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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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