In Fear Of China

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At the height of the Cold War, when the spectre of a rising China cast a long shadow over Western foreign policy, Gregory Clark's In Fear of China presented a bold and unflinching challenge to the prevailing orthodoxies of Western — and particularly Australian — attitudes toward the People's Republic. Clark, a former Australian diplomat with firsthand experience in Asia, argues with forensic precision that the fear gripping Western governments was not grounded in rational geopolitical analysis, but rather in deep-seated cultural anxiety, ideological prejudice, and wilful misreading of Chinese intentions. He systematically dismantles the myths underpinning Cold War China policy, presenting a portrait of a nation far more defensive and internally preoccupied than the menacing aggressor depicted in political rhetoric and mainstream media. What makes this work so compelling is Clark's rare combination of insider diplomatic knowledge and a willingness to court controversy, producing a text that reads as both rigorous political analysis and pointed moral critique. In Fear of China stands as a landmark in Australian and Asian political literature — a prescient corrective to Cold War groupthink that anticipated many of the foreign policy recalibrations that would follow decades later. For any reader seeking to understand how fear, rather than fact, has shaped international relations in the Asia-Pacific, this volume remains as urgent and unsettling as the day it was written.