First Steps—Clashes at the Ussuri River
Though reconciliation
was the eventual result, it was not easy for the United States and
China to find their way to a strategic dialogue. Nixon’s article in
Foreign Affairs and the study by the
four marshals for Mao had produced parallel conclusions, but the
actual movement of the two sides was inhibited by domestic
complexities, historical experience, and cultural perceptions. The
publics on both sides had been exposed to two decades of hostility
and suspicion; they had to be prepared for a diplomatic
revolution.
Nixon’s tactical
problem was more complicated than Mao’s. Once Mao had made a
decision, he was in a position to implement it ruthlessly. And
opponents would remember the fate of Mao’s previous critics. But
Nixon had to overcome a legacy of twenty years of American foreign
policy based on the assumption that China would use every
opportunity to weaken the United States and to expel it from Asia.
By the time he entered the White House, this view had congealed
into established doctrine.
Nixon therefore had
to tread carefully lest China’s diplomatic overtures turn out to be
propaganda with no serious change of approach in Beijing. That was
a distinct possibility given that the only point of contact
Americans had had with the Chinese in twenty years had been the
ambassadorial talks in Warsaw, whose 136 meetings were distinctive
only for their monotonously sterile rhythm. Two dozen members of
Congress had to be briefed on every step, and new approaches were
bound to be lost in the conflicting pressures of briefings of some
fifteen countries, which were being kept informed about the Warsaw
talks and included Taiwan—still recognized by most of them, and
especially the United States, as the legitimate government of
China.
Nixon’s general
design was turned into an opportunity as a result of a clash
between Soviet and Chinese forces on Zhenbao (or Damansky) Island
in the Ussuri River, where Siberia abuts the Chinese frontier. The
clash might not have attracted the White House’s attention so
quickly had the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, not come to my
office repeatedly to brief me on the Soviet version of what had
happened. It was unheard of in that cold period of the Cold War for
the Soviet Union to brief us on an event so remote from our usual
dialogue—or on any event for that matter. We drew the conclusion
that the Soviet Union was the probable aggressor and that the
briefing, less than a year after the occupation of Czechoslovakia,
hid a larger design. This suspicion was confirmed by a study on the
border clashes by Allen Whiting of the RAND Corporation. Whiting
concluded that because the incidents took place close to Soviet
supply bases and far from Chinese ones, the Soviets were the
probable aggressors, and that the next step might well be an attack
on China’s nuclear facilities. If a Sino-Soviet war was imminent,
some American governmental position needed to be developed. In my
capacity as National Security Advisor, I ordered an
interdepartmental review.
As it turned out, the
analysis of the immediate causes of the clashes was mistaken, at
least regarding the Zhenbao incident. It was a case of mistaken
analysis leading to a correct judgment. Recent historical studies
have revealed that the Zhenbao incident had in fact been initiated
by the Chinese as Dobrynin claimed; they had laid a trap in which a
Soviet border patrol suffered heavy casualties.30 But the Chinese
purpose was defensive, in keeping with the Chinese concept of
deterrence described in the previous chapter. The Chinese planned
the particular incident to shock the Soviet leadership into putting
an end to a series of clashes along the border, probably initiated
by the Soviets, and which in Beijing were treated as Soviet
harassment. The offensive deterrence concept involves the use of a
preemptive strategy not so much to defeat the adversary militarily
as to deal him a psychological blow to cause him to
desist.
The Chinese action in
fact had the opposite effect. The Soviets stepped up harassment all
along the frontier, resulting in the wiping out of a Chinese
battalion at the Xinjiang border. In this atmosphere, beginning in
the summer of 1969, the United States and China began to exchange
deniable signals. The United States eased some minor trade
restrictions with China. Zhou Enlai released two American yachtsmen
who had been detained since straying into Chinese
waters.
During the summer of
1969, the signals of a possible war between China and the Soviet
Union multiplied. Soviet troops along the Chinese border grew to
some forty-two divisions—over a million men. Middle-level Soviet
officials began to inquire of acquaintances at comparable levels
around the world how their governments would react to a Soviet
preemptive attack on Chinese nuclear installations.
