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Henry Kissinger

On China Hardcover – May 17, 2011

by Henry Kissinger (Author)

4.6 1,733 ratings

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"Fascinating, shrewd . . . The book deftly traces the rhythms and patterns of Chinese history."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York 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.

Print length

608 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Press
Publication date

May 17, 2011
Dimensions

6.45 x 1.88 x 9.52 inches
ISBN-10

1594202710
ISBN-13

978-1594202711
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“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, afluent, 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

About the Author

HENRY KISSINGER served as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and has advised many other American presidents on foreign policy. He received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Medal of Liberty, among other awards. He is the author of numerous books on foreign policy and diplomacy and is currently the chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 Chi-nese 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 prin- ciples 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 depar- ture, 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 Chi- nese. 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.2

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; con- temporary 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 prece- dent of the Yellow Emperor, to subdue his rivals and reunify China (and sometimes enlarge its bounds). The famous opening of The Ro- mance 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.”3 Each period of disunity was viewed as an aberration. Each new dynasty reached back to the previous dynasty’s principles of gov- ernance 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 his- tory as the Warring States period (475–221 B.C.). Its European equiva- lent 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 reunit- ing, 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 contend- ing 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 compa- rable 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 influ- ences along the Silk Road but were elsewhere walled off from casual contact by the almost impenetrable Himalayas and the Tibetan Pla- teau. 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 recog- nize the other’s superiority; their solution was to curtail contact for cen- turies 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.5 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 Jap- anese lore.6 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 un- paralleled “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 pos- sessed what would have seemed an unbridgeable technological advan- tage: in the size, sophistication, and number of its vessels, it dwarfed the Spanish Armada (which was still 150 years away).

Historians still debate the actual purpose of these missions. Zheng He was a singular figure in the age of exploration: a Chinese Muslim eunuch conscripted into imperial service as a child, he fits no obvious historical precedent. At each stop on his journeys, he formally pro- claimed the magnificence of China’s new Emperor, bestowed lavish gifts on the rulers he encountered, and invited them to travel in person or send envoys to China. There, they were to acknowledge their place in the Sinocentric world order by performing the ritual “kowtow” to acknowledge the Emperor’s superiority. Yet beyond declaring China’s greatness and issuing invitations to portentous ritual, Zheng He dis- played no territorial ambition. He brought back only gifts, or “tribute”; he claimed no colonies or resources for China beyond the metaphysical bounty of extending the limits of All Under Heaven. At most he can be said to have created favorable conditions for Chinese merchants, through a kind of early exercise of Chinese “soft power.”7
Zheng He’s expeditions stopped abruptly in 1433, coincident with the recurrence of threats along China’s northern land frontier. The next Emperor ordered the fleet dismantled and the records of Zheng He’s voyages destroyed. The expeditions were never repeated. Though Chinese traders continued to ply the routes Zheng He sailed, China’s naval abilities faded—so much so that the Ming rulers’ response to the

subsequent menace of piracy off China’s southeast coast was to attempt a forced migration of the coastal population ten miles inland. China’s naval history was thus a hinge that failed to swing: technically capable of dominance, China retired voluntarily from the field of naval explo- ration just as Western interest was beginning to take hold.
China’s splendid isolation nurtured a particular Chinese self- perception. Chinese elites grew accustomed to the notion that China was unique—not just “a great civilization” among others, but civiliza- tion itself. A British translator wrote in 1850:

An intelligent European, accustomed to reflect on the state of a number of countries enjoying a variety of different advan- tages, and laboring each under peculiar disadvantages, could, by a few well directed questions, and from very little data, form a tolerably correct notion of the state of a people hitherto unknown to him; but it would be a great error to suppose that this is the case with the Chinese. Their exclusion of foreigners and confinement to their own country has, by depriving them of all opportunities of making comparisons, sadly circum- scribed their ideas; they are thus totally unable to free them- selves from the dominion of association, and judge everything by rules of purely Chinese convention.8

China knew, of course, of different societies around its periphery in Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma; but in the Chinese perception, China was considered the center of the world, the “Middle Kingdom,” and other societies were assessed as gradations from it. As the Chinese saw it, a host of lesser states that imbibed Chinese culture and paid tribute to China’s greatness constituted the natural order of the uni- verse. The borders between China and the surrounding peoples were not so much political and territorial demarcations as cultural differen- tiations. The outward radiance of Chinese culture throughout East

Asia led the American political scientist Lucian Pye to comment fa- mously that, in the modern age, China remains a “civilization pretend- ing to be a nation-state.”9
The pretensions underlying this traditional Chinese world order endured well into the modern era. As late as 1863, China’s Emperor (himself a member of a “foreign” Manchu Dynasty that had conquered China two centuries earlier) dispatched a letter informing Abraham Lincoln of China’s commitment to good relations with the United States. The Emperor based his communication on the grandiloquent assurance that, “[h]aving, with reverence, received the commission from Heaven to rule the universe, we regard both the middle empire [China] and the outside countries as constituting one family, without any distinction.”10 When the letter was dispatched, China had already lost two wars with the Western powers, which were busy staking out spheres of interest in Chinese territory. The Emperor seems to have treated these catastrophes as similar to other barbarian invasions that were overcome, in the end, by China’s endurance and superior culture. For most of history, there was, in fact, nothing particularly fanciful about Chinese claims. With each generation, the Han Chinese had expanded from their original base in the Yellow River valley, gradually drawing neighboring societies into various stages of approximation of Chinese patterns. Chinese scientific and technological achievements equaled, and frequently outstripped, those of their Western European,
Indian, and Arab counterparts.11

Not only was the scale of China traditionally far beyond that of the European states in population and in territory; until the Industrial Revolution, China was far richer. United by a vast system of canals connecting the great rivers and population centers, China was for cen- turies the world’s most productive economy and most populous trading area.12 But since it was largely self-sufficient, other regions had only peripheral comprehension of its vastness and its wealth. In fact, China produced a greater share of total world GDP than any Western society

in eighteen of the last twenty centuries. As late as 1820, it produced over 30 percent of world GDP—an amount exceeding the GDP of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States combined.13
Western observers encountering China in the early modern era were stunned by its vitality and material prosperity. Writing in 1736, the French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde summed up the awestruck reactions of Western visitors to China:

The riches peculiar to each province, and the facility of convey- ing merchandise, by means of rivers and canals, have rendered the domestic trade of the empire always very flourishing. . . .
The inland trade of China is so great that the commerce of all Europe is not to be compared therewith; the provinces being like so many kingdoms, which communicate to each other their respective productions.14

Thirty years later, the French political economist François Quesnay went even further:

[N]o one can deny that this state is the most beautiful in the world, the most densely populated, and the most flourishing kingdom known. Such an empire as that of China is equal to what all Europe would be if the latter were united under a single sovereign.15

China traded with foreigners and occasionally adopted ideas and inventions from abroad. But more often the Chinese believed that the most valuable possessions and intellectual achievements were to be found within China. Trade with China was so prized that it was with only partial exaggeration that Chinese elites described it not as ordi- nary economic exchange but as “tribute” to China’s superiority.

Confucianism 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 repres- sion gives way to consensus.
So it was with China. The methods by which it was unified, and periodically overturned and reunified again, were occasionally brutal. Chinese history witnessed its share of sanguinary rebellions and dynas- tic tyrants. Yet China owed its millennial survival far less to the punish- ments meted out by its Emperors than to the community of values fostered among its population and its government of scholar-officials. Not the least exceptional aspect of Chinese culture is that these val- ues were essentially secular in nature. At the time when Buddhism ap- peared in Indian culture stressing contemplation and inner peace, and monotheism was proclaimed by the Jewish—and, later, Christian and Islamic—prophets with an evocation of a life after death, China pro- duced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation. Their universe was created by the Chinese themselves, whose values, even when declared of uni-
versal applicability, were conceived of as Chinese in origin.
The predominant values of Chinese society were derived from the prescriptions of an ancient philosopher known to posterity as Kong Fu-zi (or “Confucius” in the Latinized version). Confucius (551–479 B.C.) lived at the end of the so-called Spring and Autumn period (770– 476 B.C.), a time of political upheaval that led to the brutal struggles of the Warring States period (475–221 B.C.). The ruling House of Zhou was in decline, unable to exert its authority over rebellious princes com- peting for political power. Greed and violence went unchecked. All Under Heaven was again in disarray.

