Useful adversaries : grand strategy, domestic mobilization, and Sino-American conflict, 1947-1958
Material type: TextPublication details: Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1996Description: xiii, 319p. : illISBN: 9780691026374Subject(s): United States China Diplomatic relationsDDC classification: 327.51073 Summary: 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.Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
BK | Stack | 327.51073 CHR/U (Browse shelf (Opens below)) | Available | 53329 |
Browsing Kannur University Central Library shelves, Shelving location: Stack Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)
327.51 MIR/C China, the world, and India | 327.5105 FRI/C A contest for supremacy : China, America, and the struggle for mastery in Asia | 327.51054 NIM/I India-China borderlands : conversations beyond the centre | 327.51073 CHR/U Useful adversaries : grand strategy, domestic mobilization, and Sino-American conflict, 1947-1958 | 327.51073 NEW/O Owen Lattimore and the loss of China | 327.54 AMB The Ambassadors' club: the Indian diplomat at large | 327.54 DIX/A Across borders : fifty years of India's foreign policy |
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.
There are no comments on this title.