Constructing the new China policy.

AuthorHunt, Michael H.
PositionConstructing the US Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974: From 'Red Menace' to 'Tacit Ally' - Book review

Book: Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974: From "Red Menace" to "Tacit Ally". By Evelyn Goh. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 299. $75 cloth.)

Richard Nixon upended policy in a way seldom equaled when in 1972 he made his journey of reconciliation to Communist China and overturned a two-decade-old strategy of containment and isolation. The Truman administration had created that strategy, and it had persisted thanks to a strong anti-communist consensus at home and the rigid views of such leading policymakers as John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk. Nixon's insistence on engaging China as an important player on the world stage not only broke with the past but yielded a stable new policy of engagement.

Evelyn Goh, currently an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, asks that we reconsider this widely retailed version of events. The U.S. policy shift was, she contends, neither as abrupt nor as dependent on Nixon as usually depicted. Her account, which had its origins as an Oxford dissertation, argues that during the Kennedy and Johnson years China specialists within the foreign policy bureaucracy along with academics, leading Democrats, and lobbying groups explored new ways of understanding and relating to China. By the end of the decade the established notion of an implacable "Red Menace" was in competition with three new perspectives. The Sino-Soviet dispute convinced some that Beijing was a "Revolutionary Rival" of Moscow. Turmoil within China--first famine following the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution--gave rise to a second new image, that of the "Troubled Modernizer." Finally, China's military shadow over Vietnam and acquisition of nuclear weapons inspired talk of a "Resurgent Power."

While these fresh points of view had limited immediate effect on policy, they did prepare the ground for the Nixon revolution. The president built on the "Resurgent Power" outlook and moved toward rapprochement. Goh contends that the story does not stop, however, with Nixon's triumphant 1972 visit. With the White House distracted by Watergate, Henry Kissinger proceeded to promote a tacit alliance with China, anticipating the Brzezinski anti-Soviet strategy of the Carter years.

The principle problem with Goh's challenge to received wisdom is the simple one of cause and effect. Did the fresh perspectives of the 1960s have a significant impact on Nixon's thinking? A...

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