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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Pomfret
The percentage of women in the Chinese population dropped from 6.4 percent in 1870 to 4.6 percent in 1880, relegating most Chinese men in America to permanent bachelordom.
In 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes dispatched a team of Americans to China to negotiate limits on Chinese immigration. On November 17, 1880, the two parties signed a revised treaty.
While the American delegation was negotiating in Beijing, three thousand white men surrounded Denver’s Chinatown and burned it to the ground. The short-lived era of free immigration from China to the United States was over.
In May 1882, President Chester A. Arthur, a Republican, signed the Chinese Exclusion Act,
Tightened progressively over the decades, the exclusion act would not be repealed until the height of World War II, when China allied with the United States against Japan.
Fielde surveyed 160 of her Bible women and found that they had personally killed 158 unwanted baby girls and not a single boy.
Where the Northern Baptists had ignored Adele Fielde’s death, the Southern Baptists fixated on Lottie Moon’s.
In 1896, two Chinese women opened a Western-style medical practice for women and children in Jiujiang, a small city on the Yangtze River in central China.
Shi and Kang would go on to found hospitals and clinics that treated thousands of women and children a year, inspire a generation of Chinese women to become physicians, and almost single-handedly create a new profession for women in China, nursing. They would be hailed as models for a new type of Chinese woman—independent, career-oriented, patriotic, and … single.
Hundreds of Americans followed Kahn and Stone to the Middle Kingdom to devote themselves to the cause of the new China. The work they did inspiring both Americans and Chinese is another example of the deep ties uniting the two countries.
Most Western missionaries were happy to preach to the Chinese but lived apart. They hardly touched chopsticks, and their social and material lives revolved around the Montgomery Ward catalogue, July 4, Washington’s Birthday, and Christmas. Howe was different. She mingled with the Chinese.
Mary Stone came into Gertrude Howe’s life a few years later when her father, a merchant and a Christian, sent seven-year-old Mary to Howe’s school.
By the early 1890s, Gertrude Howe had saved enough money to bring five of her best pupils to her alma mater, the University of Michigan.
In 1896, the two graduates and Gertrude Howe returned to Jiujiang. Stone and Kahn were employed as missionaries at salaries higher than local missionaries but well below white ones. Hundreds of cheering townsfolk greeted their arrival, and scores lined up for medical attention even before the women had a chance to set up shop. In
In 1897, the reformer Liang Qichao met Kahn and wrote an essay upholding her as a paragon to be emulated by the new Chinese woman. Liang praised Kahn’s unbound feet, her work ethic, and her love of China. He ignored Kahn’s Christianity and described Gertrude Howe, not as a missionary but as the traveling “daughter of an American scholar-official” who had just happened upon Ida Kahn.
Liang’s portrait of Kahn illustrated the reluctance among leading Chinese to acknowledge how much Western values such as Christianity had molded Kahn, Stone, and others like them. It
In the early 1900s, when large numbers of American women missionaries began coming to China, marriage was nearly universal among Chinese women. But together, American and Chinese women fashioned a new world that offered the latter the possibility of a career and an alternative to married life. Although American female missionaries were supposed to be priming their Chinese charges for a life of marital bliss with a Christian husband, the message became muddled because so many of the American women, like Howe, remained single themselves.
In 1906, Anna Stone died of tuberculosis. At about the same time, Ida Kahn left Jiujiang for another city, where she and Howe would live until they died several decades later. As
American missionary entered her life. Jennie Hughes was a red-haired American beauty. She and Stone spent the next forty years together. They shared a bed, were apparently lovers, and, as “aunties,” raised five adopted children.
Underlying Stone’s particular allure was a serious purpose. She had studied American ideals; now she wanted Americans to practice them.
Stone and Hughes ultimately left the Methodist Church and struck out on their own. In 1920, they founded the Bethel Mission on the then radical principle of Chinese and American equality.
