Nicholas Platt

In 1972, an extraordinary diplomatic event occurred. Richard Nixon walked into the Beijing office of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. It was the first-ever visit of an American president to China, and that visit lit a fuse that in time would blow apart a great power rivalry and change forever the relationship between the US and China. Reading the memoir of Nicholas Platt, “China Boys, How US relations with the PRC Began and Grew, a personal memoir,” I was struck by how a small group of Americans and Chinese, about the number of a couple of college football teams, carried it off.

Platt, from the beginning, was part of that small team. This came about because Platt had gambled his US Foreign Service career on the premise that Chinese would get him “in the thick of things” once the United States developed a relationship with China. For two years, for ten hours a day, he studied Chinese, the last year in Taichung, Taiwan. After Taichung,
Platt spent five years at the “China watching headquarters of the world during the 1960’s” the American Consulate General in Hong Kong. There he would scan newspapers from China, including “provincial publications smuggled into the colony wrapped around fish.” The task was far more than simply reading these Chinese papers and noting deviations or repositioned language as indications of new policy. Platt explains that “editorials were shot through with references to figures and stories from great classical novels of Chinese literature”…and thus, “if you had not read (the Chinese classics) you simply could not decipher the editorials.” Platt salts his account with personal experiences that give you a glimpse of life in a very different Asia from today. Example: In Hong Kong in the 1960s, “water supplies to apartment buildings were limited to three hours every four days. CEOs and Taipans would leave board meetings abruptly hen the water came on in their zone. A frequent topic of analysis at gatherings of China experts during the dry days was the best way to flush a toilet.”

Platt returned to Washington. Not only was he a sort of walking encyclopedia of Chinese matters, but masterful at distilling the essence of political relationships. This led to two major tasks of diplomats; intelligence reports and briefing books for high ranking delegations. Even hard-to-please Kissinger liked Platt’s briefing books. Platt visited Beijing in the 1972 as part of the Nixon team, and returned, in 1973 as chief of the political section --two years before diplomatic relations between the two countries were established, working in political no-mans-land called a Liaison Office.

Platt skips his experiences as a three-time ambassador (Pakistan, the Philippines, and Zambia) , instead focusing on the early days of China-US relations, and his experiences forging the first links between the tough old People’s Liberation Army brass and wary Pentagon officials. Happily, he includes at least a chapter on his remarkable stewardship of the “Best Embassy on Park Avenue,” The Asia Society. Highly recommended.… (más)