“No one can lay claim to so much influence on the shaping of foreign policy over the past 50 years as Henry Kissinger.” —The Financial Times
In this sweeping and insightful history, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book length to a country he has known intimately for decades and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. On China illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and tight line modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, and Richard Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing. With a new final chapter on the emerging superpower’s twenty-first-century role in global politics and economics, On China provides historical perspective on Chinese foreign affairs from one of the premier statesmen of our time.
“No one can lay claim to so much influence on the shaping of foreign policy over the past 50 years as Henry Kissinger.” —The Financial Times
In this sweeping and insightful history, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book length to a country he has known intimately for decades and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. On China illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and tight line modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, and Richard Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing. With a new final chapter on the emerging superpower’s twenty-first-century role in global politics and economics, On China provides historical perspective on Chinese foreign affairs from one of the premier statesmen of our time.
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Overview
“No one can lay claim to so much influence on the shaping of foreign policy over the past 50 years as Henry Kissinger.” —The Financial Times
In this sweeping and insightful history, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book length to a country he has known intimately for decades and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. On China illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and tight line modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, and Richard Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing. With a new final chapter on the emerging superpower’s twenty-first-century role in global politics and economics, On China provides historical perspective on Chinese foreign affairs from one of the premier statesmen of our time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780143121312 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2012 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 624 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The Singularity of China
SOCIETIES AND NATIONS tend to think of themselves as eternal. They also cherish a tale of their origin. A special feature of Chinese civilization is that it seems to have no beginning. It appears in history less as a conventional nation-state than a permanent natural phenomenon. In the tale of the Yellow Emperor, revered by many Chinese as the legendary founding ruler, China seems already to exist. When the Yellow Emperor appears in myth, Chinese civilization has fallen into chaos. Competing princes harass each other and the people, yet an enfeebled ruler fails to maintain order. Levying an army, the new hero pacifies the realm and is acclaimed as emperor.1
The Yellow Emperor has gone down in history as a founding hero; yet in the founding myth, he is reestablishing, not creating, an empire. China predated him; it strides into the historical consciousness as an established state requiring only restoration, not creation. This paradox of Chinese history recurs with the ancient sage Confucius: again, he is seen as the “founder” of a culture although he stressed that he had invented nothing, that he was merely trying to reinvigorate the principles of harmony which had once existed in the golden age but had been lost in Confucius’s own era of political chaos.
Reflecting on the paradox of China’s origins, the nineteenth-century missionary and traveler, the Abbé Régis-Evariste Huc, observed:
Chinese civilization originates in an antiquity so remote that we vainly endeavor to discover its commencement. There are no traces of the state of infancy among this people. This is a very peculiar fact respecting China. We are accustomed in the history of nations to find some well-defined point of departure, and the historic documents, traditions, and monuments that remain to us generally permit us to follow, almost step by step, the progress of civilization, to be present at its birth, to watch its development, its onward march, and in many cases, its subsequent decay and fall. But it is not thus with the Chinese. They seem to have been always living in the same stage of advancement as in the present day; and the data of antiquity are such as to confirm that opinion.
When Chinese written characters first evolved, during the Shang Dynasty in the second millennium B.C., ancient Egypt was at the height of its glory. The great city-states of classical Greece had not yet emerged, and Rome was millennia away. Yet the direct descendant of the Shang writing system is still used by well over a billion people today. Chinese today can understand inscriptions written in the age of Confucius; contemporary Chinese books and conversations are enriched by centuries-old aphorisms citing ancient battles and court intrigues.
At the same time, Chinese history featured many periods of civil war, interregnum, and chaos. After each collapse, the Chinese state reconstituted itself as if by some immutable law of nature. At each stage, a new uniting figure emerged, following essentially the precedent of the Yellow Emperor, to subdue his rivals and reunify China (and sometimes enlarge its bounds). The famous opening of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a fourteenth-century epic novel treasured by centuries of Chinese (including Mao, who is said to have pored over it almost obsessively in his youth), evokes this continuous rhythm: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” Each period of disunity was viewed as an aberration. Each new dynasty reached back to the previous dynasty’s principles of governance in order to reestablish continuity. The fundamental precepts of Chinese culture endured, tested by the strain of periodic calamity.
Before the seminal event of Chinese unification in 221 B.C., there had been a millennium of dynastic rule that gradually disintegrated as the feudal subdivisions evolved from autonomy to independence. The culmination was two and a half centuries of turmoil recorded in history as the Warring States period (475–221 B.C.). Its European equivalent would be the interregnum between the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the end of the Second World War, when a multiplicity of European states was struggling for preeminence within the framework of the balance of power. After 221 B.C., China maintained the ideal of empire and unity but followed the practice of fracturing, then reuniting, in cycles sometimes lasting several hundred years.
