# 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 3, 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

2

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 slogan 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 InochChina. "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

3

leaders, philosophical and practical disagreements were made ex-
plicit. Hua sought to spur production by traditional Soviet meth-
ods, emphasizing heavy industry, improvements in agricultural
production based on communes, 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 pro-
duced. Therefore, consumer goods had to have priority over heavy
industry, the ingenuity of Chinese farmers had to be liberated, the
Communist Party needed to become less intrusive and govern-
ment would have to be decentralized. The conversation continued
over a meal where five tables seated 10 each. In answer to my ques-
tion as to the balance between centralization and decentralization,
Deng stressed the importance of decentralization in a vast country
of huge population and significant regional differences. But this
was not the principal challenge, Deng said. Modern technology

had to be introduced to China, tens of
thousands of Chinese students would be
sent abroad ("we have nothing to fear
from Western education") and the abuses
of the Cultural Revolution would be end-
ed once and for all. While Deng had not
raised his voice, the tables around us had
fallen silent. The other Chinese present
were sitting at the edge of their seats, not
even pretending not to be listening in on
the old man as he outlined his vision of
their future. "We have to get it right 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 dinner in 1979.

Our annual meetings until Deng re-
tired from his formal positions in 1990
would generally begin with a discussion
of the international situation, but reform
was the dominant theme. In September
1987, Deng described the changes he was
planning to rejuvenate the Standing
Committee of the Politburo. Given the
resistance he was encountering, that
process would probably take 10 years. 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, "that the process will continue."

Deng predicted that since the scale of the Chinese effort was so
unprecedented, there would be ups and downs; mistakes would
undoubtedly be made. Both courage and prudence were needed to
depen and accelerate structural reform. This would be accompa-
nied by structural political reform, which was, however, far more
complicated since it involved the vested interests of millions. The
"division of work" between the Communist Party and the govern-
ment needed to be revised, and that meant that many party mem-
bers would have to change jobs as managers took over responsibil-
ity from party secretaries. Such massive changes were possible
only if the basic authority was maintained, he argued; otherwise
the chaos of the Cultural Revolution would surely return.

In 1988, Deng stated that he was now ready to transfer power
from the party to the government. The Communist role would be
limited to "guidance on philosophical issues." And he indicated
that those issues would be few. Ironically, a year later, the reform
movement having accelerated beyond the leaders' ability to control
it, Deng felt obliged to protect his conception of reform, to return at
least partly to the womb of ideology. 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 underesti-
mated the problems, he said; 2050 was a more realistic estimate.
Part of Deng's motive was probably to discourage any temptation
to apply the containment policy to China.

My last meeting with Deng was in November 1989, four months
after Tiananmen Square, for a discussion followed by lunch. Noth-
ing had changed, he said; he was still the reformer he had always
been. He was defending reform, he said, not ideology. "In this
country," he said, "if stability is lost, it will take decades to regain."
Deng had difficulty understanding, he averred, why the United
States had raised no ideological issues when China was rigidly
Communist but was interfering in its domestic affairs now that
China was rapidly becoming a socialist market economy. He of-
fered a package deal for resolving the human-rights issues then on
the table: the release of a dissident who had sought refuge in the
American Embassy and new consideration for some who had been

imprisoned in the aftermath of the
Tiananmen Square upheaval, in ex-
change for a resumption of a Sino-
American political dialogue.

The offer was not taken up imme-
diately by the Bush administration,
which was concentrating on an immi-
nent summit with Gorbachev at Mal-
ta and was then deflected by the fall
of the Berlin wall. By the time the dia-
logue was resumed, Deng had be-
come more cautious and preferred to
move step by step rather than in one
fell swoop. At the same time, Ameri-
can human-rights goals had also be-
come more ambitious.

Deng considered the ultimate purpose of his life to be reform. For that, he struggled—and suffered—with courage and dedication. Paradoxically, it was the passion for reform that shaped his attitude toward the events which fall under the heading of Tiananmen Square. To American observers, they seemed a flowering of democracy. But Deng saw the demonstrations through the prism of two decades earlier, when his residence was besieged and his son

maimed for life. Believing that the whole program of reform was at
stake, he opted, with heavy-handed methods, for economic over
political reform.

Unquestionably, Deng improved the life of the Chinese people. And having achieved the reform to which his life was dedicated, he retired to permit successors to implement his legacy. The reform he sought did not aim at pluralistic democracy. Yet Deng was too wise not to understand that the changes he wrought had a momentum of their own. Clearly Deng's revolution is irreversible. Deng's economic reforms and the socialist market economy they have spawned will require predictability and therefore a growing constitutionalism, even if pluralistic democracy is not established. Decentralization will spawn a kind of federalism. Yet alterations in leadership and institutions can affect emphasis, not direction. Americans need to remember how important a role Sino-American cooperation played in Deng's design. And they owe it to Deng's struggles to recall not only what remains to be done but how far Deng brought his ancient people toward a better life by an act of will and devoted service.

This article is adapted from "Years of Renewal" by Henry A.
Kissinger, to be published by Little, Brown and Co. in 1998.

LIBERTY, ARMY PICTORIAL

While less ideological
than Mao, Deng was
more nationalist. He
was passionate about
regaining possession
of Hong Kong.

MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK

Newsweek 3/3/97

MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK

43

SPECIAL REPORT

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 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.

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."

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."

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

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.

Mao

Greeting Kissinger in 1975

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

44

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

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 fashioned 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

AVERT-AP

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

46

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

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, 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, the ingenuity of Chinese farmers had to be liberated, the Communist Party needed to become less intrusive and government would have to be decentralized. The conversation continued over a meal where five tables seated 10 each. In answer to my question as to the balance between centralization and decentralization, Deng stressed the importance of decentralization in a vast country of huge population and significant regional differences. But this was not the principal challenge, Deng said. Modern technology

had to be introduced to China, tens of thousands of Chinese students would be sent abroad ("we have nothing to fear from Western education") and the abuses of the Cultural Revolution would be ended once and for all. While Deng had not raised his voice, the tables around us had fallen silent. The other Chinese present were sitting at the edge of their seats, not even pretending not to be listening in on the old man as he outlined his vision of their future. "We have to get it right 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 dinner in 1979.

Our annual meetings until Deng retired from his formal positions in 1990 would generally begin with a discussion of the international situation, but reform was the dominant theme. In September 1987, Deng described the changes he was planning to rejuvenate the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Given the resistance he was encountering, that process would probably take 10 years. To set an example, Deng said he intended to

Deng predicted that since the scale of the Chinese effort was so unprecedented, there 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 reform, 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 maintained, he argued; otherwise the chaos of the Cultural Revolution would surely return.

a great power by the second decade of the 21st century. I underestimated the problems, he said; 2050 was a more realistic estimate. Part of Deng's motive was probably to discourage any temptation to apply the containment policy to China.

My last meeting with Deng was in November 1989, four months after Tiananmen Square, for a discussion followed by lunch. Nothing had changed, he said; he was still the reformer he had always been. He was defending reform, he said, not ideology. "In this country," he said, "if stability is lost, it will take decades to regain." Deng had difficulty understanding, he averred, why the United States had raised no ideological issues when China was rigidly Communist but was interfering in its domestic affairs now that China was rapidly becoming a socialist market economy. He offered a package deal for resolving the human-rights issues then on the table: the release of a dissident who had sought refuge in the American Embassy and new consideration for some who had been

imprisoned in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square upheaval, in exchange for a resumption of a Sino-American political dialogue.

The offer was not taken up immediately by the Bush administration, which was concentrating on an imminent summit with Gorbachev at Malta and was then deflected by the fall of the Berlin wall. By the time the dialogue was resumed, Deng had become more cautious and preferred to move step by step rather than in one fell swoop. At the same time, American human-rights goals had also become more ambitious.

*This article is adapted from "Years of Renewal" by Henry A. Kissinger, to be published by Little, Brown and Co. in 1998.*

LIBERATION ARMY PICTORIAL

A strong leader, Greeting military officers

> While less ideological than Mao, Deng was more nationalist. He was passionate about regaining possession of Hong Kong.

MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK 47

42 NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

Moving the world:
Mao Zedong and
Deng Xiaoping
in 1974

XINHUA

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 expan-
sionism 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 doctri-
nal heterodoxy.

MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK

SPECIAL REPORT

Lion in winter: Greeting Kissinger in 1975

AV

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

And your slogan will be peace: to bring down the Socialist imperialisms for the sake of peace. ...

The blueprint for Sino-American relations established by Nixon and Mao remained remarkably consistent through five administra-tions of both parties: a parallel strategy of preventing “hegemo-ny”—in other words, of preserving the global balance of power; no challenges by either side to the vital concerns of the other; accept-ance by the United States of the principle of one China and dis-avowal of a two-China or a one-China, one-Taiwan policy; and im-plicit understanding that China would not press the Taiwan issue to the point of force.

Mao's geopolitical, single-minded and essentially nonideologi-cal orientation with respect to foreign policy stood in stark contrast to the dominant role he assigned to ideology at home. When we en-countered 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 premoni-tions of its fragility. Two contradictory impulses seemed to be undermining the revolutionary élan: the persistence of tra-ditional Chinese values and the very mo-men-tum of the Communist state. Mao sounded the first theme in his reply to a Nixon compliment on having trans-formed 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 up-root 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 nu-merous than those of any other society, often by assertions of absolute power. But the very vastness of the Chinese pop-ulation imposed a limit on the govern-ment because the ruler could never be sure that he was in fact controlling his teeming, individualistic, entrepreneurial and family-oriented subjects. In the end, a kind of pluralism would assert itself, not as the result of a political philosophy

expounding liberty but because the family, not the state, has been the irrepressible purpose of Chinese life. Families would bend, like so much bamboo, to a prevailing wind, but they would not break. Even the most powerful Chinese rulers ran up against this para-doxical mass—at once obedient and independent, submissive and self-reliant, imposing limits less by direct challenges than by hesi-tance in executing orders they considered unreasonable.

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 one he had destroyed. Bureaucratic prerogatives were now legitimized by the true faith. Rebelling against that nightmare, Mao launched ever more fierce campaigns to save his people from themselves. With each passing decade, the fading Chairman would wreak another purge on the huge, bloated bureaucracies only to create more chaos, necessitating even more 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. Intrinsically universal, modern technology poses a threat to any society's claims to uniqueness. And uniqueness had always been the distinctive claim of Chinese society. To preserve that 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. Destroying his own disciples became Mao's vast enterprise. For a decade, the ag-ing Chairman renounced progress, closing all universities, recall-ing his ambassadors from abroad and sending all educated people to work in the fields so that they would experience and pass on the new revolutionary reality.

In 1973, a year after my first encounter with Mao, the physically frail but intellectually still vigorous Chairman seemed to have rec-ognized his dilemma. In one of his elliptical references, Mao warned me against Chinese women and offered to let an unlimited number immigrate to the United States to avoid 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 Revolu-tion. The Chinese would have to go to school abroad, especially since their language was itself an obstacle to modernization. The Chinese peo-ple, he added, were "very obstinate and very conservative." Ever the rad-ical, he continued: "Maybe if the So-viet Union would throw its bombs and kill all Chinese who are over 30, 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 conver-sation. In early 1974 Zhou was for all practical purposes retired, and two years later Deng was purged a sec-ond time. When I saw Mao for the last time, six months before his death, he was back to the old Chi-nese statecraft of playing off one set of barbarians against another. To avoid the United States' moving to-ward Moscow for fear of confronta-tion with China over Taiwan, he re-

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

N 1974, WHEN DENG XIAOPING BECAME MY PRINCIPAL IN-terlocutor, we knew very little about him. he had been sec-retary general of the Communist Party until he was arrest-ed in 1966, charged with being a "capitalist roader." We learned that he had been restored to the Central Committee of the Communist Party through Mao's personal interven-tion 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. Un-characteristically, Mao apologized for Deng's humiliation during the Cultural Revolution. 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. China was a poor country, he had said, in need of scientific exchanges and of learning from advanced countries such as Australia. Deng advised the Aus-tralian visitors to look at the backward side of China in their travels and not only at its achievements.

KERTONE, SIGMA

One of a kind: With Deng and Zhou in 1958

Mao overshadowed all his subordinates by the near-religious awe in which he seemed to be held (or which they thought it wise to affect)

MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK 45

SPECIAL REPORT

spitteen 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 fashion'd a modernization that is likely to turn China into an economic superpower during the 21st century.

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 nerve 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 ..."

ASHER HU

No-nonsense style: With Nixon in 1989

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

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

Our annual meetings until Deng retired from his formal positions in 1990 would generally begin with a discussion of the international situation, but reform was the dominant theme. In September 1987, Deng described the changes he was planning to rejuvenate the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Given the resistance he was encountering, that process would probably take 10 years. 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, "that the process will continue."

imprisoned in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square upheaval, in exchange for a resumption of a Soviet-American political dialogue.

LIBERATION ARMY PICTORIAL

A strong leader: Greeting military officers

MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK 47

SPECIAL REPORT

# An Emigrant's Hopes for China

Once I thought Deng, the Reformer, could rescue his people. After Tiananmen
I realized the people would rescue themselves. BY BETTE BAO LORD

EARTHQUAKES PRESAGE THE DEATH OF AN EMPEROR, or so the Chinese believe. Deng Xiaoping possessed no such title, and for the years before his death the only office he held was that of chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association. And yet, as forceful as shifting tectonic plates, the last of the Long Marchers changed the landscape of China. His actions, like phenomena of nature, were not amenable to prayers nor qualified by the price to be paid. As paramount leader Deng did as Deng saw fit. In doing so, he inspired praise and institutionalized peril.

I met him twice. On both occasions, we broke bread. The first time was soon after Mao had brought back the twice-purged

"capitalist roader" to help clean the hellish mess left by the Cultural Revolution. Then Mao held all the trumps, and Deng's hands literally shook. I can't recall anything he said that night. I only recall thinking that the diminutive man, whose toes when he was seated barely touched the rug, must not be long for this world. That was more than 20 years ago. Only in retrospect did I see that appearing weak and forgettable was the shrewdest disguise for a courtier sizing the throne.

The second time was in 1989, two months before the students began marching against corruption and for democracy, at Deng's banquet for President Bush. Had I leaned to my left I could have poured mao tai into our host's wineglass, but for him, throughout the 12 courses the wife of the American ambassador did not exist. No, worse. By befriending dissidents, I had become as an insolent child, unworthy of a glance, much less a nod from the Patriarch. A tyke to be caned as soon as the outsiders were out the door. How dare anyone with a strand of Chinese hair think for herself?

Once I thought Deng, the Reformer, could rescue the people of China. After Tiananmen, I realized that the people of

China would rescue themselves and enjoy the esteem of the world that could have been his, had he in his final years not been hard of hearing. How ironic. Heeding the cries of the people crushed by the Cultural Revolution, he climbed to power. Deaf to the cries of the people yoked by corruption and repression, he fell from grace.

In joining Mao, he nevertheless leaves a substantial legacy. Nowadays Chinese live by his words—getting rich is glorious. It is, however, the only aspiration the party of Deng allows. Someday Chinese will join their former Communist brethren around the globe and live as they choose to live, the lives of free people.

Amidst the murk of China's immediate prospects, one certainty looms: once again history will be rewritten. In the spring of 1976 hundreds of thousands gathered at Tiananmen Square to mourn Zhou Enlai's death and petition for Deng, who espoused his comrades' more benign ways. The radical regime at the time branded

the event counterrevolutionary, but even so, its fiendish Gang of Four cleared the square without calling in the tanks. Two years later Deng secured his popular mandate by overturning that verdict and pronouncing the incident a patriotic milestone.

So will leaders who follow Deng overturn the official judgment on the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989. However full their pockets and bellies thanks to the economic policies of Deng, Chinese still ache for those who perished when the tanks rolled. However unfettered Chinese look going about their business today, they still must tiptoe, kowtow and pay lip service and proffer cash under the table to open doors that may at any moment be slammed in their faces. However obliged they may feel for his genuine ac-

complishments, however forgiving and fearful of the unknown, they will always remember that Deng sullied his place in history with his own hands.