These developments
caused the United States government to speed up its consideration
of a potential large-scale Soviet attack on China. The very query
ran counter to the experience of those who had conducted Cold War
foreign policy. For a generation, China had been viewed as the more
bellicose of the two Communist giants. That the United States might
take sides in a war between them had never been considered; the
fact that Chinese policymakers compulsively studied America’s
likely attitudes demonstrated the extent to which long isolation
had dulled their understanding of the American decision-making
process.
But Nixon was
determined to define policy by geopolitical considerations, and in
these terms, any fundamental change in the balance of power had to
evoke at least an American attitude, and, if significant, a policy.
Even if we decided to stay aloof, it should be by conscious
decision, not by default. At a National Security Council meeting in
August 1969, Nixon chose an attitude, if not yet a policy. He put
forward the then shocking thesis that, in the existing
circumstances, the Soviet Union was the more dangerous party and
that it would be against American interests if China were “smashed”
in a China-Soviet war.31 What this meant practically was not
discussed then. What it should have implied for anyone familiar
with Nixon’s thinking was that, on the issue of China, geopolitics
trumped other considerations. In pursuit of this policy, I issued a
directive that in case of conflict between the Soviet Union and
China the United States would adopt a posture of neutrality but
within that framework tilt to the greatest extent possible toward
China.32
It was a
revolutionary moment in U.S. foreign policy: an American President
declared that we had a strategic interest in the survival of a
major Communist country with which we had had no meaningful contact
for twenty years and against which we had fought a war and engaged
in two military confrontations. How to communicate this decision?
The Warsaw ambassadorial talks had not been convened for months and
would have been too low-level to present a view of such magnitude.
The administration therefore decided to go to the other extreme and
go public with the American decision to view a conflict between the
two Communist giants as a matter affecting the American national
interest.
Amidst a drumbeat of
bellicose Soviet statements in various forums threatening war,
American officials were instructed to convey that the United States
was not indifferent and would not be passive. Central Intelligence
Agency Director Richard Helms was asked to give a background
briefing in which he disclosed that Soviet officials seemed to be
sounding out other Communist leaders about their attitude toward a
preemptive attack on Chinese nuclear installations. On September 5,
1969, Undersecretary of State Elliot Richardson became explicit in
a speech to the American Political Science Association:
“Ideological differences between the two Communist giants are not
our affair. We could not fail to be deeply concerned, however, with
an escalation of this quarrel into a massive breach of
international peace and security.”33 In the code of the Cold War, Richardson’s
statement warned that, whatever course the United States adopted,
it would not be indifference; that it would act according to its
strategic interests.
When these measures
were being designed, the principal goal was to create a
psychological framework for an opening to China. Having since seen
many documents published by the main parties, I now lean toward the
view that the Soviet Union was much closer to a preemptive attack
than we realized and that uncertainty about American reactions
proved to be a principal reason for postponing that project. It is
now clear for example that in October 1969 Mao thought an attack so
imminent that he ordered all leaders (except Zhou, needed to run
the government) to disperse across the country and to alert China’s
nuclear forces, tiny as they were then.
Whether as a result
of American warnings or of the Communist world’s own inner
dynamics, the tensions between the two Communist giants eased over
the course of the year, and the immediate threat of war diminished.
Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin, who had flown to Hanoi for
Ho Chi Minh’s funeral in September via India rather than China—a
much longer route—suddenly altered his return trip while en route
and turned his plane toward Beijing, the kind of dramatic action
countries take when they want either to issue an ultimatum or to
usher in a new phase. Neither happened or, depending on one’s
perspective, both did. Kosygin and Zhou met for three hours at the
Beijing airport—hardly a warm welcome for the prime minister of a
country that was still technically an ally. Zhou Enlai produced a
draft understanding providing for mutual withdrawals at contested
positions on the northern frontier and other measures to ease
tensions. The document was supposed to be co-signed on Kosygin’s
return to Moscow. It did not happen. Tensions reached a high point
in October when Mao ordered China’s top leadership to evacuate
Beijing and Defense Minister Lin Biao placed the military on
“first-degree combat readiness” alert.34
Space was thereby
created for the unfolding of Sino-American contacts. Each side
leaned over backward to avoid being perceived as having made the
first public move—the United States because it had no forum to
translate the presidential strategy into a formal position, China
because it did not want to show weakness in the face of threats.
