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# The Philosopher and the Pragmatist

Their personalities could not have been more different. But it took both Mao's statecraft and Deng's realism to transform modern China. BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

ONLY THOSE WHO EXPERIENCED MAO ZEDONG'S China can appreciate the transformations wrought by Deng Xiaoping. The bustling cities, the vast construction booms, the incredible traffic jams, the uncommunist dilemma of a growth rate threatening to spiral into inflation—all of these were inconceivable in the drab China of agricultural communes, a stagnant economy, deserted streets, and a population wearing standard jackets and professing ideological fervor. Deng's revolution changed all that. He abolished the agricultural communes and decentralized economic decision making. He fostered provincial autonomy. To be sure, it remains to be seen whether the vast gaps between China's coastal regions and the more backward interior can be bridged before there is political unrest. And economic progress has been accompanied by rigid insistence on one-party

rule. But the Chinese population is dramatically better off materially, and less constrained politically, than 25 years ago.

I first met Mao in 1972 during President Nixon's historic trip, which took place 25 years ago last week, and I saw him four more times over the course of the next three years. From 1974 to 1989, I met with Deng at least once a year. I watched as, together, they transformed China, Deng undoing but also building on Mao's legacy. Mao destroyed traditional China and cleared the way for its ultimate modernization. But he faced the revolutionary's dilemma: that the destruction of existing patterns of obligations requires an increasing resort to force, a tendency further encouraged in Mao's case by the straitjacket of ideology. Deng had the courage to base modernization on the initiative and resilience of individual Chinese. But he faced the reformer's dilemma: that it is impossible to compartmentalize reform. And in seeking to protect his economic

NEWSWEEK MARCH 9, 1997

Mao Zedong and
Deng Xiaoping
in 1974

XINHUA

and social achievements, Deng felt obliged to return at least part way to Maoism in the political field.

As one of the leaders of the Long March, Deng had been a witness and, in the end, a victim of Mao's ideological zeal. By the time I encountered him in 1974, he had had enough of political turmoil. A recurrent theme of his conversations was the yearning for political stability and the fear that, once lost, it might not be regained for decades. And if stability was lost, he argued, the dream of a better life for the Chinese people and for a strong China would vanish as well. Deng had witnessed China torn asunder by the Cultural Revolution. Returned to power a second time in 1978, he was in no mood for further political experiments; his goal was to improve the lives of the Chinese people.

These were not the priorities when Richard Nixon of the anti-Communist rhetoric and Mao Zedong of the pithy and contemptu-

ious anti-capitalist slogans came together to launch a geopolitical revolution. Nixon was driven by the desire to extricate the United States from Vietnam, to create a counterweight to Soviet expansionism and to draw the sting from militant peace movements by unveiling a grand design for peace. Mao shared Nixon's 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 use force against backsliding Communist countries. And no contemporary leader had challenged Moscow's doctrinal pre-eminence more rigorously than Mao. At the same time, however, Mao was far too subtle to believe that the United States would defend China's right to doctrinal heterodoxy.

With the very survival of his society and his system at stake, Mao had few alternatives to 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, at least 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 was due to the ability of the leaders of both sides to transcend ideology and cooperate on the basis of mutual interests. The statement in the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 opposing hegemony was a far more significant departure from the Wilsonianism dominant in the United States than from Chinese traditions. Even when not spelled out in detail, resistance to hegemony implied a joint decision to counterbalance Soviet power around the world.

Although Prime Minister Zhou Enlai was my principal interlocutor during the early visits, Mao overshadowed all his subordinates by the near-religious awe in which he seemed to be held (or which his subordinates at least thought it wise to affect). Zhou and afterward even Deng invariably conducted their conversations by buttressing their arguments with extensive quotations from Mao, even when it required a stretch to do so. And in his presence, they were extraordinarily deferential in both attitude and expression.

