by Philip Short
Thirty hours later, Zhou was awakened to be handed a message from China's Ambassador in Ulan Bator. The Mongolian Foreign Ministry had issued an official protest because a Chinese air-force Trident had violated Mongolian airspace in the early hours of Monday morning, and had crashed near the settlement of Undur Khan. All nine people on board had been killed. The bodies were identified by Soviet forensic experts and buried nearby.
An examination of the site showed that the plane had overturned and caught fire while trying to make an emergency landing in the steppe. Flying at low altitude, it probably ran out of fuel. Yet here, too, one final mystery remains. Shortly before the aircraft had taken off, Wu Faxian had telephoned the control tower at Shanhaiguan and had given the pilot, Pan Jingyin, a direct order not to fly under any circumstances. Pan assured him that he would not. Minutes later, the plane left, flying at a height of 300 metres to try to avoid radar and observing radio silence. That would normally make Pan an accomplice in Lin's betrayal. Yet he was posthumously decorated as a revolutionary martyr. Could he have been in some way responsible for the crash, and hence for foiling Lin's escape, and if so, could Beijing have learned what he had done? There is no answer.
Of all the Chinese leaders Mao purged during his years of power, only Lin Biao attempted to resist. Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi had gone meekly to their fates, maintaining to the last their unswerving devotion to the Party. Neither had attempted to defend himself; neither tried to hit back. Even Gao Gang, who made a kind of protest by committing suicide, had first confessed his errors.
Lin was different. He had employed what Mao called the ‘last and best’ of the ‘36 stratagems’ from the military manuals of Chinese antiquity: to run away. He had not abased himself. Nor had he submitted to Mao's will.
The Chairman was shattered.
His doctor, who was present when Zhou broke the news of Lin's flight, remembered years later how his face collapsed in shock.48 Once the initial crisis had passed, and the Defence Minister's allies – including the four unfortunate generals, Wu Faxian, Lin Zuopeng, Qiu Huizuo and Huang Yongsheng, who had been as much in the dark as everyone else – had been placed under arrest, Mao took to his bed, suffering from deep depression. He remained there for nearly two months, with high blood pressure and a lung infection. As ever, it was psychosomatic. But this time, he did not bounce back. In November, when he emerged to meet the North Vietnamese Premier, Pham Van Dong, Chinese who saw the television pictures were shocked at how much he had aged. His shoulders were stooped, and he walked with an old man's shuffle. People said his legs looked like wobbly, wooden sticks.
In January 1972, Chen Yi died. Two hours before the funeral, Mao decided that he would attend, disregarding the entreaties of his aides who feared that the subzero weather would be too much for his frail health. They were right. After standing through the ceremony, Mao's legs were trembling so badly he could barely walk.
It was widely rumoured afterwards that that month he had a stroke. In fact he suffered from congestive heart failure, which he made worse by refusing medical treatment.49 But the root of the problem remained political. Although Mao had been preparing, in August and early September, for a confrontation with Lin Biao, he had not decided exactly how the problem should be resolved: whether simply to demote him within the Politburo; to criticise him inside the Party, but allow him to remain a nominal member of the leadership, like Peng Dehuai in 1959; or to purge him altogether – a possibility, given careful preparation, but the least desirable option because of its effect on public opinion. By fleeing, Lin Biao had taken the initiative out of the Chairman's hands.50
In one sense, his task was made easier by the discovery of the activities of Lin Liguo.
Although Mao had sensed a security risk, and had taken precautions accordingly, details of the young air-force officers’ plotting had emerged only after Lin's flight. Juvenile though the conspiracy was, it enabled Mao to paint the Defence Minister as a traitor, who had attempted to stage a coup d'état.
