Abstract
On a bright cold Thursday morning in London, 15 December 1949, the 54th birthday of King George VI, His Majesty’s Government decided to accord diplomatic recognition to the Central Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a newly established communist revolutionary regime which had publicly denounced the West. Unfortunately, King George VI did not live to see the formal establishment of diplomatic relations between Britain and revolutionary China, which took place after four years of protracted negotiations. The remarkable decision by the British government to recognize the new Chinese government at a time when the Cold War was intensifying, and the tortuous process leading to the establishment of formal relations between the two countries in 1954, marked an important stage in Anglo-Chinese relations. Their interactions during this period also revealed much about post-war British foreign policy and the international behaviour of the People’s Republic in its early years as a revolutionary state.
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Notes
C. Hill and M. Light, ‘Foreign Policy Analysis’ in M. Light and A. J. R. Groom (eds), International Relations, A Handbook of Current Theory (London: Francès Pinter, 1985) p. 157. Hill and Light have provided a brief and useful survey of the current theories of foreign policy analysis, and their place in the study of international relations.
A. Shlaim, P. Jones and K. Sainsbury, British Foreign Secretaries (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1977) p. 14.
In addition to Light and Hill, op. cit., two useful discussions of the different theoretical perspectives in the study of foreign policy decision-making are: J. E. Dougherty and R. L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr, Contending Theories of International Relations: A comprehensive survey (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), chapter 11, pp. 468–510;
B. P. White, ‘Decision-making analysis’ in T. Taylor (ed.), Approaches and Theory in International Relations (London: Longman, 1978) pp. 141–164.
For factors influencing foreign policy decision-making see for example, L. P. Bloomfield, The Foreign Policy Process: A Modern Primer (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982);
M. Clarke and B. White, An Introduction to Foreign Policy Analysis: The Foreign Policy System (Ormskirk and Northridge: G.W. & A. Hesketh, 1981);
M. A. East, S. A. Salmore, C. F. Hermann, Why Nations Act: Theoretical Perspectives for Comparative Foreign Policy Studies (London: Sage, 1978);
L. Jensen, Explaining Foreign Policy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982).
A strong case for including policy implementation as a central part of foreign policy decision making has been made in M. Clarke, ‘Foreign policy implementation: problems and approaches’, British Journal of International Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1979, pp. 112–128,
S. Smith and M. Clarke (eds), Foreign Policy Implementation (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985).
P. Calvert, Revolution and International Politics (London: Frances Pinter, 1984) p. 152.
See Martin Wight, Power Politics (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1986) pp. 117–119.
H. Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977) pp. 9–10 and p. 13.
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© 1992 James Tuck-Hong Tang
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Tang, J.TH. (1992). Introduction. In: Britain’s Encounter with Revolutionary China, 1949–54. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22349-7_1
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