Nixon and Mao

by Margaret MacMillan

  The Chinese duly received the American reply, and the channel then went silent for several months. Nixon gave his second foreign policy report to Congress in February and spoke of how the United States hoped to remove the obstacles on its side to greater contacts between the Chinese and American peoples: “We hope for, but will not be deterred by a lack of, reciprocity.” On March 15, the United States ended all restrictions on travel by Americans to China.57 Still Beijing remained silent. Kissinger took the time to educate himself, partly through meetings with academic experts. “It would be satisfying to report that my former colleagues conveyed to me flashes of illuminating insight,” he said in his memoirs. The academics, however, proved incapable of providing advice on strategies for the next few years or on immediate issues. “I listened politely,” Kissinger claimed, “chastening any impatience with the recognition that I could hardly have been more relevant when I served as an academic consultant to two previous administrations.”58

  On April 6, 1971, the Chinese government suddenly invited an American table tennis team, which was competing in the World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, to visit China. The decision to initiate what became known as “ping-pong” diplomacy had been made at the highest levels, indeed by Mao himself, after chance encounters brought Chinese and American table tennis players together. Chinese athletic teams, which had been condemned during the wildest days of the Cultural Revolution as “sprouts of revisionism,” were only just starting to take part in international events again. The tournament in Japan was the first one that had seen a Chinese team for several years. Mao had agreed that the Chinese could take part, but the team was sent off with orders to report back to Beijing three times a day and issued strict instructions as to how to behave: “During the contest, if we meet with officials of the US delegation, we do not take the initiative to talk or exchange greetings. If we compete with the US team, we do not exchange team flags with them beforehand, but we can shake hands and greet each other.”59 Early on in the tournament, when an American player casually said at a banquet, “Hi, Chinese, long time no see. You guys played well,” the incident was immediately reported. And when the Americans asked jokingly about why they had not been invited to play in China along with Mexico and Canada, the lights burned late in Beijing as the Chinese tried to work out what this meant.60 Chou En-lai submitted a cautious report to Mao that reflected the views of both the Foreign Ministry and the State Sports Commission that the time was not yet ripe to invite an American team to China, although there might well be opportunities in the future. The Americans could leave their addresses, said Chou, but it must be made clear to them that the Chinese people were firmly opposed to “the conspiracy of ‘Two Chinas.’” (The People’s Republic always insisted that there was only one China and that Taiwan was part of it.)61

  On April 4, 1971, as the tournament was winding down, a pair of players, one American, the other Chinese, caused a fresh incident to perturb Beijing. The American competitors were generally clean-cut athletes, “the kinds of Americans that you pray to be involved in something like this,” an American diplomat remembered.62 Glenn Cowan, though, the U.S. junior champion, came from California and liked to consider himself part of the counterculture. “He’s apt to wear a purple passion shirt with tie-dye leopard-like pants,” a long-suffering team official recalled. “He has long Dartaganian [sic] locks, he [has] a floppy hat that he wears and he’s sort of a hippy.” By chance, Cowan found himself out at the practice center without a ride back to the main tournament hall. A Chinese player beckoned him toward a bus, where he found most of the Chinese team, all smiling at him. Cowan was babbling cheerfully on to the uncomprehending Chinese about how they were all oppressed when Zhuang Zedong, a world champion and one of the Chinese stars, came forward and presented Cowan with a silk brocade scarf. When the head of the Chinese team tried to stop his player, Zhuang brushed him aside, saying, “Take it easy. As head of the delegation you have many concerns, but I am just a player.” As the players got off the bus, a crowd of journalists recorded the scene. To his embarrassment, Cowan did not have anything to give in return. He managed to find a red, white, and blue shirt with a peace emblem and the words of the Beatles’ song “Let It Be,” and he presented it the following day, with maximum publicity, to the Chinese athlete. “Hippy opportunist,” said the American official.63

  Mao, who had been following the events in Japan with intense interest, sat chain-smoking for the next two days in Beijing while Chou’s report lay on his desk. The tournament in Japan would be over on April 7, and he still had not made up his mind on whether or not to invite the Americans to China. On April 6, he approved Chou’s recommendation that they do nothing. That night, as usual, his nurse read him the news stories about the tournament. Mao said approvingly, “Zhuang Zedong not only plays good Ping-Pong but knows how to conduct diplomacy as well.” At midnight, after he had already taken his customary heavy dose of sleeping pills, he suddenly sat up and ordered his nurse to contact the Foreign Ministry at once with orders to invite the Americans. It was only after she made the call that he allowed himself to fall asleep.64 As Mao subsequently described his decision, the small ping-pong ball could be used to move the large ball of the earth.65

  The invitation that reached the Americans the next day had more than a ring of the Middle Kingdom about it. Since the Americans had requested an invitation “so many times,” China had agreed to accede to their request. “If they are short of travelling expenses, we can render them assistance.”66 The first American diplomat to hear on the ground in Japan replied simply that if the team decided to go, it would not be against current American policy. He then dashed to his records and found, with relief, several of Nixon’s statements expressing hope that contacts would be resumed between China and the United States. In Washington, the desk officer at the State Department had the same reaction: “Go for it, do it.” He then went home and told his wife that if he was wrong, he would be out of a job.67

