Book Reviews

retaliation against their kin. The ROC then damaged its case for being the one China by refusing to accept most refugees from Hong Kong after 1950, despite United Na- tions recognition of the ROC as the government of China. When the Great Leap Forward sent refugees pouring into Hong Kong, the newly economically stable ROC belatedly seized the propaganda opportunity to welcome them. Part III: The Sino-U.S. ambassadorial talks in Geneva in 1955 eventually led to the return of long-unrepatriated Americans in the PRC and mainlanders in the United States. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act finally ended de facto Asian exclusion by eliminating national-origin quotas. This led to a significant ROC brain drain as the highly educated immigrated and transformed the United States into a center for the Taiwanese independence movement, increasing the proportion of Chinese-Americans with family roots in Taiwan rather than the mainland. By the 1960s, immigration became a source of U.S.-ROC friction with politically active ROC dissidents in the United States. The ROC responded by clamping down on exit visas for dissidents. The book is definitive on the topic of ROC-U.S. immigration policies in that it mines all the essential relevant archives of U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roo- sevelt through Richard Nixon; Taiwan’s key archives at Academia Sinica, Academia Historica, the Kuomintang, and the Foreign Ministry; and China’s Ministry of For- eign Affairs, Number 2 Historical, and Guangdong provincial archives. The research is both original and thorough, covering academic exchanges, deportations, refugees, voluntary exiles, defectors, and dissidents. It examines patterns in migration policy as a foreign policy tool, a form of public diplomacy, and method to shape the Chinese- American community—but the chapters do not align with these important topics. This and a lack of overarching analytical introductory and concluding paragraphs for each chapter (not to mention paragraph topic sentences) make the book hard to read and therefore hard to remember. A thematically organized article summarizing the book’s findings would be assignable to students in a variety of disciplines. The book tells an important story about how a model minority became the model. ✣✣✣

Joyce Mao, Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 226 pp. $40.00.

Reviewed by Bryan R. Reckard, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Well-argued and thoroughly researched, Joyce Mao’s Asia First underscores the signif- icance of the Asia First movement in conservative circles throughout the Cold War. Mao explains how Asia Firsters, those who demanded that U.S. foreign policy empha- size the Pacific as much as (or more than) Europe and the Atlantic, were distinct from the broader China Lobby in seeing China as one possible avenue for pushing conser- vatism beyond isolationism and into internationalism. In the years following Chiang Kai-shek’s escape from mainland China to Formosa, the Republic of China (ROC)

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had proven itself friendly to both capitalism and Christianity. Additionally, the loss of the Chinese mainland to the Communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) proved to be an adequate motive to criticize the Truman administration on grounds that it had not done enough to save China from the Communists. Presenting the ROC as Free China would provide the catalyst needed to turn traditionally diplomatic isolationists into conservative internationalists focused on the defense of Free China. A perspective supported by staunch conservatives such as Senator William Knowland and Senator Robert Taft, the newly proposed breed of internationalism preyed on American fears of a free world quickly dissolving under the pressure of an expanding Communist men- ace. Only by protecting Free China, the primary obstruction deterring Red China’s advancement, could U.S. national security and democratic ideals be preserved. Sprinkled in between arguments about the defense of Free China and a turn to conservative internationalism in the Cold War, Mao carefully weaves in another un- derlying narrative: conservative criticisms of the United Nations (UN) and the loss of U.S. sovereignty. Over nearly two decades—from the First Taiwan Strait Crisis and the subsequent passing of the Formosa Resolution in 1955 to the induction of the PRC into the UN and the ousting of the ROC in 1971—Mao illustrates the UN’s influence as it applies to the work of Asia Firsters. For instance, Mao shows how fears that China would gain control over the islands of Matsu and Quemoy through the UN during the crisis in 1954–1955 and suspicions that the Communist PRC would be admitted to the UN alongside the ROC led conservatives to frame the exclusion of the PRC in the UN as a matter of national security (p. 96). Ranging from argu- ments that included UN bylaws hampering the unilateral and “streamlined action” (p. 97) of the United States against Communism, to complaints that seating a Commu- nist state in the organization would be detrimental to U.S sovereignty because of its compulsory compliance with UN measures, Mao shows how conservatives made their case opposing the UN. As she demonstrates, these claims were raised again after the ROC was removed from the UN, despite the urgings of President Richard Nixon and U.S. Ambassador to the UN George H. W. Bush that both of the Chinas should be represented. Mao pays particular attention to the relationships that prominent Asia Firsters enjoyed with the leader of the ROC, Chiang Kai-shek, and documents how Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, sought U.S. protection for the ROC. Indeed, Mao as- serts that a “hallmark of Asia First activism” (p. 54) included the general sentiment that Chiang should be allowed to continue leading not only the ROC but the whole of China, including the mainland, in spite of U.S. misgivings regarding Chiang’s effi- cacy as a commander and lingering questions concerning corruption among the ranks of Chiang’s Nationalist Kuomintang regime. Included among Chiang’s collection of politically minded U.S. friends is Alfred Kohlberg, a textile importer and the man be- hind the so-called China lobby; Robert Welch, an author and founder of the pro ROC activist group the John Birch Society; and Barry Goldwater, U.S. Senator and 1964 Republican Party presidential nominee. Despite ebbs and flows in Goldwater’s pub- lic support for Chiang and an independent Taiwan, including his choice to support

