The centenarian statesman has allowed himself to be made into a ventriloquist’s dummy for the People's Republic
On the face of it, Henry Kissinger’s visit to China looks like a masterstroke of diplomacy. Following a recent stream of serving senior US visitors to Beijing – Secretary of State Blinken, Treasury Secretary Yellen and Climate Envoy Kerry among them – it awakened echoes of historical reconciliation and revival in the US-China relationship. The centenarian US statesman, warmly welcomed in person by Xi Jinping as an ‘old friend of China’, bearing hopes for reconciliation between two estranged superpowers dangerously near the brink of conflict – what could be a better way to get bilateral relations back on track?
Sadly, the reality is very different. The Biden administration says Kissinger travelled ‘of his own volition, as a private citizen’. If the administration had no hand in his mission, the results of the visit suggest that letting it go ahead was a bad mistake. If Kissinger was in fact tasked to convey top-level US government wishes for a thaw in relations, then this must be looking like an even worse miscalculation.
What is the basis for this pessimistic assessment?
Xi and his top colleagues gave Kissinger a far friendlier reception than those granted recently to the senior serving US officials, framing them in contrast as little more than a string of needy supplicants. Welcoming Kissinger as an ‘old friend of China’ gave Xi a perfect opportunity to pose as supreme leader of a stable state – the rising Chinese superpower – graciously welcoming a frail old emissary bearing an olive branch from its declining, divided and decadent rival.
Obviously, Chinese state media made relentless propaganda hay of this. At the start of the visit, the minister of defence reportedly said that ‘friendly US/China communication had been destroyed because some people in the US did not meet China half-way’. China’s top diplomat said that ‘US policy towards China requires diplomatic wisdom like Kissinger’s and political courage like Nixon’s.’ He noted that it was ‘impossible’ to ‘transform, encircle or contain China’.
Xi is quoted as telling Kissinger that ‘China never forgets its old friends’, and that ‘the key (to improving bilateral relations) is to follow the principles of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win co-operation’.
Beneath patronising leadership rhetoric lies a colder under-current of realpolitik, which as usual the state-directed Global Times makes explicit.
‘Under the toxic environment of its domestic politics, US China policy has deviated from a rational and sound track’ and is ‘eager to transform or contain China, which is doomed to fail’. ‘Bilateral ties have hit a historical low point due to… Washington’s wrong and provocative deeds on the Taiwan question and mishandling of the Chinese balloon incident’. Most explicitly, the rise of China brooks no resistance. ‘China’s development has a strong internal driving force and an inevitable historical logic.’ Making no bones of his private status, China had ‘delivered this message to the Biden administration through the talks with Kissinger’.
Remarks attributed to Kissinger by the state news agency Xinhua are similarly slanted for propaganda purposes. Perhaps he did indeed say that it was ‘a great honour to visit China’, whatever one might make of this ‘honour’ from the perspective of Ukraine, Tibet, Inner Mongolia or Xinjiang. But the following verbiage is surely pure ventriloquism; the language is copy-book Party jargon.
‘The [Sino-US] relationship is a matter of world peace and the progress of human society … under the current circumstances, it is imperative to maintain the principles established by the Shanghai Communique, appreciate the utmost importance China attaches to the one-China principle, and move the relationship in a positive direction, Kissinger said in the meeting.’ He also reportedly commented that ‘neither the US nor China can afford to treat the other as an adversary’.
The best that the US has so far come up with as an objective for recent attempts to unblock relations is a vague wish to revive ‘frank dialogue and fair competition’. If there is one thing they ought to have learnt from 44 years of the diplomatic relations that Henry Kissinger brokered, it’s that neither of those are in the Chinese Communist Party playbook.
So, based on public coverage, we may conclude that the following is all the Kissinger visit really achieved. It provided Xi Jinping, at no cost whatsoever, the chance to take an initiative and pass a tacitly threatening message to an embattled President Biden, in words quoted in the foreign ministry media statement: ‘China and the United States are once again at the crossroads of where to go, and the two sides need to make new decisions’.
But what sort of decisions are needed when – despite the fact that China faces no foreign military threats whatever – Xi is driving forward a massive military buildup, including new nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, space and cyber warfare capabilities? When daily he increases military aggression against Taiwan, a free, democratic state of 24 million people? When he provides crucial political and economic support for Putin’s pointless, barbarous attempts to destroy Ukraine? When he is doing everything in his power, as amply demonstrated by the so-called ‘Foreign Relations Law’ passed on 1 July 23, to weaken China’s commitments to international rules and norms in favour of powers to break them in furtherance of China’s ‘national security and sovereignty’? And when – despite assurances – he and the Party he leads do indeed regard both the US and its allies as existential adversaries to be subjugated to a new China-led authoritarian world order?
The People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping is an intelligence state in which Chinese spy agencies call their best foreign agents ‘deeply-connected friends’. No doubt Dr Kissinger had nothing but worthy motives for visiting China. But it seems that the visit did little good for the cause of freedom and democracy, at a time when China threatens both.
Perhaps it is now time for him to make a truly honourable withdrawal from the world of Sino-US relations.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/20/kissinger-xi-jinping-china-visit-embarrassment/
