## Metadata - Author: [[Henry Kissinger]] - Full Title: On China - Category: #books ## Highlights - In no other country is it conceivable that a modern leader would initiate a major national undertaking by invoking strategic principles from a millennium-old event—nor that he could confidently expect his colleagues to understand the significance of his allusions. Yet China is singular. No other country can claim so long a continuous civilization, or such an intimate link to its ancient past and classical principles of strategy and statesmanship. Other societies, the United States included, have claimed universal applicability for their values and institutions. Still, none equals China in persisting—and persuading its neighbors to acquiesce—in such an elevated conception of its world role for so long, and in the face of so many historical vicissitudes. ([Location 150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=150)) - SOCIETIES AND NATIONS tend to think of themselves as eternal. They also cherish a tale of their origin. A special feature of Chinese civilization is that it seems to have no beginning. ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=168)) - When Chinese written characters first evolved, during the Shang Dynasty in the second millennium B.C., ancient Egypt was at the height of its glory. The great city-states of classical Greece had not yet emerged, and Rome was millennia away. Yet the direct descendant of the Shang writing system is still used by well over a billion people today. Chinese today can understand inscriptions written in the age of Confucius; contemporary Chinese books and conversations are enriched by centuries-old aphorisms citing ancient battles and court intrigues. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=186)) - Chinese history featured many periods of civil war, interregnum, and chaos. After each collapse, the Chinese state reconstituted itself as if by some immutable law of nature. At each stage, a new uniting figure emerged, following essentially the precedent of the Yellow Emperor, to subdue his rivals and reunify China (and sometimes enlarge its bounds). ([Location 190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=190)) - The outward radiance of Chinese culture throughout East Asia led the American political scientist Lucian Pye to comment famously that, in the modern age, China remains a “civilization pretending to be a nation-state.”9 ([Location 258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=258)) - In fact, China produced a greater share of total world GDP than any Western society in eighteen of the last twenty centuries. ([Location 275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=275)) - Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=293)) - When the bloodletting ended and China again stood unified, the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) adopted Confucian thought as an official state philosophy. Compiled into a central collection of Confucius’s sayings (the Analects) and subsequent books of learned commentary, the Confucian canon would evolve into something akin to China’s Bible and its Constitution combined. ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=313)) - The founding Emperor of the Ming Dynasty expressed this view in 1372: “Countries of the western ocean are rightly called distant regions. They come [to us] across the seas. And it is difficult for them to calculate the year and month [of arrival]. Regardless of their numbers, we treat them [on the principle of] ‘those who come modestly are sent off generously.’”20 ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=360)) - Only under the pressure of Western incursions in the nineteenth century did China establish something analogous to a foreign ministry to manage diplomacy as an independent function of government, in 1861 after the defeat in two wars with the Western powers. It was considered a temporary necessity, to be abolished once the immediate crisis subsided. ([Location 377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=377)) - When foreign dynasts prevailed in battle, the Chinese bureaucratic elite would offer their services and appeal to their conquerors on the premise that so vast and unique a land as they had just overrun could be ruled only by use of Chinese methods, Chinese language, and the existing Chinese bureaucracy. ([Location 436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=436)) - Communist China launched itself into a new world: in structure, a new dynasty; in substance, a new ideology for the first time in Chinese history. Strategically, it abutted over a dozen neighbors, with open frontiers and inadequate means to deal simultaneously with each potential threat—the same challenge that had confronted Chinese governments throughout history. Overarching all these concerns, the new leaders of China faced the involvement in Asian affairs of the United States, which had emerged from the Second World War as a confident superpower, with second thoughts about its passivity when confronted with the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war. Every statesman needs to balance the experience of the past against the claims of the future. Nowhere was this more true than in the China that Mao and the Communist Party had just taken over. ([Location 1452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=1452)) - Now our enthusiasm has been aroused. Ours is an ardent nation, now swept by a burning tide. There is a good metaphor for this: our nation is like an atom. . . . When this atom’s nucleus is smashed the thermal energy released will have really tremendous power. We shall be able to do things which we could not do before. ([Location 1502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=1502)) - Through the lens of Western strategic analysis, most of Beijing’s military undertakings in the first three decades of the Cold War were improbable and, on paper at least, impossible affairs. Setting China against usually far stronger powers and occurring in territories previously deemed of secondary strategic importance—North Korea, the offshore islands of the Taiwan Strait, sparsely populated tracts of the Himalayas, frozen swatches of territory in the Ussuri River—these Chinese interventions and offensives caught almost all foreign observers—and each of the adversaries—by surprise. Mao was determined to prevent encirclement by any power or combination of powers, regardless of ideology, that he perceived as securing too many wei qi “stones” surrounding China, by disrupting their calculations. ([Location 1649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=1649)) - Long Live the Victory of People’s War, a 1965 pamphlet by Lin Biao, then Mao’s presumptive successor, argued that the countryside of the world (that