Word: bingnan
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...story, even now in 1983, started with him. Wang Bingnan was telling me of his first night on the hill back then in 1949. He had arrived with Mao and the Zhongyang, the Central Committee that rules the Communist Party of China. They came as a nomad encampment, several thousand men and women who promised to give new government to the China they had conquered. For two years, they had been wandering the arid northlands, pursued by Chiang Kai-shek's divisions. But Mao had raced his own best troops northeast to Manchuria to encircle and wipe out Chiang...
...Fragrant Hill so its fires twinkled above the capital. Mao's troops were still cleaning out the fallen city, and it was not yet safe for him to enter, even though Nationalist dignitaries were about to arrive to sue for peace. Each morning Chou En-lai and Wang Bingnan would drive down to negotiate; each evening they would drive back to report. Mao was inflexible: no terms for surrender. China was his to remake...
...Wang Bingnan remembered how Mao, coming in from the march that first evening, had been offered a bed. He was to sleep on a spring mattress, after 15 years of sleeping on a hard board with only a thin peasant's pad between the board and his body. Wang remembered meeting Jiang
That first night, when Wang Bingnan offered me his banquet of return, another old friend joined us on Fragrant Hill ? Qiao Guanhua. Qiao and I had been friends in our youth, when he was a fiery left-wing journalist. Later, as Foreign Minister of China, he and Henry Kissinger worked out the landmark "Shanghai Communique" of 1972, in which America recognized that Taiwan was part of China, but insisted on a "peaceful" solution. Qiao Guanhua had gone on with Mao to the end; he was released from house arrest by the new regime only last year; his wife, suspect...
...this I learned nothing that first night. I learned only later that Wang Bingnan (a hero of the revolution for arranging the Christmas 1936 kidnaping of Chiang Kaishek, later China's senior diplomat in the West) had himself been purged during the Cultural