Mao: The Unknown Story

On 21 March, a Chinese table tennis team arrived in Japan for the world championships — one of the first sports teams to travel abroad since the start of the Cultural Revolution five years before. China was good at table tennis, and Mao personally authorized the trip. So as not to appear too outlandish, the players were exempted from having to wave the Little Red Book.

They were given precise instructions on how to behave with the Americans: no shaking hands; no initiating conversation. But on 4 April, an American player, Glenn Cowan, got on the Chinese bus, and the Chinese men’s champion Zhuang Ze-dong decided to talk to him. Photographs of the two shaking hands were front-page news in the Japanese papers. When Mao was informed, his eyes lit up and he called Zhuang “a good diplomat.” Nonetheless, when the American team expressed a desire to visit China, after other foreign teams had been invited, Mao endorsed a Foreign Ministry recommendation to turn down the request.

But he was clearly uneasy with this decision, and staff noticed that he seemed preoccupied for the rest of the day. That night at eleven o’clock he took a large dose of sleeping pills, and then had dinner with his female nurse-cum-assistant, Wu Xu-jun. Mao sometimes invited one or two members of his staff to dine with him. He seldom dined with his wife at this stage, and almost never with colleagues. His routine was to take sleeping pills before dinner, so he would fall asleep right after the meal, which he ate sitting on the edge of his bed. The pills were so powerful they would sometimes hit him while he was chewing, and his staff would have to pick food out of his mouth, so he never had fish for dinner, because of the bones. This time, Wu recalled,

after he finished eating, he slumped on the table … But suddenly he spoke, mumbling, and it took me a long time to work out that he wanted me to telephone the Foreign Ministry … “Invite the American team to China.” …

I was dumbstruck. I thought: this is just the opposite of what he had authorised during the day!

Mao’s standing orders were that:

his “words after taking sleeping pills don’t count.” Did they count now?

I was really in a dilemma … I must make him say it again.

… I pretended nothing was happening and went on eating … After a little while, Mao lifted his head and tried very hard to open his eyes and said to me:

“Little Wu … Why don’t you go and do what I asked you to do?”

Mao … only called me “Little Wu” when he was very serious.

I asked deliberately in a loud voice: “Chairman, what did you say to me? I was eating and didn’t hear you clearly. Please say it again.” So Mao repeated, word for word, haltingly, what he had said.

Wu then checked with Mao about the pills rule:

“You’ve taken sleeping pills. Do your words count?”

Mao waved at me: “Yes they do! Do it quickly. Otherwise there won’t be time.”

Mao kept himself awake until Wu returned with the news that she had done what he asked.

Mao’s change of mind changed his fortunes. The invitation, the first ever from Red China to an American group, caused a sensation. The fact that it was a sports team helped capture the world’s imagination. Chou En-lai switched on his charm, and his totalitarian regime’s meticulously orchestrated theater, to produce what Kissinger called “a dazzling welcome” for the Ping-Pong team. Glowing and fascinated reports littered the American and major Western press day after day. Mao the old newspaperman had hit exactly the right button. “Nixon,” wrote one commentator, “was truly amazed at how the story jumped off the sports pages and onto the front page.” With one move, Mao had created the climate in which a visit to China would be a political asset for Nixon in the runup to the 1972 presidential election.

“Nixon was excited to the point of euphoria,” Kissinger wrote, and “now wanted to skip the emissary stage lest it take the glow off his own journey.” By the end of May it was settled, in secret, that Nixon was going.

MAO HAD NOT only got Nixon, he had managed to conceal that this had been his objective. Nixon was coming thinking that he was the keener of the two. So when Kissinger made his first, secret, visit in July 1971 to pave the way for the president, he bore many and weighty gifts, and asked for nothing in return. The most startling offer concerned Taiwan, to which the US was bound by a mutual defense treaty. Nixon offered to drop Washington’s old ally, promising to accord full diplomatic recognition to Peking by January 1975, provided he was re-elected in 1972.

By the end of the trip Chou was talking as if Peking pocketing Taiwan was a matter of course. It was only at this point that Kissinger made a feeble gesture: “We hope very much that the Taiwan issue will be solved peacefully.” But he did not press Chou for a promise not to use force.