Important Bilateral Relationship Research Articles

The trouble with Taiwan

ABSTRACT What is arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the world teeters on the brink of catastrophe as the Taiwan issue threatens to precipitate a war between the two nuclear-armed superpowers of China and the United States. Beijing demonstrated its determination to pursue unification with Taiwan during August 2022 by shooting ballistic missiles over the island. Meanwhile, the Ukraine War has increased Washington’s resolve to confront perceived Chinese aggression. There are many dimensions to the unfolding crisis over Taiwan’s future status—and the wisest US policy is one of realism and restraint in order to avert a disaster of global proportions.

Investigating the searching behavior of Sino-U.S. relations in China based on complex network

The Sino-U.S. relationship is one of the most important bilateral relationships in the literature of global geopolitics. Not only the two countries, but also other nations in the relevant regions have been influenced by their economic, cultural, political, educational, and diplomatic relations. In this paper, we have applied Visibility Graph as the method, analyzed the data from Baidu searching index of the keyword “Sino-U.S. relations” from 2011 to 2021 into a directionless and authoritarian network, and studied its dynamic characteristics. from the time series data, it has been found that the relationship between the data is closer with more edges, greater degrees, and greater clustering coefficients. Meanwhile, the shorter the average path length, the closer the relationship between the data. The results provide a new perspective for analyzing the time series characteristics of Sino-U.S. relations.

China and the United States: the case for smart appeasement

ABSTRACT How can ties between the United States and China be restored to good health? In this provocation, I argue that the deterioration of US-China relations has become so severe that it is now incumbent upon China's leaders to pursue the “smart appeasement” of the United States – that is, to take dramatic measures designed to pull the rug from under anti-China forces in America while strengthening the hand of those who wish for more stable and productive Sino-American relations. I acknowledge that the language of appeasement is unlikely to win over many converts in Beijing. But the reality is that China's own national interests – not to mention the broader interests of the international community – are dependent upon America's domestic conversation on China policy taking a sharp turn for the better. Only Chinese leaders have the power to bring about such a shift in how China is perceived in US politics. Simply put, China has no choice but to try to rescue its most important bilateral relationship. In turn, this means something approximating the policy of smart appeasement outlined here.

Obama’s Challenge to China: The Pivot to Asia, by Chi Wang. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. vi+321 pp. £70.00 (cloth); also available as an eBook.

Previous articleNext article FreeReviewsObama’s Challenge to China: The Pivot to Asia, by Chi Wang. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. vi+321 pp. £70.00 (cloth); also available as an eBook.Chin-Hao HuangChin-Hao HuangYale–NUS College, Singapore Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreChi Wang’s latest book provides a comprehensive account of the recent history of US foreign policy toward China. The book challenges the pessimistic outlook that the two countries are marching lockstep toward a preordained path of conflict and rivalry, but it also warns that the United States’ “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia has stirred up fears and anxieties reflective of a testy relationship. Within this context the book raises an interesting overarching research puzzle: why does the public diplomatic discourse between the United States and China speak of cooperation while their actions imply that each side is expecting conflict?The book aptly characterizes US-China relations as oscillating between “reassurance and cooperation” and “deterrence and confrontation.” A notable shift toward the latter occurred when trusted “China hands” and senior advisors to President Obama left their positions in the administration. In particular, the book credits James Steinberg and Jeffrey Bader for being the point persons for strengthening US policy in Asia, especially on China, and their departure in 2011 led to a gradual worsening of bilateral relations. The ushering in of a new team of Asia advisors, including Kurt Campbell and Daniel Russel, reflected different policy agendas and preferences, including a deepening of US relations with Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and Vietnam, countries that have complicated relations with China. According to Chi Wang, this has led to a tougher and more hawkish set of US policies that are intended to constrain and deter China.While the book makes a convincing argument about the impact of personnel changes on US foreign policy, it is worth noting that tensions and public spats between the United States and China predated the pivotal year of 2011. For instance, Washington began to take a tougher approach toward Beijing with its arms sale to Taiwan in January 2010, followed by President Obama’s reception of the Dalai Lama a month later. These actions spurred the US-China rift at the early onset of the Obama administration, and they unfolded during Steinberg and Bader’s tenure in government. There is no doubt that a different set of senior policy advisors on Asia could have contributed to deeper tensions, but there may be other equally plausible contributing factors as well, chief among which was China’s evolving cost-benefit calculus and growing confidence. Shortly after Obama assumed office in 2009, Beijing was lukewarm and even reluctant to take on Washington’s overtures to prioritize and elevate bilateral cooperation. A growing nationalism in China’s domestic politics resisted cooperation with a weakening superpower. This proud, self-righteous narrative within China posed difficult challenges for sustained bilateral cooperation on such sensitive issues as trade deficit, regional maritime disputes, human rights, and climate change. An action-reaction dynamic in turn led decision makers from both sides of the Pacific to assume the worst-case scenario in each other’s intentions.The book’s broader observation is valid: US-China relations are becoming increasingly complicated, with recent trend lines pointing toward more visible confrontation. Chi Wang perceives an urgent need to execute a more coherent and consistent US policy that reflects what Anthony Lake, former national security adviser, said two decades ago during his visit to Beijing: “America respects China. America wants China to be part of the system governing the world in the twenty-first century. … The United States plans to maintain its strong military presence in Asia and the Pacific, but only to preserve stability and not to contain China” (58). The latter part of the statement presents the greatest challenge: any policy recommendation that assumes that a robust US security presence in Asia is essential to preempt and offset a possible power transition in the region can lead to a continued, costly deterioration in US-China relations.Getting US-China relations back on track will not be an easy task for the new US administration. But, it could start by the president’s appointing the right strategic advisers with the right political acumen to strike a delicate balance between reassurance and deterrence, as part of a larger goal of restoring trust and cooperation in the world’s most important bilateral relationship. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 77January 2017 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689239 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The revolution in Russia’s Mideast strategy

