i’m a little too young to know Kissinger’s connections to China, but wasn’t Clinton the one who really sold us out to China?
what did Bushie do with China that was so bad?
the USA Cold War rival was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the leader of the communist world. Or so they thought. Stalin and Mao got along very well, Stalin supported the communist Chinese Revolution. But Mao had his own ideas about multipolarity of communism, and when Kruschev took over and denounced Stalin, that began a split between the two sides. It broke into open border warfare in 1969 when Brezhnev declared a kind of "Monroe Doctrine" (called Brezhnev Doctrine) for all Communist countries - the Soviet Union was the ideological leader of the movement and it reserved the right to intervene where Communist governments had gone wrong - ie) Czechoslovakia and Poland.
An increasingly radicalized Cultural Revolution China and Mao did not like this and saw it directed against them.
Kissinger and Nixon, engaged in a war in Vietnam and being brought up in the conflict with Soviet Union - did the OBVIOUS thing to take advantage of the split - They began contacts and friendship with China.
Remember too that in the early 1970s - china was dirt poor. It had an atomic bomb, and a lot of people, but little else in technological advancement or ability to project any power abroad - so Kissinger and Nixon didn't view them as a strategic threat anywhere close to what the Soviet Union was.
It don't consider Kissinger/Nixons China opening an act of "brilliance - it was a very obvious strategic option for the USA in its global conflict with the Soviet Union.
I’d give an example of what nearly got me fired for whistleblowing over one of the stupid things that his admin tried to give China at the time (and was overturned) but will wait until I retire.