Beijing, the last week of February, 1972. A spectacle just like the two sides had been hoping for. “A week that changed the world.” On one side is the originator of this phrase: United States President and foe of communism, Richard Nixon. With him is Henry Kissinger, the man who moved the world from the shadows. On the other side is Mao Zedong, the Red Messiah who governed China. He was joined by Zhou Enlai, Prime Minister and, to many Chinese, protector of healthy reason.

What it would have been like to be there, in these big historic moments when it seems in retrospect as though the people involved had so captivated the world that they reversed its orbit. Indeed, to be there not in the imagination of screenwriters and opera directors, but to be a fly on the wall, listening to what was being said. How do they speak with one another, these people who hold the fates of so many millions in their hands, and what words do they use, what jokes do they crack?

There is now enough publicly accessible documentation of the discussions in Beijing. Perhaps a few scenes?

Mao to Nixon: “I voted for you in your last election.”
(Laughter) Nixon: “You voted for the lesser evil.”
Mao: “I like the right, I’m pretty happy when the right comes to power.”

China and the USA had not had any diplomatic relations for over two decades. They were entirely estranged from one another. No contact other than on the battlefield: Americans and Chinese killed each other in the Korean War, and the USA fought communism on the Chinese border in Vietnam. China at the time had fully withdrawn from the world, and those who were there say that it was “like going into North Korea now.”

And then this coup. China had broken ties with the Soviet Union, and the Americans sensed their chance. It was an act of geopolitical opportunism on both sides. It was also certainly a staged bit of theatre by both parties and recorded by US broadcasters’ cameras in order to enthral the world long before any opera directors took the story to the stage. It was one of the first globally televised events, compared by some to the Moon landing.

Some conversations were held behind closed doors. The one here, for example, was only revealed to the public in the “Kissinger Transcripts” in 1999:

Mao: “Trade between our countries is pitiful at the moment. As you know, China is a very poor country. We don’t have much. What we do have in excess is women.“ (Laughter)
Kissinger: “We don’t have any tariffs or quotas on those.”
Mao: “If you want them, we can give you some. Make it thousands.”
Zhou: “On a voluntary basis, of course…”
Mao: “Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you millions.“ (Laughter, mainly among the women present)
Kissinger: “The Chairman sweetens the deal.”
Mao: “This will let us flood your country with disaster and harm your interests. We have too many women in our country…they bring children into the world, and we have too many of them anyway.”
Kissinger: “This is a new type of suggestion, we’ll have to go over it first.”

When composer John Adams brought this state visit to the stage 15 years later in Houston, he had a clear idea of the two main protagonists. Larger-than-life Mao was to be lionised as “Mao of the Big Posters and the Great Leap Forward”. Adams cast him as a “heroic tenor“ and Richard Nixon as a “self-doubting, lyrical, sometimes self-pitying and melancholic baritone”.

Adams left out what made these two men so monstrous. At the time of the premiere, Richard Nixon had long since gone down in history as a crook for the Watergate scandal. And while the groundwork for Watergate was laid just a few months after Nixon’s visit to China, his role in the Vietnam War as all too well known: The bombings of Cambodia that Nixon ordered (Operation Freedom Deal) are believed to have killed between 50,000 and 150,000 people from 1970 onward.

And Mao of the Big Posters? His disastrous policies probably killed between thirty and forty million of his compatriots during the aforementioned Great Leap Forward (1959–62) alone, most of whom starved. In 1972, around the time of Nixon’s visit, Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was in effect. It was a fiendish move, at the political level grandiose, at the human level one of his most horrific crimes. Mao relieved himself of his rivals within the ten years between 1966 and 1976, sending his country into collective mania to do so. “Bomb the headquarters!” he ordered, sending the blindly loyal youth of China to storm the authorities.

His first target was the party bureaucracy that he had already lost control of, followed by anything that smelled of education. Thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds formed Red Guards while Mao had writers tortured, temples destroyed and graves desecrated. This was the era when school students killed their headmistresses, university students drowned their professors, husbands sent their wives to labour camps and sons sent their mothers to the gallows. Some class traitors were buried alive, others beheaded and stoned. Dozens of Mao Zedong’s “enemies” had their heart and liver torn out and eaten in Guangxi Province.

