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 ofa transit from the poverty, chaos and smashed politics of China he is nothing but serene, a statesman — not the nervous representative ofa 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 Chine