(LifeSiteNews) — After leaving office, America’s most famous diplomat led two lives. By day he was the gravelly voiced dean of American diplomacy, ponderously pontificating on America’s role in the world. By night he was the head of Kissinger Associates, a firm that he set up in 1982 to capitalize on the connections that he had made while serving as Secretary of State.
The most lucrative of those connections was China. China’s leaders were grateful to Kissinger not only for ending its diplomatic isolation, but also for helping to legitimate what was arguably the most brutal regime in human history.
It’s no wonder that Xi Jinping himself send condolences upon Kissinger’s passing, saying that “Kissinger’s name will forever be associated with U.S.-China relations.”
Kissinger made it acceptable to go into business with the Chinese Communist Party. And, over the years, he led endless delegations of American and Western businessmen to Beijing like lambs to the slaughter, assuring them that China was gradually evolving away from communism and therefore was a safe—and humane—place to invest.
In return, of course, he necessarily had to become an apologist for the regime’s crimes against the Chinese people, both past and present.
Kissinger’s role as one of China’s chief apologists became crystal clear on June 4th, 1989, when the CCP was busily massacring thousands of unarmed protesters in the streets of its capital city.
Even as the massacre was unfolding, Kissinger went on ABC News to suggest that American shouldn’t overreact.
“What should America do, Dr. Kissinger?” asked Peter Jennings.
“I wouldn’t do any sanctions,” he replied.
What Kissinger didn’t disclose to Peter Jennings and ABC’s viewers was that he had just launched China Ventures, an investment fund in which his chief partner was a state-owned company called CITIC.
When Peter Jennings later found out about Kissinger’s business conflicts, he was livid: “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have wanted him on that broadcast, plain and simple.”
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In the days that followed, no one did more to try and repair the damage caused by the massacre to China’s image as a “modernizing authoritarian regime” than one of its chief architects. The former secretary of state criticized the students’ actions and defended Deng Xiaoping’s bloody response.
Just seven days after the massacre, Kissinger was already engaged in explaining away the Communist dictator’s response, writing in the Washington Post that “To Deng Xiaoping the demonstrations recall[ed] the Cultural Revolution, when throngs of students sought to purify Communist ideology that led to loss of his liberty, made his son a paraplegic and disrupted the loves of tens of millions. In the end the Cultural Revolution produced so many diverse factions that China was at the edge of chaos.”
Kissinger’s comparison of the peaceful and spontaneous legions of the democracy movement to the violent and destructive Red Guards, called up by Chairman Mao and operating on his orders, is a gross distortion of history. It is an insult to the memories of China’s martyrs of democracy.
But Kissinger was not done. On August 1 he claimed, again in the pages of the Post, that: “No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators …. [T]he caricature of Deng Xiaoping as a tyrant is unfair.”
The truth is that no government—except one run by brutal tyrants—would have cleared the square and the surrounding streets by driving tanks into crowds of protesters, crushing them under their treads. Or shot down fleeing protesters in the streets by the hundreds.
Over the course of his long life, Kissinger was notably silent on other human rights abuses in China as well, such as the persecution of Christians, Muslim Uyghurs, and the Falungong.
Moreover, as one of the architects of U.S. population control policies, he encouraged China to adopt the one-child policy. He argued there were “good demographic reasons” for the policy, while ignoring the hundreds of millions of horrific forced abortions and sterilizations that followed.
We speak of elite capture, the practice of Communist Chinese leaders of giving sweetheart deals to leading American officials in return for their serving as unofficial lobbyists for that brutal regime. Think of Hunter Biden’s investment in China’s Bohai Harvest.
But decades before the Bidens went panhandling in Beijing, there was Henry Kissinger.
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Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of The Devil and Communist China (forthcoming, TAN Books).