme during the 1920s. I have always looked upon him as my elder brother. We took the revolutionary road at about the same time. He was much respected by his comrades and all the people. Fortunately he survived during the “Cultural Revolution” when we were knocked down. He was in an extremely difficult position then, and he said and did many things that he would have wished not to. But the people forgave him because, had he not done and said those things, he himself would not have been able to survive and play the neutralizing role he did, which reduced losses. He succeeded in protecting quite a number of people.²

Contrary views have had their hearing; not all analysts share Deng’s ultimate appraisal of the exigencies of Zhou’s political survival.³

In my dealings with him, Zhou’s subtle and sensitive style helped overcome many pitfalls of an emerging relationship between two previously hostile major countries. The Sino-U.S. rapprochement started as a tactical aspect of the Cold War; it evolved to where it became central to the evolution of the new global order. Neither of us had any illusion of changing the basic convictions of the other. It was precisely the absence of any such illusion that facilitated our dialogue. But we articulated common purposes that survived both our periods in office—one of the highest rewards to which statesmen can lay claim.

All that was still in the distant future when Zhou and I sat down around the baize table to explore whether a beginning of reconciliation was truly possible at all. Zhou invited me, as the guest, to make the opening statement. I had decided not to detail the issues that had divided the two countries but rather to concentrate on the evolution of Sino-U.S. relations from a philosophical perspective. My opening remarks included the somewhat florid phrase “Many visitors have come to this beautiful and, to us, mysterious land . . .” At this point, Zhou interrupted: “You will find it not mysterious. When you have become familiar with it, it will not be so mysterious as before.”⁴

Unraveling each other’s mysteries was a good way of defining our challenge, but Zhou went further. In his first comments to an American envoy in twenty years, he stated that restoring friendship was one of the principal goals of the emerging relationship—a point he had already made when he met with the American Ping-Pong team.

On my second visit three months later, Zhou greeted my delegation as if the friendship were already an established fact:

So it’s only the second meeting, and I am saying what I want to you. You and Mr. [Winston] Lord are familiar with this but not Miss [Diane] Matthews [my secretary] and our new friend [referring to Commander Jon Howe, my military assistant]. You probably thought the Chinese Communist Party has three heads and six arms. But, lo and behold, I am like you. Someone you can talk reason with and talk honestly.⁵

In February 1973, Mao made the same point: the United States and China had once been “two enemies,” he offered in welcoming me to his study, but “[n]ow we call the relationship between ourselves a friendship.”⁶

It was, however, a hardheaded, unsentimental perception of friendship. The Chinese Communist leadership retained some of the traditional approach to barbarian management. In it, the other side is flattered by being admitted to the Chinese “club” as an “old friend,” a posture that makes disagreement more complicated and confrontations painful. When they conduct Middle Kingdom diplomacy, Chinese diplomats maneuver to induce their opposite numbers to propose the Chinese preference so that acquiescence can appear as the granting of a personal favor to the interlocutor.

At the same time, the emphasis on personal relationships goes beyond the tactical. Chinese diplomacy has learned from millennia of experience that, in international issues, each apparent solution is generally an admission ticket to a new set of related problems. Hence Chinese diplomats consider continuity of relationships an important task and perhaps more important than formal documents. By comparison, American diplomacy tends to segment issues into self-contained units to be dealt with on their own merits. In this task, American diplomats also prize good personal relations. The difference is that Chinese leaders relate the “friendship” less to personal qualities and more to long-term cultural, national, or historic ties; Americans stress the individual qualities of their counterparts. Chinese protestations of friendship seek durability for long-term relationships through the cultivation of intangibles; American equivalents attempt to facilitate ongoing activities by emphasis on social contact. And Chinese leaders will pay some (though not unlimited) price for the reputation of standing by their friends—for example, Mao’s invitation to Nixon shortly after his resignation, when he was being widely ostracized. The same gesture was made to former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka of Japan, when he retired due to a scandal in 1974.

A good illustration of the Chinese emphasis on intangibles is an exchange I had with Zhou during my October 1971 visit. I presented the proposals of our advance team for the presidential visit with the reassurance that, since we had so many substantive issues to deal with, technical problems would not be permitted to stand in the way. Zhou replied by turning my operational point into a cultural paradigm: “Right. Mutual trust and mutual respect. These two points.” I had emphasized functionality; Zhou stressed context.

