To the south he saw India. He had nothing but contempt for the Indians after China routed their armies in a series of border clashes. But he knew that India was the world’s second most populous nation and that with Soviet support it could be a dangerous threat.
To the north he saw the Soviet Union with the capacity to knock out China’s minuscule nuclear force in a thirty-minute surgical strike and with over forty fully modernized divisions on the Chinese border, having more than tripled those forces in less than ten years.
Across the Pacific he saw the United States. As a Communist, he regarded the U.S. as his most deadly ideological enemy. As a Chinese, however, he recognized that of all his neighbors in Asia and the Pacific, the U.S. was the only one that had no designs, present or future, against China. And most important, the United States was the only nation that had the power to hold the ring against his mortal enemy to the north.
The table was set, therefore, for a rapprochement—not because either of us liked the other’s philosophy, but because preserving the delicate balance of power was essential to both our interests. They needed us and we needed them. When Zhou began receiving our signals about reopening relations, he moved to “seize the hour and seize the day,” as one of Mao’s poems put it.
• • •
Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s formidable Foreign Minister, once warned an American negotiator, “If you think we are difficult to deal with, wait until you come up against Zhou!” When we did, I found that Zhou was not the intransigent negotiator Molotov had described. As a dedicated Communist, he considered us ideological enemies. But as a pragmatic Chinese, he recognized that he needed us.
Our differences were great, but our common interests were greater; our task was to mute the differences, not exacerbate them. The Chinese leaders wanted to mitigate the hostile encirclement in which their break with the Soviet Union had put them. We believed that it was imperative to end the “angry isolation” of the Chinese government; we also saw an opportunity to help contain the Soviet Union through triangular diplomacy. Though a common interest in rapprochement existed, we had to define our relationship in a communiqué and resolve a great many technical matters.
In our negotiations I realized that it was politically impossible for Zhou to abandon abruptly the diplomatic positions that his ideology dictated. But I knew he was a realist who valued national interest over ideology, for as he had told Kissinger, “The helmsman must guide the boat by using the waves.”
When we were discussing the American military presence in Japan and the Pacific, I knew this problem was particularly sensitive. I noted that the Chinese were calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Japan and the abrogation of our mutual defense treaty. I then pointed out that our policy was in China’s national interest even though it contravened the dictates of its ideology. Alluding to the Soviets, I said, “The United States can get out of Japanese waters, but others will still fish there.” Japan, I went on, either would seek an accommodation with the Kremlin or would rearm.
I knew that Zhou, as a realist, probably agreed with my analysis, but that Zhou, as an ideologue, could never do so explicitly. He responded with characteristic subtlety. He was silent for a moment and then changed the subject without comment. But nobody in the room could mistake his silence for anything other than agreement.
I met with Zhou for over fifteen hours of formal one-to-one negotiations, apart from the many hours we spent together at lunches, dinners, and other public events. Four things made an indelible impression on me: his stamina, his preparation, his negotiating skill, and his poise under pressure.
His stamina was remarkable. I noticed that in some of our longer meetings the younger men on both sides became drowsy as the hours unfolded and the translators droned on. But the seventy-three-year-old Zhou was quick, tough, and alert throughout. He never wandered from the subject at hand, never filibustered, and never asked for a break. If our afternoon sessions failed to resolve a disagreement about the wording of the communiqué, he did not leave the problem to his aides, but met personally with Kissinger for the rest of the day and night to iron it out. The next morning he would look as if he had just returned from a restful weekend in the country. He thrived on hard work involving great issues. Power and responsibility kept him young.
He was as well prepared as any leader I have ever met. He had done his homework and turned to his aides only for an elaboration of highly technical points.
Kissinger had told me that I would be amazed by Zhou’s negotiating skill, and he was right. Most negotiations involve symbolic issues as well as substantive ones. After my meeting with Mao, Zhou and I sat down for our first plenary session. Zhou brought up a symbolic issue to test my resolve subtly and to see whether I was renouncing my strongly held views of the past by coming to China.
“As you said to Chairman Mao this afternoon, today we shook hands,” he said. “But John Foster Dulles didn’t want to do that.”
“But you said that you didn’t want to shake hands with him,” I countered.
“Not necessarily,” Zhou replied. “I would have.”
“Well, we will shake hands,” I said as I reached across the table to shake hands once again.
Zhou seemed to warm to the subject, and he continued: “Dulles’s assistant, Mr. Walter Bedell Smith, wanted to do differently, but he did not break the discipline of John Foster Dulles, so he had to hold a cup of coffee in his right hand. Since one doesn’t shake hands with the left hand, he used it to shake my arm.” Everyone laughed, and then Zhou added, “But at the time, we couldn’t blame you, because the international viewpoint was that the Socialist countries were a monolithic bloc, and the western countries were also a monolithic bloc. Now we understand that that is not the case.”
“We have broken out of the old pattern,” I agreed. “We look at each country in terms of its own conduct rather than lumping them all together and saying that because they have this kind of philosophy they are all in utter darkness. I would say in honesty to the Prime Minister that my views, because I was in the Eisenhower administration, were similar to those of Mr. Dulles at that time. But the world has changed since then, and the relationship between the People’s Republic and the United States must change too.”
