Nancy Bernkopf Tucker and Warren I. Cohen Book on American–East Asian Relations – serie

Soon after the American Revolution, ?certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material realities. Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense.By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.

Soon after the American Revolution, certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material realities.Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Allied intent to bring Axis crimes to light led to both the Nuremberg trial and its counterpart in Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. Yet the Tokyo trial failed to prosecute Imperial Japanese leaders for the very worst of war crimes: inhumane medical experimentation, including vivisection and open-air pathogen and chemical tests, which rivaled Nazi atrocities, as well as mass attacks using plague, anthrax, and cholera that killed thousands of Chinese civilians. In Hidden Atrocities, Jeanne Guillemin goes behind the scenes at the trial to reveal the American obstruction that denied Japan's victims justice. Responsibility for Japan's secret germ warfare program, organized as Unit 731 in Harbin, China, extended to top government leaders and many respected scientists, all of whom escaped indictment. Instead, motivated by early Cold War tensions, U.S. military intelligence in Tokyo insinuated itself into the Tokyo trial by blocking prosecution access to key witnesses and then classifying incriminating documents.Washington decision makers, supported by the American occupation leader General Douglas MacArthur, sought to acquire Japan's biological warfare expertise to gain an advantage over the Soviet Union, suspected of developing both biological and nuclear weapons. Ultimately, U.S. national security goals left the victims of Unit 731 without vindication. Decades later, evidence of the Unit 731 atrocities still troubles relations between China and Japan. Guillemin's vivid account of the cover-up at the Tokyo trial shows how without guarantees of transparency, power politics can jeopardize international justice, with persistent consequences.

For decades, leadership in technological innovation has sustained U.S. power worldwide. Today, however, processes that undergird innovation increasingly transcend national borders. Cross-border flows of brainpower have reached unprecedented heights, while multinationals invest more and more in high-tech facilities abroad. In this new world, U.S. technological leadership increasingly involves collaboration with other countries. China and India have emerged as particularly prominent partners, most notably as suppliers of intellectual talent to the United States. In The Conflicted Superpower, Andrew Kennedy explores how the world’s most powerful country approaches its growing collaboration with these two rising powers.Whereas China and India have embraced global innovation, policy in the United States is conflicted. Kennedy explains why, through in-depth case studies of U.S. policies toward skilled immigration, foreign students, and offshoring. These make clear that U.S. policy is more erratic than strategic, the outcome of domestic battles between competing interests. Pressing for openness is the “high-tech community”—the technology firms and research universities that embody U.S. technological leadership. Yet these pro-globalization forces can face resistance from a range of other interests, including labor and anti-immigration groups, and the nature of this resistance powerfully shapes just how open national policy is. Kennedy concludes by asking whether U.S. policies are accelerating or slowing American decline, and considering the prospects for U.S. policy making in years to come.

In 1952, John T. “Jack” Downey, a twenty-three-year-old CIA officer from Connecticut, was shot down over Manchuria during the Korean War. The pilots died in the crash, but Downey and his partner Richard “Dick” Fecteau were captured by the Chinese. For the next twenty years, they were harshly interrogated, put through show trials, held in solitary confinement, placed in reeducation camps, and toured around China as political pawns. Other prisoners of war came and went, but Downey and Fecteau’s release hinged on the United States acknowledging their status as CIA assets. Not until Nixon’s visit to China did Sino-American relations thaw enough to secure Fecteau’s release in 1971 and Downey’s in 1973.Lost in the Cold War is the never-before-told story of Downey’s decades as a prisoner of war and the efforts to bring him home. Downey’s lively and gripping memoir—written in secret late in life—interweaves horrors and deprivation with humor and the absurdities of captivity. He recounts his prison experiences: fearful interrogations, pantomime communications with his guards, a 3,000-page overstuffed confession designed to confuse his captors, and posing for “show” photographs for propaganda purposes. Through the eyes of his captors and during his tours around China, Downey watched the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the drastic transformations of the Mao era. In interspersed chapters, Thomas J. Christensen, an expert on Sino-American relations, explores the international politics of the Cold War and tells the story of how Downey and Fecteau’s families, the CIA, the U.S. State Department, and successive presidential administrations worked to secure their release.

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.

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.

The Cold War conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China did not only encompass political, military, diplomatic, and economic clashes. The two powers also confronted each other on the cultural front. Despite a long history of extensive and mostly constructive cultural interactions, the two nations cut off existing ties in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and established new relationships aimed at attacking and isolating each other. Even after Beijing and Washington permitted cultural exchange as part of their effort to normalize diplomatic relations in the 1970s, the weaponization of cultural interactions continued.Hongshan Li provides a groundbreaking account of the confrontation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China on the Cold War’s cultural front. He investigates the origins, evolution, and significance of the role of cultural interactions in the shifting relations between the United States and the PRC from the late 1940s through the late 1970s. Li demonstrates that the drastic transformation of U.S.-China cultural interactions not only altered the course of Sino-American cultural relations but also shaped the Cold War experience of the two peoples. Fighting on the Cultural Front examines topics such as competition and conflicts over Chinese students and scholars stranded in the United States, maneuvers on the authorization of journalistic exchanges, the establishment of Taiwan as a cultural bastion, and Beijing’s promotion of its revolutionary ideology through individual U.S. citizens, particularly African Americans. This important book offers a new lens on the history of U.S.-China relations and the cultural side of the global Cold War.

