While the Communists struggled to survive, the Guomindang appeared to be consolidating its power and starting to build a new China. Chiang Kai-shek, the young soldier who had emerged as Sun Yat-sen’s successor, and the Guomindang might have brought the remaining warlords under control and finished off the Communists; they might have built a proper infrastructure for China, with roads, airfields, railways, heavy industries, and a sound educational system; they might in time have been a good government. They never had the chance. At the start of the 1930s, the Depression hit the world. China itself, as a largely agricultural economy, was spared the worst of the economic downturn, but it could not escape the impact on international relations. The Western democracies, including the United States, which had helped maintain a stable international order in the 1920s, turned inward, preoccupied with their own problems. Unfortunately, nations like Germany and Italy took a different tack: to secure what they needed, whether territory or influence, and by force if necessary. The Japanese, too, moved down an increasingly nationalistic and militaristic road—necessary, so many of them thought, to protect Japan from the indifference of the great powers. In 1931, Japanese militarists seized Manchuria outright and the world did little to stop them. From 1931 onward, the Japanese maneuvered to extend their sway into the parts of China south of the Great Wall. The Guomindang was forced to divert its resources to dealing with the Japanese threat.
In 1937, Japanese armies invaded China proper, eventually bringing the whole of the rich coastal area into a new Japanese empire. The war with Japan, which was in time absorbed into the Second World War, cut short the prospect that the Guomindang would bring stability and prosperity to China. It also opened the door to the rapid growth of the Chinese Communist Party. Without meaning to, the deeply conservative Japanese militarists saved Communism in China. The Guomindang was distracted from what was an increasingly successful campaign to wipe out the Chinese Communist Party, and the Communists themselves were able to tap into a burgeoning Chinese nationalism. When the Second World War ended, the Communists controlled much of the countryside north of the Yangtze and had a formidable army. In 1946, after fruitless talks brokered by the United States, the two sides embarked on a civil war, which ended with the victory of the Communists in 1949. Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic in Beijing, and the defeated Chiang set up an alternative government on the island of Taiwan.
In 1949, at the age of fifty-one, Chou became the new China’s first premier as well as its foreign minister. (Although he gave up the second post in 1958, he continued to supervise China’s foreign relations until his death.) He was as charming as ever. He lived austerely and simply, darning, legend had it, his own socks. He worked constantly, well into the night. No detail was ever too small for him. When he set up his new Foreign Ministry, he did his best to ensure that China’s newest diplomats, most of whom came from the military, acquired the knowledge and the skills they now needed, whether it was through lectures on international law or through diplomatic protocols. The trainees had lessons from the Soviets on how to wear suits and ties and how to dance, and sessions in a Beijing restaurant to practice eating Western food with Western-style utensils. Those who worked for Chou usually adored him. “He worked so hard,” remembered one of his interpreters, “paid attention to every detail, read all the reference materials so carefully.” It was not fair to blame him for supporting Mao, even in his more outrageous policies. “What could he have done otherwise?”16
Foreigners who met him generally found him delightful and deeply civilized. Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish diplomat who had been the U.N.’s second secretary-general, thought he had “the most superior brain I have so far met in the field of foreign politics.”17 Henry Kissinger, usually quite critical, was completely entranced. “He moved gracefully,” said Kissinger of their first meeting, “and with dignity, filling a room not by his physical dominance (as did Mao or de Gaulle) but by his air of controlled tension, steely discipline, and self-control, as if he were a coiled spring.”18 Kissinger, who was to have many hours of hard negotiations with Chou, found him “one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met”19—and a worthy adversary. “He was a figure out of history. He was equally at home in philosophy, reminiscence, historical analysis, tactical probes, humorous repartee.”20 Kindness, compassion, moderation—these were qualities both Chinese and foreigners saw in Chou.
Yet he could also be utterly ruthless. He had become hardened during that long climb to power, as they all had. Chou had seen close friends die, and he had condemned others to death. As early as 1931, he had ordered the execution of all the immediate relatives of a Communist who had given up information in a police interrogation.21 He was not just complicit in the repeated purges and killings in the Communist base areas; he helped to organize them.22 In 1934, at the start of the Long March, when the Communists fled the Guomindang, it was Chou who decided who should be weeded out and executed as unreliable and who should be left behind to the mercies of the enemy.23 In 1955, the same man who always thanked the crews on his planes let a whole flight be blown to pieces to flush out the Guomindang agents who had placed the bomb. During the Cultural Revolution, when his longtime bodyguard ran afoul of Mao’s wife, Chou did not lift a finger to protect him.24 The man who was so gentle with children did not intervene when his own adopted daughter was carried off by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. She died of her beatings in prison.25
Did he really have no choice, as his interpreter suggested? Did he remember the advice of the scholar two millennia earlier who had said the small craft that comes close to the great barge should be empty so that the crew on board the bigger vessel will leave it alone to bob on top of the waters?26 Or did he decide that he must survive for China’s sake? Throughout the calamitous attempts by Mao to transform China, Chou En-lai remained at his post. He worked extraordinary hours and kept a grasp on an extraordinary range of issues. Perhaps without him, China would have gone even further into anarchy than it did during the Cultural Revolution.
