For an expat in Beijing, unusual and sometimes unnerving encounters with nosy and sometimes impertinent Chinese are such a fact of life that one almost gets desensitized to them. And yet, there is one from last April that will stand out in my mind for many years. It was late May, 2018, and I had just walked into Beijing's Foreign Language Bookstore at Wangfujing* to look for anything that might be of interest to a blogger with a penchant for shining light on China's distorted views of reality. I was perusing a section of shelf that heavily featured titles emphasizing China's supposedly "unquestionable sovereignty" over the West Philippine Sea, and a Chinese man in his forties stepped right beside me (within about 4 inches of my face, as is their habit) and began to try and strike up a conversation. After the usual questions (what country are you from, how long have you been in China, do you speak Chinese, do you have a Chinese girlfriend, what job did you do before you came to China), the conversation took an unusual turn. I answered the final question truthfully (probably a mistake, in hindsight), telling him that before becoming a teacher in the States I had been a police officer. At this, the man's eyes widened and he shook my hand and actually introduced himself (something of a rarity for the Chinese I have encountered), and handed me his business card. Turns out that he was an academic advisor at what basically amounts to China's national academy for law enforcement administrators. I have blotted out his name except for the first letter of each syllable (which is to say each Chinese character) and contact information in the image below, but I've attached a photo of the business card just to prove my account. Also, I'll elaborate that he used the Western name of "Eric."
I won't lie. I was a little bit off-balance at this point. After all, I'm an expat who writes a blog that is highly critical of China, and here was a man with something of a position of power in China's legal system. So when the conversation turned to "what kind of books are you looking for," obviously I knew that the truth, namely "the most ridiculously chauvanistic and Jingoistic Chinese propaganda I can find, so I can show it to the world and generate the outrage your parasitic empire deserves," would probably not have been an appropriate answer. I managed to stammer something about "wanting to read China's perspective on world affairs, having already read the Western perspective." To make a long story rather short, this answer earned immediate admiration, and the man led me all over the damned bookstore, recommending book after book of the mythology China peddles as history, showering me with praise for being, as he put it, "willing to accept China's more enlightened view." Shortly before he finally left me the hell alone, the man shook my hand and said with a look that bordered on reverence, "you could be the next Henry Kissinger." I gritted my teeth and forced a facial expression which I hope managed to pass for a smile. From the tone of his voice it was clear that he thought he was paying me a compliment. I did not want to risk unpleasant attention from his PSB colleagues by pointing out that very few Americans (and indeed absolutely none of the Americans for whom I have any respect) would have taken it as such.
The Quintessential Devil
Indeed, if there is one person whom the rampantly patriotic American Right, the staunchly anti-patriotic American Left, and the underground Anarchists who set themselves against any nation they deem too powerful (which is to say any nation capable of sustaining its existence) can agree to hate, it is none other than Henry Kissinger. The Intercept shined some light on how the debate over whether he was an "elder statesman or a pariah" drove a hard wedge between the pro-establishment Left (Clintonites) and the anti-establishment Left (Berniebots) in the 2016 Democrat Primary in an impressively in-depth examination of the man's history (Froomkin, The Intercept). The Left-Wing "New Yorker" ran an article a few years back not only decrying him as a War Criminal but depicting him as seeming to take a sadistic delight in that (Anderson, The New Yorker), largely due to his at least tacit support of atrocities in Argentina. Harvard University's online newsletter, The Crimson, echoed the War Criminal label but gave a far more impressive list of crime scenes, ranging from Afghanistan to Vietnam to Chile (Galant, The Crimson). The author even characterized Kissinger as being so twisted and vile that he (insert mockingly exaggerated gasp of shock here) probably supports Donald Trump.
...Oh, the horror!
