FIRST ENCOUNTERS: When Richard Nixon met Madame Mao

Jiang Qing was not pleased that in this matter of inviting the president of the United States to visit China, her opposition had been overruled. She disapproved of her husband's rapprochement with the American Imperialist Devil. True, as a young actress in Shanghai in the Thirties, she had adored Hollywood films, copied Garbo in her dress, worn make-up and adopted high heels, which posed problems, because her feet had been bound when she was a child. She had struggled against that bourgeois past ever since. Not to mention the bourgeois present - during the Cultural Revolution she had repeated vilified America. Here she was now, on a cold evening in February 1972, ushering into the Great Hall of the People (5,000 of them in attendance) President and Mrs Nixon.

Jiang opted to be charming but aloof. If Pat Nixon's two-tone lavender gown outshone her own austere garb, it was still her night. The Red Detachment of Women was her show, a balletic fusion of song, dance and political ideology that she, as the mistress of revolutionary theatre, personally had created. The dancers raised their arms in fists instead of the usual delicately upturned palms. Jiang faced the man who had led the anti-China lobby for years. "Why," she asked disingenuously, "did you not come to China before now?"

Other questions were similarly double-barrelled. Did the President share her enthusiasm for John Steinbeck? (What about the downtrodden Okie proletariat anyway?) Why had Jack London committed suicide? (Could he not stomach decadent capitalist values any longer?) When Nixon attempted to change the subject by asking Jiang the names of the writer, composer and director of Red Detachment, she informed him graciously that it had been "created by the masses". He mustered up a smile.

Four eventful years passed. When Nixon returned to China, it was as a private citizen; by his third visit Jiang Qing, too, had fallen from power. The fact that she, however, was in prison, left Nixon more convinced than ever of the superiority of the capitalist system