The atmosphere of remoteness and of all-encompassing, at times menacing, dominance was reinforced by the manner in which meetings with Mao took place. Mao 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 events 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 Assistant Foreign Minister Wang Hairong, reputed to be Mao's niece. For a few minutes, my clearly agitated Chinese counterparts would act as if nothing unusual were happening. Then, almost immediately, Zhou 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 Zhou (or Deng, in my last two conversations), we would set off for Mao's residence in Chinese cars. No American security personnel were permitted, and the press could only be notified afterward. 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 another meeting, the photo depicted Mao wagging a finger at me, but he was smiling, so that the overall impact was that of a kind, somewhat put-upon teacher.

Mao's residence was approached through a red gate on the wide east-west axis carved from where the ancient city walls stood before the Communist revolution. Inside the Imperial City, the road hugged a lake, on the other side of which was a series of residences for high officials. All had been built in the days of Sino-Soviet friendship and reflected the heavy Stalinist style of the period.

Mao's residence appeared no different, though it stood slightly

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MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK

SPECIAL REPORT

apart from the others. On my first two visits, a small anteroom was almost completely dominated by a Ping-Pong table. It did not matter because I was always taken directly to Mao's study, a room of modest size with bookshelves lining three walls filled with manuscripts in a state of considerable disarray. 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 had no need to buttress his authority with 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 specialist in understanding and exploiting human weakness and duplicity.

Despite Mao's progressively impaired physical condition, he exuded more concentrated willpower and determination than any other 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 our last conversation, aides had to write down what the sounds he uttered might mean and then show them to him before translating.

Despite these handicaps, Mao conducted conversations in a Socratic style. He would generally begin with a question, quite often in a needling tone. With deceptive casualness, he would then offer a few pithy comments, ranging from the philosophical to the sarcastic and culminating in yet another question. The cumulative effect of his tangential observations was to convey a mood while avoiding any commitment. When Nixon tried to draw Mao into a discussion of specific measures, he replied: "These should be discussed with

the Premier [Zhou Enlai]. I discuss the philosophical questions."

That actually was true only when Mao wanted to separate himself from an as yet uncertain outcome. Once the Shanghai Communiqué had established a framework for Sino-American relations, Mao's utterances grew increasingly direct. In November 1975, he picked up on a banality I had uttered to Deng the day before, to the effect that Sino-American relations were in good shape because neither side was demanding anything from the other. That was too pedestrian for Mao: "If neither side has anything to ask from the other, why would you be coming to Beijing?... And why would we want to receive you and the president?" A month later, he chose a parable to indicate to President Ford his displeasure with what he considered ineffective American resistance to Soviet and Cuban moves in Angola, in fact cut off by Congress: "The world is not tranquil, 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."

On international affairs, Mao adopted an insistently nonideological approach. 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'." He laughed uproarious-

ly at the implication that anyone might have taken seriously a slocan which had been scrawled for decades on every public placard in China. With similar glee, Mao volunteered that he preferred dealing with conservative Western leaders because leftists were sentimental, unrealistic and vulnerable to Soviet peace offensives.

At the time of the 1972 Nixon visit, we were still treating Taiwan as the legitimate government of China, and we were also at war with North Vietnam, then ostensibly China's ally. Mao wasted no time unraveling these complexities. Taiwan would not be permitted to stand in the way of Sino-American rapprochement, nor would Indochina. "The issue [of Taiwan] is not the important one," Mao said offhandedly in the first few minutes of his meeting with Nixon, as if he were lubricating a social chat with some self-evident observation. "The issue of international relations is the important one." And Mao quickly put to rest the nightmare of possible Chinese intervention in Vietnam, which had constrained every American adminis-

tration in Indochina for a decade: "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."

Lest we miss Mao's point, Zhou expanded on it in his more elegant manner. Whatever support China gave Vietnam had a historical, not an ideological or strategic, origin. "The debt we owe them was 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 or military support; it was a delicate way to assure us that China would not get involved.