One cultural trait regularly invoked by Chinese leaders was their historic perspective—the ability, indeed the necessity, to think of time in categories different from the West’s. Whatever an individual Chinese leader achieves is brought about in a time frame that represents a smaller fraction of his society’s total experience than any other leader in the world. The duration and scale of the Chinese past allow Chinese leaders to use the mantle of an almost limitless history to evoke a certain modesty in their opposite numbers (even if, in the retelling, what is presented as history is occasionally defined by a metaphorical interpretation). The foreign interlocutor can be made to feel that he is standing against the way of nature and that his actions are already destined to be written as a footnoted aberration in the grand sweep of Chinese history.

In those first exchanges with us on our arrival in Beijing, Zhou made a valiant effort to confer on America a history longer than China’s as a kind of welcoming present. In the next sentence, however, he was back to the traditional perspective:

We are two countries on two sides of the Pacific Ocean, yours with a history of 200 years, and ours with a history of only 22 years, dating from the founding of New China. Therefore, we are younger than you. As for our ancient culture, every country has it—the Indians in the U.S. and Mexico, the Inca Empire in South America, which was even more ancient than China. It’s a pity that their scriptures were not preserved, but were lost. With respect to China’s long history, there’s one good point, the written language, which contains a heritage of 4,000 years based on historical relics. This is beneficial to the unification and development of our nation.⁷

Altogether, Zhou sought to outline a new approach to international relations, claiming a special moral quality that had evolved under Confucianism and was now ascribed to Communism:

Chairman Mao on many occasions has said that we would absolutely not become a superpower. What we strive for is that all countries, big or small, be equal. It is not just a question of equality for two countries. Of course, it’s a good thing for our two countries to negotiate on the basis of equality to exchange views, and to seek to find common points as well as putting on the table our differences. In order to really gain a relaxation in the international arena over a comparatively long period of time, one must deal with one another on the basis of equality. That is not easy to achieve.⁸

Machiavelli would have argued that it is in the interest of the country in need of reassurance yet unwilling to ask for it to strive for a general proposition that could then be applied to specific cases. This was one reason why Zhou insisted that, however strong it became, China would maintain a unique approach to international affairs that eschewed the traditional concept of power:

We do not consider ourselves a power. Although we are developing our economy, in comparison to others we are comparatively backward. Of course, your President also mentioned that in the next five to ten years, China will speedily develop. We think it will not be so soon, although we will try to go all out, aim high, and develop our socialist construction in a better, faster, and more economical way.

The second part of our answer is that when our economy is developed, we will still not consider ourselves a superpower and will not join in the ranks of the superpowers.⁹

The proposition that all that China sought was equality among nations would surely have marked a departure from an imperial history in which China is described as the Middle Kingdom. It was also a way of reassuring the United States that China was not a potential threat requiring countervailing force. The principle that Chinese international conduct was based on norms transcending the assertion of power went back to Confucius. As a basis for a new relationship, the test would be the compatibility of these norms with the pressures of a period of upheaval.

The underlying challenge of the secret visit was to establish enough confidence to turn a first meeting into a process. Almost invariably, high-level diplomatic exchanges begin by clearing away the underbrush of day-to-day issues. The unusual aspect of the secret visit was that, in the absence of any contact for twenty years, there were no day-to-day problems to clear away except two, which were recognized as insoluble in the short term: Taiwan and Vietnam. The problem was how to put them aside.

Both of these issues were anomalies. In 1971—it is hard to remember—the United States did not recognize Beijing as the capital of China. China and America had no diplomats in each other’s capitals and had no direct way to communicate with each other. The U.S. ambassador to China was assigned to Taipei, and the Chinese ambassador to the United States represented Taiwan. No U.S. diplomats or officials were assigned to Beijing. (So-called liaison offices were not established until eighteen months later.)

The second anomaly was the Vietnam War. Part of my task was to achieve Chinese understanding for a war America was fighting on China’s border against an ally of China. Both Zhou and I knew that my very presence in Beijing was a grievous blow to Hanoi, raising the implication of its isolation—though neither Zhou nor I ever discussed the issue in these terms.¹⁰

The Taiwan issue had become deeply embedded in the domestic attitudes of both countries, defined by two preconditions that had so far stymied diplomatic movement. Beijing’s position had been that American acceptance of the “one China principle” was the precondition of any progress. The American precondition was that China commit itself to peaceful resolution of the issue before the United States would discuss it.

In the first exchange over the agenda, Zhou cut that Gordian knot. In the exchanges before the meeting, he had already accepted the principle that both sides would be free to raise any topic, but he had not yet abandoned the condition that the Taiwan issue needed to be discussed and presumably settled first. In the initial exchange, Zhou indicated that he was open to any sequence of discussion I might suggest—in other words, Taiwan no longer needed to be discussed, much less settled first. He also accepted linkage in reverse—that is, to make a settlement of issues relating to Taiwan dependent on the solution of other issues, for example, Indochina:

KISSINGER: I wanted to ask the Prime Minister how he proposes to proceed. We can do it in one of two ways—each stating the problems which concern us, reserving its answers until later, or proceeding with the issues one at a time. Which do you prefer?

