Emblematic of the Cultural Revolution was the “Little Red Book” of Mao quotations, compiled in 1964 by Lin Biao, later designated as Mao’s successor and killed while fleeing the country in an obscure airline crash, allegedly after attempting a coup. All Chinese were required to carry a copy of the “Little Red Book.” Red Guards brandishing copies conducted “seizures” of public buildings throughout China under the authorization—or at least toleration—of Beijing, violently challenging the provincial bureaucracies.

  But the Red Guards were no more immune to the dilemma of revolutions turning on themselves than the cadres they were supposed to purify. Bonded by ideology rather than formal training, the Red Guards became factions pursuing their own ideological and personal preferences. Conflict between them became so intense that, by 1968, Mao officially disbanded the Red Guards and placed loyal Party and military leaders in charge of reestablishing provincial governments.

  A new policy of “sending down” a generation of youths to remote parts of the countryside to learn from the peasantry was enunciated. By this point, the military was the last major Chinese institution whose command structure remained standing, and it assumed roles far outside its ordinary competencies. Military personnel ran the gutted government ministries, tended fields, and administered factories—all in addition to their original mission of defending the country from attack.

  The immediate impact of the Cultural Revolution was disastrous. After the death of Mao, the assessment by the second and third generations of leaders—almost all of whom were victims at one time or another—has been condemnatory. Deng Xiaoping, the principal leader of China from 1979 to 1991, argued that the Cultural Revolution had nearly destroyed the Communist Party as an institution and wrecked its credibility at least temporarily.26

  In recent years, as personal memories have faded, another perspective is beginning to make a tentative appearance. This view acknowledges the colossal wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution, but it begins to inquire whether perhaps Mao raised an important question, even if his answer to it proved disastrous. The problem Mao is said to have identified is the relationship of the modern state—especially the Communist state—to the people it governs. In largely agricultural—and even incipient industrial—societies, governance concerns issues within the capacity of the general public to understand. Of course, in aristocratic societies, the relevant public is limited. But whatever the formal legitimacy, some tacit consensus by those who are to carry out directives is needed—unless governance is to be entirely by imposition, which is usually unsustainable over a historic period.

  A challenge of the modern period is that issues have become so complex that the legal framework is increasingly impenetrable. The political system issues directives but the execution is left, to an ever larger degree, to bureaucracies separated from both the political process and the public, whose only control is periodic elections, if that. Even in the United States, major legislative acts often comprise thousands of pages that, to put it mildly, only the fewest legislators have read in detail. Especially in Communist states, bureaucracies operate in self-contained units with their own rules in pursuance of procedures they often define for themselves. Fissures open up between the political and the bureaucratic classes and between both of those and the general public. In this manner, a new mandarin class risks emerging by bureaucratic momentum. Mao’s attempt to solve the problem in one grand assault nearly wrecked Chinese society. A recent book by the Chinese scholar and government advisor Hu Angang argues that the Cultural Revolution, while a failure, set the stage for Deng’s reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s. Hu now proposes using the Cultural Revolution as a case study for ways in which the “decision-making systems” in China’s existing political system could become “more democratic, scientific, and institutionalized.”27

  Was There a Lost Opportunity?

  In retrospect, one wonders whether the United States was in a position to start a dialogue with China perhaps a decade earlier than it did. Could the turmoil in China have become the starting point for a serious dialogue? In other words, were the 1960s a lost opportunity for Sino-American rapprochement? Could the opening to China have occurred earlier?

  In truth, the fundamental obstacle to a more imaginative American foreign policy was Mao’s concept of continuous revolution. Mao was determined at this stage to forestall any moment of calm. Attempts at reconciliation with the capitalist archenemy were not conceivable while the blood feud with Moscow revolved around Mao’s adamant rejection of Khrushchev’s commitment to peaceful coexistence.

  There were some tentative gropings on the American side toward a more flexible perception of China. In October 1957, Senator John F. Kennedy published an article in Foreign Affairs remarking on “the fragmentation of authority within the Soviet orbit” and calling American policy in Asia “probably too rigid.” He argued that the policy of not recognizing the People’s Republic should be continued but that America should be prepared to revisit the “brittle conception of a shiftless totalitarian China” as circumstances developed. He counseled that “we must be very careful not to strait-jacket our policy as a result of ignorance and fail to detect a change in the objective situation when it comes.”28

  Kennedy’s perception was subtle—but by the time he became President, the next change in Mao’s dialectic was in the opposite direction: toward more hostility, not less; and toward the increasingly violent elimination of domestic opponents and countervailing institutional structures, not moderate reform.

  In the years immediately following Kennedy’s article, Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, a second crisis in the Taiwan Strait in 1958 (which he described as an attempt to “teach the Americans a lesson”29), and the Great Leap Forward. When Kennedy became President, China undertook a military attack in its border conflict with India, a country that the Kennedy administration had conceived of as offering an Asian alternative to Communism. These were not the signs of conciliation and change for which Kennedy had advised Americans to stay attuned.