Once the youth had done their duty and their orgy of violence had culminated in a civil war, Mao had them put down by the army. The Chairman ultimately regained his hold on power and China was in ruins. Millions of people had been abused and murdered, and the survivors were shadows of their former selves. One million dead. An economy in shambles. A nation whose backbone had been broken, or rather one that had broken its own backbone. The Cultural Revolution officially came to an end in 1976, but its legacy taints China to this day.

While insanity reigned in China, some of the rebellious youth in Europe and the USA followed in the footsteps of their contemporaries in Shanghai and Beijing, brandishing little red Maoist Bibles. It was not the first time that the West had fantasised about a China outside of reality, and Nixon was not the first to turn a blind eye.

Yet he and his wife never waved around a Mao Bible, but instead brought home a different souvenir from their visit. The travel report would eventually place the blame on First Lady Pat Nixon, who was sitting beside Prime Minister Zhou Enlai during the banquet. On the table before her was a small tin of cigarettes, wrapped in pink fabric and decorated with two pandas.

“Aren’t they cute?” asked Pat. “I love them.” – “I’ll give you some,” replied Zhou. “Cigarettes?“ Pat asked. – “No,” said Zhou. “Pandas.” This was how it started. The Panda House at the National Zoo in Washington opened in April 1972. “Pandamonium” (Pat Nixon) of the worst kind broke out in Washington, D.C. immediately before taking the world by storm. There is now the concept of panda diplomacy, a cunning move by the CCP. Joseph Nye, who coined the concept of soft power, referred to the panda as China’s equivalent to the British royal family: “You move with them around the world and they strengthen your country’s soft power immensely.”

The panda has since become the CCP’s secret weapon. Soft power in black and white. One might suspect that the party selected the panda as its emblem because the animal is as cute as the party wishes it was. Or rather, it is a reflection of how it would like to be perceived: a giant, but the friendly, joyful, harmless sort.

The panda helped, but the zeitgeist helped even more. It signified a victory in the geopolitical sphere, with China breaking away from the Soviet axis. It took Mao’s death in 1976 for China to experience the breathtaking economic miracle that followed, with accelerated globalisation under Mao’s successor: the autocrat, pragmatist and reformer Deng Xiaoping. Yet one could easily argue that the cornerstone for China’s eventual opening and ascent to superpower was laid during those days in February 1972. The economic partnership between the West and China that began in the 1980s, and the decision by the industrialised nations to outsource much of their production and turn China’s well educated, disciplined and affordable workforce into the world’s factory, was one reason for the country’s upward advancement.

Another reason was Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, which brought a country ruined and traumatised by Mao back on its feet. Many of the reforms that Deng brought about were a direct reaction to Mao’s violent rule: Collective leadership replaced the one-man dictatorship, power was decentralised, ideology was placed on the back burner, regions and cities were given room to experiment economically. Although Deng was always an often unscrupulous defender of the one-party dictatorship, the party itself faded into the background. Pragmatic economic technocracy took the place of totalitarian rule, allowing a civil society to germinate: Environmentalists, feminists, civil rights lawyers and intellectuals in China started debates while artists explored the world beyond socialist duties – a development that the party neither promoted nor endorsed, but did tolerate as it did not feel threatened by it.

This was a CCP that the world had never seen before: A communist party that simply embodied capitalism and positioned itself as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, a phenomenally adaptable wonder. It never relinquished its autocratic core.

And, so, China transformed into that curious mixture of Leninist power structures and capitalist economies that staggered foreign visitors with a combination of enthusiasm and inescapable puzzlement – a confusion that helped birth that gave rise to that fantasy: China will be like us! Automatically! “Change through trade,” were the magic words. This was, of course, contrary to all the evidence and in spite of that shocking moment in 1989 when the party leadership around Deng Xiaoping crushed the democratic demonstration in Tiananmen Square with tanks. But even after the massacre of 1989, it did not take long for business to resume. The party offered the people a deal after 1989: You’re allowed to make money, but you keep your lips sealed. And the people got to work. China’s cities, driven by a burgeoning middle class, finally turned into those bastions of consumption and commerce that so beguiled traveling businesspeople and politicians.

