Special Section: THE CHINA CONNECTION

In negotiations, the Soviets tend to be blunt, the Chinese insinuating. The Soviets insist on their prerogatives as a great power. The Chinese establish a claim on the basis of universal principles and a demonstration of self-confidence that attempts to make the issue of power seem irrelevant. The Soviets, with all their stormy and occasionally duplicitous behavior, leave an impression of extraordinary psychological insecurity. The Chinese convey an aura of imperviousness to pressure; indeed, they pre-empt pressure by implying that issues of principle are beyond discussion. Chinese diplomats, at least in their encounters with us, proved meticulously reliable. They never stooped to petty maneuvers; they did not haggle; they reached their bottom line quickly, explained it reasonably, and defended it tenaciously. They stuck to the meaning as well as the spirit of their undertakings. As Chou was fond of saying, “Our word counts.”

Kissinger had a chance to compare Soviet and Chinese negotiating styles because of a momentous development: the opening to China. As he notes, “policy emerges when concept encounters opportunity, “and Nixon realized that the bloody border clashes between Soviet and Chinese troops in the summer of 1969 presented just such an opportunity. Fearful of a pre-emptive attack by Moscow or an all-out war, the Chinese were looking for a counter-threat to Soviet pressure. At that very moment, the U.S. was subtly signaling Peking that it was interested in a fundamental change in their relationship. There followed what Kissinger calls “an intricate minuet, so stylized that neither side needed to bear the onus of an initiative, so elliptical that existing relationships on both sides were not jeopardized.” The complex maneuvers began paying off. In October 1970, Nixon asked Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan, who was about to visit Peking, to let the Chinese know that the U.S. was ready to improve relations.

Head to Head

On Dec. 8, Pakistan’s Ambassador Agha Hilaly said that he had “a message” for me relating to Yahya’s trip. I invited Hilaly to the White House the next day, where in my office a few minutes after 6 p.m. he produced an envelope containing a handwritten missive on white, blue-lined paper which had been carried to him by hand, Yahya not trusting the security of cable communications. (This was to be the form for all messages through the Pakistani channel.) Hilaly said he was not authorized to leave the document with me.

He therefore had to dictate it as I copied it down. We did not notice the incongruity of this elegant spokesman of the elite of a country based on an ancient religion dictating a communication from the leader of a militant Asiatic revolutionary nation to a representative of the leader of the Western capitalist world; or the phenomenon that in an age of instantaneous communication we had returned to the diplomatic methods of the previous century—the handwritten note delivered by messenger and read aloud.

The message was not an indirect, subtle signal. It was an authoritative personal message to Richard Nixon from Chou Enlai, who emphasized that he spoke not only for himself but also for Chairman Mao and Vice Chairman Lin Biao (Lin Piao).

China, Chou declared, “has always been willing and has always tried to negotiate by peaceful means … A special envoy of President Nixon’s will be most welcome in Peking.” Chou En-lai observed gracefully that many other messages had been received from the U.S. through various sources, “but this is the first time that the proposal has come from a Head, through a Head, to a Head. We attach importance to the message.”

In short, a personal representative of the President was being invited to Peking.

I walked down the hall to the Oval Office. Nixon and I were as one in our readiness to accept the invitation. I drafted a reply that I handed to Hilaly on Dec. 16.

Where the Chinese notes in the Pakistani channel were handwritten, ours were typed on Xerox paper without a letterhead or a U.S. Government watermark. They were not signed (and our bureaucracy was not informed). The two sides had in effect agreed on a meeting in Peking.

The minuet went on, and several subtle signals were exchanged, including an invitation to a U.S. Ping Pong team to visit China. On April 27, 1971, the real breakthrough occurred. Another note from Chou, transmitted via the Pakistani channel, said: “The Chinese government reaffirms its willingness to receive publicly in Peking a special envoy of the President of the U.S. (for instance, Mr. Kissinger) or the U.S. Secretary of State or even the President himself for a direct meeting and discussions.” The next morning Nixon told Kissinger to get ready for a secret visit to Peking. But shortly before he was to depart, an unexpected crisis erupted.

Just when technical and bureaucratic problems seemed to be solved, there occurred an event that deflected our attention for much of the period remaining before I left on my mission: the publication of the so-called Pentagon papers. After we had struggled for months to establish a secret channel to Peking, the sudden release of over 7,000 pages of secret documents, most dealing with the war in Viet Nam, came as a profound shock. The documents, of course, were in no way damaging to the Nixon presidency. Indeed, there was some sentiment among White House political operatives to exploit them as an illustration of the machinations of our predecessors and the difficulties we inherited. But such an attitude seemed to me against the public interest: our system of government would surely lose all trust if each President used the process of declassification to smear his predecessors.

