Joyce Mao

My work focuses on the intersections between American foreign affairs and national politics during the Cold War era, with special attention to US-Asia relations. I am the author of Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the first book to look at the imprint of US-China-Taiwan relations upon the American Right after World War II. My current project, Porcelain and Steel: China in the American Economic Imagination, examines how perceptions of Chinese development influenced US grand strategy in Asia during the 1960s and beyond. It explores the historical foundations of Americans' deep emotional responses to the Chinese economy and asks what can they tell us about capitalism’s cultural dimensions and the fraught political and economic meanings of “modernity” after WWII.