What China Saw in Kissinger

Guest post by Sinification: Chinese tributes to Henry Kissinger and what they might tell us about China and its relationship with the United States

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Thomas des Garets Geddes

. Thomas is the author of Sinification, a weekly newsletter that curates, analyses and translates key articles and speeches by China's intellectual elite, focusing on the PRC's international relations.-Bill

China’s leadership went out of its way to pay tribute to former US secretary of state and national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, following his death at the age of 100 on 29 November. In a message to US president Joe Biden, China’s leader Xi Jinping (习近平) called Kissinger “a world-renowned strategist and an old friend and good friend of the Chinese people” who will be “remembered and missed”, while China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi (王毅), visited the US Embassy in Beijing to convey his condolences. Cynics may view this as testimony to Kissinger’s transactional relationship with Beijing: access to the highest echelons of power in return for praise, moderation and no crossing of any red lines. But China’s appreciation of Kissinger is more complex than this.

The man who Mao is said to have referred to playfully as the “carrier pigeon” (a play on Kissinger’s transliterated Chinese name “Jixinge”) is remembered first and foremost for his pivotal role in the US-China détente of the 1970s, which helped pave the way to China’s subsequent opening-up and the ending of the Cold War. This alone could have been enough to guarantee his status as an “old friend” of China. As the Chinese saying goes, “He who drinks the water of a well should not forget who dug it” (吃水不忘挖井人).

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Chinese Premier Hua Guofeng (华国锋) calls Kissinger “an old friend of the Chinese people” in 1979:

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He is also remembered for acting as a key “bridge” (桥梁) or “conduit” (传声筒) between Beijing and Washington and for his commitment to diffusing Sino-US tensions. “Some people claim that Kissinger was putting his marginalised self back into the spotlight. I do not subscribe to such a view. Kissinger had a sense of mission [使命感]”, comments Li Cheng (李成), a well-known “returnee scholar” at the University of Hong Kong and former director of the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. “His brilliance lay in the fact that he would start clearly from the US’s standpoint, but would give us the impression that he was acting on China’s behalf when resolving issues with the goal of safeguarding the overall US-China relationship,” remembers Wang Jisi (王缉思), a distinguished international relations scholar and founding president of Peking University’s Institute of International and Strategic Studies.

But Kissinger’s engagement with China was more personal than this. Whatever his motivations, he met every single Chinese leader since Mao and had innumerable interactions with China’s intellectual and political elite over the past fifty years. Recent tributes to him are often interspersed with photos and fond accounts of these meetings. Several of those reminiscing about him mention meeting him dozens of times. It did not matter if “Jixinge” was known for his flattery, cunning or even duplicity, he appears to have shown many of these individuals respect and paid attention both to them and to China at a time when the country arguably most needed it. He was a type of scholar-official à l’Américaine that many of China’s establishment intellectuals and officials respected, if not looked up to. “I have basically read all his books”, remarks Zheng Yongnian (郑永年), director of the Institute for International Affairs at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). For many among China’s elite, Kissinger’s death meant more than just saying goodbye to “an old friend of the Chinese people”. He had been a mentor for some, a source of inspiration for others and embodied like no other a bygone era of elite American and Chinese politics.

“Henry pointed to the photos on his window sill and said: ‘Look, I've put the picture of me with China’s leader at the front and the one with the Japanese at the back.’ I suspected at the time that if Japanese guests had been to his office, he would probably have switched the photographs around … This is the art of diplomacy, I guess.” – Wang Jisi (王缉思)

Although Chinese state-run media have been loath to criticise him, Kissinger’s failings and alleged war crimes did not go unnoted among Chinese scholars. Some of the most stinging criticisms came from Peking University professor Wang Yizhou (王逸舟), who reminds his readers:

“The general public in China may not be aware that he is ‘abhorred’ [深恶痛绝] in many parts of the world and that he has done many things … that may be [considered both] morally shameful and horrific … I personally dislike his ‘secret diplomacy’ very much. It was sometimes unscrupulous and even murderous. A lot of it was so very dark, and dark is not sufficient to describe those types of horrors … Many bad things were carried out with much aplomb and in the name of national [interests]: assassinations, sacrificing allies and deceiving opponents.”

