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become less intrusive, and government needed to be
decentralized. The conversation continued over lunch where
five tables seated ten each. Deng spoke in a conversational
tone as he elaborated on his ideas about introducing modern
technology to China, sending tens of thousands of Chinese
students abroad ("we have nothing to fear from Western
education"), ending once and for all the abuses of the
Cultural Revolution, and needing to strike a balance between
centralization and decentralization in a vast country of huge
population and significant regional differences. I noticed
that, while Deng had not raised his voice and was addressing
his remarks solely to me, 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

51

already close to 80). "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 lunch in 1979, bringing about more permanent
and fundamental changes than even those who had destroyed
ancient China. I would meet with Deng once a year for
extended conversations until he retired from his formal
positions in 1990. The meetings would generally begin with a
discussion of the international situation, 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 himself intended to

52

give up all but one of his formal positions. "So you can rest
at ease" that the process will continue, concluded Deng.

Deng stressed 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 economic structural reform.
This would be accompanied by political structural 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 were maintained; otherwise the chaos of the
Cultural Revolution would surely return.

53

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

The Communist role would be limited to "guidance on philosophical issues." When I asked for an example of a philosophical issue, Deng replied: "For instance, if we are considering an alliance with the Soviet Union." Given Deng's rancorous distrust of the Soviet Union--extraordinary even among his already quite sufficiently wary associates--this example was hardly an imminent contingency and, in the nature of things, not an issue likely to recur frequently. Deng's ultimate achievement is that, ruling in the name of Communism, he launched a process which overthrew the concepts and structures by which Communism has functioned in all other countries and steered his society on a course, the destination of which will in the end reflect the creativity of the Chinese people.

54

On this occasion, too, Deng chided me gently for having
predicted in print that China would be a great power by the
second decade of the 21st century. I underestimated the
problems, he said; 2050 was a more realistic estimate (part of
Deng's motive was probably to discourage any ideas of applying
balance-of-power principles 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
implied, not Communism. "In this country," he said, "if
stability is lost, it will take decades to regain." Deng had
difficulty understanding, he averred, why America had raised
no ideological issues when China was strictly Communist but
was interfering in domestic affairs now that China was rapidly
becoming a socialist market economy. He offered a package

55

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 Tiananmen Square upheaval--and
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, it
foundered because Deng had become more cautious and preferred
to move step-by-step rather than as a package deal. At the
same time, American human rights goals had became more
ambitious.

This article does not attempt a final assessment of
Deng's historic role, having primarily emphasized my

56

encounters with him and his predecessors. But these do permit
a number of conclusions.

Deng did achieve most of his goals. His revolution,
unlike Mao's, is irreversible. Whatever happens, China cannot
return to the state-controlled economy of Mao or to his rigid
political conformity. Deng's economic reforms and the market
economy they have spawned require constitutionalism--that is,
predictability--even if pluralistic democracy is not
established. The relative position between provinces and
central government may well fluctuate as it has throughout
Chinese history. In short, alterations in leadership and
institutions can affect emphasis not direction.

The United States is, of course, entitled to articulate
its own preferences with respect to Chinese developments and
indeed to pursue these preferences provided three principles
are kept in mind:

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* A policy of confrontation with China under present circumstances will find no takers among America's friends, either in Asia or in Europe.

* Such a confrontation does not advance the solution of any contemporary foreign policy problem.

* Disturbances in international peace and stability will generally be ameliorated by good relations between China and the US.

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

It was not until after Deng was forced into exile a second time in 1976 that I understood how strong an advocate he had been of good relations with America. And not until after his third return to power in 1979 did I fully grasp the extent to which Deng was changing his society. Indeed that his revolution was likely to endure beyond that of the larger-than-life and at times demonic figure of his predecessor, Mao Zedong.

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

That China would progress commercially only when an atmosphere for what food relations with the United States were the essential United States with the United States were the essential preconditions.

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contemptuous anti-capitalist slogans came together to launch a geopolitical revolution.

Nixon was driven by the desire to extricate America from Vietnam, to unveil a grand design for peace, and to create a counterweight to Soviet expansionism. Mao shared the concern over Soviet expansionism; indeed, he had every reason to believe that China might be its next target. For the Brezhnev doctrine of 1968 had reserved to the Kremlin the right to bring backsliding Communist leaders to heel by the use of military force. And no contemporary leader had challenged Moscow's doctrinal preeminence more rigorously than Mao. At the same time, however, Mao was far too subtle to overlook that America would not defend only American national interests and surely not his right to doctrinal heterodoxy.

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

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leaders of both sides to transcend ideology and meet on the
basis of mutual interests and necessities.

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

And on his
premise they were extraordinarily dependent in both attitude

The atmosphere of remoteness and of an all-encompassing,
at times menacing dominance was reinforced by the manner in
which meetings with Mao took place. Although Mao's philosophy
disdained historic China, he lived in the Imperial City as
remote and exalted as the emperors he derided. Appointments
with him were never scheduled; they simply came about as if an
event of nature. On each of my five meetings with Mao, the
first hint would be a stirring among my Chinese interlocutors
and the appearance of Wang Hai-jung, reputed to be Mao's
niece. For a few minutes, my clearly agitated Chinese
counterparts would act as if nothing unusual were happening
but then, almost immediately, Chou or Deng would put away his
papers and say: "Chairman Mao is expecting you." Whether or

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not the American delegation was ready did not seem to be an
issue worthy of being raised.

