Economic Cold War: America's Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949-1963 (review)

In Economic Cold War, Shu Guang Zhang has set out to write a definitive history of a largely neglected dimension of the Cold War that he calls the "economic warfare among great powers." The way in which this book was conceived already challenges the conventional understanding of the Cold War. Zhang categorically states that in addition to military confrontation, ideological rivalry, and nuclear deterrence, the Cold War was the site of another frontier, namely economic sanctions and counter-sanctions, particularly in relation to the economic embargo against China imposed by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

The two major events that are the focus of Zhang's book—America's economic embargo against the People's Republic of China after 1949 and the rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance—have been investigated repeatedly before. Nevertheless, this is probably the first book to bring the two events together and examine their dynamic interaction as a distinctive aspect of the Cold War. What also sets this book apart are the perspectives that Zhang has carefully cultivated in writing this interpretive history.

Zhang has based this account on intensive research in multilingual archives now available in the United States, Britain, China, and Russia. Use of these resources enabled Zhang not only to corroborate the historical evidence but also to construct his study in an intriguing fashion. Like many historical studies, it follows a clearly defined chronological line, but in an unconventional manner. Zhang makes it clear that he intends to tell a tale of two powers by "cross-examining Beijing and Washington." Throughout the unfolding of this cross-examination there are two distinctive thrusts: the imposing and maintaining of economic sanctions by the United States and its allies and the standing up to and fending off of these sanctions by China and the Sino-Soviet alliance. Zhang offers alternate chapters to tell us these two stories in parallel. Such an approach makes sense, particularly considering the fact that, unimaginable as it may seem today, in the 1950s and 1960s the PRC and the United States were in total noncommunication with each other. In 1971 John King Fairbank made the poignant observation about this situation that the American government had sent more men to the moon than to the PRC in the previous two decades.

The strength of Zhang's book lies not only in the rich archival sources that he has explored and in the way that he has constructed his narrative. Equally important is the analytical and explanatory framework that he has conceived and employed here. E. H. Carr once famously said that "a fact is like a sack: it won't stand up until you've put something in it." Fully conscious of the limitations of traditional historical approaches and the rational-actor model in the social sciences in the United States, Zhang's explanatory framework consciously incorporates the confrontation of values, beliefs, historical consciousness, and other cultural factors, which, he argues, decisively shaped the international behavior of both the imposer (the United States) and the target (China) of sanctions. This analytical scheme leans heavily toward ideational explanations, which are often seen as "constructivist" in international-relations theory.

Economic Cold War can equally be read as a book about the intrigues of alliance politics. Throughout, Zhang tries to show how economic sanctions imposed by the United States on the PRC played a vital role in the formation and eventual collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance. In so doing, he also reveals the intricacies of how the Western alliance led by the United States began to unravel and why the multilateral sanctions disintegrated in the late 1950s. This stands as a significant contribution to the existing literature on alliance politics.

Zhang seems to be less successful in situating his book in the larger literature on economic sanctions...