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【原文标题】On China by Henry Kissinger – review
【中文标题】基辛格《论中国》综述
【登载媒体】英国卫报
【来源地址】http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/15/on-china-henry-kissinger-review
【译 者】朱朱
【翻译方式】 人工
【声 明】 本翻译供Anti-CNN使用，未经AC或译者许可，不得转载。
【译 文】
The Chinese vice-premier, Wang Qishan, raised eyebrows on his visit to Washington last week when he announced that Americans were a very "simple people". He may well have had Hillary Clinton in his sights, after a prominent interview in which she criticised China for its recent crackdown on dissidents. One Chinese commentator came up with a tortured explanation as to why this Sino-US spat was actually a good thing: when nations know each other better, he suggested, they feel less need to be polite and can say what they really think.
中国副总理王岐山在上周访问华盛顿之际称美国人是头脑简单的民族，引来一片诧异。他这么说很可能是回击希拉里在一个著名的访谈中批评中国最近打压不同政见者。一个中国评论员称中美这场口水仗其实是件好事，并提出一个让人哭笑不得的解释：当国与国之间了解更多的时候，就不必互相尊敬而毫无顾忌地说出自己想说的话。
Well, perhaps. But if there is one narrative that marks the global society of the early 21st century, then it is the increasing unwillingness of Washington and Beijing to understand each other's viewpoints. Although millions of westerners visit China each year, the history and motivations of the regime in Beijing and the 1.3 billion people that it rules remain a source of deep mystery to the west in a way that is not true for India, the other Asian giant. Bestselling books tend to fuel the disorientation rather than reduce it, whether they are airport-style business manuals on how not to lose your shirt or analyses that predict either imminent global takeover by the Middle Kingdom or its sudden implosion.
或许是这样吧。但是如果说有哪句话能阐释出21世纪早期国际社会的特点，那么这句话应该是中美双方越来越不愿意去了解对方的看法。尽管每年有上百万外国人去中国参观，对西方人来说，中国的神秘源自于北京政体的历史和动机以及北京政府所统治的13亿中国人。而印度或其他亚洲大国的神秘却不是因为这个。不管是机场式的商业手册教你如何不倾家荡产或是分析家预测中央王国马上要进行全球收购或这个中央王国会突然发生内部瓦解，这类的畅销书都没能减少人们的迷失感，反而增加了这种迷茫。
This makes former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger's On China an unusual and valuable book. Of all the westerners who shaped the post-second world war world – and there is little doubt that he did – he is one of the very few who made the American relationship with China the key axis for his world view. This is all the more remarkable since Kissinger's realpolitik also profoundly shaped American relations with Europe, the Middle East, and south-east Asia. Yet at four decades' distance, it is the approach to China in 1971 and 1972 that stands out as the historically crucial moment.
因此，前国务卿基辛格的新作《论中国》更加变得非比寻常和意义非凡。在所有塑造二战后的世界的西方人中，毫无疑问，基辛格是极少数的利用自己的世界观建立中美关系的关键人物。同时，基辛格的现实主义政治观还深刻地塑造了美国与欧洲、中东及东南亚的关系，这更是令人称奇。然而，在时隔四十年的历史中，1971年与1972年与中国的接近才是历史性的关键时刻。
Historians would now argue that the Nixon visit to China in 1972 did not come out of the blue. During the 1960s, both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations discussed a warming of relations with China, but were frustrated by Chinese hostility, culminating in the cultural revolution, when it was hard to find anyone to pick up the phone in Beijing. Yet the decision of a Republican administration to reach out to an ideologically radical and xenophobic communist regime in the midst of a vicious land war in Asia still seems a bold one and, unlike many policy decisions of the cold war, one that has stood the test of time.
