ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter hints broadly at its conclusion, which is that U.S. policy toward the People's Republic of China (PRC) cannot be contained in one or the other of these pigeonholes. The proposition "engagement vs. containment" represents a rather shallow dichotomy, essentially an artifact of our television age in which issues are presented to an underinformed public in easily swallowed capsules of two- or three-minute durations. One result is indigestion, in the form of bad policy; another is a coarsening of discourse even among foreign policy analysts and operators.
