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By Root 1499 0

had dumped billions of dollars in technology and manpower into its war against a Third World country of peasant guerrilla fighters—and the Third World country had won. In January 1973, shortly after Nixon’s landslide presidential victory in November 1972, the United States signed the Treaty of Paris with North Vietnam, whereby South Vietnam was to remain a separate state and American military forces were to exit all of Vietnam. After Watergate, however, the North Vietnamese sensed that America would no longer enforce the treaty, and in April 1975 they overran the south and captured the capital city of Saigon. Television pictures showed American helicopters evacuating the American embassy with panicked South Vietnamese clinging to their landing skids. Many on Taiwan feared their island would be the next place to be abandoned by the United States.

In 1979, the worst fears of the Taiwanese were realized. President Jimmy Carter officially broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan and formally recognized the People’s Republic of China with its capital in Beijing. Outraged Taiwanese mobs torched Carter in effigy and stomped on peanuts to dramatize their hatred of the American president, a former peanut farmer from Georgia. While the PRC gleefully established their embassy in Washington, the Nationalists were relegated to a merely informal presence in America with a pseudo-embassy. As reports filtered home of Taiwanese officials being snubbed or barred entirely from diplomatic functions in Washington, a pall of despair fell over the island.

Fearful middle-aged and elderly KMT bureaucrats began to leave Taiwan to join their children in the United States. But they were not the only Chinese affected by world events. In the following decade, the 1980s, the thaw in Sino-American relations would lead to open exchanges between the United States and mainland China, shattering the Bamboo Curtain and opening the way to a new era of emigration.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Bamboo Curtain Rises: Mainlanders and Model Minorities

In 1976, Chairman Mao Zedong suffered a massive heart attack and lay paralyzed for months. His death on September 9, 1976, ended a life of almost mythic proportions. Born a humble peasant, he rose to stratospheric heights as the unchallenged leader of the most populous nation on earth. And while the nation he led depicted itself as a classless society, Mao reigned over China like a modern emperor.

Mao’s state funeral, organized by the Communist Party leadership, was a lavish affair befitting an emperor. Eight full days were devoted to public mourning, and more than a million people paid their respects to Mao’s body, enshrined in a crystal sarcophagus in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where he was laid to rest in a giant mausoleum under the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Publicly, the nation expressed profound grief, but privately many Chinese felt a deep sense of relief. In her memoir Wild Swans, Jung Chang wrote that the moment she learned of Mao’s death, “the news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance.”

Although Mao had been virtually deified as a savior of the Chinese people, the reality was that under his leadership China had experienced one of its worst eras, characterized by starvation and repression. Millions died during the famine caused by the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s 1958 program for the forced, rapid industrialization of China. Then, during the Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976, Mao promised to free China from the “four olds”: old habits, old customs, old ideas, and old creeds. Instead, the Red Guards, his juvenile shock troops, destroyed much of China’s priceless heritage, ransacking libraries and museums, desecrating Buddhist temples, burning irreplaceable books, archives, and historical relics. The Cultural Revolution was in essence a form of cultural genocide. By the