The result was a minuet so intricate that both sides could always
claim that they were not in contact, so stylized that neither
country needed to bear the onus of an initiative that might be
rejected, and so elliptical that existing political relations could
be continued without the need for consultation on a script that had
yet to be written. Between November 1969 and February 1970, there
were at least ten occasions when American and Chinese diplomats in
various capitals around the world had exchanged words—an event
remarkable primarily because, before then, the diplomats had always
avoided each other. The deadlock was broken when we ordered Walter
Stoessel, the U.S. ambassador in Warsaw, to approach Chinese
diplomats at the next social function and express the desire for a
dialogue.
The setting for this
encounter was a Yugoslav fashion show in the Polish capital. The
Chinese diplomats in attendance, who were without instructions,
fled the scene. The Chinese attaché’s account of the incident shows
how constrained relations had become. Interviewed years later, he
recalled seeing two Americans talking and pointing at the Chinese
contingent from across the room; this prompted the Chinese to stand
up and leave, lest they be drawn into conversation. The Americans,
determined to carry out their instructions, followed the Chinese.
When the desperate Chinese diplomats speeded up, the Americans
started running after them, shouting in Polish (the only mutually
intelligible language available), “We are from American embassy. We
want to meet your ambassador . . . President Nixon said he wanted
to resume his talk with Chinese.”35
Two weeks later, the
Chinese ambassador in Warsaw invited Stoessel to a meeting at the
Chinese Embassy, to prepare for a resumption of the Warsaw talks.
Reopening the forum inevitably raised the fundamental issues. What
were the two sides going to talk about? And to what
end?
This brought into the
open the differences in negotiating tactics and style between the
Chinese and American leadership—at least with the American
diplomatic establishment that had supervised the Warsaw talks
through over a hundred abortive meetings. The differences had been
obscured so long as both sides believed deadlock served their
purposes: the Chinese would demand the return of Taiwan to Chinese
sovereignty; the Americans would propose a renunciation of force
over what was presented as a dispute between two Chinese
parties.
Now that both sides
sought progress, the difference in negotiating style became
important. Chinese negotiators use diplomacy to weave together
political, military, and psychological elements into an overall
strategic design. Diplomacy to them is the elaboration of a
strategic principle. They ascribe no particular significance to the
process of negotiation as such; nor do they consider the opening of
a particular negotiation a transformational event. They do not
think that personal relations can affect their judgments, though
they may invoke personal ties to facilitate their own efforts. They
have no emotional difficulty with deadlocks; they consider them the
inevitable mechanism of diplomacy. They prize gestures of goodwill
only if they serve a definable objective or tactic. And they
patiently take the long view against impatient interlocutors,
making time their ally.
The attitude of the
American diplomat varies substantially. The prevalent view within
the American body politic sees military force and diplomacy as
distinct, in essence separate, phases of action. Military action is
viewed as occasionally creating the conditions for negotiations,
but once negotiations begin, they are seen as being propelled by
their own internal logic. This is why, at the start of
negotiations, the United States reduced military operations in
Korea and agreed to a bombing halt in Vietnam, in each case
substituting reassurance for pressure and reducing material
incentives on behalf of intangible ones. American diplomacy
generally prefers the specific over the general, the practical over
the abstract. It is urged to be “flexible”; it feels an obligation
to break deadlocks with new proposals—unintentionally inviting new
deadlocks to elicit new proposals. These tactics often can be used
by determined adversaries in the service of a strategy of
procrastination.
In the case of the
Warsaw talks, American proclivities had the opposite effect. China
had returned to the Warsaw talks because Mao had made a strategic
decision to follow the four marshals’ recommendations to seek a
high-level dialogue with the United States. But American diplomats
(in contrast to their President) did not envisage—or even
imagine—such a breakthrough; or rather, they defined a breakthrough
as breathing life into a process they had been nursing through 134
meetings to date. On that journey, they had developed an agenda
reflecting the pragmatic issues that had accumulated between the
two countries: settlement of financial claims the two sides had
against each other; prisoners held in each other’s jails; trade;
arms control; cultural exchanges. The negotiators’ idea of a
breakthrough was China’s readiness to discuss this
agenda.