Accompanied by Chou (or Deng, in my last two
conversations), I would set off for Mao's residence in Chinese
cars. No American security personnel were permitted, and the
press could only be notified afterwards. The Chinese were
skillful in controlling the public image to be conveyed by the
pictures they released and the adjectives they used to
describe the meeting. When Mao was photographed as beaming,
the message was that American-Chinese relations were benign;
after one of our meetings at which Mao had indicated that he
thought the US insufficiently confrontational vis-à-vis the
Soviets, the photo depicted Mao wagging a finger at me, but he was
not conveying an instructional, rather than confrontational, mood.

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

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guesthouses, all built in the boxlike, severe Stalinist style, and reflected the past in their design. One of the few relics of the early Soviet friendship.

Mao's residence appeared no different though it stood slightly apart from the others. On my first two visits, a small anteroom was almost completely dominated by a Ping-Pong table which later disappeared. It did not matter because I never had to wait and was instead taken directly to Mao's study. It was a room of modest size with bookshelves filled with manuscripts, lining three walls. Books also covered the tables and occasionally were piled up on the floor. On my first few visits, a simple wooden bed stood in a corner. The all-powerful ruler of the world's most populous nation wished to be perceived as a philosopher-king who not only had no need for the trappings of power but buttressed his authority precisely by the absence of any traditional symbol of majesty.

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

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

Despite these handicaps, Mao conducted conversations in a Socratic style. He would eschew the soliloquies and formal points with which other leaders tend to make their case. He would generally begin the dialogue by asking a question. With deceptive casualness, he would then offer a few lapidary comments on the reply, ranging from the philosophical to the sarcastic and culminating in yet another question. The cumulative effect of his tangential observations was to convey a mood and a meaning while avoiding any formal commitment. Mao indicated a route of march but left the tactical decisions to others. When Nixon tried to draw him into a discussion of specific countries, Mao replied: "These should be discussed with the Premier [Chou En-lai]. I discuss the philosophical questions."

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

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

Mao's conversations with us were divided into two

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subjects: increasingly precise elaborations of his views of a common international strategy, and more elliptical references to China's internal conditions. On international affairs, he was insistently nonideological. One of his first observations to Nixon was: "...people like me sound a lot of big cannons. For example, things like 'the whole world should unite and defeat imperialism, revisionism, and all reactionaries and establish socialism.'" Mao laughed uproariously at the implication that anyone might have taken seriously a slogan which had been scrawled for decades on every public placard in China. He stressed that he preferred dealing with conservative Western leaders like Richard Nixon, Edward Heath, or Georges Pompidou over their leftist opponents. And since Westerners were notoriously slow-witted, Mao added a specific assurance: "At present, the question of aggression from the United States or aggression from China is relatively small...You want to withdraw some of your troops back to your soil; ours do not go abroad." Uttered at a time when American forces were still fighting in Vietnam, this removed the fear-insofar as words could--of several administrations of Chinese military intervention in Indochina or anywhere around the Chinese periphery. And Mao left no doubt that even Taiwan was subordinated to the fundamental necessity of stopping Soviet

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expansionism. "The issue [of Taiwan] is not an important one," he said in the first minutes of a meeting with Nixon. "The issue of international relations is the important one."

Once that principle was established, subsequent conversations with Mao dealt with means, not ends. Cooperation grew out of common analysis, not formal agreements. In my subsequent conversations with him, Mao elaborated on general comments he had made to Nixon with detailed strategic analyses. These were put forward in his characteristically Socratic manner, combining queries with allusions and alternating bonhomie with mocking challenge. David Bruce, then head of the US Liaison Office in Beijing, attended one of these sessions which lasted nearly three hours. Having known Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Konrad Adenauer, Bruce ~~nevertheless desented~~ still acknowledged Mao's elliptical presentation put forward without notes as the most extraordinary tour de force of his experience. Mao would sketch his conception of global containment of the Soviet Union in broad strokes, analyzing the countries which would prove useful and what was needed to strengthen them--a ~~presented as precise and cold-blooded as ours were vague,~~ bureaucratic, and driven by fears of Congress ~~and the internaitl~~

M. Vietnam put forth a balance

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Mao's basic analysis was that the Soviet Union had "stretched its hands too far" and that the resources did not match its global ambitions. Hence it would surely lose, provided the countries around the Soviet periphery cooperated in thwarting Moscow's designs and did not let themselves be defeated in detail. When I indicated that this was my analysis as well, Mao pointed out that the United States might pursue a less passive and reactive course designed to get rid of the two Communist giants simultaneously by actually encouraging a Soviet attack on China: "Let them get bogged down in China...And then you can poke your finger at the Soviet back. And your slogan will be peace: to bring down the Socialist imperialisms for the sake of peace ..." To forestall this nightmare, Mao was prepared to demonstrate the positive benefits of Sino-American cooperation: "Each side has its own means," said Mao a year later, "and acted out of its own necessity. That has resulted in our two countries acting hand-in-hand...So long as our objectives are the same, we would not harm you nor would you harm us." Despite the moral chasm of the Cultural Revolution, the United States and China evolved parallel geopolitical strategies--an understanding that has been lost since the United States has given increasing priority to ideological

an implied
vibrotact

was amended to
radical elements in Mao's
still

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considerations, ironically at a moment when ideology is diminishing as a principal motivation of Chinese internal policy.

