Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › The China Challenge: American Policies In East Asia

The China Challenge: American Policies In East Asia

Edited by Frank J. Macchiarola and Robert B. Oxnam
Reviewed by Donald S. Zagoria
Winter 1991/92
The China Challenge: American Policies In East Asia
Edited by Frank J. Macchiarola and Robert B. Oxnam
Academy of Political Science
1991
195 pp.
$14.95
Login or Register to leave a comment.

This is the best collection of essays on post-Tiananmen China yet available. There are solid chapters on China's role in the world economic system, its policies toward Asian neighbors and on Chinese-American relations. Among the highlights are a sober and balanced account of Sino-U.S. relations by former U.S. Ambassador to China Arthur W. Hummel, Jr., a very informative survey of China's relations with neighboring Asian countries by Robert Scalapino, and essays by Denis Fred Simon and David M. Lampton that, in different ways, shed light on the emergence of a "Greater China" economic zone encompassing the People's Republic, especially the coastal provinces, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The papers were written for a January 1991 Asia Society conference in Racine, Wisconsin.

Related

Essay, Spring 1983
The Moscow-Beijing Détente
Donald S. Zagoria

Since the end of World War II, there have been three watersheds in Sino-Soviet relations. In February 1950, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China formed an alliance against the West. In the late 1950s, there was the beginning of the historic split between them that transformed international politics. Then, in the early 1970s, there began the Sino-American rapprochement that, by the end of the decade, completely altered the strategic landscape and led to an incipient Chinese-American alliance against the Soviet Union.

Read
Essay, Special 1980
East Asia in 1980
Andrew Nagorski

American optimism about East Asia, in precious short supply only a few years earlier, was abundantly available in 1980. "The arc from Korea through Taiwan and the Philippines, at the very center of great power rivalry for much of this century, is less subject to these strains today than at any time in well over forty years," Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke declared in June. Such pronouncements by U.S. policymakers were understandable: East Asia offered far more possibilities--for diplomatic overtures, for expanding trade--than anyone dared predict during the Vietnam era. But in 1980 enough warning signals were flashing throughout the region to suggest the need for a more balanced--and less buoyant--assessment.

Read
Essay, Winter 1982
The United States and Japan: The Bilateral Potential
David MacEachron

In the tangled international tapestry certain relationships dominate the pattern. The U.S.-Soviet struggle has colored almost all world politics for a generation. Franco-German entente has ended centuries of European warfare. One relationship which holds much potential for improving world conditions is that between Japan and the United States. This bilateral relationship, conducted within a dense multilateral web in which each nation has many other ties based on interest and sentiment, is now, and will be increasingly, central to any proper functioning of the world economy and polity.

Read
Cover image

In the Magazine

November/December 2009 / 6, 88
Essay
The Dollar and the Deficits
C. Fred Bergsten

The global economic crisis has revealed the folly of large U.S. budget and trade deficits, as well as of the strong dollar that makes them possible. If it is serious about recovery, the United States must balance the budget, stimulate private saving, and embrace a declining dollar.
Read