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Book synopsis

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.

Book details

Book category Books in English Humanities History Regional & national history

• Full title: Useful Adversaries
• Subtitle: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958
• Author: Thomas J. Christensen
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352
• EAN: 9780691026374
• ISBN: 0691026378
• ID: 04639627
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Weight: 482 g
• Dimensions: 229 × 152 × 20 mm
• Date of publishing: 28. October 1996

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