Suspended in 2025/26
PP412      Half Unit
Cold War II? Public Policy Implications of US-China Relations in the 2020s

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Relations between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China have been deteriorating since at least 2017.  This course will consider how far this deterioration should be characterized as a new cold war (“Cold War II”), and what it means for policymaking in the U.S., China and the rest of the world. It will take as its starting point a comparison of the current character of the Sino-American relationship with the superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union from the late 1940s until the Soviet collapse.  Key areas covered include: ideological differences, trade policy and tariffs, technological competition, export controls, limits on technology transfer, overseas aid and capital flows, infrastructure and energy investment, arms races, and diplomacy.

15 hours of seminars and 15 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Two graded essays (2000 words), one to be submitted halfway through Winter Term and one at the end.

There is no single textbook that includes all the material covered in this course.  Lectures and readings will primarily draw from journal articles.  Six books that will be used during the course are:

• Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (New York: HarperCollins, 2017)
• Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (Oxford: OUP, 2021)
• Eyck Freymann, One Belt, One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2020)
• Keyu Jin, The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism (New York: Viking, 2023)
• Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin, 2011)
• Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2015)

Exam (70%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Written test (30%)

• A timed 1 hour essay (30%), which students complete in class.
• A 2 hour in-person exam (70%).