Bharat Rakshak

Acharya wrote:In the Prologue of the book - On China has some interesting quote by Mao during the 1962 war.

Mao says that China does not need to wage war against India since it is peaceful

He quotes war with India 1000 years ago and says now it is needed for peace

On China by Henry Kissinger: review

On China, Henry Kissinger’s account of his diplomatic role in the Far East is fascinating but flawed in its reverence for Mao Tse-tung, says Jon Halliday.

By Jon Halliday

Early in Richard Nixon’s presidency, Henry Kissinger mused about the long-term effect of an opening to China, asking presciently “whether we really wanted China to be a world power like the Soviet Union, competing with us. Rather than their present role, which is limited to aiding certain insurgencies.” Forty years on, he suggests that decades of engagement have not secured a safe future.

On China has a fascinating analysis of Kissinger’s encounters with the Chinese leaders. I enjoyed his take on Mao’s exchanges with Stalin and Khrushchev. But there are frustrating omissions.

We get plenty on Chinese tradition, but much less about the legacy of Stalinism. The claim that the Chinese Communist Party was only “loosely aligned with the world communist movement” is not tenable. The Party was set up and funded by Moscow, and Mao proclaimed himself a disciple of Stalin. The Chinese Constitution emphatically enshrines both Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung Thought.

Kissinger has unwisely called Mao a “philosopher”. Mao rejected all the attributes of true philosophy, especially freedom of thought and debate. He had contempt for the rule of law and for human dignity, and the main reason Beijing is such a difficult customer is his legacy, not Chinese tradition.

Nixon and Kissinger tried to de-link China’s domestic behaviour from foreign policy. A week before Nixon went to China, Kissinger advised him: “For the next 15 years we have to lean towards the Chinese against the Russians.”

But “leaning towards the Chinese” could have awful implications. In November 1975, shortly after all of Indo-China had fallen to Communism, Kissinger told the Thai Foreign Minister Chatichai that “our strategy is to get the Chinese into Laos and Cambodia as a barrier to the Vietnamese”. Chatichai was in contact with the Khmer Rouge. “Tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way.”

The Americans knew very little about China’s secretive policy-making. In December 1971, as Bangladesh was breaking away from Pakistan, Washington tried to coax China into the fighting. Kissinger met the Chinese “to suggest Chinese military help”, by which he meant “military intervention”. He expected the Chinese were going to move, and later told them that if they had taken “military measures [and] the Soviet Union moved against you, we would move against the Soviet Union”.

This, he wrote, was “the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship”. Encouraging an unknown and unreliable state to take military action, with uncontrollable and unforeseeable consequences (it turned out the US duo had no idea how they would have implemented their rash offer) was breaking all the rules of realpolitik. And doubly unwise, as it gave Mao vital information about how far the US would go for him – in return for nothing. Kissinger gives us a lot about decoding Mao on co-operation, but not one word here about this, the key test case.

Kissinger seems to harbour protective feelings towards Pakistan and in On China he mentions Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, but goes out of his way to say, bizarrely, that it “does not meet the formal criteria of a rogue state”.

But Pakistan is, along with North Korea, one of the two most unreliable nuclear-armed states, and it is not by chance that both are heavily supported by China. But just here, where we most need insight, Kissinger seems short of ideas. His passages on North Korea and Pakistan are extremely brief.

{For starters he doesn't want to tip off India.}

His reluctance to factor in the nature of the Chinese Communist Party regime is a pity. Beijing’s domestic behaviour has implications for foreign policy. The regime bases its claims to “legitimacy” on fabricated history and unpleasant nationalism.

I was glad to see Kissinger can change his mind. In 1975, he called Deng Xiaoping a “bureaucrat… not a leader”. Here he acknowledges Deng’s achievement. He originally called the biography of Mao I wrote with my wife, Jung Chang, “grotesque”; here it is “one-sided but often thought-provoking”. “One-sided” I take to mean it is more critical of Mao than Kissinger is.

