The talks, highly formalistic and drawn out, with the necessary references back to the respective capitals, took place alternately at the Chinese embassy, which was in an elegant old Stockholm house, and the Canadian one, which was in a nondescript office building in the red-light district. By the fall of 1970 an agreement was ready, and after some last-minute discussions over whether Chinese or Canadian paper should be used (Swedish was the compromise), Canada and the People’s Republic of China agreed in October to establish diplomatic relations. The first Canadian diplomat arrived in Beijing in November to look for accommodations. In February 1971, the Chinese opened their embassy in Ottawa.
By this point, the United States had secretly made its own contact with the People’s Republic of China. Since no answer had come from the Chinese to the roundabout messages the Americans had been sending, in the late fall of 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had decided on a direct approach. Walter Stoessel, the American ambassador in Warsaw, was told to make contact with local Chinese diplomats. On December 3, he and a colleague who spoke some Chinese went to a gala fashion show being put on by the Yugoslavians to which the whole diplomatic corps had been invited. As the chief Chinese representative was leaving, the Chinese-speaking American bumped into him. “I introduced myself. And he was, you know, being very Chinese and bowing with hands clasped. I said, ‘I want you to meet my ambassador.’” Stoessel passed on the message from the U.S. government requesting talks and asked if they could meet again. The Chinese diplomat hastily said in Chinese, “Okay. Okay,” and fled to his waiting car.32 “If you want Chinese diplomats to suffer a heart attack,” Chou En-lai later told the Americans, “you just have to speak to them on diplomatic occasions.”33
The Chinese embassy immediately reported this “unusual behaviour” to Beijing, and Chou En-lai went straight to Mao. “The opportunity now is coming,” he told the chairman. “We now have a brick in our hands to bang on the door with.”34 Four days after the fashion show, Lei Yang, the Chinese chargé, quietly called on the American embassy to announce that the Chinese government had decided to release another pair of American yachtsmen who had been in Chinese custody since February. On December 11, Stoessel returned the call at the invitation of the Chinese. The press started to notice the black limousines with their national flags going back and forth, and the State Department, following standard procedure, also informed its own departments and selected embassies abroad. Nixon, according to Kissinger, worried that the news of the initiative was leaking too soon, saying, “We’ll kill this child before it is born.” Kissinger saw this as yet another example of the rigidity and incompetence of the State Department and yet another good reason why the White House should deal with China policy.35 On January 8, 1970, China and the United States announced that the Warsaw talks were resuming. Nixon, in the foreign policy report he sent to Congress a month later, said, “It is certainly in our interest, and in the interest of peace and stability in Asia and the world, that we take what steps we can toward improved practical relations with Peking.”36
Stoessel, under instructions from Washington, told Lei Yang at an informal meeting on January 20 that the United States was prepared to send a high-level representative to Beijing if necessary for discussions. At their first formal meeting, on February 20, Lei, who had received his instructions from China, replied that the Chinese would be pleased to receive a high-level envoy “to explore further solutions to the fundamental questions in Sino-American relations.” He mentioned what was for the Chinese the most fundamental question of all: the future status of Taiwan. The United States wanted to improve relations with China, but it continued to support “the Chiang Kai-Shek clique,” which had long since been repudiated by the Chinese people. “Is this not self-contradictory?” Nevertheless, the meeting ended with an agreement to meet again. The Chinese politely declined the offer of a cup of tea and left. In fact, that was to be the last of the formal Warsaw meetings.37
PHOTO INSERT
Nixon spent much of his time aboard Air Force One on the long flight to the Far East conferring with Henry Kissinger.
A sketch of the famous West Lake in Hangzhou, showing possible photo opportunities for when the Nixons toured it. The White House advance team made meticulously detailed preparations for every aspect of the trip.
Soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army forming a well-disciplined crowd at a sports and gymnastics exhibition staged for the Americans on February 23.
