Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  A whirlwind pounds

  Our heartsick land.

  The nation sinks

  And no one minds.

  Compounding heartbreak,

  Autumn is back:

  Its horrid insect chorus

  Blasts our ears.6

  In spite of the threat from Japan, Chou, like a number of other young Chinese, decided in 1917 to study in that country on the grounds that it was showing China the way to become modern and powerful. When he arrived, however, he found himself part of a beleaguered Chinese community, despised by the nationalistic Japanese and uncomfortably aware that their homeland needed them. Chou, who rarely went to classes, increasingly devoted himself to radical émigré politics. And, apparently for the first time, he encountered the ideas of Karl Marx.

  Marxism, with its claims to be scientific and its promise of a glorious socialist world to come, was immensely appealing to radical Chinese intellectuals. At a time when they were engaged in attacking the old values and institutions which had held China back and made it so weak, it was modern and revolutionary. During a drunken evening in Tokyo, Chou told his friends that students, workers and peasants must work together. ‘You have to have them all with you before you can push a revolution to a successful conclusion. And without a revolution China cannot be saved!’7

  A future in which there would be no more private property and no more conflicts between classes and nations had a particular appeal, perhaps without their realizing it, to Chinese brought up in a world where the Confucian values of order and harmony and of disdain for business were still powerful. Moreover, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia provided an encouraging example. What also impressed the Chinese was that the new regime in Russia, alone among the powers, proposed to hand back land taken from China in the previous century. That the gesture would prove to be an empty one was something the Chinese could not then know.

  Chou went back to a China full of anger directed against the Western powers for, as the Chinese saw it, betraying them. The end of the First World War, in which China had participated on the victorious Allied side, had brought hopes that the great powers would be true to their own publicly stated principles and help China to rule itself and safeguard its territory. Instead the Allies had decided, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, to award former German possessions in China to their ally Japan, despite the fact that China had also been an ally of the victorious powers, and that the West had repeatedly professed to be fighting for democracy and justice. The decision was based on cold calculation: China was weak and Japan was strong. It produced huge anti-Western and anti-Japanese demonstrations in Beijing on 4 May 1919, which then spread across China.

  The collapse of the 1911 republic into warlordism and the burgeoning threat as Japan tried to bring China under its control stimulated an intense artistic and political ferment which came to be known as the May Fourth Movement. Writers and scholars moved beyond criticizing their leaders and attacked the whole of the old order, which, so they argued, had got China into its present miserable straits. Reverence for the past and obedience for authority had trapped the Chinese in outmoded and useless ways of thinking and acting. The time had come, so the radicals argued, for China to become modern, to follow, in the language of the time, Mr Science and Mr Democracy. The Allied betrayal of China at the Peace Conference helped to persuade many that Communism and its promise of a classless democracy, not capitalism and liberal democracy, offered the best hope for China. Moreover, radical change at home, so they hoped, would make China stronger abroad.

  Chou enrolled at university in Tianjin but spent most of his time on political work. His revolutionary activities brought him his first term in jail and his first encounter with a fifteen-year-old who was one of the leading lights of the local Girl Students’ Patriotic Association. Deng Yingchao would become his wife seven years later. Chou may also have met at this time another, slightly older, revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung, the man whose faithful subordinate he would one day become.8

  In 1920, Chou sailed for France on a work-study programme to learn more about the world outside China. For the next three years, he eked out a living, writing articles for Chinese papers and working at menial jobs. He also wrote faithfully to Deng. ‘I haven’t made a single female friend,’ he assured her, ‘and I have no intention of having one in the future.’ From his base in France, he managed a considerable amount of travel, to London, which he did not like, and to Germany, which he found more congenial. Increasingly he made a name for himself among his fellow Chinese, as an organizer, writer and revolutionary. (The French police eventually got wind of his activities, but not until six months after he had returned to China.) In the summer of 1922, he helped to found a European branch of the new Chinese Communist Party. Although he could not know it, he was preparing himself for his future management of China’s foreign affairs.9

