Nixon and Mao (19 page)

The danger with wars of nerves is that they can lead to mistakes, and in early 1969, it looked as though the Soviet Union and China might find themselves in a major conflict. Trouble started over a mud-flat called Zhenbao (or Damansky) Island, in the Ussuri River. (It had been the scene of fighting many years earlier, in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05.) In late December 1968, Soviet and Chinese soldiers fought with sticks. In the new year, the fighting went on, with increasing casualties. Then, on March 2, 1969, the Chinese sent armed guards onto the island. When the Soviets challenged them, they refused to withdraw in the expected fashion. Instead, they opened fire. According to the Chinese, more than fifty Soviets were killed. (Soviet sources said thirty.)
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Two weeks later, the two sides fought on Zhenbao a second time, now with heavy artillery and tanks, and there were even more dead—according to one source sixty Soviets and twelve Chinese. Another source says there were over eight hundred dead Chinese.
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Both sides claimed victory. The Chinese scornfully described the Soviet soldiers as “politically degenerated and morally decadent.” Their own soldiers, they said, “armed with Mao Zedong Thought,” had easily dealt with even the Soviet tanks.
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The Americans, though, got intelligence that the Soviets had plastered the island with heavy artillery fire, leaving nothing but a pockmarked surface.
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The Chinese tried to deliver a note of protest to the Soviet ambassador in Beijing. He refused to receive it. The Chinese threw the note over the Soviet embassy wall; the Soviets threw it back out.
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The propaganda from both sides became highly emotional, with much reference to heroic deaths and bloodstained last letters filled with patriotic sentiments. Soviet commentators now described Maoism as “a criminal racist theory,” and the Chinese responded with talk of wild beasts.
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Much about the events of 1969 remains obscure, although both Chinese and Soviet scholars seem to agree that the Chinese did the most to provoke the exchanges.
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There has been much speculation since about what motives China might have had. Was Mao sending a signal to the Americans that the rupture between the People’s Republic and the Soviet Union was permanent?
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Or perhaps the signal was a “bitter lesson” to the Soviet Union, to show it that the Chinese would resist any aggression or an invasion like the recent one of Czechoslovakia. China had done something similar before when it had attacked India in 1962 and then withdrawn after savaging Indian forces, and it was to do it again with Vietnam in 1978. Or maybe—and this is a possibility, given his preoccupation with making the Chinese properly revolutionary in their outlook—Mao wanted to create a situation that would rally the Chinese in resistance to the Soviets. As he told Chou En-lai after the second Zhenbao battle, “We should let them come in, which will help us in our mobilization.”
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Whatever the causes of the clashes (which continued throughout the next months), both sides were left in a highly agitated state, each wondering what the other was up to. The Soviets feared that the new Chinese aggressiveness might be the foretaste of something even worse. Members of the Soviet Politburo, said a high-ranking official who later defected to the West, were panicking: “A nightmare vision of invasion by millions of Chinese made the Soviet leaders almost frantic.”
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Soviet hard-liners, including the defense minister, disagreed: the time had come to deal with China once and for all. “Those squint-eyed bastards,” the Soviet ambassador at the United Nations complained to American diplomats. “We’ll kill those yellow sons-of-bitches.”
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Others, among them Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet premier, urged that the Soviet Union try to defuse a dangerous situation.
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Kosygin used a hot line for the first time in years to telephone Beijing, asking to speak to either Mao or Chou En-lai, but the Chinese operator refused to put through a call from a “scoundrel revisionist.”
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The next day, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a cool note that said, “In view of the present relations between China and the Soviet Union, it is unsuitable to communicate by telephone.”
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If the Soviet Union had anything to say, it could do so in writing. Yet when the Soviets tried to initiate discussions through an exchange of memoranda, the Chinese at first refused to reply and then sent a patronizing admonition to “please calm down, don’t get excited.”
