Reflections on Henry Kissinger, On China (New York. Penguin, 2011)

Tracy B. Strong

University of California, San Diego

Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water,

Yet nothing can better overcome the hard and strong,

For they can neither control nor do away with it.

The soft overcomes the hard,

The yielding overcomes the strong;

Every person knows this,

But no one can practice it.

The leader who attends to the people would control the land and grain;

The leader who attends to the state would control the whole world;

Truth is easily hidden by rhetoric.

Laozi, Dao Deching, 78

"These aren't very good records." Pleading asthma and bad-eyesight, I was standing before the doctor at the last station of a pre-induction draft physical. Like all other potential draftees, I was naked and had just handed the doctor my file folder which had served until then as my only remaining remnant of modesty.  "I know,” I replied. “My records were lost in the revolution.” – “The revolution?” – “Yes.” The doctor had never heard this excuse before.  “Which revolution?”, he asked. I knew I had him.  “The Chinese revolution," I explained and he dutifully wrote on my file:  “Records lost in the Chinese revolution.”  Did it help that I also had in my file a letter from Henry Kissinger saying that I was to work with him in the Defense Policy Seminar at Harvard?  Probably not, as this was May, 1968 and not many knew who Kissinger was. For the record, I was classified 1-S: “to be called only in case of national emergency” thus sparing me the choice of a jail term or exile.

My records of childhood asthma were actually lost in the Chinese Revolution.   I was born in China and lived there until shortly before the Korean War, the last year under Communist rule after liberation.  China has been part of my life since then, most particularly since I went back in 1980 to do research on the life the left-wing journalist and “friend of the Chinese people,[1]” my great-aunt, Anna Louise Strong.

I had co-authored a book on her life that appeared in 1985 and has since been published in Chinese.

At Harvard in the 1960’s I had wound up first TA’ing for Kissinger’s undergraduate International Relations course and then, in 1968, post- Ph.D., I was a  second or third choice for his assistant in the graduate Defense Policy Seminar.[2]  The seminar met in the main conference room at Langdell Hall in the Harvard Law School: a thirty foot mahogany table; the walls hung with life-size portraits of past Deans in academic robes.  I cannot say I co-taught the seminar as the format was each week to have an important guest invited to the class.  It might be Herman Kahn or Alain Enthoven (then the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis) – always someone famous and at the center of power.  The week that Kissinger was negotiating with President-elect Nixon about the position of National Security Advisor he called and told me to take the seminar alone.  I gulped: I had hair down to my shoulders, had been in SDS, and had signed a “we won’t go” statement in relation to the Vietnam War: “Henry, do you know who the guest is this week?  – “No,” came the familiar gravelly voice. –“It’s General Maxwell Taylor. – That’s all right, you take care of it.”  Taylor, I thought, would take one look at me and flip out.  I had the sense to call Jack Ruina at MIT, who had been Director of Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Defense Department, and he was kind enough to provide adequate cover.

I mention this because the recent publication by Kissinger (now eighty-eight years old) of On China interests me in several manners.  First, given my background, has to do with his understanding of China; second, has to do with his understanding of the proper conduct of foreign policy and how that relates to his understanding of China. Last, given the events of the “Sixties,” his understanding of the relation between domestic and international politics seems significant.

The seminar I mentioned above was important in the development of Kissinger’s approach to foreign policy.  Actually it was not the only seminar he ran.  The expenses of all those prominent guests for the Defense Policy Seminar was funded, I believe, by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (Kissinger was close to Nelson Rockefeller, who would urge Nixon to take him on as National Security Advisor).  The audience for the Defense Policy Seminar was four Harvard graduate students and approximately thirty-five up-and coming figures from the State and Defense Departments or occasionally Congress who had flown up for the occasion. Kissinger also ran a second seminar, the summer International Seminar, the directorship of which he had been appointed to by William Yandell (“Wild Bill”) Elliott.  The attendees at the Summer Seminar were similar figures as in the regular year seminar but from Foreign Offices around the world. Using his connections to Rockefeller (which commenced in the early 1950’s when Elliott had brought Kissinger to Washington),[3] Kissinger developed the seminars sufficiently so that attendance at one of these seminars became part of the career path of administrators on the way to success.