The Chinese as well as foreigners tended to see Mao as the radical and Chou as the moderate; Mao as the one who caused the damage with his wild policies and Chou who picked up the pieces. There was much truth in this, but it is not all the truth. Chou was also a revolutionary, determined to transform China’s society so that it could become strong and could take its rightful place in the world. For him as for the other Chinese Communists, revolution and nationalism were intertwined. Mao spoke for them all on October 1, 1949, when he proclaimed the People’s Republic of China from the great Gate of Heavenly Peace, overlooking Tiananmen Square. “We, the 475 million Chinese people, have stood up and our future is infinitely bright.”27
In November 1949, at the first meeting of China’s new Foreign Ministry, Chou told his colleagues that the century of humiliation was over. The new regime had nothing to learn from its predecessors, such as the Qing or the Guomindang: “all dealt with foreign affairs with their knees on the ground.” The new China must approach the other powers as an equal. “We should have an independent spirit. We should take initiatives and should be fearless and confident.”28
Both Mao and Chou also saw the world through eyes that had been shaped by their study of Marxism. There were the capitalist powers, led after 1945 by the United States, and there were the socialist ones, their number greatly increased with the spread of Soviet power into central Europe and then the victory of the Chinese Communists. The two camps were doomed to struggle until one—socialism, if you believed Marx—was victorious. Communist diplomacy should be in the service of the final victory of Communism. Nations, Chou told the novices at the new Foreign Ministry in 1949, must always be ready to fight: “There may not be a war of swords every year, but as sure as day turns into night, there will be a constant war of words, every day of the year.”29
With his deep-seated preference for what was practical over what was purely theoretical, Chou insisted that China’s foreign policy must a
lways take into consideration actual conditions, exploiting the differences between the capitalists and even making compromises with them, and so win time. As he pointed out in a major statement on foreign policy in 1930, the Soviet Communists had saved their regime by submitting to a punitive treaty with their enemy Germany in 1918. Fortunately, since Chou was obliged to operate within guidelines laid down by Mao, the chairman took the same approach: “What we call concrete Marxism is Marxism that has taken on concrete form, that is, Marxism applied to the concrete struggle in the concrete conditions prevailing in China.”30 In his management of China’s foreign relations, Chou was flexible over tactics, seeking, as he put it, “concurrence while shelving differences.”31 He told Kissinger, in one of their many talks, “One must be cool-headed and analyze things.”32 Chou had been responsible during the Second World War for negotiating a common front with the Guomindang against the Japanese; he was prepared to compromise even with enemies in order to safeguard the party and its China. Perhaps, too, as his enemies suggested from time to time, he betrayed the influence of his early classical education. In traditional Confucian thought, harmony and the golden mean were valued above conflict and disagreement.
Over the years, Chou became a great negotiator. One of his early heroes, when he lived in Europe in the early 1920s, was David Lloyd George, the British prime minister at the time. Chou admired him for his realism, his understanding of the contemporary scene, and his ability to bring different sides together in a way that benefited Britain. Lloyd George, he said, was “cunning.” Everyone who dealt with Chou found the same thing. “He shifts his line so subtly,” wrote a Guomindang official, “that it often escapes your notice. Of course he makes compromises, but only minimal and nominal compromises at the very last moment just to keep the negotiations going. When you study his statements afterwards, you realize that he hasn’t made any substantial concession on any important issue at all.”33
CHAPTER 4
AT THE DIAOYUTAI
NIXON’S MOTORCADE SWEPT ON THROUGH TIANANMEN SQUARE, up to the northwest of the city. Important foreign visitors to Beijing stayed, as they still do today, in a special heavily guarded compound. The Diaoyutai had been created at the end of the 1950s for the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Most of its villas were new, but the site itself was very old. Generations of scholars had loved its lakes and groves. A famous Chinese poem talked of its weeping willows against the darkening hills to the west: “Peach blossoms float on the water at sunset.” Emperors and noblemen built their pavilions there and fished from its terraces, and the great eighteenth-century Qianlong emperor, renowned, among much else, for his calligraphy, wrote out its name—the Fishing Terrace, or Diaoyutai—for a plaque that is still displayed by one of the gates. The Communists had surrounded the area with barbed wire, searchlights, high walls, and armed guards and appropriated it for themselves and their friends. Mao and his wife each had villas there, which they used from time to time. Kim Il Sung, the dictator of North Korea; Nikita Khrushchev; and Che Guevara had all preceded Nixon there. So, several months earlier, had the prime minister of North Vietnam. The U.S. press corps heard rumors that Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, whose clever balancing act between the Communists and their American enemies was finally over, had just moved out of Villa 18, where Nixon and his immediate entourage were housed. (Today, in the new China, it can be rented for $50,000 a night.)
