8315 words

11/21/95

ARTICLE

One of Deng Xiaoping's daughters told me that her father had seen me more often than any other foreigner. I am in no position to verify that proposition. But over 15 years from 1974 to 1989, except for the period of Deng's second exile between 1976 and early 1979, I met with him for long conversations, usually including meals, at least once a year and, in 1974 and 1975, several times a year.

My first encounter with Deng was in New York in April 1974 when he appeared as a member of China's delegation to a United Nations conference on economic development. Having been purged in 1966 [CHECK] during the Cultural Revolution, he had reemerged only recently. Indeed, we knew so little about

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him that we thought he was some sort of economic adviser to
the Chinese delegation and were therefore in no particular
rush to meet him. After about a week, I invited the
delegation--technically headed by Foreign Minister Ch'iao Kuan
Hua--to dinner, and Deng dominated the evening's discussion.
Within six months, he had taken charge of the Sino-American
dialogue save for the rare occasions when the increasingly
feeble Mao led the discussion.

Having grown accustomed to dealing with Mao Zedong and
Chou En-lai who were prone to philosophical reflections and
indirect allusions, it took me some time to adjust to Deng's
acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occasional cynical question,
and his emphasis on what worked.

It was not until after Deng was forced into exile a
second time in 1976 that I understood how strong an advocate
he had been of good relations with America. And not until

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after his third return to power in 1979 did I fully grasp the
extent to which Deng was changing his society, indeed that his
revolution was likely to endure beyond that of the larger-
than-life and at times demonic figure of his predecessor, Mao
Zedong.

In all our meetings, Deng treated China's relationship
with the United States as a key to its security and domestic
reform as the sine qua non of its well-being. To be sure,
Deng's definition of friendship was quintessentially Chinese-
—that is, without a trace of sentimentality; it reflected his
assessment of the requirements of Chinese security in a world
composed of a menacing Russia, a resurgent Japan, a
potentially unified Korea, an India emerging into Great Power
status, and a Vietnam in the process of achieving hegemony
over Indochina.

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Deng's view of reform was equally practical. As one of the leaders of the Long March, he was a witness and, in the end, a victim of Mao's obsessive revolutionary zeal. Although he himself had been a lifelong revolutionary, he had had enough of political turmoil. In Deng's conversations with me, the yearning for political stability was ever recurrent, coupled with the fear that, once lost, it might not be regained for decades. He had witnessed China torn asunder by the Cultural Revolution through which the aging Mao sought to deal with his brutal recognition that Communism, far from creating a new society, had produced a "new" mandarin class. Thus, by the time I met him, Deng was in no mood for further political experiments.

Only those who experienced Mao's China can appreciate the transformations wrought by Deng. The bustling cities, the vast construction booms, the incredible traffic jams, the so

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uncommunist dilemma of a growth rate threatening to spiral out
of control--all of these were inconceivable in Mao's drab
China of agricultural communes, a population uniformed in
standard jackets, a stagnant economy, deserted streets, and
professed ideological fervor. That was the China I
encountered in those distant days when Richard Nixon of the
anti-Communist rhetoric and Mao Zedong of the pithy and
contemptuous anti-capitalist slogans came together to launch a
geopolitical revolution.

Nixon was driven by the desire to extricate America from
Vietnam, to unveil a grand design for peace, and to create a
counterweight to Soviet expansionism. Mao shared the concern
over Soviet expansionism; indeed, he had every reason to
believe that China might be its next target. For the Brezhnev
doctrine of 1968 had reserved to the Kremlin the right to
bring backsliding Communist leaders to heel by the use of

military force. And no contemporary leader had challenged
Moscow's doctrinal preeminence more rigorously than Mao. At
the same time, however, Mao was far too subtle to overlook
that America would not defend only American national interests
and surely not his right to doctrinal heterodoxy.

With the very survival of his society and his system at
stake, Mao had few alternatives to such an essentially
balance-of-power approach, and he could draw on a rich
tradition of Chinese statecraft. But emphasis on geopolitics
was unprecedented for an American president, certainly since
the days of Theodore Roosevelt. That China and the United
States would seek rapprochement in the early 1970s was imposed
by the international environment; that it occurred with such
speed and in so straight a line reflected the ability of the
leaders of both sides to transcend ideology and meet on the
basis of mutual interests and necessities.

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Although Chou En-lai was my principal interlocutor during the early visits, Mao overshadowed everything by the near religious awe in which he seemed to be held (or which his subordinates thought it at least wise to affect). The other Chinese leaders--Chou and afterwards even Deng--only rarely conducted a conversation in which they would not buttress their arguments with extensive quotations from Mao.

