An Insider Views China, Past and Future
By MICHIKO KAKUTANIMAY 9, 2011
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It’s been four decades since President Richard M.
Nixon sent Henry
A. Kissinger to Beijing to re-establish contact with China, an
ancient civilization with which the United States, at that point, had had no
high-level diplomatic contact for more than two decades. Since then the cold
war has ended; the Soviet Union (a threat to both China and the United States
and a spur to Sino-American cooperation) has come unwound; and economic reform
in China has transformed a poverty-ridden, poorly educated nation into a great
power that is playing an increasingly pivotal role in the globalized world.
Mr. Kissinger’s fascinating, shrewd and
sometimes perverse new book, “On China,” not only addresses the central role he
played in Nixon’s opening to China but also tries to show how the history of
China, both ancient and more recent, has shaped its foreign policy and
attitudes toward the West. While this volume is indebted to the pioneering
scholarship of historians like Jonathan D. Spence, its portrait of China is
informed by Mr. Kissinger’s intimate firsthand knowledge of several generations
of Chinese leaders.
The book deftly traces the rhythms and
patterns in Chinese history (its cycles of turning inward in isolationist
defensiveness and outward to the broader world), even as it explicates the
philosophical differences that separate it from the United States. Each country
has a sense of manifest destiny, but “American exceptionalism is missionary,”
Mr. Kissinger says. “It holds that the United States has an obligation to
spread its values to every part of the world.”
China’s exceptionalism, in contrast, he
says, is cultural: China does not proselytize or claim that its institutions
“are relevant outside China,” yet it tends to grade “all other states as
various levels of tributaries based on their approximation to Chinese cultural
and political forms.”
Lurking beneath Mr. Kissinger’s musings
on Chinese history is a not-so-subtle subtext. This volume, much like his 1994
book, “Diplomacy,” is
also a sly attempt by a controversial figure to burnish his legacy as Nixon’s
national security adviser and secretary of state. It is a book that promotes
Mr. Kissinger’s own brand of realpolitik thinking, and that in doing so often
soft-pedals the human costs of Mao’s ruthless decades-long reign and questions
the consequences of more recent American efforts to press human-rights issues
with the Chinese.
Some of the more revealing exchanges
between Mr. Kissinger and Mao have
already appeared in the 1999 book “The Kissinger Transcripts,” taken from the
nongovernmental National Security Archive. Those documents show that Mr.
Kissinger employed a good deal more flattery in his wrangling with foreign
leaders than his personal accounts might suggest. A lot of the backstage
maneuvering in the Nixon White House’s dealings with China will similarly be
familiar in outline to readers of Margaret MacMillan’s“Nixon and Mao: The Week
That Changed the World” and William Bundy’s “Tangled Web: The
Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency.”
When it comes to talking about Chinese
leaders he has met, Mr. Kissinger, the hardheaded apostle of realpolitik, can
sound almost starry-eyed. His sympathy for these leaders is not that
surprising, given his descriptions of them as practitioners of the same sort of
unsentimental power politics he is famous for himself. This approach, he says,
enabled China, “despite its insistent Communist propaganda, to conduct itself
as essentially a geopolitical ‘free agent’ of the cold war,” making a tactical
partnership with the United States in order to contain its fellow Communist
country, the Soviet Union.
Photo
Zhou Enlai, left, and Henry
Kissinger in Beijing in 1971. CreditHenry Kissinger
Archives/Library of Congress
This sort of pragmatic self-interest on
China’s part, Mr. Kissinger says, has continued. After 9/11, he writes: “China
remained an agnostic bystander to the American projection of power across the
Muslim world and above all to the Bush administration’s proclamation of
ambitious goals of democratic transformation. Beijing retained its
characteristic willingness to adjust to changes in alignments of power and in
the composition of foreign governments without passing a moral judgment.”
Regarding the brutal crackdown on
dissidents by the government of Deng Xiaoping at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Mr.
Kissinger says that the American reaction left the Chinese puzzled: “They could
not understand why the United States took umbrage at an event that had injured
no American material interests and for which China claimed no validity outside
its own territory.”
For that matter, Mr. Kissinger’s own
take on Tiananmen and the Chinese government has a determinedly “on the one
hand, on the other hand” feel: “Like most Americans, I was shocked by the way
the Tiananmen protest was ended. But unlike most Americans, I had had the
opportunity to observe the Herculean task Deng had undertaken for a decade and
a half to remold his country: moving Communists toward acceptance of decentralization
and reform; traditional Chinese insularity toward modernity and a globalized
world — a prospect China had often rejected. And I had witnessed his steady
efforts to improve Sino-American ties.”
Mr. Kissinger is even more chillingly
cavalier about the tens of millions of people who lost their lives during Mao’s
years in power and the devastating fallout of his Great Leap Forward and
Cultural Revolution. Mr. Kissinger writes about what he describes as a
“poignant” scene in which “Nixon complimented Mao on having transformed an
ancient civilization, to which Mao replied: ‘I haven’t been able to change it.
