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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