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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Pomfret
When the Pickering returned for the hunters, it whisked them off not to New England—but to Canton, China.
In the early nineteenth century, the promise of the China market sent Americans journeying around the world, killing and harvesting in staggering numbers: six million fur seals; the pelts of a quarter million sea otters; tons of sea cucumber and ginseng; forests of sandalwood; millions of silver dollars, all destined for China.
Many Americans believe that their country’s ties to China began when Richard Nixon traveled there in 1972, ending the Cold War between the two nations. In fact, the two sides have been interacting with and influencing each other since the founding of the United States.
No problem of worldwide concern—from global warming, to terrorism, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to the economy—can be solved unless Washington and Beijing find a way to work together.
America’s first fortunes were made in the China trade from 1783 until the early 1800s and profits from that commerce bankrolled America’s industrial revolution.
The first American Christian missionaries arrived in China in the 1830s.
As Americans brought Christianity to China, laborers from southern China flocked to California in search of gold. By the 1860s they constituted the largest population of foreign-born people in the American West.
They laid half of the Transcontinental Railroad connecting the East and West coasts. With their grocery stores, laundries, vegetable patches, and apothecaries stocked with herbal remedies, they provided essential services without which the West could not have been won.
Mainstream Americans turned on the Chinese in the 1870s. Congress made them the first ethnic group to be banned from the United States when it blocked Chinese workers from America in 1882.
While some Americans hated the Chinese, others nurtured a deep concern with China’s well-being. Though
With the turn of the twentieth century and the dawning of America as a global power, policy makers in Washington took more interest in China and fought to keep the country whole, despite efforts by European nations and Japan to carve it into colonies.
In 1937, the Japanese invasion of China knit China and America closer together than ever.
But as the war progressed, America came to see its Chinese ally, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, as dictatorial, incompetent and, worst of all, unwilling to fight Japan.
We now know that the reality was more complex. Chiang’s armies fought so stalwartly that it was they, not the Communists, who sustained 90 percent of the casualties battling the Japanese.
From Deng Xiaoping on, every Communist leader has sent at least one of his children to the US to study, including the Harvard-educated daughter of the current president, Xi Jinping.
For those reading this book in China, the time is also right for a reappraisal of the Middle Kingdom’s ties to Meiguo, the Beautiful Country—China’s name for the United States. Communist histories have twisted the story of America’s two-hundred-year-long association with China. In the early days of the relationship, Chinese are told, the United States schemed to colonize China, acting no better than the imperialist powers of Old Europe or even Japan. They’re taught that American charity was a trick. The Chinese version of World War II airbrushes American sacrifices from the tale. China, not
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If there is a pattern to this baffling complexity, it may be best described as a never-ending Buddhist cycle of reincarnation.
Decades before Chinese labor built America’s Western railroads, Chinese capital laid the groundwork.
Americans in the China trade also became the nation’s first great philanthropists. Forbes bankrolled the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Low supported education for women and funded libraries and hospitals.
From seventy-five tons a year in the 1770s, the opium trade to China had ballooned to fourteen hundred tons a year by the 1830s. Already, it was sucking millions of dollars of silver from China’s treasury into the coffers of British and American trading houses.
Which mattered more, profits or principle? Was the goal to make money in China or to foster change? The battle continues to this day.
In 1839, Emperor Daoguang dispatched an official known for his uncompromisingly high moral standards to deal with the scourge. Commissioner Lin Zexu turned his sights away from Chinese drug dealers and addicts and trained them on the Western merchants. He proposed a barter deal, offering to swap tea for opium and a promise to end the traffic. When the Western merchants rejected it, on the afternoon of Monday, March 18, 1839, Lin ringed the foreign ghetto with Qing troops. Hand over all the opium, and legal commerce can resume, he said.
Before he withdrew from Guangzhou, British superintendent Charles Elliot visited American merchant Robert Bennet Forbes and demanded that the Americans also depart from China and shut down trade with the empire.