In November 1973, Mao invited me to a nearly three-hour *tour d'horizon* of the international situation. Combining queries with allusions and alternating bonhomie with mocking challenge, Mao sketched his conception of global containment of the Soviet Union in broad strokes. He identified the countries that could contribute to this task

and analyzed what was needed to strengthen them as if no constraints on the application of the national interest could ever arise. David Bruce, then head of our liaison office in Beijing, who had known de Gaulle, Churchill and Adenauer, described Mao's presentation as the most extraordinary tour de force in his experience.

In Mao's view—subsequently largely borne out by events—the Soviet Union was not a real, only a mock, superpower. It had "stretched its hands too far," and its industrial capacity would not be able to sustain its global ambitions. Hence Moscow was sure to lose the geopolitical struggle, provided only that the countries around the Soviet periphery cooperated in thwarting Moscow's designs and did not let themselves be defeated one by one.

Characteristically, Mao seemed to believe that we had other options which were in fact unsustainable by the American political system or tradition. We might be tempted, he told me, to get rid of communism once and for all by embroiling the two Communist giants with each other and then turning on the victor. In Mao's thinking, our means for doing so were to encourage a Soviet attack on China, followed by American pressure on an exhausted Soviet Union. In Mao's words: "Let them get bogged down in China ... And then you can poke your finger at the Soviet back.

AP

Greeting Kissinger in 1975

## Despite Mao's progressively impaired condition, he exuded more willpower than any other leader I have encountered

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

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SPECIAL REPORT

Deng arrived in New York in April 1974 as part of a Chinese delegation headed by the foreign minister to a special session of the U.N. General Assembly dealing with economic development. When I invited the Chinese delegation to dinner, it became immediately evident who its real leader was and, even more important, that, far from being restored to ease Zhou's burden, as our intelligence reports claimed, Deng's assignment was, in fact, to replace him. Several friendly references to Zhou were ignored; allusions to remarks of the prime minister were answered by similar quotes from Mao's conversations with me.

Having grown accustomed to Mao's philosophical reflections and indirect allusions and to Zhou's smooth professionalism, it took me some time to adjust to Deng's acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occasional sarcastic interjections and his disdain of the philosophical in favor of the eminently practical. Compact and wiry, he entered a room as if propelled by some invisible force, ready for business. A spittoon ever before him—he used it frequently—Deng rarely wasted time on pleasantries. Nor did he feel it necessary to soften his remarks by swaddling them in parables. He did not envelop one with solicitude as Zhou was wont to do, nor did he treat me, as Mao had, as a fellow philosopher from among whose ranks only a select few were worthy of his personal attention. Deng's attitude was that we were both there to do our nations' business and adult enough to handle the rough patches without personalizing them.

As time went on, I developed enormous regard for this doughty little man with the melancholy eyes who had upheld his cause in the face of extraordinary vicissitudes and who would, in time, transform his country far beyond any of his predecessors. Mao had left a vacuum, as he himself indicated in his comment to Nixon. Out of the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution, Deng fashionied a modernization that is likely to turn China into an economic superpower during the 21st century.

Deng frequently insisted that he considered cordial relations with the United States the central element of Chinese foreign policy. 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, and the conviction that China could progress economically only in a relaxed international atmosphere for which good relations with the United States were the essential precondition.

Deng found many small ways to show his commitment to close relations with the United States. During my visit to Beijing in October 1975, Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua—who had allied himself with Mao's radical wife—made a blisteringly unfriendly toast at the opening banquet, and when I started to reply in kind, the television lights were turned off. The next morning, Deng invited me and the American delegation to an impromptu picnic in the Fragrant Hills near Beijing and went to ostentatious lengths to put the full weight of his person behind friendship with the United States. He did the same during Ford's visit in late November 1975. Deng ended the trip on a positive note by describing, apparently on his own, the Mao-Ford conversation to the media 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.”

