Building Sino-American Relations: An Analysis For The 1990s
This timely volume includes a number of thoughtful essays by American China specialists on U.S. policy toward China in the post-Cold War era. There is a particularly good essay by John Frankenstein on the economic aspects in which the author concludes that U.S. trade policy needs to be linked to a wider policy that will encourage China to play a positive role in the new world order. David Zweig, in another thoughtful essay, asserts that, since Tiananmen, U.S.-Chinese relations have become vulnerable to "single issue" constituencies in the United States, such as right-to-life advocates, human rights activists, trade protectionists and anticommunists.
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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.
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.
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.

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