The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present

by John Pomfret

In an editorial in the magazine Poetry, the editor Harriet Monroe called Pound’s work “the beginning of a search for the Chinese magic” that would save American verse. Western impressionist painting had already found “the regenerative influence of Oriental art,” she wrote. Now it was literature’s turn.

The 1920s witnessed the beginnings of an American craze for mah-jongg, the Chinese game of tiles, courtesy of an enterprising executive from Standard Oil. Mah-jongg occupied the centerpiece of bridesmaids’ brunches and charity luncheons.

Americans even gave Chinese names to games that had nothing to do with China. In 1928, the Pressman Company renamed a German board game Chinese checkers, and it also took America by storm.

moving pictures seized hold of the American imagination, Anna May Wong, a laundryman’s daughter born in Los Angeles in 1905, became the first nonwhite star in the United States.

Rumors of prodigious liaisons littered the gossip columns, but her most serious affair probably ended because California law prohibited whites and Asians from marrying. Nonetheless, in fertile US soil, Anna May Wong planted a commanding image of a sexy, alluring, and powerful Asian woman.

Wong was too hot for the Confucianist prudes and the equally prissy Chinese Left. She was held up as a warning to Chinese womanhood and branded an imperialist toady.

Nationalist diplomat was even partially responsible for Wong’s losing what would have been her greatest role, as O-lan in the 1937 movie version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. T. K. Chang, a Chinese consul based in Los Angeles, argued that Wong was not “Chinese” enough for the part; so a white woman, Luise Rainer, who would go on to win an Academy Award, played the role in “yellow face” instead.

If the American portrait of Chinese women swung between vixen and victim, its depiction of Chinese men was equally at odds with itself. In one corner crouched the dastardly Fu Manchu; in the other slouched the huggable Charlie Chan. Fu Manchu was the product of Sax Rohmer, a British author, and represented the apex of “yellow peril” literature, popular in both the United States and the UK in the early twentieth century. But it was Hollywood that turned him into an international sensation.

An agent of a secret society, the Si-Fan, whose tentacles penetrated from the English countryside to the White House, Fu Manchu was an Oriental wizard,

Manchu underscored the extent to which anti-Chinese racism was founded upon a fear of Chinese smarts.

Earl Derr Biggers always claimed that it was a newspaper brief about an opium bust that inspired him to conjure the character of Charlie Chan.

Biggers’s Charlie Chan spawned an industry—four novels, forty-seven movies, a comic strip, a card game, a board game (the forerunner of Clue), a radio serial, and a 1970s TV series with a dog named ChuChu and a young actress named Jodie Foster voicing one of Chan’s ten children. Chan embodied the stereotype of the wise, industrious, somewhat asexual Chinese man, despite his many offspring. Wrote Biggers of Chan: “He walked with the light dainty step of a woman.”

While American academics in the 1980s labeled Chan the creation of a racist America, Chinese in the 1930s hailed him as the first Chinese character portrayed positively in the West.

Pearl S. Buck influenced more people on the subject of China than anyone since Marco Polo. Her eighty books and countless articles and speeches were translated into 145 languages—

Published in 1931, her most popular work, The Good Earth, the first mass-market pocket-sized paperback in America, sold four million copies.

Building on some of the more positive stereotypes that already existed, Buck created a new China for Americans—less exotic, more authentic, and tethered to the land. Her transformation from a missionary who despised the “heathen Chinee” into their greatest advocate had a profound effect on American society writ large.

Buck lived the isolated life of a missionary wife in rural China. She scolded the Chinese for venerating their ancestors and for other “sins.” In letters to friends and family, she complained of her “constant contact with the terrible degradation and wickedness of a heathen people.” The Chinese, she pronounced in one missive, “are all thieves.” She condemned the infanticide that many women practiced. She pronounced herself unwilling, in a letter to her brother, “to have China considered as even a semi-civilized country.… She is a country given to the devil.”

Following the attack, Buck and her husband left China for Japan. They had wanted to return to the United States, but missionary boards in America, fearful that fleeing missionaries and their tales of woe would hurt donations, declined to pay for passage across the Pacific. As Adele Fielde had forty years before, Buck turned away from the church and found another passion: in her case, writing.

The Good Earth married the Protestant work ethic with Confucius.

