On China - Henry Kissenger
Wow - this is a must read for anyone working in Asia or wanting to know more of the Chinese culture. I have tried multiple reads into the Chinese mindset/history and have not had a lot of success. My favorite prior to this book was Pearl Buck's - The Good Earth.
What can you get from this read? The book begins with a clear survey of China from the beginning of its recorded history. The biggest takeaway being the Chinese thought that they are the central (middle) kingdom and everything outside of China is the outer region. More importantly, China has not had a history of being expansionist - unique for a potential world power.
The history of China is a consolidation of smaller kingdoms to a point of a large peaceful kingdom ruled by the Yellow Emporer. The famous opening of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a fourteenth century epic novel treausured by centuries of Chinese (including Mao, who is said to have poured over it almost obsessively in his youth), evokes this coninuous rhythm: "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." Once the rythm of consolidation occurred then the manipulation of foriegn threat could be used to preserve the kingdom from outsiders. A common thread throughout China's history has been using foriegners (barbarians against barbarians) against each other to ward off interest in attacking China (keeping the barbarians weak).
This policy worked well until the reality of China's demise in military arms and tactics came home with the British coming into Peking and demanding terms. The result of their falling behind militarily was the release of Hong Kong and Macau and the allowance of trade into controlled zones in China to western powers (which would be very familiar to anyone doing business in China since the late 1980's).
China meandered along until the Revolution. The outcome of the revolution was the fracture of the country having the prior government (led by Chaiang Kai-shek) running to Formosa (Taiwan), and Mao controlling the mainland from Beijing. Mao focused on revamping China through two main thrusts, the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution".
The Great Leap Forward represented China's first attempt at planned economies and collectivism. The attempt to pull the country out of an agrarian society to an industrialized society. Just as the Soviets experienced, this was a disaster and led to extreme shortages in grain and famines which claimed millions. As we will discuss later the Chinese learned from this experience.
The Cultural Revolution was an attempt by Mao to totally disrupt the heirachy of the party and he allowed the country to go into constant chaos. Many leaders were sent to re-education camps - if they were lucky. Gangs literally ran the streets of China disrupting everything. This was a reflection of Mao thinking that harmony (Confucionasim) led to a lack of development so constant disruption had to be introduced to allow China to be more productive. There were a lot of negatives to this policy and one key one was the outside world didn't know how to engage a country that allowed this internal policy.
The Korean and Vietnamese wars were discussed and primarily there was concern by China that the United States sought a policy of hegemony (an attempt to rule an area with subordinate states). A divide began to occur between China and the Soviets and this allowed an opening to begin discussions with China. China was able to see that the U.S. saw Korea and Vietnam as expansionist activity by the Soviets - and China subsequently had their own issues with Vietnam and the neighboring states. President Nixon was ready to close the Vietnam war and the opening of China to the West began. Of course, true to China's nature, China saw a way to take advantage of two barbarians (the U.S. and Soviets) and focus inwards againg on their economic issues.
Zhou was the (short-term) predessessor to Mao and introduced the "Four Modernizations" platform: agriculture; industry; national defense; and science and technology. Deng Xiaoping replaced Zhou in short order but he continued the focus of the Four Modernizations but with an interesting twist - instead of trying to achieve the goals with a planned economy - he allowed the people to invest.
Kissinger's quote/my emphasis "For the only time in my experience with Chinese leaders, philosphical and practical disagreements were made explicit. Hua described an economic program to spur production by traditional Soviet methods, emphasizing heavy industry, improvemetns in agricultural productions based on communes, increased mechanization, and use of fertilizers within the framework of a ubiquitous Five-Year Plan. Deng rejected all these orthodoxies. The people, he said, needed to be given a stake in what they produced. Consumer goods had to have priority over heavy industry, the ingenuity of Chinese farmers had to be liberated, the Communist Party needed to become less intrusive, and government would have to be decentralized." WOW.
I like to think of Deng Xiaoping as the George Washington of China. What we are seeing today is the direct result of his vision to disconnect the political China with the economic China. You can be assured he had his detractors - but he held to his concept and fought for it to his last days. When Gorbachev came to China and shared his vision to allow the Soviet Union to change the political framework before the economic framework of the country China saw him as "misguided" - and the outcome prooved that out as the Soviet states went into a virtual free fall.
As you can tell this book has impacted me greatly. There are a lot of other things that come out of the book that are interesting facts but the biggest read I get is I'm not certain our current political stance with China (tilting towards adversarial) is in our best interest. Out of all of the great powers, China may be the best to coexist. As in all industries the top two survive, so it shall always be with great powers. Maybe the U.S. and China should strive to be the two.
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