Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger was born in 1923 in Fürth, Germany, to a Jewish family; after the Nuremberg Laws cost his father his teaching post, the family endured regular harassment from Hitler Youth gangs. In 1938 the Kissingers emigrated to the United States as refugees; young Henry worked by day and attended high school at night before enrolling at the City College of New York. He became a US citizen in 1943 and served in the Army, working as a German interpreter. After the war he attended Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1950 and earning master's and doctoral degrees in 1952 and 1954, then remaining on the Harvard faculty until 1969, specialising in international relations and nuclear strategy.

Henry Alfred Kissinger (1923–2023) was an American diplomat and political scientist renowned for applying realist theory to United States foreign policy. He served as National Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975 and as Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977, and was the principal architect of the Nixon administration's strategic opening to China. In July 1971, feigning illness as cover, Kissinger flew secretly from Pakistan to Beijing and held two days of talks with Zhou Enlai, laying the groundwork for Nixon's visit — widely regarded as one of the most celebrated acts of secret diplomacy of the twentieth century. Kissinger's advocacy of a realism driven by geopolitical interest rather than ideology, and his triangular diplomacy using China as a counterweight to the Soviet Union, fundamentally shaped the Cold War balance of the 1970s. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for negotiating the Vietnam ceasefire, though the award proved deeply controversial: his co-recipient Lê Đức Thọ refused the prize, and several committee members resigned in protest.

After leaving the State Department in 1977, Kissinger founded Kissinger Associates in 1982 and remained an important unofficial channel of US-China communication for decades. Following the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989, as domestic pressure built for sanctions, Kissinger argued for continued engagement with China rather than isolation; some months later Deng Xiaoping summoned him and explained that the suppression of the student movement had been a necessary measure to avert civil war. In 2011 he published On China, a systematic account of Chinese strategic traditions and the evolution of Sino-American relations. Over the following decades he continued to visit China in a private capacity, meeting every one of its successive top leaders. On 20 July 2023, shortly after his hundredth birthday, he met President Xi Jinping at Villa No. 5 of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing — his more than one-hundredth visit to China since 1971, and his first meeting with Xi since 2019; Xi called the visit of 'special significance.' Kissinger died in Connecticut on 29 November 2023, at the age of one hundred.