Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy Since the Cold War
For over three decades, Sutter worked to give the U.S. government accurate information about developments in Asia as the basis for its policymaking. Now out of government, he here demonstrates his formidable analytic skills for a wider audience, arguing that much of the debate about China's potential to become a superpower fails to take into account its domestic pressures. He begins with brief chapters summarizing popular conclusions about Chinese foreign policy practices. These are followed by detailed case studies of China's relations with the United States, Taiwan, Japan, North and South Korea, Southeast and South Asian states, Russia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
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There is no major political system today about which we have less data and fewer meaningful facts than that of Communist China. Yet decisions which will shape our diplomacy, and more concretely our military establishment, for years ahead must be made in the light of what we now surmise to be the Chinese people's character and dynamics. Inescapably we fall back upon abstractions and gross generalizations.
This year India celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of her independence. These have been years of change and turmoil everywhere. Deep surging forces have torn asunder our past colonial feudal structures and have combined with the tides sweeping the world to give our post- independence evolution its unique qualities. But our own unvarying concerns have been two: to safeguard our independence and to overcome the blight of poverty.
The great hurrahs of the Cultural Revolution, the slogans, the messianic fervor, the public humiliation of the heretics are all gone. A visitor to Peking is impressed by nothing so much as by the return to normalcy, by pragmatism and-if one could imagine it in a Spartan land-a feeling of relaxation. Indeed, one might easily think that there had never been the awesome upheaval of 1966-69 "to change men's souls." Human frailty is once again understood, and there is at least an implied recognition that man does not live by faith alone.

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