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

After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot the Chinese society, there was not a little pathos in this resigned recognition of the revolutionary dilemma. In Mao's quest for egalitarian virtue, millions had been killed to bring about a classless society and to make government irrelevant. Yet at the end of the aged Chairman's life, he began to realize that his society, creator of the civil

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service, was turning the Communist bureaucracy into a mandarin class even more pervasive than the one he had destroyed because bureaucratic prerogatives were now legitimized by the true faith. Rebelling against the reality that that for which he had struggled was turning into a replica of Chinese tradition, Mao threw himself into ever more frenzied campaigns to save the people he both loved and hated from themselves. With each decade, the fading Chairman would launch an assault at the huge bloated bureaucracies only to find that the resulting chaos required even more bureaucracy to be brought under control.

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

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15. Believing all ambassadors were not接受all except American ambassadors, Chairman Mao believed that all universities and, in the end, even defense and economic development could be improved.

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

But, with every passing month, the actual choices grew more and more constricted for the aged Chairman. Within a year, Mao was to reverse the maxims he had advanced in that

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conversation. In early 1974, Chou was for all practical
purposes retired and, two years later, Deng was purged ~~one~~
after second time. When I saw Mao for the last time, he was back to
the old Chinese statecraft of playing off one set of
barbarians against another. To avoid the US moving towards
Moscow for fear of confrontation with China over Taiwan, he
recalled his comment to Nixon that the issue could wait a
~~will whinicalogy!!~~ 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." And Mao concluded with a
whimsical and melancholy bit of irony embracing all the
ambivalence with what he had wrought: "God blesses you, not
us. God does not like us because I am a militant warlord,
also a Communist."

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

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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 raw material of normal diplomacy--the trade issues, the looking after each other's nationals--was lacking. The Sino-American relationship therefore depended on the ability to concentrate on fundamentals--a task which in mature relationships is often obscured by the minutiae of routine.

Chou seemed to have unlimited time for the American-Chinese dialogue. We generally met for eight hours each of the three days of my typical sojourns in Beijing. Chou delicately alternated the venue between the Great Hall of the People and my own residence in one of the state guesthouses to convey that each side was in a sense meeting on the home turf of the other and also that the US delegation was "at home," as it were, on Chinese soil. During these lengthy sessions, including meals, Chou was never interrupted by any other business. No phonecalls or notes were passed to him--indeed, no phone was even in sight, something quite simply unachievable in Washington. Chou seemed determined to convey

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that he had no more important task than to tend to the
American relationship.

Chou's conduct of the substantive negotiations reinforced
the mood he was so meticulous in creating. Despite the fact
that there were still American forces on Taiwan, the issue of
China's unity, though always raised as a principle, was
never pressed as a practical solution. Similarly,
Vietnam was mentioned only elliptically, even though our
meetings coincided with the most intensive US air activity in
the country in four years. Chou insisted that China owed
Vietnam some support not for geopolitical reasons, even less
for a common Communist ideology. "The debt we owe them was
incurred by our ancestors. We have since liberation no
responsibility because we overthrew the old system. Still, we
feel a deep and encompassing sympathy for them."

Sympathy, of course, was not the same as political--even
less military--support; it was a delicate way to assure us
that China would not get involved. Like Mao, Chou was at
pains to stress--and more explicitly--that China would send no
soldiers abroad and hence would threaten no US interest
militarily. Indeed, Chou never even hinted that America's
actions in Vietnam might impair the relationship with Beijing
politically. As to Laos and Cambodia, Chou avoided taking a

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position--either threatening or supportive--by claiming to know nothing about them. "...When we were making our revolution, we did not know anything about that country [Laos]. Although there have been many writings in our historical books about the country called the land of the Vientiane which in Chinese means literally 'the land of the ten thousand elephants.' The same is the case with Cambodia."

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

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firestorm--everything depended on whether the Chinese and American sides could come to understand each other's intentions sufficiently to gear their actions to them without explicit understandings except vague declarations against hegemony.

Almost the first sentence uttered to me by Chou was: "Our word counts." And he proved meticulous in acting on this proposition. Chou understood--as did Nixon--that the relationship would depend on intangibles. He eschewed the "salami tactics" by which so many diplomats try to impress their constituents: each side, starting with an unfulfillable maximum position, negotiates backwards towards a compromise shaped to a far greater extent by bureaucratic and domestic imperatives than by an overall purpose. The difficulty with salami tactics is that their conclusions just as often reflect exhaustion as substance because neither side is ever clear about the ultimate goal of the other.

