Engaging China: Fifty Years of Sino-American Relations

Description

The importance of the relationship between the United States and the People's Republic of China has only grown since Richard Nixon's epochal visit in 1972. By the early twenty-first century, when the rise of China had become an inescapable fact, most American policy makers and experts saw bilateral ties with China as the most consequential foreign-relations priority for the United States. In recent years, even before the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S.-China relationship has rapidly deteriorated--and the whole world has felt the consequences. This book brings together leading China specialists to offer a retrospective on relations between the United States and China over the last half-century and consider what might be next. The contributors--including academics, leaders of China-related nongovernmental organizations, and former diplomats and government officials--analyze the relationship from a range of perspectives: political, diplomatic, economic, social, cultural, commercial, educational, medical, and military. They reassess American engagement with China from the late Mao years onward, covering leaders from Deng Xiaoping through Xi Jinping. The contributors highlight not only the accomplishments and hard-won successes of engagement but also the mistakes and misunderstandings, acknowledging the well-earned distrust and genuine frictions that plague the relationship today. Multidisciplinary and comprehensive, Engaging China is a vital reconsideration for a time when the stakes of U.S. policy toward China have never been higher. Table of Contents Part I: The Making and Unmaking of the U.S.-China Relationship 1. Engaging China: Fifty Years of Sino-American Relations, by Anne F. Thurston 2. The Logic and Efficacy of Engagement: Objectives, Assumptions, and Impacts, by Thomas Fingar 3. Mismanaging China’s Rise: The South China Sea Dispute and the Transformation of Sino-American Relations from Strategic Partners to Strategic Rivals, by John W. Garver Part II: Thinking About How We Think About China 4. A Half-Century of Engagement: The Study of China and the Role of the China Scholar Community, by Andrew Mertha 5. The American Dream and the China Dream: Unpeaceful Evolutions, by Richard Madsen 6. U.S.-China Retrospective: Forty Years of Commercial Relations, by Craig Allen 7. A Perspective on Chinese Economics: What Have We Learned? What Did We Fail to Anticipate?, by Barry Naughton Part III: On the Ground, Nongovernmental, People-to-People Cooperation 8. Strategic Adaptation: American Foundations, Religious Organizations, and NGOs in China, by Mary Brown Bullock 9. U.S.-China Relations: A Public Health Perspective, by Yanzhong Huang 10. Thinkers. Builders. Symbols. Spies? China-U.S. Educational Relations in the Engagement Era, by Robert Daly Part IV: Fault Lines, Threats to Peace, and Reflections on the Future 11. U.S.-China Military Relations: From Enmity to Entente and Maybe Back Again, by Chas W. Freeman Jr. 12. China’s Periphery: A Rift Zone in U.S.-China Relations, by Carla P. Freeman 13. Forty-Plus Years of U.S.-China Diplomacy: Realities and Recommendations, by Kenneth Lieberthal and Susan Thornton 14. Engagement with China: A Eulogy and Reflections on a Gathering Storm ,, by David M. Lampton Afterword Acknowledgments Contributors Index