As the hour went by, Chou kept looking at his watch. Nixon made one last attempt to get Mao to talk about the big issues. Neither China nor the United States, he said, had plans to dominate the world or each other: “Therefore we can find common ground, despite our differences, to build a world structure in which both can be safe to develop in our own ways on our own roads.” The same, he added pointedly, could not be said about “some other nations.” Mao said merely that China did not threaten Japan or South Korea and then turned to Chou, asking, “Do you think we have covered enough today?”37
Nixon hastened to add a few last warm sentiments. Mao had taken a great risk in inviting him to China. And, he pointed out, it had been a difficult decision for the Americans as well. The chairman was the sort of person who could see an opportunity. As Mao himself had written, “You must seize the hour and seize the day.” He wanted Mao to know that Richard Nixon was a man of his word—and more. “You will find that I never say something I cannot do. And I always will do more than I can say.”38 Mao gestured at Kissinger and repeated enigmatically, “Seize the hour and seize the day.” It was true, he admitted, that he made a lot of noise about overthrowing reactionaries and establishing socialism, but he hoped that Nixon himself would not be overthrown. Mao’s last statement was equally enigmatic: “It is all right to talk well and also all right if there are no agreements, because what use is there if we stand in deadlock? Why is it that we must be able to reach results?” People might say they had failed, he concluded, but then if they succeeded in getting agreements on a second attempt, what then?39
As they parted, Mao told Nixon that he was not very well. Nixon reassured him that he looked good, and Mao replied that appearances could be deceiving.40 A Chinese cameraman who was filming the meeting had been worried about Mao’s unhealthy pallor at the outset but was delighted to notice that, as the conversation went on, his face glowed to give the appearance of good health.41 With a last round of handshakes and photographs, the Americans took their leave. The historic conversation had been a curiously inconclusive one, with Nixon trying to lay the groundwork for future talks and Mao meandering about.
Once Nixon left, Mao changed out of his new suit and into his dressing gown and chatted happily with his doctor, who, checking his pulse, found it steady and strong. Mao approved of Nixon: “He speaks forthrightly—no beating around the bush, not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.” He liked the way Nixon talked frankly about the benefits to the United States of an improved relationship with China. And, in a reference to his estranged Communist ally the Soviet Union, Mao said, “He is much better than those people who talk about high moral principles while engaging in sinister intrigues.” In their subsequent meetings, Mao’s admiration increased. “There is a man who knows what he stands for, as well as what he wants,” he told the British prime minister, Edward Heath, in 1974, “and has the strength of mind to get it.” He was never as impressed by Kissinger. “Just a funny little man. He is shuddering all over with nerves every time he comes to see me.”42
The Americans were equally pleased, if not more so. “The P called me up,” Haldeman wrote in his diary. “Obviously, he was very impressed with the whole thing, but didn’t get into any details at that time.” What Nixon did want to talk about was how to deal with Rogers. He asked Haldeman to say that Chou had come by unexpectedly and asked specifically for Nixon himself and Kissinger to have a chat with Mao before the plenary session scheduled for later that afternoon.43 Lord later claimed that Nixon and Kissinger had assumed there would be a second meeting with Mao so that there would be an occasion for Rogers to meet him.44 Whether any of this convinced Rogers is doubtful. He was very angry and humiliated but took the attitude, according to one of his State Department subordinates, of “Well, the president needs this, and he can decide who he wants.”45 Kissinger, in his memoirs, admitted that he should have insisted that Rogers be included. “The neglect was technically unassailable but fundamentally unworthy.”46
