Kissinger’s China Fix

As the most celebrated international diplomat of the past half-century and the man who engineered Richard Nixon’s ground-breaking trip to Beijing in 1972, the views of Henry Kissinger on China are going to attract lots of attention, particularly when set out in a 586-page book (Kissinger on China, published by Penguin Press in the US and Allen Lane in the UK).

But the result is disappointing. Kissinger, now 88, writes from within a rarefied diplomatic goldfish bowl and has little interest in anything outside. Despite its crucial importance both for the PRC and for its relationship with the rest of the world, economics does not get a look-in, nor even the political economy of China and its global role. But then this was the National Security Adviser who, when told by Nixon that he had to let the State Department get involved in China policy, replied that it could have trade, since that would never amount to much.

There is no questioning the significance of the Nixon visit. As Zhou Enlai said, it would “shake the world”, even if it took seven years for diplomatic relations to be established after Mao’s death during the Carter administration. But Kissinger’s account of his secret visits to Beijing to set up the Nixon trip, and even his telling of the meetings with the ‘Great Helmsman’ and the ever-faithful Zhou, are disappointingly flat, largely retailing extracts from US government documents published long ago. Despite a lengthy historical section to kick off the book, some very important episodes are omitted or raced over: there is the briefest of mentions of the Second World War and just one sentence on the famine of around 1960 that is now thought to have killed more than 40 million people (but then six pages on the war between China and India in 1962.]. The huge weaknesses that Mao bequeathed to his country are glossed over by Kissinger’s admiration for his historic status while Zhou is treated as a diplomat and not as the man who steered economic and social policy and whose past contained its fair share of skeletons. When we get to Deng Xiaoping, the book recounts the praise for the way ‘Little Bottle’ changed China, hardly a surprise, but no real consideration of their weaknesses, political, economic and social, which are essential to any serious analysis of where the People’s Republic is heading.

Tough and accomplished international politician though he has been, Dr K clearly fell intellectually for the Chinese and their statecraft. Perhaps, having dealt with stone-faced Russians and flaky Europeans, he finally felt he had found a worthy sparring partner. The problem is that if this book speaks for a US establishment view of China, it misses out far too much. China is simply too big and complex to treat merely as the object of diplomatic admiration.