Even when Deng disagreed with the American views, he took

pains to stress the underlying amity. “Even when we differ in views,” said Deng as he welcomed me in October 1975 on what turned out to be a tense visit, “we do so as familiar friends.” But while less ideological than Mao, Deng was more nationalist. He was passionate about the return of Hong Kong to China. When I briefed him on the summit between Brezhnev and Ford at Vladivostok, he was at pains to stress that Vladivostok had been Chinese until illegally seized by Russia in the last century. And he was a nucleus more insistent with respect to Taiwan than Mao was. Chinese restraint toward Taiwan was a voluntary contribution toward 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 solution of that question ... [but] we do not admit that another country has a right to participate in the solution ...”

After Deng returned from his second exile in 1978, the transformation of Chinese society was his principal goal. Deng's reforms started from the conviction that the suffering caused by Mao's upheavals entitled the Chinese people to a dramatic improvement in their well-being. In the pursuit of that goal, practice overrode theory. “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.” And in 1987 he elaborated: “I am neither a conservative nor a reformer. I seek truth from facts.” He was a reformer, he said in the same conversation, with respect to economic and technological reform but a conservative in opposing political instability.

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 the impediments of the Gang of Four. Relations with the United States would be the centerpiece of Chinese foreign policy. Deng deplored the collapse of the Shah of Iran and the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. 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 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 People's Liberation Army invaded Vietnam to drive home that lesson.

I saw Deng the next time in Seattle, the last stop of his American journey. I was there as a sports fan to watch the American national soccer team in its effort to qualify for the World Cup. I sent Deng a note saying that I did not feel right being in the same city without seeing him, and offered a brief courtesy call. He replied that I had called on him in Washington, and courtesy required him to call on me. And to the extraordinary displeasure of his security personnel, he carried out this whim, walking from his hotel to where I was staying, in the process creating a monumental traffic jam.

We next met in April 1979 in Beijing. Hua Kuo-feng was still secretary general of the Communist 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 for economic reform. But for the only time in my experience with Chinese

AVERY-AP

With Nixon in 1989

> A spittoon before him (he used it frequently), Deng rarely wasted time on pleasantries. Nor did he soften his remarks with parables.

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

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8975 words

2/20/97-#2

ARTICLE

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
uncommunist dilemma of a growth rate threatening to spiral
into inflation--all of these were inconceivable in the drab
China of agricultural communes, a population uniformed in
standard jackets, a stagnant economy, deserted streets, and
professed ideological fervor.

Deng's revolution changed all that. He abolished the
agricultural communes and decentralized economic decision-
making. He fostered provincial autonomy. The Chinese

2

population is dramatically better off materially, and its
lives are less constrained politically than 25 years ago.

To be sure, almost every great achievement has its
shadows. It remains to be seen whether the vast gaps between
China's coastal regions and the more backward interior can be
bridged without excessive dislocations. And economic progress
has been achieved at the price of rigid insistence on one-
party rule.

This article does not attempt a final evaluation of Deng Xiaoping, who I consider a great man and a seminal reformer. It attempts to set this last survivor of the generation that made the revolution in the context of his two predecessors, whom I encountered when I first dealt with the People's Republic of China beginning in 1971.

One of Deng Xiaoping's daughters told me that her father
had received me more often than any other foreigner. I am in

3

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, sometimes including meals, at least once a year
and, in 1974 and 1975, several times a year.

As one of the leaders of the Long March, Deng had been a
witness and, in the end, a victim of Mao's revolutionary zeal.
By the time I encountered him, he, a lifelong revolutionary,
had had enough of political turmoil. A recurrent theme of his
conversations was the yearning for political stability and the
fear that, once lost, it might not be regained for decades.
And, if stability was lost, he argued, the dream of a better
life for the Chinese people and ultimately for a strong China
internationally would vanish as well. Deng had witnessed
China torn asunder by the Cultural Revolution through which
the aging Mao had sought to deal with his nightmare that

4

Communism, far from creating a new society, had produced a "new" mandarin class. When Deng returned to power in 1974, he was in no mood for further political experiments; what he strove for was to change the lives of the Chinese people.

