## books-van-heuvelen

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### Overview
- Title reviewed: Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade
- Author: Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson
- Publisher: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2024
- Length and price: 352 pp., $37.95
- Reviewer: Elizabeth Van Heuvelen, senior economist, IMF’s Strategy, Policy, and Review Department
- Focus of the book: the pivotal period of the 1970s and how cultural, diplomatic, and economic factors enabled the transformation of China’s market and the China–United States relationship

### Key findings and themes
- Convergence thesis:
  - China–US relations converged at a time when both countries needed each other to meet domestic and strategic objectives.
  - Three interlinking factors enabled the transformation: cultural, diplomatic, and economic.
- Diplomacy vs. trade incentives:
  - Henry Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon viewed trade as a mechanism to facilitate diplomacy.
  - Chairman Mao Zedong viewed trade as something to follow only after addressing diplomatic issues.
  - This difference helps explain why trade began in fits and starts and expanded once interests aligned.
- Cultural and political continuity:
  - The Maoist concept of self-reliance—zili gengsheng—features throughout Ingleson’s account and resurfaces in contemporary Chinese policy documents.
  - Political hard-liners and so-called pragmatists clashed over China’s role in evolving trade and geopolitical dynamics.

### Historical episodes and illustrative anecdotes
- US importers and “fashion diplomacy”:
  - Stories of US importers such as Veronica Yhap, founder of Dragon Lady Traders, illustrate the role of commercial actors in promoting a diplomatic and commercial thaw.
- Canton Trade Fairs:
  - Early Canton Trade Fairs provide insight into China’s internal debate over foreign trade and how US businesspeople perceived China.
- Technology and industrial deals:
  - China’s 1973 purchase of Kellogg fertilizer plants exemplifies early efforts to import technological know-how.
  - Quoted decision framing: “Should we eat 2 million metric tons of imported wheat or buy 10 chemical fertilizer plants . . . I believe we all agree to buy the 10 fertilizer plants.”
- Labor and trade protectionism:
  - Early US organized labor wariness is documented, from the passage of the 1974 Trade Act to a quota petition by the Worker Glove Manufacturers Association.

### Analytical observations and implications
- Role of diplomacy in global economic trajectories:
  - The book highlights the outsize role diplomacy can play in shaping the trajectory of the global economy.
- Continuities with contemporary tensions:
  - Many themes from the 1970s—self-reliance, clashes between hard-liners and pragmatists, strategic use of trade—resonate with current China–US tensions.
- Research opportunities:
  - Further study of how the three interlocking forces—cultural, diplomatic, and economic—have evolved in more recent years would be illuminating.

### Concluding perspective
- Ingleson’s work is meticulously researched and rich in anecdotes, offering historical context that suggests many contemporary challenges in China–US relations are not entirely new.
- For optimists, the historical record provides a potential glimmer of hope for scenarios in which each country incorporates the other into its respective vision of the future.

*Review by Elizabeth Van Heuvelen, senior economist, IMF’s Strategy, Policy, and Review Department.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2024/03/books-van-heuvelen.pdf_