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This is the second of four chapters focusing on America’s perceptions of China’s capabilities, and dwelling on the correspondence between those perceptions and the projected consequences. It looks at American perceptions of China’s capabilities as a military power, discussing them in relation to the successive conflicts in which China was involved: the Korean war, the two Taiwan Straits crises, the Sino-Indian and Sino-Soviet border conflicts, the Vietnam war and the Sino-Vietnamese fighting in 1979. The discussion marks the transition from the Truman and Eisenhower administration appraisals of China’s conventional strength as a ‘candidate great power’ (in military terms), to the perceptions in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, that China had not developed advanced conventional forces, and had been sufficiently weakened through its domestic and foreign policies eventually to require it to embark on a domestic modernization programme that led to the reduction and then ending of its support for the national liberation struggles it had previously championed. Moreover, it needed American military protection to help it deal with Soviet encirclement. This evolution in the understanding of China’s needs and capacities helped ease the path to the rapprochement and then normalization of relations between these two former military opponents, much as America’s own defeat in Vietnam made it easier for Mao to turn to Washington.

This is the first of four chapters focusing on America’s perceptions of China’s capabilities, and dwelling on the correspondence between those perceptions and the projected consequences. It presents an analysis of the rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, which was signed in February 1950, and represented one of the most significant alliances of the post-war period. The focus is on US perceptions of Chinese power during successive phases in the Sino-Soviet relationship: the perceived impact of the alliance on China’s capabilities and levels of security; the effects of its demise on Beijing and on the socialist bloc generally; and finally, the consequences of its eventual replacement in the 1970s by a tacit alignment between China and the United States.

This is the third of four chapters focusing on America’s perceptions of China’s capabilities, and dwelling on the correspondence between those perceptions and the projected consequences. It presents an assessment of America’s perceptions of China as a nuclear power, discussing the new complexities that this brought to the Sino-American relationship and to their respective broader foreign-policy agendas. The different sections of the chapter look at the process of China’s acquisition of the atomic bomb (the first atomic device was exploded by them in October 1964), the US response to this, US and international assessments of China’s nuclear power and the impact on non-proliferation, and US assessments of China’s nuclear weapons programme.

This is the last of four chapters focusing on America’s perceptions of China’s capabilities, and dwelling on the correspondence between those perceptions and the projected consequences. It focuses on US perceptions of the political economy of China from the 1950s to 1978 and its perceived consequences for China’s capabilities both internally and as a political and economic model for other developing countries. Although the decline in Beijing’s hard and soft power resources did not follow a linear trajectory, the apparent overall weaknesses of its economy eased America’s fears about the Third World impact of its politico-economic model, and also reduced concerns that any contact between Washington and Beijing would raise the prestige of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the point where its path to development would be revived as a serious source of inspiration in large parts of the developing world. The chapter dwells primarily on China’s perceived soft power attributes. The different sections look at domestic order and advancement in China in the 1950s, the Chinese model under stress from 1959 to 1965, the impact of the early Cultural Revolution in the second half of the 1960s, and restabilization and re-emergence in 1969–78.