作者：史景迁（Jonathan D. Spence） 2011年6月9日纽约时报
翻译：薛蓉 2011年6月27日译品網
很难将亨利•基辛格（Henry Kissinger）的新书《论中国》归类于任何传统的框架或体裁。这一方面是因为这个有点谦逊的标题掩盖了这本书的雄伟目标：即对中国2,500年来的外交和对外政策进行解读，同时回顾中国过去完整的历史发展周期从而更好地了解今日之中国。从形式上看，该书独树一帜，既不全是回忆录，也不全是专著或自传；相反，书中既有回忆，也有反思，既有历史，也有基于直觉的探究。
借用时下的一个流行词，这本书就像一辆"混合动力车"。在我看来，书名若是定为《中国的主题变奏曲》（VariationsonaThemeinChina）之类也许更为合适。如果记住这个名字，把它当作一个副标题，就不难明白这本书是围绕六个主题来依次展开的，即中国的早期历史、近代王朝试图改革君主制体系的失败、具有决定性影响的毛泽东时代、基辛格精心安排尼克松总统于1972年访华的自身经历、邓小平领导下的"开放"时期以及令人意外的最后一章——它独具匠心地将第一次世界大战前英德间的扩张冲突同中美当前面临的一些问题相联系了起来。
在亨利•基辛格看来，古代的中国高深莫测，因此现代的中国仍然与它存在着某种特别的共鸣。他写道："一个当代领导人居然会用一千多年前的历史事件所体现的战略思想来指点国家大事，这无论在哪个国家都是不可想象的。"但这正是毛泽东在讨论政策事务时的一贯作风。而且毛泽东"满怀信心地期待自己的同僚能够理解这些典故的含义"。为什么会这样？因为"中国的语言、文化及政治体制都是中华文明的标志，因此就连中国在亚洲地区的竞争对手以及外国侵略者都在不同程度上吸收了中国的语言、文化和政治体制，作为自己合法性的标志"。"战略大师"（strategicacumen）主导了中国古代的外交政策，而且还会招揽众多的追随者和支持者来巩固自身的核心地位。
一个很好的例子就是西方世界熟知的中国学者孔子。他用举例子的方式向一小群虔诚、愿意为之献身的学生宣扬自己的思想。而这些学生则通过与老师的对话来指导自己的实践，最终为孔子留下了一部传世经典——基辛格更是形容这部经典"类似于中国的圣经与宪法的混合体"。在西方，"均势外交，与其说是一种选择，还不如说是一种必然"，而且"无论哪一种宗教都没有足够的权威来实现全球性的传播"，因为中国的对外交流并不是"以平等为基础"的。
通过对中西方战略思维的审视，基辛格推断两者之间存在一个显著的区别："中国的理想战略强调精巧、迂回以及耐心地积累相对优势"，而"西方的传统则注重决定性的力量碰撞"。基辛格巧妙地用这个推断，为后文对中西两大哲学、军事传统的二元剖析作了充分铺垫。首先，他概括了中国围棋与西洋象棋之间的差异。西洋象棋所体现的是力量的碰撞、"决定性的战役"，其目标是"大获全胜"，而这些都取决于棋盘上每一颗棋子的部署；可是围棋讲究的是相对利益和长期围困。围棋从一张空白的棋盘开始，只有当棋盘上"布满双方势力相互交错相互牵制的区块"时才能分出胜负。
战略家和军事家对于上述差异的研究可以追溯到许多世纪以前。围棋的理念在《孙子兵法》这一旷世经典当中也有所体现。《孙子兵法》据传由一位姓孙的军事家所著，年代与孔子相近。基辛格对孙子的思想作了相当的引述，特别是借鉴了他对"声东击西"与"心理战"的精辟论述。（书中写道："也许有人会说，美国近代历史上之所以会在亚洲战场遭遇挫折，其重要原因之一正是忽视了孙子的教诲。"）基辛格在书中还引用了才华横溢的汉学典籍翻译家闵福德（John Minford）对一句孙子名言的翻译：
是故百战百胜，非善之善者也；
不战而屈人之兵，善之善者也。
孙子简明扼要地将其推崇的作战策略按照重要性和有效性的高低进行了排序：首选是全力攻击敌人的战略，其次是攻击敌人的同盟，再者是攻击敌人的军队，最后才是攻击敌人的城邦。孙子曰："其下攻城。"
那么，这个高深莫测的中国又是如何在19世纪和20世纪初险恶的历史洪流当中分崩离析，最终陷入举步维艰、甚至是绝望无助的境地的呢？基辛格在讨论第二大主题的章节里提供了一些答案。他重点论述了中国在文化、经济和政治方面接连遭受的重创：从1793年马戛尔尼伯爵（Lord Macartney）受命出使中国、要求扩大通商和居留权，到鸦片战争的爆发；从国内的各种起义和叛乱，到基督教的渗透；从20世纪初的义和团运动，到封建帝制的土崩瓦解。然而更重要的是，"几百年来的优势地位扭曲了天朝对现实的认知。自命不凡的优越感只会让不可避免的屈辱感显得更加强烈"。
然而，中国的"棋子"并没有完全出局："中国的政治家尽管拿着一副不好的牌，但却凭借着相当的技巧避免了更严重的灾难"，这是均势政治的基本规则所无法解释的。在简要地描述了19世纪中国政治家所奉行的现实主义的求生策略之后，基辛格指出，在当时的情况下还能够"维持中国政府的独立性已经是一个了不起的成就"。19世纪后期，利用屡试不爽的以敌制敌策略，中国在对抗西方侵略方面确实取得了一些实质性胜利。但讽刺的是，已近垂暮之年的政府希望依靠官员精湛的外交技巧来"争取时间，可是对于如何利用赢得的时间又毫无计划"。基辛格认为，当时日渐衰弱的中国已经无力"让强敌为胜利付出其难以承受的代价"。在这种情况下，"一定程度上的和解是唯一明智的做法"，因此对日俄等列强采取的绥靖政策也并非毫无意义。
行文至此，作者的叙述稍显模糊，原因是正在寻求新秩序的中国进入了一个"多事之秋"：起义和叛乱事件此起彼伏，军事现代化改革和教育改革齐头并进，野心勃勃的外国列强不断索取割地——可谓一波未平一波又起。随着日本的迅速崛起，特别是日本在1894-1905年间先后击败了中国舰队和俄国陆军之后，形势对中国变得更加严峻。随后，1919年新文化运动的爆发、第三国际（共产国际）运动的开展、以及1921年中国共产党的成立，这一切似乎让基辛格有些应接不暇。读者或者可以直接跳到第三大变奏曲："毛泽东领导的长期革命"。作为一名中国观察家和职业外交官，基辛格在这一部分道出了自己相当专业的分析。
在描述中国早期的共产主义革命时，基辛格平实地讲述了让他激动不已的时刻。他这样写道："农村包围城市的运动在1949年开创了一个新的朝代，而走在前面的是一位巨人——毛泽东。"当他写到毛泽东的一生是"激烈斗争的一生"时，基辛格改变了毛泽东在世人心目中的形象，但却没有改变世人的看法。尽管毛泽东有诸多让人惊叹的品质，但基辛格也承认毛泽东上台后的大多数时候证明"光靠高举意识形态的大旗是无法治理好国家的"。在1958-1962年间，"数百万人因为毛主席推行平均主义而在大饥荒中丧命"，数千万人的生活难以为继——有人甚至会用"难以想象"来形容。至此，靠意识形态治国的尝试也宣告结束。
基辛格称这次饥荒是人类历史上"最严重的饥荒之一"，估计死亡人数超过2,000万（最近有学者估计实际数字可能要高出一倍）。至于1966-1969年间的"文化大革命"，基辛格没有估计死亡人数，但是却同意今天的论断：文化大革命是由"青少年红卫兵的造反运动"牵头的，"其结果是对人类的大屠杀和对制度的大破坏"。然而，正是中国人为毛泽东的这些不可能完成的挑战奠定了基础，因为"他对（中国人的）顽强精神、能力和凝聚力充满信心"。"而且事实上，"基辛格写道，"无法想象还有哪个国家的民众能够忍受毛泽东对其社会强力施加的一系列残酷的动乱。"
这种说法对于中国人整体道德水平的评价近乎苛责。中国人为什么要"忍受"这些"动乱"？是出于恐惧？还是因为对毛泽东自20世纪初以来宣扬的共产主义革命有着不可动摇的信念？基辛格一再解释："只有像中国人这样顽强、坚忍的民族，才能在经历了这样大起大落的历史之后仍然展现出团结与活力。"
对毛泽东执政的思考，让基辛格有机会回到他在开篇伊始提出的一些主题。他写道：
历史上从来没有哪一位中国的统治者像毛泽东一样集历史性、权威、冷酷和全球视野于一身；面对挑战时雷厉风行，而在条件不允许他继续一贯强攻猛打的作风时又能展现灵活的外交手腕。
在日本战败后的四年中国内战期间（1945-1949），毛泽东张扬的辞令的确使其成为众人瞩目的对象，但却未必比得上斯大林的狡黠。这从两人在朝鲜战争伊始的初次交锋当中就可窥见一斑：当时斯大林虽然支持北韩领导人金日成入侵南韩，可是却拒绝提供援助。（"如果你遭到反击，我也不会动一个指头。你得向毛泽东求助。"）"真正的斯大林是：不可一世、目光长远、控制欲强、行事谨慎却冷酷无情。"基辛格这样写道。
基辛格描写朝鲜战争的部分可谓引人入胜。但这一部分也反映出，毛泽东本人就是位操控大师，而他在和自己作斗争的时候并非总是胜利者。基辛格在回忆自己艰辛的外交生涯时写道："政策规划的弊端在于，规划中的分析无法预知决策者在做出决策时的心理状态。"换句话说，在朝鲜战争中，"中国出兵（朝鲜）是对潜在威胁采取的先发制人策略，其决策依据其实是对形势的错误判断：美国的终极目标是中国。"事实上，"据有关各方迄今所公开的文件显示，没有任何一方认真讨论过通过外交途径解决冲突的可能性"。这一点使得交战双方的对抗进一步升级。在详细记叙了朝鲜战争之后，基辛格总结说，从整体看来，斯大林是最大的输家，而中华人民共和国赢得的却"不仅仅是平局......（这场战争）奠定了新中国作为军事强国和亚洲革命中心的地位"，并且表明中国是"一个值得尊敬和害怕的对手"。
进入全书的第四大部分——"和解之路"，基调和内容都有了重大转变。基辛格一度以第一人称叙事，因为时任尼克松总统国家安全顾问的作者走进了故事。他讲述了亲自安排尼克松成功访华并与毛泽东在北京会晤这一大胆尝试，并且记载了自己在外交上对"可能性"这一科学的探索。不过，读者若指望作者像讲述朝鲜战争那样详细地讲述越南战争，恐怕要大失所望了——美国国内对越南战争的许多细节一直保持缄默，基辛格亦是如此。他对越南战争的理解与其早先思考历史的方式是一致的。他写道：
随着美国开始向越南增兵，北京用围棋的思维将形势解读为：美国企图将越南变成又一个基地，连同朝鲜、台湾海峡和印度支那对中国形成包围之势......越南河内的领导人谙熟《孙子兵法》，并且应用书中的兵法有效地打击了法国和美国。在这场漫长的战争当中，越南先是反抗企图在二战之后重新夺回殖民地的法国，随后又在1963-1975年间与美国交战。不过早在越南战争结束以前，北京与河内都渐渐意识到，下一场对决将在彼此之间展开，为的是争夺在印度支那和东南亚地区的主导权。
尽管尼克松访华的许多细节在当事人出版的回忆录当中已有披露，但是《论中国》的参考书目及注释也提供了很多其他的信息来源。这些资源让基辛格回想起了他所率领的先遣队的工作，以及1972年2月尼克松总统与毛泽东的会晤。在讲述这段往事时，作者巧妙地将亲身经历与官方版本融合在了一起。很明显，通过磋商促成的这次访华之旅以及之后（据他自己计算）多达五十次以上的高级别访问，让基辛格乐在其中。
尽管此时毛泽东的伟人形象有些受损，但是周恩来以及随后的邓小平、江泽民和其他部长级官员却让传奇故事得以延续。这些点点滴滴的记录让我们看到了，当中美两国都甘愿冒着遭到对方拒绝的风险、主动向对方示好的时候，中美双方的政策也在逐渐转变。随后，基辛格又回到了第一个主题，不禁感慨自1972年以来"我们所接触到中国的外交风格与其传统的外交更为接近，而不同于我们同其他共产主义国家谈判时已经习以为常的迂腐程式"。让基辛格欣喜的是，"这种外交很好地迎合了中国传统的安全挑战"，也保存了"（中华）文明，因为中国周边的民族如果联合起来，其军事力量就能够占据优势"。他还发现，中国之所以能够立于不败之地，实际上是通过"打造一种良好的奖惩制度以及气势磅礴的文化。在这个背景之下，友好睦邻成为了战略的一部分"。
这本书的又一大亮点在于，让我们有机会了解周恩来。作为近乎完美的政治家、外交家以及毛泽东的左膀右臂，周恩来"拥有超乎常人的智慧，以及凭直觉感知对手心理的能力"。基辛格对这两位中国的主要领导人作了精辟的概括。对于两人的特质，他这样表述：
毛泽东永远是主导者；而周恩来则是八面玲珑。遭到反对时，满腔热血的毛泽东会用力量征服对手；而充满智慧的周恩来则会设法说服对方或智取。毛泽东喜欢冷嘲热讽；而周恩来则是一语中的。毛泽东以思想家自居；而周恩来则把自己的角色看作是管理者或谈判专家。毛泽东渴望加速历史的进程；而周恩来则乐于"顺水推舟"。
随后在北京举行的中美元首会晤进展得相当顺利。恰如基辛格所写的那样，尼克松此行是"极少数对国际事务产生深远影响的国事访问之一"。此言的确不假。
