Useful Adversaries

Useful Adversaries

Author: Thomas J. Christensen

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0691213321

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This book provides a new analysis of why relations between the United States and the Chinese Communists were so hostile in the first decade of the Cold War. Employing extensive documentation, it offers a fresh approach to long-debated questions such as why Truman refused to recognize the Chinese Communists, why the United States aided Chiang Kai-shek's KMT on Taiwan, why the Korean War escalated into a Sino-American conflict, and why Mao shelled islands in the Taiwan Straits in 1958, thus sparking a major crisis with the United States. Christensen first develops a novel two-level approach that explains why leaders manipulate low-level conflicts to mobilize popular support for expensive, long-term security strategies. By linking "grand strategy," domestic politics, and the manipulation of ideology and conflict, Christensen provides a nuanced and sophisticated link between domestic politics and foreign policy. He then applies the approach to Truman's policy toward the Chinese Communists in 1947-50 and to Mao's initiation of the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis. In these cases the extension of short-term conflict was useful in gaining popular support for the overall grand strategy that each leader was promoting domestically: Truman's limited-containment strategy toward the USSR and Mao's self-strengthening programs during the Great Leap Forward. Christensen also explores how such low-level conflicts can escalate, as they did in Korea, despite leaders' desire to avoid actual warfare.


Patterns in the Dust

Patterns in the Dust

Author: Nancy Bernkopf Tucker

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780231053624

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Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist government collapsed in 1949 despite United States support for the regime during the anti-Communist civil war. American policymakers were then forced to choose between rescuing the Nationalists or coming to terms with China's Communist government. The Truman Administration, caught up in the calculations of cold war diplomacy, refused to make a rash decision. Secretary of State Dean Acheson likened the Nationalist collapse to a tree falling in the forest--the United States would have to wait for the dust settled before it could see ahead clearly. Patterns in the Dust is a fresh look at a period overwhelmed by later events. Drawing on many previously unavailable sources, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker assesses the factors that influenced Washington policymakers during the critical few months in which the thirty-year estrangement between the two countries began. She examines the government's assessment of the chances for accommodation with the Chinese Communists, the careful efforts to ascertain American public opinion, and the effects of the Korean War which brought reasoned dialogue to an abrupt end. Patterns in the Dust highlights the flexibility that Dean Acheson retained in American policy toward China. Acheson emerges as a highly pragmatic man determined to preserve contacts with China simply because, as events have proved, that was the realistic way to conduct international relations.


The Path to Vietnam

The Path to Vietnam

Author: Andrew J. Rotter

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1501718630

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What path led Americans to Vietnam? Why and how did the United States become involved in this conflict? Drawing on materials from published and unpublished sources in America and Great Britain, historian Andrew Rotter uncovers and analyzes the surprisingly complex reasons for America's fateful decision to provide economic and military aid to the nations of Southeast Asia in May 1950.


China: A Political History, 1917-1980

China: A Political History, 1917-1980

Author: Richard C. Thornton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-27

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0429724500

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It is the purpose of this work to provide an integrated analytical framework that will serve as a guide to further study of the vast and complex subject of Chinese Communist politics. The outpouring of materials from U.S., Soviet, Chinese Communist, and Chinese Nationalist sources in recent years has greatly enriched our fund of knowledge about China. For the historian of Chinese politics the new data have provided answers to hitherto unresolved problems and raised questions about seemingly settled issues. Although it is now possible to piece together the main outlines of the struggle for power in China, obviously no single volume can presume to encompass all aspects of the story.


Crosscurrents

Crosscurrents

Author: Martin B. Gold

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-12-19

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 1793631158

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Locked in a common fight against Imperial Japan, the United States and Nationalist China became allies, but significant fissures in their relationship soon developed. Neither ally would accommodate each other’s core interests in strategies necessary to win the war. This disconnect continued after Japan’s surrender, as the United States pressed Chinese Nationalists and Communists to join a coalition government that neither wanted. During the civil war, the United States supported the Nationalists, but never to the degree they thought mattered. After the Communist triumph, America served its national security and anti-Communism, by helping the Nationalists defend Taiwan, but hedged against assisting Chiang Kai-shek to reconquer the mainland. Twice in the 1950’s tensions in the Taiwan Strait nearly expanded into nuclear conflict.


Recognition in International Law

Recognition in International Law

Author: Stefan Talmon

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 9004478140

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The bibliography lists the literature and State practice on the question of recognition in international law for the last two hundred years. It contains books and articles, ie. contributions to journals and other collected works such as Festschriften and Encyclopaedias, as well as (published and unpublished) theses, pamphlets, compilations of diplomatic documents and case notes. As many of the monographs on recognition in international law will not be available in all libraries, book reviews have been included in the bibliography in order to enable the user to decide whether it may be advisable to order a certain work by inter-library loan. Its 4,500 entries are arranged systematically according to subject categories in fourteen main sections. Each main section is further subdivided with ever-increasing specificity into sub-sections on codification, codification attempts, general studies, studies of certain recognition questions and studies of specific recognition cases. The bibliography employs a broad meaning of recognition. It is not restricted to the question of status of an authority or entity in international law but encompasses also the question of relations with it. As many of the recognition cases must be considered, and can only be understood, against their historic, political and sometimes even economic background, the bibliography includes not only purely legal treaties but also publications of a primarily historical, political or economic content which incidentally deal with aspects of recognition in international law. This is reflected by the titles of the 730 journals from more than 50 countries in 20 different languages which have been used to compile the bibliography. The bibliography contains both an author and a comprehensive subject index to enable users to locate works of a particular writer or a specific problem.


An American Missionary in China

An American Missionary in China

Author: Yu-ming Shaw

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1684172985

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This work traced the career of a seminal figure in twentieth-century Chinese-American relations. John Leighton Stuart began his work in China as a missionary in 1904. He moved on to head Yenching University, the leading Christian institution of higher leaning in China. During the Pacific War, Stuart was imprisoned by the Japanese. When General George C. Marshall was sent to China by President Truman in 1945 to mediate peace between the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists, Marshall chose Stuart as Ambassador to help with that mediation and to look after American interests in China. Stuart was the last to hold that post before the Chiang Kai-shek government's move to Taiwan. Shaw's research among materials in English, Chinese, and Japanese has produced a richly detailed examination of each phase of Stuart's life. Shaw presents Stuart as a Wilsonian idealist whose combination of liberal, situational values and nationalistic vision put him square in the middle, unable fully to support a Nationalist-led China and positing instead a Nationalist-Communist coalition that would favor the Nationalists and open the door to American influence.