  The Kennedy administration did offer a humanitarian gesture to alleviate China’s precarious agricultural condition during the famine triggered by the Great Leap Forward. Described as an effort to secure “food for peace,” the offer required, however, a specific Chinese request acknowledging a “serious desire” for assistance. Mao’s commitment to self-reliance precluded any admission of dependence on foreign assistance. China, its representative at the Warsaw ambassadorial talks replied, was “overcoming its difficulties by its own efforts.”30

  In the last years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, senior staff members and eventually the President himself began considering a move toward a less confrontational course. In 1966, the State Department instructed its negotiators to take a more forthcoming attitude at the Warsaw ambassadorial talks and authorized them to initiate informal social contacts on the sidelines of negotiations. In March 1966, the American representative at the talks offered an olive branch by stating that “the United States government was willing to develop further relations with the People’s Republic of China”—the first time an American official had used the official post-1949 appellation for China in any formal capacity.

  Finally, Johnson himself held out a peaceful option in a July 1966 speech on Asia policy. “Lasting peace,” he observed, “can never come to Asia as long as the 700 million people of mainland China are isolated by their rulers from the outside world.” While pledging to resist China’s “policy of aggression by proxy” in Southeast Asia, he looked forward to an eventual era of “peaceful cooperation” and of “reconciliation between nations that now call themselves enemies.”31

  These views were put forward as abstract hopes geared to some undefined change in Chinese attitudes. No practical conclusion followed. Nor could it have. For these statements coincided almost exactly with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, when China swung back to a stance of defiant hostility.32

  China’s policies during this period did little to invite—and may have been designed to dissuade—a conciliatory approach from the United States. For its part, Washington exhibited considerable tactical skill in resisting military challenges, as in the two Taiwan Strait Crises, but showed much less imagination in shaping foreign policy in an evolving, fluid political framework.

  An American National Intelligence Estimate of 1960 expressed, and perhaps helped shape, the underlying assessment:

  A basic tenet of Communist China’s foreign policy—to establish Chinese hegemony in the Far East—almost certainly will not change appreciably during the period of this estimate. The regime will continue to be violently anti-American and to strike at US interests wherever and whenever it can do so without paying a disproportionate price. . . . Its arrogant self-confidence, revolutionary fervor and distorted view of the world may lead Peiping to miscalculate risks.33

  There was much evidence to support the prevailing view. But the analysis left open the question as to what extent China could possibly achieve such sweeping objectives. Wracked by the catastrophic consequences of the Great Leap Forward, the China of the 1960s was exhausted. By 1966, it was embarking on the Cultural Revolution, which spelled a de facto retreat from the world with most diplomats recalled to Beijing, many for reeducation. What were the implications for American foreign policy? How was it possible to speak of a unified Asian bloc? What about the basic premise of America’s Indochina policy that the world was facing a conspiracy directed from Moscow and Beijing? The United States, preoccupied with Vietnam and its own domestic turmoil, found few occasions to address these issues.

  Part of the reason for American single-mindedness was that, in the 1950s, many of the leading China experts had left the State Department during the various investigations into who “lost” China. As a result, a truly extraordinary group of Soviet experts—including George Kennan, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, Llewellyn Thompson, and Foy Kohler—dominated State Department thinking without counterpoise, and they were convinced that any rapprochement with China risked war with the Soviet Union.

  But even had the right questions been asked, there would have been no opportunity to test the answers. Some Chinese policymakers urged Mao to adapt his policies to new conditions. In February 1962, Wang Jiaxiang, head of the International Liaison Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, addressed a memorandum to Zhou urging that a peaceful international environment would more effectively assist China to build a stronger socialist state and a more rapidly growing economy than the prevailing posture of confrontation in all directions.34

  Mao would not hear of it, declaring:

  In our Party there are some who advocate the “three moderations and one reduction.” They say we should be more moderate toward the imperialist, more moderate toward the reactionaries, and more moderate toward the revisionists, while toward the struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin-America, we should reduce assistance. This is a revisionist line.35

  Mao insisted on the policy of challenging all potential adversaries simultaneously. He countered that “China should struggle against the imperialists, the revisionists, and the reactionaries of all countries,” and that “more assistance should be given to anti-imperialist, revolutionary, and Marxist-Leninist political parties and factions.”36

  In the end, as the 1960s progressed, even Mao began to recognize that potential perils to China were multiplying. Along its vast borders, China faced a potential enemy in the Soviet Union; a humiliated adversary in India; a massive American deployment and an escalating war in Vietnam; self-proclaimed governments-in-exile in Taipei and the Tibetan enclave of northern India; a historic opponent in Japan; and, across the Pacific, an America that viewed China as an implacable adversary. Only the rivalries between these countries had prevented a common challenge so far. But no prudent statesman could gamble forever that this self-restraint would last—especially as the Soviet Union seemed to be preparing to put an end to the mounting challenges from Beijing. The Chairman would soon be obliged to prove that he knew how to be prudent as well as daring.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Road to Reconciliation

  BY THE TIME the improbable pair of Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong decided to move toward each other, both of their countries were in the midst of upheaval. China was nearly consumed by the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution; America’s political consensus was strained by the growing protest movement against the Vietnam War. China faced the prospect of war on all its frontiers—especially its northern border, where actual clashes between Soviet and Chinese forces were taking place. Nixon inherited a war in Vietnam and a domestic imperative to end it, and entered the White House at the end of a decade marked by assassinations and racial conflict.

