The Chinese had a good memory for slights and grievances. The decades before the Communist takeover of power, when China had been exploited and invaded by foreigners, were kept fresh in the national imagination as the “century of humiliation.” China’s history had not prepared it to be humiliated by outside powers. Two hundred years before Nixon’s arrival, when there was not yet a United States, Beijing had been the capital of a self-confident and powerful country. Under the great Qianlong emperor, who reigned from 1736 to 1799, China had expanded its borders in the west, doubling in size. The emperor had added new courtyards and buildings to the Forbidden City, at the heart of Beijing, and built a magnificent new Summer Palace just outside the city walls. He was a patron of the arts and learning. Chinese arts—its magnificent porcelain, for example—had reached new and elaborate heights. When the British sent an embassy under Lord Macartney to ask for rights to trade freely, as equals, and to send diplomats, again as equals, to Beijing, the Qianlong emperor received him as the representative of an inferior ruler, bearing not gifts but tribute, and with sublime condescension brushed off the requests. For the next decades, China stood still, secure in its old civilization. The outside world, especially Europe, moved on, into the Industrial Revolution. Western science, industry, and technology jumped far ahead of the rest of the world to produce, among much else, ships and guns better than anything the Chinese had.
By 1872, one hundred years after Macartney’s mission, the Summer Palace lay in ruins, looted and burned by foreign troops, and the young emperor was a cipher, dominated by his ruthless and ignorant mother. China had been racked by massive peasant rebellions, which had left great stretches of the country depopulated. And, to add to China’s misery, foreigners, greedy, demanding, unreasonable, and regrettably powerful, were tying a weak Chinese government up with a series of treaties, remembered to this day by the Chinese as the “unequal treaties.” Chinese territory and Chinese independence were slowly being sliced away. Foreign businessmen were setting up shop on Chinese soil, protected by their own consuls, their own laws, and their own soldiers. The United States, newly reunited after the Civil War, had not yet become a major player in the Far East, but American businessmen and American missionaries were busily establishing footholds. With missionaries came schools and printing presses and, perhaps most dangerous of all, ideas, which slowly started to undermine the old order.
Thoughtful Chinese grappled with ways of dealing with the challenges that came from within and without. How could the Qing dynasty and its administration revitalize itself? How could China take the foreigners’ technology and perhaps even some of their techniques, as Japan was starting to do, and use them to fend off the outside powers? Yet to turn around the huge nation of China, with its deeply conservative society, was not an easy task, and there was little will to attempt it from the regime itself. So the catastrophes continued to pile up: the French defeated a Chinese fleet in 1884 and confirmed their hold over Indochina; in 1894–95, Japan destroyed two Chinese navies and took control of Korea and possession of Taiwan; and in 1898, a rebellious sect attacked foreigners in the Boxer Rebellion, which brought more misery to northern China and provided foreign powers with yet another excuse to invade.
Chou En-lai was born in that last year, in a prosperous town in Jiangsu Province, north of the great trading port of Shanghai. When he was two, foreign troops marched into Beijing to rescue foreigners besieged by the Boxers, so called because they practiced martial arts. China signed yet another humiliating treaty, which allowed outside powers to station their troops in China permanently to protect their nationals. Chinese patriots wondered how much longer their country would survive before it was parceled out among its enemies. The outlook was grim, with the Russians pressing in from the north and the west and the French from the south. The British were moving up the Yangtze Valley, and the Germans had established themselves in Shandong. Perhaps the most dangerous of all, the Japanese had seized the island of Taiwan and clearly had their eyes on Korea and the even richer prize of Manchuria. Chou grew up in a time of growing nationalist fervor and debate. What was wrong with the old order that it had allowed China to grow so weak? How could China be saved? Western science? Western democracy? Or both?
Chou’s family was part of a vanishing world, their position in society tied to the old regime and the old order. They were scholars, part of the elite who provided the bureaucrats to run China. Men like them studied the great Chinese classics, the works of Confucius among them, so that they could take the government examinations and enter the civil service. Chou’s grandfather had been a distinguished scholar and civil servant, and several of his uncles had passed their examinations. His own father only ever held a minor government post and seems to have spent his days in genteel idleness. Chou was brought up by his extended family, partly in his father’s household, partly in the households of his uncles. The greatest influence on him may have been the widow of one of his uncles, a woman he always called “Mother.” “Without her care I would not have been able to cultivate any interest in academic pursuits,” he said.2 In 1907, when he was nine, his natural mother died after an illness that had drained his father’s modest savings. Chou was sent out to take family treasures to the pawnbrokers.3
Chou was later dismissive of his “bankrupt mandarin family,” which clung to the old ways when the world was changing around them. Yet he kept something of their manners and their deep appreciation for the arts and learning of the old China. His own education was a mix of the old and the new. He studied the classics, but his adopted mother also hired a foreign missionary, a woman, for the “new learning,” Western chemistry and mathematics, for example. In 1910, he went to Manchuria, north of the Great Wall, to live with one of his uncles. Although he was a small man, Chou attributed his toughness and his great capacity for work to the bracing climate and the standard diet of grain in the north.4 His new home of Shenyang (known to generations of foreigners as Mukden) was a major railway junction where Chinese mixed with foreigners from all over the world. In the five years since Russia’s defeat by Japan, Japanese power had started to replace Russia’s in Manchuria. A weak China could only watch from the sidelines as its territory was fought over. In Shenyang, the young Chou became a nationalist, reading radical journals and the works of prominent reformers. It is said that when a teacher asked his students why they were studying, Chou answered, “So that China can rise up.”5
The moribund Qing dynasty finally collapsed in 1911, and China became a republic. For a brief period, it looked as though the Chinese might be able to pull themselves together to deal with the twin evils of internal decay and external menace. Perhaps, thought the growing numbers of Chinese nationalists, a new form of government would bring rulers and ruled together to create a strong China. Chou celebrated by cutting off his pigtail, which had come to symbolize the old ways and subservience to the Qing.