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To bring the Chinese into a more accommodating frame of mind, Soviet hard-liners gained government permission to carry out a limited military action in August on the borders of the Soviet Union and Xinjiang Province, in China’s far west. If their attack on Chinese positions resulted in full-scale war, so be it. Although Kosygin and the other moderates continued to hope for discussions with the Chinese, they also explored other options. The Soviet Union sent out a score of delegations to Asian countries to see about establishing an “Asian collective security system,” which would clearly be directed against the People’s Republic.
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In June 1969, American intelligence picked up reports that Soviet bomber units had been sent to Outer Mongolia and were carrying out what looked like mock attacks on Chinese targets.
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In August, a Soviet diplomat in Washington had lunch with an official from the State Department. What, the diplomat asked, would be the U.S. reaction if the Soviet Union were to bomb a Chinese nuclear facility?
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The Americans picked up reports of similar queries to Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe.
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Late that month, Nixon and Kissinger were both briefed by Allen Whiting, a China specialist, who warned that the Soviet Union was getting itself into a position where it could successfully attack. (This may have been the moment when Kissinger finally accepted that Nixon was right, that the time was favorable for an American move toward China.)
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The Nixon administration was seriously concerned: it did not want either a general war or to see China defeated. It sent out signals to both sides. In late August, Richard Helms, director of the CIA, gave diplomatic correspondents a confidential briefing, which was inevitably leaked to the press. He warned of a possible Soviet strike on China. A week later Elliot Richardson, the undersecretary of state, told a political science conference in New York that the United States had no intention of exploiting the hostility between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic. “We could not fail to be deeply concerned, however,” he said, “with an escalation of this quarrel into a massive breach of international peace and security.”
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Opinion among the Chinese leadership after the March clashes had also been divided. A group led by Mao’s chosen successor, Lin Biao, believed that the Soviet Union was ready to take serious action against China, while men such as the former foreign minister Chen Yi argued for diplomacy to resolve the tensions.
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Mao himself, who was the final arbiter of China’s policy, seems to have had trouble making up his mind. He told Chou En-lai to stop the fighting after the second clash on Zhenbao Island in March, but he also gave orders that China should prepare to fight a war. Nothing much was actually done. Perhaps Mao thought that the Soviet Union had been taught its lesson. In any case, he assumed that its main interests lay in Europe, not the Far East.
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By the late summer of 1969, however, Mao could not ignore the evidence that the Soviets were up to something. The Soviet attack on August 13 apparently shocked him considerably, and when he learned that the Soviet Union might be planning a sudden nuclear strike on China, he became, in the words of a Chinese expert, “extremely nervous.”
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On August 28, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued new orders to the Chinese to prepare for war. The party also used the opportunity to order an end to the often violent struggles between different factions of Red Guards. When Ho Chi Minh died in Hanoi on September 3, Chou En-lai dashed down to pay his respects but did not stay for the funeral—partly because the situation in China was so serious but also because he did not want to meet Kosygin, who was representing the Soviet Union.
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On September 6, a member of the Soviet party asked the North Vietnamese to let the Chinese know that Kosygin was prepared to stop in Beijing for talks on his way home. Mao dithered for several days, and Kosygin was already in Tashkent, on his way home to Moscow, when word came that Chou En-lai would meet him at the Beijing airport. Kosygin took to the air again and arrived in Beijing early on the morning of September 11. On Mao’s orders, to show their displeasure, the Chinese kept the Soviets at the airport. Kosygin and Chou En-lai, with their aides, met for three and a half hours in the VIP lounge. Both sides denied that they intended to make war on the other. Kosygin may have offered to withdraw Soviet troops from the disputed territories.
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Both sides certainly agreed that they should start trying to sort out their border issues, although Chou continued to harp on the unequal nature of the existing agreements.
