Bringing the Chinese Back In: The Role of Quasi-Private Institutions in Britain and the United States

Abstract

Draft chapter for an edited volume on the topic above. This chapter focuses on the role of quasi-private institutions in the United States and Britain in reintegrating China into the international mainstream during the 1970s. It focuses upon significant think tanks, including Chatham House in Britain and the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, and the National Committee on US-China Relations in the United States. In Britain it will also scrutinize the activities of the Great Britain China Centre, a quasi-non-governmental organization established first with government funding in the early 1970s, which later received an endowment from the proceeds of a major Chinese art exhibit. In the United States, it will also consider the role of the major US philanthropic foundations, as well as the US government, in providing funding for the reintegration of mainland China into the international mainstream. This chapter will consider the degree to which these British and US organizations worked in concert with the official foreign policy bureaucracies of their own countries, and compare and contrast the British and US situations. It seeks to illuminate the re-vitalization of networks of former China hands and the recruitment of new personnel to these, as part of the long-term fabric of Sino-Western relations.