In 1972 the American visitors did not have any idea of the extent of such horrors. Their Chinese hosts were unfailingly helpful and polite but simply ignored awkward questions. The journalists had hoped for man- and woman-in-the-street interviews, but found them impossible to arrange. When owning a book published outside China could be enough to ruin a family it is not surprising that no Chinese would take the risk of talking to foreigners, especially those who, until so recently, had been portrayed as China’s bitter enemies. The day Nixon arrived in Beijing, a Chinese woman had been arrested by plainclothes police for waving at his motorcade; it turned out that she had seen her niece, who was an interpreter for the journalists. The only Chinese the Americans were going to meet were officials and a few carefully selected individuals, writers or academics for example, who were always brought out to greet foreign visitors. ‘Pathetic mummies’ was how Pierre Ryckmans, the Belgian China expert who wrote as Simon Leys, described them. ‘Out of eight hundred million Chinese, foreigners meet about sixty individuals.’10
In 1972 there were very few foreigners living permanently in Beijing or indeed in China. The Chinese Communists had moved quickly after they seized power to drive out foreign businesspeople, missionaries and teachers, all of whom were lumped together as imperialists. A few enthusiasts for Communism – ‘our foreign friends’ – had chosen to stay on after 1949 and, at least until the 1960s, had lived privileged lives. ‘The Three Hundred Percenters’, as a British diplomat called them, were trotted out to laud the glories of the Revolution and Mao and to condemn the inequities of the West. During the Cultural Revolution even they came under attack, much to their bewilderment. Chinese universities, as part of the attempt to position China as the leader of revolution for the Third World, took in some foreign students, but this foundered when African students complained that they were looked down upon by the Chinese; after a brawl at the Peace Hotel, most of them left.11 A handful of foreign journalists from China’s fellow Communist republics or from countries such as France and Canada which had already established relations with China tried – usually unsuccessfully – to find some real news.
Only forty or so countries had any sort of relations with China, and the lives of their diplomats, even those from friendly countries, were severely circumscribed. There was little to see in Beijing; most of the famous sites had been badly damaged during the Cultural Revolution and remained closed. Foreigners could visit the Temple of Heaven and one street to look for antiques. Most restaurants did not serve foreigners at all and those that did had a special room set aside. Travel outside Beijing, except to the Ming Tombs, required a special permit, and permits, usually, were not forthcoming. Most diplomats had to live in the Diplomats’ Big Building, the Communists’ equivalent of the old imperial Barbarian Hostel which had once housed foreign emissaries. Their servants, supplied by the Chinese authorities, were undoubtedly spying on them.12
When the Communists took power in 1949, their fellow Communist regimes, led by the Soviet Union, had moved quickly to recognize them as the new government of China. So too had a number of newly independent Third World nations such as India and Indonesia. The Japanese, who accepted American influence over their foreign policy, had only been able to move cautiously to re-establish trading relations. By the time Nixon visited China, though, a number of American allies had already established diplomatic relations. The British had recognized the People’s Republic in January 1950, partly because they had extensive interests to protect in the East, most notably Hong Kong, but also because their longstanding policy was to deal with governments that had established control. Several of the smaller European countries followed suit, although France held back, partly because it feared the Communist Chinese threat to its position in Indochina. The People’s Republic accepted a British representative but did nothing to send its own to London. The outbreak of the Korean War later that summer precluded any further improvements. Chinese entry into the war in the late autumn of 1950 hardened American attitudes, both towards the Chinese Communists and to having any dealings with them. For their part, the Chinese Communists showed no inclination to deal with any imperialists. In 1954, a year after the Korean armistice, there was a sudden thaw when Chinese Foreign Ministry officials in Beijing unexpectedly accepted an invitation from the British chargé d’affaires to see a film of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In September the Chinese government sent its first representative to London. French recognition came ten years later in a sudden move by de Gaulle, which his defenders claimed was to exploit the differences between China and the Soviet Union but which was in fact designed to demonstrate his and France’s independence from the United States. De Gaulle hoped to be the first major Western leader to visit China, but he was driven from office unexpectedly in the turmoil of 1968. By the late 1960s, Belgium and Italy were moving towards recognition and so was Canada, whose foreign policy usually meshed with that of the United States on major issues. The United States was finding itself increasingly alone in its insistence that the Communists not be recognized as the legitimate government of China.
Because the diplomatic corps was so small, diplomats from different blocs who normally would have seen little of each other tended to get together. Only the North Vietnamese, the Albanians and the North Koreans kept themselves aloof. The Finns had a sauna club. The Soviets built a hockey rink at their embassy and had games every Sunday morning featuring the Soviet Union against a World team made up mainly of Canadians and the Mexican ambassador, who played enthusiastically but very badly. The British brought movies in once a month from Hong Kong. To pay for shipping they held ‘girlracing evenings’ where the prettiest British secretaries jumped ahead at the roll of dice; the Soviets adored these and were morose when a temporary freeze in relations between the Soviet Union and the West obliged them to boycott the British embassy13
Now, as the Nixon motorcade sped through Tiananmen Square, where a giant portrait of Mao gazed down on vast empty spaces, almost the only spectators were a small crowd of foreign diplomats hoping to get a glimpse of the momentous visit. A small Canadian girl puttered about on a miniature motorcycle and a couple of the British men climbed lampposts to snap pictures of the cars. For the isolated little diplomatic community in Beijing, this was a rare break in their usual routine.