ZHOU: What is your opinion?

KISSINGER: I have no strong opinion. One possible way is that since Prime Minister Zhou has stated his views on Taiwan, we could state our views on Indochina. Then I could tell him of my reaction to his statement on Taiwan, and he could tell me of his reaction to mine on Indochina. Or we could take each issue one at a time.

ZHOU: Either way, it’s your decision. You can say whatever you like. You could speak first on the Taiwan question or Indochina, or together, because you may think they are linked.

KISSINGER: I believe they are linked to some extent.¹¹

In the event, we made the withdrawal of our military forces from Taiwan conditional on the settlement of the Indochina war.

Zhou’s substantive position on Taiwan, which he articulated during the long opening discussion on the first day, was familiar; we had heard it at 136 Warsaw meetings. The United States needed to “recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China and not make any exceptions” and accept that Taiwan was “an inalienable part of China.”¹² “The natural logic of the matter” dictated that the United States must “withdraw all its armed forces and dismantle all its military installations on Taiwan and in the Taiwan Straits within a limited time period.” ¹³ As these processes unfolded, eventually the U.S.–Republic of China defense treaty—whose legality Beijing did not recognize—“would not exist.”¹⁴

At the time of the secret trip to China, there was no difference between Beijing and Taipei as to the nature of the Chinese state. Both Chinese sides subscribed to the one China principle; the Taiwanese authorities forbade agitation for independence. Therefore for the United States, the issue was not agreeing to the one China principle so much as putting the recognition of Beijing as the capital of a united China into a time frame compatible with American domestic necessities. The secret trip began the delicate process by which the United States has step by step accepted a one China concept, and China has been extremely flexible about the timing of its implementation. Successive American Presidents of both parties have skillfully pursued a balancing act. They have progressively deepened relations with Beijing while creating conditions in which Taiwan’s economy and democracy have flourished. Successive Chinese leaders, while vigorously insisting on their perception of one China, have not pushed it to a showdown.

Zhou followed the same pattern on Vietnam that I had on Taiwan in the sense of avoiding any immediate commitment but also any sense of urgency. Zhou listened to my presentation and asked penetrating questions; yet he stopped far short of even moral pressure, much less threats. Whatever support China gave Vietnam had a historical, not an ideological or strategic, origin, he explained. “The debt we owe them was incurred by our ancestors. We have since liberation no responsibility because we overthrew the old system. Yet we still feel a deep and full sympathy for them.”¹⁵ Sympathy, of course, was not the same as political or military support; it was a delicate way to convey that China would not become involved militarily or press us diplomatically.

At lunch on the second day, at the Great Hall of the People, Zhou suddenly raised the issue of the Cultural Revolution. We had undoubtedly observed it from outside, he said, but he wanted his guests to understand the road that had led China—however circuitously—to where Chinese and American leaders could now meet.

Mao had sought to purify the Communist Party and break through the bureaucratic structures, Zhou explained. To this end, he had created the Red Guards as an institution outside the Party and the government, whose task was to return the system to the true ideology and ideological purity. The decision turned out to produce turmoil, as various Red Guard units pursued increasingly autonomous and incompatible policies. Indeed a point was reached, according to Zhou’s account, where various organizations or even regions created their own Red Guard units to protect themselves in the spreading chaos. The spectacle of these splinter Red Guard units fighting each other was truly shocking for a people brought up on the universal truth of Communist beliefs and faith in China’s unity. At that point, Chairman Mao had asked the PLA to restore order after the country on the whole had made progress in defeating bureaucracy and clarifying its convictions.

Zhou was in a delicate position in presenting this account, which he must have been instructed to do by Mao. He clearly sought to distinguish himself from the Cultural Revolution and yet remain loyal to Mao, who would read the transcript. At the time I tried to sum up Zhou’s main point to myself as indicating a measure of disassociation from Mao by means of an expression of qualified support as follows: There was much chaos during the Cultural Revolution. At one point, the Red Guards locked Zhou up in his own office. On the other hand, Zhou had not been as farsighted as Chairman Mao, who saw the need to inject new vigor into the revolution.¹⁶

Why present such a narrative to an American delegation on the first visit from the United States in two decades? Because the objective was to go beyond normalization to what our interlocutors called friendship, but which would be more accurately described as strategic cooperation. For that, it was important to define China as a country that had overcome its turmoil and was therefore reliable. Having navigated the Cultural Revolution, Zhou implied, it was able to face any foreign foe as a united country and was therefore a potential partner against the Soviet threat. Zhou made the theme explicit in the formal session that immediately followed. It was held in the Fujian Hall of the Great Hall of the People, where each hall is named after a Chinese province. Fujian is the province to which, in both Beijing’s and Taipei’s administrative divisions, Taiwan and the so-called offshore islands belonged.¹⁷ Zhou did not make a point of the symbolism, and the Americans ignored it.