The tragedy of this pivotal figure is that a man able to change a country as poor and as densely populated and vast as China was unable to change his thinking. He believed that economic reform was imperative. And so he dashed the iron rice bowl and opened markets, boosting China's GNP until it was the fastest growing in the world. He believed that political reform was suicide. And so he suppressed all who disagreed. In an age when billions of dollars exchange hands across oceans in less than a day and satellites circle the globe sowing seeds that bloom in the remotest parts of this planet, he secreted himself at home and prized his own counsel alone. Though millions of voices across the land had risked all to be heard, he never entertained second thoughts. To the end, his credo remained absolute: feed bodies, forget starving souls, and the party, which always knows best, retains control.

One day he will pause during a game of bridge with those jolly Red giants—Lenin, Stalin and Mao—to see a homeland he won't recognize. I cannot picture it exactly, but my hopes are high. Technology and pent-up longings, skills and energies are compelling Chinese too fast in too many directions for the party to seize them all and keep them under wraps.

I believe the soul of China cannot be killed by emperors or foreigners. It has survived for 5,000 years. I believe those who look to the horizon and see the specter of a more democratic China and cry, "The Great Wall is falling! The Middle Kingdom is disintegrating! Chaos is coming!" wear blinders. I believe in the Chinese people. I saw them in the spring of 1989, a million strong, marching peacefully, caring for one another, walking tall to embrace the young, their future.

GABRIEL HO—REUTERS

Once again, history will be rewritten:
Grieving in front of a poster in Shenzhen

LORD is the author of "The Middle Heart" and the chairwoman of Freedom House.

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

"Every yacht designer
in the world knows who their
primary opposition is: it's us."

Bruce Farr enjoys racing his yachts every bit as much as designing them.

His enthusiastic approach means that his treasured Rolex is subjected to more than its fair share of ill-treatment.

"In serious racing you crash into all sorts of things. My watch will often get whacked against winches and sidestays and fittings."

But, like his designs, his Rolex

survives to sail another day. "It's bulletproof. And utterly reliable."

Reliability means a lot to Farr: "Reliability engineering is the most important aspect of structuring a boat."

Who are we to argue? For 'reliability engineering' is precisely what goes into every single Rolex.

Which is why it's not just every yacht designer who knows who the opposition is today.

But every watchmaker too.

ROLEX
of Geneva

The Rolex Oyster Submariner Chronom

WORLD VIEW

THE MONEY
SOLUTION

Payoff and payback are playing too big
a role in justice and punishment

BY MEG GREENFIELD

RENE MACULA - AP

Too much forgiveness? O.J. on a golf course

SUDDENLY IT IS BEING SAID THAT we need more forgiveness in Washington. I think that we have, if anything, too much of it now. I don't mean forgiveness of crimes and lesser trespasses that are admitted and repented; they should be forgiven. But the forgiveness is supposed to come after the admission of wrongdoing, not before or instead of it. Practically no wrongdoing is ever really admitted, let alone repented, here anymore. Instead, if misdeeds cannot be ignored, they tend to be recast as the work

of some kind of devil—brutal political necessity, say, or early psychological mishap. The result is that people in Washington are always forgiving acts that those who perpetrated them never got around to acknowledging in the first place In the Bible it is said that the wages of sin is death. In certain circles nowadays, the wages of sin is a $2 million book advance.

This brings me to the real theme of the week: the role of money in the administration of justice. I have a feeling that historians looking back on our tumultuous times are going to say, "You know, those people were a whole lot better at crime than they were at punishment." And they will be right. Leave aside the element of capriciousness in the way criminal justice is meted out. Think only about our deep confusion and ambivalence about the role money should play in it. For instance, most people would accept the notion of direct restitution and recompense as good policy and good citizenship: the righting of a wrong, or at least the alleviation of its effect, by the one who committed it. But right off you sail into a couple of problems that people are less comfortable with.

The first is that there is a tendency to go, either formally in court or informally in the levying of various fines, from the concept of compelling amends to the concept of inflicting extreme hardship on the one who has to pay, be it O. J. Simpson or Newt Gingrich. (These, I hasten to add, are two utterly different kinds of examples in seriousness and scale, with nothing in common but a money penalty.) In theory Gingrich is making some kind of restitution for certain expenses incurred by the investigation of his funding practices, and Simpson is being asked to pay punitive damages. But whether it is those who insist that Gingrich pay the $300,000 from his own pocket or those who rather like the idea of Simpson's possibly being financially obliterated by the jury's $25 million award, we have entered a different realm here. It's not just, I think, that the idea of aiming for financial ruin as a punishment

when the criminal law fails seems misplaced to a lot of people. It is also that when you leave the realm of true recompense or restitution, you also enter the realm of the accused's being seen as able to buy his way out of other punishment, not to mention to pay off guilt.

And in case after case that is settled, there is something of that. Parties that are being sued will offer large sums just to call off the case. The terms will often include findings that let them off the hook, no matter whether they had done what they were accused of or not. The money award, in other words, will paper over the misbehavior. We will hear how the company or individual did not plead guilty to anything. The other party will take the money and move on. The result can be that the financial settlement becomes as much a *substitute* for facing up to the misconduct as a penalty for having engaged in it.

Increasingly these days, we try to correct for these things by placing limits on who can profit from what, who can say what and so forth. So-called "Son of Sam" legislation, designed to keep a criminal from raking in profit on a book about his crimes, gets put into law. On a different order, but also to control an uncontrollable aftermath, Speaker Gingrich agrees to (and is soon charged with having violated) certain restrictions on what he may say about his dealings with the House ethics committee

and what political maneuvers he may make to counter their impact. These things speak to me of an unease with the way money plays into our punishment schemes. And although the restrictions may work in some cases, they are often doomed. That is because, finally, those leveling the restrictions will be unable to guide the dialogue forever or channel the profits precisely the way they want to, either.

William Harvey, who discovered the complicated circulation of the blood, would be stumped, I think, if he were asked to do the same for the circulation of the money in public and/or celebrity life. Punish as you will: there will always be something else stashed away somewhere, different kinds of fees and compensations. For any number of our miscreants in high places or high profile, destitution isn't an option. So the money solution, as punishment, when it goes beyond the admirable impulse to pay back and rebuild, can mean the public loses both ways: there is an uncomfortable sense of having imposed a kind of gratuitous and off-the-point penalty and, worse, it doesn't even work.

I think the money solution is often a kind of cop-out—a way around the problem of ascertaining responsibility and administering proportionate punishment if wrongdoing (or liability) is found. I completely understand the instinct to pursue it if you believe that criminal proceedings reached an unjust result. And I am aware that from earliest times, fines and compensations and similar transactions were part of the human attempt to render justice. But I don't think they are doing a lot for justice in our own time. Often they merely fog the issue or deform it (as in those cases where the victims get a pittance and the lawyers get a pile) or seem to achieve a result they don't. I think we are increasingly using money to get around justice, not to impose it. Count on it: the unjust, or most of them anyway, will get richer (they have their ways) and the society that imposes the huge fines on them will feel guilty for having done so. There has to be a better way.

2

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

Soviet Union with only Belgium as an ally!

More important, China is simply not Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union—a revolutionary, messianic state with an aggressive dictator firmly in power who is bent on spreading his power and ideology abroad. China has neither the ability—with a defense budget around $10 billion—nor yet the inclination to assert its military supremacy even in the East or South China Seas. If it posed such a challenge then surely we must confront it, but it took 40 years, nine administrations, a worldwide alliance and $6 trillion to contain and transform the Soviet regime. It is worth waiting for some clarity before we take on another such endeavor.

Engagement, on the other hand, is a fact, not a policy. The United States is actively involved in maintaining the open world economy, global institutions and international political order. Thus, it welcomes every country that believes in these principles. One of America's central objectives must be to help integrate other great powers—particularly China and Russia—into this global system. But it cannot “integrate” China into the world at the cost of the principles on which that system is based. It is pointless admitting China into the World Trade Organization if done so on terms that undermine its core value-free trade.

