The Future of Chinese-American Relations
Panelists:
Jonathan Bingham – Representative (D-New York)
Alan Cranston – Senator (D-California)
Bob Dole – Senator (R-Kansas)
Barry Goldwater – Senator (R-Arizona)
Moderator:
John Charles Daly
Editor’s Note: This AEI Public Policy Forum discussed the prospects facing the United States following the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Topics covered included the economic benefits of the new relationship, implications for the US-Soviet relationship, the future of US-Taiwan relations, and instability within China itself.
JOHN CHARLES DALY, Former ABC News executive and forum moderator: This Public Policy Forum, part of a series presented by the American Enterprise Institute, is concerned with a “dragon reborn” — the nation to which it is said the twenty-first century will belong. Our subject is: The Future of Chinese-American Relations.
After a century of self-destruction and humiliation by the modern industrial nations, China in 1949 “stood up” in the words of Mao Tse-tung. Under the Communist banner and inspired by the sayings of Mao’s Little Red Book, one quarter of the world’s population was reorganized into the largest single society in the world to concentrate on self sufficiency and nation building. Progress has been note-worthy over the past thirty years.
The process has even survived the violent disruptions of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.
Today China seems better prepared than at any time in the past century to handle its enormous problems and to participate in the world economic society. China’s role in the international order has grown by leaps and bounds, by deeds and by daring. It played a role in Korea and then in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, had atomic capability by 1964, confronted the Soviet Union in the 1960s, received full representation in the United Nations in the 1970s, and launched a punishing limited invasion of Vietnam in 1979.
Looming over relations between the United States and China are vast differences in culture and the inability of the Western community to comprehend the intricacies and the subtleties of Chinese thinking, policy, and policy making.