In short, the view on the Left is that Henry Kissinger, backed by a cold and machine-like type of realpolitik, backed a lot of brutal dictators because he felt it served US geopolitical interests. Well, I'm going to say something cold myself. I could forgive all of that if I had to. The US is not afforded the luxury of only standing with "good-guys." Defeating Hitler required an alliance with Stalin. Defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan required working with the Mujahaddin (or however the hell you spell it). When Kissinger calmly asserts that we sometimes have to work with people we find distasteful in order to secure our geopolitical goals, he is, I'm sorry to say, not wrong.
What I find hard to forgive is when he sides with dictators against American interests. What I find harder to forgive is when he pays the price of power (rolling in the mud with local dictators and knowing we can't expect not to get dirty) without getting the power we paid for. What I find hardest of all to forgive (and most of my fellow Conservatives would too if they knew the sick and sordid history of it all) is how he let his awestruck adoration of the MOST brutal dictator of the century, Mao Zedong, coupled with his undisguised racism toward a faithful American ally, Japan, lead him down a long and dark road that gave an unimaginable boost to the rise of the PRC, creating a monster that threatens America (to a small extent) and all of East Asia (to a much greater extent) to this day.
The Man Who Put the "Sin" in "Sinophile"
There is no secret of how enamored Kissinger was with China. He frequently met with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the mass-murdering inhuman architects of scarcely fathomable repression, brutality and genocide ranging from massacres in Tibet in the early '50's to the Culture Revolution that left tens of millions dead across China in the '70's. He described these reptiles as "philosopher kings (McGregor, Asia's Reckoning, p. 20)" and referred to these meetings as "the most searching sweeping and significant I have ever had in government (McGregor, p. 19). Ben Chu, a British author who gets his surname from his Cantonese grandfather (and who, oddly enough, seems more willing to call BS on a lot of the China-worship in present-day discourse than other Westerners, who don't have any Chinese ancestry), when commenting on Kissinger's 2011 book, On China, muses over the way Kissinger indeed seems to be more in awe of China than China is.
Richard Nixon's old adviser puts China on a par with the trade winds or the rising of the sun, describing the country as 'a permanent natural phenomenon,' a civilization-state that 'seems to have no beginning.'
(Chu, Chinese Whispers, page 20)
Indeed, Kissinger's fawning adoration for China (which I can only surmise was a perfect fit for the jingoistic, sinocentric stereotype of "awestruck barbarian 'laowai' marvelling at the magnificence of the court of the 'Ruler of Tianxia,') is closely tied with the only thing he ever did that might be considered by some (though not anyone who truly understands the Zhonghua) as an accomplishment: the formal establishment of Sino-American diplomatic relations in 1972.
What is not so commonly known is the barbaric and juvenile motives that drove this policy far more assuredly than any geopolitical "realities" ever did, and just what level of betrayal Kissinger blackened America's name with in order to reach this goal, a goal for which the US gave up much (not the least of which being our credibility), and got little in return except... except a more powerful enemy.
Making Racial Bias a Staple of Foreign Policy
Kissinger had something else in common with the Zhonghua whose boots he was so eager to lick. He hated the Japanese. Kissinger's own notes, diaries of his staff, and interviews with the man himself show a wild, blind, paranoid racial animus toward Japan. Those around him never truly understood why he hated the Japanese so badly, but close colleagues say that his perception of the nation was colored by WW2 (McGregor, 43). If that's so, then it is no wonder Zhou and Mao were so fond of him: the easiest puppet to manipulate is one who shares your own prejudices. McGregor's Asia's Reckoning gives a deeper look into how Kissinger and Zhou Enlai (Mao's right-hand man who was largely responsible for the massacres in Tibet) used their shared racial hatred of a nation that had been a faithful ally of the United States for decades to establish a bond between the United States and the PRC... or rather, to plant the seeds of PRC influence in the US.
Kissinger embraced the idea of the Japanese as an odd, undifferentiated mass , a people with ingrained, almost uncontrollable aggressive tendencies. In his conversations with Zhou and in State Department meetings, Kissinger and his advisers describe the Japanese, the United States' key Asian ally, variously as "tribal," "peculiar," "difficult," "ethnocentric," "selfish" "self-centered," "parochial," "emotional" and prone to "over react" to surprises, as if they were immature children.
