{"id":8958,"date":"2011-05-19T23:05:11","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T23:05:11","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-05-21T03:05:52","modified_gmt":"2011-05-21T03:05:52","slug":"The-Western-politician-who-understands-China-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=8958","title":{"rendered":"The Western politician who understands China best"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chinese and American leaders have been sniping at each other in public again. This month Hillary Clinton, America\u2019s secretary of state, discussing political reform, told the Atlantic magazine that China\u2019s leaders were \u201ctrying to stop history, which is a fool\u2019s errand\u201d. This may have been what provoked Wang Qishan, a Chinese deputy prime minister, to tell a television interviewer that Americans were \u201csimple\u201d (perhaps \u201cinnocent\u201d conveys the Chinese word better), and have trouble understanding China, \u201cbecause it is an ancient civilisation, and we are of the Oriental culture.\u201d Mr Wang will applaud Henry Kissinger\u2019s latest work, a distillation of more than 40 years of involvement with China and its leaders, and an unabashedly Orientalist affirmation of the otherness of the country. The most riveting chapters deal with Mr Kissinger\u2019s leading roles in the Nixon administration as it established links with Mao Zedong\u2019s China.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

The well-known story bears retelling by a central protagonist who made his first, secret trip in July 1971, pleading illness to take a few days out of his official schedule while on a visit to Pakistan. President Richard Nixon\u2019s own trip in 1972, which had been initiated by Mr Kissinger, was indeed a \u201cweek that changed the world\u201d, as China and America ganged up to deter Soviet expansionism. Mr Kissinger\u2019s encounters with the urbane, conciliatory prime minister, Zhou Enlai, and the elliptical, moody Mao\u2014and indeed with every senior Chinese leader since\u2014make gripping reading. Some of Mao\u2019s allusively poetic dialogue, in particular, is beyond parody: \u201cAt the approach of the rain and the wind the swallows are busy.\u201d The panoramic authority with which the Chinese leaders (and their interlocutor) dissect the world is breathtaking. <\/p>\n

But Mr Kissinger is not telling all. He recounts how, in the years beforehand, more than 100 exploratory meetings in Warsaw had made no progress because of Taiwan, which America still recognised as \u201cthe Republic of China\u201d. It is not clear when or why America abandoned its notion that China should commit itself to peaceful reunification as a precondition for a presidential visit. China has never renounced the threat of invasion. Nor does Mr Kissinger explain the thinking behind the communiqu\u00e9 signed after Nixon\u2019s first visit, in which America acknowledged \u201cthat all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.\u201d Large numbers of people in Taiwan have never maintained any such thing. But for China\u2019s leaders, and, it seems Mr Kissinger himself, public opinion anywhere outside the United States is not really a factor when the geopolitical stakes are so high.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

SOURCE<\/a>
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