Like Machiavelli, Confucius was an itinerant in his country, hoping to be retained as an advisor to one of the princes then contending for survival. But unlike Machiavelli, Confucius was concerned more with the cultivation of social harmony than with the machinations of power. His themes were the principles of compassionate rule, the performance of correct rituals, and the inculcation of filial piety. Perhaps because he offered his prospective employers no short-term route to wealth or power, Confucius died without achieving his goal: he never found a prince to implement his maxims, and China continued its slide toward political collapse and war.16
But Confucius’s teachings, recorded by his disciples, survived. When the bloodletting ended and China again stood unified, the Han Dy- nasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) adopted Confucian thought as an official state philosophy. Compiled into a central collection of Confucius’s sayings (the Analects) and subsequent books of learned commentary, the Con- fucian canon would evolve into something akin to China’s Bible and its Constitution combined. Expertise in these texts became the central qualification for service in China’s imperial bureaucracy—a priesthood of literary scholar-officials selected by nationwide competitive examina- tions and charged with maintaining harmony in the Emperor’s vast realms.
Confucius’s answer to the chaos of his era was the “Way” of the just and harmonious society, which, he taught, had once been realized before—in a distant Chinese golden age. Mankind’s central spiritual task was to re-create this proper order already on the verge of being lost. Spiritual fulfillment was a task not so much of revelation or lib- eration but patient recovery of forgotten principles of self-restraint. The goal was rectification, not progress.17 Learning was the key to advance- ment in a Confucian society. Thus Confucius taught that

[l]ove of kindness, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by foolishness. Love of knowledge, without a love to learn,

finds itself obscured by loose speculation. Love of hon- esty, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by harmful candour. Love of straightforwardness, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by misdirected judgment. Love of dar- ing, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by insubor- dination. And love for strength of character, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by intractability.18

Confucius preached a hierarchical social creed: the fundamental duty was to “Know thy place.” To its adherents the Confucian order offered the inspiration of service in pursuit of a greater harmony. Un- like the prophets of monotheistic religions, Confucius preached no teleology of history pointing mankind to personal redemption. His philosophy sought the redemption of the state through righteous indi- vidual behavior. Oriented toward this world, his thinking affirmed a code of social conduct, not a roadmap to the afterlife.
At the pinnacle of the Chinese order stood the Emperor, a figure with no parallels in the Western experience. He combined the spiritual as well as the secular claims of the social order. The Chinese Emperor was both a political ruler and a metaphysical concept. In his political role, the Emperor was conceived as mankind’s supreme sovereign—the Emperor of Humanity, standing atop a world political hierarchy that mirrored China’s hierarchical Confucian social structure. Chinese pro- tocol insisted on recognizing his overlordship via the kowtow—the act of complete prostration, with the forehead touching the ground three times on each prostration.
The Emperor’s second, metaphysical, role was his status as the “Son of Heaven,” the symbolic intermediary between Heaven, Earth, and humanity. This role also implied moral obligation on the Em- peror’s part. Through humane conduct, performance of correct rituals, and occasional stern punishments, the Emperor was perceived as the linchpin of the “Great Harmony” of all things great and small. If the

Emperor strayed from the path of virtue, All Under Heaven would fall into chaos. Even natural catastrophes might signify that disharmony had beset the universe. The existing dynasty would be seen to have lost the “Mandate of Heaven” by which it possessed the right to govern: rebellions would break out, and a new dynasty would restore the Great Harmony of the universe.19

Concepts of International Relations: Impartiality or Equality? Just as there are no great cathedrals in China, there are no Blenheim Palaces. Aristocratic political grandees like the Duke of Marlborough, who built Blenheim, did not come into being. Europe entered the mod- ern age a welter of political diversity—independent princes and dukes and counts, cities that governed themselves, the Roman Catholic Church, which claimed an authority outside of state purview, and Prot- estant groups, which aspired to building their own self-governing civil societies. By contrast, when it entered the modern period, China had for well over one thousand years a fully formed imperial bureaucracy recruited by competitive examination, permeating and regulating all aspects of the economy and society.
The Chinese approach to world order was thus vastly different from the system that took hold in the West. The modern Western conception of international relations emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies, when the medieval structure of Europe dissolved into a group of states of approximately equal strength, and the Catholic Church split into various denominations. Balance-of-power diplomacy was less a choice than an inevitability. No state was strong enough to impose its will; no religion retained sufficient authority to sustain universality. The concept of sovereignty and the legal equality of states became the basis of international law and diplomacy.
China, by contrast, was never engaged in sustained contact with

another country on the basis of equality for the simple reason that it never encountered societies of comparable culture or magnitude. That the Chinese Empire should tower over its geographical sphere was taken virtually as a law of nature, an expression of the Mandate of Heaven. For Chinese Emperors, the mandate did not necessarily imply an adversarial relationship with neighboring peoples; preferably it did not. Like the United States, China thought of itself as playing a special role. But it never espoused the American notion of universalism to spread its values around the world. It confined itself to controlling the barbarians immediately at its doorstep. It strove for tributary states like Korea to recognize China’s special status, and in return, it conferred benefits such as trading rights. As for the remote barbarians such as Europeans, about whom they knew little, the Chinese maintained a friendly, if condescending, aloofness. They had little interest in convert- ing them to Chinese ways. The founding Emperor of the Ming Dy- nasty expressed this view in 1372: “Countries of the western ocean are rightly called distant regions. They come [to us] across the seas. And it is difficult for them to calculate the year and month [of arrival]. Re- gardless of their numbers, we treat them [on the principle of] ‘those who come modestly are sent off generously.’”20
The Chinese Emperors felt it was impractical to contemplate influ- encing countries that nature had given the misfortune of locating at such a great distance from China. In the Chinese version of exception- alism, China did not export its ideas but let others come to seek them. Neighboring peoples, the Chinese believed, benefited from contact with China and civilization so long as they acknowledged the suzer- ainty of the Chinese government. Those who did not were barbarian. Subservience to the Emperor and observance of imperial rituals was the core of culture.21 When the empire was strong, this cultural sphere expanded: All Under Heaven was a multinational entity comprising the ethnic Han Chinese majority and numerous non-Han Chinese eth- nic groups.

In official Chinese records, foreign envoys did not come to the im- perial court to engage in negotiations or affairs of state; they “came to be transformed” by the Emperor’s civilizing influence. The Emperor did not hold “summit meetings” with other heads of state; instead, audiences with him represented the “tender cherishing of men from afar,” who brought tribute to recognize his overlordship. When the Chinese court deigned to send envoys abroad, they were not diplomats, but “Heavenly Envoys” from the Celestial Court.
The organization of the Chinese government reflected the hierar- chical approach to world order. China handled ties with tribute-paying states such as Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam through the Ministry of Rituals, implying that diplomacy with these peoples was but one aspect of the larger metaphysical task of administering the Great Harmony. With less Sinicized mounted tribes to the north and west, China came to rely on a “Court of Dependencies,” analogous to a colonial office, whose mission was to invest vassal princes with titles and maintain peace on the frontier.22
Only under the pressure of Western incursions in the nineteenth century did China establish something analogous to a foreign ministry to manage diplomacy as an independent function of government, in 1861 after the defeat in two wars with the Western powers. It was con- sidered a temporary necessity, to be abolished once the immediate crisis subsided. The new ministry was deliberately located in an old and undistinguished building previously used by the Department of Iron Coins, to convey, in the words of the leading Qing Dynasty statesman, Prince Gong, “the hidden meaning that it cannot have a standing equal to that of other traditional government offices, thus preserving the dis- tinction between China and foreign countries.”23
European-style ideas of interstate politics and diplomacy were not unknown in the Chinese experience; rather, they existed as a kind of countertradition taking place within China in times of disunity. But as