Zhou was tough and tenacious, but was flexible in working out our differences. We were miles apart on the section of the communiqué dealing with Taiwan. We would not and could not abandon Taiwan; he would not and could not relinquish his unequivocal claim to it. He wanted to use our communiqué to assert that claim. It was a remarkable achievement, one for which Kissinger and he deserve the major credit, that we reached a compromise through which each side stated its position in noninflammatory language. Zhou—his eyes always on the main issue—knew that the new relationship with the United States was more important than prevailing on the issue of Taiwan.
During all our talks he never lost his poise. In stark contrast to the antics of Khrushchev and the theatrics of Brezhnev, Zhou never raised his voice, never pounded the table, never threatened to break off talks in order to force a concession. I told Zhou’s wife in 1976 what particularly impressed me about her husband was that he was always firm but courteous and that he spoke most softly when he “had the cards.” I attribute his poise in great part to his training and background, but it also reflected his mature self-confidence. He never felt it necessary, as the Russian leaders so obviously did, to prove his manhood before his aides.
Zhou’s conversation was not as colorful as Mao’s, but at times he would make his points with vivid imagery. When we were driving from the airport to the guest house in Peking, he said simply, “Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world—twenty-five years of no communication.”
Zhou was an accomplished poet and sometimes used a poem to make a substantive point. Alluding to the presidential election in 1972 and his hope that I would win it, Zhou spoke of a poem of Mao’s entitled “Ode to a Plum Blossom.” “In that poem,” Zhou said,
“the Chairman meant that one who makes an initiative may not always be one who stretches out his or her hand. By the time the blossoms are full-blown, that is the time they are about to disappear.” Zhou continued, “You are the one who made the initiative. You may not be there to see its success, but of course we would welcome your return.”
During our last long session in the guest house in Peking, Zhou again turned to poetry to illustrate a point. He said, “In your dining room upstairs we have a poem by Chairman Mao in his calligraphy about Lu Shan mountain. The last sentence reads, ‘The beauty lies at the top of the mountain.’ You have risked something to come to China. But there is another Chinese poem which reads, ‘On perilous peaks dwells beauty in its infinite variety.’ ” Zhou’s poetic turn of mind, as well as Mao’s, is not unusual among great leaders. Politics, at its best, is more poetry than prose.
• • •
Zhou’s negotiations with Chiang and the American mediators during the Chinese civil war were indispensable to the Communist victory. His delaying tactics bought valuable time for the Red Army to grow in strength, and his feigned desire for compromise immobilized Chiang’s American guarantors.
A Kuomintang official in Taiwan went as far as to say, “If we had only had Zhou on our side in the civil war, today it might be Mao who was in exile in Taiwan—and we would be in Peking.” However much he may have overstated his case, the Kuomintang official made a valid point: Mao’s role in the revolution has been overrated. Mao could not have conquered and ruled China alone. Whether he could have done so without Zhou is an open question. The important point to remember is that he did not: It was the partnership between Zhou and Mao that won China.
A peasant, Mao, who revolted against the oppression of landlords and warlords, and an intellectual, Zhou, who fought against inequality and foreign encroachments, they represented the two key elements in Chinese society that united in the Communist revolution.
Historically significant as their partnership would be, it got off to an inauspicious start. Zhou was a failed urban insurrectionist when he came to Mao’s Jiangxi province base in 1931. Zhou promptly took over the military command. Mao said years later that during this period he “had no voice at all” in party affairs. After the Kuomintang army chased the Red Army out of the Jiangxi and on to the Long March, the two cooperated in charting their winding course and planning their battle tactics. Midway along the six-thousand-mile trek, Zhou threw his political support behind Mao and helped elevate him to the position of Communist party chairman, and the partnership took the form the world would know for forty-two years.
Once in power, the partnership wavered between antagonism and symbiosis. Mao saw a world filled with contradictions and in a constant state of flux; he valued struggle above all else. The more pragmatic Zhou placed more emphasis on using struggle selectively to attain concrete ends. Zhou pitted his remarkable administrative talents and seemingly inexhaustible personal energy against the overwhelming inertia of China’s fifty million bureaucrats and achieved a degree of control that allowed Mao to preoccupy himself with a detached, spiritual leadership of the country.
Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka of Japan said that Zhou “behaves in front of Mao like a clumsy secretary attending an outstanding congressman.” It is hard to imagine the graceful Zhou resembling anything clumsy, but he did step into the background in Mao’s presence, probably at least partly by design. He realized the danger of pretending to Mao’s throne.
This does not mean that their partnership was without mutual loyalty or affection. It was not Mao’s habit to extol his subordinates publicly, but two incidents illustrate the friendship between the two leaders. At one point during the Cultural Revolution, a group of Red Guards labeled Zhou “the rotten boss of the bourgeoisie, toying ambidextrously with counterrevolution” and wanted to put him on trial. To their request Mao reportedly answered, “Agreed, as long as I stand with him.” Nine years later, when Zhou lay dying, Mao, who for years had been largely a recluse, went to the hospital to be with Zhou during his last hours. Mao was the last person except Zhou’s doctors to speak with him.
