The Stack June 23, 2011, 5:00PM EST

Book Review: On China by Henry Kissinger

The mandarin emeritus sees China's future in its very ancient past. Christopher Buckley reviews

By Christopher Buckley

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Editor's Rating:

The Good: Kissinger shares privileged insight and weaves historical and philosophical understanding of China.

The Bad: Beach reading this ain't.

The Bottom Line: No matter your view of Kissinger, this is an essential book for students of Sino-American relations.

Reader Reviews

On China
By Henry Kissinger
Penguin Press; 608pp; $36

Oh, warm and fuzzy China: torturing and jailing dissidents, hacking into Gmail, cozying up to the worst regimes on earth, refusing to float the renminbi, spewing fluorocarbons into the ozone, building up its navy, and stealing military secrets—all while enabling America's fiscal incontinence by buying all those T-bills. The $1.1 trillion question at the start of what's been called "The Chinese Century" is simple: Friend or enemy? Frenemy?

While Henry Kissinger doesn't quote Mario Puzo, Don Corleone's maxim, "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer," echoes throughout his grand, sweeping tutorial, On China. Kissinger has been the go-to China wise man since his first secret meeting there in 1971. And in the intervening decades, he's made 50-odd trips back, often carrying critical messages between leaders, defusing crises, or pleading with each side to understand the other's position. His perennial ambassadorship-at-large puts readers right in the room with Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Hu Jintao.

It also overflows with a lifetime of privileged observations. Here's a great one: Why did China invade Vietnam in 1979? To "teach it a lesson," Kissinger writes, for its border clashes with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. But when the Soviet Union failed to come to Vietnam's aid, China concluded it had "touched the Tiger's buttocks" with impunity, he writes. "In retrospect," Kissinger explains, "Moscow's relative passivity ... can be seen as the first symptom of the decline of the Soviet Union. One wonders whether the Soviets' decision a year later to intervene in Afghanistan was prompted in part by an attempt to compensate for their ineffectuality in supporting Vietnam against the Chinese." As such, Kissinger asserts, the 1979 clash "can be considered a turning point of the Cold War, though it was not fully understood as such at the time." Of course! Just the proverbial game of dominoes—with the pieces very widely separated. As for the psychology behind China's extraordinary death toll in Vietnam, more on that in a minute.

While Kissinger can appear to be an apologist for—or explainer-away of—Chinese un-fuzzy behavior, he demonstrates a profound understanding of the impulses behind that behavior. And those impulses, he believes, go back many thousands of years. During a meeting in the 1990s, then-President Jiang Zemin wryly remarked to Kissinger that 78 generations had elapsed since Confucius died in 449 BC. By my count, there have been eight since the Declaration of Independence. Sort of puts things in perspective.

According to Kissinger there are four key elements to understanding the Chinese mind: Confucianism ("a single, universal, generally applicable truth as the standard of individual conduct and social cohesion"); Sun Tzu (outsmarting: good; direct conflict: bad); an ancient board game called wei qi (which stresses "the protracted campaign"); and China's "century of humiliation" in the 1800s (karma's a you-know-what, Imperialists!). Actually, make that five: Wei Yuan—a 19th century midranking Confucian mandarin—developed the Chinese concept of "barbarian management," which was at the core of Mao's diplomacy with the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Now if only China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs would consider changing its name to the Office of Barbarian Management.

No, sorry, make that six elements: overwhelming fear of internal disorder or chaos. The resulting gestalt is absolute imperviousness to foreign pressure. Kissinger recounts a chilly moment when, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng tells him that overreaction by the U.S. "could even lead to war." More chilling were Mao's repeated, almost gleeful musings about the prospect of nuclear war. "If the imperialists unleash war on us," Kissinger recalls him saying, "we may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we'll get to work producing more babies than ever before." While those grim and sincere words sound as though they came from the last scene of Dr. Strangelove, Kissinger reminds us that, during the first Taiwan Strait confrontation in 1955, it was the U.S. that threatened to use nukes.