On Tuesday afternoon, she toured the Summer Palace, the extraordinary collection of pavilions, lakes and gardens, built at the end of the nineteenth century by the tyrannical Dowager Empress who had controlled China in the dying days of the Qing dynasty. That evening, with Nixon, she met China’s modern empress when Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, laid on a performance of one of her new proletarian operas. Chou En-lai had obliquely warned Nixon that morning about what to expect. ‘It was difficult to combine classical ballet with revolutionary themes.’ Like everyone in China, Chou was very careful what he said about Jiang Qing. As she targeted first one, then another of China’s top leaders in the factional fights during the Cultural Revolution, he adeptly switched his support to her.10
Humourless, self-righteous, capricious and vengeful, Jiang was a dangerous enemy. The Cultural Revolution had brought her out of the shadows into the centre of power. She and her fellow radicals, many of them, like her, from Shanghai, had answered Mao’s call to rid China of its old culture and to attack all those counter-revolutionaries who stood in the way. Jiang Qing and her closest associates (they were later tried and condemned as the Gang of Four) enthusiastically spearheaded the purging of the Communist Party and the evisceration of China’s cultural and educational institutions. They burned books and banned China’s traditional art forms as well as most foreign culture. Mozart and Beethoven were too bourgeois and so were many foreign instruments. (The piano, though, was spared because Jiang Qing had played it as a girl.) Chinese film-making came to a halt as directors tried, in vain, to meet the changeable standards laid down by the revolutionaries.
When the Nixons met her, she looked like a severe governess or prison warder, but when she had first caught Mao’s eye in the late 1930s in Yan’an she was a beautiful and charming young actress. Jiang Qing’s beauty and determination had helped her survive a difficult life. She was born to a small businessman and his concubine in Shandong province, the birthplace of Confucius, on the eve of the First World War. Her mother eventually fled from a household where she was despised and beaten, and eked out a living as a domestic servant and possibly, so Jiang Qing’s enemies later said, as a prostitute. The young Jiang frequently went hungry and was often left alone while her mother was out on mysterious errands. At her primary school, where, she said, a few poor children were admitted for show, she was teased by the other children for her poverty. She acquired a lifelong resentment of the upper classes and a contempt for traditional Chinese values.
By the time she was sixteen, at the start of the 1930s, Jiang Qing had discovered the theatre. It was an exciting time as the Chinese grappled with new and revolutionary ideas and she found herself drawn into the world of the left-wing intellectuals in Shanghai and Beijing. As her private life went from one romantic drama to another, her acting career slowly developed. Her most famous role, and one which she remembered fondly, was Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. At some point, or so she always claimed, she became a secret member of the Communist Party. She was also briefly arrested by the Guomindang police in Shanghai. Stories circulated for years that she had gained her release by providing the names of Communists.11
By 1937, when the Japanese attacked Shanghai, Jiang’s career was stalled and her latest and perhaps most serious relationship had just ended. She had no reason to stay and, as a known left-winger, every reason to flee, so along with many others she decided to head for the Communist enclave in Yenan. By comparison with the hardened revolutionary women who had survived the Long March, Jiang was fresh and glamorous. She threw herself in Mao’s way, sitting enthralled at the front row of his lectures and sending him admiring notes. ‘I worshiped Mao,’ she told an American academic years later. Mao responded with enthusiasm, inviting her back to his cave in the hillside. She rapidly became a fixture in his life. Mao was already estranged from his second wife, but even the Chairman could not simply put one wife aside and take another. The private lives of Communists belonged to the party and the party was puritanical. He Zhizen, Mao’s wife, had endured much – the Long March, the repeated pregnancies, the forced abandonment of her children as the Communists fled – and she had many supporters, among them the other senior wives such as Chou’s. When Mao, who was infatuated with Jiang, insisted, a compromise was reached. He could divorce and remarry, but his new wife had to stay out of politics. Jiang deeply resented the prohibition and those she felt were responsible for it. The Cultural Revolution gave her ample opportunity for revenge.12
