American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy (Routledge Studies in US Foreign Policy) [1 ed.] 0415659558, 9780415659550

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American Images of China

The United States and China are arguably the most globally consequential actors of the early twenty-­first century, and look set to remain so into the foreseeable future. This volume seeks to highlight that American images of China are responsible for constructing certain truths and realities about that country and its people. It also introduces the understanding that these images have always been inextricable from the enactment and justification of US China policies in Washington, and that those policies themselves are active in the production and reproduction of imagery and in the protection of American identity when seemingly threatened by that of China. Demonstrating how past American images of China are vital to understanding the nature and significance of those which circulate today, Turner addresses three key questions: • • •

What have been the dominant American images of China and the Chinese across the full lifespan of Sino-­US relations? How have historical and contemporary American images of China and the Chinese enabled and justified US China policy? What role does US China policy play in the production and reproduction of American images of China?

Exploring and evaluating a wide-­ranging variety of sources, including films and television programmes, newspaper and magazine articles, the records and journals of politicians and diplomats and governmental documents including speeches and legal declarations, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of US foreign policy, American politics, China studies and international relations. Oliver Turner is Hallsworth Research Fellow, University of Manchester, UK.

Routledge studies in US foreign policy Edited by Inderjeet Parmar University of Manchester

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This new series sets out to publish high quality works by leading and emerging scholars critically engaging with United States Foreign Policy. The series welcomes a variety of approaches to the subject and draws on scholarship from international relations, security studies, international political economy, foreign policy analysis and contemporary international history. Subjects covered include the role of administrations and institutions, the media, think tanks, ideologues and intellectuals, elites, transnational corporations, public opinion, and pressure groups in shaping foreign policy, US relations with individual nations, with global regions and global institutions and America’s evolving strategic and military policies. The series aims to provide a range of books – from individual research monographs and edited collections to textbooks and supplemental reading for scholars, researchers, policy analysts, and students. United States Foreign Policy and National Identity in the 21st Century Edited by Kenneth Christie New Directions in US Foreign Policy Edited by Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller and Mark Ledwidge America’s ‘Special Relationships’ Foreign and domestic aspects of the politics of alliance Edited by John Dumbrell and Axel R. Schäfer US Foreign Policy in Context National ideology from the founders to the Bush doctrine Adam Quinn The United States and NATO since 9/11 The transatlantic alliance renewed Ellen Hallams

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US Foreign Policy and the Rogue State Doctrine Alex Miles US Presidents and Democracy Promotion Edited by Michael Cox, Timothy J. Lynch and Nicolas Bouchet Local Interests and American Foreign Policy Why international interventions fail Karl Sandstrom The Obama Administration’s Nuclear Weapon Strategy The promises of Prague Aiden Warren Obama’s Foreign Policy Ending the War on Terror Michelle Bentley and Jack Holland United States–Africa Security Relations Terrorism, Regional Security and National interests Edited by Kelechi A. Kalu and George Klay Kieh, Jr. The United States, Iraq and the Kurds Mohammed Shareef Weapons of Mass Destruction and US Foreign Policy The strategic use of a concept Michelle Bentley American Images of China Identity, power, policy Oliver Turner

American Images of China Identity, power, policy

Oliver Turner

First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Oliver Turner The right of Oliver Turner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Turner, Oliver. American images of China : identity, power, policy / Oliver Turner. pages cm. – (Routledge studies in US foreign policy) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. China–Foreign public opinion, American–History. 2. United States– Foreign relations–China. 3. China–Foreign relations–United States. 4. United States–Public opinion. I. Title. DS775.8.T79 2014 327.73051–dc23 2013043519 ISBN: 978-0-415-65955-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77670-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of figures List of abbreviations Acknowledgements



Introduction

viii ix x 1

1 State of the art and conceptual framework

16

2 American images of China, 1776–1882

40

3 American images of China, 1882–1949

63

4 American images of China, 1949–1979

94

5 American images of China, 1979–present

120

6 American images of China: the Obama presidency and beyond

148



Conclusion

174



Bibliography Index

185 211

Figures

I.1 I.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2

San Francisco’s Chinatown China’s increasing military capabilities Eighteenth-­century chinoiserie bureau cabinet Contrasting images of nineteenth-­century Westerners and Chinese ‘Let the Chinese embrace civilization, and they may stay’ Fu Manchu ‘The Yellow Terror in all his glory’ The Brides of Fu Manchu Charlie Chan United China Relief poster ‘Is this tomorrow: America under communism’ ‘The marching Chinese’ The PRC enters the United Nations 1978 Time Man of the Year, Deng Xiaoping The Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square Contemporary Threatening China China’s imagined global dominance China in the 2010 US mid-­term elections

2 3 43 47 54 75 76 77 79 83 99 101 111 122 128 136 153 157

Abbreviations

ABCFM CCP CoCOM DoD DPRK IOC IP IR KMT MFN NPT NSC PLA PNTR PRC RFA RoC RoK SEATO UCR UN WTO

American Board of Commissioners to Foreign Missions Chinese Communist Party Co-­ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls Department of Defense Democratic People’s Republic of Korea International Olympic Committee Intellectual Property International Relations Kuomintang Most Favoured Nation Nine Power Treaty National Security Council People’s Liberation Army Permanent Normal Trade Relations People’s Republic of China Radio Free Asia Republic of China Republic of Korea South East Asia Treaty Organisation United China Relief United Nations World Trade Organisation

Acknowledgements

Writing a book can be a lonely business but luckily for me this one was developed from my PhD thesis, completed in late 2011 at the University of Manchester. As a result I had the privilege of being surrounded by people who made completing the project a sociable and genuinely enjoyable experience. My supervisor and mentor Professor Rorden Wilkinson provided every signpost I needed to make sure I didn’t get lost along the way. His intellect and expertise were invaluable resources over the years, but above all he was friendly, patient and invariably helpful. Today he is a close work colleague, motorcycling companion and good friend. My second supervisor, Dr Shogo Suzuki, performed a similarly admirable job of keeping me on track. Shogo’s knowledge, along with his keen eye for detail and improvement, were vital to the completion of my doctorate and consequently of this book. Eminently likeable, he is now someone I also consider myself privileged to know on a more personal level. In addition, I thank Professor Jeffrey Henderson; his original faith in me will always be appreciated. Professor Inderjeet Palmer gave me help and advice beyond that which he was obliged to provide throughout my PhD, and help and support in bringing this book to publication. My fellow PhD students Tom Gregory, Julia Welland, Jamie Johnson, Tom Maltby, Tom Houseman, Astrid Nordin, Kathryn Starnes, Simon Orth, Patrick Pinkerton, Jared Ahmad, Wei Yin, Ronan O’Callaghan and Guro Buchanan all made the completion of the original thesis a far more rewarding experience than it might otherwise have been. I am happy to still be friends with them all. Fieldwork in the United States was assisted by innumerable individuals, particularly at the Library of Congress to whom I extend my thanks. I also thank Jen and Ron Gravish for providing me with accommodation, food and above all a pair of friendly faces at the end of each sweltering summer day I spent in the deepest depths of some of Washington DC’s grandest buildings. I also thank everyone from Routledge who guided a naive and sometimes bewildered first-­time author through the publication process. Most notably, Pete Harris spared time, energy and genuine interest, which is very much appreciated. Nicola Parkin offered similarly valuable help and advice, especially in the early stages.

Acknowledgements   xi Above all, it is my parents, Anne and Clive Turner, who must be acknowledged. Their unwavering love and support of every possible kind over the years has, more than anything, enabled me to come this far. It is no exaggeration to say that this book is less a product of my own patience, dedication and hard work than it is theirs. This particular debt of gratitude is extended to my grandparents, Kathleen and Bill Turner and Minnie and Ralph Flecknell, as well as my great uncle Dennis Jackson. I also thank my brother Ben and his wife Charlotte, who I know are always there. Without their various influences and the countless ways in which they all helped and inspired me, this book simply would not exist.

‘At any given time the “truth” about China is in our heads.’

John King Fairbank

Introduction

In 2009, almost a century after first appearing in works by the British author Sax Rohmer, the evil Chinese character Dr Fu Manchu starred in a new novel published in the United States.1 Fu Manchu had ‘a face like Satan’ and ‘all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race’.2 He was portrayed as an enemy of the Western world and throughout the early- to mid-­twentieth century stories about him attained significant popularity among Americans. Numerous Fu Manchu books were written, and from the late 1920s feature films were released. In the twenty-­first century Fu Manchu continues to embody powerful and enduring ideas about a potentially dangerous China. Yet, he has always coexisted alongside alternative and more overtly positive imagery of that country and its people. In 1923, for example, Americans were first introduced to the good natured detective Charlie Chan, another fictional Chinese character who achieved widespread adulation. Chan was amiable and entertaining. He had assimilated to American life in a way Fu Manchu never could and he was on the side of law and order. The images Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan disseminated were exaggerated and conflicting, but both retained their appeal for many decades. Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan are examples of societal American images which have always represented particular truths about China and its people. Fu Manchu was a depiction of the ‘Yellow Peril’, the imagined possibility of invading Asian hordes from a distant and mysterious continent. Such fears had been in circulation for generations, and re-­emerged during the Cold War and beyond. Charlie Chan was the personification of a hardworking and law-­abiding model minority, another classification to which Chinese people had been assigned in the United States during previous eras, and one that similarly endured within future imaginations. The popularity of these characters today has diminished, partly because of the crude and racist stereotypes they advance. However, China and its people are still imagined entities in the sense that understandings about what they are remain contingent upon powerful and pervasive imagistic representations. Indeed, China (just like the United States) exists not as a pre-­given, pre-­discursive sovereign presence, but as what Edward Said called an ‘imaginative geography’.3 As such, while China is certainly a territorial physicality ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’, the reality of its existence has always been discursively constructed in fantasised forms.4 In short, ‘[a]t any given time the “truth” about China is in our heads’.5

2   Introduction Figures I.1 and I.2 help demonstrate this assertion. Figure I.1 shows San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of the largest in North America and the oldest in the United States. It is where American and Chinese cultures interact and a place which constructs China as, among other things, vibrant, welcoming and accessible. Figure I.2, in contrast, is a frequently reproduced image of China’s increasing military capabilities. It plays to contemporary fears of a ‘rising’ China which poses real or potential dangers to American security. Like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, these images are ostensibly contradictory, and yet both simultaneously advance particular truths about what China is. As Peter Hays Gries enquires, ‘what do you see? A cuddly panda or a menacing dragon?’6 James Mann notes that in recent times China has been reduced to singular and convenient representations by the American media, such as during the 1950s and 1960s when it was framed as a nation of communist ‘automatons’. Throughout the 1980s it was sweepingly designated as that country which was ‘going capitalist’.7 Certainly, nations cannot be accurately reduced to simplistic categorisations, and images contradictory to the logic they advance will almost inevitably circulate. Yet the fact remains that China, like any imaginative geography, has historically been interpreted in relatively stable and stereotypical forms. This arena of enquiry has attracted comparatively little attention within the International Relations (IR) discipline in particular. However, to neglect to interrogate how China’s identity is produced and established is to remain ignorant to the power of representation in continuously constructing and reconstructing a China of American design. It is also to ignore how American images of China

Figure I.1  San Francisco’s Chinatown (David Yu Photography).

Introduction   3

Figure I.2  China’s increasing military capabilities (Thompson Reuters).

are inextricable from the formulation and enactment of Washington’s foreign policies towards China. This book is designed to reveal not only what American representations of China have been, but also how they have always created particular realities within which US China policies have been made possible while potential alternatives have been dismissed. Studies of US China policies have traditionally focused primarily – or even exclusively – upon the material motivations behind them. Sino-­US relations, however, should not only be explored in overtly material terms in order to assess why particular events and actions happened; it is also important to achieve a complementary understanding of the ideas which reveal how they were able to happen in the first place. Three examples from history serve to clarify this point: 1

In the mid-­nineteenth century many American traders, frustrated by barriers to China’s potentially lucrative markets, supported the British-­led opium wars against the Chinese designed to ‘open up’ the country to trade. After the war Washington sought a treaty with Beijing on terms as favourable as those secured by the British, against which the Chinese protested. The question which arises is how could American traders support a colonial power in its war with China, and how could their government seek a treaty introduced by force, when the United States had supposedly been founded as a reaction to imperial and colonial practice? While not unimportant, material forces alone do not provide a satisfactory answer; the desire for Americans to

4   Introduction

2

3

increase trade with China, and the military capabilities of the West to realise that desire, are only part of the story. Left unexplained is how it was possible for the self-­proclaimed anti-­imperialist United States to embark upon an ostensibly imperialist project, and how the consensus could be that such actions were logical, necessary and justifiable. An examination of nineteenth-­century American images of China provides a more complete understanding of these events. As shown in Chapter 2, China was widely represented as a backward and anachronistic land and people in need of Western intervention. It was considered to exist beyond the limits of the imagined civilised world, and Western traders sought an end to what they deemed unnecessary trade restrictions and a resistance to modernisation. It was understood that the introduction of Western values there would not only benefit Americans and Europeans, but also the Chinese themselves, who might eventually become a more enlightened race. China had to change; there was no alternative. This was the reality within which American traders could support an overtly imperialist war against China, and in which the US government could justify a treaty almost identical to that secured by the British. Following its establishment in 1949, the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) became the subject of a containment policy by successive American administrations. Throughout much of the early Cold War period it was understood that China threatened American security, and Washington rejected diplomatic relations with Beijing. Taiwan was instead recognised as the official representative of China. Here we can similarly ask how such a policy approach was made possible, when the PRC accounted for a fifth of the world’s population and when the government in Taiwan was repeatedly denounced by Washington as corrupt and dictatorial. As shown in Chapter 4, in 1949 mainland China became governed by a communist regime just as fears about the spread of global communism were becoming entrenched within the United States. However, communism itself does not represent a threat. It requires the understanding that it presents a threat to non-­communist societies.8 The PRC was therefore imagined as a threatening bastion of communist values broadly anathema to those of the democratic-­ capitalist United States, and thus ‘Red China’ challenged the identity of America. The simultaneous representation of Taiwan as a non-­communist member of the free world, and one also endangered by communist expansion, completed the construction of a powerful imagined reality. The material capabilities of the PRC were not inconsequential, but they were perceived as unquestionably threatening because of particularly powerful understandings about communism. Within this reality Washington could legitimately afford diplomatic recognition to an otherwise unsavoury regime in Taiwan, while encouraging the isolation of the PRC from international affairs. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Washington adopted a more conciliatory approach towards China, re-­establishing diplomatic relations and intensifying political, economic and cultural exchanges. In this case we should once

Introduction   5 again enquire not just why the United States pursued a strategy of rapprochement with China, but how that strategy was made possible when its material realities remained broadly identical to the Cold War period in which it had been perceived as such a danger to US security. From the mid-­1960s American representations of China began to evolve. The American government ceased referring to the PRC as communist and China’s new premier Deng Xiaoping was widely admired. Deng was seen as a moderniser, and one seemingly intent on making China ‘more American’. The PRC was still communist and its economic and military capabilities were largely unchanged. Crucially, however, it was now constituted by different ideas. As shown in Chapters 4 and 5, the PRC came to exist in American imaginations as less threatening and more familiar, and Washington could rationalise an alternative policy approach. For decades Red China had been seen as a non-­member of the civilised world and ostracised and isolated accordingly. Only through alternative understandings about China could the US engage in more cooperative relations with a land and a people that it had so recently marginalised. Once again, although valuable, overtly material analyses of US China policy are exposed as incomplete. Washington’s actions were fundamentally reliant upon the circulation of particular truths about China and the constructed realities in which they were advanced.

The argument This book advances three principal and interrelated arguments: 1

Across the duration of Sino-­US relations, powerful societal images of China have always provided truths and realities about that country and its people within the United States. Warren Cohen is representative of much of the relevant literature when he describes the United States’ historical relations with China as ‘schizophrenic’, with ‘a pattern of alternating highs and lows’.9 Certainly, Amer­ ican images of China have shifted quickly and dramatically in terms of their relative positivity and negativity at given moments. However, this book shows that they have also endured as more powerful underlying assumptions about China’s identity across extended temporal periods. Moreover, and as the apparently irreconcilable Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan dichotomy demonstrates, China at any time has had the potential to exist in varying and seemingly contradictory ways. In the earliest years of Sino-­ American contact in the eighteenth century, for example, China was regularly idealised as a distant land of romance, mystery and exoticism. It was also imagined as a place of commercial and religious opportunity. The ‘backward’ customs Westerners encountered in China additionally ensured that Americans quickly regarded that country as fundamentally uncivilised. Particularly after non-­White Chinese immigrants began entering the United

6   Introduction States from the middle of the nineteenth century, it was deemed a threat to the foundations of White America. As will be shown, from these understandings emerged the respective identity constructions of Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China. It is argued that these constructions have remained especially stable and enduring across the duration of Sino-­US relations. The presence of each within American imaginations has ebbed and flowed, but none has ever disappeared completely and each has retained the capacity for resurgence. This analysis also demonstrates that all American images of China, whether enduring or not, have been produced in part from understandings about the United States itself. The four key constructions of China identified above, however, have endured particularly prominently because they are rooted within some of the most intrinsic elements of American identity. Like those of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, their apparent contradictions are therefore nullified by shared roots in American identity. The fundamental logic each advances has remained, and, in many ways, they exist as vividly today as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The argument, then, is not that American images of China represent objective observations of that country and its people. It is that they have always been subjective constructions of American design. Neither do they merely constitute assessments of China’s relative favourability (or otherwise) at given moments. They also exist as understandings of identity which have remained stable beneath comparatively superficial shifts of attitudes and opinion. This is best described with an example. As noted earlier, American imagery of China throughout much of the 1980s was overtly positive in nature. This remained the case until the 1989 ‘massacre’ in Tiananmen Square, which ensured a rapid and dramatic shift to more overtly negative American perceptions of China (see Chapter 5). However, the images which circulated around this time were in many ways continuations of those which had been advanced throughout the years, decades and even centuries beforehand. Specifically, it was considered that the violent suppression of an apparently Western-­style movement for democratic and capitalist change was evidence that China remained beyond the imagined civilised world. Uncivilised China became a resurgent construction because it was understood that the country had once again failed to conform to American standards of civilisation. Thus, while images of China had evolved to reflect new circumstances, for the most part they shifted within familiar boundaries of reference. This book also argues that societal American images of China have traditionally, and more broadly, provided the truth and reality that it exists as an inferior or unequal land and people. This has not been an historically uncontested or uniform understanding. Nonetheless, even today, while China is rarely explicitly referred to as inferior the expectation remains that it should conform to the superior values and characteristics of American identity, such as democracy and capitalism. It is shown that constructions of

Introduction   7

2

Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China have variously been inextricable from this understanding. It is also demonstrated that China’s imagined inferiority, or unequal status, has frequently been articulated through racial discourse and imagery. The assertion is not that Amer­ ican society has ever been uniquely racist or xenophobic; it is that race has historically been an especially powerful site of identity construction from which images of a non-­White China have been produced and reproduced in relation to a White United States. Along with presumptions of China’s inferiority, the issue of race has been a more prominent idea at particular moments than at others. However, both have been active within the formulation of US China policy at numerable historical junctures, often alongside the four most stable and enduring constructions of China’s identity outlined above. American images of China have always been central to the formulation, enactment and justification of US China policy in Washington. As examined in Chapter 1, the relevant literatures have commonly neglected to inform upon the significance of historical and contemporary American images of China to US foreign policy towards that country. It is argued here that the former have always been inextricable from every stage of the formulation, enactment and justification of the latter. US China policy, in other words, has consistently been enabled and legitimised by powerful images which have worked to determine the boundaries of political possibility. As already noted, this analysis shifts from a concern with the types of ‘why’ questions that have been so frequently posed in the past, to ‘how’ questions which provide new avenues of exploration. ‘Why’ questions assume that particular policies and practices can happen by taking for granted the identities of the actors involved.10 For example, why did nineteenth-­century American traders support the British in their conflicts with China, and why did their government subsequently seek a treaty with the Chinese? ‘How’ questions, meanwhile, investigate the production of identity and the ways in which this process ensures that selected practices can be enacted while others can be precluded.11 For example, how could a self-­proclaimed anti-­imperialist nation engage in ostensibly imperialist policies towards China in the nineteenth century and consider those policies legitimate? This book does not make claims of cause and effect, of causal linkages between imagery and action. Rather, it is understood that the power of imagery lies primarily in its ability to circulate and become truth so that certain courses of policy are enabled whether its intended purpose was to facilitate action or not. As such, this book reveals the specific historical conditions within which US China policies have occurred through an analysis of the political history of the production of truth.12 It argues that while the US has traditionally dominated its material relations of power with China through superior economic and military capabilities, it has also been dominant through the power of representations to establish truths about that country and its people and enact and legitimise policies accordingly.

8   Introduction

3

Material forces are therefore of core significance to this analysis. However, it is shown that the nature and degree of that significance has always been contingent upon particular ideas which give those forces meaning. Crucially, it is argued that the types of comparatively more stable and enduring imagery described above have always proven more significant in this regard. The ‘anti-­imperialist’ United States of the nineteenth century, for example, could justify imperialist practises towards Uncivilised China (as well as Opportunity China) during the opium wars because it was understood that it had to be brought into the civilised world. In the 1970s and 1980s Washington’s more conciliatory approach towards the PRC was similarly enabled principally by representations of a less uncivilised and less threatening China than had seemingly existed in the recent past. It is thus shown that key constructions of China have functioned in the service of policy not merely through an increasing prominence within American imaginations, but in some cases by virtue of their retreat. Moreover – and of key importance – it is demonstrated that twenty-­first century US China policies frequently rely upon images which emerged and became established during the very earliest encounters between Americans and Chinese. US China policy has always been active in the production and reproduction of imagery and in the reaffirmation of the identities of both China and the United States. Chapter 1 shows that the key literatures have often neglected to show how US China policy itself is active within the dissemination of imagery. As already established, material forces are always attributed particular meanings and so acts of US China policy inevitably work to reproduce those meanings. Ultimately, they reaffirm the identities of both China and the United States. This was evident during the Cold War, for example, when Washington’s containment policy continually reinforced understandings of Uncivilised (and Threatening) China in relation to the more civilised United States. The texts of Washington’s containment strategy functioned within the production of imagery and in the reconfirmation of China’s foreignness, as the PRC was marginalised beyond the limits of the ‘free’ and ‘civilised’ world. The argument, then, is that US China policies reproduce the discourses which make China foreign and which operate to enable them in the first place.13 The cycle of separation and difference is perpetuated and American images of China and US China policy are exposed not merely as inextricable, but also as mutually reinforcing. The Cold War containment of the PRC is an example of an episode which exposes a second, but interrelated, function of US China policy: the protection of American identity when threatened by that of China. This book shows that at moments when the identity of the United States has appeared most in danger, American foreign policy has worked to shield its most intrinsic values.14 China’s Cold War containment was designed primarily in response to the expansion of communism into Asia. However – and to reiterate – communism alone does not represent a physical threat. To a

Introduction   9 significant extent it was the representation of communist China as an immediate danger which meant that the identity of the United States itself had to be defended. Ultimately, US Cold War policies reproduced imagery of China as a ‘Red’ communist threat in order to secure the core values of the United States.

Research design Societal American images of China utilised for this analysis were drawn from a combination of primary and secondary sources which include (but are not limited to) films and television programmes; newspaper and magazine articles; the records and journals of politicians, diplomats, missionaries and traders; academic volumes and other publications; and various US governmental documents including formal treaties, acts, speeches/announcements and declarations. Thus they are not restricted to those produced by ‘elite’ or otherwise influential members of American society such as politicians, academics or journalists. Rather, the emphasis is on the possible complicity of any individual or institution within the social construction of China. As Antonio Gramsci argued, while not everyone functions as such, anyone has the potential to be considered an intellectual. To qualify one does not simply display oratory ‘eloquence’, but influences the flow of ideas by organising and persuading others, adopting an active role in society.15 Gramsci’s intention was for these ‘organic intellectuals’ to lead the emancipation of the working class. Yet, his insistence on their participation within the formation of everyday knowledge ensures their significance beyond moments of dramatic uprising. Anyone can engage, however insignificantly, in the construction of the world around them and in the reproduction of authoritative ideas.16 From this understanding, images of China and its people can be considered relevant not because they have been disseminated by ‘great thinkers’, but because they have been complicit (to varying degrees) in both the societal construction of China and in the continuous reconfirmation of truths which have been, and in some cases remain, accepted and assumed.17 The constructions of Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China are the most notable examples of this process identified here, along with other pertinent ideas such as China as an unequal of the United States. An unavoidable consequence of such imagistic inclusivity is that the potential range of sources from which representations can be drawn is almost limitless. Edward Said argued that powerful and consequential Western discourses of the East have historically been advanced by poets, philosophers, political theorists and imperial administrators, among many others.18 Innumerable categories of individual have been active in the production and circulation of American imagery of China, but for the purposes of this analysis societal images are drawn from three institutions: the journalistic media; the mass media; and art and literature. These are considered to provide a useful base from which the research questions of the book can be addressed. Each is briefly examined below.

10   Introduction The journalistic media The size, wealth and influence of the journalistic media, particularly within modern democratic societies, is such that an examination of societal imagery of any given subject(s) would arguably be incomplete in its absence. For pragmatic reasons, the American journalistic media is limited here to print media in the form of national newspapers and magazines, as well as their manifestations as online media in the contemporary period. Especially today, our interpretations of the world are frequently provided by powerful media organisations which frame the world in selected ways.19 Rather than replicating reality, those organisations actively construct it.20 Accordingly, the American journalistic media is considered to have been a historically significant institution within the production of truths about China and the Chinese, and to the construction of realities within which US China policy has been enacted. Of course, analysing the print media is not unproblematic. Early American newspapers were often ephemeral, with life spans of only a few months or years, and each claimed only a modest audience.21 In 1833, for instance, The New York Courier and Enquirer was the most widely read newspaper in the country with a circulation of just 4,500. Few other titles boasted half that figure.22 Until the twentieth century most American magazines also enjoyed limited circulation and were short-­lived.23 As far as it is possible, this book utilises publications deemed significant in terms of their image maker/disseminator role throughout some or all of the time periods covered. This strategy is adopted regardless of size or influence, particularly when analysing eighteenth and nineteenth century images. Since their emergence and the relative increase in circulation and impact, notable titles including the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times are explored throughout the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries (see bibliography for a full list of referenced journalistic publications). The mass media Definitions of the mass media abound, although Alan Wells’ compilation of television, film, radio and recording (along with newspapers and magazines) gives useful substance to a problematic term.24 Explicating the influence of the mass media is a similarly problematic task, but so ingrained is the assumption that it shapes our views of the world that the communication literature has ceased to question whether it has effects or not.25 The role of the American mass media in constructing China’s identity is considered analytically significant here, particularly in the modern era when it is argued that the American public probably devotes more time to interaction with it than to any other activity, including employment.26 It is beyond the scope of this book to appraise the relative influence of each mass media component within that identity construction process. Hence, television, film and radio are variously examined on the basis that their collective assemble represents a valuable component within a comprehensive analysis of American imagery of China, without becoming unnecessarily distracted by the effectual nuances of each constituent part.

Introduction   11 Art and literature The role of art in the formation of American images of China (and Asia) has been examined in the literature.27 As Raymond O’Connor explains, art represents a method of communicating culture directly, without fear of its message becoming polluted by the biases of others.28 It provides uninterrupted access to distant cultures and people and is shown in this analysis to have been strongly complicit within the construction of China and its people. This was particularly true during the earliest periods of Sino-­American relations when chinoiserie, or mock-­Chinese goods (see Chapter 2), were comparatively popular and influential before the availability of widespread alternative visual imagery such as film and television. Throughout history Western literature has contributed heavily to the production of European and non-­European identities and, ultimately, to global balances of power and the establishment of colonial authority.29 American literature has always been highly active in the production and reproduction of China’s identity.30 Fictitious, as much as non-­fictitious, literatures on China are deemed important in this analysis since what is crucial is their ability to create realities which are accepted as true. The success of Pearl Buck’s 1931 novel The Good Earth is a pertinent example (see Chapter 3). Historical and contemporary American images of China may have been factual, informed and sophisticated, or they may not. What matters is that they have been perceived to be these things because they were produced, reproduced and institutionalised. As Colin MacKerras observes, images have never been synonymous with reality: ‘at all times there is an infinity of realities’.31

Overview of the book Chapter 1: State of the art and conceptual framework Chapter 1 begins with a brief review of the relevant literatures, the purpose of which is two-­fold. First, it examines the contributions of authors which collectively represent the existing body of understanding from which this book departs. Second, it establishes the underlying rationale for the analysis by elaborating upon the most notable silences of the scholarly contributions to which it is designed to speak. The chapter then unpacks the conceptual and theoretical framework which informs the arguments made. It explicates what is meant by imagery, how it is produced and circulated and how American images of China have always emerged from understandings about the United States itself. It also explains how those images enable and legitimise US China policy. Finally, it explains the role of US China policy itself in the production and reproduction of imagery and in the protection of American identity when seemingly threatened by that of China.

12   Introduction Chapter 2: American images of China, 1776–1882 Chapter 2 begins the empirical analysis of American images of China and its people during the period 1776–1882. It shows that after Idealised China became established within American imaginations, Uncivilised China became more dominant from the early- to mid-­nineteenth century. Throughout this period Chinese were the subjects of American racism and assumptions of their inherent inferiority were widespread. US China policy was infrequent and low-­key, but Uncivilised and also Opportunity China overlapped to enable American support for the British-­led opium wars of the 1830s to 1860s. The chapter also reveals how Threatening China later became pervasive in response to the arrival of Chinese immigrants to the United States from the late 1840s. It is demonstrated that, along with Uncivilised China, this identity construction was active within (among other things) the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Chapter 3: American images of China, 1882–1949 Chapter 3 continues the analysis of American images of China, across the period 1882 to 1949. It shows how the United States’ growing material capabilities allowed it to exert increasing influence abroad. Images of China were produced from understandings of the US as a new global power and that the former required its help. Idealised and Opportunity China circulated, but images of Uncivilised China in particular worked to legitimise Washington’s involvement in quashing the Boxer Rebellion of 1901, as well as demands that the new Republic of China satisfy numerous prerequisites for diplomatic recognition. It is shown that American representations of China became more overtly positive around the time of the Second World War as the two nations fought together as allies. Still, underlying assumptions of China’s inferiority endured and created a reality within which Europe could be afforded comparatively more support. Chapter 4: American images of China, 1949–1979 Chapter 4 examines American images of China between 1949 and 1979. It shows that mainland China’s communist revolution and its entry into the Korean War were important catalysts for a re-­emergence of Uncivilised and Threatening China within American imaginations. These served primarily to justify Washington’s policy of containment towards the PRC and its marginalisation at the periphery of the imagined free world. In turn, that policy reaffirmed the identities of both China and the United States, and it is demonstrated that while the most stable constructions of China had adapted to new circumstances, they retained the same logic from which they had been constituted in the previous century. From the mid-­1960s overtly negative imagery of China receded and a policy of rapprochement was enabled. It is seen that, as ever, this was an Amer­ ican policy inexplicable in terms of material forces alone.