But his praise of Mao produces contortions worthy of Mao’s aide Zhou Enlai. “Mao,” he writes, “destroyed traditional China and left its rubble as building blocks for ultimate modernisation.” But rubble is just rubble.

[I}{See Mao's Communism was to destroy old China, just as French Revolution destroyed the ancien regime. In preparation for what we don't know as history chooses its path!}[/i]

Mao made horrific remarks about nuclear weapons and the value of human life. China’s Constitution says these “thoughts” are still valid. The world would sleep easier if Kissinger could encourage China’s leaders to disavow them.

* Jon Halliday is the co-author, with Jung Chang, of Mao: the Unknown Story (Vintage)

On China

by Henry Kissinger

608PP, Allen Lane, £30

Buy now for £26 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph Books

harbans wrote:I fail to understand why people like Kissinger have been consulted and feted till today despite their colossal failures. Kissinger could hardly be considered an intellectual in any sense. His vision was extremely short sighted and whenever he envisaged something for the long term it did'nt happen that way. A fundamental mistake was the certainty that events would follow their limited vision. A person who could'nt even see Bangladesh's emergence as an independent nation and who believed the Yahya Khans were the liberal epitomes of South Asia is to be felicited maximum as a colossal failure and nothing else. The worst strategy is to rely on 'cunning' and 'guile' forsaking Truth as a weapon. It's a sure way to lose sight of the plot.

harbans wrote:I fail to understand why people like Kissinger have been consulted and feted till today despite their colossal failures. Kissinger could hardly be considered an intellectual in any sense.

harbans wrote:I am now beginning to understand his grand strategy and for PRC in the last 40 years. It is complex but the nature of this strategy is gigantic the size of China.

With due humility Acharya Ji, i understand his 'grand strategy' hidden behind 'real politik' pitching China with the USSR, engaging it and ultimately thinking what Japan is to US the same the US can mould China into. Thats the same stream of thought in the US that led to engaging Jihadi's to take on USSR in Afghanistan. Pleading Mao to open a 3rd northern front against India and sending in the 7th fleet in 71, was never in US national interest. It still suffers as a result of those decisions taken by the Nixon-Kissinger duo. There 'real politik' decisions supposedly taken in 'national interest' are failures of US foreign policy.

To stabilize the economy and combat the 1970 inflation rate of 5.84%[2], on August 15, 1971, President Nixon imposed a 90-day wage and price freeze, a 10 percent import surcharge, and, most importantly, “closed the gold window”, ending convertibility between US dollars and gold. The President and fifteen advisors made that decision without consulting the members of the international monetary system, so the international community informally named it the Nixon shock. Given the importance of the announcement — and its impact upon foreign currencies — presidential advisors recalled that they spent more time deciding when to publicly announce the controversial plan than they spent creating the plan.[3] He was advised that the practical decision was to make an announcement before the stock markets opened on Monday (and just when Asian markets also were opening trading for the day). On August 15, 1971, that speech and the price-control plans proved very popular and raised the public's spirit. The President was credited with finally rescuing the American public from price-gougers, and from a foreign-caused exchange crisis.[3][4]
By December 1971, the import surcharge was dropped, as part of a general revaluation of the major currencies, which thereafter were allowed 2.25% devaluations from the agreed exchange rate. By March 1976, the world’s major currencies were floating — in other words, the currency exchange rates no longer were governments' principal means of administering monetary policy.

harbans wrote: There is NOTHING called National 'self interest'. Repeat NOTHING. Self Interest is always a Doctrine. You always protect Doctrine, value systems within your geographical borders or evolve on those value systems using constituted processes. The moment you engage with entities national or otherwise that don't share or won't evolve to your value systems and strengthen them, you are working against your self interest and thus notionally against the State that supposedly runs on that basis.

