President George W. Bush's firm policy in reaction to important events around the world since he entered the White House in 2001 has triggered various reactions from China, which is a major topic in this book edited by two respected scholars. Bush reversed President Bill Clinton's policy on China, calling that country a "competitor, not a strategic partner," setting the tone for his administration's policies towards the communist state on matters ranging from Taiwan to missile defense. Such a reversal by the Bush administration is viewed with hostility by China while its leadership, which is in transition, has been trying to maintain an apparently friendly diplomatic relationship with Washington.

Bush's firm position began with the incident in the South China Sea involving a US reconnaissance plane and the lost of a Chinese jet fighter on April 1, 2001, just three months after he became president. In the weeks following the incident, Chinese rhetoric failed to sway the US into appeasing Beijing. Immediately after the incident, Bush renewed a policy stating that the US would "do whatever it takes" to defend Taiwan against any Chinese military aggression, a position that has been repeated while the Chinese leadership continues its protest against the US sale of weapons and anti-missile ships to Taiwan.

Then came the terrorist attacks against the US on September 11, 2001, an unprecedented event that forced a deep revamping of policy in Washington. So far, China has tried to cooperate in the US-led anti-terrorist campaign around the world. David Finkelstein, director of Project Asia at the Center for Naval Analyses, some very interesting insights on US-China relations. Finkelstein says the US has major worries about China in four vital areas: China's threats of use of force against Taiwan, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems, China's military modernization and China's attempts to throw the US out of the Pacific-Asia region so it can become the only regional power. He explains defines these four areas to give readers an understanding of the background behind Chinese reaction to US policy under the Bush administration. He says Washington and Beijing want to work out a mutually beneficial bilateral relationship, particularly in the arena of security.

"However, there is a deep-seated mutual distrust between the respective security establishments on both sides of the Pacific that will not go away very soon, regardless of the pragmatic steps each nation takes on the road to better relations," he says. US Air force Colonel Mark Stokes, who contributes an analysis on US development of the ballistic missile defense system and Bush's rejection of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, says that Beijing views Bush's missile policy as an implied threat to its own nuclear deterrence.

Stokes says Beijing's ballistic missile forces are a political and military "trump card" designed to foil any attempts by Taiwan to move toward independence and international recognition. He says Beijing fears that the US proposal of a missile defense pact would include Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, countering its own missile defense system. In turn, Stokes says Taiwan's interest in ballistic missile defense is expected to grow with Beijing's deployment of its defense system. China has taken measures to counter the US missile defense development and its leaders, in particular President Jiang Zemin, have embarked on prolonged negotiations with the US on limiting the capability of the US system. In part, what forces China to take a firm position on missile defense is public opinion at home, says Eric McVadon, a former US Defense Attaché in Beijing. Other Asian nations have also reacted to the US ballistic missile defense effort, but their reactions have been not as severe as Beijing's.