Nixon was looking for a forum less bureaucratically constraining and more under his direct control. Mao sought for a way to break through to the highest levels of the United States government whenever he had made a firm decision. Both had to move carefully lest a premature disclosure trigger a Soviet onslaught or a rejection by the other side thwart the entire initiative. When the Warsaw talks foundered, the operating level of the U.S. government seemed relieved to be freed of the perplexities and domestic risks of a negotiation with Beijing. During the year that Nixon and Mao were searching for venues for a high-level dialogue, lower levels of the American diplomatic establishment never raised the question at the White House of what had happened to the Warsaw talks or suggested reconvening them.

  For nearly a year after the Chinese cancellation of the proposed May 20 meeting, both the American and Chinese leaders agreed on the objective but found themselves thwarted by the gulf of twenty years of isolation. The problem was no longer simply the cultural differences between the Chinese and the American approaches to negotiations. It was that Nixon’s approach differed more from that of his own diplomats than from Mao’s. He and I wanted to explore the strategic situation produced by the triangular relationship between the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. We strove for an occasion not so much to remove irritants as to conduct a geopolitical dialogue.

  As the two sides were circling each other, their choice of intermediaries conveyed a great deal about their perceptions of the task at hand. Nixon used the occasion of an around-the-world trip in July 1970 to tell his hosts in Pakistan and Romania that he sought high-level exchanges with Chinese leaders and that they were free to communicate this to Beijing. As National Security Advisor, I mentioned the same point to Jean Sainteny, the former French ambassador in Hanoi, a friend of many years who was acquainted with the Chinese ambassador in Paris, Huang Zhen. In other words, the White House chose a nonaligned friend of China (Pakistan), a member of the Warsaw Pact known for its quest for independence from Moscow (Romania), and a member of NATO distinguished by its commitment to strategic independence (France—on the assumption that Sainteny was bound to pass our message to the French government). Beijing passed hints to us via its embassy in Oslo, Norway (a NATO ally), and, strangely enough, in Kabul, Afghanistan (perhaps on the theory that the venue was so improbable as to be sure to gain our attention). We ignored Oslo because our embassy was not equipped for the necessary staff support; Kabul, of course, was even more remote. And we did not want to conduct the dialogue once again through embassies.

  China ignored the direct approach via Paris but eventually responded to the overtures via Romania and Pakistan. Before that, however, Mao communicated with us but so subtly and indirectly that we missed the point. In October 1970 Mao granted another interview to Edgar Snow, considered by the Nixon White House to be a Mao sympathizer. To demonstrate the importance Mao attached to the occasion, he placed Snow next to him on the reviewing stand during the parade celebrating the Communist victory in the civil war on October 8, 1970. The mere presence of an American standing next to the Chairman symbolized—or was intended to symbolize to the Chinese people—that contact with America was not only permissible but a high priority.

  The interview proceeded in a complex manner. Snow was given a transcript of the interview with the restriction that he could use only indirect quotations. He was also instructed to delay any publication for three months. The Chinese reasoning must have been that Snow would submit the actual text to the U.S. government and that the published summary would then reinforce a process already in train.

  It did not work out that way for the same reason that the 1965 interview failed to influence the U.S. government. Snow was a friend of the PRC of long standing; that very fact caused him to be written off in the American foreign policy establishment as a Beijing propagandist. No transcript of his interview reached high levels of government, still less the White House, and by the time the article appeared months later, it had been overtaken by other communications.

  It was a pity the transcript did not reach us, because the Chairman had made some revolutionary pronouncements. For nearly a decade, China had cut itself off from the outside world. Now Mao announced that he would soon start inviting Americans of all political persuasions to visit China. Nixon would be welcome “either as a tourist or as President” because the Chairman had concluded that “the problems between China and the U.S.A. would have to be solved with Nixon”—because of the upcoming presidential election within two years.39

  Mao had moved from vilifying the United States to inviting a dialogue with the American President. And he added a startling comment about the Chinese domestic situation, which hinted that the dialogue would take place with a new China.