When negotiating the communiqué of the secret trip with Huang Hua, who later became foreign minister and whom Chou had interposed to give himself maneuvering room in case of deadlock, I suggested a procedure drawn from my experience with Soviet diplomats who required salami tactics to justify concessions to their superiors. Huang Hua argued that such a

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

In this manner, China and the United States moved within
two years to a high degree of cooperation on the basis of
perhaps the fullest and frankest discussions of overall
strategy of my period in government service. I had no
illusions that Chou, survivor of the Long March and perhaps
more than most of decades in Mao's entourage, could prove
as implacable an opponent as he was a charming collaborator.
But in the phase where the national interest of both China and
the United States required harmonizing the policies of the two
countries without being deflected by peripheral issues, Chou
played an indispensable role.

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

Deng was to say later that Chou had eased the fate of
many but never sought to reverse the policies that made the
suffering inevitable. This was consistent with how Chou
described the Cultural Revolution to me at our first
encounter in 1971, introduced the term ' Cultural Revolution'
He insisted that I needed to learn about the
Cultural Revolution to help me understand China. He described
the country as torn between the fear of bureaucratization and
the excesses of ideological zeal. He talked of the anguish of
a society brought up on faith in a single truth when,
suddenly, factions representing different versions of the same

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truth began battling for preeminence in the streets until the
fruits of fifty years of struggle seemed in jeopardy. Chou
himself, he told me, had been kept prisoner in his office by
the Red Guards for several days. Despite his initial doubt as
to whether such drastic measures were in fact necessary, he
said, *Y only for the record*;
Mao was wiser; he had the courage to look further into
the future.

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

The pressures of his system came to expression at a

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26

trip, and all of us were taken to see Chou. The meeting place was referred to as a hospital, although it resembled any other official residence in the Imperial City. To the medically untrained eye, Chou appeared unchanged, and he was as charming as ever. But he avoided any discussion of foreign policy, even the most allusive, saying that his doctors had forbidden it. Why substantive conversation would prove more taxing than social chitchat remained unexplained.

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

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

Afterwards, Chou receded once again though he remained a

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

The Chinese government took the occasion to choose Chou as a
symbol of its continued commitment to good relations with the
United States. I was invited to accept an honorary degree
from Nankai University in Tianjin where Chou had studied and
taken to a statue of the premier as part of the ceremony.
Speeches by the participants praised Chou's role in
establishing ties with the US. After Chou's removal as a symbol

After 1974, Deng was my principal interlocutor. At
first, I thought him a step down from the titans whose
acquaintance I had made in the initial phase of restored Sino-
American relations. Acerbic, matter-of-fact, and eminently
practical, he lacked both the philosophical sweep of Mao and
the grace and suavity of Chou. Deng rarely invoked ideology
and referred to Mao at a barest minimum. But, as time went
on, I grew to admire this doughty little man whose face in

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rare unguard ed moments reflected a certain melancholy from a dramatic life full of upheavals. It became more and more apparent--especially after Deng returned from his second exile in 1978--that he could well have a more seminal impact on Chinese society than even Mao. Mao had uprooted traditional China. But he had never resolved the revolutionary dilemma: the more sweeping the upheaval and eradication of existing patterns of obligation, the greater the force needed to reimpose discipline, to replace what has been taken for granted and therefore did not need to be imposed.

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

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"I am neither a conservative nor a reformer," he said to me in 1987. "I seek truth from facts." Deng was a pragmatist whose goal was economic progress and political stability. He was a reformer, he said in the same conversation, with respect to economic and technological reform but a conservative in the sense of opposing political instability (and not, it must be noted, upholding Communist dogma).

While Mao was alive and Deng acted as vice premier, standing in for the incapacitated (medically as well as politically) Chou, his conversations with him primarily revolved around foreign policy. Sino-American relations were entering a new phase. Mao and Chou had been chiefly concerned with establishing a visible Sino-American relationship to discourage Moscow from enforcing the Brezhnev doctrine. Neither Mao nor Chou was enamored of the simultaneous US rapprochement with Moscow, but they seemed to operate from the premise that the end of the Vietnam War and Nixon's overwhelming reelection would strengthen America's role as the guardian of the global equilibrium whatever the tactical differences. America's firm conduct in the Middle East War of 1973--especially in facing down the Soviet threat of intervention--was enthusiastically endorsed by Mao and Chou.

⊕

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

The deeper strategic issue was that China considered itself under direct threat by the Soviet Union while the threat to the United States was more long-term and cumulative. China therefore strove to create an explicit anti-Soviet coalition of all neighboring states. While I had great sympathy for its analysis, in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, neither Nixon nor Ford considered a confrontational policy towards the Soviet Union sustainable in the face of

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Hills near Beijing--in effect dissociating himself from the foreign minister.

When President Ford visited China later that same year, Mao was civil, but his needling left a certain amount of leeway for the Gang of Four critics. It was Deng who saw to it that the trip was successful, elaborating on the official description of the Mao-Ford conversation as an "earnest and significant conversation...on wide-ranging issues in a friendly atmosphere." He added that "our two countries face problems of common concern and share many common points."

Throughout his career, friendship with America would remain the cornerstone of Deng's foreign policy.

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

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

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

The next time I saw Deng in Beijing in April 1979, in Bayan Hua Kuo-feng was still Secretary General of the Communist Party. He and Deng received me separately for long meetings in the Great Hall of the People. The contrast was striking. Both put forward detailed programs of economic reform. But for the only time in dealing with Chinese leaders, philosophical and practical disagreements were made explicit. Hua sought to spur production by traditional Soviet methods: emphasis on heavy industry; improvements in agricultural production based on communes through increased mechanization

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and use of fertilizers within the framework of a ubiquitous
Five Year Plan.