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The Soviets talked optimistically about restoring normal trade and diplomatic relations. Chou agreed that their proposals would be shown to Mao but warned that the People’s Republic would continue its polemics against fellow Communist parties when they went wrong. The Soviets replied primly that they had nothing against reasonable polemics: “Lies and curses do not add persuasiveness and authority to a polemic, and only humiliate the feelings of the other people and aggravate the relations.”
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The relations, unfortunately, remained aggravated and, indeed, highly dangerous for the next several months. Each side mistrusted the other too much for one meeting to help. When Kosygin flew on to Moscow, the Chinese noticed that none of his senior colleagues came out to meet him at the airport. Did that mean that the rest of the Soviet leadership did not want peace with China? Had Kosygin promised that the Soviet Union would not launch a nuclear strike on China? The Chinese record of the talks was not clear.
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(The Soviet record has the Soviets saying that rumors of such a strike were “contrived imperialistic propaganda.”)
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And perhaps the Chinese were right to be suspicious. In what was apparently a move to put more pressure on the People’s Republic, Victor Louis, a Moscow-based journalist who acted as a conduit for Soviet views, published an article in a London newspaper saying how easy it would be for the Soviet Union to launch a surprise attack on China, perhaps against China’s own nuclear facilities in Xinjiang Province. Louis also talked about how the Chinese people were starting to rise against Mao. The Soviet Union, he said, was ready to offer “fraternal help.”
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These and other signs led the Chinese leadership, notably Mao and Lin Biao, to the conclusion that Kosygin’s visit was a smoke screen to conceal the true Soviet intentions. Perhaps to send the Soviet Union a warning, China tested two nuclear devices that September, the first in almost a year.
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There was something close to panic in Beijing that autumn. On September 22, Chou En-lai told a People’s Liberation Army conference, “The international situation is extremely tense. We should be prepared for fighting a war.”
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The armed forces were put on high alert, and proper training, so disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, was resumed. Huge tunnels were constructed to link Zhongnanhai to the Great Hall of the People and a special hospital. Thousands of key personnel and their files as well as universities and colleges were moved out of the cities, and Chinese forces were sent to forward positions, ready to repel an invasion. Ordinary citizens were given shovels and told to start digging.

The Chinese waited anxiously. Perhaps the attack would come on October 1, China’s National Day. Lin Biao ordered all planes in the Beijing area to be flown away, and obstacles were placed on the run-ways. When October 1 came and went, the Chinese decided that October 20, when a Soviet delegation was due to arrive to start talking about the borders, might be the day. What if the Soviet plane carried nuclear bombs rather than negotiators? Mao and Lin Biao hastily left Beijing for the south. The remaining leadership moved into underground shelters in Beijing’s Western Hills. Chou did not reappear in his office for several months and only moved back in February 1970, when the worst of the panic was over. Throughout 1970, though, the Chinese continued to anticipate a Soviet invasion.
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To this day, those years are remembered in China as a time of great danger.
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There is an old Chinese saying: “When the extreme is reached, the reverse will set in.”
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Indeed, Mao had started to think seriously about trying to change China’s isolation in the world. In February 1969, to help him clarify his thoughts, he set up a special four-man group to study the international situation. All of its members were hardened revolutionaries who had led the Communist armies in the long struggle for power. After 1949, all had become marshals in the People’s Liberation Army. In 1969, all had plenty of time on their hands because each had been attacked and disgraced during the Cultural Revolution, amid mad accusations that they were counterrevolutionaries. (In fact, their crime was to have suggested that the Cultural Revolution was going too far.) They were among the luckier of the top leadership, though, because Mao did not feel particularly vindictive toward them. Chou En-lai was able to provide them a certain amount of protection and had sent them to live in secure factories in Beijing, where their duties were minimal and their real job was to read materials on international affairs and discuss them with one another. Chou instructed, “You should not be confined to the established views and conclusions, which need to be altered partly or totally.” With the thoughtfulness that made so many love him, he urged the four elderly men not to work too hard, adding, “Take care of your health.”
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