Image Credit: Financial Times Co Ltd. © 2019

The U.S. and China, as much as those two entities meaningfully exist, have long been in a relationship dominated by “strategic competition.”1 Many would think this is a new feature of the Pacific’s two largest powers. They would be wrong.

Since at least the middle of the 1800s, when the U.S. built its transcontinental railway on the back of Chinese laborers (“immigrant” labor, typically used to mean non-white, built America almost completely; from the Atlantic Crossing and slavery that build the cotton-industrial complex of the South to the timber-c...

"Bring Into Focus" Smithsonian, Freer and Sackler Gallery of Asian Art | Washington, D.C. | Japanese Buddhist Sutra, Photo and Editing by Author

The Goal

It is my aim, through this series, to introduce to a general audience a more thougftul and historical understanding of issues of contemporary international importance. The series will focus largely on U.S. and Chinese events, as these are the two areas where I possess formal training and am hence most comfortable.

I will occasionally focus on a single work, event, or issue that I feel is under-represented in public discourse. This includes p...

Normalization of Relations: China and the United States

In December of 1969, the U.S. ambassador in Warsaw was asked to allude to his Chinese colleague President Nixon's interest in opening “concrete discussions” with China1; three short years later the relationship had progressed more quickly than anyone a few years ago would have thought possible. The symbolic culmination of this development came in January of 1972, when the President of the United States of America, Richard Nixon, visited Beijing for a largely ceremonial meeting with the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong. ...