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Moss Roberts, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing U.S.-China Relations, 1989–2000, Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 4, March 2002, Pages 1625–1626, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700766
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Our public discourse on China is a miasma of self-righteous rhetoric, and it has been since 1945. Overzealous China haters, “holier-than” human rights missionaries (“interest groups,” David M. Lampton aptly calls them), war-scare mongers, and purveyors of dubious documents thicken the air with their opprobrium. It is a peculiar nationalist obsession. The other nations of the world do not join us in making China a global scapegoat; neither can this bear away our sins in Asia.
Is there higher ground? Professor and director of China studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and director of Chinese studies at the Nixon Center in Washington, D.C., Lampton has written an even-handed, thorough-going study of the years following the April 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square in U.S.-China relations. Lampton provides effective briefing on every relevant issue. He begins with an overview of the salient “turning points” in the period 1989–2000 and then proceeds to take up each of the key areas of mutual concern: military policies, weapons sales, proliferation, economics, trade, human rights, property rights, labor questions, Chinese and American domestic politics, the Taiwan problem, and the Russia and Japan connections on both sides. Without concealing his nationalistic sympathies, Lampton is one of the small handful of visible figures in China studies who take seriously and try to make understandable a Chinese view on these matters. For example, concerning arms sales, Lampton writes that the