There was more here than is generally understood.  Kissinger’s first book is A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822.   He clearly admires Metternich’s diplomatic skill, which sought to bring a European peace (“restore the world”) centered around the development of solidarity (despite differences in their domestic politics) between the various monarchs of Europe.  He is also clearly taken by the character of Castlereagh who, severely criticized in Britain for getting his country too involved with the affairs of the continent, committed suicide in 1822.  Important for my argument here is the fact that Kissinger presents Metternich as able to accomplish his aims not only because of his skill but because he was acquainted with (almost) all the major players in the Foreign Offices of the various European countries.  He was acquainted with them because they all came from the same class, had the same range of social acquaintances, and most likely the same education.  He admires Castlereagh, who was of the same background, for his understanding that for peace to be possible Britain simply had to be deeply involved in the world of international relations. Abstention – isolation – is dangerous.  Kissinger will see much the same in relation to China but so also, he holds is a foreign policy that does not accept important, even radical, differences in domestic structure.

What Kissinger set out to do then with the two seminars was quite consciously to recreate for himself Metternich’s situation.  He refers to Metternich’s situation as “the aristocratic conception of foreign policy” and notes that “[w]hen statesmen belonged to a community transcending national boundaries, there tended to be consensus on the criteria of what constituted a reasonable proposal.”[4]  The world was now larger; the diplomats of different backgrounds: all the greater difficulty for the successful conduct of foreign policy.  By the end of 1968, he had directed each of these seminars for several years and had identified those who were important or about to become so in the key Foreign Offices around the world.  His sense of who was going to be important was often unerring:  when he became National Security advisor he knew the players already and knew something about their respective strengths and weaknesses. The presumption was that foreign policy was or should be run as far as possible by those skilled in foreign policy. 

Kissinger is not only an historian: he has a philosophy of history.  This was first set out in his undergraduate thesis, “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant.” Written in 1950, and over four hundred pages long, the thesis concludes that political choices are always free choices (Kant), that these take place in contexts of rise and fall that have to be understood (Toynbee), and that the likely culmination over time is a fatality (Spengler).[5]  In the end, the lot of the statesman is that of tragedy.

Kissinger’s recreation of the equivalent of the diplomatic milieu of the early nineteenth century is only the starting point.  He is quite clear that successful diplomacy is a skill, and some are better than others at it. He wrote in The World Restored: “Those who achieve greatness have the strength to contemplate chaos, there to find material for fresh creation.”[6] It is for this reason that he notoriously, and imprudently, allowed journalist Oriana Fallaci to get him to compare himself to the lone cowboy leading the wagon train.[7]   

Though his choice of analogy was publicly unfortunate, he does believe in the point he was making.  This said, in this book he is circumspect and rarely criticizes or praises other American diplomats. In one of the few almost negative comments about anyone that he allows himself, Kissinger suggests that it would have been better had Donald Rumsfeld not replaced James Schlesinger in 1975 as Secretary of Defense after Gerald Ford assumed the presidency (274).  At the time, Kissinger also lost his position as National Security Advisor, which went to Brent Scowcroft, although he retained his post as Secretary of State.  About the only other negative comment is about McGeorge Bundy, who is said to hold “typical” American views of China (185). And about the only avoidable mistake he attributes to himself is his having agreed to a “clumsy” summit meeting between President Ford and Brezhnev in 1974 (267), which had the effect of setting back attempts at normalizing diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC.[8]

