Over the course of the next few days, Zhou and I systematically reviewed a wide range of international issues. Zhou had correctly analyzed our basic Middle East strategy before we arrived. I told him on November 11 that the significance of the six-point plan — which happened to be signed by Egypt and Israel that very day — resided not in its specific terms, important as they were, “but that it was negotiated between Egypt and the United States without the Soviet Union.” Zhou had already grasped the point: “I had thought of toasting you on that last night, but I was afraid the correspondents would hear us.” I explained our strategy with respect to the Geneva Conference: We would use the plenary sessions for the formal reiteration of the familiar; the real negotiations would take place under our aegis outside the conference on a bilateral basis between the various Arab countries and Israel.
With respect to Indochina I repeated our policy toward Sihanouk:
[W]e are not, in principle, opposed to Sihanouk. In many of his private statements and public statements, he seems to be under the misapprehension that the United States government is, in principle, opposed to him. That is absolutely incorrect. If he could return to Cambodia in a position of real independence for himself, we would be very interested in him as a leader. We are not interested in him if he is a captive of one particular faction that is simply using him for a very brief period of time in order to gain international recognition.
But Zhou, once burned, would not get involved again. He replied that Cambodia could not be discussed except in the context of all of Indochina, and in that case, we should devote an entire session to it later on during my visit. In fact, he did not return to the subject except to tell me that his conversations with North Vietnamese leaders indicated they had “no intention of launching a major offensive now” — a judgment that, by a strict definition of “major” and “now,” proved correct.
Zhou abandoned his passive role only on Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Zhou’s analysis, the Soviets after their expulsion from Egypt had made Iraq the pivot of their Middle East policy. The United States needed to take great care to prevent radical Iraq from achieving hegemony in the Persian Gulf; the Shah of Iran, in contrast, was a farsighted leader who understood the world situation — illustrating once again that for Peking geopolitics took precedence over ideology. As for Afghanistan, Zhou was gravely concerned about the coup that had brought Mohammed Daoud to power. The officers close to Daoud were pro-Soviet; we probably had not yet seen the last of Afghan upheavals. Afghan irredentism against neighboring Pakistan and Iran, even if not Soviet-inspired, would serve Soviet designs. It would weaken Pakistan and Iran and give Moscow a corridor to the Indian Ocean. The United States should strengthen Pakistan, which found itself in dire peril.
Unfortunately, Zhou and I, however much we respected each other, had diametrically opposite problems. Zhou represented a country capable of a powerful intellectual analysis but without the physical means to implement it. I was the foreign minister of a country that had the physical means and shared the geopolitical analysis but in post-Vietnam, Watergate conditions lacked the domestic consensus to execute its conceptions. Much as I agreed with Zhou’s recommendations, I knew there was no chance of Congressional approval of a serious effort to strengthen Pakistan. Military assistance was out of vogue; the predominant conviction in the Congress was that India was more important to us and would be irritated by a military relationship with Pakistan. The best we could do, I told Zhou, was to strengthen Iran to back up Pakistan. Thus the Shah’s role as protector of his neighbors was impelled in part by our internal disarray.
By all standards of ordinary diplomatic exchange, the dialogue with Zhou Enlai was of a high order. But those of my colleagues who had been with me on previous visits, especially Winston Lord, noticed that the old bite and sparkle were missing. Zhou asked penetrating, clarifying questions; he made intelligent comments on our presentations. And yet something was missing. For the first time he avoided the long, brilliant analyses that had made previous encounters so stimulating intellectually. Had he lost authority? Or were our approaches so comparable that it was no longer necessary?