然而，世事难料：用基辛格的话说，水门事件以及1974年8月8日尼克松总统的辞职，导致了"在1974年11月的国会选举当中，国会对积极外交政策的支持完全崩溃"。随之而来的是，"美国应对地缘政治挑战的能力遭到削弱"，这在当时的形势下意味着，美国的首要政策是要削弱苏联在中国周边地区的势力。
基辛格告诉我们，"主张对中国开放的（尼克松）总统竟然会下台，这让北京感到不解"，当然你大可以怀疑毛泽东和周恩是否真的如此惊讶。不过，水门事件的危害性和突然性绝对比不上毛泽东钦选的继承人——国防部长兼元帅林彪的倒台。林彪被指控在1971年的一次政变当中暗杀毛泽东未遂，随后和家人一起乘飞机逃往苏联时在蒙古坠机身亡。时隔这么多年，基辛格仍然出言谨慎，称该事件"据报道是一次失败的政变"。
毛泽东自己曾对尼克松打趣说：
在我们国内也有一股反动势力反对我们和你们接触。结果，他们上了飞机逃到国外去了......苏联在事后挖出了（林彪的）尸体，但对此事却绝口不提。
中美双方对彼此的城府都有夸大之嫌（或之实）。毛泽东毫无顾忌地"藐视天地间一切法律"，或者——就像基辛格对毛泽东使用中国俗语的注释所说的那样——"将法律践踏在脚下，无法无天"。
同样出人意料的是，在1976年毛泽东去世后中国发生了巨大的变化，"三落三起"的中共元老邓小平重新上台，这些都为全书的第五大部分提供了背景。邓小平1979年出访美国，给外界留下了非常好的印象，基辛格更是将其比喻为"一出（精彩的）皮影戏"。像基辛格敬佩的那些中国早期的战略家一样，邓小平也可以同时采取截然相反的政策。
（此处略去1024英文字）
在全书余下的部分里，基辛格按照时间顺序讲述了自己与中国的交往，包括邓小平后期的改革、领导班子的过渡、从江泽民到胡锦涛的权力交接以及胡锦涛一再重申的"和平崛起"等等。在"后邓小平"时代，特别是中英两国就香港的未来达成协议之后，基辛格认为中国的领导人"不再自称代表可供输出的唯一的革命真理。相反，他们所主张的目标从本质上看是防御性的，包括努力让世界不再公然敌视自己的政治制度或领土完整，为发展经济赢得时间，按照自己的步骤来解决国内问题"。
基辛格认为"与毛泽东的风格相比，这种对外政策更接近俾斯麦（Bismarck）的风格：逐步递增、防御为主、以构建堤坝防御历史洪流为基础"。其结果之一就是中国决心"要证明自己在面对外界压力时不会动摇"。正如1994年时任总理李鹏在与美国国务卿沃伦•克里斯托弗（Warren Christopher）谈话时所说的那样："中国的人权政策与（美国）无关。"
直接提及俾斯麦的政策，为本书第六章亦即最后一部分埋下了伏笔。这一部分旨在对作者的观点，特别是其对于"均势外交"以及开展有意义外交的可能性等问题的观点进行总结。为了实现上下文的顺利过渡，基辛格以第一次世界大战之前的经典外交事件为例，该事件因其撰写人的名字而被俗称为《克罗备忘录》（Crowe Memorandum）。艾尔•克罗（Eyre Crowe）是英国外交部的官员，是欧洲均势外交以及军备竞赛的数据分析员，是由其领导的英国外交部西方事务司内部的万事通，具备从外交部大量的文件当中收集相关信息的数据分析及统计能力，而且对德国有着特殊的了解——他的母亲是德国人，而他在17岁之前一直生活在德国，后来还娶了位德国女子为妻。
著名的《克罗备忘录》长达23页，于1907年元旦当天上呈给了时任英国外交大臣格雷伯爵（Earl Grey）。这份文件从严格的现实主义角度审视了欧洲国际政治的发展，特别关注了英国与刚刚统一的德国之间的海军军备竞赛。克罗的结论尖锐且令人震惊。不论德国是选择通过武力和丰富的文化底蕴来扩大影响力，还是选择通过持续向大英帝国及众多英殖民地施加压力来彰显实力，实际上德国在事关生死存亡的问题上并没有选择："不论在上述哪种情况下，德国最明智的做法都是尽可能打造一支强大的海军。"而英国的选择同样有限。考虑到德国进行扩张的迫切性，英国面临着同样严峻的选择：
英国必须做好准备，德国一定会力图削弱竞争对手的实力，通过扩大势力范围来增强自身实力，同时阻止其他国家之间的合作，最终瓦解并取代大英帝国。
《克罗备忘录》反映出一种残酷的常识，而非深奥复杂的局势。基辛格解释道，或许正因为如此，在克罗百年后的今天，中美两国的一些高级军事将领和决策者仍然在思考克罗的设想是否适用于现代，20世纪早期的德国与英国是否能替换成今天的中国和美国。直截了当地说，这或许意味着，既然中美是太平洋地区的两大强国，两强相争难免会有一战，而胜者只有一个。要想避免这一论断成为现实，中美主要还是应该在本世纪发展更丰富的结盟模式，同时双方在资源、矿产、文化遗产方面的贸易合作应该多元化，从而减少给对方带来的威胁感，保证双方能够在避免贪婪和纷争的前提下大范围地获取宝贵资源。
上述解决方法有些可以在该书的开篇部分找到，有些则可以从中国和美国现在自信的政治与商业模式当中看到。但我们需要记住基辛格并未在书中深入探讨的一件重要的小事：《克罗备忘录》并非没有受到质疑。最强烈的反对意见，来自于同样在英国外交部供职的高级官员托马斯•亨利•桑德森（Thomas Henry Sanderson）。桑德森审慎地评估和批判了克罗的观点，并于1907年2月21日向时任外交大臣格雷提交了自己的备忘录。不过在看了桑德森的"奏折"之后，格雷惊呼："没想到他（桑德森）居然为德国辩护。"
桑德森（Sanderson）在自己的备忘录中这样写道：
德国是一位益友，尽管要求有些苛刻；在谈判桌上，她咄咄逼人、坚韧固执，同时她也是最难对付的对手。对一切她自认为拥有发言权的问题，她十分在意别人是否征询她的意见......"一分耕耘，一分收获"向来都是她的座右铭。
如果把"德国"二字改为"中国"，以上描述用来形容目前的形势或许并无不妥。桑德森在形容1907年的大英帝国时，其措辞也颇为尖锐，我们只能希望以下这番话并不适用于今天的美国。桑德森写道：
有时候在我看来，外国人要是看了我们的新闻报道，肯定会觉得大英帝国就像一个触角遍及全球的庞然大物，患了痛风的触角伸向四面八方，所以一旦别人稍微靠近，她就会哇哇大叫。
《桑德森备忘录》和《克罗备忘录》都被标记为"机密"文件，但两者不可能都是对的。要么是不得不阻止德国前进的步伐，要么是英国不得不丧失其全球霸主地位。英国一直没有作出明确的决定，于是七年半之后，第一次世界大战在欧洲爆发。
史景迁：基辛格与中国（纽约时报原文）
Kissinger and
China
JUNE 9, 2011 NYT
by Jonathan D. Spence
It is hard to fit Henry Kissinger’s latest book, On China, into any conventional frame or genre. Partly that is because the somewhat self-deprecatory title conceals what is, in fact, an ambitious goal: to make sense of China’s diplomacy and foreign policies across two and a half millennia, and to bring China’s past full circle in order to illuminate the present. In form, the book is highly idiosyncratic, for it is not exactly a memoir, or a monograph, or an autobiography; rather it is part reminiscence, part reflection, part history, and part intuitive exploration.
To borrow a current phrase, it is a “hybrid vehicle,” and a more accurate title, it seems to me, would have been something like Variations on a Theme in China. If we keep that in mind as a working subtitle, then we can see how the book follows six sequential themes: China’s early history, China’s inadequate attempts to modify the imperial system of the later dynasties, the formative years of Maoist consolidation, Kissinger’s own experiences while orchestrating President Nixon’s 1972 China visit, China’s later cycles of “opening up” and repression under Deng Xiaoping, and a surprise final section that ingeniously links pre–World War I British and German expansion to some of the current problems facing the United States and China today.
For Henry Kissinger, ancient China was a subtle place. That in turn led to its special resonance in the present: “In no other country,” he writes, “is it conceivable that a modern leader would initiate a major national undertaking by invoking strategic principles from a millennium-old event,” as Mao often did in discussing policy matters. And Mao “could confidently expect his colleagues to understand the significance of his allusions.” How could it not be so? For “Chinese language, culture, and political institutions were the hallmarks of civilization, such that even regional rivals and foreign conquerors adopted them to varying degrees as a sign of their own legitimacy.” “Strategic acumen” shaped China’s earliest international policies; and to support its central position it could call on a remarkable series of potential followers and aides.
A good example was the Chinese scholar known in the West as Confucius, who taught by citing examples to a small group of loyal and dedicated students. They reciprocated by drawing on their conversations for practical examples that could create a legacy on his behalf—forming a canon that Kissinger describes as “something akin to China’s Bible and its Constitution combined.” Whereas in the Western world “balance-of-power diplomacy was less a choice than an inevitability,” and “no religion retained sufficient authority to sustain universality,” for China foreign contacts did not form “on the basis of equality.”
