Forming America's Cold War China Policy

Abstract

The last decade was an active one for scholars of Sino-American relations. China's increasing economic power and international stature spurred interest in the field, new documents from both sides of the Pacific became available, and the recent tribulations in American foreign relations only strengthen the view of Nixon's 1972 trip as a diplomatic triumph. Historians of the 1949–1979 period have successfully outlined the policies and personalities in Washington, Taipei, and Beijing. For example, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker has examined ties between Taipei and Washington, Chen Jian has written on Beijing's foreign policy and Mao Zedong's worldview, Robert Ross and Jiang Changbin have offered the most up-to-date scholarship on U.S.-China diplomacy during the Cold War, and, most recently, Yafeng Xia has written a comprehensive account of official Sino-American contact from Communist victory through rapprochement.1 Further, there exists a mountain of memoirs and biographies of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as well as detailed accounts of the famous 1972 meetings in Beijing. What most of these works share is a willingness to see the nuance, complexity, and contradictions in Sino-American relations: illustrating the conflict between Americans and Chiang Kai-shek, the Communist Chinese efforts to limit hostility with the United States, or how personal relationships or personalities influenced official policies, for example. Today, the Cold War provides only a general framework for understanding the history of Sino-American relations. It has become an ideal type—a model against which actual policies and attitudes are compared—rather than the sole defining characteristic of the era. That model grew from the early Cold War orthodoxy that shaped much of the scholarship of the 1950s which, in turn, helped spawn a counternarrative—revisionist scholarship of the 1960s and later.2 As the Cold War began to wind down in the 1980s, the history of Sino-American ties moved with the larger currents of diplomatic history into what is broadly defined as postrevisionism, an attempt to reconcile the two earlier Manichean views. Based on the contribution of scholars like those mentioned above and over five decades of shifting methodological approaches, standards and expectations are high for historians of Sino-American relations.