The book’s success led to a dramatic makeover of Buck’s identity. She sold herself as a hybrid—more Chinese than American. She sold the book as a hybrid, too, a melding of American literary realism with tales from a seventeenth-century Chinese classic, The Water Margin. “By birth and ancestry I am American; by choice and belief I am a Christian,” she wrote, “but by the years of my life, by sympathy and feeling, I am Chinese.” Most striking, however, was Buck’s about-face on China. The novel ignores many of the social ills that had disgusted her a few years earlier.

Still, some Chinese critics were uncomfortable that Buck, an American, was revealing a country the West had never seen. It triggered a sense of shame and dismay, a feeling that China had somehow “lost face” because a foreigner had described it as poor.

Fu Manchu crept away. Evolving as Japan intensified its attacks on China, these images would prove crucial to China’s cause. Books and movies like The Good Earth, films about Charlie Chan, and those starring Anna May Wong gave names and faces to the Chinese on the eve of global conflagration.

The questions he raised—among them whether China could recapture its greatness if it limited freedom—continue to vex China’s leaders today.

Luo agreed with the argument—advanced by Liang Qichao and other thinkers—that China needed a “new people.” But he rejected the contention—promulgated by both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong—that such a transformation could occur only under a dictatorship.

Ever since the death of Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist Party had placed little faith in the United States. Germany had become the Nationalist regime’s principal supporter.

But in May 1928, as Chiang’s armies headed north from the Yangtze Delta to extend Nationalist rule, they clashed with Japanese troops in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. On May 3, Japanese forces slaughtered thousands of Chinese civilians and executed a team of Chinese negotiators. Chiang wrote in his diary that Japan would soon become China’s chief enemy. This realization compelled China’s leader to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors and resume the search for a special relationship with America.

The Nationalists redoubled their efforts to woo the United States. Officials from all the party’s factions descended on Washington, seeking money, better ties, and American advice. Within a year, of the sixty-odd foreign advisers in Nanjing, thirty-two would be American; only two were Japanese.

In 1928, Herbert Hoover was elected the thirty-first president of the United States. He was the first American president to have been to China before he entered the White House. Hoover had moved to China in 1899

Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry Stimson, was considerably more pro-China than his boss. Like his predecessor Kellogg, Stimson believed that the United States should become the first Western nation to treat China as an independent country.

By the late 1920s, the Nationalists had partial control of eleven out of twenty-eight provinces. Chiang Kai-shek was keen to continue the battle to unite China, fighting both warlords and Communists while simultaneously seeking to keep the Japanese at bay. On the ground, German and Soviet officers trained China’s army, but a ragtag band of Depression-era American stunt pilots, engineers, and salesmen taught the Chinese to fly. While official Washington juggled its support of China with its unwillingness to provoke Japan, unofficial America joined the fight on the side of Chiang Kai-shek.

the sale only if all the weapons—the machine guns and bomb racks—were removed. State Department officials were worried that selling weapons to China would endanger relations with Japan. At an impasse, the US bureaucracy kicked the decision up to Herbert Hoover in the White House. Hoover authorized the sale—weapons included. And with that, the floodgates were opened. China’s arms imports from America tripled in a year. From 1930 to 1934, China bought 478 tons of smokeless gunpowder—mostly from the DuPont Company in Delaware. United Aircraft Exports Company added one million rounds of ammunition, bombs, and other equipment for the planes. For the next decade, China would be American aircraft manufacturers’ biggest foreign customer. The arms sales underlined growing American support for the Nationalist government. But Hoover was clear; the United States would not challenge the Japanese

Tokyo sought to extend its control over Manchuria. Nothing Japan did in China’s northeast, Hoover said, imperiled the “freedom,” the “economic,” or the “moral future” of the American people. As the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst editorialized at the time: “We SYMPATHIZE. But it is NOT OUR CONCERN.”

William Langhorne Bond

In March 1933, Pan Am bought out Curtiss-Wright’s interests in CNAC and announced plans to link San Francisco and Shanghai. With a battalion of Douglas DC-2s, CNAC finally began to make a profit. In 1935, CNAC carried nearly twenty thousand passengers, more than fifty times the total in 1929.

Born in Nebraska in 1889, Floyd Shumaker was an early flyboy with the US Army Air Service. Arriving in China in 1929 as a representative of the Aviation Corporation of America, owned by the Douglas Aircraft Company of Santa Monica, California, Captain Shumaker drew up a 133-page report urging the Nationalists to reorganize their air force along American lines. He advised Chiang to build a series of airfields near the new capital, Nanjing, from which his air force could strike almost anywhere in China.