Introduction   13 Chapter 5: American images of China, 1979–present Chapter 5 explores societal American images of China between 1979 and the present day. It shows that following the re-­establishment of diplomatic relations between Beijing and Washington those images became more widely positive. Discourses of Opportunity and Idealised China resurfaced after being largely silenced throughout much of the Cold War and closer relations were enabled. The Chinese appeared to embrace Western reform and were purposefully reconstructed in more familiar, less foreign terms. It is shown that after the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square this type of imagery quickly dissipated and discourses of Uncivilised China reappeared. Since the mid-­1990s Threatening China has become more prominent over fears about China’s material capabilities but also the challenges it once more presents to American identity. Chapter 6: American images of China: the Obama presidency and beyond The purpose of Chapter 6 is to interrogate contemporary American images of China, but with a particular focus on the presidency of Barack Obama (2008–2016). It demonstrates that China, while not a dominant issue in either the presidential election contests of 2008 or 2012, constituted a socially engineered imaginative geography in the way it has throughout history. It shows that in recent years China has been represented as the world’s most significant ‘rising’ power, and that this label carries with it powerful and automatic connotations of a problem to be resolved. The Obama administration’s so-­called ‘pivot’ strategy towards the Asia Pacific is described, along with the centrality of contemporary American images of China to the possibility of its enactment. Finally, and importantly, a key purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate that the most powerful and enduring societal images of China and its people explored throughout the book, and across the entire history of Sino-­US relations, remain in circulation and are still key to US China policy strategies today. Conclusion The concluding chapter draws together the main findings of the book, speaking primarily to the research questions presented in this introduction. Its purpose is to summarise how the analysis has aimed to advance our understanding of what American images of China and its people have been across the lifespan of Sino­US relations. It also describes the insight it provides into the significance of those images to the enactment and justification of US China policy, as well as the role of that policy itself in the production of imagery and the reaffirmation of identity. It concludes with some final thoughts on the rationale for the book and the importance of the type of investigation it conducts.

14   Introduction

Notes   1 William Maynard, The Terror of Fu Manchu (Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2009).   2 Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (New York: McBride, 1913), pp. 25–26.   3 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 49. See also Derek Gregory, ‘Imaginative Geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 19:4 (1995), pp. 447–485.   4 Chengxin Pan, ‘The “China Threat” in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 29 (2004), p. 306.   5 John King Fairbank, China Perceived: Images and Policies in Chinese–­American Relations (London: Andre Deutsch, 1976), p. xiv.   6 Peter Hays Gries, ‘Identity and Conflict in Sino-­American Relations’, in Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert Ross (eds), New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 309.   7 James Mann, ‘Framing China’, in Robert Giles, Robert Snyder and Lisa DeLisle (eds), Covering China (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. 102.   8 David Campbell, Writing Security (revised edn) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), especially chapter 6.   9 Warren Cohen, America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-­American Relations (5th edn) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 278 and p. 280. 10 Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-­ South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p.  4. See also Roxanne Lynn Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-­Positivist Analysis of US Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines’, International Studies Quarterly, 37:3 (1993), pp. 297–320. For a fuller discussion of the purposes of ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions see Charles B. Cross, ‘Explanation and the Theory of Questions’, Erkenntnis, 34:2 (1991), pp. 237–260. 11 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 4. 12 Michel Foucault, ‘Power and Sex’, in Lawrence Kritzman (ed.), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 112. 13 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 69. 14 Ibid., especially chapter 6. 15 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Edited and Translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 10. 16 Kate Crehan, ‘Sinking Roots: Using Gramsci in Contemporary Britain’, in Joseph Francese (ed.), Perspectives on Gramsci: Politics, Culture and Social Theory (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 35. 17 Ibid. 18 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 2–3. 19 Maxwell McCombs, Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz (eds), Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 20 Piers Robinson, ‘Theorizing the Influence of Media on World Politics Models of Media Influence on Foreign Policy’, European Journal of Communication, 16:4 (2001), pp. 531–532; Jim A. Kuypers, Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 7. 21 See Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism (3rd edn), (New York: Macmillan, 1950). 22 Ibid., pp. 202–203.

Introduction   15 23 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (London: D. Appleton and Company, 1930), p. 126. 24 Alan Wells and Ernest A. Hakanen, Mass Media and Society (Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1997), p. 5. 25 Elizabeth Perse, Media Effects and Society (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), p. 1. 26 Wells and Hakanen, Mass Media, p. 4. 27 See, for example, George Danton, Culture Contacts of the United States and China: The Earliest Sino-­American Culture Contacts, 1784–1844 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931); Jonathan Goldstein, ‘Cantonese Artefacts, Chinoiserie, and Early American Idealisation of China’, in Jonathan Goldstein, Jerry Israel and Hilary Conroy (eds), America Views China: American Images of China Then and Now (London: Associated University Presses, 1991). 28 Raymond O’Conner, ‘Asian Art and International Relations’, in Goldstein et al., America Views China. 29 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism: The New Critical Idiom (2nd edn) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), p. 72. 30 A central contention of Said’s Orientalism is that innumerable authors and institutions contributed to the ‘Orientalist’ project. 31 Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 2.

1 State of the art and conceptual framework

The purpose of this chapter is two-­fold. First, it reviews the relevant literatures to which this book is designed to speak – the state of our existing knowledge and the intellectual foundations upon which it builds. Most importantly, it establishes the core rationale for the investigation by highlighting the most notable silences of those literatures and the weaknesses in the foundations. In doing so it contextualises the three core arguments of the book by exposing the gaps in our understanding which it is designed to fill. Second, it presents the conceptual and theoretical framework which informs the key arguments of the book. The framework centralises discourse and representational processes, enabling an interrogation of the images of China which have circulated in American society throughout history and a comprehensive examination of how those images have always been active in the advancement of US China policy. The chapter concludes by summarising the key information and asserting the importance of conducting the type of investigation which constitutes the remainder of this book.

State of the art: the imagery and policy literatures Since the 1950s a body of literature has contributed greatly to our understanding of what American representations of China and its people have been. This ‘imagery’ literature represents a significant component of the intellectual platform upon which this analysis rests. A separate body of work is instead concerned primarily with the interrogation of historical and contemporary US China policy. This ‘policy’ literature is another invaluable source of knowledge for what follows. As noted in the previous chapter, however, both of these literatures contain pertinent silences to which this book is designed to speak. First, American images of China have been conceived primarily, or even solely, as assessments of positive or negative attitudes and opinion at given moments which shift in response to external global developments. Analysis of the underlying strength and endurance of images across historical periods has been largely absent. This represents the primary weakness of the imagery literature. Second, the role of American images of China within the enactment and justification of US China policy has traditionally been overlooked. Because US China policy has only infrequently been a concern of contributors to the imagery

State of the art and conceptual framework   17 literature, this is considered to represent the primary weakness of the (IR-­ dominated) policy literature, towards which this book is primarily directed. Third, where US China policy has been examined, it has been interpreted as the actions of one given state towards another, or as a ‘bridge’ between two states.1 Its role in the production and reproduction of imagery and identity, and of its ability to protect American identity when seemingly threatened, has been neglected. Overviews of both the imagery and policy literatures, and illustrations of the three key silences previously noted, are presented below.2 Existing wisdom of the imagery literature The imagery literature on historical and contemporary American representations of China and the Chinese constitutes a significant body of work.3 A key text is Harold Isaacs’ Scratches on Our Minds, originally published in 1958 (and republished as Images of Asia in 1972).4 Isaacs explored the ‘ideas’, ‘impressions’ and ‘feelings’ Americans have historically held about China.5 He proposed six periods or ‘ages’ during which images of China are described as either broadly positive or negative: the ages of respect (the eighteenth century); contempt (1840–1905); benevolence (1905–1937); admiration (1937–1944); disenchantment (1944–1949); and hostility (1949–present).6 It is explained that the nature of images has shifted in response to external developments, such as in 1840, when many concerned Americans favoured involvement in the First Opium War against what was considered a stubbornly isolationist China. The resulting age of contempt lasted until 1905, when hopes were raised that the Chinese had began to embrace modernity and Western standards of civilisation. Isaacs acknowledged that certain ideas endure: ‘[F]or the most part [images are] old and long established conceptions of the Chinese which are . . . being brought out into the . . . light of changing circumstances’.7 Yet this type of discussion was extremely limited. Had Isaacs interrogated the extent to which American images of China represent subjective truths, and hence the consistent presence of US identity in their production, he would have been better equipped to expand upon this key observation. This tendency has since been repeated throughout the imagery literature; for example, as Fairbank later asserted: ‘Well established stereotypes [of China] have become available which may be called upon to shape the American attitude at any given time’, he argued. Yet, ‘yo-­yo like fluctuations . . . [have always] dominate[d] the American image of China’.8 Isaacs’ examination of American representations of China across the full history of Sino-­US relations is one of a small number of comparable volumes to provide cogent and expert analyses. The most notable others of this type are Akira Iriye’s excellent Across the Pacific and A.T. Steele’s The American People and China, both of which explore American images of China as the positive/negative attitudes of given moments.9 Steele, for example, described ‘sudden fluctuations of feeling’ in response to historical developments. He argued that such imagistic ‘ups and downs’ were interpretable only within the context of ‘the heritage of assumptions, expectations, emotions [and] traditions

18   State of the art and conceptual framework . . . which have contributed to our present attitudes’.10 Nonetheless, like Iriye, he elaborated little upon how powerful ideas about China endure beyond isolated moments. Iriye affords comparatively more attention to US China policy, but the nature of its relationship with relevant imagery is unexplored. Isaacs suggested that ‘images, feelings, prejudices, and personality factors get somehow cranked into the process of policy making’.11 Steele observed that China policy is the result of ‘interplay’ between Washington administrations, the US Congress, public opinion and pressure groups.12 Yet none articulate the precise nature of these dynamics, and their analyses were not designed to explore the possibility that US China policy itself contributes to the production of imagery and identity. Beyond these core volumes, American images of China are explored within wider empirical contexts. Thomson, Stanley and Perry, for example, describe historical ‘ideas’, ‘images’ and ‘representations’ that Americans have historically held about East Asia, including China.13 Colin Mackerras examines Amer­ ican and wider Western perceptions of China and its people.14 Again, while highly important and informative texts, these analyses do not explore the continual role of American identity in the process of constructing China’s identity which in this book serves to demonstrate how certain ideas have endured. Neither is their purpose to interrogate the place of imagery in the enactment of foreign policy. Thompson et al. note that ‘the way people think about a place is subtly but vitally related to the way they act toward that place’,15 but no further enquiry follows. Elsewhere, a broad absence of interest in the longitudinal stability of imagery has inevitably characterised examinations of isolated historical moments. These include Stuart Creighton Miller, who explores (widespread negative and derogatory) nineteenth-­century American representations of China and its people.16 John Haddad concerns himself with romantic, more overtly positive images of China across much of the same period.17 Jane Elliot interrogates Western and Chinese images of the turn-­of-the-­century Boxer Uprising in China, and Steven Mosher explores (predominantly journalistic and academic) American ideas about China from the 1920s, but with initial attention to earlier periods.18 Finally, T. Christopher Jesperson explores understandings about China in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s when, in many ways, the Chinese were often perceived more positively.19 Primarily as analyses of historical imagistic developments, these valuable works were again rarely directed towards the contours of US China policy. The imagery literature is also represented by edited, multi-­contributor volumes. Goldstein, Israel and Conroy’s America Views China, for example, examines American imagery of China across the entirety of Sino-­US relations, with single chapters devoted to, among other things, the popularity of mock-­Chinese goods in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the widespread popularity of Charlie Chan in the twentieth century.20 A comparable volume by Hongshan Li and Zhaohui Hong is additionally concerned with Chinese images of the United States and weighted towards discussions of the media and the post-­1949 era.21

State of the art and conceptual framework   19 To recap, the stability and endurance of particular images of China within the United States is understood here to have resulted from their being produced from understandings about the most intrinsic elements of American identity. Christopher Jesperson refers to Emily Rosenberg’s notion of ‘liberal-­developmentalism’ to describe the vehicle upon which ‘commerce and culture’ has worked to forge a coherent American world view.22 ‘Images of China’, he asserts, have therefore ‘largely come from Americans’ assumptions about themselves’.23 More notably, Richard Madsen frames his analysis around the centrality of American identity to perceptions of China, from the 1960s to the 1990s.24 Throughout this time, he argues, a consistent ‘liberal myth’ generated subjective interpretations about China and expectations that it would develop democratic and capitalist values. Madsen demonstrates that American ideas about China are as reliant upon understandings of the United States as they are about China itself, to expose how certain powerful images endure. Moreover, his analysis shows how this type of imagery is comparatively more significant to the enactment of US China policy than temporally specific attitudes and opinion such as those which emerged in the aftermath of the tragedies in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The importance of US China policies to the production of imagery is not explored, inviting further enquiry. In his shorter volume Thomas Dorogi adopts a similar approach to Madsen, examining American reactions to the events in Tiananmen Square.25 Having provided a brief overview of the most salient features of the imagery literature to date, the chapter now turns to discuss those of the policy literature. Existing wisdom of the policy literature The primary concern of the policy literature – which, to reaffirm, is broadly directed towards the examination of past and current US China policy – has traditionally been the material forces which have underpinned American actions towards China, to determine why chosen policies have been enacted. However, as established earlier, the most notable silence of this body of work is that the role of American images of China in the formulation and enactment of US China policy has commonly been ignored. The remaining two silences of the relevant literatures are also evident: the capacity of powerful images to remain consistent and stable over time, and the agency of US China policy itself in the (re)production of imagery and identity. Harry Harding’s A Fragile Relationship is perhaps the most comprehensive examination of Sino-­US relations in the modern era and analyses the period between the 1970s and the early 1990s.26 Harding’s principal concern is for the strategic motivations behind political decisions formulated in Washington. Efforts to reduce diplomatic hostilities with Beijing in the early 1970s, for example, are asserted to have been driven by calculations of China as a less immediate material threat and from a desire to improve relations with Beijing in order to facilitate US military operations in Vietnam and counterbalance the Soviet Union.27 Harding acknowledges that Sino-­US relations have been characterised by a ‘cycle’ of American emotion, illustrated, for example, by the ‘euphoria’ which

20   State of the art and conceptual framework emerged towards a seemingly modernising China during the mid-­1980s.28 However, the argument does not acknowledge that American discourses have ever been responsible for constructing China’s identity. Instead, it is implied that discourses simply evolve with changing global developments, and as a result of China’s behaviour in particular. Ideational forces are thus considered external to, and of less significance than, the material (principally economic and military) forces which are treated as key to determining how China is both interpreted and acted towards. Further, and not uniquely (as demonstrated shortly), the complicity of US China policy in the production of imagery is also inevitably absent. Foreign policy is treated merely as the actions of one given state towards another.29 The possibility that it helps to mould and reformulate identities is beyond the scope of the investigation. The significance of representational processes and the possibility that, to paraphrase Fairbank, the truth about China is in our heads, is commonly disregarded throughout the wider policy literature.30 Authors including Rosemary Foot, Thomas J. Christensen and David Lampton, among numerous others, have each provided important and highly noteworthy analyses of the dynamics of Sino-­US relations at selected temporal periods, with varying degrees of attention to US China policy.31 As with Harding’s volume, however, the ideas which enabled the policies they expertly dissect are collectively overlooked and those policies are seen to rely primarily (or even exclusively) upon material ‘facts’ and ‘useable information’ for their enactment.32 The criticality of ideational forces is equally marginalised throughout the rapidly growing ‘China threat’ or ‘China rising’ sub-­literatures. Authors including Robert Kaplan and John Mearsheimer examine US policy options towards a ‘real’ or potential China threat.33 Warren Cohen predicts that China will continue to ‘brutaliz[e] the weak’, and follow great powers of the past by seeking regional dominance before expanding its influence further.34 Others question the extent to which China endangers international security. Gordon Chang, for example, argues that China’s economic model – and hence its capacity to become a true global superpower – is flawed.35 Others reject the conflation of a ‘rising’ China with a ‘dangerous’ China.36 Protagonists on both sides of the argument, however, commonly assume that a single, objectively determined reality about China – that it either is or is not a threat – can be determined, necessarily marginalising the importance of subjective interpretation and discourse.37 As throughout the imagery literature, American perceptions within the policy literature – where they do appear – are broadly conceived in relatively superficial terms. This is evident in Harding’s analysis, where the ‘cycle’ of emotion he identifies is described principally with reference to public opinion polls at selected moments. While these types of imagery are highly relevant and worthy of exploration, the capacity of images to remain stable and more actively shape foreign policy options is again conspicuous across the wider literature by its absence. Kusnitz, for example, provides a comprehensive study into the agency of American opinion in US China policy, with a focus on the Cold War period.38 A comparable analysis by Kau et al. focuses upon the 1970s.39 Consistent is the

State of the art and conceptual framework   21 shared assumption that public opinion, like images in Harding’s volume, can be studied as discrete from, and secondary to (albeit perhaps somehow affecting), governmental foreign policy.40 The possibility that China is actively constitutive of subjective understandings and ideas (including those found in public opinion polls), and that images are not something which can be treated separately or as an afterthought to assessments of US China policy performances, has traditionally been ignored. The uncertainty which surrounds the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy is articulated by Kau et al.: ‘There is clearly a rough association between public opinion trends . . . and the policy positions of the US government’, the authors state. ‘But the nature of the association is not at all clear’.41 Because of the difficulties in proving causal links between opinion and policy, the former has typically been avoided in favour of factors such as the economics and physical capabilities of the United States and China, the importance of which is widely accepted. This study, to reaffirm, does not make claims of cause and effect. It is concerned with the capacity of ideas and images to introduce potentialities for policy by constructing realities about the world in which certain actions can legitimately occur. It complements and builds from challenges to the established contours of the policy literature which have recently emerged. First, in a similar way to Richard Madsen in the imagery literature, Jie Chen asserts that an American ideology – a ‘set of values, cognitions, ideas, and ideals’ – has long pervaded US China policy.42 Chen isolates three periods in which this ideology appeared either ‘strong’ (1949–1953; 1980–1982) or ‘weak’ (1969–1972), demonstrating that American images of China endure because they are produced from powerful assumptions of US identity and that this type of imagery is most active in US China policy. Evelyn Goh’s investigation of the Sino-­US rapprochement of the early 1970s moves away from a traditional reliance upon balance of power politics to emphasise the importance of identity construction processes.43 Realist IR analyses have been inadequate, Goh argues, because policies require the kinds of perceptions and interpretations they have historically ignored: ‘the creation of meaning by discursive practice is an essential means of influencing political action’, she observes.44 Thus, Goh’s intention is not to enter established debates as to why rapprochement occurred, but rather to consider how the possibility of it happening could arise. Like Goh, Øystein Tunsjø analyses the United States’ trilateral relations with China and Taiwan around a social constructivist IR framework.45 Discursive American representations of the so-­called ‘Taiwan issue’, the author explains, have enabled selected courses of action from 1949 until the present day.46 Imagery within these analyses is not external from, or secondary to, material forces in the performance of foreign policy. It is shown to give material forces meaning so that political possibilities are made available where previously they were not. I have argued that China’s threats to US security throughout history have always been constructions of American design.47 I show that policies formulated in Washington to counter the perceived dangers which emerged – during the

22   State of the art and conceptual framework nineteenth century, the Cold War and the modern day – did not and still do not solely rely upon assessments of a material capacity to harm the United States; they rely additionally on powerful ideas and interpretations which provide the necessary conditions for action. L.H.M. Ling similarly questions ‘tired’ China threat debates, arguing that traditional Westphalian IR can do little but promote understandings of modern-­day China as an unwelcome, non-­Western outsider, thus perpetuating suspicion and hostility towards it.48 Chengxin Pan has arguably done most to further our understanding of the power of Western representations of China. In his volume, Pan shows how the desire for certainty in the West about what China is has resulted in subjective knowledges being presented as fact.49 China’s contemporary ‘rise’, he argues, is perceived in the United States in particular not in unbiased terms, but in ways which serve individual motives, most notably those of the US military–industrial complex. This ‘China threat’ image, or paradigm, is shown to be complicit in the perpetuation of suspicions and hostilities on both sides of the Pacific and therefore acts as a potentially dangerous self-­fulfilling prophecy. Pan explores this idea elsewhere, and similarly asserts that while China’s material capabilities are not unimportant, American discourse creates a China threat from understandings about the United States itself: ‘there is no such thing as “Chinese reality” that can automatically speak for itself . . . to fully understand the US “China threat” argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature’.50 This image of a China threat is explored in Pan’s volume alongside that of China as an opportunity which advances understandings of a land and people of great promise to the United States.51 Yet the purported opportunities, Pan argues, are imagined from the perspective of the American Self and thus ultimately destined to become disappointments. The purpose of this section of the chapter has been to review the existing literatures to which this book is designed to contribute. The intention has been to outline the rationale for the study by establishing the key silences of these literatures. The conclusion section of this chapter describes both how they are addressed by the analysis which follows, and why it is important to do so. The second section presents the conceptual framework of theoretical understanding around which the analysis is built and which enables the aims of the book to be achieved.

Conceptual framework International Relations and imagery: from estrangement to conciliation As already noted, this book speaks primarily to the IR-­dominated policy literature, the principal silence of which is that it has traditionally neglected to examine the role of American images of China in the enactment of US China policy. This paucity of attention is explained largely by the historical tendency of IR to ignore the significance of representational processes to the daily mechanics of global affairs. Yet when John King Fairbank noted that ‘the “truth”

State of the art and conceptual framework   23 about China is [always] in our heads’, he pointed to the central role of imagery in providing any number of possible realities about that country and its people.52 He argued, in effect, that China is an imaginative geography. The world is a product of interpretation, and interpretations are vulnerable to disagreement and conflict.53 Accordingly, the evil and threatening Fu Manchu represents a particular truth about China in equal measure to the genial and Americanised Charlie Chan. This precludes a strictly positivistic logic of explanation, the purpose of which is to search for a singular, definitive understanding of what China represents at any given moment. Instead, a logic of interpretation, which concerns itself less with identifying causality within international relations than it does with interrogating the consequences of representational processes, is required.54 This is what enables the transference from ‘why’ to ‘how’ questions described in the introduction, since the principal concern is not why the United States has chosen to engage in certain practices towards China, but how those practices have been made possible through the historical production of subjective truth. Social constructivist and postcolonial IR scholars are now among the most active in formulating the types of (‘how’) questions about representation and the interrelations of power and knowledge around which this analysis is conducted.55 A key source of inspiration is Edward Said’s Orientalism, in which it is argued that, for centuries, the identity of the global East has been constructed and reconstructed (as exotic, threatening, technologically inferior, etc.) so as to enable its domination by the West.56 As such, the Asian region (like any other) is less an objective, natural reality than it is a product of Western imaginations.57 It exists for the West, or so it appears in the mind of the Orientalist. The imaginative geography of China has always been constructed within American imaginations, for American imaginations, to enable particular courses of US China policy. Yet while China has always been the product of American discourse and representation, the argument here is not that ideas are the primary or even singular drivers of international affairs. Crucially, the intention is to emphasise the co-­constitution of the ideational and material worlds. As Alexander Wendt explains, the claim is not that ideas are more important than power and interest, or that they are autonomous from power and interest. Power and interest are just as important and determining as before. The claim is rather that power and interest have the effects they do in virtue of the ideas that make them up.58 To suggest, then, that American understandings about China simply shift and evolve as a result of external developments – most notably of China’s behaviour, which, as illustrated in the review of the literature above, has been a strong tendency of many authors – and thus that they can be attributed little or no consequence to the dynamics of Sino-­US relations and the formulation of US China policy, is fundamentally misguided. Increases in China’s military capabilities

24   State of the art and conceptual framework today, for example, do matter (see Chapters 5 and 6). What is important, however, is not simply the emergence of those capabilities, but that China – which so many people (rightly or wrongly) consider potentially dangerous – now possesses them. Like China, India has a large standing army, nuclear weapons, an increasing defence budget and so on, but it is rarely perceived as a threat to the United States. The UK’s 500 nuclear weapons are considered less threatening to American interests than North Korea’s (unsophisticated and unreliable) five.59 Unavoidably, then, identity also matters. Discourses and imagery define, to varying extents, what China ‘is’ and how it must be approached, regardless of its intentions or observable behaviour. Discourse and imagery: constructing the reality of China American images of China are understood here to be the products of discourse about that land and its people. Michel Foucault described discourse as ‘the general domain of all statements’, representing either a group of individual statements, or a regulated practice which accounts for a number of statements.60 American discourses of China are thus envisioned as the articulation of ideas about that country in the broadest possible sense. Ultimately, American images of China constitute the discursive construction of truth or reality about it. Of course, imagery in the form of art or photography, for example, is overtly visual rather than discursive, yet, like that of the world around us, its meaning will always be interpreted and articulated through language. For the purposes of this analysis American images and representations of China are considered synonymous. This is an assumption reinforced by Szalay et al., who argue that ‘images are selective, often affect-­laden representations of reality’.61 Peter Hays Gries explains that Americans look at China as though staring at the inkblots of a Rorschach test, revealing more about themselves than about China itself.62 This central role of American identity in the construction of China is reiterated by Jesperson: ‘[American] images of China have largely come from Americans’ assumptions about themselves’, he argues.63 As outlined already in this chapter, the relevant literatures as a whole do little to support this claim. However, the identity of any actor is meaningless without the presence of another because meaning itself is created in discourse.64 This mutual constitution of opposing identities, of self and other, is articulated by David Campbell: ‘identity – whether personal or collective – is not fixed by nature . . . rather, identity is constituted in relation to difference. But neither is difference fixed by nature . . . Difference is constituted in relation to identity.’65 While the extent to which discourses remain stable over time varies, Amer­ ican images of China – whether enduring or not – have been manufactured from perceptions of the identity of the United States itself.66 However, the four key constructions of China examined with particular focus throughout this book – Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China – are examples of images which have endured because, to reaffirm, their production and reproduction can be traced to among the most intrinsic components of American identity.