For his part, Deng passionately rejected all these
orthodoxies. The people, he said, needed to be given a stake
in what they produced. Consumer goods had to be given.
priority over heavy industry. The ingenuity of Chinese
farmers had to be liberated which meant that communes, step-
by-step, would be abolished; the Communist Party needed to
become less intrusive, and government needed to be
decentralized. The conversation continued over lunch where
five tables seated ten each. Deng spoke in a conversational
tone as he elaborated on his ideas about introducing modern
technology to China, sending tens of thousands of Chinese
students abroad ("we have nothing to fear from Western
education"), ending once and for all the abuses of the
Cultural Revolution, and needing to strike a balance between
centralization and decentralization in a vast country of huge
population and significant regional differences. I noticed
that, while Deng had not raised his voice and was addressing
his remarks solely to me, 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

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Soon after, Hua faded into some minor position. Over the
course of the next decade, Deng implemented what he had
described at the lunch in 1979, bringing about more permanent
and fundamental changes than even those who had destroyed
ancient China. I would meet with Deng once a year for
extended conversations until he retired from his formal
positions in 1990. The meetings would generally begin with a
discussion of the international situation, 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 himself intended to
give up all but one of his formal positions. "So you can rest
at ease" that the process will continue, concluded Deng.

Deng stressed 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 ~~economic~~ structural reform.
This would be accompanied by political structural reform which

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~~of which will in the end reflect the creativity of the Chinese~~
~~people.~~

On this occasion, too, Deng chided me gently for having
predicted in print that China would be a great power by the
second decade of the 21st century. I underestimated the
problems, he said; 2050 was a more realistic estimate #part of
Deng's motive was probably to discourage any ideas of applying
balance-of-power principles 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
implied, not Communism. "In this country," he said, "if
stability is lost, it will take decades to regain." Deng had
difficulty understanding, he averred, why America had raised
no ideological issues when China was strictly Communist but
was interfering in 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 Tiananmen Square upheaval--and
for a resumption of a Sino-American political dialogue.

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This article does not attempt a final assessment of Deng's historic role, having primarily emphasized my encounters with him and his predecessors. But these do permit a number of conclusions.

Deng's did achieve most of his goals. His revolution, unlike Mao's, is irreversible. Whatever happens, China cannot return to the state-controlled economy of Mao or to his rigid political conformity. After that time, Deng's economic reforms and the market economy they have spawned require constitutionalism--that is, predictability--even if pluralistic democracy is not established. The relative position between provinces and central government may well fluctuate as it has throughout Chinese history. In short, alterations in leadership and institutions can affect emphasis not direction, whether it will remain as Deng's legacy to his successor people.

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11/22/96-#3

# Chapter 5

## The Nixon Legacy: China and Its Leaders

The speed and comprehensiveness of modern communications have led to the paradox that historians will find it increasingly difficult to render an accurate account of contemporary international relations. Until the advent of the typewriter and the copy machine, the drafting of documents was a laborious process which limited official papers to important matters of substance. Tactical guidance, now cascading forth in profusion, was [then] left to the discretion of ambassadors or plenipotentiaries. Until the advent of the telegraph, instructions to diplomats were, of necessity, conceptual. For communications were too slow for detailed tactical directions

10

worked, by punishing the transgressor against order. Since
the United States had expanded and prospered under democratic
institutions, concord was expected to result nearly
automatically from the worldwide spread of democracy. The
balance of power as practiced in Europe was decried as either
irrelevant or dangerous; equilibrium was less significant than
a moral and legal consensus.

Thus (the statement by Mao and Nixon in the Shanghai
Communiqué of 1971 that they would jointly oppose hegemony in
Asia (a year later extended to the world) was a far more
significant departure from the Wilsonianism dominant in the
United States than from Chinese traditions. Even when not
spelled out in detail, resistance to hegemony implies a policy
of balancing power, of preventing any one nation from
marshaling the resources and manpower of a continent under its
own rule. The unspoken but unavoidable implication was that

⊕

11

China and the United States were engaged in counterbalancing
Soviet power in *Taiwan alliance with China*!

The unorthodox nature of Nixon's approach becomes evident
when contrasted with the more traditional response of the
State Department. In early 1970, when American-Sino contacts
were still being conducted through the respective embassies in
Warsaw, the Chinese proposed that an American envoy visit
Beijing. The State Department submitted a memorandum to the
White House proposing an agenda for such a mission, moving
from the procedural to the technical: diplomatic immunities,
communications, transportation; settlement of the financial
claims of each side; and the lifting of trade and travel
restrictions. The only substantive issue raised was Taiwan
for which the department offered neither a solution nor even a
reading.

⊗

19

that, at this writing, the damage still has the potential of
being arrested.

Chairman Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai and later Deputy
Premier Deng Xiaoping were my day-to-day interlocutors, but
Mao overshadowed everything by the near-religious awe in which
he was held--or which his subordinates thought it wise to
affect. The other Chinese leaders invariably buttressed their
arguments with extensive quotations from the chairman,
conferring legitimacy on their pronouncements and perhaps
security on their persons.

