Two decades or so ago, it seemed that the Sino-American power transition would be an example of peaceful change. Today, the odds of such an outcome have dwindled. Can IOs help to ensure that any resulting changes in the international system’s distribution of power (and of prestige and status) come about peacefully? In this instance, the short answer is “no.” For peaceful change to occur, the onus is on the dominant power – the incumbent hegemon – to accept, and adjust to, the shift in relative power in the rising power’s favor. There is nothing in America’s foreign policy tradition, or political culture, that suggests that the US will accept China’s emergence as its geopolitical, economic, and technological equal – or accord Beijing status and prestige on par with America’s. Rather, the US clings to the status quo of the post-1945 international order – “the world America made” (in Robert Kagan’s words) – and is ready to go to war to preserve it. That is the fundamental reason why the Sino-American power transition likely will not be an example of peaceful change.

The history of Sino-American relations during World War II can offer a window onto understanding the contemporary relations between the two countries. By way of a conclusion, the chapter offers three main “lessons” from the volume that point toward a new perspective on this critical relationship: 1. We must pay attention to grassroots interactions, 2. Drawing on Chinese sources is critical in understanding relations, 3. We must question our assumptions about the other side.

One of many Americans hired as advisors by the Chinese Nationalist government in the decade-and-a-half before Pearl Harbor, the famous cryptographer Herbert O. Yardley made crucial but long underestimated contributions to China's war effort. The Nationalist Government benefitted more in communications intelligence from recruiting Yardley than from other intelligence partnerships. Yardley's codebreaking work in China also offers a window into the transformation of Sino-American relations and the US role in Asia during the 1940s. Intelligence cooperation and covert operations became key tools of US statecraft in Asia and elsewhere around the globe during the Cold War. But before Pearl Harbor, Sino-US military and intelligence cooperation relied on partnerships between individual, non-state American actors, such as Yardley, and the Chinese government. This chapter's exploration of Yardley's work with the Juntong reveals how the ROC government's security needs and engagement with non-state actors influenced the origins and development of the US-dominated Cold War order in the Western Pacific.

The history of Sino-American relations since the eighteenth century has been powerfully influenced by a series of ad hoc, one might say grassroots American actors, often only loosely bound to the United States government. This insight is the central theme running through this introductory chapter which seeks to offer a new window onto Sino-American relations. While these ad hoc relationships had a powerful influence on US-China relations since the earliest interactions between the two countries, World War II marked a turning point as these ad hoc actors were subsumed into a larger state-centered system of engagement.

This introduction outlines the central argument of this book: diplomacy via cultural and scientific exchange was critically important to the changing relationship between the societies and governments of China and the United States between 1969 and 1978. This argument challenges the established account of Sino-American relations in this period: as determined by summit diplomacy between the top leaders in Washington and Beijing. Instead, this book reveals how a far broader and more diverse cast of Chinese and Americans—athletes, musicians, scientists, and many others—played a central role in the Sino-American rapprochement of the 1970s. Transnational societal contacts were interactively connected to high diplomacy between the US and Chinese governments and these two tracks of Sino-American diplomacy were mutually constitutive. This introduction places this argument in the context of the historiography of US-China relations and provides a sense of the scale and nature of Sino-American cultural and scientific exchange in this period.