For Mao, destruction was not only necessary, it was exhilarating. In 1927, he went to observe spontaneous and violent peasant revolts in his own province of Hunan. He wrote admiringly, in a passage that was much quoted during the Cultural Revolution, “A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner or writing an essay or painting a picture or embroidering a flower.” The peasants were turning their world upside down. “A revolution is an uprising,” he said, “an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the authority of another.”50 In 1958, as he prepared to start the Great Leap Forward, Mao described how the remnants of the old China were being cleared away like so much garbage. China, he said, was like a piece of blank paper: “A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.”51
What was written was not beautiful for China; it was hideous. But it was very difficult for his colleagues, even the bravest, to stand up to Mao. Chen Yi, a tough and experienced general who had been with Mao from the very early days, once burst out as Mao made yet another arbitrary decision, “I don’t understand what’s going on! Mao does whatever he wants to do.”52 After 1949, when the People’s Republic was established, the atmosphere around Mao became, in some respects, eerily similar to that of the old imperial court. He was increasingly inaccessible to the general public. When he traveled it was on private trains or airplanes. His houses—and there were many—were usually built especially for him, with his beloved swimming pools, his auditoriums for watching operas, and his bomb shelters. Local inhabitants were cleared away, and tight security was imposed.
Within his small circle, his underlings, secretaries, security guards, and the ever-present pretty nurses were utterly dependent on him and vied for his favor. “I had not worked long for Mao,” said his doctor, “before realizing that he was the center around which everything else revolved, a precious treasure that had to be protected and coddled and wooed.”53 His staff watched his every mood and waited for his every command. They listened for the bell from his large bed, where he lay with his books and, frequently, with his women. Mao hated new clothes, so they patched his clothes carefully and made sure that the patches were always the same color. His bodyguards broke in new shoes for him. When he wanted to eat (and he rarely ate at regular mealtimes), they had his favorite foods ready for him. They rubbed him down with hot towels when he wanted to be cleaned. If he was ready to sleep, they massaged his feet and waited for his increasingly strong doses of sleeping pills to take effect. When he got more than thirty hours of sleep per week or when he had a regular bowel movement, they noted it in their logs and rejoiced.54
In some respects, Mao remained the peasant he had been so many years ago. He still spoke in a thick Hunanese accent, and his speech was larded with coarse country expressions. True to the customs of his youth, he slept naked at night and preferred rinsing his mouth with green tea to brushing his teeth.55 He never really got accustomed to indoor lavatories. When he moved into the Zhongnanhai after 1949, an orderly followed him around the grounds with a shovel until Chou En-lai finally arranged for a special toilet by his bedroom where he could squat.56
His colleagues came and went at his command; since he liked to work in the middle of the night, they learned to go without sleep. And they tried, as Mao became increasingly capricious, to adjust themselves to his thinking. “We were terrified,” said one, “of saying something wrong in case he took it as an error.”57 Chou En-lai, so admired for his subtle intellect and his extraordinary capacity for work, worked like a lackey for Mao. He always, even when he was prime minister of China, acted as Mao’s majordomo.58 He arranged Mao’s houses and looked after his family, even leaving Politburo meetings to go off and deal with Jiang Qing’s endless medical crises.59 In Mao’s presence, he was, as Lin Biao once said, “the obedient servant,” attentive to the point of subservience and rarely showing emotion, even at Mao’s most outrageous actions.60 Yet when Mao lapsed into unconsciousness shortly before Nixon’s visit, Chou was so upset, according to Mao’s doctor, that he completely lost control of his bladder and bowels.61
Perhaps, over the years, Mao became a bit mad. Being in a position where every whim is law, virtually every wish can be fulfilled, and every dream is apparently realizable cuts the ropes of family, society, and morality that tie us all to reality. Think of other dictators: Hitler raving to the last, in his bunker under Berlin, that he had a secret weapon; Stalin in his final paranoid days preparing yet another purge of his supposed enemies. Mao’s own immediate family had a history of mental troubles, and throughout his life, particularly at difficult times, he had moments when he took to his bed in depression.62 By the late 1950s, according to his doctor, he was increasingly paranoid. He refused to swim in a new pool because he thought it had been poisoned; he abandoned a newly built house because he felt there was something wrong with its air; and he became convinced that he was surrounded by spies.63 Mao’s dependence on sleeping pills, always heavy, increased to the point where, by the mid-1960s, he was taking ten times the normal dose.
Zhang Hanzhi, one of Chou En-lai’s interpreters, had known Mao for most of her life. She thought that until that time he was still a normal human being: “In the 1970s he changed psychologically and physically. He was put into a role where everything he said was a law. Yours was to obey. He became more and more prejudiced.”64 The Mao that Nixon and Kissinger met had not been born a heartless tyrant, but untrammeled power had turned him into one. He had, when he chose, complete authority over Chinese policies, whether domestic or foreign. He remained, ill as he was, the final arbiter of any changes to the relations between China and the United States.