Our nightmare was that Peking might conclude our Government was too unsteady, too harassed, and too insecure to be a useful partner. The massive hemorrhage of state secrets was bound to raise doubts about our reliability and about the stability of our political system. I not only supported Nixon in his opposition to this wholesale theft and unauthorized disclosure; I encouraged him. I was not aware of steps later taken, the sordidness, puerility, and ineffectuality of which eventually led to the downfall of the Nixon Administration. I consider those methods inexcusable, but I continue to believe that the theft and publication of official documents did a grave disservice to the nation. The release of the Pentagon papers did not impede our overture to Peking. But this does not change the principle.

Kissinger’s arrival in Peking was set for July 9; the cover was a lengthy “information trip” through Asia beginning July 1 and taking him to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, whence he slipped away by means of an elaborate ruse. Among other things, this involved a predawn drive to Chaklala Airport with Kissinger wearing sunglasses and a hat “to ensure that no stray pedestrian spotted me— an unlikely contingency at that hour in Islamabad, where my name was scarcely a household word.” During his flight to Peking, Kissinger recalled how John Foster Dulles had refused to shake Chou En-lai’s hand at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina. “The slight, “he writes, “had not been forgotten; it was referred to on many occasions in the days afterward and on subsequent visits.” Kissinger was determined to make amends. Installed in a guesthouse in a walled-off park in western Peking, he awaited the Premier’s visit.

Chou En-lai arrived at 4:30. His gaunt, expressive face was dominated by piercing eyes, conveying a mixture of intensity and repose, of wariness and calm self-confidence. He moved gracefully and with dignity, filling a room not by his physical dominance (as did Mao or De Gaulle) but by his air of controlled tension, steely discipline, and self-control, as if he were a coiled spring. He conveyed an easy casualness, which, however, did not deceive the careful observer. The quick smile, the comprehending expression that made clear he understood English without translation, the palpable alertness, were the features of a man who had had burned into him by a searing half-century the vital importance of self-possession. I greeted him at the door of the guesthouse and ostentatiously stuck out my hand. Chou gave me a quick smile and took it. It was the first step in putting the legacy of the past behind us.

There was about Chou an inner serenity that enabled him, I would soon learn, to eschew the petty maneuvers that characterized our negotiations with other Communists. All our meetings on this and my subsequent visits lasted for many hours (sessions of five to seven hours were not uncommon); yet on no occasion did he reveal any impatience or imply that he had anything else to do. We were never interrupted by phone calls or the bureaucratic necessities of running a huge state. I do not know how he managed it; I used to joke that senior officials in Washington would probably not be able to free so much time for the Second Coming.

Chou never bargained to score petty points. I soon found that the best way to deal with him was to present a reasonable position, explain it meticulously, and then stick to it. I sometimes went so far as to let him see the internal studies that supported our conclusions. Chou acted the same way.

During our first talk, on July 9, by tacit agreement we did not press controversial issues to the hilt. Taiwan was mentioned only briefly. But at the next day’s session the mood was different. With very few preliminaries Chou recited a fierce litany and closed with a challenging question—whether, given our vast differences, there was any sense in a presidential visit.

I responded equally firmly, pointing out that Peking had broached the presidential visit and that we could not accept any conditions. I then launched into a deliberately brusque point-by-point rebuttal of Chou’s presentation. Chou stopped me after the first point, saying the duck would get cold if we did not eat first. At lunch the mood changed and Chou’s geniality returned.

After lunch I resumed my rebuttal until Chou suddenly, matter-of-factly suggested the summer of 1972 for the President’s visit, as if all that was left was to decide the timing. He added that he thought it prudent if we met the Soviet leaders first. I replied that the visits should take place in the order in which they had been arranged—first Peking, then Moscow. I did not have the impression that Chou was unhappy about this.

