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Saadia B.

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On China

by Henry Kissinger

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Saadia B. said: " Through many millennia of Chinese civilization, China was never obliged to deal with other countries or civilizations that were comparable to it in scale and sophistication. Though China and Japan shared a number of core cultural and political instit Through many millennia of Chinese civilization, China was never obliged to deal with other countries or civilizations that were comparable to it in scale and sophistication. Though China and Japan shared a number of core cultural and political institutions, neither was prepared to recognize the other's superiority; their solution was to curtail contact for centuries at a time. China acquired no overseas colonies and shared relatively little interest in the countries beyond its coast. It was for centuries the world's most productive economy and most populous trading area. The methods by which it was unified and periodically overturned and reunified again were occasionally brutal.

Chinese history witnessed its share of sanguinary rebellions and dynastic tyrants. With distinctive traditions and millennial habits of superiority, China entered the modern age a singular kind of empire: a state claiming universal relevance for its culture and institutions but making few efforts to proselytize; the wealthiest country in the world but one that was indifferent to foreign trade and technological innovation; a culture of cosmopolitanism overseen by a political elite oblivious to the onset of the Western age of exploration; and a political unit of unparalleled geographic extent that was unaware of the technological and historical currents that would soon threaten its existence.

The results of the interplay between Western overwhelming force and Chinese psychological management were two treaties negotiated, the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue. It provided the Britain for payment of a $6 million indemnity by China, the cession of Hong Kong and the opening of five coastal 'treaty ports' in which Western residence and trade would be permitted. This effectively dismantled the "Canton System" by which the Chinese court had regulated trade with the West and confined it to licensed merchants. Within the space of a decade, the Middle Kingdom had gone from preeminence to being an object of contending colonial forces.

Poised between two eras and two different conceptions of international relations, China strove for a new identity, and above all to reconcile the value that marked its greatness with the technology and commerce on which it would have to base its security. Mao's approach to preemption differed in the extraordinary attention he paid to psychological elements. His motivating force was less to inflict a decisive military first blow than to change the psychological balance, not so much to defeat the enemy as to alter his calculus of risks.

Ideology had brought Beijing and Moscow together and ideology drove them apart again. The Soviet Union regarded the Communist world as a single strategic entity whose leadership was in Moscow. It had established satellite regimes in Eastern Europe that were dependent on Soviet military and to some extent economic support. It seemed natural to the Soviet Politburo that the same pattern of dominance should prevail in Asia. In terms of Chinese history, cultural differences exacerbated latent tensions - especially since the Soviet leaders were generally oblivious of Chinese historic sensitivities.

As the 1960s progressed, even Mao began to recognize the potential perils of China were multiplying. Along its vast borders, China faced a potential enemy in the Soviet Union; a humiliated adversary in India; a massive American deployment and an escalating war in Vietnam; self-proclaimed governments-in-exile in Taipei and the Tibetan enclave of northern India; a historic opponent in Japan; and across the Pacific an American that viewed China as an implacable adversary. Sino-American diplomacy within a year moved from irreconcilable conflict to a visit to Beijing by a presidential emissary to prepare a visit by the President himself.

It did so by sidestepping the rhetoric of two decades and staying focused on the fundamental strategic objective of a geopolitical dialogue leading to a recasting of the Cold War international order. To Nixon, the opening of China was part of an overall strategic design not a shopping list of mutual irritations. Chinese leaders pursued a parallel approach. Invocations of returning to an existing international order were meaningless to them, if only because they did not consider the existing international system, which they had no hand in forming, as relevant to them. They had never conceived their security to reside in the legal arrangement of a community of sovereign states.

When Zhou wrote about reestablishing friendship between the Chinese and American peoples, he described an attitude needed to foster a new international equilibrium, not a final state of the relationship between peoples. What was sought, rather, was a world in which China could find security and progress through a kind of combative coexistence in which readiness to fight was given equal pride of place to the concept of coexistence. ...more "

Jan 22, 2024 04:45AM · see review