"Great power competition” has just become a phrase that the Pentagon is forbidden to use when speaking of the People's Republic of China and the United States. The order was conveyed in the last few weeks by the White House in a classified document the contents of which were disclosed to the Navy…

Hong Kong

What was called by some “the loss of China”—the unexpected victory in 1949 of the Chinese Communists over the American-backed Nationalists—also destroyed the career of the diplomat John Paton Davies Jr. (1908-1999) as, in the 1950s, he and other like-minded “China hands” were wrongly accused of…

On China

First there were anti-Chinese demonstrations in Suharto's Indonesia; now there are anti-American demonstrations in Jiang Zemin's China. Signs of government weakness in both countries, the disorders were orchestrated by the regimes. In Indonesia, of course, they ended unhappily for Suharto: That…

Critics of President Clinton's upcoming China trip point to its bad symbolism -- the welcome at Tiananmen Square above all. Its defenders counter with substance: Important strategic and political gains are at stake, and China is too important to let human-rights symbolism drive the agenda. Or, as…