I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.’ ”
Mr. Kissinger then, startlingly, adds:
“After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot Chinese society, there was not
a little pathos in Mao’s resigned recognition of the pervasiveness of Chinese
culture and the Chinese people.”
Buying into many of the myths Mao
promoted about himself, Mr. Kissinger describes him as “the philosopher king.”
“Mao enunciated the doctrine of
‘continuous revolution,’ but when the Chinese national interest required it, he
could be patient and take the long view,” he writes. “The manipulation of
‘contradictions’ was his proclaimed strategy, yet it was in the service of an
ultimate goal drawn from the Confucian concept of da tong, or the Great
Harmony.”
For some people, Mr. Kissinger
acknowledges, “the tremendous suffering Mao inflicted on his people will dwarf
his achievements.” But he also delivers this coldblooded rationalization: “If
China remains united and emerges as a 21st-century superpower,” many Chinese
may come to regard him as they do the early emperor Qin Shihuang, “whose
excesses were later acknowledged by some as a necessary evil.”
Photo
The portraits Mr. Kissinger draws of
Mao’s successors project an appreciative intimacy. He remembers Zhou Enlai as
conducting “conversations with the effortless grace and superior intelligence
of the Confucian sage.” He adds that the elegant Zhou — who would be
“criticized for having concentrated on softening some of Mao’s practices rather
than resisting them” — faced the classic quandary of the “adviser to the
prince,” who must balance “the benefits of the ability to alter events against
the possibility of exclusion, should he bring his objections to any one policy
to a head.”
Of Deng Xiaoping, a “doughty little man
with the melancholy eyes,” Mr. Kissinger reminds us that Deng and his family
suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution — he was exiled to perform
manual labor, and his son, Mr. Kissinger writes, was “tormented by Red Guards
and pushed off the top of a building at Beijing University” and denied
admission to a hospital for his broken back. Upon his return to government,
Deng worked to replace the Revolution’s emphasis on ideological purity with the
values of “order, professionalism and efficiency,” and Mr. Kissinger credits
him with fashioning the modernizations that would transform “Mao’s drab China
of agricultural communes” into a bustling economic giant.
There are few new insights into Nixon
here. Mr. Kissinger obliquely acknowledges what critics like the historian Robert Dallek have argued:
that Nixon tried to use his initiatives with China and the Soviet Union to
distract attention from his failures in Vietnam. Among the reasons Nixon’s trip
to China occurred in the first place, Mr. Kissinger writes, were Mao’s desire
to make “a move that might force the Soviets to hesitate before taking on China
militarily” and Nixon’s eagerness “to raise American sights beyond Vietnam.”
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RECENT
COMMENTS
RP
June 14, 2011
I like that he is
justifying his actions of the past about China, I hope he takes some
respoinsibility of make China larger than what it...
jeff
June 11, 2011
I believe that history
will remember the silence of Western leaders and news outlets. Through their
policies of free trade with Communist...
v.o.
May 19, 2011
Mr.Kissinger long time ago should have been shipped to the Haig
where he should have been tried as a war criminal. He and Mr. Nixon in 1968...
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Mr. Kissinger also says that the
secrecy surrounding negotiations with China (“Nixon had decided that the
channel to Beijing should be confined to the White House”) “nearly derailed the
enterprise,” when an out-of-the-loop State Department dismissed an invitation
Mao had made to Nixon in an interview as not serious, and described Chinese
foreign policy as “expansionist” and “rather paranoiac.”
Although Mr. Kissinger does not delve
into recent debates over the enormous amount of United States debt that China
holds, or how an increasingly ascendant China could affect the rest of the
world (the subject of books like Martin Jacques’s “When China Rules the World”
and James Kynge’s “China Shakes the World”), he observes that President Hu
Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao “presided over a country that no longer
felt constrained by the sense of apprenticeship to Western technology and
institutions,” and that the 2008 economic meltdown “seriously undermined the
mystique of Western economic prowess” among the Chinese.
These developments, in turn, Mr.
Kissinger argues, have prompted a “new tide of opinion in China — among the
vocal younger generation of students and Internet users and quite possibly in
portions of the political and military leadership — to the effect that a
fundamental shift in the structure of the international system was taking
place.”
36COMMENTS
Arguing that a cooperative United
States-China relationship is “essential to global stability and peace,” Mr.
Kissinger warns that were a cold war to develop between the countries, it
“would arrest progress for a generation on both sides of the Pacific” and
“spread disputes into internal politics of every region at a time when global
issues such as nuclear proliferation, the environment, energy security and climate
change impose global cooperation.” Mr. Kissinger, it should be
noted, is chairman of Kissinger Associates Inc., an international consulting
firm that does work with companies that have business interests in China.
“Relations between China and the United
States,” he writes, “need not — and should not — become a zero-sum game.”
ON CHINA
By Henry Kissinger
Illustrated. 586
pages. Penguin Press. $36.
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