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Historiographical Note Until recently, research on Chinese views of the United States has been relatively limited. When, in 1991, David Shambaugh published his Beautiful Imperialism: China Perceives America, 1972–1990, Gilbert Rozman of Princ‑ eton University noted: “A vast literature is concerned with American images of China and the Soviet Union and Soviet images of America, but this is the first substantial study of Chinese images of America.”1 The paucity of study on an evidently important subject seems to be largely due to the lack of contact between China and the United States during the Mao Era from 1949 to the mid‑1970s. During the period, the West had virtually no direct access to China while conditions in China made it impossible for scholars there to tackle the subject. Furthermore, the plain hostility between China and the U.S. at the time seemed to have rendered how Chinese viewed America a moot issue. Even then, however, some scholars recognized the significance of the subject. Many general works on Chinese history and Sino‑American relations produced during the Mao Era created the necessary context and framework for future specialized studies. There were, for instance, The United States and China, a classic by John King Fairbank; The Chinese World Order, a collection of historical essays edited by Fairbank (1968); Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American–East Asian Relations by Akira Iriye (1967); Nations in Darkness: China, Russia, and America by John Stoessinger (1971); and Discovering History in China by Paul Cohen (1984).2 With the onset of the Reform Age in China at the end of the 1970s, exchanges between China and the U.S. expanded quickly and scholarly inter‑ est in the history of Chinese attitudes toward the United States increased greatly. Michael Hunt, in The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914, published in 1983, confronts the notion that the Chinese and Americans possessed a natural fondness for each other. Exam‑ ining Sino‑American relations before World War I, Hunt concludes that, if indeed a special relationship existed between China and the United States, it was largely that “two distinctly different and widely separated peoples became 233 234 / Historiographical Note locked in conflict, the victims in some measure of their own mispercep‑ tions and myths.”3 Other scholars, working in the tradition of diplomatic and political history, focused on Chinese Communist leaders’ assessment of the U.S. and its effect on policymaking. In Yenan and the Great Powers: The Origins of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy, 1944–1946, published in 1981, James Reardon‑Anderson examines how, during a period of critical importance, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party struggled to ascertain Washington’s intention in China as they readied themselves for a showdown with the U.S.‑backed Chinese Nationalists.4 Zhang Shuguang and Chen Jian, in their respective works Deterrence and Strategic Culture: Chinese-American Confrontations, 1949–1958 and China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of Sino-American Confrontation, probe into the worldview and strategic considerations that shaped Communist China’s U.S. policies in the 1950s.5 Michael Sheng, in Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin, and the United States, investigates the impact of a revolutionary ideology on the Chinese Communist outlook on international politics.6 Over in China, scholars such as Tao Wenzhao, Niu Jun, and Zhang Baijia made use of recently available sources and produced important scholarship that further illuminated Chinese Communist leaders’ attitudes and policies toward the United States.7 Thomas J. Christensen also investigated China’s U.S. policies in the 1940s and 1950s, but he did so from a different angle. In his Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–1958, Christensen examines the connection between domestic conditions and foreign affairs both in China and the U.S. and suggests that the two states’ antagonistic rhetoric and policies should be considered as manifestations of some larger goals. During the period examined, Christensen points out, the U.S. govern‑ ment sought to “reverse the very popular postwar trend of demobilization” so as to maintain and increase America’s military strength; Mao, for his part, tried to mobilize the Chinese nation to achieve rapid socialist reform and industrialization by constantly reminding his people of an external menace.8 In this connection, Jianwei Wang, in his Limited Adversaries: Post–Cold War Sino-American Mutual Images, surveys the cognitive structures and substance in Chinese and American elites’ views in the 1990s and uses the...

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