A dialogue of the
deaf developed at the two meetings of the resumed Warsaw talks on
February 20 and March 20, 1970. As National Security Advisor in the
White House, I had urged the negotiating team to repeat what our
envoys had tried to say to the fleeing Chinese diplomats, that the
United States “would be prepared to consider sending a
representative to Peking for direct discussions with your
officials, or receiving a representative from your government to
Washington.” Chinese negotiators formally repeated the standard
position on Taiwan albeit in a mild form. But wrapped inside the
formulaic response on Taiwan was an unprecedented move: China was
willing to consider talks outside the Warsaw channels at the
ambassadorial level or through other channels “to reduce tensions
between China and the US and fundamentally improve
relations.”36 It did not make such talks conditional on
the settlement of the Taiwan issue.
The American
negotiators in Warsaw sought to avoid this broader approach. The
first time it was made, they did not respond at all. Afterward they
developed talking points to deflect the Chinese proposition of an
overall review of relationships into an opportunity to address the
American agenda developed over two decades of desultory
conversations.37
Nixon was no less
impatient with this approach than Mao must have been. “They will
kill this baby before it is born,” Nixon said when confronted with
a plan put forward by the negotiating team. But he was reluctant to
order them to engage in a geopolitical dialogue for fear that the
briefing system would produce a firestorm and a need for multiple
reassurances, all before the Chinese attitude was clear. Mao’s
attitude was more ambivalent. On the one hand, he wanted to explore
rapprochement with the United States. But these exchanges were
taking place in early 1970, when the Nixon administration faced
massive demonstrations protesting the decision to send forces into
Cambodia to disrupt the bases and supply chains supporting Hanoi’s
offensives into South Vietnam. The question for Mao was whether the
demonstrations marked the beginning of the genuine world revolution
so long expected by the Marxists and as often disappointed. If
China moved closer to the United States, would it be doing it just
when the world revolutionary agenda was being fulfilled? To wait
out these prospects consumed much of Mao’s planning in 1970.38 He used the
American military incursion into Cambodia as a pretext to cancel
the next session of Warsaw talks scheduled for May 20, 1970. They
were never resumed.
Nixon was looking for
a forum less bureaucratically constraining and more under his
direct control. Mao sought for a way to break through to the
highest levels of the United States government whenever he had made
a firm decision. Both had to move carefully lest a premature
disclosure trigger a Soviet onslaught or a rejection by the other
side thwart the entire initiative. When the Warsaw talks foundered,
the operating level of the U.S. government seemed relieved to be
freed of the perplexities and domestic risks of a negotiation with
Beijing. During the year that Nixon and Mao were searching for
venues for a high-level dialogue, lower levels of the American
diplomatic establishment never raised the question at the White
House of what had happened to the Warsaw talks or suggested
reconvening them.
For nearly a year
after the Chinese cancellation of the proposed May 20 meeting, both
the American and Chinese leaders agreed on the objective but found
themselves thwarted by the gulf of twenty years of isolation. The
problem was no longer simply the cultural differences between the
Chinese and the American approaches to negotiations. It was that
Nixon’s approach differed more from that of his own diplomats than
from Mao’s. He and I wanted to explore the strategic situation
produced by the triangular relationship between the Soviet Union,
China, and the United States. We strove for an occasion not so much
to remove irritants as to conduct a geopolitical
dialogue.
As the two sides were
circling each other, their choice of intermediaries conveyed a
great deal about their perceptions of the task at hand. Nixon used
the occasion of an around-the-world trip in July 1970 to tell his
hosts in Pakistan and Romania that he sought high-level exchanges
with Chinese leaders and that they were free to communicate this to
Beijing. As National Security Advisor, I mentioned the same point
to Jean Sainteny, the former French ambassador in Hanoi, a friend
of many years who was acquainted with the Chinese ambassador in
Paris, Huang Zhen. In other words, the White House chose a
nonaligned friend of China (Pakistan), a member of the Warsaw Pact
known for its quest for independence from Moscow (Romania), and a
member of NATO distinguished by its commitment to strategic
independence (France—on the assumption that Sainteny was bound to
pass our message to the French government). Beijing passed hints to
us via its embassy in Oslo, Norway (a NATO ally), and, strangely
enough, in Kabul, Afghanistan (perhaps on the theory that the venue
was so improbable as to be sure to gain our attention). We ignored
Oslo because our embassy was not equipped for the necessary staff
support; Kabul, of course, was even more remote. And we did not
want to conduct the dialogue once again through
embassies.