  Mao tried to address China’s peril by returning to a classical Chinese stratagem: pitting the barbarians against each other, and enlisting faraway enemies against those nearby. Nixon, true to the values of his society, invoked Wilsonian principles in proposing to invite China to reenter the community of nations: “We simply cannot afford,” he wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs in October 1967, “to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.”1

  Nixon went beyond a call for a diplomatic adjustment to an appeal for a reconciliation. He likened the diplomatic challenge to the problem of social reform in American inner cities: “In each case dialogues have to be opened; in each case aggression has to be restrained while education proceeds; and, not least, in neither case can we afford to let those now self-exiled from society stay exiled forever.”2

  Necessity may provide the impetus for policy; it does not, however, automatically define the means. And both Mao and Nixon faced huge obstacles in initiating a dialogue, not to speak of a reconciliation between the United States and China. Their countries had, for twenty years, considered each other implacable enemies. China had classified America as a “capitalist-imperialist” country—in Marxist terms, the ultimate form of capitalism, which, it was theorized, would be able to overcome its “contradictions” only by war. Conflict with the United States was unavoidable; war was probable.

  America’s perception was the mirror image of China’s. A decade of military conflicts and near conflicts seemed to bear out the national assessment that China, acting as the fount of world revolution, was determined to expel the United States from the Western Pacific. To Americans, Mao seemed even more implacable than the Soviet leaders.

  For all these reasons, Mao and Nixon had to move cautiously. First steps were likely to offend basic domestic constituencies and unnerve allies. This was a particular challenge for Mao in the midst of the Cultural Revolution.

  The Chinese Strategy

  Though few observers noticed it at the time, starting in 1965, Mao began slightly altering his tone toward America—and given his nearly divine status, even a nuance had vast implications. One of Mao’s favorite vehicles for conveying his thinking to the United States was through interviews with the American journalist Edgar Snow. The two had met in the Communist base area of Yan’an in the 1930s. Snow had distilled his experience in a book called Red Star over China, which presented Mao as a kind of romantic agrarian guerrilla.

  In 1965, during the preliminaries of the Cultural Revolution, Mao invited Snow to Beijing and made some startling comments—or they would have been startling had anyone in Washington paid attention to them. As Mao told Snow: “Naturally I personally regret that forces of history have divided and separated the American and Chinese peoples from virtually all communication during the past 15 years. Today the gulf seems broader than ever. However, I myself do not believe it will end in war and one of history’s major tragedies.”3

  This from the leader who, for a decade and a half, had proclaimed his readiness for nuclear war with the United States in so graphic a manner that he scared both the Soviet Union and its European allies into dissociation from China. But with the Soviet Union in a menacing posture, Mao was more ready than anyone realized at the time to consider applying the maxim of moving closer to his distant adversary, the United States.

  At the time of the Snow interview an American army was being built up on China’s borders in Vietnam. Though the challenge was comparable to the one Mao had faced in Korea a decade and a half earlier, this time he opted for restraint. Limiting itself to noncombat support, China supplied matériel, strong moral encouragement, and some 100,000 Chinese logistical troops to work on communications and infrastructure in North Vietnam.4 To Snow, Mao was explicit that China would fight the United States only in China, not in Vietnam: “We are not going to start the war from our side; only when the United States attacks shall we fight back. . . . As I’ve already said, please rest assured that we won’t attack the United States.”5

  Lest the Americans miss the point, Mao reiterated that, as far as China was concerned, the Vietnamese had to cope with “their situation” by their own efforts: “The Chinese were very busy with their internal affairs. Fighting beyond one’s own borders was criminal. Why should the Chinese do that? The Vietnamese could cope with their situation.”6

  Mao went on to speculate on various possible outcomes of the Vietnam War in the manner of a scientist analyzing some natural event, not as a leader dealing with military conflict along his borders. The contrast with Mao’s reflections during the Korean War—when he consistently linked Korean and Chinese security concerns—could not have been more marked. Among the possible outcomes seemingly acceptable to the Chairman was that a “conference might be held, but United States troops might stay around Saigon, as in the case of South Korea”—in other words, a continuation of two Vietnam states.7 Every American President dealing with the Vietnam War would have been willing to settle for such an outcome.