Rowan Callick, Asia-Pacific editor
From: The Australian
RICHARD Nixon's visit to China in 1972 is an event that has assumed epic significance.
But might it have been extraordinarily mistimed and misconceived, crucially helping the monstrous Mao Zedong and his party stay in power?
It is more usually seen as helping decide the outcome of the Cold War by aligning China with the US against the Soviet Union, and also paving the way for the US retreat from Vietnam. It is viewed as the epitome of the way in which people from opposite sides of the political fence can achieve breakthroughs that often frustrate fellow travellers.
It inspired an opera, 25 years later, by John Adams, which has just received its Metropolitan Opera premiere in New York.
As China continues to rise, it is an event that is starting to replace "Tricky Dicky" and Watergate in many minds as the immediate response to the words "Richard Nixon". It is almost universally perceived as being made possible by the strategic acumen - made manifest in a groundbreaking trip to Beijing 30 years ago next month - of secretary of state Henry Kissinger, midway through the decade-long Cultural Revolution.
Now 88, Kissinger has written a book On China - which, ever since, he has viewed as a subject of which he is entitled to a degree of ownership. He has been back more than 50 times since those pioneering visits to meet Mao, the Great Helmsman.
Leading writers in English on China - and on modern history more generally - have been commissioned to write reviews, among them Simon Schama, James Mann, Jonathan Spence, Arthur Waldron, Jonathan Mirsky.
The most stimulating view so far has come from British writer Jasper Becker, who lives in Beijing, and whose Hungry Ghosts dramatically revealed the extent of the horrors of Mao's Great Leap Forward, which killed more than 30 million people.
Becker says Kissinger rightly claims to be the chief architect of the China-US relationship, "one of the pillars of the international order as crucial to understanding world history as Britain and America's decision to make an ally of Stalin in order to defeat Hitler, the result of which was the establishment of a Soviet empire in Europe rather than a German one".
At the time, Kissinger says, the Soviet Union seemed more dangerous and expansionist than China - though Becker thinks "there wasn't much to choose between them", with China having sent almost half a million troops to Korea and Vietnam as well as to Burma and Cambodia, and having financed and trained insurgencies in a dozen countries.
Becker asks: "What exactly did America ever gain from it? It certainly enabled China's rulers to stay in power despite Mao's catastrophic rule. If Beijing and Moscow had gone to war, surely it would have been to America's great advantage" with Cambodia saved from the Khmer Rouge horrors, the US possibly victorious in Vietnam, and the threats to Taiwan and South Korea quashed.
But "even when he meets Mao - senile and dribbling - Kissinger can't help being blown away by his supposed brilliance. Yet Mao was by then recognised even by his followers as a mad monster.
"Whoever followed Mao would have had to rescue China from its total isolation and restore the economy. They would have had to go cap in hand to America for help, and Washington could dictate its own terms. Instead, Nixon turned up in Beijing as a supplicant."
In return for Mao's blessing, "the Chinese persuaded the Americans to withdraw from Taiwan, and then to support China's murderous proteges, the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia, forced them to lose the war in Vietnam, and to sacrifice Tibet.
"In truth, the Chinese couldn't believe their luck in finding such a naive and biddable partner as Kissinger. He gratefully accepts whatever the Chinese leaders tell him at face value."
Arthur Waldron, a considerable Sinologist, says that Kissinger's book "combines the worst of the romanticism and myth-making about China that have characterised writing on that subject for at least 100 years with a clear deference to the account of China's history that is today official in China".
Kissinger simply sidesteps not only the period of the Republic of China - when the great universities were founded, the arts flourished, modern medicine was introduced, the economy took off and Shanghai became a great global city - but also the crucial events of June 4, 1989, saying: "This is not the place to examine the events that led to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square."
But Waldron says Kissinger "gets one big thing right" - that today's US-China relationship lacks the firm foundation in shared interests that drove the original exchange - "fear of the Soviet Union", as Kissinger put it.
The great historian, Jonathan Spence, finds nuggets of nicely constructed summaries in Kissinger's book - for instance, in his description of the contrasting attributes of Mao and his premier, Zhou Enlai: "Mao dominated any gathering; Zhou suffused it. Mao's passion strove to overwhelm opposition; Zhou's intellect would seek to persuade or out-manoeuvre it. Mao was sardonic, Zhou penetrating. Mao thought of himself as a philosopher; Zhou saw his role as an administrator or negotiator. Mao was eager to accelerate history, Zhou to exploit its currents."
Schama, describing Kissinger and Zhou as working "counter-intuitively in tandem", is struck by the book's depiction of "a journey towards cultural empathy by two powers that seemed, at the outset, prohibitively ill-equipped to acquire that knowledge".
But Mann notes that this China-America edifice is now crumbling, and that Kissinger himself "warns about Chinese triumphalists who believe the US is in decline, and frets about Americans who want to build up military power for what they believe to be an inevitable conflict with China".
However flawed Kissinger's understanding of his own - and his country's - encounter with China, his theme remains nothing short of epic.
No comments:
Post a Comment