The Origins of Sino-American Confrontation

Both of these works make important contributions to our understanding of the Sino-American confrontation of the 1950s. They also reach very different conclusions about the origins of that confrontation. Thomas J. Christensen's thesis is that decision-making elites sometimes confront substantial difficulties in mobilizing domestic support for the strategies they prefer in response to international challenges to national interests and that they mobilize the requisite domestic support by overresponding to international challenges. Leaders may overcome these domestic obstacles by exaggerating the nature of international challenges in order to scare the people into supporting the requisite sacrifices. The greater the domestic obstacles, the more exaggeration is required. Leaders also resort to crusading rhetoric to mobilize popular support for otherwise unpopular strategies. In the process, however, what originally were relatively moderate, sober strategies founded on hard national interests are transmogrified into Manichaean doctrines that appeal to the simple folk. Christensen spends the first thirty pages of his book developing a formal model of such “two level games” and then spends two hundred pages applying that model to the case of U.S. policy toward China circa 1949–50 and another fifty pages applying it to Chinese policy toward the United States circa 1957–58

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