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Americans are better placed to answer that question than Kissinger, who has dealt with four generations of Chinese leaders.
The most profound insights of On China are psychological. They concern the fundamental cultural differences between a Chinese elite who can look back more than two millennia for inspiration and an American elite whose historical frame of reference is little more than two centuries old. This became most obvious in the wake of June 1989, when Americans recoiled from the use of military force to end the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations. To Kissinger’s eyes, it was doubly naive to retaliate to this crackdown with sanctions: “Western concepts of human rights and individual liberties may not be directly translatable ... to a civilization for millennia ordered around different concepts. Nor can the traditional Chinese fear of political chaos be dismissed as an anachronistic irrelevancy needing only ‘correction’ by Western enlightenment.” As China’s first Anglophone leader, Jiang Zemin, explained to Kissinger in 1991: “We never submit to pressure ... It is a philosophical principle.” The United States and China went to war in Korea because of another cultural gap. It came as a surprise to the Americans when Mao ordered Chinese intervention because the military odds looked so unfavorable. But, argues Kissinger, his “motivating force was less to inflict a decisive military first blow than to change the psychological balance, not so much to defeat the enemy as to alter his calculus of risks.”” Mao was a master of the ancient Empty City Stratagem, which seeks to conceal weakness with a show of confidence, even aggression. To Westerners, his insistence that he did not fear a nuclear attack seemed unhinged or, at best, callous (“We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before”). But this was classical Chinese bravado, or “offensive deterrence.” “Chinese negotiators,” observes Kissinger
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