Mack
Hall, HSG
Henry
Kissinger’s On China
“Blood will
have blood”
- Macbeth
On
China was a Christmas gift by a couple of
folks who really do qualify as Old China Hands.
Well, okay, early-middle-age China hands who spent several years in
China, and whose curiosity about what was happening in Tibet, in the western
provinces, in small towns, and in the cities and factories annoyed the Chinese
government on a number of occasions. One
hopes someday they will write their narrative on China, for it will be far more
reliable than Henry Kissinger’s self-serving door-stop.
Kissinger’s own story is
fascinating. He was born in Germany to
Jewish parents, and as a young man escaped with his family to New York via
England. He was drafted late in World
War II, and his service to his adopted country is remarkable indeed. His Bronze Star was well-earned.
Unfortunately, Kissinger’s will to
power led him in subsequent decades to dispose of nations and thousands of
lives through his arrogance and his reptilian insensitivity to human
suffering. His Nobel Peace Prize reeks
of blood and death and decay, as does his career.
On
China is over 500 pages of turbid Henrican
self-indulgence though on occasion some sense can be filtered from the
cascading fall of words, words, words, big words, small words, all striving for
hegemony, which is possibly the author’s favorite word. The preface and the first few chapters are
very useful; the beginning brilliantly and succinctly defines, compares, and
contrasts American and Chinese concepts of exceptionalism (p. xvi), and the
early chapters are a good overview of Chinese history.
After that, the adventure becomes a
plod.
And in all of this plodding, Kissinger
never employs even one of his warehouse of words in sympathy for the millions
of Chinese murdered by the Communist Party in the revolution and afterward in
purge after purge, in managed starvation, in mass executions, and in the
genocidal horror of the Great Leap Forward.
And there is no surprise in this, for Kissinger never grieved for the
thousands of deaths for which he is responsible in Viet-Nam (almost 60,000
American dead alone), Cambodia, Laos, Cyprus, Bengal, Chile, East Timor, and
Kurdistan. In his book he never mentions
the Chinese government’s murders of protestors in Tiananmen Square and in
numerous cities in China in 1989, nor the thousands of Chinese citizens who
“disappeared” in the weeks following.
His consulting business and his relationships with the power structure
in China might be compromised were he to do so.
In Kissinger’s narrative of Tiananmen (pp. 408-439) he does not mention
the deaths (“This is not the place to examine the events…” [p. 411]), and
suggests that using tanks and machine guns against the protestors was really
the protestors’ fault.
In her 11,000-year history, China has
not yet acted imperially, and there are no Chinese military bases outside of
China. China’s influence on the world has
been generally positive through its culture and its mercantilism. Dr. Kissinger assures us that China will
continue to be an inward-looking nation.
However, China’s rapid development of her
army, air force, and a blue-water navy suggests otherwise. China invaded its former ally North Viet-Nam
in 1979 (and lost), threatens Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, and is
messin’ and stirrin’ all over the Western Pacific. The United States Navy, through its fleets
and air arm, can, in concert with other nations, defeat Chinese aggression at
present. However, no situation is ever
static. The United States is a declining
power while China is a rising one. China
probably does not want to dominate the United States militarily, but China does
own this nation financially and soon we may well be a supplicant hoping our new
masters will be kind to us. This is not
Kissinger’s script; this is reality.
China quite rightly resents her
humiliation by Western powers in the 19th century and Japan in the
20th. China insanely murdered
millions of her own people after World War II and into the 1970s. A nation with a catalogue of resentments and
a recent history of violence, a nation that in the 21st century
arranges the executions of her healthy young people so that their organs can be
harvested for transplants for sale to the wealthy, is not ruled by flower
children, and is not a peaceful nation of vegans meditating on ancient
Confucian wisdom. China is not this
nation’s friend, and neither is Henry Kissinger.
Another reality, a bizarre one, is
that Dr. Kissinger, author of deaths and books, has dedicated On China, a serious if deeply flawed
examination of China and its influence on the world now, to a dress designer.
Anyone wishing to give this mildly interesting
recycling of vegetable matter a look can check it out of the public library;
this would minimize the profits to an evil man.
-30-
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