Leaders

by Richard Nixon

  Of the three, I knew Chiang the longest. I considered both him and Madame Chiang friends in a way the others were not. Our bonds were personal and also a product of shared beliefs and principles. But it was Mao and Zhou who won the war for the Chinese mainland, and of those two, it was Zhou whose vision had the greater staying power. Zhou was also, quite simply, one of the most extraordinarily gifted people I have ever known, with an incandescent grasp of the realities of power. All three are dead, but Zhou’s is the legacy that is increasingly ascendant in modern China.

  Seven months before my first visit to China in 1972, I sent Henry Kissinger on a secret mission to Peking to negotiate arrangements for it. During his two days in Peking on that initial secret trip, Kissinger spent more than seventeen hours in direct, far-ranging discussions with Zhou. On his return he reported to me that he would rank Zhou equally with de Gaulle as “the most impressive” foreign statesman he had ever met.

  Though given to occasional hyperbole, as we all are, Kissinger is seldom that lavish in his praise of people who are out of earshot. After meeting Zhou and negotiating with him for a week, I could understand why Kissinger had been so unusually laudatory in his assessment of Zhou.

  At the conclusion of my trip to China in 1972, I said in my final toast, “We have been here a week. This was the week that changed the world.” Some observers felt I had been carried away by the drama of the visit and had overestimated its significance. I believe history will demonstrate that if this first step had not been taken toward the normalization of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, the balance of power with the Soviet Union would now be weighted almost fatally against us. Both men and events contributed to the diplomatic breakthrough that was formalized by the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972. The one man who deserves the primary credit was Zhou Enlai.

  Zhou was a Communist revolutionary and a Confucian gentleman, a devoted ideologue and a calculating realist, a political infighter and a grand conciliator. A lesser man thrust into these crosscutting roles would have ended up confused in thought and action. But Zhou could assume any one of the roles or combine qualities of each without giving the slightest impression of hesitancy or inconsistency. For him these were not masks to be donned cynically at the appropriate moments. They were facets of a very complex, subtle man that in large measure explained the length and richness of his political career.

  The ruthlessness of the Communist ideologue allowed him to capitalize on historical opportunities and to endure political setbacks and physical hardships. The personal qualities of the Confucian gentleman allowed him to excel in personal diplomacy and to become “our beloved leader” to millions of Chinese. The shrewdness of the realist allowed him to assess accurately the underlying forces in domestic politics and international diplomacy. The stealth of the political infighter enabled him to ensure that his policies would outlive him and would extend into the post-Mao era. The tact and courtesy of the conciliator allowed him to keep the country together when the actions of more cataclysmic figures worked to pull it apart.

  The interplay of all these qualities allowed Zhou to lead a career in the highest reaches of Communist leadership that lasted longer than that of Lenin, Stalin, or Mao.

  • • •

  Zhou’s early life is a textbook case of the political evolution of a revolutionary leader. He was born in the town of Huai’an, about two hundred miles northwest of Shanghai, in the province of Jiangsu. When his mother died and his father proved unable to provide for him, the Zhou clan took over his upbringing, shuttling him among a host of uncles. His traditional Mandarin family trained Zhou in the Chinese classics from his infancy. But when he stayed with an aunt and uncle in the Manchurian city of Shenyang, he attended an elementary school sponsored by Christian missionaries for several years until he was fifteen years old. It was in this period that he learned “the new knowledge” brought from the West.

  After completing his elementary education, Zhou sought to enroll in a program that would have sent him to the United States for college, but was bitterly disappointed when he failed to rank high enough on the entrance examinations. Instead he attended the antitraditionalist Nankai Middle School in Tianjin and spent two years in Japan, where he read for the first time about the ideas of Karl Marx. In 1919 Zhou returned to China and attended Nankai University. Political agitation preoccupied him more than academics, however. For his role in organizing student strikes and demonstrations, Zhou spent four months in jail.

