Schaller, Michael

Summary
From the Opium Wars of the 1840s, to the Red Scare of the 1940s, through the Tiananmen “massacre” of 1989, and the Wen Ho Lee “espionage case” of 2000, Chinese-American relations have swung like a pendulum throughout the years. The United States and China: Into the Twenty-First Century–now in its third edition and thoroughly revised and updated–looks at over a century of Chinese-American turmoil from a dual perspective, examining how two dramatically different cultures interacted and collided. Based on research by the author as well as by scholars in both countries, it examines the periodic cooperation and hostility between both governments and people in the United States and China. The book places special emphasis on understanding China’s unique role in the Cold War and its centrality to the American obsession with the Vietnam War. It explains the interactions between domestic policies in China and the United States and their international behavior. The discussion of the post-World War II period, which constitutes a major portion of this textbook, has been completely revised to incorporate a vast new body of primary materials and research monographs written by Chinese and American scholars since 1990. Two entirely new chapters analyze Chinese-American relations during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations and examine the paradox of how, despite increasingly close social, political, and economic cooperation, fear of China has again become part of the American political debate.