These were not the priorities in the 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 the United States from Vietnam, to create a counterweight to Soviet expansionism, and to draw the sting from militant peace movements by unveiling a grand design for peace. Mao shared Nixon's 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

5

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 the United States would defend only American
national interests and surely not China's right to doctrinal
heterodoxy. In other words, he needed to anchor the Sino-
American relationship in some parallel approaches to foreign
policy.

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, at least 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

6

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.

The statement by Mao and Nixon in the Shanghai Communiqué
of 1972 that they would jointly oppose hegemony in Asia (a
year later extended to the world) was a far more significant
departure from the Wilsonianism dominant in the United States
than from Chinese traditions. Even when not spelled out in
detail, resistance to hegemony implies a policy of balancing
power, of preventing any one nation from marshaling the
resources and manpower of a continent under its own rule. The
unspoken but unavoidable implication was that China and the
United States were engaged in counterbalancing Soviet power in
tacit alliance with China.

Although Zhou Enlai was my principal interlocutor during
the early visits, Mao overshadowed all his subordinates by the

7

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--Zhou and afterwards even Deng--invariably
conducted their conversations by buttressing their arguments
with extensive quotations from Mao. And in his presence, they
were extraordinarily deferential in both attitude and
expression.

The atmosphere of remoteness and of 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 Assistant Foreign Minister Wang Hairong,

8

reputed to be Mao's niece. For a few minutes, my clearly
agitated Chinese counterparts would act as if nothing unusual
were happening but then, almost immediately, Zhou 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 Zhou (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 United States insufficiently confrontational vis-

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à-vis the Soviets, the photo depicted Mao wagging a finger at me, but he was smiling so that the overall impact was that of a benign teacher.

Mao's residence was approached through a red gate on the wide east-west axis carved from where the ancient city walls stood before the Communist revolution. 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 for high officials identical to the official state guesthouses in another part of the city. All had been built in the days of Sino-Soviet friendship and reflected the severe Stalinist style of the period.

10

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 never had to wait and was instead taken directly to Mao's study. It was a room of modest size with bookshelves lining three walls filled with manuscripts in a state of considerable disarray. 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 by the absence of any traditional symbol of majesty.

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(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 specialist in understanding and exploiting human weakness and duplicity. Mao would occasionally emphasize the impossibility of tricking him with an anecdote--for example, at our meeting of November 12, 1973: "The president of South Yemen approached me. He said he wanted to sever diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. He asked me my opinion. I was not taken in and replied that he must be prudent. Now they are tied very closely to the Soviet Union...."

Despite Mao's progressively 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

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his ability to speak progressively worsened to the point
where, during our last conversation, aides had to write down
what the sounds he uttered might mean and then show it to him
before translating into English.

Despite these handicaps, Mao conducted conversations in a
Socratic style. Eschewing the soliloquies and formal points
with which heads of state generally make their case, he would
generally begin with a question, quite often in a needling
tone. With deceptive casualness, he would then offer a few
lapidary comments, ranging from the philosophical to the
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.
When Nixon tried to draw Mao into a discussion of specific
measures, he replied: "These should be discussed with the
Premier [Zhou Enlai]. I discuss the philosophical questions."

13

That actually was only true when Mao wanted to separate
himself from a discussion, the outcome of which was as yet
uncertain. Once the Shanghai Communiqué had established a
framework for Sino-American relations, Mao's utterances grew
increasingly concrete and, if necessary, quite brutal. In

Statebull. October p. 681

Deng the day before to the effect that Sino-American relations
were in good shape because neither side was demanding anything
from the other. That was too pat and hollow for Mao, so he
used my comment to make his point: "If neither side has
anything to ask from the other, why would you be coming to
Beijing?...And why would we want to receive you and the
President?"

A month later, he chose a parable to indicate to Ford his
displeasure with what he considered ineffective American
resistance to Soviet and Cuban moves in Angola, in fact

[y]

14

mandated by Congress: "The world is not tranquil, 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."

Mao's conversations with us were divided into two subjects: increasingly precise elaborations of a common international strategy, and more elliptical references to China's internal conditions. On international affairs, he adopted an insistently nonideological approach. 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.'"

