Leaders Count.

• Author: Lampton, David M.
• Position: Review

Patrick Tyler, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, An Investigative History (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), 476 pp., $27.50.

MY LARGELY favorable assessment of A Great Wall is not one to which I was initially predisposed, having first read excerpts of the book's chapter on the Carter administration in Foreign Affairs. But those excerpts left out the more substantive and balanced portions of that chapter, choosing instead to concentrate almost exclusively on the well-known conflict between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (aided by his assistant secretary, Richard Holbrooke) and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. While it is true that Tyler does greatly overemphasize the significance of the Vance-Brzezinski friction in the normalization of relations between China and the United States, the book's treatment is more balanced than the truncated Foreign Affairs presentation conveys. Indeed, parts of it--such as the portions that deal with the role of Leonard Woodcock as American ambassador to Beijing--are excellent.

A Great Wall is not about the U.S.-China relationship as a whole, except in abbreviated fashion in the book's short last chapter. Rather, as the dust jacket states, it is about "Six Presidents and China"--Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton. It is a survey of the political and geostrategic dimensions of America's dealings with China over the last thirty years, with less attention paid to the Bush-Clinton era than to its predecessors. A Great Wall, then, is the White House view of a relationship critical to America's future. As such, while the volume is important, it necessarily leaves largely unexamined two critical dimensions.

Vertically, the book only examines the tip of the iceberg that is the U.S.-China relationship. The reader is not seriously apprised of how ties have deepened, broadened and multiplied over the years, whether measured in terms of economic links, the presence of nearly 50,000 Chinese students and scholars in American higher education institutions at any given time, or the scale and breadth of private sector exchanges. This, in short, is a book about how the commanding heights of the executive branch have dealt with the People's Republic of China (PRC), rather than a book about the relationship between two societies and how that relationship has influenced government policy. One looks in vain for a sophisticated or thorough description of lobbying...