Ryan Pyle for The New York Times  âI wanted these two great countries to be at peace,â said Ji Chaozhu, a former translator to Mao Zedong and otherÂ Chinese leaders. âThese were the two I had a connection to.â  FORTY years ago this month, on a cold, gray morning, President Richard M. Nixon arrived here on a groundbreaking visit aimed at improving relations with China after decades of hostility. He stepped off Air Force One and shook hands with the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai.  A photograph that captures the moment also shows a tall, bespectacled Chinese interpreter standing on the tarmac, just behind Mr. Zhou. That man is Ji Chaozhu.  “I remember that day clearly,” Mr. Ji, now 82 and retired, said a few weeks ago at his apartment on the southern island of Hainan. “Premier Zhou told me just to stand right behind him and listen clearly.”  Mr. Ji was also at Mr. Zhou’s side in Geneva, in 1954, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles famously refused to shake hands with his Chinese counterpart, a slight that deepened strains after the Korean War.  There was, in fact, a Zelig-like quality to Mr. Ji’s life. Because he served for more than 20 years as an English-speaking interpreter for China’s leaders, Mr. Ji turns up in numerous historic photographs: on the Tiananmen rostrum in 1971 with Chairman Mao Zedong and the American journalist Edgar Snow (a subtle hint that China sought improved relations with the United States); with Mao and his last official visitor, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan, in 1976; and helping Deng Xiaoping don a white cowboy hat during his whirlwind tour of the United States in 1979, which included a visit to a Texas rodeo.  HISTORIANS say that Mr. Ji did not make policy. But his language skills helped shape negotiations during one of the most important diplomatic missions of the past half-century.  Declassified White House documents list him as a participant in most of the crucial meetings Mr. Nixon and Henry Kissinger held with Chinese leaders in the early 1970s, including those that took place during Mr. Kissinger’s secret visit to China in July 1971.  Mr. Ji’s story is all the more remarkable because of his childhood ties to the United States. He grew up in New York City, attended Harvard and then dropped out of college to return to China in 1950, shortly after the victory of Mao’s forces, hoping to help build a Communist paradise.  He attended talks that ended the Korean War and worked in China’s leadership compound in Beijing, making him a witness to the intrigue and power struggles that raged there during the 1960s and 1970s.  Today, Mr. Ji divides his time between Beijing and a winter home on Hainan. His memory has faded. But he remains proud of the role he played in Chinese-American relations.  “I wanted these two great countries to be at peace,” he said. “These were the two I had a connection to.”  Interpreters for world leaders rarely tell their stories. But four years ago, after meeting the American hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, who urged him to write his memoirs, Mr. Ji published “The Man on Mao’s Right,” an account of his life as an interpreter and diplomat.  The story he told was compelling. Mr. Ji was born in 1929, into a wealthy family in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi. In the late 1930s, his family fled south before the invading Japanese and then left for the United States on the advice of Zhou Enlai, then a young Communist revolutionary.  The family returned to China after the Communist victory with the help of his elder brother, Ji Chaoding, a high-ranking underground Communist.  “When the Korean War broke out, I was torn between my love for two countries,” he said. “But I knew I was fundamentally Chinese.”  Back in China, Mr. Ji enrolled at Tsinghua University, and was then selected as an interpreter at the talks that led to a cease-fire in the Korean War.  Soon after, he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and over the next 30 years served as a translator for China’s leaders, including Mao (“He complained I spoke too loudly when I translated.”); Mr. Zhou (“He was like a father.”); Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and a member of the infamous Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution (“She was the horror of all horrors!”); and Mr. Deng (“He was so short, I had to spread my legs to get lower when I interpreted.”)  IN those years of isolation from the West, Mr. Ji bicycled to work, earned about $10 a month and had but one blue Mao suit.
Ji Chaozhu, now retired, was the interpreter at groundbreaking moments in relations between the United States and China.