The Cold War conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China did not only encompass political, military, diplomatic, and economic clashes. The two powers also confronted each other on the cultural front. Despite a long history of extensive and mostly constructive cultural interactions, the two nations cut off existing ties in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and established new relationships aimed at attacking and isolating each other. Even after Beijing and Washington permitted cultural exchange as part of their effort to normalize diplomatic relations in the 1970s, the weaponization of cultural interactions continued.Hongshan Li provides a groundbreaking account of the confrontation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China on the Cold War’s cultural front. He investigates the origins, evolution, and significance of the role of cultural interactions in the shifting relations between the United States and the PRC from the late 1940s through the late 1970s. Li demonstrates that the drastic transformation of U.S.-China cultural interactions not only altered the course of Sino-American cultural relations but also shaped the Cold War experience of the two peoples. Fighting on the Cultural Front examines topics such as competition and conflicts over Chinese students and scholars stranded in the United States, maneuvers on the authorization of journalistic exchanges, the establishment of Taiwan as a cultural bastion, and Beijing’s promotion of its revolutionary ideology through individual U.S. citizens, particularly African Americans. This important book offers a new lens on the history of U.S.-China relations and the cultural side of the global Cold War.

What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong Kong–based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society. Following the Heard brothers throughout their firm’s rise and decline, The China Firm reveals how nineteenth-century China’s American elite adapted to colonial culture, helped entrench social and racial hierarchies, and exploited the British imperial project for their own profit as they became increasingly invested in its political affairs and commercial networks.Through the central narrative of Augustine Heard & Co., Larkin disentangles the ties that bound the United States to China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from Hong Kong, China, Boston, and London, he weaves the local and the global together to trace how Americans gained acceptance into and contributed to the making of colonial societies and world-spanning empires. Uncovering the transimperial lives of these American traders and the complex ways extraimperial communities interacted with British colonialism, The China Firm makes a vital contribution to global histories of nineteenth-century Asia and provides an alternative narrative of British empire.

What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong Kong–based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society. Following the Heard brothers throughout their firm’s rise and decline, The China Firm reveals how nineteenth-century China’s American elite adapted to colonial culture, helped entrench social and racial hierarchies, and exploited the British imperial project for their own profit as they became increasingly invested in its political affairs and commercial networks.Through the central narrative of Augustine Heard & Co., Larkin disentangles the ties that bound the United States to China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from Hong Kong, China, Boston, and London, he weaves the local and the global together to trace how Americans gained acceptance into and contributed to the making of colonial societies and world-spanning empires. Uncovering the transimperial lives of these American traders and the complex ways extraimperial communities interacted with British colonialism, The China Firm makes a vital contribution to global histories of nineteenth-century Asia and provides an alternative narrative of British empire.

In the late 1970s, with relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China strained, the Carter administration saw an opening. The United States and its allies embarked on military and dual-use technology transfers to China as a counterweight to the USSR, transforming rapprochement into full-blown cooperation. Carter’s decision to pivot away from the United States’s traditional ally, the Republic of China on Taiwan, and embrace the People’s Republic redefined the Cold War from a struggle against communism to one against the Soviet Union. It not only complicated a variety of American objectives—from the security of Taiwan to global technology transfer and US-Soviet détente—but also sowed the seeds of future tensions between China and the West.This book is an international history of the Carter administration’s intricate relations with the two competing Chinese regimes, highlighting the geopolitical significance and lasting implications of this pivotal moment. Drawing extensively from previously untapped archives in China, Taiwan, Western Europe, the United States, and Russia, Sheng Peng uncovers the internal governmental debates across world capitals that affected Carter’s China policy. He charts how both mainland China and Taiwan were integrated into global supply chains for defense and dual-use technologies during the 1970s and 1980s and the present-day consequences. Jimmy Carter and China demonstrates that technological competition was as crucial as strategic and ideological competition to the course of the Cold War, and together they profoundly shaped US-China relations and the world today.

In the late 1970s, with relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China strained, the Carter administration saw an opening. The United States and its allies embarked on military and dual-use technology transfers to China as a counterweight to the USSR, transforming rapprochement into full-blown cooperation. Carter’s decision to pivot away from the United States’s traditional ally, the Republic of China on Taiwan, and embrace the People’s Republic redefined the Cold War from a struggle against communism to one against the Soviet Union. It not only complicated a variety of American objectives—from the security of Taiwan to global technology transfer and US-Soviet détente—but also sowed the seeds of future tensions between China and the West.This book is an international history of the Carter administration’s intricate relations with the two competing Chinese regimes, highlighting the geopolitical significance and lasting implications of this pivotal moment. Drawing extensively from previously untapped archives in China, Taiwan, Western Europe, the United States, and Russia, Sheng Peng uncovers the internal governmental debates across world capitals that affected Carter’s China policy. He charts how both mainland China and Taiwan were integrated into global supply chains for defense and dual-use technologies during the 1970s and 1980s and the present-day consequences. Jimmy Carter and China demonstrates that technological competition was as crucial as strategic and ideological competition to the course of the Cold War, and together they profoundly shaped US-China relations and the world today.

Chinese Encounters with America tells the stories of twelve women and men whose American experiences transformed their lives and influenced China’s trajectory, with a particular focus on the period after Beijing and Washington established full diplomatic relations in 1979. Each chapter recounts how these Chinese citizens interpreted America and adapted their understanding to bolster China’s quest for modernization.Their professions range from diplomacy, business, and science to sports, education, and the arts, but their distinctive stories are united by shared questions: Why did they go the United States, and why did they return to China? What difference did their encounters with America make in their lives and careers? What do their experiences tell us about the complexities of Sino-American interactions?At a time when US-China relations are contentious, this book challenges the idea that American and Chinese interests and values are incompatible. It shows that personal encounters have been instrumental in finding common ground, even when there are differences and disagreements. Through vivid and engaging profiles, Chinese Encounters with America offers a fresh, nuanced understanding of the world’s most pivotal relationship.