"Sensitivities and suspicions between Washington and Beijing have heightened as China's global power and influence have grown. Chinese and American officials and participants in past confrontations, and scholars from both countries explore the changing features of crisis behavior and their implications for defusing future encounters"--Provided by publisher.
The Taiwan Strait. The Korean War. Vietnam. The bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. The Sino-U.S. aircraft collision incident. U.S.-China relations have witnessed significant tensions and conflict over the years.Sensitivities and suspicions between Washington and Beijing have heightened as China's global power and influence have grown. Arguably, this new international order could increase the chances of a political-military crisis —or perhaps outright conflict —between the two powers. Managing Sino-American Crises brings together Chinese and American officials and participants in past confrontations, as well as scholars from both countries, to explore the changing features of crisis behavior and their implications for defusing future encounters. Using both conceptual analysis and historical case studies, this authoritative volume identifies specific problems and opportunities that will likely confront both countries in the future. The authors propose recommendations that will improve the effectiveness of U.S.-China crisis management skills. Contributors include Wang Jisi (Peking University), Zhang Baijia (Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party), Richard Weitz (Hudson Institute), Robert L. Suettinger (Technology, Inc.), Dennis C. Blair (Institute for Defense Analyses), David V. Bonfili (Institute for Defense Analyses), Xu Hui (National Defense University), Kurt M. Campbell (Center for Strategic and International Studies), Jonathan Wilkenfeld (University of Maryland), Xia Liping (Shanghai Institute for International Studies), Allen S. Whiting (University of Arizona), Wu Baiyi (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Niu Jun (Peking University), and Zhang Tuosheng (China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies).
More than thirty years have passed since the normalization of Sino-American relations in 1979. The United States and China are becoming more interdependent economically, yet at the same time, significant movement and improvements in Sino-American relations are constrained by major economic, security, political and other differences between the two countries. This volume analyzes current problems and issues in Sino-American relations in the context of regional and global strategic patterns and their historical development in the last thirty years. These problems and issues such as the international financial crisis, development of global reserve currencies, regional conflicts and competition for international domination have significant impacts on both world powers, and important implications to the world economy and politics.
The second half of the 20th century featured a strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. That competition avoided World War III in part because during the 1950s, scholars like Henry Kissinger, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, and Albert Wohlstetter analyzed the fundamental nature of nuclear deterrence. Decades of arms control negotiations reinforced these early notions of stability and created a mutual understanding that allowed U.S.-Soviet competition to proceed without armed conflict. The first half of the 21st century will be dominated by the relationship between the United States and China. That relationship is likely to contain elements of both cooperation and competition. Territorial disputes such as those over Taiwan and the South China Sea will be an important feature of this competition, but both are traditional disputes, and traditional solutions suggest themselves. A more difficult set of issues relates to U.S.-Chinese competition and cooperation in three domains in which real strategic harm can be inflicted in the current era: nuclear, space, and cyber. Just as a clearer understanding of the fundamental principles of nuclear deterrence maintained adequate stability during the Cold War, a clearer understanding of the characteristics of these three domains can provide the underpinnings of strategic stability between the United States and China in the decades ahead. That is what this book is about.
This study assesses the context and motivations of the PRC's use of military force since 1949. It then extracts Beijing's use of its calculus of warning statements in detail from several instances in which it has threatened and, in some cases, actually followed through with the use of military force to resolve a dispute. It offers several points to take into account in watching for and analyzing Beijing's use of this warnings calculus in contemporary contexts, and it offers a hypothetical scenario in which this calculus might appear in the context of China's claims in the South China Sea. -- Excerpted from introduction.
"Competition between America and China has intensified since 2009, creating even greater risks of conflict. Why is this so and what can be done about it? Feng Zhang and Ned Lebow identify the mistakes China and America made in their mutual relations and explain their causes and consequences. Drawing on international relations theory and historical lessons they develop a holistic approach to conflict management and resolution. It is based on a sophisticated staging of deterrence, reassurance, and diplomacy. Minimal deterrence combined with multiple forms of reassurance and sustained diplomatic efforts to reduce or finesse key areas of conflict offer the promising pathway for America and China to enhance their security and buttress their self-esteem"--
Picturing China in the American Press juxtaposes what the ordinary American news reader was shown visually inTime Magazine between 1949 and 1973 with contemporary perspectives on the behind-the-scenes history of the period. Time Magazine is an especially fruitful source for such a visual-historical contrast and comparison because it was China-centric, founded and run by Henry Luce, a man who loved China and was commensurably obsessed with winning China to democracy and Western influence. Picturing China examines in detail major events (the Korean War and Nixon's trip to China), less considerable occurrences (shellings of Straits islands and diplomatic flaps), great personages (Chairman Mao and Henry Kissinger), and the common people and common life of China as seen through the lenses and described by the pens of American reporters, artists, photographers, and editors. Picturing China in the American Press is of great interest to both scholars of communications, Chinese history, China Studies, and journalists.
Within China, the discipline of American Studies spans a wide variety of concerns and preoccupations, reflecting its practical diversity in a transnational setting. Essays in this volume by close to forty scholars, the majority most of them based in mainland China, reflect on the past history and current teaching of American Studies within China, placing these in comparative perspectives. The nature of globalization, the transmission of ideas and practices across cultural boundaries, the formulation and meaning of identity in cross-national communications, constitute major themes in contemporary American Studies in China. For officials and commentators alike, the past, present, and future state of Sino-American relations are also an overriding preoccupation of China’s America-watchers. Overall, this collection allows the reader to sample and appreciate the state of the field of American Studies in today’s China.
For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries - not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union - has ever reached sixty percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party's closed doors, he uncovers Beijing's long, methodical game to displace America from its hegemonic position in both the East Asia regional and global orders through three sequential "strategies of displacement." Beginning in the 1980s, China focused for two decades on "hiding capabilities and biding time." After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it became more assertive regionally, following a policy of "actively accomplishing something." Finally, in the aftermath populist elections of 2016, China shifted to an even more aggressive strategy for undermining US hegemony, adopting the phrase "great changes unseen in century." After charting how China's long game has evolved, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet asymmetric plan for an effective US response. Ironically, his proposed approach takes a page from Beijing's own strategic playbook to undermine China's ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.
