In Chapter 8 of this book, Yafeng Xia discussed in detail Deng Xiaoping’s efforts in maintaining a tie with the United States while not weakening the Party’s rule in China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen incident. In this chapter, I focus more on Jiang Zemin’s handling of Sino-US relations during Deng Xiaoping’s last years and beyond when Jiang was the de jure ‘core’ of the CCP leadership. In fact, with the retaining of some of Jiang’s supporters in the powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo, Jiang’s power penetrated deep into the first term of Hu Jintao (2002–2007).

Just one year after the outbreak of the pandemic in 2019, Sino-US relations witnessed a freefall, plunging to a nadir not seen since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 when the George Bush administration and its European allies swiftly imposed a wide range of penalties, from military and economic sanctions to the termination of high-level contacts. Major polls showed that most Americans had unfavourable opinions of China, which was a drastic change from prior polls (Gallup Poll, 2021). In China, while the aftermath of the Tiananmen incident sealed the political career of former general Party secretary Zhao Ziyang, it marked the beginning of the era of Jiang Zemin, then the Party secretary of Shanghai and a new protégé of Deng Xiaoping.

Since the US pivot to Asia strategy and its implementation in the Indo-Pacific in 2010, China has tried to look for ways to break through this containment circle over its head. China’s Silk Road Economic Belt concept was introduced by President Xi Jinping during his visit to Kazakhstan in September 2013. In a speech delivered at Nazarbayev University, the president suggested that China and Central Asia cooperate to build a Silk Road Economic Belt. It was the first time that the Chinese leadership mentioned the strategic vision. Then, President Xi proposed building a close-knit China-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) community and offered guidance on constructing a Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road to promote maritime cooperation later in October 2013. In his speech at the Indonesian parliament, President Xi also proposed establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to finance infrastructure construction and promote regional interconnectivity and economic integration. China also unveiled the concept for the Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR) as a development strategy to boost infrastructure connectivity throughout Southeast Asia, Oceania, the Indian Ocean, and East Africa. The MSR is the maritime complement to the Silk Road Economic Belt, which focuses on infrastructure development across Central Asia (Green, March 2018).

The chapters in this volume suggest characteristics of Chinese political culture and traditional diplomacy. With a new understanding of Chinese concepts of the world order, the authors have examined the emergence of CCP leaders like Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping. All were individuals who thought eclectically about domestic and international issues. Their political and security concerns, unprecedented for national leaders in previous periods of modern Chinese history, were inspired not only by a heightened awareness of ideas transmitted to China from the West, including America, but also by robust traditions harking back to many centuries ago. Moreover, their vision and insight also grew out of active participation in international events of the period, often as actors. However, each generation of CCP leaders faced disharmonious factors and unstable elements in China as well as in the world.

Chinese leaders today face some similar international and domestic issues, which prompted early leaders to prioritize their security concerns, national defense, economic development, and domestic control in 1950. Although the international environment dramatically changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, China apparently replaces Russia as the primary challenge to the US and the post-Cold War world order. Certainly, the PRC is nothing like it was in 1950, but the CCP’s dominant leadership, continuing fear of insecurity (Fang 2021), and Xi Jinping’s call for the ‘fighting spirit’ against the United States carry on the party’s doctrine and Mao Zedong’s legacy as one of few Communist survivors, as well as a ‘beneficial participant’ in the Cold War (Xinhuanet 2021).

In the 2020s, Xi Jinping’s Cold War II may include a ‘strategic triangulation’ of China-US-Europe relations, in which Beijing can look for new bargaining room with Washington. In the coming new cold war, China will deter the US from waging a full-scale hot war with its ever-expanding nuclear arsenal, as well as newly developed cyber and space powers. Meanwhile, China has prepared a new battleground, in case of war with the US, in Africa, as America’s next quagmire, even though the Biden administration is being battered by the pandemic, climate catastrophes, and racial tension at home.

Introduction

In 2020, the world witnessed rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait as China launched ‘gray-zone’ warfare and sent warplanes across the median line (Murray 2020). The US followed suit by dispatching Navy warships to pass through the Taiwan Strait. The media was flooded with concerns of another Taiwan Strait crisis. People wondered if the Xi Jinping administration would invade Taiwan, as well as how the US would respond as events unfolded. Since his inauguration as President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013, Xi Jinping has incorporated a good deal of Mao Zedong’s strategies into his own, and often promoted himself as a great figure. For example, Xi created a ‘Little Red Book’, and made pilgrimages to Yan’an. The current circumstances have reminded us much of the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954–1955 and 1958, in which Mao played a dominant role. However, looking back at both cases, Mao never intended to invade Taiwan (Formosa) nor fight against the US, and both crises ended through diplomatic compromise instead of war.

