On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them in Chinese. The Peking interpreters who took notes at Kissinger’s side rendered their principals’ spoken Chinese into English (Kissinger himself was, of course, speaking English) and their English typewriters produced text equivalents much faster than the pre-Microsoft Chinese “zi-pan” (字盤) could churn out the Mandarin text. No American interpreter need be involved.
In truth, Nixon and Kissinger distrusted their own State Department interpreters, thinking them more loyal to their Foreign Service fraternity than to the White House. By the same token, they were confident that the Chinese side could keep secrets. During President Nixon’s and Dr. Kissinger’s various meetings with Chairman Mao Tse-tung (毛澤東), Premier Chou En-lai (周恩來) and Chou’s top aides, Kissinger stressed that “we will not use our interpreters but will rely on your interpreters. We will tell the press that we have Mr. (John) Holdridge there to check on your interpreter.” A Chinese interpreter must have arched an eyebrow when Kissinger said this. The Harvard Professor quickly corrected himself, “and I apologize to your interpreter.” The idea that John Holdridge would “check” the translation of the Chinese interpreter was “a ruse, of course,” he assured Chou. “It is only so our people won’t say we put ourselves at your mercy,” Kissinger sighed before admitting, “—which we are doing.”
Nixon and Kissinger refused to allow any American interpreters in their secret meetings with China’s leaders. Charles W. “Chas” Freeman, the State Department interpreter on the Nixon Visit of February 1972, freely admitted that his presidential interpreting services were limited to Mrs. Nixon’s dinner chit-chat. The President did ask him to interpret his banquet speech, but, because it contained “…some of Chairman Mao’s poetry, it would have been catastrophic for me to do it. So, my first act as interpreter of Chinese was to refuse to interpret.” Although Freeman claimed the title of “principal American interpreter for the visit”, it seems he never interpreted a word for Nixon or Kissinger.
Keeping State Department interpreters out of the loop preserved Nixonian secrecy — from the State Department! But Kissinger kept no secrets from his Chinese friends. Quite the contrary. During his hundreds of hours of conversations with Chinese leaders, Kissinger encouraged Chinese security services to listen in on his phone calls with the skeptical diplomats of his own State Department.
For example, after a particularly testy round of last-minute intramural debates in “Hangchow” (杭州) with the Nixon delegation’s State Department contingent on the Shanghai Communique’s Taiwan language, Kissinger was obliged to beg Chinese indulgence. “I hope you are listening in on my telephones,” Dr. Kissinger beseeched Chinese vice foreign minister Ch’iao Kuan-hua (喬冠華), “because then you will know what I am up against.” He needn’t have worried. The Chinese spy services listened to all the American delegation’s conversations in China, via tapped telephones, hidden microphones and otherwise.
In 2006, the State Department declassified thousands of pages of those transcripts, and I suppose we now have a “comprehensive” record of Dr. Kissinger’s colloquies with the Chinese. I don’t know how many historians have plowed through the verbiage, much less understood the historical context in which they were embedded. I guess you have to have been there. But having read most of them, I am struck by Kissinger’s flawed and haphazard management of his China diplomacy, and by his neglect (if not disdain) for Taiwan in the process. His lack of an American interpreter proved a handicap from his very first encounter with Chinese premier Chou En-lai on July 9, 1971.
I must say, I am amazed by the subtlety with which Chou probed Kissinger about the US view of Taiwan’s legal status. After offering Kissinger and his two aides cigarettes (“Panda” (熊貓牌) China’s finest), the Premier mentioned Edgar Snow’s interview with Chairman Mao the previous January.
Kissinger was pleased to answer that he had indeed read the interview. Ah, but Chou wasn’t interested in that interview. He needed to know how deeply Kissinger and the Americans had studied the Taiwan issue and if they had marked a prominent assertion by Chairman Mao to Edgar Snow on July 16, 1936, that “Formosa” (Taiwan) should be independent along with Korea, as both were then Japanese colonies. It was a statement, memorialized on page 96 of Snow’s first book, Red Star Over China, which subsequently gained broad fame as an ex cathedra pronouncement.