The atmosphere of remoteness and of an all-encompassing, at times menacing dominance was reinforced by the manner in which meetings with Mao took place. Although Mao's philosophy disdained historic China, he lived in the Imperial City as remote and exalted as the emperors he derided. Appointments with him were never scheduled; they simply came about as if an event of nature. On each of my five meetings with Mao, the first hint would be a stirring among my Chinese interlocutors and the appearance of Wang Hai-jung, reputed to be Mao's

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niece. For a few minutes, my clearly agitated Chinese counterparts would act as if nothing unusual were happening but then, almost immediately, Chou or Deng would put away his papers and say: "Chairman Mao is expecting you." Whether or not the American delegation was ready did not seem to be an issue worthy of being raised.

Accompanied by Chou (or Deng, in my last two conversations), I would set off for Mao's residence in Chinese cars. No American security personnel were permitted, and the press could only be notified afterwards. The Chinese were skillful in controlling the public image to be conveyed by the pictures they released and the adjectives they used to describe the meeting. When Mao was photographed as beaming, the message was that American-Chinese relations were benign; after one of our meetings at which Mao had indicated that he thought the US insufficiently confrontational vis-à-vis the

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Soviets, the photo depicted Mao wagging a finger at me,
conveying an instructional, rather than confrontational, mood.

The approach to Mao's residence was through a red gate on
the wide east-west axis carved from where the ancient city
walls once stood. Today this avenue is a permanent gridlock;
in the early days of Sino-American relations, however, it was
largely empty. The few official cars and the more numerous
bicycles seemed lost on it. Once inside the Imperial City,
the road hugged a lake, on the other side of which was a
series of residences identical to the official state
guesthouses, all built in the boxlike, severe Stalinist style-
-one of the few relics of the early Sino-Soviet friendship.

Mao's residence appeared no different though it stood
slightly apart from the others. On my first two visits, a
small anteroom was almost completely dominated by a Ping-Pong
table which later disappeared. It did not matter because I

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never had to wait and was instead taken directly to Mao's study. It was a room of modest size with bookshelves filled with manuscripts lining three walls. Books also covered the tables and occasionally were piled up on the floor. On my first few visits, a simple wooden bed stood in a corner. The all-powerful ruler of the world's most populous nation wished to be perceived as a philosopher-king who not only had no need for the trappings of power but buttressed his authority precisely by the absence of any traditional symbol of majesty.

Mao would rise from the center of a semicircle of easy chairs, a female attendant standing close by to steady him (and, on my last visit, to hold him up) for by the time I met him, he already had had several strokes. He would fix upon his visitor a smile both penetrating and slightly mocking as if to warn that there was no point in trying to deceive this

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specialist in understanding and exploiting human weakness and duplicity.

Despite Mao's impaired physical condition, he exuded more concentrated will power and determination than any leader I have encountered, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle. He could move only with difficulty, and his ability to speak progressively worsened to the point where, during my last conversation with him, aides had to write down what the sounds he uttered might mean and then show it to him before translating it into English.

Despite these handicaps, Mao conducted conversations in a Socratic style. He would eschew the soliloquies and formal points with which other leaders tend to make their case. He would generally begin the dialogue by asking a question. With deceptive casualness, he would then offer a few lapidary comments on the reply, ranging from the philosophical to the

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sarcastic and culminating in yet another question. The
cumulative effect of his tangential observations was to convey
a mood and a meaning while avoiding any formal commitment.
Mao indicated a route of march but left the tactical decisions
to others. When Nixon tried to draw him into a discussion of
specific countries, Mao replied: "These should be discussed
with the Premier [Chou En-lai]. I discuss the philosophical
questions."

But that actually was only partially true. For one
thing, Mao could be brutal in exposing the hollowness of an
interlocutor's observations. On one occasion, he picked up on
a banality I had uttered to Deng several days earlier to the
effect that Sino-American relations were in good shape because
neither side had anything to demand from the other. Showing
his attention to detail, Mao volunteered: "If neither side
has anything to ask from the other, why would you be coming to

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Beijing?... And why would we want to receive you and the
President?