Others such as Sun Bingyan (孙冰岩), a lecturer at Peking University’s School of International Studies, while stressing that Kissinger’s “contributions to the US-China relationship, China and the Chinese people were definite and positive”, point out that his approach to the PRC had always been guided by American interests and “the preservation of America’s hegemonic powers”. However, what distinguished him from America’s current foreign policy, Sun adds, was that he put less emphasis on values and ideological differences.

Values and ideology are a recurring theme throughout these commentaries and Kissinger’s legacy is almost invariably contrasted against the alleged failings of America’s current foreign policy and domestic politics. The US no longer possesses enough “Kissinger-like wisdom”, regrets Wu Xinbo (吴心伯), director of Fudan University's Institute of International Studies. Kissinger was always able to keep the “big picture” in mind and think “pragmatically” about the issues at hand, he says. Sun Bingyan describes Kissinger’s keen sense of history, which “enabled him not to see China simply as a ‘communist country’”. Unlike others in the US, he was able to look at issues from a “Chinese perspective”, not just from an American one, remarks Zheng Yongnian, before adding:

“For Kissinger, no matter what kind of political system an opponent might have, he would engage with them provided that it was conducive to the construction of a stable [international] order. When he came to play a role [in US politics], the United States was still an elite and middle-class democracy. It has now become a populist democracy that is engaging in ‘values-based diplomacy’ and building ‘democratic alliances’. This is not something that Kissinger would have liked.”

Praise for Kissinger was therefore also a way of voicing China’s long-held dissatisfaction with America. One commentary signed by Zheng’s “strategy and security research team” at CUHK went so far as to call on the US to “return urgently to Kissinger's tradition of Machiavellian diplomacy [美国迫切地需要重返基辛格的马基雅维利外交传统].”

“To foreign leaders imbued with less elevated maxims, America’s claim to altruism evokes a certain aura of unpredictability; whereas the national interest can be calculated, altruism depends on the definition of its practitioner.” – Henry Kissinger

To some extent, several of these authors were projecting onto Kissinger their own vision of the world, a largely realist one characterised by a preference for Verantwortungsethik (ethic of responsibility) over Gesinnungsethik (ethic of conviction), in which national interests are paramount. Unlike in the West where Kissinger’s realist credentials have been questioned, Shi Yinhong (时殷弘), a highly respected professor of international relations at Renmin University of China, is unequivocal when describing Kissinger as “a classical realist” willing to make “unrighteous” decisions and commit immoral deeds for the greater good of the nation. “The reality of international politics is that state relations are still largely dominated by realist thinking, and China is no exception”, observes Zhao Huasheng (赵华胜), a leading Russia expert. “In China, elites and ordinary people alike generally view [international] politics as a struggle for power and material interests”, says Wang Jisi.

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But it would be wrong to lump all China’s intellectual elite into this one cynical view of international relations or to view their tributes to Kissinger as unqualified endorsements of his ideas and policies. Even those who seemed most sympathetic to Kissinger’s style of diplomacy would occasionally bemoan his disregard for smaller countries and describe some of his practices as outdated. Wang Yizhou, concludes his bitter criticism of Kissinger by lauding his belief in the value of diplomacy, adding that, although Kissinger himself “never had any interest in globalism [全球主义] and seldom used international multilateral mechanisms like the United Nations, I believe that, while he may have disliked this other aspect of diplomacy, he inadvertently set it in motion.” In fact, what transpires from these commentaries is that different schools of thought naturally coexist in China and that, much like Kissinger, one and the same individual can exhibit seemingly contradictory beliefs. The same could be said about China and its approach to foreign policy.

Just as there was Kissinger the scholar, the statesman and the businessman, China’s appreciation of him is arguably as multifaceted and complex as the man was himself.