On China (43 page)

If Mao’s interpreters—Nancy Tang and Wang Hairong, who was close to Mao’s wife—were opposing the Foreign Minister and the de facto ambassador to Washington, matters had reached a fraught moment, and the internal split had reached the highest levels. Mao’s calling the Foreign Minister “Lord Qiao”—implying that the Foreign Minister was a Confucian—was another danger sign of the domestic rift. If there were big character posters—the large-font declarations by which the ideological campaigns were conducted during the Cultural Revolution—being put up at the universities, some of the methods and surely some of the arguments of the Cultural Revolution were beginning to reappear. In that case, Mao’s reference to a possible civil war could have been more than a figure of speech.

Ford, who obscured his shrewdness behind a facade of Midwestern simplicity and directness, chose to ignore the signs of division. Instead, he conducted himself as if the premises of the Zhou era of Sino-U.S. relations were still valid and launched himself into a case-by-case discussion of issues around the world. His basic theme was the measures America was taking to prevent Soviet hegemony, and he invited specific Chinese cooperation, especially in Africa. Mao had rebuffed Nixon for attempting much less in their conversation three years earlier. Whether Ford’s seeming guilelessness disarmed Mao or Mao had planned a strategic dialogue all along, this time he joined in, adding characteristically mordant comments, especially about Soviet moves in Africa, that proved that he had maintained his mastery of detail.

At the very end of the conversation, there was a strange appeal by Mao for help on presenting a better public posture on U.S.-China relations:

There was no time to inquire which foreigners were in a position to give briefings that the media would believe. It was a problem Mao traditionally could have solved by ordering up a positive communiqué, assuming he still had the power to impose his will on his factions.

Mao did not do so. No practical consequences followed. We found the draft communiqué, presumably overseen by Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua, to be unhelpful, if not provocative, and refused to accept it. Clearly, a significant power struggle was taking place inside China. Deng, though critical of our tactics with the Soviets, was eager to maintain the relationship with America established by Zhou and Mao. Equally obviously, some groups in the power structure were challenging this course. Deng overcame the impasse by issuing a statement, in his capacity as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee (the executive committee of the Communist Party), affirming the usefulness of Ford’s visit and the importance of Sino-U.S. friendship.

For months following the meetings, the Chinese split was in plain view. Deng, who had replaced Zhou without being given the title of Premier, was once more under attack, presumably from the same forces that had exiled him a decade earlier. Zhou had disappeared from the scene. The conduct of the Foreign Minister, Qiao Guanhua, turned confrontational. The silken style with which Zhou had eased the road toward collaboration was replaced by a taunting insistence.

The potential for confrontation was kept in check because Deng sought occasions to demonstrate the importance of close relations with the United States. For example, at the welcoming dinner for my visit in October 1975, Qiao had delivered a fire-breathing toast in front of American television castigating U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union—a violation of diplomatic protocol at total variance with the sensitive handling of American delegations heretofore. When I responded sharply, the television lights were turned off so that my words could not be broadcast.

The next day, Deng invited the American delegation to a picnic in the Western Hills near Beijing where the Chinese leaders live, which had not been on the schedule originally, and conducted it with the solicitude that had characterized all meetings since the opening to China.

Matters came to a head when Zhou died on January 8, 1976. Roughly coincident with the Qingming Festival (Tomb-Sweeping Day) in April, hundreds of thousands of Chinese visited the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square to pay tribute to Zhou’s memory, leaving wreaths and poems. The memorials revealed a deep admiration for Zhou and a hunger for the principles of order and moderation he had come to represent. Some poems contained thinly veiled criticism of Mao and Jiang Qing (again using the favored technique of historical analogy).
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The memorials were cleared overnight, leading to a standoff between police and mourners (known as the “Tiananmen Incident” of 1976). The Gang of Four persuaded Mao that Deng’s reforming tendencies had led to counterrevolutionary protests. The next day, the Gang of Four organized counterdemonstrations. Two days after the mourning for Zhou, Mao dismissed Deng from all Party posts. The position of acting Premier went to a little-known provincial party secretary from Hunan named Hua Guofeng.

Chinese relations with the United States became increasingly distant. George H. W. Bush having been named CIA Director, Tom Gates, a former Secretary of Defense, was appointed head of the Beijing Liaison Office. Hua Guofeng did not receive him for four months and, when he did, stuck to established, if formal, phraseology. A month later in mid-July, Vice Premier Zhang Chunqiao, generally regarded as the strongest man in the leadership and a key member of the Gang of Four, took the occasion of a visit by Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott to put forward an extremely bellicose position regarding Taiwan, quite at odds with what Mao had told us:

The Gang of Four was pushing China in a direction reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution and of the provocative Maoist style toward Khrushchev.

On September 9, 1976, Mao succumbed to his illness, leaving his successors with his achievements and premonitions, with the legacy of his grandiosity and brutality, of great vision distorted by self-absorption. He left behind a China unified as it had not been for centuries, with most vestiges of the original regime eliminated, clearing away the underbrush for reforms never intended by the Chairman. If China remains united and emerges as a twenty-first-century superpower, Mao may hold, for many Chinese, the same ambiguous yet respected role in Chinese history as Qin Shihuang, the Emperor he personally revered: the dynasty-founding autocrat who dragged China into the next era by conscripting its population for a massive national exertion, and whose excesses were later acknowledged by some as a necessary evil. For others, the tremendous suffering Mao inflicted on his people will dwarf his achievements.

