China Hong Kong And The Long 1970s Global Perspectives

This book explores the forces that impelled China, the world’s largest socialist state, to make massive changes in its domestic and international stance during the long 1970s. Fourteen distinguished scholars investigate the special, perhaps crucial part that the territory of Hong Kong played in encouraging and midwifing China’s relationship with the non-Communist world. The Long 1970s were the years when China moved dramatically and decisively toward much closer relations with the non-Communist world. In the late 1970s, China also embarked on major economic reforms, designed to win it great power status by the early twenty-first centuries. The volume addresses the long-term implications of China’s choices for the outcome of the Cold War and in steering the global international outlook toward free-market capitalism. Decisions made in the 1970s are key to understanding the nature and policies of the Chinese state today and the worldview of current Chinese leaders.

This book aims at providing an accessible introduction to and summary of the major themes of Hong Kong history that has been studied in the past decades. Each chapter also suggests a number of key historical figures and works that are essential for the understanding of a particular theme. However, the book is by no means merely a general survey of the recent studies of Hong Kong history; it tries to suggest that the best way to approach Hong Kong history is to put it firmly in its international context.

The surprising story of how Cold War foes found common cause in transforming China’s economy into a source of cheap labor, creating the economic interdependence that characterizes our world today. For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganization was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians. Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.

The issues surrounding Hong Kong's global position and international links grow increasingly complex by the day as the process of Hong Kong's transformation from a British colony to a Chinese Special Administration Region unfolds. This volume addresses a number of questions relating to this process. How international is Hong Kong? What are its global and international dimensions? How important are these dimensions to its continued success? How will these dimensions change, especially beyond the sphere of economics? Is Hong Kong's internationalization, defined in terms of its willingness to embrace international values and its capacity to maintain its international presence, at risk? These questions are presented as they pertain to the changing situation; relations between mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong; the positions of Australia, Canada and the United States on Hong Kong; internalization of international legal values; Americanization vs. Asianization; linkages to the world through Guangdong; strategies to emigrate overseas, cultural internationalization; media internationalization and universities within the global economy.

How succession in authoritarian regimes was less a competition of visions for the future and more a settling of scores “Joseph Torigian’s stellar research and personal interviews have produced a brilliant, meticulous study. It fundamentally undermines what political scientists have presumed to be the way Chinese Communist and Soviet politics operate.”—Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine The political successions in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, respectively, are often explained as triumphs of inner‑party democracy, leading to a victory of “reformers” over “conservatives” or “radicals.” In traditional thinking, Leninist institutions provide competitors a mechanism for debating policy and making promises, stipulate rules for leadership selection, and prevent the military and secret police from playing a coercive role. Here, Joseph Torigian argues that the post-cult of personality power struggles in history’s two greatest Leninist regimes were instead shaped by the politics of personal prestige, historical antagonisms, backhanded political maneuvering, and violence. Mining newly discovered material from Russia and China, Torigian challenges the established historiography and suggests a new way of thinking about the nature of power in authoritarian regimes.

This volume focuses on Chinese economic statecraft during the first decade of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up policies, from 1978 to 1989. During these years, Chinese economic engagement with the external world was tentative and experimental, with long-term strategies still decidedly under development. Prominent topics covered are China’s efforts to steer an economic course tailored to and representing what Deng Xiaoping famously described as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”; China’s quest for advanced science and technology; China’s dealings with international economic institutions, especially the World Bank; China’s engagement with other powers, including Japan, the United States, the ASEAN nations, and Europe; and the role of non-governmental organizations, including foreign policy think tanks, exchange groups, and educational institutions, in developing Chinese economic thinking and methodology during this decade. Contributors also focus on how elements of the Chinese military turned to building China’s new economic infrastructure, and on Chinese efforts to break into foreign markets. The volume ends with an overview and reassessment of earlier findings on Chinese economic statecraft in these years, by one of the leading Chinese experts on the PRC’s international policy.

A unique account of how Chinese and American athletes, scientists, and artists rebuilt US-China relations in the 1970s.

The emergence of China as a dominant regional power with global influence is a significant phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Its origin could be traced back to 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong came to power and vowed to transform China and the world. After the ‘century of humiliation’, China was in constant search of a new identity on the world stage. From alliance with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, China normalized relations with America in the 1970s and embraced the global economy and the international community since the 1980s. This book examines China’s changing relations with the two superpowers, Asian neighbours, Third World countries, and European powers. China and the World since 1945 offers an overview of China’s involvement in the Korean War, the Sino-Soviet split, Sino-American rapprochement, the end of the Cold War, and globalization. It assess the roles of security, ideology, and domestic politics in Chinese foreign policy and provides a synthesis of the latest archival-based research on China’s diplomatic history and Cold War international history This engaging new study examines the rise of China from a long-term historical perspective and will be essential to students of Chinese history and contemporary international relations.