Engaging China

The importance of the relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China has only grown since Richard Nixon’s epochal visit in 1972. By the early twenty-first century, when the rise of China had become an inescapable fact, most American policy makers and experts saw bilateral ties with China as the most consequential foreign-relations priority for the United States.In recent years, even before the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S.–China relationship has rapidly deteriorated—and the whole world has felt the consequences. This book brings together leading China specialists to offer a retrospective on relations between the United States and China over the last half-century and consider what might be next. The contributors—including academics, leaders of China-related nongovernmental organizations, and former diplomats and government officials—analyze the relationship from a range of perspectives: political, diplomatic, economic, social, cultural, commercial, educational, medical, and military. They reassess American engagement with China from the late Mao years onward, covering leaders from Deng Xiaoping through Xi Jinping. The contributors highlight not only the accomplishments and hard-won successes of engagement but also the mistakes and misunderstandings, acknowledging the well-earned distrust and genuine frictions that plague the relationship today.Multidisciplinary and comprehensive, Engaging China is a vital reconsideration for a time when the stakes of U.S. policy toward China have never been higher.

China is confronting the United States with its biggest international challenge. If there is one book that can help readers understand China's transition, in American eyes, from a quasi-ally against the Soviet Union to the biggest threat to U.S. interests in the global arena, this is the one., Immensely readable and rich with perspective and detail, Engaging China reckons with the rise and fall of one of history’s most pivotal diplomatic strategies. From esteemed American scholars and practitioners who grappled with China in real time, this is a clear-eyed account of what happened—and a roadmap for what lies ahead., This wonderful volume, composed of contributions from an all-star lineup of talented and experienced China hands, reminds us of the richness of the past fifty years of engagement and the benefits accrued to both countries and their peoples. A must-read for all who want to understand the crucial importance of the U.S.-China nexus., Engaging China offers a nuanced understanding that there was no single framework, assumption, or motivation behind the increasing interdependence with China that developed after 1971. Moreover, the volume demonstrates that there was connectivity and thinking about relations well before 1971. It will be an essential text for students, a resource for policy makers, and a good read for the general public.

Anne F. Thurston is the former director of the Grassroots China Initiative and senior research professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. She has written or edited many books about China, including Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China’s Great Cultural Revolution (1987); A Chinese Odyssey: The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident (1991); Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994), and, with Gyalo Thondup, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet (2015).