  Neither man lost his job. Nixon and Kissinger were surprised but delighted at the invitation. A rather bewildered group of players and officials from the U.S. Table Tennis Association headed for China, filled with last-minute advice from American diplomats and laden with cameras and tape recorders reporters had pressed on them, as well as all the American pens the embassy in Tokyo could find to give as presents. The team, which was the first American delegation into China since 1949, arrived in Canton by train and then flew north to Beijing and, later, Shanghai. Everywhere they saw the giant portraits of Mao, the cartoons with a pygmy Nixon and a giant Chinese, and the signs that said, “Down with the U.S. imperialists.” On the streets the locals stared at them with amazement, especially at Glenn Cowan, with his long hair, and a teenage player in her miniskirt, and the Americans stared back. One young American girl spent much of the time in tears because she would not eat Chinese food; finally the Chinese made her a hamburger and French fries.68

  Chou oversaw all the detailed arrangements for their reception and even had the Forbidden City, which he had closed to save it from the Red Guards, reopened for sightseeing. The trip, “an international sensation,” in Kissinger’s words, received huge publicity in the world press. The handful of foreign journalists stationed in Beijing were joined—and this was another breakthrough—by reporters from the big American news services. In China itself, all the matches were broadcast live on television and radio. Chou ordered the Chinese players to let the Americans win some of them.69

  On April 14, Chou held a lavish reception in the Great Hall of the People for the visiting teams. In alphabetical order, the teams from Canada, Colombia, Great Britain, Nigeria, and the United States climbed up the great staircase that Nixon would ascend a year later. Chou was a charming host, chatting with all the players, posing patiently for photographs, and deprecating his own ability at ping-pong. He made jokes about the weather with the British and talked to the Canadians about his admiration for Dr. Norman Bethune. His most significant words were, of c
ourse, directed at the Americans. To the president of the U.S. Table Tennis Association, he quoted a Chinese proverb about the joy of having friends from afar. “Your visit,” he said as he toasted the Americans, “has opened a new chapter in the history of the relations between Chinese and American peoples.” And he went on: “With you having made the start the people of the United States and China in the future will be able to have constant contacts.”70

  As the reception came to an end, Chou asked if there were any more questions. Glenn Cowan popped up to ask, “What do you think of the hippy movement?” He did not know much about it, Chou said, so his views might be rather superficial. Perhaps young people around the world were dissatisfied and wanted change but had not yet found the ways to bring that about. “When we were young,” the old revolutionary said, “it was the same thing too. Therefore, I understand the ideas of youth, they are very curious.” Cowan replied that the hippy movement was really very deep: “It is a whole new way of thinking.” Chou suggested that more was needed: “Spirit must be transformed into material force before the world can move forward.” (Cowan’s mother apparently sent Chou flowers with thanks for educating her son.) Chou concluded by commending Cowan for not playing too badly against the Chinese team and wished him progress. “I could talk for hours,” Cowan told reporters. He became, temporarily, a great Sinophile, talking about staying on in China, which, in his view, was so much less conformist than the United States. That desire vanished when he found himself ill in a Chinese hospital.71

  The whole visit was “vintage Chou En-lai,” in Kissinger’s opinion. “It was a signal to the White House that our initiatives had been noticed.”72 The Americans were careful to respond. On April 14, Nixon ended most of the remaining restrictions on trade between the United States and China. Two days later, he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and while he was careful to warn them not to get their hopes up about an immediate breakthrough with China, he added that he had told his daughter Tricia that he had a suggestion for her honeymoon: “I hope sometime in your life, sooner rather than later, you will be able to go to China to see the great cities, and the people, and all of that, there.”73 He was noncommittal about his own chances of getting there, but at the end of April he told a press conference, without any prodding, “I hope, and, as a matter of fact, I expect to visit Mainland China sometime in some capacity.”74

  Because Nixon and Kissinger had kept the secret of their contacts with Chou En-lai so well, the United States also sent out some contradictory signals. Spiro Agnew, the vice president, in a rambling impromptu press conference late one night, complained vociferously about the favorable press coverage of China during the ping-pong team’s visit and the whole policy of removing obstacles to contacts. Nixon sent orders to Agnew to keep quiet about China and to the White House press office to say that Agnew completely supported the president’s China policy.75 At the end of April, a State Department spokesman said rightly that the United States’ position on Taiwan was “an unsettled question.” In London, William Rogers, who knew nothing of the secret channels to China, said that Mao’s remarks to Edgar Snow did not constitute a “serious invitation” to Nixon to visit China. He added some pointed remarks about Chinese foreign policy being “expansionist” and “rather paranoid.” Kissinger was unreasonably outraged at these “bureaucratic shenanigans,” which he saw as a power grab by the State Department.76