China ignored the
direct approach via Paris but eventually responded to the overtures
via Romania and Pakistan. Before that, however, Mao communicated
with us but so subtly and indirectly that we missed the point. In
October 1970 Mao granted another interview to Edgar Snow,
considered by the Nixon White House to be a Mao sympathizer. To
demonstrate the importance Mao attached to the occasion, he placed
Snow next to him on the reviewing stand during the parade
celebrating the Communist victory in the civil war on October 8,
1970. The mere presence of an American standing next to the
Chairman symbolized—or was intended to symbolize to the Chinese
people—that contact with America was not only permissible but a
high priority.
The interview
proceeded in a complex manner. Snow was given a transcript of the
interview with the restriction that he could use only indirect
quotations. He was also instructed to delay any publication for
three months. The Chinese reasoning must have been that Snow would
submit the actual text to the U.S. government and that the
published summary would then reinforce a process already in
train.
It did not work out
that way for the same reason that the 1965 interview failed to
influence the U.S. government. Snow was a friend of the PRC of long
standing; that very fact caused him to be written off in the
American foreign policy establishment as a Beijing propagandist. No
transcript of his interview reached high levels of government,
still less the White House, and by the time the article appeared
months later, it had been overtaken by other
communications.
It was a pity the
transcript did not reach us, because the Chairman had made some
revolutionary pronouncements. For nearly a decade, China had cut
itself off from the outside world. Now Mao announced that he would
soon start inviting Americans of all political persuasions to visit
China. Nixon would be welcome “either as a tourist or as President”
because the Chairman had concluded that “the problems between China
and the U.S.A. would have to be solved with Nixon”—because of the
upcoming presidential election within two years.39
Mao had moved from
vilifying the United States to inviting a dialogue with the
American President. And he added a startling comment about the
Chinese domestic situation, which hinted that the dialogue would
take place with a new China.
Mao told Snow that he
was ending the Cultural Revolution. What he had intended as a moral
and intellectual renovation had turned into coercion, he said.
“When foreigners reported that China was in great chaos, they were
not telling lies. It had been true. Fighting [between Chinese] was
going on . . . first with spears, then rifles, then mortars.”40 Mao, as Snow
reported, now deplored the cult of personality built around his
person: “It was hard, the chairman said, for people to overcome the
habits of 3,000 years of emperor-worshipping tradition.” The titles
ascribed to him such as “Great Helmsman . . . would all be
eliminated sooner or later.” The sole title he wished to retain was
“teacher.”41
These were
extraordinary assertions. After having convulsed his country with
upheavals that destroyed even the Communist Party so that only a
cult of personality was left for cohesion, Mao now pronounced the
end of the Cultural Revolution. It had been proclaimed so that the
Chairman could govern without doctrinal or bureaucratic
inhibitions. It had been sustained by shredding existing structures
and by what Mao now described as “maltreatment of ‘captives’—party
members and others removed from power and subjected to
reeducation.”42
Where did all this
leave Chinese governance? Or was it being told to a foreign
journalist in Mao’s characteristic elliptically wandering way, in
pursuit of its principal purpose, to encourage a new phase in the
relationship between China and the United States and the world by
conveying an altered governance? As Snow recorded, Mao announced
that “between Chinese and Americans there need be no prejudices.
There could be mutual respect and equality. He said he placed high
hopes on the peoples of the two countries.”43
Nixon, in a break
with American foreign policy tradition, had urged a relaxation of
tensions on the basis of geopolitical considerations in order to
return China to the international system. But to the China-centered
Mao, the principal vision was not the international system so much
as the future of China. To achieve its security, he was willing to
shift the center of gravity of Chinese policy and bring about a
reversal of the alliances—not, however, in the name of a theory of
international relations but rather of a new direction for Chinese
society in which China could even learn from the United
States:
China should learn from the way America developed, by decentralizing and spreading responsibility and wealth among the 50 states. A central government could not do everything. China must depend upon regional and local initiatives. It would not do [spreading his hands] to leave everything up to him [Mao].44
Mao, in short,
reaffirmed classic principles of Chinese governance cast in
Confucian principles of moral rectitude. He devoted a part of his
interview to castigating the habit of lying, which he blamed not on
the Americans but on the recently disempowered Red Guards. “If one
did not speak the truth, Mao concluded, how could he gain the
confidence of others? Who would trust one?”45 Snow recorded. The
fire-breathing, radical ideologist of yesterday now appeared in the
garb of a Confucian sage. His concluding sentence seemed to express
a sense of resignation to new circumstance if not without, as
always, taunting double meanings: “He was, he said, only a lone
monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella.”46
There was more to the
last line than Mao’s habitual mockery in presenting the creator of
the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as returning to
his original philosophic vocation as a lonely teacher. For as
several Chinese commentators later noted, the quotation in Snow’s
English text was but the first line of a familiar Chinese couplet.