Over the next decade China's ambitions are bound to expand, bumping up against ours and those of our allies in the region. Washington should treat Beijing with the respect due a great world power, welcoming its participation and clout in all areas of international life. But the United States must also make clear to Beijing—as it would any other great power—that if certain lines are crossed, most importantly the borders of Taiwan, it would seek to contain China's influence, provide military aid to East Asian states that felt threatened and reverse the integration of China into the various institutions of economic and political power. This could be called a strategy of deterrence.

Such an approach sees Beijing as troublesome but without the power or appeal to be a global rival. It takes into account the potential for instability in China. Beijing has unleashed history's most revolutionary force within its borders—capitalism. It may not bring liberalism or democracy, but it will certainly bring turmoil and change.

Deterrence may be morally unsatisfying to those who want to confront or co-opt Beijing, but it reflects the uncertain reality we face. It is, in the parlance of global capitalism, a hedge strategy.

# The Freedom to Bowl

‘We can do whatever we want’—except dissent

BY CARROLL BOGERT

THE FREEDOM TO SING A SONG ISN'T ENSHRINED IN ANY BILL OF RIGHTS. In a country without freedom of religion or freedom of speech, it may even sound trivial. But not to Lin Jiqiu, 34, a member of the Jiantang singing troupe in Xiamen. Her troupe performs *nanguan*, an ancient and distinctive music that was nearly wiped out after the 1949 revolution, when communist cadres forced them to drop their 16th-century love ballads for propaganda ditties. ("Welcome the Dragon" became a big tune after the railroad line to Xiamen was com-

pleted in the 1950s.) But in 1994, a few troupes finally were legalized and began performing across the province. "When I don't have time to drop by and sing with the group," says Lin, "it's hard for me to sleep at night."

How free is China today? The Chinese authorities like to answer such questions very precisely (Chairman Mao was 70 percent correct and 30 percent incorrect, the Communist Party has determined). Without any phony attempts at precision, it seems fair to say that China is more and more free for a very large number of people and not at all free for a very small number of people. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are now able to change jobs, get divorced, take vacations, complain vociferously on talk radio and vote out their village leaders. Yet about 3,000 are in prison for their political views, the highest number of any country in the world.

The socialist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg once said that “freedom is always only freedom for those who think differently.” And those people, by definition, are a minority. Singer Lin Jiqiu doesn’t regret her inability to publish an anti-communist newspaper. On the streets of Shanghai these days, no one seems afraid of a Western reporter with an open notebook. “Whaddya wanna know?” asks one cocky teenager, hanging out with his pals out-

side a popular bowling alley. “We can make money and have fun. We can do whatever we want.” Some people’s idea of freedom is the freedom to bowl. And who can blame them? Those people are free in China today.

Chen Longde is not. The Zhejiang native sent an open letter to China's Parliament last year, calling for a re-evaluation of the label "counterrevolutionary" to describe the 1989 democracy protests. He was quickly jailed. And just days after he arrived in the Luoshan labor camp last August, one of the prison bosses, Tang Jinbao, beat him so severely with an electric cattle prod that Chen leaped from a third-story window to escape. He broke his right hip and leg, but survived. Relatives told NEWSWEEK that after being discharged from the hospital, Chen was sent to make wool shirts at a new labor camp, Shiliping. Nothing in "Asian values," even as touted by practitioners more subtle than the Chinese Communist Party, can explain away that kind of treatment. Indeed, Beijing has signed many international agreements renouncing the use of torture.

But foreigners must recognize less tangible measures of freedom, too. Jing Jun, 40, now an anthropology professor at the City College of New York, remembers how his little schoolmates in Beijing used to criticize him for throwing away candy wrappers instead of folding them carefully, the way everyone else did. "That would never happen today," he says. "Who the hell cares?" China today is hectic, chaotic, motley, uneven and rather wild. It's a thousand times freer than it used to be. And if it were just a little freer, a smart guy like Jing Jun might want to live there.

With GEORGE WEHRFRITZ and MIKE LARIS in Beijing and LYNETTE CLEMETSON in Shanghai

PASCAL G. YU

**Zero tolerance:** 1989 execution of 'counterrevolutionaries'

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

Moving the world:

XINHUA

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 pa-
pers 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 Chi-
nese 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 mes-
sage was that American-Chinese relations were benign. After an-
other meeting, the photo depicted Mao wagging a finger at me, but
he was smiling, so that the overall impact was that of a kind, some-
what 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 be-
fore 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.

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

SPECIAL REPORT

30

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

And your slogan will be peace: to bring down the Socialist imperi-
alisms for the sake of peace. ...

The blueprint for Sino-American relations established by Nixon and Mao remained remarkably consistent through five administra-
tions of both parties: a parallel strategy of preventing "hegemo-
ny"—in other words, of preserving the global balance of power; no
challenges by either side to the vital concerns of the other; accept-
ance by the United States of the principle of one China and dis-
avowal of a two-China or a one-China, one-Taiwan policy; and im-
plicit understanding that China would not press the Taiwan issue
to the point of force.

Mao's geopolitical, single-minded and essentially nonideologi-
cal orientation with respect to foreign policy stood in stark contrast
to the dominant role he assigned to ideology at home. When we en-
countered 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 premoni-
tions of its fragility. Two contradictory
impulses seemed to be undermining the
revolutionary élan: the persistence of tra-
ditional Chinese values and the very mo-
mentum of the Communist state. Mao
sounded the first theme in his reply to a
Nixon compliment on having trans-
formed 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 up-
root 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 nu-
merous than those of any other society,
often by assertions of absolute power.
But the very vastness of the Chinese pop-
ulation imposed a limit on the govern-
ment because the ruler could never be
sure that he was in fact controlling his
teeming, individualistic, entrepreneurial
and family-oriented subjects. In the end,
a kind of pluralism would assert itself,
not as the result of a political philosophy

expounding liberty but because the family, not the state, has been
the irrepressible purpose of Chinese life. Families would bend, like
so much bamboo, to a prevailing wind, but they would not break.
Even the most powerful Chinese rulers ran up against this para-
doxical mass—at once obedient and independent, submissive and
self-reliant, imposing limits less by direct challenges than by hesi-
tance in executing orders they considered unreasonable.

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. Destroying his
own disciples became Mao's vast enterprise. For a decade, the ag-
ing Chairman renounced progress, closing all universities, recall-
ing his ambassadors from abroad and sending all educated people
to work in the fields so that they would experience and pass on the
new revolutionary reality.

In 1973, a year after my first encounter with Mao, the physically
frail but intellectually still vigorous Chairman seemed to have rec-
ognized his dilemma. In one of his elliptical references, Mao
warned me against Chinese women and offered to let an unlimited
number immigrate to the United States to avoid 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 Revo-
lution. The Chinese would have to go
to school abroad, especially since
their language was itself an obstacle
to modernization. The Chinese peo-
ple, he added, were "very obstinate
and very conservative." Ever the rad-
ical, he continued: "Maybe if the So-
viet Union would throw its bombs
and kill all Chinese who are over 30,
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 conver-
sation. In early 1974 Zhou was for all
practical purposes retired, and two
years later Deng was purged a sec-
ond time. When I saw Mao for the
last time, six months before his
death, he was back to the old Chi-
nese statecraft of playing off one set
of barbarians against another. To
avoid the United States' moving to-
ward Moscow for fear of confronta-
tion with China over Taiwan, he re-

KEYSTONE—STOHA

IN 1974, WHEN DENG XIAOPING BECAME MY PRINCIPAL IN-
terlocutor, we knew very little about him. he had been sec-
retary general of the Communist Party until he was arrest-
ed in 1966, charged with being a "capitalist roader." We
learned that he had been restored to the Central Committee
of the Communist Party through Mao's personal interven-
tion 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. Un-
characteristically, Mao apologized for Deng's humiliation during
the Cultural Revolution. 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. China was a poor
country, he had said, in need of scientific exchanges and of learning
from advanced countries such as Australia. Deng advised the Aus-
tralian visitors to look at the backward side of China in their travels
and not only at its achievements.

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

SPECIAL REPORT

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.”

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 nuance 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 ...”

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.

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.