The Americans were deeply impressed with Mao. In his memoirs Nixon talks about Mao’s “remarkable sense of humor” and how his mind moved “like lightning.”47 Mao was a man, Nixon told White House staff on his return, “who sees strategic concepts with great vision.”48 Kissinger was even more effusive. Mao was a colossus among men, he said: “I have met no one, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, who so distilled raw, concentrated willpower.”49 As both Kissinger and Lord were fond of saying later, if they had walked into a cocktail party, they would have known at once that Mao was the most important man in the room.50
Although the Americans were at first a little disappointed with the actual conversation, as time went by it began to take on mythic proportions, and even the most commonplace of Mao’s observations seemed to have a deeper meaning. “The more we began to think about it,” Lord recollected, “the more we examined the transcript of the meeting, we realized that Mao had hit the key issues—the Soviet Union, Taiwan and Vietnam—in just a few sentences, sometimes directly and sometimes in an allegorical way, stating the basic Chinese positions, which gave us a framework to enlarge and flesh out over the “next few days.”51 For Kissinger, Mao’s scattered remarks were like the composer Richard Wagner’s use, in his overtures, of motifs that he intended to develop later on. Or like the heart of China itself. “Later on,” Kissinger wrote, “as I comprehended better the many-layered design of Mao’s conversation, I understood that it was like the courtyards in the Forbidden City, each leading to a deeper recess distinguished from the others only by slight changes of proportion, with ultimate meaning residing in a totality that only long reflection could grasp.”52 Mao, he told one of his biographers, was a visionary and Nixon a pragmatist, but those differences had faded into insignificance.53
CHAPTER 6
MAO TSE-TUNG
JUST BEFORE HIS MEETING WITH MAO ENDED, NIXON PAID ONE LAST carefully crafted compliment: “The Chairman’s life is well known to all of us. He came from a very poor family to the top of the most populous nation in the world, a great nation. My background is not so well known. I also came from a very poor family, and to the top of a very great nation. History has brought us together.”1 Nixon liked to stress how he and Mao both rose from similar humble origins. Like Mao, it is true, he was a consummate politician. Like Mao, too, he liked the great policy issues and was bored by day-to-day administration. When he saw in a memorandum that a Washington paper had compared him to Mao, Nixon scrawled a delighted “K—Note!”2
Nixon might not have been as pleased at some other comparisons that could have been drawn—the difficulties both men had, for example, in dealing with people, especially as equals. Nixon was most at ease with the attentive Bebe Rebozo; Mao seemed happiest with his undemanding and unsophisticated bodyguards and nurses. Both men had difficult relationships with their wives. Nixon usually ignored Pat; Mao gave orders that his wife was not to be admitted to his presence. And both men were deeply suspicious, even paranoid. The Nixon tapes reveal a man who peered out to see a world full of enemies: Jews, liberals, homosexuals, the establishment, the press.3 Mao also saw threats everywhere, whether from Taiwan or the Soviet Union or from inside his own party. By the 1960s, although he was surrounded by layers of protection, he was convinced that unnamed enemies were trying to poison him. As a consequence, he moved restlessly around China, from one house to another.4
There were also profound differences between the two men. Nixon, for all his abuses of office, accepted and believed in democracy; Mao was a dictator. And the two men’s paths to their momentous meeting had been very different. When Nixon was born in his quiet California town in 1913, Mao was twenty years old. He had already taken part in a revolution, when China got rid of the Qing dynasty to become a republic. While Nixon was going to college in the 1930s, Mao was maneuvering his way into power in the internecine struggles of the Chinese Communist Party and trying to stay out of the clutches of the Guomindang. In 1937, the year Nixon started pract
ice as a lawyer in the placid town of Whittier, near Los Angeles, Mao was living in a cave in northwestern China and consolidating his hold over the party. That year, the Japanese invaded China. While Nixon laid the foundations for a career in politics by talking to local service clubs, Mao dealt with great strategic issues and negotiated with the Guomindang for a common front against Japan. Nixon spent most of the Second World War as a supply officer in the Pacific; Mao, positioning the Communists to seize power in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat.
