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On September 24, 1970, the Rolling Stones interrupted their concert at the Palais des Sports in Paris to invite a French Maoist called Serge July onstage. News of an earthshaking event called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been trickling out of China since 1966. Information was scarce, but many writers and activists in the West who were opposed to the United States and its war in Vietnam were becoming fascinated with Mao Zedong, their earlier infatuation with Soviet-style Marxism having soured. Jean-Paul Sartre hawked copies of a banned Maoist newspaper in Paris, and Michel Foucault was among those who turned to China for political inspiration, in what Sartre called “new forms of class struggle in a period of organized capitalism.”
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After the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, Chinese political struggles became milder and more mundane. Members of the Politburo and politicians of higher rank rarely were toppled (except for Chen Liangyu in 2006) and ideology seldom triggered significant rifts. Bo Xilai changed all that. He was a Politburo member and a favored candidate for a spot on the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee when he was pulled down dramatically in 2012. His radical Maoist movement in Chongqing, where he was Communist Party Chief, sparked a red fervor with his throwback policies and disturbed the whole of Chinese political and economic society. Some Politburo Standing Committee members went to Chongqing and endorsed Bo’s venture while others refused to talk about it and warned of impending disaster. Quickly, an unprecedented division among China’s top leaders materialized. Even today, in front of the court where Bo is being tried in Jinan, Shandong province, in Eastern China, both supporters and detra
What if Nixon had never gone to China?
China’s shift of weight towards the United States had major international implications. It heightened Soviet military vulnerability, while also providing what would become an engine of global economic growth. Within China, the pivot opened space for major domestic economic reform, although the Chinese Communist Party would not take advantage of this for several years.
We think of China’s shift as an inevitability the consequence of timeless currents associated with the balance of power. But in fact, the summit between Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon demanded bold thinking from Chinese and American policymakers, thinking that ran against decades of foreign-policy orthodoxy in both countries. Even then, the summit required careful choreography, played out across several countries.
It was a hot afternoon in June in the East China city of Jinan. I was returning to my hotel after an afternoon coffee, thinking of the conference I had come to attend and trying to escape the heat on the shady side of the street. My cell phone rang, and I heard the distinctive regional accent of my Chinese publisher, calling from California, where he had recently bought a home so his wife could raise their child free of China’s stifling pollution. Had I received the emails with the requested revisions, he asked. He needed a response within 48 hours. I explained that I was traveling, would be attending a conference for the next two days, and could not possibly reply that quickly. “What are you doing tonight?” he asked knowing that it was only 4:00 p.m. in China and there were still several hours left in the day. He explained that my book launch was scheduled for mid-July, less than a month away, and we had to move quickly. In China, everything needs to move quickly.
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