State of the art and conceptual framework   25 These types of images can be likened to Said’s notion of ‘Latent Orientalism’: an underlying and ‘almost unconscious’ collectivity of shared ideas and beliefs about the global East which has preserved a ‘unanimity, stability and durability’ of representation.67 As will be shown, Idealised China became established from understandings about a more scientifically enlightened and advanced United States. Uncivilised China has always been produced in relation to presumed superior standards of American civilisation. Opportunity China exists primarily for particular American ideals of free international trade and open markets. Threatening China has been produced to confirm the need to secure the United States from external threat. In a broad sense, the identity of the United States has traditionally been defined in part by an imagined commitment to the values of democracy, personal liberty and the free market.68 This constitutes what has been termed a democratic-­capitalist ideology, or ethos.69 It is shown that images of China have frequently been produced from these understandings, such as Uncivilised China, which has been conceived as uncivilised because it lacks these commitments and qualities. In addition, historically the United States has been conceived as a predominantly White/Caucasian society.70 This constitutes another powerful site from which China and the Chinese, as ‘non-­White’, have been produced.71 Robert Blauner vividly describes the power and longevity of the ‘race issue’ within the United States, likening it to a ‘gritty old boxer who just won’t stay down’.72 The dominance of the White American population, he argues, has resulted in the ‘internal colonialism’ of non-­Whites like the Chinese who, to varying extents, inhabit imbalanced power relations which favour the former.73 This analysis shows that Chinese in America have been historically beholden to political and economic arrangements over which they have had little control. In Orientalism Said argued that during the nineteenth century, all Europeans were racist or ethnocentric.74 The argument here is not that the Chinese have been the consistent and uniform victims of American racism; it is that race is a political, rather than a natural, category, and powerful discourses have racially objectified the Chinese as a non-­White other without necessarily implying racist sentiment. Of course, classificatory labels such as ‘White’ and ‘non-­White’ are often unhelpful and even meaningless. Indeed, Homi Bhabha challenges neat delineations between cultures on the basis that they exist in a state of perennial ‘mixedness’.75 Yet identities are frequently and crudely contrasted with others and, to reaffirm, American images of China (racial or otherwise) need not be informed and/or sophisticated to circulate. What is important is that they do circulate, with the capacity to represent selected realities about China and its people. This analysis also demonstrates the historical persistence of embedded understandings – even into the twenty-­first century – that China represents a cultural inferior of the United States. Such perceptions have not been unique, uniform or timeless, yet, as Michael Shapiro observes, the process of making others foreign most commonly ensures their status as less-­than-equal subjects.76 Ikechi Mgbeoji argues that Western (particularly European) colonialism habitually propagated

26   State of the art and conceptual framework the truth that the only route for the non-­West to become less inferior was to aspire to the standards of the West.77 A comparable dynamic is revealed throughout the chapters that follow, through ingrained expectations that China must lessen its imagined inferiority by conforming to American expectations. In this sense, American images of China have often been produced within a paternalistic structure, wherein the actions of the latter as the parental authority are understood to represent the best interests of the former.78 These enduring assumptions are explained in part with reference to implicit American understandings of ‘exceptionalism’, and of the United States as a ‘redeemer nation’ with a responsibility to advance its Enlightenment values abroad.79 American governmental papers, notes Bruce Kuklick, have always advanced a vision of the world rooted in Protestantism and the Enlightenment.80 In this analysis, American exceptionalism is most emphatically demonstrated by the construction of China through negation, a strategy used to deny the history of foreign others and construct (or deconstruct) their geographies as a blank spaces, or tabula rasas, waiting to be filled.81 Ultimately, it is demonstrated that across the history of Sino-­US relations particular discourses of China, like those outlined above, have become naturalised statements of fact and accepted simply as what is.82 This has generated common sense, a form of knowledge that goes unquestioned since it is assumed to be a true reflection of reality.83 Common sense knowledges are almost unconsciously reproduced and rarely scrutinised or challenged.84 This was evident throughout much of the late nineteenth century and during the early Cold War, for example, when Threatening China seemingly posed a danger to White America (see Chapters 2 and 3 respectively). The naturalisation of discourses means that they have never been free or unrestricted, but, rather, moulded and constrained as the product of systemic regulations which promote selected ideas and suppress others.85 Foucault refers to these regulations as societal ‘rules of exclusion’.86 This ensures that discourse is always ‘controlled, selected [and] organised’ so that the ideas of some are accepted, whereas those of others are ignored or rejected and considered beyond the lines of acceptable argument.87 Walter Lippmann put it another way, suggesting that ‘in the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us’.88 As certain discourses of China have been promoted as common sense, others have inevitably been marginalised and silenced. For much of the Cold War, for example, discourses of Opportunity and Idealised China were subdued within American imaginations as Threatening and Uncivilised China became dominant. Yet discourse is a site from which power can be challenged and undermined, meaning the logic that discourses of China claim to advance can always be questioned and opposed.89 ‘[W]here there is power,’ argued Foucault, ‘there is resistance’.90 Resistance is a highly contested concept, especially within postcolonial IR, but here resistance discourses are those which challenge the most powerful and established American ideas about China, exposing their vulnerability and introducing alternative modes of thinking. Discourses may be ‘buried or masked’

State of the art and conceptual framework   27 by rules of exclusion and deemed inferior, naive or inadequately articulated.91 ‘Unofficial’ or ‘subjugated’ knowledges about China, however, always have the potential to reappear.92 Moreover, discourses are not discrete or isolated units of analysis. Their peripheries are open, overlapping and constituted by others.93 In this analysis it is shown that the four key constructions of China have often coexisted, and have on occasions become mutually reinforcing. Discourses of China should also not be essentialised, and throughout the chapters that follow it is shown that while such constructions as Threatening and inferior China have resurfaced in recognisable forms, they have always been in a perpetual state of flux.94 They have evolved and been modified to meet new circumstances and new frames of reference so that today, for example, just like in the nineteenth century, the assumption remains that China should conform to the (superior) standards of Western civilisation, yet it is no longer brazenly referred to as ‘uncivilised’ and the relevant imagery is advanced in more subtle forms (see Chapter 6). Ultimately, the discursive production of American images of China, and the resulting construction of truths and realities, means they have been the historical subjects of classification strategies. The process of classification relies upon stereotypes, or ‘controlling images’, whereby individuals and groups are imbued with quick and easy representations for the purpose of identification.95 Importantly, then, and as the term ‘controlling image’ implies, those representations have always been imbued with a form of power. The power of representation: political possibility and US China policy Power in global affairs is not merely the capacity of states to exert material force; it exists in less conventional forms and spaces. In IR it is now a widely contested concept, becoming increasingly denaturalised, dispersed and ultimately devoid of an assumed centre.96 Power is understood by Foucault to be inextricable from knowledge, such that one cannot be advanced in the absence of the other.97 The result is a power/knowledge nexus which precludes the advancement of discourse and the establishment of truth as neutral or dispassionate endeavours.98 This means that American discourses and imagery of China have never been produced objectively or in the absence of purpose and intent. Their dissemination must be acknowledged as a performance of power, however seemingly innocent or benign. As will be shown throughout the chapters that follow, American representations of China have regularly been advanced with a clear agenda. This occurred during the latter half of the nineteenth century when ideas about a China ‘threat’ were promoted by those who openly favoured restrictions against Chinese immigrations, and during the Cold War when propaganda depicted ‘Red’ China in highly threatening terms in support of the United States’ communist containment policy (see Chapter 4). Equally, and as Fairclough argues, common sense discourses may represent an ‘ideological sleight of hand’ by advancing an opinion or point of view which is disguised as truth or fact.99 That which becomes

28   State of the art and conceptual framework common sense is largely determined by comparatively more powerful actors.100 Thus, imagery can be circulated with an explicit motivation but, and as already suggested, it can also be reproduced almost unconsciously. In line with Said’s notion of Latent Orientalism, ideas can become naturalised and accepted ‘fact’, as Gramsci’s organic intellectuals across society engage in their promotion and continuation because as ‘truths’ they appear so unproblematic. Historically, Sino-­American relations of power have been dominated by the United States both in terms of material capability and of ideational forces or power/knowledge. As ‘a circulating medium’, however, power is not inevitably suppressive, nor is it the possession of individuals or institutions. It is everywhere, working productively through social relations and in the construction of reality as much as of the actors within it.101 Accordingly, while the power of representation may appear readily observable in late nineteenth century American newspaper articles which vehemently opposed Chinese immigration to the United States, for example, it was just as inextricable from the arguments of those who wrote positively of a more civilised land and people. It would be erroneous to suggest, then, that China and the Chinese have been the perpetual victims of American power (discursive or material). Material forces are only attributed meaning for use as a result of certain knowledges about them.102 In other words, it is discourse – or power/knowledge – which ensures that material capabilities can be utilised, and in what manner. As Doty explains, the fact that the United States claims unrivalled material power is undeniably important. However, the US does not consider invading every country over which it boasts military superiority or, indeed, against which it exhibits grievance.103 That military power is constituted by understandings of identity, and of who to invade (among other things) and who not. Discourse, notes Obeyesekere, ‘is about practice. . . . Insofar as discourse evolves it begins to affect the practice’.104 International relations, therefore, represents an arena of power that is both political and discursive, wherein discourses create certain political possibilities and preclude others.105 Yet such a reassessment of power does not entirely preclude an appreciation for those which preceded it.106 To reiterate, the suggestion is not that ideas are more important than, or distinct from, material power. Material power is affective as a result of the ideas of which it is constituted.107 David Campbell explains that foreign policy is an extension to the international realm of the human tendency to identify unfamiliar others as alien and foreign.108 Richard Ashley similarly notes that modern statecraft is more accurately termed ‘modern mancraft’.109 Such societal discourses of foreignness are discourses of separation and difference by which states are made foreign from one other in a ‘specific sort of boundary producing political performance’.110 It is argued here that the production and dissemination of American images of China constitutes this performance, and represents the ubiquitous process by which China and the Chinese are made foreign from the United States for the purpose of enabling US China policies. As Campbell puts it, foreign policy represents the international ‘inscription of foreignness’.111 This analysis will

State of the art and conceptual framework   29 demonstrate that the most stable and enduring images of China (Threatening, Uncivilised, etc.) have traditionally been comparatively active in this regard, to explain not why particular American foreign policies towards China have occurred, but how they have been made possible. As outlined in the introduction, this study shows that American images of China – including those which circulate in the present day – have frequently been those of an inferior or unequal land and people expected to conform to the superior values of American identity such as democracy and capitalism. The construction of foreign others as barbaric, uncivilised, etc., has historically enabled and legitimised the appropriation of (particularly non-­Western) lands and resources, as well as the subjugation and extermination of people.112 Ellingson agrees, noting that the historical construction of non-­Europeans as ‘lower’ peoples has been at the heart of the establishment of a global European hegemony.113 The study also shows that China’s imagined inferiority has commonly been articulated through racial discourse and imagery. Race here represents an especially powerful site of identity construction from which images of a non-­ White China have been produced, and is shown to have been an integral component of the foreign policy process at numerable historical junctures.114 Glazer and Moynihan, for instance, argue that immigration has long been, and remains, the most important determinant of American foreign policy because it responds so powerfully to the ethnic composition of the United States.115 Jan Pierterse describes racism as ‘the psychology of imperialism’, with the capacity to justify overseas domination.116 American discourses and imagery of China, then, have consistently determined the boundaries of the politically possible by being inextricable from, and complicit within, every stage of the formulation, enactment and justification of US China policy. The nature and purpose of that policy, however, must be reconsidered. In the previous section it was shown that throughout the relevant literatures US China policy has been conceived in relatively restrictive terms as a ‘bridge’ between two states.117 This analysis further draws from the work of Campbell, who argues that foreign policy not only represents the international inscription of societal discourses of separation and difference, but actively reaffirms them.118 Acts of foreign policy, in short, impose particular interpretations of the world, thereby reproducing them.119 US China policy is shown here to be a political performance active within the construction of China’s identity as well as that of the United States, perpetuating the cycle of discursive difference so that the production of imagery continues. For example, the possibility of US involvement in the nineteenth-­century opium wars was not only introduced by discourse and imagery of Uncivilised China, it was also an act which itself reinforced the representational processes of which it was constituted. Specifically, and as shown in Chapter 2, it reproduced Uncivilised China in comparison to the more civilised United States by affirming the requirement of the former to modernise to what were considered more enlightened Western practices and values. It makes no sense to assume that the enactment of US China policy signals the end of discourse’s capacity to construct

30   State of the art and conceptual framework reality and social actors. Instead it carries on, reproducing the understandings upon which policies rely and in which they are framed, to be relied upon again in the future. Related to this point, this book also demonstrates that US China policy has consistently worked not only in the construction of identity, but also in the protection of the identity of the United States when seemingly threatened by that of China.120 Danger can be ascribed to otherness wherever it may be found.121 Yet not all potential dangers are interpreted as such. The designation of threat is therefore at least partly constitutive of representational processes which determine what is dangerous and what is not.122 As Wendt explains, every state in the world does not represent a danger to every other, and so international threats must be constitutive of particular ideas which make them interpretable as such.123 This means that Sino-­US relations must be understood as boundary-­producing rituals in which ‘dangers’ from China, when identified, are not merely from calculations of material threat, but are partly the result of subjective interpretation.124 In this book it is argued that a key purpose of depicting China as a threat has been to protect the components of American identity (primarily racial and ideological) deemed most fundamental to its being. As such, representations of a threatening China have most commonly been advanced by, and served the interests of, those who support actions to defend that identity. It is shown that this has included politicians and policymaking circles, such as those within the administration of President Harry Truman which implemented the Cold War containment of the PRC (Chapter 4). It also exposes the complicity of other societal individuals and institutions, including elements of the late-­nineteenthcentury American media which supported restrictions against Chinese immigration to the Western United States (Chapter 2). To some extent, dangers in the international realm always constitute threats to identity.125 In the analysis which follows, it is shown that this has been especially evident during moments of crisis (or ‘rupture’) to American identity which demonstrate most emphatically how dangers are socially constructed.126 Crises of identity occur when the existing order is considered in danger of collapse. The prevailing authority is seen to be weakened and rhetoric over how to reassert the ‘natural’ identity intensifies.127 The Cold War represents one such moment of crisis for American identity, as Washington’s containment policy functioned to protect the latter from the ‘threatening’ values of communist Red China, which conflicted with those of the democratic-­capitalist United States. This is not to suggest that danger is non-­material. Indeed, representational processes separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ through a logic of difference which determines the relative salience of material factors in the assessment of external threats.128 Yet as Hixson asserts, ‘[f]oreign policy plays a profoundly significant role in the process of creating, affirming and disciplining conceptions of national identity’,129 and the United States has always been especially dependent upon representational practices for understandings about its identity.130

State of the art and conceptual framework   31

State of the art and conceptual framework: overview and conclusion The first section of this chapter showed that what can be referred to as the imagery literature provides valuable insights into American representations of China and the Chinese across the centuries of Sino-­US relations. Infrequently, the literature has examined the significance of those representations to US China policy, with comparatively little overall success. This is primarily because the intention of most contributors – as journalists, area studies scholars and historians – has not been to engage in this debate. It also showed that the policy literature provides sophisticated insight into the contours of historical and modern US foreign policy towards China. Recent contributions interrogate the role of ideational forces in the implementation of that policy, but the literature as a whole has traditionally neglected to afford them attention. Both bodies of work provide a substantive base of knowledge and inspiration for the chapters that follow. However, the key rationale for this book is that no volume has yet been designed to explore American images of China and their significance to US China policy across the full history of their relations. This is the aim of the study which follows, by addressing the key silences of the relevant literatures through the three core arguments formulated in the introduction. The conceptual and theoretical framework outlined in the second section of this chapter described the tools which equip this book to speak to those silences and advance those central arguments. To recap, the first argument is that powerful societal images of China have always provided truths and realities about that country and its people within the United States. Throughout the relevant literatures those images have most commonly been presented as attitudes and opinion and described in terms of their relative positivity and negativity at given temporal moments (the 1930s, the Cold War, etc.). The assumption has been that ideas about China have simply shifted in line with external events and developments, so that their power to create truths and realities about what China is has traditionally been ignored. Exceptions exist, yet this represents the primary silence of the imagery literature. In short, the importance of imagery has traditionally been both misrepresented and underestimated. Such a tendency is also found across the policy literature, wherein a concern for imagery (when it has appeared) has generally extended only to examinations of US public opinion. This type of imagery is important and is utilised at various points to inform  the arguments of this book. However, uncertainties remain as to what have been the dominant, enduring American images of China over time. Addressing these uncertainties is a key aim of this study, for two reasons. First, it enables a demonstration of how American images of China have always  been produced from understandings about the United States itself, and therefore how they represent subjective constructions of reality, rather than simple interpretations of global developments ‘out there’. Second, it shows how more longitudinally stable imagery (Uncivilised China, China as a cultural

32   State of the art and conceptual framework inferior, etc.) has always been particularly active in the advancement of US China policy. The conceptual and theoretical framework of this book promotes an understanding of more powerful commonalities and continuities of discourse and imagery. It works to expose how such representations as Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China, among others – which emerged and became established during the very earliest periods of Sino-­US relations – endured until the present day as subjective truths about that country and its people. Becoming established and naturalised, this type of imagery has retained the capacity for resurgence at any moment because of its production from among the most intrinsic components of American identity. The second argument is that American images of China have always been central to the formulation, enactment and justification of US China policy in Washington. Some important advances in our understanding of this relationship have recently been made throughout the relevant literatures. However, in broad terms they have tended to examine US China policy as a bridge between pre-­ existing, ‘atomised’ states131 or, to put it differently, as the observable actions of the United States towards China whose identities have been fixed and assumed. Questions therefore remain over how processes of discourse and representation have always constructed the identities of both China and the United States, securing the truths and realities which made courses of policy possible and justifiable. Since US China policy has only infrequently been an arena of concern within the imagery literature, this constitutes the primary weakness of the (IR-­ dominated) policy literature to which this book primarily speaks. Authors of the policy literature have traditionally privileged material over ideational forces so that images, where they are considered, have most commonly been analysed separately and relegated to secondary importance. Material forces are understood here not as separate from, or less consequential than, ideas, but as constituted by ideas which give them meaning. As a result, the conceptual framework which informs this book is designed to facilitate a more nuanced and satisfactory understanding of the inextricability of images from US China policy. It does this by emphasising the power of discourse and representation to construct China’s identity (as a threat, an opportunity, etc.) as well as that of the United States, thereby creating the necessary realities within which policy options are made available and justifiable. By exposing the capacity of images and assumptions to endure over time, the framework allows an exposition of how this type of representation has always been most complicit within that process. To reaffirm an earlier point, while the existence of an objectively determin­ able reality about China is disputed here, the analysis which follows is envisaged primarily as complementary, rather than contradictory, to the literatures from which it departs. It is designed to work alongside studies which inform us why particular US China policies have been enacted by exposing the social construction of the conditions which made them politically possible. The third argument is that US China policy has always been active in the production and reproduction of imagery and in the reaffirmation of the identities of

State of the art and conceptual framework   33 both China and the United States. Traditionally, that policy has been interpreted in relatively restrictive terms, as the material acts of one given actor towards another. Accordingly, the service of US China policy itself in the construction of China’s identity and hence in the perpetuation of discourses of separation and difference, or ‘foreignness’, currently remains almost entirely absent from our existing base of knowledge. The conceptual framework of this analysis introduces the opportunity to demonstrate this process, by exposing the role of US China policy as political performances active in the (re)production of the discourses and representations on which they rely. The importance of this is to show that US China policies are not simply an endpoint of representational processes; the discourses by which they are advanced work like any other, constructing and reconstructing reality as well as the actors within them. It is also to show that this process functions in the protection of US identity when seemingly threatened by that of China – especially during times of crisis – by confirming the ideas and values understood to define them both. The book now turns to the exploration of American images of China and their role within the enactment of US China policy across the lifespan of their bilateral relations. This is achieved across four individual chapters which interrogate those images in a broadly chronological manner. Accordingly, the purpose of the next chapter is to examine the earliest period of Sino-­US relations, from 1776 to 1882.

Notes    1 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 61.    2 It is recognised that it is not always entirely accurate to designate individual works as belonging to either an ‘imagery’ or ‘policy’ literature, as their contents may overlap and span the two. Nonetheless, a division of the literature in this way is useful for demonstrating exactly where the key silences described above lie and where they have been partially addressed, and for establishing the rationale for the analysis which follows.    3 This literature is complemented by another which explores Chinese images of the United States. See, for example, David Shambaugh, Beautiful Imperialist: China Perceives America, 1972–1990 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Carola McGiffert (ed.), Chinese Images of the United States (Washington DC: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 2005); Hong Zhang, America Perceived: The Making of Chinese Images of the United States, 1945–1953 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002). For British images of China, see: Ariane Knüsel, Framing China: Media Images and Political Debates in Britain, the USA and Switzerland, 1900–1950 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012); Emma Mawdsley, ‘Fu Manchu vs. Dr Livingstone in the Dark Continent? Representing China, Africa and the West in British Broadsheet Newspapers’, Political Geography 27 (2008), pp. 509–529.    4 Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958); Harold Isaacs, Images of Asia: American Views of China and India (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).    5 Ibid., pp. 11–12.    6 Ibid., p. 71. This framework has been adopted and modified by others. See Warren Cohen, ‘American Perceptions of China’, in Oksenberg and Oxnam, Dragon and

34   State of the art and conceptual framework    7    8    9

  10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19

  20   21

  22   23

Eagle, p. 55; Steven Mosher, China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 21. Isaacs, Scratches, pp. 87–88. John King Fairbank later agreed. See John King Fairbank, China Watch (Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 5–6. Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-­East Asian Relations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1967); A.T. Steele, The American People and China (New York: The McGraw-­Hill Book Company, 1966). Iriye later contributed to an exploratory examination of imagery in Sino-­US relations. See Michael Hunt, David Shambaugh, Warren Cohen and Akira Iriye, ‘Mutual Images in US– China Relations’. Occasional Paper no. 32. (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Asia Program, 1988). Cohen condensed a full history of American imagery of China into a single chapter. See Warren Cohen, ‘American Perceptions of China’, in Oksenberg and Oxnam, Dragon and Eagle, pp. 54–86. See also D.P. Das, ‘The American Image of China’, China Report, 8:11 (1972), 11–17. Steele, American People, p. 1. Isaacs, Scratches, p. 64. Steele, American People, p. 205. James Claude Thomson, Peter W. Stanley and John Curtis Perry, Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York: Harper Row, 1981), p. xi and pp. 4–5. Mackerras, Western Images. Thomson, Stanley and Perry, Sentimental Imperialists, p. 5. Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). John Haddad, The Romance of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Jane E. Elliot, Some Did it for Civilization, Some Did it For Their Country: A Revised View of the Boxer War (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2002); Mosher, China Misperceived. T. Christopher Jesperson, American Images of China, 1931–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University, 1996). See also Robert McClellan, The Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes Towards China, 1890–1905 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1971); Jianwei Wang, Limited Adversaries: Post Cold War Sino-­ American Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Alexander Liss, ‘Images of China in the American Print Media: A Survey from 2000 to 2002’, Journal of Contemporary China 12(35), pp. 299–318. Goldstein et al., America Views China. Hongshan Li and Zhaohui Hong (eds), Image, Perception, and the Making of US– China Relations. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998). See also Heinz Dieter Assmann, Thomas Chan and Karin M. von Filseck (eds), Perceptions and Images of China (Baden-­Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2008). For recent examinations of US media images of China see, for example, Yi Edward Yang and Xinsheng Liu, ‘The “China Threat” Through the Lens of US Print Media: 1992–2006’, Journal of Contemporary China, 21:76 (2012), pp. 695–711; Li Zhang, ‘The Rise of China: Media Perception and Implications for International Politics’, Journal of Contemporary China, 19:64 (2010), pp. 233–254. Jesperson, American Images, pp. xvi–xvii. Ibid., p. xv. Thompson et al. note that American ideas about China ‘tell us a good deal more about ourselves than they do about Asia’. See Thomson et al., Sentimental Imperialists, p. 5. Karin Filseck suggests that China was looked on by Europeans ‘with the eyes of the Occident’. See also Chengxin Pan, ‘The “China Threat” in American Self-­ Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 29 (2004), especially pp. 310–313.

State of the art and conceptual framework   35   24 Richard Madsen, China and the American Dream: A Moral Enquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. xi.   25 Thomas Laszlo Dorogi, Tainted Perceptions: Liberal Democracy and American Popular Images of China (Lanham, MD: University of America Press, 2001).   26 Harry Harding, A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China Since 1972 (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1992). Warren Cohen has produced arguably the most concise yet insightful history of the United States’ relations with China: see Cohen, America’s Response.   27 Harding, Fragile Relationship, pp. 33–34 and pp. 87–94.   28 Ibid., p. 358.   29 See also, for example, David M. Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing US–China Relations, 1989–2000 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), chapter 1; Cohen, America’s Response, chapter 9; Foot, Practise of Power, pp. 243–245.   30 Fairbank, China Perceived, p. xiv.   31 Foot, Practice of Power; Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-­American Conflict, 1947–1958 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Lampton, Same Bed. See also Robert L. Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of US–China Relations, 1989–2000 (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003); Ezra F. Vogel (ed.), Living With China: US–China Relations in the Twenty First Century (New York: WW Norton and Company, 1997); Yufan Hao (ed.), Sino-­American Relations: Challenges Ahead (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010).   32 Richard Harris Moorsteen and Morton Abramowitz, Remaking China Policy: US– China Relations and Governmental Decision Making (Washington DC: RAND, 1971), p. 70.   33 Robert D. Kaplan, ‘How We Would Fight China’, The Atlantic Monthly, 295:5 (2005), pp. 49–64; John J. Mearsheimer, ‘China’s Unpeaceful Rise’, Current History, 105:690 (2006), pp.  160–162. See also Thomas J. Christensen, ‘Posing Problems Without Catching Up: China’s Rise and Challenges for US Security Policy’, International Security, 25:4 (2001), pp.  5–40; Denny Roy, ‘Hegemon on the Horizon? China’s Threat to East Asian Security’, International Security, 19:1 (1994), pp. 149–168.   34 Warren Cohen, ‘China’s Rise in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 30:4–5 (2007), p. 703.   35 Gordon Chang, The Coming Collapse of China (London: Arrow, 2002). See also, for example, Khalid R. Al-­Rhodan, ‘A Critique of the China Threat Theory: A Systemic Analysis’, Asian Perspective, 31:3 (2007), pp. 41–66; Vince Cable, and Peter Ferdinand, ‘China as an Economic Giant: Threat or Opportunity?’ International Affairs, 70:2 (1994), pp. 243–261.   36 See in particular Peter Hays Gries, ‘Social Psychology and the Identity-­Conflict Debate: Is the “China Threat” Inevitable?’, European Journal of International Relations, 11:2 (2005), pp.  235–265; Aaron L. Friedberg, ‘The Future of US–China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable?’, International Security, 30:2 (2005), pp. 7–45. See also Oliver Turner, ‘China’s Recovery: Why the Writing Was Always on the Wall’, The Political Quarterly 80:1 (2009), pp. 111–118.   37 For further analyses of China’s contemporary ‘rise’, with varying degrees of focus on its relations with the United States and on US China policy, see, for example, Thomas J. Christensen, ‘Fostering Stability or Creating a Monster? The Rise of China and U.S. Policy Toward East Asia’, International Security, 31:1 (2006), pp.  81–126; Thomas J. Christensen, ‘Chinese Realpolitik’, Foreign Affairs, 75:5 (1996), pp.  37–52; Robert G. Sutter, China’s Rise in Asia: Promises and Perils (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).   38 Leonard A. Kusnitz, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: America’s China Policy, 1949–1979 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).

36   State of the art and conceptual framework   39 Michael Y.M. Kau, Pierre M. Perrolle, Susan H. Marsh and Jeffrey Berman, ‘Public Opinion and Our China Policy’, Asian Affairs, 5:3 (1978), pp. 133–147.   40 See also Foot, Practice of Power, chapter 4; Steven M. Teles, ‘Public Opinion and Interest Groups in the Making of US–China Policy’, in Robert Ross (ed.), After the Cold War: Domestic Factors and U.S.-China Relations (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); Ole Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (revised edn) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), especially pp. 86–90.   41 Kau et al., ‘Public Opinion’, p. 135.   42 Jie Chen, Ideology in US Foreign Policy: Case Studies in US–China Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), p. 1.   43 Evelyn Goh, Constructing the US Rapprochement With China, 1961–1974: From ‘Red Menace’ to ‘Tacit Ally’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).   44 Ibid., pp. 5–8.   45 Øystein Tunsjø, US Taiwan Policy: Constructing the Triangle (London: Routledge, 2008).   46 Ibid., p. 2.   47 Oliver Turner, ‘ “Threatening China” and US Security: The International Politics of Identity’, Review of International Studies, 39:4 (2013), pp. 903–924.   48 L.H.M. Ling, ‘Worlds Beyond Westphalia: Daoist Dialectics and the “China Threat” ’, Review of International Studies 39:3 (2013), pp. 549–568.   49 Chengxin Pan, Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China’s Rise (Cheltenham, UK: Edwin Elgar, 2012). For a review of this volume see Oliver Turner, Review of Chengxin Pan, Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China’s Rise (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2012), Global Change, Peace and Security 26:1 (2014), pp. 121–123.   50 Pan, ‘China Threat’, pp. 313. See also Chengxin Pan, ‘Understanding Chinese Identity in International Relations: A Critique of Western Approaches’, Political Science, 5:2 (1999), pp. 135–148.   51 Pan, Knowledge, Desire and Power, chapters 6 and 7.   52 Fairbank, China Perceived, p. xiv.   53 Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 24.   54 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 4.   55 Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan, Postcolonial Geographies (New York: Continuum, 2002), p.  65. To reaffirm, authors such as Evelyn Goh and Øystein Tunsjø have utilised IR constructivist approaches to examine US China policy.   56 Said, Orientalism.   57 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 199.   58 Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 135. For a discussion of these tensions and of the need to resist the ‘over textualisation’ of postcolonial analysis, see Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism, pp. 82–90.   59 Alexander Wendt, ‘Constructing International Politics’, International Security 20 (1995), p. 73.   60 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (translated by A.M Sheridan Smith) (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 80.   61 See Lorand B. Szalay, Jean B. Strohl, Liu Fu and Pen-­shui Lao, American and Chinese Perceptions and Belief Systems: A People’s Republic of China–Taiwanese Comparison (New York: Plenum Press, 1994), p. 61.   62 Gries, ‘Identity and Conflict’, p. 309.   63 Jesperson, American Images, p. xv.   64 Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), pp. 12–13.

State of the art and conceptual framework   37   65 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 9; Walter L. Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and US Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 1; See also Stuart Hall, ‘Who Needs Identity?’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, CF: Sage Publications, 1996), pp. 1–5.   66 Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 124.   67 Said, Orientalism, p. 206.   68 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘American Democracy in Relation to Asia’, in Robert Bartley, Chan Heng Chee, Samuel P. Huntington and Shijuro Ogata, Democracy and Capitalism: Asian and American Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p.  35. See also Patrick M. Garry, Liberalism and American Identity (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1992), especially chapter 4.   69 Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Partricia Dolbeare, American Ideologies (Chicago: Markham, 1976), p.  16; Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Towards Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).   70 Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race and American Foreign Policy: A History (Boston: Northeastern University Press); Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).   71 See, for example, Najia Aarim-­Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).   72 Robert Blauner, Still the Big News: Racial Oppression in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), p. vii.   73 Blauner, Racial Oppression, pp. 52 and 83.   74 Said, Orientalism, p. 204.   75 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge: New York, 1994), p. 99.   76 Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practises in Biography, Photography and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 100.   77 Ikechi Mgbeoji, ‘The Civilised Self and Barbaric Other: Imperial Delusions of Order and the Challenges of Human Security’, Third World Quarterly, 27:5 (2006), p. 857.   78 John Kleinig, Paternalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 4.   79 Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p.  1. For similar arguments see John G. Ruggie, ‘The Past as Prologue?: Interests, Identity, and American Foreign Policy’, International Security, 21:4 (1997), p.  110; Hixson, American Diplomacy, p.  1; Charles Lockhart, The Roots of American Exceptionalism: History, Institutions and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), especially chapter 1.   80 Bruce Kuklick, ‘US Intellectual History’, in Ernest May (ed.), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 1993), pp. 157–158.   81 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 11; Bill Ashcroft, On Post-­Colonial Futures (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 40.   82 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 10.   83 Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London: Longman, 1992) p. 92.   84 Ibid., p. 77, emphasis in original.   85 Fairclough, Social Change, p. 64.   86 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith) (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 216.   87 Ibid., p.  216; James F. Keeley, ‘Toward a Foucauldian Analysis of International Regimes’, International Organization, 44:1 (1990), p. 91.   88 Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1922), p. 81.

