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    CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir
    Unavailable
    CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir
    Unavailable
    CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir
    Ebook447 pages6 hours

    CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir

    By Nicholas Platt

    5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    China Boys offers a close-up, worm's-eye view of the U.S. opening to China and the pioneer days in U.S.-China relations that followed. Diplomat Nicholas Platt describes preparations for the historic Nixon visit to China in 1972 and the interplay within the U.S. delegation during the visit itself. He recounts setting up America's first resident diplomatic office in the PRC, headed by David Bruce, and first encounters between Americans and Chinese, including Olympic athletes, orchestra maestros, Members of Congress, airplane manufacturers, bankers, scientists, and inner city youths. He further reveals the forging of the first links between the Pentagon and the People's Liberation Army following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and shows how these all these diverse practical ties later evolved into today's huge and crucial relationship. He also examines the role played by nongovernmental organizations like the Asia Society in building U.S.-China relations.

    "Nick Platt, a key participant when the Pentagon and the PLA began to talk to each other in 1979--80, illuminates the beginning of what is becoming the key relationship in the world's military balance."
    --HAROLD BROWN, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 1977--81

    "China Boys is a timely, enlightening, and entertaining book by a distinguished U.S.-China relations insider who was with Nixon and Kissinger at the beginning and has enjoyed a ringside seat ever since. . . . Ambassador Platt provides valuable perspective and context for today's debate, as his engaging storytelling, keen insights, and wicked wit carry the reader through four decades of U.S.-China friendship, friction, and frustration."
    --JAMES MCGREGOR, author, One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China, and former Wall Street Journal China Bureau Chief
    LanguageEnglish
    PublishereBookIt.com
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9781456603588
    Unavailable
    CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir

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    • 5/5
      In 1972, an extraordinary diplomatic event occurred. Richard Nixon walked into the Beijing office of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. It was the first-ever visit of an American president to China, and that visit lit a fuse that in time would blow apart a great power rivalry and change forever the relationship between the US and China. Reading the memoir of Nicholas Platt, “China Boys, How US relations with the PRC Began and Grew, a personal memoir,” I was struck by how a small group of Americans and Chinese, about the number of a couple of college football teams, carried it off. Platt, from the beginning, was part of that small team. This came about because Platt had gambled his US Foreign Service career on the premise that Chinese would get him “in the thick of things” once the United States developed a relationship with China. For two years, for ten hours a day, he studied Chinese, the last year in Taichung, Taiwan. After Taichung, Platt spent five years at the “China watching headquarters of the world during the 1960’s” the American Consulate General in Hong Kong. There he would scan newspapers from China, including “provincial publications smuggled into the colony wrapped around fish.” The task was far more than simply reading these Chinese papers and noting deviations or repositioned language as indications of new policy. Platt explains that “editorials were shot through with references to figures and stories from great classical novels of Chinese literature”…and thus, “if you had not read (the Chinese classics) you simply could not decipher the editorials.” Platt salts his account with personal experiences that give you a glimpse of life in a very different Asia from today. Example: In Hong Kong in the 1960s, “water supplies to apartment buildings were limited to three hours every four days. CEOs and Taipans would leave board meetings abruptly hen the water came on in their zone. A frequent topic of analysis at gatherings of China experts during the dry days was the best way to flush a toilet.” Platt returned to Washington. Not only was he a sort of walking encyclopedia of Chinese matters, but masterful at distilling the essence of political relationships. This led to two major tasks of diplomats; intelligence reports and briefing books for high ranking delegations. Even hard-to-please Kissinger liked Platt’s briefing books. Platt visited Beijing in the 1972 as part of the Nixon team, and returned, in 1973 as chief of the political section --two years before diplomatic relations between the two countries were established, working in political no-mans-land called a Liaison Office. Platt skips his experiences as a three-time ambassador (Pakistan, the Philippines, and Zambia) , instead focusing on the early days of China-US relations, and his experiences forging the first links between the tough old People’s Liberation Army brass and wary Pentagon officials. Happily, he includes at least a chapter on his remarkable stewardship of the “Best Embassy on Park Avenue,” The Asia Society. Highly recommended.

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