Adam S.R. Bartley - Perceptions of China and White House Decision-Making, 1941-1963: Spears of Promise, Shields of Truth

This book assesses and evaluates the decision-making behavior of United States presidents and their chief advisers from Roosevelt to Kennedy pertaining to China. Seeking to dispel with the notion that each administration sought policy outcomes on the basis of a rational decision-making model, Bartley highlights the contradictions of adopted presidential decision-making processes and the nature of domestic politics as playing prejudicial and debilitating roles. The book demonstrates that elite decision-making processes interacted with assumptions made about Chinese behavior, interests, and attitudes only superficially and in some cases not at all. Misinformation and misperception were the natural outcomes. Reinforced by the politics of McCarthyism at home, intellectual debate on China policy was squashed, parochialism and nuance were shunned, and information was closed off. Ultimately, a divorce between the norm of behavior and the search for rational policy was registered in each administration. The net result was a lasting and destructive cognitive dissonance: to fit expectations of a China reality constructed, information was ignored, overlooked, and distorted.

Offering new insights into the China policies of consecutive administrations from 1941 to 1963, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of American foreign policy, security studies, and international relations.

Adam S. R. Bartley is a lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Australia, where he received his PhD. His research interests include Chinese foreign policy, SinoAmerican relations, and security in the Asia-Pacific.

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Perceptions of China and White House Decision-Making, 19411963

Spears of Promise, Shields of Truth

Adam S.R. Bartley

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bartley, Adam S.R., 1985 author.

Title: Perceptions of China and White House Decision-Making,

19411963 : Spears of Promise, Shields of Truth / Adam

S.R. Bartley.

Description: New York : Routledge Taylor & Francis Group,

2020. | Series: Routledge advances in American history ;

vol. 14 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019043356 (print) | LCCN 2019043357 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780367271923 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429295447 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781000766165 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781000766325 (mobi) |

ISBN 9781000766486 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: United StatesForeign relationsChina. | China

Foreign relationsUnited States. | United StatesForeign

relations19451989Decision making.

Classification: LCC E183.8.C5 B33 2020 (print) |

LCC E183.8.C5 (ebook) | DDC 327.73051/0904dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043356

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043357

ISBN: 978-0-367-27192-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-29544-7 (ebk)

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by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book marks the culmination of a study into US China perceptions which began, despite the 19411963 time frame, with the reading of those remarkable Fulbright hearings of March 1966 on USChina relations. What indeed was so remarkable about these hearings? The answer requires two parts. By 1966, United States China policy had streamed between a volatile medium of dramatic policy departures on the one hand and threats of global nuclear war on the other. The historic partnership between the Chinese and American peoples during the Second World War had long since faded from the collective consciousness. More recent memories, drawn by a vacuum of understanding and sensibility to the Chinese political revolution of 1949 in the United States, and further manufactured by the falsehoods, half truths, and deceptions of McCarthyism, defined more than a simple disliking of the Chinese Communists. It produced, destructively, an insidious infatuation with all things Communism at home, leading terminally to the decline of intellectual observation of the China mainland. What occurred in 1950 thereafter was the purge from government and public opinion of an opposition to the hard-line anti-Beijing policies from presidents Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson. The Fulbright hearings reversed this trend, the outcome of which produced more than just a cathartic reflection in periodicals throughout the country. The neurotic darkness about China, the theologian and notable political commentator Reinhold Niebuhr observed, had begun to lift.