communists with their own weapons, propaganda campaigns, poster wars, etc., all with good effect. The governor turns out under his sun helmet and ostrich feathers to be a sound and unflappable man. At bottom, it has been the cops who held the key, managing through good training and self-control to deny to the communists the martyr and the emotional issue they were looking for. . . .
Across the border the Cultural Revolution has ground to a halt with the basic issue becoming not whether Mao can impress his antediluvian ideology on the Chinese people, but whether the government in Peking can extend its influence in the provinces sufficiently to restore order and maintain economic production. I think they probably can, but at a cost of almost everything the old man has sought to achieve. When they finish up––God knows when that will be––they will probably be back roughly where they started, with much of the old Party apparatus intact and society galloping towards Russian-style revisionism even faster than before.
In the meantime, the Chinese appear to have lost the respect they had for what once was a pretty effective government. Some of the legendary discipline is gone––streets are dirty, people are beginning to steal things in a minor way, mass calisthenics are skipped, and once automatic response to mass appeals to rush out and do things like kill sparrows is no longer taken for granted. Organizations are fighting in the streets and in the communes for political power in battles so confused that even local residents don’t know which side is which. The only answer is tough army sanctions, which I suspect are soon to be imposed. The net result of such sanctions, however, to judge by the happenings of February and March when the army cracked down briefly, will be “Fascist atrocities” that make Hong Kong look like a teddy bear’s picnic. And where will it leave the “great Red Sun in our Hearts,” Chairman Mao? In charge of a garrison state as far removed from communist Nirvana as any you can find.
A Difference of Opinion
Throughout the chaotic months of 1967, the People’s Liberation Army, led by Mao’s chief lieutenant Lin Biao, stayed on the sidelines making half-hearted, localized attempts to referee the violence but avoiding decisive action in most cities. By August, public order in the cities, and with it the fate of the People’s Republic, seemed to be sliding away. Consul General Rice asked me to do a detailed analysis and make a judgment about the survival of the regime. The result became notorious in the analytical community in Hong Kong and Washington as the “bifurcated airgram.”
After a week of writing and rewriting, I sent Ed Rice a detailed draft arguing that the situation had deteriorated alarmingly, but that the point of no return had yet to be reached. Mao still had the option of calling in the PLA to quell the violence and form the basis for a new structure. The consul general disagreed, believing that the deterioration of order was irrevocable. He asked me to go back, review my data, and come up with a new draft. I did, but with the same conclusion.
Famous for his fairness, Rice decided to send in my analysis without edit and append his own dissent as a cover page. I was relieved and delighted. This approach would guarantee a wide readership. Rice’s comment argued, on the basis of his long experience in China, that the regime had entered a “descending spiral,” a tailspin from which it could not pull out. The deputy consul general, Allen Whiting, a noted China academic on loan to the government, agreed with Rice and added a short statement to this effect at the bottom of the cover page.
Order Restored
After the message was sent off, I departed with the whole family on two months of home leave, our first since 1965. Having always flown to Asia, transiting from one almost identical airport to another, we were determined to return home on the surface of the earth and get a sense of the real size of our planet. It took five weeks just to reach New York, via boat from Japan to the Soviet Union, trans-Siberian Railway across Russia (with Soviet expert and Hong Kong colleague Kurt Kamman as our guide), and the final leg from Europe aboard the SS United States from England.
While we were in America acquainting our three tigers with their grandparents, Chairman Mao called on the People’s Liberation Army to restore order throughout China. The violent stage of the Cultural Revolution came to an end that summer of 1967. Military men, all party members to begin with, took over the key positions in the provincial governments and party committees and ran the country for more than a decade. The Red Guards and their contemporaries were sent down to factories and farms, most of them far from home, where they were to spend the next ten years. The political tensions of the Cultural Revolution would last until Mao’s death in 1976 and his wife’s arrest immediately thereafter, but the killing and chaos were over.
We returned to Hong Kong months after the PLA crackdown, time enough to spare superiors the sheepish discomfort of “I told you so” encounters. We spent our final months in Garden Road reporting the militarization of the Chinese government, the rustication of the Red Guards, the suppression of the fighting factions, and the return to a nervous, inconclusive calm.
Heading Home
We prepared to leave the Crown Colony after almost five years, assigned to an additional year of language training in Taiwan to prepare me to be the U.S. interpreter at the Warsaw talks, our sole formal point of contact with the Beijing regime. On the eve of our departure these long-standing orders were changed in favor of a job on the Mainland China desk at the State Department in Washington. I was relieved. The Cultural Revolution had dried up the talks. Sheila and I were delighted at the prospect of returning to the United States.
The changes in our own country were in many ways as deep and disruptive as those we had observed in China. Since we had been away, President Kennedy had been killed, President Johnson had turned the Civil Rights Movement into law, feelings against the Vietnam War had exploded, forcing Johnson’s decision to leave the presidency, Martin Luther King had been shot and Washington burned, the feminists were transforming women’s rights, Robert Kennedy was dead, and the campaign to choose the next president was in full and turbulent swing. The country was going through a revolution of its own, less violent but in many ways as profound as the one that we had covered in China. It was time to go home and relearn the country we represented.
6
Signs and Signals
Signs of Change
My first chore as junior man on the Mainland China desk at State was to chronicle the achievements of Lyndon Johnson’s China policy. Every bureau in the executive branch was given an equivalent task during the waning months of LBJ’s presidency. The result, a slim volume at best, was revealing. Digging into the files since 1964, I found that every initiative to improve relations with Beijing—proposals for exchanges in journalism, sports, education, and culture, as well as ideas to resume trade and new approaches to the talks in Warsaw—had only gotten as far as Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s inbox before being returned without action. The Chinese, embroiled in the Cultural Revolution and dominated by radicals, would not have been interested. Neither, apparently, was Secretary Rusk.
After President Nixon took office in early 1969, the office of the new Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, called for new China initiatives. We dusted off the previous proposals and sent them forward. This time they were not returned but disappeared, apparently sent to the White House for consideration. The change was striking. Something was up. We had all noted the 1967 Nixon article in Foreign Affairs calling for a new approach to China, but had no inside knowledge of the new President’s thinking.
The “bifurcated airgram” from Hong Kong had made my reputation as a China analyst. In March 1969, I was asked to head the division in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) that covered the People’s Republic of China