On another occasion, he chose a parable to indicate his
displeasure with what he considered ineffective American
resistance to Soviet and Cuban moves in Angola: "The world is
not tranquil," said the gusts painfully emitted by the
shattered hulk, "and a storm--the wind and rain--are
coming...At the approach of the storm, the swallows are
busy...but the flapping of their wings cannot obstruct the
coming of the storm." And later, when President Ford seemed
to defeat the interpreter with the statement, "I always say it
is possible to disagree without being disagreeable," Mao
interjected: "Why would you always say that?"

Mao's conversations with us were divided into two
subjects: increasingly precise elaborations of his views of a
common international strategy, and more elliptical references

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to China's internal conditions. On international affairs, he
was insistently nonideological. One of his first observations
to Nixon was: "...people like me sound a lot of big cannons.

For example, things like 'the whole world should unite and
defeat imperialism, revisionism, and all reactionaries and
establish socialism.'" Mao laughed uproariously at the
implication that anyone might have taken seriously a slogan
which had been scrawled for decades on every public placard in
China. He stressed that he preferred dealing with
conservative Western leaders like Richard Nixon, Edward Heath,
or Georges Pompidou over their leftist opponents. And since
Westerners were notoriously slow-witted, Mao added a specific
assurance: "At present, the question of aggression from the
United States or aggression from China is relatively
small...You want to withdraw some of your troops back to your
soil; ours do not go abroad." Uttered at a time when American

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forces were still fighting in Vietnam, this removed the fear-
-insofar as words could--of several administrations of Chinese
military intervention in Indochina or anywhere around the
Chinese periphery. And Mao left no doubt that even Taiwan was
subordinated to the fundamental necessity of stopping Soviet
expansionism. "The issue [of Taiwan] is not an important
one," he said in the first minutes of a meeting with Nixon.
"The issue of international relations is the important one."

Once that principle was established, subsequent
conversations with Mao dealt with means, not ends.
Cooperation grew out of common analysis, not formal
agreements. In my subsequent conversations with him, Mao
elaborated on general comments he had made to Nixon with
detailed strategic analyses. These were put forward in his
characteristically Socratic manner, combining queries with
allusions and alternating bonhomie with mocking challenge.

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David Bruce, then head of the US Liaison Office in Beijing, attended one of these sessions which lasted nearly three hours. Having known Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Konrad Adenauer, Bruce still acknowledged Mao's elliptical presentation put forward without notes as the most extraordinary tour de force of his experience. Mao would sketch his conception of global containment of the Soviet Union in broad strokes, analyzing the countries which would prove useful and what was needed to strengthen them--a presentation as precise and cold-blooded as ours were vague, bureaucratic, and driven by fears of Congress.

Mao's basic analysis was that the Soviet Union had "stretched its hands too far" and that the resources did not match its global ambitions. Hence it would surely lose, provided the countries around the Soviet periphery cooperated in thwarting Moscow's designs and did not let themselves be

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defeated in detail. When I indicated that this was my
analysis as well, Mao pointed out that the United States might
pursue a less passive and reactive course designed to get rid
of the two Communist giants simultaneously by actually
encouraging a Soviet attack on China: "Let them get bogged
down in China...And then you can poke your finger at the
Soviet back. And your slogan will be peace: to bring down
the Socialist imperialisms for the sake of peace..."

To forestall this nightmare, Mao was prepared to
demonstrate the positive benefits of Sino-American
cooperation: "Each side has its own means," said Mao a year
later, "and acted out of its own necessity. That has resulted
in our two countries acting hand-in-hand...So long as our
objectives are the same, we would not harm you nor would you
harm us." Despite the moral chasm of the Cultural Revolution,
the United States and China evolved parallel geopolitical

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strategies--an understanding that has been lost since the
United States has given increasing priority to ideological
considerations, ironically at a moment when ideology is
diminishing as a principal motivation of Chinese internal
policy.

Mao's single-mindedness with respect to foreign policy
stood in stark contrast with his ideological commitments at
home which increasingly clashed with the realities of a
technological age. When we encountered Mao, he was both the
ruthless leader of a revolutionary ideology and one consumed
by premonitions of its fragility. Two contradictory
tendencies seemed to be undermining the revolutionary élan:
the persistence of traditional Chinese culture and the
requirements of modern technology. The first theme was
sounded when Nixon complimented Mao on having transformed an
ancient civilization. "I have not been able to change it,"

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Mao replied. "I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing."

After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot the Chinese society, there was not a little pathos in this resigned recognition of the revolutionary dilemma. In Mao's quest for egalitarian virtue, millions had been killed to bring about a classless society and to make government irrelevant. Yet at the end of the aged Chairman's life, he began to realize that his society, creator of the civil service, was turning the Communist bureaucracy into a mandarin class even more pervasive than the one he had destroyed because bureaucratic prerogatives were now legitimized by the true faith. Rebelling against the reality that that for which he had struggled was turning into a replica of Chinese tradition, Mao threw himself into ever more frenzied campaigns to save the people he both loved and hated from themselves.

