Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America

An internationally recognized scholar provides a powerful explanation of the "Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America" between the United States and China. For over three decades following the 1972 rapprochement between the US and China, the two countries seemed to be steadily building a stronger relationship even accounting for periodic setbacks like the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The last decade, though, has seen a sharp increase in tensions between the two countries. What happened? In Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America, author David Shambaugh examines the evolution, expansion, and disintegration of the American engagement coalition and policies toward China. While most US observers place the blame on Xi Jinping's increasingly aggressive foreign policy and repressive domestic measures, Shambaugh focuses on the US side of the relationship. He argues that the real issue is America's paternalistic approach toward China. When China behaves in ways that correspond with American aspirations, the US engages with China and treats it as a mostly benign actor. However, America's primary aspiration for China is fundamentally a missionary one: integrating that nation into a US-led liberal capitalist world order. When China pushes back against this, engagement declines and US policymakers blame China for becoming a more malign force in world politics. As Shambaugh shows, China's primary goal for a century and a half has always been a simple one: to become wealthy, powerful, sovereign, and respected by others. As the USSR learned in the late 1950s, the Chinese did not want to be managed by a greater power but rather to establish themselves as an independent one. By focusing on the role of US expectations in fueling the shift towards competition and rivalry in the last decade, Shambaugh provides a new angle on this critical, global relationship.