opportunities for when the
Nixons toured it. The
White House advance team
made meticulous, detailed
preparations for every
aspect of the trip.
Soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army forming a well-disciplined crowd at a sports and gymnastics exhibition staged for the Americans on February 23.
As Chou En-lai waits to greet him, Nixon descends the steps alone from Air Force One. He is the first American president ever to visit China.
The crucial first handshake between Nixon and Chou.
As Nixon and Chou review Chinese troops at the Beijing airport, Pat Nixon follows behind.
China was dotted with pictures of Mao. This giant one on the wall of the Forbidden City gazes out over Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.
Nixon’s first and, on this trip, only meeting with Mao. From left to right, Chou En-lai, Tang Wensheng (Nancy), Mao’s interpreter, Mao, Nixon and Kissinger. Winston Lord has been cropped out of the right-hand side of the picture.
Another handshake for the cameras. Both the Americans
and Chinese were eager to overcome the memory
of the infamous snub when John Foster Dulles refused
to shake Chou En-lai’s hand in Geneva in 1954.
Chou hosts a welcome banquet in the Great Hall of the People the day of Nixon’s arrival in Beijing.
Nixon and Chou toasting each other with maotai, the formidable Chinese alcohol.
On 1 October, the Chinese sent what they considered a very public message to the Americans when Mao invited Snow to accompany him on the reviewing stand in Tiananmen Square on China’s National Day. A picture of the two was published in the People’s Daily. Snow, who had first met Mao when the Communists were holed up in Yan’an in the late 1930s, stayed on in China for a couple of months more and had a long conversation with Mao. He was glad, the Chairman said, that Nixon had won the election. ‘If he wishes to come to Beijing, please tell him he should do it secretly, not openly – just get on a plane and come.’ Nixon had made it clear that he wanted to talk directly to the Chinese and not through the Warsaw discussions. ‘Therefore I say I am ready to hold talks with him if he is willing to come. It doesn’t matter if the negotiations succeed or fail, if we quarrel or not, if he comes in the capacity of a tourist or the President.’ Taiwan was clearly an issue between them but what did it really have to do with Nixon? The situation had been created by earlier administrations. Ten million people in Taiwan were nothing compared to the billion in the rest of Asia. ‘Will China and the US remain for 100 years without establishing relations? After all, we haven’t occupied your Long Island!’ Unfortunately the United States missed the significance of Snow’s visit, partly because he himself took several months to find a publisher for the story of his visit and partly because official Washington tended to write him off as a fellow traveller, so no one went to see him at his home in Switzerland. Snow, who was old and ailing, seems not to have made any attempt to brief the government. Nixon claims in his memoirs that the Americans knew about the interview a few days after it took place. Kissinger, on the other hand, says that the Chinese overestimated American subtlety and intelligence-gathering and that Washington did not know about the interview for several months, by which time the channel through Pakistan was producing results.23
Although Yahya was increasingly preoccupied with the growing threat of secession by East Pakistan and the resulting tensions with India, he continued to act as intermediary. In October 1970, while he was in the United States for the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations of the United Nations, he paid a visit to Nixon and Kissinger in Washington. Nixon asked Yahya to carry word to the Chinese that the United States was anxious to normalize relations. Yahya flew to China on a state visit in November and duly conveyed his message to Chou En-lai. ‘This is the first time’, the Chinese Prime Minister remarked, ‘that a proposal has come from a Head through a Head, to Head! The United States knows that Pakistan is a great friend to China and therefore we attach great importance to it.’ Chou also made it clear, however, that the Chinese would accept a special envoy only to discuss the withdrawal of American forces from Taiwan.24
Yahya, possibly because he was trying to cope with cyclone damage in East Pakistan and coming elections in both halves of his country, took several weeks to deliver Chou’s reply, which the Americans finally received on 8 December. Kissinger found it encouraging and downplayed the Chinese linking of the Taiwan issue to a visit by an American representative. In fact, the Chinese demand for American withdrawal from Taiwan was an obstacle and the American message that went back on 16 December said firmly, ‘The meeting in Peking would not be limited only to the Taiwan question but would encompass other steps designed to improve relations and reduce tensions.’ As for the American presence on Taiwan, it was the general policy of the United States to ‘reduce its military presence in the region of East Asia and the Pacific as tensions in this region diminish’. The Americans apparently sent a copy through their Rumanian channel as well, which the Soviets in time picked up. At some point, Nixon and Kissinger also considered, but rejected, establishing another channel through Ottawa, where the Chinese opened an embassy in February 1971. But the danger of the contacts being noticed were thought too great; in addition, Nixon could not bear Trudeau. The State Department remained unaware of all these developing contacts.25