(p. 46)
Momentarily putting aside the woolly freaking mammoth in the room (namely, that every single bit of that description sounds like a commentary on Chinese society, as I have already explained (Reminisci, Steemit)), this undisguised ethnic bias (against a vital and faithful ally no less) is disgusting. McGregor chronicles this over and over, from the obscure and largely unimportant, such as Kissinger's habit of mockingly referring to Japan as "Kabuki Land (p. 66)" to his briefing of his staff wherein he described the Japanese as naturally "mean and treacherous," caring for nothing except their own interests, to his gleeful eagerness to encourage the Chinese to invade the Senkakku Islands (p. 69), Kissinger's bias against Japan was never hidden. Once can also assume it meshed well with the goals of his boss, Richard Nixon. Due to (of all the stupid things) a mistranslation in a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, Nixon was quite open about the fact that his entire foreign policy was to "stick it to the Japanese (McGregor, 22)." Kissinger (and his boss, Nixon) were not content simply to be racists who hated a key ally while worshiping a narcissistic enemy with a history of ethnocentric imperialism in private. Oh, no. They had to make it official US policy, with repercussions that have echoed through history.
Feeding Our Children to the Dragon
Let's rewind to World War 2. Japan brought China to their knees without breaking much of a sweat. While the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Chek (that is to say, the legitimate government) did eventually get their act together and start hitting the Japanese back, a peasant rabble calling itself the People's Liberation Army was hiding out in Yan'an, afraid to face the Japanese in anything more than a hit-and-run (McGregor, 293, 331). On 2 Sep, 1945, while most of China was still under Japanese control (McGregor, 331), Japan surrendered to the Allies, having had the wind knocked out of her by two American atom bombs and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. China, if truth be known, didn't contribute much to the victory, and what contributions it did make were certainly not by the PLA.
It may come as something of a shock then (or not, if one is familiar with the arrogance that underpins Chinese society) to hear that China claims almost sole credit for victory in WW2.
In August 1945, the Chinese people won the Anti-Japanese war after eight years of fierce fighting, with the support of international anti-Fascist forces.
(Cao Dawei, China's History, 190)
For those who do not typically read translated Chinese propaganda, the Shenzhen Museum makes similar boasts (Chu, 101). Millions upon millions of other examples of this sophistic view of their "glorious victory" can be found all over China, and with them, the (sometimes) subtle undertone: that Japan should be forever sentenced to grovel in contrition at the feet of "the Mighty China." Japan, having dealt with China since so far back into antiquity that a European ruler still holding a legitimate claim to the title "Imperator of Rome" could still be found, saw the writing on the wall. China's hegemonic and colonial ambitions, as well as their long-lasting vindictive nature, have been on display for Japan to see since the reign of Qin Shihuang (Stephen Mosher, Bully of Asia, 32 - 66). The self-proclaimed "rulers of All Under Heaven" had, even by their own modern estimates, fought 3,790 wars from 1100 B.C. to 1911 A.D (an average of 1.26 wars per year), and scarcely a handful of these wars could be called defensive in nature (Mosher, 56). From the casual (and indeed gleeful) way China's supposedly "enlightened" scholars such as Sima Guang wrote of the mass murder of surrendering troops (Mosher, 40-41) to the far-reaching scope of China's invasions and raids, invading Java, Ceylon and even Japan itself on several occasions (Mosher, 62 - 63), the Japanese had born witness to the barbarism and brutality of China for centuries before embarking on their own passing aggressive phase of a mere fifty years. They knew that if they were to disarm, as the terms of the Instrument of Surrender dictated, then they would require a powerful protector to shield them from the vengeful, petulant wrath of the Zhonghua and their vicious aggrieved victim mentality.