Kissinger’s reflections about the Western and Chinese concepts of strategy lead him to posit a stark distinction, one in which “the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage,” while “the Western tradition prized the decisive clash of forces.” It is a good way for Kissinger to prepare the reader for a dualistic approach to two vast philosophical and military traditions, which he begins by summarizing the key differences between the Chinese players of the board game weiqi (the Japanese go) and those favoring the contrasting game of chess. While chess is about the clash of forces, about “decisive battle” and the goal of “total victory,” all of which depend on the full deployment of all the pieces of the board, weiqi is a game of relative gain, of long-range encirclement, which starts with an empty board and only ends when it “is filled by partially interlocking areas of strength.”
Teachers and practitioners of grand strategy have studied these contrasts between the two for many centuries. The principles of weiqi are echoed in the haunting text known as The Art of War, by a certain Master Sun, writing around the same time as Confucius. Kissinger quotes Sun at some length, drawing especially on his insights into the concepts of “indirect attack” and “psychological combat.” (“One could argue,” says Kissinger, “that the disregard of [Master Sun’s] precepts was importantly responsible for America’s frustration in its recent Asian wars.”) As the talented translator of classical Chinese John Minford renders one of the maxims by Master Sun quoted by Kissinger:
Ultimate excellence lies
Not in winning
Every battle
But in defeating the enemy
Without ever fighting.
Master Sun succinctly lists his favored tactics for success in order of their priorities and effectiveness: first on the list is an all-out attack on the enemy’s strategy, second comes an attack on his alliances, then comes an attack on his armies, followed by an attack on his cities. “Siege warfare,” says Master Sun, “is a last resort.”
How then did this subtle and complex China collapse as completely as it did, left to flounder, apparently helpless, in the vicious currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In what I would call the second section of his variations, Kissinger gives a partial answer, one that focuses on the various cultural, economic, and political blows that hit China in numbing succession, from the arrival of Lord Macartney’s mission in 1793, seeking expanded trade and residence rights, to the opium wars, the internal rebellions, the Christian sectarians, down to the Boxers of 1900 and the collapse of the imperial regime itself. Somewhat undercutting his previous discussion, Kissinger suggests that “centuries of predominance had warped the Celestial Court’s sense of reality. Pretension of superiority only accentuated the inevitable humiliation.”
At the same time some of those weiqi pieces were still in play: “Chinese statesmen played their weak hand with considerable skill and forestalled what could have been an even worse catastrophe,” defying the basic rules of balance of power politics. Rapidly sketching some of the survival strategies of Chinese political realists in the nineteenth century, Kissinger argues that “the rearguard defense to maintain an independent Chinese government was a remarkable achievement.” In the later nineteenth century, he writes, the Chinese scored some real successes against Western aggression by using those tried and true methods of pitting enemy against enemy, with one central irony being that the fading government expected its most skillful officials to “gain time without a plan for using the time they gained.” He recognizes that resorting to appeasement of major powers like Russia and Japan made sense in a situation where “some degree of conciliation [was] the only prudent course,” given the fact that a rapidly weakening China was no longer in a position “to make its defeat costly beyond the tolerance of the stronger.”
The narrative becomes somewhat blurred here, owing to the remarkable confluence of events in China’s quest for a new order. Rebellions, military modernization, transformative education, assertive foreign powers demanding ever fresh “concessions”—all overlapped, compounded by the swift rise of Japan, which between 1894 and 1905 defeated the fleets and the land armies of both China and Russia. With the coming of the New Culture Movement in 1919, the activities of the Third International (the Comintern), and the 1921 founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Kissinger appears somewhat overwhelmed, and the reader might perhaps be wise to skip to what I see as the third of the main variations, where the chapter title “Mao’s Continuous Revolution” signals to the reader that Kissinger is approaching the areas of his analytical expertise as a China-watcher and professional diplomat.