The Chinese duly received the American reply and the channel then went silent for several months. Nixon gave his second foreign policy report to Congress in February and said that the United States wanted to remove the obstacles on its side to greater contacts between the Chinese and American peoples. ‘We hope for, but will not be deterred by a lack of, reciprocity.’ On 15 March, the United States ended all restrictions on travel by Americans to China. Still Beijing remained silent. Kissinger said in his memoirs that he took the time to educate himself, partly by meetings with academic experts. ‘It would be satisfying to report that my former colleagues conveyed to me flashes of illuminating insight.’ The academics proved incapable of providing advice on strategies for the next few years or on immediate issues. ‘I listened politely,’ Kissinger claimed, ‘chastening any impatience with the recognition that I could hardly have been more relevant when I served as an academic consultant to two previous administrations.’26
On 6 April 1971, the Chinese government suddenly invited an American table-tennis team, which was competing in the World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, to visit China. The decision to initiate what became known as ‘ping-pong’ diplomacy had been made at the highest levels, indeed by Mao himself, after chance encounters brought Chinese and American table-tennis players together. Chinese teams, which had been condemned during the wildest days of the Cultural Revolution as ‘sprouts of revisionism’, were only just starting to take part in international events again. The tournament in Japan was the first to have seen a Chinese team for several years. Mao had agreed that the Chinese could take part, but the team was sent off with orders to report back to Beijing three times a day and with strict instructions on how to behave. ‘During the contest, if we meet with officials of the US delegation, we do not take the initiative to talk or exchange greetings. If we compete with the US team, we do not exchange team flags with them beforehand, but we can shake hands and greet each other.’ Early on in the tournament, when an American player casually said at a banquet, ‘Hi, Chinese, long time no see. You guys played well,’ the incident was immediately reported. And when the Americans asked jokingly why they had not been invited to play in China along with Mexico and Canada, the lights burned late in Beijing as the Chinese tried to work out what this meant. Chou En-lai submitted a cautious report to Mao which reflected the views of both the Foreign Ministry and the State Sports Commission that the time was not yet ripe to invite an American team to China, although there might well be opportunities in the future. The Americans could leave their addresses, said Chou, but it
must be made clear to them that the Chinese people were firmly opposed to ‘the conspiracy of “Two Chinas”’. (The People’s Republic always insisted that there was only one China and that Taiwan was part of it.)27
On 4 April, as the tournament was winding down, a pair of players, one American, the other Chinese, caused a fresh incident to perturb Beijing. The American team were generally clean-cut athletes, ‘the kinds of Americans that you pray to be involved in something like this’, an American diplomat remembered. Glenn Cowan, though, the US junior champion, came from California and liked to consider himself part of the counter-culture. ‘He’s apt to wear a purple passion shirt with tie-dye leopard-like pants,’ a long-suffering team official recalled, ‘he has long D’Artagnanian locks, he’s a floppy hat that he wears and he’s sort of a hippy.’ By chance, Cowan found himself out at the practice centre without a ride back to the main tournament hall. A Chinese player beckoned him towards a bus in which he found most of the Chinese team, all smiling at him. Cowan was babbling cheerfully on to the uncomprehending Chinese about how they were all oppressed when Zhuang Zedong, a world champion and one of the Chinese stars, came forward and presented him with a silk brocade scarf. When the head of the Chinese team tried to stop his player, Zhuang brushed him aside. ‘Take it easy. As head of the delegation you have many concerns, but I am just a player.’ As the players got off the bus, a crowd of journalists recorded the scene. To his embarrassment, Cowan did not have anything to give in return. He managed to find a red, white and blue shirt with a peace emblem and the words of the Beatles’ song ‘Let It Be’, and he presented this the following day with maximum publicity to the Chinese athlete. ‘Hippy opportunist,’ said the American official.28
