8975 words

2/20/97-#2

ARTICLE

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

Nixon was driven by the desire to extricate the United
States from Vietnam, to create a counterweight to Soviet
expansionism, and to draw the sting from militant peace
movements by unveiling a grand design for peace. Mao shared
Nixon's concern over Soviet expansionism; indeed, he had every
reason to believe that China might be its next target. For
the Brezhnev doctrine of 1968 had reserved to the Kremlin the
right to bring backsliding Communist leaders to heel by the

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use of military force. And no contemporary leader had
challenged Moscow's doctrinal preeminence more rigorously than
Mao. At the same time, however, Mao was far too subtle to
overlook that the United States would defend only American
national interests and surely not China's right to doctrinal
heterodoxy. In other words, he needed to anchor the Sino-
American relationship in some parallel approaches to foreign
policy.

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

speed and in so straight a line reflected the ability of the
leaders of both sides to transcend ideology and meet on the
basis of mutual interests and necessities.

The statement by Mao and Nixon in the Shanghai Communiqué
of 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mao would rise from the center of a semicircle of easy chairs, a female attendant standing close by to steady him

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

Despite Mao's progressively impaired physical condition, he exuded more concentrated will power and determination than any leader I have encountered, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle. He could move only with difficulty, and

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

Despite these handicaps, Mao conducted conversations in a
Socratic style. Eschewing the soliloquies and formal points
with which heads of state generally make their case, he would
generally begin with a question, quite often in a needling
tone. With deceptive casualness, he would then offer a few
lapidary comments, ranging from the philosophical to the
sarcastic and culminating in yet another question. The
cumulative effect of his tangential observations was to convey
a mood and a meaning while avoiding any formal commitment.
When Nixon tried to draw Mao into a discussion of specific
measures, he replied: "These should be discussed with the
Premier [Zhou Enlai]. I discuss the philosophical questions."

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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. 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, so he
used my comment to make his point: "If neither side has
anything to ask from the other, why would you be coming to
Beijing?...And why would we want to receive you and the
President?"

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

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mandated by Congress: "The world is not tranquil, and a
storm--the wind and rain--are coming...At the approach of the
storm, the swallows are busy...but the flapping of their wings
cannot obstruct the coming of the storm."

Mao's conversations with us were divided into two
subjects: increasingly precise elaborations of a common
international strategy, and more elliptical references to
China's internal conditions. On international affairs, he
adopted an insistently nonideological approach. One of his
first observations to Nixon was: "...People like me sound a
lot of big cannons. For example, things like 'the whole
world should unite and defeat imperialism, revisionism, and
all reactionaries and establish socialism.'"

He laughed uproariously at the implication that anyone
might have taken seriously a slogan which had been scrawled
for decades on every public placard in China. With similar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was, however, a difference in the situation and
hence in the tactics of the two sides. China was, in fact,
the most directly threatened party of the strategic triangle,
and Mao knew it despite his bravado that China was immune to
pressure and implacable in the defense of its principles.
Mao, who understood our design far better than our domestic
critics, could not be expected to be enthusiastic about the
application of Chinese statecraft to China, which was our
policy of being closer to Moscow as well as to Beijing than
they were to each other. He would surely have preferred to be
on the side of the strategic triangle that had the greater
options. But he was experienced enough to understand that we
had our own method for pursuing parallel objectives.

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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 would not have believed (or lost respect for
us if he came to believe it) had I told him the American
reality after Vietnam and Watergate (and maybe at all times):
it was all we could do to mobilize the American people in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 redefined a specifically Chinese version of Communism.

Now 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

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stability is lost, it will take decades to regain." Deng had difficulty understanding, he averred, why the United States had raised no ideological issues when China was 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.

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

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

Deng considered the ultimate purpose of his life to be
reform. For that, he struggled--and suffered--with courage
and imagination. Paradoxically it was the passion for reform
which shaped his attitude toward the events which fall under
the heading of Tiananmen Square. To American observers, they
seemed a flowering of democracy. But Deng saw less glory in
demonstrations by students whose fathers had besieged his
residence when they had been students and who had thrown his
son out of a window, maiming him for life. Believing that he

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The while program of return was at state 75 applied for once political was obliged to choose between political and economic reform, he opted for the latter, albeit with heavy-handed methods.

Unquestionably, he has improved the life of the Chinese people. And having achieved the reform to which his life was dedicated, he retired to permit successors to implement his legacy. The reform he sought did not aim at pluralistic democracy. At the same time, Deng was too wise not to understand that the changes he wrought had a momentum independent of the intentions of their originator. Clearly Deng's revolution is irreversible. Whatever happens, China cannot return either to the state-controlled economy or to the rigid political conformity of the Mao period. At the same time, Deng's economic reforms and the market economy they have spawned will require growing constitutionalism--that is, predictability--even if pluralistic democracy is not established. The relative position between provinces and

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central government may well fluctuate as it has throughout
Chinese history. Alterations in leadership and institutions
can affect emphasis not direction which history will record as
Deng's legacy to his ancient people.

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