Wow! eBook
The China Threat: Memories, Myths, and Realities in the 1950s
Author(s): Nancy Bernkopf Tucker (Author)
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication Date: 1 May 2012
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 288 pages
- ISBN-10: 0231159242
- ISBN-13: 9780231159241
Book Description
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker confronts the coldest period of the cold war – the moment in which personality, American political culture, public opinion, and high politics came together to define the Eisenhower Administration’s policy toward China. A sophisticated, multidimensional account based on prodigious, cutting edge research, this volume convincingly portrays Eisenhower’s private belief that close relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China were inevitable and that careful consideration of the PRC should constitute a critical part of American diplomacy. Tucker controversially argues that the Eisenhower Administration’s hostile rhetoric and tough actions toward China obscure the president’s actual views. Behind the scenes, Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, pursued a more nuanced approach, one better suited to China’s specific challenges and the stabilization of the global community. Tucker deftly explores the contradictions between Eisenhower and his advisors’ public and private positions. Her most powerful chapter centers on trade and Eisenhower’s recognition that rigid prohibitions would undermine the global postwar economic recovery and push China into a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. Ultimately, Tucker finds Eisenhower’s strategic thinking on Europe and his fear of toxic, anticommunist domestic politics constrained his leadership, making a fundamental shift in U.S. policy toward China difficult if not impossible. Consequently, the president was unable to engage congress and the public effectively on China, ultimately failing to realize his own high standards as a leader.
Editorial Reviews
Review
This is an excellent manuscript that illuminates as no other existing book does the larger forces that shaped Eisenhower Administration policy toward China in what was an especially critical moment for US relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. Tucker, one of the leading scholars of the history of twentieth century Sino-American relations, draws upon her own prodigious research along with the most important new work in the field to fashion a sophisticated and multi-dimensional account of the intersection of personality, American political culture and high politics in the making of US China policy. –Mark Bradley, University of Chicago
About the Author
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker is professor of history at Georgetown University and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is an American diplomatic historian specializing in American-East Asian relations, particularly relations with China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and has written and edited several books, including Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China and the award-winning Uncertain Friendships: Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992.
