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by
John Pomfret
In the 1840s, Emperor Daoguang tasked Xu Jiyu, the governor of Fujian province, just north of Guangdong, with writing a history of the Western barbarians. Published in 1849, Xu’s A Short Account of the Oceans Around Us lavished praise on America, and especially on its first president, inaugurating a Chinese cult of George Washington that would endure through the era of Mao Zedong.
Americans, Xu wrote, were “docile, good-natured, mild and honest.” No other country came closest to the Confucian ideal that “everything under heaven is for the common good.” Americans possessed what China wanted, he wrote: “wealth and power.”
First was Washington’s selfless dedication to his country, a rebuke to the widespread corruption in the Qing court. Second, Washington had thrashed the British, China’s foe. Third, in contrast to China’s sclerotic monarchy, where the emperor clung to power until his dying day, Washington’s return to civilian life served as a model of the cardinal virtues that Chinese sages had promoted from time immemorial. Just as Washington had mistaken the Chinese for Caucasians, Xu and his fellow scholars saw Washington’s virtues as Chinese.
the old mandarin conviction that China sat at the apex of world civilization no longer held true. China needed to look outside itself for answers to its quest for wealth and power. But most Qing officials were not ready for that perspective and in 1850, when Emperor Daoguang died and was replaced by a more traditionalist leader, Emperor Xianfeng, the court accused Xu Jiyu of “inflating the status of foreign barbarians” and banished him, along with other pro-Western officials, to the edges of the empire.
The signing of the Treaty of Nanjing between Britain and China forced American politicians to pay attention to China. Britain spurred the United States to demand equal treatment. No longer could the United States remain aloof from the interests of American businessmen and missionaries in China.
The Wangxia Treaty of Peace, Amity, and Commerce between the United States of America and the Chinese Empire set the foundation for American ties with China for more than a century. Fundamental to it were the premises that America required equal access to China’s markets and opposed carving China into pieces. Later, these ideas would be called the Open Door.
The US treaty opened the way for Westerners to participate in China’s inland trade, giving Americans the right to use Chinese ports to move goods around the country and to send their warships into Chinese waters. Ignorant of economics and the law, Qiying had little idea what he was agreeing to. He focused chiefly on keeping Cushing from traveling to Beijing.
Issachar Jacox Roberts,
The first Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison, arrived in China in 1807 on a Yankee ship and for months pretended he was an American before acknowledging his British citizenship. China was a reluctant convert.
nineteenth-century contemporaries were comfortable with their culture of Confucius, Buddha, and the Tao, and showed little interest in the holy goods the missionaries were hawking. In the first twenty-seven years of their missionary work in China, Protestant missionaries claimed only ten converts.
Roberts included—displayed an exasperation with, even a hatred of, Chinese culture.
While the first group of Western missionaries studied Chinese and hobnobbed with the upper classes, Roberts was drawn to the masses. He preached to a leper colony on the outskirts of town. His first convert was a beggar.
He was barely a mile from the foreign factories, but he could have been a thousand. To fit in, he donned a floor-length Chinese gown. His neighbors contributed to his wardrobe, donating Chinese socks and shoes. When aspiring mandarins flocked to Guangzhou for the annual civil service examination that year, some of them dropped by Roberts’s mission. Roberts had been told that they were implacable foes of his work, but they sat politely through Sunday services.
was always “the lodestar, the goal,” in the words of renowned American evangelist Sherwood Eddy, who spent thirty years preaching in Asia. Its market for souls remained as tantalizing to America’s missionaries as its nascent demand for goods was to American salesmen.
Peter Parker, the fourth American preacher in China, landed in Guangzhou in October 1834. A graduate of both Yale’s medical college and its divinity school, he was the first medical missionary to be sent abroad.
Through good works, they sought to convince the Chinese of the superiority of their faith. Parker opened Guangzhou’s first hospital, introduced anesthesia to China, and over his three decades in the country performed more than fifty thousand surgeries—all for free. In his application to the American Board, Parker described dual goals: disseminating “the blessings of science and Christianity all over the globe.”
The barely literate Roberts, on the other hand, went straight for the Chinese soul.
They were scholars, not bomb throwers. They wanted, in Parker’s words, to “heal” China, to help it become stronger and embrace Western values in the process.
Parker and his contemporaries viewed with alarm the arrival of the Baptist strivers who saw little good in Chinese culture and embraced the sword instead of the scalpel.
The Baptists wanted to cast aside the old China and create a new one, modeled on America.
