"On China"

[fiefoe]

It's always interesting to follow an outsider's (Henry Kissinger, in this case) account of history that one's already familiar with.

Kissinger used 围棋 （Go） effectively to explain why 'encirclement' is such a dirty word in Chinese geopolitics. The lengthy discussion on how we got into the Korean War was also fascinating: Stalin stirred up the trouble in the first place but then refused to be dragged into it; the Chinese's initial attack as defense was quite misconstrued by the Americans, ditto the Americans fleet movement into Taiwan strait as containment.

• "A special feature of Chinese civilization is that it seems to have no beginning."
• Lucian Pye: China remains "a civilization pretending to be a nation-state."
• "Chinese navy history was .. a hinge that failed to swing."
• revisionism -> 修正主义
• I forgot that at the end of the fable of 愚公移山, it was angels who came to lift the mountains away.
• "The Romance of Three Kingdoms" was banned after 1949.
• "To Mao, the greatness of the Chinese people was an organizational principle."