The marriage was happy for only a few years. The couple fought, among other things, over Jiang’s decision to get herself sterilized after she bore Mao a daughter. Her health deteriorated and, in 1956, she was treated in the Soviet Union for cervical cancer. When Mao resumed his womanizing, without bothering to conceal it from her, she was deeply hurt. Mao’s doctor once discovered her weeping on a bench outside her husband’s quarters in the Zhongnanhai. She begged Li not to say anything. ‘Just as no one,’ she said, ‘Stalin included, could win in a political battle with her husband, so no woman could ever win the battle for his love.’ By the end of the 1950s Mao and Jiang lived increasingly separate lives. Understandably, perhaps, she became even more sensitive to slights than before and grew obsessed with her health. Dr Li was constantly called in to examine her for largely imaginary illnesses. When she could not sleep, it was because someone had tampered with her pills and when she found her bath too hot it was a plot by her nurses to harm her. Li thought her main problem was that she was bored and lonely. She was also terrified that Mao would abandon her as he had abandoned his other wives. Mao tried in vain to reassure her. She was useful to him as a secretary and he valued her devotion and her complete dependence on him.13
Mao needed someone like Jiang to make his Cultural Revolution and she leaped at the opportunity he offered her. ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog,’ she famously said when she was on trial after his death. ‘When he said “Bite,” I bit.’ Her health miraculously improved. She revelled in her new power and her moment in the sun, the adoring crowds, the banners with her sayings, the army generals who obsequiously asked for her guidance. She dashed about the country in her private plane with its silk sheets to stir up revolution and held herself up as the model of the new proletarian culture. Top officials in Beijing got urgent calls in the middle of the night to stand by for a gift from Jiang; a basket of turnips she had grown arrived in a special car. With an astonishing lack of self-awareness, she invited Roxanne Witke, a young American academic, to watch her at work in her lavish private garden in Canton as she solemnly laid out specimens of her orchids.14
Those who had slighted her in the past now paid a heavy price. Jiang turned the Red Guards loose on Liu Shaoqi’s wife, Wang Guangmei, one of the party elders who had relegated her to a minor role in Yan’an. Wang was accused of the crime of dressing like a bourgeois by wearing flowered dresses and a necklace on state visits abroad; she was paraded in front of jeering crowds in an evening dress and a necklace made of gilded Ping-Pong balls. Rivals, even colleagues, from Jiang’s Shanghai days were paraded through the streets in dunces’ caps. Shanghai police records were purged and acquaintances from that period who might have kept incriminating material about her affairs or her dealings with the Guomindang police had their houses ransacked by people who claimed to be Red Guards; every scrap of paper, including a child’s school notes, was carted off to Jiang to be destroyed.15
Jiang condemned China’s film industry as steeped in old-fashioned and incorrect values. It shut down because she was too busy to come up with clear guidelines for the sorts of films she wanted. She did, however, have more success in the field of Chinese opera. The traditional operas, with their plots revolving around mythical beings and great historical figures of the past and their classical singing and dancing, were plainly retrograde. Under her guidance, six model revolutionary operas were created; they were the only ones performed all over China until Mao’s death. It was one of these that the Nixon party was to see.