AVERY-AP

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

Deng predicted that since the scale of the Chinese effort was so
unprecedented, there 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 accompa-
nied by structural political reform, which was, however, far more
complicated since it involved the vested interests of millions. The
"division of work" between the Communist Party and the govern-
ment needed to be revised, and that meant that many party mem-
bers would have to change jobs as managers took over responsibil-
ity from party secretaries. Such massive changes were possible
only if the basic authority was maintained, he argued; otherwise
the chaos of the Cultural Revolution would surely return.

The offer was not taken up imme-
diately by the Bush administration,
which was concentrating on an immi-
nent summit with Gorbachev at Mal-
ta and was then deflected by the fall
of the Berlin wall. By the time the diag-
logue was resumed, Deng had be-
come more cautious and preferred to
move step by step rather than in one
fell swoop. At the same time, Ameri-
can human-rights goals had also be-
come more ambitious.

LIBERTY, ARMY, PICTORIAL

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

Decades of economic growth matched by progress in other fields, the colonial rulers boast: Junks wait in Kowloon harbor in 1952

# Farewell to My Hon

DENG XIAOPING'S DEATH has, not surprisingly, unleashed a new round of speculation about the futures of China and Hong Kong. I am not in a position

to speculate about the future of China. Indeed, I am never sure that anyone who does can really claim with much confidence to know what they are talking about. But I can say a thing or two about Hong Kong, this remarkable city which I have now governed for nearly five years—and whose transfer of sovereignty is now only four months away.

Let us, as Deng would have said, try to seek truth from facts. What are the facts about today's Hong Kong?

Hong Kong is one of the most successful cities in the world. With no natural resources, Hong Kong's 6 million people have created the world's eighth largest trading economy, equivalent to about a fifth of China's GDP. Hong Kong boasts the seventh largest foreign-currency reserves in the world—the second highest per head. Hong Kong has the world's busiest container port. We have some of the lowest taxes in the world. Thirty-five years of economic growth have been accompanied by steady

progress in other fields, too. Where only 1 in 33 of our young people went into higher education 10 years ago, now 1 in 4 does so. Life expectancy in Hong Kong is second only to Japan, child mortality lower than the United States, Germany or Australia.

This isn't a statistical almanac or a page from the Hong Kong budget book. These are the vital signs of a living, vibrant community. A community which has succeeded over the years through all the ups and downs of the history taking place around it. A community which has not just coped, but grown, prospered and become accustomed to taking momentous events in its stride.

What else does the world see in Hong Kong? Great social stability. This is a moderate, calm, levelheaded place. Overall crime is down, and violent crime down dramatically—not just on last year but on a decade ago.

Hong Kong gets rave reviews from the IMF and from leading international think tanks. We're the freest economy in the world, according to the Heritage Foundation; and the second most competitive, says the World Economic Forum.

What is the formula that has produced this happy combination? No secret formula, but the hard work and the entrepreneur-

ial flair of Chinese men and women under a rule of law and an efficient, uncorrupt administration dedicated to free-market economics. Hong Kong is a very free society—free economically, and free politically, too. People are free to say what they think, write what they like, travel wherever they want, criticize me and their government—a freedom which, now and then, like people in most free societies, they indulge in. Hong Kong has a free press, an independent judiciary. A self-confident legislature. Everyone, government and governed, is subject to the law.

It is these political freedoms which, as much as Hong Kong's economic freedom, lie at the heart of Hong Kong's success. That is why they are at the core of the Joint Declaration, the treaty under which sovereignty returns to China on June 30. China has promised Hong Kong that its political rights—as well as its economic freedoms—will be guaranteed for 50 years beyond 1997. Why has it done so? Not out of altruism, but from a hardheaded recognition that if this is the formula that has produced such riches under British sovereignty, it would be wise to stick to it under Chinese sovereignty as well.

It is a pity, therefore, that some recent

34

WERNER BISCHOP—MAGNUM (LEFT), MICHEL SETBOUN—SYGMA

PERISCOPES®

'Too squishy for one group, too stiff for the other': Thompson

BELTWAYS

It's Not Easy to Be Fair

SENATE GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS COMMITTEE chairman Fred Thompson has promised an evenhanded investigation of campaign-funding abuses. But neither side is buying it. Conservative Republicans are furious that Thompson has agreed to consider issuing subpoenas suggested by the Democrats. His GOP critics worry that such power sharing means he lacks partisan zeal and will turn the inquiry into a vehicle for campaign-finance reform. They're saying Thompson, a likely presidential contender in 2000, wants to be seen as the man who cleaned up American politics. "He wants to look statesmanlike," says a GOP activist. Democrats will test Thompson's fairness pledge this week, when they hand him 27 subpoena requests. They grumble that they've been shut out of prime office space and denied access to a copying machine. A Thompson aide laughs off the grumbling: "We're too squishy for one group and too stiff for the other. We're just going to keep our eye on the ball."

PENTAGON

Merging Traffic

THE DAYS OF THE MILITARY-service secretaries may be numbered. The posts of army and navy secretary date from the Founding Fathers (the air-force job is, of course, modern). But curb-ing, or even abolishing, their independent powers is one option being considered by a team studying the post-cold-war

reorganization of the Pentagon. The goal: cutting its civilian work force by a quarter. Deputy Secretary John White, who ordered the study, is known to think the service secretary jobs are obsolete but that outright elimination may be too drastic. A likely compromise:

merging the staffs of the civilian secretary and military chief of staff of each service. The report is due as early as next month.

The Pentagon

WORLD BANK

Dining in
Splendor

EVEN AS THE WORLD BANK prepares for its third round of layoffs in 10 years, president James Wolfensohn is enjoying a new private dining room at the anti-poverty agency's Washington headquarters. Like the handshakes for the departees, the dining room is golden—or, to be exact, one wall is covered in gold leaf. It's not as expensive as it sounds, costing “only $25 a square foot [$3,600],” said a spokesman. “This is not extravagance.” Bank officials say it is one of several dining rooms used by everyone at the bank. But the maitre d', when asked directions to the gold room, said: “Oh, Mr. Wolfensohn's private room. Right this way.”

Wolfensohn in India last year

The secretary in Moscow

ALBRIGHT

She's Where?

WHEN SECRETARY OF STATE Madeleine Albright and her entourage chose to stay at Moscow's Radisson-Slavyanskaya hotel last week, local American businessmen winced. "It's like staying at the flagship hotel of Murder Inc.," said one. After a U.S. entrepreneur and partner in the Radisson was gunned down outside the hotel last year, Washington considered steering high-ranking visitors elsewhere. But in 1997 Moscow, says one diplomat, it's hard to find a hotel "that doesn't have some connection with organized crime." U.S. officials say Albright and Co. were booked at the Radisson in part for "security reasons." Since Bill Clinton has stayed there, security is already set up.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM WATCH

Beijing Duck 'n' Cover Edition

The supreme leader of the biggest country in the world dies, and all the CW wants to talk about is: did big Dem donor Johnny Chung use a photo with Clinton to promote his Beijing beer?

<table><thead><tr><th>Players</th><th>Conventional Wisdom</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Clinton</td><td>Accessgate keeps getting slimier. And Starr (re)turn bodes ill. Back to bunker mode.</td></tr><tr><td>Deng</td><td>Brought China into modern era—but left human rights in Ming dynasty.</td></tr><tr><td>Yeltsin</td><td>Old CW: Loud, fat and drunk. New CW: Waxy, gaunt and needs a stiff one.</td></tr><tr><td>Starr</td><td>"I make a mistake, it's a beaut." Just what we want to hear from all-powerful prosecutor.</td></tr><tr><td>Lott</td><td>Says influence-buying soft money is the "American way." So was slavery.</td></tr><tr><td>P. Boone</td><td>Tries comeback as heavy-metal man. When he bites off a bat's head, CW will buy it.</td></tr></tbody></table>

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: DAVID BURNETT-CONTACT, SERGEI KARPUKHIN-AF, PABLO BARTHOLOMEW-GAMMA-LIAISON, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

42

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

XINHUA

MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK 43

SPECIAL REPORT

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."

AP

44 NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

And your slogan will be peace: to bring down the Socialist imperi-
alisms for the sake of peace. ...”