3
Chou En-lai
IN THEIR CAR on the drive from the airport, Chou turned to Nixon and said, ‘Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world – twenty-five years of no communication.’1 It had crossed over much more than that: the long years of humiliation that the Chinese had endured at the hands of the outside world; the Americans’ own memories of retreating in Korea in the face of Red Chinese attacks; and the decades of fear and suspicion on both sides since the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949. The handshake also had to make up for one that had never occurred. In 1954, at the Geneva conference which was trying to wind up the Korean War and deal with the French defeat in Indochina, the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had publicly brushed pass Chou En-lai’s proffered hand. The Chinese had not forgotten the incident – indeed they remembered it vividly, just as they remembered the sign that was said to have been placed at the entrance to the park in the foreign quarter of Shanghai, ‘No dogs, no Chinese’. For them, though, the handshake now was not just about making up for a past slight. Its real significance was that China was being treated as an equal by a great power. Nixon’s first moments in China had been worrying both sides ever since the trip had been arranged. The Americans feared that Nixon might forget to shake hands with Chou, and the Chinese suspected that he might repeat Dulles’s snub.
The Chinese had a good memory for slights and grievances. The decades before the Communist takeover of power, during which China had been exploited and invaded by foreigners, were kept fresh in the national imagination as ‘the century of humiliation’. China’s history had not prepared it to be humiliated by outside powers. Two hundred years before Nix
on’s arrival, when there was not yet a United States, Beijing had been the capital of a self-confident and powerful country. Under the great Qianlong Emperor, who reigned from 1736 to 1799, China had expanded its borders in the west, doubling in size. The Emperor had added new courtyards and buildings to the Forbidden City at the heart of Beijing, and built a magnificent new Summer Palace just outside the city walls. He was a patron of the arts and learning. Chinese arts – the magnificent porcelain, for example – had reached new and more elaborate heights. When the British sent an embassy under Lord Macartney to ask for rights to trade freely, as equals, and to send diplomats, again as equals, to Beijing, the Qianlong Emperor received him as the representative of an inferior ruler, bearing not gifts but tribute, and with sublime condescension brushed off the requests. Over the ensuing decades, China stood still, secure in its old civilization. The outside world, especially Europe, moved on, into the Industrial Revolution. Western science, industry and technology jumped far ahead of the rest of the world to produce, among much else, ships and guns better than anything the Chinese had.
By 1872, eighty years after Macartney’s mission, the Summer Palace lay in ruins, looted and burned by foreign troops, and the young Emperor was a cipher, dominated by his ruthless and ignorant mother. China had been racked by massive peasant rebellions which had left great stretches of the country depopulated. And, to add to China’s misery, foreigners, greedy, demanding, unreasonable and regrettably powerful, were tying up a weak Chinese government with a series of treaties, remembered to this day by the Chinese as ‘the unequal treaties’. Chinese territory and Chinese independence were slowly being sliced away. Foreign businessmen were setting up shop on Chinese soil, protected by their own consuls, their own laws and their own soldiers. The United States, newly reunited after the Civil War, had not yet become a major player in the Far East, but American businessmen and American missionaries were busily establishing footholds. With missionaries came schools and printing presses and, perhaps most dangerous of all, ideas which began slowly to undermine the old order.
Thoughtful Chinese grappled with ways of dealing with the challenges that came from within and without. How could the Qing dynasty and its administration revitalize itself? How could China take the foreigners’ technology and perhaps even some of their techniques, as Japan was starting to do, and use them to fend off the outside powers? Yet to turn around a huge China, with its deeply conservative society, was not an easy task and there was little will to attempt it from the regime itself. So the catastrophes continued to pile up: the French defeated a Chinese fleet in 1884 and confirmed their hold over Indochina; in 1894–5, Japan destroyed two Chinese navies and took control of Korea and possession of Taiwan; and in 1898, the Boxer Rebellion brought more misery to north China and provided the foreign powers with yet another excuse to invade.
Chou En-lai was born in that last year, in a prosperous town in Jiangsu province, north of the great trading port of Shanghai. When he was two, foreign troops marched into Beijing to rescue fellow nationals besieged by the Boxers. The Chinese signed yet another humiliating treaty which allowed outside powers to station their troops in China permanently to protect their citizens. Chinese patriots wondered how much longer their country would survive before it was parcelled out among its enemies. The outlook was grim, with the Russians pressing in from the north and the west and the French from the south. The British were moving up the Yangtze valley and the Germans had established themselves in Shandong. Perhaps the most dangerous of all, the Japanese had seized the island of Taiwan and clearly had their eyes on Korea and the even richer prize of Manchuria. Chou grew up at a time of mounting nationalist fervour and debate. What was wrong with the old order if it allowed China to grow so weak? How could China be saved? Western science? Western democracy? Or both?
