Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › A Fragile Relationship: The United States And China Since 1972

A Fragile Relationship: The United States And China Since 1972

Harry Harding
Reviewed by By Donald S. Zagoria
Spring 1992
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
Harry Harding
Brookings
1992
361 pp.
$38.95

This is the first comprehensive analysis of U.S.-Chinese relations over the past 20 years, focusing especially on the impact of the Tiananmen Square crisis. Harding sees China, now that the Cold War is over, as an independent counterpart in a complex balance of power. The United States should exercise restraint in any program of military cooperation while reinstating wide-ranging dialogue on global and regional security issues. It should understand that, despite Tiananmen, China's economic reforms remain largely intact and are even moving forward. Finally, the United States should expand economic relations with China while insisting they be placed on a more reciprocal basis. A threat to withdraw China's most-favored-nation status is not the appropriate mechanism for addressing commercial issues any more than it was in dealing with the trade surpluses generated by Japan or Taiwan. Rather, more precisely targeted retaliatory measures are called for, such as those stipulated in Section 301 of the Trade Act. On human rights what is required is a policy that embodies the U.S. interest in political reform, identifies "appropriate methods for promoting it," but acknowledges the limits of U.S. leverage. The author also calls for getting China to cooperate in establishing a more effective international regime to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

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, Jul 1973
The American Quarter-Century in Asia
Dick Wilson

As a European, and particularly as a Briton, I had the unusual good fortune to come first to Asia by way of America. The African and Indian friendships formed during college days at Oxford whetted my appetite for an understanding of the non-white world, but only when I arrived at Berkeley for a postgraduate year did I enter the life of the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos, the Indonesians-who were there by the score, sharing with me the experience of being a foreign student in the United States.

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