if by some unwritten law, these periods of division ended with the re- unification of All Under Heaven, and the reassertion of Chinese centrality by a new dynasty.
In its imperial role, China offered surrounding foreign peoples im- partiality, not equality: it would treat them humanely and compas- sionately in proportion to their attainment of Chinese culture and their observance of rituals connoting submission to China.
What was most remarkable about the Chinese approach to interna- tional affairs was less its monumental formal pretensions than its un- derlying strategic acumen and longevity. For during most of Chinese history, the numerous “lesser” peoples along China’s long and shifting frontiers were often better armed and more mobile than the Chinese. To China’s north and west were seminomadic peoples—the Manchus, Mongols, Uighurs, Tibetans, and eventually the expansionist Russian Empire—whose mounted cavalry could launch raids across its extended frontiers on China’s agricultural heartland with relative impunity. Re- taliatory expeditions faced inhospitable terrain and extended supply lines. To China’s south and east were peoples who, though nominally subordinate in the Chinese cosmology, possessed significant martial traditions and national identities. The most tenacious of them, the Viet- namese, had fiercely resisted Chinese claims of superiority and could claim to have bested China in battle.
China was in no position to conquer all of its neighbors. Its popu- lation consisted mainly of farmers bound to their ancestral plots. Its mandarin elite earned their positions not through displays of martial valor but by way of mastery of the Confucian classics and refined arts such as calligraphy and poetry. Individually, neighboring peoples could pose formidable threats; with any degree of unity, they would be over- whelming. The historian Owen Lattimore wrote, “Barbarian invasion therefore hung over China as a permanent threat Any barbarian
nation that could guard its own rear and flanks against the other

barbarians could set out confidently to invade China.”24 China’s vaunted centrality and material wealth would turn on itself and into an invita- tion for invasion from all sides.
The Great Wall, so prominent in Western iconography of China, was a reflection of this basic vulnerability, though rarely a successful solution to it. Instead, Chinese statesmen relied on a rich array of dip- lomatic and economic instruments to draw potentially hostile foreign- ers into relationships the Chinese could manage. The highest aspiration was less to conquer (though China occasionally mounted major mili- tary campaigns) than to deter invasion and prevent the formation of barbarian coalitions.
Through trade incentives and skillful use of political theater, China coaxed neighboring peoples into observing the norms of Chinese cen- trality while projecting an image of awesome majesty to deter potential invaders from testing China’s strength. Its goal was not to conquer and subjugate the barbarians but to “rule [them] with a loose rein” ( ji mi). For those who would not obey, China would exploit divisions among them, famously “using barbarians to check barbarians” and, when nec- essary, “using barbarians to attack barbarians.”25 For as a Ming Dy- nasty official wrote of the potentially threatening tribes on China’s northeastern frontier:

[I]f the tribes are divided among themselves they [will remain] weak and [it will be] easy to hold them in subjection; if the tribes are separated they shun each other and readily obey. We favor one or other [of their chieftains] and permit them to fight each other. This is a principle of political action which asserts: “Wars between the ‘barbarians’ are auspicious for China.”26

The goal of this system was essentially defensive: to prevent the formation of coalitions on China’s borders. The principles of barbarian management became so ingrained in Chinese official thought that

when the European “barbarians” arrived on China’s shores in force in the nineteenth century, Chinese officials described their challenge with the same phrases used by their dynastic predecessors: they would “use barbarians against barbarians” until they could be soothed and sub- dued. And they applied a traditional strategy to answer the initial Brit- ish attack. They invited other European countries in for the purpose of first stimulating and then manipulating their rivalry.
In pursuit of these aims, the Chinese court was remarkably prag- matic about the means it employed. The Chinese bribed the barbarians, or used Han demographic superiority to dilute them; when defeated, they submitted to them, as in the beginning of the Yuan and Qing Dynasties, as a prelude to Sinicizing them. The Chinese court regularly practiced what in other contexts would be considered appeasement, albeit through an elaborate filter of protocol that allowed the Chinese elites to claim it was an assertion of benevolent superiority. Thus a Han Dynasty minister described the “five baits” with which he pro- posed to manage the mounted Xiongnu tribes to China’s northwestern frontier:

To give them . . . elaborate clothes and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in order to corrupt their mouth; to give them music and women in order to cor- rupt their ears; to provide them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their stomach . . . and, as for those who come to surrender, the emperor [should] show them favor by honoring them with an imperial reception party in which the emperor should personally serve them wine and food so as to corrupt their mind. These are what may be called the five baits.27

In periods of strength, the diplomacy of the Middle Kingdom was an ideological rationalization for imperial power. During periods of

decline, it served to mask weakness and helped China manipulate con- tending forces.
In comparison to more recent regional contenders for power, China was a satisfied empire with limited territorial ambition. As a scholar during the Han Dynasty (A.D. 25–220) put it, “the emperor does not govern the barbarians. Those who come to him will not be rejected, and those who leave will not be pursued.”28 The objective was a compliant, divided periphery, rather than one directly under Chinese control.
The most remarkable expression of China’s fundamental pragma- tism was its reaction to conquerors. When foreign dynasts prevailed in battle, the Chinese bureaucratic elite would offer their services and ap- peal to their conquerors on the premise that so vast and unique a land as they had just overrun could be ruled only by use of Chinese meth- ods, Chinese language, and the existing Chinese bureaucracy. With each generation, the conquerors would find themselves increasingly assimilated into the order they had sought to dominate. Eventually their own home territories—the launching points for their invasions— would come to be regarded as part of China itself. They would find themselves pursuing traditional Chinese national interests, with the project of conquest effectively turned on its head.29

Chinese Realpolitik and Sun Tzu’s Art of War
The Chinese have been shrewd practitioners of Realpolitik and stu- dents of a strategic doctrine distinctly different from the strategy and diplomacy that found favor in the West. A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the har- mony of the universe. There were too many potential enemies for the empire ever to live in total security. If China’s fate was relative security, it also implied relative insecurity—the need to learn the grammar of over a dozen neighboring states with significantly different histories

and aspirations. Rarely did Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash; elaborate multiyear maneuvers were closer to their style. Where the Western tradition prized the de- cisive clash of forces emphasizing feats of heroism, the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.
This contrast is reflected in the respective intellectual games favored by each civilization. China’s most enduring game is wei qi (pronounced roughly “way chee,” and often known in the West by a variation of its Japanese name, go). Wei qi translates as “a game of surrounding pieces”; it implies a concept of strategic encirclement. The board, a grid of nineteen-by-nineteen lines, begins empty. Each player has 180 pieces, or stones, at his disposal, each of equal value with the others. The play- ers take turns placing stones at any point on the board, building up positions of strength while working to encircle and capture the oppo- nent’s stones. Multiple contests take place simultaneously in different regions of the board. The balance of forces shifts incrementally with each move, as the players implement strategic plans and react to each other’s initiatives. At the end of a well-played game, the board is filled by partially interlocking areas of strength. The margin of advantage is often slim, and to the untrained eye, the identity of the winner is not always immediately obvious.30
Chess, on the other hand, is about total victory. The purpose of the game is checkmate, to put the opposing king into a position where he cannot move without being destroyed. The vast majority of games end in total victory achieved by attrition or, more rarely, a dramatic, skillful maneuver. The only other possible outcome is a draw, meaning the abandonment of the hope for victory by both parties.
If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage. In chess, the player always has the capability of the adversary in front of him; all the pieces are always fully deployed.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press; 1st edition (May 17, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 608 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594202710
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594202711
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.08 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.45 x 1.88 x 9.52 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #360,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #210 in International Diplomacy (Books)
- #361 in Asian Politics
- #457 in Chinese History (Books)

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Henry Kissinger

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Henry Kissinger served in the US Army during the Second World War and subsequently held teaching posts in history and government at Harvard University for twenty years. He served as national security advisor and secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and has advised many other American presidents on foreign policy. He received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Medal of Liberty, among other awards. He is the author of numerous books and articles on foreign policy and diplomacy, including most recently On China and World Order. He is currently chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.

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Francis Fung

RELATION OF CHINA DREAM, CHINA REVIVAL, DECRATIC WORLD ORDER AND MULTIPOLAR PEACE AND HARMONY

Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2014

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Dear Dr. Kissenger, following is my humble comment on the renaissance of Confucian constitution for China as inspired by my China dream. Kindly review and comment. Your support and help in propagating the kingly way in China is greatly appreciated.

