On China

On China by Henry Kissinger Page A

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his own office. On the other hand, Zhou had not been as farsighted as Chairman Mao, who saw the need to inject new vigor into the revolution. 16
    Why present such a narrative to an American delegation on the first visit from the United States in two decades? Because the objective was to go beyond normalization to what our interlocutors called friendship, but which would be more accurately described as strategic cooperation. For that, it was important to define China as a country that had overcome its turmoil and was therefore reliable. Having navigated the Cultural Revolution, Zhou implied, it was able to face any foreign foe as a united country and was therefore a potential partner against the Soviet threat. Zhou made the theme explicit in the formal session that immediately followed. It was held in the Fujian Hall of the Great Hall of the People, where each hall is named after a Chinese province. Fujian is the province to which, in both Beijing’s and Taipei’s administrative divisions, Taiwan and the so-called offshore islands belonged. 17 Zhou did not make a point of the symbolism, and the Americans ignored it.
    Zhou began by outlining China’s defiance, even should all conceivable enemies unite against it:
    You like to talk about philosophy. The worst would be that China would be carved up once again. You could unite, with the USSR occupying all areas north of the Yellow River, and you occupying all the areas south of the Yangtze River, and the eastern section between these two rivers could be left to Japan. . . .
    If such a large maneuver should occur, what would the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mao be prepared to do? We would be prepared to resist for a protracted period by people’s warfare, engaging in a long-term struggle until final victory. This would take time and, of course, we would have to sacrifice lives, but this is something which we would have to contemplate. 18
    According to recent Chinese historical accounts, Zhou had been specifically instructed by Mao to “brag” that “although all under the heaven[s] is in great chaos, the situation is wonderful.” 19 Mao was worried about Soviet aggression, but he did not want to express concern, even less appear to ask for help. The narrative of turmoil under the heavens was his way of eliciting American attitudes without the implication of concern involved in asking for them: to sketch both the maximum conceivable threat and China’s fortitude in resisting even it. No American intelligence estimate had ever conceived so cataclysmic a contingency; no American policymaker had considered so global a confrontation. Yet its sweep did not specify the specific dominant concern—which was a Soviet attack—and thus China avoided appearing as a supplicant.
    Despite its apparent explicitness, Zhou’s presentation was a subtle approach to a discussion of strategic cooperation. In the Atlantic region we were allied with friendly countries under a looming threat. They would seek reassurance by transforming oral pledges into a legal obligation. The Chinese leaders took the opposite course. How China was prepared to stand alone, even in the face of a nuclear threat, and fight a protracted guerrilla war on its own against a coalition of all major powers became a standard Chinese narrative over the next decade. Its underlying purpose was to turn self-reliance into a weapon and into a method of mutual assistance based on parallel perceptions. Reciprocal obligations between China and the United States would not be established in a legal document but in a shared perception of a common threat. Though China made no claim for outside assistance, it would spontaneously arise from shared perceptions; it would be dispensed with if the other party did not share—or no longer shared—the Chinese view of the challenge.
    At the very end of the second day’s session and with the evening blocked for Zhou by the visit of the North Korean dignitary—with about eighteen hours

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