Henry Kissinger is a statesman who needs no introduction. The 88-year-old former American security chief has set aside strategising to tell the kind of standard China story that the Western world is currently gobbling up. What makes his take compelling, however, is that he plays a lead role in it.
On China is Kissinger’s monument to a life spent in the service of improving Sino-American relations. The US’s first emissary to China, he was present for ‘the week that changed the world’, as President Nixon dubbed the trip that the two made to China in 1972. The visit forms a key chapter in this book by an author who went on to make more than 50 official trips to China over 40 years.
We begin with a crash course in Chinese philosophy, realpolitik and Sun Tzu’s Art of War before Kissinger gallops through a solid account of Chinese history. So far, so average. But it is the next section that really sets On China apart, as Kissinger canters through grittier, personal anecdote-led passages that detail the most confrontational aspects of Sino-American diplomacy in the ’60s and ’70s.
The veteran negotiator’s candid, first-hand accounts enliven stories that have been told countless times before. The transcripts from his first conversations with Mao’s foreign minister Zhou Enlai, for example, in which the terms of President Nixon’s seminal ’72 visit were decided and drafted, offer a new take on a landscape defrosting in the wake of the Cold War.
What you want from On China, but never quite get, is that gasp-out-loud moment of discovery. The historical framework is expertly crafted, but Kissinger is pedagogical. The tome reads like a manual designed to instruct on why China is the way it is. However, the occasional sag is lifted by the first-hand descriptions, intellectual clout and an optimistic prognosis: Kissinger ends by predicting a rosy future founded on a ‘Pacific Community’ that sees the two superpowers ‘co-evolving’ and ‘dominating’. For him, the future may not be red but it is bright.