When Kissinger and company proved oblivious to the Edgar Snow-Taiwan connection, the Premier preemptively interjected to set the record straight. Premier Chou insisted that whatever Chairman Mao said or didn’t say to Edgar Snow “in 1936 when he left China,” Snow was unreliable. “Of course, not all his works were so accurate,” he pressed on an uncomprehending Kissinger, “because they were written in the manner of conversation.” “Certain points were not so accurate, and in individual places were wrong.”
In fact, there were no “translation mistakes.” Snow’s Red Star Over China draft was rigorously edited by the Chinese Communist Party propaganda department in Yen-an (延安) in 1936 before it was published in the United States, indeed, before Snow was allowed to leave. And even after Snow returned to New York, he received letters from China about more changes to the manuscript.
Having established that his guests were not connoisseurs of Taiwan history (as a trained interpreter would have been), the Chinese Premier proceeded to harangue Kissinger on Taiwan’s legal status as a part of China.
On Kissinger’s next visit to Peking in October 1971 — just two weeks after California Governor Ronald Reagan’s mission to Taiwan for its October 10 national day — Chou again greeted Kissinger with banter — this time about “the weather in California.” And again, Kissinger’s cluelessness signaled that Reagan would not be a problem. In an earlier “On Taiwan” essay of March 20, 2023, I described Governor Reagan’s visit to Taipei, his resultant break with Kissinger, and his 1976 campaign against President Ford. Reagan raged during the North Carolina primary of 1976, “How will we defend a candidate who said he will retain Dr. Kissinger if he is elected President?” Reagan wasn’t alone.
In Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter’s presidential debate of October 1976, he pledged to the American people that, unlike Gerald Ford, “I would never let friendship with the People’s Republic of China stand in the way of the preservation of the independence and freedom of the people on Taiwan.” When President Carter settled into the White House to educate himself on the Nixon-Ford China record, Patrick Tyler of The New York Times writes, Carter himself spent days perusing the Kissinger transcripts. He was struck by “Kissinger’s fawning.” “‘Why, he just kissed their ass,” the President told aides; he termed Kissinger’s private negotiations with Chinese leaders “despicable.” Carter would set the tone for a new approach to China, and particularly over the Taiwan issue.
Leonard Woodcock, Carter’s envoy to Peking, was my boss from 1977 to 1979. He, too, had also immersed himself in the negotiating record and was likewise disgusted. So unsettled was Woodcock that, shortly after arriving at post in Peking on July 26, 1977, he addressed his foreign service staff: “You may think I’m a dilletante, but I’m not.” (Woodcock was the most influential and experienced labor negotiator in America.) “I’ve read everything I can about China, including the transcripts of the Warsaw talks, the Paris Talks, and Secretary of State Kissinger’s talks with the Chinese, and let me say one thing,” Woodcock concluded, “never again shall we embarrass ourselves before a foreign nation the way Henry Kissinger did with the Chinese.”
I arrived in Peking in July 1977, just a few days after Ambassador Woodcock, and missed this execration of Kissinger. But during the two years I worked under him, he did indeed hold Kissinger in low regard, a sentiment I attributed, at the time, to partisanship. In hindsight, it is clear his opinion was justified. China policy after Kissinger would no longer be a one-man show, and neither Carter nor Reagan was inclined to honor any of Kissinger’s unwritten promises to now-dead Chinese leaders.
By 1978, China’s leadership, ideology and strategic direction were entirely new. China was desperate for normal relations with the United States, while US President Carter’s written instruction was “Tell Leonard [Woodcock] & others to hang tough — not to be in any hurry. We must protect US interests & integrity.”
President Reagan likewise was appalled by the secret record of Kissinger’s diplomatic mishandling of the Taiwan issue. But much time has passed and many memoirs published and, ever since, the sheer audacity of Kissinger’s China Opening in 1971 has overshadowed the lasting damage that his secret diplomacy, unencumbered by informed translation, has inflicted upon Taiwan.
John J. Tkacik, Jr. is a retired US foreign service officer who has served in Taipei and Beijing and is now director of the Future Asia Project at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. He is also on the Advisory Board of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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