He 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. With similar

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glee, Mao volunteered that he preferred dealing with conservative Western leaders such as Richard Nixon, Edward Heath, or Georges Pompidou because the conservatives were more suspicious of the Soviet Union while their leftist opponents were sentimental, unrealistic, and vulnerable to Communist peace offensives.

At the time of the 1972 Nixon visit, we were still treating Taiwan as the legitimate government of China and did not recognize Beijing as the capital. We were also at war with North Vietnam, then ostensibly China's ally and beneficiary of its economic and some military assistance. Mao wasted no time unraveling these complexities. Taiwan would not be permitted to stand in the way of Sino-American rapprochement and nor would Indochina. "The issue [of Taiwan] is not the important one," Mao said off-handedly in the first few minutes of his meeting with Nixon as if he were

16

And Mao quickly put to rest the nightmare legacy of the Korean War of possible Chinese intervention in Vietnam which had obsessed and constrained every American administration in Indochina for a decade: "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."

In November 1973, Mao invited me to a nearly three-hour tour d'horizon of the international situation. Combining queries with allusions and alternating bonhomie with mocking challenge, Mao would sketch his conception of global containment of the Soviet Union in broad strokes. He would identify the countries which could contribute to this task and analyze what was needed to strengthen them as if no

17

In Mao's view--subsequently largely born out by events--
the Soviet Union was not a real, only a mock, superpower. It
had "stretched its hands too far," and its industrial capacity
would not be able to sustain its global ambitions. Hence
Moscow was sure to lose the geopolitical struggle, provided
only that the countries around the Soviet periphery cooperated
in thwarting Moscow's designs and did not let themselves be
defeated one-by-one.

In pursuit of that goal, Mao sought a strategic
partnership with the United States and to demonstrate the
positive benefits of Sino-American cooperation. In 1975, he
expressed this approach, characteristically mixing reassurance
with an implied threat: "Each side has its own means and
acted out of its own necessity. That has resulted in our two

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countries acting hand-in-hand...So long as our objectives are the same, we would not harm you nor would you harm us."

There was, however, a difference in the situation and hence in the tactics of the two sides. China was, in fact, the most directly threatened party of the strategic triangle, and Mao knew it despite his bravado that China was immune to pressure and implacable in the defense of its principles.

Mao, who understood our design far better than our domestic critics, could not be expected to be enthusiastic about the application of Chinese statecraft to China, which was our policy of being closer to Moscow as well as to Beijing than they were to each other. He would surely have preferred to be on the side of the strategic triangle that had the greater options. But he was experienced enough to understand that we had our own method for pursuing parallel objectives.

[y]

19

Characteristically, Mao seemed to believe that we had an option other than cooperating with China. We might be tempted, he told me, to get rid of Communism once and for all by embroiling the two Communist giants with each other and then turning on the victor. Our means for doing so in Mao's thinking were to encourage a Soviet attack on China followed by American pressure on an exhausted Soviet Union. In Mao's words: "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...."

The aged revolutionary who had never known a period without struggle would not have believed (or lost respect for us if he came to believe it) had I told him the American reality after Vietnam and Watergate (and maybe at all times): it was all we could do to mobilize the American people in

20

defense of the global equilibrium; to encourage a Soviet
attack on China with which we were ostensibly seeking to
improve relations, to be followed by American pressure against
the Soviet rear, was too Machiavellian for the American of the
1970s and, I dare say, of any other period.

With respect to Taiwan, Mao said in 1973: "...We can do
without Taiwan for the time being and let it come after one
hundred years. Do not take matters of this world so rapidly.
Why is there need to be in such great haste? It is only such
an island with a population of 12 or more million [corrected
by Zhou to 16 million]...As for your relations with us, I
think they need not take 100 years." Normalization of
relations with the United States clearly had priority over
reunification with Taiwan.

