11102 words

2/20/97-#1

ARTICLE

Only those who experienced Mao's China can appreciate the
transformations wrought by Deng. The bustling cities, the
vast construction booms, the incredible traffic jams, the so
uncommunist dilemma of a growth rate threatening to spiral
into inflation--all of these were inconceivable in the drab
China of agricultural communes, a population uniformed in
standard jackets, a stagnant economy, deserted streets, and
professed ideological fervor.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were prone to philosophical
reflections, elegant formulations, and indirect allusions. It
therefore took me some time to adjust to Deng's acerbic, no-
nonsense style, his occasional cynical question, and his
relentless emphasis on the practical.

It was not until after Deng was forced into exile a
second time in 1976 that I understood how much good relations
with the United States owed to his influence. And not until
after his third return to power in 1979 did the extent to
which Deng was changing his society become clear in a way that

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is likely to endure beyond that of the larger-than-life figure
of his predecessor, Mao Zedong.

Deng's view of reform for China was eminently practical.
As one of the leaders of the Long March, he was a witness and,
in the end, a victim of Mao's revolutionary zeal. By the time
I encountered him, a lifelong revolutionary, 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 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
Communism, far from creating a new society, had produced a
"new" mandarin class. When Deng returned to power in 1974, he

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was in no mood for further political experiments; what he
strove for was to change the lives of the Chinese people.

These were not the priorities in the distant days when
Richard Nixon of the anti-Communist rhetoric and Mao Zedong of
the pithy and contemptuous anti-capitalist slogans came
together to launch a geopolitical revolution.

Nixon was driven by the desire to extricate the United
States from Vietnam, to create a counterweight to Soviet
expansionism, and to draw the sting from militant peace
movements by unveiling a grand design for peace. Mao shared
Nixon's concern over Soviet expansionism; indeed, he had every
reason to believe that China might be its next target. For
the Brezhnev doctrine of 1968 had reserved to the Kremlin the
right to bring backsliding Communist leaders to heel by the
use of military force. And no contemporary leader had
challenged Moscow's doctrinal preeminence more rigorously than

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Mao. At the same time, however, Mao was far too subtle to
overlook that the United States would defend only American
national interests and surely not China's right to doctrinal
heterodoxy. In other words, he needed to anchor the Sino-
American relationship in some parallel approaches to foreign
policy.

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

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 China and the
United States were engaged in counterbalancing Soviet power in
tacit alliance with China.

Although Zhou Enlai was my principal interlocutor during
the early visits, Mao overshadowed all his subordinates by the
near religious awe in which he seemed to be held (or which his

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subordinates thought it at least wise to affect). The other
Chinese leaders--Zhou and afterwards even Deng--invariably
conducted their conversations by buttressing their arguments
with extensive quotations from Mao. And in his presence, they
were extraordinarily deferential in both attitude and
expression.

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

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

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

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me, but he was smiling so that the overall impact was that of a benign leader.

Mao's residence was approached through a red gate on the wide east-west axis carved from where the ancient city walls stood before the Communist revolution. Today this avenue is a permanent gridlock; in the early days of Sino-American relations, however, it was largely empty. The few official cars and the more numerous bicycles seemed lost on it. Once inside the Imperial City, the road hugged a lake, on the other side of which was a series of residences for high officials identical to the official state guesthouses in another part of the city. All had been built in the days of Sino-Soviet friendship and reflected the severe Stalinist style of the period.

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

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

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

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his visitor a smile both penetrating and slightly mocking as if to warn that there was no point in trying to deceive this specialist in understanding and exploiting human weakness and duplicity. Mao would occasionally emphasize the impossibility of tricking him with an anecdote--for example, at our meeting of November 12, 1973: "The president of South Yemen approached me. He said he wanted to sever diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. He asked me my opinion. I was not taken in and replied that he must be prudent. Now they are tied very closely to the Soviet Union...."

Despite Mao's progressively impaired physical condition, he exuded more concentrated will power and determination than any leader I have encountered, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle. He could move only with difficulty, and his ability to speak progressively worsened to the point where, during our last conversation, aides had to write down

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what the sounds he uttered might mean and then show it to him
before translating into English.

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

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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,
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 wanted a more
explicitly coordinated strategy. 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

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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."

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

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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 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.