  Zhou was twenty-two years old when he was released from prison in 1920. He then traveled to Europe to continue his education. He visited England and Germany, but spent most of his time in France. His reputation as a strike organizer had preceded him, and radical groups of Chinese students abroad welcomed him. He enrolled in classes, but political agitation still consumed most of his energy. Zhou was soon receiving a stipend from the Comintern.

  In 1924 Zhou returned to China to join Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary Kuomintang party, with which the Communists were then in alliance. He was appointed deputy director of the political department of the Whampoa Military Academy, whose commandant was a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek. Impressed by Zhou, Chiang retained him as chief commissar on the Kuomintang’s military campaigns and sent him with other officers to organize an uprising in Shanghai to facilitate its armed capture.

  In 1927, when Chiang took Shanghai, he turned his guns on the Communists within his ranks, whose growing strength he now feared. Zhou barely escaped with his life. He then organized several unsuccessful urban insurrections against the Kuomintang before Chiang’s army forced the remnants of Zhou’s on to the Long March. During the six-thousand-mile trek, Zhou became a trusted aide of Mao. When the Kuomintang and the Communists formed a united front against the Japanese in World War II, he served as Mao’s liaison to Chiang, and afterward he was the chief Communist negotiator in the talks to try to end the civil war. After the Communist victory in 1949, Zhou served as the Premier, the Foreign Minister, and sometimes both for over a quarter of a century.

  • • •

  The unique personality of Zhou Enlai was one of the most vivid impressions of my trip to China in 1972. Through the many hours of plenary sessions and informal meetings, I came to know him well and to respect him greatly. Enlai translates as “coming of grace,” a name that succinctly captured his presence and disposition. Zhou was unassuming but quietly strong. He conveyed immense charm and poise through his graceful movements and erect, easy stance. He faithfully observed the old Chinese rule in personal and political relations of never “breaking the surface.”

  Zhou’s appearance gave the impression of personal warmth, absolute forthrightness, complete self-possession, and unmistakable intensity. In the plenary sessions he was calculatingly restrained. Wearing a neatly tailored gray Sun Yat-sen suit with a “Serve the people” ideograph pinned to the flap of his pocket, he sat motionless across the table from me. He leaned forward slightly, setting his arms on the table and clasping his hands together before him. His right arm was noticeably wizened, a permanent reminder of an injury sustained during the Long March. At age seventy-three his brushed-back black hair was only slightly gray. Its single wave was uncharacteristic for a Chinese, as was his dark, almost Mediterranean complexion.

  His sharply sculpted features remained impassive during the formal sessions. When listening, Zhou would hold his head slightly to one side while looking directly into my eyes. Henry Kissinger once likened Zhou to a cobra that sits quietly, poised to strike, and then springs at the opportune moment. The phrase that was often used to describe Charles Parnell, the great nineteenth-century Irish patriot, could well have been applied to Zhou Enlai: He was a volcano under an ice cap.

  Zhou seemed to understand what I was saying before he heard the translation, which was not surprising because he once had a working knowledge of English, as well as French, German, Russian, and Japanese. Occasionally he even corrected the translation of his own statem
ents to capture better the nuances of his thoughts. When speaking, he used no notes and only rarely brought any of his aides into the discussion. He was logical and earnestly convincing. To add power to his statement, he would lower his voice, providing emphasis with a discreet nod of the head.

  Though he might have appeared frail because of his thin frame, Zhou’s stamina surpassed that of many of his younger associates. Because of his enormous workload—at the time he was both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister—he was reputed to rise early and work long into the night. Often he received foreign visitors at odd hours of the morning and conducted conversations that lasted until sunrise, always finishing them as fresh and incisive as he was at the outset.

  As we became better acquainted in the more informal settings of banquets and sight-seeing, Zhou’s gestures became more expansive and his face more animated. He would often sit back in his chair and use his expressive hands to great effect, sweeping an arm before him when adding scope to a statement or generalizing and pushing his hands together at the fingertips when weaving the strands of an argument into a conclusion. The silent chuckle at the wordplay in the formal sessions gave way in social conversation to easy and sometimes uproarious laughter at friendly jokes. The merriment brought out the light in his eyes, while his broad smile deepened the creases in his skin and seemed to evince a very genuine pleasure.