The article analyzes the guiding imperatives behind Russia’s grand strategy in the Mideast, including both its domestic decision-making institutional idiosyncrasies and the wider geopolitical considerations at play. It discusses the evolution of Russian strategy after the so-called “Arab Spring” events and into the present day, taking care to individually analyze Moscow’s most important bilateral relationships. The review begins by addressing Russia’s anti-terrorist intervention in Syria, before progressing to some words about the two competing foreign policy factions present in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After outlining the key differences between the Liberal and Military-Security camps, the work then broadly explains how their rivalry fi gures into the formulation of Russia’s overall grand strategy in the Mideast. Following that, it logically proceeds to examine the other bilateral relationships that are of signifi cance to Moscow, beginning with Turkey, Iraq, and Israel, and ending with Saudi Arabia and Iran. The goal of the research is to establish a very general understanding of how Russia’s foreign policy is presently practiced in the Mideast, how and why it got to where it is today, and forecast on the prospects for its further development. In doing this, the article relies on empirical observations and references several under-discussed news items that have evaded wider scrutiny. It also makes use of a few academic sources in proving that the geopolitical environment in which Russia conducts its present foreign policy was largely shaped by the US’ legacy of Hybrid Wars on the region, which in hindsight created fertile ground for the revolution in Russia’s Mideast strategy. In summary, Russia seeks to replace the US as the Mideast countries’ most preferred and trusted partner, capitalizing off of Washington’s decline in regional infl uence brought about by the disastrous rise of Daesh and the controversial perceptions over the Iranian nuclear deal in order to fi ll the strategic void that’s been created in America’s wake, and as of the end of 2016, Moscow has been wildly successful.

India and Pakistan's evolving relationships with the Gulf

The relationships of South Asian rivals India and Pakistan with Gulf countries are evolving and strengthening. India's focus has shifted towards security and defence cooperation, though it does not seek a dominant or partisan role. Pakistan will continue to try to balance its relations with Gulf Arab states and those with Iran, while its most important bilateral relationship will continue to be with Saudi Arabia.

Response on behalf of Chinese Embassy in Ireland

The China–EU relationship is one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world. Cooperation is the key in seeking economic development for both China and European Union. Observing the strong trade relationship and the relatively limited inward and outward investments, China looks forward to working with the EU to advance the agreement negotiations, and to launch the feasibility studies of signing a Free Trade Agreement as soon as possible.

U.S.‐India Ties: Calibrating Collaboration Post‐Non‐Alignment

With the rise of India, China, and Japan, the 21st century is often hailed as the Asian century. Whether these states can collaborate with each other over the long‐term in an effort to avoid regional anarchy in the Asia‐Pacific is an open question. How U.S.‐India ties will evolve constitutes a major determinant of how much stability or strife the Asia‐Pacific will experience over the foreseeable future. Selected aspects of this important bilateral relationship will be assessed here. The nature of U.S. grand strategy in Asia, and where India fits in this strategy will be examined. Understanding U.S. grand strategy provides insight to American strategic concerns and their impact on Washington's important bilateral relationships. U.S. and Indian perspectives on grand strategy will then be compared. Finally, how India's grand strategy plays into that country's foreign policy toward the United States relative to overall regional concerns will be evaluated.

