Nixon and Mao (28 page)

On July 8, Kissinger reached Rawalpindi, in West Pakistan. He was suffering, so his aides said, from an attack of Delhi belly. A sharp-eyed American diplomat was impressed at how much he nevertheless managed to eat at Ambassador Farland’s buffet lunch. That evening Yahya gave a small private dinner. As Kissinger continued to complain about his stomach, Yahya insisted that Kissinger must go with his aides into the hills, to Yahya’s own bungalow, where the cool air would revive him. One of the Secret Service agents with brisk efficiency sent a colleague to check out the presidential quarters; the Pakistani government was forced to keep him there until Kissinger had gone and returned.

At 3:30 in the morning, Kissinger, disguised in a floppy hat and dark glasses, was whisked off through deserted streets to the Rawalpindi airport in a small blue car driven by Pakistan’s foreign minister. The other Americans followed with the luggage. The Pakistan International Airlines plane waited, its engines already running. At the top of the stairs, a party of Chinese officials, among them Nancy Tang, Mao’s personal interpreter, waited to greet the Americans, much to the shock of the Secret Service agents, who had no idea what was going on or where they were off to. One started to reach for his gun. A stringer for a London newspaper who happened to be at the airport seeing his mother off noticed the unusual activity and asked a policeman what was up. “It’s Henry Kissinger; he’s going to China.” The reporter rushed off to send the story to London, where it was spiked because his editor assumed he must have had too much to drink. In the American embassy the next day, rumors went around that something was not quite right about the story of Kissinger’s illness.
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Nixon himself nearly let the secret out when he gave a speech in Kansas City on July 6. He talked in a statesmanlike way of a new world order where the five main powers would be the United States, the Soviet Union, western Europe, Japan, and China. It was essential, he said, that his administration take the first steps toward ending the isolation of China. The comments were overlooked by the American press but picked up by alert British and Asian journalists. The White House managed to persuade them to keep quiet.
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The plane took off into the darkness. Kissinger disappeared into the special VIP cabin, and the rest of the Americans, without thinking, arranged themselves on the right-hand side of the aisle; the Chinese took the left. Dawn came up to reveal the Hindu Kush, the great range of mountains that helps divide China from its neighbors. As the plane crossed into Chinese airspace, Winston Lord, perhaps by design, found himself at the front, the first American official in twenty-two years to reach China.
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The Chinese and Americans chatted politely among themselves. Holdridge, who had visited China as a child before the Second World War, noticed that one of the Chinese aircrew quietly pocketed all the packages of cigarettes the steward brought around. “This seemed a hopeful sign that he was human, and that China was still China.” Kissinger, who spent much of the time poring over his notes, had a brief flash of anger when he realized that his assistant had forgotten to pack a change of shirts for him. He borrowed a couple (as luck would have it, with labels saying “Made in Taiwan”) from the much taller Holdridge. Kissinger managed to hold the sleeves up with elastic bands, but he spent his time in China looking, said Lord, rather like a penguin.
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On the other side of the world, Nixon had just broken the news of Kissinger’s trip to Rogers, whom he had invited to San Clemente partly to keep an eye on him. It had not been a good few weeks for Rogers. In May, he had been deeply hurt and distressed when he was informed, shortly before it was announced, that Nixon and Kissinger had negotiated a major arms deal, SALT I, with the Soviet Union and that Kissinger had been having regular secret meetings with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington. Now he was given a feeble story about how Kissinger had been in Pakistan when the Chinese had unexpectedly invited him to Beijing to meet Chou.
