By the late summer of 1969, however, Mao could not ignore the evidence that the Soviets were up to something. The Soviet attack on 13 August apparently shocked him considerably and, when he learned that the Soviet Union might be planning a sudden nuclear strike on China, he became, in the words of a Chinese expert, ‘extremely nervous’. On 28 August, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued new orders to the Chinese to prepare for war. The party also used the opportunity to order an end to the often violent struggles between different factions of Red Guards. When Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, died in Hanoi on 3 September, Chou En-lai dashed down to pay his respects but did not stay for the funeral, partly because the situation was so serious but also because he did not want to meet Kosygin, who was representing the Soviet Union.30
On 6 September, a member of the Soviet party asked the North Vietnamese to let the Chinese know that Kosygin was prepared to stop in Beijing for talks on his way home. When he got the news, Mao dithered for several days, and Kosygin was already in Tashkent on his way home to Moscow when word came that Chou En-lai would meet him at Beijing airport. Kosygin, who had landed in Tashkent, took to the air again and landed in Beijing early on the morning of 11 September. On Mao’s orders, to show their displeasure, the Chinese kept the Soviets at the airport. Kosygin and Chou En-lai, with their aides, met for three and a half hours in the VIP lounge. Both sides denied that they intended to make war on the other. Kosygin may have offered to withdraw Soviet troops from the disputed territories. Both sides certainly agreed that they should try to sort out their border issues, although Chou continued to complain about the unequal nature of the existing agreements. The Soviets talked optimistically about restoring normal trade and diplomatic relations. Chou agreed that their proposals would be shown to Mao but warned that the People’s Republic would continue its polemics against fellow Communist parties when they went wrong. The Soviets replied primly that they had nothing against reasonable polemics. ‘Lies and curses do not add persuasiveness and authority to a polemic, and only humiliate the feelings of the other people and aggravate the relations.’31
The relations unfortunately remained aggravated and indeed highly dangerous for the next several months. Each side mistrusted the other too much for one meeting to help. When Kosygin flew on to Moscow, the Chinese noticed that none of his senior colleagues came out to meet him at the airport. Did that mean that the rest of the Soviet leadership did not want peace with China? Had Kosygin promised that the Soviet Union would not launch a nuclear strike on China? The Chinese record of the talks was not clear. (The Soviet record has the Soviets saying that rumours of such a strike were ‘contrived imperialistic propaganda’.) And perhaps the Chinese were right to be suspicious. In what was apparently a move to put more pressure on the People’s Republic, Victor Louis, a Moscow-based journalist who acted as a conduit for Soviet views, published an article in a London newspaper saying how easy it would be for the Soviet Union to launch a surprise attack on China, perhaps against China’s own nuclear facilities in Xinjiang province. Louis also talked about how the Chinese people were starting to rise against Mao. The Soviet Union, he said, was ready to offer ‘fraternal help’. These and other signs led the Chinese leadership, notably Mao and Lin Biao, to the conclusion that Kosygin’s visit was a smokescreen to conceal the true Soviet intentions. Perhaps to send the Soviet Union a warning, China tested two nuclear devices that September, the first in almost a year.32
There was something close to panic in Beijing that autumn. On 22 September, Chou En-lai told a People’s Liberation Army conference, ‘The international situation is extremely tense. We should be prepared for fighting a war.’33 The armed forces were put on high alert, and proper training, so disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, was resumed. Immense tunnels were constructed to link Zhongnanhai to the Great Hall of the People and a special hospital. Thousands of key personnel and their files as well as universities and colleges were moved out of the cities, and Chinese forces were sent to forward positions ready to repel an invasion. Ordinary citizens were given shovels and told to start digging.
