This is a valuable contribution to the study of Sino-Japanese and international relations of the early People's Republic. Between 1949 and 1971, despite the absence of formal diplomatic relations, China and Japan saw five rounds of trade agreements and the exchange of hundreds of industrial experts and technicians. By 1965, Japan had emerged as China's most important trade partner and in 1971 a third of China's imports came from Japan. Partly owing to the limitations of the Soviet model (which focused on heavy industry) and the later Sino-Soviet split, Japanese industries functioned as important points of reference conceptually and as suppliers of high-end goods and technology to China. In spite of the continued US-led blockade against China, the Chinese leadership under Zhou Enlai maintained a sizable trade with small and medium-sized Japanese enterprises (particularly those from Kansai) as well as with major Japanese conglomerates through a hybrid framework of friendship and LT (Liao-Takasaki memorandum) trade.

Methodologically, Amy King's approach is anchored on a four-part framework developed by political scientist John Campbell (“Institutional analysis and the role of ideas,” Theory and Society, 1998), with the goal of correcting scholars' tendency to view early PRC foreign policy through a prism of either pragmatism or ideology on the part of policymakers. Instead, King stresses the interaction between four levels of ideas (background cognitive, foreground cognitive, background normative and foreground normative) which determined the character of Sino-Japanese economic relations. While ideas themselves did not provide specific strategies for PRC leaders to adopt vis-à-vis Japan, King stresses that the identification of the four levels allows the drawing of causal connections between different ideas and outcomes. King observes that ideas were particularly effective in the PRC leadership's ability to engage the anti-US views of small Japanese businesses, and to legitimize to lower officials the government's engagement with a former (and latent) enemy against anti-imperialism's pride of place in the PRC's diplomacy.

King's study benefits in no small measure from her timely research at China's foreign ministry archives, which have been closed to researchers since 2014. Although early PRC–Japan interactions are currently underexplored in the English-language literature, King's work complements an important study by Liu Jianping (Zhanhou ZhongRi guanxi, Social Science Academic Press, 2010) on the influence of Japanese Communist Party leader Nosaka Sanzō on future PRC leaders in Yan'an, which laid the foundations of the PRC's non-governmental diplomacy towards Japan. As King highlights, many of the apparently contradictory features of the PRC's Japan policy were formed in this period. Importantly, the PRC's “mistaken idea” of Japan as a distinctly “Eastern” actor rather than a fully fledged member of the capitalist bloc, for example, existed simultaneously with Beijing's tendency to overstate the role of American imperialism in Japan, partly in a bid to engage and win over Leftist and non-governmental Japanese actors. Echoes of such contradictory frameworks can be found in China's rhetoric towards Japan in the recent Senkaku/Diaoyu conflict.

Yet, although they were clearly important in the early Cold War, broad similarities between Chinese and Japanese factor endowments and political and societal structures were first observed by the late Qing rulers, and in the 1900s the Qing pursued the first intensive programme of modernization modelled after Japan. Even into the 1930s, the dominance of Japanese zaikabō cotton mills in China meant that Sino-Japanese technical exchanges in the cotton textiles industry achieved the same kind of results as those described in King's work. While efforts in the 1950s and 1960s no doubt laid the institutional foundations for Japan's emergence as China's major trading partner in the 1970s, official recognition of the broad compatibility between the two economies predated the CCP's rise to power, and for that matter, the state-planned heavy industrial experiment in 1930s' Manchukuo.

Finally, in contrast to King's detailed elucidation of PRC views, one is left with a more equivocal picture of the place of pro-China Japanese politicians and industrialists' ideas in Japanese politics and society. For this to become a more genuinely transnational work, we would need to hear directly from the voices of Japan's pro-China politicians, technicians and industrial leaders who featured prominently in the narrative, and to explore the implications of their efforts for Japan's China policy over the long term.

Overall, this is a well-researched empirical study of China's interactions with Japan in the early PRC, and it will be valuable to any scholar or student interested in Sino-Japanese relations, international relations in the PRC and in postwar East Asia generally, the history of the People's Republic, and alternative development pathways in the Cold War.