Abstract: In 1950, because they feared an invasion of Manchuria, the Chinese Communists fought in the Korean War and suffered many thousands of casualties. In 1962 the People's Republic of China fought with India to safeguard a route to Chinese nuclear test sites free from potential Russian interference. In 1979 China fought a short, violent border war with Vietnam that again resulted in thousands of Chinese casualties. This time China fought to express its displeasure over Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia. In 1996 this scenario was partially reenacted in the Taiwan Straits. No one can doubt China's willingness to go to war to defend what it considers its vital interests. Patrick Tyler, a former Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, has written a contemporary investigative history of the United States' China policy titled A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China (New York: Public Affairs Press, 1999, $27.50). The book is based on memoirs and archival research, declassified US government documents and extensive interviews with policy makers. With so much known about the policy-making process, it would seem impossible to add anything new to the already existing record. Tyler's material is fuller on the US side, but he tells as much as he can about Chinese actions, detailing the complex and complicated story of recent Sino-American relations with clarity and dispatch. Tracing the shifts of US-China policy through Democratic and Republican administrations, Tyler observes that every US president since Richard M. Nixon-whatever his ideological stripe or predilection-- has ultimately engaged China simply because no other reasonable choice was available. Tyler's study defends pragmatism in foreign policy. Nixon's achievement in opening China was more operational than conceptual because using China as a strategic counterbalance against the Soviet Union had long tantalized US President Lyndon B. Johnson. Nixon longed for an opening to China, but international political conditions were not right. The United States was embroiled in Vietnam, and China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. Tyler's detailed examination of the ways Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger managed to open China leaves out none of their faults and gives them the credit they deserve. Kissinger approached China with a unique mixture of fawning and arrogance. James Lilley, a CIA career officer and later an ambassador to China, describes Kissinger's method: You embrace them, you make all the right statements about building strong and genuine relations and all the while you run espionage operations against them. The soundness of Kissinger's secret understandings with the Chinese emerged in a review conducted by Michel Oksenberg, President Jimmie Carter's national security adviser for China. Oksenberg called Kissinger's actions perfectly defensible and recommended that Carter maintain them. The book plunges into a narrative of bureaucratic warfare inherent in the policy process. In every administration ambitious men battled with and sought to undermine each other for control of US China policy. Of necessity, the book plunges into a narration of bureaucratic warfare. One learns that Kissinger regarded the US Department of State as a greater adversary than the Chinese. He flattered Zhou Enlai, fawned over Mao Zedong and curried favor with Nixon. During Carter's administration, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski regarded Secretary of State Cyrus Vance as dangerous to Carter's interests and policy conceptions as the Soviets were. He devoted much time and energy trying to defeat Vance. President Ronald Reagan's administration fared no better. The duel between Alexander Haig and his adversaries was as hard fought as the negotiations with the Chinese. If this account is to be believed, and there is no reason to doubt it, US foreign policy was determined more by timing and the ebb and flow of events than by planning. …
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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