London. By early 1840, British traders were forking over more to move their goods up and down that ninety-mile stretch of water
we hold
would have lost millions. “My dear Forbes,”
The Burlingame Treaty, signed in 1868, pleased Americans because it promised to bring more Chinese workers to the United States.
Like the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, former secretary of state William Seward, with Burlingame the treaty’s author, imagined a merger between the United States and China.
By the time the treaty was signed, Chinese had been coming to the United States for almost two decades. In 1848, the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill near the Sacramento River touched off a flood of treasure hunters rushing to California. Southern China was so tightly wound into the web of global trade that the electrifying news of gold’s discovery made it to China’s coast only days after it hit New York.
number was 25,000. For thirty years, the Chinese made up the largest population of foreigners in the American West.
Even today, San Francisco is known in Mandarin Chinese as jiujinshan, “the old gold mountain.”
The first waves of Chinese were mostly men, and for decades, the ratio in US Chinatowns never dropped below ten men to one woman. It was less expensive to sustain a family back in China.
With so many men and so few women, the Chinese, when they could, married whites, generally Irish girls, who were equally low on the American totem pole.
In the beginning, white America welcomed the Chinese.
California’s press predicted that the Chinese would one day be on a par with whites. “China boys will yet vote at the same polls, study at the same schools and bow at the same altar as our own countrymen,”
At a time of severe labor shortages, Chinese toilers saved the West. By 1870, Chinese made up one-third of the populations of Idaho and Montana,
As laundrymen, cooks, and small-scale merchants, Chinese did the work that white women would have performed if they had been present in large numbers.
On May 10, 1869, on Promontory Summit near Ogden, Utah Territory, the golden spike on the railway connecting California with Council Bluffs, Iowa, was driven home.
The transcontinental railroad did not turn the United States into the global clearinghouse for Chinese goods. But that did not stop Americans from dreaming about the revolutionary potential of the China market.
The larger problem, however, was that by the early 1870s, European nations had stopped minting silver coins. So no matter how many trade dollars the US Mint churned out, it could not stanch the fall in silver’s price.
Once the American economy soured, Americans soured on the Chinese, as they had soured on the Irish several decades earlier. Everyday American racism made the Chinese an easy target.
Equally important, their unrelenting work ethic unnerved white Americans. A higher percentage of Chinese were employed than white men. The white response was to stack the deck against the Chinese. State legislatures passed laws to block Chinese entry into America or prevent those already in the United States from working. When those measures failed, there were lynch mobs, arsons, and murders.
That day, John Swinton, a pro-union editorial writer, published a letter in the New York Tribune calling “the Chinese-American question” the leading issue of the day. The Chinese, like blacks, Swinton argued, were not intelligent enough to live in a democracy. “It is a question not only for discussion and decision,” Swinton said, “but for action.”
Action came the next month, when Congress passed a new naturalization act that extended citizenship to Americans of African descent but excluded Asians, who were denied citizenship unless they’d been born in the United States. Mainstream America was switching sides on the Chinese question.
“Plain Language from Truthful James.” The poem—a mere 372 words—was a rip-roaring success. The doggerel, which would be renamed “The Heathen Chinee,” was translated into dozens of languages, set to music, reprinted in virtually every newspaper in the country, sold by the hundreds of thousands in illustrated copies, and turned into a Broadway hit.
Thousands of Americans “went for that heathen Chinee.” In Los Angeles on October 24, 1871, after two Chinese gangs rumbled over the rights to a prostitute, a mob of five hundred white and Hispanic men invaded the city’s small Chinatown. Sixteen Chinese were strung up on street lamps. No one was jailed for the crimes.
annual State of the Union address in 1874, Ulysses S. Grant became the first president to call for controls on Chinese immigration.
Americans of European stock had a love-hate relationship with Asian beauty.
Though prominent white customers—judges, politicians, lawyers, police officers, businessmen—skulked into Chinatown in search of illicit charms, in public they championed the crackdown on Asian women.
In 1881, the California legislature amended the civil code to prohibit marriage between whites and “Mongolians.” Six other Western states followed suit.
