Patrick Tyler, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, An Investigative History (New York: Public Affairs, 1999).

My largely favorable assessment of A Great Wall is not one to which I was initially predisposed, having first read excerpts of the book's chapter on the Carter administration in Foreign Affairs. But those excerpts left out the more substantive and balanced portions of that chapter, choosing instead to concentrate almost exclusively on the well-known conflict between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (aided by his assistant secretary, Richard Holbrooke) and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. While it is true that Tyler does greatly overemphasize the significance of the Vance-Brzezinski friction in the normalization of relations between China and the United States, the book's treatment is more balanced than the truncated Foreign Affairs presentation conveys. Indeed, parts of it--such as the portions that deal with the role of Leonard Woodcock as American ambassador to Beijing--are excellent.

A Great Wall is not about the U.S.-China relationship as a whole, except in abbreviated fashion in the book's short last chapter. Rather, as the dust jacket states, it is about "Six Presidents and China"--Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton. It is a survey of the political and geostrategic dimensions of America's dealings with China over the last thirty years, with less attention paid to the Bush-Clinton era than to its predecessors. A Great Wall, then, is the White House view of a relationship critical to America's future. As such, while the volume is important, it necessarily leaves largely unexamined two critical dimensions.

Vertically, the book only examines the tip of the iceberg that is the U.S.-China relationship. The reader is not seriously apprised of how ties have deepened, broadened and multiplied over the years, whether measured in terms of economic links, the presence of nearly 50,000 Chinese students and scholars in American higher education institutions at any given time, or the scale and breadth of private sector exchanges. This, in short, is a book about how the commanding heights of the executive branch have dealt with the People's Republic of China (PRC), rather than a book about the relationship between two societies and how that relationship has influenced government policy. One looks in vain for a sophisticated or thorough description of lobbying in Washington (not to mention Beijing). Left unmentioned, too, are the ties between localities in the two nations or those between philanthropic and civic organizations. There is a difference between foreign policy (government) and foreign relations (government and society). This is a book about the former.

Even within the U.S. government, the volume focuses on the White House, State Department and Pentagon, mentioning Congress only glancingly and largely ignoring other important executive branch actors such as the Treasury Department and United States Trade Representative. There is no index entry for the Asian financial crisis and no reference to the significant cooperation between the Treasury Department and Beijing during that downturn. Indeed, Tyler gives the economic dimension of the U.S.-China relationship scant treatment, except when business interests are brought in as an explanation for presidential behavior, as in his discussion of the Clinton administration.

Horizontally, the book is not about the U.S.-China relationship either, because it directs little attention to the Chinese side of the equation. The reader will wait in vain to learn much about the internal social and political forces driving the Chinese in their interaction with the Americans--or about the background and personalities of Chinese leaders, the perceptions and history that shape their proclivities, and the domestic political and social challenges and forces (including public opinion) that animate them.

Apart from the concluding chapter, the volume does not detail the scope of the transformation under way in China, and what that metamorphosis means for the world and, specifically, for America. China's modernization, whether it succeeds or fails, could well be the single most important event of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. By focusing so exclusively on personalities, rivalries, turf battles and foibles, Tyler inadvertently trivializes the importance of what has occurred and what is at stake in the future management of the U.S.-China relationship. For all the bitterness in the Vance-Brzezinski discord of the Carter years, for example, there was a serious argument behind it: would a move toward China in 1978 undermine or improve the prospects for meaningful strategic arms control agreements and a more stable relationship with a nuclear superpower? This was an issue worthy of vigorous debate, albeit perhaps not one conducted in such an unseemly manner.

Even the informed reader is frequently hard-pressed to sort fact from speculation in Tyler's treatment, particularly when he slides from descriptions of behavior to the attribution of motives. No documentation is provided to validate the assertion concerning the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war and the Nixon-Kissinger "tilt" toward Pakistan: that "for Kissinger, the conflict in East Pakistan could be exploited to get Nixon's attention again." Likewise, Tyler has George Bush readily accepting his 1974 assignment to Beijing because he "was trying to get as far as he could from Watergate"; in fact, and as Bush's contemporaneous correspondence shows, he was ambivalent about the "isolation" from Washington politics that his assignment to China would impose, while at the same time he was glad to be removed from what he called the "incivility" of Washington politics. Indeed, Tyler's portrayal of individuals often possesses a stick figure quality, with undocumented caricatures that reflect popular cynicism rather than the complexity of real people. The picture of Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, for example, ascribes motives of ambition and duplicity that indisputably enliven the prose but nonetheless do injustice to the person.