As Chou En-lai waits to greet him, Nixon descends the steps from Air Force One. He is the first American president ever to visit China.
The crucial first handshake between Nixon and Chou.
As Nixon and Chou review Chinese troops at the Beijing airport, Pat Nixon follows behind.
China was dotted with pictures of Mao. This giant one on the wall of the Forbidden City gazed, as it still does, over Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.
Nixon’s first and, on this trip, only meeting with Mao. From left to right, Chou En-lai; Tang Wensheng (Nancy), Mao’s interpreter; Mao; Nixon; and Kissinger. Winston Lord has been cropped out of the right-hand side of the picture.
Another handshake between Nixon and Mao, for the cameras. Both the Americans and the Chinese were anxious to overcome the memory of the infamous snub when John Foster Dulles refused to shake Chou En-lai’s hand in Geneva in 1954.
Chou hosts a welcoming banquet in the Great Hall of the People the day of Nixon’s arrival in Beijing.
American and Chinese flags fly side by side in the Great Hall of the People as Nixon and Chou address the guests at the welcoming banquet.
Nixon and Chou toasting each other with mao-tai, the formidable Chinese alcohol.
Chou, the urbane host, with the Nixons.
Nixon working out his ideas on one of his favorite yellow legal pads.
Nixon and Chou in one of their private meetings. Kissinger and Qiao Guanhua also face each other across the table.
A scene from The Red Detachment of Women, one of Jiang Qing’s revolutionary opera/ballets, during a special performance for the Americans.
Nixon and Jiang Qing at the performance of The Red Detachment of Women.
The president and Mrs. Nixon and their party on the Great Wall.
Pat Nixon had her own itinerary of visits to communes, hospitals, and schools. Here she watches a student singing, presumably a revolutionary song.
Pat Nixon admiring a panda at the Beijing Zoo. The Chinese have used gifts of pandas for centuries to foster their foreign relations.
Nixon, the reluctant sightseer, on his whirlwind tour of the old imperial precincts, the Forbidden City, in Beijing.
Nixon held an impromptu press conference outside his villa at Hangzhou and then posed with the journalists.
Air Force One brings Nixon back to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington for a triumphal welcome.
In the United States, a debate broke out between the White House and the State Department about whether it was wise to think of sending an emissary to China before relations had improved significantly. Would such a move, the State Department asked, cause problems with America’s allies in Asia, such as Japan and Taiwan? Would the Chinese use the evidence of American interest to put pressure on the Soviet Union to mend fences?38 Kissinger was infuriated at what he saw as bureaucratic rigidity of the worst kind. Of course the diplomats wanted to continue the old-style talks, “without result, true, but also without debacle or controversy.”39 As the Americans argued among themselves, they kept postponing the date of the next meeting. In the spring, the long-running conflict in Indochina upset the delicate negotiations through Warsaw. In March, the situation in Cambodia suddenly deteriorated when Lon Nol, an American-backed general, overthrew the neutralist government of Prince Sihanouk. By the beginning of May, Sihanouk had established a government in exile in Beijing, and South Vietnamese and American forces were invading Cambodia to prop up Lon Nol. The Chinese put out a statement condemning the “brazen” invasion and said that it
was not “suitable” for the meeting scheduled for May 20 to be held. Tiananmen Square filled up with a huge protest rally, and Mao called on the people of the world to defeat “the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs.”40
It looked as though Chinese-American relations were going back into the deep freeze. Nixon, in any case, was preoccupied with Indochina and the widespread protests in the United States as a result of Cambodia. Mao, as became apparent later, was brooding over the loyalty of his chosen successor, Defense Minister Lin Biao. Nevertheless, there were some encouraging signs that the will to improve relations remained on both sides. In the second week of May, as Washington and the country were rocked by demonstrations against the Cambodian invasion and bombings, Nixon, to the dismay of his security and staff, impulsively decided to go out and talk to the demonstrators. During a strange late-night conversation by the Lincoln Memorial, he tried to explain himself and his ideals to a group of students. In rambling but widely reported remarks, he urged them to travel, to know not just their own country but the world. One of his great hopes for his administration was that “the great mainland of China be opened up so that we could know the seven hundred million people who live in China and who are one of the most remarkable people on earth.”41 In an interview with Time later that fall, he said, “If there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China. If I don’t, I want my children to.”42
Although the Cambodian invasion in May 1970 disrupted the gradual opening of contacts between China and the United States, the two sides did not pull back completely to their old stance. In July, after American troops had pulled out of Cambodia, the Chinese suddenly released an unfortunate clergyman who had languished in a Chinese jail for two decades. (He was carried across the border to Hong Kong on a stretcher and died soon afterward.) The Chinese also announced that another imprisoned American had committed suicide several years earlier. The United States, for its part, dropped its longstanding opposition to Italy’s exporting heavy trucks to China. The Italians profited by getting frozen pork as an exchange. That autumn, at a state banquet for Ceauescu of Romania, Nixon used the words “People’s Republic of China” for the first time.
