Der Aufstieg Ostasiens in der Weltpolitik 1840–2000 (The Rise of East Asia in World Politics, 1840–2000). By Gottfried-Karl Kindermann. [Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001. €44.99. 727 pp. ISBN 3-421-05174-7.]

2003 ◽  
Vol 176 ◽  
pp. 1097-1098
Author(s):  
Reinhard Drifte
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
Before And After

This monumental work is in many ways the essence of Professor Kindermann's 50 years' research on East Asia, theoretically based on the Munich school of neo-realism (of which he is the pre-eminent representative) and inspired by his many personal encounters with those Asian leaders who shaped the region's rise in world politics. It also introduces interesting research by other German scholars, which is often excluded from the English-language literature that dominates the Asian studies field. The focus of the analysis is on the foreign policy of the states in the West Pacific region (including Myanmar and Indochina), their interactions and their place in world politics. It is impossible to summarize the 34 chapters within this review. The books offer a superb chronological and contextual overview of a crucial period in East Asia that is highly readable and illustrated with relevant photos. The most space is devoted to China, documenting its rise from imperial victim to major economic power. The coverage of China's interaction with foreign powers and the domestic background is very detailed, especially concerning the Kuomintang before and after 1949, and the Taiwan issue. The account of the era after the Pacific War focuses mostly on the People's Republic of China. Several pages are devoted to the Quemoy crisis of 1954–55, which revealed the complexities of the US–PRC–Taiwan triangle. Kindermann demonstrates how this crisis was the first application of Washington's “calculated ambiguity” towards the PRC concerning Taiwan. A whole chapter is devoted to the second Taiwan crisis of 1958 and its aftermath in 1962. Kindermann's interviews in Taiwan show how the US actively prevented Chiang Kai-shek's plan of occupying two mainland Chinese cities to start the “liberation” of the PRC. There are four chapters on how the Communist Party established and maintained its rule over China, but the majority deal with China's foreign interactions. On Tibet, Kindermann argues that the 17-item agreement of 1951 between Tibetan leaders and the Communist government may have served as a tolerable solution to the Tibet issue and thus have prevented a lot of hardship for the Tibetan people, even though the Tibetan representatives had been coerced into signing it.

scholarly journals Proving Chinese Law in the Courts of the United States

Amicus Curiae ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-215
Author(s):  
Richard K Wagner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
English Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Procedure ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Chinese Law ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Chinese Business ◽  
The Us

The volume of disputes heard by United States (US) courts containing a China element continues to be robust even against a backdrop of political rhetoric concerning an economic ‘de-coupling’ of the US and China. These cross-border disputes often involve Chinese parties and special issues, some of which concern Chinese business culture, but many of which involve interpreting questions of Chinese law. How is proving Chinese law accomplished in these cases and how have US courts performed in interpreting Chinese law? This article first discusses the approach to proving Chinese law in US courts. While expert testimony is often submitted and can be valuable to a US court, the applicable US rule offers no standards by which these opinions are to be judged. And, in the China context, without specific guidance, it can be challenging for a judge, unaccustomed with China or the Chinese legal system to determine which version of the law to believe. Moreover, under the applicable rule, the US court can simply ignore competing Chinese law opinions and conduct its own Chinese law legal research, presumably using English language sources. This can lead to interesting interpretations of Chinese law to say the least. The article anchors its discussion in an examination of those recent cases which have interpreted Article 277 of the Civil Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China. This is the legal provision of Chinese law that can be implicated in certain situations involving cross-border discovery, and there are now numerous Article 277 cases among the reported US decisions. The article analyses Article 277 by placing it within the larger context of Chinese civil procedure and argues that the language used in the provision has a special meaning within Chinese evidence law that has been obscured in those US case decisions interpreting it, leading to erroneous results. The article concludes by offering judges and practitioners some suggestions for interpreting Chinese law in future US cases. Keywords: Chinese law; US courts; Article 277; deposition; cross-border discovery; Hague Evidence Convention; Chinese civil procedure.

Mr. X and the Pacific

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. Heer
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Impact

This book chronicles and assesses the little-known involvement of US diplomat George F. Kennan—renowned as an expert on the Soviet Union—in US policy toward East Asia, primarily in the early Cold War years. Kennan, with vital assistance from his deputy John Paton Davies, played pivotal roles in effecting the US withdrawal from the Chinese civil war and the redirection of American occupation policy in Japan, and in developing the “defensive perimeter” concept in the western Pacific. His influence, however, faded soon thereafter: he was less successful in warning against US security commitments in Korea and Indochina, and the impact of the Korean War ultimately eclipsed his strategic vision for US policy in East Asia. This was due in large part to Kennan’s inability to reconcile his judgment that the mainland of East Asia was strategically expendable to the United States with his belief that US prestige should not be compromised there. The book examines the subsequent evolution of Kennan’s thinking about East Asian issues—including his role as a prominent critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War—and the legacies of his engagement with the region.

