His arguments are at once compelling and thought-provoking. For example, Zhao emphasizes the guiding role of revolutionary ideology in Mao's foreign policy. But he also points out—correctly—that Mao was never short in the spirit of realism, evidenced by the fact that he never made a reckless challenge to the superpowers.

With his comparative analyses of Mao and Deng, Zhao put greater emphasis on the common features between the two men. Both, for instance, were committed to forging a socialist country, opposing hegemony and safeguarding national sovereignty and dignity, while stressing the consistency of the overall goals of national development.

These comments should prove extremely helpful to the international academic and policy research communities seeking to understand the continuity and changes of China's foreign policy over its recent history.

China-U.S. relations have been another critical focus of Zhao's post-1978 research. He has emerged as one of the few Chinese political scientists who visited the United States, and performed scholarly work there, during the earliest days of the reform era.

As a visiting scholar to the University of California at Berkeley and Pomona College, Zhao produced several influential essays about Sino-U.S. relations. He emphasized the importance of Sino-U.S. cooperation by joking that "as two great countries, neither China nor the United States can kick the other one off to another planet," and that peaceful coexistence was the only sensible way forward.

Zhao also stressed that, as China and the United States are the two founding members of the UN, both should continue to make more contributions to world peace and development. Many of his arguments, such as "lost historical opportunities," deserve great attention.

Rather, by giving three examples of lost opportunities in the history of the China-U.S. relations, his deliberate intentions have been to remind the public and the leaders of both countries of the imperative to seize the chance to develop mutually beneficial relations.