  On April 27, fortunately, Hilaly, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, finally brought the long-awaited reply from Chou En-lai to Nixon’s secret message of the previous December. The Chinese repeated their insistence that the United States must withdraw its forces from Taiwan before relations could be restored but—and this was a softening of their previous position—suggested that the matter be discussed in Beijing by a special envoy from Nixon or even Nixon himself. Kissinger was elated. As he later wrote, “Every once in a while a fortunate few can participate in an event that they know will make a difference.” Sitting in his study that night, he recalled, he experienced a rare moment of peace and hope: “The message from Peking told us above all that despite Indochina we had a chance to raise the sights of the American people to a future of opportunity.”77

  Through the good offices of Hilaly, Nixon sent a swift reply to Chou. The Chinese message was “constructive, positive and forth-coming,” and the United States intended to send one back in the same spirit. With an eye on his domestic politics, Nixon also asked that the Chinese not give visas to any American politicians for the time being.78 On May 10, Kissinger called Hilaly in and handed him the formal American reply for transmission to the Chinese. Nixon accepted Chou’s suggestion that he visit Beijing himself for conversations to deal with the important issues dividing their two countries. In order to arrange that, he proposed a secret visit by Kissinger to exchange preliminary views on “all subjects of mutual interest” and to work out the details of the visit and its agenda. One facet of the trip was emphasized: “It is also understood that this first meeting between Dr. Kissinger and high officials of the People’s Republic of China be strictly secret.” The Chinese again were mystified by this insistence on secrecy. “If they want to come,” said Mao, “they should come in the open light. Why should they hide their head and pull in their tail?”79 Kissinger has always made a good case for the need for secrecy before his first visit. He also points out that the Americans proposed a second, public, one for him once the ice had been broken. When the only contact the United States had with China was through Pakistan and when American and Chinese statesmen had no idea of the others’ thinking, it would have been very dangerous to allow several weeks of public and potentially damaging speculation before the visit took place. Such open comment, whether from enthusiasts or opponents, might have spooked the Chinese, worried American allies, and made the trip a domestic liability in the United States. American opponents of an opening to China would have had time to rally, and other nations might have intervened. “The tender shoot so painstakingly nurtured for more than two years might well have been killed.”80 “Looking back,” said Bill Brown, who was deputy director of the office that dealt with the People’s Republic of China, “I don’t feel that the American people were such sheep or that it was so delicate in Congress and in the American body politic.”81 In any case, it has never been clear why the fact of Kissinger’s trip to Beijing had to remain secret until it was over. It did, though, make a wonderful adventure and a wonderful announcement, and that in itself may have appealed to both Kissinger and Nixon, with their great awareness of history.

  The Chinese received the American message on May 17 and, a few days later, an assurance that a recent advance in arms limitation talks between the Soviet Union and the United States was not directed against China. “President Nixon wishes to emphasize,” the message transmitted through Pakistan said, “that it is his policy to conclude no agreement which would be directed against the People’s Republic of China.”82 In Beijing, Mao ordered Chou to call together the Politburo, the inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party, to prepare a reply. In his opening speech, Chou talked about how American power was declining and how the United States was now anxious to get out of Vietnam. That gave China an opportunity to improve relations with its former enemy, a move that would help China in several ways, such as furthering the peaceful reunification of its territory and providing support against its enemies. (The Soviet Union was not mentioned specifically.) If the opening succeeded, it would make the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union even fiercer; if it failed, well, it would show the Chinese people the reactionary face of American imperialism.83

  Mao approved the report, and Chou sent off a reply. The Pakistanis alerted Kissinger that they were dispatching a special courier with a highly important message. At 8:00 P.M. on June 2, Hilaly, his hands shaking, handed over two sheets of paper to Kissinger, who read them with relief and then elation. Chou extended a warm invitation to Kissinger to come to Beijing in June to prepare
the way for Nixon’s visit. “It goes without saying,” Chou added, “that the first question to be settled is the crucial issue between China and the United States which is the question of the concrete way of the withdrawal of all the U.S. Armed Forces from Taiwan and Taiwan Straits area.” As Kissinger recognized, this was a considerable modification of the original Chinese position that the forces must be withdrawn before talks could take place. Kissinger rushed over to the White House, where Nixon was hosting a state dinner for the unlovely dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. As Nixon read the message, Kissinger said solemnly, “This is the most important communication that has come to an American President since the end of World War II.” He later pushed the date back to the Civil War.84

  The two men talked until nearly midnight about what lay ahead. As Kissinger was leaving, Nixon decided that they ought to celebrate, so he hunted up a bottle of very good brandy. The two men raised their glasses and Nixon, according to his memoirs, proposed a toast. “Henry, we are drinking a toast not to ourselves personally or to our success, or to our administration’s policies which have made this message and made tonight possible. Let us drink to generations to come who may have a better chance to live in peace because of what we have done.”85