292 { China’s Quest
at the ministerial level or higher so that basic and related problems could be
solved. The conceptual breakthrough of aligning with the United States to
deter Soviet attack had finally been made. Mao Zedong laid out for his doctor,
Li Zhisui, his view of China’s beleaguered situation at this juncture:
“Think about this,” [Mao] said to me one day. “We have the Soviet Union
to the north and the west, India to the south, and Japan to the east. If
all our enemies were to unite, attacking us from the north, south, east,
and west, what do you think we should do? ... “Think again,” he said,
“Beyond Japan is the United States. Didn’t our ancestors counsel nego-
tiating with faraway countries while fighting with those that are near?”^10
When Li Zhisui asked incredulously, “How could we negotiate with the
United States?” Mao replied:
The United States and the Soviet Union are different. ... The United
States never occupied Chinese territory. America’s new president,
Richard Nixon, is a longtime rightist, a leader of the anti-communists
there. I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think—not
like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.
“Neither I nor Wang Dongxing [head of Mao’s security unit] believed
Mao,” Li Zhisui recalled. “American imperialists were [being] accused of
seeking hegemony by force in all of Asia. Capitalism, we were certain, was
weak and dying, the victim of its own internal contradictions.”
As conflict along the Sino-Soviet border spiraled upward in August–
September, the United States announced a policy that amounted to pro-
Chinese neutrality. Responding to intelligence from multiple sources that
Moscow was seriously considering a preemptive attack on China, Nixon
concluded that Soviet “smashing” of China would not be in US interests.
Henry Kissinger, who was a participant and a key architect in these events as
President Nixon’s national security advisor, said this was a revolutionary mo-
ment in US foreign policy: a president had declared that US interests required
the survival of a major communist country.^11 In line with this new thinking,
on September 6, Under Secretary of State Elliot Richardson in a speech laid
out the new US position:
In the case of Communist China, long-run improvement in our rela-
tions is in our national interest. We do not seek to exploit for our own
advantage the hostility between the Soviet Union and the People’s
Republic. Ideological differences between the two Communist giants
are not our affair. We could not fail to be deeply concerned, however,
with an escalation of this quarrel into a massive breach of international
peace and security. Our national security would in the long run be prej-
udiced by associating ourselves with either side against the other. Each