Adele Fielde, Mary Stone, Ida Kahn, Gertrude Howe, and Jennie Hughes touched the lives of thousands of Americans and Chinese and hinted at the magic in the melding of the Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom.
That the then tiny State Department (it had a workforce of eighty-six people, many of them clerks) would even care about Asia underscored a sea change in the American attitude toward the Far East. A year earlier, the United States had annexed Hawaii. And in December 1898, at the height of the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley, moved by what he said was “Providence,” had ordered the invasion of the Philippines and seized Guam. China suddenly did not look so far away.
The Influence of Sea Power on History that only a mighty navy could provide the military muscle to support increased trade and national strength. Mahan urged Americans to turn their gaze toward the Far East as the primary locus of the coming world struggle. To him, Hawaii and the Philippines were the stepping-stones to China, a “carcass” destined to be devoured, he wrote, by Western “eagles.”
In economic terms, America and China had swapped places. At the turn of the twentieth century, China, which had once made one-third of all the products in the world, now manufactured barely 6 percent, while America accounted for nearly one-quarter of such output.
The National Association of Manufacturers, founded in 1895, pushed the US government to cut a waterway through Central America to speed American exports to the Far East. The Panama Canal would be completed in 1914.
American business also lobbied the US government for help in China.
American businessmen and strategists were responding to a challenge. In the 1890s, Germany, Russia, Britain, France, and Japan had all appropriated more Chinese territory. From the south to Manchuria, China was being carved up. “All of Europe is seizing China,” warned Henry Cabot Lodge, a senator from Massachusetts who represented New England’s textile magnates. “If we do not establish ourselves in the East, that vast trade, from which we must draw our future prosperity … will be practically closed to us forever.” Lodge and others demanded that America stop the partition of China.
Along with US business, the British government prodded the United States to do something for China. While England wanted to keep its Chinese colonies and concessions, it also sought to ensure that its merchants were not excluded from other parts of the Middle Kingdom. So Rockhill’s British colleagues approached him to argue that the United States, as the only power with no territory in China, was uniquely positioned to halt the country’s dismemberment.
Persuaded, Rockhill got Hay’s permission to draw up some notes on the relationship with China. Working out of the swank confines of the recently opened Holland House Hotel on Fifth Avenue at Thirtieth Street in New York, he reiterated what had been a consistent American stance since the Treaty of Wangxia of 1842 and Humphrey Marshall’s addendum a decade later: that trade should be open to all and that China’s stability was in the interests of the United States.
He earned the lasting enmity of railroad magnate E. H. Harriman when he refused to get the Qing court to open up the Forbidden City to Harriman and his entourage during a 1905 trip to Beijing. Rockhill’s aim instead was to use the Open Door to protect the territorial integrity of China, which he, like other Americans, viewed as vital to long-term US interests in Asia.
In late August, Rockhill sent his notes to Secretary of State Hay. On September 6, with President McKinley’s approval, Hay dispatched a text identical to Rockhill’s draft to the Western powers and Japan. One by one, the foreign powers agreed to an “Open Door” with China.
While Americans congratulated themselves on their moral fiber, the Chinese were justifiably perplexed. As in the case of the Burlingame Treaty, the Americans had not consulted the Qing court about the new policy. But once they digested it, the Chinese assumed that if the other great powers tried to slam the door shut, America would keep it ajar. Thus was born another great expectation. America’s commitment would be tested soon enough.
At 9:00 a.m. on August 15, 1900, twenty Chinese soldiers came to the door of an American missionary compound in a dusty county seat in central China and escorted two American families away. Every man, woman, and child from the township, Fenzhou, had turned out to watch the foreigners leave.
The Boxer Rebellion underscored China’s tortured and often violent reaction to modernity.
As the rebellion gathered steam, Western envoys took little notice. In Washington, William Rockhill assured Secretary of State John Hay on June 1 that the rebellion would fizzle.