The atmosphere of remoteness and of an all-encompassing,
at times menacing, dominance was reinforced by the manner in
which meetings with Mao took place. Although Mao's philosophy
disdained the legacy of imperial China, his existence in the
Imperial City was elaborated in a manner as remote and exalted
as any of the emperors whom he derided. Appointments with him

23

of easy chairs. Bookshelves overflowing into piles on the
floor and what looked like manuscripts bound with string
covered the walls. Books were also piled on tables. 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 for the
trappings of power or any traditional symbol of majesty.

Mao would rise to greet me from out of the central easy
chair, a female attendant standing close by (and, on my last
visit, holding him up) for by the time I met him, he had
already suffered several of the strokes which eventually would
disable him. He would fix upon his visitor a smile both
penetrating and slightly mocking as if to warn that it would
be futile to attempt to deceive this specialist in human
weakness and duplicity. Since barbarians always ran the risk
of missing the point, [Mao would occasionally emphasize the

24

impossibility of tricking him with an anecdote--for example,
at our meeting of November 12, 1973:

> The president of South Yemen approached me. He said he wanted to sever diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. He asked me my opinion. I was not taken in and replied that he must be prudent. Now they are tied very closely to the Soviet Union.

Even when Mao's physical condition became progressively more impaired, he exuded more concentrated will power and determination than any leader I have encountered, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle. Mao moved only with difficulty, and his ability to speak worsened from meeting to meeting to the point where, during our last conversation, aides needed to write down what the sounds he uttered might mean, and he would either nod or shake his head before the translation could proceed.

Despite these handicaps, Mao conducted conversations in the form of a Socratic dialogue. Eschewing the soliloquies

27

Mao: I believe in that. And that is why
your recent trip to the Arab world was a
good one. 4

The cumulative effect of Mao's tangential observations
was to convey the mood and to indicate the route of march
while ostensibly leaving the tactical decisions in Zhou's
control. When, in February 1972, Nixon tried to draw him into
a discussion of specific countries, Mao 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 discussion, the outcome of which was as yet
uncertain, as was the case during Nixon's visit. 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,

⁴China-II (1974) book, Tab K, pp. IV-185-186.

⊕

28

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 pat and hollow for Mao, who wanted a more
explicitly coordinated and also more confrontational strategy
toward the Soviet Union. So he used my comment to make his
point:

> If neither side has anything to ask from
> the other, why would you be coming to
> Beijing?...And why would we want to
> receive you and the President?

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

⊕

29

And later in the conversation, when President Ford asserted,
"I always say it is possible to disagree without being
disagreeable"--a pronouncement which utterly stumped the
interpreter, it being linguistically impossible to make that
juxtaposition in Chinese--Mao brought the subject to a close:
"Why would you always say that?" (Had he understood the
phrase, he would no doubt have objected even more strongly.)

Mao's conversations with us were divided into two
subjects: increasingly precise elaborations of his views
regarding a common international strategy, and more elliptical
references to China's internal conditions. On international
affairs, he followed a geopolitical and 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

30

imperialism, revisionism, and all
reactionaries and establish socialism."

He laughed uproariously at the implication that anyone might
have taken seriously a slogan which had been scrawled for
decades on every public placard in China. With similar glee,
Mao volunteered that he preferred dealing with conservative
Western leaders such as Richard Nixon, Edward Heath, or
Georges Pompidou because the conservatives were more
suspicious of the Soviet Union while their leftist opponents
were sentimental, unrealistic, and vulnerable to Communist
peace offensives.

It was fortunate for Sino-American relations that the
Nixon Administration was Mao's first American interlocutor.
Almost any conceivable alternative group--let alone the
McGovernite Democratic Party of the late 1960s and early
1970s--would have been reluctant to base the relationship so

(Y)

⊕

31

explicitly on strategic and geopolitical considerations. 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 assistance as well as some military aid. Mao wasted no time unraveling these complexities. Taiwan would not be permitted to stand in the way of Sino-American rapproachment 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 a social chat with some self-evident observation.

And Mao quickly put to rest the nightmare legacy of the Korean War of possible Chinese intervention in Vietnam which had

⊕

32

obsessed and constrained every American administration in
Indochina for a decade:

> At present, the question of aggression
> from the United States or aggression from
> China is relatively small...You want to
> withdraw some of your troops back to your
> soil; ours do not go abroad.

In subsequent conversations, Mao elaborated the general
comments he had made to Nixon. In November 1973, he invited
me to a nearly three-hour tour d'horizon of the international
situation. Combining queries with allusions and alternating
bonhomie with mocking challenge, Mao would sketch his
conception of global containment of the Soviet Union in broad
strokes. He would identify the countries which could
contribute to this task and analyze what was needed to
strengthen them as if no constraints on the application of the
national interest could ever arise.

