Book review: “On China” by Henry Kissinger 

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In this book Henry Kissinger provides a generic map of China upfront, but he  has not thrown much light on the Middle Kingdom as a geographic entity in the prelude to his narrative. 

Geographically China is a continental power, with only its east side exposed to the seas. 

Historically, yellow earth and blue waters didn’t quite mix. The Son of Heaven preferred peasant stock to foreign traders. 

For one thing, the Son of Heaven almost always had enough trouble fending off horse-riding barbarians from the steppes. He didn’t want to invite fresh trouble from the sea-trading barbarians. 

For another, the Middle Kingdom was supposed to be self-sufficient. When was the last time a Chinese emperor traded with barbarians for food to feed his starving subjects? 

Trade was way beneath the Son of Heaven. Tribute was music to his ears.

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Notably, between 1405 and 1433, Admiral Zhèng Hé was repeatedly sent overseas to check out and expand Ming’s tributary world. Trade be damned.

 (Rumor has it that Admiral Zheng was actually on secret missions, but here I am not going to indulge myself with such rumor.)

The fact remains that Admiral Zheng’s armada did rule the waves. He had successfully charted the course for the Middle Kingdom as a super-sea power. 

Yet, in the end his roaring success failed to move the needle. Yellow earth won. Blue waters lost. 

Alas, if you didn’t take full advantage of your first bite of the apple, your second bite won’t come easy if at all.

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Meanwhile, the dynastic cycle went on in seclusion——yes, seclusion, a term avoided by Kissinger out of his diplomatic respect for the Middle Kingdom. 

Truth be told, Mao Zedong was the first Chinese rebel-turned-emperor who had really succeeded in weaponizing seclusion, which is something unexplored in Kissinger’s narrative. 

It’s hardly a myth that only when the CCP holed up in Shaanxi caves did Maoism survive and thrive. 

Maoism was more an Oriental ideology glorifying militarized seclusion than an Occidental ideology glorifying global communism. 

In seclusion, Mao was in a much better position to make good on ideological cleansing to pave the way for his paradise of equalitarianism, which appealed to his like-minded fellow perpetrators of crimes against humanity (e.g. Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge). 

Indeed, to stay on top of the game, Mao and Maoists couldn’t stop requiring and acquiring human sacrifices. Incidentally this was practically what Maya’s god-kings did to their subjects in seclusion.

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Three years after Mao joined the Marxist saints, Deng Xiaoping weaponized the opening-up of China to win America over to his side in his extremely costly border war with Vietnam in 1979. 

Vietnam, then Russia’s formal ally, was deeply disappointed at Moscow’s lukewarm support. The Russian fleet, already cruising in the South China Sea, was held back by the invisible but unmistakable Sino-American “alliance”. 

Brezhnev hesitated to call Deng’s bluff, thus losing momentum, much like Khrushchev who hesitated to call Kennedy’s bluff in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This poker (war) game rewarded Deng with Jimmy Carter’s confidence in China’s readiness for a prime time show with America.

Deng’s prime time show with America, I suspect, was meant to preempt  Carter’s prime time show with Russia whose military presence on China’s northern border was an imminent threat, to say the least. 

Then bursting onto the scene was a John Wayne-type guy named Ronald Reagan, a Cold War warrior determined to call Moscow’s bluff anytime, anywhere. 

Shrewdly, Deng let Reagan run the Three Kingdoms show. He trusted that Reagan would put up with Communist China in order to beat up Communist Russia. 

Deng, therefore, didn’t kick up a big fuss even when Reagan stuck the Taiwan-friendly Six Assurances in his face in 1982, in exchange for America’s benevolent neutrality over the Hong Kong question. Deng had bigger fish to fry.

Keep a low profile, Deng counseled.

Keep a low profile, Central Military Commission Chairman? Soon enough, people on the Tiananmen Square would find out that the totalitarian plague reared its ugly head, again.

The rest is history.

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I was most impressed by Kissinger’s account of his shuttle diplomacy, sprinkled with anecdotes he edited for public consumption. 

That being said, I can’t help reminding myself that Sir Henry Wotton, King James I’s ambassador, once privately described his profession this way: "An ambassador is an honest man who is sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." 

I wonder whether English-speaking Zhou Enlai, who was with Mao, might have secretly compared Henry Kissinger with Henry Wotton. 

I also wonder how Brooklyn, New York-born Nancy Tang Wensheng, Mao’s translator and Jiang Qing’s close associate, felt about Kissinger——a pioneering panda-hugger, perhaps? But then I digress.

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In my humble opinion, after all is said and done, this century won’t end up as a China century. 

The People’s Republic of China is an ideology whereas the United States of America is an idea. Either you pick up a competitive idea and run with it or you let an anachronistic ideology run you into the ground. 

The world’s choice can’t be clearer.

— Lingyang Jiang