Another Yankee, Robert M. Short, came to China as a Boeing representative and was also engaged as an adviser. In the spring of 1931, Short was training a squadron of Nationalist fighters in “bandit suppression,” the term of art for anti-Communist operations. Then, in September 1931, the Imperial Japanese Army grabbed most of northeastern China, rolling over the Korean border and up from Port Arthur.

At the State Department, Henry Stimson advocated a tough response, including economic sanctions, but President Hoover wanted none of it. Trade

Wall Street also backed the Japanese regime. In the early 1920s and 1930s, J. P. Morgan floated almost $100 million in Japanese bonds freeing Tokyo to engage in military adventures.

But Japan’s population had doubled in fifty years. Some American officials realized that Japan needed an outlet for its people. Better to have them head to Manchuria, the thinking went, than to America’s West Coast.

On January 7, 1932, Stimson issued to Japan and China what became known as the Stimson Doctrine. He informed both sides that the United States would not recognize territorial changes executed by force. At the same time, under no circumstances would the United States deploy troops to defend Chinese territory.

On February 18, 1932, Japan announced the founding of a new country, Manchukuo, consisting of Japanese-held territory in northeast China. On March 27, 1933, Japan formally withdrew from the League of Nations, with its foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka proclaiming it “a day on which Japan set the world on the road to the establishment of a true and real peace.”

This time the American press championed the Chinese. Reporting from a hospital ward filled with wounded Chinese women, Victor Keen of the New York Herald Tribune accused the Imperial Japanese Army of “irresponsible hysteria or merciless racial hatred.” President Hoover dispatched US Marines to Shanghai but only to protect American lives and property. His bottom line was that America had no dog in this fight. US correspondents disagreed. “Surrounded by Marines from California, Texas and Virginia, I watched the Japanese bomb the defenseless city,” wrote Reginald Sweetland in the Chicago Daily News. The United States should have done something, American reporters insisted.

1932, it diverted $11 million from naval development to build up air power. That spring, T. V. Soong asked the United States to dispatch a mission to train Chinese pilots. The US State Department opposed the plan,

So Soong and Nationalist adviser Arthur Young proposed a scheme for an unofficial mission staffed by volunteers. The Commerce Department supported the idea because it guaranteed more sales.

Ultimately, the State Department agreed to a “civilian” mission. Colonel John Jouett, the commander of training for the Army Air Corps, led the team. Commerce Department officials quietly agreed to Chinese requests that their pilots be schooled in bombing, gunnery, observation photography, and close air support—not generally in the syllabus of a civilian flight school.

Jouett’s efforts were just one aspect of the Commerce Department’s plan to corner the China market. In 1933, it sent famed stunt pilot and speed ace Jimmy Doolittle to Shanghai to demonstrate another new biplane fighter, the Curtiss Hawk II.

mid-1935, the Nationalist air force had five hundred aircraft, most of them American.

In October, Prime Minister Koki Hirota piled on more demands: China was to abandon its policy of playing one barbarian against another; Japan and the Nationalists were to enter an alliance to suppress the Communists; and the Chinese government was to recognize Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo in China’s northeast.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been in office for a little more than a year, and facing the Depression, the last thing he wanted was to hurt the profitable trade with Japan. American citizens, Hornbeck argued, should be ordered to stop aiding China’s military. Sales of military hardware should be halted, too. China, Hornbeck wrote, should “stand on its own feet.” With that, America’s flyboys left China, Colonel Jouett’s mission ended, and even Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s American pilot had to return home.

At a time when Americans were wringing their hands over Japanese landgrabs in Manchuria, a piece of American legislation did almost as much to enfeeble China as the Imperial Japanese Army. On June 19, 1934, President Roosevelt signed into law the American Silver Purchase Act, which directed the US Treasury to buy silver until the price tripled. This obscure decree, long since forgotten, had no effect on the US economy, already reeling under the shock of the Depression. The annual American output of silver amounted to a piddling $32 million, dwarfed by peanuts and potatoes. But Roosevelt needed the votes of the senators and representatives from the silver states—Nevada, Utah, and Montana. In exchange for a multibillion-dollar subsidy to America’s mining interests, Roosevelt won their support for his New Deal. Still, the law claimed a casualty: China.