"The Broken Honeymoon: Rethinking Sino-U.S. Economic Exchange in the Long 1980s"

This paper examines one of the most important eras in the history of Sino-US economic relations: the 1980s. From the diplomatic normalization in the late 1970s to the Tiananmen incident in 1989, the long decade witnessed a broken honeymoon between the existing hegemon and the rising superpower. Scholars have analyzed political split that resulted from China’s crackdown on democratic movements while paying scant attention to their economic and trade engagement that generated significant lasting impacts. In this paper, I argue that economic interactions during the honeymoon decade, especially the burgeoning US-China trade, set the larger pattern of Sino-US relations over the past three decades. Drawing on newly discovered business documents and company archives, I examine how businesspeople from China and the US interacted with each other, explored the markets, worked with local governments, and managed to establish economic and trade ties in a politically uncertain environment. Networks constructed through multiple-level economic engagement in the 1980s assisted in the rehabilitation of US-China relations started by high-profile diplomatic visits and also ushered in a whole new era for the global economic order following the collapse of the Cold War world.