Taiwan’s Favorite Heroes: Mr. Kissinger’s Legacy of the Good Old Days and the Failure of the United States to Seize Taiwan

Mr. Kissinger is remembered far less fondly in Taiwan, a self-ruled island democracy over which Beijing has claimed sovereignty. There, he has long been blamed for his central role in shifting America’s diplomatic relations to Beijing from Taipei, and for failing to obtain a broad commitment from Beijing not to seize Taiwan. Over the past half century, Mr. Kissinger visited Beijing but never went to Taiwan.

The Chinese state media covered Mr. Kissinger’s role in organizing President Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 and his advocacy over the past 50 years between the two countries. Beijing often highlights the years of 1972 and 1979 for being important in establishing diplomatic ties between the US and China.

President Trump imposed broad tariffs on Chinese goods, greater scrutiny of visa applications from China, stricter limits on high-tech exports to China and tighter monitoring of Chinese investment and intelligence-gathering activities in the United States. Mr. Biden has kept Mr. Trump’s tariffs in place. He has strengthened military agreements with the Philippines and Australia to counter China.

On Chinese social media, Mr. Kissinger’s death dominated search topics. People mourned the death of Mr. Kissinger as well as the death of Charles T. Munger, a prominent investor in China, on the Weibo platform.

Lu Yeh-chung is a professor of diplomacy at National Chengchi University in Taipei, and he says that many people think that he was not a good friend of Taiwan.

Mr. Kissinger “was viewed as a living legacy of the good old days,” said Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Mr. Kissinger spoke with Mr. Blinken regularly, including as recently as last month, Mr. Blinken said. Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mike Pompeo all had conversations with him. But he wasn’t some retired coach, reminiscing about the good old days. He was the ultimate back-channeller, especially to leaders in China.

State media outlets said he was China’s old friend. On Chinese social media, people said his death marked the end of an era. He visited the country at his 100th birthday in July.

But the reason his advice was sought out goes to the depth of his experience: When Mr. Kissinger died on Wednesday, Mr. Blinken was headed to Israel in an effort to win a longer pause in a bloody conflict. Mr. Kissinger was in the middle of shuttle diplomacy 50 years ago.

To Mr. Kissinger’s critics, this fervor for being involved, decades after he could have retired, showed a desire to get back into power or something similar, since he wanted to tarnish his legacy by pardoning massacres, bombs and the deaths of thousands when doing so.

The Kissinger conversations with secretaries of state and presidents were not only about navigating the downward spiral in relations with Beijing. He met with the person who negotiated SALT I a major arms-control treaty. He weighed in on artificial intelligence, a passion of his in recent years and a subject he wrote about at length, often with Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive who grew close to the former secretary of state.

Mr. Kissinger met with the embassy’s vast staff, talking about what the process of opening the relationship was like — in an era when it seemed inconceivable China would become the world’s second-largest economy.

On that same trip, Mr. Kissinger was celebrated at the U.S. Embassy, where R. Nicholas Burns, the current U.S. ambassador, lives in a house that Mr. Kissinger helped get constructed when the United States had a representative to China, but full diplomatic recognition had not yet happened.

It was a calculated move. Mr. Xi was making clear that he wanted to move back toward the warmth that surrounded President Richard M. Nixon’s opening to China in the early 1970s, engineered by Mr. Kissinger in secret interchanges and a remarkable, also secret trip to China. After the July visit, a summit meeting with President Biden was set for this month.