As Nixon was laying the foundations of his political career, Mao was leading the Chinese Communists in a civil war against the Guomindang. By 1949, as the new congressman Richard Nixon was making a name for himself as the scourge of Communists, Mao was the undisputed leader of both China and his party. When Nixon was going after Alger Hiss in the early 1950s as a suspected Communist, Mao was purging and killing millions of landlords, Guomindang supporters, and—a usefully vague category—“rightists.” By the time Nixon finally achieved the presidency of the United States, Mao had been ruler of China for two decades.
Five years after Mao’s death, in 1981, his own party ruled that Mao had been correct 70 percent of the time and wrong the other 30 percent, and that most of his mistakes had occurred after 1949. It was a way of, or at least a start at, trying to deal with his legacy. On the one hand were the triumph of the Communist Party over the Guomindang and the unification of China under one rule; on the other were the secret police, the purges, the destruction of many of China’s cleverest and most talented people, and, above all, the dreadful cost of his utopian schemes. The Great Leap Forward, in the late 1950s, which was supposed to turn China into a developed country right away, ruined much of China’s agriculture and industry and led to a famine that may have killed as many as forty million people. Then, as China was recovering from that horror, Mao visited the anarchy and cruelty of the Cultural Revolution on its people.
He was not born a ruthless dictator, but his background, the times, and his own character combined to make him one. By nature self-absorbed, headstrong, and impatient of authority, whether that of his father or the government, he lived in a time in China’s history when such qualities were useful. As the old order disintegrated, partly under its own weight but also because of the challenges from the outside world, those who were bold and iconoclastic had the best chance to survive and flourish. In 1917, in one of his earliest published articles, Mao wrote, “A long period of peace, pure peace without any disorder of any kind, would be unbearable.” History, he said, taking a theme popular in Chinese traditional historiography, alternated between order and chaos. “It is the times when things are constantly changing and numerous men of talent are emerging that people like to read about.”5 He had never intended to become a Communist or make revolution, he told his old friend the American journalist Edgar Snow in a conversation in 1964, but China was oppressed and in turmoil: “In short, this was independent of our will.” The fact that he survived at all helped persuade him that he had been chosen by fate. “On many occasions death seemed to be at my elbow,” he recollected, noting that often he had narrowly escaped. “Once a guard who was at my side was killed by a bomb and his blood splashed on me.”6
Like his colleagues’ in the Communist Party, Mao’s rise to power occurred against a background of instability, violence, and misery. Before he was out of his teens he had taken part in a revolution and seen headless bodies lying in the streets. He had seen pitched battles between reformers and conservatives trying to restore the old order. He had seen soldiers terrorizing the local population, mass arrests, and executions. By the time he was thirty, he was a hardened revolutionary. He had experienced treachery, cruelty, and betrayal, and had inflicted the same things on others. He had already lost many friends and comrades, and his wife and two brothers had been executed by the Guomindang. He himself had fled into a precarious refuge in the hills of south-central China. He had learned, through it all, to understand power and to trust no one. He had also learned how to survive in the savage internal struggles of the Chinese Communist Party, playing off one faction against the other and quietly undermining his rivals. In 1971, as Mao was turning his anger on Lin Biao, his defense minister, Lin’s son said ruefully, “Today [he] uses this force to attack that force; tomorrow he uses that force to attack this force. Today he uses sweet words and honeyed talk to those whom he entices and tomorrow he puts them to death for some fabricated crimes.”7
Like many other rebels in China’s long history, Mao came from the countryside. His province, Hunan, had a long history of providing both great civil servants and bandits, who took advantage of its rivers and mountains. The Hunanese, who loved hot red peppers, were said to have a temperament to match their cooking. They were stubborn and deeply suspicious of outsiders, whether their Manchu rulers or the foreign missionaries who started to appear in the nineteenth century. “China can only be conquered,” a proverb had it, “when all the Hunanese are dead.”8
Mao was born a peasant, into a small village where life went on as it had for centuries. Only a few rumors of the outside world drifted in: of the great upheavals of the Taiping Rebellion, which convulsed so much of China in the mid-nineteenth century, and then the Boxer Rebellion, at the end of the century, which brought Western troops into the capital itself. Like Nixon, Mao later exaggerated his humble beginnings. His hardworking and thrifty father had grown more prosperous than many of his neighbors, partly through moneylending. As a result, he was able to educate his sons, a move that, in a society that valued education highly, was the usual route out of the peasant class.
