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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 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 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, abdiate and hence would threaten no American interest—militarily. Instead, 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 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."

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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.

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 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, Zhou played an indispensable role.

Where Mao's role was sounding the basic themes as in the overture of a Wagner opera, it was Zhou's task to mount the actual performance by elaborating on Mao's allusions. In his relationship with Mao, Zhou, 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 attitude of a melancholy observer though as premier he was in fact responsible for the entire range of Chinese policy.

Deng was to say later that Zhou had eased the fate of many but never sought to reverse the policies that made their suffering inevitable. This was consistent with how Zhou described the Cultural Revolution to me at our first

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encounter in 1971. He introduced the subject, insisting 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. Zhou himself, he told me, had been kept prisoner in his office by Bad Guards for several days. Fifty years of struggle and sacrifice seemed to dissolve despite his initial doubt as to whether such drastic measures were in fact necessary, he said, if only for the record: "Mao was wiser; he had the courage to look further into the future."

Zhou never explained what that future was or why it required such stupendous suffering to achieve it. Clearly he had made a personal decision that the best he could do was to mitigate the designs of his awesome chief: any attempt to reverse them would merely guarantee his own destruction. When speaking of China's domestic problems, Zhou adopted a passive tone almost as if the policies which he was in fact implementing were someone else's. 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 the United States which had "the courage to use young people" in its government. Yet Zhou never left me with 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, 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 frequent dips at Confucians.

Zhou exploded—the only time I saw him lose his temper. Confucianism, he said, was a doctrine of class oppression white Communism represented a philosophy of liberation. With uncharacteristic insistence, he kept pursuing the assault on Confucianism, no doubt to some degree so as to have it on record at least for the benefit of Mao's niece who was also seated at the obligatory round table.

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In early 1974, Zhou disappeared from exercising his responsibilities, though he remained in office. 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 Zhou 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 interlocutor. My wife and children had accompanied me on the trip, and all of us were taken to see Zhou. The meeting place was referred to as a medical facility although it resembled any other official residence in the Imperial City. To the medically untrained eye, Zhou 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 it. Why substantive conversation would prove more taxing than social chitchat remained unexplained. When I complimented him on appearing to be in good shape, Zhou replied ambiguously: "Appearances can be deceiving."

Zhou 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 Marxist orthodoxy. Counterdemonstrations were organized, and Deng was purged for the second time.

By the time I returned to China for a private visit in 1979, Deng had been restored, and Zhou once more became a symbol—this time for reform. Large 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.

Afterwards, Zhou 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 United States—relations between Washington and Beijing fell into a deep freeze. China's ambassador to Washington, Li Danyu, was recalled, and Beijing refused to accept 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 invoke Zhou 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 Zhou had studied and taken to a statue of the premier as part of the ceremony. Speeches by the

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participants praised Zhou's role in establishing ties with the United States. Zhou served as a symbol for the thaw that followed and that continues to this day.

Deng Xiaoping

In 1974, when Deng Xiaoping became my principal interlocutor, we knew very little about him. Our intelligence specialists told us that he had been secretary general of the Communist Party until he was purged in 1966, charged with being a "capitalist road-er." We learned that he had been restored to the Central Committee of the Communist Party through Mao's personal intervention and against the opposition of the radicals in the Politburo. Though Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, had publicly snubbed Deng shortly after his return to Beijing, he was clearly important to Mao.

Uncharacteristically, Mao apologized for Deng's treatment during the Cultural Revolution, which included working in a factory as a manual laborer, being kept under detention when not working, and seeing his son left paralyzed as a result of having been tossed out of a window by Red Guards.

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The same reports also told us that, in speaking to a delegation of Australian scientists, Deng had struck themes that were to become his trademarks, in the decades ahead China was a poor and developing country, Deng had said, that was in need of scientific exchanges and of learning from advanced countries such as Australia. Deng advised the Australian visitors to look at the backward side of the country in their travels through China and not only at its achievements. Our reports concluded that Deng had been brought in to strengthen Zhou's position and not as a counterweight to the premier.