In describing the early years of the Communist revolution in China, Kissinger tells us plainly where he stands emotionally. As he phrases it, “at the head of the new dynasty that, in 1949, poured out of the countryside to take over the cities stood a colossus: Mao Zedong.” He shifts the image but not the cosmic idea when he tells us that Mao lived “a lifetime of titanic struggle.” Despite these awesome attributes, Kissinger also admits that the main years of Mao’s power proved that it was “impossible to run a country by ideological exaltation.” The attempt to do so ended by making tens of millions of Chinese lives almost unbearable—one might be tempted to say “inconceivable,” while “millions died to implement the Chairman’s quest for egalitarian virtue” in the famine between 1958 and 1962.
Kissinger notes that the famine was “one of the worst” in human history and assesses the deaths at over 20 million (some scholars recently have estimated twice that number as probable1). As to the Cultural Revolution toll between 1966 and 1969, he gives no estimates, but accepts the current judgment that “the result was a spectacular human and institutional carnage,” one primed by “the assaults of teenage ideological shock troops.” Yet it was the Chinese people themselves who gave Mao’s impossible challenges a kind of foundation because of “his faith in [their] resilience, capabilities, and cohesion.” “And in truth,” says Kissinger, “it is impossible to think of another people who could have sustained the relentless turmoil that Mao imposed on his society.”
The remark is close to harsh in its moral judgment of the Chinese population as a whole. Why did the Chinese even try to “sustain” this “turmoil”? Was it out of fear? Or out of the same kind of unwavering faith in transformation that Mao had been preaching since the Teens of the twentieth century? By way of explanation, Kissinger repeats that “only a people as resilient and patient as the Chinese could emerge unified and dynamic after such a roller coaster ride through history.”
Thinking about Mao in power gives Kissinger the chance to circle back to some of the themes with which he opened his variations. “No previous Chinese ruler,” we are told,
combined historical elements with the same mix of authority and ruthlessness and global sweep as Mao: ferocity in the face of challenge and skillful diplomacy when circumstances prevented his preference for drastic overpowering initiatives.
Mao’s flamboyant rhetoric certainly made plenty of noise in the four-year Chinese civil war (1945–1949) that followed the defeat of Japan, but it was not necessarily a match for Stalin’s canniness, as could be seen at the time of the preliminary sparring between Stalin and Mao at the very beginnings of the Korean War: the Russian response to North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, both approving an invasion of the south and refusing to provide assistance (“If you should get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help”), “was authentically Stalin,” writes Kissinger: “haughty, long-range, manipulative, cautious, and crass.”
Indeed, as Kissinger’s absorbing chapter on the Korean War shows, Mao was by no means always successful when dealing with the master manipulator himself. “The trouble with policy planning,” Kissinger notes, in a passage that suggests both his lifetime of diplomacy and its attendant travails, “is that its analyses cannot foresee the mood of the moment when a decision has to be made.” Or, to put it another way, in Korea “a Chinese offensive was a preemptive strategy against dangers that had not yet materialized and based on judgments about ultimate American purposes toward China that were misapprehended.” The confrontations were compounded by the fact that not one “of the many documents published to date by all sides reveals any serious discussion of a diplomatic option by any of the parties.” Overall, Kissinger concludes, in his detailed coverage of the Korean War, Stalin was the biggest loser, and the PRC achieved “something more than a draw…. [The war] established the newly founded People’s Republic of China as a military power and center of Asian revolution,” and showed that China was “an adversary worthy of fear and respect.”
With the fourth of the variations, “The Road to Reconciliation,” On China makes a major shift in mood and content, becoming in part a first-person narrative, as Kissinger himself enters the story as President Nixon’s national security adviser during the bold and ultimately successful quest to arrange a meeting between Mao and Nixon in Beijing, with an accompanying account of diplomatic exploration of the science of the possible. Readers seeking to find chapters on the Vietnam War as detailed as those on the Korean War will be disappointed—Kissinger remains muted on many aspects of the Vietnam war as it was viewed in the United States, and links the war to his earlier patterns of historical thinking, claiming:
When the US buildup in Vietnam began, Beijing interpreted it in wei qi terms: as another example of American bases surrounding China from Korea, to the Taiwan Strait and now to Indochina…. Hanoi’s leaders were familiar with Sun Tzu’s Art of War and employed its principles to significant effect against both France and the United States. Even before the end of the long Vietnam wars, first with the French seeking to reclaim their colony after World War II, and then with the United States from 1963 to 1975, both Beijing and Hanoi began to realize that the next contest would be between themselves for dominance in Indochina and Southeast Asia.
Although much of the Nixon visit to China has been covered by the principals themselves in their published memoirs, the bibliography and notes to On China give helpful leads to many other sources. They enable Kissinger to recall the work of his advance team—and then the President’s February 1972 visit to Mao—in a sustained narrative that neatly blends the personal with the national sides of the story. Kissinger obviously derived immense pleasure from negotiating this China trip and from all his other visits at the highest levels—fifty or more, according to his own calculation—that came afterward.
Even if Mao was a somewhat tarnished colossus by this time, there is also Zhou Enlai to continue the tale, and then later Jiang Zemin, Deng Xiaoping, and other ministerial-level Chinese officials. Cumulatively these transcribed minutes help us to see the gradual changes in policy when both sides were willing to risk rebuff. Reprising his first variation, Kissinger reflects on how, from 1972 onward, “what we encountered was a diplomatic style closer to traditional Chinese diplomacy than to the pedantic formulations to which we had become accustomed during our negotiations with other Communist states.” Here, to his obvious delight, “was a diplomacy well suited to China’s traditional security challenge,” preserving a “civilization surrounded by peoples who, if they combined, wielded potentially superior military capacity.” China, Kissinger observes, prevailed by “fostering a calibrated combination of rewards and punishments and majestic cultural performance. In this context, hospitality becomes an aspect of strategy.”
As an added plus, there was the chance to get to know Zhou Enlai, a consummate courtier, politician, and diplomat, who “dominated by exceptional intelligence and capacity to intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number.” In a nicely constructed summary of the two main Chinese leaders, Kissinger writes of their special attributes:
Mao dominated any gathering; Zhou suffused it. Mao’s passion strove to overwhelm opposition; Zhou’s intellect would seek to persuade or outmaneuver it. Mao was sardonic; Zhou penetrating. Mao thought of himself as a philosopher; Zhou saw his role as an administrator or a negotiator. Mao was eager to accelerate history; Zhou was content to exploit its currents.
The subsequent leader-to-leader meetings in Beijing went well and it may very well be true, as Kissinger writes, that the Nixon trip was “one of the few occasions where a state visit brought about a seminal change in international affairs.”
How swiftly, nevertheless, things could change: the Watergate crisis and the resignation of President Nixon on August 8, 1974, led, in Kissinger’s words, “to a collapse of congressional support for an activist foreign policy in the subsequent congressional elections in November 1974.” This was accompanied by an “enfeebling [of] the American capacity to manage the geopolitical challenge,” which in this situation meant above all a policy by which the US would weaken the Soviet build-up on China’s borders.
Kissinger tells us that “the destruction of the President who had conceived the opening to China was incomprehensible in Beijing,” though one might question whether Mao and Zhou were genuinely so astonished. Watergate was surely no more harmful and unanticipated than the sudden destruction of Mao’s selected successor, the minister of defense and army marshal Lin Biao. Lin was accused of trying to kill Mao in a 1971 coup, and subsequently was himself killed when the plane in which he was trying to escape to the Soviet Union, along with several of his family members, crashed in Mongolia. Even after this long passage of time, Kissinger carefully refers to the drama as being “reportedly an abortive coup.”
Mao himself jocularly noted in an aside to Nixon that
in our country also there is a reactionary group which is opposed to our contact with you. The result was that they got on an airplane and fled abroad…. As for the Soviet Union, they finally went to dig out the corpses, but they didn’t say anything about it.
Each side could (and did) exaggerate the subtlety of the other. Mao felt no hindrance to “defying laws both human and divine” or—as Kissinger glosses Mao’s use of the familiar Chinese idiom—”trampling law underfoot without batting an eyelid.”
Equally hard to predict were the astonishing changes brought to China after Mao’s death in 1976, and the return to power of the thrice-purged Party veteran Deng Xiaoping, which provides the setting for the fifth variation. In his 1979 visit to the United States, which Kissinger labels “a kind of shadow play,” Deng made a dramatically favorable impression. Like the earlier Chinese strategists admired by Kissinger, Deng could pursue contrasting policies at once: thus in early 1979, for instance, while he was charming his hosts in the United States, he not only also ordered Chinese troops into Vietnam, to counter Soviet influence there, but also arrested and ordered harsh prison sentences for many of the Chinese artists and writers who had been participating in the short-lived flourishing of demands for more freedom of expression known as “Democracy Wall.”
