Book Review: Memories of Tiananmen: Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989–2019 by Francis L. F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan

Abstract

ing the conduct of their American allies. Wang frames his book as follows: ‘The relationship between the United States and China from 1953 to 1956 was characterized by U.S. efforts to contain China and Beijing’s struggles to break the containment’ (p. 203). In his telling, New China was responding to a belligerent United States imperial power. But one could just as easily, and with equal justification, reverse his formula, and postulate that China, a revolutionary communist state bent on transforming the existing order, provoked responses from the United States which, although undoubtedly hostile to the PRC, was constructing defensive alliances against the very real efforts of the PRC to support communist revolutions elsewhere in Asia through subversion, united front policies, and armed insurrection. The period 1953–6, characterized by China’s peace offensive, was an aberration in the diplomacy of the Maoist era, as Wang himself recognizes. In 1957, Mao installed the abrasive Chen Yi as foreign minister, replacing Zhou Enlai, as China turned from pragmatic to radical diplomacy. In sum, Wang Tao’s book, developed from a doctoral dissertation in history, is an impressive debut work by a gifted scholar. Isolating the Enemy both presents a thoughtprovoking thesis and fills in fascinating details of the early Cold War, a formative period in Sino-American relations, the echoes of which still reverberate to this day in the context of enhanced rivalry between Beijing andWashington seven decades later. It is a book that merits close reading by diplomatic historians and students of US–East Asian international relations.