Papers presented by Elizabeth Ingleson since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Convergence not collapse: US-China relations and the end of the Cold War"

Abstract:

This paper considers what the end of the Cold War looked like from the perspective of US-China relations. It argues that rather than systemic collapse as experienced by the Soviet Union, the Cold War ended for US-China relations with an economic convergence in which China, the world’s largest communist nation, became entwined with the global capitalist system. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, this paper brings business history methods and questions into the centre of this convergence. It traces the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganization was essential to these connections, this paper also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians. Re-examining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US–China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—this paper takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy and led to a very different kind of ending to Cold War tensions between the United States and China.