( k" ^; I) X! e2 ^3 B8 v( F$ p至于邓小平，则是个“有着忧郁眼神的勇敢小个子”。基辛格说，邓小平及其家庭在文革期间遭受了巨大的苦难。在重返政府工作岗位后，邓小平设法去除文革对意识形态纯正性的强调，代之以“秩序、专业和效率”的价值观。基辛格称赞他推动了将“毛泽东时代的农民公社”转变为繁忙的经济大国的现代化进程。2 ]) a, k1 v: D% K% v$ j3 B
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尽管基辛格并未深入探究当今美国所欠中国巨额债务引起的争议，以及日益崛起的中国将如何影响世界的问题，但他认为，如今中国“已不再有那种师从西方技术和制度的受限感”，并且 2008年的经济危机 “大大削弱了西方经济能力”在中国人眼中的 “神秘感”。8 Y$ d- k/ n, ^6 x. S& j
. o0 j" v U. Q/ v' w8 @- _1 |- V! L基辛格说，这些发展使得“中国产生了一股新的舆论浪潮——特别是在乐于表达的年轻一代学生和网民，另外还可能有一小部分政治和军队领导人中——这样也导致一种国际体系结构的根本性变化正在形成。”+ h* U2 ^5 J' |; k: r
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在强调合作性的中美关系“对全球稳定与和平至关重要”的同时，基辛格警告说，两国也有可能形成冷战，而这会 “阻碍太平洋两岸整整一代的发展”，并在“核扩散、环境、能源安全和气候变化等全球性问题急需国际合作的时候使分歧扩散到每个地区的国内政治中”。2 L) j4 s( ?4 `% f3 J/ E
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需要指出的是，基辛格现在是基辛格联合咨询公司的董事长，该公司与许多在中国有商业利益的公司都有业务。“中国和美国的关系，”他写道：“不需要——也不应该——成为一场零和博弈。”- o8 J* _; P2 k) ~: U: d
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Henry Kissinger on China 6 J; H/ ?$ S- b9 UThe easy part: Kissinger, Nixon, Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in 1972. / m" ~# a3 F% H: T* v' x# h
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An Insider Views China, Past and Future May 9, 2011 * s- _8 S4 G+ a* L0 A1 l2 M2 {7 D/ `& }& T- p& `: @8 U/ Q, [" s7 T
It’s been four decades since President Richard M. Nixon sent Henry A. Kissinger to Beijing to re-establish contact with China, an ancient civilization with which the United States, at that point, had had no high-level diplomatic contact for more than two decades. Since then the cold war has ended; the Soviet Union (a threat to both China and the United States and a spur to Sino-American cooperation) has come unwound; and economic reform in China has transformed a poverty-ridden, poorly educated nation into a great power that is playing an increasingly pivotal role in the globalized world. : a3 A; ]- {: v% K& |* a # ], d' C/ Y% N# y+ I3 \8 S% p( o4 f
Mr. Kissinger’s fascinating, shrewd and sometimes perverse new book, “On China,” not only addresses the central role he played in Nixon’s opening to China but also tries to show how the history of China, both ancient and more recent, has shaped its foreign policy and attitudes toward the West. While this volume is indebted to the pioneering scholarship of historians like Jonathan D. Spence, its portrait of China is informed by Mr. Kissinger’s intimate firsthand knowledge of several generations of Chinese leaders.7 }) ^, v Y) O
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The book deftly traces the rhythms and patterns in Chinese history (its cycles of turning inward in isolationist defensiveness and outward to the broader world), even as it explicates the philosophical differences that separate it from the United States. Each country has a sense of manifest destiny, but “American exceptionalism is missionary,” Mr. Kissinger says. “It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world.”& E" i6 d" |/ _7 q) o! l4 ^
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China’s exceptionalism, in contrast, he says, is cultural: China does not proselytize or claim that its institutions “are relevant outside China,” yet it tends to grade “all other states as various levels of tributaries based on their approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms.” - Z# c% X! n' k$ U' u. ?. I- \/ N# @ l" N# X# s# O0 @1 k9 N _
. f/ J" l5 h% T6 a; ILurking beneath Mr. Kissinger’s musings on Chinese history is a not-so-subtle subtext. This volume, much like his 1994 book, “Diplomacy,” is also a sly attempt by a controversial figure to burnish his legacy as Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. It is a book that promotes Mr. Kissinger’s own brand of realpolitik thinking, and that in doing so often soft-pedals the human costs of Mao’s ruthless decades-long reign and questions the consequences of more recent American efforts to press human-rights issues with the Chinese.1 e) u- U- [& g [% @% {/ Q
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7 \& G) ]1 g7 j2 [Some of the more revealing exchanges between Mr. Kissinger and Mao have already appeared in the 1999 book “The Kissinger Transcripts,” taken from the nongovernmental National Security Archive. Those documents show that Mr. Kissinger employed a good deal more flattery in his wrangling with foreign leaders than his personal accounts might suggest. A lot of the backstage maneuvering in the Nixon White House’s dealings with China will similarly be familiar in outline to readers of Margaret MacMillan’s “Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World” and William Bundy’s “Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency.”+ h+ Q9 F4 x) [! J# S