CONTEMPORARY CONFUCIAN CONSTITUTIONAL RENAISSANCE REVISED ACCORDING TO CHINA DREAM AND HARMONY RENAISSANCE OR
ORDER OF THE HUMANE AUTHORITY WAY ENDOWED WITH SPIRIT OF CHINA DREAM AND HARMONY RENAISANCE
INTRODUCTION
In a paper titled "The Chinese dream can enrich world civilization" the well-known academic Yue Dai Yuan from Peking University posted the following questions to the Chinese nation: "First, what kind of ideological and conceptual schemes do we need to effectively tackle the world's problems? Without fundamental conceptual capabilities, no great ideals can be created nor can a strong culture and society be built. Second, what kind of social system can make a virtuous man willing to live in a society? Our future social designs must surpass both those of the ancients and those of the West. Only in this way will we benefit the people and make a contribution to world civilization. Third, what way of life can make people feel that their lives are meaningful? This requires society to cultivate spiritual values. No society can sustain a sense of purpose merely by achieving ever-higher living standards. It is only by developing a spiritual dimension that life can be enriched".
She answered her questions by looking into ancient Chinese civilization. There are reasons why the Chinese civilization continued 5000 years uninterrupted despite foreign invasions unlike all other ancient civilizations of the world that has ended. There are reasons why the Chines civilization influenced the whole world without hegemony or outright occupation. No other ancient or modern civilization has influenced the Far East as much as China did. According to Yue Dai Yuan, "The history of world civilization has demonstrated that Chinese civilization is a cultural system with powerful resonance. Since ancient times, Chinese culture has put the pursuit of a spiritual and moral life at the center of its concerns. Its harmony principles stand for reconciliation between man and nature, for healing the rift between logic and spirituality, between the pursuit of material wealth and the good life, between natural science and humanism"
" If these intrinsically Chinese cultural genes can be brought up to date and fused with our modern, culturally diverse world, a new Chinese dream that represents a new historical epoch will emerge and benefit all of humanity".
The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) laid out a strategy for building a culturally strong nation on the basis of ideals that, while having their roots in Chinese civilization, are different from both of those of the West and ancient China, and project a new China with new spirit of global significance. This CPC call opens the way for adopting Confucian inspired constitution for long term political reform and rejuvenation of world culture.

CALL FOR CONFUCIAN AND HARMONY RENAISSNCE
Along the above line of call by the 18 National Congress of the Communist Party of China(CPC) and his own outstanding research, the Confucian and Marxist scholar Jiang Qing, the most original, provocative Confucian political thinker, has single handedly led the contemporary debate on Confucian and Harmony Renaissance that led to the discovery of ancient Confucian teaching of the Humane Authority governance system or the Royal Way of governance. This ancient paradigm of superior governance explained why Chinese ancient civilization outlasted all other ancient world civilization and satisfied Prof. Yue Dai Yuan above three questions most expertly. The Humane Authority Governance System upholds that the legitimacy of governance follows the tradition of the Gongyang school of Confucius politics according to the contemporary Confucian and Harmony Renaissance debate. And this new contemporary Confucian teaching encompasses religion, philosophical and political thought, all three parts are integral of Confucius Renaissance.
The key feature of the Way of the Humane Authority lays down the theoretical basis for Confucian Constitutionalism and a Tricameral Parliament according to Jiang Qing's book "A Confucian Constitutional Order, how China's ancient culture can shape its political future". In this book and other contemporary Confucian and Harmony Renaissance debate one can find more details on Humane Authority governance tradition and discovery. According to current worldwide debate, the multifaceted Tricameral nature of Humane Authority governance system offers the promise of future solution for a world with diverse culture surpassing the Western liberal Democracy and Middle Eastern Theocracy. Because the Humane Authority Tricameral Parliament requires three legitimacy for good governance and defined as will of heaven, spirituality; will of earth, tradition and harmony and will of the people. In the Western liberal democracy, the legitimacy of the U.S. government is entirely grounded in the will of the people lacking the legitimacy of will of the tradition, harmony and will of heaven or spiritual qualities. Whereas the Middle East governance is strongly grounded in religion but lacking in the will of the people.
The promise of the Humane Authority Governance for the future diverse world forecasts the importance of Confucian and Harmony Renaissance will far surpass the discovery of democracy during European Renaissance. It is more universal and puts China in a higher moral high ground than liberal democracy as we shall see. The rediscovery of the Humane Authority political thinking in time will totally repudiate Margaret Thatcher's triumphant statement that "China is unlikely to become a superpower because it lacked an independent ideology with global clout" and the U.S. media often echo in chorus, that China will never catchup with the U.S. because it has no original idea of importance to offer to the rest of the word.

WESTERN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY WITHOUT CONCURRENT SUPORT OF HUAMNE AUTHORITY WILL NOT WORK IN CHINA
The deficiencies of Western liberal democracy without the concurrent support of Humane Authority are many, despite the famous tunnel vision statement by Churchill and the prediction by Professor Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University, in his book "The end of history and the last man "he concluded that Western liberal democracy is the answer all political solution for the world. In a New York Times article, titled "A Confucian Constitution for China" by Jiang Qing and Daniel Bell, the authors in response to Hillary Clinton's criticism of China, sum up the deficiency of Western liberal democracy as "Democracy is also flawed in practice. Political choices come down to the desires and interests of the electorate. This leads to two problems. First, the will of the majority may not be moral: it may favor racism, imperialism or fascism. Second, when there is a clash between the short-term interests of the populace and the long-term interests of mankind, as is the case with global warming, the people's short-term interests become the political priority. As a result, democratically elected governments in America and elsewhere are finding it nearly impossible to implement policies that curb energy usage in the interests of humanity and of future generations." Of late, news of U.S. government's shortcomings seems to flood the West's own media. Outstanding examples are: the U.S. 2008 financial crises that dragged down the world economy due to corrupt creation of toxic mortgage investments, to this day none of the U.S. culprit that caused the multi-trillion dollar loss has been sentenced; the U.S. government's gridlock that led to government shut down in 2013; the U.S. sky rocketing deficit spending; years of PEW survey leaves no doubt the alarming low confidence of U.S. public towards the direction the U.S. is heading. The loss of public confidence has a lot to do with the U.S. style election, the lack of performance, and the U.S. politician in order to win reelection tend to be short sighted and engage in negative campaign strategies .

The U.S. Supreme Court which has the ultimate say in law making is concerned only with matters of legality without moral guidance resulting in rulings such as "money is speech freedom" in U.S. political campaign thus allowing voting to be disproportionately dominated by the rich. Liberal democracy tends to favor community self-interest and narrow vision as oppose to measures that are more holistic and may benefit the world and the nation as a whole. The fact that the U.S. is only major developed nation did not sign the Kyoto Ecology Accord is a good example. The U.S. elections for president are more about popularity as opposed to meritocracy, the proven value system in the Far East. The uninformed public often is emotional and whimsical. The election of an alcoholic president who led us to the disastrous Iraq nation building war under false pretenses is unlikely to happen in a constituent representative democracy as practiced in Hong Kong and the Bahai faith.

For more discussions of the inadequacy of the U.S. liberal democracy and why it will not work in a country as large, complex and with 5000 years of history as China please read the revealing book "The Fourth Revolution" by chief editors of "The Economist" magazine John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. The conclusion of the book is that Western Liberal Democracy has a lot to learn from East Asia's political system of selection by meritocracy combined with constituent representative democracy. Their brave and pointed warning is that without East West exchange and mutual learning to improve Western liberal democracy the U.S. is heading to the forth coming political Fourth Revolution. According to the Fourth Revolution, as the longest Civilization State in history, Western liberal democracy will not work in China. For detail analysis of China as a Civilization State please refer to the book "When China Rules the World" by Martin Jacques, the seasoned China observer, and "China Wave" by Zhang Weiwei, who maintained that China needs its own Confucian constitution brand for long term reform and lasting contribution to world civilization and political rejuvenation.

CORRECT AND RELEVANT NAME FOR THE THREE PARLIAMENT HOUSES OF HUMANE AUTHORITY WAY IN CHINA

The names of the three Parliament Houses in China adopted by the contemporary debate must be revised to fit their functionality in China. Confucius himself advised "before one acts one must have correct names." I propose the following reasons for changing the three Humane Authority Way parliament house names.