This is the China many of us have known for our entire lives: the China of “reform and openness”. And this is a China that no longer exists, as it is making way for something new, a political creature the likes of which the world has never before seen.

The blame lies with this man: Xi Jinping. Xi came into power in 2012, at a time when civil society seemed to be increasingly emancipating itself as a nervous, crisis-addled CCP was fighting for its power in a manner as corrupt as it was disoriented. Xi took the reins to save the party leadership. Within a short period of time, he was able to get a firm grip on a CCP that seemed doomed to fail. He also – to borrow the term used in China – “harmonised” a multifaceted, vibrant, sometimes insubordinate society, meaning that he drowned out voices of dissent and made every aspect of life subject to the whims of the party. The apparently incorruptible Xi cleansed the land and the party, including ideologically. Xi then made the party even more godlike, omniscient, omnipresent.

Where Deng Xiaoping called for pragmatism, Xi appeals to ideology: He preaches Marx and practises Lenin with a long unseen fervour and strictness. Because he senses that Marx has little to say to modern people, he adds Confucius and boisterous nationalism. Where Deng sought openness and curiosity for the country, Xi isolates China once more.

In the decades of reform and openness, there were always forces of reform, original debates, striking experiments and courageous breaks in taboo, at least in the country’s underbelly and even within the party. This is no longer the case in Xi’s China. Xi is doing away with important tenets of Deng Xiaoping’s policies of reform and openness. His China is no longer a state that prioritises economic prosperity above all, but rather political control. His party is no longer one that delegates tasks to the state, to the companies, to civil society, to the media that fought for their liberties. These liberties do not exist anymore.

In the past twelve years, Xi has enacted a series of ideological cleansings throughout the country. Repression and ideological zeal have returned with a ferocity not seen since Mao. Xi is taking a giant step back into the past. Some compare him with Mao Zedong, but this argument does not hold much water: Mao was the perennial rebel who bloomed in times of chaos. The fetishist for control and stability, Xi Jinping, is the antithesis of Mao in many ways. Xi is not a revolutionary, but a technocrat deft at navigating through the labyrinth of the state apparatus.

China’s dictatorship has been updated with 21st-century equipment. While Xi has one leg in the past, his other is moving toward the future: The regime is no longer afraid of new technology, but has in fact learned to love it. China is more dependent than any other nation on information technology. The party believes that it can use Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) to create mechanisms for control that will catapult its economy into the future and make its apparatus immune to crisis. At the same time, it hopes to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen.

After more than a half century, totalitarianism is returning to China. Xi’s digital totalitarianism is a much more clever variety than that of Mao’s and Stalin’s: It is one in which the ruler is transmitted into the minds of their subordinates thanks to the omnipresent technical surveillance.

According to propaganda in China, Mao Zedong vanquished the nation’s enemies, Deng Xiaoping made the nation rich, and Xi Jinping is making them strong and leading them to the centre of the world. Xi is giving his people the “Chinese dream”, the national fantasy of great power. He is also giving China an ideological enemy: the West. His message to the world is that China is returning to the apex of power. The party’s media sound the drums: Step aside, West! Make way, capitalism and democracy! Here comes zhongguo fang’an, the “Chinese solution“.

The contest of systems has recommenced, and the camps are being established: The liberal democrats here, China and Russia side by side over there. And the USA? To them, China is not only its adversary with regard to system, but also with regard to superpower status. China and the USA could scarcely have been any more different in 1972, and yet they saw the potential of cooperation. Now, when these two nations look at each other, they see only a threat.

Even the pandas are gone. When Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, the two pandas at the National Zoo in Washington, were called back to Beijing last November, many commentators saw this as a symbolic move. The air between China and the USA, said Voice of America, had become “icy”.

Nixon in China? That was then. Now it’s Xi in Russia. Xi and Putin, who recently promised a “boundless friendship”. “A change is happening unlike any we have seen in the past 100 years,” said Xi to Putin over one year ago. “Let us shape this change together.” Putin’s response: “I agree.”

 

Kai Strittmatter has spent most of his life observing and writing about China. He studied Sinology in Munich, Xi’an and Taipei, and worked as the China Correspondent for Süddetusche Zeitung in Beijing for over 14 years. He has written a number of books on China, the most recent being Die Neuerfindung der Diktatur and Chinas neue Macht.