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With each decade, the fading Chairman would launch an assault
at the huge bloated bureaucracies only to find that the
resulting chaos required even more bureaucracy to be brought
under control.

Moreover, these assaults returned Mao to a dilemma as
ancient as China itself. Modern technology is universal; it
threatens any society's claims to uniqueness, always a
distinctive feature of Chinese civilization and one in the
name of which China had refused to copy the West in the 19th
century even at the risk of colonization. One objective of
Mao's Cultural Revolution had been to eradicate precisely
those elements of modernization that threatened China with a
universal culture. Forgoing modernization, purging his own
disciples to maintain values which impose on his society his
own specific version of virtue, the Chairman renounced all the

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tools of progress for a decade including education by closing
all universities and, in the end, even defense.

In 1973, a year after my first encounter with Mao, the
physically frail but intellectually vigorous Chairman seemed
to have recognized this dilemma. In one of his elliptical
references, he warned me against Chinese women and their
radical views. Referring to American congressional pressures
regarding Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, Mao offered
to send any number of Chinese women to America to reduce the
risk of potential disaster for his country. (At first, I
thought he was joking, and he had to repeat the comment
several times before I understood that he was referring to his
wife's radicalism and that no comment of Mao's--however
flippantly presented--was random.) He was ending the Cultural
Revolution, he said. China would have to go to school abroad,
especially since the Chinese language was an obstacle to

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modernization. The Chinese people, he added, were "very
obstinate and very conservative." "If the Soviet Union would
throw its bombs and kill all Chinese who are over thirty, that
would solve the problem for us."

But, with every passing month, the actual choices grew
more and more constricted for the aged Chairman. Within a
year, Mao was to reverse the maxims he had advanced in that
conversation. In early 1974, Chou was for all practical
purposes retired and, two years later, Deng was purged a
second time. When I saw Mao for the last time, he was back to
the old Chinese statecraft of playing off one set of
barbarians against another. To avoid the US moving towards
Moscow for fear of confrontation with China over Taiwan, he
recalled his comment to Nixon that the issue could wait a
hundred years: "A hundred years hence we will want it and
fight for it...And when I go to heaven to see God, I'll tell

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Him that for the present it is better to have Taiwan under the
care of the United States." And Mao concluded with a
whimsical and melancholy bit of irony embracing all the
ambivalence with what he had wrought: "God blesses you, not
us. God does not like us because I am a militant warlord,
also a Communist."

It was from under the shadow of this towering, driven,
and conflicted personality and against the backdrop of Mao's
ever present temptation to institutionalize permanent upheaval
that Chou sought to establish continuity and consistency in
his vast country. Graceful, suave, and elegant, Chou was my
principal interlocutor in the first three years of Sino-
American relations. Throughout the strange preliminary period
before liaison offices were established in each capital in
1973--when we exchanged messages first through Pakistan, then
through the Chinese Embassy in Paris via the American military

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attaché, General Vernon Walters--the dialogue between the two sides followed no established diplomatic precedent. As a result of the long separation, the raw material of normal diplomacy--the trade issues, the looking after each other's nationals--was lacking. The Sino-American relationship therefore depended on the ability to concentrate on fundamentals--a task which in mature relationships is often obscured by the minutiae of routine.

Chou seemed to have unlimited time for the American-Chinese dialogue. We generally met for eight hours each of the three days of my typical sojourns in Beijing. Chou delicately alternated the venue between the Great Hall of the People and my own residence in one of the state guesthouses to convey that each side was in a sense meeting on the home turf of the other and also that the US delegation was "at home," as it were, on Chinese soil. During these lengthy sessions,

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including meals, Chou was never interrupted by any other
business. No phonecalls or notes were passed to him--indeed,
no phone was even in sight, something quite simply
unachievable in Washington. Chou seemed determined to convey
that he had no more important task than to tend to the
American relationship.

Chou's conduct of the substantive negotiations reinforced
the mood he was so meticulous in creating. Despite the fact
that there were still American forces on Taiwan, the issue of
China's unity, though always raised as a principle, was
invariably deferred as a practical solution. Similarly,
Vietnam was mentioned only elliptically, even though our
meetings coincided with the most intensive US air activity in
the country in four years. Chou insisted that China owed
Vietnam some support not for geopolitical reasons, even less
for a common Communist ideology. "The debt we owe them was

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incurred by our ancestors. We have since liberation no
responsibility because we overthrew the old system. Still, we
feel a deep and encompassing sympathy for them."