His admiration for Mao and Zhou Enlai, however, is extensive.  Mao is a “colossus.  Domineering and overwhelming in his influence, ruthless and aloof, poet and warrior, prophet and scourge, he unified China and launched it on a journey that nearly wrecked its civil society.” (91).  One has the sense of being in the presence of a force of nature.  By contrast:  “In some sixty years of public life, I have encountered no more compelling figure than Zhou Enlai.”[9]   Kissinger is not alone in such appreciations.  In almost parallel terms, Anna Louise Strong wrote in her notes to her three post-1959 interviews with Mao:

Nobody on earth is as easy to listen to as Mao, but few people do I find as hard to put down on paper.  I can explain this most easily be a comparison to Zhou Enlai.  Zhou has specialized in interpretation, so that he puts his ideas in foreign terms and only the bare words needs translation.  But Mao, beginning as a peasant of China and becoming a poet, a philosopher, a Marxist, a leader of armies and of government, still specializes, by constant contacts and conscious effort, as the soul and analyzing brain of the Chinese people.  In talking with Mao, one feels a great expanse of vision, a lightning thought that flies easily over the world, a philosophy that accepts life and death and the long travail of mankind through countless ages and countless millions of human beings, a hard-won, costly advance, always imperiled by the accidents of nature and conflicts of men, yet always moving forward in a reach that may conquer the stars.  […] "Humanity is only in its childhood," he once said. […] Because of this he talks easily and lightly about serious things and seriously about trivial things.  But his thought, whether joking or serious is always Chinese.[10]

On China has several aims.  The first is to present an understanding of China and to differentiate its conduct of foreign policy from that prevalent in the West. This understanding is historical. Kissinger places great emphasis on the antiquity, indeed the “eternal” quality (19) of China.  The fundamental metaphor for the Chinese approach to foreign policy is the board game of weiqi – known by its Japanese name “Go” to most Westerners – which, as opposed to seeking the capture of the king in Western chess, plays in multiple regions at the same time, with non-hierarchical pieces, slowly seeking to surround space.  All spaces are interchangeable and nothing corresponds to a central city.[11] 

 The general model was given in Sun Tzu’s Art of War.  Kissinger remarks:  “Where the Western tradition prized the decisive clash of forces emphasizing feats of heroism, the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage (33).”  Whereas Western foreign policy has tended to be “segmented,” the Chinese have a “comprehensive” approach to policy making (171-172). He writes: “The Chinese style of Sun Tzu strategy … knows no single events, only patterns reflecting an overall design (400).”  Kissinger scarcely masks his disdain for and distress at the return of “segmentation” after he left office, a tendency he attributes to the American character.

Importantly then, the Chinese conduct of foreign policy is “non-Clausewitzian,” emphasizing psychological and political elements over the purely military.  Since the (semi-)mythical days of the Yellow Emperor (Gōngsūn Xuānyuán, 2697–2597 BCE, who gave the Chinese writing and silk), China had been an empire: hence concepts like that of the “balance of power” that emerged in the West after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 consequent to the relative equality of power of the various European states simply do not apply. Kissinger notes that China never sought to obtain colonies (i.e. control over non-contingent territory that was not “Chinese”.)  Not for nothing does China call itself Zhōngguó – the Central Kingdom.

Kissinger admires the availability of the past to contemporary Chinese foreign policy makers.  When Mao proposed the 1962 attack on what were Indian incursions in the Himalayas, he drew lessons on how the Chinese should conduct themselves. With full expectation that he would be understood, he adduced a positive example from an event in the Tang dynasty (618-907) in which China had dispatched troops to support an Indian kingdom and a negative one from Timurlane’s sacking of Delhi in 1398.  Kissinger mentions this not simply as admiration of historical cultivation: it is the immediate presence of the past is important to him and it suggests that in foreign policy there is no progress (27) – merely the same problems in different contexts.  Albeit strongly modified by a concern for stability, Kissinger’s view is somewhat like Machiavelli’s for whom all past historical examples were at the same distance,[12] Indeed, it is Mao’s confidence in the  “tenacity of Chinese culture,” Kissinger indicates, that permitted the Chairman to downplay the importance of nuclear weapons, a theme that Mao repeats throughout his career (to the consternation of the Soviets) and proposed for the first time in 1946 during an interview with Anna Louise Strong in Yan’an.[13]

