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At Henry Kissinger’s lunch with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the table decorations included a sprawling miniature landscape featuring a bridge that state broadcaster CCTV said represented the “bridge between China and the United States”, seen here in this screenshot taken from the CCTV video. Photo: CCTV
Opinion
Alice Wu
Alice Wu

Beijing’s red carpet welcome for Kissinger is a hopeful reminder of how US-China ties can be

  • Kissinger’s warm reception shows Beijing is in favour of cooperation and offers much-needed hope to the world that US-China diplomacy can make a comeback
Alice Wu
Alice Wu
Why you can trust SCMP

The problem with living in the moment is that it would be ridiculous to ignore the precariousness of the future given the way things are – there’s war, persistent tensions and conflicts, and leaders hell-bent on drawing lines, lighting more fires and flashpoints.

Even if one insists on shutting out the future, living in the moment demands we be hot and bothered by what scientists are saying is likely to be the earth’s hottest month on record.

Let that sink in. We are quickly headed to hell unless a miracle happens.

And here’s me hoping that Henry Kissinger’s recent Beijing visit can put diplomacy back into the world’s orbit and eject reckless and dangerous sophomoric high-school talk into oblivion.
What constitutes stupid talk? Let’s consider the psychodrama over whether US President Joe Biden sees his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping as “an old friend” back in November 2021. In their first video talk, Xi called Biden “lao peng you”, or old friend. That Biden’s team had to stress that Biden and Xi were no backslapping buddies should have raised red flags.

When even common courtesy – recognising that being old friends on the world stage is a basis for goodwill and a nuanced way of starting afresh – is rebuffed, it signifies a very low low.

How relations have soured since the high point in 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization after a lengthy and complicated American-supported process.

The world was very different before the vilification of China became the tenor of US foreign policy. In those good old days, recognising the benefits of engagement and vying for better mutual understanding, deeper cooperation and liberalisation over confrontation was the consensus.

Since then, taunts – and a picking at “red lines” – an exchange of insults and much overreaction over a balloon that, as the Pentagon later found out, did not collect any intelligence over the US, have left the relationship in tatters. The recent thaw was a good thing, beginning with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s Beijing visit, followed by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and climate envoy John Kerry.
But even that wasn’t without incident. If Blinken’s trip was, in his words, to “bring some greater stability to the relationship”, that the US has “an obligation, and I think China has an obligation to manage that relationship responsibly, to make sure that the profound differences we have don’t veer into conflict”, then having Biden calling Xi names – “a dictator” – would be counterproductive at best, and senseless sabotage at worst.

02:20

US diplomatic veteran Henry Kissinger visits Beijing ‘as a friend of China’

US diplomatic veteran Henry Kissinger visits Beijing ‘as a friend of China’
To have the controversial but brilliant Kissinger – the architect of normalising ties between Washington and Beijing in the 1970s and a true “old friend” of China’s – visit Beijing a month after he turned 100 speaks to how absolutely necessary it is for the world to see Sino-US relations back on course.
The White House may regret that Kissinger got more of an audience in Beijing than sitting US officials but it’s more than clear why. To the rest of the world, Kissinger is a reminder of how things need not be – which offers us desperate hope.

His warm reception is a good sign that Beijing is in favour of cooperation. Kissinger is a realist: diplomacy may not remove adversarial aspects in the relationship, but it is necessary to deter disaster. Kissinger made a powerful argument for this in his 2014 book World Order. “The combination of balance-of-power strategy with partnership diplomacy […] can give Chinese and American leaders experiences in constructive cooperation and convey to their two societies a way of building towards a more peaceful future.”

Henry Kissinger as US secretary of state chats with China’s vice-premier Deng Xiaoping at a dinner in New York in 1974. Photo: Bettmann Archive

“Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force and legitimacy,” he wrote. “Wise statesmanship must try to find that balance.”

It would be wise to listen to him and give Kerry, another “old friend” of China’s, according to Wang Yi, a chance to chart new grounds that seek cooperation over confrontation, at least in climate change. It should hopefully be obvious to leaders of both countries that it’s not really about whether they’ve got a friend in each other, but that the future of humanity is at stake.

As the late journalist, professor and my mentor Tom Plate has called for, for as long as I’ve known him: relentless engagement, rather than aggressive containment, offers China and the US the best chance of achieving their ends.

Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA

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