Drawing upon fifty ADST-created oral histories and one from Berkeley's Bancroft Library, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker weaves together a wide range of interviews with key players in making and executing U.S. policy toward China since World War II. Interviewees included Arthur Hummel, James Lilley, John Stewart Service, Winston Lord, Marshall Green, Harry Thayer, Chas. Freeman, and John Holdridge. Professor Tucker provides clarity and continuity with her introductions and conclusions and arranges portions of interviews around particular issues in loosely chronological sequence.

What emerges vividly are historical events such as Nixon's trip to China, the Tiananmen Massacre, and the recurring Taiwan Strait crises, along with portraits of leading personalities in Sino-American relations such as Mao Zedong, Henry Kissinger, Zhou Enlai, Chiang Kai-shek, and Lee Teng-hui, among others. This rich array of interviews provides the context for understanding the otherwise baffling diplomatic interaction between the United States and China, shedding light on the circumstances under which difficult and crucial decisions were reached and revealing the background and biases of the people who made and carried out those policies.

Professor Tucker teaches in both the History Department and the school of Foreign Service at Georgetown. She is a leading authority on Sino-American relations and the author of Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949-1950 (Twayne) and Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945-1992: Uncertain Friendships (Columbia), which won the Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.