⊕

Kissinger: Because in that case, nobody will be attacked.⁵

These conversations took place in November 1973, at the very moment neoconservative critics were chastising the Nixon Administration for insufficient vigilance vis-à-vis the Soviet threat. While Mao's analysis of Soviet motivations paralleled that of the neoconservatives, he differed on the appropriate strategy. The neoconservatives, believing that the Soviet Union was preparing some ultimate apocalyptic showdown, wanted the United States to concentrate on that threat and not dissipate its strength in geopolitical contests around the Soviet periphery (which was why they did not support the administration on either Indochina or Angola). But that was exactly what Mao proposed as the best strategy to defeat Soviet expansionism wherever it reared its head. In pursuit

⁵China-II (1974) book, Tab K, pp. IV-189-190.

36

of that goal, Mao sought a strategic partnership with the
United States and to demonstrate the positive benefits of
Sino-American cooperation, saying in 1975:

> Each side has its own means and acted out
> of its own necessity. That has resulted
> in our two countries acting hand-in-
> hand...So long as our objectives are the
> same, we would not harm you nor would you
> harm us.

Focused on forming an anti-Soviet coalition, Mao (and
Zhou) were solicitous about America's relations with Europe
and Japan. They urged me to calm the disputes generated by my
1973 proposal for a "Year of Europe;" in their view, the
foreseeable results of the proposed joint declarations were
not worth the disputes they generated. And they were
especially concerned about American-Japanese relations. After
years of condemning our security treaty with Japan, Mao and

⁶On the "Year of Europe," see *Years of Upheaval*, Chapter V.

⊕

37

Zhou now saw in it a means to contain the Soviet Union and to protect against a resurgence of Japanese militarism.

There was, however, a difference in the situation and hence in the tactics of the two sides. China was, in fact, the most directly threatened party of the strategic triangle, and Mao knew it--despite his bravado that China was immune to pressure and implacable in the defense of its principles. Nor did he miss the inevitable implication of the Nixonian approach to foreign policy that we would resist changes in the global balance of power at the side of China if necessary, whatever the tactical maneuver in the interim.

And the different geopolitical as well as domestic situation of each country did dictate different tactical approaches to the common challenge. Under direct threat and with little scope for diplomatic maneuver, Mao treated the Soviet Union as an implacable enemy to be confronted verbally,

D

politically, and militarily at each opportunity. The Nixon
and Ford Administrations, governing a society shocked by a
decade of civil unrest, had to have as their top priority
restoring confidence in the purposes and design of our foreign
policy. Though we shared Mao's interpretation of Soviet
motives, if the Soviet Union were, in fact, to engage in
expansionism, we would resist. At the same time, a
demonstration of having gone the extra mile to rally domestic
support and to sustain the crises would be needed--but equally
not until then.

Our policy was driven as well by a strategic rationale.
If we had cemented ourselves into the posture of implacable
hostility toward the Soviet Union that Mao advocated, our
diplomacy would have lost all flexibility and much of our
ability to lead our allies. Our international position--and
our security alike--required us to maneuver in a way that

39

brought us closer to each of the Communist giants than they
were to one another. Since we considered China the weaker and
the more threatened, we tilted our policy toward Beijing while
steering clear of the rigidity that would fuel a resurgence of
the Vietnam peace movement in the United States and undermine
our capacity for a firm foreign policy. We were determined to
reserve final decisions for actual, not conjectural,
challenges.

Mao, who understood our design far better than our
domestic critics, could not be expected to be enthusiastic
about the application of Chinese statecraft to China. He
would surely have preferred to be on the side of the strategic
triangle that had the greater options. But he was experienced
enough to understand that we had our own strategy in pursuing
parallel objectives.

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

> Let them get bogged down in China...And
> then you can poke your finger at the
> Soviet back. And your slogan will be
> peace: to bring down the Socialist
> imperialisms for the sake of peace....

The aged revolutionary who had never known a period
without struggle--and who was emotionally so dependent on it
that he was ever contriving upheavals even after victory--
would not have believed (or lost respect for us if he came to
believe it) had I told him the American reality after Vietnam

B

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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 with
which we were ostensibly seeking to improve relations, to be
followed by American pressure against the Soviet Union, was too
Machiavellian for the United States of the 1970s and, I dare
say, of any other period.

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 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 of a two-China or one-China, one-Taiwan policy;

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and deferral by China of pressing the Taiwan issue. Mao said

in 1973:

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

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

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

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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 in 1975, he
concluded the meeting with a whimsical and melancholy bit of
irony that embraced all his ambivalence over what he had
wrought. Explaining why it was just as well that Taiwan's
status remain unchanged for awhile, he said:

> God blesses you, not us. God does not
> like us because I am a militant warlord,
> also a Communist.

Zhou Enlai

It was Zhou who sought to rescue continuity and
consistency from beneath the shadow of this towering, driven,

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available for our dialogue. On my typical sojourns in
Beijing, we generally met for eight hours each day. Zhou
delicately alternated the venue between the Great Hall of the
People and my own residence in one of the ponderous state
guesthouses. It was his way of suggesting that the United
States delegation was "at home," as it were, on Chinese soil
and that meetings were therefore alternating between the "home
turf" of each side. During these lengthy sessions, which
included meals, Zhou was never interrupted by any other
business. No phone calls or notes were passed to him.
Indeed, no phone was even in sight, a state of affairs
unthinkable--nay, impermissible--in Washington. Zhou seemed
determined to convey that he had no more important task than
to nurture the relationship with the United States. (I need
to joke that senior officials in Washington would probably not
be able to free so much time for the Second Coming.)