The blueprint for Sino-American relations established by Nixon and Mao remained remarkably consistent through five administra-
tions of both parties: a parallel strategy of preventing “hegemo-
ny”—in other words, of preserving the global balance of power; no
challenges by either side to the vital concerns of the other; accept-
ance by the United States of the principle of one China and dis-
avowal of a two-China or a one-China, one-Taiwan policy; and im-
plicit understanding that China would not press the Taiwan issue
to the point of force.

expounding liberty but because the family, not the state, has been the irrepressible purpose of Chinese life. Families would bend, like so much bamboo, to a prevailing wind, but they would not break. 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 direct challenges than by hesitance in executing orders they considered unreasonable.

was referring to the radicalism of his
wife and her coterie. Mao went on to
say he was ending the Cultural Rev-
olution. The Chinese would have to go
to school abroad, especially since
their language was itself an obstacle
to modernization. The Chinese peo-
ple, he added, were "very obstinate
and very conservative." Ever the rad-
ical, he continued: "Maybe if the So-
viet Union would throw its bombs
and kill all Chinese who are over 30,
that would solve the problem for us."
But that was another way of saying
that the problem was insoluble.

Kermit, Kermit, Kermit

MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK

SPECIAL REPORT

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 nuance 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 ..."

AVERT-AP

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

The offer was not taken up immediately by the Bush administration, which was concentrating on an imminent summit with Gorbachev at Maita and was then deflected by the fall of the Berlin wall. By the time the dialogue was resumed, Deng had become more cautious and preferred to move step by step rather than in one fell swoop. At the same time, American human-rights goals had also become more ambitious.

LIBERATION ARMY PICTORIAL

## While less ideological than Mao, Deng was more nationalist. He was passionate about regaining possession of Hong Kong.

MARCH 3, 1997 NEWSWEEK 47

SPECIAL REPORT

In joining Mao, he nevertheless leaves a substantial legacy. Nowadays Chinese live by his words—getting rich is glorious. It is, however, the only aspiration the party of Deng allows. Some-day Chinese will join their former Communist brethren around the globe and live as they choose to live, the lives of free people.

One day he will pause during a game of bridge with those jolly Red giants—Lenin, Stalin and Mao—to see a homeland he won't recognize. I cannot picture it exactly, but my hopes are high. Technology and pent-up longings, skills and energies are propelling Chinese too fast in too many directions for the party to seize them all and keep them under wraps.

GARRY HO—REUTERS

NEWSWEEK MARCH 3, 1997

FEB 21 '97 08:45PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

CJ

IN1309 memoir

DEPT: VER # 2

BU: HJ: Galley 1000

PG: ISSUE:

CREATOR: SSHABA; 02/20/97, 15:05

PRINTED BY: mwhita; 02/21/97, 8:34 PM

WRITER: DDZOLA

FROM: rpratt; 02/20/97

FILE: IN1309-IN-NWK

REVISOR: GMILKO; 02/21/97, 17:28

By Henry A. Kissinger

Only those who experienced Mao'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 spi-
ral into inflation—all of these were incon-
ceivable in the drab China of agricultural
communes, a population uniformed-in-stan-
dard jackets, a stagnant economy, deserted
streets, and professed ideological fervor.
Deng's revolution changed all that. He abol-
ished the agricultural communes and
decentralized economic decision-making.
He fostered provincial autonomy. The
Chinese population is dramatically better
off materially, and its lives are less con-
strained politically than 25 years ago.
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 without excessive dislocations.

IN1309 Page 1 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

And economic progress has been achieved at the price of rigid insistence on one-party rule. Mao destroyed traditional China and cleared the way for its ultimate modernization. But he faced the revolutionary dilemma: that the destruction of existing patterns of obligations tempts an increasing resort to force. And Mao was further constrained by the straightjacket 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 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, 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

IN1309

Page 2 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT: PG:

life for the Chinese people and for a strong
China would vanish as well. Deng had wit-
nessed 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 in the dis-
tant days when Richard Nixon of the anti-
Communist rhetoric and Mao Zedong of the
pithy and contempious anti-capitalist slo-
gans 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 expan-
sionism, and to draw the sting from militant
peace movements by unveiling a grand
design for peace. Mao shared Nixon's con-
cern 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 back-
sliding Communist countries. And no con-
temporary leader had challenged Moscow's
doctrinal preeminence more rigorously

IN1309 Page 3 of 38

TOTAL P.02

IN1309 memoir

DEPT: PG:

than Mao. At the same time, however, Mao
was far too subtle to overlook that the
United States would surely not defend

China's right to doctrinal heterodoxy and
that he needed to anchor the Sino-American
relationship in some parallel definitions of
the national interest.

With the very survival of his society and
his system at stake, Mao had few alterna-
tives to an essentially balance-of-power
approach, and he could draw on a rich tradi-
tion 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 interna-
tional environment; that it occurred with
such speed was due to the ability of the lead-
ers of both sides to transcend ideology and
cooperate on the basis of mutual interests
and necessities.

The statement by Mao and Nixon in the
Shanghai Communique of 1972 that they
would jointly oppose hegemony in Asia (=
year later extended to the world) was a far
more significant departure from the

IN1309

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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
dominating its region or the world. The
unspoken but unavoidable implication was
that China and the United States were
engaged jointly in counterbalancing Soviet
power.

Although Premier Zhou Enlai was my
principal interlocutor during the early vis-
its, Mao overshadowed all his subordinates
by the near religious awe in which he
seemed to be held (or which his subordi-
nates at least thought it wise to affect). Zhou
and afterwards even Deng invariably con-
ducted 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 domi-
nance was reinforced by the manner in
which meetings with Mao took place. Mao

IN1309

Page 5 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

Appointments with him were never sched-
uled; 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, reputed to be Mao's nicce.

For a few minutes, my clearly agitated
Chinese counterparts would act as if noth-
ing 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

--- End of column ---

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 permit-
ted, 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 adjec-
tives they used to describe the meeting.

IN1309

Page 6 of 38

FEB 21 '97 08:46PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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 complimentary to vis-à-vis the Soviet, 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. Today, this avenue is a permanent gridlock, in the early days of Sino-American relations, it was largely empty. Inside the Imperial City, the road hugged a take, on the other side of which was a series of residences for high officials identified to the official state guest—houses 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.

Mao's residence appeared no different, though it stood slightly apart from the others. On my first two visits, a small ameroom

IN1309

Page 7 of 38

FEB-22-1975 10:21 FROM

TO NEW YORK 1 F.02

IN1309 memoir

DEPT: PG:

emphasize the impossibility of tricking him
with an anecdote—for example, at our
meeting of November 12, 1975.⁴ The presi-
dent 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....

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

Despite Mao's progressively impaired
physical condition, he exuded more concen-
trated 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 our last conversa-
tion, 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. Escrowing
the colloquium and formal points with—
which heads of state generally make their
qase, he would generally begin with a ques-
tion, quite often in a needling tone. With

IN1309 Page 9 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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

A month later, he chose a parable to indi-
cate to President Ford his displeasure with
what he considered ineffective American
resistance to Soviet and Cuban moves in
Angola, in fact 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 divid-
ed into two subjects: increasingly precise
elaborations of a common international
strategy, and more elliptical references to
China's internal conditions. On internation-
al affairs, Mao adopted an insistently non-
ideological approach. One of his first obser-
vations 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 implica-
tion that anyone might have taken seriously
a slogan which had been scrawled for

IN1309

Page 11 of 38

INL309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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

Western leaders such as Richard Nixon, —
Edward Heath, or Georges Pompidou

because leftists were sentimental, unrealis-
tic, 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 some of its
economic and some military assistance.

Mao wasted no time unraveling these com-
plexities. Taiwan would not be permitted to
stand in the way of Sino-American rap-
prochement and nor would Indochina. "The
issue [of Taiwan] is not the important one,"
Mao said off-handedly in the first few min-
utes of his meeting with Nixon as if he were
lubricating a social chat with some self-evi-
dent observation. "The issue of internation-
al relations is the important one." And Mao
quickly put to rest the nightmare of possible

INL309 Page 12 of 38

FEB-22-1973 10:20 FROM

TO NEW YORK 1 1.04

(4)

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

"Although there have been many writings in our historical books about the country called the land of the Vietnamese, which in Chinese means literally 'the land of the ten thousand elephants'. The same is the case with Cambodia."