Mao, who had been following the events in Japan with intense interest, sat chain-smoking for the next two days in Beijing while Chou’s report lay on his desk. The tournament in Japan would be over on 7 April and he still had not made up his mind whether to invite the Americans to China. On the 6th, he approved Chou’s recommendation that they do nothing. That night, as usual, his nurse read him the news stories about the tournament. Mao said approvingly, ‘Zhuang Zedong not only plays good Ping-Pong but knows how to conduct diplomacy as well.’ At midnight, after he had already taken his customary heavy dose of sleeping pills, he suddenly sat up and ordered his nurse to contact the foreign ministry at once with orders to invite the American team. It was only when she had made the call that he allowed himself to fall asleep. As Mao subsequently put it, the small Ping-Pong ball could be used to move the large ball of the earth.29
The invitation, which reached the Americans the next day, had more than a ring of the Middle Kingdom about it. Since the Americans had requested an invitation ‘so many times’, China had agreed to accede to their request. ‘If they are short of travelling expenses, we can render them assistance.’ The first American diplomat to hear on the ground in Japan replied simply that, if the team decided to go, it would not be against current American policy. He then dashed to his records and found with relief several of Nixon’s statements expressing hope that contacts would be resumed between China and the United States. In Washington, the desk officer at the State Department had the same reaction. ‘Go for it, do it.’ He then went home and told his wife that he would be out of a job if he was wrong.30
Neither man lost his job. Nixon and Kissinger were surprised but delighted by the invitation. A rather bewildered group of Ping-Pong players and officials from the US Table Tennis Association headed for China, filled with last-minute advice from American diplomats and laden with cameras and tape recorders that reporters had pressed on them as well as all the American pens the embassy in Tokyo could find to give as presents. The team, the first American delegation into China since 1949, arrived in Canton by train and then flew north to Beijing and later to Shanghai. Everywhere they saw the giant portraits of Mao, the cartoons with a pygmy Nixon and a giant Chinese, and the slogans which said ‘Down with the US imperialists’. On the streets the locals stared at them with amazement, especially at Glenn Cowan with his long hair and at a teenage girl player in her mini-skirt, and the Americans stared back. One young American girl spent much of the time in tears because she would not eat Chinese food; finally the Chinese made her a hamburger and French fries.31
Chou oversaw all the detailed arrangements for their reception and even had the Forbidden City, which he had closed to save it from the Red Guards, reopened for sightseeing. The trip, ‘an international sensation’ in Kissinger’s words, received extensive publicity in the world’s press. The handful of foreign journalists stationed in Beijing were joined, and this was another breakthrough, by reporters from the big American news services. In China itself, all the matches were broadcast live on television and radio. Chou ordered the Chinese players to let the Americans win some of them.32
On 14 April, Chou held a lavish reception in the Great Hall of the People for the visiting teams. In alphabetical order, the teams from Canada, Colombia, Great Britain, Nigeria and the United States climbed the impressive staircase that Nixon was going to climb a year later. Chou was a charming host, chatting with all the players, posing patiently for photographs and deprecating his own ability at Ping-Pong. He made jokes about the weather with the British and talked to the Canadians about his admiration for Dr Norman Bethune. His most significant words were of course directed at the Americans. To the president of the US Table Tennis Association, he quoted a Chinese proverb about the joy of having friends from afar. ‘Your visit’, he said as he toasted the Americans, ‘has opened a new chapter in the history of the relations between Chinese and American peoples.’ And he went on: ‘With you having made the start the people of the United States and China in the future will be able to have constant contacts.’33
As the reception came to an end, Chou asked if there were any more questions. Glenn Cowan popped up. ‘What do you think of the hippy movement?’ He did not know much about it, Chou said, so his views might be rather superficial. Perhaps young people around the world were dissatisfied and wanted change, but they had not yet found the ways to bring that about. ‘When we were young,’ the old revolutionary said, ‘it was the same thing too. Therefore, I understand the ideas of youth, they are very curious.’ Cowan replied that the hippy movement was really very deep: ‘It is a whole new way of thinking.’ Chou suggested that more was needed: ‘Spirit must be transformed into material force before the world can move forward’. (Cowan’s mother apparently sent Chou flowers with thanks for educating her son.) Chou concluded by commending Cowan for not playing too badly against the Chinese team and wished him progress. ‘I could talk for hours,’ Cowan told reporters. He became, temporarily, a great sinophile, talking about staying on in China, which in his view was so much less conformist than the United States. That desire vanished when he found himself ill in a Chinese hospital.34
