Patrick Smith: Kissinger’s Skilled Eye on China, Then and Now

TFT Columnist Patrick Smith spent nearly 30  years in Asia,  covering the Far East for the International Herald Tribune, The New Yorker, and other publications. His latest book, Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post–Western World, was published by Pantheon last year.    

Nearing age 90 now, Henry Kissinger has set down in a new book his extraordinary challenge four decades ago, when he brought together Mao Tse-tung, the giant of the peasant revolution, with the dedicated anti-Communist, Richard M. Nixon.  On China (Penguin Press, $36), whatever else it purports to be, is at its core the former secretary of state’s reflections on the most imaginative and elegantly fashioned diplomatic initiative of his career – and of his time.

Kissinger explains the China he found when he began the spadework for Nixon’s visit in February 1972. This was an important project, for the past is ever-present in  the Chinese consciousness. The focus, as might be expected, is on the different styles and methods of leadership and diplomacy between East and West: The Western preferred frontal assault and total victory; China brought two millennia of practice in indirection, patient encirclement, and carefully attenuated compromise. “No other country can claim so long a continuous civilization,” Kissinger writes, “or such an intimate link to its ancient past and classical principles of strategy and statesmanship.”

The historical line Kissinger traces after establishing what he calls China’s “singularity” runs through the 18th and 19th century arrival of Western legations, the Opium Wars of the early 1840s, the decline, confusion, and eventual collapse in 1911 of the Qing (the last imperial dynasty), and the subsequent turmoil that opened the way to the Chinese Communist Party and eventually Mao’s arrival in Beijing in 1949. After that, the book reveals itself ever more as a preamble to Kissinger’s entrance in Mao’s later years...