38   State of the art and conceptual framework   89 Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures. Lecture One: 7 January 1976’, in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (Edited by Colin Gordon) (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 100–101.   90 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 95.   91 Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, pp. 81–83.   92 Jurgen Habermas, ‘Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again’, in Michael Kelly (ed.) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 92.   93 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 6.   94 See ibid.   95 Patricia H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd edn) (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 114.   96 Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, ‘Power in a Postcolonial World: Race, Gender, and Class in International Relations’, in Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds), Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (London: Routledge, 2004), p.  8. See also Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’, International Organization, 59 (2005), pp. 39–75.   97 Michel Foucault, ‘Prison Talk’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (Edited by Colin Gordon) (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), p. 52.   98 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1979).   99 Fairclough, Language and Power, p. 94. 100 Ibid., p. 92. 101 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Translated by Robert Hurley) (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 93. 102 Wendt, ‘Constructing International Politics’, p. 73. 103 Doty, ‘Counterinsurgency Policy’, p. 298. 104 Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-­Eating Myth and the Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 56. 105 Michael W. Apple, The State and Politics of Knowledge (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), p. 6; Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 4. 106 Barnett and Duvall, ‘Power’, p. 47. 107 Wendt, Social Theory, p. 135. 108 Campbell, Writing Security, especially chapter 2. 109 Richard K. Ashley, ‘Living on Border Lines: Man, Postructuralism, and War’, in James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 303. 110 Richard K. Ashley, ‘Foreign Policy as Political Performance’, International Studies Notes, 13 (1987), p. 51, emphasis in original. See also Shapiro, Politics of Representation, chapter 3. 111 Campbell, Writing Security, p. x. 112 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 7. See also Bill Ashcroft, Post-­Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 21. 113 Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. xiii. See also Mgbeoji, ‘Civilised Self ’. 114 For the link between racial representations and foreign policy see ibid., p.  68; DeConde, Ethnicity; Ronald Bayor (ed.), Race and Ethnicity in America: A Concise History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 98. 115 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, introduction to Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan (eds), Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 23.

State of the art and conceptual framework   39 116 Jan Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale (London: Pluto, 1990), p. 223. 117 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 61. 118 Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 68–69. 119 Nizar Messari, ‘Identity and Foreign Policy: The Case of Islam in US Foreign Policy’, in Kubálková, Foreign Policy, p. 235. 120 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 69. 121 James Der Derian, ‘The War of Networks’, Theory and Event, 5:4 (2002), http:// muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4derderian.html, last accessed 19 October 2010. 122 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 1. 123 For a similar analogy see Wendt, ‘Constructing International Politics’, p. 73. 124 Ashley, ‘Border Lines’, p. 304. 125 Ibid., p. 304. 126 Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 136–137. 127 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 13. 128 David L. Rousseau, Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities: The Social Construction of Realism and Liberalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 4. 129 Hixson, Myth of American Diplomacy, p. 8. 130 Campbell, Writing Security, p.  91. See also John Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 218–219. 131 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 61.

2 American images of China, 1776–1882

Introduction Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was among the foremost China experts in colonial America.1 He read widely about the country and its people and likely conversed with sailors who voyaged there. His aspirations for American society were framed in part by an admiration of what he knew about China, but he never actually saw it for himself.2 To Franklin, China was an imaginative geography in the purest possible sense, and yet he became actively involved in the production and reproduction of truths about what it was. In a fictional narrative of a visitor to China, for instance, he wrote that there was ‘a great deal of cheating’ there, that horses were kept ‘chiefly for war’ and that its people had ‘a sort of religion’.3 The substance of the work was based upon Franklin’s readings, but it was interspersed by entirely fabricated elements of his own.4 As noted in the introduction, representational processes have always constructed the reality of China, no matter how flawed or sophisticated they may be. The case of Benjamin Franklin, who never went there, is a useful example of the power of imagery to establish its identity within American imaginations. The purpose of this chapter is to initiate the exploration of American images of China across the earliest period of their relations, from 1776 to 1882. Continental American history, of course, precedes the late eighteenth century. However, this analysis begins with the formal establishment of the United States in 1776 and the earliest interactions between the people of that new nation and China. It is shown that the identity constructions of Idealised and Opportunity China first emerged and became established during this period. The chapter also demonstrates that these constructions developed and endured, and later coexisted with equally stable and pervasive images of Uncivilised China. During the British-­led opium wars of the mid-­nineteenth century these powerful representations of China and its people were inextricable from Washington’s decision to establish formal ties with Beijing and from US demands for a treaty almost identical to that secured by Great Britain. The chapter then explores how the introduction of Chinese immigrants to the (particularly Western) United States from the 1850s became the catalyst for fears of Threatening China, which presented an imagined danger to the White

American images of China, 1776–1882   41 population. Chinese in America attracted widespread racism as Uncivilised and Threatening China attained positions of relative dominance within American imaginations. Ultimately, they combined to play another key role in determining the boundaries of the politically possible by providing the necessary reality within which Washington could formulate and impose an almost total ban on Chinese immigration in the latter stages of the period. Throughout the first half-­ century of Sino-­US contact in particular, governmental interaction was essentially non-­existent. However, a central purpose of this chapter is to reveal how these early policy decisions were enabled, and how ideas about China which have circulated in American society ever since first became established and ingrained.

Imagining China: earliest American constructions On 4 July 1776 the United States of America officially came into being. China was not completely unknown to eighteenth-­century Americans as they had long imported tea from Canton, the only Chinese port to accommodate foreign trade.5 Nonetheless, it was distant and alien and existed as something of a ‘mirage’ whose identity predominantly reflected the ideas of Europeans, the majority of whom had also never seen Asia.6 American newspapers regularly cited China, but accurate information was often restricted to such mundane affairs as shipping and trade.7 Yet China’s inherent mystery and exoticism generated a degree of populist attention and the introduction of imported Chinese goods helped relieve the ‘dullness of Puritan life’.8 Americans themselves soon began producing items which imitated Chinese styles, collectively known as chinoiserie. Mock-­Chinese furniture, textiles and architecture, among other things, provided expressions of Western visions of Asia.9 The emergence and popularity of chinoiserie is evidence of a tangible interest in China but, more significantly, of early representational processes. Chinoiserie helped create the imaginative geography of Idealised China, and the exotic, romantic nature of these goods betrays the underlying discursive truths upon which this identity was formed. As Raymond O’Connor explains: ‘The image formed was one of a fantastic, uncivilised nation of strange people who lived on the opposite side of the globe, a fitting location for such a weird society’.10 Such early ‘metaphysical contact’ helped create alluring fantasies about China.11 These fantasies had long been nurtured by the ships of the British East India Company and their monopoly over British trade there. Divorced from the Empire, however, the United States was free to establish relations of its own, and on 22 February 1784 the Empress of China left New York to become the first American vessel to reach Canton. The ship returned with significant profits, but its commercial achievements were not the only cause for celebration. Enquired the Connecticut Courant: Some years ago . . . the arrival of a vessel after so prosperous a voyage, from so distant a part of our globe, would be announced by public thanksgiving

42   American images of China, 1776–1882 and ringing of bells! Should not this be our practise now, since Providence is countenancing our navigation to this new world?12 The New Jersey Gazette declared that Americans could now trade with China without interference from Europe.13 As noted by the Courant, that country was America’s ‘new world’, and Opportunity China became more prominent within American imaginations.14 In 1791 Alexander Hamilton informed the House of Representatives that China held significant potentialities of revenue for merchants and the government, and northeastern ports such as Salem, New York and Boston dominated this early trade. Chinese handkerchiefs, wallpaper, silk and pottery are a small selection of the items that decorated late-­eighteenth-century American homes. This fascination for Idealised China is reflected in Figure 2.1: an eighteenth-­century chinoiserie bureau cabinet of the type bought and manufactured by Americans of the period. Idealised China was heavily romanticised as a ‘dreamworld’ of ancient mystery and exoticism.15 Crucially, it was constructed from, and served to reproduce, understandings about the United States as the supposed embodiment of Enlightenment values, as John Winthrop’s famous ‘city upon a hill’ or Thomas Jefferson’s ‘empire for liberty’. The US Constitution itself codified Congress’ right to ‘promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts [for] authors and inventors’.16 In early nineteenth century America China was contrasted with the scientific values and activities of the West.17 It was different and alien, and yet knowable as an object within, and belonging to, particular frames of reference. In other words, the power/knowledge nexus ensured that American discourse was neither neutral nor dispassionate. China was incorporated into Western identity and constructed for American imaginations.18 China’s detachment from the modern world was further reinforced by newspapers and magazines, which presented sketches and drawings of ‘traditional’ Chinese scenes, including pagodas, riverside villages, dancers and performers and any manner of other aspects of Chinese life which might pique the interest of their audience. Even during this early period, constructions of China were numerable and diverse. It is therefore unsurprising that another identity emerged which not only existed simultaneously, but which appears almost antithetical, to the logic of Idealised China. The construction of Uncivilised China was that which existed predominantly in the minds of the few people who went there, and stood in stark contrast to the exotic, Idealised China of many Americans at home. At the heart of the matter was the low regard in which many Chinese held foreigners. Their Middle Kingdom was the centre of the universe, surrounded by the lands of foreign barbarians, and for centuries their unique tribute system of trade had set strict parameters within which the latter were granted permission to trade.19 Europeans and Americans were restricted to Canton for the health and protection of the Chinese people.20 The differing worldviews of Chinese and Americans demonstrate emphatically that civilisation is a subjective and value-­laden concept.21 Just as Idealised China was contrasted with a more scientifically enlightened United States, Uncivilised

Figure 2.1 Eighteenth-century chinoiserie bureau cabinet (Rob Corder).

44   American images of China, 1776–1882 China was comparatively less advanced and semi-­barbarous. Complaints arose quickly. Vice-­consul to Canton Thomas Randall observed that ‘the Chinese are considered by most persons who have seen them, as very contemptible, however importantly they think of themselves’.22 A contributor to the Country Courier declared the Chinese ‘tricksters’, ‘the most pusillanimous people on Earth’ and ‘the greatest rogues in nature’.23 In 1821 Francis Terranova, an Italian sailor attached to an American ship, was indicted of murdering a Chinese woman after throwing an object overboard. The incident was almost certainly accidental, but Terranova was sentenced to death. Americans in Canton were aggrieved, and they had the support of the American press: ‘[The Chinese] conduct throughout speaks for itself, without any comment’, declared the Republican Chronicle.24 These sentiments were echoed by American missionaries to China who began journeying there in the early nineteenth century in search of converts. As did traders, missionaries voyaged to Opportunity China which could be adapted to their principally non-­commercial motivations. They quickly became significant image-­makers of China and the Chinese, and in 1830 reverends David Abeel and Elijah Bridgeman arrived in Canton. The American Board of Commissioners to Foreign Missions (ABCFM) informed the latter that ‘China, if it should embrace Christianity, or tolerate its introduction, would open access to almost all Eastern and Southern Asia and the Asiatic islands’.25 Thus Opportunity China was pursued aggressively; as the ABCFM made clear, the Chinese might willingly ‘embrace Christianity’ but, if they did not, efforts would be made to ensure that it was ‘tolerated’. Opportunity China was constructed largely upon the so-­called myth of the China market: that persistent and recurring false promise that China’s enormous population would bring corresponding (principally economic) rewards. Such hopes were quickly reassessed. The Religious Monitor and Evangelical Repository complained that ‘there seems to be more obstacles to the introduction of Christianity into China than into any other place. The idolatry and superstition of that country are of the grossest kind’.26 Reverend Robert Morrison observed that the Chinese were ‘prone to prevaricate, to deceive, to lie’,27 and David Abeel later reflected that ‘there is probably no other space on Earth so filled with real wretchedness as China’.28 It is worth reiterating that Americans of this period, or indeed any period, were not uniquely racist or xenophobic towards foreign (particularly non-­ Western) peoples. Nor is it argued that the Chinese were the perpetually helpless victims of American racism or power. As already observed, the traditional worldviews of many Chinese around this time were framed by similar civilised/ uncivilised distinctions between their own people and barbarians beyond their borders. Warren Cohen suggests that nineteenth-­century Chinese were ‘probably the most ethnocentric people in the world’.29 However, the intention here is to write a history of the production of truth, and American discourses actively constructed a China which compared broadly unfavourably to the United States. Even the romanticisation of Idealised China could reinforce its imagined inferiority. In 1816, for example, the Country Courier celebrated the view over

American images of China, 1776–1882   45 Canton as ‘perfectly picturesque . . . the imaginary residence of the imaginary gods, whom they worship, more in puppet show style than with the ceremony of solemnity’.30 While the beauty and curiosities of Idealised China are celebrated, the image produced is that of a people misguided by a comical faith. Individuals such as the trader Silas Holbrook relied far less on subtlety and suggestion, observing that the natural reaction of Americans when they encountered Chinese was to laugh: ‘His dress . . . is ridiculous. His trowsers [sic] are a couple of meal bags . . . his cap is fantastic . . .’, he wrote.31 In 1818 the Weekly Visitor sought to challenge prevailing wisdom about China. ‘About three years ago, at a public dinner . . . the conversation turned on the dishonesty and immorality of the Chinese’, the Visitor wrote, before describing a story told by a Mr John Locke: a Chinese merchant, Sha-­King-Qua, heard of the death of a bankrupt English acquaintance and in sympathy sent money to the man’s children in England. According to the Visitor, Mr Locke ‘was so much affected [by the story], that his eyes filled and his voice thickened’.32 The generosity and altruism of Sha-­KingQua is hence applauded, but the individual is simultaneously confirmed as the exception which proves the rule; as a ‘Chinaman’ of good character his laudable deed is worth recalling, and the ‘dishonesty and immorality’ of the Chinese race is confirmed. By the early- to mid-­nineteenth century discussions of this ‘dishonesty and immorality’ could be reached seamlessly in conversation, and people like Holbrook could refer to the Chinese in openly racist terms without fear of contradiction or reprisal. Ultimately, these representational processes are evidence that the discursive foundations of Uncivilised China in particular were becoming common sense, ‘implicit, backgrounded, taken for granted’.33 Uncivilised China was prominent and enduring because it was constructed from among the most intrinsic and valuable components of American identity; as archaic, despotic and heathen, for many China represented everything the United States was not. As such, the words of Abeel, Holbrook and myriad others did as much to construct the United States as they did China. As Haddad puts it, ‘we find manifest in [early American] reactions only a smug belief in the pre-­eminence of their own civilization’.34 Further, because the United States had been founded in reaction to the nature and practices of Europe, its sense of exceptionalism (as that of a ‘redeemer nation’ tasked with advancing Enlightenment values abroad) was grounded upon active progression.35 In his revolutionary 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, for example, Thomas Paine had argued that ‘the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind’.36 China may have been self-­evidently removed from the United States, but it was considered that it could and should aspire to American standards of civilisation. This meant that by the 1820s China had become the subject of negation strategies, which serve foremost to deny history and construct geographies as blank spaces waiting to be filled.37 Thomas Paine had asserted that ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again’,38 and Reverend Abeel spoke of the necessary ‘salvation of a whole [Chinese] empire’.39 When describing the Great Wall

46   American images of China, 1776–1882 of China to its readers, The Minerva newspaper concluded that it had failed in its principal task: ‘its towers, its gates, its bridges, are almost everywhere gigantic labours . . . but all these precautions have not prevented invasions’.40 While China’s history was not always explicitly denied, the relative advancement of the West meant that it was at least denied an ultimate purpose, since it had led in the end to misery and decay. Varying American constructions of China’s identity had emerged during this earliest period and in each case were produced from understandings about the United States itself. American discourses of Idealised, Opportunity and Uncivilised China circulated so that China and its people existed in forms that were exotic and idealised, practical and unromantic. The presence of China within American imaginations, however, is easily overstated. This was particularly true in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even in Washington. In 1786 Samuel Shaw had become the first American consul to Canton, but the post was largely ceremonial and reflected early US policy in Asia, which was framed exclusively around the development of trade.41 Indeed, across the first 50 years of contact with China a Washington-­appointed consul was resident there for just 14 of them.42 Nonetheless, discourse and imagery worked to make China foreign from the United States as a boundary-­producing performance.43 These representational processes worked to determine the potentialities of US China policy, which from the mid-­nineteenth century became a more prominent feature of Sino-­American relations. Further, it was comparatively stable and enduring images of China which were most active in this regard. It is to an examination of these developments that the analysis now turns.

Representation and the beginnings of US China policy Since the early part of the century American merchants had involved themselves in the British-­dominated opium trade in China, despite it being declared illegal by the Chinese. In March 1839 it was ordered that all opium held by foreigners must be confiscated and destroyed. Americans signed a bond which signalled their intention to abstain from dealing the drug, but the British refused and decamped to Hong Kong. From there they continued to trade with the help of Americans still in Canton.44 A petition to Congress in May argued that, if the British decided to blockade China’s ports, its government should entertain ‘all the just and reasonable demands of the foreign power’. The United States, it concluded, should join forces with the Europeans ‘to establish commercial relations . . . upon a safe and honourable footing, such as exists between all friendly powers’.45 Tensions with the Chinese remained and conflict soon followed. This Anglo-­Chinese War, or First Opium War, lasted three years, from 1839 to 1842, during which time the US government remained officially neutral. As indicated above, however, the majority of traders in the region were broadly in favour of the conflict. The crucial question here is not why Americans supported the British. It is how contemporary discourses and imagery of China could legitimise this policy when the United States itself had been founded in reaction to the

American images of China, 1776–1882   47 imperial and colonial practices of Europe, as Jefferson’s ‘empire for liberty’. This question is best approached when we acknowledge that American images of China were not external to the practices of the Chinese which Americans found so disagreeable. They were disagreeable because, in relation to the United States, China was deemed backward and uncivilised. As such, Uncivilised China simultaneously reproduced the supposedly more civilised facets of American identity. The deployment of (predominantly British) material forces, in other words, was not separate from, but actively constitutive of, representational practices, and was a justifiable instrument of a Western civilising mission. The ‘just and reasonable demands’ referred to in the petition were those made by law-­abiding, civilised nations such as the United States, which sought commercial relations based upon ‘a safe and honourable footing’. American truths about Uncivilised China ensured the logic in siding with their enlightened European cousins. It was established in Chapter 1 that discourses are not bounded and discrete, but in fact overlap. American expectations around the time of the First Opium War that Uncivilised China conform to Western civilisation, for instance, were formed in part by equally enduring understandings of Idealised China and its technological inferiorities.46 As early as 1819 the Port Folio had argued that in war ‘the Chinese would fall . . . before the steady courage of a well disciplined European army. [They would be] food for cannon; and, I might add, amusement for the bayonet’.47 As Hobson observes, Western designations of the global East as exotic, alluring and, most importantly, passive, have traditionally provided the rationale for its imperial penetration and control.48 These were the representations which additionally helped to justify American support for the ‘civilised’ British. Figure 2.2, taken from a mid-­nineteenth century edition of Putnam’s

Figure 2.2 Contrasting images of nineteenth-century Westerners and Chinese (Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, April, 1857).

48   American images of China, 1776–1882 Monthly Magazine, illustrates the overlapping qualities of Idealised and Uncivilised China of the day. The Chinese are depicted in traditional battle clothing with swords clearly visible. They are darkened and mysterious, but advance comparable imagery as items of chinoiserie of the period (see Figure 2.1). Collectively, their purpose is to reproduce notions of American technological and cultural superiority. In Figure 2.2 the Westerners stand in the light with a modern ship in the background. They wear smarter attire and (perhaps ironically) appear prepared for diplomacy rather than battle. The lures of Opportunity China also ensured that, for the most part, American merchants supported the opening of China to the modern world. Opportunity China did not simply represent American material concerns for profitable economic relations, however. Just like Idealised and Uncivilised China, it has always been a construction of American design. As Audie Klotz observes, the economic practices of states are interpretable not merely through the calculated significance of material gain. They must be additionally acknowledged as the manifestation of ideas which give those gains meaning. As such, they are necessarily constitutive of discourse and identity processes.49 In the mid-­nineteenth century Washington was keen to intensify foreign trade, but China existed as an opportunity despite resistance from the Chinese themselves. Power/knowledge, in short, made China an opportunity. Opportunity China was constitutive of American commitments to free and open international trade and, as such, was a particular kind of imagined opportunity. The Opium War ended in 1842 with total defeat for China. Great Britain obtained the Treaty of Nanjing, and with it a number of privileges. Four new ports were opened to foreign (including American) commerce, and yet in May 1843 Caleb Cushing was tasked with securing an equivalent agreement with China on behalf of the United States. The Sino-­American Treaty of Wanghia was signed on 3 July 1844.50 It confirmed the right of Americans to trade in the new treaty ports, but also granted them the privilege of extraterritoriality (the entitlement of foreigners accused of crimes to be tried by the legal system of their own country, rather than that of the country in which the crime is alleged to have been committed). This effectively reduced the sovereignty of the Chinese government within its own territory. The treaty also granted Americans an ostensibly innocuous permission: the freedom to study the Chinese language. Such an undertaking had been previously forbidden to foreigners, but the demand was not driven by mere curiosity alone. Certainly, Idealised China remained an object of fascination. In 1834, for example, a Chinese woman by the name of Afong Moy was put on display at the American Museum in New York, where she ‘performed’ her Chineseness to the wonder of White American audiences.51 Throughout the Opium War 100,000 people visited a museum of Chinese artefacts in Philadelphia.52 In the late 1840s John R. Peters presented a significant collection of Chinese items to American audiences in Boston, Philadelphia and New York. China’s appeal as a source of  entertainment and curiosity was demonstrated by the eventual sale of the

American images of China, 1776–1882   49 collection to the circus owner P.T. Barnum.53 Crucially, however, American knowledge remained active within the management of Sino-­American relations of power. In 1842, for example, the American Oriental Society was founded with the aim of studying the ‘Oriental nations’ to complete ‘the general ethnography of the globe’.54 Such a Western ethnography ensured that the Orient constituted not merely an exotic and spiritualised imaginary, but a political one too.55 Edward Said argued that Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt reduced it to ‘a department of French learning’56 and China was not innocently studied or observed in the West. People and institutions wanted to understand China, but in a way which suited their own values and motivations. This was illustrated through Washington’s insistence in 1844 that Americans be afforded the right to study Chinese. In his memoirs Reverend Abeel argued that ‘the [Chinese] language is to be mastered before anything of importance can be attempted; and they who can give the greatest number of years to its acquisition, are the best prepared to employ it to advantage’.57 What this means is that in the summer of 1844, as at any time before and since, China’s was not a fully constructed, unproblematic identity with which the United States shared relations. Naturalised, stable and enduring American representations of Idealised, Opportunity and Uncivilised China in particular had served in the creation of the necessary reality in which American traders could broadly support the First Opium War of 1839–1842. Those representations also functioned to legitimise a treaty with China identical to that which had been secured by the imperial British Empire. Moreover, each of these policies did not constitute a simple ‘bridge’ between states.58 They functioned in the production of imagery by working to affirm identity constructions, most notably those of a civilised United States and an Uncivilised China. As ‘a badge of subordination’, for example, extraterritoriality confirmed China’s legal system as inferior.59 It imposed a particular interpretation of the world and reproduced it, confirming China’s location beyond the imagined family of civilised nations.60 Cushing himself wrote that in a land of such ‘sanguinary barbarism’ Americans required legal protection.61 Ultimately, US China policy served to perpetuate the discourses of difference upon which it relied. The United States dominated its relations of power with China both politically and discursively and was not only in a position to demand a treaty with China, but also to represent the country in such a way that not doing so would be illogical. China’s foreignness and inferiority, in other words, were inextricable from the identification of China as a land and people from whom concessions should be sought. These types of representations coloured American perceptions of China for decades. For instance, in 1851 China’s Taiping Rebellion began. It lasted more than ten years and claimed around 20 million lives. The rebellion was a religiously motivated movement led by Hong Xiuquan and aimed to overthrow the nation’s ruling Qing dynasty. It gained early favour in the United States, principally because it was understood that the Taipings were following a form of Protestant religion. Moreover, it was considered that they were fighting for

50   American images of China, 1776–1882 modernisation and the intensification of foreign commerce.62 Hong Xiuquan was indeed a self-­proclaimed Protestant, but the reforms he envisaged would be inspired by Chinese traditions and teaching.63 With this understanding the American press became disillusioned and the ‘blasphemous’ Hong was criticised.64 In July 1853 Commissioner to China Humphrey Marshall, after labelling the imperial government ‘impotent, ignorant [and] conceited’, informed the State Department that the Taipings were incapable of establishing a functioning government. Marshall favoured US intervention as ‘a mission of humanity and charity’, but only when the emperor could be identified as ‘a subscriber to the laws of nations’.65 In the introduction it was explained that the fictional Chinese detective Charlie Chan was likeable to American audiences partly because he conformed to societal expectations, becoming Americanised. In the 1850s Americans (and the wider West) similarly wanted a Chinese revolution to which they could relate and which matched their hopes and expectations. To reaffirm an earlier point, non-­Western others such as China have been traditionally perceived as inferior for not aspiring to the standards of the West,66 and an apparent refusal by the Chinese to accept superior teachings around the time of the Taiping Rebellion was met with disappointment and scorn. Michael Hunt observes a congruence of feeling among American traders, missionaries and diplomats towards China around this time. Each group, he argued, initially appeared hopeful of widespread progression and change, but each was dismayed by what they saw.67 This was the role of the Taiping rebellion in reinforcing already enduring assumptions of an inferior, Uncivilised China. It was evident to many that the Chinese had failed to attain the standards of American civilisation by rejecting a pre-­ prescribed model of progress. The understanding that China should conform to Western expectations was shared even by Americans sympathetic to that country. For example, in 1861 Minister to China Anson Burlingame guaranteed that ‘while we claim our treaty right to buy and sell, and hire, in the treaty ports . . . we will not ask for, nor take concessions of, [Chinese] territory’.68 Burlingame worked tirelessly to encourage Sino-­American cooperation. Yet, even for China’s champion the existence of the treaty ports and, by extension, the manner in which they were forcibly opened to foreign trade, was unproblematic. The assumed right of Americans to ‘buy and sell, and hire’ on Western, rather than Chinese, terms went unquestioned and stayed beyond the realm of debate. Discourse was controlled and regulated so that particular understandings about China (and the United States) remained in circulation. Ultimately, China’s adherence to the ‘unequal’ treaties signed after its defeat in the opium wars (a second war had been fought between 1856 and 1860, resulting in additional treaties) was taken for granted. Alternative constructions of China, most notably that of an equal which could trade on its own terms, were unthinkable even among Sinophiles like Burlingame. Yet, up until the mid-­nineteenth century the vast majority of Americans had never seen China or even encountered its people. As it had been for Benjamin Franklin, China was an imaginative geography of the most emphatic type. This

American images of China, 1776–1882   51 changed from the 1850s onwards as Chinese immigrants began to enter the United States. While Uncivilised China in particular remained, Threatening China emerged as an additionally powerful construct within sections of Amer­ ican society. Fears circulated among the White American population, and the Chinese were reconstructed as a danger to the United States’ Caucasian foundations. Threatening China became established, enduring and highly active in the eventual legitimisation of a near total ban by Washington on immigration from China. It is to this phase in the history of Sino-­US relations that the chapter now turns.

Threatening China: representation and self-­preservation From 1848 the California Gold Rush attracted in excess of one hundred thousand people to the region in two years. Between 1849 and 1870 100,000 arrived from China.69 Some newspaper editors welcomed an influx of Chinese labour;70 for them, the United States could profit enormously from Opportunity China. Others, however, feared that the immigrants could destabilise American society. Indeed, as early as 1852 the Chinese became the targets of legislation as the Foreign Miner’s License Tax was introduced. Officially, the tax was aimed at all non-­US citizens employed in the Californian mining sector, but the majority of Chinese labourers at the time were miners.71 Washington’s foreign policy engagement with China remained comparatively infrequent and sporadic around this time. Nonetheless, as a boundary-­producing performance the representation of China and the Chinese continued to make them foreign from the United States, continually adjusting the boundaries of possibility for the policies that were enacted.72 Moreover, the most powerful discourses and images which circulated were responsible for the production of truths that would endure and resurface across the lifetime of Sino-­American relations. Discourses of an inferior, Uncivilised China remained particularly prominent around this time and were commonly produced from perhaps the most ‘catastrophic’ site of identity construction: race.73 Since the early 1800s Western intellectuals had studied presumed, seemingly innate differences between the world’s ethnic groups. Authors such as Samuel George Morton and Robert Knox classified the world’s populations, establishing hierarchies of race.74 Such imagery functioned explicitly to make the Chinese a classification of people, a quick and easy stereotypical image. Caucasians were invariably privileged over all other races, including the Chinese, and American lawyers, judges and political leaders promoted the ‘scientific’ discoveries of the day. This was demonstrated in the 1854 case of People vs. Hall where a White American, George Hall, was convicted of murdering a Chinese miner in California.75 On appeal the decisive testimony of a Chinese witness was dismissed, and in overturning the original ruling Chief Justice Murray referred to a stipulation of American law which decreed that ‘no Black, or Mulatto person, or (Amer­ ican) Indian’ could give evidence against a White individual. Since American Indians had originally migrated from Asia, Murray reasoned, all Asians were

52   American images of China, 1776–1882 also Indian. It was also decided that the term ‘Black person’ applied to a member of any race except Caucasian. As such, the Chinese were designated ‘Black’. In passing judgement Murray argued that ethnology had reached a ‘high point of perfection’ and that the Chinese were ‘a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior’.76 This was a truth that remained at the heart of the so-­called China Question for decades. The Chinese were deemed incompatible with the Amer­ ican character and as such were inassimilable. Discourses of Uncivilised and Threatening China overlapped so that the former was at least partly responsible for the emergence of the latter. Put simply, to be uncivilised was to be a threat to the civilised United States. Dominant discourses classified the Chinese as undesirable and they were distanced from the ‘normal’ population over fears of what Persaud terms ‘civilizational decomposition’.77 However, discourses of China not only reaffirmed established logic; they also challenged it. Resistance discourses sought to disrupt naturalised constructions, and during the 1860s less antagonistic imagery of China circulated. Leland Stanford, for example, who oversaw the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad during the 1860s and who hired thousands of Chinese immigrant labourers, considered them a model minority.78 He described the Chinese as ‘quiet, peace­ able, industrious, economical – ready and apt to learn all the different kinds of work required in railroad building’.79 Prevailing understandings of Uncivilised and Threatening China were interrupted elsewhere, albeit sometimes in patronising tones. ‘All hail, John Chinaman!’ declared the Chicago Tribune, after praising the contributions of Chinese workers to American society.80 The Albion argued that their introduction to the southern United States was an ‘experiment [which] seems worth trying’.81 Newspapers called for the ban on Chinese testimony in court to be repealed, and in January 1868 the California senate voted overwhelming in favour of its abolition. In the same year Anson Burlingame travelled with two Chinese envoys and a significant entourage to San Francisco, where he was warmly greeted.82 They toured the country, during which time Burlingame praised the Chinese and reintroduced enthusiasm for the economic potentialities of Opportunity China. He also played to enduring images of Idealised China, as the spectacle and ‘entertainment’ of his exotic group captured American imaginations.83 In July of that same year Washington signed the Burlingame Treaty with China,84 an economic agreement which has been described as the country’s ‘first equal treaty’.85 Beneath the written agreement, however, lay subtle reminders of China’s presumed inferiority and of the imbalanced relations of power which defined its relationship with the United States. Notably, article five of the treaty guaranteed free migration for American and Chinese citizens between both countries, as well as the right of legal citizenship. While seemingly nonpartisan, this agreement ran counter to the traditional prohibition of the emigration of subjects from China.86 Article four declared religious freedoms for both Americans and Chinese in the opposing country, but Beijing had long resisted the introduction of Christianity into China and had allowed it only as a result of the ‘unequal’ treaties it had been forced to sign after defeat in

American images of China, 1776–1882   53 the opium wars. Other articles provided the mutual assurance of unrestricted travel and access to educational institutions.87 Again, these may have benefitted Chinese in the United States to an equal or even greater degree than they did Americans in China, but the treaty itself, drafted by Secretary of State William Seward ‘in accordance with his own ideas of what was right and proper’, ultimately reinforced existing and naturalised assumptions of a backward, Uncivilised China.88 This was how the Burlingame Treaty was enabled. China still apparently lay at the periphery of the civilised world, and its conformity to American standards of civilisation was the overriding aim of Washington’s policy approach. Moreover, US China policy itself again served to reproduce and perpetuate the logic of the discourses of separation upon which it relied. It reaffirmed the identities of both China and the United States through the texts of its enactment. The function of Uncivilised China around this time in reconfirming American standards of civilisation is further revealed in Figure 2.3. An illustration from Harper’s Weekly argues that in order to remain in the United States, Chinese immigrants had to ‘embrace civilisation’. It should be acknowledged that Chinese communities in America were far from voiceless in the face of discrimination. Many discussed and protested against the restrictions and violence they encountered.89 In 1866, for example, a group in Montana published an article called Good Chinamen in which they wrote of their desire to work, pay taxes and be treated with dignity.90 However, resistance strategies – including those of Stanford and others – were frequently subjugated. The United States needed foreign workers, but for the most part it wanted them from Europe. The San Francisco Chronicle provided an example of the type of casual hostility towards the Chinese which more forcefully circulated American society: It is a most disgusting fact that the boys of Oakland are not allowed to stone Chinamen, or to set dogs upon them with impunity. Nay more, free white citizens, of the heaven-­descended Caucasian race, have actually been arrested . . . for no other offence than merely abusing Chinamen.91 The Chinese were denied the basic right of American citizenship.92 Since 1790 ‘free white persons’ alone had been granted this privilege after spending two years in the country.93 The Immigration and Naturalisation Act of 1870 reaffirmed their ineligibility despite removing the word ‘White’ from the statute. Those of ‘African nativity and descent’ could integrate legally into American society but others, including the Chinese, remained excluded.94 People vs. Hall had determined that the Chinese were Black by virtue of not being White. As always, race was a political category, and now Chinese in America were neither Black nor White; they were, in fact, something entirely undefined. Continually reconstructed, they were a race of people which changed to suit the needs of White American society. The Chinese were powerless before a legal system which expertly manoeuvred around them. As Daniels aptly claims: ‘it is understandable that the phrase “a Chinaman’s chance” meant no chance at all’.95

54   American images of China, 1776–1882

Figure 2.3 ‘Let the Chinese embrace civilization, and they may stay’ (Corbis Images).

