Meetings with remarkable Maoists

HISTORY: CLIFFORD COONANreviews On ChinaBy Henry Kissinger, Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 586pp. £30

ON OPENING this book and reading the frontispiece caption, “Kissinger in China”, I found myself taking a deep breath. China-watchers like to put the start date for China’s real opening-up to the world at July 9th, 1971, when Henry Kissinger, the most influential US diplomat since the second World War, became the first American official to go to China in more than two decades. The temperature of the Cold War changed, and this is the man who can give first-hand accounts of some of the actors in this tumultuous era.

A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Kissinger is demonised by the left for his role in the 1973 military coup in Chile and the secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia, but equally is adored by conservatives for bringing about detentewith the Soviet Union and helping to bring China out of wilful obscurity. When one of the most polarising figures in global diplomacy takes on a country that provokes similarly extreme reactions in the international community, you have to pay attention.

Here is the eyewitness view of a period that changed the course of the world, by its chief facilitator, first as national security adviser, then as secretary of state, for presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford.

On Chinadoes not disappoint. We get a great flavour of some of the main actors in the geopolitical dramas of the era, including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. It will please the students of international relations, and the China-watchers, but it is a surprisingly light read, and Kissinger comes across as more likable than in some of his other works. It is quirky in a way that I was not expecting.

For someone whose key contributions to Chinese history are so rooted in a period nearly 40 years ago, it is a surprise when Kissinger goes back further, to the origins of Confucianism, the warring-states period and other ancient epochs that served to make China what it is today. His grand sweep is powerful indeed, focusing on strategic icons of Chinese history, such as the chess-like board game known as weiqi(or Go) and Sun Tzu's The Art of War, the latter of which was important to Kissinger's reading of Mao's foreign policy.

The way Kissinger gives a lengthy historical context for contemporary events is a very Chinese approach, and this book is going to do well in pirate editions on mainland China when they eventually come out. “China established itself as a great power not to be trifled with while conducting a redefinition of the Chinese identity at home and challenging the great powers diplomatically, sometimes concurrently, sometimes sequentially. In pursuit of this foreign-policy agenda, Mao owed more to Sun Tzu than to Lenin,” he writes.

He captures Mao’s famous wit. When Nixon congratulates him on his transformation of Chinese society, Mao quips: “I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.” Mao emerges more strongly from these pages than Nixon, who is curiously absent.

The details of the Mao-Nixon meetings were revealed in Margaret MacMillan's excellent Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, and we've also read about them in The Kissinger Transcripts. What we haven't had is Kissinger's take on events, and this is where On Chinatruly comes into its own.

“Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus,” Kissinger writes in the first chapter. “So it was with China.”

His account of early Chinese history is lively and readable, and his description of Mao Zedong’s idiosyncratic approach to statesmanship is peppered with insights, such as: “Mao’s China was, by design, a country in permanent crisis: from the earliest days of Communist governance, Mao unleashed wave after wave of struggle.”

Over the years Kissinger has maintained links with all the Chinese leaders he met during 50 trips there, but it is his contacts with Mao that stand out. His evaluation of Mao’s motives and his delineation of the Great Helmsman’s machinations are masterly.

There is humour here too: “I had been sent to Beijing by Nixon in October 1971 – on a second visit – for that purpose. In subsequent exchanges, it was decided that the code name for this trip would be Polo II, our imaginations having been exhausted by naming the first secret trip Polo I.”

His take on the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists, centred on Tiananmen Square, is pure Kissinger in its detached style, and reads like a fudge. He stops short of approval for Deng Xiaoping’s actions, but his respect for the realpolitik means he cannot condemn it outright.

"This is not the place to examine the events that led to the tragedy in Tiananmen Square," he writes, begging the question: where is the place if not a book called On China? "But the occupation of the main square of a countrys capital, even when completely peaceful, is also a tactic to demonstrate the impotence of the government, to weaken it, and to tempt it into rash acts, putting it a disadvantage."

He brings great clarity to his description of the tricky relationship between China and the Soviet Union, which ultimately worked to US advantage. When Mao went to visit Stalin in Moscow just weeks after the end of the civil war that had given him his mandate to rule, he stayed for two months. Surely this must be the last time a head of state went on a two-month official visit, but the Russian leader kept him out of the loop and treated him with what looked like disdain. This helped toughen Mao’s approach to the Soviet Union and formed the basis for the Sino-Soviet split.

Particularly satisfying, and written with the pace of a political thriller, is the chapter on the Korean War, although some contemporary historians are far more critical than Kissinger of China’s role in this war.

In his epilogue Kissinger turns to the strained relations between Washington and Beijing: “I am aware of the realistic obstacles to the co-operative US-China relationship I consider essential to global stability and peace . . . Relations between China and the United States need not – and should not – become a zero-sum game.”

CLIFFORD COONANis China Correspondent of The Irish Times. He lives in Beijing