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China's Quest: The History of the Foreign Relations of the People's Republic of China
From its founding 65 years ago, the People's Republic of China has evolved from an important yet chaotic and impoverished state whose power was more latent than real into a great power on the cusp of possessing the largest economy in the world. Its path from the 1949 revolution to the present has been filled with twists and turns, including internal upheavals, a dramatic break with the Soviet Union, the 1989 revolution wave, and various wars and quasi-wars against India, the USSR, Vietnam, and South Korea. Throughout it all, international pressures have been omnipresent, forcing the regime to periodically shift course. In short, the evolution of the PROC in world politics is an epic story and one of the most important developments in modern world history. Yet to date, there has been no authoritative history of China's foreign relations.
John Garver's monumental China's Quest not only addresses this gap; it will almost certainly serve as the definitive work on the topic for years to come. Garver, one of the world's leading scholars of Chinese foreign policy, covers a vast amount of ground and threads a core argument through the entirety of his domestic political concerns-regime survival in particular-have been the primary force driving the People's Republic's foreign policy agenda. The objective of communist regime survival, he argues, transcends the more rudimentary pursuit of national interests that realists focus on. Indeed, from 1949 onward, domestic politics has been integral to the PROC's foreign policy choices. Over the decades, the regime's decisions in the realm of international politics have been dictated concerns about internal stability. In the early days of the regime, Mao and other part leaders were concerned with surviving in the face of American aggression. Later, they came to see the post-Stalinist Soviet model as a threat to their revolutionary program and initiated a stunning break with Khrushchev regime. Finally, the collapse of other communist regimes in and after 1989 radically altered their relationships with capitalist powers, and again preserving regime stability in a world where communism has been largely abandoned became paramount.
China's Quest, the result of over a decade of research, writing, and analysis, is both sweeping in breadth and encyclopedic in detail. Quite simply, it will be essential for any student or scholar with a strong interest in China's foreign policy.
John Garver's monumental China's Quest not only addresses this gap; it will almost certainly serve as the definitive work on the topic for years to come. Garver, one of the world's leading scholars of Chinese foreign policy, covers a vast amount of ground and threads a core argument through the entirety of his domestic political concerns-regime survival in particular-have been the primary force driving the People's Republic's foreign policy agenda. The objective of communist regime survival, he argues, transcends the more rudimentary pursuit of national interests that realists focus on. Indeed, from 1949 onward, domestic politics has been integral to the PROC's foreign policy choices. Over the decades, the regime's decisions in the realm of international politics have been dictated concerns about internal stability. In the early days of the regime, Mao and other part leaders were concerned with surviving in the face of American aggression. Later, they came to see the post-Stalinist Soviet model as a threat to their revolutionary program and initiated a stunning break with Khrushchev regime. Finally, the collapse of other communist regimes in and after 1989 radically altered their relationships with capitalist powers, and again preserving regime stability in a world where communism has been largely abandoned became paramount.
China's Quest, the result of over a decade of research, writing, and analysis, is both sweeping in breadth and encyclopedic in detail. Quite simply, it will be essential for any student or scholar with a strong interest in China's foreign policy.
868 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 4, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 16, 2022
For my Chinese foreign policy class. engaging for what it is.
May 7, 2021
This is a big book, in every sense of the word. If taking notes, expect having to invest about five days of full-time labour. A whole lifetime's worth of scholarship on China distilled into 888 utterly dense pages. I'm not aware of the existence of a better researched or more comprehensive work on the PRC's foreign policy after 1949.
June 8, 2025
Si quieres aprender sobre la historia de la política exterior china, compra este libro. Hacía tiempo que buscaba exactamente lo que ofrece el autor: un equilibrio entre la visión panorámica y el análisis detallado. En otras palabras: un libro que cubriese todos los temas clave y, al mismo tiempo, los abordase con profundidad. Y lograr hacer eso con un tema tan extenso tiene muchísimo mérito.
Mi única objeción es que la parte final, centrada en el presente y futuro de China, se queda algo desactualizada a la luz de acontecimientos recientes como el COVID-19 o la agresión rusa a Ucrania. Pero eso es inevitable, ya que el autor escribió el libro antes de que ocurrieran. En cualquier caso, un must-read.
Mi única objeción es que la parte final, centrada en el presente y futuro de China, se queda algo desactualizada a la luz de acontecimientos recientes como el COVID-19 o la agresión rusa a Ucrania. Pero eso es inevitable, ya que el autor escribió el libro antes de que ocurrieran. En cualquier caso, un must-read.
July 28, 2020
Fantastic and comprehensive. Meticulously researched (the sources are a gold mine in and of themselves) and insightful. Perhaps most impressively, I felt that Garver communicated the perspectives from which Chinese leaders and people viewed events without caricaturing or moralizing, while also consistently noting with compassion the joys and, more often in this time period, sufferings of the Chinese people as a result of Chinese policies.
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August 19, 2016327.51009 G2445 2016
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews