The Zhongnanhai Clinic was stripped of its emergency equipment, all of it taken to Mao’s house. The United States government made an unwitting contribution as well: oxygen tanks and a respirator that had been sent on ahead in case Nixon fell ill were moved into Mao’s bedroom. Dr. Li and his team worked around the clock to get the chairman well enough to receive Nixon. They managed to get his heartbeat under control and started him on diuretics. By the third week of February, Mao could get out of bed and walk a few steps. He was still bloated—a new suit and shoes were, in fact, essential—and had trouble getting his words out, but he was well enough to show to the Americans. The emergency medical equipment, including that from the United States, was hidden in a giant lacquer chest and behind potted plants, and Mao’s hospital bed was taken away.5
On February 21, Mao was “as excited as I had ever seen him,” remembered Li.6 As soon as Air Force One landed, Mao ordered Chou to bring Nixon around at once. Chou urged that Nixon be taken to his villa first. Mao reluctantly agreed. By 2:30 he could no longer wait and called Chou again at the Diaoyutai. Chou went immediately to see Kissinger to tell him that Mao wanted to meet with the president and “fairly soon.” Like those other great dictators Stalin and Hitler, Mao was used to making others fit his timetable. His colleagues had long since grown accustomed to sudden meetings in the middle of the night. Mao was also a master at keeping his friends and enemies off balance. So, too, had been generations of Chinese rulers before him. To Winston Lord, this was “a typical example of the Chinese style, where the Emperor used to keep visitors on edge, and the schedule was never fixed until the last minute.” The purpose, he thought, was “partly to make us feel grateful when the actual meeting took place and that it did take place.” It also reminded Lord of the traditional Chinese approach to the world: “it was typical of the Chinese Emperor indicating that he was the head of the Middle Kingdom and that we were showing obeisance.”7
It was tempting to assume, and many foreigners did, that the Chinese remained Chinese in some essential and timeless way whether they were Communist, nationalist, or something else. After all, China had over two thousand years of virtually continuous existence as a state and two thousand years of dealing with the outside world. History, as a source of lessons and analogies, had tremendous power over Chinese thinking. As one American scholar said, “It was as if the Egyptians at the beginning of the twentieth century still wrote in hieroglyphics, studied in their schools a variant of the ancient cults of Isis and Ra, and were still ruled by a dynasty modeled after that of the Pharaohs.”8 When the Communists debated policy among themselves, they drew as easily on the events of the third century B.C. as those of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Whoever led China inherited deeply rooted ways of looking at and dealing with foreign powers. What this meant, or so observers like Lord argued, was that the Chinese still saw China as the kingdom at the center of the world and the ruler of China as superior to all other rulers. While the Chinese possessed civilization, others were merely barbarians. For much of its history, certainly, China had been the dominant civilization and the dominant power in its world. Geography—seas, deserts, mountains, wastelands—had combined to insulate it from sustained contact with other great civilizations. Those peoples the Chinese knew well were at lower stages of development and looked to China as the model of civilization. And so the Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Mongols, and Tibetans borrowed from China, whether it was a written language, religion, manufacturing techniques, or philosophy.
The idea that China was merely a nation among other nations was not an easy one for many Chinese to absorb, and China’s first steps into international diplomacy in the nineteenth century were often difficult. When the Qing dynasty finally decided to send scholars abroad to report back on other countries, it had trouble finding anyone who would agree to go. One man resigned his official position rather than suffer the shame of being sent among barbarians. A scholar who did tour foreign countries and who sent relatively favorable reports back was accused of losing his senses. Conservatives at court tried to prevent his reports from being disseminated. A hundred years later, when the People’s Republic of China was established, Mao reacted with fury at a suggestion that China might act as a bridge between the Soviet Union and the United States: “This is nonsense! That means the Chinese people should bend their heads down to allow Americans to walk to the Soviet Union and to allow Soviets to walk to the States on our back. Can we do this?”9
At times, the Communists reflected, perhaps without their realizing it, the old assumptions about China being the center of the world. In 1936, a young left-wing American writer, Edgar Snow, was granted one of the great scoops of twentieth-century journalism when he was able to interview Mao and the other top Communist leaders just after they had finished the Long March. In an exchange that Snow did not include in his famous book Red Star over China, he asked Mao what effect a successful Communist revolution in China would have elsewhere. “The Chinese revolution,” replied Mao without hesitation, “is the key factor in the world situation, and its victory is heartily anticipated by the people of every country, especially by the toiling masses of the colonial countries.”10 It was an attitude that infuriated the Soviets and contributed to the split between them and the Chinese at the end of the 1950s.
Yet to see China as locked into such a limited sense of itself as the Middle Kingdom overlooks the richness and variety of the Chinese past.11 The Chinese had many different traditions to draw on and a great many centuries. Their history had other lessons to offer. In the Warring States period, before the Qin emperor united China, in 221 B.C., or in the Three Kingdoms period of the third century A.D., statesmen saved their states through their skills in fighting and negotiating. The lessons from those years sound like ones that Machiavelli could have taught, about how to manuever in an anarchic world. Even when it was united, China had not always been strong. Chinese rulers may have claimed to have the Mandate of Heaven to rule the earth, but for much of the time they knew it was not true, that other rulers did not obey the Chinese emperor. China had suffered invasions by the same peoples it sometimes patronized. It had been obliged to make deals and bargains with powerful leaders on the periphery. In its turn, it had learned from others. As a much watched Chinese documentary of the late 1980s on the Yellow River put it, China always had the choice before it of looking inward or turning outward and embracing the world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as China’s rulers tried to come to grips with outside powers, the same choice came up repeatedly: should China seek its security by dealing with other powers and maneuvering through the complex world of international relations or should it rely only on itself and, as much as possible, shut the world out? Such questions have also occurred to Americans over the centuries.
The Chinese Communist Party reflected the tension in that choice. It had its genesis in the fury of Chinese nationalists at the depredations of the outside world, yet it drew its inspiration from a foreign ideology. It belonged to a worldwide movement, but it also had moments of great chauvinism. To Chinese Communists, as to other Chinese nationalists, the record of past humiliations at the hands of foreigners was a painful and a living one. In their conversations during Kissinger’s first two trips to China, Chou En-lai returned again and again to past injuries at the hands of the Americans. On the other hand, the Chinese Communists knew that China needed alliances and friendships. One of China’s first acts after 1949 had been to obtain a treaty with the Soviet Union, and in the 1950s, at least, China had participated energetically in international bodies, from the Geneva conference of 1954 to the nonaligned movement of Third World countries. In 1972, Mao had decided on a radical new friendship.
When Chou brought Mao’s summons to Kissinger at the Diaoyutai that February afternoon, Kissinger, or so he claimed in his memoirs, remained “somewhat cool” and asked Chou about a few minor details for the banquet scheduled for that evening.12 In fact, the news was intensely exciting and a
relief to both Kissinger and Nixon. Lord recalled their reaction: “It was going to send a clear signal to the world and to the Chinese people that Mao personally was behind this visit and the historic importance of the event. So this was obviously very good news, even if it was a somewhat unorthodox way to proceed with the leader of the Free World.”13 American conservatives, many of whom were already unhappy about the trip, would have been incensed if the Chinese had appeared to insult the president—and they would have blamed Nixon for letting himself be put in such a position.