It now seems inevitable—though it was not—that Deng’s ten years of close to absolute power after 1979 must have led inexorably to the immense demonstrations and subsequent massacres of 1989 in Tiananmen Square. We can note the caution of Kissinger’s language, as he writes that the events of spring 1989 were not due to a single cause, but that “it was the unprecedented confluence of disparate resentments that escalated into upheaval.” More simply put, “events escalated in a manner neither observers nor participants thought conceivable at the beginning of the month.”
Recent events in North Africa and the Middle East may help to underline Kissinger’s sardonic reflection that “the occupation of the main square of a country’s capital, even when completely peaceful, is also a tactic to demonstrate the impotence of the government, to weaken it, and to tempt it into rash acts, putting it at a disadvantage.” As to the “harsh suppression of the protest,” writes Kissinger, that was “all seen on television.” In fact, I believe it is still accepted by most analysts in the West that the television lights were turned out on the square, and much of the killing took place in darkness—hence the great disparity in reports of what happened where, and when, and of how many fatalities there really were. Such figures are needed if one is to separate random from deliberate use of lethal power.
So was Deng Xiaoping a tyrant or a reformer, or an intricate mixture of the two? Some of the most absorbing pages of Kissinger’s book deal with the uses of diplomacy shortly after the Tiananmen crackdown, and the differences in response that were in play. He discusses how President George H.W. Bush sent a personal letter to Deng on June 21, 1989, in which he spelled out the issues concerning sanctions and other steps as he saw them, while at the same time he referred to Deng as a “friend,” despite what had so recently occurred. In the same letter, Bush talked of the United States as a “young country,” especially when contrasted to the “history, culture and tradition” of China.
To reinforce some of the themes in the letter concerning the best methods for damage control in the circumstances, on July 1 the President sent Brent Scowcroft (his national security adviser), together with Lawrence Eagleburger (deputy secretary of state), in a military transport plane to meet with Deng and the Chinese premier, Li Peng. In the ensuing discussion seeking some balance between violent suppression and the threat to order, Kissinger observes, “the difficulty was that both sides were right.” The letter and the talks do seem, however, to have led to a reopened dialogue, and in November 1989 Kissinger was invited to Beijing in a private capacity to continue the Bush/Scowcroft overtures.
The most intriguing materials in Kissinger’s depiction of his own personal meetings with Deng Xiaoping concern the various alternatives for solving the impasse over the treatment of the celebrated Chinese astrophysicist and writer on democracy Fang Lizhi. Witty and acerbic, sharp and funny in debate, Fang, the ousted vice-president of the prestigious Chinese University of Science and Technology, had for several years been openly advocating free speech and assembly.2 During the crackdown (and manhunt) that followed Tiananmen he had been sheltered in the American embassy, and faced severe punishment if the Chinese authorities got hold of him. Kissinger reports that after he told Deng that “your best friends in America would be relieved if some way could be found to get him [Fang] out of the Embassy and let him leave the country,” Deng then personally unscrewed the microphones between his and Kissinger’s chairs, to ensure that confidentiality was maintained. Asked by Deng what solution he could see to the problem of Fang, Kissinger tells us that he told the Chinese leader:
My suggestion would be that you expel him from China and we agree that as a government we will make no political use of him whatsoever. Perhaps we would encourage him to go to some country like Sweden where he would be far away from the US Congress and our press. An arrangement like this could make a deep impression on the American public….
True to his training in politics during the Mao years, Deng “wanted more specific assurances” and asked Kissinger: “What would you think if we were to expel him after he has written a paper confessing to his crimes?” Kissinger doubted that Fang would agree to write such a confession, and told Deng:
If he says that the American government forced him to confess, it will be worse for everyone than if he did not confess. The importance of releasing him is as a symbol of the self-confidence of China.
It was a delicate line to tread, and one that certainly suggested curbing some of Fang’s rights to freedom of expression, as long as it could be done tactfully.
In fact, while staying in the embassy, Fang wrote an essay, “The Chinese Amnesia,” published in these pages after his release, deploring the ways that “the Communists’ nefarious record of human rights violations” had been “largely overlooked by the rest of the world.”3 Fang and his wife were finally flown to the UK in an American military plane, and after a spell in Cambridge and Princeton he was subsequently appointed a professor of physics at the University of Arizona. Among other writings, in 1996 he published in these pages an essay (with Perry Link) commenting on the need for “freedom to criticize and dissent” in China,4 and he served for years as both a board member and cochair of the organization Human Rights in China; otherwise he seems to have concentrated mainly on his scholarly work.
The remaining chronological chapters of On China bring Kissinger’s own dealings with China close to the present, by looking at the later Deng reforms and the transition to the next generations of leaders, from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, with his reiterated calls for China’s “peaceful rise.” In this post-Deng period, after the negotiated agreements on the future of Hong Kong, Kissinger feels that China’s leaders
no longer made any claim to represent a unique revolutionary truth available for export. Instead, they espoused the essentially defensive aim of working toward a world not overtly hostile to their system of governance or territorial integrity and buying time to develop their economy and work out their domestic problems at their own pace.
Kissinger calls this a “foreign policy arguably closer to Bismarck’s than Mao’s: incremental, defensive, and based on building dams against unfavorable historical tides.” One consequence was the Chinese determination “to prove their imperviousness to outside pressure.” As the former premier Li Peng put it in a talk with Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1994, “China’s human rights policy was none of [the US’s] business.”
The direct reference to Bismarck’s policies lays a foundation for Kissinger’s sixth and last variation, designed to draw his arguments together, especially those on “balance of power” and the possibilities of meaningful diplomacy. To effect this transition, Kissinger has chosen a classic of pre–World War I diplomacy, known most commonly by its author’s name as the “Crowe Memorandum.” Eyre Crowe was a career official in the British Foreign Office, an omnicompetent tabulator of the European balance of power and the burgeoning arms race, a mine of information on the so-called Western section of the Foreign Office (which he supervised), a master of the statistical skills needed to assemble the relevant information in the vast Foreign Office files, and with a special knowledge of Germany—he was born to a German mother, lived in Germany until he was seventeen, and had married a German woman.
Crowe’s celebrated twenty-three-page memorandum, handed in to British Foreign Secretary Earl Grey on New Year’s Day of 1907, took a hard-eyed realist’s view of the march of European international politics, with special focus on the naval arms race in which England and the recently unified Germany appeared to be locked. Crowe’s conclusion was sharp and devastating. Whether Germany chose to spread its influence by the force and richness of its cultural inheritance, or chose to project its strength by constant pressures on the British Empire and its many colonial dependencies, it essentially had no choice in the matter of survival: “In either case Germany would clearly be wise to build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” England’s choice of options was also limited. Given Germany’s urgent race for expansion, England was faced with a similarly stark choice:
England must expect that Germany will surely seek to diminish the power of any rivals, to enhance her own by extending her dominion, to hinder the co-operation of other States, and ultimately to break up and supplant the British Empire.
The Crowe Memorandum is a document projecting a kind of ruthless common sense rather than profound complexity. Perhaps for that reason, as Kissinger explains, there are senior military officers and policymakers in both China and the United States today who, more than a century after Crowe, wonder whether his formulations could be adapted to the present time so as to replace early-twentieth-century Germany and England with the choices facing China and the United States today. In its most direct form, this might point to a possible struggle between the two major powers in the Pacific, in a situation with room for only two major protagonists, only one of whom can win. The main riposte to this argument is to seek a richer pattern of alliances in the current century, and to diversify trade in resources, minerals, and cultural relics in a nonthreatening way that can promise wide-scale access to valued resources without major greed and disagreements.
Some of these answers can be found in the early texts with which Kissinger began his book; some can be seen in the patterns of political and commercial assertiveness that we are now witnessing in both China and the United States. But we need to remember one fact, small but relevant, that Kissinger does not pursue: namely, Crowe’s memorandum did not go unchallenged. The most important critique came from another senior career officer in the Foreign Office, Thomas Henry Sanderson (1841–1923), who on February 21, 1907, handed to Grey his own careful assessment and criticism of Crowe’s logic. After reading Sanderson’s countermemo, Grey exclaimed that “somewhat to my surprise he [Sanderson] has taken up the cudgels for Germany.”
What Sanderson wrote in his own notations to Crowe’s memorandum was that
Germany is a helpful, though somewhat exacting friend, that she is a tight and tenacious bargainer, and a most disagreeable antagonist. She is oversensitive about being consulted on all questions on which she can claim a voice….Her motto has always been “Nothing for nothing in this world, and very little for sixpence.”
With China substituted for Germany this is perhaps not a bad description of how things stand at the moment. As for Sanderson’s depiction of the old British Empire in 1907, that too was trenchantly written, and one can only hope that it does not apply to the United States today. “It has sometimes seemed to me,” wrote Sanderson,
that to a foreigner reading our press the British Empire must appear in the light of some huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes stretching in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream.
Both of the memos, Sanderson’s and Crowe’s, were marked “secret.” But they could not both be right. Either Germany had to be stopped in her tracks or England had to lose her paramount global position. No clear decision had been taken when—seven and a half years later—World War I broke out in Europe.