Kissinger’s second aim is to elaborate the relation between international and domestic politics.  He notes with pride that generally since the opening with China in the early 1970’s, “both sides have refused to permit historic legacies or different conceptions of domestic order to interrupt their essentially cooperative relationship (12-13).”  Again and again, Kissinger is at pains to separate geopolitics out from domestic policies and “ideology” (e.g. 196, 201, 235, 300).  Here China had the advantage because “for Mao, conception and execution were identical.  For the United States, the difficulty lay in building a supportive consensus among our public” (251).  Indeed, with Watergate, an “activist” foreign policy “collapsed.”  What is of note here, and Kissinger emphasizes this, is that precisely at the time of the anti-war movement in this country (and all that was connected to it), the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was going on in China. Despite these profound domestic disturbances,  Kissinger views it as a triumph of a correct conduct of foreign policy that during this period of serious domestic troubles in each country, Nixon and Mao nevertheless managed what they did. In Kissinger’s account, it is only when his power was diminished after 1975[14] and after he was out of office that the domestic situation in the United States seriously interfered with the proper conduct of foreign policy. Until then, it had been an unfortunate distraction.

I had been increasingly involved in the anti-war movement.   In 1969, when I had moved to the University of Pittsburgh, I received a Christmas card from Kissinger – a map of the world with a black border around it – in which he had written: “”Heard you led the moratorium in Pittsburgh – must have brought you up wrong.” I did not know whether to be complemented or frightened.

Why did an “activist” foreign policy collapse with Nixon’s resignation?  Kissinger’s answer is that the players no longer had the correct understanding of foreign policy or of China.  As we move to the Ford and Clinton administrations, Kissinger finds that “the American advocates of human rights insisted on values they considered universal… [they] emphasized moral not political goals.”   He goes on to say that “democratic values and human rights are the core of America’s belief in itself.  But like all values they have an absolute character and this challenges the elements of nuance by which foreign policy is generally obliged to operate.” (387-389; see “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy,” 517). He wryly recounts being lectured in 1990 about the danger of projecting values across borders by Jiang Zemin, then General Secretary, “something about which I had written several decades earlier”(in A World Restored). The regret is that contemporary American policy developments have required him to engage in explanations that he has always thought inappropriate to foreign policy.

Kissinger certainly does not think that we have seen “the end of history.”  While he does not explicitly say so, he clearly rejects the notion that “allies and adversaries alike were moving inexorably toward adopting multiparty democracy and open markets (institutions that, in the American view, were inevitably linked). … A new concept had evolved to the effect that the nation-state was declining in importance and the international system would henceforth be based on transnational principles.” (393)  He notes that Warren Christopher’s urging during his confirmation hearings as Secretary of State that the United States should “seek to facilitate the peaceful evolution of China from communism to democracy” was “anathema” to Beijing in that, consciously or not, it made the aim of American foreign policy the overthrow of the Chinese political system. (396)  He, in fact, compares the foreign policy of the present day PRC to that of Bismarck – no small compliment from a man who thought of Bismarck as the greatest diplomat of the nineteenth century.[15]  And he has nothing but disdain for the range of mostly American China scholars who have moved, in a “catch-up” manner, from being “against” China to being more or less “for” China, to thinking that China was on the path to becoming a market economy, to thinking that the Party would collapse after the Tiananmen “incident.”[16]  His emphasis on the antiquity and the “tenacity” of the Chinese implies a continuity no matter which turn the line might take at any particular moment in time.

