Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989 (review)

Reviews 255 Robert S. Ross. Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. ix, 349 pp. Hardcover $39-5°> isbn 0-8407-2453-9. Paperback, isbn 0-8047-2454-7. The work under review is a notable achievement in diplomatic history. There is no aspect ofmodern U.S. foreign policy that has been more controversial than relations with China. The author has covered a period oftwo decades without partisanship or sensationalism, and this could not have been an easy task. His book is destined to be the definitive account ofits subject even when more details emerge in the future. Robert Ross has based his study on personal interviews with a long list of U.S. officials, principally both retired and active China and East Asia specialists in the Foreign Service, and on a perceptive reading ofofficial and unofficial documents issued in Washington and Beijing. He also interviewed officials and scholars in China, but presumably under some constraints. There appears to have been no use of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. The book tells its story in a straightforward manner; each chapter, and then the entire work, ends with a section called "conclusions." The book is a diplomatic history and not a history ofdecision making. Hence there are low-keyed references to policy disputes, to arguments resolved only at the presidential level or through the dismissal ofsenior officials, and to the bureaucratic style ofsome presidential advisers, but these references do not add up to an explanation ofhow policy issues were resolved in Washington, and they do not reflect the flavor of acrimonious bureaucratic battles. (The corresponding discussion ofhow policies evolved in Beijing—where much less is known of such matters—is actually somewhat more satisfying.) The ups and downs of the U.S.-China relationship are charted by Ross in the first instance in terms ofhow each side viewed its own and die other side's strategic relationship with the USSR. This, he asserts, created the basis for each side's estimate ofhow far the other side should and could be pushed to compromise other issues, particularly that ofTaiwan. (Other factors are not ignored: of particular interest is Ross' analysis ofleadership-succession considerations on both sides.) With the threat of the USSR now no longer in the picture, Ross states in his final conclusions that die characteristics ofU.S.-China negotiations in the 1970s and 1980s no longer apply in the 1990s.© 1996 by UniversityCloser attention to what he must have been told by his oral informants might ofHawai'iPresshave produced a more exciting book and one with a more obvious relevance for the present. Most of the China hands he interviewed had spent decades trying to develop the U.S. relationship with China. These officers believed that issues be- 256 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. ?, Spring 1996 tween China and the United States could not be resolved without direct contact, and that opening China more widely to the noncommunist world under appropriate conditions could help ameliorate some of the excesses of the Chinese regime . (Similar thinking was behind the earliest U.S. diplomatic contacts with Beijing beginning in Geneva in the mid-1950s, when one aim, not fully accomplished even now, was to stabilize the status quo in the Taiwan Strait by securing a renunciation-of-force agreement that would be followed by gradually broadening contacts with China.) The global geopolitical and strategic concepts that dominated the thinking of the Kissingers and Brzezinskis in the 1970s and 1980s were not shared to the same degree by most working-level diplomats, who were more concerned with regional issues and many ofwhom were very aware of China's limitations in the global, as opposed to the Asian, strategic balance. Most of these officials were also not particularly concerned by domestic political considerations , such as presidential politics. For some of these officials, the maintenance of a U.S. relationship with Taiwan was important, but most of the individuals consulted by Ross probably viewed Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s as an unavoidable obstacle to better relations with China (rather than as the important objective of U.S. policy that it had been in the...