  At the state dinners Zhou and I toasted each other with maotai instead of champagne, which is the traditional drink at such affairs. Maotai, a 106-proof rice wine, is a fiery brew. It has been humorously said that a man who drank too much of it exploded when he lit an after-dinner cigarette. At one point Zhou put a match to a cup of maotai to demonstrate its combustibility, and the liquid was instantly consumed in flames.

  When we moved around the banquet hall to clink glasses with over fifty high-level officials, I noted that he was sipping his drink gingerly, barely letting it touch his lips as he toasted each guest. We were both still on our first glasses by the time we returned to our table. Then we downed the rest. Given the drink’s potency, I was astonished when Zhou told me that on special occasions during the Long March he drank as many as twenty-five cups of it in a day, though his age had since limited him to two or three cups. I remembered reading that on the Long March, when the Red Army overran the village of Maotai, where the drink originated, the troops had drunk the place dry. Zhou remarked to me with a snake-oil salesman’s glint of the eye that on the Long March maotai was “a cure for everything.”

  Our conversation ranged from politics to history to philosophy, in all of which Zhou was completely at home. Zhou was a scholar-turned-insurrectionist who never lost the scholar’s keenness of mind and depth of thought. The categories into which his ideology sometimes channeled his thinking, however, could distort his reading of history. In our talks, for example, he referred to the French troops who fought with the colonists in the Revolutionary War as “volunteers.” The French forces, in fact, except for a few like Lafayette, were actually trained, professional soldiers serving a political purpose in opposing the British armies.

  Zhou also told me that Lincoln waged the Civil War in order to free the slaves and won because “the people” supported him. In fact, Lincoln, who is one of the few true giants in history and of whom the Chinese spoke with great respect, waged war not to free the slaves but to bring the states of the South back into the Union. His Emancipation Proclamation was a tactical maneuver that freed the slaves only in the rebelling states, but not in the border states that had remained within the Union. Lincoln was unalterably opposed to slavery, but his first priority was to save the Union.

  Though he was a dedicated revolutionary, Zhou looked not at all out of place amid the splendor of the palaces of old Peking, moving about them with a calm and grace worthy of a sage of the dynastic periods. No one would have guessed after seeing him in these surroundings that he was a leader of a movement whose professed mission was nothing less than conquering the world, reforming civilization, and changing human nature. The ornamentation was oddly respectful of China’s past. The palaces were decorated with extravagant paintings of Chinese landscapes and with ancient artifacts of silver, gold, and jade. There was not a trace of the raucous exhortations of the propaganda posters that lined the streets of Peking.

  The subtlety of the art and ornamentation was matched by the subtlety in Zhou’s personality and his handling of affairs of state. This subtlety, which Zhou possessed to a greater degree than any other world leader I have known, is a distinctly Chinese character trait. It has resulted from centuries of development and conscious refinement of Chinese civilization. It was present in conversation, where Zhou carefully drew distinctions between shades of meaning; it was present in negotiations, where he skirted contentious points through indirection; it was present in diplomacy, where he sometimes conveyed important messages through seemingly trivial events.

  Zhou and all the Communist Chinese leaders I spoke with took particular delight in reminding me that an exchange of Ping-Pong teams had initiated the breakthrough in our relations. They seemed to enjoy the method used to achieve the result almost as much as the result itself. Mao, for example, said that China had been “bureaucratic” in insisting that all major issues be settled before relations could be improved. “Later on,” he said, “I saw you were right, and we played table tennis.”