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 which 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 liason office in Beijing, who had known de Gaulle, Churchill and Adenauer, described Mao's presentation as the most extraordinairey tour de force in his experience.

In Mao's view, subsequently largely born out by events—the Soviet Union was not a real, only a mock, superpower. It had

IN1309 Page 14 of 38

TOTAL P.04

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

"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.

Other options included well in far-flung areas such as to be a source of political capital or to be an unrelievable power in the American political equation. He selected a tradition of stability and a tradition of peace....

The aged revolutionary who had never known a period without struggle would not have believed me had I told him the

IN1309 Page 15 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

American reality after Vietnam and Watergate (and maybe at all times): it was all we could do to mobilize the American people in defense of the global equilibrium; to encourage a Soviet attack on China to be followed by American pressure against the Soviet Union, was too Machiavellian for the American of the 1970s and, I date say, of any other period.

Normalization of relations with the United States clearly had priority over reunification with Taiwan. 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."

The blueprint of Sino-American relations established by Nixon and Mao remained remarkably consistent through five administrations of both parties: a parallel strategy with China in preventing "hegemony"—in other words, to preserve the global balance

IN1309

Page 16 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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, especially with the threat of force.

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

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

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 revolutionary élan: the persistence of traditional Chinese values and the very momentum of the 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

IN1309

Page 17 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

After a lifetime of titanic struggle to
uproot Chinese society, there was not a lit-
tle 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 government because the ruler
could never be sure that he was in fact con-
trolling his teeming, individualistic, entre-
preneurial, and family-oriented people.

Abundant governments were thereby occa-
sionally 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 expounding
liberty but, like a powerful stream our—
rounding and finally swamping all obsta-
cles of the lifestyle and spirit of the mid-
virilant Chinese. In the end, the family, not
the state, has been the ultimate unit of
order, purpose

IN1309

Page 18 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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, I didn't
suppose about their families, I learned to my
astonishment that, prior to the Communist
takeover, many families had sent their sons
all over the world to study in different countries so as to protect them
selves against all possible outcomes. One
son would stay with the Communists,
another would go 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 they would not break. The limit of
their pliability was established by 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 direct challenges
than by hesitance in excusing orders they
considered unreasonable.

That Communist practice reinforced
rather than curbed China's historic
trends magnified the frustrations and
ultimately the rage of Mao's last years.

IN1309 Page 19 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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 bureau-
cracy into a feudal class even more perva-
sive than the one he had destroyed.

Bureaucratic prerogatives were now legit-
imized by the true faith. Rebelling against
End of column

that nightmare, Mao launched ever more
fierce campaigns to save his people—whom
he both loved and despised—from them-
selves. With each passing decade, the fad-
ing Chairman would wreak another purge
on the huge, bloated bureaucracies he had
found, destroyed, and then multiplied, only
to create more chaos, necessitating even
more bureaucracy to bring it under control.

Intrinsically universal, modern technology
poses a threat to any society's claims to
uniqueness. And uniqueness had always
been the distinctive claim of Chinese soci-
ety. To preserve that uniqueness, China had

IN1309

Page 20 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

refused to imitate the West in the 19th cen-
tury, 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 mod-
ernization which threatened to engulf
China in a universal culture.

Destroying his own disciples became part of Mao's vast enterprise to impose on his society his own version of virtue. For a decade, the aging Chairman renounced all modes of progress, closing all universities, recalling his ambassadors from abroad, and sending all educated people to work in the fields so that they would experience and pass on the new revolutionary reality.

In 1973, a year after my first encounter
with Mao, the physically frail but intellectu-
ally still vigorous Chairman seemed to have
recognized his dilemma. In one of his ellip-
tical references, Mao warned me against
Chinese women and their radical views,

referring to the pressure in the American...

Congress at the time on behalf of increased—

Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union,

Mao offered to supply an unlimited number

IN1309 Page 21 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT: PG:

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 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

IN1309 Page 22 of 38

FEB 21 '97 09:19PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

P.7/18

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

of barbarians against another. To avoid the
United States moving towards Moscow for

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

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

States."

In 1974, when Deng Xiaoping became my
principal interlocutor, we knew very little
about him. We knew that he had been sec-
retary general of the Communist Party until
he was purged in 1966, charged with being a
"capitalist roader." We learned that he had
been restored to the Central Committee of
the Communist Party through Mao's per-
sonal intervention and against the opposi-
tion 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 participation during the Cultural

IN1309

Page 23 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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 sewed out of a window by Red Guards.

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. China was a poor country, Deng had said, 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.

As soon as we met Deng, we realized that this last assessment was wrong for he was not no time in distancing himself from Zhou.

Deng had arrived in New York in April 1974 as part of a Chinese delegation headed by the foreign minister 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 its real leader

IN1309 Page 24 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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 premier
were answered by similar quotes from
Mao's conversations with me.

Having grown accustomed to Mao's
philosophical reflections and indirect allu-
sions and to Zhou's smooth professional-
ism, it took me some time to adjust to
Deng's acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occa-
sionalzymatic interjections and his disdain
of the philosophical in favor of the eminent-
ly practical. Compact and wiry, he entered a
room ready for business, with a minimum
of bantlings. A spittoon ever before him—he
used it frequently—Deng rarely wasted
time on pleasantries, ir getting to the point—
Nor did he feel it necessary to soften his
remarks by swaddling them in parables. He
—End of column—
did not envelop one with solicitude as Zhou
was wont to do, nor did he treat me, like
Mao had, as a fellow philosopher from
among whose ranks only a select few were

IN1309

Page 25 of 38

IM1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

process of achieving hegemony over
Inochina. And it was based on Deng's con-
viction that China could progress economi-
cally only in a relaxed international atmos-
phere for which good relations with the
United States were the essential precondi-
tion.

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 opening
banquet and, when I started to reply in
kind, the television lights were turned off.

The next morning, Deng demonstratively
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
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-

IN1309

Page 27 of 38

FEB-22-1997 10:04

FROM

10

NEW YORK 1

1:22

(4)

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

In the pursuit of that goal, practice overrode theory. Where Mao sought to conform

Chinese society to Marxist theory, Deng

affected Marxist dogma to fit economic reality. "I do not care whether a cat is black or

reform but a conservative opposing political instability.

IN1309 Page 29 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT: PG:

of Chinese foreign policy. Deng deplored
the collapse of the Shah of Iran and
Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. He
urged a stronger American policy; in any
event, he made clear, 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 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
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 that I
did not feel right being in the same city
without seeing him and offered a brief cour-
tesy call. He replied that I had called on him
in Washington, and courtesy required him
to call on me. And to the extraordinary dis-
pleasure of his security personnel, he car-

IN1309

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

ried out this whim, walking from his hotel
to where I was staying, in the process creat-
ing 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

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

striking. Both put forward detailed pro-
grams for economic reform. But for the only
time in my experience with Chinese lead-
ers, philosophical and practical disagree-
ments were made explicit. Hua sought to
spur production by traditional Soviet meth-
ods, emphasizing heavy industry, improve-
ments in agricultural production based on
communes, 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 pro-
duced. Therefore, consumer goods had to
have priority over heavy industry, ~~whate~~ 1)
~~or orthodoxy prescribed.~~ The ingenuity of
Chinese farmers had to be liberated, which 1)

IN1309 Page 31 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

meant that communists would be abolished. The Communist Party needed to become less intrusive, and government would have to be decentralized. The conversation continued over a meal where five tables seated ten each. In answer to my question as to the balance between centralization and decentralization, Deng stressed the importance of decentralization in a vast country of huge population and significant regional differences. But this was not the sole challenge, Deng said. Speaking in a conversational tone, he elaborated his ideas about introducing modern technology to China: sending tens of thousands of Chinese students abroad ("we have nothing to fear from Western education"); and ending once and for all the abuses of the Cultural Revolution, noted that, while Deng had not raised his voice, the tables around us had fallen silent. The other Chinese present were sitting at the edge of their seats, not even pretending not to be listening in on the old man as he outlined his vision of their future (Deng was already close to 80). "We have to get it right this

IN1309 Page 32 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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 meeting 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, "that
the process will continue."

