The late Henry Kissinger had as many detractors on the Latin American and Southeast Asian left as he had admirers in Beijing. After his death on Wednesday, the People’s Republic of China has once again exalted the figure of its old friend, far beyond protocol.
“He made historic contributions to the normalization of relations between China and the United States, for the benefit of both countries and the world,” says President Xi Jinping’s condolences to his counterpart Joe Biden.
Also the official Chinese media, usually belligerent with Washington, melt in praise of who was Secretary of State and architect of the cold war.
In July, shortly after his centenary, Kissinger was complimented by Xi himself in the same Diaoyutai room where, on his 1971 trip, he met Premier Zhou Enlai to change the course of history.
In this meeting – on a secret flight from Pakistan even for the anti-communist allies of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea – the historic meeting between Nixon and Mao, the following year in Beijing, was forged.
That rapprochement was not philanthropy, but a studied wedge between the USSR and China. At the antipodes of the current foreign policy that throws Moscow into the arms of Beijing.
Although Kissinger is liberally in Chinese textbooks, his current claim looks not to the past but to the present. Nixon then signed the Shanghai Communiqué, to which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adheres today with more devotion than to the classics of Marxism. Not surprisingly, the US “recognizes that all Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait consider that there is one China and that Taiwan is part of China”.
For Taipei, which had just been replaced in the UN, it was a new betrayal that would be consummated in 1979, when Washington exchanged ambassadors with Beijing.
But Kissinger did not move in a vacuum. In France, General De Gaulle had already established relations with communist China in 1964. Also Canada or Italy – in addition to the entire communist bloc – were ahead of the United States’ turn.
This turn seemed irreversible until the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, which increased the decibels of hostility towards China, already perceived now with Biden as an unprecedented threat to US hegemony.
Even having been awarded a paradoxical Nobel Peace Prize, Kissinger, a cold war warrior, will be little mourned in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos or Timor. Nor in Taiwan, where they remember that he flew a hundred times to China without ever landing in Taipei.
Henry Kissinger had time to see the reunion of Xi and Biden last month in San Francisco. A few days earlier, at his latest appearance in New York, the master of realpolitik warned: “The United States and China have a unique ability to bring peace and prosperity to the world, but also to destroy it, if not they go hand in hand”.