The Chinese waited anxiously. Perhaps the attack would come on 1 October, China’s National Day. Lin Biao ordered all planes in the Beijing area to be flown away and obstacles were placed on the runways. When 1 October came and went, the Chinese decided that 20 October, when a Soviet delegation was due to arrive to start talking about the borders, might be the day. What if the Soviet plane carried nuclear bombs rather than negotiators? Mao and Lin Biao hastily left Beijing for the south. The remaining leadership moved into underground shelters in Beijing’s Western Hills. Chou did not reappear in his office for several months and moved back only in February 1970 when the worst of the panic was over. Throughout 1970, though, the Chinese continued to anticipate a Soviet invasion. To this day, those years are remembered in China as a time of great danger.34
There is an old Chinese saying that ‘When the extreme is reached, the reverse will set in,’ and indeed Mao was now starting to think seriously about doing something about China’s isolation in the world. In February 1969, to help him clarify his thoughts, he set up a special four-man group to study the international situation. All its members were hardened revolutionaries who had led the Communist armies in the long struggle for power. After 1949, all had become marshals in the People’s Liberation Army. In 1969, all had plenty of time on their hands because they had been attacked and disgraced during the Cultural Revolution amid mad accusations that they were counterrevolutionaries. (In fact their crime was to have suggested that the Cultural Revolution was going too far.) They were among the luckier of the top leadership, though, because Mao did not feel particularly vindictive towards them. Chou En-lai was able to provide them with a certain amount of protection and had sent them to live in secure factories in Beijing where their duties were minimal and their real job was to read materials on international affairs and discuss them with each other. Chou instructed, ‘You should not be confined to the established views and conclusions, which need to be altered partly or totally.’ With the thoughtfulness that made so many love him, he urged the four elderly men not to work too hard: ‘Take care of your health.’35
The group’s leader, the former Foreign Minister Chen Yi, was chosen by Mao himself. Marshal Chen, who had been a Communist for almost as long as Mao himself and was also a poet, was one of the Revolution’s outstanding generals and one of the few men Mao called friend. He was brave and outspoken, qualities which had got him into trouble during the Cultural Revolution when, for example, he told a meeting of radical students that they were acting senselessly. What, he demanded, was the point of parading the older generation – the very people who had made the Revolution – in dunces’ caps and accusing them of all sorts of improbable crimes? He refused to believe that the party was riddled with traitors as the Red Guards claimed. ‘Pick on me’, he shouted defiantly, ‘and expose me to the public! A member of the Communist Party, he’s worth nothing if he dare not stand up and speak the truth.’ They had responded to his challenge with a series of meetings to denounce him. At one point, in the summer of 1967, Chen was trapped in the Foreign Ministry for several hours until Chou managed to rescue him and send him out of harm’s way.36
In December 1968, in spite of his own precarious position, Chen had bravely written a report, in contradiction of official propaganda, arguing that the United States was focused on the Americas and Europe rather than on the Far East, and that the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States suggested, although he did not say so explicitly, an opening for China. Between the two superpowers, Chen probably favoured the US. ‘If the US could change its current hostile attitude towards us,’ he had commented in the late 1950s, ‘there would be a future for the bilateral relationship.’ Chen was a devout Communist but also a strong Chinese nationalist and he found it difficult to forgive the Soviet Union for an abrupt cancellation of all its aid agreements in 1960. ‘What kind of Marxist-Leninis
m is this? Even capitalist countries would not do something like this!’37
The four old marshals were allowed to read virtually anything they wanted, including translations from foreign newspapers. They were also given unlimited green tea and a couple of younger colleagues, ‘strong labourers’ as Chen described them, to help with their researches. In their discussions, they cautiously started to question one of the main assumptions of China’s foreign policy: that the Soviet Union and the United States were equally hostile to China. Perhaps China could manoeuvre between them. Chen Yi, as always, was the boldest. ‘Due to strategic necessity, Stalin signed the non-aggression treaty with Hitler. Why can’t we play the America card?’ American policy, he pointed out, had been changing subtly. He wanted to suggest to the leadership that China resume the Warsaw talks with the United States which had been temporarily broken off the previous year.38
In July, the Four Marshals submitted their first report. While it contained the standard abuse of American capitalists and Soviet revisionists and the usual praise for the ‘invincible Mao Tse-tung Thought’, they daringly pointed out the conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union. They also argued that a major attack on China was not imminent. The United States had been too badly burned in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union was deterred by fear of what the US might do.39