No account of the secret trip can be complete without the saga of my shirts. Knowing the vicissitudes of a hectic twelve-day trip through Asia, I had asked my aide Dave Halperin to be sure to set aside a couple of clean shirts specifically for Peking. As the Pakistani plane took off from Chaklala and soared toward the Himalayas, Halperin, who had come to see me off, was stunned by the realization that he had set aside the shirts so carefully that I could not have packed them; at this thought he became physically sick. I was aghast when, in the plane, I wanted to change shirts before arriving in Peking. In desperation I borrowed some white shirts from John Holdridge—a six-foot-two trim former West Pointer whose build did not exactly coincide with my rather more compact physique. Photos of my party in shirtsleeves show me smiling enigmatically, in garments that left me with the appearance of having no neck.

Their size was the least of it; for these shirts were prominently labeled “Made in Taiwan.” I was telling the literal truth when I told our hosts that Taiwan was a matter close to me.

“Eureka!”

A single code word cabled from Kissinger to Nixon, “Eureka, ” advised that the trip had been successful. After returning from Peking, Kissinger and Aide Winston Lord drafted a report to Nixon that exulted: “We have laid the groundwork for you and Mao to turn a page in history.” On July 15 Nixon informed stunned television viewers of Kissinger’s secret trip and his own plan to visit China some time before May 1972. In October 1971. Kissinger returned to China, with a team of “advance men, “to prepare for Nixon’s own visit.

Even in the millennia of their history the Chinese had never encountered a presidential advance party, especially one disciplined by the monomaniacal obsession of the Nixon White House with public relations. When I warned Chou En-lai that China had survived barbarian invasions before but had never encountered advance men, it was only partly a joke.

The details of the Nixon trip were settled very rapidly. We proposed two dates, Feb. 21 and March 16; Chou chose the earlier. Problems solved themselves as easily as was compatible with the obsessive single-mindedness of the advance men. The head of our security detail distinguished himself by requesting a list of subversives in each locality the President was likely to visit. This raised an interesting problem; in China conservative Republicans would undoubtedly be classed as subversives, and if we asked how many Communist sympathizers there were we would get the unsettling answer of 800 million.

Chou and I spent over 25 hours together reviewing the world situation, another 15 working on a statement that later came to be known as the Shanghai Communique. Nixon had seen and approved a draft communique prepared by me and my staff. It followed the conventional style, highlighting fuzzy areas of agreement and obscuring differences with platitudinous generalizations. Quite uncharacteristically, the Premier made a scorching one-hour speech—at the express direction of Mao, he said—declaring that our approach was unacceptable. The communique had to set forth fundamental differences; otherwise the wording would have an “untruthful appearance.” Our present draft was the sort of banality the Soviets would sign but neither mean nor observe.

Chou said that he would submit a proposed draft. It was unprecedented in design. It stated the Chinese position on a whole host of issues in extremely uncompromising terms. It left blank pages for our position. It was intransigent on Taiwan. At first I was taken aback. To end a presidential visit with a catalogue of disagreements was extraordinary. But as I reflected further I began to see that the very novelty of the approach might resolve our perplexities. A statement of differences would reassure allies and friends that their interests had been defended. If we could develop some common positions, these would then stand out as the authentic convictions of principled leaders.

I told Chou that I would accept his basic approach. We outlined the key joint positions, especially the paragraph concerning both countries’ opposition to hegemony. Though this later became a hallowed Chinese word, it was first introduced by us.

Taiwan, as expected, provided the most difficult issue. We needed a formula acknowledging the unity of China, which was the one point on which Taipei and Peking agreed, without giving up our existing relationships. I finally put forward the American position on Taiwan as follows: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China … The United States Government does not challenge that position.” Chou and I refined the text until at 8:10 a.m., concluding a nearly nonstop session of 24 hours, we had agreed on the main outline. We had scheduled our departure for 9 a.m. Chou took me to the door of the guesthouse and spoke to me for the first time in English: “Come back soon for the joy of talking.”

Conversation with a Colossus

Nixon’s huge presidential party reached Peking at 11:30 a.m. on Monday, Feb. 21, 1972. Nixon, Kissinger and most of their staffs were quartered in a large guesthouse near the old Imperial Fishing Lake, Secretary of State William Rogers and his entourage in a smaller one a few hundred yards away. “The Chinese had well understood the strange checks and balances within the Executive Branch,” Kissinger notes wryly, “and had re-created the physical gulf between the White House and Foggy Bottom in the heart of Peking.” Barely three hours after his arrival, Nixon received a sudden invitation.

At 2:30 I was told that Chou En-lai needed to see me urgently in the reception room. Without the usual banter he said: “Chairman Mao would like to see the President.” The President and I set off for the first encounter with one of the colossal figures of modern history.

