In 1969, Chairman Mao had asked four senior military marshals to study China’s strategic policy. Throughout the spring and summer, Chinese and Soviet armies had been skirmishing. Moscow was debating whether to bomb China’s nuclear arms facilities. That August, Beijing faced a huge new deployment of Soviet forces massing at China’s border at Kazakhstan. At the very moment Nixon was seeking a secret American rapprochement with China, two of the marshals on Mao’s task force, Chen Yi and Ye Jianying, proposed playing “the card of the United States.” Marshal Chen specifically recommended high-level talks with Washington. Mao accepted their report."