金融时报：基辛格和他的《论中国》
作者：西蒙•沙玛 2011年6月3日 《金融时报》
深陷阿富汗泥潭的我们，应当向谁寻求指引呢？嗯，当然是威灵顿公爵(Duke of
Wellington)。反正亨利•基辛格(Henry Kissinger)是这样认为的。别想了，这件事和印度帝国没什么关系。在我和基辛格的谈话开始十分钟后，他说道，政策制定者们应该考虑……比利时。没错，比利时。基辛格嗓音低沉，话音听起来自然很浑厚。这位博士说到这里顿了一下，想看看我这个历史学教授是不是明白了。
猛然间我确实有点明白了。如果把兴都库什山被搬到泥泞的弗兰德这一离奇景象抛在脑后，你会发现：阿富汗和比利时这两个国家都称不上已经塑造成型，都是不同语言和不同信仰相互竞争的舞台，也都是居心叵测的邻国肆意欺凌的对象——斯海尔德河(Scheldt)！默兹河(Meuse)！瓦济里斯坦(Waziristan)！基辛格像一位耐心的导师一样继续解释道：“18世纪前以及整个18世纪，各路军队在弗兰德进进退退。”的确如此，这些人马引发了无穷无尽的恐怖战争。19世纪早期，在比利时独立展现出曙光时，威灵顿公爵给出的解决方案是什么呢？是国际社会一致同意保证比利时的中立地位。“这一中立地位持续了80年之久。”基辛格暗示，我们在阿富汗问题上若取得同样的成果，就太幸运了。
现已87岁高龄的基辛格最近出版了一本关于中国的巨著，书中的某些部分出奇地感人。基辛格本身就是一部历史。当然，这里的意思决不是说他已经过时、已经远逝——情况恰恰相反。在位于曼哈顿中城的基辛格顾问公司(Kissinger Associates)的办公室里，他邀请我坐在他的左边，告诉我他有一只眼睛的视力已经不及正常水平了。幸运的是，几乎没有证据显示他的身体还有其它毛病。他卷曲的头发已经雪白，宽阔的面庞上也有了更多皱纹，但他善于分析的头脑仍然敏锐如刀，能够以稳健的思维步伐做出连串的判断；那是长老的思考，如果改让马基雅维利(Machiavelli)来刻画尤达大师(Yoda)，一定就是这个样子。虽然基辛格在现实中居住在曼哈顿和康涅狄格州，但他真正的居所却是在经典治国大师云集的帕纳塞斯山(Parnassus)——在那里，俾斯麦(Bismarck)每天向梅特涅(Metternich)脱帽致意，困倦的塔列朗(Talleyrand)戴着扑满白粉的假发，向周恩来心有灵犀地眨了眨眼。
基辛格居高临下俯视国家事务里的种种小问题，这种视角有好的一面，也有不那么好的一面。一方面，身居奥林匹斯山巅的高远视角让基辛格能看清更广阔的图景。另一方面，一生都沉浸在官方事务的繁文缛节和需小心应对的外交工作当中，这让他的讲话变得圆滑、失去了棱角。不过，他在这本关于中国的书中对毛泽东、周恩来、邓小平和江泽民做出了坦诚全面的描述，其中不乏呈现人真实一面的描写。他在回忆起与毛泽东的交谈时深沉地笑出声来，像是在含着鹅卵石漱口。他说，年事已高的毛泽东仍不服软，夸张地宣称“老天不收我”、或是坚称希望被人“诅咒”，以证明即使到最后时刻他也仍具有让人又畏惧又愤恨的帝王之力。
我尽力不让自己因“尼克松(Nixon)-柬埔寨-智利”的惯常原因而不喜欢基辛格，但我不只一次为他彻底折服。17年前，我受邀为他的著作《大外交》(Diplomacy)撰写书评。我原以为这本书能让我对外交文化大开眼界，比如关键决策是怎样依赖看似微不足道的外交礼节等琐事才得以确定的。我还记得在巴黎举行越战和谈时各方围绕谈判桌的形状展开的冗长争辩，既荒诞可笑、又举足轻重。难道这本书中没有电报措辞不当造成政治灾难、鸡尾酒会上的错漏演变成国际事件的故事？然而，《大外交》却相当常规而优雅地阐述了19世纪的外交政策、欧洲列强的大公们的治国艺术。这本书角度独特、堪称优秀：它经常给予读者启发，尤其是在探讨俾斯麦和1815年维也纳会议之时。基辛格在哈佛大学(Harvard)曾对俾斯麦做过许多研究，而维也纳会议是他的著作《重建的世界》(A World Restored)中的核心部分——该书至今都仍是这一领域的最佳著作。我在书评中也是像上面这样说过，还对该书未能从社会学视角来探讨外交实践表示遗憾。
书评刊出大约一周以后，我的电话响了。对方言辞礼貌，话音深沉、神秘、带有德国口音——当然得装成这样了，我想。两天前，我一个爱开玩笑的朋友才刚刚在电话上冒充过基辛格，几乎以假乱真，我一时间还真以为基辛格在因我写的那篇书评痛斥我，后来我才识破了这个把戏。所以这个电话打来时，我本欲以自己模仿得很像的尼克松的腔调接电话，但很快发现对方这次真是基辛格。他对我希望他写的那种书表达了一种礼貌的困惑，问我能否考虑当面更详细地解释给他听。我深吸一口气，想道，干嘛不去呢？在基辛格的公寓门外，我对自己说：这可能是个坏主意，但为时已晚。基辛格本人（而不是我料想中的曼哈顿男仆）亲切地用一只手为我拉开门（我就是在这一刻为他折服的），另一只手朝感激地张开大口的慵懒猎犬扔了一片狗饼干。是为不战而屈人之兵。
在将近20年后的今天，基辛格仍记得那天的事（他的记忆力仍然出众），这让我有些受宠若惊。基辛格告诉我，他已尝试在这本关于中国的新书中融入一些我希望具备的视角，我又一次为他折服。他点到为止的奉承让我猝不及防。我回忆起，我的确注意到该书的一些段落将中国实力的展示作为某种文化表演进行陈述：继承自帝国时代的宴席、敬酒和悉心的拿捏，例如外国使节应在何时以何种方式受到主席接见。基辛格认为，如果不能敏锐地注意到他所谓的这种“把款待当作战略的一个方面”，中国之门的打开可能就不会发生，世界也会变得与现在截然不同。
那么，这本关于中国的新书，可谓与基辛格迄今已出版的任何著作都不同：它讲述的是两个一开始看起来几乎没有任何途径互相了解的大国，走向文化上互相理解的过程。看看尼克松和毛泽东，再听听他们的谈吐，这两个人的搭配应算是怪异中的怪异。但为美中两国“准盟友”关系铺平道路的是基辛格和周恩来，本书的核心是这二人建立个人友谊的故事——二人的友谊来源于了解难以理解的异国文化的共同努力。
当然，亨利•基辛格必须要努力掌握的第一个难以理解的异国文化就是美国文化。1938年，当基辛格一家逃离纳粹德国到达纽约时，他已经15岁了。当时，有很多方式和社区可以帮助基辛格缓解这种文化上的冲击：纽约上西城有活跃的德国犹太侨民社区，人数众多；哈德逊河畔有定期聚会(stammtisch)；纽约市立大学(City
University of New York)有来自世界各地的人，还有军事情报解读组，其中有许多像基辛格这样的人。但在哈佛，基辛格看到的却是另一番情景：学院名流们的求思若渴。以最严苛方式把基辛格一路带进美国思想殿堂的是一位令人意想不到的精神导师——来自田纳西州莫夫里斯波洛(Murfreesboro)的威廉•扬德尔•艾略特(William
Yandell Elliott)。基辛格回忆道，“他可是个大名人”，是范德比尔特大学(Vanderbilt
University)“逃亡派诗人”(Fugitive Poets)中的一员。这群诗人还包括爱伦•泰特(Allen Tate)和约翰•克劳•兰塞姆(John Crowe
Ransom)。艾略特把自己的张扬个性和坚韧头脑带到了华盛顿，担任富兰克林•罗斯福(Franklin
Roosevelt)的顾问，并一直与那个圈子保持着联系。艾略特一开始可能对哈佛的本科生并不感兴趣，尤其是那些带有浓重德国口音、诚挚迫切求知求学的本科生。基辛格郁闷地笑着说：“我被分配给他时，他明确表示这对他是个很大的负担。他说，‘你不妨写一篇关于康德(Kant)的论文吧。’”绝对命令(Categorical Imperative)与政治实践？这正合年轻基辛格的心意，尽管作为前罗德学者(Rhodes Scholar)的艾略特要求他在下次会面时朗读出来——这很像贝利奥尔学院(Balliol)的风格。基辛格朗读完后，这位逃亡派诗人承认：“你的思想倒的确有点意思。”“实际上，他说他现在愿引导我的才智发展。第一步就是让我去读《卡拉马佐夫兄弟》(The Brothers Karamazov)。”