This separation of foreign policy and domestic politics, of politics and morality, is perhaps too easy, but it does contain a warning. Kissinger thinks that politics should be autonomous – that it is a different realm of human activity from that of morality, or of economics.  (When he asked for criticism from the TA’s about his undergraduate international Relations course, I suggested that he might have mentioned that there had been a depression during the 1930’s). Even more importantly, politics is also a totally different realm that of bureaucracy.  There is a lot of Max Weber in Kissinger:   Weber wrote to his friend and student Roberto Michels in November, 1906, that "indispensability in the economic process means nothing, absolutely nothing in the power position and power chances of the class."[17]  "Bureaucracy," Weber suggests elsewhere, “failed completely whenever it was expected to deal with political problems." The two forms are "inherently alien" to each other.[18]  For Kissinger, this is the central quality of the modern world.  He writes: “A challenge of the modern period is that issues have become so complex that the legal framework is increasingly impenetrable.  The political system issues directives but the execution is left, to an ever larger degree, to bureaucracies separated from both the political process and the public, whose only control is periodic elections, if that. … Fissures open up between the political and bureaucratic classes and between both of these and the general public.” (177-179).  He goes on to suggest, as have some contemporary scholars, that for all of the horrors consequent to the Cultural Revolution, Mao at least possibly raised the central question of the relation between bureaucracy and politics  (178).[19] When I was in China in 1985 with a group of American journalists, in city after city, and especially in the New Economic Zones, we would be welcomed by the city mayor, normally a person in his late 60’s or 70’s, who after a few standard words of greeting, would turn the meeting over to his “associate,” almost always a man some twenty-five to thirty years younger.  The in-between generation, which would have provided continuity, was a casualty of the Cultural Revolution, but precisely that open space permitted new departures, for few had been able to develop petrified bureaucratic self-interests.  Indeed, in 1966, Kissinger had already suggested that precisely because the Chinese leadership “bases its rule on a prestige that transcends bureaucratic authority, it has not given so many hostages to the administrative structure.  … [P]olicy could probably be altered much more dramatically in Communist China than in the more institutionalized Communist countries.”[20]

It is significant that as Kissinger approaches the end of his life he has chosen to punctuate it with this long book on China.  Why so? In part, I suspect it is because he views the China policy he developed (with Nixon) as his most signal achievement.  That achievement consists first, in having avoided war between the USSR and China (something that his book argues was a very real possibility).[21] Here it should be said that Chinese Communist Party distress with the USSR goes back a long ways.  In 1980, Lu Ding Yi (who had been director of propaganda in Yan’an in the 1940’s) told me, still with bitterness, that they had received no significant military aid from the Russians until shortly before victory in 1949 and then very little:  in March, 1948, I remember a few old Soviet “Bob” bombers flying over Nanjing probably to bomb the airport south of the city. Worried both about its pre-eminence in the Communist world and about US atomic weapons,  the USSR had urged the PLA to stop its advances at the Yangtze river and leave the south to Chiang Kai-shek. Secondly it consists in having made stability the aim of the relations between China and the United States.  Stability is, for Kissinger, certainly the central and perhaps the only aim of diplomacy.  “An  international system is stable,” he writes, “ if the level of reassurance required by its members is achievable by diplomacy.  When diplomacy no longer functions, relationships become increasingly concentrated on military strategy – first in the form of arms races, then as maneuvering for strategic advantage even at the risk of confrontation, and finally, in war itself.” (439)  One must therefore as far as possible developments which make stability impossible: he adduces the nationalist unification of Germany in 1871 and cites Disraeli to the effect that the unification of Germany was an event more significant than the French Revolution. (440)  What is clear in this book is that at least in relation to China, as a foreign policy aim regime change cannot be the source of peace and stability. (443)

