Walker, codenamed Road Runner after the hyperactive cartoon character, was used to dropping in on cities and towns around the world and bullying and cajoling the locals to make sure that every detail for a presidential visit, including thorough press coverage, was in place. This time, he complained to Washington that he was finding it hard to get clear answers to all his demands and questions. When the Chinese head of protocol demurred over a particular arrangement, Walker snapped back, ‘I don’t give a rat’s ass what you say, we’re going to do it this way. We always do it this way.’ The Chinese was puzzled: ‘What’s a rat’s ass?’ When it gradually dawned on him, there was a major crisis and a senior official had to fly out from Washington to smooth everything over.2 The agreement that Nixon would visit China was the first, most important step, but there were many times in the next few months when it looked as though the visit might never take place. The minuet, in Kissinger’s description, was performed on the edge of a cliff, by dancers who were never quite sure what moves others were about to make.
After Kissinger’s first secret visit, the Chinese and the Americans used the Paris channel to talk about everything from refuelling the American aircraft to relations with the Soviet Union. In October, Kissinger travelled back to Beijing, this time openly, as the Chinese had requested, to start drafting the joint communiqué which was to be issued by both sides at the conclusion of the President’s visit and to continue work on the arrangements for Nixon’s trip. ‘China,’ Kissinger told Chou, ‘despite its long experience in handling outsiders, has never undergone anything like the phenomenon of a visit by an American President.’ Kissinger flew in Air Force One so that the Chinese could get used to dealing with the President’s aircraft. He also brought a much larger party which included communications and security experts as well as Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, from the White House advance team. This time, too, there was an official representative from the State Department, an experienced China hand called Al Jenkins. ‘My task’, said Kissinger in his memoirs, ‘was to give him a sense of participation without letting him in on any key geopolitical discussions, especially the drafting of the communiqué.’3
Kissinger took off from the United States this time and landed in China at Shanghai on 20 October. From there two Chinese pilots took over the controls, just as they would when Nixon arrived. In their conversations in Beijing, the Chinese had also insisted that Nixon should travel in a Chinese plane for part of his trip within China. It was not usual, Kissinger said, for American presidents to travel on any planes but their own. ‘It’s on our territory,’ Chou said simply, and pointed out that he himself would accompany Nixon. ‘We will be responsible, and your Secret Service men can also have a look in our plane because everything will be all right.’4
In Beijing, although the Americans had no way of knowing it, the repercussions from Lin Biao’s flight were still causing trouble in the upper echelons of the party. Chou En-lai was much preoccupied with trying to clean up the mess and in fending off attacks from the radicals. At the Diaoyutai, where the Americans were again housed, a ripple from off-stage reached them when they discovered copies in their rooms of an English-language news release condemning American imperialists and calling on the people of the world to overthrow them. Kissinger gathered all the releases up and handed them over to a Chinese official with the comment that some previous guests must have left them behind. Chou was furious and embarrassed at what may have been an attempt by radicals in the official Chinese news agency to derail the delicate process of opening up relations with the Americans. He immediately reported to Mao, who made light of it: ‘Tell the Americans, these are nothing but empty words.’ The next day as Kissinger drove to the Great Hall of the People, the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister tried to explain that, just as the Americans communicated with one another through newspapers, so did the Chinese through slogans. He showed Kissinger a wall where a poster denouncing the United States had been freshly covered with a welcome for the Afro-Asian Ping-Pong Tournament.5
The American party stayed in Beijing for a week trying to work out the details, both small and large, of Nixon’s visit. (To guard against Chinese listening devices, they played a tape of Johnny Cash country-and-western songs; whenever they wanted anything like a cup of tea from the Chinese, they turned the music off and spoke loudly.) The Americans toured some of the sights Nixon would see: the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs and the Summer Palace. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, put on one of her famous revolutionary operas for them. Interestingly, the programme also contained a performance of a Beethoven symphony by the Beijing Philharmonic which was appearing for the first time since the Cultural Revolution had started. The communications experts met together to reconcile the colossal demands of the Americans for rapid communications with the antiquated state of the Chinese telephone system and to make arrangements for satellite transmission. The Americans wanted to bring the President’s special armoured limousine; the Chinese insisted that he would be perfectly safe in one of their cars. The issue was finally settled when Nixon said he did not care which car he used. The American chief of security bewildered the Chinese when he asked them to round up all the usual trouble-makers before Nixon arrived. His Chinese counterpart complained about the American’s arrogant manner.6
The Americans, Kissinger told Chou, would bring their own interpreters: ‘But in private meetings between the Chairman and the President we may want to rely on your interpreters in order to guarantee security’. He could not, Kissinger claimed, trust American interpreters not to talk to the newspapers. The Chinese agreed with understandable alacrity. Using their interpreters would give them greater control over the record of Nixon’s conversations. Finding enough English-speakers was something of a problem, however; the Chinese brought them in from all over the country, often from the farms where they had been sent during the Cultural Revolution.7
