Suchergebnisse

Relations between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China during the Cold War have always been important and very complicated. At times, they were openly hostile and later tacitly amicable. The major reason for the problematic character of the relationship has always been the Taiwan issue. Even when in the late 1970s the U.S. government under President Jimmy Carter tried to establish official diplo-matic relations with the People's Republic - the so called normalization -, it was not a smooth process. The different positions of Washington and Beijing about Taiwan's status and America's relationship to the Kuo-mintang regime there led to stalemate and frictions. It took different rounds of secret negotiations before both sides could finalize a normalization agreement in late 1978 which led to the establishment of official diplomatic relations in 1979. Accordingly, this study's major question is what President Carter's motivation was to risk the suc-cess of an objective as important as normalization, for the sake of preserving Taiwan's security. The thesis advanced here is that the Carter administration's tenacity becomes only understandable if one takes into account the American vision of itself as the dominant power in the Asia-Pacific region and the bilateral strategic set-up between the United States and China. If Taiwan was not controlled by Beijing, it could provide leverage against China. This mechanism is still working today, and it helps the United States to balance China's growing power and influence in Asia-Pacific. Therefore, Taiwan matters!

A relatively recent coinage within international relations, "nation branding" designates the process of highlighting a country's positive characteristics for promotional purposes, using techniques similar to those employed in marketing and public relations. Nation Branding in Modern History takes an innovative approach to illuminating this contested concept, drawing on fascinating case studies in the United States, China, Poland, Suriname, and many other countries, from the nineteenth century to the present. It supplements these empirical contributions with a series of historiographical essays and analyses of key primary documents, making for a rich and multivalent investigation into the nexus of cultural marketing, self-representation, and political power