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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 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 legacy of the Korean War of possible Chinese intervention in Vietnam which had obsessed and constrained every American administration in Indochina for a decade: "At present, the question of

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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.

In Mao's view--subsequently largely born out by events-- the Soviet Union was only a real, but a mock, superpower. It had "stretched its hands too far," and its industrial capacity

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would not be able to sustain its global ambitions. Hence
Moscow was therefore 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.

While Mao's analysis of Soviet motivations paralleled
ours, he differed on the appropriate strategy. The
neoconservatives, believing that the Soviet Union was
preparing some ultimate apocalyptic showdown, wanted America
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 of that goal, Mao sought a
strategic partnership with the United States and to

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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 us 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 US-Japan relations. After years of condemning the US security treaty with Japan, Mao and Zhou now saw in it a means to contain the Soviet Union and to protect against a resurgence of Japanese militarism.

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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 Mao miss the inevitable implication of Nixon's 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.

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

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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 rear, was too
Machiavellian for the American 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 by America of a two-China or one-China, one-
Taiwan policy; and deferral by China of pressing the Taiwan

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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

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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."

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

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individualistic, entrepreneurial, and family-oriented people.

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

EP

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war. One son would stay with the Communists, another would go to America, occasionally a third would be in Taiwan. This is how it happened that several senior Chinese officials I encountered (including one Chinese ambassador to Washington) had brothers in the United States. With survival of the unit as a primary goal, families would bend, like so much bamboo, to a prevailing wind, but it would not break. The limit of their pliability was established by the pervasive common sense. In the end, even the most powerful Chinese rulers ran up against this paradoxical mass--at once obedient and independent, submissive and self-reliant, imposing limits less by defining issues than by reserving a residuum of judgment in execution.

Ironically, the family unit is now threatened more by the birth control policies of China than it ever was by Communist ideology. Families limited to one child will produce

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generations that know no uncles, aunts, cousins or the entire
network of obligations and mutual support that has
characterized the traditional unit. Only children have no
context of contemporaries to help socialize them and will not
accept the competition and discipline by which a reverence for
age and learning was inculcated. Poignantly the policy is
driven by necessity--by limits of resources in relation to
population--rather than by ideological choice.

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

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

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

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

In 1973, a year after my first encounter with Mao, the
physically frail but intellectually still vigorous Chairman

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seemed to have recognized this dilemma. In one of his
elliptical references, Mao warned me against Chinese women and
their radical views; referring to current pressure in the
American Congress on behalf of increased Jewish emigration
from the Soviet Union, Mao offered to supply an unlimited
number of Chinese women to the United States; this was his
way, he said to avoid potential disaster for his own country.

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

Mao went on to say he was ending the Cultural Revolution. The
Chinese would have to go to school abroad, especially since
their language was itself an obstacle to modernization. The
Chinese people, he added, were "very obstinate and very
conservative." Ever the radical, he continued: "Maybe if the
Soviet Union would throw its bombs and kill all Chinese who

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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.

BELIEVE YOU MEANT TO DELETE FOLLOWING (PP. 15-23):

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

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implication that anyone might have taken seriously a slogan
which had been scrawled on every public building in China for
two decades. 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 that the United States need not fear Chinese
expansionism: "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 that the
Chinese might intervene militarily in Indochina or, for that
matter, anywhere around the Chinese periphery. And Mao left
no doubt that even Taiwan was subordinated to the fundamental

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

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

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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.

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 realistically the United States had an option other than containment. It might decide 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

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

So risky and daring a policy had, in fact, no supporters
even among the most hard-line elements in the United States.
Still, 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, characteristically combining reassurance with an
implicit threat, "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 considerations, ironically at a moment when

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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 the
unchallenged leader of a revolutionary ideology and, at the
same time, consumed by premonitions of its fragility. Two
contradictory tendencies seemed to Mao 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."

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After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot
traditional China, there was not a little pathos in this
resigned recognition of the revolutionary dilemma. In Mao's
quest for egalitarian virtue, millions had been killed to
bring about a classless society and to make government
irrelevant. Yet at the end of the aged Chairman's life, he
began to realize that his society, creator of the civil
service, was on the way to replicating a traditional mandarin
class even more pervasive than the one he had destroyed
because bureaucratic prerogatives were now legitimized by a
true faith. Rebelling against the inevitable consequence of
his own efforts, Mao threw himself into ever more violent
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

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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 imposed on his society his
own specific version of virtue, the Chairman renounced all the
tools of progress for a decade, withdrawing all ambassadors
except one from abroad and closing all universities.