1) The name House of Heaven is not appropriate for China because it is not necessary to install state religion in Humane Authority Way to work, although in China, ancestor worship is traditional and widespread. It is an element of Confucius religion to remember and respect our common origin and continuity of Chinese civilization. What we need is the whole system of Confucian moral teaching as a noble guide for China. This moral teaching can be substituted by other nations cultural values deemed as more appropriate for each different country. This makes the Humane Authority Way more universal compared to the U.S. worldwide forceful enforcement of its bill of rights and systems of values, which may or may not be universal in other cultures having to deal with other higher rights priority such as the rights of livelihood, medical health and education. I propose that in China the House of Heaven be revised to House of spirituality as suggested by my wife Julia Devendorf, the consummate teacher. The spiritual quality of Confucian teaching is what highly recommended by Professor Yue Dai Yuan, another renowned and dedicated teacher, in the previously cited essay "The Chinese dream can enrich world civilization." I draw upon her inspiration of China dream to rename the House of Heaven as House of Spirituality (HOS). Although in some Islamic or Christian culture they may want to use the names "House of Ala" or "House of God" to be appropriate for their culture and tradition.

2) The name of "House of Earth" should be revised to "House of Tradition and Culture" (HTC) because the Humane Authority Way deals with good governance for a nation. The organic growth of any nation cannot be broken from its tradition and culture as witnessed by the immense chaos and tragedy created by U.S. nation building in Iraq that disrupts Iraqi on going tradition and political stability. In all nations, political change must be continuous otherwise we are inviting chaos and revolution that can be very costly. Most of all, a nation denies its tradition and culture has lost its soul. As a priority I strongly advised China must not look away from its 5000 years of continuous culture but must engage actively in Confucian and harmony renaissance because they are the essence of Chinese ancient culture. I strongly support the CPC dedication to rejuvenate China with Chinese characteristics. Because the continuation of a nation depends on tradition and culture.

3) The "House of Tradition and Culture" (HTC) must be able to exercise its guidance on Humane Authority Way with authority. So it shall be the only house given the veto power in the deliberation of national policy. The three houses are bound to work harmoniously by consensus but all laws including declaration of war, must pass withat least two houses to be adopted. The granting of veto power to the house is that as the executive arm of the government it can avoid gridlock and to stop social disturbance without calling upon the military. In the U.S. the president is granted the veto power. Unfortunately, giving one person the veto power will never win the hearts and minds of any nation. That is why Obama recently faces vigorous objections from the opposition party, the public and even the Supreme Court on legal grounds without needed moral judgment. On the other hand veto power to the "house of tradition and culture", HTC , collectively is very necessary at times of emergency to curb unnecessary and misguided violence. As an aside, the U.S. president is also given the power to wage war, to appoint Supreme Court judges and cabinet ministers. That makes the President effectively a dictator at times. It is most logical to grant those similar powers to the "House of Tradition and Culture", HTC, to maintain national stability with no need to call on the military. That fulfills the teaching of the Humane Authority Way.
4) The House of People's Will should be more specific, because of the afore mentioned short comings of U.S. liberal democracy and U.S. liberal democracy has infected China's uninformed public to look away from its tradition and culture and other developing nations are disturbed by international media controlled by the U.S. and West. Not the least let us not forget the warning of the forth coming Western political Fourth Revolution conclusion in the book "The Fourth Revolution". An appropriate name that exercises the people's will but allows more universality without falling into the trap of Western liberal democracy is constituent democracy. This form of democracy works to accommodate both election and selection by meritocracy. Constituent democracy has been proven in the success of Singapore, Hong Kong and the Bahai Faith. The House of the people's will shall be revised to "House of Constituent Democracy" HCD. China already has the equivalent of the HCD in the form of People's Consultative Congress that advices the present government. All China needs is to formalize it to become the HCD.

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA HAS PROVEN RECORDS TO CONTINUE CHINA'S SUCCESS, CULTURE AND TRADITION.

The CPC has ample track records to prove that it is the most logical entity to head the "House of Tradition and Culture"( HTC)with 51% vote in China. As much as the aforementioned three houses of parliament are bound by the principle of Humane Authority Way to work harmoniously, the power of veto to the "House of Tradition and Culture" is necessary to ensure smooth government function, so it is the most important house among the three pillars of the Humane Authority Way. HTC needs to be the strongest house so it can act as the executive branch of the three houses. The most credible and able of all political parties in China is the CPC, which can head the HTC for the following reasons:

1) CPC is the most natural, logical and able choice to continue the Chinese tradition to take charge of the HTC and to continue running all government functions to assure the most smooth transition to a Humane authority Way nation and society. CPC's current role is already the consensus leader of all the political parties and the 56 minorities of China. Its leadership style is one by constituent democracy in keeping with Humane Authority Way as a shining example of how the House of Constituent Democracy (HCD) can work in China.

2) In 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong as the founder and Chairman the CPC together with other minority political parties founded a unified Chinese People Republic that started the important tradition of the new China. Mao's revolutionary theories not only liberated the whole China under imperialist powers occupation but also for the first time in Chinese history liberated the masses and women as equal citizens. His famous saying on women rights that "Women carry half of the sky" started and was put into action from the early Yan An revolutionary days. His love for the minorities won the hearts and minds of the Tibetan, Xinjiang and Mongolia minorities. That is why Peoples Republic of China was able to unite Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia under Mao but not under the previous Nationalist government. All these monumental achievements make an undeniable modern Chinese epic tradition that will be long lasting and must be preserved for all Chinese history. In recognition of CPC's epic liberation legacy tradition under Chairman Mao's leadership CPC should be given 51% voting rights to head the HTC. Chairman Mao because of the liberation legacy he left for China will always be remembered as the father of modern China despite his mistakes of over enthusiastic for the future of China in his old ages. Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader that launched todays reform and open up era of modern China summed up correctly that he gave Mao 80% for correct leadership and 40% for impatience at old age, resulting in a 60% overall score. The Western media's constant malicious attack on Chairman Mao is very inconsiderate and insensitive to the majority of Chinese people.

3) Chairman Mao during his rule of China also correctly predicted the catching up with U.K. in economy during 1980s ,when China was so poor and behind it was inconceivable by the West that China can catch up with U.K. China's economy eventually did catch up with U.K. in 2000 under Deng Xiaoping. Mao's prediction is just a little early; however it sets the goals for China to continue to surpass the imperialist powers as a laudable tradition.

4) The progress made by China during the last 30 or so years starting with the reform and open up movement launched by Deng Xiaoping is nothing short of miracle. Its modernization broke all kinds of world records. It accomplished the modernization achievements in 30 years while it took the West centuries to accomplish. Coming from its poor agriculture background China today accounts for 90% of the world's poverty reduction by moving 600 million people out of abject poverty. It has higher life expectation and lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. It has more college graduates than the U.S. and soon will have more engineers and scientists working than the U.S. In 2012 its economy caught up with Japan to become the second largest economy in the world. Today it is the largest export country in goods surpassing the U.S., which came from mere millions in export in 1949 to today's trillions. It is expected by World Bank and many experts that China's economy will catch up with the U.S. in real terms by 2020 if not earlier. For more discussion of China's ascendance please refer to the book "China's Mega Trends" by John Nassbitts, "China in 2020" by Hu Angang, " The China Wave" by Zhang Weiwei and "When China Rules the World" by Martin Jacques.

WHAT LIES AHEAD AFTER CHINA IMPLEMENTED THE HUMANE AUTHORITY WAY?

Since the Humane Authority Way originated in ancient China it is natural for China to transition into it. As mentioned in previous section the CPC has also been in practice as political party for the last 60 years for the role as the consensus leader in the most important HTC of Humane Authority Way. According to the eminent scholar Yue Dai Yuen in Introduction, I quote again, "The history of world civilization has demonstrated that Chinese civilization is a cultural system with powerful resonance. Since ancient times, Chinese culture has put the pursuit of a spiritual and moral life at the center of its concerns. Its harmony principles stand for reconciliation between man and nature, for healing the rift between logic and spirituality, between the pursuit of material wealth and the good life, between natural science and humanism." Thus with renaissance of Confucianism and harmony brought about by China Dream and the Humane Authority Way, China will further her modernization in the direction as called for by the 18 National Congress of CPC under the leadership of Xi Jinping.

