China Changes- Part 1

President Nixon’s plane touched down in Beijing On February 21, 1972. Deng Xiaoping was at the time working in a tractor factory, exiled there with his family during the Cultural Revolution. Eight years later Deng would return to power and unleash an economic engine which is now the envy of much of the world. Despite this period of internal exile Deng was with Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist leader, from the first days of the Chinese revolution and the period of war that preceded it. Deng’s rise to prominence began after the cataclysmic starvation and economic failure of the Great Leap Forward in the late 50’s, which resulted in in the death of tens of millions of Chinese.

The Communists led by Mao came to power in 1949. Unlike the American Revolution which was initiated and completed in less than a decade, the Chinese Communists battled for power began in the 1920’s, was interrupted for about a decade to engage in the common battle of WW II in the 1930’s and early 40’s culminated in a Communist victory in 1949. Before the War of Liberation, China was ruled uninterrupted by a string of emperors going back to 1,700 BCE, a period of about 3,700 years. By way of comparison, the history of the English Crown stretches back to between 700 and 800 CE, which makes the history of the British Monarchy almost 2,500 years shorter than that of the Chinese dynasties.  

When Nixon came to China in 1972, Mao had been in power for more than 20 years. Although Western kids, opposed to the Vietnam War, were waving Mao’s Little Red Book of pithy communist blabber, the Chinese leader had at the time already been discredited even among Chinese Communists for more than a decade. The Great Leap Forward, initiated at the beginning of 1958, had been a colossal disaster. Mao, who was paranoid of foreign influence, engaged the entire nation in a simultaneous battle of rapid industrialization and collectivization of farming. A nation of peasant farmers who had worked out a barely sustainable and impossibly fragile equilibrium of self-sufficiency were organized into collectives. Simultaneously, in a move to rapidly accelerate steel production which greatly exacerbated the shift away from this fragile equilibrium Mao ordered that each collective develop backyard furnaces to smelt steel. To meet some of the production goals some collectives smelted the farm tools on which they relied for their sustenance. The results were disastrous. Western estimates are that somewhere between 20 and 45 million died of famine or disease.

A few years later, around the time Kennedy came to office, Deng was given some control over Chinese economic policy, and in a sign of things to come he was quoted in 1961 as saying in a speech on the reform of agrarian policy “It doesn't matter whether it's a white cat or a black, I think; a cat that catches mice is a good cat." Still it would take Deng nearly 20 more years to unleash what is today modern China.

Zhou En Lai, who secretly negotiated the details of the trip with Henry Kissinger, met Nixon’s plane. Zhou, who had been in the late 50’s responsible for the administration of the Great Leap Forward, had been at the center of political power near Mao for more than two decades. He was a well-travelled, cosmopolitan diplomat, with near unrivaled power in Mao’s inner circle.  Zhou was also a fervently committed Communist, who notwithstanding his battles to mitigate the damage of the Cultural Revolution, evidenced near blindness to the suffering caused by the policies he espoused. Yet he was more progressive than many of the others around Mao. 

During my recent trip to China there were many news reports regarding recent publication and availability in China of a book by Chinese Author Tan Hecheng titled “Bloody Myth: An Account of the Cultural Revolution Massacre of 1967 in Daoxian, Hunan”. The book was written 26 years ago, but has just been released now. It details China’s history during the Cultural Revolution. Many believe that Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution in response to his perception of diminished power after the Great Leap Forward. Almost all cultural institutions found themselves under attack. Teachers, artists, and intellectuals from across the country were sent into internal exile to “learn” the value of work in either grim factories or collectivists farms. Not only Deng, but China’s newly installed leader Xi Jinping were sent to internal exile, and it is commonly believed that Xi is responsible for the book’s publication.

In a move that would serve as premonition to the bloodletting in Cambodia, Chinese youth were organized into Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. After mass rallies with hundreds of thousands in Tiananmen Square, they were sent into the countryside to wreak havoc. Millions more died, as children humiliated, starved, and killed the intellectual leadership of the country for the sole purpose of serving the desperate whims of the madmen Mao who was trying to retain his grasp on power while descending into madness. Of course the story of the Cultural Revolution is not only that of the madness of the leader, but if those around Mao who let it go on for so long.

It is this history that is now coming to light in China. Even today Mao’s image stares down across Tiananmen Square. While the History of the Cultural Revolution is for the first time becoming available in China, the Great Leap Forward is still off limits. Is this because the Cultural Revolution represents a failure of political power which directly affected some of those now in power, while the Great Leap Forward was a failure of Governmental control of the economy which continues to this day? In the English newspaper China Daily which covers the country cautiously, but with some complexity and insight, it is not unusual to see letters to the editor which extol the virtues of Maoist thinking, even in some cases for the furtherance of business growth. I find this really mind-blowing, but it does indicate the confusing time warp which forms the cultural foundation on which Chinese economic engine now generates such extraordinary wealth. 

As detailed vividly in Harrison Salisbury’s wonderful 1992 book, The New Emperors: China in The Era of Mao and Deng, Mao was already a very sick man at the time of the 1972 meetings. Elements of the murderous Gang of Four, responsible for the death of millions, and the near strangulation of intellectual progress during the Cultural Revolution, were still in place. With the exception of one meeting between Mao and Nixon which lasted about an hour, Zhou represented the senior elements of the Chinese government at all the other meetings.

Kissinger’s influence on the meetings cannot be understated. History would later record Nixon’s frailties, and the brilliant way the Machiavellian Kissinger exploited them. Perhaps Kissinger’s crimes cannot be compared to those of Zhou, but like Zhou his biography is splashed with the blood of innocents from Chile to Vietnam.  It would overstate the case to suggest that Nixon was already, perhaps under the influence of alcohol, talking to pictures. That would be just a year or two later. But the Great Opening was orchestrated at the most elemental level between Zhou, a dark prince of Chinese history, in partnership with the master of America’s dark political arts, Henry Kissinger. These were great, though not necessarily good men.

Nixon’s courage to seek an opening with China in the face of attacks from the American right makes this perhaps one of the most courageous of his career. The gambit, taken at the height of the Vietnam War essentially provided a practical, progressive, alternative to the nihilistic frenzy which still very much gripped the China for most of the previous decade during the Cultural Revolution. It may be one of the most profoundly important historical events of the 20^th Century. For America it created a new relationship with China, while at the same time marginalizing and thus weakening the Soviet Union.

While it would still take four more years for progressive elements like Deng Xiao Ping and others to route the reactionary Chinese Communist party members completely and another two years for the formal economic opening to take place, the potential for what the relationship between China and the United States could become was unleashed at the meeting. Nixon & Kissinger’s move strengthened the hand of the forces in China angling for modernity. It is that modernity that now moves at a pace that most Americans can barely comprehend.