Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Rosemary Foot
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- PART I COMPETING DISCOURSES, 1961–1968
- 2 “Red Menace” to “Revolutionary Rival”: Recasting the Chinese Communist Threat
- 3 “Troubled Modernizer” to “Resurgent Power”: Revisionist Images of the PRC and Arguments for a New China Policy
- 4 The Revisionist Legacy: The Discourse of Reconciliation with China by 1968
- PART II DISCURSIVE TRANSITIONS, 1969–1971
- PART III DISCOURSES OF RAPPROCHEMENT IN PRACTICE, 1971–1974
- Bibliography
- Dramatis Personae
- Index
2 - “Red Menace” to “Revolutionary Rival”: Recasting the Chinese Communist Threat
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Rosemary Foot
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- PART I COMPETING DISCOURSES, 1961–1968
- 2 “Red Menace” to “Revolutionary Rival”: Recasting the Chinese Communist Threat
- 3 “Troubled Modernizer” to “Resurgent Power”: Revisionist Images of the PRC and Arguments for a New China Policy
- 4 The Revisionist Legacy: The Discourse of Reconciliation with China by 1968
- PART II DISCURSIVE TRANSITIONS, 1969–1971
- PART III DISCOURSES OF RAPPROCHEMENT IN PRACTICE, 1971–1974
- Bibliography
- Dramatis Personae
- Index
Summary
… a great, powerful force in China, organized and directed by the government along Stalinist lines, surrounded by weaker countries … this we regard as a menacing situation.
President John F. Kennedy, 1 August 1963We are facing the greatest menace to our freedom.
Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, November 1962This Assembly would face the greatest menace to its future if it … admitted the … People's Republic [of China].
Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Representative to the United Nations, 22 October 1962American attitudes toward China from the nineteenth century until the Second World War had been broadly paternalistic, assuming a “special friendship” with the Chinese people. However, the situation altered dramatically in 1949 and 1950, when the communists won control of the mainland in the civil war and “Red” China subsequently allied itself with the Soviet Union. The communist victory seemed to signify Chinese rejection of American values and the American model of civil society, a rejection that gained enormous salience in the context of the rapidly developing Cold War. The Sino-Soviet alliance dramatically confirmed America's “loss” of China to its main enemy. After the Second World War, the Soviet Union was the only power capable of challenging American hegemony; and the communist leadership in Moscow coupled its rhetoric about a communist world revolution with action, expanding domination over its neighboring Eastern European states by setting up Soviet-backed communist regimes in them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974From 'Red Menace' to 'Tacit Ally', pp. 17 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004