How Kissinger became an asset of China

It started with Henry Kissinger. Before Intel apologised to China for attempting to remove forced labor from the company’s supply chains in December, before Disney thanked a Chinese public security bureau that rounded up Muslims and sent them to concentration camps, before LeBron James criticised the Houston Rockets’ general manager for supporting democracy in Hong Kong, before Marriott fired an employee for supporting Tibet, before Sheldon Adelson personally lobbied to kill a bill condemning China’s human rights record, even before Ronald Reagan called China a ‘so-called Communist country,’ the men whose relationship became a blueprint for everything that came after sat with Premier Zhou Enlai in a Chinese government guesthouse in July 1971, discussing philosophy.

By his flattery, persistence, and charm over dozens of hours of conversation over five years, Zhou initiated US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger as a friend of China. The friendship wasn’t merely diplomatic, or coldly strategic.