历史学家现在会称，尼克松1972年访华并非完全出乎预料。在20世纪60年代，肯尼迪政府和约翰逊政府都讨论过要与中国关系回暖的问题，但是都由于中国的敌视而受阻，这种敌视在文化大革命期间达到高潮，而那时候在北京几乎找不到谁会用电话。亚洲当时还处在邪恶的战火中，共和党政府能决定向意识形态激进并排外的共产党政权伸出双手，也是一件非常勇敢的事。况且，这个决定与许多冷战政策不同，其结果是需要时代的检验的。
The book is really two distinct narratives built into one. The first is a long-range sweep through Chinese history, from the very earliest days to the present. For the most part, this is elite history, where statesmen do deals with other statesmen. Yet there are human touches that reveal something of the writer. One of the commonest comparisons to Kissinger is the 19th-century statesman Metternich, the pin-up for pragmatic diplomacy. Here, Kissinger implies an interesting alternative comparison with his pen-portrait of Li Hongzhang, the Chinese foreign minister of the late 19th century. Li had to make various compromises on Chinese sovereignty, including cession of railway rights to Russia, which led to his being reviled by his contemporaries. A century later, Li's reputation is still controversial in China, but he is widely regarded as an original thinker who played a difficult hand with skill. The parallel does not need to be laboured. And one imagines it gave Kissinger some pleasure to cite a figure few have heard of in the west, but who is known to every educated Chinese person.
这本书实际上融合了用两种不同的叙述手法。第一个是对中国历史大跨度的介绍一遍，从最早的时候到现在。其中主要是精英的历史，政治家与政治家之间的博弈。当然也有显示作家经历的人物接触。与基辛格最常见的比较是19世纪的政治家梅特捏，他是务实外交的楷模。这里，基辛格却对19世纪晚期中国的外交重臣李鸿章进行了特写。这似乎暗示着基辛格将自己比作李鸿章。李鸿章由于在中国主权上多次作出妥协而被同时代的人诟病，包括向沙俄转让铁路权。一个世界之后，李鸿章的名誉在中国还是充满争议。但是他被广泛认为是用技巧处理棘手问题方面的思想者祖师。基辛格与李鸿章的比较并不费劲。并且，有人猜想，引证一个中国受过教育的人都知道而西方没听说过的人物，基辛格一定获得了不少乐趣。
The historical merges into the personal in the early 1970s, when Kissinger, as national security adviser, becomes a central figure in the narrative during the secret approach to Mao's China. Inevitably, the sections many will turn to first are those where Kissinger reveals the details of his conversations with top Chinese leaders from Mao to Jiang Zemin. The contours of the story are familiar, but the judgments on figures who have passed into history still have freshness because they come from the last surviving top-level figure who was at the 1971 meeting. "Mao dominated any gathering, [premier] Zhou [Enlai] suffused it," he notes. "Mao was sardonic; Zhou penetrating." He also gives us details of the one occasion when he (and possibly any westerner) saw the unflappable Zhou Enlai lose his temper: when Kissinger suggested that Chinese Marxism had adapted the tenets of traditional Confucianism. Zhou may have been particularly incensed since the insight was in many ways quite accurate.
历史性的事件在20世纪70年代体现个人所为上，那时候，作为国家安全顾问的基辛格由于秘密访华成为这个事件的主角。自然，基辛格在书中披露与毛泽东到江泽民的中国领导人的谈话细节成为最受关注的部分。故事的轮廓我们都很熟悉，但对这些人物的评论还是新颖的。因为他们是1971年会议参加者中还健在的高层人物，尽管他们已经被淹没在历史长河之中。“在任何会面中，都是毛泽东主导，而周恩来参加。”他说，“毛泽东讲话带讽刺，而周恩来更深刻尖锐。”基辛格也透露他（也许是任何西方人）罕见地看到一向镇定的周恩来发脾气：当基辛格提到，中国的马克思主义已经顺应了传统儒家思想时，周恩来失态了，而这一洞识是如此之深刻，所以周大约尤为被触怒了。（此处感谢三维重构的点拨~已更改~）
One aspect of Chinese politics that Kissinger stresses is the tendency of leaders to make statements and let listeners draw their own inferences and that is a technique that he employs throughout the book. He notes that some observers consider Mao's cruelty a price worth paying for the restoration of China as a major power, whereas others believe that his crimes outweigh his contribution.
