Given the History of U.S. Relations with China, Why Would the Communist Party leaders of the PRC Be Inclined to Go to War with the United States?
In considering the above history, please pay special attention to:
- The U.S. Relationship with China compared with that of the European Colonial Powers–the United States did not victimize China in the way that Great Britain, France, Germany, and other major powers did.
- The fact that the U.S. Fought Japan, the country whose military leaders invaded and savaged China during WWII, and the fact that the U.S., not the Chinese Communist Party, defeated Japan in the Great Pacific War and weakened the Japanese forces and compelled them to pull out of China at the end of WWII.
- The United States Decided Not to Intervene with troops in the Chinese Civil War, thereby standing back and allowing Mao’s armies to defeat the Chiang Kai-shek Kuomintang.
- The United States came to terms with China in the 1970s, recognized the PRC, and aligned with the PRC against a massive USSR army that was positioned on China’s northern border.
- The United States opened Deng Xiaoping-led China to the global capitalist system of commerce and trade, thereby enabling China a) to join the world community of nations and b) grow prosperous, and thus also enabling the Communist party, which was in serious trouble with its own people because of Mao’s radical poverty-inducing policies, to regain some measure of political legitimacy within Chinese society.
- The United States has kept open the maritime commons in order to sustain the system of liberal global trade and commerce, not to exclude the PRC from this system, and in reality the PRC has benefitted from this system of trade and commerce.
- The United States has no territorial claims on Taiwan, nor does it seek to utilize Taiwan to launch an invasion of the PRC-in fact, the U.S. has no desire whatsoever to destabilize, invade, or conquer China.
In answering this question, you must read all of the books and articles in the last section of the syllabus:
- Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War
- Howard French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power
- Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Super Power (Conclusion only)
- Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
- Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China
and read the following:
- Howard French, Everything Under the Heavens.
- Fei-Ling Wang, The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power. SUNY, 2017. HAND OUT
- Adam B. Lerner, “The Uses and Abuses of Victimhood Nationalism in International Politics,” European Journal of International Relations, May 7, 2019.
- (PDF) Perry Link, “Chinese Nationalism Today: A Terse Anatomy,” USCC.gov June 18, 2008
- Susheng Guo, “From Affirmative to Assertive Patriots: Nationalism in Xi Jinping’s China,” The Washington Quarterly, Vol, 44, 2021, Issue 4. (On line, Feb 2, 2022)
- “Xi Jining Has Nurtured an Ugly Form of Chinese Nationalism: It May Be Hard to Control,” The Economist, July 16, 2022.
NO external sources is needed for this essay, and it is ok if the essay surrounds 2-3 of the sources listed above. And carefully remind yourselves that this is a politics paper, not a history paper. Please yourself when writing the paper, there is no such idea as keeping the paper “politically correct”.