Book Review
On China, by Henry Kissinger
The Penguin Press, New York, USA, 2012
Henry Kissinger, the supreme diplomat and renowned academic, has put out a book that should be made compulsory reading for current American diplomats. Unlike the American politicians and the TV pundits who have been ceaselessly bashing China since the
communist revolution without ever visiting China, Kissinger has visited China on 50 occasions, talked with the top leadership of the last half century and researched the Beijing archives. The result is a highly informative view of China, with summarised sketches of its ancient history and culture and its impact on Chinese politics, while the centrepiece is the historic US-China rapprochement managed by President Nixon and Chairman Mao in which Kissinger played the key role. Despite its historical perspective, the book is highly readable and absorbing.
During the period just after 1970, China was just coming out of the tragic upheaval of the cultural revolution when Chairman Mao sought to dismantle the bureaucracy and create a pure communist society by destroying state institutions and the careers of all the leading figures in academia, the public services and the military by empowering the youth operating as dictatorial Red Guards. The experiment nearly destroyed the Chinese revolution but Mao, ever the master of ideological contradictions, ended the power of the
Red Guards and sought a reversal of policy. Meanwhile China faced a greater external threat from its erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, as China claimed ideological primacy over the Soviet Union in the communist world and became an adversary. Military skirmishes on the Chinese border went on between the countries for over years. China then needed
an ally against its rival communist state.
President Nixon, despite being later vilified for his authoritarian style, was one of the most cerebral of modern US Presidents and a clear headed visionary unlike most of his later successors in office. He had been a committed China basher in his politics. The USA was the strongest military and economic power in the world. The Communist Party of China, likewise, ceaselessly spewed hatred against the USA which was branded the “paper tiger” and its allies “the running dogs of US imperialism” in its daily propaganda for the Chinese people, as the USA had aided the Kuomintang government and protected them in their refuge in Taiwan. But China was desperately poor and its economy was hopelessly backward. How this unlikely duo agreed to cooperate at all is a piece of major world history.
Despite its backwardness and problems, China was a country to be reckoned with. It had given a good account of its military prowess in Korea against the might of the USA and its allies, as it had earlier against India in the border skirmishes. It was then the conduit for arms and supplies to the North Vietnamese fighting the USA and its allies. But China
needed the USA to curtail the Soviet threat. The USA was losing the war in Vietnam with seemingly no way out of the debacle while it was engaged in confrontations with the USSR in Europe, the Middle East and many other parts of the world. So it was left to two men of outstanding prescience, Nixon and Mao, to leave aside their ideological differences and collaborate, against the tenor of public opinion in their own countries, negotiating initially in complete secrecy.
The convoluted politics of the Western powers had hitherto ignored the existence of one fifth of the world’s population living in China. Taiwan with 16 million people represented China in the UN and its Security Council while 400 million people in China were non-persons. It was only in November 1971 that China took its rightful seat in the UN after an overwhelming majority elected it in the General Assembly of the UN, despite strong US opposition. But Nixon had the foresight to see that China, with the background of its five millennia old continuous civilisation, would become a world power with the creative ability of its vast population. China and the US agreed that despite the ideological divide, and while each country retained the right to criticise the other in public, they had a confluence of interests in confronting the ambitions of the USSR. But China declines to sign any formal agreements with the USA and opts for carefully worded joint communiqués that would satisfy political opponents to their collaboration in each country.
Of great interest to students of diplomacy are the contrasting styles of US and Chinese negotiators and real life pictures of the Chinese leaders. Mao himself, whom Kissinger describes as a colossus, does not participate in the negotiations. He gives audiences like a divinity from his simple book strewn office room and makes his points through metaphors, epigrams and references to classical Chinese literature but declines to be drawn into details which he says will be the work of his ministers. His two great experiments with pure communism, The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, were both costly disasters but the old revolutionary was a cult figure because of his lifelong fight to restore China’s dignity after “The Century of Shame” when the Western powers plundered and humiliated a vast country that was for millennia the greatest world power.
Despite Kissinger’s understanding of China, he cannot but pay lip service to America’s commitment to promote democracy and human rights worldwide. This, coming from the man who really began the calamitous Vietnam War that cost 3 million Vietnamese lives and master-minded the overthrow of the democratic Chilean government of Allende to
install a military dictatorship which tortured and killed tens of thousands, must be seen as sanctimony intended for his American audience. But unlike American politicians and its general public which tends to regard developing nations with condescension, Kissinger states: “The attempt to alter the political structure of a country of the magnitude of China from outside is likely to involve vast unintended consequences. American society should never abandon its commitment to human dignity. It does not diminish the importance of that commitment to acknowledge that Western concepts of human rights and individual
liberties may not be directly translatable, in a finite period of time to Western political and news cycles, to a civilisation for millennia ordered around different concepts.” (page 426)
Another issue of particular interest is the 1989 Tiananmen Square riots (described as the Tiananmen massacre in the West) which Kissinger places in its true context. After one decade of gradual liberalisation of the economy, following three decades of continuous revolutionary experiments under Mao, sections of the students were now demanding Western-style political choice and, in the style of the former left-wing Red Guards, were occupying public places, schools and universities. The Chinese authorities could not decide how to handle this situation and the response was debated for almost seven weeks before the government decided that the movement should be cracked down by force to avoid
more chaos. Force was met with counter-force and led to many deaths. This incident was highlighted in the Western media which had flocked to China earlier to report on Gorbachev’s first visit to Beijing. The Western media and politicians screamed of massacres and human rights violations and sanctions were once again imposed on exchanges with China. American politicians could conveniently forget how the peaceful Civil Rights movement of the sixties and the Anti-War protests of the seventies were brutally suppressed. Strategically, the US felt it no longer needed China on its side as the Soviet Union had crumbled and was no longer an adversary. In fact, the US believed that China would be the next communist state to collapse: a big mistake.
Despites these setbacks, the policies of Deng Xiaoping continued to move the country from autarchy to an open market economy linking it to the external world a dramatic shift for a country which had closed itself to foreign influences for several millennia and considered itself the “Middle Kingdom” which was the centre of human civilisation. The aged revolutionary, a hero of the Long March and the anti-Japanese and revolutionary wars, begins the process of reforming the Communist Party and the country which enables his successor, Jiang Zemin, to oversee a two decade development which makes China a world
power and the second largest economy in the world.
Kissinger makes the pertinent observation that US foreign policy is not consistent and also suggests it is not always working in its best interest because it is often driven by domestic political agendas. Further, with every change of administration, the key personnel in the State Department up to Assistant Deputy Secretary are replaced and there are long intervening learning periods. On the other hand, the operation of the Chinese government through the communist party (with a current membership of 90 million) after Mao does not present a monolithic structure with an unchallenged supreme leader as many are
led to believe. After Mao, the communist party acquired a diverse representation and issues are often hotly debated between the more liberal right wing and the traditional Mao inspired left wing before major policy decisions are taken. Major policy decisions are taken after long and careful analysis that takes into account the impact of current strategies in the long-term.
Sadly, the Western democratic system relies on politicians concerned with short-term interests that enable them to grab power and the consequences of this are evident in the crises facing the West today.
For thousands of years, Chinese leaders had learnt how to handle powerful and hostile “foreign barbarians” and absorb them into their system. But the “Century of Shame” (mid 19th to mid 20th centuries) had shown that China could not now stand up to the military might of modern Western aggressors. This book is essentially the story of how China re-invented itself to learn what was useful from the West and once again established itself as a dominant power in the world.
Kenneth Abeywickrama
26 August 2012.