Chou’s family were part of a vanishing world, their position in society tied to the old regime and the old order. They were scholars, part of the elite who provided the bureaucrats to run China. Men like them studied the great Chinese classics, the works of Confucius among them, so that they could take the government examinations and enter the civil service. Chou’s grandfather had been a distinguished scholar and civil servant, and several of his uncles had passed their examinations. His own father, however, only ever held a minor government post and seems to have spent his days in genteel idleness. Chou was brought up by his extended family, partly in his father’s household, partly in those of his uncles. The main influence on him seems to have been the widow of one of his uncles, a woman he always called Mother. ‘Without her care I would not have been able to cultivate any interest in academic pursuits.’ In 1907, when he was nine, his natural mother died after an illness which drained his father’s modest savings. Chou was sent out to take family treasures to the pawnbrokers.2
Chou was later dismissive of his ‘bankrupt mandarin family’, which clung to the old ways when the world was changing around them. Yet he kept something of their manners and their deep appreciation of the arts and learning of the old China. His own education was a mix of the old and the new. He studied the classics but his adopted mother also hired a foreign missionary, a woman, for the ‘new learning’ – Western chemistry and mathematics, for example. In 1910, he went north of the Great Wall, to Manchuria, to live with one of his uncles. Although he was a small man, Chou attributed his toughness and his formidable capacity for work to the bracing climate and the standard diet of grain in the north. His new home of Shenyang (known to generations of foreigners as Mukden) was a major railway junction where Chinese mixed with foreigners from all over the world. In the five years since Russia’s defeat by Japan, Japanese power had started to replace Russian in Manchuria. A weak China could only watch from the sidelines as its territory was fought over. In Shenyang, the young Chou became a nationalist, reading radical journals and the works of prominent reformers. It is said that when a teacher asked his students why they were studying, Chou answered, ‘So that China can rise up.’3
The moribund Qing dynasty finally collapsed in 1911 and China became a republic. For a brief period, it looked as though the Chinese might be able to pull themselves together to deal with the twin evils of internal decay and external menace. Perhaps, thought the growing numbers of Chinese nationalists, a new form of government would bring rulers and ruled together to create a strong China. Chou celebrated by cutting off his pigtail, which had come to symbolize the old ways and subservience to the Qing.
Two years later he moved to a high school in Tianjin, the main port for Beijing, and another city where Chinese came into daily contact with large numbers of foreigners. By this stage, the adult Chou was starting to emerge. He was an outstanding student, and also good-looking and charming, with an ability to inspire tremendous loyalty. When he needed money for further studies, four of his friends pledged him a share of their tiny scholarships. Chou was also learning to conceal what he was really thinking. Over the years his gentle courtesy, his patience and his good humour almost invariably won the praise of foreign statesmen, even when Chou was quietly working against them. ‘We all considered him’, said Nikita Khrushchev, ‘a bright, flexible, and up-to-date man with whom we could talk sensibly.’4 Chou was a talented actor; at Tianjin, he normally played women’s parts because he had the necessary delicate looks and build and a light voice. When Nixon and Kissinger met him, they discovered a man who could be the fiery Communist revolutionary at one moment and the urbane man of the world the next.
The young Chou not only finished his schoolwork more quickly than his classmates but took on extra responsibilities, whether organizing debates or lectures or putting out student magazines. His essays frequently won prizes. In them he showed what was to be a lifelong preference for empirical knowledge. In the turmoil of the last years of the Qing, there was a renewed interest in the scholars who had unsuccessfully resisted the invasion of China in the seventeenth century by these Manchu foreigners from north of the Great Wall and who had tried to understand why
the preceding Chinese regime, the Ming, had collapsed. Chou was particularly influenced by those scholars who argued that Chinese learning had become too abstract and speculative and who called for ‘practical statesmanship’ and ‘practical learning’. Like many nationalist Chinese of his time, he was also drawn by the ideas of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, which seemed to promise that China might evolve out of its present miserable state.5
Exactly how that was to happen did not seem at all clear in the second decade of the twentieth century. The republic was a disaster, with Yuan Shikai trying to make himself emperor. After his death in 1916, China slipped into warlordism, where strong men and their armies controlled their own fiefdoms and competed with each other to gain control. Japan took advantage of the breakdown of the Chinese state and the preoccupation of the other powers with the First World War to present demands which would have turned China into its protectorate. Only a public outcry and pressure from the rest of the other powers made the Japanese back off, and even then only temporarily. Chou, in the ancient tradition of China’s scholar-bureaucrats, wrote a sad poem:
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