War, politics and 10 million girls

Some of modern history's most fascinating diplomacy involved Chinese and United States leaders during the 1970s, when the two nations ended decades of antagonism and moved towards normal relations.

Especially important were secret talks between Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong and US national security adviser (later secretary of state) Dr Henry Kissinger, whose secret 1971 trip to Beijing was his first of nine official visits.

Dr Kissinger's records of those meetings will be unavailable for several more years. But copies of many transcripts, filed at the State Department by his aide, Winston Lord (later the US ambassador to China), were recently declassified under the US Freedom of Information Act and turned over to the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington DC, a non-profit research library of declassified government documents.

Earlier this month, these papers were published by The New Press, New York, under the title The Kissinger Transcripts, edited by William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive. It also contains many accounts of Dr Kissinger's meetings with Soviet Communist Party chairman Leonid Brezhnev.

What follows is most of the fourth Beijing talk, a midnight meeting of chairman Mao, premier Zhou Enlai and Dr Kissinger. The transcript makes clear that common concerns about the Soviet Union brought the two sides together, and made them willing to overlook other political differences.

The subsequent demise of the USSR, of course, removed that bond and helps explain why relations today are less cordial. - Robert Keatley DATE AND TIME: Saturday, February 17, 1973, 11.30pm to Sunday, February 18, 1973, 1.20am.

PLACE: Zhongnanhai, chairman Mao's residence, Beijing, People's Republic of China.