Thus national self interest does not really imply anything at all if it can be literally anything, unless and until it is linked very specifically to a value system. Kissinger's hallmark was delinking national interest and value systems. That's a fundamental failure in approach to any 'national interest'.

harbans wrote:US used the 1971 war to its advantage and due to PM Indira Gandhi both Pakistan and Mao came closer to US in geo political terms.

The US got mud in it's face 1971. India hardened it's resolve to make the nuke. It pissed generations of Indians off. Nothing i see in US National interest here

For the first time US could get close relations with two authoritarian countries which it could never get before.

The results of which again went against US national interests as we know today.

Another factor was the lack of honest information, the secrecy and propaganda that is central to the culture of war. As contradictions mounted the Soviet people became more and more cynical about the propaganda of government-controlled media. It was common to hear the Russian people say that you could find truth anywhere except in Pravda and the news anywhere except in Izvestia. This was exacerbated by the propaganda warfare carried out by the West in Radio Free Europe and by dissidents in self-published Samizdat.

Secrecy and distortion of information have disastrous economic as well as political effects. As explained in a 1991 article "Secrecy and restricted movement, the hallmarks of militarism and bureaucracy, pervaded Soviet society when I was working there. They hampered the work of the scientific institutes where I was located, even though they were not doing military research. As a result, I found that all levels of the system, from institutes to ministries, were isolated from each other, both by barriers to communication and by an attitude that one should mind one's own business."

The command-administrative model of war-communism hobbled economic development. As the article by Latsis put it, "The glitter of [the war-time economic] miracle blinded us for decades, and the command-administrative methods of the extensively developing economy took firm root in the country."

When, at the end, the Gorbachev administration realized that they would have to convert military industry to civilian production, they could not even get the Defense Ministry to give them an accurate list of defense industries (See Agaev remarks to the United Nations). In other words, the Soviet Union had developed its own military-industrial complex.

Economic indicators were routinely suppressed or falsified to the point that when the final economic collapse was imminent there were no published figures to indicate the points of weakness. For example, as Latsis remarks, the government did not even admit until 1988 that it was running a budget deficit. As a result the government had no way to take remedial action.

All of these factors accumulated on top of a profound alienation of the Soviet people that had grown up over the years as the country remained in the grips of the culture of war. In the Stalin years, not only was the economy devoted to the arms race, but information was controlled in the form of propaganda and dissidents were sent to labor camps. People did not feel free to discuss this, and most people did not participate in governance. Although women were more equal in the work force than in the West, at the top the Communist Party was all men. Photos of the ruling Politburo showed old men covered with war medals like so many old military generals.

The second trend we see in the Arab Spring is a manifestation of “Carlson’s Law,” posited by Curtis Carlson, the C.E.O. of SRI International, in Silicon Valley, which states that: “In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.” As a result, says Carlson, the sweet spot for innovation today is “moving down,” closer to the people, not up, because all the people together are smarter than anyone alone and all the people now have the tools to invent and collaborate.

But this is not about technology alone. As the Russian historian Leon Aron has noted, the Arab uprisings closely resemble the Russian democratic revolution of 1991 in one key respect: They were both not so much about freedom or food as about “dignity.” They each grew out of a deep desire by people to run their own lives and to be treated as “citizens” — with both obligations and rights that the state cannot just give and take by whim.

If you want to know what brings about revolutions, it is not G.D.P. rising or falling, says Aron, “it is the quest for dignity.” We always exaggerate people’s quest for G.D.P. and undervalue their quest for ideals. “Dignity before bread” was the slogan of the Tunisian revolution. “The spark that lights the fuse is always the quest for dignity,” said Aron. “Today’s technology just makes the fire much more difficult to put out.”

We need to keep that in mind in China, sir. We should be proud of the rising standard of living that we have delivered for our people. Many of them appreciate that. But it is not the only thing in their lives — and at some point it won’t be the most important thing. Do you see what I mean, sir?

Satya_anveshi wrote:from a super kaanspiracy site..but hope it is just that and we aren't found being super dumb to let this unaccounted for.