U.S.–China Relations

U.S.-China relations have developed steadily since President Nixon's groundbreaking visit to China over forty years ago, and are generally stable today. Yet the next U.S. President will face both challenges and opportunities with Beijing. Recent indications are that bilateral cooperation on North Korea's nuclear threat can become a positive, while tensions in the South China Sea are less promising. Perceived Chinese cyberspying, Taiwan and economic frictions will all need to be handled carefully. The next American leader will want to continue the constructive engagement that has characterized past bilateral ties, while speaking out frankly when the two sides differ, as on human rights. Experience has shown that Beijing and Washington can manage their differences and highlight commonalities in what many see as the single most important bilateral relationship in the world today.

U.S.–China Relations: Balancing Cooperation and Competition in the Most Important Bilateral Relationship in Both the Region and the World

The NCAFP held a conference with participants from the United States and China on opportunities and challenges in the bilateral relationship. The following is a summary of the conference discussion, which was held in March 2015.

Fire on the Water: China, America, and the Future of the Pacificby Robert Haddick

There is little doubt that the United States and China have one of the most important and complicated bilateral relationships in the world. Some argue that U.S.–China relations have been on a downw...

Sifting Through American Foreign Policy

This volume brings together some of the most recent writings of Amitai Etzioni, brilliant sociologist and leading communitarian thinker, on international security issues. The articles, mostly published in 2010 and 2011, with a few from 2009, have been revised and updated. Unlike many other collections of this kind, they work together quite well as a coherent, thoughtful, and impressively wide-ranging analysis of some of today's toughest “hot spots.” Etzioni is always worth reading for his insights, his carefully researched and argued incisiveness, his ability to look at the empirical evidence from different perspectives, and the wisdom which flows from creative thinking across disciplinary divides and long experience both in academe and as a policy advisor. Rightly, the collection starts with three articles exploring the single most important bilateral relationship for the future world order, that between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Although the analysis misses the most recent deterioration in this relationship, its conclusions still stand: While considerable uncertainty surrounds the rise of China in the future, the United States will almost certainly enjoy military superiority for decades to come, and therefore can afford to accommodate this rise, rather than confront China and thus risk turning it into a challenger by way of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Etzioni also points out that some of the accusations the United States regularly levels against China are somewhat hypocritical (for example, “China surely is not a responsible stakeholder, but then few nations are,” p. 40.), and he assures the West that it need not fear the ideological competition from China, given the overall worldwide trend toward democratization.

Techno-Orientalism with Chinese Characteristics: Maureen F. McHugh’s <em>China Mountain Zhang</em>

Author(s): Fan, Christopher T. | Abstract: Christopher T. Fan argues that McHugh’s award-winning 1992 science fiction novel perceives the twilight of the American Century by offering a “critical realism,” to use Georg Lukacs’s phrase, of postsocialist US–China interdependency. In other words, it offers a form in which we perceive ourselves as subjects and objects of the twenty-first century world-system’s most important bilateral relationship. Moreover, as a novel about US–China interdependency, it implicitly critiques the binary Orientalism that structures the rapidly growing body of work on “techno-Orientalist” formations. Fan's analysis thus extends arguments about American Orientalism’s non-Manichean formations (Christina Klein, Melani McAlister, Colleen Lye) into the postsocialist era.The novel’s near-future, China-centric world analogizes McHugh’s personal crises of professional desire as a precarious laborer in New York City, with the massive reorientation of desires from Maoist politics to market-directed individuality that she witnessed among her students when she taught in China from 1987–1988. Chinese racial form plays a crucial mediating role in the novel because it reflects the revival of Confucian humanist discourse in reform-era China as a way to focus a national project of rapidly generating capitalist desire. Finally, by describing US–China interdependency, this article also generates a theory of US–China neoliberalism that corrects for universalist, Euro-American accounts of neoliberal subject formation (Lauren Berlant), as well as insufficiently subject-sensitive accounts (Aihwa Ong).

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy

It really is quite remarkable how much can happen in six months. The period under review here was always going to be noteworthy because it was punctuated by a federal election and a change of government. But few would have predicted how eventful foreign affairs would prove to be in its aftermath. A number of Australia’s most important bilateral relationships were unexpectedly undermined by the sorts of “events” that former British prime minister Harold Macmillan famously suggested made policy-making such a difficult business For students of comparative foreign policy, the last six months provide an interesting opportunity to analyze the competing priorities and styles of the outgoing and incoming governments. They also allow us to contemplate one of the potentially most important but frequently neglected questions in the study of foreign policy: does it really make any difference who is in charge?

