The Missing Man In Beijing

Chas W. Freeman, a U.S. diplomat who served as Richard Nixon's interpreter when he arrived in Beijing 40 years ago today, had a confession to make during an anniversary panel discussion last week at the former Nixon Center in Washington:

When I tried to sleep on Air Force One on the way to Beijing, I was jolted awake by a nightmare. I dreamed that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would be standing there with his old political sparring partner and secret pen pal, Zhou Enlai. In my dream, Chiang stepped forward to greet his former friend and political backer, Richard Nixon with a loudly sarcastic “long time, no see!” As we pulled up to the shabby old structure that was then the only terminal at Beijing’s airport, I peered anxiously out the window. Others were elated to see Premier Zhou emerge to greet us. I was merely relieved that he was there pretty much by himself.


Top: Nixon meeting Zhou Enlai in Beijing, Feb. 21, 1972. Bottom: Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek with communist leader Mao Zedong during their World War II alliance

Soft America, Hard China

Eugene Robinson urges the U.S. to take China and its leaders seriously, especially heir apparent Xi Jinping, because they are men (mostly) who have been tested by considerable hardship. Robinson is implying that our elites are soft and dilettantish by comparison:

Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, once one of Mao Zedong’s lieutenants, fell out of favor and was persecuted during much of that era. Xi Jinping is part of a remarkable generation that survived the apocalypse of the Cultural Revolution; as a teenager, he spent long, hard years living in a cave in the poor, remote Shaanxi province.

Xi fared better than the man considered his chief rival for power and influence in China — Bo Xilai, the Communist Party chief for the Chongqing metropolitan area, which is home to nearly 30 million people. Bo’s father, Bo Yibo, was one of Mao’s most trusted associates before being purged in the Cultural Revolution. The whole family was sent to a prison for five years, then to a labor camp for another five. Bo Xilai’s mother either committed suicide or was beaten to death.

I recount this history because it helps me understand why the men — and a few women — now running China are the way they are: impatient to make up for lost time, pathologically wary of the slightest instability, tough, resourceful, adaptable, coldly unsentimental and, as [Henry] Kissinger generalized in his introduction, convinced “that every solution is the beginning of a new set of problems.”

Photo: Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong

Mao Tied

An LA real estate investor has single-handedly made a federal case out of the presence of a statue of Mao Zedong at the Nixon Library. Previously confined to Kai Chen's website, the issue rose to the attention of the LA Times today:

"Mao was the biggest mass murderer in human history," Chen said, his volume set to high. "His hands were dipped in the blood of American soldiers who fought in Korea and Vietnam. How can that image be put alongside world leaders like Winston Churchill and De Gaulle? It's a perversion of American freedom. You don't put an anti-American symbol in a U.S. museum."

While generally sympathetic to the criticism, the Library's federal director, Cold War scholar Tim Naftali (shown here), doesn't promise to remove the statue anytime soon nor indeed those of Nikita Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev, neither of whom was a day at the beach. Naftali does say:

"I think having a statue of a person in a museum can imply respect," he said. "I thought there might very well be confusion among visitors. With Churchill, Meir and Sadat all in the same room, there is an equivalency there and the implication that they're all alike. They were not all alike. Mao was a mass murderer.

"It seemed to me out of place in a publicly funded museum," Naftali added. "I don't think it's the best way to teach history."

Why that's true, I'm not precisely sure. As I wrote in August on learning of Kai Chen's campaign:

As the Nixon aide (later, private Nixon Library director) who supervised the design of the display in which the statues appear, I can say with absolute confidence that they weren't intended to honor anyone. We asked President Nixon to pick the ten leaders he'd met who'd had the most decisive impact on the postwar world. Four of his choices were leaders of communist regimes -- the two Chinese plus Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev. The idea was to give visitors an idea of what they looked like and illustrate RN's proposition that the U.S. could be a force for stability and constructive change by finding ways to be in dialog even with leaders of unfriendly or unsavory powers.

Nixon would have been the first to say that the Chinese regime was odious....And yet there's considerable evidence that his overtures and policies were good for the Chinese and Soviet peoples, in the same way that the North Koreans and Iranians might end up being better off if relations with the U.S. improved.

No one from the private Nixon Foundation was quoted in the Times article, though two of the Library's docents spoke up on behalf of the volunteers' nearly two decades of service as expert and unfailingly professional interpreters of President Nixon's life and times.

Overall the article seemed designed to leave the impression that sticking up for keeping Mao's statue would amount to a vote for the formerly private Nixon Library's pro-Nixon spin. Memo to the younger generation of reporters: Richard Nixon was an anti-communist. His counter-intuitive opening to Beijing was the essence of his genius as a statesman. I doubt if Naftali or indeed Kai Chen would argue that the Chinese people, no matter how they were abused by their communist leaders, would be better off if Richard Nixon hadn't sat down with Mao and tipped mao tai glasses with Zhou. If the policy was worth pursuing then, it makes abundant sense to depict the Chinese leaders now in a museum gallery designed both to capture a unique moment in the annals of geopolitics and to demonstrate the advisability of being willing to shake hands with friends and foes alike in the pursuit of peace.

Besides, Remember Lot's Wife

Commentators on the Youpai Forum complain on moral grounds about the statues of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on display at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. (More commentary here.) These Chinese communist leaders, they write, were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. The writers don't say why they think bad people shouldn't be depicted three-dimensionally as opposed to in photographs and text, since I assume the bloggers don't want all references to Mao and Zhou in the museum expunged.

It may be that the critics, who are asking federal Library director Tim Naftali to remove the statues, are mistaking an exhibit for a memorial. As the Nixon aide (later, private Nixon Library director) who supervised the design of the display in which the statues appear, I can say with absolute confidence that they weren't intended to honor anyone. We asked President Nixon to pick the ten leaders he'd met who'd had the most decisive impact on the postwar world. Four of his choices were leaders of communist regimes -- the two Chinese plus Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev. The idea was to give visitors an idea of what they looked like and illustrate RN's proposition that the U.S. could be a force for stability and constructive change by finding ways to be in dialog even with leaders of unfriendly or unsavory powers.

Nixon would have been the first to say that the Chinese regime was odious. He dedicated much of his career to opposing communism. And yet there's considerable evidence that his overtures and policies were good for the Chinese and Soviet peoples, in the same way that the North Koreans and Iranians might end up being better off if relations with the U.S. improved. While Library officials may well decide to replace the whole exhibit one day, Soviet- and PRC-style airbrushing of the politically incorrect or even morally repugnant is a terrible and an anti-historical idea.

37 37 Years Ago In Shanghai

The AP:

[On Feb. 28,] 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai issued the Shanghai Communique at the conclusion of Nixon's historic visit to China.

Maotaing One On

Distilled from fermented sorghum, maotai (or moutai) is a clear Chinese wine that is, hold onto your hat, up to 55% alcohol. After igniting a cupful at their banquet table, Premier Zhou Enlai served it to President Nixon for toasting purposes in the Great Hall of the People in 1972, which helped make the product of southwestern China internationally famous.

Zhou told the President that it helped sustain him and Chairman Mao during the difficult days of the Long March in the 1930s. News comes today that as economic difficulty spreads in the PRC as elsewhere, the Chinese plan to increase their production of the brew by 2,000 tons a year.

When I get to know you better, I'll tell you my own maotai stories. See, there was this one evening in Xiamen in 1985...