On China Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  CHAPTER 1 - The Singularity of China

  CHAPTER 2 - The Kowtow Question and the Opium War

  CHAPTER 3 - From Preeminence to Decline

  CHAPTER 4 - Mao’s Continuous Revolution

  CHAPTER 5 - Triangular Diplomacy and the Korean War

  CHAPTER 6 - China Confronts Both Superpowers

  CHAPTER 7 - A Decade of Crises

  CHAPTER 8 - The Road to Reconciliation

  CHAPTER 9 - Resumption of Relations: First Encounters with Mao and Zhou

  CHAPTER 10 - The Quasi-Alliance: Conversations with Mao

  CHAPTER 11 - The End of the Mao Era

  CHAPTER 12 - The Indestructible Deng

  CHAPTER 13 - “Touching the Tiger’s Buttocks” The Third Vietnam War

  CHAPTER 14 - Reagan and the Advent of Normalcy

  CHAPTER 15 - Tiananmen

  CHAPTER 16 - What Kind of Reform? Deng’s Southern Tour

  CHAPTER 17 - A Roller Coaster Ride Toward Another Reconciliation The Jiang ...

  CHAPTER 18 - The New Millennium

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  Index

  ALSO BY HENRY KISSINGER

  A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh,

  and the Problems of Peace: 1812–22

  Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy

  The Necessity for Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy

  The Troubled Partnership: A Reappraisal of the Atlantic Alliance

  American Foreign Policy

  White House Years

  Years of Upheaval

  Diplomacy

  Years of Renewal

  Does America Need a Foreign Policy?

  Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century

  Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War

  Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group • Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2011 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Henry A. Kissinger, 2011 All rights reserved

  Excerpts from “Making of Plans,” “Strategic Offensive,” and “Attack by Fire” from The Art of War by Sun-Tzu, translated by John Minford. Copyright © John Minford, 2002. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kissinger, Henry, 1923–

  On China / Henry Kissinger.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44535-8

  1. China—Foreign relations—20th century. 2. China—Foreign relations—21st century.

  3. World politics—21st century. I. Title.

  DS775.8. K47 2011

  327.51—dc22

  2011009265

  MAP BY JEFFREY L. WARD

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  TO ANNETTE AND OSCAR DE LA RENTA

  CHINA AND ITS NEIGHBORS

  Preface

  FORTY YEARS AGO almost to the day, President Richard Nixon did me the honor of sending me to Beijing to reestablish contact with a country central to the history of Asia with which America had had no high-level contact for over twenty years. The American motive for the opening was to put before our people a vision of peace transcending the travail of the Vietnam War and the ominous vistas of the Cold War. China, though technically an ally of the Soviet Union, was in quest of maneuvering room to resist a threatened attack from Moscow.

  In the interval I have been to China more than fifty times. Like many visitors over the centuries, I have come to admire the Chinese people, their endurance, their subtlety, their family sense, and the culture they represent. At the same time, all my life I have reflected on the building of peace, largely from an American perspective. I have had the good luck of being able to pursue these two strands of thinking simultaneously as a senior official, as a carrier of messages, and as a scholar.

  This book is an effort, based in part on conversations with Chinese leaders, to explain the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and international order, and its relationship to the more pragmatic, case-by-case American approach. Different histories and cultures produce occasionally divergent conclusions. I do not always agree with the Chinese perspective, nor will every reader. But it is necessary to understand it, since China will play such a big role in the world that is emerging in the twenty-first century.

  Since my first visit, China has become an economic superpower and a major factor in shaping the global political order. The United States has prevailed in the Cold War. The relationship between China and the United States has become a central element in the quest for world peace and global well-being.

  Eight American presidents and four generations of Chinese leaders have managed this delicate relationship in an astonishingly consistent manner, considering the difference in starting points. Both sides have refused to permit historic legacies or different conceptions of domestic order to interrupt their essentially cooperative relationship.

  It has been a complex journey, for both societies believe they represent unique values. 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 the heir of 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.