Sympathy, of course, was not the same as political--even
less military--support; it was a delicate way to assure us
that China would not get involved. Like Mao, Chou was at
pains to stress--and more explicitly--that China would send no
soldiers abroad and hence would threaten no US interest
militarily. Indeed, Chou never even hinted that America's
actions in Vietnam might impair the relationship with Beijing
politically. As to Laos and Cambodia, Chou avoided taking a
position--either threatening or supportive--by claiming to
know nothing about them. "...When we were making our
revolution, we did not know anything about that country
[Laos]. Although there have been many writings in our
historical books about the country called the land of the

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Vientiane which in Chinese means literally 'the land of the
ten thousand elephants.' The same is the case with Cambodia."

Once most of the regional problems were removed from the agenda, Chou and I could concentrate on the geopolitical aspects of the US-China relationship which, in the Chinese view, depended on our respective abilities to orchestrate parallel contributions to the global equilibrium. Even at the first "secret" meeting in 1971, Chou and I, by a kind of tacit agreement, devoted most of our dialogue to an analysis of the international situation despite the unbreakable deadline of 48 hours by which time I had to reappear in Pakistan. In the process, we both avoided the principal purpose of my trip--to arrange a visit by Nixon to Beijing--until 18 hours before I had to leave. Because the concrete issues which did exist were not ready for resolution, the only available area for cooperation was defining a community of interests. And since

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the common interests could not be expressed in formal
diplomatic language--which surely would have created a
firestorm--everything depended on whether the Chinese and
American sides could come to understand each other's
intentions sufficiently to gear their actions to them without
explicit understandings except vague declarations against
hegemony.

Almost the first sentence uttered to me by Chou was:
"Our word counts." And he proved meticulous in acting on this
proposition. Chou understood--as did Nixon--that the
relationship would depend on intangibles. He eschewed the
"salami tactics" by which so many diplomats try to impress
their constituents: each side, starting with an unfulfillable
maximum position, negotiates backwards towards a compromise
shaped to a far greater extent by bureaucratic and domestic
imperatives than by an overall purpose. The difficulty with

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salami tactics is that their conclusions just as often reflect exhaustion as substance because neither side is ever clear about the ultimate goal of the other.

When negotiating the communiqué of the secret trip with Huang Hua, who later became foreign minister and whom Chou had interposed to give himself maneuvering room in case of deadlock, I suggested a procedure drawn from my experience with Soviet diplomats who required salami tactics to justify concessions to their superiors. Huang Hua argued that such a procedure was certain to produce deadlock; he thought it much better for each side honestly to present its actual requirements and then see how they could be reconciled. We spent three hours explaining each other's necessities and agreed to meet the next morning three hours before the fixed departure deadline for each side to present its proposal. As it turned out, the Chinese draft proved less complicated than

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our version which was never offered because the Chinese draft
had been put on the table first.

Another example of Chou's style emerged during the
negotiation of the Shanghai Communiqué. Chou had proposed the
innovation that we forgo the usual diplomatic communiqué which
pretends to agreements by artful language designed to gloss
over existing differences. He proposed that in its place each
side clearly state its actual view on disputed issues. This,
he argued, would avoid confusion both at home and
internationally and highlight whatever genuine agreements
might be reached. Though I accepted that procedure, the
Chinese version of their position on some issues proved too
enthusiastic and confrontational. Deeming some of the Chinese
language potentially offensive, even when stated as the
Chinese position of a joint communiqué, I suggested the
removal of several sentences and offered to let Chou object to

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an equal number of sentences in the American draft. Chou
replied: "I don't want your sentences; give them to your
president if you choose. What you have to do is convince me
why our sentences are offensive." He in fact removed them
from the Shanghai Communiqué but, nothing in China ever being
wasted, they subsequently reappeared in a Chinese United
Nations speech where they were barely noticed except by Chou's
interlocutors. (We responded by using one of Chou's phrases,
regretting that the Chinese had chosen to enter the UN by
"firing empty cannons"--which subsequently earned us some
editorial reprimands.)

In this manner, China and the United States moved within
two years to a high degree of cooperation on the basis of
perhaps the fullest and frankest discussions of overall
strategy of my period in government service. I had no
illusions that Chou, survivor of the Long March and perhaps

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more _______ously of decades in Mao's entourage, could prove
as implacable an opponent as he was a charming collaborator.