Roberts’s colleague, J. Lewis Shuck, wrote to the Baptist mission in the United States: Parker and company “have no converts, no churches and no extensive militant missionary operations, yet they regard it as interference for Baptist missionaries to come to Canton or Macao. Interfere with what?” One thing all the missionaries agreed upon, however, was that China was sick. Even as Roberts thundered against Chinese idolatry on the streets of Guangzhou, Parker was at the forefront of recasting the Chinese image in the United States.
Hong asked Roberts to join his rebellion, propagate the Gospel, and baptize his followers. “Your ignorant younger brother, Hong Xiuquan, salutes you,” it ended. To have a former pupil in such an exalted position—the rebel king of China!!—presented enormous possibilities for China and for Roberts. “Never were the prospects for usefulness with God’s blessing brighter,” Roberts enthused to a friend back home. “They almost dazzle!… China will be revolutionized, Christianized, & a great multitude saved through these means.” Other missionaries shared Roberts’s enthusiasm, looking to Hong’s followers
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Roberts would spend the next year trying to sway Western policy in favor of the rebellion.
Issachar Jacox Roberts represented a major strain of thinking in America’s hopes for China: that it could be converted in one miraculous stroke into a nation like the United States. Such hopes did not die with the Tennessee evangelist.
Anson Burlingame bobbed into Beijing on July 20, 1862. The first American minister assigned to the capital, he arrived, accompanied by his wife, Jane, their two sons, and their six-year-old daughter, with no place to stay and a tiny budget. He also had no guidance from President Abraham Lincoln
He wanted China open for US business and for mission work. Seward gave Burlingame what Jane Burlingame called “carte blanche” to fashion a China policy along those lines.
The number of missionaries would jump from one hundred in 1800 to four thousand by the turn of the century, with Americans leading the way.
From 1860 on, the fires of a xenophobic, anti-Christian hatred would burn in many Chinese hearts, stoked by those in the upper class and others with bad memories of the Taipings.
The “Record” was the first major effort by the conservative faction in the Qing court to demonize the West; it would not be the last.
In June 1870, a story spread through the northern treaty port of Tianjin that French Catholics were murdering babies in an orphanage, touching off one of the worst antiforeign riots China had ever seen. Chinese attacked the orphanage and raped, mutilated, and murdered ten nuns.
In a letter to a friend in 1916, Mao had predicted that China and America would one day join forces to counter Japan. “We attack the Japanese army. The US attacks the Japanese navy,” he wrote. “Then Japan would be defeated in no time.” Like many of his countrymen, he had been inspired by Wilson and had placed his hopes in the United States. In the weeks following China’s betrayal, Mao founded a student association, organized a student strike, and established a journal, the Xiang River Review. In it, he poured scorn on the Western powers, including America, calling them “a bunch of robbers” who
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With the May Fourth Movement, Chinese intellectuals launched themselves on a crusade to transform their countrymen. They were convinced that something was rotten with being Chinese and searched for evils inside what they called their “national characteristics.” Here again, they drew inspiration from Americans. The most influential treatise on the Chinese in the late nineteenth century was written by an American. Arthur H. Smith was a missionary who fought on the side of the Union during the Civil War and in 1872 moved to China to preach for the Congregationalist church. He stayed in China for
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Smith wrote Chinese Characteristics, and it became the most widely read book on China in the world for more than thirty years. In it, Smith divided the traits of the Chinese into twenty-six categories including “face,” politeness, disregard for time, disregard for accuracy, an absence of nerves, and an absence of sympathy. Predictably, he concluded that the only way to “save” China was through Christ. Smith’s message that there was something wrong with the Chinese would later be labeled as racist by Western scholars. But it struck a chord with the May Fourth generation as they searched for the
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On December 16, Sun presided over an anti-American rally as the ships took up positions in the harbor. A day later, he released a letter, “To my friends, the American people,” that sounded like the lament of a spurned lover. “When we first waged the revolution to overthrow dictatorship and the corrupted government, we had America as our model, and we hoped we could have the help of our American Lafayette to achieve our goal,” he wrote. Instead, the United States dispatched warships to threaten an attack. “Has the nation of Washington and Lincoln denied its faith in freedom and taken to
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Starting in the 1910s, American money and ideas helped usher in China’s age of openness. Civil society developed, literature blossomed, Chinese universities grew in size and influence, and Chinese scientists collaborated with some of the keenest minds in the world. But, while private American initiatives supported the best China had to offer, the US government seemed stuck in a time warp—backing a series of warlord governments in Beijing. America’s inability to recognize the wave of the future in China opened the door to a country that would grow into its biggest foe: the Soviet Union.