Two years later he moved to a high school in Tianjin, the main port for Beijing and another city where Chinese came into daily contact with large numbers of foreigners. By this stage, the adult Chou was starting to emerge. An outstanding student, he was also good-looking and charming, with an ability to inspire great loyalty. When he needed money for further studies, four of his friends pledged him a share of their tiny scholarships. Chou was also learning to conceal what he was really thinking. Over the years his gentle courtesy, his patience, and his good humor almost invariably won the praise of foreign statesmen, even when Chou was quietly working against them. “We all considered him,” said Nikita Khrushchev, “a bright, flexible, and up-to-date man with whom we could talk sensibly.”6 Chou was a talented actor; at Tianjin, he normally played women’s parts because he had the necessary delicate looks and build and a light voice. When Nixon and Kissinger met him, they discovered a man who could be the fiery Communist revolutionary at one moment and the urbane man of the world the next.
The young Chou not only finished his schoolwork more quickly than his classmates but took
on extra responsibilities, whether organizing debates or lectures or putting out student magazines. His essays frequently won prizes. In them he showed what was to be a lifelong preference for empirical knowledge. In the turmoil of the last years of the Qing, there was a renewed interest in the scholars who had unsuccessfully resisted the invasion of China in the seventeenth century by the Manchu foreigners from north of the Great Wall and who had tried to understand why the preceding Chinese regime, the Ming, had collapsed. Chou was particularly influenced by those scholars who’d argued that Chinese learning had become too abstract and speculative and who had called for “practical statesmanship” and “practical learning.” Like many nationalist Chinese of his time, he was also drawn by the ideas of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, which seemed to promise that China might evolve out of its present miserable state.7
Exactly how that was to happen did not seem at all clear in the second decade of the twentieth century. The republic was a disaster, with its second president, Yuan Shikai, trying to make himself emperor. After his death in 1916, China slipped into warlordism, where strong men and their armies controlled their own fiefdoms and competed with one another to gain control. Japan took advantage of the breakdown of the Chinese state and the preoccupation of the other powers with the First World War to present demands that would have turned China into a Japanese protectorate. Only a public outcry and pressure from the rest of the other powers made the Japanese back off, and even then only temporarily. Chou, in the ancient tradition of China’s scholar-bureaucrats, wrote a sad poem:
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.8
In spite of the threat from Japan, Chou, like a number of other young Chinese, decided in 1917 to study in Japan 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, its members 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 that had held China back and made it so weak, Marxism was modern and revolutionary. On 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 successful conclusion. And without a revolution China cannot be saved!”9
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 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 principles of 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 May 4, 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, they argued, had got China into its present miserable straits. Reverence for the past and obedience to authority had trapped the Chinese in outmoded and useless ways of thinking and acting. The time had come, 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 persuade many that Communism and its promise of a classless democracy, not capitalism and liberal democracy, was the best hope for China. Moreover, radical change at home, they hoped, would make China stronger abroad.
Chou enrolled at the 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.10
In 1920, Chou sailed for France on a work-study program 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, Chou 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 only six months after he had returned to China.) In the summer of 1922, he helped 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.11
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 Guomindang, or National People’s Party, 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 cooperate faithfully with them. Let the Guomindang unite China and kick out the Western powers, and then the Chinese Communists, 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, 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 tuberculosi
s 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.12
At the end of the 1920s there seemed to be a moment of hope for China: the Guomindang, now under the leadership of Chiang Kaishek, 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 of China, 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 Kai-shek 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 impossible 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 to the Communist Party whenever necessary. In 1931, as the Guomindang hounded the remaining Communists, Chou and his wife 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 maneuvered 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 into doing so: in 1932, Guomindang newspapers had published a notice in which Chou renounced Communism, and although Chou denounced the story, almost certainly truthfully, as a fake, Mao held it over him for the rest of his life.13 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.”14 In 1976, toward the end of his life, as the attacks from the radicals around Mao were mounting, he refused to go into the operating room until he had finished a letter to Mao saying that he had never betrayed the party.15 His survival in the recurrent savage and bloody intraparty struggles won him a comparison to a popular Chinese doll that always righted itself when it was knocked over.
Nixon and Mao Page 5