A new cold war: Henry Kissinger & the rise of china Edited by Sanjay Barua & Rahul Sharma harper collins Rs.799 Pages 295 -Dilip Thakore February 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of a historic meeting in Beijing, China, between US President Richard Nixon and China’s Chairman Mao Zedong in 1972, which future historians may well mark as an inflection point in global history. This event signalled a rapprochement between the US and China which had fought several proxy wars in Korea (1950), Vietnam (1965-72) and face-offs in lesser battles in other countries around the world. It was the outcome of top-secret negotiations between communist China’s top leadership and a clandestine visit via Pakistan of Dr. Henry Kissinger, America’s secretary of state and a highly acclaimed foreign affairs scholar-strategist a year earlier. These first ever meetings had been initiated by the two American leaders to cut down to size the Soviet Union, with whom the US had been engaged in a prolonged ideologically-driven Cold War. Last July (2021), to mark the golden jubilee of Kissinger’s secret visit to China which has dramatically changed the balance of global power, public intellectuals Sanjaya Baru and Rahul Sharma commissioned this excellent compendium of 19 essays, penned by disparate experts in foreign affairs and international diplomacy to expound upon the fallout of that great thaw in US-China relations. The galaxy of international policy wonks and analysts who have contributed to Henry Kissinger and the Rise of China — A New Cold War include Kishore Mahbubani, Kanti Bajpai, Rana Mitter, Sujan Chinoy, Suhasini Haidar — names perhaps familiar to Indian readers, plus US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia foreign policy experts. Their impressive credentials are summarised in an index of this compendium. Without exception, all of them have contributed valuable insights explaining the rapid rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from a backward third world country devastated by famines during Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-60) and the Cultural Revolution (1965-75) social engineering experiments, into the world’s second largest economic and military power. The rise of modern China began with the Kissinger-Nixon diplomatic initiative 50 years ago. Today PRC is a formidable rival to the US and has transformed the post-World War II global order. Kissinger’s covert visit to China which is mile-stoned, if not celebrated, in this volume of essays was driven by his many years of study of European balance of power politics. When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, he appointed Kissinger, then a Harvard professor to break the Soviet/China communist nexus. To appreciate the historic significance of the Kissinger/Nixon rapprochement with communist China in the early 1970s, it’s important to bear in mind that after 1949 when the Red Flag was hoisted by Mao Zedong in Peking (Beijing), the US — a staunch ally of pre-communist China, and the Kuomintang government led by Generalissimo Chiang-Kai Shek during World War II — hadn’t acknowledged the communist regime. Until Nixon and Mao shook hands in Beijing in 1972, the US continued to…
