Useful Adversaries : : Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958 / / Thomas J. Christensen.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Christensen, Thomas J.,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2020]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Studies in International History and Politics ; 179
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.) :; 1 halftone 16 line illus.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures and Tables -- Preface -- Note on Translation and Romanization -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Grand Strategy, National Political Power, and Two-Level Foreign Policy Analysis -- Chapter 3. Moderate Strategies and Crusading Rhetoric: Truman Mobilizes for a Bipolar World -- Chapter 4. Absent at the Creation: Acheson's Decision to Forgo Relations with the Chinese Communists -- Chapter 5. The Real Lost Chance in China: Nonrecognition, Taiwan, and the Disaster at the Yalu -- Chapter 6. Continuing Conflict over Taiwan: Mao, the Great Leap Forward, and the 1958 Quemoy Crisis -- Chapter 7. Conclusion -- Appendix A. American Public Opinion Polls, 1947-1950 -- Appendix B. Mao's Korean War Telegrams -- Bibliography -- Index