This was the line pursued in briefings to Party officials which began in mid-October, to be followed by meetings in factories and work units to inform the population at large.51
It was not an easy story to sell. Even the credulity of the long-suffering Chinese was strained by the revelation that yet another of Mao's closest colleagues had proved to be a villain. What did it say about the Chairman's judgement if Liu Shaoqi (a ‘scab and renegade’), Chen Boda (a ‘sham Marxist’) and Lin Biao (a ‘counter-revolutionary careerist’), all of whom had been at Mao's side for decades, were suddenly, one after the other, unmasked as hidden enemies? The ‘Hundred Flowers’ and the anti-Rightist Campaign had cost Mao the trust of China's intellectuals. The chaos and terror of the Cultural Revolution had destroyed the faith of the Party hierarchy and tens of millions of ordinary citizens. Lin Biao's fall was the last straw. After 1971, general cynicism prevailed. Only the young (and not all of them), and those who had profited from the radical upsurge, still believed in Mao's revolutionary new world.
The combined effects of illness and political failure brought the Chairman close to despair. For the first time since the autumn of 1945, when Stalin had betrayed him in the confrontation with Chiang Kai-shek, he felt like giving up. One afternoon in January 1972 he told an appalled Zhou Enlai, whom he had placed in charge of the day-to-day work of the Central Committee, that he could no longer carry on and Zhou should take over.52 In 1945 it had had been an American, Harry Truman, who had lifted Mao's depression by launching the Marshall mission to mediate in the Chinese civil war. This time, too, an American would get him out of his black hole. For Mao, and for the Chinese people, the fate of Lin Biao was soon to be eclipsed by an even more astonishing and unthinkable event: after twenty years of unblinking hostility, the US President, Richard Nixon, was to pay an official visit to Beijing.
The clashes on Zhenbao Island in March 1969, and the tension between Beijing and Moscow the following spring and summer, had certainly got Washington's attention. Even beforehand, some US leaders had begun to think aloud about a more productive relationship with Beijing. A year or so earlier, Nixon had written of the need to wean China from its ‘angry isolation’, a phrase which he had repeated in his inaugural address. There had been talk of trying to move towards a triangular relationship. But until the border conflict raised the spectre of a Sino-Soviet war, no one could see how that might be done.53
The first hesitant signals began in July that year. The United States modified its ban on American citizens travelling to China. Three days later, China released two American yachtsmen who had strayed into Chinese waters. In August, the Secretary of State, William Rogers, stated publicly that the US was ‘seeking to open up channels of communication’. Romania and Pakistan were asked to relay private messages. In October, as Sino-Soviet tensions eased, Nixon made a more substantial gesture: the Chinese were informed that two US destroyers, which had been making symbolic patrols in the Taiwan Straits since the Korean War, were to be withdrawn.
So began what Kissinger called an ‘intricate minuet’, which twenty-one months later would make him the first US official to travel to Beijing since 1949.
Along the way there was farce: when Walter Stoessel, the US Ambassador in Warsaw, approached his Chinese counterpart at a reception to express interest in talks, he watched his interlocutor back away and run down a staircase, terrified of a contact for which he had no instructions. There was tragedy: an American businessman, who had spent fifteen years in Chinese prisons as a spy, committed suicide shortly before he was to have been released as a gesture of goodwill. There were setbacks: contacts virtually stopped for six months in 1970 because of the US offensive in Cambodia. And there was bafflement: on National Day in Beijing that year, Zhou Enlai brought Edgar Snow and his wife, who were then visiting China, to be photographed with Mao on Tiananmen. It was an unprecedented gesture: no foreigner had ever been so honoured. ‘Unfortunately,’ Kissinger confessed later, ‘what they conveyed was so ob
lique that our crude Occidental minds completely missed the point.’ Only long afterwards did he realise that Mao was signalling that the dialogue with America had his personal support.
Mao's elliptical way of doing things soon defeated his purposes a second time. In an interview with Snow in December, he alluded to Nixon's remark, two months earlier, that ‘if there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China’. Mao told Snow: ‘I would be happy to talk with him, either as a tourist or as President.’ Afterwards, Snow was given the official Chinese transcript of the conversation, but asked to delay publication for several months. Mao's assumption was that Snow would send a copy of the transcript to the White House. He did not – and again the Chairman's message did not get through.54
The following spring, therefore, Mao made a gesture which even the obtuse Americans could not fail to understand.