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0 _2 R* ~3 V6 o$ V: C8 VWhen it comes to talking about Chinese leaders he has met, Mr. Kissinger, the hardheaded apostle of realpolitik, can sound almost starry-eyed. His sympathy for these leaders is not that surprising, given his descriptions of them as practitioners of the same sort of unsentimental power politics he is famous for himself. This approach, he says, enabled China, “despite its insistent Communist propaganda, to conduct itself as essentially a geopolitical ‘free agent’ of the cold war,” making a tactical partnership with the United States in order to contain its fellow Communist country, the Soviet Union.: J: \# x4 F' A- w$ D3 T
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This sort of pragmatic self-interest on China’s part, Mr. Kissinger says, has continued. After 9/11, he writes: “China remained an agnostic bystander to the American projection of power across the Muslim world and above all to the Bush administration’s proclamation of ambitious goals of democratic transformation. Beijing retained its characteristic willingness to adjust to changes in alignments of power and in the composition of foreign governments without passing a moral judgment.” ! P" R8 m& f" n# u2 }- T7 a) s" D6 _8 V" [+ y+ {7 I8 C
" f( x7 e' Y7 O6 {6 D* p5 i: ORegarding the brutal crackdown on dissidents by the government of Deng Xiaoping at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Mr. Kissinger says that the American reaction left the Chinese puzzled: “They could not understand why the United States took umbrage at an event that had injured no American material interests and for which China claimed no validity outside its own territory.” l; l2 Q. `" f8 j; G# i 9 f7 x: T8 j K- _9 S8 q2 t9 e! Z; n # x6 @, N& t4 O; t8 r8 v O$ ]/ J gFor that matter, Mr. Kissinger’s own take on Tiananmen and the Chinese government has a determinedly “on the one hand, on the other hand” feel: “Like most Americans, I was shocked by the way the Tiananmen protest was ended. But unlike most Americans, I had had the opportunity to observe the Herculean task Deng had undertaken for a decade and a half to remold his country: moving Communists toward acceptance of decentralization and reform; traditional Chinese insularity toward modernity and a globalized world — a prospect China had often rejected. And I had witnessed his steady efforts to improve Sino-American ties.” , H# z9 [' f3 G! \6 C# L7 `6 O7 \1 [+ n' g N5 |
- [3 L+ `% u# @0 U' @; G& rMr. Kissinger is even more chillingly cavalier about the tens of millions of people who lost their lives during Mao’s years in power and the devastating fallout of his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Mr. Kissinger writes about what he describes as a “poignant” scene in which “Nixon complimented Mao on having transformed an ancient civilization, to which Mao replied: ‘I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.’ ”4 X% j6 n7 I" b- v: K6 }1 c9 r8 q
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Mr. Kissinger then, startlingly, adds: “After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot Chinese society, there was not a little pathos in Mao’s resigned recognition of the pervasiveness of Chinese culture and the Chinese people.”2 f+ k8 n. e% }$ n
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Buying into many of the myths Mao promoted about himself, Mr. Kissinger describes him as “the philosopher king.” - w+ `5 k% g1 ^/ z: r% T( z/ b' k" _; U2 [* E
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“Mao enunciated the doctrine of ‘continuous revolution,’ but when the Chinese national interest required it, he could be patient and take the long view,” he writes. “The manipulation of ‘contradictions’ was his proclaimed strategy, yet it was in the service of an ultimate goal drawn from the Confucian concept of da tong, or the Great Harmony.” 9 r* K6 _$ ?# @) I# @+ w% B/ t) ~4 T v1 L0 k: ^( j! I1 K8 {