As a visionary new leader Xi already called for a China dream to rejuvenate the Chinese nation by rediscovery what is best in the past to combine with what is best in the future to bring a better life for all China with improved environment, better social and health services and an responsive governance according to the Humane Authority Way, a truly socialist nation with Chines characteristics. By today's news China already is the country with the biggest production of renewable energy products including solar energy products. Based on the conclusion of all cited references we can expect that China will be most exemplary in its undertakings entrusted by the Chinese people's wisdom. The CPC is the largest political party with 75 million active members, it has 60 years of proven nation building record as mentioned in the last section, it has the most resources among all political parties in the world, it is accustomed to manage large projects as witnessed by the perfect hosting of the 2008 Beijing Olympic with the theme "One world, One dream" and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo with the theme "Better City, Better Life". Both event themes accurately forecast China `s dream and future action.
All predictions expect China to become exemplary in political reform and modernization far exceeding its past achievements. China will become a good model to the multipolar world in all human endeavors beneficial to the world. No matter how strong China becomes it will never become a hegemony power. It will always practice harmony and mutual development as promised by President Xi Jinping in numerous world speeches. It is not in the Chinese gene to practice hegemony. China's culture profoundly influenced the world especially the East in the past but it was always through resonance instead of hegemony in contrast to the U.S. Ever since the end of second World War , as the world's only superpower the U.S. always seek to extend its influence through wars such as the Vietnam war and the Iraq war.

In the future the world will become more multipolar, more democratic and more peaceful because the U.S. will have to share its power position with China and other nations. As liberal democracy comes under more world denial beginning at the home front challenged by the political fourth revolution predicted by the book "The Fourth Revolution." The U.S. will involuntarily concede some of the moral high ground to China and thus become less aggressive and arrogant for the better. The U.S. postured shining light on the hill will become less blinding to the world , that allows a more diverse world culture with hundred flowers blooming in a verdant and beautiful world cultural garden.

Francis C W Fung, Ph.D.
Director General
World Harmony Organization
San Francisco, CA

RELATION OF CHINA DREAM, CHINA REVIVAL, DEMOCRACTIC WORLD ORDER AND MULTIPOLAR PEACE AND HARMONY
Dear editor, kindly publish and distribute following important China dream discussion topics:
Definition:
Harmony Renaissance: Revival of harmony philosophy ancient or modern for multipolar national cultural identity and world peace and harmony. For more details please refer to World Harmony Organization and Francis C W Fung publications. UPDATED 20 CHINA
China Dream: Revival of Chinese nation for national dignity and multipolar world peace and harmony. For more details on China dream please refer to summary of President Xi's statements.
1) China dream, harmony renaissance essential for China and global peace and China revival.
2) China dream and harmony renaissance together means Chinese soft power.
3) China must continue harmony renaissance for survival against U S criticism
4) China must be proactive on harmony renaissance not to be contained by U.S. liberal democracy
5) China dream, resolve south China sea dispute by harmony diplomacy
6) ancient Chinese thought, modern Chinese softpower through harmony renaissance
7) Harmony renaissance is the spirit of China dream, dream with in a dream
8) Harmony renaissance vs liberal democracy thought in 21st century.
9) Rally around harmony renaissance to rebuild a Chinese civilization state
10) Can China survive without harmony renaissance under U.S. democracy assault?
11) Survival of the fittest demands China dream to include harmony renaissance.
12) Without harmony renaissance China dream is empty
13) "China is unlikely to become a superpower because it lacked an independent ideology with global clout" according to Margret Thatcher.
14) China will remain a "small country" without harmony renaissance despite economic growth.
15) China dream means 21st century multipolar world, peace and world harmony.
16) Harmony renaissance is the missing ancient Chinese ideology with global clout Margret Thatcher is referring to.
17) Harmony renaissance is the revival of Chinese cultural value ,ancient and modern.
18) The Chinese dream with harmony renaissance can enrich world civilization.
19) Harmony renaissance adds spiritual life and perspective to China dream.
20) Harmony Renaissance will be a preferred balance to U.S. relentless and powerful push of liberal democracy ideology on other countries in a multipolar world.
21) China dreams mean democratic world order and multipolar world peace and harmony.
22) Sun Yet Sen and Nationalist party empowered the elite, Mao Zedong empowered women and the masses, Deng Xiaoping's reform and open up empowered the economy and rule and order, the final movement in the symphony of Chinese modernization is to empower China's soul and spirit with China dream and harmony renaissance.
Best of Harmony
Francis C W Fung, Ph.D.
Director General
World Harmony Organization

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David M. Nataf

Informative, sweeping

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2011

Verified Purchase

In "On China", former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger paints a broad picture of Chinese history, from the three kingdoms period through to the voyage of British agent McCartney, the Boxer rebellion, the cultural revolution and the current day. The greatest focus is on the opening up of relations and the second half of the text could almost be called "History of Kissinger-China relations", but that does reflect Kissinger's important historical role.

Early in the book, to demonstrate the differences between Chinese and western strategic thinking, Kissinger compares chess to wei qi, known in the west by its Japanese name "Go". Chinese strategic thinking, as stressed in the writings of Sun Tzu, does not stress absolute mastery, which is the name of the game in chess. Chess is a game with a clear victor and a clear winner, where total domination of the other player is the key. It ends when the opposing king meets the grim reaper. By contrast, wei qi is a game of subtle victories, with a lot of close matches where a game has a slight winner, but barely. In addition, the strategic priority in chess is to gain control of territory with the pieces already on board -- everything is explicit. In wei qi, which translates as "game of surrounding pieces", strategy is to be found in the pieces not yet placed on the board. Chess matches begin with a struggle for control of the center of the board and for the elimination of enemy pieces in head-on clashes; Wei Qi players move into empty pieces to mitigate the strategic potential of their adversaries. Quoting Kissinger "Chess produces single-mindedness; wei qi generates strategic flexibility."

This leads into Kissinger's analysis of historical Chinese geopolitical strategy. Tradition in China was to rarely directly militarily engage enemies, instead preferring subterfuge. The strongest army was the army that never needed to fight. The strategy with respect to the barbarians surrounding China was to play "barbarian against barbarian", a narrative Kissinger implied continues through to the present day.

Playing barbarian against barbarian was a strategy that worked for China due to its historical position of strength. Its emperor was ruler of "all under heaven" and trade with other countries was contextualized in terms of tribute to the emperor - an ideology which meant an absence of trade with Japan. This strategy would near its end with increasing trade with the west, particularly Britain. China viewed Britain as a "far barbarian", an offense to Britain. Britain was not allowed an embassy in China as horizontal state to state relations would be an offense to Chinese state ideology. Trade with China was limited to a single port. After the opium wars (opium being the one western import that was immensely successful in the Chinese market), trade with China was expanded to six ports, and embassies were allowed. Not wanting to give advantage to Britain, they gave the same deal to other imperial powers hoping to spur competition. The Chinese court concluded that playing barbarian against barbarian was the wise choice, and that they should play France and America against Britain. However, they had no real means to make that happen. What would follow was a "century of humiliation", including the Boxer rebellion and the occupation of Manchuria, whereby China was consistently subject to the will of foreign powers. There were individuals in the Chinese court pleading change, but conservative forces would consistently win out. Plans for military and technological catch-up to the west were rejected on the basis that "China would no longer be China". At some point, I'd like to better understand why China fell prey to conservatives and oligarchy whereas Japan underwent the Meiji restoration and industrialized? This is not explained by Kissinger. As I read the anecdtoes of the incompetence of 19th century Chinese leadership, I could not help but think of the current American leadership, whose priority is to maintain oligarchy at all costs, even at the expense of the future.

The ongoing humiliation of China, the boxer rebellion, the carving up of Chinese territory by Russia and Japan could only end in the complete eradication of the previous Chinese ruling class, and the rise of Mao Zedong (Kissinger's preferred spelling). Kissinger speaks approvingly of Mao, and all of his major actions except for the cultural revolution are spoken of with praise. All three of China's major wars since Mao: The Korean war, the Sino-Indian war, and the third Vietnam war, are portrayed as Chinese victories. In the Korean war, China shocked the world by entering the conflict, and achieved its goal of creating a Korean buffer state and not having Western troops on its border, of falling victim to the wei qi strategy of encirclement. In the Sino-Indian war, Kissinger spoke approvingly of how Mao was motivated by a previous conflict ~1000 years prior, when China deterred future Indian aggression. It would take over territory and give it back, and give back captured weapons, a successful move of preemptive deterrence, and since that time India has not dared attack China.