As soon as we met Deng, we realized that this last assessment was wrong for he wasted no time in distancing himself from Zhou. Deng had arrived in New York in April 1974 as part of a Chinese delegation to a special session of the UN General Assembly dealing with economic development. When I invited the Chinese delegation to dinner, it became immediately evident who the real leader of the delegation was and, even more important, that, far from being restored to ease Zhou's burden (as our intelligence

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--------- End of column ---------

reports claimed), Deng's assignment was, in
fact, to replace him. Several friendly refer-
ences to Zhou were ignored; allusions to
remarks of the premier were answered by
similar quotes from Mao's conversations
with me.

To make sure we got the point, Deng
apropos of nothing, suddenly reverted to
my last conversation with Zhou by asking
whether I was familiar with Confucius.
Fearful of provoking another outburst like
Zhou's, I replied evasively, whereupon
Deng took it upon himself to educate me:
"Confucius, in short, was an expert in keep-
ing up the rites, and very conservative. His
ideology has been binding the Chinese for
over two thousand years. These ideas have
a deep influence on the ideology of the peo-
ple. If we wish to emancipate the people's
ideology from old thinking, we must
remove Confucius. This is a move to eman-
cipate the people's thinking." I asked
whether the debate in China was theoreti-
cal or practical. specifically: "Is it directed against indi-
viduals, living individuals, and not against
ancient individuals?" Deng minced no

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words in confirming that the anti-Confucian
campaign had eminently contemporary
purposes: "There is some ground in what
they say. When you criticize a conservative
ideology, then, naturally, it will affect some
working staffs—some people who repre-
sent the conservative ideology being
attacked."

Having grown accustomed to Mao 's

Deng'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 cynical
interjections and his disdain of the philo-
sophical in favor of the eminently practical.
Compact and wiry, he entered a room ready
for business, with a minimum of banter. A
spitton ever before him—which he used it fre-
quently—Deng rarely wasted time on
pleasantries in getting to the point. Nor did
he feel it necessary to soften his remarks by
swaddling them in parables. He did not
anvil one with solicitude as Zhou was wont to do, nor did he treat me, like Mao had, as a fellow philoso-
pher 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

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enough to handle the rough patches without
personalizing them.

As time went on, I developed enormous
regard for this doughty little man who had
~~united~~ stock of his cause in the face of extraordi-
nary vicissitudes and who would, in time,
transform his country far beyond any of his
predecessors. Mao's traditional China had
left a vacuum, as he himself indicated in his
comment to Nixon. Out of the wreckage of
the Cultural Revolution, Deng fashioned a
modernization that is likely to turn China
into an economic superpower during the
21st century.

Even as he was distancing himself from
~~Zhou~~ Deng found many small ways to
show his commitment to close relations
with the United States. In October 1975,
Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua—who had
allied himself with Mao's radical wife—
made a blisteringly unfriendly toast at the
------ End of column ------
opening banquet and, when I started to
reply in kind, the television lights were
turned off. The next morning, Deng demon-
stratively invited me and the American del-
egation to an impromptu picnic in the

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Fragrant Hills near Beijing and went to
ostentatious lengths to put the full weight of
his person and office 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 describ-
ing, 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 prob-
lems of common concern and share many
common points."

Deng never let any doubt that he consid-
ered cordial relations with the United
States the central element of Chinese for-
eign 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 require-
ments of Chinese security in a world com-
posed of a menacing Russia, a resurgent
Japan, a potentially unified Korea, an
emerging India, and a Vietnam in the
process of achieving hegemony over
Indochina. And it was based on Deng's con-
viction that China could progress economi-

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cally only in a relaxed international atmosphere for which good relations with the United States were the essential precondition.