What might the future hold?  It is certainly now the case, as CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corporation) Chairman Fu Chengyu said in an interview in 2006 in the Financial Times: “China’s goal is not to overturn the world order but instead to participate in this world order, and to reinforce it and even profit from it.”  There are, however, as Kissinger notes, forces in both countries that foresee “inevitable” conflict. A third point in writing the book is thus to urge China to stay the course it has been following since 1971:  Kissinger certainly knows that his book will be read in China – and taken seriously.  For Kissinger, any given political event is in principle evitable  as long as one has adequate skill and understands politics as autonomous, for if Kissinger is quietly descended from Max Weber, he is also even more quietly a cousin to Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.   The statesman operates best without the constraint of pre-existing rules, in a state that is always exceptional.  He is in essence a revolutionary, the term Kissinger used to describe Bismarck.  Not for nothing is his third book entitled The Necessity for Choice.  Choices take place fatally in the context of a tragic vision.  He told Oriana Fallaci: “In a certain sense … I am a fatalist.  I believe in destiny.  I am convinced, of course, that you have to  fight to reach a goal. But I also believe that there are limits to the struggle a man can put up to reach his goal.’’[22]

Kissinger, I believe, thinks of the world in these terms: fatalism and tragedy.  The main enemy of the tragic hero is the deadened and dangerous routine of bureaucracy: again the picture is like Max Weber.  And given the stranglehold of the bureaucracy and the clasa discutidora (Carl Schmitt’s phrase) that presently stifles action in Washington, there is a question if there be not some truth in this vision.  In this sense, he can claim that while he might not have originally been in favor of the war in Vietnam (he admitted to Fallaci that it was “useless”) but still found it necessary to order the bombing of Cambodia in order to make possible a “staged withdrawal … to give the people of the region and opportunity to shape their own future and to sustain the world’s faith in America’s role.” (192)  The question that is begged here – and perhaps too easily derived from his tragic fatalism – is if there might not have been other, less destructive, ways of achieving this goal.  (I recognize the easy emptiness of my question: nonetheless to justify a policy on post hoc ergo propter hoc basis is like saying that the elimination of the kulak class was necessary to defeat the Nazis.)

The tragic-fatalist stance in relation to America is made all the easier by the fact that Kissinger seems basically to have accepted a simple if not simplistic  Hartzian consensus view of America.  Ours is a “society without fundamental social schisms (at least until the race problem became visible) and the product of an environment in which most recognized problems have proved soluble.”[23]  Thus, as Tocqueville had noted long ago, American politics tend to be dominated by businessmen and lawyers, two groups, avers Kissinger, particularly unsuited for the conduct of international relations.  Against this, I might note, even if I cannot be pursue it in detail, that one should rather read American history as the conflict between two opposing visions of the polity and that if one does so, at least some of those who protested against the Vietnam War, whatever their exaggerations and naivetés, were not simply “brought up wrong,” but were drawing on a radical tradition of regicides, revolutionaries and reformers.[24]