In March 1971, a Chinese table-tennis team participated in the World Championships in Nagoya, Japan. They were the first Chinese sportsmen to travel abroad for years. On April 4, one of the US team taking part, a nineteen-year-old Californian, mentioned casually to a Chinese player that he would love to visit Beijing. This was reported back to Zhou Enlai, who raised it with Mao next day. They agreed not to pursue it. But that night, after taking his sleeping pills, Mao called his head nurse and told her drowsily, just before he fell asleep, to telephone the Foreign Ministry with instructions to invite the American players at once.II
Ping-pong diplomacy, as it was called, took the world by storm.
The US players were given a dazzling welcome. Zhou himself received them in the Great Hall of the People, and declared that they had opened a new chapter in the two countries’ relations which marked a ‘recommencement of our friendship’.
Three months later, Kissinger followed. His journey was kept secret – thanks to a subterfuge about a stomach upset which supposedly confined him to bed in Pakistan. On his return, an exuberant Nixon announced on American television that a high-level dialogue with China was under way and he himself would go there next spring. To flesh out the details, Kissinger returned to Beijing in October – this time in the full glare of publicity – and agreed the basis for the Shanghai communiqué, which was to be the crowning achievement of the presidential visit, fixing the pattern of Chinese–US relations for the rest of the century and beyond.
Mao was preoccupied with the Lin Biao affair during Kissinger's first trip, and bedridden, suffering from depression, during the second. None the less, it was his caustic instruction that the two sides avoid ‘the sort of banality that the Soviets would sign, but neither mean nor observe’ that gave the communiqué its force. Differences were stated ‘explicitly, sometimes brutally’, which underlined their common interest in opposing Soviet hegemony.55 Only the crucial issue of Taiwan remained wrapped in ambiguity.
The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China, and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.56
As Kissinger left for home at the end of this second visit, the United Nations General Assembly voted to expel Taiwan and seat the People's Republic in its place. An era in post-war politics was over.
By January 1972, the diplomatic preparations for Nixon's trip had been completed.
But the central personage of the drama was missing. Mao's physical condition was deteriorating, and he was still refusing to allow his doctors to treat him. On February 1 – three weeks before Nixon was due to arrive – he relented, only to collapse, unconscious, next day after choking on phlegm from his infected lungs. A combination of antibiotics and the prospect of meeting China's ‘most respected enemy’ pulled him back from the brink. However, his throat remained swollen, making it difficult for him to talk, and his body was so bloated from the build-up of fluid that a new suit and shoes had to be made. In the week before Nixon arrived, his staff helped him to practise sitting down, getting up and walking about in his room, to exercise his muscles again after the months he had spent confined to his bed.57
When the great day came, Mao was on tenterhooks. He sat by the telephone listening to minute-by-minute reports of the President's progress from the airport, where he had been greeted by Zhou Enlai; through the empty streets of Beijing, cleared of traffic for the occasion; to the state guest-house at Diaoyutai. No meeting with Mao was on the schedule. But he now sent word that he wanted to see the President at once. At Zhou's insistence, Nixon was allowed to rest and have lunch. But then he and Kissinger were swept off in a cavalcade of Red Flag limousines to Zhongnanhai, where Mao was impatiently waiting. In his memoirs, Kissinger gave an awed description of the scene that met them:
[In] Mao's study … manuscripts lined bookshelves along every wall; books covered the table and the floor; it looked more the retreat of a scholar than the audience room of the all-powerful leader of the world's most populous nation … Except for the suddenness of the summons, there was no ceremony. Mao just stood there … I have met no one, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, who so distilled raw, concentrated will power. He was planted there with a female attendant close by to help steady him … He dominated the room – not by the pomp that in most states confers a degree of majesty on the leaders, but by exuding in almost tangible form the overwhelming drive to prevail.
Nixon's account was more matter-of-fact. But he, too, was bowled over by what Kissinger called, in words almost identical to those Sidney Rittenberg had used at Yan'an, thirty years earlier, ‘our encounter with history’.
