This conclusion elaborates three implications of the arguments of this book. First, it argues that the importance of exchange diplomacy in Sino-American rapprochement demonstrates the limits of Henry Kissinger’s understanding of rapprochement as dictated by geostrategic maneuvering and high-level diplomacy. We need, this conclusion posits, a more holistic account of Sino-American diplomacy to fully explain the development of that relationship through the 1970s. Second, this conclusion argues that the interconnection between Sino-American exchange and high diplomacy offers a case study of the value in connecting transnational and diplomatic history – an insight that has implications for both fields. Third and finally, the conclusion reflects on the lessons we can draw from the US-China exchange relationship of the 1970s in understanding the prospects for Sino-American cooperation in the twenty-first century.

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.

This chapter recounts China’s participation at the First Hague Conference of 1899, where the Qing Empire was a formally included but in practice highly marginalized participant, and the implications of the so-called Boxer Rebellion that also erupted in 1899, and was followed by the subsequent Eight Nation collective occupation that radically escalated nineteenth-century practices of intervention. The use of international law as a mechanism for systematically coordinating the interests of expanding Western commercial empires in non-Western spaces was now accorded quasiconstitutional status by the new treaty arrangements reconstructing the nearly collapsed Qing political authority.

Chapter 2 draws insights from FPA to explain the relationships among power, beliefs and interests as causes of distinctive American IL policy. The focus is on ‘foreign policy ideology’ as the ideational concept that best captures the transformation of power into ideas capable of shaping global interests. A generation of empirical survey research, combined with a rich history of diplomatic thought, has shown American foreign policy ideology to be structured by two dimensions forming an influential four-part typology. A ‘governance’ dimension measures whether American power is exercised primarily through international institutions dominated by elites, or conversely whether US foreign policy interests are advanced through domestic law and institutions under popular control. A second ‘values’ dimension measures whether US policy promotes values of individual liberty through law, or whether it is used to promote illiberal national security or non-universal cultural and identity values. IL policy can thus be located between ‘internationalist–nationalist’ positions on the governance dimension and ‘liberal–illiberal’ positions on the cross-cutting values dimension, which together form four ideal policy types: ‘liberal internationalism’, ‘illiberal internationalism’, ‘liberal nationalism’ and ‘illiberal nationalism’.