By this point, Nixon and Kissinger, partly because they did not trust the State Department to manage the contacts through Warsaw, had decided to establish their own, highly secret channels of communication. One, they hoped, would be through Paris. General Vernon Walters, the military attaché in Paris, who had been standing by for over a year, got orders in the summer of 1970 to pass word from Nixon to the Chinese embassy that the United States was prepared to hold secret talks and that Nixon would send a high-level official to Paris if necessary. At some point—it is not clear from his memoirs exactly when—Walters found himself standing alone with his Chinese opposite number, Fang Wen, as they waited for their cars after a reception at the Polish embassy. He took the opportunity to say in French that he had a message from the president for the Chinese government. Fang’s jaw dropped, and he hastily said, “I’ll tell them; I’ll tell them; I’ll tell them.” He jumped into his Mercedes limousine and drove off before Walters could hand over his letter.43 Walters finally delivered it a few days later. The Chinese greeted him cautiously but courteously.
The channel did not immediately produce results. It took until the following summer, and only after he had made his secret trip to Beijing, for Kissinger to be able to talk to the Chinese ambassador in Paris. For some reason, perhaps because secrecy had become second nature, he flew in and out of Paris incognito and had himself smuggled in and out of Walters’s apartment and the Chinese embassy. Over time Walters himself became very friendly with Fang, also a retired general. They conducted much detailed business about the arrangements for Nixon’s trip and compared notes about the Soviets—a menace—and about how they would deal with drug dealers—execution.44 The Chinese invariably gave Walters a present of preserved apricots as he left; he could not bear their taste and, for fear of compromising security, filled up his safe with them.45
The other secret channel Nixon and Kissinger opened up was through Pakistan, and this is the one that finally produced the dramatic breakthrough they were looking for. Nixon had been using Yahya Khan to send indirect messages to Beijing since 1969. In the autumn of that year, for example, the Americans asked Yahya to let the Chinese know that they were canceling the Seventh Fleet’s patrols in the Taiwan Straits.46 According to Chinese sources, the direct channel was opened in the early spring of 1970 but did not become really active until late in the year. Modern technology was bypassed as the two sides used only trusted emissaries in a way that would have been familiar to the ancient Greeks or the great Venetian diplomats of the Renaissance. If Nixon wanted to contact Beijing, he or Kissinger passed a message, typed on ordinary paper and unsigned, to Agha Hilaly, the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, who in turn took it himself to Yahya. In Pakistan, Yahya called in the Chinese ambassador and read the message to him. The two men then carefully checked the Chinese diplomat’s handwritten notes, and the contents of the American message went on to Chou and Mao in Beijing. Eventually a reply would come back through the same circuitous route. Hilaly would arrive at the White House with a handwritten note from Yahya and would dictate its contents to Kissinger and then carefully carry the paper away again.47 The messages sometimes took several days and, in one case, three weeks to reach the other side. The Chinese never entirely understood why Nixon insisted on such secrecy. It was all a bit mysterious, Mao told his old friend Edgar Snow, how Nixon wanted to keep all contacts with China secret, even from the State Department.48 Nixon and Kissinger tried to explain that if word of the negotiations leaked out, the resulting political uproar in the United States would make it difficult to carry on.49