But in the phase where the national interest of both China and
the United States required harmonizing the policies of the two
countries without being deflected by peripheral issues, Chou
played an indispensable role.

Where Mao's role was weaving the basic themes as in the
overture of a Wagner opera, it was Chou's task to mount the
actual performance by elaborating on Mao's allusions. In his
relationship with Mao, Chou, recalling the fate of
predecessors who had been destroyed once they had reached the
pinnacle of being Number Two, took great care to emphasize
that he was the subordinate. Wherever possible and even when
it required a stretch, he buttressed his observations by
quotes from Mao and invariably described initiatives as having
been decreed by Mao. And on domestic matters, he adopted the

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attitude of passive, even melancholy observer though as
premier he was in fact responsible for the entire range of
Chinese policy.

Deng was to say later that Chou had eased the fate of
many but never sought to reverse the policies that made the
suffering inevitable. This was consistent with how Chou
described the Cultural Revolution to me at our first
encounter. He insisted that I needed to learn about the
Cultural Revolution to help me understand China. He described
the country as torn between the fear of bureaucratization and
the excesses of ideological zeal. He talked of the anguish of
a society brought up on faith in a single truth when,
suddenly, factions representing different versions of the same
truth began battling for preeminence in the streets until the
fruits of fifty years of struggle seemed in jeopardy. Chou
himself, he told me, had been kept prisoner in his office by

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the Red Guards for several days. Despite his initial doubt as to whether such drastic measures were in fact necessary, he said: Mao was wiser; he had the courage to look further into the future.

Chou never explained what that future was, and I doubt that he shared Mao's vision of it. Clearly he had made a personal decision that the best he could do was to mitigate the zealotry of his demonic chief; any attempt to reverse it would merely guarantee his own destruction. When speaking of China's domestic problems, Chou adopted a passive tone almost as if he were an observer of the policies which he was in fact implementing. Like Mao, he would praise the Chinese language for having served to unify the country, but now he thought it had become an obstacle to modernization. He said that China had much to learn from America which had "the courage to use young people" in its government. Yet Chou never left me with

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the impression that he considered it his task to remedy the
weaknesses he was describing.

The pressures of his system came to expression at a
dinner in the Great Hall of the People in December 1973. As
part of a general discussion of philosophy, I observed that
China was essentially Confucian in its belief that there
exists a single, universal, generally applicable truth; all
Communism had done was to change the content of that truth. I
cannot now recall, if I ever knew, what possessed me to make
this basically accurate statement which ignored Mao's
occasional digs at Confucians (which in retrospect were
clearly aimed at Chou's upper middle-class origins). Chou
exploded--the only time I saw him lose his temper. With
uncharacteristic insistence, he emphasized his rejection of
that proposition, no doubt in part to have a record for Mao's
niece seated at the table.

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In early 1974, Chou disappeared from dealing with Americans and entered a hospital shortly after. No Chinese official was to mention him again; the long tour d'horizon with Mao described earlier became the bible which Chinese officials invoked thereafter when legitimizing their positions.

I saw Chou for the last time in December 1974 when I came to Beijing from Vladivostok to brief the Chinese on the summit between Brezhnev and Ford. By then, Deng had become my new interlocutor. My wife and children had accompanied me on the trip, and all of us were taken to see Chou. The meeting place was referred to as a hospital although it resembled any other official residence in the Imperial City. To the medically untrained eye, Chou appeared unchanged, and he was as charming as ever. But he avoided any discussion of foreign policy, even the most allusive, saying that his doctors had forbidden

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it. Why substantive conversation would prove more taxing than
social chitchat remained unexplained.

Chou died in January 1976 and came to symbolize to the
Chinese people the humane hopes of his society. Large throngs
gathered that month in Tiananmen Square to mourn his death.
Mao--or his entourage--interpreted these demonstrations to be
directed at Maoist orthodoxy. Counterdemonstrations were
organized, and Deng was purged for the second time.

When I returned to China for a private visit in 1979,
Deng had been restored, and Chou once more became a symbol--
this time for the reform direction. Great crowds--I among
them--toured an exhibition on his life at the museum in
Tiananmen Square tracing the evolution of his career and
displaying replicas of his office (which I had never seen) and
of his home.