The principle victor over their forces, namely, the U.S., gave firm promises to fulfill this role after the Post-War Occupation ended in 1951. In return, Japan pledged themselves to a state of dependency few nations would be willing to accept (McGregor, 21). This dependency included a commitment to essentially mirror our foreign policy (such as supporting Chiang Kai-Chek's Nationalists in Taiwan and giving Mao's Communists the cold shoulder). In return for this rather jaw-dropping level of near vassalage, the U.S. did promise to consult Japan on changes in policy toward Japan's bitter, aggressive, and wounded neighbor: China (McGregor, 21). Japan, in the tradition of loyalty that characterizes their society, honored the arrangement, even as distasteful as they found this helpless state. They avoided establishing economic ties with China, choosing to maintain relations with Taiwan instead, even though in the 60's it would have been in their interest to try and establish a foothold in what would become the Chinese market. It was not unreasonable for them to expect the U.S. to hold up its meager end of the bargain (checking with them before changing our China policy), given that they were essentially placing themselves in Washington's hands.
However, Kissinger and Nixon, to put it bluntly, did not share Japan's views on honor or loyalty.
Kissinger's negotiations with Mao and Zhou happened largely in secret, a secret kept even from (indeed, ESPECIALLY from) Japan, and with good reason. If the Japanese had seen the concessions we were making to China in that one fateful communique, they would have been horrorstruck, as would the American People if truth be known. Put simply, Nixon and Kissinger's "deal" with China was basically a complete, outright capitulation, at least in rhetorical terms. The document was a contrite, apologetic confession that America's entire Asia policy since the end of WW2 had been wrong, written in the manner of a barbarian vassal kowtowing before a Chinese emperor. Zhang Qingmin delivers an excerpt in the CPC pamphlet China's Diplomacy.
In the Joint Communique issued in Shanghai during Nixon's visit to China in 1972, the U.S. stated: "The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Straits maintain that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China. The United States does not challenge this position."
(p. 30)
Take a minute to throw up if you need to. I did too when I read that. Richard "Watergate" Nixon, in a single document, not only acknowledged that a vital American ally who had shed blood beside us in a long and arduous war did not actually exist as a sovereign state, but he went so far as to claim that the Taiwanese believe this as well! This was followed up by another joint declaration, mostly written by Mao's staff, wherein Nixon pledged that the U.S. would sever all diplomatic ties with Taiwan, abrogate our mutual defense accord, and withdraw all military support. To put this in perspective, imagine if Barack Obama's 2012 accord with Iran (wherein he gave them everything they demanded and got nothing in return but empty promises) had also included a clause wherein we pledged to abrogate our treaty with Israel and switch our diplomatic recognition to Palestine. If you can imagine that apocalyptic scenario, you can begin to imagine what a betrayal Nixon and Kissinger's much-vaunted accord with China truly was. McGregor lays bare the reality of this betrayal of both Taiwan and Japan, as well as other U.S. allies who were caught off guard by the U.S.'s sudden embrace of the monster in Beijing.
In one fell swoop, Nixon and Kissinger consigned a loyal Taiwan and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists into a diplomatic isolation in which they are still largely suspended. Other countries that had dutifully followed Washington's lead shunning Beijing's Communists along Cold War lines since the 1949 revolution were forced to scramble to reset their policies.
(p. 21)
For Japan, which had sacrificed everything including, in all but name, their own sovereignty, the betrayal was felt on a deeper level. Eisaku Sato of Japan, the one against whom Nixon's ill-founded grudge had been directed in the first place, later recounted to McGregor how he had been "hurt, humiliated, and politically destroyed" by the surprise shift in policy.
"I did everything [the Americans] asked," Sato told the visiting Australian Labor leader, Gough Whitlam, tears welling up in his eyes. "They let me down."
(p. 49)
We threw a host of allies, including two loyal nations who happened to be the only functioning democracy in the region and the island in transition to becoming the next one, into the hungry maw of the dragon. And what did we get in Nixon & Kissinger's Faustian Bargain with Mao?
