Kissinger's Thoughts on China

Henry Kissinger's “On China” (Penguin Books, 2012) is a magisterial book. Although it deals almost entirely with China, it contains many valuable lessons for foreign policy in general, and US foreign policy in particular. I will come back to that in a moment.
The book is divided in three parts. In the first, Kissinger provides a bird's-eye of China's history with the emphasis on the “century of humiliations”, a period of China's impotence towards the West, Japan and Russia which still strongly colors Chinese attitude toward foreign powers today. In the second part, Kissinger describes the Sino-American rapprochement in which he has, famously, played such a big role. Not only is the discussion of the diplomatic minuet into which the United States and China engaged before the first serious contacts were established riveting, so are transcripts of the conversations with Mao and Zhou Enlai, and Kissinger's assessment of the two. The third part deals with Dengist and post-Dengist China when Kissinger played the role of a senior statesman and trusted intermediary between the two governments but no longer participated in active policy formulation. It is there that Kissinger tries to distill the lessons for the conduct of US policy toward China, and where he provides a hopeful, but ultimately very somber, and at times even dark, assessment of the likely path the relations might take.