With rising tensions between the United States China, John Pomfret’s meticulously detailed and colourful history of United States-China relations, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, could not be more timely. In Pomfret’s telling, the US love affair with China has been marked by cycles of exuberance and deflationary despair, with China reciprocating in equally exuberant, sometimes despairing, often angry, tandem.
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