How the Empire will Prevail: Will Washington Foment War Between China and India? by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

devesh wrote:^^^

regardless of the website's background, we need to watch out for any diabolical and convoluted schemes coming out of Washington.

What is Washington’s solution for the rising power of China?
The answer might be to involve China in a nuclear war with India.
The staging of the fake death of bin Laden in a commando raid that violated Pakistan’s sovereignty was sold to President Obama by the military/security complex as a way to boost Obama’s standing in the polls. The raid succeeded in raising Obama’s approval ratings. But its real purpose was to target Pakistan and to show Pakistan that the US was contemplating invading Pakistan in order to make Pakistan pay for allegedly hiding bin Laden next door to Pakistan’s military academy. The neocon, and increasingly the US military position, is that the Taliban can’t be conquered unless NATO widens the war theater to Pakistan, where the Taliban allegedly has sanctuaries protected by the Pakistan government, which takes American money but doesn’t do Washington’s bidding. Pakistan got the threat message and ran to China. On May 17 Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, as he departed for China declared China to be Pakistan’s "best and most trusted friend." China has built a port for Pakistan at Gwadar, which is close to the entrance of the Strait of Hormuz. The port might become a Chinese naval base on the Arabian Sea. Raza Rumi reported in the Pakistan Tribune (June 4) that at a recent lecture at Pakistan’s National Defense University, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, asked the military officers whether the biggest threat to Pakistan came from within, from India, or from the US. A majority of the officers said that the US was the biggest threat to Pakistan.
China, concerned with India, the other Asian giant that is rising, is willing to ally with Pakistan. Moreover, China doesn’t want Americans on its border, which is where they would be should Pakistan become another American battleground.
Therefore, China showed its displeasure with the US threat to Pakistan, and advised Washington to respect Pakistan’s sovereignty, adding that any attack on Pakistan would be considered an attack on China The US has been fawning all over India, cultivating India in the most shameful ways, including the sacrifice of Americans’ jobs. Recently, there have been massive US weapons sales to India, US-India military cooperation agreements, and joint military exercises.
Washington figures that the Indians, who were gullible for centuries about the British, will be gullible about the "shining city on the hill" that is "bringing freedom and democracy to the world" by smashing, killing, and destroying. Like the British and France’s Sarkozy, Indian political leaders will find themselves doing Washington’s will. By the time India and China realize that they have been maneuvered into mutual destruction by the Americans, it will be too late for either to back down.
With China and India eliminated, that only leaves Russia, which is already ringed by US missile bases and isolated from Europe by NATO, which now includes former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire. A large percentage of gullible Russian youth admires the US for its "freedom" (little do they know) and hates the "authoritarian" Russian state, which they regard as a continuation of the old Soviet state. These "internationalized Russians" will side with Washington, more of less forcing Moscow into surrender.

June 7 (Bloomberg) -- CIA director Leon Panetta, who has been nominated to succeed Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said China appears to be building the capability “to fight and win short-duration, high-intensity conflicts” along its borders.Its near-term focus appears to be on preparing for potential contingencies involving Taiwan, including possible U.S. military intervention,” Panetta said in a 79-page set of answers to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee in advance of his confirmation hearing, scheduled for June 9.
China’s efforts to modernize its military “emphasize anti- access and area capabilities,” Panetta said in his written answers. China also is modernizing its nuclear forces and improving its space and counter-space operations as well as its computer network operations, Panetta said.In addition, China is expanding its missions to include humanitarian assistance, non-combat evacuation operations, and counter-piracy support, according to Panetta.The U.S. should continue to “monitor closely” the growth of China’s military capabilities while designing a strategy “to preserve peace, enhance stability, and reduce risk in the region,” Panetta said.“The complexity of the security environment, both in the Asia-Pacific region and globally, calls for a continuous dialogue between the armed forces of the United States and China to expand practical cooperation where we can and to discuss candidly those areas where we differ,” Panetta said.