ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some major decisions in the history of Chinese foreign policy and some aspects of the policy process as revealed in these important cases. It presents few short case studies of important or telling incidents in the history of China's relations with the outside world, drawing some conclusions about the nature of the policymaking process from them. The Third Front was one of the most significant developments in the history of the People's Republic of China, but until the mid-to-late 1980s it was all but unknown in the West. In 1964, after reports from the People's Liberation Army General Staff Department's Operations Division discussing China's strategic vulnerabilities to superpower air power, Mao single-handedly changed the policies of China's emerging Third Five Year Plan. The chapter concludes with the likely evolution of the foreign policy making process and decision rules in the emerging post-Deng era.