  Chou came home to China in the summer of 1924. Warlords were running the country, but in the south a new political movement was growing. Sun Yat-sen’s National People’s Party, the Guomindang, was, as its name suggested, nationalist and in those days a mix of radicals and workers on the one hand and the propertied classes on the other. The party was building new branches and creating its own army with support from the Soviet Union, which saw this as a way to strike at the imperialists. The Soviets ordered the tiny Chinese Communist Party to co-operate faithfully with the Guomindang. Let them unite China and kick out the Western powers, and then the Chinese Communists, so the revolutionary experts in Moscow asserted, could overthrow the bourgeois forces represented by the Guomindang and have a proper socialist revolution. Chou, although this was later played down in accounts in China, worked tirelessly for the coalition and indeed ended up virtually running the Guomindang’s military academy.

  He also found time to marry Deng Yingchao, herself by now an experienced revolutionary. Perhaps there was some love involved, but their relationship seems to have been more a political partnership. Chou apparently told a niece years later that he had given up a woman he loved because he needed a revolutionary comrade: ‘And so I chose your aunt.’ Deng, like Chou himself, was prepared to commit herself wholeheartedly. When she became pregnant shortly after their marriage, she had an abortion. ‘We felt’, the couple said later, ‘a child would interfere with our work.’ She had miscarriages later but never her own children. Like many of the revolutionary wives, she paid a price. In the early 1930s, she came down with tuberculosis and had to be carried on a litter for much of the Long March, when the Communists fled through the Chinese countryside from their former allies, the Guomindang.10

  At the end of the 1920s there seemed to be a moment of hope for China when the Guomindang, now under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, managed to bring most of the country under at least nominal control. China at last had a central government that worked. In response, possibly because they felt guilty about their years of exploitation, most of the foreign powers started to give back the concessions they had wrung out of China over the previous century; Japan alone held back. The Communists were not there to share in the triumph because Chiang turned on them as soon as he no longer needed their help. By the end of 1927, the Communist organization, which had been strongest in the cities, was shattered and thousands of Communists had been killed or thrown in jail. A few scattered groups remained at large, out in the countryside where they lived hand to mouth like bandits. Chou, with a substantial price on his head, went underground in Shanghai and, with what was left of the Communist Party’s organization, managed to escape the Guomindang’s attentions until the start of the 1930s.

  The Communists’ disaster was made worse by incompetent and unworkable instructions from Communist International headquarters in Moscow. The Soviets, however, invariably laid the blame on the Chinese Communists themselves. Chou somehow managed to avoid the repeated purges of the Chinese leadership. He made abject self-criticisms whenever necessary. In 1931, as the Guomindang hounded the remaining Communists, he and his wif
e abandoned Shanghai for the relative safety of a Communist guerrilla base in south-central China where Mao and others were trying to hang on. Over the next four years, as Guomindang troops closed in, Chou manoeuvred adroitly through the shoals of vicious internal party struggles, managing to choose the winning sides. At the beginning of 1935, he threw his support behind Mao. Perhaps he did so out of conviction, or perhaps, as a recent biography of Mao suggests, because he was blackmailed. In 1932 Guomindang newspapers had published a notice in which Chou renounced Communism. Although Chou decried it, almost certainly truthfully, as a fake, Mao held it over him for the rest of his life. Chou became Mao’s faithful lieutenant, never bidding for supreme power himself or joining with those who dared to disagree with Mao. As he said in 1972, in one of his last and most humiliating self-criticisms, ‘I have always thought, and will always think, that I cannot be at the helm and can only be an assistant.’ Towards the end of his life in 1976, when the attacks from the radicals around Mao were mounting, he refused to go into the operating theatre until he had finished a letter to Mao saying that he had never betrayed the party.11 His survival in the recurrent savage and bloody intra-party struggles won him a comparison to a popular Chinese doll which always righted itself when it was knocked over.

