IN NOVEMBER 2022, President Joe Biden met with General Secretary Xi Jinping of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Bali. Their conversation was a brief glimmer of light in an otherwise dark period of competition and mistrust between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the world’s two most powerful countries. Renewed concern over espionage, covert activities, and influence operations has made foreign nationals in China and Chinese working and living in the United States the target of investigations carried out in the name of national security. Chinese in the United States also face prejudice, racism, and even violence. Foreigners in the PRC contend with the real threat of being taken hostage by Chinese authorities in retaliation for actions by their home governments. The game of spy-versus-spy, and the collateral damage of ideological paranoia, is a reminder that a Cold War mentality is being maintained by hawks on both sides of the Pacific.
Not since 1989, and perhaps not since China’s Reform and Opening Era began in 1978, has there been such a decoupling. Both countries have hit rough patches before, but three years of Zero-COVID policies that limited inbound and outbound travel to the PRC, the continued difficulty Chinese citizens face when applying for US visas, and ideological retrenchment in both Beijing and Washington have significantly curtailed the people-to-people contacts that, in recent decades, have sustained the US-China relationship through tough times.
The core of this relationship is made up of individual engagement by people from both countries, some with good intentions, others seeking to further their own nation’s strategic interests. In Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic (2022), Terry Lautz grounds US-PRC relations in the lives of 10 Americans—ranging from diplomats, scholars, and lawyers to journalists—who devoted their lives, and in a couple of cases still devote their lives, to work related to China. John Delury’s Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China (2022) deals with some people who fall into this category, but at its heart are different sorts of Americans engaged with China: it begins with a botched covert mission in Northeast China in the 1950s and looks at ongoing CIA clandestine activities to overthrow the CCP.
Mistrust on Both Sides: On Terry Lautz’s “Americans in China” and John Delury’s “Agents of Subversion”