The Chinese were marginalised but also represented as physically harmful. Threatened societies have been historically imagined as bodies whose health is in danger,96 and the arrival of Chinese immigrants to the United States coincided with the development of germ theory, which introduced Americans to the link between germs and disease.97 The Chinese were blamed for the spread of smallpox and leprosy, among other things, and the Washington Post likened ‘the wholesale immigration of Mongolians’ to a ‘deadly plague’.98 When arguing for a restriction of Chinese immigration Senator John Miller argued: ‘Let us keep

American images of China, 1776–1882   55 the blood which circulates through our political system . . . [and] preserve our life from the gangrene of Oriental civilisation’.99 Just like Idealised, Opportunity and Uncivilised China, Threatening China was a social construction of American imaginations. This is not to argue that the Chinese were uniformly of no danger to Americans. Rather, it is to say that Threatening China was a very particular kind of fantasised (non-­White, uncivilised) threat and existed in part to reinforce understandings of American identity as civilised and Caucasian. It mattered little that the Chinese were still relatively few in number, since danger could be ascribed to any identity which appeared to threaten that of America.100 This is demonstrated by the fact that as late as 1880 the Chinese represented just 0.002 per cent of the US population.101 Nonetheless, the New York Times echoed the sentiments of many when it boldly argued that, [t]here are a few weak sentimentalists in the eastern states who would look upon a massacre of the Chinese in San Francisco as a shameful crime. . . . Such people, however, have nothing to do with real politics, and their opinions are of very little consequence.102 By suggesting that the opinions of those who criticised physical violence towards Chinese communities were deemed ‘of very little consequence’, the Times exposed the continuing capacity of societal rules of exclusion to make true certain discourses while silencing and marginalising others. The anti-­Chinese movement soon found a centre with the California Workingmen’s Party, which popularised the slogan ‘The Chinese must go!’ In 1876 the California State Senate declared that the Chinese ‘have never adapted themselves to our habits [and remain] impregnable to all the influences of Anglo-­Saxon life’.103 Threatening China was now a dominant construction in American imaginations and an emerging crisis of American identity enabled US China policy to act in its protection.104 Then, just as in the modern day, the United States was especially dependent upon representational practices to continually reaffirm its identity,105 and China was constructed as a danger to its survival. Thus the ‘China Question’ was in fact the ‘America Question’. A policy of restricting or even preventing Chinese immigration was by no means inevitable or a foregone conclusion. However, powerful and pervasive representations of Uncivilised and Threatening China eventually ensured that any alternatives to exclusion were presented as no alternatives at all. By the late 1870s political opposition to the anti-­Chinese movement was almost non-­existent. During the presidential campaigns of 1876 and 1880 both main parties ran with anti-­Chinese rhetoric, so the range of debate did not extend far.106 An 1879 referendum among California voters found 150,000 people in favour of a total exclusion of Chinese migrants from the state. Only 900 voted against.107 In 1880 James Angell wrote to Secretary of State William Evarts: ‘the absolute and formal prohibition of the [Chinese] laborers would be diametrically opposed to all our national traditions’.108 In the Senate George Hoar asserted that

56   American images of China, 1776–1882 a ban would represent a crime against the Declaration of Independence: ‘the flag bears the stars of hope to all nations,’ he argued. ‘A hundred thousand Chinese land in California and everything is changed. . . . The self-­evident truth becomes the self-­evident lie’.109 Robert McClellan argues that the truth about the Chinese was clouded by hyperbolic claims of their undesirability.110 In fact, truths about the Chinese were a very heavy presence across American society. Their production and establishment ensured that the Chinese Exclusion Act could be voted into law on 23 March 1882.111 President Chester A. Arthur opposed a ban on immigration from China and signed the bill reluctantly.112 Certainly, the most dominant discourses continued to meet resistance and, like Evarts and Hoar, Protestant missionaries had consistently opposed Chinese exclusion laws.113 Eastern senators had voted in disapproval of the Exclusion Act, and Senator Oliver Morton observed that ‘if the Chinese in California were white people . . . I do not believe that the complaints and warfare made against them would have existed to any considerable extent’.114 In unwitting confirmation of Morton’s point Senator Henry Teller, in support of the Act, declared that ‘the Caucasian race has a right . . . to look down upon every other branch of the human family’.115 Stable and enduring constructions of China’s uncivilised and threatening identity had constituted an inextricable component of US China policy at every stage of its formulation, enactment and justification. Discourses of race, underpinned by the pseudo-­scientific findings of Morton, Knox and others, contributed significantly to a reality in which the Act could pass by a majority of 167 votes to 66.116 They ensured that Americans could not only justifiably ban Chinese immigrants from entering their territory, but could also rebel against tenets upon which their society had supposedly been built and emerge from such a crisis with a sense that justice had prevailed. The Act also functioned to shield (White) American identity from an imagined external threat, and reproduced the imagery upon which it relied. These are the processes which explain how the Chinese Exclusion Act was made possible and legitimised. The material forces of physical immigration alone do not provide an adequate explanation for the fears and hostility which circulated American society, nor the extreme measures implemented to reduce its effects. Americans may have feared for their employment, their livelihoods and even their health, but the Chinese were uniquely singled out as a danger from all incoming peoples. This is illustrated by the ability of Irish immigrants to lead vocal anti-­Chinese protests without significant reaction.117 To some extent the motivations of individuals and groups who constructed China in this way varied. However, the discourses of separation and difference which circulated most prominently were boundary-­producing performances advanced to enable and legitimise the types of restrictions enacted.118 Those who gained from the establishment of the fantasised China ‘threat’ were therefore principally those who attributed the most significance to particular (racial) understandings about the US and how its identity was threatened by non-­White immigrant Chinese. They supported measures to protect its presumed Caucasian identity, and did so by emphasising China’s racial foreignness and the implicit dangers it brought.

American images of China, 1776–1882   57 As ever, China was not dispassionately observed or external to the discourses and imagery about it. Power/knowledge constructed China as uncivilised and threatening to the most intrinsic values of (White) American identity so that particular truths could be produced and reproduced throughout society. Indeed, support in the House of Representatives had been nationwide, even from states with few or no Chinese.119 Immigrants already in the country were granted permission to stay, but the arrival of new labourers from China was prohibited for a minimum of ten years.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to initiate the examination of American images of China and the Chinese and of their significance to US China policy. It has shown that eighteenth-­century Americans were exposed to images of China through newspapers and magazines, exotic Chinaware and the stories of travellers, among other sources. The identity construction of Idealised China quickly emerged as a powerful imaginative geography of myth, romance and exoticism. Traders and missionaries later voyaged to Opportunity China in search of customers and converts. Both, however, became frustrated. China’s unfamiliar people, culture and traditions convinced Americans that it lacked the standards of civilisation of the United States. Throughout the early- to mid-­nineteenth century discourses of Uncivilised China became widespread and naturalised, and eventually attained a dominant presence in American imaginations. Discourses of Threatening China were also advanced as increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants entered the United States from the 1850s onwards, presenting an imagined danger to White American society. A central aim here has been to demonstrate the emergence and establishment of these four key constructions. As constitutive of the most intrinsic components of American identity they were not neutral observations about China. Each was a controlling image and a product of power/knowledge.120 Each also functioned to produce and reproduce the identity of the United States, existing for American imaginations. Importantly, across the chapters that follow they are shown to have endured and retained the capacity for resurgence at future moments. While they have evolved and adapted to new circumstances, each has exhibited familiar discursive foundations identified in this early period. During the nineteenth century images of China and its people were also frequently produced from among the most powerful sites of identity construction: race. So-­called scientific racism lent ‘expert’ credence to derogatory stereotypes of the Chinese, and in particular to established assumptions of their inherent inferiority. Alternative representations remained in circulation. Resistance to the relative dominance of Uncivilised and Threatening China in particular was advanced, but routinely ignored or deemed illegitimate. The regulation of discourse marginalised competing ideas so that the Chinese were labelled inassimilable to American society. This chapter has also shown that nineteenth-­century US China policy, although infrequent, was principally enabled by the most stable and enduring

58   American images of China, 1776–1882 discursive representations of the period. The United States involved itself little in the opium wars of the mid-­nineteenth century. However, it was naturalised assumptions of Uncivilised China (along with Idealised and Opportunity China) in particular which ensured the possibility that Washington could legitimise a treaty with China almost identical to that obtained by colonial Great Britain. This was despite the fact that the United States had supposedly been founded in reaction to the imperialist practises of Europe. This policy itself also functioned to reaffirm the identities of both China and the United States, and the societal discourses of difference which had made it possible. Only through such an interrogation of representational processes could the question of how this policy was enabled and justified be answered. Truths about the Chinese similarly provided the rationale for widespread discriminatory measures by America’s judicial institutions and for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In this case, US China policy also functioned to shield American identity from an external ‘threat’ during a moment of crisis to its existence. It was believed that the Chinese endangered White America, and they were barred from threatening it further. The United States and China experienced a turbulent first century of bilateral relations but certain constructions of the latter’s identity had proven powerful, resilient and stable. Understandings about Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China in particular were never separate from China itself. They were inextricable from the production of the truth and reality of what China was. Ultimately, it was this type of imagery which had consistently proven most active in the enactment and justification of US China policy. The book now turns to examine American images of China between the years 1882 and 1949. It begins from where this chapter concludes, and demonstrates that the most prominent images of China explored so far continued to be of fundamental significance to Sino-­US relations throughout the entirety of the period.

Notes    1 Aldridge, Dragon and Eagle, p. 25.    2 Ibid., pp. 89 and 29–30.    3 Jared Sparks (ed.), The Works of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2 (Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Company, 1836), pp. 247 and 245.    4 Ibid., p. 241.    5 Ports at Macao and Whampoa were open to foreign vessels but international trade was ultimately restricted to Canton.    6 Aldridge, Dragon and Eagle, p. 8.    7 See, for example, Boston Newsletter, 26 September 1720; Boston Gazette, 4 May 1730; Independent Gazetteer, 14 May 1785; Newport Herald, 14 January 1790.    8 Ping Chia Kuo, ‘The Impact of Chinese Culture on New England Life’, The New England Quarterly, 3:3 (1930), p. 421.    9 Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: John Murray, 1961), p. 7.   10 Raymond O’Conner, ‘Asian Art and International Relations’, in Goldstein et al., America Views China, p. 38.   11 Adolf Reichwein, China and Europe – Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century (Vancouver: Read Books, 2007), p. 4.   12 Connecticut Courant, 16 May 1785.

American images of China, 1776–1882   59   13 New Jersey Gazette, 16 May 1785. For overviews of early Sino-­US trade relations see: Ernest May and John King Fairbank (eds), America’s China Trade in Historical Perspective: The Chinese and American Performance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1986); Kenneth Scott Latourette, The History of Early Relations Between the United States and China, 1784–1844 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1917), chapters 1 and 2.   14 The argument is not that such identity constructions as Idealised and Opportunity China did not circulate before 1776. It is that they developed more quickly and became more prominent as Americans themselves began journeying there.   15 Fairbank, China Watch, p. 3.   16 Constitution of the United States, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8. National Archives and Record Administration, www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html, last accessed 28 March 2010.   17 Haddad, Romance of China, p. 21.   18 David Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 128.   19 For a clear and succinct discussion of the tensions which emerged between Chinese and foreign visitors to China around this time, see Yongjin Zhang, China in International Society Since 1949: Alienation and Beyond (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 1998), pp. 7–10.   20 Cohen, America’s Response, p. 3.   21 Christopher Hobson, ‘ “Democracy as Civilisation” ’, Global Society, 22:1 (2008), pp. 75–95.   22 Harold Coffin Syrett and Jacob Ernest Cooke (eds), The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, August 1791–December 1791 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 50.   23 Country Courier, 22 August 1816.   24 Republican Chronicle, 4 March 1822.   25 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Nineteenth Annual Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1928), p. 93.   26 Religious Monitor and Evangelical Repository, September 1826.   27 Robert Morrison, A View of China for Philological Purposes; Containing a Sketch of Chinese Chronology, Geography, Government, Religion and Customs (Macao: P.P. Thoms, 1817).   28 David Abeel, Journal of a Residence in China and the Neighbouring Countries (2nd edn) (New York: J. Abeel Williamson, 1836), p. 141.   29 Cohen, America’s Response, p. 3.   30 Country Courier, 22 August 1816.   31 Silas Holbrook, Sketches, by a Traveller (Boston: Carter and Hendree, 1830), p. 259.   32 Weekly Visitor and Ladies Museum, 27 June 1818.   33 Fairclough, Language and Power, p. 77.   34 Haddad, Romance of China, p. xvi.   35 Madsen, American Exceptionalism, pp. 1–2.   36 Thomas Paine, ‘Common Sense’, in Philip Sheldon Foner (ed.), The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1993), p. 5.   37 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 11.   38 Thomas Paine, The Political and Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Paine, vol. 1 (London: R. Carlile, 1819), p. 49.   39 Abeel, Journal, p. 141.   40 The Minerva, 13 November 1824.   41 Tyler Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia: A Critical Study of the Policy of the United States With Reference to China, Japan and Korea in the 19th Century (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), p. 69.

60   American images of China, 1776–1882   42   43   44   45

  46   47   48   49   50   51   52

  53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71

Ibid., p. 78. Ashley, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 51, emphasis in original; Campbell, Writing Security. See Dennett, Americans, pp. 91–105. Merchants of the United States at Canton, China, ‘Memorial of R.B. Forbes and Others’, in United States House of Representatives, Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the First Session of the Twenty Sixth Congress. December 24th, 1839 (Washington DC: Blair and Rives, 1839), p. 207. Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 6. The Port Folio, January 1819. John M. Hobson, ‘Discovering the Oriental West’, in Sandra Harding (ed.), The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 45. Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), especially chapter 1. Treaty of Wanghia, 3 July 1844. Reprinted in Paul Hibbert Clyde, United States Policy Toward China: Diplomatic and Public Documents, 1839–1939 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), pp. 13–21. James S. Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), p. 12. Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p.  34. See Haddad, Romance of China, chapter 4, for a more comprehensive discussion of the museum as well as the man who established it, Nathan Dunn. See P.T. Barnum, China and the Chinese: Being a Picture of the Genius, Government, History, Literature, Agriculture, Arts, Trade, Manners, Customs, and Social Life of the People of the Celestial Empire (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1850). John Pickering, ‘Address’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1:1 (1849), p. 5. See Mallinin Johar Schueller, US Orientalisms: Race, Nation and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 44. Said, Orientalism, p. 83. Abeel, Journal, p. 146. Campbell, Writing Security, p. 61. Benj. H. Williams, ‘The Protection of American Citizens in China: Extraterritoriality’, The American Journal of International Law, 16:1 (1922), p. 53. Messari, ‘Identity’, p. 235. Quoted in Dennett, Americans, p. 164. Miller, Unwelcome Immigrant, pp. 115–117. John King Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), p. 470. See, for example, Daily Evening Traveller, 15 September 1854; New York Times, 26 October 1854. Humphrey Marshall, ‘China During the Taiping Rebellion’, in Benson Lee Grayson, The American Image of China (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979), pp. 93–94. Mgbeoji, ‘The Civilised Self ’, p. 857. Hunt, Special Relationship, pp. 36–37. Department of State, Papers Relating to Foreign Relations of the United States, 1863 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), p. 862. Daniels, Asian America, p. 9. See, for example, New York Times, 29 June 1869; Washington Post, 25 October 1878. Randall E. Rohe, ‘After the Gold Rush: Chinese Mining in the Far West,

American images of China, 1776–1882   61   72   73   74

  75

  76   77

  78

  79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94

  95   96

1850–1890’, in Arif Dirlik (ed.), Chinese on the American frontier (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 17–18. Ashley, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 51. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-­Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (2nd edn) (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 20. See Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839); Robert Knox, Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850). Morton influenced others who later paid tribute to his work: see, for example, Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co., 1854). Transcript of People vs Hall reprinted in Robert F. Heizer and Alan J. Almquist, The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination Under Spain, Mexico and the United States to 1920 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 229–234. Ibid., pp. 230 and 233. Randolph Persaud, ‘Situating Race in International Relations’, in Chowdhry and Nair, Power, Postcolonialism, p. 74. See also Ian Haney-­López, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006), especially chapter 5. For the idea of an Asian ‘model minority’ see: Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws and Love (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Linda Trinh Võ, Mobilizing an Asian American Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), chapter 3. Edwin L. Sabin, Building the Pacific Railway (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1919), p. 111. Chicago Tribune, 14 June 1869. The Albion, 14 August 1869. See Frederick Wells Williams, Anson Burlingame and the First Chinese Mission to Foreign Powers (New York: Scribner’s, 1912), p. 120. Dennett, Americans, pp. 379–380. Burlingame Treaty, 1868 (San Francisco, 1879), Berkeley Digital Library, http:// sunsite.berkeley.edu/cgi-­bin/flipomatic/cic/brk5022, last accessed 18 October 2010. David L. Anderson, Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861–1898 (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1985), p. 45. Charles, J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth Century America (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 30. Burlingame Treaty, Berkeley Digital Library, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/cgi-­bin/ flipomatic/cic/brk5022. Williams, Anson Burlingame, p. 144. McClain, In Search of Equality, pp. 13–15. Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 30:3 (1880), p. 20. San Francisco Chronicle, 3 July 1868. Exceptions occurred and a number of Chinese citizens were naturalised into the United States as early as 1852. See Daniels, Asian America, pp. 26–28. See Naturalization Act (An Act to Establish a Uniform Rule of Naturalization), 26 March 1790. University of Washington, Bothell, http://library.uwb.edu/guides/ USimmigration/1%20stat%20103.pdf, last accessed 11 November 2010. See An Act to Amend the Naturalization Laws and to Punish Crimes Against the Same, and for Other Purposes, 14 July 1870. Reprinted in Albany Law Journal: A Weekly Record of the Law and the Lawyers, vol. 2 (Albany, NY: Weed Parson and Co., 1870), p. 179. Daniels, Asian America, p. 34. Campbell, Writing Security, p. 75.

62   American images of China, 1776–1882   97 Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 37.   98 Washington Post, 30 January 1879.   99 Quoted in Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 224. 100 Der Derian, ‘War of Networks’. 101 Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (revised edn) (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), p. 110. 102 New York Times, 26 February 1880. 103 Quoted in Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-­Chinese Movement in California (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 39. 104 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 13. 105 See Campbell, Writing Security, p. 91. 106 Foster Rhea Dulles, China and America: The Story of Their Relations Since 1784 (New York: Kennikat Press, 1967), p. 87. 107 Bill Ong Hing, Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), p. 32. 108 Quoted in Gyory, Closing the Gate, p. 212. 109 Quoted in Martin Gold, Forbidden Citizens: Chinese Exclusion and the US Congress, A Legislative History (Alexandria, VA: TheCapitol.Net Inc.), p. 98. 110 McClellan, The Heathen Chinee, p. 26. 111 Chinese Exclusion Act, 6 May, 1882. University of Washington, Bothell, http://library. uwb.edu/guides/USimmigration/1882_chinese_exclusion_act.html, last accessed 8 September 2010. The Act applied to Chinese labourers ‘both skilled and unskilled’ and those employed in mining. 112 Steven Otfinoski, Chester Arthur (Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavandish, 2009), pp. 70–71. 113 Judy Yung, Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 127. 114 Quoted in Sandmeyer, Anti-­Chinese Movement, p.  88; Aarim-­Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, p. 79. 115 Quoted in Gyory, Closing the Gate, p. 228. 116 Fifty-­nine voters abstained. See Gyory, Closing the Gate, pp.  238–239 for a more detailed analysis of the vote. 117 Cohen, America’s Response, p. 30. 118 Ashley, ‘Foreign Policy’, p. 51. 119 Takaki, Strangers, p. 111. 120 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 114.

3 American images of China, 1882–1949

Introduction In 1901 American President Theodore Roosevelt declared: ‘Owing to the rapid growth of our power and our interests on the Pacific, whatever happens in China must be of the keenest national concern to us’.1 His words were characteristic of a period in which the United States became far more active in East Asia. Throughout the nineteenth century Washington had adopted what Fairbank described as a ‘ “Me, too” ’ approach, whereby the United States had sought to secure equal privileges from China as those claimed by others such as Great Britain. This was largely because China’s international relations were usually beyond the limits of American influence.2 During the first half of the twentieth century this pattern changed. The United States’ material capabilities increased significantly, along with the potentialities of its political authority. As importantly, to reiterate, the material power and interests of the United States have always been contingent upon the ideas of which they are constituted.3 As such, the ability of Washington to exert influence in East Asia, and adopt a more assertive policy strategy there, was additionally reliant upon particular ideas both about the United States itself and of China (along with the wider region). Indeed, the most prominent and stable images of China which had already emerged and become established continued to resurface and circulate between 1882 and 1949, with significant consequences for foreign policy. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the developments of this period. It shows that from the end of the nineteenth century American representations of China increasingly reflected understandings of the United States as a benevolent global power. Further, while China’s identity was similarly dynamic and in flux, US China policies were heavily framed by understandings about that country and its people which had remained especially stable. A revolutionary movement in China during the early twentieth century convinced many Amer­ icans that, in order to become a modern republic, it still required American assistance. Uncivilised China remained at the periphery of the civilised world, and Washington’s policy response was formulated according to this accepted reality. Other enduring images, most notably Idealised and Threatening China,

64   American images of China, 1882–1949 maintained the capacity to re-­emerge throughout the period. Uncivilised China remained notably vivid during the turmoil of China’s Warlord Era of the 1920s in particular. China and the Chinese attracted palpable American sympathies in the years preceding the Second World War, and throughout the conflict they were valued allies of the United States. However, Washington’s policies remained grounded upon far more enduring representations of an inherently inferior land and people. Additionally, those policies served to reaffirm China in these terms, and to enable and legitimise a relative lack of post-­war material support.

China and the American century The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 represents a critical moment in American history. It reversed the traditional American policy of embracing immigration and, argues Gyory, ‘chang[ed] forever the nation’s image of itself as a beacon of hope, a refuge for the poor and the oppressed the world over’.4 However, it was also the inscription of powerful and enduring representations which had circulated American society for decades. Whites had long occupied the most elevated position in an imagined hierarchy of race. This was demonstrated by America’s judicial institutions (which had denied selected non-­Whites the right of naturalisation), by scientific racists such as Samuel Morton and Robert Knox and by politicians such as Henry Teller who supported the Act on the basis that the Caucasian race had the right to look down on every other. The Chinese had sympathisers in the United States, but resistance discourses which sought to challenge the naturalised logic of Uncivilised and Threatening China in particular were frequently silenced. The foreignness of the Chinese was ingrained, as confirmed by President Grover Cleveland in 1888. The Chinese are ‘an element ignorant in our constitution and laws [and] impossible of assimilation’, he argued.5 The quota of Chinese immigrants allowed into the United States was heavily restricted. Between 1870 and 1880 their numbers had increased from around 63,000 to over 105,000. Between 1880 and 1890 the figure rose by barely another 2,000.6 Nevertheless, violence against the Chinese continued. In 1885 a community was attacked at Rock Springs, Wyoming. The coal mines there were among the largest in the western United States and the labourers were almost exclusively Chinese. In such a locality the realities of Threatening China were more powerful and reified than in most others, and the consequences were tragic. Homes were burned and numerable people were killed and injured. The Act was modified as loopholes were discovered and US China policy continued to serve in the protection of (White) American identity. The Scott Act of 1888, for example, decreed that Chinese who left the country could no longer return.7 The Supreme Court declared explicitly that ‘there [is] nothing in the treaties between China and the United States to prevent congress from modifying or repealing the same, the question whether such modification or repeal is wise or just is not a judicial question’.8 Inconsistencies of American discourses were a

American images of China, 1882–1949   65 powerful representational component of the processes by which its China policies were enabled. They functioned consistently in the advancement of power, as the ‘civilised’ United States conducted and justified the types of behaviour for which Americans had criticised China in the past;9 specifically, it could discriminate against outsiders as the Chinese had once discriminated against foreign barbarians. The United States dominated Sino-­American material relations of power, but the interrogation of representational processes demonstrates how its capabilities could be legitimately utilised against Uncivilised, Threatening and inferior China. US China policy was still made possible by, and consisted of, dominant discursive constructions of that country and its people. However, it was also framed by the equally significant and continuous construction of the United States itself. By 1890 the Union had formally expanded to 44 states (and included the enormous non-­state District of Alaska). In 1898, five years after gaining Hawaii, the US emerged victorious from war with Spain and assumed control of its Asia Pacific territories of Guam and the Philippines (along with those of the Caribbean). Secretary of State John Hay noted that it had been a ‘splendid little war’.10 To the exhilaration of Americans, a conflict that lasted barely three months had transformed the United States into a global power. American identity was evolving, and increasingly articulated as a civilised and yet powerful world leader. This was confirmed by Senator Albert Beveridge, who argued that Americans should establish global trading posts, build a new navy and export the United States and its values to Asia: ‘Our institutions will follow our flag on the wings of commerce’, Beveridge asserted. ‘And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted’.11 The possibility of abstaining from the affairs of Asia was increasingly unthinkable. President McKinley, for example, described his nation’s role in the Philippines: ‘There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise and Christianize them’.12 American foreign policy became a far more intensive political performance.13 Indeed, Iriye notes that between 1880 and the First World War the United States and Asia became embroiled in the ‘diplomacy of imperialism’.14 As demonstrated by the Exclusion Act, however, US China policies were the articulations of discourses of separation and difference which had been in continual production for over a century. The imagined economic opportunities presented by China and Asia more widely, for instance, remained a powerful lure. McKinley argued that to cede the Philippines to a European rival ‘would be bad business’.15 The American intellectual Brooks Adams observed that the United States was in a prime position ‘to reduce [East Asia] to a part of our economic system’.16 Opportunity China remained a discursive construction in the sense that power/ knowledge had turned it into a particular kind of opportunity, existing for the United States. In turn, the US was confirmed as a global promoter of international trade. The extent to which China itself was willing to participate in these developments was, for the most part, irrelevant. This was illustrated in 1899 when China’s imaginary promises of markets and wealth contributed to the

