Free On China by Henry Kissinger Page A

threatened to involve China in a universal culture.
    By 1968, Mao had come full circle. Driven by a mixture of ideological fervor and a premonition of mortality, he had turned to the youth to cleanse the military and the Communist Party and bring into office a new generation of ideologically pure Communists. But reality disappointed the aging leader. It proved impossible to run a country by ideological exaltation. The youths who had heeded Mao’s instructions created chaos rather than commitment and were now in their turn sent to the remote countryside; some of the leaders initially targeted for purification were brought back to reestablish order—especially in the military. By April 1969, nearly half of the Party’s Central Committee—45 percent—were members of the military, compared with 19 percent in 1956; the average age of new members was sixty. 22
    A poignant reminder of this dilemma came up in the first conversation between Mao and President Nixon in February 1972. Nixon complimented Mao on having transformed an ancient civilization, to which Mao replied: “I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.” 23
    After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot Chinese society, there was not a little pathos in Mao’s resigned recognition of the pervasiveness of Chinese culture and the Chinese people. One of the historically most powerful Chinese rulers had run up against this paradoxical mass—at once obedient and independent, submissive and self-reliant, imposing limits less by direct challenges than by hesitance in executing orders they considered incompatible with the future of their family.
    Therefore, in the end, Mao appealed not so much to the material aspects of his Marxist revolution as to its faith. One of Mao’s favorite tales drawn from classical Chinese lore was the story of the “foolish old man” who believed he could move mountains with his bare hands. Mao related the story at a Communist Party conference as follows:
    There is an ancient Chinese fable called “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.” It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. He called his sons, and hoe in hand they began to dig up these mountains with great determination. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, “How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you to dig up these two huge mountains.” The Foolish Old Man replied, “When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them away?” Having refuted the Wise Old Man’s wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party had long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s heart. 24
    An ambivalent combination of faith in the Chinese people and disdain for its traditions enabled Mao to carry out an astonishing tour de force: an impoverished society just emerging from a rending civil war tore itself apart at ever shorter intervals and, during that process, fought wars with the United States and India; challenged the Soviet Union; and restored the frontiers of the Chinese state to nearly their maximum historic extent.
    Emerging into a world of two nuclear superpowers, China managed, despite its insistent Communist propaganda, to conduct