The Lost Chance in China and the Rise of Cold War Populism

“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 it’s 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 America’s 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