47 If completed,
the couplet is not so much mocking as ominous. Left unspoken, or at
least untranslated, was the second line of the couplet:
“wu fa wu tian.” As written, the
Chinese characters mean “without hair, without sky”—that is, the
monk is bald, and because he holds an umbrella, he does not see the
sky above him. But in the tonal Chinese language, the line is a
pun. Pronounced slightly differently, the line takes on a new
meaning: “without law, without heaven”—or, less literally: “defying
laws both human and divine”; “neither God-fearing nor law-abiding”;
“trampling law underfoot without batting an eyelid.”48
Mao’s closing salvo
was, in other words, even further reaching and more subtle than
initially apparent. Mao cast himself as a wandering classical sage
but also as a law unto himself. Was Mao toying with his
English-speaking interviewer? Could he possibly think Snow would
understand the pun, which is, for a Western ear, almost impossibly
obscure? (Mao did sometimes overestimate Western subtlety even as
the West sometimes exaggerated his.) Given the context, the
probability is that Mao’s pun was directed to his domestic
audience, particularly those leaders who might oppose rapprochement
with the heretofore hated United States and whose opposition later
culminated in the crisis—and alleged coup—of Lin Biao shortly after
the U.S. opening to China. Mao was effectively announcing that he
was about to turn the world upside down again. In that mission, he
would not be bound by “laws human or divine,” not even the laws of
his own ideology. It warned doubters to get out of the
way.
The text of Mao’s
interview was surely circulated in high levels of Beijing even as
it was being ignored in Washington. Snow had been asked to delay
publication so that China could develop an official initiative. Mao
decided to cut through the minuet of third-party communications by
addressing the American administration directly at the highest
level. On December 8, 1970, a message was delivered to my office in
the White House from Zhou Enlai. Reviving a diplomatic practice of
previous centuries, the Pakistani ambassador brought it from
Islamabad, where it had been delivered as a handwritten
communication. Beijing’s missive formally acknowledged the messages
received through intermediaries. It noted a comment made by Nixon
to President Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan of Pakistan, when Yahya
called at the White House a few weeks earlier, to the effect that
America, in its negotiations with the Soviet Union, would not
participate in a “condominium against China” and would be prepared
to send an emissary to a mutually convenient place to arrange
high-level contacts with China.49
Zhou Enlai replied as
he had not to previous messages because, he said, this was the
first time a message had “come from a Head, through a Head, to a
Head.”50 Emphasizing that his reply had been
approved by Mao and Lin Biao, then Mao’s designated heir, Zhou
invited a special emissary to Beijing to discuss “the vacation
[sic] of Chinese territories called
Taiwan” which “have now been occupied by foreign troops of the
United States for the last fifteen years.”51
It was an artful
document. For what exactly was Zhou Enlai proposing to discuss? The
reversion of Taiwan to China or the presence of American troops on
the island? There was no reference to the treaty of mutual
assistance. Whatever it meant, it was the mildest formulation on
Taiwan that had been received from Beijing for twenty years. Did it
apply only to American forces stationed in Taiwan, most of whom
were support forces for Vietnam? Or did it imply a more sweeping
demand? In any event, to invite the representative of the reviled
“monopoly capitalists”52 to Beijing had to reflect some deeper
imperative than the desire to discuss Taiwan, for which a forum
already existed; it had to involve the security of
China.