Kissinger darted upstairs to get Nixon, and the two men piled into a Chinese limousine, along with Chou En-lai, Lord, and a Secret Service agent, leaving consternation in their wake. The Secret Service agent, torn between following his orders not to tell anyone where he was going and his responsibility to protect the president, managed to alert Dwight Chapin, the man responsible for Nixon’s schedule, on the way out. Chapin consulted Haldeman, who in turn called in Ron Ziegler, the press secretary, and the three men spent what Haldeman described as “a very long hour and a half trying to figure out what the various contingencies were.” There was a moment of panic when the agent’s radio went dead. (It turned out that the tin roof on Mao’s house briefly blocked communication.)14 He could not avoid, Haldeman admitted, “all the wild range of possibilities you have when you’re sitting in a Chinese guest house with Red Army troops guarding you outside and you kind of wonder if the P’s taken off alone with no staff, no security, except one agent, no doctor, etc.”15
Haldeman, as always, also worried about press coverage. No one knew when Nixon would be back, and in the meantime a plenary session between the Americans and the Chinese had been scheduled for 4:30 P.M. The American press corps was already being assembled at the Great Hall of the People in preparation, and the networks were planning for live coverage. (When Haldeman and Ziegler postponed the start of the plenary, there was intense speculation among the journalists, but most dismissed the outlandish rumor that Nixon was meeting with Mao.)16
The car bearing Nixon toward his momentous meeting turned in at the gate of the walled Zhongnanhai, named after the two manmade lakes, the Central and the Southern, that separated it from the Forbidden City. Just as the old imperial complex had been “forbidden,” off-limits to anyone except the imperial family, their court, and their servants, so too was the Zhongnanhai. Very few foreigners and few ordinary Chinese had ever been allowed past its ubiquitous special guards. There was nowhere in Beijing where you could peer into its extensive grounds, where the top Communist Party leadership lived in their special villas. Many of the Zhongnanhai’s buildings dated back to the time of the Qing emperors, and it was as secluded and remote a seat of power for China as the Forbidden City had once been. Special farms all over China provided supplies for its inhabitants. Mao’s food was treated with particular care; his supplies went first to a laboratory in Beijing, which checked on its freshness and tested for poison. Special food tasters then did another check.17
At first, Mao had lived in the Hall of Beneficent Abundance, a library built in the eighteenth century by the Qianlong emperor. Its main entrance still bore a sign in the emperor’s own calligraphy. From its chambers and courtyards, Mao had planned the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and had laid the groundwork for the Cultural Revolution. After he had discovered that his study had been bugged by overzealous colleagues, he never lived there again. In 1966, he had his private indoor swimming pool converted to a house.
Nixon’s car was waved through the red walls and drove for a mile past walled houses, the lakes, and groves of trees. Mao’s house stood alone, “simple and unimposing” in Kissinger’s words. “It could have belonged to a minor functionary.”18 There did not appear to be any special security as the car drove up to the front door. In fact, Mao and all the top leaders were constantly under an elaborate and intensive guard.
The Nixon party walked into a hallway that contained a ping-pong table. Mao’s doctor motioned them toward Mao’s study and then waited anxiously outside the open door in case Mao collapsed again. Only Chinese photographers were on hand to record the scene as Nixon and Mao met for the first time. Mao shuffled toward Nixon, supported by one of his corps of pretty young assistants. Mao took Nixon’s hand in his own and shook it warmly for a long time. The photographers made sure that they caught this handshake too.
Another photograph shows the party seated with piles of Mao’s books around them and white porcelain spittoons, standard furnishings in many Chinese offices to this day, on the floor. Chou and Kissinger sit attentively at the edges of a semicircle, overshadowed by their masters. Although the photograph does not show him, another man sat beyond Kissinger. Winston Lord had worked on the China file at the National Security Council and had been on Kissinger’s earlier trips to China. Kissinger brought him along to this historic meeting, Lord thought, as a reward for all his hard work. Since even Kissinger realized that taking along a junior official rather than the secretary of state was odd, he asked the Chinese to crop Lord out of any photographs.19 In order to keep the discussions from leaking to the press or to the rest of the United States government, the only interpreter was the Chinese one. Beside Chou in the photograph is a demure young woman, Tang Wensheng, Mao’s interpreter, who was able to make sense out of his slurred speech and heavy Hunanese accent. She was also an influential player in the dance to gain his ear. The Americans knew her better as Nancy, the name she had acquired when she lived in Brooklyn as a child. In the middle, a beaming Mao leans back, looking supremely comfortable. On his left, Nixon leans forward with an intent expression.
