Bartering Chinese Women: Mao and Kissinger September 12, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
The honour! Strange History is, as we speak, being hacked by a bunch of Chinese ruffians. If the fairies and mermaids disappear under a swelter of fake Tiffany bags you’ll know why. To celebrate this epoch-making event Beachcombing thought that he would bring China centre stage and also throw Kissinger into the mix.
It is 1973 and Kissinger has passed over to see that great friend of the United States, Mao Zedong, a man who has the dubious honour of having been responsible for more deaths than any other individual in history.
Beach recently re-imagined a famous encounter between Finnish democrats and Molotov before the Winter War and he hopes soon to be a very small fly on the wall at an encounter between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Why? Because diplomacy rocks. It throws up important people who really don’t know how to act appropriately in each other’s company, and as there are translators and secretaries in the room their idiocies go on record.
Anyway, Mao and Kissinger are sitting face to face: a serial-killing peasant from Hunan province squares off against the svelte, metropolitan Henry, a Bavarian Jew whose family just got out of the Reich in time and who wrote his doctorate on ‘Peace, Legitimacy and the Equilibrium: A Study of Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich’.
Beachcombing is not sure that Castlereagh and Metternich can prepare anyone for the rigours of the psychopathic side of Marxism, but HK certainly tried his best.
By all accounts the two got on surprisingly well and smoked cigars into the small hours. It was sometime in the miasma of burnt Havana that Mao brought up the question of women: ‘You know, China is a very poor country. We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.’
Beach has a small file of men being offered women on their travels: perhaps he should try this with the hackers? But here the normal, give- me-your-sister-and-I’ll-give-you-a-camel is really being institutionalized: memories of an early Soviet’s attempt to nationalize the fairer sex.
Mao, in any case, realized he wasn’t getting anywhere and upped the offer to ten million. Was he joking? With Mao you never know but Kissinger thanked him saying ‘It is such a novel proposition. We will have to study it’! For the record Beach bets HK’s hands were sweating as he said that.
Of course, the irony is that today China has a gender imbalance like few others in history: 119 boys were born two years ago for every 100 girls. All that pent up energy and aggression with nowhere to go: it’s terrifying and will lead to world wars and downed history blogs.
Any other curious diplomatic encounters? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
