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.
CHAPTER 9
Resumption of Relations: First Encounters with Mao and Zhou
T
HE MOST DRAMATIC EVENT of the Nixon presidency occurred in near obscurity. For Nixon had decided that for the mission to Beijing to succeed, it would have to take place in secrecy. A public mission would have set off a complicated internal clearance project within the U.S. government and insistent demands for consultations from around the world, including Taiwan (still recognized as the government of China). This would have mortgaged our prospects with Beijing, whose attitudes we were being sent to discover. Transparency is an essential objective, but historic opportunities for building a more peaceful international order have imperatives as well.
So my team set off to Beijing via Saigon, Bangkok, New Delhi, and Rawalpindi on an announced fact-finding journey on behalf of the President. My party included a broader set of American officials, as well as a core group destined for Beijing—myself, aides Winston Lord, John Holdridge, and Dick Smyser, and Secret Service agents Jack Ready and Gary McLeod. The dramatic denouement required us to go through tiring stops at each city designed to be so boringly matter-of-fact that the media would stop tracking our movements. In Rawalpindi, we disappeared for forty-eight hours for an ostensible rest (I had feigned illness) in a Pakistani hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas. In Washington, only the President and Colonel Alexander Haig (later General), my top aide, knew our actual destination.
When the American delegation arrived in Beijing on July 9, 1971, we had experienced the subtlety of Chinese communication but not the way Beijing conducted actual negotiations, still less the Chinese style of receiving visitors. American experience with Communist diplomacy was based on contacts with Soviet leaders, principally Andrei Gromyko, who had a tendency to turn diplomacy into a test of bureaucratic will; he was impeccably correct in negotiation but implacable on substance—sometimes, one sensed, straining his self-discipline.