Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974
From 'Red Menace' to 'Tacit Ally'

This book is about US policy towards China from 1961 to 1974.

Evelyn Goh (Author)

9780521108621, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 April 2009

316 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.47 kg

'… there is much to admire in this book'. International Affairs

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.

Part I. Competing Discourses, 1961–8: 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 reconciliation with China by 1968
Part II. Discursive Transitions, 1969–71: 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, 1971–4: 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.

Subject Areas: Diplomacy [JPSD], International relations [JPS], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], Asian history [HBJF]