Deng measured challenged America's good

faith not only to the question of its commitment to con-

training the Soviet Union. His disagree-

ments concerned the tactics required to reach agreed objectives. "Even when we differ in views," said Deng as he welcomed me in October 1975 on what turned out to

be a flight-right word? visit, "we do so as familiar'

friends." 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 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, it became increasingly apparent that he would transform Chinese society, Deng's reforms started from the conviction

that the suffering caused by Mao's

entitled the Chinese upheavals would turn into a travesty if it

people

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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, Zhou) sought to transform Chinese society in
accordance with Marxist theory, Deng
insisted on altering Marxist dogma to fit
economic reality; "I do not care whether a
cat is black or white so long as it catches
mice" was one of his widely quoted apho-
risms. On many occasions he said to me,

"Reality is our teacher." *practice overrode theory by implication, even—or perhaps especially—Marxist theory.* He
said to me in

1987, "I am neither a conservative nor a
reformer," I seek truth from facts." Deng
---------- End of column ----------

was a pragmatist 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.

Shortly after President Carter normal-
ized 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

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in Washington, and courtesy required him to call on me. And to the extraordinary displeasure of his security personnel, he carried out this pledge, walking from his hotel to where I was staying, and 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 of economic reform. But for the only time in my experience dealing with Chinese leaders, philosophical and practical disagreements were made explicit. Hua sought to spur production by traditional Soviet methods, emphasizing 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. Therefore, consumer goods had to have priority over heavy industry, whatever

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this time," concluded Deng. "We have
made too many mistakes already."

Soon after, Hua faded into some minor
position. Over the course of the next
decade, Deng implemented what he had
described at the lunch in 1979, bringing
about more permanent and fundamental
changes than even those who had destroyed
ancient China. I would meet with Deng
once a year for extended conversations
until he retired from his formal positions in
1990. The meetings would generally begin
with a discussion of the international situa-
tion, but reform was the dominant theme.

In September 1987, Deng described the
changes he was planning in the Standing
Committee of the Politburo as part of the
effort to bring younger people into leading
positions. Given the resistance he was
meeting, it would probably take ten years to
complete the process of rejuvenation. To set
an example, Deng said he intended to give
up all but one of his formal positions. "So
you can rest at ease," concluded Deng, *smoking* that
the process will continue.

Deng stressed that since the scale of the
Chinese effort was so unprecedented, there

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would be ups and downs; mistakes would undoubtedly be made. Both courage and prudence were needed to deepen and accelerate structural reform. This would be accompanied by structural political ~~moved~~ reform

1st.

which was, however, far more complicated since it involved the vested interests of millions. The "division of work" between the Communist Party and the government needed to be revised, and that meant that many party members would have to change jobs as managers took over responsibility from party secretaries. Such massive changes were possible only if the basic authority was ~~were~~ maintained; otherwise the chaos of the Cultural Revolution would surely return.

In 1988, Deng elaborated on his political reform. He was now ready to transfer power from the party to the government.

The Communist role would be limited to "guidance on philosophical issues." On this occasion, too, Deng chided me gently for having predicted in print that China would be a great power by the second decade of the 21st century. I underestimated the problems, he said; 2050 was a more realistic esti-

And he initiated a close win, which would be few, clinically a year later the reform movement having accelerated beyond the leaders' ability to control, and felt obliged to protect his conception of reform at least partly with the support of ideology.

womb

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window and maiming him for life. Believing
that the whole program of reform was at
stake, he opted, with heavy-handed meth-
ods, for economic over political reform.

Unquestionably, Deng _he has_ improved the life
of the Chinese people. And having achieved
the reform to which his life was dedicated,
he retired to permit successors to imple-
ment his legacy. The reform he sought did
not aim at pluralistic democracy. Yet _At the same time_, Deng
was too wise not to understand that the
changes he wrought had a momentum of
their own _independent of the intentions of their originator_. Clearly Deng's revolution is irre-
versible. Whatever happens, China cannot
return either to the state-controlled econo-
my or to the rigid political conformity of the
Mao period. At the same time, Deng's eco-
nomic reforms and the market economy
they have spawned will require growing
constitutionalism—that is, predictability—
even if pluralistic democracy is not estab-
lished. The relative position between
provinces and central government may well
fluctuate as it has throughout Chinese histo-
ry. Alterations in leadership and institu-
tions can affect emphasis not direction

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