With Nixon’s historic reconciliation with China in 1972, Sino-American relations were restored, and China moved from being regarded as America’s most implacable enemy to a friend and tacit ally. Existing accounts of the rapprochement focus on the shifting balance of power between the USA, China and the Soviet Union, but in this book Goh argues that they cannot adequately explain the timing and policy choices related to Washington’s decisions for reconciliation with Beijing. Instead, she applies a more historically sensitive approach that privileges contending official American constructions of China’s identity and character. This book demonstrates that ideas of reconciliation with China were already being propagated and debated within official circles in the USA during the 1960s. It traces the related policy discourse and imagery, and examines their continuities and evolution into the early 1970s that facilitated Nixon’s new policy.
• Combines diplomatic history with international relations theory and concepts • Comprehensive study of origins and implementation of US policy of reconciliation towards China from 1960s to end of Nixon administration • Uses newly declassified documents from Nixon administration
Contents
Part I. Competing Discourses, 1961–1968: 1. 'Red Menance' to 'Revolutionary Rival': re-casting the Chinese communist threat; 2. 'Troubled Modernizer' but 'Resurgent Power': revisionist images of the PRC and arguments for a new China policy; 3. The revisionist legacy: the discourse of reconsiliation with China by 1968; Part II. Discursive Transitions, 1969–1971: 4. Nixon's public China policy discourse in context; 5. Debating the rapprochement: 'resurgent revolutionary power' vs. 'threatened realist power'; Part III. Discourses of Rapprochement in Practice, 1971–1974: 6. 'Principled realist power': laying the discursive foundations of a new relationship, July 1971 to February 1972; 7. Principles in practice: policy implications of the decision for rapprochement; 8. 'Selling' the relationship: the Nixon Administration's justification of the New China policy; 9. 'Tacit ally' June 1972 to 1974: consolidating or saving the US-China rapprochement.
Reviews
‘This book provides a novel account of US-China rapprochement in the 1960s and 1970s … Constructivists and students of American foreign policy will find much that is stimulating here.’ Yuen Foong Khong, University of Oxford
‘Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China is a superb book. Evelyn Goh makes good use of recently available U.S. archival materials and Chinese sources to offer new insights into the U.S. policy making process during the Johnson and Nixon administrations … Both the specialist and the general reader will learn a great deal from this book." Robert Ross, Harvard University
'… there is much to admire in this book'. International Affairs
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