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Nixon instead of Chiang after the signing of the Shanghai Communiqué, Mao shows how Goldwater continued to support an independent Taiwan after Nixon’s presidency and into the 1990s. Mao supports her argument using government documents, archival materials, and a reasonable number of secondary texts. Her archival research in the papers of Knowland, Taft, Goldwater, and Kohlberg is prominently displayed throughout the book as she recounts the behind-the-scenes proceedings of the Asia First cohort. In the case of the John Birch Society, Mao artfully connects Welch’s writings, Kohlberg’s papers, and the society’s official documents and publicity materials into one coherent telling of the self-styled “foreign policy watchdog organization” (p. 133). In addition, although Mao’s narrative suggests that the John Birch Society did not represent the entire conservative Asia First movement, the organization did highlight and clarify the rationale behind Asia First logic and managed to integrate it into a conservative internationalist platform. In sum, Mao’s book offers a unique look at the perspectives and power of a con- servative faction of politicians and citizen activists determined to halt the wave of Communism that was certain to swell after the PRC victory in mainland China. Asia First concerned more than a swiveling of the U.S. Cold War spotlight from Europe to the Far East; it was a driving force behind the development of conservative foreign policy in the post-World War II era. Indeed, its influence on contemporary global politics can still be seen in myriad instances of Pacific-oriented U.S. diplomacy. More- over, Mao’s account of Asia First politics demonstrates how a traditionally isolationist faction of politicians came to view the order of the world and the U.S. position in that order. For the present-day reader trying to make sense of developments in the South China Sea, the relationship between the United States and Taiwan, and U.S. foreign policy in the Pacific generally, Mao’s Asia First is an informative primer. ✣✣✣

Dina Fainberg and Artemy M. Kalinovsky, eds., Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezh- nev Era: Ideology and Exchange. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. xxii + 198 pp. $85.00.

Reviewed by Stephen V. Bittner, Sonoma State University

In recent scholarship, Soviet society during the long reign (1964–1982) of Leonid Brezhnev has been transformed into something that previous generations of Sovietol- ogists could scarcely have imagined—a happening place. Decidedly postrevolutionary in outlook, acquisitive at its core, riven with corruption and unofficial economies that provided everything from narcotics to rock-and-roll records, yet suffused with the familiar iconography, exhortations, and eschatology of Marxism-Leninism, Soviet society under Brezhnev defies easy categorization. That “stagnation” is a mostly in- adequate description of its complexity is the central premise that Dina Fainberg and

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