Zhou seemed uncharacteristically tentative — as if he knew he needed to plant as many seeds as possible on this visit without being sure that he would be there for the harvest. He seemed eager to remove Taiwan as a rallying point for the anti-American faction in Peking. He listened patiently while I explained the impossibility of the “Japanese formula” for Taiwan — whereby the United States would have to break diplomatic relations with Taipei as a condition for normalization with Peking. I suggested that perhaps normalization was possible short of the Japanese formula so long as the United States recognized “the principle of one China.” Zhou did not reject this approach. To my astonishment, he asked me the next day whether I had a precise formula for it. It seemed almost like a replay of the exchanges that had established the Liaison Offices. Zhou even included a sentence in the communiqué to the effect that normalization required that the United States recognize the “principle” of one China — something that had never been at issue. We were never to find out what exactly Zhou had in mind, for he was removed from office or incapacitated before we had a chance to learn what the phrase meant in practice.
In this mood of almost anxious goodwill, the group dealing with bilateral issues made considerable progress. There was agreement to expand the staffs and the functions of the Liaison Offices. Additional cultural exchanges were arranged; trade was increased. The claims and assets issues approached a solution — though Zhou could not avoid pointing out that our threat of legal action to vindicate claims was empty: How could one sue a government one did not recognize? Yet strangely enough, all this progress on what is normally the standard fare of diplomacy made us slightly uneasy. We could not tell why Zhou seemed so eager to get things settled; he did not supply, as was his wont, the rationale or the ultimate objective. One was put in mind of a brilliant, slightly stifling summer day whose beauty is the harbinger of a distant thunderstorm.
Another Meeting with Mao
THAT this time the authoritative line on foreign policy would not be laid down by Zhou Enlai became clear on Monday, November 12, when late in the afternoon we were invited to see Chairman Mao Zedong. The summons came as peremptorily as it had on all previous encounters with the Chairman, in the midst of a regular review session. We traveled in Chinese cars, I with Zhou, along the now-familiar route to the simple residence in the Imperial City where Mao lived. The entrance hall with its Ping-Pong table and the booklined study with its semicircle of easy chairs had become almost familiar. But one could never become accustomed to that incarnation of willpower who greeted us with his characteristic mocking, slightly demonic smile. Mao looked better than I had ever seen him, joking with my companions David Bruce and Winston Lord about Bruce’s age, Lord’s youth, and his own seniority over both of them. He was eighty.
All this was standard. What was new was that Mao, while continuing the elliptical Socratic dialogue of my first two encounters with him, substituted precision for his usual characteristic allusions. On this occasion Mao would not leave it to Zhou to give texture to his indirections; he would take over Zhou’s role of articulating policy. He was not content with indicating a general direction; he intended to fill in the road map. He began by asking what Zhou and I had been discussing.
“Expansionism,” replied Zhou, making clear that containing the Soviet Union remained the top priority for China.
“Who’s doing the expanding, him?” inquired Mao, pointing at me — as if all this were new to him and Zhou had not been reporting daily.
“He started it,” answered Zhou, “but others have caught up.” Mao went along cheerfully with Zhou’s implication that the Soviets were now the principal threat, but he used it to discourage any undue sense of danger that might tempt accommodation. Soviet expansionism, he retorted, was “pitiful”; the Soviets’ courage did not match their ambitions, as had been demonstrated durin
g the Cuban missile crisis and America’s recent alert. He illustrated his contempt for Soviet leaders once again by the story of his encounter in 1969 with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, who had come uninvited to Peking airport to discuss the easing of Sino-Soviet tensions:
I said that I originally said this struggle was going to go on for ten thousand years. On the merit of his coming to see me in person, I will cut it down by one thousand years. [Laughter] And you must see how generous I am. Once I make a concession, it is for one thousand years.
And then there was another time [a Romanian official] came also to speak on behalf of the Soviet Union. This time I again made a concession of a thousand years. [Laughter] You see, my time limit is becoming shorter and shorter.
