Abstract
Almost forty years ago the United States astonished the world with a dramatic shift in Asian policy. Washington would abandon its long-time ally Taiwan, fully expecting that, after such a setback, the island would have no choice but to join China. China, at last able to act on the interest in containing the USSR that she shared with the United States, would become Washington’s chief interlocutor and partner in the Pacific.
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Notes
William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 2.
Shijie Erbao [World Journal] August 13, 1995, p. A1. Quoted in Arthur Waldron, “Back to Basics: The US Perspective on Taiwan-PRC Relations,” in Crisis in the Taiwan Strait ed. James R. Lilley and Chuck Downs (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1997), pp. 326–347, at p. 333 n. 18.
See Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo’s Son: Chiang Ching-Kuo and the Revolutions in China and Taiwan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)
also Taiwan Yearbook 2006 (Taipei: Government Information Office, 2006), pp. 538 ff.
Margaret Macmillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2007).
Probably still best, though with much omitted, is Henry Kissinger, White House Years, but see also, among others, Marshall Green, John H. Holdridge, and William N. Stokes, War and Peace With China: First-Hand Experiences in the Foreign Service of the United States (Bethesda, MD: Dacor-Bacon House, 1995). Also see, Macmillan, Nixon and Mao.
For the USSR, see Jack F. Matlock Jr., Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995).
See W. M. Frohock, André Malraux (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” The Russian Review, vol. 45 (1986), pp. 115–181 at p. 167.
Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
Edward E. Rice, Mao’s Way (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
Juergen Domes, The Internal Politics of China (New York: Praeger, 1973).
Ken Ling, The Revenge of Heaven: Journal of a Young Chinese (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972).
George H. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966)
Li Thian-hok. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966)
Li Thian-hok, “The China Impasse,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 36, no. 3 (April 1958), pp. 437–448.
Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984 (New York: Perennial Books, 1971).
See John J. Tkacik Jr., Reshaping the Taiwan Strait (Washington: Heritage Foundation, 2007), especially pp. 197–202, which contain proposals conveyed by the American ambassador in Taipei for preserving an international status for the island.
William B. Bader and Jeffrey T. Bergner, eds., The Taiwan Relations Act: A Decade of Implementation (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1989), p. 159.
Author’s personal information. In a Washington lecture, Senator Jesse Helms (1921–) noted “at that time, most countries of the world ignored Taiwan. And, like some in the United States, these same people assumed it was only a matter of time before the communists on the mainland consumed tiny Taiwan.” Senator Jesse Helms, “Entering the Pacific Century,” in The B. C. Lee Lectures (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 1996), p. 6.
Robert L. Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of US-China Relations1989–2000 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003), p. 420. Cited in Tkacik, p. 12 n. 3.
For a summary, see Arthur Waldron, ed., How the Peace Was Lost: The 1935 Memorandum “Developments Affecting American Policy in the Far East.” Prepared for the State Department by Ambassador John Van Antwerp MacMurray (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1992), especially the Introduction.
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© 2008 Peter C. Y. Chow
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Waldron, A. (2008). Nixon and Taiwan in 1972: The Week That Didn’t Change the World. In: Chow, P.C.Y. (eds) The “One China” Dilemma. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611931_9
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