Chinese President Xi Jinping has not had time to meet with the former Secretary of State and current President’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, who has visited China this week. A month and a half ago, the new Beijing Defense Minister, Li Shanfu, refused to have a bilateral meeting with the US Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, despite the fact that both met at the same summit in Singapore.
But today, Xi and Li hosted a reception honoring an American who has held no public office for 47 years: Henry Kissinger.
Just turned 100 years old, Kissinger is in Beijing on a trip whose preparations have been carried out with extreme discretion and which Xi has managed to turn into a way of counterattacking the ‘quasi-Cold War’ policy that the United States has launched against China. Xi and Kissinger met in the same building where the then US National Security Adviser met secretly with Zhou Enlai, who served as prime minister for nearly a quarter century under Mao Zedong, to explore ways the two countries, hitherto sworn enemies, could restore relations and work together. It was the culmination of the so-called ‘ping-pong diplomacy’, because it had begun with discreet visits by Chinese and American teams of that sport, which would end up giving rise, eight years later, to the recognition of communist China by the US, to the detriment of Taiwan.
The event, according to the US media, has been an exaltation of Hollywood’s own nostalgia. While nostalgic piano music played, images of the meeting between Zhou and Kissinger were projected in a room decorated with a display of the symbols that in Chinese culture mean peace and joy. Xi declared that “we will never forget our old friend” and praised “the splendid strategic vision of the former National Security Adviser and former Secretary of State.”
Kissinger has always been a proponent of ‘realism’ in international relations, a theory propagated by considering countries as independent entities that maximize their profits and whose only guide is reason of state, not ideology or values. For that reason, his philosophy fell into oblivion as soon as President Gerald Ford lost the 1976 election and, except for the four years of Donald Trump, he has never again held sway in Washington, neither with Republican nor Democratic presidents.
He fits perfectly in present-day China, something heightened by his understanding of Vladimir Putin’s position on the invasion of Ukraine. In fact, one day before the meeting in Beijing, the Chinese ambassador to the US, Xie Feng, once again insisted at the Aspen Institute Security Forum that his country “defends the territorial integrity of Ukraine but in exchange for acknowledging Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Xi’s remarks came just as a veritable military maneuver competition with large-scale nuclear-capable systems was taking place in the Pacific Ocean between the US – supported by South Korea -, North Korea, Russia, and China.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project