The late Henry Kissinger had as many detractors on the Latin American and Southeast Asian left as he did admirers in Beijing. After his death last Wednesday, the People's Republic of China has once again exalted the figure of his 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,” reads President Xi Jinping's condolences to his counterpart Joe Biden.
The Chinese official media, usually belligerent with Washington, are also full of praise for the man who was Secretary of State and architect of the Cold War.
Last July, shortly after turning one hundred years old, Kissinger was entertained by Xi himself in the same Diaoyutai room where, on his 1971 trip, he met with Premier Zhou Enlai to change the course of history.
In that 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 was forged, the following year in Beijing.
That approach was not philanthropy, but a studied wedge between the USSR and China. In the antipodes of the current foreign policy that throws Moscow into the arms of Beijing.
Although Kissinger figures generously in Chinese textbooks, his current demand does not look to the past but to the present. Nixon then signed the Shanghai Communiqué, to which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) clings today with more devotion than to the classics of Marxism. Not in vain, the US “recognizes that all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait consider that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China.”
For Taipei, which had just been replaced at the UN, it was a new betrayal that would be consummated in 1979, when Washington exchanged ambassadors with Beijing.
But Kissinger was not moving in a vacuum. In France, General De Gaulle had established relations with communist China already in 1964. Canada and Italy – in addition to the entire communist bloc – also anticipated the turn of the United States.
This seemed irreversible until the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House, which increased the decibels of hostility towards China, now perceived 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 to China a hundred times without ever landing in Taipei.
Henry Kissinger had time to see Xi and Biden's reunion last month in San Francisco. A few days before, in his last appearance, in New York, the master of realpolitik warned: "The United States and China have a unique capacity to bring peace and prosperity to the world, but also to destroy it, if they do not go hand in hand."
