A Tale Of Two Translators

David Barboza profiles Zhou Enlai's translator, Ji Chaozhu, whom I met in 2002 when visiting Beijing with Julie and David Eisenhower. Ji and his family fled to New York City in the late 1930s after the Japanese invasion of China. When he returned after the revolution with a U.S. education and peerless command of English, he began what Barboza calls a Zelig-like career:

[H]e joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and over the next 30 years served as a translator for China’s leaders, including Mao (“He complained I spoke too loudly when I translated.”); Mr. Zhou (“He was like a father.”); Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and a member of the infamous Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution (“She was the horror of all horrors!”); and Mr. Deng (“He was so short, I had to spread my legs to get lower when I interpreted.”)

IN those years of isolation from the West, Mr. Ji bicycled to work, earned about $10 a month and had but one blue Mao suit.

He was also one of only a handful of trustworthy and competent English-speaking interpreters in China. Another was his younger colleague Tang Wensheng, or Nancy Tang, Mao’s primary interpreter during the Nixon and Kissinger visits.

Mr. Ji said he had recommended Ms. Tang, who had been a family friend in New York. In the 1940s, their fathers had started a Chinese-language newspaper together.

When Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Nixon visited in the early 1970s, Mr. Ji and Ms. Tang served as the chief interpreters. The United States delegation usually came without its own interpreters.

“Nixon really didn’t trust the State Department to keep a secret, so we didn’t really have anyone of our own,” Winston Lord, an aide who traveled with Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Nixon to Beijing, said in an interview.

But shortly after that historic moment, Mr. Ji and Ms. Tang were drawn into the power struggles of the Cultural Revolution, which spanned the years from 1966 to 1976. Mao, in his latter years, grew suspicious of everyone around him, including Zhou Enlai. Historians say Mao’s close advisers, including Ms. Tang, struggled with Mr. Zhou and his associates.

During the same trip, I sat next to Nancy Tang at a banquet. When the conversation turned to the Sept. 11 attacks the year before, she looked at me with a steely smile on her face and in her ex-New Yorker's English berated Americans for not paying "enough attention to what's going on in the world."

Picture Perfect Once More

When I was director of the Nixon library, I posted this article on the library's web site from Beijing on Nov. 22, 2002. My photos of the TV taping have been preserved, ironically enough, thanks to anti-PRC blogger Kai Chen.

Ji Chaozhu may remember it as the day Richard Nixon’s younger daughter put him back in the picture.

As Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai's handpicked interpreter, Ji stood at Zhou's right shoulder as he greeted Nixon at Capital Airport in Beijing on Feb. 21, 1972. He went on to serve as China's ambassador to Great Britain as well as a UN under-secretary general. But when the U.S.-born and educated Ji fell out of favor in the murky haze of Communist Party politics, he was airbrushed out of the official Chinese photograph of the Nixon-Zhou handshake (above). While the 73-year-old Ji has long since been restored to a position of respect in foreign affairs circles in China, the altered photo still sometimes pops up in official publications (and Google searches; see the sixth image on the top row).

Enter Julie Eisenhower. In Beijing this week to help unveil “Journeys to Peace,” an exhibition about her father’s historic trip jointly assembled by the Nixon library and the Chinese government, she participated in a televised interview with Ji. They shared the stage with life-sized statues of Nixon and Zhou, sculpted for our exhibition by Studio EIS in Brooklyn, New York. Following a stop at the Shanghai Library in December, the Reader’s Digest Foundation-sponsored exhibition will be unveiled at the Nixon library on Jan. 9 (the 90th anniversary of Nixon’s birth).

Eisenhower knew about the altered photo and had presented Ji with an autographed copy of the real McCoy (above right) during an earlier visit. She decided to do him one better with the cameras rolling. “I’d like to ask Ambassador Ji to show us where he was standing when my father met Zhou Enlai,” she said. Ji gamely jumped to his feet and took up his accustomed position next to the statue of his late boss. He said he recalled Nixon reaching for Zhou’s hand and saying, “This handshake comes across the vast Pacific ocean and many years of no communication.”

It was one of several bracing moments during a Chinese program called “Let the World Understand You,” taped before an audience of international relations students gathered in the National Museum of Chinese History.

The producers staged a reunion of men and women associated with President and Mrs. Nixon’s visit, ranging from a former server at Bejing’s state guest houses who had helped Nixon with his chopsticks to Zheng Mingzhi, a top Chinese ping-pong player who in 1971 visited Nixon at the White House with her teammates. The PRC having beaten the U.S. that year, Eisenhower asked Zheng if she thought the U.S. might win a rematch. “Well, you’re improving,” she said with a smile.