And the fifth time the Romanian President Ceauşescu came again — that was two years ago — and he again raised the issue, and I said “this time no matter what you say, I can make no more concessions.” [Laughter]
Committed now to a struggle of eight thousand years, the Chairman saw no point in tactical maneuvers. American diplomacy depended too much on “shadowboxing,” he said; his strategy was based on more direct blows. Of course, it was also true that he had no choice; a million Soviet troops right up against the Chinese border discouraged thoughts of flexibility. But I saw no sense in arguing tactics. I said that however different our tactics we had proved our determination to resist challenges. On that point he and I could meet. He replied: “I believe in that. And that is why your recent trip to the Arab world was a good one.”
It turned out that Mao’s principal concern was not our Soviet policy but our domestic situation, specifically Watergate. What good was a strategy of containment if at the same time we sapped our capacity to implement it by our domestic divisions? He simply could not understand the uproar over Watergate; he contemptuously dismissed the whole affair as a form of “breaking wind.” The incident itself was “very meager, yet now such chaos is being kicked up because of it. Anyway we are not happy about it.” He saw no objective reasons for an assault on a President who had done a good job:
[I]t seems that the number of unemployed has been cut down by an amount and the U.S. dollar is relatively stable. So there doesn’t seem to be any major issue. Why should the Watergate affair become all exploded in such a manner?
It was not possible to explain to the absolute ruler of the Middle Kingdom the finer points of a constitutional system of checks and balances, which placed even the highest officials under the rule of law. At the same time, Mao had a point. He was not concerned with the intrinsic merits of our domestic drama. Watergate interested him primarily for its impact on our fitness to resist Soviet expansionism. And with respect to that, the geopolitical consequences threatened to dwarf the original offense.
Zhou had avoided articulating Chinese anxieties about our long-term policy toward the Soviet Union; he had not raised the dreaded US–Soviet condominium. Mao was not so delicate, though he was far too proud to seek reassurance directly. He chose the elliptical route of implying that there might be secret arrangements between us and Moscow. Once upon a time, he said, he had doubted our ability to keep secrets. Now he was confident that we could do so; my first visit to China had, after all, remained secret. And finally his real point: “And another situation would be your recent dealing with the Soviet Union.” There were no secret dealings with the Soviets, and I said so; we would not give a hostage to the Kremlin by conducting talks that, if leaked, might leave us isolated. Peking was being fully briefed about any discussions.
I knew well enough that my reassurance was no more credible than protestations of affection to a person racked by jealousy. The very insecurity that engenders the suspicion discounts the value of the assurance. Still, Mao chose to treat my remarks at face value, using them as a point of departure for a brilliant analysis of the overall strategic position of the Soviet Union.
Moscow, according to Mao, looked strong but it was actually overextended. It had to be wary of Japan and China; it had to keep an eye on South Asia and the Middle East; and it faced another front in Europe, where it had to maintain forces larger than those facing China. In fact, only a fourth of the entire Soviet military forces were deployed against China — something of an underestimate. Hence, Mao concluded, the Soviet Union could not attack China “unless you let them in first and you first give them the Middle East and Europe so they are able to deploy troops eastward.” And the converse was, of course, also true. We were thus the key to global security. The real danger was the potential victims’ lack of understanding of the requirements of the geopolitical balance. If all those threatened by Soviet aggression cooperated, each of them was safe and the Soviets would confront increasing difficulties; if they did not, each was in peril. In other words, containment.
Mao then reviewed the attitudes of various European countries in these terms. It was astonishing how much the aged leader knew about the domestic politics of faraway countries and how he could move inexorably to his conclusions without a note in front of him. It was Mao’s core conviction that while our European allies were wavering for various reasons, they would not in the end abandon their vital interests by succumbing to Soviet blandishment. It was important, therefore, not to confuse temporarily irritating tactics with long-term trends. We must stick to a firm line even if some of our friends seemed hesitant, and in time they would gain courage from our leadership.
