Chou En-lai and the Opening to the West

Chou En-lai and the Opening to the West PDF Author: Dallas G. Wilfong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Chou En-lai and the Opening to the West

Chou En-lai and the Opening to the West PDF Author: Dallas G. Wilfong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Book Description


Chou En-Lai and the Opening to the West

Chou En-Lai and the Opening to the West PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 10

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The announcement on July 15, 1971, that President Nixon had accepted an invitation to travel to Beijing to meet with Chinese leaders must have surprised the people of China, and of the world, in view of the state of affairs both within China and the world at that time. China itself was still in the waning period of the great Cultural Revolution which had been launched in 1966. Diplomatic relations between China and the United States had not existed for over 20 years, and the rift in Chinese-Soviet relations had badly deteriorated over the previous 12 years. The rhetoric of Chinese foreign policy was to encourage a "people's war" against U.S. imperialism and its lackeys. The strategy of Premier Chou En Lai to reopen ties to the West via a rapprochement with the United States in that environment makes sense, however, when viewed in the larger context of China's national interests, the security and economic well-being of its 800 million people, and the preservation of its ideological faith for future generations. China viewed the presence of Soviet troops on its borders as well as the potential Soviet dominance of communist ideology as threats to its vital national interests. Moreover, the aftermath of both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution left the economy severely weakened, thereby threatening the well-being of its large population. To enhance and protect China's vital national interests, Chou sought a state of global equilibrium. To meet that goal, the priority was to counter Soviet power and aggression. This he proposed to do by utilizing diplomacy to normalize relations with the United States, thereby creating a counterweight to Soviet power. Furthermore, by ending its isolation and reaching out to normalize relations with the United States, China would be able to avail itself of the much needed technological information from the West. If China's economy was to grow to meet the demands of its population, contact with the West was indicated.

Chou En-lai and the Opening to the West

Chou En-lai and the Opening to the West PDF Author: Maurice A. Deaver
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages :

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Zhou Enlai and the Opening to the West

Zhou Enlai and the Opening to the West PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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The February 1972 agreement between Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong and U.S. President Richard Nixon to normalize diplomatic relations fundamentally and dramatically altered the nature of U.S.-Sino relations and strategically changed the nature of China's role in the community of nations, The skillful, painstaking and at times brilliant diplomatic work of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that resulted in the opening to the West was perhaps Zhou's most remarkable diplomatic achievement in a long career marked by many diplomatic coups. The opening to the West laid the groundwork for China to reenter the international world order after a period of intense isolation. It also established the basis for China to be taken seriously as a player on the international scene. It was Zhou's finest hour. This paper suggests that classic European balance-of-power or ideologically driven visions modeled after Chinese revolutionary thought do not fully explain Zhou's strategy in managing China's approach to the West. A balance-of-power strategy may be a construct to explain the one significant result of the negotiations -- China building an alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union -- but it does not explain Zhou's grand strategy. Zhou's statecraft was not driven simply by a desire to create a new power balance against Moscow. Rather, Zhou's strategy was to attempt to reintegrate China in the international system by normalizing relations with the Western superpower on conditions that were acceptable to Chinese political interests at a time when China's leadership was fractured and the nation in disarray. Zhou's strategy reveals that he was a daring practitioner of realist diplomacy who viewed negotiating with the West as the means to achieve some measure of domestic stability and the re-establishment of China's economic well-being after a period of tremendous internal turbulence that brought China to the brink of social dislocation and disaster.

Chou

Chou PDF Author: John McCook Roots
Publisher: Doubleday Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
A biography of the man who was Premier of the Chinese People's Republic from its inception in 1949 until his death in 1976.

Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and the Evolution of the Chinese Communist Leadership

Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and the Evolution of the Chinese Communist Leadership PDF Author: Thomas Kampen
Publisher: NIAS Press
ISBN: 9788787062763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book challenges long-established views that Mao Zedong became Chinese Communist Party leader during the Long March (1934-1935) and that by 1935 the CCP was independent of the Comintern in Moscow. The result is a critique not only of official Chinese historiography but also of Western scholarship, which all future histories of the rise of the PRC will need to take into account.

Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai PDF Author: Gao Wenqian
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786725982
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Zhou Enlai, the premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976, is the last Communist political leader to be revered by the Chinese people. He is considered "a modern saint" who offered protection to his people during the Cultural Revolution; an admirable figure in an otherwise traumatic and bloody era. Works about Zhou in China are heavily censored, and every hint of criticism is removed -- so when Gao Wenqian first published this groundbreaking, provocative biography in Hong Kong, it was immediately banned in the People's Republic. Using classified documents spirited out of China, Gao Wenqian offers an objective human portrait of the real Zhou, a man who lived his life at the heart of Chinese politics for fifty years, who survived both the Long March and the Cultural Revolution not thanks to ideological or personal purity, but because he was artful, crafty, and politically supple. He may have had the looks of a matinee idol, and Nixon may have called him "the greatest statesman of our era," but Zhou's greatest gift was to survive, at almost any price, thanks to his acute understanding of where political power resided at any one time.

China Marches West

China Marches West PDF Author: Peter C Perdue
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 748

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Book Description
From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central Eurasia, the Manchu rulers defeated the Zunghar Mongols, and brought all of modern Xinjiang and Mongolia under their control, while gaining dominant influence in Tibet. The China we know is a product of these vast conquests. Peter C. Perdue chronicles this little-known story of China's expansion into the northwestern frontier. Unlike previous Chinese dynasties, the Qing achieved lasting domination over the eastern half of the Eurasian continent. Rulers used forcible repression when faced with resistance, but also aimed to win over subject peoples by peaceful means. They invested heavily in the economic and administrative development of the frontier, promoted trade networks, and adapted ceremonies to the distinct regional cultures. Perdue thus illuminates how China came to rule Central Eurasia and how it justifies that control, what holds the Chinese nation together, and how its relations with the Islamic world and Mongolia developed. He offers valuable comparisons to other colonial empires and discusses the legacy left by China's frontier expansion. The Beijing government today faces unrest on its frontiers from peoples who reject its autocratic rule. At the same time, China has launched an ambitious development program in its interior that in many ways echoes the old Qing policies. China Marches West is a tour de force that will fundamentally alter the way we understand Central Eurasia.

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China PDF Author: Ezra F. Vogel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674257413
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist An Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the Year Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.

While China Faced West

While China Faced West PDF Author: James Claude Thomson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674951372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The years from 1928 to 1937 were the "Nanking decade" when the Chinese Nationalist government strove to build a new China with Western assistance. This was an interval of hope between the turbulence of the warlord-ridden twenties and the eight-year war with Japan that began in 1937. James Thomson explores the ways in which Americans, both missionaries and foundation representatives, tried to help the Chinese government and Chinese reformers undertake a transformation of rural society. His is the first in-depth study of these efforts to produce radical change and at the same time avoid the chaos and violence of revolution. Despite the conservatism of the right wing in the Kuomintang party dictatorship, this Nanking decade saw many promising beginnings. American missionaries--the largest group of Westerners in the Chinese hinterland--often took the initiative locally, and some rallied to support of China's first modern-minded government. They assisted both in rural reconstruction programs and in efforts of at ideological reform. Thomson analyzes the work of the National Christian Council in an area of Kiangsi province recently recovered from Communist rule. He also traces the deepening involvement of missionaries and the Chinese Christian Church in the "New Life Movement," sponsored by Chiang Kai-shek. Unhappily aware of the sharpening polarization of Chinese politics, these American reformers struggled in vain to steer clear of too close an identification with the ruling party. Yet they found themselves increasingly identified with the Nanking regime and their reform efforts obstructed by its disinclination or inability to revolutionize the Chinese countryside. In this way, American reformers in Nationalist China were forerunners of subsequent American attempts, under government sponsorship, to find a middle path between revolution and reaction in other situations of national upheaval. For this book, James Thomson has used hitherto unexplored archives that document the participation of American private citizens in the process of Chinese social, economic, and political change.