Mao’s portrait was in those days everywhere in Peking; his calligraphy covered billboards and public buildings; his personal dominance of the polity he had created was all-encompassing. The emphasis on personality in a Marxist system that in theory asserted the predominant role of material factors and historical forces was astonishing. It was as if the titanic figure who had risen from humble origins to rule nearly a quarter of mankind did not trust the permanence of the ideology in whose name he had prevailed. Challenging the gods, he sought immortality in the adoration of those vast millions who had endured the passage of so many conquerors, who had absorbed so much forced transformation only to transcend events by their endurance, their practicality, and their pervasive humanity.
And Mao sensed the ephemerality of this acclaim; sycophancy was the device of the least trustworthy. Dreading the fate of the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, who had revolutionized China for twenty years only to sink into the oblivion reserved for those who presume to alter China’s elemental rhythms, Mao may have accelerated what he was so eager to avoid. By attempting to inflict upon his country the tour de force of a permanent revolution he also reawakened the historical Chinese yearning for continuity. The Chinese people have survived not by exaltation but by perseverance, not by spurts but by a steady pace. They have become great by a unique blend of culture, common sense, and self-discipline. Their greatest leaders find themselves assimilated sooner or later by this enduring mass of individualists who will suffer but not change their essential character and who understand, even when they cannot articulate, that in China ultimate stature goes to those who can reduce historic goals to the human scale. The Chinese people are talented but also skeptical, aspiring but also conscious that no one man’s intuition, however tremendous, can provide the answer to the dilemmas of history.
Thus by a remarkable irony the leader who seems to have survived in the hearts of his countrymen is not the epic giant who made the Chinese revolution but his much more anonymous disciple, Zhou Enlai, who worked unobtrusively to assure the continuity of life rather than the permanence of upheaval.
In February 1973, however, there was no question about who was preeminent. Mao towered above everyone. He rarely saw foreigners; almost without exception those were heads of state or the highest ranking Communist Party officials. I had met Mao once with Nixon’s entourage during the first Presidential visit in Peking. The summons had come suddenly, for there was never a formal appointment. This was partly because the Chairman’s frail health made it hazardous to predict when he would be in a condition to receive visitors. Design was likely involved as well, for remoteness enhances mystery and aloofness is an attribute of majesty. Not that Mao needed artifice to magnify his impact. I had been struck during his meeting with Nixon by the almost physical force of his authority. He had dominated the room as I have never seen any person do except Charles de Gaulle.
My summons this time came on February 17, when Zhou Enlai and I were meeting in the state guest house. It was around 11:00 at night, because Zhou liked to work late and we nearly always had a session after dinner. We met in the state guest house because Zhou made it a practice — despite the wide gap in our protocol rank — to call on me as often as I did on him. Suddenly the unfailing serenity of our interlocutors was ruffled by the appearance of Miss Wang Hairong, Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs. Reported to be a relative of Mao’s, with the look of an easily startled deer, she carried unobtrusiveness almost to the point of invisibility.
Now she placed a note before Zhou. He continued talking on Soviet motivations for another minute and then said: “I would like to let you know a new piece of news. Chairman Mao has invited you to a meeting. You can go with your colleague, Mr. Lord.” This neatly ruled out the rest of my party. It also gave Winston Lord an opportunity to appear for the first time in a picture with Mao; he had been present as note-taker at Nixon’s meeting with Mao in 1972, but we had asked the Chinese to delete him from the communiqué and to crop him from the picture in order to ease the offense to the State Department, none of whose officials attended.
One always went to see Mao in Chinese cars. And the Chinese never permitted American security men on these visits. We set off in Zhou’s battered old 1939-vintage automobile along the broad avenues leading from the state guest house to the center of town, which was almost completely deserted at this hour of the night. Before reaching Tien An Men Square and the Great Hall of the People, we turned off to the left through a traditional Chinese gate with red columns that interrupted a long vermilion wall paralleling the wide thoroughfare. The road took us past modest houses behind high, nondescript walls for another mile or so; it wound along a lake on one side and an occasional residence in the Soviet bureaucratic style on the other. Mao’s domicile was modest, like that of a middle functionary. We drove up to a covered portico; no special security precautions were visible. Inside, across a small sitting room and a wide hallway, was Mao standing in front of a semicircle of easy chairs covered with brown slipcovers. Books were everywhere: on the floor in front of Mao, on the little tables between the armrests, on bookcases that lined the wall.
Mao uttered a few pleasantries while Chinese cameramen took pictures. We learned later that the press treatment in the People’s Daily the next day was always a good barometer of the state of our relations. On this occasion in February 1973, the People’s Daily gave banner headlines to our meeting, with two front-page photographs; the lights were green for friendship.
