Everyone stood at attention while the band played the national anthems of China and the United States. Then, while it played revolutionary favorites such as “A Song to Our Socialist Motherland,” Chou and Nixon inspected the honor guard. Mrs. Nixon followed at the rear with her escort, an American military aide. It was the first time since 1950 that an American in uniform had walked freely in the People’s Republic of China. They were trailed by a group of American and Chinese officials: the American secretary of state, William Rogers, and his aides; Kissinger and his staff; Marshal Ye Jianying, one of the old heroes of the Communist victory in 1949; Ji Pengfei, the Chinese foreign minister; and their Chinese colleagues. Joseph Kraft, the distinguished journalist, noticed how many acting and deputy ministers were there, filling in for all those officials who had lost their jobs during Mao’s recent Cultural Revolution.8
The airport ceremonies, perfunctory by Chinese standards, were over in fifteen minutes, and the party climbed into big black Chinese limousines with lace-curtained windows and disappeared toward the city, with the press following in buses. The Americans had a brief glimpse of the northern Chinese countryside. The shabby farm buildings, the peasants, and their animals brought home China’s poverty and weakness.9 There were no other cars on the roads, only buses and hordes of bicycles. The photographers leaned out the windows to snap workers sweeping up fresh snow and passersby who seemed curiously uninterested in the convoy dashing past. The convoy passed the diplomatic quarter, where the Chinese authorities kept foreign diplomats carefully segregated, and turned left at the Workers’ Stadium. Some of the more observant Americans caught sight of barricades holding back traffic on the side streets and police discouraging passersby from taking a closer look. Haldeman, himself a master of stage management, wondered whether the Chinese authorities had chosen not to assemble a huge crowd in Tiananmen Square, in the heart of Beijing, as a dramatic display of the indifference of the Chinese people to their foreign visitor.10 He was right. Diplomats in the British mission learned that the Communists had given extensive briefings; the locals were told to ride their bicycles or walk by without showing any curiosity. That night on the Chinese news the lead item was about a group of women workers. The last item mentioned that the American president had dropped by.11
As they entered Beijing, the Americans were struck by the smell of burning coal and by how drab it all was, from the buildings to the monotonous blue of the locals’ clothing. Most of the Americans had read their briefing notes and their guidebooks on the plane, and they knew that they were entering one of the great capital cities of the world. For seven centuries, China’s rulers had made Beijing their capital, building its great walls and gates, dotting it with monuments, and, in its heart, creating the series of palaces, temples, and courtyards that made up the imperial quarter, known as the Forbidden City because it was barred to ordinary mortals. Chinese noblemen, bureaucrats, merchants, and scholars had built their own palaces, arranged around a series of courtyards, and the lower classes had followed suit in their own more modest dwellings. Ceramic dogs stood guard outside the entrances to important houses, and smaller dogs and mythical beasts on the points of the tiled roofs warded off evil spirits.
In Beijing was a network of alleyways—the hutong—whose walls hid both crowded slums and serene gardens. In the spring, if you stood on one of Beijing’s few hills or climbed a pagoda, you could look down on a forest of soft green and flowering trees hidden by the walls. Running north and south through the city, a series of lakes brought fresh water in from the hills to the north and helped keep the city cool in the summer. Beijing’s climate was as extreme as Chicago’s or Toronto’s: stiflingly hot and humid in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. Because of earthquakes, most buildings were only one story high.
Foreign incursions, invasion, and civil war had all taken their toll on the city, but Beijing had survived largely unchanged into the twentieth century, with only a few signs of the new world in which China found itself: a railway station, a handful of Western churches and embassies, a few universities, some office buildings. In 1949, when the People’s Republic was proclaimed by Mao after the Communist victory, Beijing contained the largest extent of medieval buildings in any city in the world. The new Communist rulers were indifferent both to the city’s charms and to its past. They were revolutionaries who had spent the past two decades in the countryside. Many of them had never seen a city before, and what they saw they did not approve of.