Mao Tse-tung, the ruler whose life had been dedicated to overturning the values, the structure, and the appearance of traditional China, lived in fact in the Imperial City, as withdrawn and mysterious even as the emperors he disdained. Nobody ever had a scheduled appointment; one was admitted to a presence, not invited to a governmental authority. I saw Mao five times. On each occasion I was summoned suddenly. On one visit Mao expressed interest in meeting my wife Nancy. The fact that she was shopping presented no obstacle to our hosts. She was hustled out of a shop by a protocol officer who seemed to know exactly where she was and brought her to Mao.

Tall and powerfully built for a Chinese, Mao fixed the visitor with a smile both penetrating and slightly mocking, warning by his bearing that there was no point in seeking to deceive this specialist in the foibles and duplicity of man. I have met no one, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, who so distilled raw, concentrated will power. He was planted there with a female attendant close by to help steady him (and on my last visits to hold him up); he dominated the room—not by the pomp that in most states confers a degree of majesty on leaders, but by exuding the overwhelming drive to prevail.

In his presence even Chou seemed a secondary figure, though some of this effect was undoubtedly by design. Chou was too intelligent not to understand that the No. 2 position in China was precarious to the point of being suicidal. None of his predecessors had survived. (Neither, in fact, did he. I am convinced —though I cannot prove it—that only illness and death saved him from an assault by what was later called the Gang of Four, tolerated if not backed by Mao.) Mao’s impact was all the more impressive because it was so incongruous in relation to his physical condition. Before our first meeting he had already suffered a series of debilitating strokes. He could move only with difficulty. Words seemed to leave his bulk as if with great reluctance; they were ejected from his vocal cords in gusts, each of which seemed to require a new rallying of physical force until enough strength had been assembled to tear forth another round of pungent declarations. In my last private meeting with him, in October 1975, Mao could barely speak; he croaked general sounds that aides wrote down and then showed him to make sure they had understood before translating. Yet even then, in the shadow of death, Mao’s thoughts were lucid and sardonic.

Mao, in contrast to all other political leaders I have known, almost never engaged in soliloquies. Not for him were the prepared points most statesmen use, either seemingly extemporaneously or learned from notes. His meaning emerged from a Socratic dialogue that he guided effortlessly and with deceptive casualness. Mao could be brutal in cutting to the heart of a problem.

On one of my later trips I commented to Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-p’ing) that the relations of our two countries were on a sound basis because neither asked anything of the other. The next day Mao firmly rebutted my banality: “If neither side had anything to ask from the other, why would you be coming to Peking? If neither side had anything to ask, then why … would we want to receive you and the President?”

This was the colossus into whose presence we were now being ushered. He greeted Nixon with his characteristic sidewise glance. “Our common old friend, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, doesn’t approve of this,” he joked, taking Nixon’s hand in both his own. Nixon made an eloquent statement of his long journey from anti-Communism to Peking, based on the proposition that the foreign policy interests of the two countries were compatible and neither threatened the other. Mao used the occasion to give us an important assurance: “Neither do we threaten Japan or South Korea.”

Later on, as I comprehended better the many-layered design of Mao’s conversation, I understood that it was like the courtyards in the Forbidden City, each leading to a deeper recess distinguished from the others only by slight changes of proportion, with ultimate meaning residing in a totality that only long reflection could grasp. Mao was elliptical, for instance, in conveying his decision to expand trade and exchanges with us.

He couched this in the form of an explanation of China’s slowness in responding to American initiatives over two years. China had been “bureaucratic” in its approach, he said, in insisting all along that the major issues had to be settled before smaller issues like trade and people-to-people exchanges could be addressed. “Later on I saw you were right, and we played table tennis.” This was more than a recitation of history and a disarming apology; it meant that there would be progress with respect to trade and exchanges at the summit. Mao, in short, had willed the visit to be a success.

Mao delicately placed the issue of Taiwan on a subsidiary level, choosing to treat it as a relatively minor internal Chinese dispute. What concerned him was the international context —that is, the Soviet Union. To a long disquisition by Nixon on the question of which of the nuclear superpowers, the United States or the Soviet Union, presented a greater threat, Mao replied: “At the present time, the question of aggression from the United States or aggression from China is relatively small … You want to withdraw some of your troops back on your soil; ours do not goabroad.” By a process of elimination, the Soviet Union was clearly Mao’s principal security concern. Equally important was the elliptical assurance, later repeated by Chou, that removed the nightmare of two Administrations—that China might intervene in Indochina militarily. In foreclosing Chinese military intervention abroad and in the comments on Japan and South Korea, Mao was telling us that Peking would not challenge vital American interests.