  A primary focus of this book is the interaction b
etween Chinese and American leaders since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. Both in and out of government, I have kept records of my conversations with four generations of Chinese leaders and have drawn on them as a primary source in writing this book.

  This book could not have been written without the dedicated and able assistance of associates and of friends who permitted me to impose on them for help.

  Schuyler Schouten was indispensable. He came to my attention eight years ago when Professor John Gaddis of Yale recommended him as one of his ablest students. When I started this project I asked him to take a two-month leave from his law firm. He did so, and in the process became so involved that he saw the effort through to its end a year later. Schuyler undertook much of the basic research. He helped with the translation of Chinese texts and even more with penetrating the implications of some of the subtler ones. He was indefatigable during the editing and proofreading phase. I have never had a better research associate and very rarely one as good.

  It has been my good fortune to have Stephanie Junger-Moat work with me for a decade across the gamut of my activities. She was what in baseball they would call the essential utility player. She did research and some editing, and was the principal liaison with the publisher. She checked all the endnotes. She helped coordinate the typing and never hesitated to pitch in when deadlines approached. Her crucial contribution was reinforced by her charm and diplomatic skill.

  Harry Evans edited White House Years thirty years ago. He permitted me to impose on our friendship to go over the entire manuscript. His editorial and structural suggestions were numerous and wise.

  Theresa Amantea and Jody Williams typed the manuscript many times over and spent many evenings and weekends helping meet deadlines. Their good cheer, efficiency, and sharp eye for detail were vital.

  Stapleton Roy, former ambassador to China and distinguished China scholar; Winston Lord, my associate during the opening to China and later ambassador to China; and Dick Viets, my literary executor, read several chapters and made insightful comments. Jon Vanden Heuvel provided helpful research on several chapters.

  Publishing with The Penguin Press was a happy experience. Ann Godoff was always available, ever insightful, never harassing, and fun to be with. Bruce Giffords, Noirin Lucas, and Tory Klose expertly shepherded the book through the editorial production process. Fred Chase copyedited the manuscript with care and efficiency. Laura Stickney was the book’s principal editor. Young enough to be my granddaughter, she was in no way intimidated by the author. She overcame her reservations about my political views sufficiently that I came to look forward to her occasionally acerbic and always incisive comments in the margins of the manuscript. She was indefatigable, perceptive, and vastly helpful.

  To all these people I am immensely grateful.

  The governmental papers on which I drew have all been declassified for some time. I would like to thank in particular the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Cold War International History Project for permission to use extended excerpts from their archive of declassified Russian and Chinese documents. The Carter Library helpfully made available many of the transcripts of meetings with Chinese leaders during the Carter presidency, and the Reagan Library provided numerous useful documents from their files.

  Needless to say, the shortcomings of the book are my own.

  As always over half a century, my wife, Nancy, provided her staunch moral and intellectual support amidst the solitude authors (or at least this author) generate around themselves when writing. She read most of the chapters and made innumerable important suggestions.

  I have dedicated On China to Annette and Oscar de la Renta. I started the book in their home in Punta Cana and finished it there. Their hospitality has been only one facet of a friendship that has added joy and depth to my life.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  New York, January 2011

  Note on Chinese Spellings

  THIS BOOK MAKES frequent reference to Chinese names and terms. Well-known alternative spellings exist for many Chinese words, based on two particularly widespread methods of transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet: the Wade-Giles method, prevalent through much of the world until the 1980s, and the pinyin method, adopted officially in the People’s Republic of China in 1979 and increasingly common in Western and other Asian publications thereafter.

  For the most part, this book employs pinyin spellings. For example, the pinyin spelling “Deng Xiaoping” is used rather than the Wade-Giles spelling “Teng H’siao-ping.” Where other, non-pinyin spellings remain significantly more familiar, they are retained for the reader’s convenience. For example, for the name of the ancient military theorist “Sun Tzu,” the traditional spelling is used, rather than the newer pinyin spelling “Sunzi.”