Soon after Nixon’s China trip, there was a lull in Sino-American relations from 1972 to 1978. Richard Nixon’s initial opening to China was followed by a period in which the projected normalization of diplomatic ties between the two powers was allowed to languish. By the spring of 1978, the Jimmy Carter administration had become more enthusiastic about establishing formal diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the time, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping was eager to proceed with normalization in order to enlist Washington to oppose the Soviet Union. But more importantly, China would be able to get access to Western science and technology for his “Reform and Opening up” policy. On December 15, 1978, President Carter announced the agreement on the establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and China. This relationship was premised primarily on US-China shared opposition to the Soviet Union (Mann 1998, 78–95; Kissinger 2011, 348–76).

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan suggested on several occasions that if elected president, he would restore ‘official relations’ with Taiwan. When Reagan took office in January 1981, China became one of the principal battlegrounds for infighting within the new administration. After a year and a half of diplomatic maneuvering between the two sides, China and the United States signed the August 17, 1982, communique, restricting US arms sales to Taiwan.

After Xi Jinping took office in 2012, his government sought an enhanced role on the geo-political stage while assuring the international community that the PRC would not pursue conventional policies of military and political hegemony. However, while China repositioned itself by creating a new ‘center of gravity’ in the Asia-Pacific region, its new demands faced new challenges and implications for its national security, foreign threats, and strategic environment. The disputed islands in the East and South China Seas are possible sources of international discontent and present increasingly sensitive issues over sovereignty. In April 2013, China released its annual Defense White Paper, titled ‘The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Forces’. It clearly states that a strong national defense and powerful armed forces are strategically commensurate with China’s modernization, peaceful development, international standing, and security concerns. In short, China’s armed forces must meet the new requirement for its national development and security strategy (Information Office 2013).

In August 2013, Xi Jinping, chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), visited the aircraft carrier Liaoning, commenting that China should build an even stronger naval force (Huang and Ng 2013, 1–3). The PLA Navy (PLAN) expanded from a ‘coastal fleet’ in the 1980s to a ‘twenty-first century maritime power’ (Cole 2010, x).

When Henry Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States on April 12, 1945, he inherited from the FDR administration a China policy the purpose of which his Secretary of State James Byrnes defined as to build ‘a strong, united, and democratic China’ (May 1974, 10). However, when Truman passed the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower on January 20, 1953, not only did China remain divided between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland and the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan, but the United States had done its share in perpetuating such a division by fighting the Korean War with the PRC under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and by forging a political and military alliance with Taiwan under the rule of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, GMD). Examining this episode of Sino-US relations in the context of the twentieth-century US China policy that began with John Hay’s Open Door Notes, Warren Cohen, a renowned historian of modern China and US foreign relations, calls the Truman administration’s China policy after 1950 the ‘great aberration’ caused by the fear of Communism that made the American people and their leaders forget ‘the sound geopolitical, economic, and ethical basis of their historic desire for China’s well-being’ (Cohen 2019, 198).

Scholarship on US-China relations during World War II abound, and the overwhelming focus is on the relationship between the United States and Jiang Jieshi. Most historical narration emphasizes the importance of the Republic of China within the diplomatic dynamic held by the United States from 1938–1945. This is attributed to Jiang Jieshi’s role, although obligatory in the eyes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, within the various Allied conferences during World War II. Unfortunately, the cliché ‘history is written by the victors’ applies to much of the early historical analysis of diplomatic relations between the US and China. Scholarship on American policy towards Wang Jingwei’s government was also affected by an outdated, binary lens of ‘good versus evil’, ‘friend or foe’, that existed before World War II and carried over into the Cold War. This research asks new twenty-first century questions of the diplomatic situation in World War II China to help understand current geo-politics and US-China relations. Just because Wang was pro-Japanese, did that make him anti-American? As discussed in a previous chapter, Li Dazhao was initially pro-American, yet became disillusioned by the United States; on that point, just because Mao Zedong was communist, did that make him anti-American during World War II? Eliminating the archaic ‘Cold War Lens’ of ‘good versus bad’ expands the study of this field.

George Marshall’s failed mission to mediate a coalition agreement between the ruling Nationalist government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was followed by the Civil War that ended with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 and the Sino-Soviet alliance a few months later. In less than a year, the new Communist regime was faced with a graver challenge with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. This time, the responses of the United States and Communist China put the two already unfriendly countries on a collision course when the Chinese military and the American-led United Nations Command forces met face to face on the Korean battlefield. One year after fierce fighting, the Americans and the Chinese Communists agreed to meet at the negotiation table to talk about an armistice, however reluctantly, as the war stalled on the battlefields. With battle and negotiation, the Chinese Communists began to build a resume showing both persistence and bargaining capacity, while the Americans learned to consider cultural factors in future diplomatic and military operations in dealing with the Communists. In the long run, Sino-US relations were built mostly through negotiations and reconciliations.

The Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, when the North Koreans attacked South Korean positions along the 38th Parallel, and ended with an armistice three years later. The United States’ instantaneous involvement in the war to lead the United Nations Command (UNC) on the side of the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) and Communist China’s entry into the war four months later to aid the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) transformed the war from a civil war to an international conflict.