Communist Party founder Chen Duxiu stressed that America was no exception. Anyone, he declared, who “advocates that America is China’s friend is a traitor to the Chinese nationalist movement.” On street corners, young Communists sermonized against “imperialistic foreign devils.” In June 1925, a general strike against all foreign firms was called in Guangzhou. Chinese working for Westerners were ordered to stay home.
cash. He also looked to America as a piggy bank; the Americans would dub him “Cash My Check.”
Alice Hobart found her views on China transformed by the Nanjing Incident. Alice had moved to China in 1910 to teach and had married Hobart, an up-and-coming salesman for Standard Oil of New York. By 1927, she had already written two books and had become an ardent admirer of American big business and a booster of America’s role as enlightener of the Chinese. But face-to-face with murderous xenophobia in Nanjing, she found herself doubting that America’s beneficence had done anything for China.
Hobart and thousands of Americans like her had expected China to take Western ideas and technology and go in one direction, but it was careening in another. Dashed hopes for China’s republican revolution dismayed America’s apostles of business and the Lord. Once believing that they could do everything—feed, clothe, cleanse, build, teach, and transform China—America’s missionaries now reckoned that they had accomplished nothing. “We cannot evangelize China. We cannot cure China’s multiplying diseases. We cannot educate her multiplying millions or feed them,” announced Frank Gamewell, the
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Chiang’s marriage to a devout Methodist sparked another wave of expectations among the missionary crowd, which had so recently lost faith in China.
Buck Clayton, and the Harlem Gentlemen, held court at the swanky Canidrome Ballroom throughout 1935. Clayton teamed up with a Chinese musician named Li Jinhui to bring a jazz sensibility to Chinese folk songs. The result, known as shidaiqu, or “modern melodies,”
American values worried Chiang Kai-shek. Though he modeled China’s new capital, Nanjing, on Washington, DC, Chiang was less inclined toward American ideals than Sun Yat-sen. Challenged by warlords and the Communist Party, he had little use for the American concepts of personal freedom or democracy. He valued loyalty above all.
Chiang told American reporter Lewis Gannett in 1926, “Thinking men in China hate America more than they hate Japan.” Japan talked to China in terms of ultimatums. “She says frankly that she wants special privileges,” Chiang said. “We understand that and know how to meet it.” But the Americans, he said, “come to us with smiling faces and friendly talk” but do nothing to help China. “Because we have been deceived by your sympathetic talk,” Chiang said, “we end by hating you most.”
The Communist Party had also fixed its sights on American liberalism. By the 1920s, the party’s cofounder, Chen Duxiu, who had once branded Woodrow Wilson “the number one good man in the world,” had lost his affection for the American Way. When he learned that US immigration officers had detained a group of Chinese students at the US border, he exulted. Let those Chinese suffer, he sneered, because “it is public knowledge that almost every single American-trained student opposes revolution, worships money, and idolizes the United States. The fewer such Chinese the better.”
Communist Party congresses starting in 1922 identified the United States as one of the main enemies of China’s revolution. It was a formidable opponent, the party noted, because so many Chinese were passionately pro-American. The party spilled vast quantities of ink trying to convince Chinese not to be hoodwinked by America’s promises. In a 1929 policy paper, the Communists charged that American missionary, health, and education activities were “only a disguise of liberalism.” Anyone who doubted that, said Chen Duxiu, “is a traitor.”
To him, American liberalism was an “extremely harmful tendency” that “disrupts unity, undermines solidarity, induces inactivity and creates dissension.”
With the dawn of the 1930s, influential Chinese began to take a more jaundiced view of American culture, too. American women in particular came under increased scrutiny. Once an ideal, they were now portrayed as extreme.
Chinese writers came up with a new storyline for America; it was too free, too loose, too wild.
Though China’s liberals have been airbrushed from China’s modern history, in fact from the 1920s to the 1940s, a group of several hundred men and women, many educated in America, became the conscience of their nation in opposing the tyrannical ideologies of the Communists and the Kuomintang, resisting Japanese imperialism, and advocating democracy. Some of China’s greatest writers and thinkers embraced the promise of American democracy. One of them was Lin Yutang.
Lin disagreed with the notion that the struggle for “national salvation”—to which both the Communists and the Nationalists laid claim—justified sacrificing individual rights or a civil society.
