PIVOTAL ROLE OF KISSINGER REMEMBERED
The former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger has been fondly remembered in China after he died at the age of 100 in Connecticut on Nov 29. Kissinger had a profound influence on relations between the two superpowers, and for many years was regarded as a firm friend of China.
“The world has lost a tireless advocate for peace,” said Winston Lord, Kissinger’s top aide in the 1970s. “America has lost a towering champion for the national interest. I have lost a cherished friend and mentor.”
At dawn on July 9, 1971, Kissinger and Lord entered Chinese airspace aboard a Pakistani aircraft. The clandestine trip, which resulted in a Chinese invitation to then president Richard Nixon, resulted in top leaders from the United States and China meeting in February 1972 for the first time in two-and-a-half decades, a period during which the two countries were, in Kissinger’s words, “at war, near war”.
The trip also helped lay the foundation for today’s international geopolitical order.
The Nixon visit was followed by a prolonged period of what Kissinger called “cooperative coexistence” in which China rose to be a dynamic element in the world economy and the U.S. “easing out of its pain at the outcome of the Vietnam War”, as Lord put it.
The death of Kissinger, who had been the last surviving member of Nixon’s cabinet, comes as China and the U.S. work to improve what Kissinger called “the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship”.
In July, two months after Kissinger celebrated his 100th birthday, he traveled to Beijing, where his host reminded him of what had happened there 52 years before.
“It was in July 1971 in the same place, Villa No. 5 of Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, that you and Premier Zhou Enlai had a meeting to start the normalization process,” President Xi Jinping told Kissinger.
Some of the most intense hours of that visit and one in October were spent between Kissinger and Zhou as the two negotiated a draft of what would become known as the Shanghai Communique.
“Today, more than 50 years later, the communique is still being invoked as one of the foundations of our relationship, while most communiques disappear within weeks,” said Lord, who was U.S. ambassador to China from 1985 to 1989.
In a message of condolence sent to U.S. President Joe Biden over Kissinger’s passing, President Xi Jinping said that Kissinger had made it his lifelong pursuit to promote the development of China U.S. relations and enhance the friendship between the two peoples, and “his name will always be associated with China-U.S. relations”.
Kissinger, recalling his 1972 meeting with Mao Zedong, said the Chinese leader spoke allegorically, in “a Socratic manner”, and “had the quality of being at the center of wherever he stood”, adding that “it moved with him wherever he moved”.
In December 1975 Mao told the visiting U.S. president Gerald Ford that his secretary of state, Kissinger, “has been interfering in my internal affairs”.
Asked to elaborate, the 82-year-old chairman answered, “He does not allow me to go and meet God.”
“That would be too powerful a combination if he went there,” Kissinger, who was also present, told Ford.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in the German city of Fuerth, northern Bavaria, on May 27, 1923, the son of a schoolteacher and a homemaker. In 1938, five years after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Kissinger fled from his homeland with his Jewish parents and younger brother.
Many, including Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time magazine and author of the book Kissinger: A Biography, argue that Kissinger’s traumatic childhood explained his preoccupation with peace and order and influenced the formation of his realpolitik approach to foreign policy, a view that Kissinger himself did not share.
“The political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life,” he once said.
The Scottish American writer-historian Niall Ferguson, who immersed himself in Kissinger’s private papers, correspondence and academic writings from Harvard, where Kissinger was a student and later a professor, sought to fathom the man in his 2015 book Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist.
“The idea of Kissinger as the ruthless arch-realist is based on a profound misunderstanding,” Ferguson wrote, pointing to Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis “The Meaning of History”, in which the aspiring intellectual, after having studied the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, said, “Peace is therefore the noblest goal of human endeavor, the affirmation of the ultimacy of man’s moral personality.”
Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept 24, 1974, Kissinger, then newly appointed U.S. secretary of state, and who first gained public attention as a nuclear strategist a decade earlier, echoed his younger self. “Two centuries ago the philosopher Kant predicted that perpetual peace would come eventually. … What seemed utopian then looms as tomorrow’s reality,” he said, alluding to the avoidance of nuclear annihilation.
Nixon made Kissinger his national security adviser after taking office in 1969. With a shared strategic approach to foreign policy the two pursued the dual approaches of detente with the Soviet Union and opening to the Chinese throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.
“Our basic strategy was to be closer to both of them than they were to each other,” said Kissinger, whose ultimate goal was, in his own words, “to shape a global equilibrium” that he and Nixon believed could best serve U.S. national interests.
Regarding the U.S. and China, Kissinger said: “In a way, they were fortunate that their long isolation from each other meant that there were no short-term day-to-day issues between them.”
This, he said, “enabled them to lay the basis for a world unimaginable then but unachievable without Sino American cooperation”.