The whole visit was ‘vintage Chou En-lai’, in Kissinger’s opinion. ‘It was a signal to the White House that our initiatives had been noticed.’ The Americans were careful to respond. On 14 April, Nixon ended most of the remaining restrictions on trade between the United States and China. Two days later, he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and, while he was careful to warn them not to get their hopes up about an immediate breakthrough with China, he added that he had told his daughter Tricia that he had a suggestion for her honeymoon. ‘I hope sometime in your life, sooner rather than later, you will be able to go to China to see the great cities, and the people, and all of that, there.’ He was noncommittal about his own chances of getting there, but at the end of April he told a press conference, without any prodding, ‘I hope and, as a matter of fact, I expect to visit Mainland China sometime in some capacity.’35
Because Nixon and Kissinger had kept the secret of their contacts with Chou En-lai so well, the United States also sent out some contradictory signals. Spiro Agnew, the Vice-President, in a rambling, impromptu press conference late one night, complained vociferously about the f
avourable press coverage of China during the Ping-Pong team’s visit and the whole policy of removing obstacles to contacts. Nixon sent orders to Agnew to keep quiet about China and to the White House press office to say that Agnew completely supported the President’s China policy. At the end of April, a State Department spokesman said rightly that the United States’ position on Taiwan was ‘an unsettled question’. In London, Rogers, who knew nothing of the secret channels to China, said that Mao’s comments to Edgar Snow did not constitute a ‘serious invitation’ to Nixon to visit China. He added some pointed remarks about Chinese foreign policy being ‘expansionist’ and ‘rather paranoid’. Kissinger was unreasonably outraged at these ‘bureaucratic shenanigans’ which he saw as a power grab by the State Department.36
On 27 April, fortunately, Hilaly, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, finally brought the long-awaited reply from Chou En-lai to Nixon’s secret message of the previous December. The Chinese repeated their insistence that the US must withdraw its forces from Taiwan before relations could be restored but, and this was a softening of their previous position, suggested that the matter be discussed in Beijing by a special envoy from Nixon or even by Nixon himself. Kissinger was, he later wrote, elated: ‘Every once in a while a fortunate few can participate in an event that they know will make a difference’. As he sat in his study that night, he recalled, he experienced a rare moment of peace and hope. ‘The message from Peking told us above all that despite Indochina we had a chance to raise the sights of the American people to a future of opportunity.’37
Through the good offices of Hilaly, Nixon sent a swift reply to Chou. The Chinese message was ‘constructive, positive and forthcoming’ and the United States intended to send one back in the same spirit. With an eye on his domestic politics, Nixon also asked that the Chinese not give visas to any American politicians for the time being. On 10 May, Kissinger called Hilaly in and handed him the formal American reply for transmission to the Chinese. Nixon accepted Chou’s suggestion that he visit Beijing himself for conversations to deal with the important issues dividing their two countries. In order to arrange that, he proposed a secret visit by Kissinger to exchange preliminary views on ‘all subjects of mutual interest’ and to work out the details of the visit and its agenda. ‘It is also understood that this first meeting between Dr Kissinger and high officials of the People’s Republic of China be strictly secret.’ The Chinese again were mystified by this insistence on secrecy. ‘If they want to come,’ said Mao, ‘they should come in the open light. Why should they hide their head and pull in their tail?’ Kissinger has always made a good case for the need for secrecy before his first visit. He also points out that the Americans proposed a second, public one, for him, once the ice had been broken. When the only contact the United States had with China was through Pakistan and when American and Chinese statesmen had no idea of the others’ thinking, it would have been very dangerous to allow several weeks of public and potentially damaging speculation before the visit took place. Such open comment, whether from enthusiasts or opponents, might have spooked the Chinese, worried American allies and made the trip a domestic liability in the United States. American opponents of an opening to China would have had time to rally and other nations might have intervened. ‘The tender shoot so painstakingly nurtured for more than two years might well have been killed.’38
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