26

preserve its uniqueness, China had refused to imitate the West
in the 19th century, risking colonization and incurring
humiliation. A century later, one objective of Mao's Cultural
Revolution--from which indeed it derived its name--had been to
eradicate precisely those elements of modernization which
threatened to engulf China in a universal culture. This is
why, in 1966, he had purged Deng Xiaoping--as a 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 new revolutionary
reality.

27

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

28

conservative." Ever the radical, he continued: "Maybe if the
Soviet Union would throw its bombs and kill all Chinese who
are over thirty, that would solve the problem for us." But
that was another way of saying that the problem was insoluble.

Within a year, Mao was to reverse the maxims advanced in
that conversation. In early 1974, Zhou was for all practical
purposes retired and, two years later, Deng was purged a
second time.

When I saw Mao for the last time, six months before his
death, he was back to the old Chinese statecraft of playing
off one set of barbarians against another. To avoid the
United States moving towards Moscow for fear of confrontation
with China over Taiwan, he recalled, with whimsical irony, his
comment to Nixon that the issue could wait a hundred years:
"A hundred years hence we will want it and fight for it...And
when I go to heaven to see God, I'll tell Him that for the

29

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

Zhou Enlai

It was from under the shadow of this towering, driven,
and conflicted personality and against the backdrop of Mao's
ever present temptation to institutionalize permanent upheaval
that Zhou sought to establish continuity and consistency in
his vast country. Graceful, suave, and elegant, Zhou was my
principal interlocutor in the first three years of Sino-
American relations. Throughout the strange preliminary period
before liaison offices were established in each capital in
1973--when we exchanged messages first through Pakistan, then
through the Chinese Embassy in Paris via the American military
attaché, General Vernon Walters--the dialogue between the two
sides followed no established diplomatic precedent. As a

30

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
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

31

soil. During these lengthy sessions, including meals, Zhou was never interrupted by any other business. No phone calls or notes were passed to him--indeed, no phone was even in sight, a state of affairs unthinkable if not impermissible in Washington.

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

Similarly, Vietnam was mentioned only elliptically, even when, in May 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

32

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
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

[4]

33

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 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.

34

Because the concrete issues which did exist were not ready for resolution, the only available area for cooperation was defining a community of interests. And since the common interests could not be expressed in formal diplomatic language--which surely would have created a firestorm-- everything depended on whether the Chinese and American sides could come to understand each other's intentions sufficiently to gear their actions to them without explicit understandings except vague declarations against hegemony.

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

35

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

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

36

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
struggle and sacrifice seemed to dissolve despite his initial
doubt as to whether such drastic measures were in fact

37

necessary, he said, if only for the record: "Mao was wiser; he had the courage to look further into the future."

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

He said that China had much to learn from the United States which had "the courage to use young people" in its government.

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

38

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.

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 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.

39

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

I saw Zhou for the last time in December 1974 when I came
to Beijing from Vladivostok to brief the Chinese on the summit
between Brezhnev and Ford. By then, Deng had become my
interlocutor. My wife and children had accompanied me on the
trip, and all of us were taken to see Zhou. The meeting place
was referred to as a medical facility although it resembled
any other official residence in the Imperial City. To the
medically untrained eye, Zhou appeared unchanged, and he was
as charming as ever. But he avoided any discussion of foreign
policy, even the most allusive, saying that his doctors had

40

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 reform. Large crowds--I among them--
toured an exhibition on his life at the museum in Tiananmen
Square tracing the evolution of his career and displaying

41

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

42

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

43

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.

44

As soon as we met Deng, we realized that this last
assessment was wrong for he wasted no time in distancing
himself from Zhou. Deng had arrived in New York in April 1974
as part of a Chinese delegation to a special session of the UN
General Assembly dealing with economic development.

When I invited the Chinese delegation to dinner, it
became immediately evident who the real leader of the
delegation was and, even more important, that, far from being
restored to ease Zhou's burden (as our intelligence 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. 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,

45

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 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-

46

-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 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

47

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

48

television lights were turned off. The next morning, Deng
demonstratively invited me and the American delegation to an
impromptu picnic in the Fragrant Hills near Beijing and went
to ostentatious lengths to put the full weight of his person
and office behind friendship with the United States. He did
the same during Ford's visit in late November 1975. Deng
ended the trip on a positive note by 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

49

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
conviction that China could progress economically only in a
relaxed international atmosphere for which good relations with
the United States were the essential precondition.

Deng 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

50

the time is riper for a solution of that question...[but] we
do not admit that another country has a right to participate
in the solution..."

After Deng returned from his second exile in 1978, it
became increasingly apparent that he would transform Chinese
society. Deng's reforms started from the conviction that the
suffering caused by Mao's 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
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,

51

"Reality is our teacher;" practice overrode theory by implication, even--or perhaps especially--Marxist theory.

"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.

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 was restoring United States relations as the centerpiece of Chinese foreign policy. Deng deplored the collapse of the Shah of Iran and Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. He urged

52

a stronger American 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 Zhou'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.

I saw Deng the next time in Seattle, the last stop of his
American journey. I was there as a sports fan to watch the
American national soccer team in its effort to qualify for the
1982 World Cup. I sent Deng a note that I did not feel right
being in the same city without seeing him and offered a brief
courtesy call. He replied that I had called on him in

53

Washington, and courtesy required him to call on me. And to
the extraordinary displeasure of his security personnel, he
carried out this pledge, walking from his hotel to where I was
staying and in the process creating a monumental traffic jam.

