The Fall of Zhou Enlai
Political survival
for the second man in an autocracy is inherently difficult. It
requires being close enough to the leader to leave no space for a
competitor but not so close as to make the leader feel threatened.
None of Mao’s number twos had managed that tightrope act: Liu
Shaoqi, who served as number two with the title of President from
1959 to 1967 and was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, and
Lin Biao had both been destroyed politically and lost their lives
in the process.
Zhou had been our
principal interlocutor at all meetings. We noticed on the visit in
November 1973 that he was a shade more tentative than usual and
even more deferential to Mao than customarily. But it was
compensated for by a conversation of nearly three hours with Mao,
the most comprehensive review of foreign policy strategy we had had
yet. It ended with Mao escorting me to the anteroom and an official
release announcing that the Chairman and I had had “a far-ranging
discussion in a friendly atmosphere.”
With Mao’s apparent
imprimatur, all negotiations ended rapidly and favorably. The final
communiqué 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” even further. Exchanges
and trade were to be increased. The scope of the liaison offices
was to be expanded. Zhou said he would recall the head of the
Chinese Liaison Office from Washington to instruct him on the
nature of the agreed intensified dialogue.
Contemporary Chinese
historians point out that the criticisms of the Gang of Four
against Zhou were reaching a crisis point at this time. We were
aware from the media that an anti-Confucian campaign was taking
place but did not consider that it had any immediate relevance to
foreign policy or Chinese leadership issues. In his dealings with
Americans, Zhou continued to exhibit unflappable self-assurance. On
only one occasion did his serenity leave him. At a banquet in the
Great Hall of the People in November 1973, in a general
conversation, I made the observation that China seemed to me to
have remained essentially Confucian in its belief in a single,
universal, generally applicable truth as the standard of individual
conduct and social cohesion. What Communism had done, I suggested,
was to establish Marxism as the content of that truth.
I cannot recall what
possessed me to make this statement, which, however accurate,
surely did not take into account Mao’s attacks on Confucians who
were alleged to be impeding his policies. Zhou exploded, the only
time I saw him lose his temper. Confucianism, he said, was a
doctrine of class oppression while Communism represented a
philosophy of liberation. With uncharacteristic insistence, he kept
up the argument, no doubt to some degree so as to have it on record
for the benefit of Nancy Tang, the interpreter who was close to
Jiang Qing, and Wang Hairong, the grand-niece of Mao, who was
always in Zhou’s entourage.
Shortly afterward, we
learned that Zhou was stricken with cancer and that he was
withdrawing from the day-to-day management of affairs. A dramatic
upheaval followed. The visit to China had ended on a dramatic high.
The meeting with Mao was not only the most substantive of all
previous dialogues; its symbolism—its length, the demonstrative
courtesies such as escorting me to the anteroom, the warm
communiqué—was designed to emphasize its significance. As I was
leaving, Zhou told me that he thought the dialogue had been the
most significant since the secret visit:
ZHOU: 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.3
The dialogue provided
for in the communiqué never got underway. The nearly completed
negotiations on financial issues languished. The head of the
liaison office returned to Beijing but did not come back for four
months. The National Security Council officer in charge of China
reported that bilateral relations were “immobilized.”4 Within a month, the
change in Zhou’s fortunes—though not its extent—became
visible.
It has since emerged
that in December 1973, less than a month after the events described
here, Mao obliged Zhou to undergo “struggle sessions” in front of
the Politburo to justify his foreign policy, described as too
accommodating by Nancy Tang and Wang Hairong, the Mao loyalists in
his entourage. In the course of the sessions, Deng, who had been
brought back from exile as a possible alternative to Zhou, summed
up the prevailing criticism as follows: “Your position is just one
step away from [the] Chairman. . . . To others, the Chairmanship is
within sight, but beyond reach. To you, however, it is within sight
and within reach. I hope you will always keep this in mind.”5 Zhou was, in effect,
accused of overreaching.