  Zhou also had the rare ability to pay meticulous attention to detail without getting bogged down in it. On our third night in Peking we were taken to the gymnastics and table tennis exhibition. It had begun to snow, and we were scheduled to visit the Great Wall the next day. Zhou left his seat briefly, and I assumed that he had gone to the rest room. Later I found that he had personally gone to see to it that the people were sweeping the snow off the road to the Great Wall. The next day the road was pristine. This incident was typical.

  I discovered that Zhou had personally assembled the members of the honor guard that welcomed us at the airport; they were all strong-looking, very tall, and immaculately turned out. He had chosen the songs for the band to play during dinner. I knew he had done his homework on my background because he had selected many of my favorites, including “America the Beautiful,” which was played at my inauguration. After the trip, Secretary of State William Rogers told me that before one of his meetings with Zhou a young lady came and handed Zhou the galleys of the next day’s newspaper, which he proceeded to arrange for the front page.

  In Zhou’s case there is almost certainly some truth in the adage that greatness is the accumulation of attention to detail. Yet, though he tended personally to each tree, he always was able to see the forest.

  Zhou also possessed another distinctly Chinese quality, an unshakable self-confidence that the Chinese have acquired from enjoying cultural supremacy in their region for millennia. But the awareness by the Chinese of their cultural heritage cut two ways.

  On the one hand it combined with a natural resentment of the national humiliations China suffered in the past two centuries to create a heightened sensitivity to diplomatic indignities. The Chinese attitude toward the outside world was graphically described by my friend the late Harold Lee, an Oxford graduate and a resident of Hong Kong, who had an almost uncanny understanding of both Chinese and western psychologies. In 1965 I asked him how the Communist Chinese would react if the United States recognized the government in Peking. His reply was characteristically blunt: “ ‘You will recognize us?’ they would ask incredulously. ‘You have it all wrong. The only question is whether we will recognize you.’ ” An incident at the Geneva Conference on Vietnam in 1954 illustrated Zhou’s sensitivity to slights of Chinese national honor. Zhou was representing China and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles the United States. Dulles had told a reporter that there was one condition under which the two would meet: “Only if our automobiles collide!” By chance they encountered each other when both arrived early for one morning session. Zhou reached out to shake hands. Dulles shook his head and walked ou
t of the room, thoroughly humiliating the Chinese Foreign Minister. Six years later Zhou still winced when he recounted the incident to his friend Edgar Snow. In the context of those times, Dulles’s snub was understandable. Thousands of Americans had been killed by Communist Chinese “volunteers” in the Korean War; Chiang Kai-shek’s government on Taiwan would soon sign a mutual defense treaty with us; and mainland China and the Soviet Union were united in their belligerency toward the United States. I knew how deeply the incident had offended Zhou, however. Therefore, when I reached the bottom step of the airplane ramp on my first arrival in Peking, I made a point of extending my hand as I walked toward him. Our handshake produced the most memorable photograph of the trip.

  On the other hand, in our dealings with the Chinese their self-confidence allowed them to turn their critical scrutiny inward without becoming insecure about their shortcomings. Zhou continually referred in our talks to their need to understand and overcome their imperfections. In our first meeting he noted the great contrast in the average age of their party and ours, saying, “We have too many elderly people in our leadership. So on this point we should learn from you.” Similarly, later in the visit, he apologized for an incident during our visit to the Ming tombs, in which a lower official had provided some children with colorful clothing and instructed them how to act when our group arrived: “Some people got some young children there to prettify the tombs, and it was putting up a false appearance. Your press correspondents have pointed this out to us, and we admit that this was wrong. We do not want to cover up the mistake on this, of course, and we have criticized those who have done this.” Throughout my visit I could not help thinking of Khrushchev’s bombast and how much healthier the Chinese approach was. Khrushchev’s crude boasting was obviously a cover for an inferiority complex. Zhou’s subtle self-criticism was clear evidence of a mature self-confidence. Yet I knew that this was basically only a way of approaching things and that in fact the Chinese were absolutely convinced of the ultimate superiority of their culture and philosophy and that these would triumph in time over ours and everyone else’s.