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Penguin
May 2011
On Sale: May 17, 2011
608 pages
ISBN: 1594202710
EAN: 9781594202711
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Drawing on forty years of intimate acquaintance with the country and its leaders, Henry Kissinger reflects on how China's past relations with the outside world illuminate its twenty-first century trajectory. In On China, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book length to the country he has known intimately for decades and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. Drawing on historical records as well as on his conversations with Chinese leaders over the past forty years, Kissinger examines how China has approached diplomacy, strategy, and negotiation throughout its history and reflects on the consequences for the global balance of power in the twenty-first-century. As Kissinger underscores, the unique conditions under which China developed continue to shape its policies and attitudes toward the outside world. For centuries, China rarely encountered other societies of comparable size and sophistication. China was the "Middle Kingdom," treating the peoples on its periphery as vassal states. At the same time, Chinese statesmen-facing threats of invasion from without and the contests of competing factions within-developed a canon of strategic thought that prized the virtues of subtlety, patience, and indirection over feats of martial prowess. On China examines key episodes in Chinese foreign policy, with a particular emphasis on the decades since the rise of Mao Zedong, and the often fraught but crucial relationship between Beijing and Washington. Kissinger illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, Richard Nixon's historic trip to Beijing, and the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. Kissinger brings to life the two towering figures of the People's Republic of China, Mao and Deng Xiaoping, revealing how their divergent visions have shaped China's modern destiny. The book traces the evolution of Sino-American relations over the past sixty years, following their dramatic course from estrangement to strategic partnership to economic interdependence, and toward an uncertain future. With a final chapter on the ascendant superpower's twenty-first century global role, On China provides a sweeping historical perspective on Chinese foreign affairs from one of the premier statesmen of the twentieth century.
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