Playing the China Card

...Ultimately, the language agreed upon declared that “knowing of President Nixon’s expressed desire to visit the People’s Republic of China,” Beijing issued an invitation...

...When Lin’s son failed at an assassination attempt against Mao, he and his parents tried to flee China, but they died when their plane ran out of fuel over Mongolia...

...For his part, Mao hoped to gain American technological assistance and strategic information...

...Ironically, when it finally took place on February 21, it consisted of one hour of slow, inconsequential conversation...

...In April 1971, after playing coy, China invited the U.S...

...Chiang even sent his son, Ching-kuo, to be educated and trained in the Soviet Union, and he eventually returned with a Russian wife...

...THE BOOK is not without some inaccuracies...

...In 1924, Soviet advisers headed by Michael Borodin went to China to reorganize the Nationalist Party according to the Leninist model...

...Playing the China Card Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World By Margaret MacMillan Random House...

...An intricate three-cornered dance, it seemed to work on that level...

...The Nationalist Party’s dominant Right wing split with its Left wing and Soviet advisers were sent packing...

...Nixon had to resign as President in disgrace due to Watergate...

...Reaction to news of the meeting was particularly intense because of the known ideological bent of its principals...

...Yet here they were ending a quarter century of nonrecognition...

...The net result was American recognition of China, but Beijing would not come to Nixon’s aid in Vietnam...

...The Kremlin became apprehensive...

...China-watchers misdiagnosed Defense Minister Lin Biao’s falling out with the Chairman five months before the Nixon-Mao meeting...

...MacMillan also depicts the way the Americans excitedly prepared for the trip to a China that was unknown territory after being closed for a quarter century by Mao...

...Mao’s killing of his top comrades and his Cultural Revolution isolated him politically...

...Because of his bloated body, Mao was dressed in a new suit and new shoes...

...The Americans did not know it, the author says, but Mao was barely well enough to be seen when he met Nixon...

...The U.S...

...Thus began an exchange of messages and gestures leading to the President’s trip...

...For centuries it has been de rigueur for brides in China to wear red clothes...

...and Japan, the Soviet Union extended its hand...

...Reviewed by Valentin Chu Author, “Ta Ta, Tan Tan (Fight Fight, Talk Talk),” “Thailand Today” The whole world was shocked and enthralled in February 1972 by the apparently friendly meeting of President Richard M. Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong...

...Pacific nations that had defense treaties with the United States, including Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia, began to wonder about the reliability of the American commitment...

...Another debatable point: MacMillan says Meiling Soong, Chiang’s wife, “encouraged his increasingly dictatorial and chauvinist tendencies...

...Casting a vast research net and aided immensely by hindsight, she examines contemporary news accounts, official records, plus relevant memoirs and interviews, in shedding a new light on the theatrical occasion...

...IN HER INTRODUCTION the author poses a question: “Was the American President a supplicant, asking to come to China, or were the Chinese inviting him...

...So did the Nixon-Mao meeting change the world, as MacMillan’s subtitle states, or did the world change in spite of it...

...Most students of modern China tend to believe that Chiang’s Wellesley-educated wife was the only Western and Christian influence on this otherwise tactless and rigid leader...

...Mao, an extreme Marxist dipped in sweet-and-sour sauce, was the nemesis of Rightists of all shapes and colors...

...Margaret MacMillan, a professor of history at the University of Toronto and the provost of Trinity College, provides the answer in Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World...

...Three years of delicate probings, exchanges of signals and hush-hush arrangements preceded the encounter...

...Nixon, mistrusted and disliked universally by liberals, had climbed to power as a staunch anti-Communist...

...In fact, Chiang and the Nationalists did move to the Left...

...Interestingly, the author says she wore a red coat to China, despite the advice of American China experts who warned that only prostitutes wore red there...

...For despite getting a 98 per cent Gallup Poll approval rating within the U.S., the Nixon-Mao meeting touched off strong international repercussions ranging from Albania’s outrage to Canada’s support...

...Pat Nixon, who was to accompany her husband, dutifully studied her briefing book containing a summary of Chinese history and culture, plus quotes from Mao’s Little Red Book and his poetry...

...China became a land of dysfunction...

...For instance, about Chiang Kai-shek, the defeated Nationalist leader, it tells us: “Like his contemporaries Mao and Chou, he was a great nationalist...

...Taiwan was crestfallen...

...The USSR viewed China, its erstwhile comrade, as distinctly hostile...

...China’s charming and sometimes ruthless Chou acted on behalf of the enigmatic Chairman...

