Obviously, Chinese state media made relentless propaganda hay of this. Welcoming Kissinger as an ‘old friend of China’ gave Xi a perfect opportunity to pose as supreme leader of a stable state – the rising Chinese superpower – graciously welcoming a frail old emissary bearing an olive branch from its declining, divided and decadent rival. Xi and his top colleagues gave Kissinger a far friendlier reception than those granted recently to the senior serving US officials, framing them in contrast as little more than a string of needy supplicants. What is the basis for this pessimistic assessment? If Kissinger was in fact tasked to convey top-level US government wishes for a thaw in relations, then this must be looking like an even worse miscalculation. If the administration had no hand in his mission, the results of the visit suggest that letting it go ahead was a bad mistake. The Biden administration says Kissinger travelled ‘of his own volition, as a private citizen’. Following a recent stream of serving senior US visitors to Beijing – Secretary of State Blinken, Treasury Secretary Yellen and Climate Envoy Kerry among them – it awakened echoes of historical reconciliation and revival in the US-China relationship. The centenarian US statesman, warmly welcomed in person by Xi Jinping as an ‘old friend of China’, bearing hopes for reconciliation between two estranged superpowers dangerously near the brink of conflict – what could be a better way to get bilateral relations back on track? On the face of it, Henry Kissinger’s visit to China looks like a masterstroke of diplomacy.
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