The Lost Chance in China and the Rise of Cold War Populism offers a rollicking retelling of the fate of America’s diplomats stationed in China during World War II and the start of the Chinese Civil War, documenting how their efforts to find peace in China clashed with the anti-Communist network of right-wing advocates known as the China Lobby. Fueled by America’s end-of-the-war fury over the loss of China to Mao and the Communists, the on-the-ground experts in Asia lost the public relations battle to Cold War populists, who pushed a toxic version of public anger that built the rhetorical foundation of McCarthyism. Hartnett diagnoses the moment’s political battles by mapping a series of interlocking dispositions, emotion-based reactions that short-circuited critical thinking and empathy, instead feeding strident anti-Communism, xenophobia, and class-based resentments. Hartnett’s masterwork offers a haunting prehistory to our contemporary moment, when populism again stokes outrage and fear at the cost of nuanced international understanding.

Stephen J. Hartnett is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver. He is the director of the UCD College-in-Prison Program, served as the 2017 president of the National Communication Association, and is the editor of Captured Words/Free Thoughts, the annual arts and politics magazine. He has published ten books, including A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War (2021) and the coedited Imagining China: Rhetorics of Nationalism in an Age of Globalization (2017). His scholarship on international affairs has appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly, the International Journal of Communication, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, the Taiwan Journal of Democracy, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. His journalism on U.S.-China-Taiwan relations has appeared in SupChina, Public Seminar, New Lines Magazine, and Communication Currents. He has served since 2016 as one of co-organizers for five conferences in Beijing, one in Shenzhen, one in Hong Kong, and one online conference in Shanghai (during COVID). He has been awarded the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism, the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, the Association for Chinese Communication Studies’ Xiao Award for Outstanding Rhetorical Research, and the University of Colorado’s Thomas Jefferson Award.