What the Nixon party saw was an ancient city in the process of being turned into a new Communist one, worthy to be a center of world revolution. Beijing was to become modern, and the model the Communists had first had in mind was Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, in those early days one of the new China’s few friends. And so the arches over the main streets, which had been erected over the centuries to virtuous people—upright civil servants, for example, or loyal widows—were removed. Acres of the old city were bulldozed to allow for gigantic avenues and massive squares. Tiananmen Square itself was laid over the ruins of part of the Forbidden City. The great walls that had encircled the city for centuries were torn down to make a multilane ring road. Their magnificent gates went as well.
The Americans were also struck by the silence. Bicycle bells tinkled gently and occasionally a truck or bus honked its horn, but there was none of the usual hubbub of a great city. John Holdridge, from the State Department, who had known Beijing before the Second World War, when, like all Chinese cities, it had been noisy and bustling, was startled by the change: “When I peeked at Beijing through the car curtain, it appeared to be almost a ghost city. The few pedestrians moved slowly, their faces impassive, as if they were suffering some form of combat fatigue as a result of the Cultural Revolution, which was then winding down.”12
Few outsiders knew much about the Cultural Revolution. China had virtually shut down for three years, between 1966 and 1969. Most of its embassies around the world had been closed or scaled back as Chinese officials were summoned home to get their thoughts purified. Foreign visitors were discouraged, apart from a handful of sympathizers like the ever adaptable Han Suyin, the famous author, who wrote admiringly of the wonderful way the Chinese were throwing off old, outmoded ways of thought and launching themselves enthusiastically into the future. The young were challenging their elders and all were working together, or so official propaganda said, to build a truly democratic and socialist China. Only a handful of foreign journalists and diplomats had remained in Beijing, and their movements had been severely limited, or worse. The British mission was ransacked and burned by Red Guards. Soviet diplomats were penned up in their embassy by days of demonstrations; when the Soviet Union finally withdrew their families in 1967, women and children were beaten or forced to crawl under pictures of Mao on their way to their planes.
The Chinese press was filled with wild attacks on some of the old heroes, the leading figures of the Communist revolution. Could it really be true that the former Chinese president Liu Shaoqi had been planning to restore capitalism in China? That the great revolutionary general Peng Dehuai had spent years plotting against the revolution? Glimpses of curious events reached the outside world: millions of ecstatic Red Guards jamming Tiananmen to wave their Little Red Books, weeping and cheering as their idol, Mao, appeared on the reviewing stand; mass rallies to denounce elderly men and women; provincial governors paraded through the streets with dunce caps and placards around their necks; a steady stream of vitriol against the enemies of the revolution from Chinese radio, along with extraordinary claims of miracles performed by Mao’s words. Party officials, it was announced, were being reeducated in factories or on farms. The universities and many of the high schools were closed so that the students could take part in the new revolution and their teachers go off for their own reeducation.
Then suddenly, it seemed, the whole thing was over. In the fall of 1968 the authorities ordered the students to stop rampaging about and to head for the countryside. Slowl
y and cautiously, the schools and universities reopened. Mao remarked, with his customary insouciance, that it would probably be necessary to have another cultural revolution “in a few years.” In fact, the factional fights let loose by the years of turmoil went on, in some cases until Mao’s death seven years later, in 1976. In 1969, the Ninth Party Congress officially ended the Cultural Revolution, declaring it a great triumph and a victory for the forces of socialism.
The Chinese who had suffered through the Cultural Revolution had a different view. The bill for that hideous event is still being totted up and may never be fully known. An entire people were encouraged to turn on their own society and culture, and on one another. Any cruelty, any excess was permitted as long as it was done in the name of Mao and the revolution. Being descended from the wrong class—landowners, for example—or owning a foreign book or old porcelain, or saying something that appeared to criticize Mao were all grounds for persecution. Teachers, blamed for transmitting old values, were arrested by their students and, in many cases, tortured to death. Children were told to denounce their parents if they had incorrect attitudes. Neighbors and colleagues turned on one another.
