Chapter 15
Nixon’s Shameful Collusion with Beijing

II. Mao Zedong’s Theft of National Cultural Relics

John Burns, a New York Times reporter, was also one of the witnesses to this historic moment. He recalled: “I was standing 50 to 60 feet away, along with other foreign reporters and some Beijing locals, held back by a police line. One thing I remember very clearly, which captures the feeling of that day, was that the landing of Air Force One at Beijing Airport was, of course, controlled by the Chinese side, and they were very clever about it. Air Force One’s nose stopped right beside a huge sign at the airport, on which in big white letters on a red background was written a quote from Chairman Mao Zedong: ‘Cause trouble and fail, cause trouble again and fail again until destruction — that is the logic with which imperialism and all reactionaries in the world treat the people’s cause. They will never go against this logic.’ I don’t know how the American advance team missed seeing that sign. But it seemed to be another message from Beijing broadcast on television to all who could read this quote, just as Premier Zhou Enlai extended his hand to welcome President Nixon at the bottom of Air Force One’s stairs. It seemed to foreshadow an impending dog-eat-dog brutal fight.

But on that gloomy morning in February 1972, President Nixon and his entourage did not notice this subtle detail from the Chinese; their attention was elsewhere. After Air Force One landed, whether Nixon would be received by Mao was still an unconfirmed hope. Henry Kissinger’s special assistant Lord said: “When we arrived at the hotel, Premier Zhou Enlai invited us to have tea together. He drank only two sips before hurrying away. But about an hour later, unexpectedly, Zhou came back and told Kissinger that Chairman Mao wanted to meet President Nixon immediately. Normally, to say directly, ‘Come, come meet the Chairman’ without prior notice would be considered rude and awkward. But this is the typical style of a Chinese emperor; he demands his subjects to come at a moment’s notice. We did not think much of it then; we took it as a positive sign — Chairman Mao meeting Nixon at the very start of our visit to China was a signal to the whole world, to the Chinese people, and to his own Politburo: that this visit by the American president was personally arranged by him.“

It seemed Mao, the old lecher, was already impatient to get some “foreign meat.” Lord recalled: “the meeting was low-key, not at all like the typical grand occasion for meetings of heads of state as you might imagine. Chairman Mao was said to be a peasant; he indeed came from a peasant family. According to him, he represented the masses of the Chinese people in the communist society. He did not live in a grand palace but in a rather simple house in Zhongnanhai. When we entered his residence, we saw a ping-pong table in the outer room. This naturally reminded us of the visit by the American ping-pong team a few months earlier — the first signal to the world that US-China relations might break through. Then we entered his study, which was filled with books everywhere, a very modest setting. So the meeting could be called very low-key. (These American bureaucrats didn’t care at all that these books were national cultural relics stolen and misappropriated by Mao’s bandits.)”