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The PIA plane flew on, across the vast desert that the Silk Route had once crossed, and landed at a military airport outside Beijing around lunchtime. On the ground, a small party headed by Ye Jianying, one of the four marshals whose reports had started Mao and China down a new path in international relations, waited to escort them to the Diaoyutai. Holdridge found himself in a car with Huang Hua, an experienced diplomat who had just been appointed ambassador to Canada. “You know,” said Huang to open the conversation, “in 1954 at Geneva, your Secretary of State refused to shake the hand of our premier, Premier Zhou En-lai.” Holdridge hastened to assure Huang that there would be nothing similar this time. When Chou arrived at the Diaoyutai that afternoon, he climbed out of his limousine with his arm outstretched. Holdridge remembered the scene years later: “Kissinger strode out to greet him. Kissinger extends his hand, handshake, and boom, boom, boom, boom—flashbulbs all over the place, videotape, etc. This was an historic handshake.” Chinese who were present thought that Kissinger was nervous and tense.
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The Chinese kept the news of Kissinger’s visit secret until after he had left, but word began to spread in the inner circles of government. Zhang Hanzhi was a young official in the Foreign Ministry. She and her colleagues sensed that something was happening. Government ministers looked excited. Two of the top interpreters had disappeared. At lunchtime they reappeared and broke the news. “It was like a bomb exploding in the foreign ministry,” Zhang recalled.
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That first day, Kissinger and Chou talked until nearly midnight. Chou opened the discussions by inviting Kissinger to make an opening statement, adding, “Besides, you have already prepared a thick book.” Kissinger hastily explained that he rarely used written notes but that he wanted Nixon to know what he was going to say. After Kissinger had gone through his summary of American concerns, it was Chou’s turn.
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The two men and their colleagues settled down for what were to be seventeen hours of conversation. They had only two days to get to know each other and develop the necessary level of trust to enable the contact that had been established with such difficulty to produce fruit.

Chou was experienced, his diplomatic skills sharp after years of negotiating with Communist enemies, such as the Guomindang, and onetime friends, such as the Soviet Union. He also had the self-control and patience that surviving throughout the long years of war and inner-party struggle had brought. Kissinger was much younger, but he had an equal talent for diplomacy. If he was not as seasoned as Chou, he was learning quickly. The two statesmen, the old hand and the novice, laid themselves out to charm each other. Kissinger lavished praise on China, “this beautiful and, to us, mysterious land.” Oh, said Chou, “when you have become familiar with it, it will not be as mysterious as before.” Kissinger also took every opportunity to flatter Chou himself: “It is hard to believe that the Prime Minister could be anything but cool-headed.” When the question of taping their conversations came up, Kissinger demurred: “You will be so much more precise and better organized than I, that I would be shown up at a disadvantage.” That was probably untrue, replied Chou: “You are younger and have more energy than I.”
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In those first encounters, Chou and Kissinger discovered the main areas where they agreed and disagreed. For China, Taiwan was the most important issue, while for the United States, getting out of Vietnam was of equal importance. The Chinese made it clear that although they did not intend to use force to reunite Taiwan with China, they were not prepared to see two Chinas in the world or in international bodies such as the United Nations. They wanted the United States to recognize that Taiwan was part of China and to set a timetable for withdrawing American forces. The United States, Kissinger hinted, expected that one day there would be only one China but could not say so right away for political reasons. In any case, it intended to withdraw its troops, but that was linked partly to what happened in Indochina. Once the United States was safely out of its wars there, it could dismantle many of its bases in Asia. Chou refused to be drawn into making any promises on Indochina. The peoples there must decide their own fates, he said.
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Kissinger also devoted considerable effort to reassuring the Chinese that the United States had no intention of colluding with other powers (neither the Soviet Union nor Japan was mentioned specifically) against China. Indeed, Nixon promised that the United States would not take any major steps affecting China without discussing them with the Chinese first. Chou would not be drawn into discussions of a common front between China and the United States.