...The author’s account reveals many other fascinating and sometimes shadowy details...

...The two were actually engaged in a power struggle...

...The American press corps was not allowed to be present, nor was an American interpreter on hand...

...She also skillfully juxtaposes actual events and behind-the-scenes remarks by the individuals involved, giving her very readable volume a multidimensional quality...

...He had been sick for months with congestive heart failure, dangerously high blood pressure and incessant coughs...

...Then Mao looked at his watch and concluded the session...

...By fleshing out official accounts with inside maneuverings, MacMillan lends a human touch to history...

...The Americans had routinely sent a respirator and oxygen tanks ahead for Nixon’s possible emergency use...

...The United States and China, MacMillan points out, were playing what has been called the “China card” against their common adversary, the USSR...

...When the young republic’s founder, Chiang’s brother-in-law Sun Yat-sen, appealed for help and was ignored by the U.S...

...A reader cannot help feeling that Nixon and Kissinger wanted to bare the American soul to the inscrutable Chinese, that Nixon was uptight and fawning to Mao and Chou, that Kissinger was a master politician gifted with old-Europe craftiness, and that Mao was a dying man...

...team was entertained without Mao’s presence...

...How it was determined that this auspicious color was assigned to prostitutes is a mystery...

...One of the Americans who had visited the old, bustling, noisy city after World War II, was astounded by the silent streets filled mostly with bicycles and impassive pedestrians...

...The author notes that the China card began to lose its effect within two years, when U.S.-Chinese relations cooled again...

...Kissinger turns out to have been the godfather of Nixon’s historic audience with Mao...

...unlike them, he never moved to the Left...

...Similarly, U.S...

...Following Mao’s death in 1976, his successors jailed the Gang of Four, who sought to preserve his legacy, and without openly denouncing the Communist ideology embraced a market economy...

...In reporting this semantic tussle, MacMillan adds laconically: “Kissinger, who was so deeply impressed by Chou En-lai and his ‘extraordinary personal graciousness,’ might have been taken aback if he had heard Chou’s speech to his colleagues later that year...

...What really happened...

...Over the next week Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, met several times with Prime Minister Chou En-lai...

...A couple of years later, alleged Soviet duplicity ended the SovietNationalist honeymoon...

...China initially drafted a joint announcement saying Nixon had asked for an invitation...

...At the time the two global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were locked in the depths of the Cold War...

...Nixon’s secret motive was to end the Vietnam mess with China’s help, using Nationalist-held Taiwan as a bargaining chip...

...was weighed down by the increasingly controversial and unpopular Vietnam War...

...Soviet talk of a nuclear attack on China was not always muted...

...Kissinger objected, not wanting Americans to seem like supplicants...

...The author reports that the American experts attributed the break to Lin’s opposing Mao’s new friendship toward the United States...

...London was irritated about being kept in the dark...

...sporadic clashes broke out between the substantial forces each had stationed along their common border...

...It offers a succinct sketch, too, of how in prior years Beijing’s picturesque medieval houses and massive city walls were bulldozed to make gigantic avenues and enormous squares, often patterned after Moscow...

...Nixon’s attempts to raise specifics were brushed aside by Mao with his murky “philosophical” remarks...

...Hers was a wise decision...

...Nixon, said Chou, had ‘eagerly’ asked to be invited to China, like a whore who would ‘dress up elaborately and present herself at the door.’” The book gives realistic visual descriptions of the locales where various keynote incidents took place: the room in the exclusive Zhongnanhai government compound where Nixon saw Mao, and the huge banquet hall where the U.S...

...The Chinese hid them in Mao’s bedroom, while removing his hospital bed from the meeting room...

...table tennis team competing in Japan to visit the mainland— giving birth to the term “ping-pong diplomacy...

...Actually, her book shows the correct response is both...

...There is no clear answer...

...He had his first haircut and shave in months...

...Next, the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight...

...Many drastic changes took place in the world soon after the Nixon-Mao meeting...

...In those days, it seems, they were more creative than analytical...

...Around 1970, Washington sent repeated hints to Beijing suggesting a rapprochement...

...One reads how jealous Nixon and Kissinger were of each other’s limelight, how they tried to bypass the State Department in arranging the whole affair, and how Kissinger even asked the puzzled Chinese to help pull the wool over the State Department’s eyes...

...Secretary of State William P. Rogers, although a nominal member of the visiting team, was repeatedly sidelined and duped by Nixon and Kissinger...