Jiang was
determined that the evening would be a success. She sent off Qiao Guanhua, the Deputy Foreign Minister, to brief the Nixons on what they were about to see. She also agonized over whether to wear a dress. In the China of 1972 dresses were frowned upon as bourgeois, while shapeless suits were good proletarian wear. In the end, she was wearing a suit when she welcomed the Nixon party to the special theatre in the Great Hall of the People. Nixon found her ‘unpleasantly abrasive and aggressive’ as she shot questions at him. Why had Jack London committed suicide? Why hadn’t Nixon come to China before now? Nixon had a question of his own: who had written the opera? It was ‘created by the masses’, said Jiang proudly. As she later told Roxanne Witke, ‘One could not have expected him to grasp the magnitude of her personal responsibility for the creation of a new model theater for the nation’.16
Perhaps by design, the opera – The Red Detachment of Women – was about Hainan Island, which had been reunited, as Taiwan had still not been, with Communist China. Interpreters whispered the plot in the Americans’ ears but it was not difficult to follow, because the good characters – peasants, Communists, guerrillas – bounded on looking noble and upright while the villains – landlords and their minions – slunk on with averted faces. In spite of the propaganda, Nixon found it an enjoyable spectacle. ‘This is certainly the equal of any ballet that I have seen, in terms of production,’ he told American reporters. ‘It was’, thought Haldeman who had also enjoyed the performance, ‘rather an odd sight to see the P. clapping at the end for this kind of thing, which would have been horrifying at home, but it all seems to fit together somehow, here.’ Ron Walker, the White House advance man, took some Chinese records home and used to entertain his friends with spirited imitations of the dancing until he fell and had to have knee surgery.17
It snowed that night and the next day, a Wednesday. The Americans watched with some amazement as thousands of ordinary citizens came out with shovels and brooms to clean the streets. That evening, the Chinese laid on another entertainment with table tennis and gymnastics, two sports at which they excelled. The crowd was made up largely of military and athletes, all dressed in coloured uniforms and seated in sections. They had been carefully briefed to applaud the Americans loudly as they came in. During the evening, as the lights played on each section, there were more loud cheers for the television cameras. Haldeman was deeply impressed by the organization.
Nixon told reporters the next day that he had never seen such athletes. ‘Just superb.’ In his diary, he struck a more sombre note: ‘Not only we but all the people of the world will have to make our very best effort if we are going to match the enormous ability, drive and discipline of the Chinese people’. The United States must take care to build a good relationship with China as it develops. ‘Otherwise,’ he later wrote, ‘we will one day be confronted with the most formidable enemy that has ever existed in the history of the world.’ That night, Nixon did not sleep well and got up at 5 a.m. to smoke a Great Wall cigar and jot down his thoughts about the trip.18
Nixon had tried to avoid sightseeing, but the Great Wall itself was too good a photo-opportunity to miss. Early on Thursday morning, when the Americans back home were settling down to their evening television, the Nixon party, accompanied by Chou and Marshal Ye, drove thirty-five miles to where the Wall swoops down north of Beijing. There are many myths about the Great Wall: that it is the only man-made structure that can be seen from the moon; that it was first built, all 4,000 miles of it, by the Qin Emperor in the second century bc; and that it existed down through time to hold off the barbarians who threatened the most sophisticated and advanced civilization in the world. Its mere existence, despite invasions and revolutions, is seen in China as a sign of the will of the Chinese people themselves to endure and triumph. It symbolizes, says a recent Chinese encyclopaedia, ‘the great strength of the Chinese nation’. In reality, the Wall, which cannot be seen from the moon, was built piecemeal over the centuries, sometimes to protect China itself, but it was also built by warring kingdoms to defend themselves in the periods when China was not united or as an aggressive move by Chinese rulers to stake out a claim in barbarian territory. In its early and greatest phase, the Tang dynasty did not bother with walls at all, preferring to reach out to the world and, if necessary, deal with threats through diplomacy or force. The section of the Wall that Nixon saw was built not by the Qin Emperor but by Ming rulers a mere four hundred years ago.19