  While the Communists struggled to survive, the Guomindang appeared to be consolidating its power and starting to build a new China. Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang might have brought the remaining warlords under control and finished off the Communists; they might have built a proper infrastructure for China, with roads, airfields, railways, heavy industries and a sound education system; they might in time have been a good government. They never had the chance. At the start of the 1930s, the Great Depression hit the world. China, itself a largely agricultural economy, was spared the worst of the economic downturn, but it could not escape the impact on international relations. The Western democracies including the United States, which had helped to maintain a stable international order in the 1920s, turned inwards, preoccupied with their own problems. Unfortunately, other nations like Germany and Italy took a different tack, to secure what they needed, whether territory or influence, and by force if necessary. The Japanese too adopted an increasingly nationalistic and militaristic route – necessary, so many of them thought, to protect Japan from the indifference of the great powers. In 1931, Japanese militarists seized Manchuria outright, and the world did little to stop them. From then on, the Japanese manoeuvred to extend their sway into the parts of China south of the Great Wall. The Guomindang was forced to divert its resources to deal with the threat.

  In 1937, Japanese armies invaded China proper, eventually bringing the whole of the rich coastal area into a new Japanese empire. The war with Japan, which was in time absorbed into the Second World War, cut short the prospect that the Guomindang would bring stability and prosperity to China. It also opened the door to the rapid growth of the Chinese Communist Party. Without meaning to, the deeply conservative Japanese militarists saved Communism in China. The Guomindang was distracted from what was an increasingly successful campaign to wipe out the Chinese Communist Party, and the Communists themselves were able to tap into a burgeoning Chinese nationalism. When the Second World War was over, the Communists controlled much of the countryside north of the Yangtze and had a formidable army. In 1946, after fruitless talks brokered by the United States, the two sides embarked on a civil war, which ended with the victory of the Communists in 1949. Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic in Beijing and the defeated Chiang set up an alternative government on the island of Taiwan.

  In 1949, at the age of fifty-one, Chou became the new China’s first premier as well as its foreign minister. (Although he gave up the second post in 1958, he continued to supervise China’s foreign relations until his death.) He was as charming as ever. He lived austerely and simply, darning, so legend had it, his own socks. He worked constantly, well into the night. No detail was ever too small for him. When he set up his new foreign ministry, he did his best to ensure that China’s freshly recruited diplomats, most of whom came from the military, acquired the knowledge and the skills they now needed, whether it was through lectures on international law or diplomatic protocols. The trainees had lessons from the Soviets on how to wear suits and ties and how to dance, and sessions in a Beijing restaurant to practise eating Western food with Western-style utensils. Those who worked for Chou usually adored him. ‘He worked so hard,’ remembered one of his interpreters, ‘paid attention to every detail, read all the reference materials so carefully.’ It was not fair to blame him for supporting Mao, even in his more outrageous policies. ‘What could he have done otherwise?’12

  Foreigners who met him generally found him delightful and deeply civilized. UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld thought he had ‘the most superior brain I have so far met in the field of foreign politics’. Henry Kissinger, unusual in someone so critical, was completely entranced. ‘He moved gracefully’, said Kissinger of their first meeting, ‘and with dignity, filling a room not by his physical dominance (as did Mao or de Gaulle) but by his air of controlled tension, steely discipline, and self-control, as if he were a coiled spring.’ Kissinger, who was to have many hours of hard negotiations with Chou, found him ‘one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met’ – and a worthy adversary. ‘He was a figure out of history. He was equally at home in philosophy, reminiscence, historical analysis, tactical probes, humorous repartee.’13 Kindness, compassion, moderation, these were qualities both Chinese and foreigners saw in Chou.