The conversation, which was originally meant to last for fifteen minutes, lasted for just over an hour. The tone was amicable and, at times, jocular. Mao spoke with difficulty; his words came out in harsh bursts. The Americans assumed that he must have had a stroke.20 Partway through, Mao seized Nixon’s hand again and held it for almost a minute. Nixon was delighted. “The most moving moment,” he told his diary.21 Nixon started by praising Mao’s great learning: “You read a great deal.” He expressed his admiration for Mao’s essays and for his poetry.22 “Those writings of mine aren’t anything,” Mao said. “There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.” (Yet millions of Mao’s collected works, and even more millions of the Little Red Book, which contained his aphorisms, had been printed during the Cultural Revolution.) Nixon insisted: “The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed a world.” Mao demurred: “I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.”23 The remark, Kissinger thought, was “not without pathos.” Did Mao fear that China was slipping back into its old bureaucratic ways? “The aging Chairman railed against a fate that so cruelly mocked the suffering and meaning of a lifetime of struggle.”24
Of Nixon’s own writings, the chairman said generously, “Your book, The Six Crises, is not a bad book.”25 And of Nixon himself he remarked, “I voted for you during your election,” adding, “I like rightists.”26 In 1793, the Qianlong emperor, whose grounds they were on, sent a letter to George III of England replying to the English request for diplomatic and trading relations: “On perusing your memorial, so simply worded and sincerely conceived, I am impressed by your genuine respectfulness and friendliness and greatly pleased.”27 He went on to exhort George III on proper behavior. Two hundred years later, Mao dealt briskly with Nixon’s complaint that American backing for Pakistan in the recent war with India had cost the Republicans politically: “As a suggestion, may I suggest you do a little less briefing!”28 When Mao reminded Nixon that the Democrats might well come into office again, there was perhaps a hint that Mao’s own position was much stronger than Nixon’s.29
Nixon, who had prepared carefully for this moment, did his best to talk about the relations between their two countries and about the international scene, but Mao waved him off. “Those questions are not questions to be discussed in my place. They should be discussed with the Premier. I discuss philosophical questions.�
�30 When Nixon tried to bring the conversation around to specific issues affecting the United States and China, such as Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korea, Mao was dismissive: “All those troublesome issues I don’t want to get into very much.”31 On Taiwan, he would only say that Chiang Kai-shek, “our common old friend,” did not approve of his meeting with Nixon.32 Mao also brought up a common Chinese theme, that China was never an aggressor. “You want,” he said pointedly to Nixon, “to withdraw some of your troops back on your soil; ours do not go abroad.”33
Both men had fun with Kissinger. “What about asking him to be the main speaker today?” asked Mao. The doctor of philosophy (“A doctor of brains,” interjected Nixon) should be ready to discuss the philosophic questions.34 “We two must not monopolize the whole show,” said Mao. “It won’t do if we don’t let Dr. Kissinger have a say. You have been famous about your trips to China.” When Kissinger replied that he was only doing as Nixon wished, Nixon got a laugh from Mao and Chou by describing him as a “very wise assistant.” Kissinger, Nixon added, was the only man who could make secret trips to Paris and Beijing without anyone finding out beyond a couple of pretty girls. When Kissinger replied that he had used the girls as a cover, Mao was intrigued: “So your girls are often made use of?”35 Was it significant that although Mao asked Kissinger for his opinion a couple of times, he did not do so with his own subordinate Chou? Was it perhaps a subtle way of undercutting Nixon?
In the record made by Lord, which is the only one so far made public, there is just a fleeting reference to the thorny issues of Taiwan and of the Soviet Union. Dr. Li, who listened to everything from his post outside the door, thought he heard Mao say that Taiwan would be a continuing problem. According to Li, as well, Mao warned the Americans that the Chinese press would continue to run articles attacking the United States and he expected that American papers might do the same with China. It would take time for the peoples of their two countries to become friends.36
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