Late on the night of Kissinger’s first day in China, Chou En-lai made his report to Mao. The chairman was pleased to learn that the United States intended to start withdrawing troops and support from Taiwan. As for Vietnam, said Mao in an altruistic fashion, it was important that the United States settle it because people were getting killed there, adding, “We should not invite Nixon to come just for our own interests.” Mao also ordered Chou to make a statement the following morning on the big issues, pointing out that “all under the heaven is in great chaos.” The theme was a favorite one of Mao’s, who believed that great changes—the victory of Communism, for example—occurred when the world was in turmoil. In a fit of bravado, perhaps because he did not like the idea of Kissinger reassuring China that the United States would not collude with others against it, Mao added that Chou could tell the Americans that China was quite ready to be divided up among the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan if they chose to invade. In fact, according to Chinese sources, Mao was relieved to hear that the United States had no aggressive intentions toward China. If that was true, the Chinese military could move even more troops north to the border with the Soviet Union.
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The next morning, Chou arranged for the Americans to have a tour of the Forbidden City. They were taken first to a small museum to see an exhibit of artifacts dug up during the Cultural Revolution. It was a sad display, although the American visitors could not know it, in light of the wide-scale destruction of China’s cultural heritage during the Cultural Revolution. The Forbidden City was closed off to keep any Chinese from seeing the extraordinary visitors. The Americans wandered through the great imperial courtyards and some of the halls where the emperors had once maintained harmony between heaven and earth. “We absorbed,” Kissinger told Nixon, “the magnificently simple and proportionate sweeps of the red and gold buildings.” His unfortunate assistants, Lord remembers, sweated in the summer heat under the burden of their briefcases, which they dared not leave behind.
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The meetings resumed at noon, in the Great Hall of the People. The Chinese had pointedly selected the Fujian Room, named after the province that faced Taiwan. Chou duly made a strongly worded statement that faithfully echoed Mao’s views. And perhaps he shared them; it was, after all, a difficult change of direction for an old Communist to find himself talking to a representative of the greatest capitalist power in the world. “There is chaos under heaven,” he told the Americans, who were taken aback by the change in his tone. “In the past 25 years,” Chou went on, “there has been a process of great upheaval, great division, and great reorganization.”
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The two superpowers were vying to control neutral countries and the territories that lay between them. “The Soviet Union is following your suit, in stretching its hands all over the world.”
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China, he added, was still a weak country, but it did not fear a combined attack from its three main enemies. Already it was preparing for a people’s war. “This would take some time and, of course, we would have to sacrifice lives.”
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All over the world, the people were mobilizing. “Such resistance is stimulated by your oppression, your subversion, and your intervention.” The United States was enmeshed in Taiwan and Indochina; it was encouraging Japanese militarism; and it was conniving with the Soviets to keep a monopoly of nuclear weapons. Perhaps it was not worth Nixon’s coming to China at all if the differences between their two countries remained so great, especially over Taiwan, which was a small matter for the Americans but not for China. “Taiwan is not an isolated issue,” said Chou, “but is related to recognition of the People’s Republic of China, and it is also related to the relations of all other countries to China.” If Nixon wanted to come to China, he would have to discuss Taiwan.
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Kissinger rallied and was equally firm back. He wanted to make it clear, he said, that the Chinese had been the first to suggest that Nixon come to Beijing, and they must decide when the time was right. On the other hand, a visit by Nixon would take China and the United States a long way toward solving the issues between them. “It also has tremendous symbolic significance because it would make clear that normal relations are inevitable.” On Taiwan, Kissinger said, he had already explained that the United States intended to withdraw its forces and that the other issues the Chinese worried about—the recognition, for example, that Taiwan was part of China—would settle themselves in due course. In time, too, relations between the United States and China would move onto a normal, peaceful footing.
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Once Chou had said his piece, he reverted to his usual courteous self. He noted that he had followed American wishes in keeping the visit a secret. James Reston, the
New York Times
reporter who was on his way to Beijing, had found himself on such a slow train that he would not arrive until Kissinger had left. As for the American politicians who wanted to visit China, Chou said, “I have a great pile of letters from them on my desk asking for invitations, which I have not answered.” Nixon would greatly appreciate that, Kissinger said. “This is done,” Chou replied, “under the instructions and wisdom of Chairman Mao.”
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