The Lost Chance in China and the Rise of Cold War Populism offers a rollicking retelling of the fate of America’s diplomats stationed in China during World War II and the start of the Chinese Civil War, documenting how their efforts to find peace in China clashed with the anti-Communist network of right-wing advocates known as the China Lobby. Hartnett’s masterwork offers a haunting pre-history to our contemporary moment, when populism again stokes outrage and fear at the cost of nuanced international understanding.
The Lost Chance in China and the Rise of Cold War Populism offers a rollicking retelling of the fate of America’s diplomats stationed in China during World War II and the start of the Chinese Civil War, documenting how their efforts to find peace in China clashed with the anti-Communist network of right-wing advocates known as the China Lobby. Fueled by America’s end-of-the-war fury over the loss of China to Mao and the Communists, the on-the-ground experts in Asia lost the public relations battle to Cold War populists, who pushed a toxic version of public anger that built the rhetorical foundation of McCarthyism. Hartnett diagnoses the moment’s political battles by mapping a series of interlocking dispositions, emotion-based reactions that short-circuited critical thinking and empathy, instead feeding strident anti-Communism, xenophobia, and class-based resentments. Hartnett’s masterwork offers a haunting prehistory to our contemporary moment, when populism again stokes outrage and fear at the cost of nuanced international understanding.
Arvustused
The Lost Chance in China and the Rise of Cold War Populism is a lively, stimulating, thorough, and thoughtful contribution to the history of foreign relations, diplomacy, and the advent of the Cold War, but its also an important encapsulation of what a rhetorical perspective can often offer to more conventional history. Stephen Hartnett is at heart a grand storyteller, and he sifts through countless memos, telegrams, editorials, dispatches, and government reports to offer a rollicking read with well-drawn mid-20th century characters (from journalists and popular commentators to mid-level diplomats, legislators, and defense operatives) in an almost breathless narrative. His work is devastatingly effective in demonstrating how communication was the driving force behind the unfolding arc of the tragedy of U.S./China relations.Timothy Barney, author of Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of Americas International Power When a distinguished scholar of rhetoric and communication goes into the archives of Washington and China in the 1940s, nothing short of a dazzling history of Cold War McCarthyite populism results. This erudite book is as important to history, China studies, and international relations as it is to media and communication scholars. The lessons of the past it meticulously untangles offer sobering warnings to the present.Guobin Yang, Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania
Stephen J. Hartnett is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver. He is the director of the UCD College-in-Prison Program, served as the 2017 president of the National Communication Association, and is the editor of Captured Words/Free Thoughts, the annual arts and politics magazine. He has published ten books, including A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War (2021) and the coedited Imagining China: Rhetorics of Nationalism in an Age of Globalization (2017). His scholarship on international affairs has appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly, the International Journal of Communication, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, the Taiwan Journal of Democracy, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. His journalism on U.S.-China-Taiwan relations has appeared in SupChina, Public Seminar, New Lines Magazine, and Communication Currents. He has served since 2016 as one of co-organizers for five conferences in Beijing, one in Shenzhen, one in Hong Kong, and one online conference in Shanghai (during covid). He has been awarded the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism, the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, the Association for Chinese Communication Studies Xiao Award for Outstanding Rhetorical Research, and the University of Colorados Thomas Jefferson Award.
