Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974

Evelyn Goh is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She graduated with first class honours in Geography from the University of Oxford, and also obtained an MPhil in Environment and Development from the University of Cambridge. In 2001, she completed a doctorate in International Relations at Nuffield College, Oxford. Dr Goh has been a visiting fellow at the East-West Center in Washington DC, where she received the 2004 Southeast Asian Fellowship. Her main research interests lie in the areas of US foreign policy, US-China relations, and Asia-Pacific security and international relations. She has published on the diplomatic history of US-China relations, US strategy in the Asia-Pacific, the implications of 9/11 on US power, and environmental security. Her current projects include a comparative study of Southeast Asian states' security strategies vis-à-vis the US and China; a monograph tracing the evolution of the American policy towards China in the 1990s; and an investigation of the impact of China's hydropower development in the upper Mekong river basin on regional environmental security.

'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

• 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.