66   American images of China, 1882–1949 decision by Secretary of State John Hay to distribute the Open Door Notes among the Western powers.17 Ostensibly, the Notes were aimed at securing China’s future as a free and sovereign state, but Hay’s intention was to ensure American access to Opportunity China at a time when the Europeans and Japanese seemed intent on apportioning it between themselves. Any benefits to China were incidental.18 Said argued that Asia, never the West’s ‘interlocutor’, has always represented its silent other.19 In the case of China, McKinley not only placed American interests first, but also chose not to consult with the Chinese on his plans. The Nation magazine articulated wider American sentiment when it argued that, ‘[w]e do not need to seek an unfair advantage. An open door and no favor infallibly means for the United States . . . the greater share and gain in the commercial exploitation of China’.20 The continued imbalance of political and discursive Sino-­US relations of power ensured that American interests in China could not be deemed unfair and its policies could appear justifiable regardless of continued Chinese resentment to the still-­active ‘unequal’ treaties. The commercial ‘exploitation’ of Opportunity China was legitimate exploitation because of the truth that China itself required help. The creation of opportunity was considered that of opportunity for all, enabled through paternalistic reasoning which informed Americans that China’s best interests were being served. Concomitantly, between 1898 and 1901 China suffered its latest internal crisis, the anti-­Western Boxer Uprising, or Rebellion. Those responsible – the so-­called Boxers – were not blindly xenophobic, but resented the privileged position foreigners occupied within Chinese territory. The New York Times reported that ‘an army of civilization’ had arrived in China to pacify the unrest.21 The Chicago Daily Tribune argued that China had to be ‘rescued from herself by the powers’.22 The United States committed 2,500 troops to aid an alliance of Western nations which moved quickly to suppress the turmoil. While each government sought financial compensation from Beijing, the American attitude towards China was generally sympathetic.23 Indeed, Washington sought lower indemnities than those demanded by the European powers and the payments were eventually returned. As Tyler Dennett argues, however, American governmental policy has since been ‘clothed in a garb of altruism which it could not properly claim’.24 The Open Door Notes had been intended to ensure that China remained free and sovereign in order to offer the United States long-­term economic benefits. Similarly, the McKinley administration sought reparations that would not prove so burdensome as to facilitate the country’s collapse.25 Once again, and rather than the less stable attitudes and opinions of the day, powerful and enduring American constructions of China’s identity were primarily responsible for the creation of a reality in which US China policy could be enacted. Specifically, American involvement in the pacification of the Boxers was unproblematic as long as the Chinese were uncivilised and a potential opportunity of American design. In Chapter 2 it was demonstrated that Uncivilised China in particular (along with Threatening China) had attained a dominant position within American

American images of China, 1882–1949   67 imaginations throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1901 the New York Times confirmed a relative and continuing marginalisation of Idealised China: ‘In the old days . . . the Chinese Empire was regarded as a fairyland of beauty and mystery’, it wrote. ‘At present . . . [we] now have the impression that there is little but a hardworking, practical, and miserable people’.26 Nonetheless, romantic and idealised images of the East, as discourses of partial resistance, continued to inspire. For example, in turn-­of-the-­century San Francisco Chinese communities became the subjects of photographer Arnold Genthe. A disproportionately high number of Genthe’s subjects were captured wearing unusually ornate clothing, giving the impression that it was an everyday occurrence. In fact, it only happened on special occasions. Genthe also manipulated photographs so that Caucasian people disappeared and signs written in English appeared blank. His intention was to make his Chinese scenes ‘more Chinese’, to give the impression that San Francisco’s Chinatown was a pure and authentic ‘Canton of the West’, when actually no such place existed.27 As had been the case at the time of the opium wars, it was understood that China’s opportunities in the early twentieth century could only be exploited if a level of civilisation was introduced and sustained. Such American policy strategies as the Open Door Notes and contributing to the suppression of the Boxer Uprising were enabled in this way, through overlapping assumptions of Uncivilised and Opportunity China. Yet, the possibility of their enactment additionally relied upon equally enduring understandings that the Chinese remained an essentially inferior people. This was reflected in the work of Genthe who pandered to romantic stereotypes of Idealised China. For many Americans Chinatowns were tourist attractions and sources of entertainment due to the curiosities on display.28 China was still a place of romance and exoticism, and its people were still strange and worthy of spectacle as a continuing projection of a more modern, scientific and enlightened American identity. Racial power relations were also still such that White Americans could venture beyond the comfort of their world into that of another. They were free to roam Chinatowns, as ‘neo-­colonial enclaves’, while the Exclusion Act maintained severe restrictions on the Chinese.29 Franz Fanon once described his dissection ‘under white eyes’; these, he argued, were the only real eyes: ‘I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away the slices of my reality. I am laid bare. . . . Why, it’s a Negro!’30 Genthe and the tour guides of the nation’s Chinatowns similarly allowed their audiences to strip away all vestiges of individual character and gaze upon ‘Chinamen’ as members of an external, fascinating Chinese world. Chinatowns were sites of Blauner’s internal colonialism, wherein the Chinese were beholden to unfamiliar and discriminatory political and economic arrangements.31 Under White eyes the Chinese were alien objects of entertainment and interest, and the impossibility of their assimilation remained assured. In the case of San Francisco’s Chinatown, ‘an invisible moat’ enforced its dislocation from mainstream American life.32 To reiterate, the Chinese here are not considered to have been the perpetual victims of American racism or power. Indeed, Chinese middlemen exploited

68   American images of China, 1882–1949 their own communities by providing cheap indentured labourers.33 As such, elements of the Chinese population itself were complicit in their own construction as an inferior people, in line with Dirlik’s notion of ‘self-­Orientalization’.34 However, it is important to recognise that the continued Idealisation of China and the Chinese by people such as Genthe contributed to the imbalance of Sino-­ American relations of power, both political and discursive, which still privileged the latter. To reiterate, Western classifications of the global East as exotic, alluring and passive have traditionally provided the logic and rationale for imperial penetration and control.35 Romantic and idealised representations of China as a culturally anachronistic land and people circulated as truth, reinforcing their assumed inferiority and ultimately proving active in the justification of such policies as the Open Door Notes and the quashing of the Boxer Rebellion. In part, this was how China could be ‘rescued from herself by the powers’.36 Moreover, and as always, US China policy also served in the production of imagery and the reconfirmation of the truths which made them possible in the first place. The Chinese were not consulted and, in the case of the Open Door Notes in particular, were passively described as an object of negotiation. The Notes enabled the powers ‘to maintain their positions in the markets of China’, it was argued, in order to ensure an ‘equality of treatment’ there.37 Thus, while Washington’s nineteenth-­century policies in China may have been broadly formulated according to a ‘ “Me, too” ’ approach, in the twentieth century they became more assertive and proactive.38 The United States’ material capabilities had increased but, as ever, an examination of these forces alone does not provide an entirely satisfactory analysis of events. It does not explain how those capabilities could be legitimately utilised towards China. Like that of any imaginative geography, American identity has always been prone to fluctuation and evolution, and the United States had become regarded as a new world power. However, its material resources were not external to this understanding. As ever, they were actively constituted by it. The US, in other words, did not have to exert influence in Asia as a result of its increased capabilities. Those capabilities were contingent upon ideas which made the possibility of not doing so beyond the realms of reason. As such, they could be justifiably directed towards a China which remained less civilised, inferior and a particular kind of manufactured opportunity. American representations of China formulated in the nineteenth century had become inscribed as twentieth century US foreign policy. Imagined truths about Idealised, Opportunity and Uncivilised China in particular continued to provide the necessary realities within which Washington could act in particular ways. Beneath each lay the naturalised, largely unquestioned understanding that China was essentially inferior in relation to the manifestly superior United States. These patterns of representation continued to operate into the early- to mid-­ twentieth century. Indeed, when a revolutionary movement gripped China in 1911, naturalised assumptions of Uncivilised China were key in determining the potentialities of US policy. Many Americans still sought a China which conformed to their expectations and which might finally discard its imperial,

American images of China, 1882–1949   69 dynastic heritage in favour of a more Western-­style polity. It is this period of Sino-­American relations which the analysis now examines.

China’s American revolution The violent Boxer Rebellion had left little hope for the survival of the ruling Qing dynasty, and from October 1911 revolutionary fervour engulfed parts of China. Within two months 15 provincial assemblies had declared their independence, and on 12 February the following year the young emperor Puyi was forced to abdicate. The Republic of China (RoC) had already been formally established, with Sun Yat-­sen its provisional president. The military commander Yuan Shikai had been chosen to lead the Qing army against Sun’s rebellion and he became so powerful that the new government required his support. He was quickly named president in place of Sun.39 In 1912 Minister to China William Calhoun typified broader American understandings of the situation: ‘there are so many phases to it, and there is so much mystery about it, that no-­one knows what to believe or expect’.40 During the early stages of unrest the American press appeared similarly undecided: ‘The Chinese are industrious, apt, dextrous, and accustomed to frugal life’, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, with the caveat: ‘[b]ut they do not possess a single element of character out of which republican citizenship can be manufactured’.41 The Chicago Daily Tribune informed its readers that the Chinese were ‘dumb to progress’.42 Others applauded the actions of the dissenters: ‘The sympathies of Americans are naturally with the movement toward a republican form of government’, noted the Washington Post.43 The New York Times asserted that ‘for the past decade there have been many capable and high-­ minded men among the reformers . . . there is good to reason to think that they will be able to guide the nation with a fair degree of safety’.44 Disparities in opinion are unremarkable, even predictable, but what underpinned the arguments of both sides were naturalised understandings that inferior, Uncivilised China had to change; there was no acceptable alternative. ‘Whatever injustices may be committed in the course of the modernization of China’, the Times had earlier asserted, ‘will evidently be lesser evils than the continuance of unmodernized China’.45 The United States had been born from revolution, the rhetoric of which, as previously noted, supported freedom for all people including those beyond American shores.46 However, Americans compared subsequent revolutions with the ‘exemplary’ model of their own. The influential statesman and lawyer Francis Dana, for example, once wrote to John Adams that theirs had been ‘the grandest revolution that has ever taken place in the world’.47 The Taiping uprising of the mid-­nineteenth century had raised hopes that a more progressive, Protestant China might be established, but they were quickly extinguished when it faltered beneath the leadership of the ‘blasphemous’ Hong Xiuquan. Half a century later Americans put faith in Sun Yat-­sen, ‘China’s George Washington’ (a man he professed to admire) and a self-­proclaimed Christian.48 Like Hong

70   American images of China, 1882–1949 before him, Sun and his followers appeared focused upon building a modern republic. As a result, the fruits of his revolution were judged against the paragon of US republicanism. The Post remarked: To say their government is a republic does not prove it to be so. The way to prove it is for all the women to wear high-­heeled boots, girdle corsets, hobble skirts, and basket hats and for the male sex to come over to this country and patronise American tailors. Then, and only then, will we be convinced that China really has a republican form of government.49 The limitations of interrogating American imagery of China as the attitudes and opinions of given moments – as has traditionally been the case throughout the relevant literatures – are reaffirmed in this way. Despite the advancement of overtly positive (as well as negative) responses to this temporally specific moment, it was more powerful underlying assumptions which informed Amer­ icans in 1912, just as they had in the 1850s, namely that China remained essentially uncivilised and ignorant to the superior practices of the West. Such paternalistic rhetoric and activity exposed a relationship in which the United States was presumed to remain a legitimate figure of authority over China, and that for many Americans (and Europeans) the Chinese could only become equals with Western tutelage. This had been illustrated in 1900 by the Chicago Daily, which presented a group of ‘notable Chinamen in the United States’. Their achievements were applauded, but in each case references were made to the debts they owed American society. Chin Tan Sun, for example, gave ‘a share of the credit for his success to his white wife’; Chu Fong had ‘discarded his queue and silken robes’ in favour of Western dress; Yong Kay was ‘an Americanised Chinaman’.50 Each provided a template for the arrival years later of Charlie Chan and similar characters. They were a model minority which worked hard and could evidently attain success, reflecting a discourse of resistance which continued to re-­emerge. However, all that was laudable was American-­inspired. As Yong Kay in particular demonstrated, Americanised Chinamen were better than Chinamen. Such underlying truths contributed to the determination of the potentialities of policy, as Washington elected not to afford diplomatic recognition to the new RoC. Assistant Secretary of State Huntington Wilson argued that: it would be more in accordance with established precedents to defer recognition of the Chinese Republic until a permanent constitution shall have been definitely adopted by a representative national assembly, a president duly elected in accordance with the provisions of such constitution, and the present Provisional Government replaced by a permanent one with constitutional authority.51 ‘Presidents’, ‘permanent constitutions’ and ‘representative national assemblies’ were each alien concepts to China’s dynastic traditions, but they were those

American images of China, 1882–1949   71 which it had to embrace. Power/knowledge made it true that, in order for Uncivilised China to be awarded diplomatic recognition by the imagined family of civilised nations, it had to adhere to selected prerequisites. This understanding was articulated and reinforced by Sun Yat-­sen himself, who stated that ‘with the establishment of the provisional government we will try our best to carry out the duties of a civilised nation so as to obtain the rights of a civilised state’.52 American negation strategies worked to discard China’s imperial, dynastic history so that a new, less inferior polity could be engineered in its place. When the Washington Post had insisted that China could only become a republic once its people had embraced American fashion, it had contributed to the emerging script being prepared.53 One author explicitly wrote that China was in a ‘plastic state’ and ‘willing to be moulded by America’.54 Another speculated that English might replace Chinese as the country’s official language.55 A volume-­length treatise recommended the various ways in which Westerners could contribute to the construction of a new China. Among others, naval officers, civil engineers and doctors had roles to play, the author explained.56 These were the processes which explain how a delay in the diplomatic recognition of the RoC was made possible, as an inscription of stable and enduring understandings of Uncivilised China in particular. When Dulles argued that the revolution ‘drew tighter bonds with the Chinese people’ and yet did little to affect American policy, he unwittingly acknowledged that temporally specific attitudes and opinions of the moment did little to create a new reality for actions by Washington.57 Rather, it was the more powerful and stable underlying imagery of China which once again worked most actively in this regard. Uncivilised China – as always – had to change, and this understanding did the most to prescribe the boundaries of Washington’s political options. Recognition was formally awarded by President Woodrow Wilson in May 1913, the first Western leader to do so. He declared that the establishment of a ‘free government’ in China was ‘the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation’.58 It had been implanted upon the tabula rasa China had come to represent.59 China’s presumed status as an ultimately less-­than-equal subject was reaffirmed in other ways during this period, and particularly after the fighting of the First World War. During the war China sided with the United States and its allies, and while Chinese troops were not directly involved in the fighting Beijing provided considerable support. Workers were transported to Europe and China’s enormous resources of labour were utilised even before the country had formally declared its position.60 At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 Beijing lobbied for mainland territories in China formally held by defeated Germany, such as Shandong, to be returned.61 However, it emerged that the government of Japan, which had joined the war earlier and committed equipment and troops, had signed wartime treaties with its European allies, ensuring that former Chinese territories were ceded to Tokyo.62 The Japanese claims met resistance in Paris, including from Washington, but its delegates threatened to withdraw from the talks. As had presidents before him, Wilson wanted a stable and sovereign

72   American images of China, 1882–1949 China and so the return of territories to Beijing’s control made sense. Unfortunately, his priority was the establishment of the League of Nations, and Japan represented a potentially crucial member.63 Certainly, material considerations were crucial to Wilson eventually admitting defeat; Japan had contributed much to the war, for longer than had China, and the presence of another ‘global power’ in the League of Nations appeared likely to increase its legitimacy. However, in order to overlook China’s demands it had to be the case that Wilson (and others) perceived China as a fundamentally inferior partner whose passionate arguments in Paris could be dismissed. At the Peace Conference, and despite widespread positive international sentiment towards China, it ‘immediately felt itself regarded as a third rate country’.64 This was demonstrated quite literally through the allocation to China of fewer seats at the negotiating table than the other Allied powers. The potentialities of (American) policy were once more framed primarily by the most stable and enduring assumptions of China rather than the attitudes and opinions of the day. Such understandings would be reinforced for decades as China remained devoid of a stable central government, experiencing considerable upheaval. The death of Yuan Shikai in 1916 triggered the so-­called warlord era of modern Chinese history, during which time no authoritative body ruled.65 In 1923 Time magazine articulated a continued lack of American understanding of the situation in a report headed ‘China: Information please!’66 Time was run by Henry Luce, an ardent China sympathiser and a man with strong opinions on exactly what his readers should know about that country and its people. Perceptions of Uncivilised China as being further than ever from acceptable standards of political and economic civilisation were expressed by Time on numerable occasions during the mid-­1920s. Indeed, to many Americans ‘the China mess was incomprehensible and hopeless’.67 During this period the United States enjoyed comparatively greater fortunes. Its economy boomed; ‘never had a nation become so rich so fast’.68 With regards to the internal instability in China, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg declared: The United States is not concerned with the type of government set up in China. It cares only that conditions shall be created permitting the citizens of China to achieve their own highest welfare and engage freely with citizens of the United States in such relations as shall be mutually desired and profitable.69 The United States, therefore, was very concerned with the type of government which might be established and, as had so often been the case in the past, it was that which would enable access to China through relations ‘mutually desired and profitable’. Alongside those of Uncivilised China, discourses of Opportunity China were still very much active in American policies. This was revealed in 1921 when the Nine Power Treaty (NPT) formalised the Open Door principle. The administration of President Warren Harding signed the treaty, as American policy continued to affirm the identity of the United States as that of a newly

American images of China, 1882–1949   73 emerging and yet benevolent global power. The treaty declared that Washington sought to ‘respect the sovereignty, the independence, and the territorial and administrative integrity of China’.70 Like that of any imaginative geography, China’s identity was unstable and always in flux. To some extent, Uncivilised China had evolved within American imaginations after the apparent rejection of its imperial, dynastic heritage.71 American senators, for example, were conscious of public sympathy for China’s sovereignty.72 Yet the possibility of abandoning the Open Door and relinquishing the rights of extraterritoriality as well as the administration of treaty ports were precluded by more powerful images. US China policy, once more, was primarily enabled in this way as the sympathies of the moment were overridden and cancelled out. Dulles explains that these types of privileges affected American interests too greatly to be surrendered,73 but as always this is only part of the story. Opportunity China was still more than a site of realpolitik, economic calculation, as the type of opportunity it presented (legitimately) remained of American design. Material considerations explain why ‘unequal’ privileges over Beijing were not given up. Yet, to explain how the structure of the ‘unequal’ treaties could be justifiably maintained by a ‘benevolent’ global power like the United States, and how it was possible for the Chinese not to be consulted throughout their continued manipulation, necessitates an interrogation of the representational processes upon which these actions relied. Alongside Opportunity China, unshakable truths about China’s inferiority retained an active role in American foreign policy. The NPT was enabled by, and ultimately worked to confirm, imagery of China as a nation from which privileges could unproblematically be gained. It represented a diplomatic victory for the United States, but was yet another blow for the Chinese. These were the dominant representations of China during the early- to mid-­ twentieth century, and the role that they played in the formulation, enactment and justification of US China policy. Imagery of Uncivilised China – of a land and people which had clearly yet to attain Western standards of civilisation – remained especially prominent in American imaginations as China’s revolution failed to secure a Western-­style polity. Uncivilised China also overlapped with Opportunity China, as it was understood that to be more civilised was to create potential opportunities for the United States and China itself. As demonstrated in the next section, Threatening China also re-­emerged around this time. The socially constructed nature of that threat, however, is illustrated by the ease of its transference and its coexistence with seemingly contradictory imagery of a more familiar, less threatening China, particularly throughout the 1930s. During this time the Japanese became the objects of American fears and the Chinese attracted sympathy. Yet, as always, it was the most stable and enduring representations of China which proved more central to the implementation of China policy. It is to these developments that the analysis now turns.

74   American images of China, 1882–1949

Threatening China and American sympathies The Sino-­Japanese war of 1894–1895 had provoked concern in the American press about a potential military threat from Asia. In 1904 Arthur Judson Brown had argued that the Chinese and Japanese would soon endanger the West,74 and in 1912 the Washington Post predicted a ‘war of the world’ between the ‘Yellow and White races’.75 Popular stage plays of the time utilised powerful and threatening ‘dragon ladies’ of the East.76 As already described, these types of fears were famously articulated by Sax Rohmer’s fictional character Fu Manchu, who first appeared in 1913.77 To reaffirm, Fu Manchu was a Chinese villain with ambitions to enslave the Western world. Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-­shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. . . . Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race . . . and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man.78 Rohmer’s novels were popular among Americans. Fourteen were published before he died in 1959, by which time they had sold more than 20 million copies.79 Many additional titles followed, as recently as 2009.80 Fu Manchu starred in films from 1929 into the 1930s, before re-­emerging in the late 1960s,81 and a TV series was created in 1956. In the mid to late nineteenth century, Threatening China had attained a dominant position in American imaginations. It represented a ‘danger’ to the White American majority despite only a tiny proportion of the US population being Chinese. Its (relatively less emphatic) re-­ emergence during the early part of the twentieth century was no less a social construction. This was demonstrated by the lack of material danger presented by China, but also by its adaptability and the relative simplicity of its transference. As Das observes, it became a habit of film producers to portray ‘ugly China in the ugliest manner . . . to produce diabolical effects on the screen’.82 To her frustration, and in testament to the naturalisation of Threatening China, the Asian-­American actress Anna May Wong became typecast by Hollywood as a ‘dragon lady’ during the 1920s and 1930s.83 In addition, East Asian men had (among other things) long been perceived as a threat to White women. This is illustrated in Figure 3.2, an American editorial cartoon from 1899 which depicts a grossly malicious Chinese character over the body of a White female, for whose death he is presumably responsible. Decades later, Fu Manchu pandered to the same anxieties through his plans for forced miscegenation which threatened White America.84 This is shown in Figure 3.3, in a promotional poster for the film The Brides of Fu Manchu, in which White American women are the targets of the evil Chinese villain. Yet, at neither point was the source of fear the Chinese. It was the security of American women and, most importantly, of the nation. The Chinese were attached to this anxiety so that particular truths about them could be established and so the future racial integrity of the United States – embodied in White

Figure 3.1  Fu Manchu (Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc.).

76   American images of China, 1882–1949

Figure 3.2 ‘The Yellow Terror in all his glory’.

females – could be retained. Threatening China had been adapted to fit a new era as the accepted wisdom of the Chinese as a danger to American women was remoulded and reproduced. That Threatening China once more existed principally as a social construct was later reaffirmed when the Japanese became enemies of the United States during the Second World War. Suddenly, it was they – and not the Chinese who (as will be discussed shortly) were more widely perceived as friends and allies – who were very purposefully presented as a threat to White females. Of course, the catastrophic attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, and the terrible loss of life which ensued on both sides across the Asia Pacific, meant that the Japanese were a danger to Americans and their security. Yet Wartime propaganda informed Americans that the Japanese now represented a very particular threat to American women and national racial security, as fears were exported for political gain. Collectively, these images serve to demonstrate the imagined nature of the dangers presented by China at any given moment. They portray a discursive

Figure 3.3  The Brides of Fu Manchu.

78   American images of China, 1882–1949 threat which is not objective and external to the United States. It is one which is imagined and produced for American imaginations. In the late nineteenth century China represented a ‘threat’ to White America. Yet, the ‘danger’ was not simply ‘there’ and material forces of immigration alone cannot explain the extreme measures taken to protect American society from a comparatively minute influx of foreign labour. The danger was constructed from understandings about the United States and used purposefully in the reproduction of its (White) identity. In the twentieth century, race remained a political category and a powerful site from which images of China were disseminated. Boundary-­producing rituals of representation continued to identify imaginary threats ‘out there’85 and US foreign policy mobilised to retain control. These rituals helped perpetuate the belief that a secure, ‘fully made’ White America needed protection,86 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 remained in effect. In addition, since 1910 the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco had housed arriving Chinese (and other Asian) immigrants off-­shore. Inside, they were subjected to interrogation and medical testing before a verdict on their application was made.87 Fu Manchu threatened the West not just by his actions, but through his exaggerated Asian identity. He was mysterious, unfamiliar and a threat to what it was to be American. The immigration station on Angel Island was another inscription of such discourses of difference and separation which itself functioned continually to reinforce the foreignness of the Chinese. It shielded White America from ‘civilisational decomposition’,88 as articulated in 1939 by Harry Laughlin, advisor to the House committee on Immigration and Naturalisation. In order to protect the United States, he argued, it is necessary to establish racial standards, to hold the country against all alien would-­be invaders . . . and to set up standards for the admission of outside reproductive stocks into the mate-­selection circle of the established race.89 Since ‘all alien would-­be invaders’ were threats, the Chinese per se were once more not responsible for American fears. Threatening China was a product of those fears, as demonstrated by the decision to ban Japanese immigration to the United States in 1924, despite their number representing just 2 per cent of California’s population.90 The Japanese were likened to a ‘plague of locusts’ and it was argued that their arrival in California was ‘stripping away the Americanness of the state’.91 That ‘Americanness’, of course, was White and Western, and US foreign policy functioned as it had done in the passage of the Exclusion Act, reaffirming and protecting American identity against a discursively engineered threat. As explained in the Introduction, the type of imagery exuded by Fu Manchu (and Threatening China more broadly) appears ostensibly irreconcilable with that of the fictional detective Charlie Chan. Chan first appeared in the early 1920s and eventually starred in 47 different films.92 Unlike Fu Manchu, he was unthreatening in part because he had embraced American culture, becoming

American images of China, 1882–1949   79 more familiar. He wore Western clothes and even one half of his name is Americanised, in stark contrast to that of the hyper-­stereotypical Fu Manchu. Chan represented purposeful resistance to imagery of Threatening China, as explained by his creator Earl Derr Biggers: ‘Sinister and wicked Chinese are old stuff but an amiable Chinese on the side of law and order has never been used’.93 Yet he also reinforced derogatory stereotypes. In one novel, for example, the audience learns that Chan’s mother ‘would have mourned for the old ways, the old customs. He mourned for them himself . . .’94 By equating China with ‘the old

Figure 3.4  Charlie Chan (Getty Images).

80   American images of China, 1882–1949 ways’, Biggers here, as elsewhere, unintentionally contributes to naturalised discourses of Idealised China as a less advanced and culturally anachronistic land and people. Chan also speaks in broken English, and at one point we learn that he has 12 children.95 Such images confirmed popular, negative assumptions about the inability of the Chinese to assimilate fully with American culture, as well as of the potential threat to the White American majority. Chan is an important image here for two key reasons. First, he further highlights the socially constructed nature of the ‘threat’ presented by China and the wider ‘Yellow Peril’. By providing an alternative truth and reality about that country he exposes the subjective, contingent nature of danger. China, in other words, ‘is’ threatening when powerful discourses tell us it is, and ‘is not’ when those discourses change. By extension, Chan reveals once again how US China policy is never merely a response to objective observations of danger. It is a policy performance towards one of any number of possible threats and an inscription of the societal representations which enable them. Second, Chan demonstrates that even overtly contradictory American images of China share roots in US identity. He is a member of a (non-­White) model minority. He was welcome in the United States because he was less foreign and less threatening to the American identity he had willingly adopted. His character is asexualised, for example, to challenge traditional fears of the dangers Asian men present to White women.96 When in 1900 the Chicago Daily Tribune had presented a group of ‘notable Chinamen in the United States’, it had applauded their achievements before emphasising their debt to the United States.97 Like them, Chan was essentially inferior and his successes were owed to superior American society. Inferior and unthreatening, he could also attract American sympathies because he was manufactured in more familiar terms. Indeed, from the beginning of the 1930s it was this type of imagery of China which became increasingly prominent. In 1931, for instance, Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth was published.98 It tells the story of an impoverished Chinese family whose ordeals often appear to be the result of Western influence in China. It was the highest selling American novel in 1931 and 1932.99 By the mid-­1960s more than 2,500,000 copies had been sold.100 It won a Pulitzer Prize, and in his study of American perceptions of Asia nearly thirty years later, Harold Isaacs found that ideas about China among the majority of interviewees were framed largely by Buck’s novel.101 Colleen Lye suggests that the success of The Good Earth was due to its portrayal of ‘real’ Chinese people and its avoidance of simple stereotypes.102 The characters were not just Chinese, like Franz Fanon was just a ‘Negro’.103 They were hardworking, brave and identifiable to Americans. Superficially, at least, they were cast within a positive light, but once again located within paternalistic relations so that their ultimate helplessness and inferiority were reinforced. Notably, the original edition of the book featured a rural landscape and plough, a scene which drew comparisons between China’s present and the West’s agrarian past. More significant than the publication of Buck’s novel for the emergence of sympathy towards China was the invasion by Japanese troops of Manchuria, also

American images of China, 1882–1949   81 in 1931. In 1925, after the death of Sun Yat-­sen, General Chiang Kai-shek had assumed control of the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) party. In 1927 he had undertaken a purge of his communist rivals and established a de facto government in Nanjing.104 Chiang appealed to the United States and the League of Nations for help in fighting the Japanese but President Herbert Hoover withheld consent to intervene. The Great Depression in particular had done much to ensure that domestic issues took precedence over foreign affairs.105 Throughout the mid-­1920s China had been an issue of minor importance in Washington, and by the end of the decade there remained confusion with regard to the political situation there.106 In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt was elected president. The policies of his administration contrasted markedly with those of his republican predecessor, but US China policy altered little. Sympathy and action remained unmarried, as Under Secretary of State William Phillips confirmed when he described the new administration’s China policy as ‘hands off ’.107 However, while popular sentiment and governmental policy may have appeared at polar extremes, a 1937 Gallup poll found that 54 per cent of Amer­ icans favoured withdrawing their troops from China in order to avoid direct conflict with Japan.108 As late as 1939 only 6 per cent of respondents thought that the United States should fight the Japanese in defence of their interests in China.109 Accordingly, the boundaries of American policy were still most forcefully prescribed by stable and enduring representations over attitudes and opinions of the moment. In 1934, for example, Roosevelt passed the Silver Purchase Act despite warnings that the nationalisation of domestic silver would damage the Chinese economy, which still relied on a silver standard. The effects were disastrous and China suffered severe deflation.110 Once again, powerful underlying societal representations of China remained comparatively more active in US foreign policy. They explain most effectively how Washington could justify a relative lack of support for China (and even policies which harmed it), and how the limits of political action appeared so far removed from popular imagery of the time. American sympathies of the 1930s did little to challenge naturalised perceptions of China’s inherent inferiority and inconsequence, or of its location at the periphery of the civilised world, which even Charlie Chan and voices like Buck’s reinforced. Those limits of political possibility were tested even more emphatically during the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath as sympathies for China increased. Understandings of a less alien and ‘less Chinese’ land and people became far more widespread, but while the Chinese fought with Americans as allies, their status as equals was never assured. This is the period to which the analysis now turns.