And, finally, the insistence on the recognition of difference sometimes keeps Kissinger from extending his thought in directions that might be a bit less Realpolitik.  He is, I think, right about the dangers of claims to the universalism of a given set of values.  (This is not to say that there are no universal values, but it is to say that the claiming of them is a political act and not a moral one).  Hence one should be careful of ascribing to developments in other countries (here China) the qualities as those one wishes to claim for oneself.  Such lessons are almost always too easy drawn: it is, for instance, worth noting that while the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square appeared to make appeal to “American type rights,” they did so mostly on an instrumental basis, in order to build up Chinese national pride.  Wuer Kaixi, a central leader of the demonstration, called upon the spirit of the May Fourth movement: “We only have one goal: the modernization of China.” Not insignificantly, the demonstrators helped the police arrest three men who had thrown ink on the portrait of Mao over the Gate of Heavenly Peace – all were sentenced to long prison terms. Fang Lizhi, the dissident physicist who caused a major diplomatic incident when he received asylum in the American Embassy in Beijing after the Tiananmen crackdown, was not a participant in the events of the square.[25] My point is that one might avoid claiming that human rights are universal as the basis of policy and look instead to what can be learned and taken over (much, perhaps, as the Chinese have historically assimilated their opponents). The point here is that it is only by foregoing ultimate justifications that one can conduct foreign policy and possibly build rights on and from different cultural resources.  For instance, consider for example the value of filial piety. (I steal this example, as I do the one above, from Daniel Bell, who now teaches political philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing).  East Asian societies influenced by Confucianism (of central importance in Kissinger’s analysis) strongly emphasize the idea that children have a duty to care for elderly parents, a duty to be forsaken only in the most exceptional circumstances. In political practice, this means that parents have a right to be cared for by their children. There are disputes about the best means of implementing this right -- Japan and Singapore have laws that make it mandatory to provide financial support for elderly parents, whereas Hong Kong uses more indirect methods such as tax breaks and housing benefits -- -but the assumption that there is a pressing need to secure this right is not a matter of political controversy in East Asia. During the course of cross-cultural dialogue, it is not inconceivable that non-East Asian states may also come to regard the right to be cared for by adult children as fundamental. They will not do so, however, on the basis of Confucianism.  For example, Western participants may come to question the assumption that relatively fit elderly parents can be committed to nursing homes. More pragmatically, the promotion of filial piety can be seen as advantageous in an age when Social Security payments are no longer economically sustainable at their current level. If these arguments become sufficiently persuasive to non-Asian participants, perhaps all parties can agree that the right to be cared for by adult children should be included in the unforced consensus on rights that human beings have, albeit for different reasons.  All universalist theories of rights exhibit what one might call a “parochial universalism.” Bell calls this China’s ‘soft power,“ appropriating Joe Nye’s catch-phrase.[26]  I note that China has – and we will increasingly recognize this in the future – “soft power” also. China is becoming an example to the world: domestically, it is aggressively pursuing green energy policies to a far greater extent that is the United States. It has managed to build an inter-city high-speed rail system and highway system (larger than the US Interstate) in the last decade and a half. It appears able to decide to do something and then do it.  Internationally, it is providing extensive development aid to portions the Third World  (especially to those hostile to the United States) without accompanying it with the domestic political and economic reform demands often attached by the West.   If you are a leader in a sub-Saharan mineral rich African country and have a choice between aid from China and from the United States, the choice appears increasingly obvious. Dealing with the exemplar that China provides by these sorts of policies should be at the center of American foreign policy in the decades to come.

We are told that that Kissinger mentioned to President Nixon that Zhou Enlai was a student of French history.  Apparently when Nixon and Zhou were walking around the ponds in Zhongnanhai, the compound just west of the Forbiddden City that houses the top Chinese leadership, Nixon asked Zhou what he thought the impact of the French Revolution on Western civilization to be.  After short reflection, Zhou is said to have answered: “It’s too soon to tell.”  When I was in China in 1985 with a group of American journalists who had covered China in the 1930’s and 1940’s, we had an audience with Deng Xiaoping.  Unprompted, Deng said that China’s economic development was such that if it continued into 2020, there would no longer be a rational reason for warfare.  On China is most likely the last major publication we shall have from Kissinger.   It is an effort to shape the practice of American foreign policy towards China over the next decades, decades in which he thinks America will have to deal with a new kind of bipolarity.  Is Kissinger right? Will his practices, if followed, give stability? Will – should – the United States aim (only) at stability?  One can only give Zhou Enlai’s answer.

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[1] The Chinese have a hierarchy for foreigners who are deemed to have specially helped the Chinese cause: ”friend,” “old friend,” “honored old friend,” – I believe that only four Americans are “Friends of the Chinese People”: Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, and Henry Kissinger.

[2] There is a brief description of this seminar in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2005), 99

[3] As a piece of disciplinary gossip, I am told that Elliott first offered the post in Washington (where he was on the National Security Council) to Sheldon Wolin, who became a political theorist of great importance to the American Left. He turned it down.

[4] Henry A. Kissinger, “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy,” Daedalus 95.2 (Spring, 1966), 514.