The White House opted
to leave the answer open for actual direct contacts. Our reply
accepted the principle of an emissary but defined his mission as
“the broad range of issues which lie between the People’s Republic
of China and the U.S.”—in other words, the U.S. emissary would not
agree to confine the agenda to Taiwan.53
Leaving nothing to
the chance that the Pakistan channel might not work efficiently,
Zhou Enlai sent a parallel message via Romania, which, for some
never explained reason, arrived a month after the Pakistani
message, in January. This message, too, we were told, had been
“reviewed by Chairman Mao and Lin Piao [Lin Biao].”54 It described Taiwan
as the one outstanding issue between China and the United States
and added an entirely new element: since President Nixon had
already visited Belgrade and Bucharest—capitals of Communist
countries—he would also be welcome in Beijing. In light of the
military clashes of the past decade and a half, it was significant
that Taiwan was listed as the only
issue between China and the United States; in other words, Vietnam
clearly was not an obstacle to reconciliation.
We replied through
the Romanian channel, accepting the principle of an emissary but
ignoring the invitation to the President. At this early stage of
contacts, accepting a presidential visit seemed too importuning,
not to mention too risky. We conveyed our definition of an
appropriate agenda phrased, to avoid confusion, identically with
the message via Pakistan, to the effect that the United States was
prepared to discuss all issues of concern to both sides, including
Taiwan.
Zhou Enlai had seen
Yahya in October and the Romanian Vice Premier in November. Mao had
received Snow in early October. That all these messages emerged
within a few weeks of each other reflected the fact that diplomacy
had gone beyond the tactical and was being orchestrated for a major
denouement.
But to our
surprise—and no little uneasiness—there was no response for three
months. Probably it was because of the South Vietnamese offensive,
backed by U.S. airpower, on the Ho Chi Minh Trail through southern
Laos, the principal supply route for North Vietnamese forces in the
South. Mao also seems to have had second thoughts about the
prospects of an American revolution based on the anti–Vietnam War
demonstrations.55 Perhaps it was because Beijing prefers to
move at a pace that demonstrates its imperviousness to mere
tactical considerations and precludes any demonstration of Chinese
eagerness, much less of weakness. Most likely, Mao needed time to
align his own domestic constituencies.
It was not until the
beginning of April that we heard from China again. It chose none of
the channels we had established but a method of its own, which
forced into the open the issue of the Chinese desire to achieve a
better relationship with America and was less dependent on actions
of the United States government.
This is the
background to the episode that has entered folklore as Ping-Pong
diplomacy. A Chinese Ping-Pong team participated in an
international tournament in Japan, the first time a Chinese sports
team had competed outside China since the beginning of the Cultural
Revolution. In recent years, it has emerged that the impending
encounter between the Chinese and American teams caused
considerable internal debate in the Chinese leadership. The Chinese
Foreign Ministry initially recommended avoiding the tournament
entirely, or at least remaining aloof from the American team. Zhou
forwarded the matter for reconsideration by Mao, who deliberated
for two days. Late one night, after one of his periodic bouts of
insomnia, Mao lay “slumped over the table” in a
sleeping-pill-induced haze. Suddenly he croaked to his nurse,
telling her to phone the Foreign Ministry—“to invite the American
team to visit China.” The nurse recalled asking him, “Does your
word count after taking sleeping pills?” Mao replied, “Yes, it
counts, every word counts. Act promptly, or it will be too
late!”56
This order from Mao
in hand, the Chinese players used the occasion to invite the
American team to visit China. On April 14, 1971, the amazed young
Americans found themselves at the Great Hall of the People in the
presence of Zhou Enlai, which was more than had ever been achieved
by the vast majority of the foreign ambassadors stationed in
Beijing.
“You have opened a
new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people,”
affirmed the Chinese Premier. “I am confident that the beginning of
our friendship will certainly find support with the majority of our
peoples.” The athletes, stunned by the fact that they were being
propelled into high-level diplomacy, did not respond, causing Zhou
Enlai to end with a sentence we later came to recognize as
characteristic: “Don’t you think so?”—evoking a round of
applause.57
As usual with Chinese
diplomacy, Mao and Zhou were operating on many levels. On one
level, the Ping-Pong diplomacy constituted an answer to the
American messages of January. It committed China publicly to the
course heretofore confined to the most secret diplomatic channels.
In that sense, it was reassurance. But it was also a warning of
what course China could pursue were the secret communications
thwarted. Beijing could then undertake a public campaign—what would
today be called “people-to-people diplomacy”—much as Hanoi was
doing in pressing its objectives on Vietnam, and appeal to the
growing protest movement in American society on the basis of
another “lost chance for peace.”