Friends, allies, ‘equals’ In September 1940 Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany, an agreement which proved to be a blessing for China. Between 1937 and 1941 the Chinese received four loans from the United States, totalling around 120 million dollars.111 Six months after Japan allied itself with Germany, China received another 95

82   American images of China, 1882–1949 million.112 Wider American sympathies for the Chinese were expressed by the fundraising and humanitarian efforts of such organisations as United China Relief (UCR) and the Rockefeller Foundation. Promotional posters for the UCR depicted solemn but dignified Chinese families. Popular stereotypes of Asian cowardice were challenged in one entitled, ‘China first to fight!’ (Figure 3.5). The hair and clothes of the Chinese characters in this poster and others by UCR would not have looked out of place in the West. Like Charlie Chan, the individuals were Chinese but not ‘as Chinese’ as those which threatened America, such as Fu Manchu and other exaggerated caricatures seen already (see, for example, Figures 2.3, 3.1 and 3.2). The moderation of their foreignness from ‘true’ Americans was a purposeful juxtaposition to representations of Threatening China of the recent past. Another wartime poster explicitly utilised highly paternalistic imagery, as Uncle Sam feeds a young Chinese child sitting on his lap.113 To reaffirm, in order to become civilised China (like other non-­Western lands and peoples) has been traditionally expected to adhere to, and reproduce, the norms and values of the West. Indeed, as this analysis has shown, (particularly Uncivilised) China had long been regarded as inferior, most notably because of a perceived non-­compliance with American identity. For more than a century discourse and imagery of the Chinese as a distinct and inassimilable race had helped justify their marginalisation and exclusion, especially within the United States. To galvanise sympathy and rationalise aid and support, groups like the UCR now reconstructed the Chinese as decent, civilised and familiar. The historically stable superior/inferior binary opposition appeared at least partially destabilised as China’s identity became less different, less foreign and, necessarily, less unequal. Indeed, a 1942 Gallup public opinion poll found that Amer­ icans considered the Chinese hardworking, honest, brave, religious, intelligent and practical.114 Ronald Takaki provides two quotes from Chinese Americans who described the new atmosphere: ‘World War Two was the most important historic event of our times’, Charlie Seong explained. ‘For the first time we felt we could make it in American society.’ Harold Liu recalled: ‘in the 1940s for the first time Chinese were accepted by Americans as being friends’.115 In the Pocket Guide to China distributed to American soldiers in Asia was an article entitled ‘How to spot a Jap’. The Chinese are described as taller, ‘with fairly normal feet’ and with eyes ‘set like Europeans’.116 The Japanese were compared unfavourably in each case. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Japanese had been applauded for embracing modernity, and for being comparatively more Western than the backward, uncivilised Chinese. Now, it was the Chinese who were closer to the Western ideal. The social construction of identity allowed the bases of comparison to vary. Rather than culture, it was now physicality which distinguished the Chinese from the Japanese. However, and as always, it could not be said that representational processes were neutral or dispassionate and the purpose of their construction was unchanged. The Chinese (and Japanese) confirmed Western superiority; others ‘more like us’ were identifiable, trusted, better.

Figure 3.5 United China Relief poster.

84   American images of China, 1882–1949 Throughout the 1930s this had been the message of Henry Luce’s media empire, Time Inc. Luce was particularly keen to promote a favourable image of Chiang Kai-­shek who repeatedly appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Along with his wife, Soong May-­ling, Chiang was named Person of the Year for 1937. Time’s enormous weekly circulation of almost one million by the end of the decade was used by Luce to complement the efforts of the UCR. Edgar Snow’s 1938 volume Red Star over China won American support for the Chinese communists, but Chiang was widely portrayed as China’s true leader.117 By 1936 all three of Luce’s main publications (Time, LIFE and Fortune) were backing Chiang.118 Americans had once again found a Chinese leader with whom they could identify. A Christian convert and a supposed advocate of democracy, it was reported in the New York Times that Chiang started each day by listening to Western classical music.119 His image also challenged traditional assumptions of the Chinese as inherently weak. The Port Folio had once labelled Asians ‘a feeble race of men’120 and J.R. McCulloch’s 1865 Dictionary of Natural Objects in the World observed that ‘Asiatics . . . have never been a match for the Europeans, even when the latter were comparatively weak and semibarbarious’.121 In 1927 H.G. Wells had lamented the absence of a ‘strong man in China’,122 but Chiang now filled that vacancy within American imaginations: ‘Firm in the saddle of his stumpy, strong-­sinewed Chinese horse sat the great soldier-­statesman . . . His Excellency Generalissimo Chiang Kai-­shek’, declared Time.123 Takaki describes the war as ‘a watershed’ in the history of America’s Asian population.124 Certainly, images of the Chinese throughout this ‘age of infatuation’ were ostensibly more positive than negative.125 However, just as Said observed the ‘unanimity, stability and durability’ of ‘Latent Orientalism’,126 so can we say that naturalised American discourses were pervasive and sustaining beneath the newfound optimism reified by Luce, the UCR and public opinion polls. In 1943 Washington relinquished all ‘unequal’ rights in China, including that of extraterritoriality.127 The Exclusion Act of 1882 was officially repealed and Chinese in America were given permission to become citizens for the first time since 1790. In this and other ways, the overtly positive attitudes and opinions of Americans appeared key to US China policy. However, in the case of the Magnuson Act, for example, the number of Chinese allowed into the United States was still restricted according to the requirements of the 1924 Immigration Act.128 As such, the Exclusion Act essentially remained in effect. Once again, while popular attitudes of the moment were not entirely insignificant, more powerful underlying constructions of China’s identity had evolved very little. They worked to override comparatively fleeting ideas framed primarily by the events and attitudes of the Second World War. The Chinese were not singled out, as the Immigration Act of 1924 applied to a multitude of nationalities and regions. However the quotas of the Act still favoured White Europeans and in 1943 the Chinese remained classified as an essentially undesirable race. The assumed inferiority and unequal status of China was reinforced by Washington’s wartime ‘Europe first’ strategy, as outlined in

American images of China, 1882–1949   85 the Plan Dog memorandum authored by Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark. The memorandum provided four policy options for the United States during the Second World War. One was to provide equal support to both Europe and the Asian nations fighting Japan. This possibility was dismissed, along with two remaining options, and the recommendation was to afford priority to Europe. The memorandum argued that ‘the continued existence of the British Empire, combined with building up a strong protection in our home areas, will do most to ensure the status quo in the Western Hemisphere, and to promote our principal national interests’.129 It is undeniable, then, that material forces played a profoundly significant role in the formulation and enactment of Washington’s wartime policy strategy. Europe had always been the more significant trading partner of the United States and, as the Plan Dog memorandum confirmed, American security relied more fundamentally upon its future stability. Material forces, in other words, do much to explain why Europe was privileged over China. However, the ideas and understandings which gave them meaning help us understand how the ‘Europe first’ (‘China second’) strategy could be enabled so unproblematically. To reiterate, the argument is not that ideas are more important than power and interest, but that power and interest are important because of the ideas of which they are constituted.130 Material forces in Asia and Europe mattered, but how they mattered was entirely contingent upon discourse and representational processes. During the war American expectations of China had become heightened, with ideas of common ground and a common future. In 1937, for instance, the New York Times spoke of Amer­ ica’s ‘Eastern front’ in Asia,131 and in 1940 that the war there was ‘our crisis’.132 It was a period of ‘dreamy unreality’,133 but China and the United States had become allies through circumstance. The most powerful and pervasive understandings of China and its people did not disappear overnight. They were friends, not equals. At the Cairo Conference of 1943 Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill assured Chiang that, upon Tokyo’s surrender, China would regain sovereignty of its former territories now occupied by the Japanese. It has been argued that this gesture granted China equal status with the Allied powers, but Chiang’s request for British-­held Hong Kong to be returned was ignored. China was ‘a second class ally’.134 This was the belief even of China’s latest champion, Time, which applauded the country for electing to ‘side with civilisation’.135 This was indicative of the widespread understanding that China had merely allied itself with civilised nations; it did not represent civilisation itself. These are the processes which explain how the United States could justify a comparative lack of support for China. Stable, naturalised and overlapping images of a still essentially uncivilised and ultimately inferior land were implicit and taken for granted. The Chinese were valued allies, but were still below Westerners in the imagined hierarchy of people and nations. As the Pocket Guide to China had confirmed, Americans still had to be educated on how to distinguish the Chinese from the Japanese, as a lower race of people than Caucasians. In April 1946, after the close of the Second World War and when Japan no longer presented a threat, China’s civil war between the Nationalists (Chiang’s

86   American images of China, 1882–1949 KMT and its followers) and the communists reignited. By 1948 it was clear that the former were suffering untenable losses.136 Washington had long doubted Chiang’s abilities to lead and unify the country and George Kennan, head of the Policy Planning Staff, advised that while the American government still supported the KMT its defeat would not be a ‘catastrophe’.137 Thereafter, and despite continued public support for Chiang and a surge in anti-­communist rhetoric, the administration of new President Harry Truman sought to withdraw American troops from China. In the end, victory for the communists came quickly. By April 1949 they had captured the nationalist base of Nanjing and Chiang and his followers retreated to the island of Taiwan (then known as Formosa). On 1 October 1949 Mao declared the formal establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Department of State defended its actions with the publication of the China White Paper, arguing that a communist victory had been inevitable.138 The Chinese were widely admired after once being broadly detested and deemed a backward and uncivilised race. To a significant extent, however, American images of China remained familiar and unchanged. Chiang argued that ‘[i]t is particularly necessary to come to Asia’s rescue . . . I hope that the American people and their statesmen will dedicate their lives to this task’.139 His wife Soong Mai-­ling had lobbied extensively within the United States to secure increased support for China.140 However, Washington’s ‘Europe first’ strategy was articulated through the implementation of the extensive and costly post-­war Marshall Plan, designed to prevent Europe from collapsing. Truman argued that ‘the deepest concern with European recovery . . . is that it is essential to the maintenance of the civilization in which the American way of life is rooted’. This was the group of nations, he asserted, which had to become the primary recipient of support.141 Civilisation, as observed earlier, is a value-­laden concept and Truman had made clear that the only legitimate course of action was to protect that which remained manifestly superior to others. China and the wider Asian region did not inhabit this civilisation. Thus, just as naturalised discourses of Threatening and Uncivilised China had once worked to disregard any possibility other than marginalising and excluding Chinese immigrants from the White United States, more than half a century later the idea of conceiving of China as a true equal to the West remained unthinkable. As Fairbank argued: in Sino-­American relations to 1949, China was always the weaker party, in trouble, the recipient of our interest and philanthropy. America was always the superior party, not in such trouble, able to help. It was not an equal relationship, which is no doubt why we enjoyed it.142 Discourse of China remained contained and regulated as rules of exclusion marginalised competing ideas and possibilities. The White Paper argued that China had become engulfed by ‘economic chaos’, concomitant with the fall of government.143 All that could have saved China, it concluded, would have been ‘full scale intervention’ on behalf of the Nationalists.144 The Washington Post asserted

American images of China, 1882–1949   87 that ‘the China situation will always illustrate the eccentricities of a remote and irrational emanation from the central madness of a warring world’.145 Such sentiments were reflective of Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff, who suggested that, ‘for some time to come, China will be a chaotic and undependable factor on the Far Eastern scene’.146 Certainly, wartime China was perceived as more friendly and familiar and even less inferior than in the past. However, such discursive resistance as that advanced by Chiang, Soong Mai-­Ling and others could not overcome prevailing and naturalised truths. Most importantly, it could not provide a sufficiently compelling reality within which any other possibility than the ‘Europe first’ strategy or America’s eventual withdrawal from China could have been justified. Europe represented a more significant material ally but power/knowledge still informed Americans that China remained at the periphery of (Western) civilisation. This was confirmed by Chiang himself: ‘in West Europe, nations are advanced in industries and enjoy a higher standard of civilisation, nationalism and democracy’, he asserted.147 As ever, powerful American representations had been complicit at every stage of the formulation, enactment and justification of US China policy by attributing meaning to the material world. That policy itself also served in the reproduction of imagery and identity. China was affirmed as ‘chaotic and undependable’, and the White Paper argued that a program of development could not be formulated because the political and economic conditions there were so unstable.148 The United States, by contrast, was civilised, altruistic and benevolent. Truman had asserted that, ‘we are ready to help China as she moves toward peace and genuine democratic government . . . we will persevere with our policy of helping the Chinese people to bring about peace and economic recovery’.149 Once more, acts of American policy towards China were not merely those of one given state towards another. They reaffirmed the foreignness of China and were themselves complicit within its continuous construction, as well as of the United States. The discourses of separation and difference upon which American policies rested were perpetuated and their logic reinforced. As ‘remote’ and ‘warring’, ‘chaotic’ and ‘undependable’, China remained essentially uncivilised and inconsequential in comparison to the superior Western world.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to examine American images of China between 1882 and 1949. It has shown how the four key constructions of China’s identity which had emerged during the nineteenth century retained the capacity to resurface at future moments. The Open Door Notes of 1899, for example, confirmed the endurance and significance of Opportunity China in American imaginations. Washington’s decision to participate in quashing the Boxer Rebellion, and to demand of the new Chinese government in 1911 that it satisfy a number of prerequisites for diplomatic recognition, revealed the stable logic of Uncivilised China. Individuals such as Arnold Genthe disseminated imagery of

88   American images of China, 1882–1949 Idealised China and of its people as exotic, mysterious and a source of fascination. Finally, Threatening China re-­emerged in the early to mid-­twentieth century, most famously articulated by the widespread popularity of Fu Manchu. The previous chapter showed that governmental US China policy was highly infrequent throughout the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century it became increasingly intensive. This reflected an evolution of American identity, and its transition to an increasingly self-­identified new global power. Washington’s policies became more proactive, but the United States did not have to exert itself towards China. Its material capabilities were constitutive of ideas which made it possible, even necessary, to do so. Moreover, these ideas were often those which had become naturalised during the previous century. Opportunity and Uncivilised China, for example, were highly active contributors to the justification of the Open Door Notes, suppressing the Boxer Rebellion and delaying recognition of the new Republic of China. Idealised China provided truths that the Chinese were still an essentially inferior race of people. Alongside Threatening China and the imagined fears it continued to present for the White American population, it contributed towards a reality in which Chinese immigration to the United States could logically remain restricted. During and after the Second World War, the most powerful representations ensured that China could be the legitimate recipient of comparatively less support than Europe. These images overrode temporally specific attitudes and opinions which had attracted widespread American sympathy for the Chinese. It has also been shown that American foreign policy itself remained active in the production of imagery and in the construction of China’s identity, as well as that of the United States. The material forces advanced by Washington were attributed meanings which were perpetuated via the enactment of policy. The Open Door Notes, for example, affirmed China as a passive and silent actor and the object of Western negotiation. The United States, in contrast, was confirmed as a global power which could participate in those negotiations and help determine Uncivilised and Opportunity China’s future. After the Second World War China policy advanced imagery of that country as chaotic and remote. American identity was conversely reproduced as civilised and benevolent, the concern of which was to rebuild a strong and peaceful China. These representational processes remained highly significant in the years and decades which followed. During the Cold War period images of Uncivilised and Threatening China were especially prominent. The task of US China policy to shield American identity was once again of critical importance, until the Sino-­American rapprochement of the 1970s. This is the focus of the following chapter, which explores Amer­ ican imagery of China between the years 1949 and 1979.

Notes    1 Theodore Roosevelt, Presidential Addresses and State Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, pt. 2 (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1905), p. 601.    2 John King Fairbank, ‘ “American China Policy” to 1898: A Misconception’, Pacific Historical Review, 39:4 (1970), p. 413.

American images of China, 1882–1949   89 Wendt, Social Theory, p. 135. Gyory, Closing the Gate, p. 1. Quoted in Hunt, Special Relationship, p. 92. Daniels, Asian America, p. 73. Scott Act, 29 April 1902. University of Washington, Bothell, http://library.uwb.edu/ guides/USimmigration/32%20stat%20176.pdf, last accessed 11 June 2011.    8 Chae Chan Ping v. United States, No. 130. Supreme Court of the United States, 13 May 1889, p. 581.    9 Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, pp. 168–169.   10 William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Letters of John Hay, vol.  2 (London: Constable and Co., 1915), p. 337.   11 Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, The Meaning of the Times (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1908), p. 43.   12 Richard F. Hamilton, President McKinley, War and Empire. vol.  2: President McKinley and America’s ‘New Empire’ (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), p. 81.   13 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 134.   14 Iriye, Across the Pacific, pp. 55–56.   15 Hamilton, War and Empire, p. 81.   16 Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900), p. 221.   17 Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1899 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), pp.  131–133. For overviews of the motives behind the Open Door Notes see Jerry Israel, ‘ “For God, For China and For Yale” ’ – The Open Door in Action’, The American Historical Review, 75:3 (1970), pp.  796–807; Thomson et al., Sentimental Imperialists, chapter 9.   18 For agreements with this interpretation see Israel, ‘For God’, p. 807; Cohen, America’s Response, p.  42; Dulles, China and America, p.  110; Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia, p. 658.   19 Said, Reflections, p. 202.   20 The Nation, 72 (1901), pp. 368–369.   21 New York Times, 20 June 1900.   22 Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 July 1900. For a volume-­length exploration of Western and Chinese media images of the events see Elliot, Boxer War.   23 Dulles, China and America, p. 117 and p. 121.   24 Dennett, Americans, p. 658.   25 Ibid., pp. 558–659.   26 New York Times, 11 August 1901.   27 See John Kuo Wei Tchen, Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown (Mineola, NY: Dover), especially pp. 13–14.   28 Sabine Haenni, ‘Filming “Chinatown”: Fake Visions, Bodily Transformations’, in Peter X. Feng, Screening Asian Americans, pp. 21–52 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).   29 Blauner, Racial Oppression, p. 88.   30 Franz Fanon, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, in Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta (eds), Identities: Race, Class, Gender and Nationality (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 64.   31 Blauner, Racial Oppression, p. 52.   32 Betty Lee Sung, A Survey of Chinese American Manpower and Employment (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976), p. 133.   33 Blauner, Racial Oppression, p. 88.   34 Arif Dirlik, ‘Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism’, History and Theory, 35:4 (1996), p. 104.

   3    4    5    6    7

90   American images of China, 1882–1949   35 Hobson, ‘Oriental West’, p. 45.   36 Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 July 1900. For an exploration of Western and Chinese media images of the events see Elliot, Boxer War.   37 Department of State, Foreign Relations, 1899, p. 131.   38 Fairbank, ‘ “American China Policy” ’, p. 413.   39 For good overviews of these events see Colin Mackerras, China in Transformation, 1900–1949 (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Ltd, 2008), chapters 3 and 4; Denis Twitchett and John King Fairbank (eds), The Cambridge History of China, vol. 12: Republican China 1912–1949, part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chapter 4.   40 Quoted in James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911–1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 111. For American attitudes towards the Chinese revolution see Thomson et al., Sentimental Imperialists, chapter 12.   41 Los Angeles Times, 27 April 1912.   42 Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 February 1912.   43 Washington Post, 8 November 1911.   44 New York Times, 31 October 1911.   45 New York Times, 20 June 1900.   46 Paine, ‘Common Sense’, p. 5. The American Declaration of Independence famously argued that ‘all men are created equal’. See Declaration of Independence. National Archives and Record Administration, www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html, last accessed 23 June 2011.   47 Francis Dana, ‘Francis Dana to John Adams’, reprinted in Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams vol.  12 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1852), p. 468.   48 Judith F. Kornberg and John R. Faust, China in World Politics: Policies, Processes, Prospects (2nd edn) (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005), p.  99; Julie Lee Wei, Ramon H. Myers and Donald G. Gillin, Prescriptions for Saving China: Selected Writings of Sun Yat-­sen. (Translated by Julie Lee Wei, E-­su Zen and Linda Chao) (Stanford: Hoover University Press, 1994), p. 21.   49 Washington Post, 17 March 1912.   50 Chicago Daily Tribune, 27 July 1900.   51 Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States with the Annual Message of the President Transmitted to Congress December 3, 1912 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, n.d.), p. 86.   52 Quoted in Jerome Alan Cohen (ed.), China’s Practice of International Law: Some Case Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 244.   53 Washington Post, 17 March 1912.   54 Quoted in Karen Garner, Precious Fire: Maud Russell and the Chinese Revolution (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), p. 19.   55 Los Angeles Times, 12 January 1913.   56 John Coming, How China Ought to be Governed: Written Before the Russo-­Japan War, and Modified to Suit the Present Republican Regime (Singapore: Kelly and Walsh, 1914).   57 Dulles, China and America, p. 135.   58 Quoted in Israel, Progressivism, p.  103; Michael P. Riccards, The Presidency and the Middle Kingdom: China, the United States and Executive Leadership (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 2000), p. 38.   59 Ashcroft, Post-­Colonial Futures, p. 40.   60 See Bruce A. Elleman, Wilson and China: A Revised History of the Shandong Question (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), pp. 33–34.   61 For an examination of China’s demands and its experiences at the conference see ibid., chapter 2.

American images of China, 1882–1949   91   62 Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 258.   63 Ibid., chapter 7.   64 Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 41; Xu, China, p. 258.   65 For overviews of this period in Chinese history see Bruce A. Elleman, Modern Chinese Warfare, 1795–1989 (New York: Routledge, 1991), chapter 10; Edwin E. Moise, Modern China: A History (3rd edn) (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2008), pp.  47–51; Peter Gue Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949 (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 75–95.   66 Time, 12 May 1923.   67 Thomson et al., Sentimental Imperialists, p. 162.   68 LaFeber et al., The American Century, p. 133.   69 Quoted in Harold S. Quigley, ‘The United States in the Pacific: A Survey of the Relations of the United States with China and Japan and American Opinion Thereon August 1, 1927–June 1, 1929’, Pacific Affairs, 2:8 (1929), p. 473.   70 Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1922, vol. 1 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1938), pp. 276–281.   71 See Yongjin Zhang, ‘China’s Entry into International Society: Beyond the Standard of “Civilization” ’, Review of International Studies, 17:1 (1991), pp. 3–16.   72 John Chalmers Vinson, The Parchment Peace: The United States Senate and the Washington Conference, 1921–1922 (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1955), p. 171.   73 Dulles, China and America, p. 159.   74 Arthur Judson Brown, New Forces in Old China: An Unwelcome but Inevitable Awakening (New York: F.H. Revell Company, 1904).   75 Washington Post, 10 March 1912.   76 Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 12–13.   77 See Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (New York: McBride, 1913).   78 Rohmer, Insidious, pp. 25–26.   79 For a full list of Fu Manchu literary titles see Bernard A. Drew, Literary Afterlife: The Posthumous Continuations of 325 Authors’ Fictional Characters (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), pp. 17–18.   80 See Maynard, Terror.   81 For an overview of Fu Manchu film titles see Kim Newman, ‘Fu Manchu’, in Phil Hardy (ed.), The BFI Companion to Crime (London: Cassell, 1997), pp. 138–140.   82 Das, ‘American Image’, p. 13.   83 Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 123.   84 Jachinson Chan, Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 30.   85 Ashley, ‘Border Lines’, p. 304.   86 Persaud, ‘Situating Race’, p. 74.   87 For an overview of the facility and its history see H.M. Lai, ‘Island of Immortals: Chinese Immigrants and the Angel Island Immigration Station’, California History, 57:1 (1978), pp. 88–103.   88 Persaud, ‘Situating Race’, p. 74.   89 Harry H. Laughlin, Immigration and Conquest: A Report of the Special Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York (New York: New York Chamber of Commerce), p. 6.   90 Immigration Act of 1924 (An Act to Limit the Immigration of Aliens into the United States, and for Other Purposes), 26 May, 1924. University of Washington, Bothell, http://library.uwb.edu/guides/USimmigration/43%20stat%20153.pdf, last accessed

92   American images of China, 1882–1949

  91   92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119 120

17 May 2011; Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 17. New York Times, 21 June 1919. Diane Carson, ‘Cultural Screens: Teaching Asian and Asian-­American Images’, in Diane Carson and Lester D. Friedman (eds), Shared Differences: Multicultural Media and Pedagogy (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 182–183n. Quoted in David Manning White, Popular Culture (New York: Arno Press, 1975), p.  29; M.T. Kato, From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution, and Popular Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), p. 139. Earl Derr Biggers, Charlie Chan in the Black Camel (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 1929), p. 169. See Ken Hanke, Charlie Chan at the Movies: History, Filmography and Criticism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), p. 66. Chan, Chinese American Masculinities, chapter 3. Chicago Daily, 27 July 1900. Pearl Buck, The Good Earth (New York: The John Day Company, 1931). See Publishers Weekly, 21 January 1933, pp. 190–191. Steele, American People, p. 171. Isaacs, Scratches, especially part 2, chapter 1. Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 205; Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 126. Fanon, ‘Fact of Blackness’, p. 64. For examinations of events in China during this period see Hans J. van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), especially chapters 2 and 3; Lloyd E. Eastman, Jerome Ch’en, Suzanne Pepper and Lyman P. van Slyke, The Nationalist Era in China, 1927–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially chapters 1 and 2. LaFeber et al., The American Century, chapter 6. Cohen, America’s Response, p. 101 and p. 108. Quoted in Ibid., p. 124. George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 68. Ibid., p. 168. Milton Friedman, ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt, Silver, and China’, The Journal of Political Economy, 100:1 (1992), pp. 62–83. Maochun Yu, The Dragon’s War: Allied Operations and the Fate of China, 1937–1947 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), p. 88. Cohen, America’s Response, p. 136. See Jesperson, American Images, pp. 44–45. Cited in Isaacs, Scratches, p. xviii. Quoted in Takaki, Strangers, p. 373. Special Service Division, Services of Supply, United States Army, The Pocket Guide to China (Washington DC: War and Navy Departments), pp. 66–67. An article entitled ‘How to Tell Japs From Chinese’ had earlier appeared in LIFE magazine. See LIFE, 22 December 1941. Isaacs, Scratches, p.  163; Jerry Israel, ‘Carl Crow, Edgar Snow and Shifting American Journalistic Perceptions of China’, in Goldstein et al., America Views China. Jesperson, American Images, pp. 12 and 28. New York Times, 3 January 1937. Joseph Dennie and Asbury Dickens, The Port Folio, 1819, vol. 7 (Philadelphia: Harrison Hall, 1819), p. 100.

American images of China, 1882–1949   93 121 J.R. McCulloch, A Dictionary, Geographical, Statistical, and Historical, of the Various Countries, Places, and Principal Natural Objects in the World, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1865), p. 184. 122 New York Times, 23 January 1927. 123 Time, 11 December 1933. 124 Takaki, Strangers, chapter 10. 125 Mosher, China Misperceived, chapter 3. 126 Said, Orientalism, p. 206. 127 This happened with the Magnuson Act, 17 December, 1943. See University of Washington, Bothell, http://library.uwb.edu/guides/USimmigration/57%20stat%20 600.pdf, last accessed 13 June 2011. 128 Immigration Act of 1924, http://library.uwb.edu/guides/USimmigration/1924_immigration_act.html, last accessed 9 July 2011. 129 Memorandum for the Secretary, 12 November, 1940. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box4/a48b01. html, last accessed 3 June 2011. 130 Wendt, Social Theory, p. 135. 131 New York Times, 22 February 1937. 132 New York Times, 1 January 1940. 133 Steele, American People, p. 22. 134 Cohen, America’s Response, p. 138. 135 Time, 9 December 1940. 136 See Bevin Alexander, The Strange Connection: US Intervention in China, 1944–1972 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), chapter 8. 137 Quoted in Yafeng Xia, Negotiating With the Enemy: US–China Talks During the Cold War, 1949–1972 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 15. 138 Lyman P. van Slyke (ed.), The China White Paper: August 1949, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. xvi. 139 Chiang Kai-­shek, ‘Statement by President Chiang Kai-­shek to Mr Arch T. Steele of the New York Herald Tribune’, in van Slyke, China White Paper, p. 894. 140 See Sandy Donovan, Madame Chiang Kai-­shek: Face of Modern China (Minne­ apolis: Compass Point Books, 2007), especially chapter 7; Jesperson, American Images, chapter 5. 141 John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project (online), www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=12805&st=marshall+plan&st1=civiliz ation#axzz1XumhRSGZ, last accessed 18 August 2001. 142 Fairbank, United States and China, p. 320. 143 van Slyke, China White Paper, p. xv. 144 Ibid. 145 Washington Post, 4 October 1949. 146 Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. 8 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), p. 155. 147 Kai-­shek, ‘Statement’, p. 894. 148 Department of State, Foreign Relations, 1948, 8, p.  155; van Slyke, China White Paper, p. 984. 149 Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. 10 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1972), p. 629.

4 American images of China, 1949–1979

Introduction Since the early to mid-­twentieth century Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan had represented contrasting realities of China. Fu Manchu was not only threatening, he was threatening because he was mysterious, alien and unfamiliar. He endangered the Western world with his actions but, as stereotypical and exaggerated, his Asian identity challenged what it meant to be American. Charlie Chan, meanwhile, was unthreatening, largely because he had embraced American culture. He was more familiar and less foreign, in reflection of traditional expectations that China should conform to the values of the United States. During the Cold War traditional patterns of American imagery continued to circulate, and these contributed to the production of accommodating realities in which selected acts of China policy could occur. Until the rapprochement of the 1970s Americans were confronted by a newly Threatening China: the communist PRC. Like Fu Manchu, its identity challenged that of the United States and policies were enacted to protect American society from the dangers it was understood to present. Taiwan, conversely, was envisioned as a member of the ‘free world’. Like Charlie Chan, it was constitutive of American values and hence more familiar. As an imaginative geography which appeared to conform to American identity, it was the recipient of US support and protection. It is to this period of Sino-­American relations which the book now turns. This chapter begins by describing how mainland China – a valuable ally of the United States throughout the Second World War – came to be represented as uncivilised and threatening in the space of just a few years. Throughout much of the Cold War contrasting American images of the PRC and Taiwan were crucial to the establishment and maintenance of Washington’s highly antagonistic Two China policy, made possible by their dislocation into discrete political entities. During the 1960s the PRC endured considerable internal disruption. American policy there became less intensive, but societal discourses of separation and difference were highly active in the construction of an increasingly uncivilised land and people. Nonetheless, China’s identity remained unstable and in flux, and by  the late 1960s American images had evolved sufficiently to expand the boundaries of the politically possible. During the early 1970s a strategy of

American images of China, 1949–1979   95 rapprochement was enabled and the re-­establishment of full diplomatic ties with the PRC was not only made available, but seemingly became the only logical course of action.

