kissinger on china

You’ve become one of the world’s great experts on China since you first visited there in 1971. There seems to be a looming problem with China, as there was with Japan ten or fifteen years ago. Is China becoming so powerful it will endanger U.S. interests?

In the United States, there’s always a temptation to believe that we can write the course of history, that it’s entirely up to us to decide whether a country is powerful, less powerful, whether it is helpful to us or not. And one of the fundamental lessons we have to learn is that we are moving into a world in which a lot of things are happening that we cannot control. We can shape, but we cannot prevent China from becoming a major country. We can slow it down and then pay the consequences ten to twenty years down the road, and policymakers have every right to consider that. But fundamentally, China is going to emerge as a major power in Asia. Secondly, the center of gravity of the world is going to shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Those are realities.

Then we have to ask the policy question: Do we want to slow down that process at the risk of producing a generation of Chinese considering us to be the biggest obstacle of their national endeavors? Or do we want to signal an attitude of cooperation while defending specific American interests when they are being challenged? That we must always do. I tend to lean toward the second course. I believe also that a new equilibrium will emerge in Asia, and if we want to be relevant to that, it is wiser to do it from a posture of cooperation with China than from a posture of trying to recreate the Cold War, because in the second course, all the countries around China will be forced to choose and we will be blamed for putting them in a position where they are forced to choose. It will weaken our position in those countries, rather than strengthen it.

[from http://www.cfr.org/publication/8255/kissinger.html]