The purpose of the meeting was to underline that friendship between the United States and China was to be consummated while Mao was still alive. Mao wasted no time in making this point. As we headed for the easy chairs and while the photographers were still in the room, he said: “I don’t look bad” (anticipating my thought, which indeed compared his appearance favorably with that when he had met Nixon just a year before), “but God has sent me an invitation.” Somehow it did not seem incongruous that the leader of the most populous atheistic state, the dialectician of materialism, should invoke the Deity. No being of lesser rank could presume to interrupt the Chairman’s labors. Even more striking was the matter-of-fact casualness with which Mao treated the imminent end of his rule and hinted at the urgency to complete whatever business required his personal attention.
As he had a year earlier with Nixon, Mao proceeded to engage me in a joshing Socratic dialogue that made its key points in seemingly spontaneous and accidental fashion. His observations seemed random but formed a pattern spelling out a series of directives for his subordinates. Mao drew a line under the past by one of his indirections. Both Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson had died within the previous two months, he noted. With them the old China policy and the old Vietnam policy had been buried. In his mocking way, Mao challenged me: “At that time, you. . . . opposed us. We also opposed you. So we are two enemies.” He laughed.
“Two former enemies,” I replied.
That was not enough for Mao: “Now we call the relationship between ourselves a friendship,” he insisted.
And Mao immediately gave this commonplace significance by stressing one of the basic principles of Chinese statecraft: that maneuvering for petty advantage is shortsighted and that we should do nothing to undermine mutual confidence. “Let us not speak false words or engage in trickery,” he insisted. “We don’t steal your documents. You can deliberately leave them somewhere and try us out,” he joked, though he gave us no clue as to where we might carry out this test and how we might know that the Chinese had not taken advantage of it. There was no sense in running small risks, Mao was saying. And while he was at it he questioned the utility of big intelligence operations as well. Indeed, he considered intelligence services generally overrated. Once they knew what the political leaders wanted, their reports came in “as so many snowflakes.” But on really crucial matters they usually failed. The Chinese services had not known about Lin Biao’s plottingI nor about my desire to come, he said. He suspected that our intelligence agencies ga
ve us the same problem.
In short, large goals required farsighted policies, not tactical maneuvering. The challenge before our two countries was to fashion joint action despite ideological differences. In this both sides must remain true to their principles while pursuing common objectives. Mao recalled with approval Nixon’s comment to him in 1972 that China and the United States in coming closer to each other were fulfilling their own necessities. Mao took the proposition a somewhat cynical step further by indicating that we would strengthen domestic support for our cooperation if we took occasional potshots at each other — just so long as we did not take our own pronouncements too seriously:
So long as the objectives are the same, we would not harm you nor would you harm us. . . . Actually it would be that sometime we want to criticize you for a while and you want to criticize us for a while. That, your President said, is the ideological influence. You say, “away with you Communists!” We say, “away with you imperialists!” Sometimes we say things like that. It would not do not to do that.
Mao Zedong, the father of China’s Communist revolution, who had convulsed his people in his effort to achieve doctrinal purity, went to great pains to show that slogans scrawled on every wall in China were meaningless, that in foreign policy national interests overrode ideological differences. Ideological slogans were a facade for considerations of balance of power. Each side would be expected to insist on its principles; but each had an obligation not to let them interfere with the imperatives of national interest — a classic definition of modern Machiavellianism. “I think both of us must be true to our principles,” I replied, getting into the spirit of things. “And in fact it would confuse the situation if we spoke the same language.”
In this almost jocular manner we reviewed the world situation until almost 1:30 in the morning. In Mao’s view the Soviet threat was real and growing. He warned against a fake détente that would sap resistance to Soviet expansionism and confuse the peoples of the West. The United States and Europe should resist the temptation to “push the ill waters eastward.” It was a futile strategy, for in time the West, too, would be engulfed. The United States and China must cooperate. This required institutionalizing our relationship. Setting up the liaison offices in each other’s capitals was a good decision. He urged an expansion of contacts and even trade, calling the present level “pitiful.”
In Mao’s view the United States would serve the common interest best by taking a leading role in world affairs, by which he meant constructing an anti-Soviet alliance. Long gone was the day when Peking denounced the American system of alliances as an imperialist device; in its current view they had become pillars of international security. American troops abroad, castigated for decades, were useful provided they were deployed intelligently. The Chairman criticized our military deployments in Asia only because in his view they reflected no strategic plan: They were “too scattered.” As had Zhou, Mao stressed the importance of close American cooperation also with Western Europe, Japan, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey. We should build up our defenses and keep our eye on the fundamental (Soviet) challenge rather than squabble over short-term problems with our allies. He urged a strengthening of unity among the industrial democracies:
As for you, in Europe and Japan, we hope that you will cooperate with each other. As for some things it is all right to quarrel and bicker about, but fundamental cooperation is needed.
And yet for all his preoccupation with foreign policy, the Chairman could not avoid the obsession of his last years with Peking’s internal problems, which as so often in China’s history seemed to follow their own momentum. Repeatedly Mao warned me about the pressures on him from radicals, but he did it so allusively that my dense Occidental mind did not immediately follow his meaning. “You know China is a very poor country,” said Mao. “We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women.”
Thinking that Mao was joking, I replied in kind: “There are no quotas for those, or tariffs.”