When the state fractured, wars between the various components were fought savagely. Mao once claimed that the population of China declined from fifty million to ten million during the so-called Three Kingdoms period (A.D. 220–80),4 and the conflict among the contending groups between the two world wars of the twentieth century was extremely bloody as well.
At its ultimate extent, the Chinese cultural sphere stretched over a continental area much larger than any European state, indeed about the size of continental Europe. Chinese language and culture, and the Emperor’s political writ, expanded to every known terrain: from the steppelands and pine forests in the north shading into Siberia, to the tropical jungles and terraced rice farms in the south; from the east coast with its canals, ports, and fishing villages, to the stark deserts of Central Asia and the ice-capped peaks of the Himalayan frontier. The extent and variety of this territory bolstered the sense that China was a world unto itself. It supported a conception of the Emperor as a figure of universal consequence, presiding over tian xia, or “All Under Heaven.”
The Era of Chinese Preeminence Through many millennia of Chinese civilization, China was never obliged to deal with other countries or civilizations that were comparable to it in scale and sophistication. India was known to the Chinese, as Mao later noted, but for much of history it was divided into separate kingdoms. The two civilizations exchanged goods and Buddhist influences along the Silk Road but were elsewhere walled off from casual contact by the almost impenetrable Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. The massive and forbidding deserts of Central Asia separated China from the Near Eastern cultures of Persia and Babylonia and even more from the Roman Empire. Trade caravans undertook intermittent journeys, but China as a society did not engage societies of comparable scale and achievement. Though China and Japan shared a number of core cultural and political institutions, neither was prepared to recognize the other’s superiority; their solution was to curtail contact for centuries at a time. Europe was even further away in what the Chinese considered the Western Oceans, by definition inaccessible to Chinese culture and pitiably incapable of acquiring it—as the Emperor told a British envoy in 1793.
The territorial claims of the Chinese Empire stopped at the water’s edge. As early as the Song Dynasty (960–1279), China led the world in nautical technology; its fleets could have carried the empire into an era of conquest and exploration. Yet China acquired no overseas colonies and showed relatively little interest in the countries beyond its coast. It developed no rationale for venturing abroad to convert the barbarians to Confucian principles or Buddhist virtues. When the conquering Mongols commandeered the Song fleet and its experienced captains, they mounted two attempted invasions of Japan. Both were turned back by inclement weather—the kamikaze (or “Divine Wind”) of Japanese lore. Yet when the Mongol Dynasty collapsed, the expeditions, though technically feasible, were never again attempted. No Chinese leader ever articulated a rationale for why China would want to control the Japanese archipelago.
But in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, between 1405 and 1433, China launched one of history’s most remarkable and mysterious naval enterprises: Admiral Zheng He set out in fleets of technologically unparalleled “treasure ships” to destinations as far as Java, India, the Horn of Africa, and the Strait of Hormuz. At the time of Zheng’s voyages, the European age of exploration had not yet begun. China’s fleet possessed what would have seemed an unbridgeable technological advantage: in the size, sophistication, and number of its vessels, it dwarfed the Spanish Armada (which was still 150 years away).
Table of Contents
Preface xv
Note on Chinese Spellings xix
Prologue 1
Chapter 1 The Singularity of China 5
The Era of Chinese Preeminence 8
Confucianism 13
Concepts of International Relations: Impartiality or Equality? 16
Chinese Realpolitik and Sun Tzu's Art of War 22
Chapter 2 The Kowtow Question and the Opium War 33
The Macartney Mission 35
The Clash of Two World Orders: The Opium War 45
Qiying's Diplomacy: Soothing the Barbarians 51
Chapter 3 From Preeminence to Decline 57
Wei Yuan's Blueprint: "Using Barbarians Against Barbarians," Learning Their Techniques 60
The Erosion of Authority: Domestic Upheavals and the Challenge of Foreign Encroachments 64
Managing Decline 69
The Challenge of Japan 77
Korea 80
The Boxer Uprising and the New Era of Warring States 86
Chapter 4 Mao's Continuous Revolution 91
Mao and the Great Harmony 92
Mao and International Relations: The Empty City Stratagem, Chinese Deterrence, and the Quest for Psychological Advantage 97
The Continuous Revolution and the Chinese People 106
Chapter 5 Triangular Diplomacy and the Korean War 113
Acheson and the Lure of Chinese Titoism 118
Kim Il-sung and the Outbreak of War 122