Mao took Nixon's hand in both his own and held it for almost a minute.
One of them presided over the citadel of international capitalism, backed by the strongest economy and military forces in the world; the other was uncontested patriarch of a revolutionary communist state of 800 million people, whose ideology called for the overthrow of capitalism wherever it might appear.
The photograph in the People's Daily next day told China, and the world, that the global balance of power had been transformed.
Their talks lasted over an hour, far longer than the brief courtesy call that had initially been planned. Mao startled Nixon by telling him that he preferred dealing with right-wing leaders because they were more predictable. Nixon emphasised that the biggest threat they both faced came not from each other but from Russia. Kissinger, ever the diplomatist, was struck by Mao's deceptively casual conversation, embedding his thoughts in tangential phrases which ‘communicated a meaning while evading a commitment … [like] passing shadows on a wall’. Zhou worried about Mao getting tired. Nixon had been told that the Chairman was recovering from bronchitis, and after Zhou had looked at his watch several times, the President brought the meeting to a close.
After that, everything else was anticlimax. Nixon and Zhou laboured over the nuts and bolts of the Chinese–American relationship. But the tone had already been set.
To Mao, Nixon's visit was a triumph. Others, whose nations’ historical role in China was not less, would soon follow: Kakuei Tanaka, to establish diplomatic relations with Japan; the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath. But nothing would ever again in Mao's life equal the moment when the leader of the Western world came to the Forbidden City bearing in tribute a shared concern about a common enemy. In 1949, Mao had argued that China should not be in too much of a hurry to establish ties with the Western powers – that it should complete its ‘house-cleaning’ first, and then determine, at a time of its own choosing, which countries it wished to admit. For years, as Western leaders sought to isolate Red China, that had seemed a hollow excuse. But now the first among them had come to Beijing, seeking co-operation on a basis of equality. China had indeed stood up. It was a moment to savour.
Yet it also marked a massive retreat.
Nixon had put his finger on it in an article he wrote a year before his election. The United States, he said,
needed to engage with China, ‘but as a great and progressing nation, not as the epicentre of world revolution’.58 That was indeed what happened. In opening the door to America, Mao had responded to geopolitical necessity – the need for a common front to contain the expansionist impulses of Russia. There were moments of doubt. Mao fretted that the Americans,59 ‘whether purposely or not’, might stand aside while the Russians attacked China: ‘Let them get bogged down … And then you can poke your finger at the Soviet back.’ But the bottom line was, as he put it: ‘We can work together to deal in common with a bastard.’ The price of that cooperation was the abandonment of his vision of a new Red ‘Middle Kingdom’ from which the world's revolutionaries would draw hope and inspiration. In its place came cold-eyed balance-of-power politics aimed at guaranteeing not revolution but survival.
At his meeting with Nixon, Mao acknowledged this himself. ‘People like me sound like a lot of big cannons,’ he said. ‘For example, [we say] things like “the whole world should unite and defeat imperialism …”’ – at which point he and Zhou laughed uproariously.60
Mao could rationalise such statements by his usual argument that all progress stemmed from contradictions, and that there could be no advance without retreat. None the less, retreat it was. Another of his favourite themes of the 1960s – the notion that China, by the force of its example, would spur a worldwide revolutionary upsurge – had been irredeemably compromised.
The collapse of Mao's plans for his succession and the eclipse of revolutionary by geopolitical concerns were not the only holes being punched into the Cultural Revolution and its policies.
In the autumn of 1971, when Mao toured central China to rally support among the provincial military commanders, he had complained that veteran cadres who had been unjustly purged had still not been rehabilitated.61 The following November, two months after Lin Biao's death, he said the denunciation of the marshals and others involved in the ‘February Adverse Current’ had been wrong; they had merely been ‘opposing Lin Biao and Chen Boda’. At Chen Yi's funeral in January 1972, he gave further signs of distancing himself from the attacks on the old guard. Later that year he condemned the persecution of He Long as ‘a false case’.62