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

54

For his part, Deng passionately rejected all these orthodoxies. The people, he said, needed to be given a stake in what they produced. Therefore, consumer goods had to have priority over heavy industry, whatever orthodox textbooks alleged. 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 would have 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 of the challenge of striking a balance between centralization and decentralization in a vast country of huge population and significant regional

55

differences. I noticed that, while Deng had not raised his
voice and was addressing his remarks 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 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

56

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

57

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.

In 1988, Deng elaborated on his political reform. He was
now ready to transfer power from the party to the government.
The Communist role would be limited to "guidance on
philosophical issues." On this occasion, too, Deng chided me
gently for having predicted in print that China would be a
great power by the second decade of the 21st century. I
underestimated the problems, he said; 2050 was a more
realistic estimate. Part of Deng's motive was probably to
discourage any ideas of applying balance-of-power principles
to China.

58

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 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.

59

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
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

60

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

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
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.

FEB-20-1997 13:50

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.01

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

FEB-20-1997 13:50

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.02

2
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

FEB-20-1997 13:50

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.04

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

FEB-20-1997 13:51

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.05

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

FEB-20-1997 13:51

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.06

6

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

FEB-20-1997 13:51

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.07

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

FEB-20-1997 13:51

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.08

8

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

FEB-20-1997 13:51

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.09

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

FEB-20-1997 13:52

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.10

10

me, but he was smiling so that the overall impact was that of
*Teacher*
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

FEB-20-1997 13:52

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.11

11

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

FEB-20-1997 13:52

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.12

12

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

FEB-20-1997 13:52

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.13

13

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."

FEB-20-1997 13:52

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.14

14

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

FEB-20-1997 13:53

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.16

16
~~followed a geopolitical and insistently~~
~~ affairs, he ~~followed a~~ 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.

FEB-20-1997 13:53

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.17

17

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

FEB-20-1997 13:53

KAI DC

212 753 7248

18

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

D

FEB-20-1997 13:53

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.21

21

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. Not 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.

As 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.

as well as

* Beijing
* Don't we
* I heart it

D

FEB-20-1997 13:54

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.22

22

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

⊕

FEB-20-1997 13:54

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.23

23

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

FEB-20-1997 13:54

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.24

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

FEB-20-1997 13:54

KAI DC

212 753 7248

25

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,

FEB-20-1997 13:54

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.26

26
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

TOTAL P.26

FEB-20-1997 14:03

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.01

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

FEB-20-1997 14:03

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.02

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

FEB-20-1997 14:03

KAI DC

212 753 7248

P.03

29

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

D

FEB-20-1997 14:03

KAI DC

212 753 7248

30

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.

⊕

FEB-20-1997 14:04

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.05

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.

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

FEB-20-1997 14:04

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.06

32

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

FEB-20-1997 14:04

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.07

33

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

FEB-20-1997 14:04

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.08

34

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

FEB-20-1997 14:04

KAI DC

212 753 7248

35

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

FEB-20-1997 14:05

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.10

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

FEB-20-1997 14:05

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.11

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."

FEB-20-1997 14:05

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.12

38

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

39

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.

41

"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

FEB-20-1973 14:06

KHI DC

212 133 1240 1.10

42

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.

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.

FEB-20-1972 14:00

RN1 DC

212 133 1240 1.10

(4)

44

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."

45

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."

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

48

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.

49

FEB-20-1997 14:07

KHI DC

212 100 1240 1.24

50

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.

⊕

FEB-20-1997 14:07

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.25

51

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

⊕

FEB-20-1997 14:07

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.26

52
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.

FEB-20-1997 14:08

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.27

53

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."

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. Large crowds--I

FEB-20-1997 14:08

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.28

54

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.

TOTAL P.28

FEB-20-1997 14:09

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.01

Deng Xiaoping

FEB-20-1997 14:09

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.02

When I invited the Chinese delegation to Tianjin, 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

FEB-20-1997 14:10

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.05

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."

FEB-20-1997 14:10

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.06

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

FEB-20-1997 14:10

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.07

61

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

⊕

FEB-20-1997 14:10

KAI DC

212 753 7248

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
assumption that China could progress economically only in a
relaxed international atmosphere for which good relations with

FEB-20-1997 14:11

KAI DC

212 753 7248

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.

FEB-20-1997 14:11

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.10

64

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.

⊕

FEB-20-1997 14:11

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.11

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.

FEB-20-1997 14:11

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.12

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

FEB-20-1997 14:11

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.13

67

being in the same city without seeing him and offered a brief
courtesy call. He replied that I had called on him in
Washington, and courtesy required him to call on me. And to
the extraordinary displeasure of his security personnel, he
carried out this pledge, walking from his hotel to where I was
staying and in the process creating a monumental traffic
jam.

FEB-20-1997 14:11

KAI DC

212 753 7248

FEB-20-1997 14:12

KAI DC

212 753 7248

69

of the Cultural Revolution, and of the challenge of striking 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 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 already close to 80). "We have to get it right this time," concluded Deng. "We have made too many mistakes already."

FEB-20-1997 14:12

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.16

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

FEB-20-1997 14:12

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.17

71

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.

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