  Occasionally, in the interest of achieving consistency throughout the book’s text, quoted references to names originally listed in the Wade-Giles format have been rendered in their pinyin spellings. Such changes are further noted in the endnotes. In each case, the underlying Chinese word remains the same; the difference is in the method of rendering the word in the Roman alphabet.

  Prologue

  IN OCTOBER 1962, China’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong summoned his top military and political commanders to meet with him in Beijing. Two thousand miles to the west, in the forbidding and sparsely populated terrain of the Himalayas, Chinese and Indian troops were locked in a standoff over the two countries’ disputed border. The dispute arose over different versions of history: India claimed the frontier demarcated during British rule, China the limits of imperial China. India had deployed its outposts to the edge of its conception of the border; China had surrounded the Indian positions. Attempts to negotiate a territorial settlement had foundered.

  Mao had decided to break the stalemate. He reached far back into the classical Chinese tradition that he was otherwise in the process of dismantling. China and India, Mao told his commanders, had previously fought “one and a half” wars. Beijing could draw operational lessons from each. The first war had occurred over 1,300 years earlier, during the Tang Dynasty (618–907), when China dispatched troops to support an Indian kingdom against an illegitimate and aggressive rival. After China’s intervention, the two countries had enjoyed centuries of flourishing religious and economic exchange. The lesson learned from the ancient campaign, as Mao described it, was that China and India were not doomed to perpetual enmity. They could enjoy a long period of peace again, but to do so, China had to use force to “knock” India back “to the negotiating table.” The “half war,” in Mao’s mind, had taken place seven hundred years later, when the Mongol ruler Timurlane sacked Delhi. (Mao reasoned that since Mongolia and China were then part of the same political entity, this was a “half” Sino-Indian war.) Timurlane had won a significant victory, but once in India his army had killed over 100,000 prisoners. This time, Mao enjoined his Chinese forces to be “restrained and principled.”1

  No one in Mao’s audience—the Communist Party leadership of a revolutionary “New China” proclaiming its intent to remake the international order and abolish China’s own feudal past—seems to have questioned the relevance of these ancient precedents to China’s current strategic imperatives. Planning for an attack continued on the basis of the principles Mao had outlined. Weeks later the offensive proceeded much as he described: China executed a sudden, devastating blow on the Indian positions and then retreated to the previous line of control, even going so far as to return the captured Indian heavy weaponry.

  In no other country is it conceivable that a modern leader would initiate a major national undertaking by invoking strategic principles from a millennium-old event—nor that he could confidently expect his colleagues to understand the significance of his allusions. Yet China is singular. No other country can claim so long a continuous civilization, or such an intimate link to its ancient past and classical principles of strategy and statesmanship.

 
Other societies, the United States included, have claimed universal applicability for their values and institutions. Still, none equals China in persisting—and persuading its neighbors to acquiesce—in such an elevated conception of its world role for so long, and in the face of so many historical vicissitudes. From the emergence of China as a unified state in the third century B.C. until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, China stood at the center of an East Asian international system of remarkable durability. The Chinese Emperor was conceived of (and recognized by most neighboring states) as the pinnacle of a universal political hierarchy, with all other states’ rulers theoretically serving as vassals. Chinese language, culture, and political institutions were the hallmarks of civilization, such that even regional rivals and foreign conquerors adopted them to varying degrees as a sign of their own legitimacy (often as a first step to being subsumed within China).

  The traditional cosmology endured despite catastrophes and centuries-long periods of political decay. Even when China was weak or divided, its centrality remained the touchstone of regional legitimacy; aspirants, both Chinese and foreign, vied to unify or conquer it, then ruled from the Chinese capital without challenging the basic premise that it was the center of the universe. While other countries were named after ethnic groups or geographical landmarks, China called itself zhongguo—the “Middle Kingdom” or the “Central Country.” 2 Any attempt to understand China’s twentieth-century diplomacy or its twenty-first-century world role must begin—even at the cost of some potential oversimplification—with a basic appreciation of the traditional context.