On the whole Kissinger and Chou concentrated on the big political issues: the Soviet Union, the tension in South Asia, Japan, Korea and the United Nations. Taiwan was at the top of China’s list, Vietnam at the top of the Americans’. Kissinger was usually accompanied only by Winston Lord. He did not want, he told Chou, to share the discussions of major issues ‘with colleagues not in my own office’. Jenkins from the State Department was therefore sent off to talk to one of Chou’s subordinates about issues Kissinger considered less important, such as trade, or was kept occupied with trips to see an oil refinery and a chemical plant. With Chou, Kissinger said, it was as though the two of them were resuming a seamless conversation. ‘Everything ever said to me by any Chinese of any station was part of an intricate design – even when with my slower Occidental mind it took me a while to catch on.’8
In their twenty-five hours of conversations, Kissinger and Chou covered much of the world and much history, but they kept coming back to Taiwan. And it was to be Taiwan that caused them the most trouble when they came to draft the communiqué for the conclusion of Nixon’s trip. Kissinger had come prepared with a detailed draft which he handed over to the Chinese on 22 October. ‘It is such a long one,’ commented Chou. The draft contained much fine language about how the Chinese and the Americans recognized one another’s differences but how they wanted to work together for international peace and security. Neither side was seeking hegemony, a favourite word used by the Chinese to attack the superpowers. The draft also skated over the key areas of dispute such as Taiwan, expressing the hope that the issue could be settled peacefully. It was the sort of standard communiqué issued when nations still had important matters to work out. Mao disliked it intensely, perhaps because as an old revolutionary who still dreamed of leading a world revolution he did not care for the idea of subscribing to something so bland and conventional. The United States, he told Chou later that night, was talking about peace and security. ‘We have to emphasize revolution, liberating the oppressed nations and peoples in the world.’ It was all empty talk, Mao went on, when the Americans said they would not interfe
re in other countries’ internal affairs and swore that they were not seeking to dominate the world. ‘If they did not seek hegemony, how could America expand from 13 states to 50 states?’ Chou should tell the Americans that it was better for everyone to speak frankly. Anything short of that would be ‘improper’.9
Chou duly complied with his instructions. On the morning of 24 October, he told Kissinger that they must face the fact that there were significant differences between the positions of their respective countries. To do otherwise would be dishonest, the sort of thing the Soviet Union might do. The Americans, Chou lectured Kissinger, were behaving like Metternich had after the Napoleonic Wars: trying to suppress revolution and maintain order by relying on old friends. Metternich had failed in the end because he could not hold off revolution forever. The Americans were facing something similar in the present. ‘This awakening consciousness of the people is promoting changes in the world, or we might call it turmoil.’ Look at Vietnam, at the rest of Asia, at Africa, at Latin America, even at Europe. The Americans should understand the power of revolution; after all they had once been revolutionary themselves when they fought for their independence. Both the United States and China wanted peace; but, Chou demanded, ‘Shall this generation of peace be based on hopes for the future or on old friends?’ That was a fundamental difference between their two countries. If the United States preferred to behave as Metternich once had, it would find itself facing revolutionary challenges after a few years. ‘Of course,’ Chou concluded blandly, ‘perhaps limited by your system, you are unable to make any greater changes, while we, due to our philosophy, foresee such a thing.’10
The Chinese prepared their own draft, which set out their general approach and their views on major issues, and left a space for the Americans to do the same. The Chinese also added the requisite revolutionary sentiments, about oppression breeding resistance, for example, and peoples making revolution. Mao was pleased. The communiqué, he said, now had a ‘voice’. On the evening of 24 October Chou read out the new draft. ‘I had wanted to escape from it today,’ he told Kissinger, ‘but it appears not possible.’ Kissinger was taken aback, but, as he said in his memoirs, gradually came round. ‘I began to see that the very novelty of the approach might resolve our perplexities.’ On Taiwan, the Chinese insisted that the Americans set a timetable for withdrawing all their troops and recognizing China’s sovereignty over the island. Kissinger could not go that far, although he stressed that the American military forces would gradually be withdrawn once the United States had extricated itself from Vietnam. He hinted, too, at greater concessions once Nixon had been re-elected in the autumn of 1972: ‘I have told the Prime Minister two things: first, it’s possible for us to do more than we can say, and secondly, it’s possible for us to take more measures after next year than during next year.’ Nixon, he promised, would reaffirm that when he came to China. Kissinger told Chou, though, that the Chinese would have to tone down their criticisms of the United States: ‘It will be said that the President came 12,000 miles in order to be asked to sign a document containing the sharpest possible formulations against United States policy’.11
Kissinger delayed his flight back to the United States and he and Winston Lord worked late into the night of 24 October on the Chinese draft, seeking, said Kissinger, ‘a tone of firmness without belligerence’. All the next day and night, the two sides went back and forth. ‘I pointed out with melancholy’, Kissinger later reported to Nixon, ‘that the Chinese draft still accentuated our differences in provocative fashion.’ The two sides gradually inched closer together on the wording of the communiqué. The language became calmer, although the differences remained. And Taiwan remained intractable. Finally, on the morning of 26 October, as Air Force One stood ready at the Beijing airport, Kissinger came up with language on Taiwan that seemed acceptable to both sides. ‘The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Straits maintain there is but one China. The United States Government does not challenge that position.’ Chou accepted it, later remarking to his colleagues, ‘After all, a Dr is indeed useful as a Dr.’ By eight o’clock on the morning of the 26th, the two sides had agreed on a draft. As he stood at the door of the Diaoyutai guesthouse to see Kissinger off, Chou spoke in English for the first time: ‘Come back soon for the joy of talking.’12
