Ji Chaozhu was a Chinese diplomat who held a number of important positions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, most notably as English interpreter for Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai; later as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's ; and lastly as an Undersecretary General of the United Nations, a post from which he retired in 1996. He played a central role in the talks leading up to and during President Richard M. Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China. His memoir, The Man on Mao's Right, was published in July 2008, by Random House.
Early years in U.S.
Ji was born on July 30, 1929, in Shanxi Province to an affluent family who were also sympathetic to the Communist Party. His father was a wealthy landlord, lawyer, and provincial official, while his eldest brother, Ji Chaoding, was a noted economist who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Ji and his family fled their home in Taiyuan, the provincial capital, in the late 1930s during the Second Sino-Japanese War. At the urging of Zhou Enlai, a young revolutionary at the time, Ji's family emigrated to New York City in 1939, when Ji was nine years old. He earned a high school diploma from Horace Mann-Lincoln High School, and attended Camp Rising Sun in 1944. He was a sophomore at Harvard University in 1950 when the Korean War broke out, which saw his native homeland and his adopted country fight on opposite sides. Ji described how he "was torn between love for two countries", but knew that he "was fundamentally Chinese".
Return to China
Ji left Harvard in the middle of his studies and returned to the newly formed People's Republic of China. He studied chemistry at Tsinghua University in Beijing, with the goal of being a scientist and developing nuclear weapons for the PRC. He was instead selected to be an interpreter and notetaker at the negotiations in Panmunjom that would eventually bring an end to the Korean War, due to his English-language skills. After two years in Korea, he returned to Beijing where he was recruited to become Zhou's English interpreter, accompanying the Premier to the 1954 Geneva Conference, and on Zhou's many other international trips. For most of the next two decades, he was a close aide to Zhou, and a frequent interpreter for Mao, often appearing on Mao's right on the reviewing stand at Tiananmen Square during public celebrations when English-speaking dignitaries were present. He holds the distinction of having been interpreter for Mao Zedong's last two official visits with English-speaking dignitaries, in 1976, months before the chairman's death.
Role in Sino-American relations
During his long career, Ji's first-hand knowledge of American culture made him a valuable member of the Chinese diplomatic corps. This was especially showcased during Henry Kissinger's secret visit to Beijing in 1971, which led to President Nixon's visit to China the following year. Zhou Enlai chose Ji to head the first diplomatic mission to the U.S. in 1973. Ji went on to establish the PRC's first liaison office in Washington, and was subsequently assigned to its embassy staff in the US after full diplomatic relations were established. He served as interpreter for Deng Xiaoping during his visit to the US in 1979. The New York Times observed how – from the time of Nixon's visit to China until Deng's visit to the US – Ji was the only person from either country capable of interpreting from English to Chinese. The newspaper consequently labelled him "The Indispensable Mr. Chi". He was highly respected by US officials, so much so that in 1981, then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig specifically asked the PRC to send Ji to meet with Ronald Reagan in an attempt to defuse tensions between the two sides. This arose as a result of president's plans to sell sophisticated weapons to Taiwan. Ji met with every American president from Nixon to Clinton.
Family and political life
In 1956, Ji married Wang Xiangtong, an English translator working for the International Red Cross. Both Ji and Wang experienced periodic political problems during the many purges and other upheavals that marked the Mao years. In spite of his close association with Zhou and Mao, Ji was considered suspect because he had been educated in the U.S., and an elder brother had stayed behind when Ji returned to China. Wang had a similar problem, as her father and mother had become separated at the end of the civil war when the Communists took control and the Nationalists fled to Taiwan. Her father and three brothers were stranded and could not return to the mainland, and her mother was in Beijing and could not leave. Ji was able to join the Chinese Communist Party in spite of his overseas connections, but Wang could not. They had two sons: Xiaotan lives in Beijing with his wife and a daughter, and Xiao-bin lives in the U.S., where he had attended high school and college while Ji was working in China's Washington embassy, and Wang was working at the United Nations. In his final years, Ji divided his time between Beijing and the island of Hainan.
Death
Ji Chaozhu died on April 29, 2020, at the age of 90 from an undisclosed illness. News of his death was first announced by the China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a brief notice to the Associated Press. He was survived by his wife and his two sons.