In that nineteenth-century bourgeois style so loved by the Soviet and Chinese Communists, its rooms were filled with overstuffed armchairs and sofas, each with its antimacassar. Nixon and Chou En-lai sat side by side on a sofa in the main reception room, while the other Americans and Chinese sat in a semicircle drinking tea and listening to their exchange. (Although the Americans had brought their own interpreters, they had agreed to use Chinese ones for most meetings.) “Both seemed to be very friendly, but noncommittal,” Haldeman recorded for his diary. “They didn’t get off of the trivial ground at all during the session.”1 Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, watched the body language. “I found it extraordinary that Chou Enlai would be focused on the President, would drill in on him, but the President kind of would look off or look down on the floor and would not focus directly on Chou Enlai.”2 Kissinger found the conversation itself troubling. Nixon, he complained later to Haldeman, had responded to Chou’s compliments about Kissinger’s work in getting the trip organized by saying that other Americans had done the advance work; this, Haldeman said, “had Henry disturbed that it would put him down in the eyes of the Chinese.”3
It was not unusual for Kissinger to be worried about his position. His time in the Nixon administration, first as national security adviser and then, after the 1972 election, as secretary of state, was punctuated by complaints—about his rivals, his subordinates, his colleagues. He repeatedly accused William Rogers and the State Department of stabbing him in the back and moaned that the president did not do enough to defend him. Nixon, in turn, worried about Kissinger’s mental state. As Raymond Price, one of Nixon’s speechwriters, put it, “The care and feeding of Henry was one of the greatest burdens of his presidency, but he was worth it.”4
He was worth it, in Nixon’s view, for his brains and his enormous knowledge of the world and because he represented the East Coast intellectual establishment, of which Nixon was secretly in awe. Although Nixon was grudging with his praise, his memoirs grant that Kissinger had “intensity and stamina” and was “so enormously endowed with extraordinary intellectual capacity.”5 In the end, though, Nixon valued Kissinger because he found in him someone who saw foreign policy as he did. “I knew,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “we were very much alike in our general outlook in that we shared a belief in the importance of isolating and influencing the factors affecting worldwide balances of power.”6
Like Nixon, Kissinger recognized that the United States had lost ground internationally in the 1960s, partly because of Vietnam and partly because other nations had grown in power. “In the forties and fifties,” Kissinger wrote in a 1968 essay, “we offered remedies; in the late sixties and in the seventies our role will have to be to contribute to a structure that will foster the initiative of others. We are a superpower physically, but our designs can be meaningful only if they generate willing cooperation.”7 Like Nixon, he, too, believed that the United States needed to look to its friends and allies to share the burden of maintaining international order. He also saw the world as a series of overlapping relationships: statesmen should always be aware of the ways in which issues were linked and be prepared to use that linkage. If China wanted better relations with the United States, then it could be asked to put pressure on the North Vietnamese to come to an agreement with the Americans.8
Nixon and Kissinger did not always see eye to eye. Nixon was more American, more optimistic. He believed that the United States, by its very nature, was a force for good. Kissinger was deeply suspicious of talk of morality or principles in foreign relations. “It is part of American folklore,” he wrote in the same 1968 essay, “that, while other nations have interests, we have responsibilities; while other nations are concerned with equilibrium, we are concerned with the legal requirements of peace.” He was inclined to be pessimistic and to see the international arena as an anarchic, savage place, where nations struggled in an endless Darwinian competition for survival. What Kissinger valued was stability and peaceful change. What he feared were active, revolutionary nations that wanted to overturn the existing order.9 Nevertheless, in the pursuit of stability, he argued, statesmen should be prepared to deal with any power. “Our objective,” he said of himself and Nixon, “was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality.”10 He believed that American policy makers should always ask themselves two questions: “What is it in our interest to prevent? What should we seek to accomplish?”11
American statesmen did not usually talk in such terms because they smacked too much of the old Europe, and Kissinger often used
circumlocutions such as “geopolitics” or the “rules of equilibrium.” European alliance systems (often referred to as “entangling”), spheres of interest, and balances of power were all part of the bad old game of politics, which, in the eyes of many Americans, led to wars. European statesmen such as Metternich, Bismarck, and others who practiced Realpolitik (a practical policy based in reality) were seen on the other side of the Atlantic as coldhearted operators who sought power for their own countries at the expense of others. Most Americans believed that the United States ought to be wary of being drawn into their destructive games. In his farewell speech in 1796, George Washington famously warned against “the insidious wiles of foreign influence” and asked, “Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?” Over a century later, as his country stood poised to enter the First World War, Woodrow Wilson told the Senate that the United States had war aims unlike those of any other nation: “I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power; catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influences intruded from without.”12
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