“After our encounter with history,” writes Kissinger, “we turned to the practical issue of how to distill from it a direction for policy.” Over the next four days Kissinger spent some 22 hours with Chinese officials resolving issues in the communique.

Explosion in Hangzhou

Meanwhile, the Peking summit unfolded on other levels as well. Sightseeing trips went off as magnificent spectacles. Hordes of television commentators and journalists converged on each set piece, eager to record the profound thoughts of the leading actors. “This is a great wall,” said Nixon to the assembled press at the Great Wall, placing his seal of approval on one of mankind’s most impressive creations.

The symbolic events continued each evening. Banquets in the capital took place in the gigantic Great Hall of the People that commemorates the Communist takeover. Each Chinese at the table concentrated on making sure every American plate was filled with heaps of food. And then, of course, came the endless rounds of toasts. We drank mao-tai, that deadly brew which in my view is not used for airplane fuel only because it is too readily combustible. I received graphic proof of this when Nixon on his return to Washington sought to illustrate the liquid’s potency to his daughter Tricia. He poured a bottle of it into a bowl and set it afire. To his horror the fire would not go out; the bowl burst and sent flaming mao-tai across the table top. The frantic combined efforts of the First Family managed to extinguish the fire just before a national tragedy occurred.

Each Chinese around the table would drink only by toasting an American. This was done with a cheery “gan-bei “—which means “bottoms up” and is taken literally. Exuberance mounted as such evenings progressed. Fortunately, the banquet toasts were prepared ahead of time, and were read. Only in Shanghai did euphoria carry one away when Nixon proposed what sounded like a defensive military alliance in his only extemporaneous toast of the trip. (He said: “We join the Chinese people, we the American people, in our dedication to this principle: That never again shall foreign domination, foreign occupation, be visited upon this city or any part of China or any independent country in this world.”) Luckily, by that hour the press was too far gone itself.

It would be pleasant to report that after our departure from Peking, the business portion of the trip was completed. And in deed Hangzhou (Hangchow), at the mouth of the lower Yang tze River, is one of the most beautiful cities in China. Ambassador Huang Zhen (Huang Chen) in Paris had told General Vernon Walters, the U.S. military attache there, of a Chinese saying that there were two places worth seeing: Heaven above and Hangzhou below. The setting was reduced to Nixonian prose when the President pointed out to Chou En-lai on visiting the West Lake that the scene “looks like a postcard.”

The mood of the American party did not match the tranquillity of the scenery. On the plane to Hangzhou the State Department experts were given the communique, in the preparation of which they had had no part. No sooner had we arrived in Hangzhou than Secretary Rogers submitted a list of amend ments prepared by his staff, as numerous as they were trivial.

Nixon was beside himself. He dreaded a right-wing assault on the communique. Leaks that the State Department was unhappy about American concessions might well be the trigger.

He also knew that reopening the communique after the Chinese had been told he agreed to it might well sour his trip. He was so exercised that he started storming about the beautiful guesthouse in Hangzhou in his underwear. He would “do something” about the State Department at the first opportunity—a threat he had made at regular intervals since my first interview with him those many years ago at the Pierre Hotel, and never specified or implemented. I recommended that I have a goat it after dinner. If the Chinese insisted on the existing draft, we would have no choice but to stick with our commitment.

The Chinese were unhappy, but eventually the differences, many of them extremely minor, were papered over. As the Americans headed home, Kissinger weighed the significance of the trip.

For all their charm and ideological fervor, China’s leaders were the most unsentimental practitioners of balance-of-power politics I have encountered. Mao and Chou, practicing statesmanship in which ideology reinforced history and culture to confer assurance, found a natural partner in Nixon.

Nonetheless it would be dangerous in the extreme to assume that Chinese objectives and ours are in all respects identical.

We did not have any illusions about the nature of the new relationship. Peking and Washington were entering a marriage of convenience. Once China becomes strong enough to stand alone, it might discard us. Before then, the Soviet Union might be driven into a genuine relaxation of tensions with us—if it has not first sought to break out of its isolation by a military assault on China. But whatever China’s long-term policy, our medium-term interest was to cooperate, and to support its security against foreign pressures.