基辛格从艾略特那里学到的是，如果不掌握很长的时间跨度，那么对政治和政府的任何阐述都将是浅薄和适得其反的。在这本关于中国的著作中，这种长远视野得到了全面展示。该书引人入胜之处在于，它坚持从中国古典文化的起源开始讲述，历数“中央王国”的诸多朝代，之后才论及衰落、割据和革命时代。基辛格微笑着讲起他在这本书开篇时提到的场景，毛泽东把党内领导人召集过来听他讲述唐朝发生的一场战争。“这就像我们的某位领导人回顾查理大帝(Charlemagne)时代的战争一样。”你能够听出来，基辛格是在认为我们的领导人回顾历史并没有什么坏处。他还哀叹“现代的政治家们太缺少历史感。对他们而言，连越南战争都久远得难以想象，朝鲜战争就更是与我们不再有什么关系了，”尽管朝鲜半岛冲突还远谈不上结束、而且随时都有可能从“冷战”转为“热战”。基辛格叹息道：“这（即戈尔•维达尔(Gore Vidal)喜欢说的‘失忆合众国’(United
States of Amnesia)）是一种重大的残缺……我和政策制定者们交谈时，如果引述一些历史做类比，他们就会想‘他怎么又开始扯历史了。’”
在基辛格心目中，以深厚历史知识为基础进行分析思考的完美典范，仍是哈里•杜鲁门(Harry
Truman)身边杰出的顾问圈子。基辛格说，这个圈子的领军人物乔治•凯南(George
Kennan)有着“绝佳的头脑和远见卓识”，凯南关于遏制理论的那篇文章（1946年详述苏联野心的那份著名的长电报）“是具有开创性的，一个标点都不需要改”。但作为一位外交家，凯南可算是冷战中的一个暴脾气。基辛格回忆道，凯南从来都不能很好控制住自己的怒火，他曾在柏林滕珀尔霍夫机场不讲策略地大喊：莫斯科的状况还“跟纳粹德国一样”。“他的想法多少有些绝对，”基辛格微笑着说。“他不能忍受那些可能发生的意外事件。”
而掌控意外正是基辛格外交政策风格的精髓所在，特别是在面对中国的时候。俄中两国间的相互猜疑必然导致爆炸性的冲突，这一客观历史局面由来已久。但只有基辛格和周恩来共同秉持理性、遵循这一局面中的逻辑，才能实现中美激动人心的建交。如今我们知道，苏联因过度扩张而走向自我毁灭，那么，当时中国人对苏联入侵（毛泽东称之为“祸水”）的担心是否过了头？一点儿也不——基辛格答道。中苏双方当时都很紧张，这正是导致1969年的局面变得非常危险的原因。基辛格说，勃列日涅夫(Brezhnev)流露出“一种感觉，认为中国正浮现出一些不详的危险信号”。斯大林(Stalin)在人生的最后几年也受到同一难题的困扰——始终没有“解决如何维持对中国的影响的问题”。苏联发动先发制人式打击的危险迫在眉睫，毛泽东对此保持着足够警惕——“他把所有政府高官都疏散到全国各地，只留周恩来一人在北京。”
第一次启程去与周恩来会面的时候，基辛格对中国历史和文化了解多少？“一开始……呵，毫无了解。”因为那时候保密是第一位的，常规机构都拒绝向他提供任何资料。于是他回到了哈佛，希望研究中国现代史的学术大师费正清(J.K. Fairbank)和欧文•拉铁摩尔(Owen
Lattimore)能给他上几堂速成课。“他们想跟我谈为何应该允许中国加入联合国(UN)的事情，并向我提供了各种会让这件事变得轻松的方法。我认为这么做当然是非常明智的。不过，他们谁都没有坐下来告诉我：‘现在你真的该去了解中国人是怎么想的了。’”基辛格随后进行了大量自学，而且他非常清楚：如果想要达成任何成果，就必须摆脱美国官僚机构和国务院的通病，不能动不动就提出索赔和赔偿之类的法律问题，而应直奔基本原则、从达成“一个中国”的共识开始。“一个中国”的立场，是当时台湾国民党政府和北京共产党政府都坚持的。
谈起这个全球结盟态势上的重大转变，基辛格似乎在暗示这只能通过19世纪政治中常见的那种私人互动来实现。毕竟这整件事的中心（不要忘记尼克松古怪、混乱而扭曲的个性）是毛泽东——他的重要性是基辛格无论如何不愿低估的。我问他如何看待毛泽东最高指示的混乱与矛盾：下令开展“大跃进”，人为导致饥荒、致使几百万人饿死；发动灾难性的文化大革命，直到它即将致使国家崩溃才急踩刹车。“这些都是对‘人皆有一死’的反叛，”基辛格说道。这话听起来有点玄妙，但提供了一个有趣的补遗。被“无法想象的恶行”留下永久伤痕的，是邓小平那一代人以及邓本人（邓小平在上述运动中曾两次被打倒，他的一个儿子也被盛怒的红卫兵迫害致残）。但他们的下一代，开始认为也许毛泽东“出发点是好的……但一如既往地做过了头”。文革的痛苦与恐怖已是上一代人的记忆，基辛格说，这一代人“怀念……一种不一样的社会”。“现在在重庆，”他告诉我，“有一位党委书记，叫薄熙来，正在引领某种毛泽东思想的复兴。我一位曾在中国呆过的同事告诉我，10年前，大学毕业生们都想成为高盛(Goldman Sachs)的高管，而现在，他们想当政府官员。”毛泽东本人面对当今的中国会怎么办呢？“我想他会头痛。他确实相信他对中国人民负有道德使命。而当今中国雅皮士们的自私会让他头痛。”
中国政府顽固地以残暴方式处理人权问题的记录，难道不会令我们在跟他们攀交情时犯下犹豫吗？在基辛格的职业生涯中，他曾不时被指责对人权问题不够关切，他对此似乎有些敏感。他回答说：“我会定期提出人权问题，通常是以个人名义，从不公开宣扬。但对于主张人权的人士来说，公开宣扬是一项道德使命，因为它让我们站在历史的正确一边。为此，我尊重他们。”
但这种尊重，不足以妨碍他将中国看做推动朝鲜半岛和阿富汗局势转危为安的不可或缺因素。没有中国的积极参与，任何试图使阿富汗免受恐怖主义侵扰的努力，都是徒劳的。这样说或许把中国的位置摆得太高，因为事实上俄罗斯和中国搭了美国在阿军事行动的“便车”：该行动遏制住了圣战主义者，减轻了圣战主义者在中亚和新疆对俄中自身国家安全构成的威胁。那么，事后来看，巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)宣布从即将到来的7月份起开始从阿富汗撤军是个好主意吗？这个问题让我们的思绪一下子跳回越南。“根据我的个人经验，一旦迈出撤军的第一步，这条路就得一直走下去。黎德寿(Le Duc Tho)曾在谈判中讥讽我：如果用50万人都无法摆平越南，你凭什么认为用越来越少的人反倒可以呢？这个问题我一直没有想出答案。我们发现自己的处境是，要维持……南越人民的自由选择权……我们就必须继续撤军，而这也就减弱了各方参与我所参与的那个和谈的积极性。我们在阿富汗也将面临同样的挑战。我在写给尼克松的一份备忘录中说过，撤军开始的时候，就像在吃盐焗花生，越吃越想吃。”
基辛格甚至还笑着为阿富汗局势勾勒出一个比任何人迄今想到的都严酷的前景，其中，基地组织(al-Qaeda)存在与否只是最不紧要的一个问题。他说，可能发生的情况是一种事实上的分裂——印度和俄罗斯改组北方联盟，巴基斯坦与塔利班建立紧密联系、以抵御巴自身受到的包围。
忽然间，我在这个春天中感到一丝寒意。一战百年纪念即将到来之时，人们却隐约感到它在重演。那不是比利时式的，而是萨拉热窝式的。想想这些吧：充当大国代理人的准国家；包围妄想症；准备就绪的军火库（这次是核装备）；四面受敌、神经过敏的巴基斯坦出于不安全感变得暴躁好斗。“最终，爆发一场印巴战争的可能性越来越大，”基辛格说，声音像平静的深海。“因此，通过某种国际程序讨论这些问题，也许能够制定出足够的约束措施，使得巴基斯坦不再感到被印度包围、不再把塔利班当作其战略保留。”他直视着我。“这可能吗？我不知道。但我知道，如果我们放任局势自行发展，这一地区可能变成下一场世界大战的巴尔干。”
突然间，基辛格悲观论断展示出的无可辩驳的清晰逻辑，让这位“奇爱博士”(Dr
Strangelove)仿佛变成了“潘格罗斯博士”(Dr Pangloss)。两周前，美国各地都出现了圣经海报，宣称世界末日绝对会在5月21日到来。如果他们是对的，你现在就不会在读这篇文章了。但如果基辛格是对的，散发海报的人就还有机会把这个日期拨后一点。可别说历史和基辛格没有提醒你。
亨利•基辛格所著的《论中国》(On China)由艾伦莱恩出版社(Allen Lane)出版