The blueprint of Sino-American relations established by
Nixon and Mao remained remarkably consistent through five

[y]

21

administrations of both parties: a parallel strategy with
China in preventing "hegemony"--in other words, to preserve
the global balance of power against the Soviet Union; no
challenge by either side to the vital concerns of the other;
acceptance by the United States of the principle of one China
and disavowal by America of a two-China or one-China, one-
Taiwan policy; and deferral by China of pressing the Taiwan
issue.

Mao's geopolitical, single-minded and essentially
nonideological orientation with respect to foreign policy
stood in stark contrast to the dominant role he assigned to
ideology at home. When we encountered Mao, he was the
unchallenged leader of a revolution that had claimed tens of
millions of victims in the name of historical truth; yet he
was assailed by premonitions of its fragility. Two
contradictory impulses seemed to be undermining the

22

revolutionary élan: the persistence of traditional Chinese
values and the very momentum of a Communist state. Mao
sounded the first theme in his reply to a Nixon compliment on
having transformed an ancient civilization: "I have not been
able to change it. I have only been able to change a few
places in the vicinity of Beijing."

After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot Chinese
society, there was not a little pathos in Mao's resigned
recognition of the pervasiveness of Chinese culture. Through
the millennia, Chinese rulers have governed a population far
more numerous than those of any other society, often by
assertions of absolute power. But the very vastness of the
Chinese people imposed a limit on the exactions possible for
the government because the ruler could never be sure that he
knew all it required to control the activities of his teeming,
individualistic, entrepreneurial, and family-oriented people.

23

Absolute governments were thereby occasionally driven to
extreme attempts to impose conformity, as Mao did during his
lifetime by putting the entire population in uniform. Yet, in
the end, a kind of pluralism would assert itself time and
again, not as the result of a political philosophy preaching
liberty but--like a powerful stream surrounding and finally
swamping all obstacles--of the lifestyle and spirit of the
individual Chinese. In the end, the family, not the state,
has been the ultimate unit of Chinese life, and preservation
and enhancement of the family has proven to be the
irrepressible purpose of the Chinese. When I first talked to
Maoist Chinese leaders about their families, I learned to my
astonishment that, prior to the Communist takeover, many
families had sent their sons to different countries so as to
protect themselves against all possible outcomes of the civil
war. One son would stay with the Communists, another would go

24

to America, occasionally a third would be in Taiwan. With
survival of the unit as a primary goal, families would bend,
like so much bamboo, to a prevailing wind, but it would not
break. The limit of their pliability was established by the
pervasive common sense. In the end, even the most powerful
Chinese rulers ran up against this paradoxical mass--at once
obedient and independent, submissive and self-reliant,
imposing limits less by defining issues than by reserving a
residuum of judgment in execution.

That Communist practice reinforced rather than curbed
China's historic tendencies magnified the frustrations and
ultimately the rage of Mao's last years. Millions had died to
implement Mao's quest for egalitarian virtue. Yet at the end
of the aged Chairman's life, he came up against the reality
that a centrally planned state was turning the Communist
bureaucracy into a feudal class even more pervasive than the

25

one he had destroyed. Bureaucratic prerogatives were now
legitimized by the true faith. Rebelling against the
nightmare that one result of his victory was to repeat the
Chinese tradition of an all-embracing mandarin class, Mao
launched ever more fierce campaigns to save his people--whom
he both loved and despised--from themselves. With each
passing decade, the fading Chairman would submit to yet
another purge the huge, bloated bureaucracies he had found,
destroyed, and then multiplied, only to find that the result
was chaos necessitating even greater bureaucracy to bring it
under control.

In the course of these assaults upon his own system, Mao
kept circling back to a dilemma as ancient as China itself.
Being universal, modern technology intrinsically poses a
threat to any society's claims to uniqueness. And uniqueness
had always been the distinctive claim of Chinese society. To

26

preserve its uniqueness, China had refused to imitate the West
in the 19th century, risking colonization and incurring
humiliation. A century later, one objective of Mao's Cultural
Revolution--from which indeed it derived its name--had been to
eradicate precisely those elements of modernization which
threatened to engulf China in a universal culture. This is
why, in 1966, he had purged Deng Xiaoping--as a proponent of
modernization. Destroying his own disciples became a part of
Mao's vast enterprise to impose on his society his own version
of virtue. For a decade, the aging Chairman renounced all the
tools of progress including education, closing all
universities, recalling his ambassadors from abroad, and
sending all educated people to work in the fields so that they
would experience and hopefully pass on the new revolutionary
reality.