When the session
ended, a Politburo meeting criticized Zhou openly:
Generally speaking, [Zhou] forgot about the principle of preventing “rightism” while allying with [the United States]. This is mainly because [he] forgot about the Chairman’s instructions. [He] over-estimated the power of the enemy and devaluated the power of the people. [He] also failed to grasp the principle of combining the diplomatic line with supporting revolution.6
By early 1974, Zhou
disappeared as a policymaker, ostensibly on account of his cancer.
But illness was not a sufficient explanation for the oblivion into
which he fell. No Chinese official referred to him again. In my
first meeting with Deng in early 1974, he mentioned Mao repeatedly
and ignored any reference I made to Zhou. If a negotiating record
was needed, our Chinese opposite numbers would cite the two
conversations with Mao in 1973. I saw Zhou only one more time, in
December 1974, when I had taken some members of my family to
Beijing with me on an official visit. My family was invited to the
meeting. In what was described as a hospital but looked like a
State Guesthouse, Zhou avoided any political or diplomatic subjects
by saying his doctors had forbidden any exertions. The meeting
lasted a little more than twenty minutes. It was carefully staged
to symbolize that dialogue about Sino-American relations with Zhou
had come to an end.
There was no little
poignancy at such an end to a career defined by ultimate loyalty to
Mao. Zhou had stood by the aging Chairman through crises that
obliged him to balance his admiration for Mao’s revolutionary
leadership against the pragmatic and more humane instincts of his
own nature. He had survived because he was indispensable and, in an
ultimate sense, loyal—too loyal, his critics argued. Now he was
removed from authority when the storms seemed to be subsiding and
with the reassuring shore within sight. He had not differed from
Mao’s policies as Deng had done a decade earlier. No American
dealing with him noted any departure from what Mao had said (and in
any event, the Chairman seemed to be monitoring the meetings by
reading the transcripts every evening). True, Zhou treated the
American delegations with consummate—though aloof—courtesy; that
was the prerequisite for moving toward partnership with America,
which China’s difficult security situation required. I interpreted
his conduct as a way to facilitate Chinese imperatives, not as
concessions to my or any other American’s personality.
It is conceivable
that Zhou may have begun to view the American relationship as a
permanent feature, while Mao treated it as a tactical phase. Zhou
may have concluded that China, emerging from the wreckage of the
Cultural Revolution, would not be able to thrive in the world
unless it ended its isolation and became a genuine part of the
international order. But this is something I surmise from Zhou’s
conduct, not his words. Our dialogue never reached an exchange of
personal comments. Some of Zhou’s successors tend to refer to him
as “your friend, Zhou.” To the extent that they mean this
literally—and even if it has a sardonic undertone—I consider it an
honor.
Politically hobbled,
emaciated, and terminally ill, Zhou surfaced in January 1975 for
one last public gesture. The occasion was a meeting of China’s
National People’s Congress, the first convocation of its kind since
the start of the Cultural Revolution. Zhou was still technically
Premier. He opened with a declaration of carefully worded praise
for the Cultural Revolution and the anti-Confucius campaign, both
of which had nearly destroyed him and both of which he now hailed
as “great,” “important,” and “far-reaching” in their influence. It
was the last public declaration of loyalty to the Chairman whom he
had served for forty years. But then halfway through the speech,
Zhou presented, as if it were simply the logical continuation of
this program, a completely new direction. He revisited a long
dormant proposal from before the Cultural Revolution—that China
should strive to achieve “comprehensive modernization” in four key
sectors: agriculture; industry; national defense; and science and
technology. Zhou noted that he was issuing this call—effectively a
repudiation of the goals of the Cultural Revolution—“on Chairman
Mao’s instructions,” though when and how these were issued was left
unclear.7
Zhou exhorted China
to achieve the “Four Modernizations” “before the end of the
century.” Zhou’s listeners could not fail to note that he would
never live to see this goal realized. And as the first half of
Zhou’s speech attested, such modernization would be achieved, if at
all, only after further ideological struggle. But Zhou’s audience
would remember his assessment—part forecast, part challenge—that by
the end of the twentieth century, China’s “national economy will be
advancing in the front ranks of the world.”8 In the years to
come, some of them would heed this call and champion the cause of
technological advancement and economic liberalization, even at
serious political and personal risk.