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Afterwards, Chou receded once again though he remained a respected figure. In the summer of 1995--after President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan made a visit to the US--relations between Washington and Beijing fell into a deep freeze. China's ambassador to Washington, Li Daoyu, was recalled, and Beijing refused agreement on a new American ambassador. At this time of tension between the two countries, a trip arranged months before brought me to China with a delegation of the America-China Society.

The Chinese government took the occasion to use Chou as a symbol of its continued commitment to good relations with the United States. I was invited to accept an honorary degree from Nankai University in Tianjin where Chou had studied and taken to a statue of the premier as part of the ceremony.

Speeches by the participants praised Chou's role in establishing ties with the US.

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After 1974, Deng was my principal interlocutor. At first, I thought him a step down from the titans whose acquaintance I had made in the initial phase of restored Sino-American relations. Acerbic, matter-of-fact, and eminently practical, he lacked both the philosophical sweep of Mao and the grace and suavity of Chou. Deng rarely invoked ideology and referred to Mao at a barest minimum. But, as time went on, I grew to admire this doughty little man whose face in rare unguarded moments reflected a certain melancholy from a dramatic life full of upheavals. It became more and more apparent--especially after Deng returned from his second exile in 1978--that he could well have a more seminal impact on Chinese society than even Mao. Mao had uprooted traditional China. But he had never resolved the revolutionary dilemma: the more sweeping the upheaval and eradication of existing patterns of obligation, the greater the force needed to

40

reimpose discipline, to replace what has been taken for granted and therefore did not need to be imposed.

Deng's reforms started from the conviction that the suffering caused by the Communist upheavals would turn into a travesty if it did not lead to an improvement in the well-being of the Chinese people. Hence the dominant theme of his political life was for practical economic reform. Where Mao (and, to a lesser extent, Chou) sought to transform Chinese society in accordance with Marxist theory, Deng insisted on altering Marxist dogma to fit reality; "I do not care whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice" was one of his widely quoted aphorisms. On many occasions he said to me, "Reality is our teacher;" practice overrode theory by implication, even--or perhaps especially--Marxist theory.

"I am neither a conservative nor a reformer," he said to me in 1987. "I seek truth from facts." Deng was a pragmatist

41

whose goal was economic progress and political stability. He was a reformer, he said in the same conversation, with respect to economic and technological reform but a conservative in the sense of opposing political instability (and not, it must be noted, upholding Communist dogma).

While Mao was alive and Deng acted as vice premier, standing in for the incapacitated (medically as well as politically) Chou, my conversations with him primarily revolved around foreign policy. Sino-American relations were entering a new phase. Mao and Chou had been chiefly concerned with establishing a visible Sino-American relationship to discourage Moscow from enforcing the Brezhnev doctrine.

Neither Mao nor Chou was enamored of the simultaneous US rapprochement with Moscow, but they seemed to operate from the premise that the end of the Vietnam War and Nixon's overwhelming reelection would strengthen America's role as the

42

guardian of the global equilibrium whatever the tactical
differences. America's firm conduct in the Middle East War of
1973--especially in facing down the Soviet threat of
intervention--was enthusiastically endorsed by Mao and Chou.

Subsequently, differences in perspective between Beijing
and Washington became more apparent. Nixon's position
progressively weakened; détente with the Soviet Union
continued but in the face of growing conservative opposition
in the United States. In December 1974, Gerald Ford, the new
president, met with Brezhnev in Vladivostok, not far from the
Chinese border. It was one of the less brilliant moves of the
Ford Administration; almost any other venue would have been
preferable in terms of our relations with the Chinese. Deng
did not fail to point out Chinese sensitivities: "In the
past, the inhabitants of this territory were mainly Chinese.
And our name for that place was Haishanwey [meaning sea

43

slug]...We hear that its present name Vladivostok means 'ruler
of the East'...But East also includes the part of the Pacific
that you are in." [CHECK]

The deeper strategic issue was that China considered
itself under direct threat by the Soviet Union while the
threat to the United States was more long-term and cumulative.
China therefore strove to create an explicit anti-Soviet
coalition of all neighboring states. While I had great
sympathy for its analysis, in the aftermath of Vietnam and
Watergate, neither Nixon nor Ford considered a confrontational
policy towards the Soviet Union sustainable in the face of
European doubts and America's domestic divisions. Both
presidents were determined to resist Soviet expansion but, to
mobilize this resistance, they felt obliged to demonstrate the
seriousness of their efforts to build a structure of peace.
Lastly, we were convinced that our bargaining position in both

44

Beijing and Moscow would be enhanced if we were closer to each
than either was to the other.

