Summary of Kevin Rudd's The Avoidable War

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 China has long understood the importance of understanding America, as the Chinese Communist Party believes their survival depends on it. However, America has rarely felt the need to understand China, as their geopolitical footprint is so large.
#2 China’s history is one of periodic incursions by foreign invaders. Chinese official culture has long taken pride in its ability to Sinify invaders within a generation of their arrival through the inherited norms, practices, and procedures of China’s formidable Confucian bureaucratic state.
#3 The Americans were the dominant Christian presence in China after the Chinese government forced out the Europeans in the First Opium War in 1839. American missionaries led the way in the establishment of Western hospitals, colleges, and universities in China.
#4 The American relationship with China changed with the American Revolution. The United States replaced Britain as China’s principal interlocutor with the West. However, American policies towards China were influenced by questions of race.

Sujets

• China
• Asia

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 10 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669383963
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Kevin Rudd's The Avoidable War
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

China has long understood the importance of understanding America, as the Chinese Communist Party believes their survival depends on it. However, America has rarely felt the need to understand China, as their geopolitical footprint is so large.

#2

China’s history is one of periodic incursions by foreign invaders. Chinese official culture has long taken pride in its ability to Sinify invaders within a generation of their arrival through the inherited norms, practices, and procedures of China’s formidable Confucian bureaucratic state.

#3

The Americans were the dominant Christian presence in China after the Chinese government forced out the Europeans in the First Opium War in 1839. American missionaries led the way in the establishment of Western hospitals, colleges, and universities in China.

#4

The American relationship with China changed with the American Revolution. The United States replaced Britain as China’s principal interlocutor with the West. However, American policies towards China were influenced by questions of race.

#5

The decisions made at the Paris Peace Conference sparked widespread protests in China, and radicalized Chinese politics. Mao Zedong, who had been one of many young Chinese who had been initially inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s commitments to China, now described the United States and the other Western powers as a bunch of robbers.

#6

China was shaped by three great powers during this time: Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The Treaty of Versailles gave away a lot of China’s territory to Japan, and the American government looked to the KMT government as the only possible strategic counterweight against Japan.

#7

The United States was an unreliable ally in China’s war against Japan. It did not offer any military support for the KMT, despite professing sympathy for China. The US extended a series of significant Treasury loans to a cash-strapped KMT government, but did not deploy any military forces to China.

#8

American postwar diplomacy, primarily through the Marshall Mission of 1945 to 1947, tried to reconcile Nationalist and Communist forces in a democratic government supported by an integrated Chinese army under Chiang’s control. But Mao had long seen the United States as no better than the other imperialist powers.

#9

Following the Communist victory in 1949, the next quarter century of the US-China relationship was its most acrimonious. American troops were fighting Chinese troops in Korea, and American concerns about the brutal treatment of American POWs grew.

#10

The opening to China was the result of a rapid deterioration in Sino-Soviet relations over the previous decade, sparked by Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Joseph Stalin after the Soviet leader’s death. Mao saw this as a threat to himself, as well as China’s strategic exposure to the Soviet threat.

#11

The relationship between China and the United States was established in 1979, after years of negotiations. However, the two countries had radically different expectations from the start. Beijing saw the relationship as a transactional one that would enhance China’s national security and prosperity. Washington saw it as transformational, carrying with it the deeper objective of changing the fundamental nature of Communist China itself.

#12

China’s reforms were not political or ideological, but economic. They were a pragmatic move in the tradition of the country’s imperial past. While opposed to the political and economic chaos brought about by Mao’s mass movements, Deng had no interest in any form of fundamental democratic reform.

#13

The relationship between the United States and China was shaped by the fact that most American administrations after Nixon did not see the relationship in the same brutally pragmatic terms as the Chinese did. The bilateral trade and investment relationship grew rapidly as Beijing imported advanced computer systems, aircraft, and automobiles from the United States.