Mao went to a traditional village school where the pupils memorized the old characters and some of the great classics of Chinese civilization. He also learned to write poetry in the classical forms, as Chinese scholars had done for centuries. By the time he was ten, he began to understand some of the key ideas of Confucianism, the legacy that underpinned so much of traditional Chinese culture. The Confucian ideas of individual virtue and of the need for leaders to be virtuous, and Confucianism’s faith that humans could be improved, later mingled with Mao’s Marxism to produce his beliefs that China needed the moral leadership of the Communist Party and that human nature was infinitely malleable. And, as Chinese had done for centuries, he looked to history for lessons and guidance. By the time Mao was in his teens, though, the changes in China and the wider world were starting to press in on even his small village. He came across a pamphlet that warned that China was going to be divided up by outside powers. “After I read this,” he remembered, “I felt depressed about the future of my country and began to realise it was the duty of all the people to help save it.”9
As a young man, he also read the great Chinese novels that told of upright heroes who defied corrupt and incompetent officials. Mao’s favorite, The Water Margin, is a Chinese version of the Robin Hood legend, with a brotherhood of bandits and rebels who swear to one another to protect the poor and avenge injustice.10 Within his own family, he practiced rebellion by defying his father. (Like Nixon, he loved his mother deeply.) When his mother, a gentle Buddhist, tried to make peace between them, Mao, according to his own later account, was immovable: “I learned that when I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained weak and submissive, he only beat me more.”11
When his father pulled him out of school to work on the farm, Mao dawdled in the fields and spent as much time as he could reading. A year later, when he was fourteen, his family, as was the custom, found a wife for him. Mao refused to accept the girl and left home. “My father was bad,” he said many years later, during the Cultural Revolution. “If he were alive today, he should be ‘jet-planed.’” (This was a favorite torture of the Red Guards in which the victim’s arms were yanked up behind his head.)12 While Mao may have been bolder than other young men his age, such conflicts between the generations were not unusual and are not sufficient to explain the man he became. His father, moreover, continued to support Mao wh
en he resumed his education, trying first one school and then another.
At sixteen, Mao left the countryside behind—as it turned out, forever. His father, with some reluctance, had agreed that he should go to school in a nearby town. Some of the characteristics of the later Mao were becoming apparent by this stage. Among his new classmates he stood out as arrogant, stubborn, and sensitive to slights. “Many of the richer students despised me,” he told Edgar Snow, “because usually I was wearing my ragged coat and trousers.”13 Two years later he moved on to another school, this one in the provincial capital of Changsha, just in time for the revolution of 1911, when China became a republic. Mao, along with Chou and many other Chinese, cut off his pigtail as a sign that the world had changed. When some of his fellow students proved reluctant to follow his example, he and his friends seized them by force and chopped theirs off as well.
In those early years, he was finding his heroes, among them the tyrannical Qin emperor, who first united China in 221 B.C. and who burned books and buried scholars alive to make sure that nothing or no one could challenge his version of reality. He also admired Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern Chinese nationalism, and George Washington, who outlasted the British to win independence for the thirteen colonies.14 He even defended an unlikely figure, “Butcher” Tang, the general who imposed a harsh rule on Changsha in the years after 1911. Although Tang closed schools, banned newspapers, and executed five thousand people in his three years in power, often in the most brutal ways, Mao approved of his strong government: “Without such behaviour, the goal of protecting the nation would be unattainable. Those who consider these things to be crimes do not comprehend the overall plan.”15 The belief that firm, even harsh government was necessary for the Chinese people was to stay with Mao all his life.
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