After [the summit in] Vladivostok until the death of Mao,
the Chinese leaders attacked our détente policy in terms which
our conservative movement would have approved. Deng,
following Mao, called the détente policy "shadow boxing;" he
doubted the efficacy of regular consultations with Moscow and
dubbed the European Security Conference an "insecurity
conference." He questioned the wisdom of greater economic
cooperation with the Soviet Union: "We do not understand why
the United States and the West use their strong points to make
up for Soviet weakness. If the United States and Europe took
advantage of the weaknesses of the Soviet Union, your
negotiating position might be stronger."

Throughout 1975, as Indochina collapsed and Angola fell
to Cuban troops, Chinese criticisms grew more insistent. The

45

Chinese foreign minister, Ch'iao Kuan-hua, who later joined
the so-called Gang of Four which purged Deng a second time,
accused America of trying to push the "evil waters east" and
of "seeking to stand on the shoulders of China" in order to
make a better deal with Moscow.

Deng was always more conciliatory. He neither challenged
America's good faith nor did he question its commitment to
containing the Soviet Union. His disagreements concerned
tactics to reach agreed objectives, and his criticisms were
tempered by helpful suggestions on how to improve US relations
with Japan as well as moderation regarding Korea and Taiwan--
though he was passionate in insisting that Chinese restraint
towards Taiwan was a contribution towards good relations with
the United States; it was not a right on which Washington
could insist. "We can wait until the time is riper for a

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solution of that question...[but] we do not admit that another
country has a right to participate in the solution..."

Deng never left any doubt that he considered cordial
relations with America the central element of Chinese foreign
policy. "Even when we differ in views," said Deng as he
welcomed me in October 1975, "we do so as familiar friends."
On that same visit, Ch'iao Kuan-hua implied in a toast that
the United States had adopted a policy of appeasement towards
the Soviet Union. The next day Deng took the American
delegation to an unscheduled, sumptuous lunch in the Fragrant
Hills near Beijing--in effect dissociating himself from the
foreign minister.

When President Ford visited China later that same year,
Mao was civil, but his needling left a certain amount of
leeway for the Gang of Four critics. It was Deng who saw to
it that the trip was successful, elaborating on the official

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description of the Mao-Ford conversation as an "earnest and
significant conversation...on wide-ranging issues in a
friendly atmosphere." He added that "our two countries face
problems of common concern and share many common points."
Throughout his career, friendship with America would remain
the cornerstone of Deng's foreign policy.

After the overthrow of the Gang of Four, Hua Kuo-feng
became Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party on the
basis of an alleged statement by the dying Mao: "With Hua in
charge, I will be at ease." [CHECK] In 1978 [CHECK], Deng
returned from exile to his previous position as vice premier
(in which he was technically outranked by Hua Kuo-feng).
Shortly after President Carter normalized relations with
Beijing, Deng paid a visit to Washington and invited me to
call on him. Exile had not mellowed him; he was feisty. He
looked forward to implementing major reforms, he said, free of

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the impediments of the Gang of Four (and perhaps of Mao). He was restoring US relations as the centerpiece of Chinese foreign policy. Deng deplored the collapse of the Shah of Iran and Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. He urged a stronger US policy; in any event, China would resist Soviet expansionism. Because Vietnam had become a Soviet tool, China would "teach it a lesson."

Many senior officials of the Carter Administration thought Deng was bluffing. But I recalled Chou's pronouncement, "Our word counts," and also Deng's remark when I had reminded him of Mao's reference to the "empty cannons" of ideological rhetoric. "My cannons," said Deng, "are always at least half-full." Shortly after Deng's return to China, the Red Army invaded Vietnam to teach its lesson.

The next time I saw Deng was in Beijing in April 1979. Hua Kuo-feng was still Secretary General of the Communist

49

Party. He and Deng received me separately for long meetings
in the Great Hall of the People. The contrast was striking.
Both put forward detailed programs of economic reform. But
for the only time in dealing with Chinese leaders,
philosophical and practical disagreements were made explicit.
Deng sought to spur production by traditional Soviet methods:
emphasis on heavy industry; improvements in agricultural
production based on communes through increased mechanization
and use of fertilizers within the framework of a ubiquitous
Five Year Plan.

For his part, Deng passionately rejected all these
orthodoxies. The people, he said, needed to be given a stake
in what they produced. Consumer goods had to be given
priority over heavy industry. The ingenuity of Chinese
farmers had to be liberated which meant that communes, step-
by-step, would be abolished; the Communist Party needed to