The American breakthrough in studies of Communist China during the last decade, despite all the difficulties of study from a distance, has given us a new capacity to appraise Peking's shifts of current policy. At the same time, our very success in understanding short-term developments tends to foreshorten our perspective, as though Chairman Mao's new China were actually as new as he so fervently exhorts it to be. If we ask the long- term question-What is China's tradition in foreign policy?-our query may provoke two counter-questions: Did the Chinese empire ever have a conscious foreign policy? Even if it
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