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Zhou was brought home to me at a dinner in the Great Hall of the People in December 1973. As part of a general discussion, I made the observation that China was essentially Confucian in its belief in a single, universal, generally applicable truth as a standard of individual conduct and social cohesion. All Communism had done, I suggested, was to alter the content of that truth. I cannot now recall what possessed me to make this statement which, however accurate, was surely oblivious of Mao's periodic digs at Confucians. Zhou exploded. It was the only time I saw him lose his temper. Confucianism, he said, was a doctrine of class oppression while Communism represented a philosophy of liberation. With uncharacteristic insistence, he kept pursuing the assault on Confucianism, no doubt to some degree so as to have it on record at least for the benefit of Mao's niece who was also seated at the obligatory round table.

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I saw Zhou for the last time in December 1974. Barely settled in the state guesthouse, I was whisked off, accompanied by my wife and children who had joined me for the occasion, to see Zhou in what was described as a hospital. Located in the general area of the former Imperial City as Mao's residence, it looked to the medically untrained eye as identical with any other Soviet-model Chinese guesthouse. Zhou appeared physically unchanged and as suave as ever. Yet he steered clear of any substantive discussion. He rebuffed every attempt to engage him by saying that his doctors had warned him against any strain. Why substantive conversation would prove more taxing than social chitchat was not explained. Only the symbolism was plain: Deng, not Zhou, was my officially designated interlocutor.

By the time I returned to China for a private visit in 1979, Deng had been restored, and Zhou had been fully

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honorary degree from Nankai University in Tianjin where Zhou
had studied, and the ceremony consisted of speeches praising
his role in establishing ties with the United States. Later,
at a visit to a statue of the late premier, a friendly student
crowd greeted me--probably the only pro-American demonstration
in China at the time.

Deng Xiaoping

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

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Qing, had publicly snubbed Deng shortly after his return to
Beijing, he was clearly important to Mao.

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

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

brought in to strengthen Zhou's position and not as a
counterweight to the premier.

As soon as we met Deng, we realized that this last
assessment had to be wrong for he wasted no time in distancing
himself from Zhou. Deng had arrived in New York in April 1974
as part of a Chinese delegation to a special session of the UN
General Assembly dealing with economic development. We paid
no particular attention since Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua
was the official head of the delegation. Deng did not ask to
see me, but neither did he leave New York even after Qiao
Guanhua had delivered the official Chinese speech. Believing
him to be clearly subordinate to Zhou and primarily interested
in economics, I did not invite Deng to dinner together with
the entire Chinese delegation until a scheduled address to the
General Assembly brought me to New York about a week later.

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It became immediately evident who the real leader of the
delegation was and, even more important, that, far from being
restored to ease Zhou's burden (as our intelligence 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. Indeed, Zhou's name was never so
much as mentioned by any member of the Chinese delegation. To
make sure we got the point, Deng, apropos of nothing, suddenly
reverted to my last conversation with Zhou by asking whether I
was familiar with Confucius. Fearful of provoking another
outburst like Zhou's, I replied evasively, whereupon Deng took
it upon himself to educate me:

Confucius, in short, was an expert in
keeping up the rites, and very
conservative. His ideology has been
binding the Chinese for over two thousand
years. These ideas have a deep influence
on the ideology of the people. If we wish
to emancipate the people's ideology from

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old thinking, we must remove Confucius.
This is a move to emancipate the people's
thinking.⁹

I asked whether the debate in China was theoretical or
practical, specifically: "Is it directed against individuals,
living individuals, and not against ancient individuals?"
Deng minced no words in confirming that the anti-Confucian
campaign had eminently contemporary purposes:

> There is some ground in what they say.
> When you criticize a conservative
> ideology, then, naturally, it will affect
> some working staffs--some people who
> represent the conservative ideology being
> attacked.¹⁰

Having grown accustomed to Mao Zedong's philosophical
reflections and indirect allusions and to Zhou's smooth
professionalism, it took me some time to adjust to Deng's
acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occasional cynical
interjections and his disdain of the philosophical in favor of

⁹China-II (1974), Tab L, p. I-163.

¹⁰*Ibid.*

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the eminently practical. Compact and wiry, he entered a room ready for business, with a minimum of banter. A spittoon ever before him--which he frequently used--Deng rarely wasted time on pleasantries in getting to the point. Nor did he feel it necessary to soften his remarks by swaddling them in parables. He did not 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 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
with a touch of melancholy in his face
doughty little man who had stuck to his cause in the face of
extraordinary vicissitudes and who would, in time, transform
his country far beyond any of his contemporaries. Mao's
traditional China had left a vacuum, as he himself indicated

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in his comment to Nixon. Out of the wreckage of the Cultural
Revolution, Deng fashioned a modernization that is likely to
turn China into an economic superpower during the 21st
century. Even as he was distancing himself from Zhou, Deng
found many small ways to show his commitment to close
relations with the United States. In October 1975, Foreign
Minister Qiao Guanhua--who had allied himself with ~~Mao's~~
radical wife--made a blisteringly unfriendly toast at the
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 great 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, ~~as I shall~~
describe in a later chapter. After Deng was forced into exile

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