The night of Nixon’s first day in Beijing, the lead item on the news was about a group of heroic women workers, and Nixon’s arrival was dropped in at the end, almost as an afterthought; but when it became official that Nixon had been granted an audience with Mao, the news coverage changed overnight. The next day, the front page of the People’s Daily had large photographs of Mao greeting Nixon; a group shot of Mao, Nixon, Chou, and Kissinger; and Chou welcoming Nixon at the airport. Inside there were more photographs and several stories, as well as texts of the toasts that Chou and Nixon had exchanged at the previous evening’s banquet.65
CHAPTER 7
THE LONG FREEZE
AFTER HIS MEETING WITH MAO, NIXON AND HIS ADVISERS— including, this time, William Rogers—went off in the late afternoon to a formal session with Chou and his colleagues. Now that Mao had given his audience, the Chinese were genial and friendly. Chou praised the Americans’ pioneer spirit. And how nice, he said, that the Americans had so many young people in their delegation—“We have too many elderly people in our leadership.”1 He apologized for the fact that the meeting with Mao had come so quickly that the American press had not been able to cover it. He promised, though, that the announcement and photographs of the meeting would be given to the Americans so that they could release the story first. Nixon was ecstatic: “That is unprecedented. No other nation we have ever dealt with has been so generous.”2 As far as briefing the press went, Chou said, he regretted that he was not as skilled as Mr. Kissinger. Nixon disagreed; “Having read the transcripts of conversations the Prime Minister had with Dr. Kissinger, I think the Prime Minister can handle himself with anyone in the world.”3 It was so refreshing, the president commented, to deal with Chairman Mao and Chou, who talked “directly, and honestly, and candidly.”4
None of the other Chinese spoke in the plenary session. On the American side, William Rogers made a couple of brief comments, while Kissinger remained silent. There was no need for the latter to say anything because it had already been arranged that he would sit in on the meetings between Nixon and Chou where substantive issues would be discussed. Rogers and his State Department entourage were relegated to dealing with the Chinese foreign minister and his officials on, as Kissinger put it contemptuously in his memoirs, “the obs
essions of our East Asian Bureau: the promotion of more trade and exchanges of persons.”5
Nixon talked, as he had with Mao, about how neither China nor the United States was a threat to the other, and how, if they worked together, the world could be a more peaceful place. “Yes,” said Chou, “we hope so.”6 Tomorrow, the two men agreed, they would start in on the difficult issues dividing them. Chou singled out one in particular, “the Taiwan situation.” Nixon agreed but pointed out that there were many other issues, from Korea to the Soviet Union.7 It was unlikely that they would be able to solve everything in these first meetings, but they were setting in motion a process. “Yes, indeed,” said Chou, “in spite of the fact that there exists now such great differences between us and in the future there will still be differences.”8 Nixon expressed optimism: “We will have a chance to know each other as peoples and also to communicate as governments.”9
Though in 1972 Americans and Chinese knew each other only secondhand and through the distorting lenses of fear and suspicion, it had not always been like that. Before 1949, Americans and Chinese had come to know quite a lot about each other. In the nineteenth century considerable numbers of Americans had come to China to do business or to do good. Americans were fascinated by China, whether it was the China of the “yellow hordes” and the ancient wisdom and arcane powers of Dr. Fu Manchu or the heartbreakingly simple and noble peasants of Pearl S. Buck’s novels in the 1930s. American businessmen down the decades dreamed of the markets that lay waiting there, whether for Yankee steel in the nineteenth century or Pepsi-Cola in the 1970s. Missionaries dreamed rather of souls and immense opportunities to save them. From the nineteenth century on, Americans made up one of the largest groups of foreign missionaries in China. They built churches, founded schools, and started printing presses. Many of China’s great universities of today started out as branches of American institutions, such as the Yale Medical School. Missionaries’ letters home, their books and magazines, and their illustrated talks to their home congregations helped to create, in American minds, a China that was weak and helpless and in need of American assistance. Americans found something intriguing, too, in the idea of a relationship between the old civilization and their new one.
Over the years, thousands of Chinese went to the United States to acquire Western learning or to make money on the “Golden Mountain.” When they returned home, they brought American attitudes and American learning with them. To Chinese nationalists, a growing force by the late nineteenth century, the United States appeared in a variety of lights, sometimes merely as part of a larger West threatening China, sometimes as a sympathetic power, sometimes even as a model. On the other hand, the United States was a new society, founded on revolutionary principles, and that appealed to Chinese radicals who blamed their own civilization for their country’s woes. As a young man, Mao urged his fellow students to study Americans such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln because China needed similar, progressive leaders. “China is very weak,” he said. “She will grow strong, rich and independent only after many years; but the important thing is that we must learn these things.”10
The signals sent by the United States itself were contradictory. In 1900, American soldiers were part of the expeditionary force that invaded Beijing in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion and forced yet another humiliating treaty with exorbitant indemnity payments on China. Along with other foreign troops, American soldiers stayed on to protect their nationals. Yet at the same time the American government sent notes to the other powers advocating an open-door policy in China, where all powers would have equal rights rather than stake out exclusive areas, even colonies, for trade and investment. (Even though the notes were really more about keeping access in China for American businessmen, they at least assumed that China would continue as a sovereign state.) Moreover, although the American government had taken its share of the indemnities leveled on China after the Boxer Rebellion, it remitted most of them to China in 1908 and converted the remainder into a scholarship fund for Chinese students who wanted to study in the United States. In 1972, if they had been allowed to talk to them, the American visitors would have found elderly intellectuals who had gone to Princeton or Columbia or Berkeley on these scholarships.