[y]

27

In 1973, a year after my first encounter with Mao, the physically frail but intellectually still vigorous Chairman seemed to have recognized his dilemma. In one of his elliptical references, Mao warned me against Chinese women and their radical views; referring to current pressure in the American Congress on behalf of increased Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, Mao offered to supply an unlimited number of Chinese women to the United States; this was his way, he said to avoid potential disaster for his own country.

At first I thought he was joking, and he actually had to repeat the comment several times before I understood that he was referring to the radicalism of his wife and her coterie.

Mao went on to say he was ending the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese would have to go to school abroad, especially since their language was itself an obstacle to modernization. The Chinese people, he added, were "very obstinate and very

28

conservative." Ever the radical, he continued: "Maybe if the
Soviet Union would throw its bombs and kill all Chinese who
are over thirty, that would solve the problem for us." But
that was another way of saying that the problem was insoluble.

Within a year, Mao was to reverse the maxims advanced in
that conversation. In early 1974, Zhou was for all practical
purposes retired and, two years later, Deng was purged a
second time.

When I saw Mao for the last time, six months before his
death, he was back to the old Chinese statecraft of playing
off one set of barbarians against another. To avoid the
United States moving towards Moscow for fear of confrontation
with China over Taiwan, he recalled, with whimsical irony, 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 Him that for the

29

present it is better to have Taiwan under the care of the
United States."

Zhou Enlai

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 Zhou sought to establish continuity and consistency in
his vast country. Graceful, suave, and elegant, Zhou 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
attaché, General Vernon Walters--the dialogue between the two
sides followed no established diplomatic precedent. As a

30

result of the long separation, the traditional raw material of
diplomacy--the trade issues, the looking after each other's
nationals--was lacking. There was no trade at all and very
few visitors. 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.

Zhou demonstrated the priority he attached to the
American relationship by making available seemingly unlimited
time for the American-Chinese dialogue. We generally met for
eight hours each of the three days of my typical sojourns in
Beijing. Zhou 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
American delegation was "at home," as it were, on Chinese

[y]

31

soil. During these lengthy sessions, including meals, Zhou was never interrupted by any other business. No phone calls or notes were passed to him--indeed, no phone was even in sight, a state of affairs unthinkable if not impermissible in Washington.

Zhou's conduct of the substantive negotiations reinforced the mood he was so meticulous in creating. The issue of China's unity was always raised as a principle, and Zhou insisted that China would never accept a two-China or a one-China, one-Taiwan solution. At the same time, once the principle was established in the Shanghai Communiqué, he never pressed for a practical solution any more than Mao did.

Similarly, Vietnam was mentioned only elliptically, even when, in June 1972, meetings coincided with the mining of North Vietnam's harbors. Zhou insisted that China owed Vietnam some support neither for geopolitical nor ideological reasons, but

May'72

32

as a historical obligation. "The debt we owe them was
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, Zhou was at
pains to stress--and more explicitly--that China would send no
soldiers abroad and hence would threaten no American interest
militarily. Indeed, Zhou never even threatened--as Brezhnev
occasionally had--that America's actions in Vietnam might
impair the relationship with Beijing politically. As to Laos
and Cambodia, Zhou 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

33

many writings in our historical books about the country called
the land of the 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, Zhou and the Nixon Administration could concentrate on the geopolitical aspects of the United States-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, Zhou 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.

34

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 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.

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 Zhou, survivor of the Long March and of decades in Mao's entourage, could--if Chinese interests required it--prove as implacable an opponent as he was a charming