#14

However, in the decade following diplomatic normalization, the deep underlying tensions already at work across the wider fabric of the US-China relationship came to the surface. The political relationship remained fraught as the Communist Party wrestled with the effects that the opening to America was having on Chinese students, intellectuals, and policy elites.

#15

The ascent of Gorbachev in 1985; a final agreement on the Sino-Soviet border in 1989 after three hundred years of dispute, conflict, and war; and then the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 fundamentally changed China’s strategic landscape.

#16

Following the Tiananmen Square protests, China began to open up economically, and the American business community supported this. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton continued this course of action, despite the concerns of the American public, to promote America’s growing trade and investment relationship with China.

#17

China’s economic reform project was led by Zhu Rongji, who was mayor of Shanghai in 1989. He was pale and drawn, but unflappable. He took me to the window of the Peace Hotel, and as we looked across the river to the wasteland opposite, he told me this would soon rival the Manhattan skyline.

#18

China’s economic transformation went hand in hand with little interest in liberalizing their political system beyond some half-hearted experiments in localized village democracy.

#19

In 2001, Bush’s administration had a conflict with China when a Chinese fighter jet closed within ten feet of an American EP3 reconnaissance aircraft, resulting in a midair collision. The American pilot died, while the Chinese pilot extracted a treasure trove of technological and intelligence data from the damaged aircraft.

#20

I visited Washington in 2017 as prime minister and spent most of my time on China. I congratulated Bush on how well he handled a potentially dangerous period in the relationship with China.

#21

The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 had a profound effect on Chinese strategic thinking. For decades, China’s leadership had been respectful of American military, economic, and technological power. But thirty years later, as the scale of the economic carnage wrought by the structural weaknesses of America’s financial system became apparent, a less reverent perspective emerged in Beijing.

#22

China was not immediately abandoning the preexisting American-led order, but it was beginning to build a new, more China-friendly order within its own region.

#23

The Beijing Olympics of 2008 was the culmination of years of China developing its international self-confidence. It was seen around the world and within China as the country’s global coming-out party.

#24

China was Obama’s first foreign policy issue, and he chose not to attack his predecessor for being weak on China. He instead tried to work with Beijing in important areas, such as North Korean and Iranian nuclear proliferation, G20 collaboration on the stabilization of international financial markets, and multilateral action on climate change.

#25

The Obama administration recommended, and Chinese leaders accepted, the expansion of the bilateral machinery of the relationship established under the G. W. Bush administration through the Strategic Economic Dialogue. This was to become a twice-annual meeting to discuss economic issues.

#26

China’s foreign policy elite was against the idea of a G2-style world order, as it was seen as incompatible with Beijing’s decades-long advocacy of multipolarity as the preferred form of global governance. Moreover, China’s leaders felt the costs would be too high in terms of diminished foreign policy flexibility.

#27

It is unclear whether or not there was any possibility of new levels of strategic convergence between the American and Chinese worldviews during the Obama administration. The window for such an agreement closed as soon as new tensions arose in and around the South China Sea.

#28

In 2010, China began to assert itself more in the South China Sea, claiming that it would no longer tolerate foreign naval vessels operating in international waters within its two-hundred-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone without express permission.

#29

In 2012, China could no longer operate freely due to a distracted America, and analysts in Beijing identified a hardening of political attitudes and strategic postures toward China.

#30

The CCP has seen the American ideal as a threat to its own political legitimacy, and has railed against it since the 1920s. The Chinese people feel a collective pride about the return of China to a central place in the global order.

#31

Xi’s worldview is Marxist-Nationalist, and he uses both ideology and nationalism to appeal to the people. While his ideology is still based on Marxism-Leninism, his appeal to the people is nationalist.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

It is difficult to determine what China thinks of America, as there is no shared Sino-American historiography on the evolution of their relationship. However, it is still useful to probe these unstated but powerful dimensions of the relationship.

#2

The Chinese view American strategy as simply the prosecution of American interests, and they believe that American ideals of democracy, free trade, and the integrity of the global rules-based order are s