xii { Preface
with united Vietnam. Chinese armies preformed credibly in Korea, on the
Indo-Tibet border, and in border battles with Soviet forces. China’s power
became credible. And it waxed. By the beginning of the twenty-first century,
it had become clear that the PRC is a rising global power that will rival, and
perhaps replace, the United States. And yet, strangely, there was no compre-
hensive history of PRC foreign relations.
I abstained for a number of years from tackling this task because of its
sheer immensity. Finally, in the fall of 2012, my beloved wife, Penelope Prime,
convinced me to go ahead. If I did not tackle the matter and give it my best
effort, I would regret it in a few years when I no longer had the vigor to under-
take such a task, she said. The summation of my life’s study of Chinese foreign
relations would remain unwritten. She convinced me to give it my best shot.
The volume you have in your hands is the result.
The effort to survey in one volume sixty-six years of PRC foreign relations
imposed limits in terms of scope of coverage. Thus the following work will
follow China’s relations with the five major Asian powers: the USSR and its
successor the Russian Federation, Japan, India, Iran, and the United States.
China’s ties with the states of Southeast or Central Asia, or with Europe, are,
with a few exceptions, not discussed. Moreover, with the exception of two
“economic” chapters dealing with China’s post-1978 opening and then its ex-
plosive post-1992 economic rise, the focus of the book will be on political and
security aspects of PRC foreign relations. Readers should keep in mind that
the focus on political and security factors is not meant to imply monocausal-
ity or to exclude economic, cultural, or other explanations. Each of Beijing’s
foreign policy decisions was immensely complex, and the focus on only a few
political-strategic calculations is not intended to deny that many other factors
were at work.
The conceptual theme providing some analytical coherence to the study is
the link between PRC internal politics and its foreign relations. While foreign
objectives have, of course, weighed heavily on the minds of China’s leaders,
domestic concerns have been paramount and have deeply impacted China’s
foreign ties. The way in which this domestic-international linkage worked
differed over time. I discern three periods of internal-international linkage,
which will be explicated in the next chapter. The broad perspective taken in
this book is the relation between state formation and survival and that state’s
foreign relations. It seems to me that this approach situates China’s experi-
ence in the context of one of the main processes of the last century of global
history—the enthusiastic embrace of, and then disenchantment with, com-
munism. It also captures a central dramatic of China’s modern history. It also
opens (though does not answer) the question of how a post-Leninist People’s
Republic of China might relate to the world.
There are, of course, other analytically useful ways of viewing any
phenomenon—especially something as complex as a sixty-year slice of a big