Word: china
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Taiwan, as expected, provided the most difficult issue. We needed a formula acknowledging the unity of China, which was the one point on which Taipei and Peking agreed, without giving up our existing relationships. I finally put forward the American position on Taiwan as follows: "The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China ... The United States Government does not challenge that position." Chou and I refined the text until at 8:10 a.m., concluding a nearly nonstop session of 24 hours, we had agreed on the main outline...
...tung, the ruler whose life had been dedicated to overturning the values, the structure, and the appearance of traditional China, lived in fact in the Imperial City, as withdrawn and mysterious even as the emperors he disdained. Nobody ever had a scheduled appointment; one was admitted to a presence, not invited to a governmental authority. I saw Mao five times. On each occasion I was summoned suddenly. On one visit Mao expressed interest in meeting my wife Nancy. The fact that she was shopping presented no obstacle to our hosts. She was hustled out of a shop by a protocol...
...couched this in the form of an explanation of China's slowness in responding to American initiatives over two years. China had been "bureaucratic" in its approach, he said, in insisting all along that the major issues had to be settled before smaller issues like trade and people-to-people exchanges could be addressed. "Later on I saw you were right, and we played table tennis." This was more than a recitation of history and a disarming apology; it meant that there would be progress with respect to trade and exchanges at the summit. Mao, in short, had willed...
...that is, the Soviet Union. To a long disquisition by Nixon on the question of which of the nuclear superpowers, the United States or the Soviet Union, presented a greater threat, Mao replied: "At the present time, the question of aggression from the United States or aggression from China is relatively small ... You want to withdraw some of your troops back on your soil; ours do not go abroad." By a process of elimination, the Soviet Union was clearly Mao's principal security concern. Equally important was the elliptical assurance, later repeated by Chou, that removed the nightmare...
...final week Kissinger writes of the near confrontation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. over a crisis in Jordan; the reason for Nixon's famed "tilt" toward Pakistan in its 1971 war with India-and a secret decision to give major aid to Peking if the Soviets threatened China. Throughout all three parts (which, of course represent only a fraction of the full, 1,521-page book), Kissinger offers unusual insights into that remarkable figure, Richard Nixon, "this withdrawn, lonely and tormented...