On October 1, the Chinese sent what they considered a very public message to the Americans when Mao invited Snow to stand with him on the reviewing stand in Tiananmen Square on China’s National Day. A picture of the two was published in the People’s Daily. Snow, who had first met Mao when the Communists were holed up in Yan’an in the late 1930s, stayed on in China for a couple of months more and had a long conversation with Mao. He was glad, the chairman said, that Nixon had won the election: “If he wishes to come to Beijing, please tell him he should do it secretly, not openly—just get on a plane and come.” Nixon had made it clear that he wanted to talk directly to the Chinese and not through the Warsaw talks. Mao told Snow, “Therefore I say I am ready to hold talks with him if he is willing to come. It doesn’t matter if the negotiations succeed or fail, if we quarrel or not, if he comes in the capacity of a tourist or the President.” Taiwan was clearly an issue between them, but what did it really have to do with Nixon? Mao asked. The situation had been created by earlier administrations. Ten million people in Taiwan were nothing compared to the billion in the rest of Asia. “Will China and the U.S. remain for 100 years without establishing relations? After all, we haven’t occupied your Long Island!”50 Unfortunately, the United States missed the significance of Snow’s visit, partly because he himself took several months to find a publisher for his story about his visit and partly because official Washington tended to write him off as a fellow traveler, so that no one went to see him at his home in Switzerland. Snow, who was old and ailing, seems not to have made any attempt to brief the government.51 Nixon claims in his memoirs that the Americans knew about the interview a few days after it took place. Kissinger, on the other hand, says the Chinese overestimated American subtlety and intelligence gathering and that Washington did not know about the interview for several months, by which time the channel through Pakistan was producing results.52
Although Yahya was increasingly preoccupied with the growing threat of secession by East Pakistan and the resulting tensions with India, he continued to act as intermediary. In October 1970, while he was in the United States for the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations of the United Nations, he paid a visit to Nixon and Kissinger in Washington. Nixon asked Yahya to carry word to
the Chinese that the United States was eager to normalize relations. Yahya flew to China on a state visit in November and duly conveyed his message to Chou En-lai. “This is the first time,” the Chinese prime minister remarked, “that a proposal has come from a Head through a Head, to Head! The United States knows that Pakistan is a great friend to China and therefore we attach great importance to it.” Chou also made it clear, however, that the Chinese would only accept a special envoy in order to discuss the withdrawal of American forces from Taiwan.53
Yahya, possibly because he was trying to cope with cyclone damage in East Pakistan and coming elections in both halves of his country, took several weeks to deliver Chou’s reply, which the Americans finally received on December 8. Kissinger found it encouraging and downplayed the Chinese linking of the Taiwan issue to a visit by an American representative. In fact, the Chinese demand for American withdrawal from Taiwan was an obstacle, and the American message that went back on December 16 said firmly, “The meeting in Peking would not be limited only to the Taiwan question but would encompass other steps designed to improve relations and reduce tensions.” As for the American presence on Taiwan, it was the general policy of the United States to “reduce its military presence in the region of East Asia and the Pacific as tensions in this region diminish.”54 The Americans apparently sent a copy through their Romanian channel as well, which the Soviets in time picked up. At some point, Nixon and Kissinger also considered, but rejected, establishing another channel through Ottawa, where the Chinese had had an embassy since February 1971. But the danger of the contacts being noticed were thought too great; in addition, Nixon could not bear Trudeau.55 The State Department remained unaware of all these developing contacts.56
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