There are also errors of fact and inaccurate assertions. President Clinton is said to have banned television coverage of his first major speech on China policy in 1997 to avoid domestic political repercussions. Not true--World Net television and many others were there. Marshall Lin Biao is said to have been leader of the Chinese "volunteers" in Korea--in fact, it was General Peng Dehuai. Most surprising is the assertion that "the Tiananmen massacre stands as one of the greatest tragedies that has befallen China in the twentieth century." Tragic and unnecessary as the June 4, 1989, violence was, even the highest estimate of casualties there pales in comparison to the man-made calamities of Chiang Kai-shek blasting the Yellow River dikes in mid-1938 to stop the advance of the Japanese imperial army, Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, in which 20-30 million perished in a policy-induced famine during the late 1950s and early 1960s, or the senseless factional violence of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, in which countless numbers were unjustly jailed, killed or forced into internal exile or suicide.

In the policy domain, too, there are serious oversimplifications, bordering on errors. Thus, at the very beginning of the book we are told that "the United States has accepted since 1972 that there is only one China and that Taiwan is a part of it [emphasis added]." In fact, the United States has not accepted this; instead, it has adopted a series of locutions designed to keep the point somewhat ambiguous. Similarly, in describing U.S. security obligations toward Taiwan, Tyler understates the ambiguities built into American policy, most particularly in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. In essence, the U.S. government is obligated to be "gravely concerned", to make available to Taiwan defensive weaponry, and to maintain U.S. regional military capabilities to respond to a breakdown of peace. But Washington has not written Taiwan a blank check.

That said, Patrick Tyler's book is a great read and I recommend it as such. The strongest elements of A Great Wall are as important as its blemishes. No reader is likely to avoid concluding--rightly--that, from the days when normalized relations with the PRC were simply a gleam in Richard Nixon's eyes to the twilight of the Clinton administration, Taiwan has proved the single most dangerous and important locus of contention between Beijing and Washington. Twice, the United States has sought to halt nascent efforts by Taiwan to develop nuclear weapons. The potential for armed conflict has never been (and is not now) entirely absent. In the early 1970s, Mao Zedong, as Tyler records, declared that while the Taiwan issue might remain on the margins of the Sino-American relationship for perhaps a hundred years, eventually China would fight for it against the United States. As Deng Xiaoping explained to President Ford in 1975, "I think it is clear that the Chairman's meaning was that even in 100 years, a peaceful transition [reunification with Taiwan] would be impossible." In exquisite detail Tyler records how each administration has tried to maintain the contradictions and ambiguities of policy concerning Taiwan. This issue can be productively managed only with restraint in Beijing, Washington and Taipei; but domestic politics in all three capitals often render such restraint difficult, sometimes impossible.

In his discussion of Taiwan, as in much of the book, Tyler rarely ventures from description to analysis. For example, he accurately and interestingly recounts the sequence of events beginning with the State Department's 1994 refusal to grant Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui overnight privileges in Hawaii; proceeding through the provocative issuance of a visa to Lee in 1995; the ensuing crisis in the Taiwan Strait a year later; Bill Clinton's articulation of the "Three No's" to mollify Beijing in 1998; and Lee's July 1999 incendiary call for "special state-to-state" relations across the Taiwan Strait. However, Tyler fails to analyze the larger dilemma confronting Washington. For each time the United States seeks to reassure Beijing that it does not wish to promote the separation of Taiwan from the mainland, it creates anxieties and resentment in Taipei, where a distinct identity from the PRC grows stronger every day. And when Washington does try to take the sensibilities of a democratic Taiwan into account, it inflames Beijing. Washington, therefore, is forced to tread a very thin line.

The second conclusion one takes from Tyler's book is that political leadership counts, that a willingness to take risks is not only essential, but more often than not has brought political dividends to those American politicians willing to do so. The presidents who have advanced U.S. interests vis-ˆ-vis China furthest have been those who moved beyond their own initial bases of parochial support to consider the larger national interest. And in doing well for America, they have generally done well for themselves. This is a lesson that the next president could well learn.

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