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

IN1309

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

On this occasion, too, Deng chided me
gently for having predicted in print that
China would be a great power by the sec-
ond decade of the 21st century. I underesti-
mated the problems he said; 2050 was a
more realistic estimate. Part of Deng's
motive was probably to discourage any
ideas of applying containment principles to
China; in this he proved characteristically
far sighted.

My last meeting with Deng was in
November 1989, four months after
Tiananmen Square, for a discussion fol-
lowed by lunch. Nothing had changed, he
said; he was still the reformer he had
always been. He was defending reform, he
implied, not Communism. "In this coun-
try," he said, "if stability is lost, it will take
decades to regain." Deng had difficulty
understanding, he averred, why the United
States had raised no ideological issues
when China was rigidly Communist but
was interfering in domestic affairs now that
China was rapidly becoming a socialist
market economy. He offered a package deal

IN1309

Page 35 of 38

IN1309 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

for resolving the human rights issues then
on the table: the release of a dissident who
had sought refuge in the American Embassy
and new consideration for some who had
been imprisoned in the aftermath of
Tiananmen Square upheaval, in exchange
for a resumption of a Sino-American politi-
cal dialogue.

The offer was not taken up immediately
by the Bush Administration, which was
concentrating on an imminent summit with
Gorbachev at Malta and was then deflected
by the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the time
the dialogue was resumed, Deng had
become more cautious and preferred to
move step-by-step rather than in one fell
swoop. the same time, American human
rights goals had also become more ambi-
tious.

It is not my goal here to attempt a final
assessment of Deng's historic role. But my
encounters with him and his predecessor
-------- End of column --------
permit a number of conclusions. Deng con-
sidered the ultimate purpose of his life to be
reform. For that, he struggled—and suf-
fered—with courage and dedication.

IN1309

Page 36 of 38

["IN1309 memoir", "DEPT:", "PG:", "Paradoxically it was the passion for reform which shaped his attitude toward the events which fall under the heading of Tiananmen Square. To American observers, they seemed a flowering of <u>demons</u> <u>demons</u> <u>demons</u>

IM1309 memoir

DEPT: PG:

they have spawned will require growing constitutionalism - what is, predictability even if pluralistic democracy is not established. The relative position between provinces and central government may well cultivate as it has throughout Chinese history. Alterations in leadership and institutions can affect emphasis, not direction.

Americans need to remember how important a role Sino-American cooperation played in his design. And posterity owes Deng to recall not only what remains to be done but how far he brought his ancient people by an act of will and devoted service

towards a better life. This article is adapted from "Years of Renewal" by Henry A. Kissinger, to be published by Little, Brown and Company in 1988.

IM1309 Page 38 of 39

TOTAL P. 31

FEB-21-1997 16:00 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.01

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT: VER # 3

BU: MJ: Galley 957

PG: ISSUE:

CREATOR: DEFRIED; 02/20/97, 17:24

PRINTED BY: mwhite; 02/21/97, 11:05 AM

WRITER: KISSINGER

FROM: defried; 02/20/97

FILE: DENGHK2-IN-MWK

REVISOR: MWHITA; 02/21/97, 09:33

By Henry A. Kissinger

Only those who experienced Mao's China can appreciate the transformations wrought by Deng Xiao Ping. The bustling cities, the vast construction booms, the incredible traffic jams, the ~~decals~~ go 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 population is dramatically better off materially, and its lives are less constrained politically than 25 years ago.

To be sure, ~~at least~~ some~~ achieve~~ a~~起~~ a shadow~~ remains to be seen~~ whether the vast gaps between China's coastal regions and the more backward

DENGHK2 Page 1 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:01 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.03

DENGKAI2 memoir

DEPT: PG:

interior can be bridged without excessive dislocations. And economic progress has been achieved at the price of rigid insistence on one-party rule in lieu of the next two paragraphs, suggest you extend this paragraph to introduce the contrast between deng and mao—the two great leaders who transformed modern china, each so different in style and philosophy from the other, the one both building on and undoing the other's legacy.

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 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

DENGKAI2 Page 2 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:01

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1

P.04

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT: PG:

Communism, far from creating a new society, had produced a "new" mandarin class. When

it returned to power in 1949, 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 dis-
tant days when Richard Nixon of the anti-
Communist rhetoric and Mao Zedong of the
pithy and contemptuous anti-capitalist slo-
gans came together to launch a geopolitical
revolution. «no new paragraph.» Nixon was driven by the desire
to extricate the United States from Vietnam,
to create a counterweight to Soviet expan-
sionism, and to draw the sting from militant
peace movements by unveiling a grand
design for peace. Mao shared Nixon's con-
cern 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 preemi-
nence more rigorously than Mao. At the
same time, however, Mao was far too subtle
to overlook that the United States would

DENGHK2 Page 3 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:02 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.06

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT: PG:

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 dominating its region on the world. 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 Premier 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 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.

DENGHK2 Page 5 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:02

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1

P.07

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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, 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 adjec-tives they used to describe the meeting.

DENGHK2 Page 6 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:02

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.08

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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

relations were benign. After one of our meetings at which Mao had indicated that he thought the United States insufficiently confrontational vis-a-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 guest-houses 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.

Mao's residence appeared no different, though it stood slightly apart from the others. On my first two visits, a small anteroom

DENGHK2 Page 7 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:03 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.09

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT. 1

PG: 1

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.

Mao would rise from the center of a semi-circle 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 mock-ing, as if to warn that there was no point in trying to deceive this specialist in under-standing and exploiting human weakness

and duplicity. Mao would occasionally emphasize the impossibility of tricking him with an anecdote—for example,

DENGHK2 Page 8 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:03

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P. 10

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT: PG:

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 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 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

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

DENGHK2

FEB-21-1997 16:03 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.11

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

convey a mood and a meaning while avoid-
ing any formal commitment. When Nixon
tried to draw Mao into a discussion of spe-
cific measures, he replied: "These should be
discussed with the Premier [Zhou Enlai]. I
discuss the philosophical questions."

That actually was only true when Mao
wanted to separate himself from a discus-
sion, 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 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 nei-
ther 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?"

DENGHK2

Page 10 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:03 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.12

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT: PG:

Mao's conversations with us were divid-
ed into two subjects: increasingly precise
elaborations of a common international
strategy, and more elliptical references to
China's internal conditions. On internation-
al affairs, he adopted an insistently nonide-
ological approach. One of his first observa-
tions 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 reac-
tionsries and establish socialism.'"

He laughed uproariously at the implica-
tion that anyone might have taken seriously
a slogan 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 such as Richard Nixon,
Edward Heath, or Georges Pompidou

DENGHK2

FEB-21-1997 16:11

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.33

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT: PG:

because the conservatives were more suspi-
cious of the Soviet Union, while their leftist
opponents were sentimental, unrealistic,
and vulnerable to Communist peace offen-
sives.

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 lubricating
--- End of column ---

a social chat with some self-evident obser-
vation. "The issue of international relations
is the important one." 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:

DENGHK2

TOTAL P.33

FEB-21-1997 16:04

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1

P.15

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT:

PG:

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 for a moment that if he came to believe it, he had 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 defense of the global equilibrium: to encourage a Soviet attack on China, which we were potentially seeking to improve relations to be followed by American pressure against the Soviet Union, was too Machiavellian for the American of the 1970s and, I dare say, of any other period.

DENGHK2

Page 15 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:05 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.16

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT: PG:

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

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

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 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."

DENGHK2 Page 16 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:06 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.20

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT: PG:

cty. To preserve that 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 propovent of moderniza-

tion. 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.

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 the current pressure in the American

DENGHK2 Page 20 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:06

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1

P.21

DENGHK2 memoir

DEPT: PG:

Congress at the time...add 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 dis-
aster for his own country. At first I thought
he was joking, and he actually had to repeat
the comment several times before I under-
stood 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 conservative." Ever the
radical, he continued: "Maybe if the Soviet
-------- End of column --------

Within a year, Mao was to reverse the
maxims advanced in that conversation. In
early 1974, Zhou was for all practical pur-

DENGHK2

Page 21 of 43

FEB-21-1997 16:06

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.22

DENGKONG memoir

DEPT: PG:

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 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 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

DENGKONG2