The legacy of Admiral von Tirpitz: a geopolitical understanding of China's naval buildup through sea-denial strategies

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Paolo Pizzolo
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Power Projection ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
Sea Power ◽  
Military Development ◽  
Maritime Strategy

Abstract As manifest challenger of the United States (US)-led international order, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has inaugurated a revisionist strategy that encompasses a multifaceted spectrum of initiatives, including an ambitious naval military build-up. History has shown that revisionist and challenging powers tend to defy the established order through arm races. US Admiral Mahan and German Admiral Tirpitz theorized two different approaches to naval strategy, the former focusing on global maritime hegemony and the latter on regional counterbalance based on risk theory. This article attempts at explaining the puzzle of China's naval buildup through the lenses of geopolitics, adding a geopolitical dimension to the current debate. It suggests that the PRC's naval military development does not follow a Mahanian global maritime strategy aimed at challenging the US primacy worldwide, but rather a Tirpitzian regional approach focused on counterbalancing the US presence within the scope of China's sea power projection, that is, the Pacific region. To substantiate this hypothesis, the study compares diachronically contemporary Chinese naval arm race with Wilhelmine Germany's High Seas Fleet. The findings underscore that, in maritime terms, China's revisionism vis-à-vis the US somewhat resembles that of Imperial Germany vis-à-vis Imperial Britain, both aiming at regional counterbalance and anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) tactics rather than global maritime counterhegemony. Although Chinese sea power is still far from posing a serious threat to that of the US and its allies, an unrestrained continuation of Beijing's naval buildup could encourage arms races and direct confrontation due to regional security dilemmas.

The Foreign Policy of the USA Towards the PRC During Gerald Ford Presidency: 1974-1977

2019 ◽  
pp. 46-56
Author(s):  
Anatoliy V. Goncharenko ◽  
Lybov G. Polyakova
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
White House ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa

The article researches the US foreign policy towards the PRC during Gerald Ford presidency in 1974-1977. It describes the reasons, course and consequences of the intensification of the US foreign policy strategy in the Chinese direction during the investigated period. There was explored the practical realization of the “Pacific Doctrine”by Washington. The role of various groups in the American establishment in the question of the formation of the Chinese White House policy has been analyzed. The specific foreign policy actions of the administration of the US president Gerald Fordon the PRC in 1974-1977 are analyzed. The chief results of the foreign policy of the administration of the President of the United States Gerald Ford (1974-1977) concerning the PRC, which resulted from the real political steps taken by the leaders of both countries, was the establishment of systematic and reliable channels of bilateral ties, expansion of economic, scientific and cultural contacts, the beginning of a systematic exchange of views on the most important issues of international relations. In the second half of the 70’s of the twentieth century this dialogue ensured the continuity of China’s policy in Washington, which was based on the concept of a “balance of power”, while China played a complementary role in the foreign policy strategy of the White House. These factors formed the “Pacific Doctrine” of G. Ford, which gave Beijing the status of an American partner in maintaining a balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region and consolidated a positive assessment of the place and role of the People’s Republic of China in Asian politics in the United States of America. The return of American political thought to the ideas of the combination policy occurred in the formation of US-Soviet strategic parity and awareness of the ruling circles in the United States, due to the defeat in Vietnam, the limited resources of force influence on the international situation. Started in the United States the study of China’s behavior in the international arena and its power parameters made it possible then to draw a preliminary conclusion that the People’s Republic of China can fill the place of the missing link in the “triangle” of the global scheme – a place of counterweight to the USSR; this required the removal of a US-Chinese confrontation. However, the socio-political and ideological contradictions that were pushed to the foreground on the initial stage of the Chinese policy of the administration of G. Ford and the process of normalization of bilateral relations, again made themselves felt at a later stage. Their injection was promoted by the logic of the development of bilateral US-China relations, as well as by a number of internal objective and subjective reasons, as in the People’s Republic of China (a sharp increase in the struggle for power connected with the illness and death of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong), and in the United States (Gerald Ford made certain curtseys towards the American right-wing conservative forces and began to intensify approaches to Beijing and Moscow, and also the presidential campaign of 1976). Keywords: the USA, PRC, China, foreign policy, American-Chinese relations, “Pacific Doctrine”, Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger , Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Courtney A. Short
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Civilian Population ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
Life Threatening ◽  
Work First

This study examines the occupation of Okinawa from the wartime planning stages in late 1944 and early 1945 through to the end of the US Navy’s responsibility for occupation duties in July 1946. In engaging in the historical discourse about the role of race in the Pacific War, two analytical choices drive the structure of this work. First, civilians that ethnically bore more resemblance to the enemy than the invading US forces served as the focal point of American racialized interactions. By examining the contact between a besieged civilian population and the US military rather than the contact between two combatant militaries, the study contests the misleading argument that issues of race in the Pacific War stemmed only from dehumanizing an enemy. A large, mostly docile civilian population complicates the term “enemy” and allows for an exploration of American racism in the Pacific expressed outside of the confines of force-on-force conventional warfare. Second, the environment of combat, central to this historical debate, also features predominantly in my work. The confusion, energy, heightened emotions, delirious exhaustion, life-threatening situations, and trauma of combat pushed the actors involved into dramatic decision making.

Silent Partners: SOE's French Indo-China Section, 1943–1945

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 943-976
Author(s):  
MARTIN THOMAS
Keyword(s):  
Effective Resistance ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Office Of Strategic Services ◽  
The One ◽  
Resistance Movement

Pursued over the last two years of the Pacific war, the Free French effort to organize and direct an effective resistance to the Japanese occupation of Indo-China ended in military failure. Characterized by administrative complexity, inadequate supplies and attenuated communications, Gaullist insurgency was marred by Free France's de facto reliance upon Admiral Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command (SEAC). While the re-conquest of Malaya and Burma remained incomplete, British backing for a resistance network in Indo-China was bound to be limited. And as British interest in the final re-conquest of their own territories climaxed in the spring and summer of 1945, so material provision for the French in Indo-China inevitably declined. Although Mountbatten consistently supported his Free French protégés, Churchill, in particular, was reluctant to take issue with his American allies. Neither the US government nor American commanders in China and the Pacific supported Free French methods and objectives. By 1945, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), dedicated to supporting guerrilla warfare and resistance organization, and the Office of War Information (OWI), which disseminated US propaganda, were developing independent contacts inside northern Indo-China. As a result, the OSS increasingly endorsed the one truly effective resistance movement: Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh coalition.

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