Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, China’s relationship with local Chinese minorities can be a mixed blessing. In Malaysia and Indonesia, politicians sometimes play on the Malay population’s fear and dislike of the Chinese minority. Vietnam today has “friendly” relations with China. Yet its history, from a local point of view, is mostly a story of a thousand years of Chinese rule, followed by achieved independence and periodic wars to preserve it; the most recent war of that type was fought in 1979. Kurlantznick does not ignore this fact, but he often depicts the charm offensive in unqualified form and then presents the caveats much later.

Chinese advances abroad, however, are as much a product of US missteps as they are of Chinese accomplishments. For all of China’s interests in acquiring natural resources and strengthening ties to its neighbors, dealing directly with the United States in a wide range of areas is China’s top foreign policy priority. It is no accident that the current foreign minister and his predecessor had both first been ambassadors to the United States. As Kurlantzick points out, China’s successes in weakening US positions around the world are often a direct result of mistakes by the US, ranging from unilateralism to its failure to even try to understand Middle Eastern societies on their own terms. I happen to agree with his generally very negative view of recent US foreign policy, but I doubt that non-partisan readers will find this a balanced critique. Yet his proposed changes to US foreign policy, which range from emphasizing multilateralism over unilateralism to rebuilding the US public diplomacy apparatus, are unlikely to be seen as controversial, except perhaps in neo-conservative circles.

While the points made in this book are not always argued as rigorously as one might hope, this is still the first book to describe in some depth the full range of China’s efforts to gain friends and exert influence on the rest of the world. Its descriptions and analyses are readily accessible to the general reader with interest in foreign policy, and specialists will learn from it as well.