Interesting is the third Vietnam war (France and United States made up the first two). As recently as 1973, China and Vietnam had been allied, but the exit of the USA changed geopolitical considerations in the area. Vietnam, a historic Chinese vassal state, wanted to reunite all of Indochina, such an empire of ~100 million people under Ho Chi Minh would challenge regional Chinese hegemony. It signed a mutual defense treaty with Moscow in 1978 or so, and China saw the risk of being encircled, a la wei qi. As such, in a move of aggressive deterrence, it invaded Vietnam, wiped out enemy forces at huge cost to its own forces, and then pulled out. Vietnam no longer had the means to create a united Indochina, and a mockery was made of the Soviet Union, who failed to live up to their treaty obligations. Surprisingly, this obvious victory for China is one that Kissinger states was perceived as a failure by the western media and strategic analysts at the time. Why? Kissinger laments the fact that the best alternative to keep Vietnam out of Cambodia was to align with the "execrable" Pol Pot.

The rise of the Sino-American alliance is presented in the book as being primarily a consequence of Soviet antagonism. China was recruiting the far barbarian (United States) to help fight the near barbarian (Soviet Union). Sino-soviet relations began to sour in the Korean war, where Mao was upset at the lack of Soviet assistance. There were also frequent border clashes in China's north. Over time, Chinese propaganda began referring to the USSR as "revisionist" rather than "communist" or "socialist".

Kissinger does ask why rapprochement did not happen earlier. In the 1950s, it was impossible on the part of the USA because state department thinkers were embroiled in the debate of "who lost China", referring to the nationalist defeat at the hands of the communists. This led to soviet experts taking over the positions of intelligence command. In the 1960s, China was torn apart by the internal instability of the cultural revolution, an impact that Kissinger compares to the effect the second Vietnam war had on the sociology of the USA. Once both countries had settled down, and the issue of Soviet intimidation became to serious to ignore, the case for rapprochement became stronger and stronger. Kissinger also claims that Mao was hedging because he thought the Vietnam protests in the USA could unleash a revolution there -- this sounds hard to believe. It is also claimed he equated the timelines between 1918-1939 and 1945-1968, and thought another convulsion was around the corner.

I didn't pay as much attention in the sections dealing with 80s, 90s and early 2000s as I found them kind of dull. There was some brief discussion about the Chinese shock with respect to the negative world reaction following Tienanmen square, they didn't get why the rest of the planet cared. Had I been more informed I might have been more captivated by the commentary that China is returning to Confucian values, rather than its post-revolutionary Marxist-Maoist ideological structure.

Forwarding to the future, Kissinger asks if China-US relations are under the same framework as Britain-Germany relations of 100 years prior. He brings up the Crowe memorandum of 1907, which concluded that Berlin-London antagonisms were inevitable and independent of behaviors and beliefs of their leaders. Kissinger realizes this may be the case but urges a different future. He points out that whereas European leaders in 1914 were unaware of the destructive potential of their weapons, the same is not true of current leaders and nuclear weapons. He urges the creation of a pacific community, much like the post-war atlantic community, so that Sino-US relations can be moved through the prism of a shared future rather than a competition. I wonder if he really means to endorse global government. It's a nice picture, but it seems all of these politics end with a rosy epilogue showcasing a vision of a possible bright future.

In an interview on TV I saw of Kissinger with respect to this book, he said that the concept of "China's rise", was a mislabel. China, he said, believes it has always been at the apex of civilization, and the period 1800-2000 or so is merely an exception to the historic norm. That is the impression I get from his text, and of Kissinger's view of China.

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Guy Dawnay

When you sup with the devil...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 2, 2012

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It is hard to criticise Henry Kissinger, the scholar, diplomat, strategist and Cold war warrior who has a fair claim to have played a major role in bringing that war to a satisfactory conclusion. In this book, he lays out how the opening to China constructed by himself and Nixon was arranged, negotiated and so skillfully played out to build a de facto US-Chinese alliance that outflanked the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. That this was achieved against a backdrop of Chinese support for the Vietcong and an American polity that appeared hopelessly split by the fall out from the Vietnam war makes his achievement all the more remarkable. Even more remarkable is that this co-operation has endured beyond the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Eastern European communism and survived the outrage over the Tianmen massacre.

Kissinger tells the story of how he, Nixon and successive Presidents managed this difficult relationship by choosing to ignore ideology in favour of an appeal to Realpolitik and geopolitics. This, of course, was Kissinger's metier having previously written a study of how previous statesmen had managed to sideline opposed ideologies and conduct policy according to more practical principles in A World Restored, Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22 (1957). It's a good story too, well told and well paced, full of clear insights on how national interests prevailed over ideological enmity on several occasions. The section on how the US and China co-operated to constrain Vietnamese ambitions in Indochina - to the point where China actually went to war with its recent ally in Hanoi - also gives a new twist to the Domino Theory. Similarly, the construction of compromises over Taiwan show how useful managed and understood ambiguities can be in reaching a modus vivendi. What makes the book greater than a history or memoir is the way in which Kissinger unrolls a practical philosophy of statesmanship and the conduct of foreign policy and attempts to make those lessons clear to other readers. "Leaders cannot choose the options history affords them, even less that they be unambiguous," is just one example of his epigrams. In the concluding chapters of the book, he is also keen to lay out a roadmap for the way ahead and makes a strong case for a partnership between the US and China in managing Asian and indeed world affairs by adopting an attitude that avoids casting the relationship as a zero sum game. Anything Kissinger writes, it must be said, is noted in Beijing as a virtual ex cathedra announcement on US foreign policy.

But there are problems with both the book and the approach and these are evident in the earlier chapters where Kissinger surveys Chinese history and the creation of the Chinese mindset. The chapter on the 19th Century is problematical in that he buys into a rather uncritical acceptance of Chinese claims of victim status at the hands of rapacious European and Asian imperialists. These claims are well known; that the imperialists - especially Britain - introduced opium in order to sap away at Chinese strength as a prelude to partition; that the Qing were quickly reduced to helplessness by the superior technology of the foreigners and forced to hand over sizeable tracts of territory to Russia, grant extraterritoriality in the concessions which allowed the people to be exploited accordingly; that the First World War further accelerated the Chinese disintegration as a prelude to partition by Japan; that the Chinese people were only saved from the debilitating corruption of the Guo Min Dang by the heroic efforts of the Communist Party who emerged as the avowed leaders of a newly liberated and once more united China. Chinese school children are taught this history and one of the few school trips that they go on is to see the ruins of the old imperial Summer Palace burned by the British and French in 1860, the symbol of complete Chinese humiliation; Never Trust a Foreigner is the clear message.

And yet there are huge questions to be asked of this narrative. As Julia Lovell has argued in The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011) Opium was as much a Chinese business as it was British; blaming Colombian drug barons for the British cocaine habit is well, six of one and half a dozen of the other - or more properly Ma Ma Hu Hu. Similarly, it was not so much superior technology as sheer xenophobia in refusing to accept that foreigners should be treated as equals that grated most with the Lao Wai even when, as Robert Bickers points out, the receipts from a properly (British) administered, uncorrupted and constructive Shanghai customs administration was the only reliable revenue stream the Qing possessed. When the Taiping rebellion descended on Nanjing in the 1850s, Chinese business interests did not flee north for succour at Beijing, they turned to the foreigners at Shanghai (who provided a leader in General Gordon for their armies) - and stayed with them until the Japanese occupation, seventy years later. School trips to the new Summer Palace - built with money that should have gone towards the defence of the realm - were not in evidence when I went there.

Similarly, while admitting that Kissinger had little choice but to deal with Mao and no doubt had to make the most of it, he seems to pull his punches on the post-1949 record. To his credit, he does record that 60% of the Chinese population had no more than primary education by 1982 and that the goal of the Chinese drive towards consumerism then consisted of providing each person with a bicycle, a radio, and a watch - but it is still not quite the same as the concurrent British dream of a Golf, Sony Walkman and a Swatch or even 'two cars in the garage and a chicken in every pot'. A certain amount of sublimation would be necessary in anyone forced to sit down with a monster capable of the ironically named 'Great Leap Forward' and 'Cultural Revolution', of dubious sexual appetites and unpleasant personal habits , yet Kissinger seems to genuinely admire the man responsible for the worst atrocities of the 20th Century - even when he is careful to condemn Pol Pot's paltry (by comparison) efforts in this direction.