Symposium: Australia–US Economic Relations and the Regional Balance of PowerIntroduction

The hyperbole about the Asian century and China's seemingly inexorable rise notwithstanding, Australia's most important bilateral relationship remains that with the United States. This statement wo...

Capabilities, Cooperation, and Culture: Mapping American Ambivalence Toward China

The Sino-American relationship is arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Whether this relationship remains peaceful or becomes conflictual will have far-reaching economic and political ramifications. For more than two decades, American analysts have been attempting to answer one question: Is China a threat to the United States? The result has been a voluminous collection of data that equally supports contradictory answers. I contend that if we want to understand the probable course of the Sino-American relationship, we need to ask a different question: When and why are Americans likely to perceive China as a threat? This paper reports the results of a social psychological experiment designed to explore the basis of American attitudes toward other states in general and toward China specifically. Contrary to expectations that economic insecurity drives American attitudes toward economic competitors, this study finds that American attitudes toward China are shaped primarily by cultural and institutional judgments. These results contribute to the field of IR by challenging preconceptions about the extent and potential impact of Americans' economic insecurities, by contributing to a nascent constructivist literature that examines how threat is constructed in the national imagination, and by informing how policymakers approach important bilateral relationships.

Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations

Seventy years have passed since the United States and Japan fought a bitter war. Since then the two nations have established an important bilateral relationship, and they are two of the closest allies in the world. How did this volte-face take place? Michael R. Auslin, the director of Japan studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, provides answers to this question in Pacific Cosmopolitans. Exploring the history of U.S.-Japan cultural exchanges from the eighteenth century to the present, Pacific Cosmopolitans uncovers “the deep fascination in both countries with an exotic Other, a fascination that soon became a rigorous attempt to maintain permanent contact as well as to study and analyze the fundamental features of each country” (p. 2). A casual cultural exchange in the early 1800s evolved to a more formal exchange in the late nineteenth century. The exchange evolution did not occur linearly, however, because of rising nationalism in Japan and racist anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States during the early twentieth century.

Korean issues in U.S.-China relations 1990–2010

Abstract Korean issues in recent history and current affairs have been a remarkable and varied factor with respect to global and regional security and in relations between the United States and China—arguably the most important bilateral relationship in today's world. The extraordinary events and remarkable developments that compose this saga merit review, including many forgotten, unknown, or ignored developments and details. This examination is based on the author's experiences in various capacities, official and independent, over two decades. Much of it derives from his extensive contacts, conversations, and candid exchanges with People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of Korea (ROK) government officials, military officers (active and retired), think-tankers, and other scholars and specialists. It describes the ups and downs of relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and encompasses ROK-PRC and ROK-U.S. issues. The article co...

Emerging Trends in India–US Relations

Of late the relationship with the United States has become India’s most important bilateral relationship. Bilateral trade may have remained small due to India’s own huge domestic market in other respects economic relations are growing fast. Bilateral investment ties have grown substantially. Institutional mechanisms involving the private sectors in both countries are active in promoting cooperation in high technology, defence procurement and production, agriculture, health and energy. Much more, however, needs to be done to expedite procedures for clearances for high-tech exports from the US. India, in turn, is conscious of the fact that it needs to take a number of steps to take if it is to foster cooperation with the US in higher education. It also needs to be recognised that on issues like the Doha Round and Climate Change, much work needs to be done to bridge differences, though one can derive satisfaction from the fact that it was the agreement reached between President Obama and leaders of the ‘BASIC’ grouping that prevented a total breakdown of the Copenhagen Summit. This agreement largely reflected the understanding reached when Dr. Manmohan Singh visited Washington.

A Rejoinder: Building 'Positive, Cooperative and Comprehensive’ China-US Relations

The US-China relationship is one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world. As two of the world's largest economies, there can be no solution to the global economic crisis if the two work at cross purposes and many of the region's most complex security challenges - North Korean denuclearisation first among them - require Sino-US cooperation. The good news is that both US President Barrack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao are aware of and accept the shared responsibility and necessity for a cooperative approach toward dealing with the global financial crisis and regional security challenges; both have pledged to develop a "positive, cooperative and comprehensive" relationship and build mutual trust in a way that encourages, rather than worries, friends and allies in the Asia Pacific.