With Lin Biao approaching the height of his power, all China was becoming militarized. Charged with restoring order to the country, the army had taken control of government offices and work units at every level of Chinese society. The party secretaries who had once controlled China's provinces had been removed, replaced by provincial military commanders, and soldiers were in charge of the bureaucratic hierarchy from the top to the bottom, even in the villas frequented by Mao. Led by Lin Biao, the whole country was studying Mao's thought, and because the People's Liberation Army excelled in the study of Mao, everyone was learning from the army, too. Everyone wanted to bask in the glory of the military. We all wore military uniforms. Even I did. Only Mao, still insisting on the comfort of his old, baggy clothes, held out. He wore a uniform only for his rare public appearances, to show his support for the army.

Our country had two main enemies then, the Soviet Union and the United States, and in March 1969, China and the Soviet Union fought military skirmishes over Zhenbao (Treasure) Island, along the Heilongjiang border. In the months that followed, the whole country was mobilized for war. Tens of millions of people were evacuated from the cities and shipped to rural areas in a variety of guises. Cadres from both the government and the party, and intellectuals and teachers who had yet to be struggled against, were sent to do manual labor in so-called May 7 Cadre Schools. The schools were supposed to provide intellectuals with an opportunity to taste the harsh realities of rural life and to learn from the country's poor and lower-middle peasants. But the intellectuals rarely lived with the peasants. They lived in miserable circumstances in rural concentration camps, and they were forced to perform backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk, often beyond the breaking point. The real purpose of the May 7 Cadre Schools, everyone knew, was not learning but punishment. Students from middle schools and universities, the same students Mao had once called upon to rebel against the authorities, were sent “up to the mountains and down to the countryside” to be “reeducated by the poor and lower-middle peasants.” As the war scare grew, others were evacuated away from the borders. In August 1969, the remaining city residents were mobilized to “dig tunnels deep” in preparation for aerial, possibly nuclear, attack. In Beijing, the underground tunnels, crisscrossing the length and breadth of the city, were to serve as air-raid shelters in which the entire population could live for weeks.

At the height of the militarization, with the war fever at its hottest, Mao presented me with a riddle. “Think about this,” he said to me one day. “We have the Soviet Union to the north and the west, India to the south, and Japan to the east. If all our enemies were to unite, attacking us from the north, south, east, and west, what do you think we should do?”

Mao's assumption that we were surrounded by enemies bent on doing us in was one I shared, but I did not know how to answer his question. What should we do? I thought about his question for a day before telling the Chairman that I still could not answer.

“Think again,” he said. “Beyond Japan is the United States. Didn't our ancestors counsel negotiating with faraway countries while fighting with those that are near?”

I was aghast. Our newspapers were filled with vitriolic attacks against the United States. China was offering aid to Vietnam, now struggling in its war against the United States. “How could we negotiate with the United States?” I asked, incredulous.

“The United States and the Soviet Union are different,” Mao explained. “The United States never occupied Chinese territory. America's new president, Richard Nixon, is a longtime rightist, a leader of the anti-communists there. I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think—not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.”

Neither I nor Wang Dongxing believed Mao. The mutual antagonism between China and the United States dated to the outbreak of the Korean War, in June 1950, and the invective against the United States had never mellowed. American imperialists were accused of seeking hegemony by force in all of Asia. Capitalism, we were certain, was weak and dying, the victim of its own internal contradictions.

But Mao was serious, and China was in the process of a major foreign-policy realignment.

Nixon the rightist was also directing the United States toward a new path. The American president had already sent friendly feelers to China via Pakistani president Yahya Khan and Romania's Nicolae Ceau escu, stating that he did not support the Soviet proposal for creating a collective Asian security system and assuring Mao that he opposed the Soviet Union's talk of a surgical strike against China's nuclear facilities. Mao's interests for China coincided with Nixon's strategy for the United States. “What collective Asian security system?” Mao had exclaimed when he learned of Nixon's assurances. “It's an Asian war system, designed to attack China.” Mao was bellicose toward the Soviet Union, countering its threat with one of his own. “China's atom bombs and missiles may not be able to reach the United States,” he said, “but they can easily reach the Soviet Union.”

In December 1969, Premier Zhou Enlai passed on to Mao a cable from our embassy in Poland, where China and the United States had been conducting inconclusive and sometimes hostile meetings for years. At a cocktail party to mark the opening of a fashion show in Warsaw, the American ambassador to Poland had suggested another meeting with our ambassador in Warsaw. He had something of substance to discuss.

Mao showed me the cable. He was delighted. “We have been talking without saying anything for eleven years,” he said. “Now we can start over again and talk seriously. Nixon must be sincere when he sends word that he is interested in talking with us.”

I took the opportunity of Mao's desire for rapprochement to broach the question of renewing my subscriptions to American medical journals. With the Cultural Revolution's ban on subscriptions to American publications, I felt increasingly isolated from medical science, but Mao was getting older, and I knew that soon my responsibilities for his health would become more onerous. I wanted to learn as much as possible about medical advances. Without access to American medical journals, I explained to Mao, we had no way of learning about progress there.

“The United States is doing everything it can to get information about us,” Mao responded. “Why are we so stupid to shut our eyes to what's going on abroad? Write a report listing the medical journals you want.”

Mao sent my request for journals to both Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng. “I want them to think carefully about our relations with foreign countries,” he said, “especially the United States.”

China's public rhetoric attacking the United States continued undiminished and so did our support for North Vietnam in the ongoing war. But behind the scenes, the rapprochement with the United States was quietly unfolding. Mao was beginning to negotiate with his archenemy from afar even as China prepared for war with our onetime big brother nearby.