[5] See my discussion in "Oswald Spengler:  Ontologie, Kritik und Enttäuschung" in Peter Ludz, ed., Spengler Heute (München. Beck Verlag, 1980). See also the excellent Thomas J. Noer, “Henry Kissinger’s Philosophy of History,” Modern Age (Spring 1975), 180-189. On his fatalism, see his interview with Oriana Fallaci, “Henry Kissinger,” Interview with History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976),42.

[6] Kissinger, A World Restored, 213.  One wonders if his sentence echoes Nietzsche’s “one must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

[7] Fallaci, op. cit,, 41.

[8] See The Kissinger Transcripts edited by William Burr (New York: New Press, 1998), 274-277, 372.

[9] Though one of the American journalists at a 1985 return trip to China, sponsored by the China News Association, remarked to the group (of which I was a part) that the “day [he] became a man was when he realized the Zhou had lied to hm.”

[10] Tracy B. Strong and Helene Keyssar, “Anna Louise Strong: Three Interviews with Chairman Mao Zedong,” The China Quarterly, 103 (Sept. 1985), 497-498.  André Malraux, Antimémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1967) gives much the same sense of Mao as a world-historical figure.

[11] This was an argument first made in 1969 by Scott Boorman, The Protracted Game: A weiqi Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy (New York. Oxford UP, 1969) and was well-known to those studying guerilla warfare.  Kissinger knew of the Boorman book but cites a US Army manual from 2004. Mao mentions weiqi as his model in “Problems of Strategy in Guerilla War against Japan,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung (Peking. Foreign Languages Pres, 1967), 102.

[12] In his interview with Oriana Fallaci, he claims intellectual affinity with Spinoza and Kant (Fallaci, op. cit., 40)  and once told me that Nietzsche was one of the few philosophers for whom he had respect.

[13]  Mao Tse-Tung, “Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong,” Selected Works, volume 4, 100

[14] The Kissinger Transcripts, 374-375 and the material cited by Burr on 413, n 13.

[15] All of the elements of Kissinger’s world-view can be found in his “The  White  Revolutionary:  Reflections  on  Bismarck,”  Daedalus,  97  (Summer, 1968),  888-924.  It is worth noting that muchof the argument in that essay reflects the analysis given in Max Weber’s magisterial  “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland” (1918) in Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen. Mohr, 1967), 126–336, translated in Speirs, ed.Weber: Political  Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1980) and in Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

[16] The term is Chinese;  however, they refer to the “Pearl Harbor incident.”

[17] Cited from Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen. Mohr, 1959, second edition, 1974), 97; see Lawrence Scaff, "Max Weber and Robert Michels," American Journal of Sociology, 86.6, (1981) 1269-1286, esp. 1281-1283.

[18]  Max Weber, “Parliament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland," Gesammelte Politische Schriften 329n1, 351;  translated as “Parliament and Governance in a Reconstructed Germany,“ Economy and Society,1399, 1417.

[19] Kissinger cites a Chinese text of Hu Angang, an economics professor at Tsinghua University,  available in English translation at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XI-43.pdf.

[20] Kissinger, “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy,” 521

[21] See On China, chapter six.  

[22] Fallaci, op. cit., 42,

[23] Kissinger, “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy.” 514 (also cited without page reference) in  Noer, 186

[24] I take the predicates from the blurb the author Robert Stone used to describe our book on Anna Louise Strong (back cover).

[25] Fang was a prominent dissident advocating something like “American-style” rights.  He was invited to a state diner in Beijing during George H.W. Bush’s visit in 198, apparently on the initiative of the US Embassy but without the prior knowledge of the White House.  The Chinese took great offence and barred his car from the Embassy. Kissinger considers the issue and his negotiation (now as a private citizen) of the resolution on 367-373 (it took eight months).

[26] Daniel Bell, “Developing China’s Soft Power,” Op-Ed, International Herald Tribune, September 23, 2010.  When I gave a talk to the School of International Relations in Beijing in September, 2010, the first question was about “soft power.”