• • •
The remarkable partnership of these two great leaders of China in the twentieth century reached its zenith in 1972 with the end of the Cultural Revolution and the success of the Sino-American rapprochement.
As Zhou escorted me into Mao’s book-strewn study for our meeting, I remembered what Malraux had told me during our White House dinner just a few days before my departure for Peking: “You will be dealing with a colossus, but a colossus facing death.” Mao and I did not negotiate. He was taking my measure, as I was taking his. He wanted to know if I had a global view that was compatible with his. He was trying to discern whether American affluence had made us soft and whether our troubles in Vietnam had sapped our strength of will.
The fragility of his health was striking. His secretary needed to help him to his feet as I entered. He apologetically told me that he could not talk very well, which Zhou later attributed to an attack of bronchitis but which I assumed was actually the aftermath of a stroke. His skin had no wrinkles, but its sallowness made it seem almost waxen. His face was benign, but unexpressive. His eyes were distant, but could be piercing. His hands seemed as if they had never aged. They were not tough, but very delicate. Age had affected his stamina, however. The Chinese had scheduled our meeting to run only about fifteen minutes. Mao became thoroughly captivated by the discussion, so it stretched into an hour. I noticed that Zhou glanced at his watch with increasing frequency as Mao began to tire.
The difference between the two was striking. Zhou looked, talked, and acted like a highly civilized, debonair diplomat. Mao was robust, earthy, exuding an animal magnetism. Mao was chairman of the board; even in his declining years he still was recognized as the leader. But Zhou was the chief operating officer.
Mao had a casual, elliptical manner that gave me the impression of a man juggling a dozen thoughts in his mind at once. He set forth his views in a calm, flat voice that made him impressive in a small meeting, but would have failed as oratory.
He liked to sound outrageous even when making serious points. “I voted for you during your last election,” he proclaimed with a broad smile. I said that he must have been choosing the lesser of two evils. “I like rightists,” he responded with obvious enjoyment. “People say that you are rightists—that the Republican party is on the right—that Prime Minister Heath is also to the right.” I tossed in de Gaulle’s name. Mao demurred that de Gaulle was a different question and then continued, “They also say the Christian Democratic party of West Germany is to the right. I am comparatively happy when these people on the right come into power.” Referring to our diplomatic rapprochement, I brought the point home by saying, “I think the most important thing to note is that in America, at least at this time, those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about.”
He also frequently indulged in self-deprecation to make a point obliquely. While the photographers did their work at the outset of our meeting, we engaged in light repartee. Kissinger mentioned that as a professor at Harvard he had assigned Mao’s writings to his students. Mao responded, “These writings of mine aren’t anything. There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.” I said that his writings had moved a nation and changed the world. Mao replied, “I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.”
When I returned to China in 1976, Mao’s condition had deteriorated considerably. His speech sounded like a series of monosyllabic grunts and groans. But his mind remained quick and incisive. He understood everything I said, but when he tried to answer, the words just would not come out. If he thought the translator had not understood him, he would impatiently grab a note pad and write out his comments. It was painful to see him in this condition. Whatever one may think of him, no one can deny that he was a fighter to the end.
In those days the United States was suffering fr
om the Vietnam syndrome and was shirking its responsibilities as a world power. Mao asked me the key question: “Is peace America’s only goal?” I replied that our goal was peace, but a peace that was more than the absence of war. “It must be a peace with justice,” I told Mao.
We must keep this point in mind when dealing with the Communist Chinese. They are revolutionaries who believe their interests and ideals are worth fighting and dying for. If we answer Mao’s question with a discourse that exclusively emphasizes the need for peace and friendship, the Chinese will consider us to be wrong; even worse, they will consider us to be fools. After all, they will say, if peace is really our only goal, we can attain it any time we wish simply by surrendering. Thus, we must reiterate to the Chinese that we, too, have values for which we will struggle.
The onset of Parkinson’s disease had stiffened all of Mao’s movements. He had never been physically graceful. But at age eighty-two the peasant’s shambling stride had become an old man’s slow shuffle. Mao, like Churchill in his old age, was still proud. At the end of our meeting his secretaries lifted him out of his chair and helped him walk with me toward the door. When the television lights and cameras came on to record our final handshake, however, he pushed his aides aside and stood there on his own for our farewell.
• • •
“Mao’s outward jerkiness was not misleading,” wrote Ross Terrill in his biographical study Mao. “The balance in his being, if it existed, came from a clash of opposites. He was part tiger, he said of himself, and part monkey. The ruthless side and the quixotic side each took its turn.” Unlike Zhou, Mao did not weave the strands of his personality together, but instead let each of them pull him in a different direction.
As the arbiter of government policy, Mao was impulsive. He rose late in the day and worked through the night. Like Stalin, he frequently called members of his staff at odd hours of the early morning for trivial matters. He withdrew from day-to-day affairs for long periods of lonely introspection. He would cross-examine policy experts for hours and then stroll into his garden to ask a guard for advice on the same policy questions.
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