In September, with the fear of Soviet attack building, they sent Chou En-lai a second report which underlined their earlier conclusions. ‘The last thing the US imperialists are willing to see is a victory by the Soviet revisionists in a Sino-Soviet war, as this would [allow the Soviets] to build up a big empire more powerful than the American empire in resources and manpower.’ Although in the long term China was struggling against both powers, its strategy should be to use the one against the other. In some ‘further thoughts’, Chen Yi spelled out what this could mean. ‘It is necessary for us to utilize the contradiction between the United States and the Soviet Union in a strategic sense and to pursue a breakthrough in Sino-American relations.’ He had some ‘wild’ ideas about how to do this. China should use the Warsaw talks to propose to the Americans that their two sides hold meetings ‘at the ministerial or even higher levels’ to discuss the major issues. When Foreign Ministry officials quailed at passing on such heresy to Chou and Mao, Chen insisted.40
Apparently Mao said nothing at all when he saw the reports. He was in the process of working out his own thoughts on the correct strategy for China. It was clear that China could not continue to sustain the enmity of the two superpowers as well as that of most of its neighbours. Chou, as always, waited for direction from the Chairman. When the Swedish ambassador asked him that June whether the Soviet Union or the United States was the greater threat to China, Chou was curiously vague: ‘Now the situation is changing; we should wait and see.’41 Could the fences with the Soviet Union be mended? Was it in China’s interest to seek that solution? Or was there an alternative? Chinese history, which still held the Communist leaders in its thrall, offered an instructive lesson. In the third century ad, during a period of disunity, one of China’s greatest strategists had allied his kingdom with a second to defeat a third.
That autumn, Mao asked his doctor to consider a problem. ‘We have the Soviet Union to the north and the west, India to the south, and Japan to the east. If all our enemies were to unite, attacking us from the north, south, east, and west, what do you think we should do?’ Dr Li confessed that he was at a loss. ‘Think again,’ Mao said. ‘Beyond Japan is the United States. Didn’t our ancestors counsel negotiating with faraway countries while fighting with those that are near?’ The doctor, not surprisingly, was dumbfounded. How, he asked Mao, could China negotiate with the United States? It was easy, Mao replied. Unlike the Soviet Union, the United States had never occupied Chinese territory. And its new President, Richard Nixon, was a right-winger. ‘I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think – not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.’ (Although Mao could not know it, Nixon had just startled his cabinet in Washington by saying that it was not necessarily in the best interests of the United States to see the Soviet Union crush China.) Another Chinese statesman was also watching and waiting. ‘Once China and the Soviet Union have any contact,’ said Chen Yi, ‘the US will get impatient just like an ant on top of a hot pot. Nixon will not be satisfied at being left behind and will try to catch up.’ The world had been surprised when Kosygin and Chou had met in Beijing that autumn. ‘If a Sino-US summit meeting could be held, it would shock the world even more!’42
10
The Banquet
THE RIGHTIST WAS now in Beijing. The first night of the visit, Chou En-lai invited Nixon, as the Chinese always did special guests, to a banquet given in his honour at the Great Hall of the People, that monstrous Stalinist structure which ran along one side of Tiananmen Square. Banquets, toasts, the exchange of gifts, all have been part of diplomacy throughout recorded Chinese history. The Chinese Communists took such protocols as seriously as their predecessors had done. ‘Their whole idea’, said Winston Lord, Kissinger’s assistant, who in 1985 would come back to China as the American ambassador, ‘is to inculcate in outsiders coming to the Middle Kingdom a sense of obligation for their hospitality and friendship. In effect, they seek to create ties of alleged friendship. They want us to feel that friends do favors for other friends.’1
The Americans – the entire party, from the President and Mrs Nixon to the crew of their aircraft – gathered in the foyer of Nixon’s villa at the Diaoyutai, along with Chinese protocol people and translators, for the motorcade into the centre of the city. At the Great Hall, they walked into an enormous two-storey lobby with polished floors and massive chandeliers, where Chou En-lai and his colleagues waited to greet them. The guests made their way up the grand staircase for a series of photographs, carefully posed according to rank, and were then ushered into a massive, sombre hall filled with round tables and decorated with Chinese and American flags. It could hold up to three thousand people for a banquet; that evening there were perhaps a thousand. As the Americans entered, a Chinese military band started playing a medley of American folk songs. (In imperial China, officials had always believed in using music to soothe visiting barbarians.)