...The answer is, not much.
Essentially, Kissinger and Nixon's plan had been to use the growing Sino-Soviet rift to try and persuade China "we have the same enemy: the USSR." The success of this plan was, to say the least, limited. Though China and the USSR did have occasional border skirmishes, the much-longed-for goal of an actual alliance with China, never even came close to happening. If anything, Kissinger got played. China gained huge concessions from America on a vast array of issues, used us as a shield against the USSR, alleviated the threat of a conflict with us (giving the Chinese, who were already calling that conflict "inevitable," more time to prepare for it), and in return they gave us very little except a few semi-supportive speeches from Mao.
Mosher hits the proverbial nail on the head regarding the reasons why Kissinger's grand bargain failed.
Kissinger, though, was blind to the desire for hegemony that animated Zhou and the rest of the Communist elite-and still animates them down to the present day.
(p. 115)
The only thing we got in return, in essence, was a stronger, safer, more secure enemy.
Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Henry Kissinger
In Dante's Inferno, the deepest circle of Hell is depicted as a frozen shell where the worst of sinners, traitors, are condemned to the harshest torment Hell has to offer. Yet even within this shell, he depicts three men having yet more elite places of suffering set aside for themselves. In his poem, Lucifer is depicted as having three mouths, each one chewing one of these three men for all eternity. The three men being chewed in Lucifer's three mouths, according to Dante, are Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius (the latter two being the two men whose assassination of their friend and emperor is such a gut-wrenching moment in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar). Well... I certainly can't argue with Iscariot, but I dare say if Dante had been alive today, he'd have written about Lucifer having two mouths open and waiting, with saigns hanging from the fangs that read "reserved for Richard Nixon" and "reserved for Henry Kissinger."
I'd be lying if I said I think it's harsh enough, but it's a start.
Notes
*If anyone reading this happens to be in Beijing, do not get this confused with Xinhua's much larger "New World Bookstore" close to the subway station. The bookstore specifically set aside for foreign language publications (usually Chinese government propaganda translated into English) is a few blocks farther down the road and on the left, close to where Toys 'R' Us used to be.
Works Cited
Books
Cao Dawei & Sun Yanjing. China's History. Trans. Xiao Ying, Li Li & He Yunzhao. Beijing: China Intercontinental Press, 2010.
ISBN 978-7-5085-1302-7
Chu, Ben. Chinese Whispers. London: Weidenfeild & Nicolson, 2013.
ISBN 978-1-7802-2474-9
McGregor, Richard. Asia's Reckoning. New York: Penguin Random House, 2017.
ISBN 978-0-399-56267-9
Mosher, Stephen. Bully of Asia. Washington: Regenery Publishing, 2017.
ISBN 978-1-62157-696-9
Zhang Qingmin. China's Diplomacy. Trans. Zhang Qingmin. Beijing: China Intercontinental Press, 2010
ISBN 978-7-5085-1312-6
From the Web
Anderson, Jon Lee. "Does Henry Kissinger Have a Conscience?" The New Yorker. 20 Aug, 2016. Web. 9 Sep, 2018.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/does-henry-kissinger-have-a-conscience
Froomkin, Dan. "HENRY KISSINGER’S WAR CRIMES ARE CENTRAL TO THE DIVIDE BETWEEN HILLARY CLINTON AND BERNIE SANDERS." The Intercept. 13 Feb, 2016. Web. 9 Sep, 2018.
https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/
Galant, Michael R. "Welcoming War Crimes: The Normalization of Henry Kissinger." Harvard University. The Crimson. 31 Jan, 2017. Web. 9 Sep, 2018.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/1/31/galant-welcoming-war-crimes/
Reminisci, Patriam. "Chinese Ethnocentrism: It's Written Right Into Their Name." Steemit.com. 20 Feb, 2018. Web. 9 Sep, 2018.
https://steemit.com/china/@patriamreminisci/chinese-ethnocentrism-it-s-written-right-into-their-name