Seated in the audience’s front row, and described by the program’s host as the most famous person in China, was Zhang Chaoyang, founder and CEO of Sohu.com, the NASDAQ-traded Internet portal. Zhang said he was eight and living in his hometown of Xian when the Nixons visited. He told Eisenhower that while he’d been too young to appreciate the full significance of her father’s visit, it had had dramatic repercussions in his life, enabling him to attend MIT and learn about the fledgling Internet (then a Pentagon project begun during the Nixon administration) as early as 1975. He said Nixon's visit helped trigger China’s astonishing economic growth.

The taping brought back memories of ideological passions in both countries. Zhang Hanzhi, also an interpreter during the 1972 visit, said that before the Nixons arrived, Zhou Enlai had told his staff that he thought they would enjoy hearing American folk songs performed during the official banquets. But as Zhang noted, the only Americans then living in China and available to serve as music consultants were leftists “who were not entirely delighted about the prospect of President Nixon’s visit.” Finally one reluctantly suggested “Home On the Range,” which was duly performed for the presidential party.

Less familiar to the American guests was a ballet entitled “The Red Detachment of Women,” to which the Nixons were taken by Mao Zedong’s third wife, Jiang Qing. After Mao died in 1976, she was tried and convicted for her role in the Cultural Revolution. Song Chencheng, the prima “Red Detachment” ballerina from 1972, came to the Beijing taping to meet Eisenhower. She brought along her costume, which still fit perfectly, and danced across the stage just as she had 30 years ago for the Nixons.

The final speaker, retired government official Li Menghua, summed up the afternoon, and the three decades since that historic handshake, by telling Eisenhower that Americans and Chinese were great peoples who together could help make the world a better place. “That’s exactly the way my father would’ve put it,” she said.

Li And Glen, Ji and RN -- Together Again

Friendly U.S.-China relations have many fathers and mothers -- table tennis players, Richard Nixon and Zhou Enlai, Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaopeng. Surely they include legendary Flying Tiger Glen Beneda and China's Li Xiaolin, longtime friends who were reunited today at the Nixon Library.

A fighter pilot from Nebraska, Beneda was shot down over Japanese-occupied China in May 1944 during a Flying Tigers bombing raid. After crash-landing his single-engine P-51 Mustang in a rice paddy, the injured Beneda evaded capture for two months until meeting up with the Chinese communist New 4th Army, commanded by Gen. Li Xiannian. Li later became President of the People's Republic, serving from 1983-1988. His daughter, pictured above with Beneda, is VP of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. She's perhaps China's leading citizen diplomat.

China is justifiably proud of its pre-revolutionary collaborations with Americans against the Japanese. Beneda is treated like an emperor when he visits China with his wife of 63 years, Elinor. She was a farm girl, sister of an air corps buddy of Beneda who died in a 1943 bombing mission over Romania. She told me Glen was a city boy -- 6,000 in his town, she said.

During a ceremony at the Library, Beneda reciprocated China's friendship by presenting Madame Li with his "walkie pointie," a phrasebook he used to communicate with the Chinese farmers who helped him along the way, as well as the Chinese flag he carried with him.

Madame Li and other Chinese officials were in Yorba Linda to show reporters a new exhibition marking the 30th anniversary of the opening of formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing. The exhibit (on display through Friday before moving to longer installations back east) includes the famous photograph (above left) of President Nixon shaking hands with Premier Zhou Enlai at Capital Airport in Beijing during their historic meeting in February 1972.

Oddly, someone's missing from the photo in the exhibit. Standing directly behind Zhou at the airport that day was translator Ji Chaozhu. You can see him in the picture at right. Though Ji, one of China's most respected diplomats, later served as ambassador to the Court of St. James's as well as an undersecretary of the United Nations, he fell out of favor in Chinese politics and was airbrushed out of this most photo revered of photos. Although Ji has long since been rehabilitated, the Ji-less picture of the first Nixon-Zhou meeting still shows up occasionally in publications -- and now exhibits.

I was along in November 2002 when Julie and David Eisenhower visited Beijing to mark the 30th anniversary year of the Shanghai Communique. Appearing on Chinese television with Ambassador Ji, Julie decided to put him back in the picture (which I took the liberty of snapping, with a first-generation digital camera). As I wrote at the time:

Mrs. Eisenhower knew about the altered photo and had presented Mr. Ji with an autographed copy of the real McCoy during an earlier visit. She decided to do him one better with the cameras rolling. "I'd like to ask Ambassador Ji to show us where he was standing when my father met Zhou Enlai," she said. Mr. Ji gamely jumped to his feet and took up his accustomed position next to the statue of his late boss. He said he recalled President Nixon reaching for Zhou's hand and saying, "This handshake comes across the vast Pacific ocean and many years of no communication."