Arrival
The morning was cold and gray and slightly hazy. At the last moment before the plane's wheels touched down, Chou En-lai, China's Prime Minister, appeared on the runway with a party of about twenty-five officials. An honor guard, together with a military band, marched out to join them. Two solitary flags, one the American, the other the Chinese, hung limp in the still air. The only other witnesses to the historic arrival were American journalists, who had been sent on ahead of the president's plane. There were no crowds.
The Chinese were making a point, but what it was remained obscure. Perhaps they intended to demonstrate that even the head of the most powerful nation in the world did not impress them. Perhaps it meant they feared the Americans, for their part, would be cool on the arrival. Perhaps they wanted to show that the trip was strictly about business, not friendship. After all, the Chinese authorities could summon up sizable crowds whenever they wished.
The door of Nixon's plane opened, and the president appeared to faint applause from the small crowd on the ground. As Nixon reached the last steps, he thrust his arm out toward Chou and the two men shook hands, seemingly for longer than usual. Chou said a few words to Nixon in English. How was Nixon's flight? "Very pleasant," said Nixon. As the rest of the American party clambered down, Chou noticed Kissinger and said, with genuine warmth, "Ah, old friend." The two men had met before, when Kissinger had come to pave the way for Nixon.
Everyone stood to attention while the band played the national anthems of China and the United States. Then, while it played revolutionary favorites such as "A Song to Our Socialist Motherland," Chou and Nixon inspected the honor guard. Mrs. Nixon followed at the rear with her escort, an American military aide. It was the first time since 1950 that an American in uniform had walked freely in the People's Republic of China.
The airport ceremonies, perfunctory by Chinese standards, were over in fifteen minutes, and the party climbed into big black Chinese limousines with lace-curtained windows and disappeared towards the city. There were no other cars on the roads, only buses and bicycles. The photographers leaned out the windows to snap workers sweeping up snow and passerby who seemed curiously uninterested in the convoy dashing past. Some of the more observant Americans caught sight of barricades holding back traffic on the side streets and police discouraging passerby from taking a closer look. Haldeman, himself a master of stage management, wondered whether the Chinese authorities had chosen not to assemble a huge crowd in Tiananmen Square, in the heart of Beijing, as a dramatic display of the indifference of the Chinese people to their foreign visitor. He was right. Diplomats in the British mission learned that the communists had given extensive briefings; the locals were told to ride their bicycles or walk by without showing any curiosity. The night on the Chinese news the lead item was about a group of women workers. The last item mentioned that the American president had dropped by.