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Chapter Ten:
Defense in Depth

In which gates, operated with our new instinct, become at once a tool of prosperity and
survival.

If you walk for a few minutes to the south of Tinanmen Square in Beijing, leaving the
tomb of Mao Zedong behind you, there’s a small lane that runs back into a warren of
anonymous, white-walled buildings. The streets are unusually clean; the
surveillance cameras unusually – even for Beijing – dense. The neighborhood is
home to many of the last of the generation of Communist Party cadres who joined
and supported its rise decades ago. Several years ago, I found myself settled into one
of them for an afternoon tea with Huang Hua, one of the great modern Chinese
foreign policy figures – and a member of that early revolutionary generation. Huang
was, in a sense, heir to the Warring States diplomat Su Qin, whom Master Nan had
encouraged me to study. Huang had penetrated the madness of Mao’s revolutionary
era to see the possibility of a different order, one he’d brought to vivid life after
Deng Xiaoping ascended to the Chinese leadership in 1976. Huang had been the
country’s Foreign Minister and later a Vice Premier. He was always calm, with an
easy and relaxed temperament. One of my favorite images of him was from the mid-
1970s when, while sitting on a flight to the US from Paris to take China’s seat at the
United Nations, he was ambushed by Walter Cronkite. Huang is completely
unflustered in the scratchy video of that encounter. He sits quietly in a cloud of
smoke. Cronkite pesters him. Huang smiles, offers a cigarette to the news crew, and
though he is in the midst of a transit from the poverty, chaos and smashed politics of
China he is nothing but serene, a statesman – not the nervous representative of a
twitchy power.

“Do you know the difference between Western and Chinese thinking?” Huang asked
that afternoon as we sat inside his courtyard house. Leaves were turning outside. He
was in his early 90s then, still tack-sharp. “You see, when Chinese want to do
something, we begin with the question: What is the nature of the age? Westerners
begin with the goal. What do they aim to achieve?” Deng’s foreign policy, one Huang
shaped and executed, had been an excellent example. Mao, who ruled China from
1949 until 1976, had a darting, paranoid, murderously strategic temperament. The
nature of his age, he was convinced in his Marx-addled mind, was one of zhanzheng
yu geming – war and revolution. From this first principle, everything followed: He
honeycombed Beijing with bomb-proof tunnels, relocated Chinese industry to
isolated and gaspingly poor mountain strongholds, reacted to foreign ideas or
influence with a snapping electricity – and was bent on protective isolation as he
dragged the country through one impossible and failed isolationist development
initiative after another.

Deng, when he came to power in 1977, read the nature of his age too. He read it
differently. “There is no possibility of a great war. Don’t be afraid of it, there is no
risk of it,” he assured a group of Chinese cadres during a chat in 1983. The cadres
were having a hard time replacing their Maoist paranoia with confidence that China

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