SINOGRAPH Lingering lessons from a
warmonger By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - Can peace win a war? That is,
can peaceful methods prevail over traditional
military measures in confrontations? This is not
an issue to be discussed in the next Woodstock
peaceniks' session of some newly established
Association of Flower Children; it is the
lingering question in the latest book by a man
defined as a notorious warmonger and yet also a
Nobel Peace laureate: former United States
secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger's answer to this question - which
according to Western strategic tradition should be
a deafening "no" - is, conversely, "yes."
His new volume, On China, in fact,
is not so much about China as it is about Chinese
diplomacy, something inextricably intertwined with
China's strategic mentality and practice. It is
about how this
mindset, a legacy from
ancient war master Sunzi, can help us to
understand China, the foremost anthropological and
cultural challenge to the West; and how it can
improve Western political planning philosophy
overall.
The question is at the heart of
Sunzi's idea that the best victories are achieved
before a single battle has been fought.
This tradition of diplomacy is, for
instance, how China managed to overcome many -
although certainly not all - of the difficulties
after the Opium Wars despite the many errors in
its judgment regarding foreigners and despite
making many wrong domestic political choices.
Kissinger spots the cruel realism of the
Chinese political mind when he writes:
Having stopped the British advance
Wei Yuan [a senior Qing official] continued,
Beijing needed to weaken London's relative
position in the world and in China. He came up
with another original idea: to invite other
barbarians into China and set up a contest
between their greed and Britain's, so that China
could emerge as the balancer in effect over the
division of its own balance.
Through
such an understanding of how to improve a
bargaining position and fight the best possible,
China - objectively very weak - managed to cope
adeptly with the very difficult position of being
squeezed between the Soviets and the US in the
1970s. This strategic tradition optimized her
hand, for instance, during the process of reforms
and the wave of globalization.
In recent
weeks, the many reviews of the book that have come
out often read as dutiful, with most claiming it
contains nothing new. The facts are indeed all
very well known, but Kissinger's analysis and
warnings are not.
Often it is not clear
what the West should heed from China. This is not
simply about an old bag of tricks, but the Chinese
mindset and its ability to combine in one pattern
diplomacy and war - something that Kissinger
himself saw as distinct in his former volume,
Diplomacy.
This Chinese mindset is
not without faults. It sees an order in
everything, it can be at times far too
conspiratorial, and it therefore traps the Chinese
strategist by failing to help him perceive
accidents and the unexpected, which if recognized
as such can be exploited in devising new
strategies and stratagems.
This
traditional conspiratorial mind can be protective
and yet also blinding. In the Opium Wars it took
decades for China to realize that old cultural
paradigms were not working and that a completely
different world had opened its gates before the
old mandarins.
It happened again with Mao
Zedong, who tried to use the Americans like pawns
on his convoluted chessboard, missing the fact
that American power was not in the intelligence of
a group of its leaders but in the strangely
coordinated collective mind producing
technological and cultural innovation and freedom
- all simplistically branded as "capitalism".
Openly, Kissinger's book is not for the
Chinese. It is a warning for Westerners who might
underestimate Chinese tradition and should learn
to equip themselves in a world in which 22% of
humanity is playing an ever-greater role.
But it also contains a convoluted
cautionary tale for the Chinese themselves. It
tells them: Do not get too wrapped up in
conspiracy theories and do not look at the world
only through your own prism. The world is full of
surprises, and one should accept differences and
react to them. This ability to be positively open
to surprises is a Western tradition and something
the Chinese tend to dislike as they wonder about
the ulterior motive and ultimate mover - the traps
and the plot - behind the "surprise".
Convoluted plots, right or wrong, could
work better with fewer variables. But in the
present world, the number of variables is
infinite. This is not only about the US and China,
or Western tradition versus Chinese tradition. The
rise of China is changing everything in the world,
and this impacts everybody.
There are deep
ruptures. In China's part of the world, Japan,
Vietnam and South Korea do not wish to be
dominated once again by China. And in parts of the
Western world, many Latin American countries are
trying to find a way to escape the US's cultural
and political embrace.
We are now in a
period of new competition and change, where many
cultural and political differences must be
reconciled. For this to happen, one must be
hard-nosed enough to see one's weakness and act
cruelly on them, and one must be good-hearted
enough to strive to avoid bloodshed. This might be
the ultimate lesson of a "war-mongering" Nobel
Peace Prize laureate.
Francesco
Sisci is a columnist for the Italian daily Il
Sole 24 Ore and can be reached at
fsisci@gmail.com
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