316 { China’s Quest
were not true, what did that say about China’s politics? The whole Lin Biao
affair made Mao seem either like fool or a liar in many people’s eyes. The high
drama of the Sino-American rapprochement was a welcome diversion from
China’s unseemly domestic politics, and went some distance toward relegiti-
mizing Mao’s rule. But Zhou, it seemed to Mao, was stealing too much of the
credit for China’s diplomatic successes.
Mao, according to Zhou’s biographer Gao Wenqian, also wanted to
strengthen the position of the remaining Cultural Revolution radicals (Jiang
Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, etc.) as an ideological safeguard
on Zhou and the just-rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping at the forthcoming Tenth
Congress scheduled for August 1973. Mao saw Jiang Qing’s radicals as the
protectors of the “correct verdicts” removing revisionists during the Cultural
Revolution and of the radical policies implemented during the Cultural
Revolution. Mao understood that Jiang Qing’s group could not run China’s
economy or state, and did not want to remove Zhou. Mao realized that no
one except Zhou or possibly Deng could administer China’s sprawling state
and economy. But both Zhou and Deng had to meet Mao’s test of his loyalty
to the Cultural Revolution. Mao suspected that if, someday, Zhou ended up
as China’s top leader, perhaps merely by outliving Mao, he would focus exclu-
sively on economic development, quickly returning China to the revisionism
of the early 1960s. Greater empowerment of the radicals was thus required,
and deflating Zhou’s status as a diplomatic genius was part of this. Thus, Mao
started a campaign criticizing Zhou’s putative “rightist capitulation” to the
United States.
In June 1973, Mao began to insinuate that Zhou’s diplomacy had aban-
doned revolution to curry favor with the United States. The head of the US
Liaison Office in Beijing, George H. W. Bush, delivered to Zhou a copy of
the Soviet-US-British nuclear nonproliferation treaty, briefed Zhou on the
contents of that treaty, and passed on a personal letter from Nixon to Zhou.
Staffers in the MFA drafted a report based on these materials and passed it on
to Zhou, who added some editorial commentary before passing it on to Mao.
Mao crossed out all of Zhou’s comments, adding that Zhou was too soft in
dealing with the Americans. Mao then passed the document back to the MFA
with the acid observation that “When joining hands with the bourgeoisie,
one tends to forget struggle.”^2
Mao’s effort to undermine Zhou’s diplomacy continued the next month
when the MFA drafted another report on Soviet-US nuclear nonproliferation
cooperation. The two superpowers planned in this way to control the world,
the MFA report concluded. Apprised of the report by Nancy Tang and Wang
Hairong, Mao again condemned the MFA document for avoiding the cor-
rect view that “revolution is the basic trend in the world today.” The docu-
ment was revisionist, Mao concluded, as he warned others not to get on Zhou
Enlai’s “pirate ship”^3 Mao also had Nancy Tang and Wang Hairong spread the