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For some people, Mr. Kissinger acknowledges, “the tremendous suffering Mao inflicted on his people will dwarf his achievements.” But he also delivers this coldblooded rationalization: “If China remains united and emerges as a 21st-century superpower,” many Chinese may come to regard him as they do the early emperor Qin Shihuang, “whose excesses were later acknowledged by some as a necessary evil.” C3 \ W9 \4 u: m% y( {' |& s7 ~. v, s* ` 8 E6 F% S* x) b* M: g/ e% Y ) A! x3 O. A# O& o' HThe portraits Mr. Kissinger draws of Mao’s successors project an appreciative intimacy. He remembers Zhou Enlai as conducting “conversations with the effortless grace and superior intelligence of the Confucian sage.” He adds that the elegant Zhou — who would be “criticized for having concentrated on softening some of Mao’s practices rather than resisting them” — faced the classic quandary of the “adviser to the prince,” who must balance “the benefits of the ability to alter events against the possibility of exclusion, should he bring his objections to any one policy to a head.”. n; \# o3 D0 Q2 w* K6 w, n
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Of Deng Xiaoping, a “doughty little man with the melancholy eyes,” Mr. Kissinger reminds us that Deng and his family suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution — he was exiled to perform manual labor, and his son, Mr. Kissinger writes, was “tormented by Red Guards and pushed off the top of a building at Beijing University” and denied admission to a hospital for his broken back. Upon his return to government, Deng worked to replace the Revolution’s emphasis on ideological purity with the values of “order, professionalism and efficiency,” and Mr. Kissinger credits him with fashioning the modernizations that would transform “Mao’s drab China of agricultural communes” into a bustling economic giant. 4 ^( O) P- d, [5 Y: Q: w/ f8 C$ N. A$ C' F; C/ c* T
- z8 w+ n! T. z6 FThere are few new insights into Nixon here. Mr. Kissinger obliquely acknowledges what critics like the historian Robert Dallek have argued: that Nixon tried to use his initiatives with China and the Soviet Union to distract attention from his failures in Vietnam. Among the reasons Nixon’s trip to China occurred in the first place, Mr. Kissinger writes, were Mao’s desire to make “a move that might force the Soviets to hesitate before taking on China militarily” and Nixon’s eagerness “to raise American sights beyond Vietnam.” 2 l) F$ l6 X# d5 q- C* B7 ?; C( G+ n3 o- |, l: A; Q
: A6 w8 I( X! \Mr. Kissinger also says that the secrecy surrounding negotiations with China (“Nixon had decided that the channel to Beijing should be confined to the White House”) “nearly derailed the enterprise,” when an out-of-the-loop State Department dismissed an invitation Mao had made to Nixon in an interview as not serious, and described Chinese foreign policy as “expansionist” and “rather paranoiac.” * B( ^1 t% L+ k6 _) Y, Z# y# @- z+ K7 M7 J! v
R( |7 \. H" L* gAlthough Mr. Kissinger does not delve into recent debates over the enormous amount of United States debt that China holds, or how an increasingly ascendant China could affect the rest of the world (the subject of books like Martin Jacques’s “When China Rules the World” and James Kynge’s “China Shakes the World”), he observes that President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao “presided over a country that no longer felt constrained by the sense of apprenticeship to Western technology and institutions,” and that the 2008 economic meltdown “seriously undermined the mystique of Western economic prowess” among the Chinese.0 |# t/ X0 d9 d3 ^0 I
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These developments, in turn, Mr. Kissinger argues, have prompted a “new tide of opinion in China — among the vocal younger generation of students and Internet users and quite possibly in portions of the political and military leadership — to the effect that a fundamental shift in the structure of the international system was taking place.”$ K# R8 W! P. F& o6 ?. x1 c8 U$ Q
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6 {7 \6 A6 j' d$ N6 ~3 lArguing that a cooperative United States-China relationship is “essential to global stability and peace,” Mr. Kissinger warns that were a cold war to develop between the countries, it “would arrest progress for a generation on both sides of the Pacific” and “spread disputes into internal politics of every region at a time when global issues such as nuclear proliferation, the environment, energy security and climate change impose global cooperation.” Mr. Kissinger, it should be noted, is chairman of Kissinger Associates Inc., an international consulting firm that does work with companies that have business interests in China. # J' { _; ]8 Q2 ^- E & d" s! L1 N- W& t, x: d6 |" N% {, L: Y' Y. B6 E: k) I
“Relations between China and the United States,” he writes, “need not — and should not — become a zero-sum game.”
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