Zhou soon conveyed
that the diplomatic channel remained his preferred option. On April
29, the Pakistani ambassador brought another handwritten message
from Beijing dated April 21. It explained the long silence by “the
situation of the time”58 without explaining whether this referred
to domestic or international conditions but reiterating the
willingness to receive a special envoy. Zhou was specific about the
emissary Beijing had in mind, naming me or Secretary of State
William Rogers or “even the President of the U.S. himself.”59 As a condition of
restoration of the relations, Zhou mentioned only the withdrawal of
American armed forces from Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait—by far the
least contentious issue—and omitted the reversion of
Taiwan.
At that point, the
secrecy with which the diplomacy had been conducted nearly derailed
the enterprise and would have in any previous period of dealing
with Beijing. Nixon had decided that the channel to Beijing should
be confined to the White House. No other agency had been told of
the two communications from Zhou Enlai in December and January.
Thus in a public briefing on April 28, a State Department spokesman
declared as the American position that sovereignty over Taiwan was
“an unsettled question subject to future international resolution.”
And when the Secretary of State, attending a diplomatic meeting in
London, appeared on television the next day, he commented on the
Snow interview and dismissed the invitation to Nixon as “fairly
casually made” and not “serious.” He described Chinese foreign
policy as “expansionist” and “rather paranoiac.” Progress in
negotiations—and a possible Nixon trip to China—would be possible
only if China decided to join the international community in some
unspecified way and complied “with the rules of international
law.”60
It was a measure of
China’s strategic imperatives that progress toward resumption of
the dialogue continued. The reference to Taiwan as an unsettled
question was denounced as “fraudulent” and a “brazen intervention
in the affairs of the Chinese people” by the governmental
spokesman. But the invective was coupled with a reaffirmation that
the visit of the table tennis team was a new development in the
friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
On May 10, we
accepted Zhou’s invitation to Nixon but reiterated our insistence
on a broad agenda. Our communication read: “At such a meeting each
side would be free to raise the issue of principal concern to
it.”61 To prepare for the summit, the President
proposed that as his assistant for national security I should
represent him at a preliminary secret meeting with Zhou. We
indicated a specific date. The reason for the date was not high
policy. During the late spring and early summer, the Cabinet and
White House had planned a series of travels, and it was the first
time a high-level plane became available.
On June 2, we
received the Chinese reply. Zhou informed us that he had reported
Nixon’s acceptance of the Chinese invitation to Mao “with much
pleasure”62 and that he would welcome me to Beijing
for preliminary conversations on the proposed date. We paid little
attention to the fact that Lin Biao’s name was dropped from this
communication.
Within a year,
Sino-American diplomacy had moved from irreconcilable conflict to a
visit to Beijing by a presidential emissary to prepare a visit by
the President himself. It did so by sidestepping the rhetoric of
two decades and staying focused on the fundamental strategic
objective of a geopolitical dialogue leading to a recasting of the
Cold War international order. Had Nixon followed professional
advice, he would have used the Chinese invitation to return to the
traditional agenda and speed up its consideration as a condition
for higher-level talks. Not only might this have been treated as a
rejection, the whole process of intensified Sino-U.S. contact would
almost certainly have been overwhelmed by domestic and
international pressures in both countries. Nixon’s contribution to
the emerging Sino-American understanding was not so much that he
understood its desirability but that he was able to give it a
conceptual foundation to which Chinese thinking could relate. To
Nixon, the opening to China was part of an overall strategic
design, not a shopping list of mutual irritations.
Chinese leaders
pursued a parallel approach. Invocations of returning to an
existing international order were meaningless to them, if only
because they did not consider the existing international system,
which they had no hand in forming, as relevant to them. They had
never conceived their security to reside in the legal arrangement
of a community of sovereign states. Americans to this day often
treat the opening to China as ushering in a static condition of
friendship. But the Chinese leaders were brought up on the concept
of shi—the art of understanding matters
in flux.
When Zhou wrote about
reestablishing friendship between the Chinese and American peoples,
he described an attitude needed to foster a new international
equilibrium, not a final state of the relationship between peoples.
In Chinese writings, the hallowed words of the American vocabulary
of a legal international order are rarely to be found. What was
sought, rather, was a world in which China could find security and
progress through a kind of combative coexistence, in which
readiness to fight was given equal pride of place to the concept of
coexistence. Into this world, the United States entered with its
first diplomatic mission to Communist China.