The Wall near Beijing is still an extraordinary sight as it coils its way up and down the hills and Nixon had a marvellously clear day for his visit. He went hatless in spite of the cold, and his party, who felt obliged to follow his lead, shivered along as he climbed a short distance upwards. The bolder made snowballs and threw them into the valleys below. The American press corps swarmed around the President. Walter Cronkite hopped along as the electric socks he had brought against the cold gave him a series of shocks. The White House advance party had worked out the best sites for photographs and the live television cameras were already positioned on two of the Wall’s towers. Nixon shook hands with all the Chinese present for the cameras. ‘Imagine climbing all these mountains carrying stones,’ he said to an American journalist. To Marshal Ye, he praised the architecture and said what a pity it was they did not have time to climb all the way up to the summit. ‘Haven’t we already had our summit meeting in Beijing?’ Ye replied and quoted a line from Mao to the effect that you are not a real man until you get to the Great Wall. Ron Ziegler urged the reporters to ask Nixon for his impressions. ‘I think that you would have to conclude’, the President said solemnly, ‘that this is a great wall and that it had to be built by a great people.’ And, in words which have been repeated approvingly ever since he was in China, he added, ‘A people who could build a wall like this certainly have a great past to be proud of and a people who have this kind of a past must also have a great future.’20
After fifteen minutes at the Wall, he headed off to another of China’s architectural glories, the tombs of the Ming emperors with their great avenue of stone guardians and animals. Nixon, who was clearly bored with the whole expedition by this point, managed to summon up a few more thoughts for the journalists. The tombs were not that old considering China’s thousands of years of history, he pointed out, but they were yet more evidence of the rich history of the Chinese people, ‘a reminder that they are very proud in terms of cultural development and the rest’. It had been worth coming all the way from Washington to see the Wall and now the Ming tombs. Would he advise Americans to apply for tourist visas? a reporter asked. Nixon said he would. The journalists, who were desperate for hard news, fell on this tidbit. Perhaps there had been some agreement reached on exchanges.21
That evening, Nixon who was already annoyed that Chou had suddenly added a Peking-duck dinner to the timetable, asked Haldeman and Kissinger to cut down on the time allocated for the Forbidden City the following morning. Perhaps they could also cut out some of the toasts at the remaining banquets. He was persuaded to back down on the latter when Kissinger pointed out that he would offend his Chinese hosts. On Friday morning, though, Nixon galloped through the Forbidden City on a shortened schedule in an hour and a half. He saw what he needed to, in Haldeman’s view, and generated some more pictures and quotations. ‘Give me a pair of those,’ he said when he was shown earplugs that an emperor had worn to screen out criticisms. When Chou called his attention to a display of ancient eating utensils which included gold spoons, Nixon joked, for the benefit of the reporters, that he thought the Chinese only used chopsticks. ‘How do you think we eat soup?’ Chou retorted.22
By Friday, Nixon, who was still having trouble sleeping, was tired and grumpy. He grumbled to Haldeman about his problems and how nobody in the press understood him. He was also worried about the communiqué, which was still not settled, although Kissinger and his Chinese counterpart, Qiao Guanhua, had been working long hours on the wording. His own conversations with Chou were running out of steam because the two men had
covered the main issues by now. When they met that afternoon for an hour, Nixon told Chou he was through talking. The two men chatted in a desultory way about Africa and the Middle East. Libya was a strange country, they agreed. Why, Chou wondered, was it not possible for Israel to return the occupied territories to the Arabs? It was very difficult, Nixon replied, but he would make sure that Kissinger kept the Chinese informed on the delicate negotiations he was conducting on that very subject.
Chou also took the opportunity to reiterate China’s suspicions of the Soviet Union. While he still hoped that Sino-Soviet relations could be mended, he had to say that China would not negotiate under the threat of attack. It was curious, Chou thought, that the Soviets, who were so strong, seemed to have such a fear of China. ‘Pathological,’ Nixon agreed. When Nixon went to the Soviet Union for his summit meeting in May, Chou advised, he hoped that the President would make it clear that the United States and China were not colluding against the Soviet Union. Nixon assured Chou that he would. He had something to ask Chou. Would the Chinese consider releasing John Downey, a CIA pilot who had been shot down over China twenty years previously? Downey’s mother was old and sick. It might be possible, Chou said; it appeared that Downey had been behaving rather well recently. Downey was freed a year later and resumed his interrupted life, going to Harvard Law School and ending up a judge.23
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