"Live and let live" (#132; Topic F)

Earlier, in talking to 200+ impressionable high-school students in West Virginia (#122), I mentioned that, even with several thousand years of culture and history behind her, China maintains a "live and let live" attitude. Little did I know that this view was shared by Henry Kissinger -- some 34 years ago. Yesterday, George Washington University's National Security Archives released 2,100 memoranda on Kissinger's secret conversations with senior officials home and abroad between 1969 and 1972. As reported by the Associated Press (and published in today's Washington Post), Kissinger, when accompanying President Nixon to China in 1972, said, to Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing on 6/22/1972: "If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina." That is indeed the "live and let live" spirit. At first, I was surprised that Kissinger shared this view. On second thought, I am not surprised, on three counts. One, Kissinger's ancestry is Jewish -- people of Chinese or Jewish ancestry, both with long history but an underappreciated culture, think alike on many fronts. Two, Kissinger, before he entered politics, was an accountant, as I am -- accountants are trained to respect facts and abhor wishful thinking. Three, Kissinger, after he left politics, was a management consultant, as I was. (Though I cannot claim a clientile as prestigious as Kissinger's, when I was the president of a consultancy firm in Taipei, I had many international business firms as well as the American Institute in Taiwan as my clients.) And management consultants are pragmatic -- they aim for achievable structures built on sound cost-benefit analyses. Yesterday, when interviewed on his words uttered more than three decades ago, Kissinger said: "One of my objectives had to be to get Chinese acquiescence in our policy." Well said. Given that "live and let live" is a reciprocal proposition, perhaps the reverse would hold as well. We'll see.