基辛格强调中国政治的一个方面是领导人偏好自己做出模糊的声明并让听众得出自己的推论。对这个方法的使用贯彻了基辛格的全书。他指出，一些观察家认为毛泽东的残酷对中国恢复大国地位是值得的。然而，其他人认为毛泽东过大于功。
But Kissinger's view is discernible only where he hints that a "recent biography" of Mao (presumably Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story) is interesting but "one-sided." After all, it is a Chinese tradition that senior mandarins make their views known by praise or condemnation of a piece of literature; it was a favourite tactic of Mao's.
但是，基辛格提示说一部新近的毛泽东的传记是有趣的但却是片面的。（据推测可能是张戎与乔•哈利戴的《毛泽东：鲜为人知的故事》）这能看出基辛格对毛泽东的看法是很清楚的。毕竟，高层官员用文学典故或褒或贬这是中国的传统，这也是毛泽东喜欢用的策略。
Nixon's role also comes in for scrutiny by his former secretary of state. Despite his fondness for "vagueness and ambiguity", among the 10 presidents whom Kissinger has known, Nixon "had a unique grasp of long-term international trends". It is hard not to see there yet another subtle criticism of more recent administrations which have failed to consider the impact of their policies in the longer term, particularly in the Middle East.
尼克松的角色也受到前国务卿的检查。尽管尼克松喜欢讲话“模糊与歧义”，但在基辛格认识的十位总统中，尼克松“对长远国际形势有着独到的认识”。不难发现，这里还饱含对现今政府的批评，批评他们没能考虑政策的长远影响，尤其是美国中东的政策。
The final part of the book has a distinctly elegiac feel, as if Kissinger is worried that the rise of a new assertive nationalism in China along with "yellow peril" populist rhetoric in the US may undo the work that came from that secret visit to Beijing in 1971. His prescription – that the west should hold to its own values on questions of human rights while seeking to understand the historical context in which China has come to prominence – is sensible. But policymakers in Washington and Beijing seem less enthusiastic about nuance than their predecessors. The hints and aphorisms batted between Zhou and Kissinger have given way to a more zero-sum rhetoric.
本书的最后一部分给人明显的凄凉感觉，因为基辛格担心，中国过于自信的民族主义情绪不断增加，而美国民粹主义者“来自黄种人的威胁”的论调不断出现，这二者都有可能毁掉1971年对北京秘密访问所带来的成果。基辛格的处方是合理的，他要求西方既应该在人权问题上保持自己的价值观，又要努力理解中国发展至今所处的历史背景。但华盛顿与北京的政策制定者似乎对这些细节都不如前任们热情。基辛格与周恩来所讨论的暗示与警句已经被零和的论调所取代。
Henry Kissinger will always remain a controversial historical figure. But this elegantly written and erudite book reminds us that on one of the biggest questions of the post-second world war world his judgment was right, and showed a long-term vision that few politicians of any country could match today. Unless, of course, Hillary Clinton is even now on a secret mission to Tehran.
基辛格将永远是一个富有争议的历史人物。但是这部考究博学的著作告诉我们，在冷战后最大的问题之一上他的观点是正确的，而且体现出长远的考虑，这是现在任何国家的政治家都难以比拟的。当然，如果希拉里现在正在前往德黑兰秘密访问就不一定了。
楼主辛苦了。好文章。
下面这句话翻得有点问题，呵呵：
when Kissinger suggested that Chinese Marxism had adapted the tenets of traditional Confucianism. Zhou may have been particularly incensed since the insight was in many ways quite accurate.
那是在基辛格建议中国的马克思主义应该适应传统儒家思想的原则的时候，由于周恩来在很多方面洞察力非常准确，因此他被激怒了。
suggest 此处应是暗示的意思
had adapted 已经适应了（而不是应该适应）
the insight 不是his insight，应该指的是基辛格所描述的自他己的洞识，而不是周恩来的洞识。
整句大意是，当基辛格提到，中国的马克思主义已经顺应了传统儒家宗旨时，周恩来失态了，而这一洞识是如此之深刻，所以周大约尤为被触怒了。
或许我理解得也不见得全对，冒昧多言，还望海涵。 |
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狗仔卡
发表于 2011-5-20 10:34
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