  Yet he could also be utterly ruthless. He had become hardened during that long climb to power, as they all had. Chou had seen close friends die and he had condemned others to death. As early as 1931, he ordered the execution of all the immediate relatives of a Communist who had given up information in a police interrogation. He was not just complicit in the repeated purges and killings in the Communist base areas, he helped to organize them. At the start of the Long March in 1934, when the Communists fled the Guomindang, it was Chou who decided who should be weeded out and executed as unreliable, and who should be left behind to the mercies of the enemy. In 1955, the man who always thanked the crews on his planes let a whole flight be blown to pieces to flush out the Guomindang agents who had placed a bomb on board. During the Cultural Revolution, when his longtime bodyguard ran afoul of Mao’s wife, Chou did not lift a finger to protect him. The man who was so gentle with children did not intervene when his own adopted daughter was carried off by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. She died of her beatings in prison.14

  Did he really have no choice, as his interpreter suggested? Did he remember the advice of the scholar two millennia earlier who had said the small craft that comes close to the great barge should be empty so that the crew on board the bigger vessel will leave it alone to bob on top of the waters?15 Or did he decide that he must survive for China’s sake? Throughout the calamitous attempts by Mao to transform China, Chou En-lai remained at his post. He worked extraordinary hours and kept a grasp on an extraordinary range of issues. Perhaps without him China would have gone even further into anarchy than it did during the Cultural Revolution.

  The Chinese as well as foreigners tended to see Mao as the radical and Chou as the moderate, Mao as the one who caused the damage with his wild policies and Chou who picked up the pieces. There was much truth in this, but it is not all the truth. Chou was also a revolutionary, determined to transform China’s society so that it could become strong and take its rightful place in the world. For him, as for the other Chinese Communists, revolution and nationalism were intertwined. Mao spoke for them all on 1 October 1949 when he proclaimed the People’s Republic of China from the great Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking Tiananmen Square. ‘We, the 475 million Chinese people, have stood up and our future is infinitely bright.’16

  In November 1949, at the first meeting of China’s new Foreign Ministry, Chou told his colleagues that the century of humiliation was o
ver. The new regime had nothing to learn from its predecessors, such as the Qing or the Guomindang; ‘all dealt with foreign affairs with their knees on the ground.’ The new China must approach the other powers as an equal. ‘We should have an independent spirit. We should take initiatives and should be fearless and confident.’17

  Both Mao and Chou also saw the world through eyes which had been shaped by their study of Marxism. There were the capitalist powers, led after 1945 by the United States, and there were the socialist ones, their number greatly increased with the spread of Soviet power into Central Europe and then the victory of the Chinese Communists. The two camps were doomed to struggle until one, socialism if you believed Marx, was victorious. Communist diplomacy should be at the service of the final victory. Nations, Chou told the novices at the new foreign ministry in 1949, must always be ready to fight. ‘There may not be a war of swords every year, but as sure as day turns into night, there will be a constant war of words, every day of the year.’18

  With his deep-seated preference for what was practical over what was purely theoretical, Chou insisted that China’s foreign policy must always take into consideration actual conditions, exploiting the differences between the capitalists, even making compromises with them, and so win time. As he pointed out, in a major statement on foreign policy in 1930, the Soviet Communists had saved their regime by submitting to a punitive treaty with their enemy Germany in 1918. Fortunately, since Chou was obliged to operate within guidelines laid down by Mao, the Chairman took the same approach: ‘What we call concrete Marxism is Marxism that has taken on concrete form, that is Marxism applied to the concrete struggle in the concrete conditions prevailing in China . . .’ In his management of China’s foreign relations, Chou was flexible over tactics, seeking, as he put it, ‘concurrence while shelving differences’. He told Kissinger, in one of their many talks, ‘One must be cool-headed and analyze things.’19 Chou had been responsible during the Second World War for negotiating a common front with the Guomindang against the Japanese; he was prepared to compromise even with enemies in order to safeguard the party and its China. Perhaps, too, as his enemies suggested from time to time, he betrayed the influence of his early classical education. In traditional Confucian thought, harmony and the golden mean were valued above conflict and disagreement.