Mao did not put forward these ideas in a single presentation. Instead, he spoke in lapidary sentences each of which required physical effort to articulate. Perhaps his stroke-induced infirmity imposed the need for the dialogue form to give him the chance to regroup. Perhaps he had always preferred to involve his opposite number in a dialogue. Whatever the reason, Mao spoke in short paragraphs, each of which tended to end in a query that implied its own answer — indeed, permitted no other conclusion — yet nevertheless forced me to become a partner in the journey to his intellectual destination.
Having established the basic analysis of the international situation in about an hour, Mao suddenly turned to the issue of Taiwan, and then not to state a challenge but to hint obliquely at a solution. He had heard that the three Baltic states still had embassies in the United States, he said. I affirmed it. “And the Soviet Union did not ask you first to abolish those embassies before they established diplomatic relations with you?” That was not exactly accurate, since at the time relations were established the Soviet Union recognized the Baltic states. But if Mao was implying that relations with Taiwan were no necessary obstacle to normalization with China, I saw no reason to draw fine historical distinctions; so I assented to his proposition. Zhou helpfully chipped in that though maintaining diplomatic relations with the United States, the Baltic states did not have access to the United Nations. Did all this mean, I wondered, that China might acquiesce in a separate legal status for Taiwan, contenting itself with excluding Taiwan from the UN?
Mao veered in another direction that hinted at the same thing in a more convoluted way. A believer in the unity of opposites, he began by affirming a contradiction. As a matter of principle we had to sever relations with Taiwan if we wanted diplomatic relations with Peking. Nor did he believe in peaceful transition; after all, Taiwan’s leaders were “a bunch of counter-revolutionaries.”
But this was not an insoluble dilemma. He was in no hurry about implementing his unshakable principles: “I say that we can do without Taiwan for the time being, and let it come after one hundred years. Do not take matters on this world so rapidly. Why is there need to be in such great haste?” At the same time, relations between Peking and Washington need not march to the slow drumbeat of internal Chinese disputes; there was no need to wait so long: “As for your relations with us, I think they need not take a hundred years. . . . But that is to be decided by you. We will not rush you.”
What did all this mean? Was it another hint that normalization could be separated from the issue of Taiwan? And that the rate of normalizing relations was up to us?
At a minimum, it suggested that China would not attempt to swallow Taiwan quickly afterward; certainly, that the Taiwan issue would not be an obstacle to our relations, that contrary to public perception we were under no pressure with respect to it. I am inclined to believe that like Zhou on the day before, Mao was indirectly inviting a proposal that combined the principle of a unified China with some practical accommodation to the status quo. We cannot know, because the domestic situation in China changed too rapidly to permit an exploration of all the implications of Mao’s remarks. And for the immediate future it made little difference. Mao had made clear that for “a hundred years” China would draw no political conclusions from his general principles. And lest we miss the point — one could never be too sure about Westerners’ acuteness — he compared the situation in Taiwan with that in Hong Kong and Macao, where China was in no hurry either (and had, in fact, diplomatic relations with the countries “occupying” them). Taiwan was not an important issue, he said: “The issue of the overall international situation is an important one.”
Taiwan being thus disposed of, not only with no hint of pressure but with its explicit renunciation, Mao turned to the Middle East, embedding Taiwan, as it were, between two treatises on how to contain Soviet power in different areas of the world. He demonstrated the attention he paid to relations with America by recounting his reaction to a conversation I had had with the head of the Chinese Liaison Office on the day of the alert. The unfortunate Huang Zhen had been taken by surprise when I briefed him; he therefore responded with boilerplate Chinese support of the Arab position. Mao took pains to put the conversation in perspective. Huang Zhen had been correct in mentioning Chinese support of the Arab goals, but “he didn’t understand the importance of US resistance to the Soviet Union.” China “welcomed” our “putting the Soviet Union on the spot, and making it so that the Soviet Union cannot control the Middle East.” In other words, containment had priority over all other considerations — including Chinese courtship of the Arab countries.
Years of Upheaval Page 102