Why did the U.S. government begin to normalize U.S. relations with the People's Republic of China? (original) (raw)

In-depth review of article by Ilnyun Kim, that focuses upon how American liberals, primarily those associated with the Democratic Party, sought to address the vexed and controversial issue of China policy during the 1950s. Kim focuses particularly on three figures: Fairbank, the leading U.S. academic specialist on China and Asia; Fairbank’s brother-in-law and Harvard colleague, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; and Chester Bowles, U.S. ambassador to India from 1951 to 1953 and again from 1963 to 1969. All three were New Deal Democrats, liberal supporters of domestic reform who believed that internationally the United States should oppose colonialism and seek to encourage the non-Communist left, a faith expounded by Schlesinger in 1949 in his influential book The Vital Center. Married to sisters, Fairbank and Schlesinger were personally as well as politically close. Helped by generous funding from the Ford Foundation and other sources, during this decade Fairbank was engaged in the process of making Harvard into one of the leading academic nodes of Asian studies in the United States, while writing extensively himself and mentoring dozens of doctoral students. The review suggests that, while these individuals were Democrats, from the mid-1950s onward, a significant contingent of the Republican Party likewise began to question the wisdom of the existing American policies on China, especially the continued recognition of the Nationalists on Taiwan as the sole legal government of China. Yet what ultimately broke the logjam in relations between mainland China and the United States was not a revolt against the irrationality of the existing situation, but a response to perceived clear and present dangers. In spring 1969, armed skirmishes between Soviet and Chinese troops on their joint border apparently caused Chinese leaders, especially Mao Zedong, to panic that a full-scale Russian attack might be imminent. Chinese overtures to the new administration of Richard Nixon, a president embroiled in an unwinnable war in Vietnam with no proper exit strategy, and acutely conscious that on the international scene the United States needed to manage its substantial but by no means limitless resources more effectively, arrived at the right psychological moment. Top policymakers in both countries finally came together in identifying substantial immediate advantages their own nations might derive from the resumption of at least partial relations. On the American side of the great divide, Fairbank and his allies had done much to facilitate a reversal of policy, not least by persistently and plausibly highlighting the potential ensuing benefits for the United States. Chance and political contingency, however, determined whether and when their vigorous and protracted campaign would finally be rewarded.