  Mao told Snow that he was ending the Cultural Revolution. What he had intended as a moral and intellectual renovation had turned into coercion, he said. “When foreigners reported that China was in great chaos, they were not telling lies. It had been true. Fighting [between Chinese] was going on . . . first with spears, then rifles, then mortars.”40 Mao, as Snow reported, now deplored the cult of personality built around his person: “It was hard, the chairman said, for people to overcome the habits of 3,000 years of emperor-worshipping tradition.” The titles ascribed to him such as “Great Helmsman . . . would all be eliminated sooner or later.” The sole title he wished to retain was “teacher.”41

  These were extraordinary assertions. After having convulsed his country with upheavals that destroyed even the Communist Party so that only a cult of personality was left for cohesion, Mao now pronounced the end of the Cultural Revolution. It had been proclaimed so that the Chairman could govern without doctrinal or bureaucratic inhibitions. It had been sustained by shredding existing structures and by what Mao now described as “maltreatment of ‘captives’—party members and others removed from power and subjected to reeducation.”42

  Where did all this leave Chinese governance? Or was it being told to a foreign journalist in Mao’s characteristic elliptically wandering way, in pursuit of its principal purpose, to encourage a new phase in the relationship between China and the United States and the world by conveying an altered governance? As Snow recorded, Mao announced that “between Chinese and Americans there need be no prejudices. There could be mutual respect and equality. He said he placed high hopes on the peoples of the two countries.”43

  Nixon, in a break with American foreign policy tradition, had urged a relaxation of tensions on the basis of geopolitical considerations in order to return China to the international system. But to the China-centered Mao, the principal vision was not the international system so much as the future of China. To achieve its security, he was willing to shift the center of gravity of Chinese policy and bring about a reversal of the alliances—not, however, in the name of a theory of international relations but rather of a new direction for Chinese society in which China could even learn from the United States:

  China should learn from the way America developed, by decentralizing and spreading responsibility and wealth among the 50 states. A central government could not do everything. China must depend upon regional and local initiatives. It would not do [spreading his hands] to leave everything up to him [Mao].44

  Mao, in short, reaffirmed classic principles of Chinese governance cast in Confucian principles of moral rectitude. He devoted a part of his interview to castigating the habit of lying, which he blamed not on the Americans but on the recently disempowered Red Guards. “If one did not speak the truth, Mao concluded, how could he gain the confidence of others? Who would trust one?”45 Snow recorded. The fire-breathing, radical ideologist of yesterday now appeared in the garb of a Confucian sage. His concluding sentence seemed to express a sense of resignation to new circumstance if not without, as always, taunting double meanings: “He was, he said, only a lone monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella.”46

  There was more to the last line than Mao’s habitual mockery in presenting the creator of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as returning to his original philosophic vocation as a lonely teacher. For as several Chinese commentators later noted, the quotation in Snow’s English text was but the first line of a familiar Chinese couplet. 47 If completed, the couplet is not so much mocking as ominous. Left unspoken, or at least untranslated, was the second line of the couplet: “wu fa wu tian.” As written, the Chinese characters mean “without hair, without sky”—that is, the monk is bald, and because he holds an umbrella, he does not see the sky above him. But in the tonal Chinese language, the line is a pun. Pronounced slightly differently, the line takes on a new meaning: “without law, without heaven”—or, less literally: “defying laws both human and divine”; “neither God-fearing nor law-abiding”; “trampling law underfoot without batting an eyelid.”48

  Mao’s closing salvo was, in other words, even further reaching and more subtle than initially apparent. Mao cast himself as a wandering classical sage but also as a law unto himself. Was Mao toying with his English-speaking interviewer? Could he possibly think Snow would understand the pun, which is, for a Western ear, almost impossibly obscure? (Mao did sometimes overestimate Western subtlety even as the West sometimes exaggerated his.) Given the context, the probability is that Mao’s pun was directed to his domestic audience, particularly those leaders who might oppose rapprochement with the heretofore hated United States and whose opposition later culminated in the crisis—and alleged coup—of Lin Biao shortly after the U.S. opening to China. Mao was effectively announcing that he was about to turn the world upside down again. In that mission, he would not be bound by “laws human or divine,” not even the laws of his own ideology. It warned doubters to get out of the way.

  The text of Mao’s interview was surely circulated in high levels of Beijing even as it was being ignored in Washington. Snow had been asked to delay publication so that China could develop an official initiative. Mao decided to cut through the minuet of third-party communications by addressing the American administration directly at the highest level. On December 8, 1970, a message was delivered to my office in the White House from Zhou Enlai. Reviving a diplomatic practice of previous centuries, the Pakistani ambassador brought it from Islamabad, where it had been delivered as a handwritten communication. Beijing’s missive formally acknowledged the messages received through intermediaries. It noted a comment made by Nixon to President Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan of Pakistan, when Yahya called at the White House a few weeks earlier, to the effect that America, in its negotiations with the Soviet Union, would not participate in a “condominium against China” and would be prepared to send an emissary to a mutually convenient place to arrange high-level contacts with China.49

  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.