Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974

With Nixon's historic reconciliation with China in 1972, Sino-American relations were restored, and China moved from being regarded as America's most implacable enemy to a friend and tacit ally. Existing accounts of the rapprochement focus on the shifting balance of power between the USA, China and the Soviet Union, but in this book Goh argues that they cannot adequately explain the timing and policy choices related to Washington's decisions for reconciliation with Beijing. Instead, she applies a more historically sensitive approach that privileges contending official American constructions of China's identity and character. This book demonstrates that ideas of reconciliation with China were already being propagated and debated within official circles in the USA during the 1960s. It traces the related policy discourse and imagery, and examines their continuities and evolution into the early 1970s that facilitated Nixon's new policy.

Evelyn Goh is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She graduated with first class honours in Geography from the University of Oxford, and also obtained an MPhil in Environment and Development from the University of Cambridge. In 2001, she completed a doctorate in International Relations at Nuffield College, Oxford. Dr Goh has been a visiting fellow at the East-West Center in Washington DC, where she received the 2004 Southeast Asian Fellowship. Her main research interests lie in the areas of US foreign policy, US-China relations, and Asia-Pacific security and international relations. She has published on the diplomatic history of US-China relations, US strategy in the Asia-Pacific, the implications of 9/11 on US power, and environmental security. Her current projects include a comparative study of Southeast Asian states' security strategies vis-à-vis the US and China; a monograph tracing the evolution of the American policy towards China in the 1990s; and an investigation of the impact of China's hydropower development in the upper Mekong river basin on regional environmental security.