Kyle Laracey (A)History Mr. Peters-CampbellThur., Mar. 15, 2012

Nukes, Crazies, War, and Diplomacy:Kissinger’s On China

Henry Kissinger’s On China sets the standard for histories of China from the perspective of

the United States. The master negotiator who orchestrated Nixon’s official visit to China and meeting

with Mao, Henry Kissinger is one of the greatest diplomats of the twentieth century. In On China, he

manages to tell the story of the birth of New China, adroitly pointing out and explaining subtleties lost

on those with no experience in hands on diplomacy. Overall, On China portrays China in a

remarkably fascinating and applicable light and should be the de facto book on China’s modern

history.

Kissinger’s experience bolsters such a claim. As someone who acted as informal ambassador

to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a country which, for nearly two decades, the United States

nor the U.N. officially recognized as an independent state from the Republic of China (ROC) in exile

in Taiwan. Kissinger personally orchestrated both Nixon’s first top-secret visit to the PRC and his

widely publicized and famed second. Kissinger probably has more far-eastern diplomatic experience

than anyone else in the United States alive today.

On the other hand, Jonathan Spence, former professor of Chinese History at Yale, would be

considered Kissinger’s counterpoint in historians of China. Spence’s most well known work, The

Search for Modern China, currently serves as the de facto standard for Chinese History programs

around the country. However, Spence covers Chinese history more holistically than Kissinger, who

rather prefers to stick to the American-Chinese-Soviet power triangle.

This specification of Kissinger’s is just what is needed. Throughout the book, Kissinger

routinely excerpts anything unnecessary to the conversation. But what is the conversation in on

China? It is quite obviously China-US relations post-1949. Where Spence takes a few hundred pages

to introduce to the reader the historical background of “Modern China” starting with the fall of the

Ming Dynasty in the early 1600s, Kissinger conveniently summarizes the buildup to the 1949 in a few

dozen pages. And this is all that one needs – perhaps for a Chinese History course, one would be

expected to know all the facts and dates of the Qing dynasty. Kissinger’s book, on the other hand, is

written for pragmatists; it is written from experience and for those interested in diplomacy, the Cold

War in the Far East, and the spread of Communism.

Kyle Laracey (A)History Mr. Peters-CampbellThur., Mar. 15, 2012

An example of Kissinger’s consolidation is his description of the fall of the Qing dynasty in

the twentieth century. The following comes after a description of the Boxer Uprising of spring 1900

against foreigners in China:

The consequence was another harsh blow. An Eight-Power allied expeditionary force—consisting of France, Britain, the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy—arrived in Beijing in August 1900 to relieve the embassies. After suppressing the Boxers and allied Qing troops…they dictated another “unequal treaty” imposing a cash indemnity and granting further occupation rights to the foreign powers.

A dynasty unable to prevent repeated foreign marches on the Chinese capital or to forestall foreign exactions from Chinese territory had plainly lost the Mandate of Heaven. The Qing Dynasty, having prolonged its existence since the initial clash with the West, collapsed in 1912.

Thus, in a concise paragraph or two, Kissinger manages to subsume the relatively unimportant decade

from 1900 to 1912, and get on to a brief summary of the ROC and the civil war.

Tied to this idea of conciseness is his wonderful ability to summarize. He can aptly sum up

the result of an entire half-century of history in a few sentences. This is all one needs: when reading

something like Spence, one learns many facts, memorizes them for a time, but in the end only

remembers the big picture of something, not really the individual facts. And Kissinger understands

that his readers care about the big picture, not dates down to the hour, or people down to their place of

birth and birthdays. For example, his summarization of the status of the Chinese Empire at the turn of

the twentieth century illuminates what a dire situation China had come to:

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese world order was totally out of joint; the court in Beijing no longer functioned as a meaningful factor in protecting either Chinese culture or autonomy. Popular frustrations boiled to the surface in 1898, in the so-called Boxer Uprising… The epicenter of the conflict was once again the long-contested foreign embassies in Beijing—which the Boxers besieged in the spring of 1900. After a century of vacillating between haughty disdain, defiance, and anguished conciliation, China now entered a state of war against all of the foreign powers simultaneously.

Apart from his tendency to excerpt parts of history inapplicable to the story post-1949,

another theme persists throughout the book: his love for heroes and villains. More generally,

Kissinger enjoys focusing in on individuals in history. For example, the primary subject of his

discourse on the Manchu Qing court’s dealings with the west, he chooses Li Hongzhang, as close to a

diplomat that the Qing could get, and quite a foreboding of the pragmatist Zhou Enlai:

Such was Li’s dilemma through the decades he sought to navigate China between European, Russian, and Japanese rapaciousness and the intransigent obtuseness of his own court. Later Chinese generations have acknowledged Li Hongzhang’s skill but have been ambivalent or hostile about the concessions to which he lent his signature…Nevertheless, it enabled China to preserve the elements of sovereignty, however

Kyle Laracey (A)History Mr. Peters-CampbellThur., Mar. 15, 2012

attenuated, through a century of colonial expansion in which every other targeted country lost its independence altogether. It transcended humiliation by seeming to adopt to it.

Kissinger believes that it is best to tell a story through the main actors involved in it, not

through a string of facts, dates, and places, which yet again makes this book more of a novel than a

textbook.

This distinction is a very important one to make: where Spence’s work is more of a text,

Kissinger’s is more of a thriller non-fiction which gives you the best juicy parts and the big picture.

This satisfies the vast majority of the reading population, and gives them a firm education of late

Chinese history. In comparison with Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China, Kissinger’s

tale aims at a broader audience with a more novel-like feel than Spence’s textbook.

Another facet of Kissinger’s storytelling, perhaps one which Spence lacks, is his remarkable

ability to abstract away from the current situation being described and place it in parallel to another,

similar time in history, whether after or before the current situation. He allows the reader to compare

important events in history, which is history’s prime aim: to educate the student about previous events

which are similar enough to a currently faced problem such that the student can learn the best solution

to the current problem:

Where the American perception went partially awry was in thinking of Communism as a monolith and failing to understand the depth of suspicion, even at this early stage, between the two Communist giants.

The Eisenhower administration dealt with the threat of aggression by methods borrowed from America’s European experience. It tried to shore up the viability of countries bordering the Communist world following the example of the Marshall Plan,a nd it constructed military alliances in the style of NATO… It did not fully consider the essential difference between the European conditions and those at the fringe of Asia. The postwar European countries were established states with elaborated institutions…In Asia around the rim of China, however, the states were still in the process of formation. The challenge was to create political institutions and a political consensus out of ethnic and religious divisions.

Thus, in closing, I would like to say that Kissinger’s On China is definitely recommended

reading for anyone concerned with or interested in the history of modern China. It tells a tale in a

different manner than others’, through the focusing in on individuals, the excising of relatively

lengthy swathes of history, and an abstraction away from the specifics to the big picture. Either as a

complement to or a replacement of Spence’s The Search for Modern China, Kissinger’s new tale fits

the job mightily well.