American Intervention: Resisting Aggression 129
Chinese Reactions: Another Approach to Deterrence 133
Sino-American Confrontation 143
Chapter 6 China Confronts Both Superpowers 148
The First Taiwan Strait Crisis 151
Diplomatic Interlude with the United States 158
Mao, Khrushchev, and the Sino-Soviet Split 161
The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis 172
Chapter 7 A Decade of Crises 181
The Great Leap Forward 181
The Himalayan Border Dispute and the 1962 Sino-Indian War 184
The Cultural Revolution 192
Was There a Lost Opportunity? 197
Chapter 8 The Road to Reconciliation 202
The Chinese Strategy 203
The American Strategy 213
First Steps-Clashes at the Ussuri River 215
Chapter 9 Resumption of Relations: First Encounters with Mao and Zhou 236
Zhou Enlai 241
Nixon in China: The Meeting with Mao 255
The Nixon-Zhou Dialogue 262
The Shanghai Communiqué 267
The Aftermath 273
Chapter 10 The Quasi-Alliance: Conversations with Mao 275
The "Horizontal Line": Chinese Approaches to Containment 277
The Impact of Watergate 292
Chapter 11 The End of the Mao Era 294
The Succession Crisis 294
The Fall of Zhou Enlai 297
Final Meetings with Mao: The Swallows and the Coming of the Storm 303
Chapter 12 The Indestructible Deng 321
Deng's First Return to Power 322
The Death of Leaders-Hua Guofeng 327
Deng's Ascendance-"Reform and Opening Up" 329
Chapter 13 "Touching the Tiger's Buttocks": The Third Vietnam War 340
Vietnam: Confounder of Great Powers 341
Deng's Foreign Policy-Dialogue with America and Normalization 348
Deng's Journeys 356
Deng's Visit to America and the New Definition of Alliance 360
The Third Vietnam War 367
Chapter 14 Reagan and the Advent of Normalcy 377
Taiwan Arms Sales and the Third Communiqué 381
China and the Superpowers-The New Equilibrium 387
Deng's Reform Program 396
Chapter 15 Tiananmen 405
American Dilemmas 411
The Fang Lizhi Controversy 428
The 12- and 24-Character Statements 437
Chapter 16 What Kind of Reform? Deng's Southern Tour 440
Chapter 17 A Roller Coaster Ride Toward Another Reconciliation: The Jiang Zemin Era 447
China and the Disintegrating Soviet Union 456
The Clinton Administration and China Policy 461
The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis 471
China's Resurgence and Jiang's Reflections 478
Chapter 18 The New Millennium 487
Differences in Perspective 493
How to Define Strategic Opportunity 497
The National Destiny Debate-The Triumphalist View 503
Dai Bingguo-A Reaffirmation of Peaceful Rise 508
Epilogue: Does History Repeat Itself? The Crowe Memorandum 514
Toward a Pacific Community? 527
Afterword to the paperback edition 531
Notes 549
Index 585
What People are Saying About This
Praise for Henry Kissinger's On China
“Fascinating, shrewd… [The book’s] 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…even as it explicates the philosophical differences that separate it from the United States.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Nobody living can claim greater credit than Mr. Kissinger for America's 1971 opening to Beijing, after more than two decades of estrangement, and for China's subsequent opening to the world. So it's fitting that Mr. Kissinger has now written On China, a fluent, fascinating…book that is part history, part memoir and above all an examination of the premises, methods and aims of Chinese foreign policy.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Fascinating… In On China, statesman Henry Kissinger draws on historical records and 40 years of direct interaction with four generations of Chinese leaders to analyze the link between China’s ancient past and its present day trajectory. In doing so, the man who helped shape modern East-West relations presents an often unsettling, occasionally hopeful and always compelling accounting of what we’re up against.”—The Chicago Sun-Times
“Fascinating… No living American has played a more important role than Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser and secretary of state, in bringing about the historic rapprochement between the United States and China. … [Kissinger] draw[s] deep insights into China's traumatic encounter with much stronger Western powers.”—The San Francisco Chronicle
“On China, Kissinger's 13th book, blends an incisive strategic analysis of the moves and countermoves of China, the United States and the former Soviet Union with telling vignettes about his meetings with Chinese Communist Party leaders… entertaining.”—The Los Angeles Times
“No one can lay claim to so much influence on the shaping of foreign policy over the past 50 years as Henry Kissinger.”—The Financial Times
“From the eminent elder statesman, an astute appraisal on Chinese diplomacy from ancient times to the fraught present “strategic trust” with the United States. Former Secretary of State Kissinger brings his considerable scholarly knowledge and professional expertise to this chronicle of the complicated evolution and precarious future of Chinese diplomacy with the West. … Sage words and critical perspective lent by a significant participant in historical events.”—Kirkus Reviews