Useful Adversaries

Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947-1958

Thomas J. Christensen

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691026374, 9780691026381
• eBook ISBN: 9780691213323
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a new analysis of why relations between the United States and the Chinese Communists were so hostile in the first decade of the Cold War. Employing extensive documentation, it offers a fresh approach to long-debated questions such as why Truman refused to recognize the Chinese Communists, why the United States aided Chiang Kai-shek's KMT on Taiwan, why the Korean War escalated into a Sino-American conflict, and why Mao shelled islands in the Taiwan Straits in 1958, thus sparking a major crisis with the United States.


Christensen first develops a novel two-level approach that explains why leaders manipulate low-level conflicts to mobilize popular support for expensive, long-term security strategies. By linking "grand strategy," domestic politics, and the manipulation of ideology and conflict, Christensen provides a nuanced and sophisticated link between domestic politics and foreign policy. He then applies the approach to Truman's policy toward the Chinese Communists in 1947-50 and to Mao's initiation of the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis. In these cases the extension of short-term conflict was useful in gaining popular support for the overall grand strategy that each leader was promoting domestically: Truman's limited-containment strategy toward the USSR and Mao's self-strengthening programs during the Great Leap Forward. Christensen also explores how such low-level conflicts can escalate, as they did in Korea, despite leaders' desire to avoid actual warfare.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Princeton Studies in International History and Politics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Note on Translation and Romanization
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Grand Strategy, National Political Power, and Two-Level Foreign Policy Analysis
• Chapter 3: Moderate Strategies and Crusading Rhetoric: Truman Mobilizes for a Bipolar World
• Chapter 4: Absent at the Creation: Acheson’s Decision to Forgo Relations with the Chinese Communists
• Chapter 5: The Real Lost Chance in China: Nonrecognition, Taiwan, and the Disaster at the Yalu
• Chapter 6: Continuing Conflict over Taiwan: Mao, the Great Leap Forward, and the 1958 Quemoy Crisis
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Appendix A: American Public Opinion Polls, 1947-1950
• Appendix B: Mao’s Korean War Telegrams
• Bibliography
• Index