Instead, the Chinese authorities chose to incite the rebels, providing them with officers and arms. After experimenting with reforms, the court of the Empress Dowager Cixi had swung in a more truculent direction. The Westerners must be eliminated, Cixi declared, or at least thrown into the sea. On June 5, the Boxers cut the railroad from Tianjin to Beijing. The Qing army joined their ranks and five days later, the telegraph lines were severed. The last cable from the US legation read: “We are besieged in Peking.”
On June 19, the Zongli Yamen delivered an edict to all eleven foreign ministers in Beijing, severing relations with the Western powers and Japan and declaring war on foreigners. The Qing authorities promised all the embassies in Beijing free passage out of the country. But when Chinese troops killed the German minister the following day, the Westerners decided to stay put.
Billeted at the American embassy to the south of Legation Street, fifty US Marines were tasked with stopping the Chinese from gaining access to the sixty-foot-high and forty-foot-wide Tartar Wall that loomed over the foreign ghetto. If the Chinese were able to scale it, the Westerners below would be sitting ducks. During one firefight, Private Dan Daly, a five-foot-six Irish American from Manhattan’s rough-and-tumble Five Points neighborhood, found himself alone behind a low stone parapet. As the Chinese attacked in ones and twos, Daly picked off two hundred of them. For his deeds, he won the
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On July 3, the mandarins in the south told Secretary of State John Hay that the United States was China’s only hope for stopping an all-out war.
Hay’s circular, of course, flew in the face of the facts. The United States was at war with China. Just hours before he had issued the note, US and British marines and Russian sailors had conducted a lightning raid on Imperial Army positions on the Tartar Wall, killing scores of Chinese Muslim fighters.
Preserving China was considered essential to the fortunes of the United States. The idea that a vast Chinese market awaited America’s merchants had penetrated deep into the minds of capitalist America. And the belief that only a unified China would ensure stability in Asia undergirded the thinking of Yankee strategists as well.
Reports of the rebellion dominated newspapers in the United States, overshadowing news of the upcoming presidential election that pitted McKinley, with Teddy Roosevelt as his running mate, against William Jennings Bryan. The New York Sun called the upheaval “the most exciting episode ever known to civilization.”
It was not easy for McKinley to spare troops for China. An insurrection was raging in the Philippines, and editorial writers at home argued that the United States, in sending an army to China to fight, was sinking to the level of Old Europe. But American business had made its position clear: it was America’s job to keep China open for trade, and so a military operation was required. With an election approaching in November, a probusiness presidency bowed to the interests of its favored constituency.
No sooner had they beaten the Boxers than the foreign armies proceeded to loot. German and French forces, which had barely engaged in any fighting, launched scores of punitive expeditions, robbing, raping, and slaughtering innocent Chinese.
In the midst of the havoc, Wilbur Chamberlin of the New York Sun got hold of a story that prompted a national conversation in the US about what Americans were doing in China.
Person Sitting in Darkness,” published in the North American Review, was an acid indictment of all the shenanigans that accompanied Western expansion: land grabs, unequal treaties, concessions, massacres, talk of “the white man’s burden” and “manifest destiny.” It raised several basic questions: Why did Americans feel compelled to “save the heathens,” especially the Chinese? Shall we “go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness,” he asked, “or shall we give those poor things a rest?”
As Earl Cranston, a Methodist bishop, told a congregation in Denver on June 17, 1900, the Boxer Rebellion was “worth any cost in bloodshed if we can make millions of Chinese true and intelligent Christians.”
New York, Chinatown sprawled next to the Lower East Side, forming a bond between Jewish taste buds and Chinese stir-fry. Sundays? Christmas? The breaking of the fast after Yom Kippur? American Jews flocked to Chinese joints. They were always open and did not discriminate. Neither did Chinese clubs. Jewish performers Eddie Cantor and Isidore Baline, later known as Irving Berlin, both made their debuts in Chinatown.
Today there are forty-one thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States, more than all the McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Wendy’s, Domino’s, and Pizza Huts combined.