译者/何黎
作者简介：西蒙·沙玛（Simon Schama），英国历史学家、美国哥伦比亚大学艺术史讲师，英国《金融时报》特约编辑，BBC纪录片解说员，美国《纽约客》杂志文艺评论员。
纽约时报：基辛格论中国
作者：MAX FRANKEL 2012年12月05日
亨利·基辛格(Henry Kissinger)不但是前往共产中国的第一位官方美国特使，而且40年来，先后50余次往返其间，覆盖双边各达7任元首。外交上，他享有特权；而在88岁高龄之际，他在《论中国》(On China)一书中，回顾反思自己精彩的历程。
以华盛顿与北京现在相互理解的程度看，可谓不错了，因为基辛格一直在尽力为双方调停，察言观色，从隐晦的笑话到发脾气，无所不包。在每一个危急关头，他都力求提出一些“战略观念”，以此度过充满冲突、双方不满与恐惧的历史阶段。无论是作为尼克松总统的国家安全顾问，还是尼克松与杰拉德·福特的国务卿，抑或自1977年起，作为私人特别居间人，基辛格一直毫不动摇，致力于消除中国因美国干涉其内政而产生的那种在他看来尚属正当的愤慨，以及美国因中国对民族、宗教与政治异见者残酷镇压而生的反感。
在他对中美关系磕磕绊绊的回顾中，令人意外的是，受到大事宣扬的1971-1972年的尼克松-基辛格中国之行，其实挺顺利的。“考虑到时代的需要，中国与美国找到途径走到一起势所必然。”他写道，“这迟早会发生的，不管双方两国的领导人是谁。”两国都已疲于战争（越战、中苏边境冲突）与国内的矛盾冲突（尼克松治下的反战抗议，毛泽东治下的文化大革命）。两国都决意对抗苏联的挑衅，因此得以很快成为同道。面对莫斯科的威胁，两国领导人放下在越南与台湾上的冲突，停止各自例行的谴责——不管是谴责国际帝国主义还是共产主义。双方认定敌人的敌人就是朋友， 而十多年里，这一条颇有成效。
可时代不同了。中国终于脱离了毛泽东将革命进行到底的疯狂教条，摆脱了中央计划经济这一无用的灵丹妙药；中国成为了一个工业强国。苏联及其帝国倒塌了。而美国，虽觉得自己高高在上，但也开始带着传教士一般的热情推销民主，尽管美国对外国石油、商品与信贷的依赖已经到了危险的地步。权力平衡发生根本变替，使中国与美国成为两个相互依赖的经济巨头，但却并未使两国建立包罗万象的战略伙伴关系规划。
正是为了展示有这种规划的需要，基辛格检视了中美关系的风风雨雨，甚至走进中国古代历史以明确这个民族的性格（他发现这个例子很合适：中国人喜欢下围棋，一种耗时的包围游戏，而我们下国际象棋，寻求对中心的掌控与完胜）。基辛格参考了大量新近的学术研究成果以及自己北京之行的笔记，以此赞美毛泽东的几位继任者的务实。他说，他们乐于待在已经恢复的历史边界内，愿意等待时机与台湾和平统一，最为坚定地继续他们的高经济增长并消除中国依然普遍的贫困现象。他对美国是否有能力继续保持稳定的外交政策则不太有信心，指出“民主过渡这一漫无休止的心理表演”其实是在不断邀请其他国家在我们身上“两面下注”。
正如基辛格的研究者所熟知的，他长期以来认为，民主对国家治理而言是一个负担 ——无论是美国国内民主的喧闹，还是我们对其他国家民主化的鼓动，莫不如此。
他再次想起20世纪70年代在任时的痛苦，当时他认为，越战期间美国的抗议活动可能会误导毛泽东相信，一场“真正的世界革命”就在眼前。他认为，尼克松在水门事件中的“毁灭”、国会不再支持越战、对总统战时权力的新约束与情报机密的“大量外流”，所有这一切累加起来有损于与中国的准联盟，使美国在对付苏联问题上显得软弱无力。他高兴的是，吉米·卡特并未让人权问题影响与中国的关系，而罗纳德·里根开朗的性格克服了他在与北京打交道时“几乎难以理喻的矛盾”，即便是在他提倡台湾独立这一设想的时候。
当然，对这种 准联盟最为严厉的考验是1989年天安门事件中对民运的残酷镇压。那场暴力镇压也考验了基辛格对于在外交关系中主张美国价值观的容忍度。
回想起来，他认为一切取决于局势：“有些对人权的侵犯行为实在令人震惊，”他写道，“根本无法想象继续保持关系会有何益处；譬如，柬埔寨的红色高棉，卢旺达的种族灭绝。因为公开施压要么演变为改朝换代，要么就是退位，这种做法很难用于那些与之继续保持关系对美国安全颇为重要的国家。在与中国的关系上，尤其如此，对于西方社会对中国令人屈辱的干预，这个国家有着太多记忆 。”
因此，基辛格很是赞赏乔治·H·W·布什总统的做法，他“熟练而又优雅”地行走在“钢丝”上，一方面在天安门事件后通过制裁惩罚中国，同时又通过私人信函向特使表达歉意。基辛格注意到，比尔·克林顿总统一度想施压，但他明智地变得温和时，却并不受人感激；中国人“并不将撤销单边威胁视为让步，而且他们对任何有关干涉他们内政的口风，都极为敏感。”而乔治·W·布什，尽管也有他的“自由议程”，却获得了基辛格的赞扬，因其通过“合理平衡战略重点”，克服了“美国传教与务实两种路径之间的历史矛盾” 。
如果美国将其对民主管治的偏好作为在其它中国问题上取得进展的主要条件，基辛格的结论是，“势必陷入僵局”。那些为传播美国价值观念而战斗的人值得尊敬。“但外交政策必须明确目标与手段的界限，而如果所采用的手段逾越了国际框架或对国家安全至关重要的关系的容忍度，就必须做出选择。”这一选择，他坚持认为，“不容回避”，尽管他自己也试图打回避的擦边球 ：“美国辩论最好的结局是将两种路径结合起来：让理想主义者认识到，执行原则需要时间，因此有时需要根据时势做出调整；让‘现实主义者’接受，价值观念有其自身的现实且必须融入到可行的政策中去。”
不过，在最后，基辛格还是为国家安全至上投了赞成票。这本著作中不时有对美国价值观的称赞，以及对人类尊严的承诺与义务，这可能有时真的会使我们的政策超越对国家利益的考量。事实上，在《论中国》出版后，这样的事真的发生了，奥巴马总统冒险插手利比亚。基辛格或许感到惊讶的是，这一人道主义干预以及在利比亚改朝换代的企图，并未促使中国在联合国行使否决权。然而，如今是在亚洲而不是欧洲，他认为，“主权至高无上，”而一切“来自外部”的改变中国国内结构的企图“势必引发巨大的始料不及的后果” 。此外，正如他在华盛顿实施现实主义政治时所坚持的，和平事业也是一个道德追求。
基辛格的经验与忠告这一中心主题必须从他在《论中国》中有时不着边际、大多熟悉的故事讲述中提炼出来。只是在书末他才讨论了未来中美关系这一基本问题：没有了共同的敌手来约束他们，世界上的两个大国靠什么来保持和平，促进双方的合作与信任？
基辛格回答这一问题的方式是回顾历史，那是英国外交部一位高级官员艾尔·克劳(Eyre Crowe)1907年写的一份备忘录。克劳认为，“（德国）尽己所能建立一支强大的海军”，是符合德国的利益的，而这本身就会导致与英帝国的“客观”冲突，不管德国的外交官说或做了什么。如今在美国，基辛格注意到，有一个“克劳思想流派”(Crowe school of thought)，该派视中国的崛起“与美国在太平洋的地位不相容”，因此最好采取先发制人的敌对政策。他感受到两国社会的焦虑在增大，他也担心那些声称中国的民主是信任关系前提的美国人会加剧这种焦虑。他警告说，隐含的下一次冷战会阻止两国的进步，并使两国“分解为本身自会成为事实的预言中”，而在现实中，双方主要的竞争更有可能是经济而非军事上的。
沉湎于自己对外交体系建构的习惯性偏好，基辛格坚持认为，两个大国的共同利益应该有可能“共同进化”到“一个更为全面的框架”。他展望，英明的领导人建立一个“太平洋共同体”(Pacific community)，类似于美国与欧洲建立的大西洋共同体。所有亚洲国家就可加入这一体系，这一体系当被视为联合的事业而非中美两大敌对集团的竞争。而太平洋两岸的领导人有责任去“建立磋商与相互尊重的传统”，从而使共同的世界秩序“体现各国的抱负”。
这确是基辛格首次北京之行的使命所在。他虽然没有这么说，却是将这个希望寄托在了那些与他分享相似观点的国家身上。
Max Frankel是《纽约时报》前执行主编，报道了尼克松―基辛格1972年的中国之行。
本文最初发表于2011年5月15日。
