Merle Goldman, a Leading Expert on Communist China, Dies at 92

In November 1974, a small group of American college presidents spent three weeks traveling through China, visiting universities, communes, factories and even the office of Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, who was still four years away from taking over as Communist Party leader. Though the United States had recently re-established relations with China, it was an insular, even forbidding place, utterly foreign to these Western visitors. Fortunately, the delegation had a famed Sinologist as a guide: Merle Goldman. A historian at Boston University, Dr. Goldman was still relatively early in her…

The Rise and Fall of the U.S.-China Economic Partnership

For more than a quarter century, the fortunes of the United States and China were fused in a uniquely monumental joint venture. Americans treated China like the mother of all outlet stores, purchasing staggering quantities of low-priced factory goods. Major brands exploited China as the ultimate means of cutting costs, manufacturing their products in a land where wages are low and unions are banned. As Chinese industry filled American homes with electronics and furniture, factory jobs lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese from poverty. China’s leaders used the proceeds of…

How Republicans Can Replay the Reagan Era

For a long time, longer than I’ve held this job, my advice to Republican politicians and policymakers has been consistent: It isn’t the 1970s or 1980s anymore. The ideas associated with Ronald Reagan’s ascent to power, forged in an era of Cold War and high crime rates, stagflation and sexual revolution, were responses to crises and challenges decades in the past, and the G.O.P. was doomed to cycles of failure until it devised an agenda more fitted to the times. The year 2021, though, is the first time a reasonable…