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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 the United States to reduce the risk of potential disaster for his own country. At first, I thought he was joking, and he had to repeat the comment several times before I understood that he was

END OF LIKELY DELETION]

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

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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

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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 traditional raw material of diplomacy--the trade issues, the looking after each other's nationals--was lacking. There was no trade at all and very few visitors. The Sino-American relationship therefore depended on the ability to concentrate on fundamentals--a task which in mature relationships is often obscured by the minutiae of routine.

Zhou demonstrated the priority he attached to the American relationship by making available seemingly unlimited time for the American-Chinese dialogue. We generally met for eight hours each of the three days of my typical sojourns in Beijing. Zhou delicately alternated the venue between the

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Great Hall of the People and my own residence in one of the state guesthouses to convey that each side was in a sense meeting on the home turf of the other and also that the American delegation was "at home," as it were, on Chinese soil. During these lengthy sessions, including meals, Zhou was never interrupted by any other business. No phone calls or notes were passed to him--indeed, no phone was even in sight, a state of affairs unthinkable if not impermissible in Washington.

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

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Similarly, Vietnam was mentioned only elliptically, even when, in June 1972, meetings coincided with the mining of North Vietnam's harbors. Zhou insisted that China owed Vietnam some support neither for geopolitical nor ideological reasons, but as a historical obligation. "The debt we owe them was incurred by our ancestors. We have since liberation no responsibility because we overthrew the old system. Still, we feel a deep and encompassing sympathy for them."

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

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

Once most of the regional problems were removed from the agenda, Zhou and the Nixon Administration could concentrate on the geopolitical aspects of the United States-China relationship which, in the Chinese view, depended on our respective abilities to orchestrate parallel contributions to the global equilibrium. Even at the first "secret" meeting in 1971, Zhou and I, by a kind of tacit agreement, devoted most of our dialogue to an analysis of the international situation

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despite the unbreakable deadline of 48 hours by which time I
had to reappear in Pakistan. In the process, we both avoided
the principal purpose of my trip--to arrange a visit by Nixon
to Beijing--until 18 hours before I had to leave. Because the
concrete issues which did exist were not ready for resolution,
the only available area for cooperation was defining a
community of interests. And since the common interests could
not be expressed in formal diplomatic language--which surely
would have created a firestorm--everything depended on whether
the Chinese and American sides could come to understand each
other's intentions sufficiently to gear their actions to them
without explicit understandings except vague declarations
against hegemony.

Almost the first sentence Zhou uttered to me--after
reminding me of John Foster Dulles' refusal to shake hands
with him--was: "Our word counts." And he proved meticulous

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in acting on this proposition. Zhou 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 backward toward 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 and that neither side is ever clear about the ultimate purposes of the other.

In this manner, China and the United States moved within two years to a high degree of cooperation on the basis of perhaps the fullest and frankest discussions of overall strategy of my period in government service. I had no illusions that Zhou, survivor of the Long March and of decades in Mao's entourage, could--if Chinese interests required it--

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prove as implacable an opponent as he was a charming
collaborator. But in the phase where the national interest of
both China and the United States required harmonizing the
policies of the two countries without being deflected by
peripheral issues, Zhou played an indispensable role.

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

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

Deng was to say later that Zhou had eased the fate of
many but never sought to reverse the policies that made their
suffering inevitable. This was consistent with how Zhou
described the Cultural Revolution to me at our first encounter
in 1971. He introduced the subject, insisting that I needed
to learn about the Cultural Revolution to help me understand
China. He described the country as torn between the fear of
bureaucratization and the excesses of ideological zeal. He
talked of the anguish of a society brought up on faith in a
single truth when, suddenly, factions representing different
versions of the same truth began battling for preeminence in
the streets until the fruits of fifty years of struggle seemed
in jeopardy. Zhou himself, he told me, had been kept prisoner
in his office by Red Guards for several days. Fifty years of

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struggle and sacrifice seemed to dissolve despite his initial
doubt as to whether such drastic measures were in fact
necessary, he said, if only for the record: "Mao was wiser;
he had the courage to look further into the future."

