Ten Million Kisses
February 16th, 2008You think you have what it takes to be a diplomat? Even now?
Chinese leader Mao Zedong proposed sending 10 million Chinese women to the United States, in talks with top envoy Henry Kissinger in 1973, according to documents released Tuesday. The powerful chairman of the Chinese Communist Party said he believed such emigration could kickstart bilateral trade but could also “harm” the United States with a population explosion similar to China, according to documents released Tuesday by the State Department on US-China ties between 1973 to 1976.
In a long conversation that stretched way past midnight at Mao’s residence on February 17, 1973, the cigar-chomping Chinese leader referred to the dismal trade between the two countries, saying China was a “very poor country” and “what we have in excess is women.” He first suggested sending “thousands” of women but as an afterthought proposed “10 million,” drawing laughter at the meeting, also attended by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s national security advisor at that time, told Mao that the United States had no “quotas” or “tariffs” for Chinese women, drawing more laughter.
Kissinger then tried to highlight to Mao the threat posed by the Soviet Union and other global concerns as he moved to lay the groundwork for restoring diplomatic ties a year after Nixon’s historic visit to China. But Mao dragged the talks back to the topic of Chinese women.
“Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens,” Mao said. “Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million,” he said.
Kissinger noted that Mao was “improving his offer.”
Mao continued, “By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children and our children are too many.”
A shrewd diplomat, Kissinger seemed to turn the tables on Mao, replying, “It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it.”
The two leaders then spoke briefly about the threat posed by the Soviet Union, with Mao saying he hoped Moscow would attack China and be defeated. But Mao again lamented, “We have so many women in our country that don?t know how to fight.”
The assistant Chinese foreign minister, Wang Haijung, who was at the meeting, then cautioned Mao that if the minutes of the conversation were made public, “it would incur the public wrath.”
Kissinger agreed with Mao that the minutes be scrapped.
But when Kissinger joked that he would raise the issue at his next press conference, Mao said, “I’m not afraid of anything.
“Anyway, God has sent me an invitation,” said the Chinese leader, who coughed badly during the talks. [He] died in September 1976. US-China diplomatic relations were restored in 1979.
Nixon and Kissinger’s work with China is some of the most intriguing, impressive diplomatic work of all-time, right up there with Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana territory, covered in Jefferson’s Great Gamble, which is an excellent book. On Nixon’s campaign with China, there are so many different books that I don’t know which to recommend, so I guess I’d urge you to read a good biography of Nixon, like Nixon by Jonathan Aiken, and a good biography of Kissinger, like Kissinger by Walter Isaacson and I’d recommend you read a good book about Mao — who knew, and considered, the negotiations with Nixon’s White House to be his last “Great Act” in his passion play — like, say, Mao by Phillip Short. (Seize the Hour is also a fantastic book as long as you’re reading a later, better edited and corrected edition as it had small errors here and there.)