In the early days of the republic, many Chinese looked to the United States as a model—of government, but also of a society. President Woodrow Wilson’s promises of a new world order founded on justice and peace, his talk of national self-determination, and his evident antipathy to Japanese attempts to dominate China and the rapid expansion of Japanese forces into Siberia in the wake of the Russian Revolution made him, briefly, a hero to nationalistic Chinese. That came to an abrupt end in 1919, when Wilson took a prominent role in the gift of former German possessions in China to Japan. The Americans, so many Chinese concluded, were simply imperialists in republican clothing.
As Chiang Kai-shek and his Guomindang moved to unite China in the 1920s, the United States, like most other foreign powers except the Soviet Union, was initially antipathetic. Chiang, or so it was widely held in the West, was a dangerous radical who was out to expropriate foreign businesses. When Chiang made it clear that although he was a nationalist, he was no radical, the United States moved cautiously to recognize his regime. In 1928 it signed a treaty with China that, for the first time in decades, allowed China to set its own tariffs on imports. On the other hand, at the start of the 1930s, when Japan seized Manchuria, the United States merely protested and did nothing more than adopt a policy of not recognizing the puppet state of Manchukuo that the Japanese hastily set up there. Now the United States seemed neither a strong friend nor an enemy.
That was gradually to change in the late 1930s as Japan’s intentions for China became increasingly clear. The seizure of Manchuria was, for the militarists who now dominated the Japanese government, only a first step to making China part of a greater Japanese empire. The United States, reluctantly, shook itself out of its isolation and moved to counter Japan in the Pacific and on the mainland of Asia. The Japanese invasion of China, with its bombing of Chinese cities and brutal treatment of civilians, enraged American public opinion and led to President Roosevelt’s famous “quarantine speech,” in which he argued that aggressor nations should be treated as part of a dangerous epidemic. From the end of 1938 onward, the United States lent money to Chiang’s government. By 1941 the Flying Tigers, American pilots under the leadership of General Claire Chennault, were helping build him an air force.
When Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States and China became allies, even if not necessarily friends. American soldiers, advisers, arms, and money poured into the inland provinces that made up free China. Chiang was grateful but not excessively so. As a nationalist, he was prepared to take American assistance but not American advice. And he was not about to risk what remained of his armed forces in all-out attacks on the Japanese; he had done his share of fighting, and now it was the turn of his new allies. The Americans found this frustrating. Those on the spot also became increasingly pessimistic about the ability of a creaky, corrupt, and inefficient Guomindang to hold China together. The trouble was that the alternative, the relatively small Chinese Communist Party, was hard to imagine as a government for China. Moreover, its ideology ran counter to everything most Americans believed.
Nevertheless, in 1944 the American government, acting on the same principle that made it an ally of the Soviet Union’s against Germany, sent a military mission to the Communist headquarters at Yan’an, in northwestern China. This was the first time many of the Communist leaders had met Americans (other than sympathizers such as Edgar Snow), but although the Americans demonstrated the conga line at the weekly dances, the contact did little to bring greater understanding.11 If anything, Mao got the wrong ideas from chatting with the Americans and from watching the Hollywood movies they sometimes showed on an outdoor screen—that, for example, Americans did not know how to fight properly.
; A small amount of American military aid made its way to the Communist armies, although most American support continued to go to the Guomindang. After the defeat of Japan in 1945, that support continued, sliding into outright American backing for the Guomindang against the Communists in the growing postwar tension between the two camps in China. At first Mao seems to have hoped that he could use the Americans against the Guomindang. He even expected that American capitalism would be eager to invest in China, even a Communist one.12
Although President Truman sent the eminent General George Marshall on a prolonged visit to China at the end of 1945, in a last-ditch effort to broker a compromise between the Guomindang and the Communist Party, his efforts succeeded only in irritating the former and convincing the latter that the United States was its enemy. By the summer of 1946, China was plunged into civil war. The United States was clearly in the Guomindang’s camp, although it limited its help to equipment, money, and international recognition. (Offering American military was out of the question, given the other demands on U.S. forces.) Mao was bitter, and perhaps embarrassed, by what he saw as American betrayal. In a 1947 speech, he admitted that the Communists had made mistakes: “It was the first time for us to deal with the U.S. imperialists. We didn’t have much experience. As a result we were taken in. With this experience we won’t be cheated again.”13
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