Zhou never explained what that future was, why it
required such stupendous suffering to achieve it. Clearly he
had made a personal decision that the best he could do was to
mitigate the designs of his awesome chief; any attempt to
reverse them would merely guarantee his own destruction. When
speaking of China's domestic problems, Zhou adopted a passive
tone almost as if the policies which he was in fact
implementing were someone else's. Like Mao, he would praise
the Chinese language for having served to unify the country,
but now he thought it had become an obstacle to modernization.
He said that China had much to learn from the United States
which had "the courage to use young people" in its government.

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Yet Zhou never left me with the impression that he considered
it his task to remedy the weaknesses he was describing.

The pressures of his system came to expression at a
dinner in the Great Hall of the People in December 1973. As
part of a general discussion, I observed that China was
essentially Confucian in its belief that there exists a
single, universal, generally applicable truth; all Communism
had done was to change the content of that truth. I cannot
now recall, if I ever knew, what possessed me to make this
basically accurate statement which ignored Mao's
frequent digs at Confucians (which in retrospect were clearly
aimed at Zhou's upper middle-class origins). Zhou exploded--
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

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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.

In early 1974, Zhou disappeared from exercising his
responsibilities, though he remained in office. No Chinese
official was to mention him again; the long tour d'horizon
with Mao described earlier became the bible which Chinese
officials invoked thereafter when legitimizing their
positions.

I saw Zhou for the last time in December 1974 when I came
to Beijing from Vladivostok to brief the Chinese on the summit
between Brezhnev and Ford. By then, Deng had become my
interlocutor. My wife and children had accompanied me on the
trip, and all of us were taken to see Zhou. The meeting place
was referred to as a medical facility although it resembled
any other official residence in the Imperial City. To the

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medically untrained eye, Zhou appeared unchanged, and he was
as charming as ever. But he avoided any discussion of foreign
policy, even the most allusive, saying that his doctors had
forbidden it. Why substantive conversation would prove more
taxing than social chitchat remained unexplained. When I
complimented him on appearing to be in good shape, Zhou
replied ambiguously: "Appearances can be deceiving."

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

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

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among them--toured an exhibition on his life at the museum in Tiananmen Square tracing the evolution of his career and displaying replicas of his office (which I had never seen) and of his home.

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

The Chinese government took the occasion to invoke Zhou as a symbol of its continued commitment to good relations with the United States. I was invited to accept an honorary degree

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from Nankai University in Tianjin where Zhou had studied and
taken to a statue of the premier as part of the ceremony.

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

Deng Xiaoping

In 1974, when Deng Xiaoping became my principal
interlocutor, we knew very little about him. Our intelligence
specialists told us that he had been secretary general of the
Communist Party until he was purged in 1966, charged with
being a "capitalist 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

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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

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the people. If we wish to emancipate the people's ideology
from old thinking, we must remove Confucius. This is a move
to emancipate the people's thinking."

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."

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

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interjections and his disdain of the philosophical in favor of
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
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

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

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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."

Deng never left any doubt 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 in a world composed of a
menacing Russia, a resurgent Japan, a potentially unified
Korea, an emerging India, and a Vietnam in the process of
achieving hegemony over Indochina. And it was based on Deng's
assessment that China could progress economically only in a
relaxed international atmosphere for which good relations with

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the United States were the essential precondition. He neither
challenged America's good faith nor did he question its
commitment to containing the Soviet Union. His disagreements
concerned tactics to reach agreed objectives. "Even when we
differ in views," said Deng as he welcomed me in October 1975
on what turned out to be a frigid (?) visit, "we do so as
familiar friends." He was passionate in insisting that
Chinese restraint towards Taiwan was a contribution towards
good relations with the United States; it was not a right on
which Washington could insist. "We can wait until the time is
riper for a solution of that question...[but] we do not admit
that another country has a right to participate in the
solution..."

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.

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After Deng returned from his second exile in 1978, it became increasingly apparent that he would transform Chinese society. 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 Mao's 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, Zhou) sought to transform Chinese society in accordance with Marxist theory, Deng insisted on altering Marxist dogma to fit economic reality; "I do not care whether