It is also worth remembering that however necessary Realpolitik may be, it should not allow us to blind us to the facts. Kissinger had no choice but to deal with the Communist party as the government of China, but he does have a choice when it comes to legitimising it. No-one ever voted the Communists into power and it would be a brave person who with hindsight would argue even that in 1949, Mao was the least worst option for a Chinese government. Those who have been dazzled by the science-fiction cityscapes of Shanghai into thinking that it was, perhaps, all worth while after all, need to look beyond to the dwellings that the Chinese people are shovelled into - bad enough to shame a Victorian slum landlord, but signed off happily by the CCP building inspectors - and to the factories where there are no limits to hours or the semblances of dignified working conditions. Chinese leasure time is so constrained that a midweek holiday means working the weekend to make up the time lost - and annual holidays are entirely at the whim of the owners - who are the CCP in many cases. As to the environment in which people live, it may seem sentimental to say so but a child born into the smog of Shanghai or Guangzhou may grow up without ever having seen a star or having heard a bird sing - it really is worse than anything imagined by Rachel Carson in the Silent Spring of 1962.

China is on the rise and, if its state run CCTV English language service is anything to go by, proclaiming itself as the coming power in competition with the 'cucumber painted green', a phrase which Kissinger reports one of China's Generals using to dismiss the USA. We will have to deal with this fact and it is far from clear whether Kissinger's continued advocacy of geopolitical tactics and Realpolitik will serve while China's masters remain unaccountable. For the Communist Party is not the word of the Chinese People made flesh, as plenty of Chinese people would tell you publicly - if they were allowed to.

All in all then, one cannot help but admire Kissinger in any of his guises - scholar, diplomat, historian and Cold War warrior - or indeed this brilliant book. However, one is left wishing that when supping with the Devil he had used a slightly longer spoon - and paid attention a little more to what they were feeding him from the historical pot.

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Minh

On China by Henry Kissinger

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 27, 2023

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Having read the book, I have known about the history of China in 17th century. The history is related to the rise of China.

Athena

very insightful and interesting read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 13, 2023

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Will China tame the western dragon? The world doesn’t need the confrontation but peaceful far sighted and best intentioned leaders.

Serghiou Const

Insightful, engaging, informed, and comprehensive

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 13, 2011

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The book covers a huge historical period. It is true, however, that the first of a total of eighteen chapters plus an epilogue covers a period of millenia. It commences with the unification of China in the 3rd century B.C. and ends in the 19th century, a period of humiliation for China with incursions, depredations, and its semicolonization by the Western powers. The aim of this first chapter is to familiarize the reader with China's Confucian culture, its approach to Diplomacy and its conception of the Art of War. The balance of the book covers the remaining period to the present year. This latter period includes the very period of its humiliation including the notorious opium war, the 22 year civil war which ended with communism prevailing in 1949;the Mao era and the turbulent sixties with the Great Leap Forward which left in its wake 20 million Chinese dead from famine, the Cultural Revolution which nearly ruined China and forced Mao to reverse it. But it also describes the unprecedented growth under Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese leaders that followed him rendering China an Economic Superpower.

The credentials of the author for writing the book are impeccable:the book was written 40 years after the author's first high level mission to China at the behest of president Nixon in 1971 and following 50 additional travels and discussions with four generations of Chinese leaders in the interval.

The book aims, partly drawing on the discussions with Chinese leaders as primary source, to explain the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and international order, and its relationship to the more pragmatic American way.

American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China's exceptionalism is cultural. China does not proselytize;it does not claim that its contemporary institutions are relevant outside China. But it is heir to the Middle kingdom tradition, which formally graded all other states as various levels of tributaries based on their approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms;in other words, a kind of cultural universality.

At the time when Buddhism appeared in Indian culture stressing contemplation and inner peace, and monotheism was proclaimed by the Jewish - and, later, Christian and Islamic - prophets with an evocation of a life after death, China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never created a myth of cosmic creation. Their universe was created by the Chinese themselves, whose values, even when declared of universal applicability, were conceived of as Chinese in origin.

The predominant values of Chinese society were derived from the prescriptions of Confucius (551-479 B.C.). Confucius was concerned with the cultivation of social harmony. His themes were the principles of compassionate rule, the performance of correct rituals, and the inculcation of filial piety. The Confucius canon would evolve into something akin to China's Bible and constitution combined. Its maxim the harmonius society. Confucius preached a hierarchical social order. Oriented toward this world, his thinking affirmed a code of social conduct, not a roadmap to the after-life. At the pinnacle of the Chinese order stood the Emperor, a figure with no parallel in the Western experience. He combined the spiritual as well as the secular claims of the social order. The empire was administered by high literate bureaucracy selected following national examination.

In Diplomacy rarely did the Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash;elaborate multiyear maneuvers were closer to their style. Where Western tradition prized the decisive clash of forces, the Chinese ideal sressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.

China's most enduring game is wei qi. Wei qi translates as 'game of surrounding pieces;it implies a concept of strategic encirclement.

Chess on the other hand, is about total victory. The purpose of the game is checkmate, to put the opposing king into a position where he cannot move without being destroyed.

A similar contrast exists in the case of China's distictive military theory. Chinese thinkers developed stragetic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict. The seminal figure in this tradition is known to history as Sun Tzu, author of the famed treatise 'The Art of War'. What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military. Where Western strategists reflect on the means to assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses the means of building dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome becomes a foregone conclusion.

The author is incisive in describing the personalities of Chinese leaders including Mao's and Zhou's:'The difference between the leaders was reflected in their personalities. Mao dominated any gathering;Zhu suffused it. Mao's passion strove to overwhelm opposition;Zhou's intellect would seek to persuade or outmaneuver it. Mao was sardonic;Zhou penetrating. Mao thought himself as a philosopher;Zhou saw his role as an administrator or negotiator;Mao was eager to accelerate history;Zhou was content to exploit its currents. A saying he often repeated was 'The helmsman must ride the waves.' When they were together there was no question of the hierarchy, not only in the formal sense but in the deepest aspect of Zhou's extraordinary deferential conduct.'

And then we come to Deng. Mao destroyed China and left its rubles as building blocks for ultimate modernization. Deng was the builder. The China of today - with the world's second-largest economy and largest volume of foreign exchange reserves, and with multiple cities boasting skyscrapers taller than the Empire State building - is testimonial to Deng's vision, tenacity, and common sense.

Mao had governed as a traditional emperor of a majestic and awe-inspiring kind. He embodied the myth of the imperial ruler supplying the link between heaven and earth and closer to the divine than the terrestrial. Deng governed in the spirit of another Chinese tradition:basing omnipotence on the ubiquitousness but also the invisibility of the ruler.

Mao had governed by counting on the endurance of the Chinese people to sustain the suffering his personal vision would impose on them. Deng governed by liberating the creativeness of the Chinese people to living above their own vision of the future.

In the epilogue the author outlines possible scenarios in the relationship between USA and China:

The conflict scenario: The United States is more focused on overwhelming military power, China on decisive psychological impact. Sooner or later, one side or the other would miscalculate.

The above scenario is countered by China's demographics and the capability of modern military technology.

Another scenario is that the crucial competition between the United States and China is more likely to be economic and social than military.

The author concludes appropriately the book with a wish:that the United States and China could merge their efforts to build the world.

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arnaldo

A definitive book on China.

Reviewed in Spain on December 3, 2022

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This is a definitive book to understand China. Kissinger writes with souplesse and transmits a series of personal impressions through the contact with Chineses leaders that no one else had. The intermediation of Nixon with Mao opened doors that have been preserved over the years. The fact that he lived extended periods in China helped. For a portrait of Chu Enlai and Jiang Zemin this book is inescapable. Being a patriot Henry realizes that the confrontation postures towards China solve nothing. Being a realist, Kissinger belittles the obstinacy of the idealist left in general with human rights. There is no international politics that is built around and based on the human rights elegy. That make sense in a Western context but little in civilizations that don't yet have the minimum to give comfort and basic food to their populations. A must read.

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