This study, based on primary sources, deals with the linguistic development and polemical uses of the expression Unequal Treaties, which refers to the treaties China signed between 1842 and 1946. Although this expression has occupied a central position in both Chinese collective memory and Chinese and English historiographies, this is the first book to offer an in-depth examination of China's encounters with the outside world as manifested in the rhetoric surrounding the Unequal Treaties. Author Dong Wang argues that competing forces within China have narrated and renarrated the history of the treaties in an effort to consolidate national unity, international independence, and political legitimacy and authority. In the twentieth century, she shows, China's experience with these treaties helped to determine their use of international law. Of great relevance for students of contemporary China and Chinese history, as well as Chinese international law and politics, this book illuminates how various Chinese political actors have defined and redefined the past using the framework of the Unequal Treaties.

George F. Kennan is well known as the preeminent American expert on the Soviet Union during the Cold War and the author of the doctrine of containment. In Mr. X and the Pacific, Paul J. Heer chronicles and assesses Kennan's work in affecting US policy toward East Asia. Heer traces the origins, development, and bearing of Kennan's strategic perspective on the Far East during his time as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950. The author follows Kennan's career and evolution of his thinking as he subsequently became a prominent critic of American participation in the Vietnam War. Mr. X and the Pacific offers readers a new view of Kennan, revealing his importance and the totality of his role in East Asia policy, his struggle with American foreign policy in the region, and the ways in which Kennan's legacy still has implications for how the United States approaches the region in the twenty-first century.