Mao himself had apparently approved the guests on the Chinese side. While there were representatives from the Beijing revolutionary committee, one of the new organs created during the Cultural Revolution, none of the leading radicals was present, not even Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. (She later told the Nixons that she had been too ill to come.)2 The Chinese who were present were largely officials, from the government, the Communist Party or the People’s Liberation Army. Ye Jianying, one of the Four Marshals who had written the bold reports in the summer of 1969 urging China to rethink its views on the world, was there, as was Ji Pengfei, the ineffectual Foreign Minister, and his much more competent deputy, Qiao Guanhua.
On the other side of the world, Americans watched on their morning television shows as the band played the Chinese and American national anthems and the banquet began. The Nixons and the topranking Americans sat with Chou En-lai at a large table for twenty, while everyone else was at smaller tables of ten. Each person had an embossed ivory place-card in English and Chinese in gold lettering and chopsticks inscribed with his or her name. The Americans had all been briefed on how to behave at Chinese banquets. Everyone had been issued with chopsticks and urged to practise ahead of time. Nixon had managed to become reasonably adept, but Kissinger remained hopelessly clumsy. The distinguished television reporter Walter Cronkite shot an olive high into the air. ‘The Chinese take great pride in their food,’ said a White House memo, ‘and to compliment the various courses and dishes is also recommended.’3
As the band played on – ‘Oh! Susanna’, ‘Turkey in the Straw’, and that Cultural Revolution favourite, ‘Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman’ – teams of waiters brought dish after dish. Nixon, who had once ordered a banquet at the White House time
d by stopwatch and been delighted when it came in under an hour, had no complaints this evening as the two former enemies celebrated a new relationship and the American networks covered it live for four hours. Large turntables rotated on each table, laden with duck slices garnished with pineapple, vegetarian ham (according to the English menu), three coloured eggs, carp, chicken, prawns, shark fin, dumplings, sweet rice cake, fried rice and, in a nod towards Western tastes, bread and butter.
Some of the Americans, including John Holdridge from the State Department, spoke Chinese well and a few of the Chinese spoke English. Otherwise conversation was through interpreters. At the head table, Nixon and Chou En-lai exchanged desultory remarks through Mao’s interpreter, Tang Wensheng. Rogers told long stories about his hero, the great golfer Sam Snead, to the Chinese Foreign Minister, a tough, old revolutionary who had no idea what golf was. Mrs Nixon chatted away politely, asking her Chinese hosts such questions as how many children they had.4
Chou En-lai, who was smoking Chinese cigarettes, turned to Mrs Nixon and gestured to the picture of two pandas on the package. ‘We will give you two,’ he said. According to Chinese sources, Mrs Nixon screamed with joy. Although the Americans had dropped some hints, the Chinese had been noncommittal on the pandas. Like banquets, the exchange of presents has always been important in diplomacy and giving the right presents, not too lavish and not too simple, has been an art, one at which the Chinese had traditionally excelled. In imperial China, the emperors had despatched gifts – silks, brocades or porcelain, for example – to other rulers as a mark of imperial favour and, often, to keep them quiescent. Communist China had continued to send gifts abroad, often as before porcelain or cloth, but now, as an indication of its revolutionary nature, to peoples and not rulers. In special cases, it also offered pandas, just as its predecessors had done. Placid bears which spend most of their time eating or sleeping perhaps signal a placid relationship. The famous Empress Wu presented a pair to the Emperor of Japan in the seventh century and Chiang Kai-shek another pair to the United States during the Second World War. After 1949, the Communist party gave pandas to the Soviet Union and North Korea as marks of friendship. Ling-ling and Hsing-hsing were now destined for the National Zoo in Washington.5
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