It was dangerous to work for the government or be a member of the party, and particularly dangerous at the higher levels. Marshal Peng, who had contributed so much to the Communists’ survival and eventual victory in 1949, was beaten until his ribs broke and he could no longer lie down; his lingering death was made worse because he was denied medical treatment until it was too late. Liu Shaoqi, the former president, was publicly humiliated and tormented, and then placed in solitary confinement, where his guards and medical attendants had strict orders to treat him harshly. He went mad and died in squalid misery. The persecution did not spare family members. (The son of another leading Communist, Deng Xiaoping, was thrown out a window and became a paraplegic.) Young children were turned out of their homes and left to wander the streets. All over China, at all levels of society, there were similar tragedies. A recent estimate is that between 1966 and 1976 three million Chinese died as a result of the Cultural Revolution. That is not counting the many millions more, by the admission of the Chinese authorities themselves, who were brutalized and victimized. An Italian psychiatrist who visited China shortly before Nixon’s visit was astonished at the prevalence of facial tics.13
In 1972 the American visitors did not have any idea of the extent of such horrors. Their Chinese hosts were unfailingly helpful and polite but simply ignored awkward questions. The journalists had hoped for man-and-woman-in-the-street interviews but found them impossible to arrange. Since owning a book published outside China could be enough to ruin a family, it is not surprising that no Chinese would take the risk of talking to foreigners, especially those who, until so recently, had been portrayed as China’s bitter enemies. The day Nixon arrived in Beijing, a Chinese woman had been arrested by plainclothes police for waving at his motorcade; it turned out that she had seen her niece who was an interpreter for the journalists.14 The only Chinese the Americans were going to meet were officials and a few carefully selected individuals, such as writers or academics who were always brought out to greet foreign visitors. “Pathetic mummies” was how Pierre Ryckmans, the Belgian China expert who wrote as Simon Leys, described them. “Out of eight hundred million Chinese, foreigners meet about sixty individuals.”15
In 1972 there were very few foreigners living permanently in Beijing or, indeed, in China. The Chinese Communists had moved quickly after they seized power to drive out foreign businesspeople, missionaries, and teachers, all of whom were lumped together as imperialists. A few enthusiasts for Communism—“our foreign friends”—had chosen to stay on after 1949 and, at least until the 1960s, had lived privileged lives. The “Three Hundred Percenters,” as a British diplomat called them, were trotted out to laud the glories of the revolution and Mao and to condemn the inequities of the West.16 During the Cultural Revolution even they came under attack, much to their bewilderment. Chinese universities, as part of the attempt to position China as the leader of revolution for the Third World, took in some foreign students, but this foundered when African students complained that they were looked down upon by the Chinese; after a brawl at the Peace Hotel, most of them left.17 A handful of foreign journalists from China’s fellow Communist republics or from countries such as France and Canada, which had already established relations with China, tried, usually unsuccessfully, to find some real news.