“So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands,” shot back Mao.
“Of course, on a voluntary basis,” interrupted Zhou.
“Let them go to your place,” Mao continued. “They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens.” He laughed uproariously.
But Mao was not yet sure that I had got the point; he returned to the theme a few minutes later. “Do you want our Chinese women? . . . [W]e can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests.” Since Americans were notoriously slow-witted, Mao returned to the theme yet again — by which time I understood he was making a point, though not yet what. Afterward, Winston Lord’s wife, Bette, explained it to me: that conditions in China were far from being as stable as they looked; that women — meaning Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, as leader of the radical faction — were stirring up China and challenging the prevailing policy.
Personalities were not, however, the heart of China’s domestic problem. What confronted Mao in his last days was the centuries-old dilemma of Chinese modernization. Historically, China has established its preeminence more frequently by the force of its example and its cultural superiority than through the displays of raw power that have characterized the political history of Europe. Indeed, China has been so dominant in Asia for centuries that it has had no direct experience of the notions of balance of power or sovereign equality in its own sphere. (All the more remarkable how adept it became at it when the outside world gave no other choice.) Other societies have been considered not in equilibrium but in some sort of tributary relationship to China. So firmly established was the concept of Chinese majesty that its rulers often considered it prudent to make larger gifts to their vassals than they received in tribute.
It was a massive shock when in the nineteenth century China learned that the barbarians of the West had acquired a technology that could enable them to impose their will on the Middle Kingdom as well as on other Asian states. But while Japan reacted to the same challenge by deciding to modernize at whatever cost (and miraculously preserved its individuality in the process), China was not prepared to hazard its culture on which it based its claim to greatness. Modern technology is universal; it brings with it a degree of standardization that carries uniformity in its train. To be like everyone else was to the Chinese a repellent thought. Technology and modernization thus threatened China as no other nation, for they challenged its essence, its claim to uniqueness.
Deliberately, China rejected the Japanese route; it encapsuled itself in its traditions, relying on its marvelous diplomatic skill and self-assurance to ward off the hated (and feared) foreign devils. And China in fact fared better than any other nation where European colonizers established themselves. By manipulating the rivalries and greed of the imperialist powers, China maintained a larger margin of independence than any other country in a comparable position.
Mao’s revolution reflected the same historic Chinese ambivalence. In a curious way it was both a rebellion against China’s old values and a confirmation of them. Maoism sought to overcome China’s past but like traditional Confucianism it saw society as an ethical and educational instrument, though infused with a diametrically opposite doctrine fashioned by the peasant’s son from rural Hunan province. The object of the Great Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao in 1966 — and where else but in China would a bloody political upheaval call itself “cultural”? — was precisely the eradication of those elements of modernity that were not uniquely Chinese, an assault on the Western influences and bureaucratization that threatened to level China and absorb it into a universal culture.
By February 1973, when we met, the aged Chairman had realized that while his latest grandiose conception had dramatized his country’s independence, it had simultaneously doomed it to impotence. He knew now — if perhaps only as a transient conviction — that China’s continuing to live apart from the rest of the world would ensure its irrelevance and expose it to untold danger. China, he indicated not wit
hout melancholy, would have to go to school abroad. He had halted the Cultural Revolution, and he remarked with sadness that the Chinese people were “very obstinate and conservative.” The time had come for them to study foreign languages, he said, which was another way of stressing the importance of learning from abroad. That, too, had been the symbolism of playing Beethoven at the cultural event. He would send more Chinese to school overseas, he repeated. He himself was learning English. And something had to be done to simplify the Chinese written language to enable Chinese to grasp foreign ideas better.
But the aged Chairman was too old to carry through to its conclusion another revolution against the instincts of his Party, the traditions of his people, and deep down his own. Within a year of this conversation with me he overturned the maxims he had advanced late at night in his study, or at least he permitted others to do so. Zhou Enlai was retired and within another year his successor, Deng Xiaoping, was toppled by the very forces Mao seemed to be resisting in 1973, once again delaying the modernization that one side of Mao recognized as essential. Did Mao encourage the radicals who later came to be called the Gang of Four, or did they take advantage of his growing feebleness? Probably there was a little of both. Mao died still wrestling with the dilemmas and contradictions of his revolution and indeed of Chinese history.
After my session with Mao, the rest was anticlimax. My next day’s talks with Zhou Enlai covered some details of setting up the liaison offices; I informed him of our plans for new diplomatic initiatives toward Europe and the Middle East. Zhou Enlai had also agreed to release two American pilots whose planes had strayed over Chinese territory during the Vietnam war. The Chinese held another prisoner, John Downey, captured during an intelligence operation in 1950 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Downey’s sentence had already been commuted, making him eligible for release late in 1973. But Zhou dropped a hint that his release would be expedited if we put forward a compassionate reason. Within a month Downey’s mother fell ill; we communicated that fact to Zhou Enlai. On March 12, 1973, Downey was released, clearing the slate at last of the human legacies of the period of hostility between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.
Years of Upheaval Page 11