From one of the most prominent post-Cold War geopolitics experts and “a grand strategist to whom the Pentagon turns” (The Wall Street Journal), a probing and insight-filled look at the China experts who have influenced—and continue to influence—America’s policy toward its greatest rival.

No country or civilization is as big or as old as China. And in the minds of Americans whose job it is to contemplate international affairs, China has always been more than just the “ultimate place”: quite simply, it is the essential foreign policy challenge—one frequently thought incapable of being solved.

Enter the China Whisperers: American missionaries, travelers, journalists, linguists, and foreign service officers who, going back a hundred years, have been on the ground, fluent in Mandarin, and enamored of the culture. In the early and mid-20th century, these were the true China experts of the Western world. Some proved unwitting dupes, others showed their brilliance. What lured them to that distant nation? With its deep history and unstable present, China was something Americans could use both to fill their dreams and measure their own young nation directly against.

To this cohort of Americans, it seemed possible for outsiders like themselves to shape China and its destiny. And over a period of a few transformative decades they had front-row seats to the formation of both the Nationalist and Communist parties; crossed the Gobi Desert; searched out the young Mao Zedong in the wilds of Yen’an province; provided visionary analysis on the American predicament in Asia; bore witness to China’s World War II; and made invaluable contributions to journalism and diplomacy. But the China Whisperers may have gotten too close to the story. Washington rejected their counsel when they contradicted reigning ideology, and, tragically, these ground-level experts offered advice that was often ignored.

The ranks of China Whisperers have been filled in recent years not so much by nomadic journalists and explorers as by multi-lingual policy experts who’ve had the ear of the person occupying the Oval Office. Often, their voices have proved critical, counseling engagement over precipitous moves.

China Whisperers is the story of how Americans both have succeeded and failed to interpret China over the past century. It paints a full-bodied portrait of the drama of trying to understand a radically different and age-old culture—one whose rivalry with America constitutes the most dangerous element of geopolitics.