School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemContainment and cooperation: continuity in U.S. policy toward the People's Republic of China during the Cold War( 2004)President Nixon's 1972 visit to the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.) was a critical milestone in the history of Sino-U.S. relations. The move put an end to two decades of mutual hostility and opened up a period of strategic cooperation between the two countries. The significance of the event is so often stressed that it creates an impression that there are two distinct periods of U.S. policy toward the P.R.C. - containment during the 1950s and 1960s and strategic cooperation in the 1970s and 1980s. This thesis challenges this conventional wisdom. It finds that the United States has continuously contained the P.R.C. throughout the Cold War but it has also been willing to cooperate to achieve important interests. Of course there are differences of emphasis that allow us to distinguish the period before the Nixon visit from the period that followed after, but American strategists have never regarded the choice between cooperation and containment as mutually exclusive. Both goals have been pursued simultaneously. The thesis is structured around the following key arguments relating to the relationship between the United States and the P.R.C.: • During the 1950s and 1960s, containment was the dominant dimension in U.S. Asian policy but cooperation between the two states to achieve specific objectives was also important. • During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States viewed the P.R.C. as a strategic partner and worked closely with it in confronting the Soviet Union; nevertheless, containment was an important U.S. goal during this period and remained an integral part of its calculations in its dealings with the communist state. • Overall, throughout the Cold War, containment and cooperation were pursued together as part of a continuous U.S. strategy in confronting the Chinese communism. The thesis shows the importance of the relationship between the United States, a world superpower with interests in the Asian region, and the P.R.C., a regional communist power that is able to do both harm and good to the former's interests.
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ItemConsuming trust: herbal food and drink and its place in contemporary China( 2011)Deeply grounded in the traditional notions of health and medicine, herbal food and drink have been used in China for centuries. Being part of its ‘traditional’ approach to well-being, however, the consumption of herbal food and drink is increasing in contemporary Chinese society and further reflects various meanings and perceptions relating to individual's engagement with modernity and their places in the rapidly changing social and cultural context. This thesis investigates the meanings of herbal food and drink in contemporary China and the extent to which it is reinvigorated by, and reflective of, the rapidly changing circumstances that the country finds itself in. By drawing on results of fieldwork in China across ten cities/ regions, the thesis identifies and relates consumption patterns in association with herbal food and drink with meanings attached to modernity, well-being, and both collective and individual Chinese identity. The findings of the research revealed a recurrent reference by people to ‘trust’, ‘intimacy’, and ‘natural’, which are not only grounded in the particular Chinese cultural imagination in relation to food, but, more importantly also indicative of how people’s perception on the contemporary cultural and social context and their place within it. To this end, the argument presented in this thesis is that the symbiotic relationship between ‘trust’, ‘intimacy’ and herbal food and drink is a resource for people to cope with anxieties brought on by rapid change in contemporary Chinese society because of the inherent links people make between herbal food and drink and notions of stability, tradition and their ‘unique’ Chinese identity. Given that there has been a series of food scandals in the past decade, coinciding with China’s policy of opening up to economic development, that a ‘moral panic’ over food safety emerged , it is not surprising that perceived risks of health are connected to much broader and significant concerns relating to the modern condition. Moreover, continual reference to the well-being of the body, ‘trust’, ‘intimacy’, and the ‘naturalness’ of herbal food and drink have been excessively employed as a kind of coping strategy for the anxieties that contemporary life poses for people as they navigate rapid change by drawing on the familiar and trusted symbols of balance and well being that are traditionally associated with Chinese food. That is, the call for well-being and a ‘balance’ of body is symbolic of a call for a similar kind of balance in life in a rapidly changing society and embeds with political economy implication. To reiterate, the linkage between knowledge and practice of herbal food and drink with ‘traditional’ Chinese culture is extensive, and, at the individual level, demonstrates a lived-experience associated with a particular way of being, identity and family belonging. Further, the prosperity of the herbal industry is indeed built on exploiting such close associations with intimacy, trust and continuity. As such, the interplays among tradition and modernity, collective and individual identities, and the patterns of herbal food and drink are enormous. This study on herbal food and drink can contribute to a better appreciation of how consumption serves as a linkage between agency and structure, between that in the hands of people to navigate, challenge or reject such as what they consume as opposed to that which lies beyond their influence.
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ItemShadows and substance: the formation of a radical perspective in American China studies, 1968-1979( 1987)American perceptions of China, according to Stanford Professor Harry Harding, were subject to “regular cycles of romanticism and cynicism, of idealization and disdain”. A quick glance at the American record does confirm that the Chinese have been repeatedly described as the most remarkable people on earth; or, in their faceless mass, the most fearful monsters. Despite American China specialists continuously confessing that China is “dim, distant and very little known,” American images of China keep flickering between the good and the evil. Just within the past fifty years, this perceptual pendulum has had several dramatic swings. From the faith expressed in Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), as a “sage” and a “man of destiny” and that the KMT was China’s last chance in the 1930s, to President Harry Truman’s final description of the KMT elite (including Chiang) as being “all thieves”; from the initial empathy which many China specialists felt for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a possibly better alternative for China in the 1940s to their later insistence that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was extreme, irrational and a dangerous enemy to the so-called “free-world”; from the unanticipated infatuation with the PRC in the early 1970s, which quickly replaced two decades of American hostility, to the new wave of negativism, which arrived at the end of the 1970s and loudly proclaimed “China stinks!” in the early 1980s. It is difficult to believe that China could actually have undergone such diverse changes to fit these various American descriptions. Given the fact that large-scale American China studies did not really take shape until the 1950s, and very little in the way of reliable data was available to the United States after it broke off diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1950, it is justifiable to argue that American perceptions of China might have less to do with the empirical reality of China at any given time than with that of the United States itself. This thesis analyses the swing of U.S. Sinophila and the beginning of disillusion which took place in the field of American China studies from 1968 through 1979. The author attempts to explain how different circumstances, frames of mind and sets of values which American scholars brought to their studies shaped their approaches and coloured their judgement. This inquiry had its initial genesis in an interest in the ideology and politics of American Sinology. However, given the scope and complexity of the issue, such a project is beyond a single person’s ability to comprehend, especially when working under an academic deadline. The task of a thorough study of all American China scholars who had romanticized the PRC in the 1970s also seemed impossible without making some very broad generalizations. Hence, the scope of this work is narrowed to simply focusing on the formation, growth and dissolution of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) from 1968 to 1979.