Zhou began by outlining China’s defiance, even should all conceivable enemies unite against it:

You like to talk about philosophy. The worst would be that China would be carved up once again. You could unite, with the USSR occupying all areas north of the Yellow River, and you occupying all the areas south of the Yangtze River, and the eastern section between these two rivers could be left to Japan. . . .

If such a large maneuver should occur, what would the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mao be prepared to do? We would be prepared to resist for a protracted period by people’s warfare, engaging in a long-term struggle until final victory. This would take time and, of course, we would have to sacrifice lives, but this is something which we would have to contemplate.¹⁸

According to recent Chinese historical accounts, Zhou had been specifically instructed by Mao to “brag” that “although all under the heaven[s] is in great chaos, the situation is wonderful.”¹⁹ Mao was worried about Soviet aggression, but he did not want to express concern, even less appear to ask for help. The narrative of turmoil under the heavens was his way of eliciting American attitudes without the implication of concern involved in asking for them: to sketch both the maximum conceivable threat and China’s fortitude in resisting even it. No American intelligence estimate had ever conceived so cataclysmic a contingency; no American policymaker had considered so global a confrontation. Yet its sweep did not specify the specific dominant concern—which was a Soviet attack—and thus China avoided appearing as a supplicant.

Despite its apparent explicitness, Zhou’s presentation was a subtle approach to a discussion of strategic cooperation. In the Atlantic region we were allied with friendly countries under a looming threat. They would seek reassurance by transforming oral pledges into a legal obligation. The Chinese leaders took the opposite course. How China was prepared to stand alone, even in the face of a nuclear threat, and fight a protracted guerrilla war on its own against a coalition of all major powers became a standard Chinese narrative over the next decade. Its underlying purpose was to turn self-reliance into a weapon and into a method of mutual assistance based on parallel perceptions. Reciprocal obligations between China and the United States would not be established in a legal document but in a shared perception of a common threat. Though China made no claim for outside assistance, it would spontaneously arise from shared perceptions; it would be dispensed with if the other party did not share—or no longer shared—the Chinese view of the challenge.

At the very end of the second day’s session and with the evening blocked for Zhou by the visit of the North Korean dignitary—with about eighteen hours before our unbreakable departure deadline—Zhou raised the issue of a visit by President Nixon. Both Zhou and I had made glancing references to it but had avoided being specific because neither of us wanted to deal with a rebuff or to appear as a supplicant. Zhou finally adopted the elegant solution of moving into the topic as a procedural issue:

ZHOU: What is your thinking on an announcement of the visit?

KISSINGER: What visit?

ZHOU: Would it cover only your visit or also President Nixon’s visit?

KISSINGER: We could announce my visit and say that Chairman Mao has extended an invitation to President Nixon and he has accepted, either in principle or at a fixed time, next spring. What is your pleasure? I think there are advantages in doing both together.

ZHOU: Then would it be possible for the two sides to designate some of our men to draft an announcement?

KISSINGER: We should draft in the context we have been discussing.

ZHOU: Both visits.

KISSINGER: That would be all right.

ZHOU: We shall try it. . . . I have an appointment at six o’clock that will last until ten o’clock. My office is free to you. Or you can go to your residence for discussions. You can have supper and rest and a film.

KISSINGER: We will meet at 10:00.

ZHOU: Yes, I will come to your residence. We will work deep into the night.²⁰

As it happened, the communiqué could not be finished that night because of a deadlock over who would be said to have invited whom. Each side wanted the other to look more eager. We split the difference. The draft needed the Chairman’s approval, and Mao had gone to bed. Mao finally approved a formulation in which Zhou, “[k]nowing of President Nixon’s expressed desire to visit the People’s Republic of China,” was said to have “extended an invitation,” which Nixon had then accepted “with pleasure.”

We finished drafting the terms of a statement for the visit of President Nixon just before the deadline for our departure on the afternoon of Sunday, July 11. “Our announcement will shake the world,” said Zhou, and the delegation flew back, concealing its excitement for the hours before the world could be shaken. I briefed Nixon at his San Clemente “Western White House.” Then, simultaneously on July 15, from Los Angeles and Beijing, the secret trip and the invitation were both made public.

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Zhou Enlai

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