REPARTEE WITH MAO

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We reviewed the world situation until almost 1:30 a.m. In Mao's view the Soviet threat was real and growing. He warned against a fake détente that would sap resistance to Soviet expansionism and confuse the peoples of the West. The U.S. should take a leading role in world affairs, by which he meant constructing an anti-Soviet alliance. As had Chou, Mao stressed the importance of close American cooperation with Western Europe, Japan, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. We should build up our defenses and keep our eye on the Soviet challenge rather than squabble over short-term problems with our allies. I commented, only half humorously, that he was one of our better NATO allies.

For all his preoccupation with foreign policy, the Chairman could not avoid Peking's internal problems. Repeatedly, Mao warned me about the pressures on him from radicals, but he did it so allusively that my dense Occidental mind did not immediately follow. "You know China is a very poor country," said Mao. "We don't have much. What we have in excess is women."

Thinking that Mao was joking, I replied in kind: "There are no quotas for those, or tariffs."

"If you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands," shot back Mao. "Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens." He laughed uproariously.

Mao returned to the theme twice more—by which time I understood he was making a point, though not yet what. Years afterward, Bette Bao, Chinese-born wife of my colleague Winston Lord, explained it: women—meaning Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, leader of the radical faction—were stirring up China and challenging the prevailing policy.

Maoism sought to overcome China's past, but, like traditional Confucianism, the philosophy saw society as an ethical and educational instrument. The object of the Great Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao in 1966—and where but in China would a bloody political upheaval call itself "cultural"?—was precisely the eradication of those elements of modernity that were not uniquely Chinese, an assault on Western influences and bureaucratization. By February 1973, the aged Chairman had realized that while the Cultural Revolution had dramatized his country's independence, it had simultaneously doomed it to impotence. China, he indicated not without melancholy, would have to go to school abroad. He himself was learning English.

But the aged Chairman was too old to carry to its conclusion another revolution against the instincts of many of his countrymen and, deep down, his own. Within a year of this conversation Chou En-lai was retired and within another year his successor, Deng Xiaoping, was toppled by the very forces Mao seemed to be resisting in 1973, once again delaying the modernization that one side of Mao recognized as essential. Did Mao encourage the radicals who later came to be called the Gang of Four, or did they take advantage of his growing feebleness? Probably a little of both.