‘The one thing that Doctor Kissinger had not worked out yet’, according to Chapin, ‘was how he was going to be able to keep Secretary of State Rogers from attending various meetings, but for the most part it was all coming together in a way that pleased Doctor Kissinger.’13 As Air Force One taxied down the runway, a coded message came in from Washington. The United States had lost its battle at the United Nations to keep Taiwan as a member. Ever since 1949, the Americans had insisted that Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China in Taiwan was the true representative for China, and so Taiwan and not the People’s Republic had occupied the China seat on the Security Council, in the General Assembly and in the UN’s agencies. At home, the well-organized and well-funded China lobby had made sure that there was no weakening of resolve. At the start of the 1960s, when the Kennedy administration looked at the possibility of having both Chinas in the UN, Nixon, at the time out of office, led the campaign to make sure that the United States continued to support Taiwan as the only true China. It was getting increasingly difficult, however, to hold the line at the UN itself. In the 1950s, determined lobbying by American diplomats and emergency measures such as sending a US navy aircraft to collect the delegate from the Maldive Islands had kept the status quo intact. By the close of the decade, however, the end of the big European empires was producing new nations by the dozens, and most Third World countries and, of course, the Communist ones voted year after year for an Albanian resolution to admit the People’s Republic. In the 1960s the Americans had been able to hold off the inevitable only by getting the vote classified as ‘important’, which meant that a majority of two-thirds was required – but even on that, time was running out.
In his first couple of years in office, when Nixon was questioned about American policy on the China representation issue, he merely said he had no plans to change that policy ‘at this time’. In fact, he was gradually modifying his longstanding opposition to having the People’s Republic in the United Nations. This was largely because of his moves towards the People’s Republic but also because it had become clear that the United States was about to lose the vote at the UN. In 1970, the General Assembly voted by a slim majority for the Albanian resolution to expel Taiwan and give its seat to mainland China. A compromise solution, floated briefly by the United States and others, that the People’s Republic take the seat on the Security Council but that Taiwan remain in the General Assembly went nowhere when both Chinas refused to accept the presence of the other in the United Nations. When Kissinger raised the issue of dual representation in his conversations with Chou during his first secret trip to China, Chou made it clear that China intended to reclaim what was rightfully its own, not share it with an illegitimate government. When Mao heard the proposal, he said firmly, ‘We will never board their “two China” pirate ship.’ That same summer, Washington sent a special envoy to sound out Chiang Kai-shek. The old leader was also firm; ‘he would rather be a piece of broken jade lying smashed on the floor than a whole tile on a roof’.14
At the start of 1971, a high-level study group in Washington concluded that the United States was likely to lose the annual important-question vote and therefore the requirement for a two-thirds majority on the Albanian resolution. American allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada were indicating that they were no longer prepared to vote with the United States. Taiwan, the study concluded, might be expelled as early as that year. While the study merely laid out American options, increasingly the thinking in official Washington was that the United States should be seen to put up a good fight for Taiwan but that the admission of the People’s Republic to the UN was in reality a good thing. On his secret trip t
o China that summer, Kissinger tried one last face-saving move for the United States when he promised Chou that the American government would allow China’s admission by a mere majority but that it would still insist that expelling a member required two-thirds. The People’s Republic would be in right away and Taiwan would be out soon. Chou was not interested: ‘We do not consider the matter of reclaiming our seat in the UN. as such an urgent matter. We have gone through this for 21 years, and we have lived through it.’15
The sensational news of Kissinger’s visit to China served to undermine the American position, but the American delegation at the UN, led by its ambassador, George H.W Bush, fought on during the summer and early autumn. They were handicapped because Washington delayed sending them clear directives about what American policy was, whether to keep to the old line or try to get some sort of compromise, until September. That autumn, when the General Assembly met, the Americans spent the days lobbying to keep the admission of the People’s Republic of China as an important question requiring a two-thirds majority. Each night the Americans met to go over their lists as their old friends slipped away. Then, as the crucial vote in the General Assembly approached in October, Kissinger made news headlines with his second trip to China. ‘So’, said one of the American diplomats, ‘that was the coup de grâce. If there was any lingering possibility that we could hold a line, that pretty well ended.’16
Kissinger, who has been criticized for the timing of his trip, may well have chosen his dates deliberately. In a conversation with Rogers and Nixon on 30 September, he said he had been told that the week between 19 and 28 October was the tricky one. Rogers complained strenuously that Kissinger was almost certain to be in Beijing when the vote took place: ‘Everybody would think we were deliberately undercutting our own effort’. Kissinger agreed to see if he could change his trip, but later that day he and Nixon talked alone and agreed that it was not worth it. ‘I think’, said Kissinger, ‘the votes are set now.’ Nixon agreed.17
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