is, the developing countries) would defeat the cities of the world (that is, the advanced countries) much as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had defeated Chiang Kai-shek. The administration of Lyndon Johnson read these lines as a Chinese blueprint for support for—and probably outright participation in—Communist subversion all around the world and especially in Indochina. Lin’s pamphlet was a contributing factor in the decision to send American forces to Vietnam. Contemporary scholarship, however, treats his document as a statement of the limits of Chinese military support for Vietnam and other revolutionary movements. For, in fact, Lin was proclaiming that “[t]he liberation of the masses is accomplished by the masses themselves—this is a basic principle of Marxism-Leninism. Revolution or people’s war in any country is the business of the masses in that country and should be carried out primarily by their own efforts; there is no other way.” ([Location 1674](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=1674)) - once revolutionaries seize power, they are obliged to govern hierarchically if they want to avoid either paralysis or chaos. The more sweeping the overthrow, the more hierarchy has to substitute for the consensus that holds a functioning society together. ([Location 1703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=1703)) - Mao’s faith in the ultimate success of his continuous revolution had three sources: ideology, tradition, and Chinese nationalism. The single most important one was his faith in the resilience, capabilities, and cohesion of the Chinese people. And in truth, it is impossible to think of another people who could have sustained the relentless turmoil that Mao imposed on his society. Or whose leader could have made credible Mao’s oft-repeated threat that the Chinese people would prevail, even if it retreated from all its cities against a foreign invader or suffered tens of millions of casualties in a nuclear war. Mao could do so because of a profound faith in the Chinese people’s ability to retain its essence amidst all vicissitudes. ([Location 1719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=1719)) - An ambivalent combination of faith in the Chinese people and disdain for its traditions enabled Mao to carry out an astonishing tour de force: an impoverished society just emerging from a rending civil war tore itself apart at ever shorter intervals and, during that process, fought wars with the United States and India; challenged the Soviet Union; and restored the frontiers of the Chinese state to nearly their maximum historic extent. ([Location 1773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=1773)) - Still, with all its achievements, Mao’s insistence on turning the ancient system upside down could not escape the eternal rhythm of Chinese life. Forty years after his death, after a journey violent, dramatic, and searing, his successors again described their now increasingly well-off society as Confucian. In 2011, a statue of Confucius was placed in Tiananmen Square within sight of Mao’s mausoleum—the only other personality so honored. Only a people as resilient and patient as the Chinese could emerge unified and dynamic after such a roller coaster ride through history. ([Location 1780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=1780)) - in the Western doctrine, preemption seeks victory and a military advantage. Mao’s approach to preemption differed in the extraordinary attention he paid to psychological elements. His motivating force was less to inflict a decisive military first blow than to change the psychological balance, not so much to defeat the enemy as to alter his calculus of risks. ([Location 2100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=2100)) - When the Chinese view of preemption encounters the Western concept of deterrence, a vicious circle can result: acts conceived as defensive in China may be treated as aggressive by the outside world; deterrent moves by the West may be interpreted in China as encirclement. The United States and China wrestled with this dilemma repeatedly during the Cold War; to some extent they have not yet found a way to transcend it. ([Location 2106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=2106)) - Mao set the tone of the next day’s meeting by receiving Khrushchev not in a ceremonial room but in his swimming pool. Khrushchev, who could not swim, was obliged to wear water wings. The two statesmen conversed while swimming, with the interpreters following them up and down the side of the pool. Khrushchev would later complain: “It was Mao’s way of putting himself in an advantageous position. Well, I got sick of it. . . . I crawled out, sat on the edge, and dangled my legs in the pool. Now I was on top and he was swimming below.” ([Location 2672](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=2672)) - One can only imagine Mao’s bemusement: he had goaded Moscow and Washington into threatening nuclear war against each other over some of the world’s least vital geopolitical real estate in what was an essentially nonmilitary piece of Chinese political theater. Moreover, Mao had done so at a time of his choosing, while China remained vastly weaker than the United States or the USSR, and in a manner that allowed him to claim a significant propaganda victory and rejoin Sino-U.S. ambassadorial talks from what his propaganda would claim was a position of strength. ([Location 2788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=2788)) - DURING THE FIRST DECADE of the People’s Republic of China’s existence, its tough leaders navigated the decrepit empire they had conquered and turned it into a major power internationally. The second decade was dominated by Mao’s attempt to accelerate the continuous revolution at home. The driving force of continuous revolution was Mao’s maxim that moral and ideological vigor would overcome physical limitations. ([Location 2822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=2822)) - Two complete overhauls of China’s domestic structure took place: first of the economy, with the Great Leap Forward at the beginning of the decade; and second, of the social order, with the Cultural Revolution at the end. Diplomacy was out of fashion; but war was not. When Mao felt the national interest challenged, in the midst of all its self-inflicted travail, China stood up once again, to go to war at its furthest western frontier in the inhospitable Himalayas. ([Location 2826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=2826)) - In diplomatic practice, initialing freezes the text; it signifies that the negotiations have been concluded. Signing the document puts it into force. ([Location 2900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0046ECJBY&location=2900))