Volume 46, Number 4 · March 4, 1999
Kissinger & the Emperor
By Jonathan D. Spence
The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow
edited by William Burr
The New Press, 515 pp., $30.00
From the moment when they first began to keep historical records, the Chinese showed a fascination with the complexities of diplomacy, with the give-and-take of interstate negotiation, the balancing of force and bluff, the variable powers of human words to affect the onrushing course of events. Successful examples of bargaining, whether the fruits of deceit or of moral persuasiveness, swiftly found their way into fiction, poetry, and popular drama, and thus entered the culture of the country as a whole. Such tales formed both a respite and a satisfying coda to the otherwise unremitting records of violent warfare, as China's earliest states battled for survival, or as the emperors—after the unification of China under a single ruling house in 221 BCE—fought to fend off foreign invaders or suppress internal rivals to the throne.
Review, 7235 words
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