Summer writing project (Day Twenty-One)

I spent today reading instead of writing. I finished reading Stephen J. Hartnett's book, A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War. I'll probably have some more coherent thoughts about it later, but right now it's kind of late, so I'll only say a little bit about it (that maybe I'll have to correct later!).

A World of Turmoil is a rhetorical history, which is somewhat different from a "regular" history. Hartnett is a professor of communication rather than a historian, so some of the ways he approaches his topic are different from the way traditional historians would approach the same topic. For one thing, although the book covers the "long cold war" period from the end of WW II to the present, Hartnett doesn't cover the period comprehensively, but focuses on five "case studies" of communicative challenges faced by the US, China, and Taiwan: 

1. the period from the end of the Second World War to 1952 (the end of the Truman administration), when Chiang Kai-shek lost the Civil War with the Communists and escaped to Taiwan and the US separated the Communist and Nationalist forces as part of its involvement in Korea;
2. the beginning of the Eisenhower administration and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954-5;
3. Nixon's and Kissinger's visits to China and negotiations over the Shanghai Communiqué;
4. Lee Teng-hui's presidency, visit to Cornell, the third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996, and the Clinton administration's "Three Noes" policy; and
5. the Tsai and Trump administrations.

For these five case studies, the author focuses on how various communicative strategies (or lack of strategies, in some cases) taken by the parties involved resulted in confusion, mutual suspicion, and other challenges to peaceful relations among the three parties. (I'll say more about this at another point.) 

Another thing that is different from most histories I've read is Hartnett's conclusion, in which he proposes what China, the US, and Taiwan should do in order to have more peaceful and productive relations among themselves. I'm not entirely convinced that all of his recommendations are possible (he seems to think, for instance, that Taiwan should simply stop calling itself the Republic of China and should change its constitution, assuming that the CPC would be OK with that?!); at any rate, I haven't read too many traditional histories that end with recommendations for future action. (Maybe there are some?)

Anyway, that was what I accomplished today. Perhaps I'll get back to writing tomorrow.