On China

On China is a 2011 work of non-fiction by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A blend of history, personal narrative, and political analysis, Kissinger’s book offers a historical overview of Chinese diplomacy, focusing on the author’s own role in re-establishing Sino-American relations under President Nixon. Oxford China-specialist Rana Mitter, writing in the Guardian, called On China an “unusual and valuable book. Of all the westerners who shaped the post-second world war world—and there is little doubt that he did—[Kissinger] is one of the very few who made the American relationship with China the key axis for his world view.”

Kissinger opens his book by offering an overview of his qualifications for writing it. Besides his well-known role in the 1972 Nixon visit to China, Kissinger has made more than 50 trips to China, sometimes in an informal diplomatic capacity and at other times to meet new senior Communist Party officials in order to report back to Washington.

At the center of Kissinger’s book is the argument that Chinese diplomacy cannot be understood without a sense of Chinese history and the particularly subtle diplomatic culture to which it has given rise. “In no other country is it conceivable that a modern leader would initiate a major national undertaking by invoking strategic principles from a millennium-old event,” he asserts, going on to point out that Chairman Mao often did just this, and “could confidently expect his colleagues to understand the significance of his allusions.”



Accordingly, Kissinger sets out a potted history of China, with a focus on its diplomacy. For hundreds of years, China was the “Middle Kingdom,” the center of the world, surrounded by small, unsophisticated vassal states. Nevertheless, the threat of barbarian invasion loomed, and within the country’s borders repeated collapses into civil war lead to the development of a large, complex body of strategic thought. Kissinger argues that this thought is notable for the emphasis it places on subtlety and long-term thinking over short-term military aggression.

In light of this tradition, Kissinger examines the decisions made by Chinese diplomats during the colonial era, as China first encountered European powers, followed by the rise of the USSR and the Korean War.

The bulk of Kissinger’s book is devoted to Mao and his successors. Kissinger writes admiringly of Mao that he “destroyed traditional China and left its rubble as building blocks for ultimate modernization.” For much of Mao’s premiership, repeated miscommunications caused mistrust between Chinese and American authorities. Kissinger reports that in the mid-1960s, Mao had entrusted to American journalist Edgar Snow an assurance that China would never challenge the US militarily—but the message didn’t get through, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration focused its Asian policy on thwarting the threat posed by China.



This changed during Kissinger’s own tenure as Secretary of State when, under his guidance, President Nixon decided on a de-facto alliance with China. It appeared at the time that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade China. Nixon decided that the danger of a victorious USSR was too great: China had to be bolstered. "It was a revolutionary moment in US foreign policy," Kissinger declares. "An American president declared we had a strategic interest in the survival of a major communist country."

Kissinger met Mao, and he describes him with humor and admiration, noting his “bantering and elliptical style of conversation…Mao advocated his ideas in a Socratic manner. He would begin with a question or an observation and invite comment. He would then follow with another observation. Out of this web of sarcastic remarks, observations and queries would emerge a direction, though rarely a binding commitment.”

Mao is compared and contrasted with his Premier Zhou Enlai: "Mao was sardonic; Zhou penetrating." Kissinger reports that Zhou was enraged by Kissinger’s suggestion that Chinese Communism had adopted many of the tenets of Confucianism.



Kissinger admits that he was initially not enamored of Deng Xiaoping’s “acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occasional sarcastic interjections and his disdain of the philosophical in favor of the eminently practical…Deng rarely wasted time on pleasantries, nor did he feel it necessary to soften his remarks by swaddling them in parables.” It was under Deng that Sino-American relations endured their most severe test when the People’s Liberation Army crushed student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. President George H.W. Bush was forced to impose (limited) sanctions, but Deng told American diplomats, “We don’t care about the sanctions. We are not scared by them.”

Some months later, Deng summoned Kissinger and told him that the suppression had been necessary to avoid civil war. Deng reaffirmed that the Chinese leadership would not bow to the US on domestic issues. Kissinger says that he came to feel “enormous regard for this doughty little man with the melancholy eyes,” and argues that modern China is “a testimonial to Deng’s vision, tenacity, and common sense.”

The book’s final section focuses on the future, in which Kissinger believes China will play a superpower role. He cautions that in some ways the current state of play between China and the US resembles the tensions between Britain and Germany in the run-up to World War I. His conclusion is that US leaders should seek to understand Chinese politics and the history underlying the present—but he implies that he has little confidence in this happening in the near future.