Nixon and Mao (25 page)

Nixon working out his ideas on one of his favorite yellow legal pads.

Nixon and Chou in one of their private meetings. Kissinger and Qiao Guanhua also face each other across the table.

A scene from
The Red Detachment of Women,
one of Jiang Qing’s revolutionary opera/ballets, during a special performance for the Americans.

Nixon and Jiang Qing at the performance of
The Red Detachment of Women.

The president and Mrs. Nixon and their party on the Great Wall.

Pat Nixon had her own itinerary of visits to communes, hospitals, and schools. Here she watches a student singing, presumably a revolutionary song.

Pat Nixon admiring a panda at the Beijing Zoo. The Chinese have used gifts of pandas for centuries to foster their foreign relations.

Nixon, the reluctant sightseer, on his whirlwind tour of the old imperial precincts, the Forbidden City, in Beijing.

Nixon held an impromptu press conference outside his villa at Hangzhou and then posed with the journalists.

Air Force One brings Nixon back to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington for a triumphal welcome.

In the United States, a debate broke out between the White House and the State Department about whether it was wise to think of sending an emissary to China before relations had improved significantly. Would such a move, the State Department asked, cause problems with America’s allies in Asia, such as Japan and Taiwan? Would the Chinese use the evidence of American interest to put pressure on the Soviet Union to mend fences?
³⁸
Kissinger was infuriated at what he saw as bureaucratic rigidity of the worst kind. Of course the diplomats wanted to continue the old-style talks, “without result, true, but also without debacle or controversy.”
³⁹
As the Americans argued among themselves, they kept postponing the date of the next meeting. In the spring, the long-running conflict in Indochina upset the delicate negotiations through Warsaw. In March, the situation in Cambodia suddenly deteriorated when Lon Nol, an American-backed general, overthrew the neutralist government of Prince Sihanouk. By the beginning of May, Sihanouk had established a government in exile in Beijing, and South Vietnamese and American forces were invading Cambodia to prop up Lon Nol. The Chinese put out a statement condemning the “brazen” invasion and said that it was not “suitable” for the meeting scheduled for May 20 to be held. Tiananmen Square filled up with a huge protest rally, and Mao called on the people of the world to defeat “the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs.”
⁴⁰

It looked as though Chinese-American relations were going back into the deep freeze. Nixon, in any case, was preoccupied with Indochina and the widespread protests in the United States as a result of Cambodia. Mao, as became apparent later, was brooding over the loyalty of his chosen successor, Defense Minister Lin Biao. Nevertheless, there were some encouraging signs that the will to improve relations remained on both sides. In the second week of May, as Washington and the country were rocked by demonstrations against the Cambodian invasion and bombings, Nixon, to the dismay of his security and staff, impulsively decided to go out and talk to the demonstrators. During a strange late-night conversation by the Lincoln Memorial, he tried to explain himself and his ideals to a group of students. In rambling but widely reported remarks, he urged them to travel, to know not just their own country but the world. One of his great hopes for his administration was that “the great mainland of China be opened up so that we could know the seven hundred million people who live in China and who are one of the most remarkable people on earth.”
⁴¹
In an interview with
Time
later that fall, he said, “If there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China. If I don’t, I want my children to.”
⁴²

Although the Cambodian invasion in May 1970 disrupted the gradual opening of contacts between China and the United States, the two sides did not pull back completely to their old stance. In July, after American troops had pulled out of Cambodia, the Chinese suddenly released an unfortunate clergyman who had languished in a Chinese jail for two decades. (He was carried across the border to Hong Kong on a stretcher and died soon afterward.) The Chinese also announced that another imprisoned American had committed suicide several years earlier. The United States, for its part, dropped its longstanding opposition to Italy’s exporting heavy trucks to China. The Italians profited by getting frozen pork as an exchange. That autumn, at a state banquet for Ceau
escu of Romania, Nixon used the words “People’s Republic of China” for the first time.