Only forty or so countries had any sort of relations with China, and the lives of their diplomats, even those from friendly countries, were severely circumscribed. There was little to see in Beijing; most of the famous sites had been badly damaged during the Cultural Revolution and remained closed. Foreigners could visit the Temple of Heaven, where the Ming emperors had once sacrificed to the gods, and one street to look for antiques. Most restaurants did not serve foreigners at all, and those that did had a special room set aside. Travel outside Beijing, except to the Ming Tombs, required a special permit, and permits, usually, were not forthcoming. Most diplomats had to live in the Diplomats’ Big Building, the Communists’ equivalent of the old imperial Barbarian Hostel, which had once housed foreign emissaries. Their servants, supplied by the Chinese authorities, undoubtedly spied on them.18
When the Communists took power in 1949, their fellow Communist regimes, led by the Soviet Union, moved quickly to recognize them as the new government of China. So did a number of newly independent Third-World nations, such as India and Indonesia. The Japanese, who accepted American influence over their foreign policy, were able only to move cautiously to reestablish trading relations. By the time Nixon visited China, though, a number of American allies had already established diplomatic relations. The British had recognized the People’s Republic in January 1950, partly because Britain had extensive interests to protect in the East, most notably Hong Kong, but also because Britain’s long-standing policy was to deal with governments that had established control. Several of the smaller European countries followed suit, although France held back, partly because it feared the Communist Chinese threat to its position in Indochina. The People’s Republic accepted a British representative but did nothing to send its own to London. The outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950 precluded any further improvements. Chinese entry into the Korean War on the side of North Korea in the late autumn of 1950 hardened American attitudes, both toward the Chinese Communists and toward any dealings with them. For their part, the Chinese Communists showed no inclination to deal with any imperialists. In 1954, a year after the Korean armistice, there was a sudden thaw when Chinese Foreign Ministry officials in Beijing unexpectedly accepted an invitation from the British chargé d’affaires to see a film of the coronation of Elizabeth II. In September the Chinese government sent its first representative to London. French recognition of the People’s Republic of China came ten years later in a sudden move by de Gaulle, which his defenders claimed was to exploit the differences between China and the Soviet Union but was in fact designed to demonstrate his and France’s independence from the United States. De Gaulle hoped to be the first major Western leader to visit China, but he was driven from office unexpectedly in the turmoil of 1968. By the late 1960s, Belgium and Italy were moving toward recognition; so was Canada, whose foreign policy usually meshed with that of the United States on major issues. The United States was finding itself increasingly alone in its insistence that the Communists not be recognized as the legitimate government of China.
Because the diplomatic corps was so small, diplomats from different blocs who normally would have seen little of one another tended to get together. Only the North Vietnamese, the Albanians, and the North Koreans kept themselves aloof. The Finns had a sauna club. The Soviets built a hockey rink at their embassy and had games every Sunday morning, featuring the Soviet Union against a “world” team made up mainly of Canadians and the Mexican ambassador, who played enthusiastically but very badly. The British brought movies in once a mon
th from Hong Kong. To pay for shipping they held “girl-racing evenings” in which the prettiest British secretaries jumped ahead on squares laid out at the roll of dice; the Soviets adored these events and were morose when a temporary freeze in relations between the Soviet Union and the West obliged them to boycott the British embassy.19
Now, as the Nixon motorcade sped through Tiananmen Square, where a giant portrait of Mao gazed down on vast empty spaces, almost the only spectators were a small crowd of foreign diplomats hoping to get a glimpse of the momentous visit. A small Canadian girl puttered about on a miniature motorcycle, and a couple of the British men climbed lampposts to snap pictures of the cars. For the isolated little diplomatic community in Beijing, this was a rare break in their usual routine.
CHAPTER 3
CHOU EN-LAI
IN THEIR CAR ON THE DRIVE IN FROM THE AIRPORT, CHOU TURNED to Nixon and said, “Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world—twenty-five years of no communication.”1 It had crossed over much more than that: the long years of humiliation that the Chinese had endured at the hands of the outside world; the Americans’ own memories of retreating in Korea in the face of Red Chinese attacks; the decades of fear and suspicion on both sides since the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949. The handshake also had to make up for one that had never occurred. In 1954, at the Geneva conference that was trying to wind up the Korean War and deal with the French defeat in Indochina, the strongly anti-Communist American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had publicly brushed past Chou En-lai’s proffered hand. The Chinese had not forgotten the incident; indeed, they remembered it vividly. For the Chinese, Nixon’s handshake was not just about making up for a past slight; its real significance was that China was being treated as an equal by a great power. Nixon’s first moments in China had been worrying both sides ever since the trip had been arranged. The Americans feared that Nixon might forget to shake hands with Chou; the Chinese suspected that he might repeat Dulles’s snub.
Nixon and Mao Page 4