Isolating the Enemy: Diplomatic Strategy in China and the United States, 1953–1956

Abstract

Isolating the Enemy is a valuable addition to continuing historical debates about Sino-American relations in the 1950s and beyond. It conclusively resolves persistent questions, weighs in on others, and opens the door for new avenues of inquiry. Drawing on newly available Chinese, Russian, and Vietnamese government materials, Tao Wang shows that from 1953 to 1956, Beijing and Washington each pursued a “wedge strategy” meant “to eliminate the other's threat through uniting allies and mobilizing supporters to push the other to make concessions” (pp. 3, 7). Each sought to isolate the other from natural allies, and both understood what their opponent was up to. These opposing wedge strategies generated a mix of confrontation and conciliation in U.S. and Chinese diplomacy, confounding contemporaries and entrenching mutual suspicions. The book is organized around three major events: the Geneva Conference on Indochina (April–July 1954), the first Taiwan Strait crisis (September 1954–May 1955), and the Bandung Conference (April 1955). Wang suggests that China's leaders generally got the better of their American counterparts in all three of these high-stakes encounters. Effectively shaming the United States for trying to derail the Geneva Conference, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and head of state Mao Zedong skillfully concluded complex bargains with leaders in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Russia, Britain, and France. In contrast, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles found themselves caught between “the unattainable and the unacceptable” because they ignored conciliatory overtures, exaggerated Chinese ambitions, underestimated tensions between China and Vietnam, and overestimated Sino-Soviet differences (p. 61). Ultimately,