On China By Henry Kissinger, Allen Lane, Rs 899

Henry Kissinger’s latest book, On China, is a blend of history, memoir and policy prescription. He begins with a deftly-sketched outline of Chinese statecraft, from Confucius and Sun Tzu to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. This provides the background for the main part of the book, which is devoted to a thoughtful analysis of the foreign policy of contemporary China, drawing on the author’s extensive discussions with Chinese leaders over many decades. In the concluding chapter, Kissinger looks into the future and offers his recommendations to policymakers in the United States of America.

Kissinger has enjoyed access to the highest levels of leadership in Beijing ever since his famous secret visit to the city in 1971, which paved the way for the normalization of US-China relations and for a quasi-alliance between the two powers. He provides vivid pen portraits of four generations of Chinese leaders — from Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai to Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao — as well as a great deal of new information about his conversations with these leaders.

By 1971, 22 years since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the normalization of US-China ties was long overdue. This does not, however, explain the decision of the two governments to enter into what Kissinger himself describes as a quasi-alliance, in which the “partners sought to coordinate their actions without creating a formal obligation to do so”. The basis of the quasi-alliance was the shared geopolitical aim of containing the Soviet Union.

Mao explained his approach in two extensive conversations with Kissinger in 1973. “So long as the objectives are the same, we would not harm you nor would you harm us”, he said. “And we can work together to commonly deal with a bastard.” He called on the US to “draw a horizontal line — the US-Japan-Pakistan-Iran...Turkey and Europe”, linking a grouping to oppose the Soviet Union. Pro-Soviet Iraq had figured earlier in the conversation. Mao had raised a “crucial issue, that is the question of Iraq, Baghdad. We don’t know if it is possible for you to do some work in that area”, he inquired suggestively. Kissinger records that Mao “stressed the importance of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan as barriers to Soviet expansion”, urging the US to increase its strength in the Indian Ocean.

Mao’s West Asia strategy bore an uncanny similarity with the ideas propounded by Olaf Caroe and other Anglo-American strategists in the early years of the Cold War. Caroe, who had served as governor of the North-West Frontier Province under Jinnah, called for the formation under Western leadership of an alliance of the “northern tier” countries, comprising Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan, as a barrier to Soviet expansion towards the “wells of power” — the oil resources of the region. These ideas led to the formation of the Baghdad Pact in the Dulles years.

If Mao echoed the ideas of the “northern tier” school, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, adopted a line that was strikingly similar to the ‘domino theory’ underlying SEATO. On his visit to the US in 1979, he confided to President Jimmy Carter his intention of going to war with Vietnam, alleging that Vietnam aimed to incorporate Cambodia and Laos into an Indochinese Federation. “The three states is only the first step”, he warned. “Then Thailand is to be included”. As Kissinger observes, “China undertook the campaign with the moral support, diplomatic backing and intelligence cooperation of the United States — the same ‘imperialist power’ that Beijing had helped eject from Indochina five years earlier.”

Kissinger offers two contradictory assessments of the outcome of the Sino-Vietnamese war. On the one hand, he concedes that “China found itself involved in the Third Vietnam War by factors comparable to what had drawn the United States into the second one. Something in the almost maniacal Vietnamese nationalism drives other societies to lose their sense of proportion and to misapprehend Vietnamese motivations and their own possibilities”.

At the same time, he disputes the “conventional wisdom among historians... that the war was a costly Chinese failure”. Rushing gallantly to the defence of his erstwhile allies, Kissinger argues unconvincingly that, over a period of time, “Deng achieved sufficient maneuvering [sic] room to meet his objective of thwarting Soviet domination of Southeast Asia and the Malacca Strait”. There was never, of course, even the remotest prospect of Soviet control of the entire region. Kissinger justifies the failed Chinese strategy by inventing a fantasy threat, just as he sought to claim success for Nixon’s policy in the Bangladesh Liberation War by reference to a fictitious Indian threat to West Pakistan.

The world has moved on since the days of the Sino-US quasi-alliance. The Soviet Union has ceased to exist, China’s comprehensive power is now second only to that of the US, and other major powers are rising in an increasingly polycentric world. Kissinger warns against the possibility of a new Sino-US Cold War, which would retard development on both sides of the Pacific. Moreover, “an explicit American project to organise Asia on the basis of containing China or creating a bloc of democratic states for an ideological crusade is unlikely to succeed — in part because China is an indispensable trading partner for most of its neighbours.”

“The crucial competition between the United States and China”, Kissinger writes, “is more likely to be economic and social than military”. This calls not for partnership but rather “co-evolution”, in which the two countries can cooperate as much as they compete. While emphasizing the formidable challenges involved, he proposes the creation of a Pacific Community with the participation of all regional states. This “would replace strategic uneasiness to some extent. It would enable other major countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and Australia to participate in the construction of a system perceived as joint rather than polarized between ‘Chinese’ and ‘American’ blocs”.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in China, even though its arguments are not uniformly convincing.