Henry Kissinger’s book On China arrived in the capital’s bookshops on the eve of the 23rd anniversary of Tiananmen Square on June 6. Today, that episode may be a blip in the history of a country with a four-millennia-old civilisation and continuous nationhood since 221 BC. In 1989, however, it rattled China, brought into question Deng Xiaoping’s economic pragmatism

and soured Chinese relations with the West, particularly the US. The book’s relevance is, however, wider. It gives a unique insight into the thought processes of four generations of Chinese leaders, with whom Mr Kissinger interacted in official and demi-official capacities. Mao Zedong, in his elliptical magnificence, speaks to the reader; as does Zhou Enlai and so on. Although Mr Kissinger’s avuncular indulgence is manifest, giving the Chinese the benefit of the doubt, for instance in ignoring their proclivity to function both within the domain of the post-World War II global order as outside it through the clandestine export of lethal technologies to their clients in South Asia and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). But the nexus between Chinese strategic and operational thinking and their cultural and historical roots is masterly.
Illustrative is a comparison between the Chinese board game Wei Qi and chess, of Indian provenance and now universal acceptance. While in the Chinese game, played with 180 pieces per player on a board with 19 by 19 lines, the aim is to outflank through spatial dominance, in chess the object is to checkmate the antagonist into submission. Mr Kissinger explains that the 1950 Korean War, where China opposed the US, the 1962 Sino-Indian border clash and the 1979 Sino-Vietnam hostilities were all acts of offensive deterrence. The first ensured the survival of DPRK, a Chinese protégé, the second downsized India and made Jawaharlal Nehru a nervous wreck. The last demonstrated Soviet helplessness as they could not assist Vietnam despite a friendship treaty. Though akin to the Western doctrine of pre-emptive action, for the Chinese, Mr Kissinger concludes, in each case, “having restored the psychological equation, in Chinese eyes, genuine deterrence has been achieved”. That explains China’s unilateral withdrawal in 1962 to pre-war positions. Additional factors perhaps were the likely onset of winter, extended supply lines, Soviet ire over Chinese distraction during the Cuban missile crisis and President John F. Kennedy swinging the full US support behind India.
Both countries, post-World War II, faced complex challenges. It is in countering them that posterity now judges their ruling elite. The Indian leadership inherited a country partitioned by the departing rulers; the Chinese in 1949 had a nation traumatised by Japanese occupation and ravages but also a bloody civil war, leaving one faction with Taiwan, though fully supported by the US.
China had, however, been a nation in continuum since 221 BC. Even though Chinese empires fractured, re-uniting in cycles, the idea of China was uncontested. Every barbarian invasion, if not thwarted at the border, was eventually overpowered through endurance or absorbed in Chinese culture. Thus Mao’s China refused to join the Warsaw Pact or give a naval base to the Soviets. They first aligned with the USSR to fight the US in Korea and then, in 1972, reversed it to help the US contain the Soviets. They struck quasi-alliances, advancing their national interests, convinced of their manifest destiny. Despite Mao’s revolutionary zeal to purge China of the vestiges of Confucianism, his successor Deng Xiaoping actually resurrected the same to put China on the path of accelerated rise.
The Indian elite, on the contrary, were strung between their English education, Nehru’s Fabian Socialist vision and Gandhiji’s deliberate tapping into the fossilised Indian religious and cultural well springs, realising that an enslaved nation could not be freed without spiritual revival. Nehru’s Indo-centric narrative taught the masses to recognise the relevance of their own traditions. This had in it as much of Buddha as of the Bhagavad Gita. It, however, had no pragmatic advice on how to deal with hard decisions impinging on foreign policy and national security. The answer to that would be a complex mix of Asoka’s pacifism and Chanakya’s statecraft.
In retrospect, non-alignment was good in practice but bad in theory, as India got entrapped in its logic. When the Chinese descended on eastern India in 1962, Nehru went rushing to the US, even seeking air cover, which in retrospect was both unnecessary and impractical, particularly when India had not even deployed its own air assets.
Episodically, India has operated on the basis of realpolitik. In 1971, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi correctly assessed that factors favoured pre-emptive action. The US was war-weary post-Vietnam, China was exhausted after its fratricidal Cultural Revolution and Pakistan had lost all moral authority, first in undermining an electoral verdict and then with genocide. India succeeded in bifurcating its principal antagonist in South Asia. Having done so Indira Gandhi chose to ignore her external environment, in which the creator of today’s China, Deng Xiaoping, had been recalled by Mao after his banishment since 1966. He worked from 1973 to 1976 and, following Mao’s death and temporary sidelining, again from 1979 to 1991. The great pragmatist had by then worked his magic, the result for all to behold. The greatest challenge Indira Gandhi perceived in 1975 was Jayaprakash Narayan. As India slipped under Emergency control, losing its core marketing values of freedom and democracy, China was emerging from Mao’s nihilism. A young Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, with a mandate to remodel India, stumbled within two years of his historic victory. The time to break away from the sterile dogmas of controlled economy and non-aligned policy was already long past. China was showing that there is space between being non-aligned and aligned. It is called being a pole. The initiative was finally taken by an accidental Prime Minster, Narasimha Rao, seven years too late and myriad steps too few.
Mr Kissinger’s last chapter is titled, “Does history repeat itself?” For China the world hopes not, as it would be regressive for China to mutate into a Middle Kingdom, remote and prescriptive. For India, the question is whether the creators of chess can outplay the masters of Wei Qi. Where the Chinese have given the world products, India has exported ideas. Can the material trump the mental, the prosaic the spiritual?

K.C. Singh is a former secretary in the external affairs ministry