"Walking on Two Tracks": America's China Scholars, Studies of Contemporary China, and the United States' China Policy, 1949–79

This project seeks to combine both diplomatic and intellectual history, focusing on the interplays between America’s China scholars and the U.S. government with respect to its China policy. Firstly, it intends to “rediscover” China scholars’ role in American diplomatic history, who were an active community among “China hands” but neglected by historians, whereas their counterparts, the China experts in the foreign services, were the main focus of most historical monographs. Secondly, the project explores how a new field – the studies of Contemporary China – was established, viewed as a national enterprise, and integrated into the broader context of Cold War area studies. Finally, it intends to explain the connections between China studies and America’s China policy, uncovering the reciprocation, tension, and dynamics between them.

Featuring prominent academics such as A. Doak Barnett (Columbia), Lucian W. Pye (MIT), John K. Fairbank (Harvard), Richard Solomon, Michel Oksenberg, Alexander Eckstein (all at University of Michigan), and so on, this project reveals how China scholars tried to “walk on two tracks” – building China studies and influencing America’s China policy over three decades. Furthermore, the two tracks will be merged into one story, seeking to answer a fundamental question: how did America’s China scholars utilize the development of China studies to facilitate the changing of America’s China policy? And as the research unfolds, three pillars will emerge in the construction of arguments: ideology and policy, institution and mechanism, as well as community and network.

The narrative starts from the postwar debate on the “loss” of China and the formation of the field in the 1950s, flowing into a robust development of studies of contemporary China in the 1960s, during which the China scholars more actively engaged in creating a new discourse on China policy. The research then traces the footprints of an academic-centered political organization - National Committee on the United States-China Relations (NCUSCR) – on exchange programs between the two countries in the early 1970s, as well as how two Michigan professors – Solomon and Oksenberg, entered the NSC in the Nixon and Ford administrations, respectively. From being silenced during the McCarthy era and re-emerging as policy consultants for the State Department, congressmen and governors in the 1960s, to eventually entering the center of political power, it tells a story of the rise and fall of America’s China scholars in their interactions with domestic politics and the making of foreign policy.

Essentially, the poster will explain the research question, objectives, methodology, historiography, structure, and sources (primary and secondary). More importantly, it will use three line charts to help demonstrate the key points. The first will illustrate the political roles of these academics between 1949 and 1979, named “the rise and fall of America’s China scholars.” The second and third will be two chronological diagrams showcasing, respectively, the development of studies of contemporary China in the United States and China scholars’ engagement with America’s China policy. The connections between these factors will be more distinct once put together for comparison.