Two strands of policy had been competing with each other through the turbulences of Mao’s rule. There was the revolutionary thrust that saw China as a moral and political force, insisting on dispensing its unique precepts by example to an awestruck world. There was the geopolitical China coolly assessing trends and manipulating them to its own advantage. There was a China seeking coalitions for the first time in its history but also the one defiantly challenging the entire world. Mao had taken a war-wracked country and maneuvered it between competing domestic factions, hostile superpowers, an ambivalent Third World, and suspicious neighbors. He managed to have China participate in each overlapping concentric circle but commit itself to none. China had survived wars, tensions, and doubts while its influence grew, and in the end, it became an emerging superpower whose Communist form of government survived the collapse of the Communist world. Mao achieved this at horrendous cost by relying on the tenacity and perseverance of the Chinese people, using their endurance and cohesion, which so often exasperated him, as the bedrock of his edifice.

Approaching the end of his life, Mao was edging toward a challenge to the American design of world order, insisting on defining tactics and not only strategy. His successors shared his belief in Chinese strengths, but they did not think China capable of achieving its unique potential by willpower and ideological commitment alone. They sought self-reliance but knew that inspiration was not enough, and so they devoted their energies to domestic reform. This new wave of reform would bring China back to the foreign policy conducted by Zhou—characterized by an effort to connect China to global economic and political trends for the first time in its long history. This policy would be embodied by a leader purged twice in a decade and returned from internal exile for the third time: Deng Xiaoping.

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NLY THOSE WHO experienced Mao Zedong’s China can fully appreciate the transformations wrought by Deng Xiaoping. China’s bustling cities, the construction booms, the traffic gridlocks, the un-Communist dilemma of a growth rate occasionally threatened by inflation and, at other times, looked to by the Western democracies as a bulwark against global recession—all of these were inconceivable in Mao’s drab China of agricultural communes, a stagnant economy, and a population wearing standard jackets while professing ideological fervor from the “Little Red Book” of Mao quotations.

Mao destroyed traditional China and left its rubble as building blocks for ultimate modernization. Deng had the courage to base modernization on the initiative and resilience of the individual Chinese. He abolished the communes and fostered provincial autonomy to introduce what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The China of today—with the world’s second-largest economy and largest volume of foreign exchange reserves, and with multiple cities boasting skyscrapers taller than the Empire State Building—is a testimonial to Deng’s vision, tenacity, and common sense.

Deng’s was a fitful and improbable road to power. In 1974, when Deng Xiaoping became America’s principal interlocutor, we knew very little about him. He had been General Secretary of the Communist Party’s powerful Central Committee until he was arrested in 1966, charged with being a “capitalist roader.” We learned that, in 1973, he had been restored to the Central Committee through Mao’s personal intervention and against the opposition of the radicals in the Politburo. Though Jiang Qing had publicly snubbed Deng shortly after his return to Beijing, he was clearly important to Mao. Uncharacteristically, Mao apologized for Deng’s humiliation during the Cultural Revolution. The same reports also told us that, in speaking to a delegation of Australian scientists, Deng had struck themes that were to become his trademark. China was a poor country, he had said, in need of scientific exchanges and learning from advanced countries such as Australia—the sort of admission China’s leaders had never made heretofore. Deng advised the Australian visitors to look at the backward side of China in their travels and not only at its achievements, another unprecedented comment for a Chinese leader.

Deng arrived in New York in April 1974 as part of a Chinese delegation, technically headed by the Foreign Minister, to a special session of the U.N. General Assembly dealing with economic development. When I invited the Chinese delegation to dinner, it became immediately evident who its senior member was and, even more important, that far from being restored to ease Zhou’s burden, as our intelligence reports claimed, Deng was, in fact, assigned to replace Zhou and, in a way, to exorcise him. Several friendly references to Zhou were ignored; allusions to remarks of the Premier were answered by comparable quotes from Mao’s conversations with me.

Shortly afterward, Deng was made Vice Premier in charge of foreign policy, and only a little later, he emerged as Executive Vice Premier with a supervisory role over domestic policy—an informal replacement for Zhou, who was, however, left with the now largely symbolic title of Premier.

Soon after Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Deng had been stripped of his Party and government positions. He had spent the next seven years first on an army base, then in exile in Jiangxi province, growing vegetables and working a half-day shift as a manual laborer in a tractor repair plant. His family was deemed ideologically incorrect and received no protection from the Red Guards. His son, Deng Pufang, was tormented by Red Guards and pushed off the top of a building at Beijing University. Though he broke his back, Deng Pufang was denied admission to a hospital. He emerged from the ordeal a paraplegic.
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Among the many extraordinary aspects of the Chinese people is the manner in which many of them have retained a commitment to their society regardless of how much agony and injustice it may have inflicted on them. None of the victims of the Cultural Revolution I have known has ever volunteered his suffering to me or responded to queries with more than minimal information. The Cultural Revolution is treated, sometimes wryly, as a kind of natural catastrophe that had to be endured but is not dwelt on as defining the person’s life afterward.

For his part, Mao seems to have reflected much of the same attitude. Suffering inflicted by him or on his orders was not necessarily his final judgment on the victim but a necessity, potentially temporary, for his view of the purification of society. Mao seems to have considered many of those exiled as available for service as a kind of strategic reserve. He recalled the four marshals from exile when he needed advice on how to position China in the face of the international crisis of 1969. This, too, is how Deng returned to high office. When Mao decided to drop Zhou, Deng was the best—perhaps the only—strategic reserve available to run the country.