Leaders by Richard Nixon

Author:Richard Nixon [Nixon, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ZHOU

ENLAI

The Mandarin Revolutionary

THE STORY OF China during the past half century is, to an extraordinary degree, the story of three men: Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Chiang Kai-shek. As Mao consolidated his rule on the mainland after defeating Chiang’s forces, the Chinese Communists portrayed the conflict between Mao and Chiang as, in effect, a war between God and the Devil. Mao saw himself as the modern-day equivalent of the first Emperor of Ch’in, the ruler who first unified China over two thousand years ago. He wove a cult of personality that gave him the status of a deity. Zhou stayed largely in the shadows, the loyal functionary who made the machinery run. On Taiwan, Chiang ruled with an authoritarian hand but without Mao’s extravagant self-glorification, preserving his dignity, working an economic miracle, and nurturing his people’s hopes for a return to the mainland.

Of the three, I knew Chiang the longest. I considered both him and Madame Chiang friends in a way the others were not. Our bonds were personal and also a product of shared beliefs and principles. But it was Mao and Zhou who won the war for the Chinese mainland, and of those two, it was Zhou whose vision had the greater staying power. Zhou was also, quite simply, one of the most extraordinarily gifted people I have ever known, with an incandescent grasp of the realities of power. All three are dead, but Zhou’s is the legacy that is increasingly ascendant in modern China.

Seven months before my first visit to China in 1972, I sent Henry Kissinger on a secret mission to Peking to negotiate arrangements for it. During his two days in Peking on that initial secret trip, Kissinger spent more than seventeen hours in direct, far-ranging discussions with Zhou. On his return he reported to me that he would rank Zhou equally with de Gaulle as “the most impressive” foreign statesman he had ever met.

Though given to occasional hyperbole, as we all are, Kissinger is seldom that lavish in his praise of people who are out of earshot. After meeting Zhou and negotiating with him for a week, I could understand why Kissinger had been so unusually laudatory in his assessment of Zhou.

At the conclusion of my trip to China in 1972, I said in my final toast, “We have been here a week. This was the week that changed the world.” Some observers felt I had been carried away by the drama of the visit and had overestimated its significance. I believe history will demonstrate that if this first step had not been taken toward the normalization of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, the balance of power with the Soviet Union would now be weighted almost fatally against us. Both men and events contributed to the diplomatic breakthrough that was formalized by the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972. The one man who deserves the primary credit was Zhou Enlai.

Zhou was a Communist revolutionary and a Confucian gentleman, a devoted ideologue and a calculating realist, a political infighter and a grand conciliator.

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