Red China and the politics of danger In October 1949 Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, but Washington instead maintained diplomatic relations with the Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai-­shek in Taiwan. This strategy was known as the Two China policy, and it provided the basis of Sino-­American relations for decades.1 In February 1950 Beijing and Moscow signed the Sino-­ Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. Mao’s preference for closer ties with Stalin was reaffirmed later that year when Chinese troops became involved in the Korean War in alliance with the Soviet-­backed North.2 It has previously been argued that this conflict instilled a ‘legacy of hatred’3 between the United States and China which lasted a generation.4 Certainly, American images and policy shifted, and 1949 to 1972 represented a new ‘age of hostility’ in Sino-­American relations.5 Yet beneath rapidly evolving, temporally specific attitudes and opinion of communist China lay a familiar continuation of traditional patterns and trends. In particular, the construction of Threatening China resurfaced in American imaginations, and once again functioned strongly in Washington’s foreign policies of the period. In the previous chapter it was demonstrated that during the 1930s and 1940s the Chinese had broadly been perceived in overtly positive terms. Indeed, in 1943 President Roosevelt had repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act to ‘correct an injustice to our friends’.6 Further, right up until the late 1940s it was widely considered that China could not pose a threat in the short term. For instance, in 1948 a memorandum from the Policy Planning Staff had stated that ‘in any war in the foreseeable future China could at best be [considered] . . . an inconsequential enemy’.7 This view was reinforced in February 1949 by National Security Council report (NSC) 41, which declared that China was unlikely to threaten the  United States ‘within the next generation or more’.8 The American press had  also responded to the establishment of the PRC in a predominantly measured tone. Within just a few years, however, China had been reconstructed as a ‘Red’ communist ally of the Soviet Union at the periphery of the civilised world, and as a threat to US national security. China represented a material danger to the United States in the sense that Americans were being killed by Chinese troops in Korea. Nonetheless, the course of Sino-­American relations during the first half of the 1950s is inexplicable in the absence of attention to representational processes. As always, those processes gave American and Chinese material forces meaning, and expose how the United States’ policies of the time could be enacted. Also, their exploration once again provides the opportunity to demonstrate how those policies themselves served in the production of imagery and in the reaffirmation and protection of identity.

96   American images of China, 1949–1979 The outbreak of the Korean War on 25 June 1950 led Truman, two days later, to order the Seventh Fleet to China in order to deter a communist invasion of Taiwan from the mainland.9 This intervention has traditionally been analysed in terms of military and strategic considerations.10 Less well described are the processes of representation which explain how the possibility of intervening on Taiwan’s behalf was introduced after so recently appearing unthinkable.11 Just a few years earlier the US State Department had considered Chiang’s government ‘undemocratic, corrupt and incompetent’.12 Wider concerns were raised that his regime was becoming violent and dictatorial. As late as October 1949 Secretary of State Dean Acheson argued that continued American involvement in China’s internal conflict could engender perceptions of the United States as the principal ‘imperialistic menace to China’. He argued that Washington should not be seen as a supporter of Taiwan, or of its ‘discredited, decayed KMT government’, and the island did not constitute a priority to American security.13 On 23 June 1949 Acheson had affirmed the administration’s desire to abstain from military intervention in the Chinese civil war.14 How then, could a fleet of American warships be deployed to protect Taiwan just four days later? How could mainland China, whose physical capabilities were largely unchanged, suddenly be deemed threatening and a legitimate target of marginalisation and containment so soon after it had been an ally of the United States? In short, what was the significance of American imagery of China to the formulation, enactment and justification of US China policy which an analysis of material forces alone is unable to reveal?15 Truman asserted that the decision to dispatch the Seventh Fleet to Taiwan was devoid of political prejudice.16 Of course, this was not true. When the president announced his intention to protect Taiwan he stated that ‘[t]he attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations. . . . It has defied orders of the Security Council of the United Nations’. Communist forces, he argued, now represented a direct threat to American security.17 Truman had emphasised the criticality of shielding the United States from the encroachment of communism, but communism itself does not constitute a material threat. It requires the understanding that it represents a threat by contradicting the values of non-­communist states.18 The Cold War period was one in which the military capabilities of the most economically powerful states in particular did much to determine the nature and course of international politics. However, each of those states did not represent a threat to every other. Great Britain, for example, increased its military capacities but was not considered potentially harmful to the United States. Conversely, states that were comparatively insignificant in material terms, most notably Vietnam and North Korea, were judged by Americans (at least at one time) to be the legitimate arenas of enormous economic and human expense. As Wendt explains, ideas about the Cold War did not exist externally to the Cold War itself. The Cold War was constituted by shared ideas about what it was.19 The material forces of China which ‘threatened’ the United States were not external to circulating discourses about them: they were constitutive of those

American images of China, 1949–1979   97 discourses. During the 1930s and 1940s China had been a friend and ally of the United States. In the 1950s its capabilities were broadly unchanged, but power/ knowledge made Threatening China real as a controlling image of American design. Communist China was a ‘threat’ to America in large part because its capabilities – those which had so recently been dismissed as inconsequential – were now represented in such a way. This is illustrated perhaps no more pertinently than in the Truman administration’s 1947 Executive Order 9835 (the ‘Loyalty Order’): any individual or group identified as ‘totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive . . . or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States’, it declared, would be barred from employment by the federal government.21 Communist values were anathema to the functioning of the United States and had to be repelled.22 In the speech which came to constitute his so-­called doctrine, Truman pledged American support for ‘free people’ threatened by communists.23 The doctrine was, in effect, a ‘call to arms’ for the nations of the free world.24 Labelling communist dangers ‘outside pressures’, it was an act of foreign policy designed to protect American identity.25 The same can be said of NSC 68.26 Written in 1950, this was among the most important policy documents of the Cold War as it established a roadmap for America’s response to the emerging ‘dangers’ of communism. Numerable governmental statements of the time were based on its rhetoric, and it drew significant inspiration from both the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.27 In particular, it emphasised the need to ‘assure the integrity and vitality of our free society’.28 As among the most enduring American images, Threatening China served prominently in adjusting the boundaries of political possibility beyond the intervention in the Taiwan Strait. Upon its entry into the Korean War, for example, the PRC was subjected to a trade embargo by Washington.29 Such a hard-­line approach may at least in part have been the result of Truman’s personal disdain for communism. However, just as the Exclusion Act of 1882 had restricted and controlled the Chinese at home, Washington’s policy of containment towards the PRC was the inscription of American discourses which separated Threatening China from the true American population. It was not a ‘bridge’ between states or the final product of representation;30 the embargo was intended to slow China’s development, but also to confirm it as an international pariah.31 As such, US China policy once more imposed American interpretations of the world. In doing so it necessarily reproduced them and reaffirmed China’s foreignness from the United States and its location beyond an imagined civilised world. As Truman explicitly observed, the aim was to restrict trade ‘between the free world and the Soviet Union and its Satellites’.32 These are the processes which explain how US China policy could justifiably marginalise the PRC – a land and people which had so recently been the objects of overtly positive American imagery. As a boundary-­producing political performance societal processes of representation reconstructed China as an imminent danger. The PRC, in other words, was exactly what American discourses allowed it to be. As Bruce Cumings explains, 20

98   American images of China, 1949–1979 China, little known to most Americans . . . could become ‘China’, an issue that most people could be mobilised around because it stood for nothing in the American mind and therefore could stand for everything – it was a tabula rasa on which the right-­wing and the expansionists could write.33 As it had done during the hysteria of the late nineteenth century over immigration from China, American identity entered a period of crisis.34 Threatening China had adapted to new circumstances, but it remained a largely stable construction in the sense that it was still a fantasised, socially engineered danger to the United States. Discourses of ideology had now largely replaced those of race in the protection of what it was, but the United States was still an imagined, ‘fully made’ society.35 That society was no longer articulated so widely as one of a superior White population. Instead, it was primarily defined by a commitment to a democratic-­ capitalist ideology, inhabited by Truman’s ‘free people’. This was codified by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which moved from a focus on racial or national origins to affiliation with communism as a specific barrier to entry into the United States.36 As Harold Isaacs put it, during the Cold War, ‘all the qualities attributed to the “evil and untrustworthy Oriental” came into their own in the new circumstances and the new hostile setting’.37 Figure 4.1 is illustrative of early Cold War American anxieties about the dangers of communism. Published by the Catechetical Guild Educational Society in 1947, Is This Tomorrow was a comic book which tells the story of how a small communist group takes control of American society. It sold four million copies, and many more were distributed free of charge, primarily among church groups.38 Warren Cohen labels Washington’s non-­recognition and containment policy towards China during the Cold War ‘The Great Aberration’.39 In one sense it can be argued that US China policy had diverged significantly from that of previous eras, as the American tradition of seeking closer, mutually beneficial relations with that country had seemingly been abandoned. Yet the fundamental aims of that policy were also highly consistent with historical trends. It functioned to protect American identity and reaffirm China’s foreignness by marginalising the latter at the periphery. This was principally enabled by re-­emerging discourses and imagery. Indeed, aside from a resurgence of Threatening China, other particularly notable ideas resurfaced. For example, in the nineteenth century fears over increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants entering the United States were regularly articulated through metaphors of an approaching tide: ‘If there were to be a flood-­tide of Chinese . . . we should be prepared to bid farewell to republicanism and democracy’, warned the New York Times in 1865.40 James Angell had stated that, as a minister to China, one of his principal duties was to restrict the immigration which threatened to ‘flood the pacific states’.41 Almost a century later, in 1958, the Washington Post reintroduced Americans to images of China’s supposedly limitless population. Its headlines included ‘China breeds race of automatons’ and ‘Our dedicated Enemy: 650 million Chinese yoked as human oxen’.42 The New York Times similarly declared ‘China organising a peasant force: Puts vast rural population under military code’.43 During the Korean

Figure 4.1 ‘Is this tomorrow: America under communism’.

100   American images of China, 1949–1979 War Chinese troops had been likened to a ‘yellow tide’44 and a ‘human sea’.45 Works such as Robert Rigg’s Red China’s Fighting Hordes46 additionally reinforced traditional images of what Isaacs referred to as China’s ‘faceless mass’.47 These types of fears had originally been established from the understanding that the Chinese threatened the civilisational composition of nineteenth-­century White America.48 The PRC’s Cold War containment was still designed to protect Amer­ican identity from (now ideological) encroachment, and the resurgence of ‘floods’ of Chinese in American imaginations represented another enduring reality of Threatening China. Figure 4.2 is illustrative of this traditional idea: an image from a 1929 edition of Ripley’s Believe it or Not which asserts that the Chinese population, if marching slowly, could walk endlessly across a given point because of its rate of reproduction. The Chinese in the cartoon are identical and anonymous as the collective is the intended focus of concern. It is a product of its time and yet, as this book has shown, knowledge of China’s comparatively large population has long been manipulated for desired purposes. Although presenting Isaac’s ‘faceless mass’, the Ripley’s image was intended principally to inspire and entertain with no overtly malicious agenda. Figure 2.2 from the nineteenth century and I.2 in the twenty-first century are rather more leading and suggestive, and clearly demonstrate that the ‘mass’ has been used for centuries to subtly and effortlessly reinforce ingrained understandings that China’s large population should necessarily provoke anxiety and mistrust. Glenn Hook argues that metaphorical language can be used to help promote certain political options in favour of others.49 China and its people were the subjects of broadly less explicit and vitriolic language than in the past. However, resurgent discourses of floods of Chinese contributed to the re-­establishment of Threatening China and to the understanding that containing the PRC remained the only viable option. They also provided the truth that Taiwan was now a bastion of American values in a region vulnerable to communist expansion. In 1954 the PRC’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) attacked the Nationalist-­held islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait. The Eisenhower administration reacted by signing a defence treaty with Taipei, article seven of which granted the United States the right to station military forces in Taiwan.50 The island became represented primarily as a strategic location from which to operate and defend American interests; the United States and ‘all free nations’, Eisenhower argued, ‘have a common interest that Formosa and the Pescadores should not fall into the control of aggressive Communist forces’. It was imperative to ‘preserve the vital stake of the free world in a free Formosa’.51 Taiwan was now a vital component in the struggle for East Asian influence, at least in part because its location enabled a physical American presence less than two hundred kilometres from China. Harry Harding explains why Taiwan was so pivotal to Cold War American interests. Geographically, he argues, the island represented a crucial link in the chain of defence against communist expansion in the Western Pacific.52 Such an understanding is not disputed here. However, the Truman administration did not consider formal alliances with every nation threatened by a powerful neighbour, particularly those it regarded as undemocratic and

American images of China, 1949–1979   101

Figure 4.2  ‘The marching Chinese’ (Ripley’s Believe It or Not).

corrupt. American support for Taiwan not only required a strategic appreciation for the material realities of the Cold War, but the understanding that it represented a non-­communist member of the imagined free world and an extension of the values of American identity. Constructed and reconstructed, Taiwan, like China, existed entirely for American imaginations. To rephrase Fairbank, at any given time the truth about the island was in their heads.53 Taiwan reconfirmed the United States as free, democratic and civilised. Washington’s actions, and in particular its Two China policy, were themselves inextric-

102   American images of China, 1949–1979 able from the construction of identity. The policy reinforced understandings of American exceptionalism and the duty of the United States to disseminate its values by protecting the free world from the ‘dangers’ of communism. The US was additionally reconfirmed as inherently superior to (mainland) China, since it was imperative that its values be maintained in the region. The types of paternalistic assumptions which had been so inextricable from American support for the British during the opium wars of the nineteenth century, and from the decision to delay recognition to the new Republic of China in the early twentieth century, remained pervasive. The United States and China were still unequals. The regulation of discourse continued to classify the latter as in need of superior American intervention of the type Washington’s Two China policy implicitly provided. Only in this way can it be explained how the United States could defend a regime it had so recently dismissed as unfit to govern, while containing and marginalising a land and people it had so recently considered allies. The Truman Doctrine in particular advanced the rhetoric of American identity and made it unthinkable that communism could be allowed to succeed where the values of capitalism and democracy might fail. The PRC had not entered the Korean War when Truman approved American intervention in the Taiwan Strait. However, Red China was already a perceived threat by virtue of what it was. As Bostdorff explains, ‘Korea marked a turning point in the application of American foreign policy but the Truman Doctrine was the symbolic turning point which made that transformation possible’.54 During the earliest stages of the Cold War Threatening China had re-­emerged as a prominent construction in American imaginations, and once more it worked primarily for those who benefitted most from its existence within American imaginations. As a projection of American identity it served to affirm the United States as a global promoter of democracy and capitalism and legitimised China’s containment at the margins of the imagined free world. That world was deemed to consist of inherently civilised nations such as the United States and Taiwan. Indeed, the overlapping nature of discourse meant that, just as it had been during the late nineteenth century, Cold War China was threatening in part because it was uncivilised. During the 1950s representations of Uncivilised China coexisted with those of Threatening China, and throughout the 1960s the former became an especially pervasive image. The PRC largely withdrew from international affairs, a situation facilitated by Washington’s continued policy of containment. It is to this period which the chapter now turns.

Containing uncivilised China China’s entrance into the Korean War had contributed significantly to the re-­ emergence of Threatening China. More fundamentally, in 1949 China had again seemingly rejected prescribed standards of Western civilisation. Truman had once argued that the ‘basic policy was to encourage the development of a strong, independent, united, and democratic China’.55 It was the last of these hopes which remained the most critical. To reconfirm, American images such as that of

American images of China, 1949–1979   103 Uncivilised China have long endured because, to a significant extent, they are constitutive of the most intrinsic understandings of American identity. The United States has always been defined in large part by a commitment to democracy, and it was this component of Truman’s statement which gave Cold War Uncivilised China particular meaning. Put differently, China could fulfil Truman’s other three hopes by becoming strong, independent and united. However, just as during China’s Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and its revolutionary movement of 1911, a failure to establish Western-­style democratic governance was that which primarily ensured a reconstruction of Uncivilised China in American imaginations, and which worked most actively to enable Washington’s policies towards it. Perhaps most notably, since 1949 the PRC had been denied entry to the newly formed United Nations (UN). Indeed, between 1951 and 1960 Washington successfully blocked all meaningful debate on the matter.56 In 1960 future president Richard Nixon would argue that, in order to gain entry to the UN, China had to first ‘purge itself of its offences against . . . the principles of civilised behaviour’.57 His sentiments echoed those of Dean Acheson, who had argued in 1949 that it was imperative to determine whether the new PRC was going to behave ‘in conformity with international law . . . as a civilised power, or as an uncivilised or semi-­civilised entity’.58 Violating (US-­led) international law and being civilised, in other words, were incompatible and mutually exclusive. By 1965 the so-­called China Lobby, or Committee of One Million, would obtain 312 congressional signatures in favour of China’s continued omission from the UN, a majority in both houses of American government.59 Once more, and as powerfully as it had done for over a century, Uncivilised China served the vital function of affirming the United States as a member of the civilised world and legitimising political performances accordingly. This was evident in the establishment in 1954 of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) which included Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines. Washington had also established post-­war alliances with Japan, South Korea and, as already noted, Taiwan. To a significant extent, the organisation worked on behalf of the most fundamental tenets of American identity, as articulated by the original agreement. The aim of SEATO, it explained, was ‘to strengthen the fabric of peace and freedom and to uphold the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law’ in the region. The particular severity of communist threats is revealed where the treaty notes that Washington would respond only to ‘aggression and armed attack’ from communist forces. Other types of aggression, it states, would be referred to the treaty provisions of the UN.60 Like the trade embargo, membership of SEATO was a policy enabled by relations of power still dominated by the United States, not least discursively in terms of its ability to propagate the truth that China was a legitimate object of containment. SEATO was a performance which distinguished those inside from outside, on the basis of such core American values as a commitment to democracy and individual liberty. NSC 68, the framework for American Cold War foreign policy, argued explicitly that ‘civilization itself ’ was threatened by communism.61

104   American images of China, 1949–1979 Societal American discourses of both the US and China separated non-­ communist from communist, good from bad, ‘us’ from ‘them’. Indeed, even before the Chinese had entered the Korean War in 1950 the American press had begun linking Mao’s regime with that of Stalin. Throughout the 1950s these discourses were advanced especially forcefully by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. By engineering an unparalleled fear of communism, McCarthy was influential in securing the discursive hegemony of Threatening and Uncivilised China by silencing writers sympathetic to the PRC. Famously, the academic and renowned China expert Owen Lattimore was isolated for intense and aggressive interrogation by McCarthy, who accused him of spying for the Soviet Union. Lattimore was found guilty, but the charges were later dropped after they were found to have relied upon extremely dubious evidence.62 Red Star Over China by the journalist Edgar Snow was notable for advancing resistance discourses. Along with additional works by Snow, Red Star provided imagery of a more civilised, less antagonistic communist China.63 Snow had travelled with Mao’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during its ‘Long March’ of 1936, and his volume praised the character and values of its members. ‘Who were these warriors who had fought so long, so fiercely, so courageously[?]’, the author enquired. Snow’s primary intention was to address prevailing Western impressions of China, which he described as ‘woefully ignorant’.64 Agnes Smedley’s Battle Hymn of China was similarly sympathetic towards Mao’s communist followers.65 Like Red Star, Smedley’s book recounted time spent by the author in the company of the CCP, in this case between 1938 and 1941. Smedley challenged stereotypes of China’s anonymous ‘faceless mass’ by emphasising the personal experiences of those loyal to Mao. Those men and women, she asserted, were enduring ‘infinite suffering, at colossal sacrifice’.66 Among other things, Smedley drew attention to the loss of family members and a lack of food and clothing among the communists, while simultaneously describing the brutality of Chiang Kai-­shek’s Nationalists in their suppression of the CCP. Identified as China sympathisers, Snow and Smedley both became victims of McCarthyism. They were silenced and discredited, and both were forced to move abroad until their deaths.67 As Steven Mosher explains, ‘the public was not favourably disposed toward a China that had intervened in the Korean War, was allied to the Soviet Union, and seemed to be espousing a communism even more radical than Moscow’s’.68 In other words, societal rules of discursive exclusion marginalised ideas which competed with those of Robert Rigg, for example, who argued that ‘[n]o fat and sadistic warlords of China’s history will ever be able to compete with the grisly record of the militaristic Chinese communists’.69 Chinese authors such as Shaw-­tong Liu were additionally enthusiastic in promoting a China of this type: ‘Red China’s rulers are the new partners of the dictators of Russia . . . I am one of those few fortunate fish who escaped through the net’, he explained.70 Uncivilised China became a highly vivid construction throughout the 1960s, which proved to be an extremely troubled decade for the country. To begin with, Mao’s government sought to limit China’s contact with other nations, principally those in the West, and in 1958 initiated the Great Leap Forward. This was a

American images of China, 1949–1979   105 radical programme of economic reform aimed at increasing China’s prosperity, but the consequences were disastrous. A famine between 1959 and 1961 claimed approximately 14 million lives as agricultural and industrial production was decimated.71 In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, designed to instigate widespread political reform and the enforcement of Maoist socialism. The result was another tragedy for China in the form of extreme violence and social upheaval.72 China’s diplomatic isolation, perhaps inevitably, meant that Amer­ ican foreign policy there became less active during this period. Yet societal discourse and identity processes remained inextricable from making Uncivilised and Threatening China foreign from the United States. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, labelled the Great Leap forward a ‘catastrophe’73 and the Cultural Revolution an ‘orgy of madness’.74 Uncivilised China seemed to be further than ever from attaining Western standards of civilisation, as illustrated by Time magazine which declared, ‘Red China: Back to the Cave!’75 Despite the ongoing policy of containment, then, it is important to emphasise that China’s isolation during the period was at least partly self-­imposed. In the 1960s the PRC reduced foreign contact with the non-­communist world and traded almost exclusively with other members of the communist bloc. China’s foreign diplomats were recalled,76 and by the end of the decade its international activity was essentially non-­existent.77 The argument is therefore not that the whole of American society was intent upon vilifying China. Just as Edward Said’s Orientalism does not represent a ‘nefarious’ Western plot to suppress the global East,78 neither are American representations of China understood here to have been uniformly advanced to purposefully marginalise and alienate the PRC. Moreover, and as Yongjin Zhang enquires, if the PRC’s isolation was at least partly the result of Chinese policy, how and why was it interpreted as such a threat to the United States?79 The understanding here that Cold War China (as at any time) was not dispassionately observed but an imaginative geography is articulated by Robert D. Schulzinger, who usefully contrasts two quotes by former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. In 1965 McNamara argued that ‘China . . . looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organise all of Asia against us’. Thirty years later he reflected that, [The Cultural Revolution of 1966] led to China’s withdrawal from active involvement in international affairs for more than a decade. But, blinded by our assumptions and preoccupied with a rapidly growing war, we – like most other Western leaders – continued to view China as a serious threat in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.80 These statements demonstrate that Cold War China was a socially constructed threat and a representation of the most powerful American discourses. Like many in the West, Americans throughout the 1950s and 1960s were ‘blinded’ by rules of discursive regulation which steered their understandings about China

106   American images of China, 1949–1979 and marginalised competing ideas. In 1959 the Conlon Report by Congress recommended closer diplomatic relations with Beijing.81 In 1960 future United States ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson argued for the inclusion of the PRC to the organisation.82 As Shulzinger indirectly reveals, however, such resistance discourses to the overlapping dominance of Threatening and Uncivilised China faltered. Constrictions upon the flow of ideas about China precluded these arguments from attracting significant interest and the potentiality of their implementation as policy was dismissed. The prominence of Opportunity China, for example, remained comparatively subdued throughout this period. This was still a fantasised interpretation of China, the expectation of which was that it should conform to the requirements of American identity. As a result, its subjugation cannot be explained in material terms alone, from a relative lack of Sino-­American bilateral trade. Indeed, the PRC’s foreign trade activities with other nations increased more than three-­fold during the 1950s.83 China therefore had the potential to be an opportunity to the United States in the sense that commercial prospects existed. In fact, theoretically at least, China was becoming more of an opportunity each year. However, its material reality was attributed particular meanings which informed Americans that, in fact, the country was not an opportunity which could be exploited. As already noted, the trade embargo imposed upon China was designed in part to obstruct its future development. Tied to this was the aim of reducing the threat it could represent to American security.84 This explains why the embargo was established.85 However, the material threat of the PRC was relatively less significant than that of the Soviet Union, and yet the embargo placed upon it was comparatively stricter. How this ‘China differential’ could be justified cannot be satisfactorily explained in the absence of concern for the ideational forces which actively constituted the capabilities of the PRC (along with those of the Soviet Union and the United States). Naturalised Cold War discourses of Uncivilised and Threatening China facilitated the establishment of a reality in which China’s trade embargo could be enacted, and which could be even more comprehensive than that imposed upon Moscow. China’s material opportunities may have been increasing but, as constitutive of dominant discourses which precluded the possibility of their exploitation, the social construction of Opportunity China remained marginalised and alternative courses of action were considered to be no alternative at all. For example, in the mid-­1950s European nations lobbied Washington to abandon its apparently discriminatory policy towards China, but American intransigence led to a collapse of negotiations.86 Idealised China was similarly marginalised throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s. In stark contrast to the romantic realities of China and its people constructed by eighteenth and early nineteenth century travellers, and by exotic chinoiserie in American homes, the author and diplomat Claude Buss wrote in 1964 that ‘there is nothing unusually mysterious or exotic about the Chinese . . . Chinese are human beings, entirely understandable and subject to the same rational and emotional influences as any other people in the world’.87 Writing

American images of China, 1949–1979   107 about a trip there in 1952, Mary Endicott argued that ‘the real China seemed vastly different from romantic, ancient China. . . . If there was loveliness still, it was only for the few’.88 The relative dominance of Uncivilised and Threatening China was sustained and perpetuated in this way, as well as in part by the behaviours of China itself. In 1962 the PRC engaged in a brief war with India over territorial disputes in Tibet. The motivations and catalysts for the conflict were numerous and responsibility could be attributed on both sides.89 However, in the United States it was Red China which attracted much of the blame. Time described the conflict in apocalyptic terms: ‘Chinese troops overwhelmed precarious Indian outposts [with] a rain of mortar and machine-­gun fire [and] a hail of Chinese anti-­aircraft fire’, it observed.90 President John F. Kennedy ‘deplored’ China’s actions and emphasised the hope that it would cease to violate Indian sovereignty.91 Of course, debate has long surrounded the extent to which the PRC has been responsible for the cultural suppression of Tibetans since it occupied the territory in 1949. However, the American CIA had been active in Tibet since 1956, supporting the very resistance which had contributed to the war the president was denouncing.92 Once again, inconsistencies of discourse allowed an American government to criticise China for behaviours in which it was also engaged. Moreover, they functioned within relations of power still dominated by the United States, both discursively and politically. In particular, they allowed the free, non-­communist United States to intervene in a distant foreign region while unproblematically framing the actions of Red China as aggressive and inhumane. In short, Uncivilised China once again existed in part to reproduce the imaginative geography of a more civilised United States, and to legitimise political performances towards it. It is worth briefly noting that if societal American representations of China and American foreign policy there appeared overtly hostile around this time, it was not an approach unique to the United States. Mao Zedong repeatedly labelled the US an aggressor intent on suppressing foreign populations.93 As late as the end of the 1960s the Chinese government only spoke negatively of America.94 Then, in 1964, shortly after the war with India, China successfully detonated its first atomic bomb. It was an event marked, perhaps surprisingly, by relative calm among the major newspapers. The New York Times bucked the trend, but emphasised the dangers of proliferation rather than an imminent Chinese threat.95 President Lyndon Johnson described the detonation as ‘no surprise’, before explaining that its significance should not be overestimated.96 Still, in the same year more than half of Americans perceived China as the biggest threat to world peace. By 1967 the proportion was 71 per cent.97 This apparent contradiction is useful in further demonstrating the existence of Threatening China as a product of American imaginations. It also helps to further expose the traditional absence of representational processes from examinations of Sino-­ American relations as a fundamental flaw. The ‘dangers’ presented by Threatening China remained primarily wedded to identity. As already established, the communist PRC threatened what it meant to

108   American images of China, 1949–1979 be American and the democratic-­capitalist ideology of the United States. China’s newfound possession of nuclear weapons was not entirely inconsequential, as reflected by the concerns of the New York Times. However, the broadly muted American response demonstrates that the reality of Threatening China was that it still endangered the core values of the United States. With or without nuclear weapons, this remained a naturalised, underlying truth. To a significant extent, then, Cold War China of the 1950s and early to mid-­ 1960s existed in largely stable and traditional forms. While Threatening and Uncivilised China had modified and evolved, their discursive foundations could be traced to those first established in the nineteenth century. The policy of containment was the inscription of American discourses which functioned to make China foreign and enforce its location at the periphery of an imagined civilised world. That strategy itself served to reproduce the identities of both the United States and China and perpetuate the cycle of discursive difference which enabled it. However, by the late 1960s the relative prominence of Threatening and Uncivilised China within American imaginations was increasingly challenged, and new possibilities were introduced. This process eventually culminated in a rapprochement between Washington and Beijing. As always, constructed truths and realities about China were of vital significance to the enactment of American policy. These are the developments the chapter now explores.

Rapprochement In 1953 Joseph Stalin died, an event which proved highly significant to relations between the Soviet Union and China. Tensions emerged between Mao and Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, and by the beginning of the 1960s the alliance had collapsed entirely.98 Since the early 1950s the American government had considered the potential benefits of encouraging a breakdown of the relationship.99 After Beijing’s diplomatic isolation from Moscow was confirmed, the types of discourses which had been so effectively subjugated in the past were increasingly accommodated. In 1966 the National Committee on United States– China Relations was established, the stated intention of which was to debate the efficacy of the US policy approach towards the PRC and possible alternatives to diplomatic non-­recognition. A year later a congregation of China experts at the University of California debated Washington’s strategies towards China live on television.100 In 1969 President Richard Nixon declared his intention to reduce the deployment of US troops abroad,101 and it was widely considered that formal ties with Beijing might enable a smoother withdrawal from the disastrous war in Vietnam. The United States’ decision to seek closer ties with China can be convincingly explained in realpolitik terms. By the late 1960s the Soviet Union had become a more formidable military threat and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, along with the declaration of the aggressive Brezhnev Doctrine, alarmed both Washington and Beijing. Moreover, hostilities between the Soviet Union and the  PRC created an opportunity for the United States to manoeuvre into an

American images of China, 1949–1979   109 advantageous diplomatic position. Such shifts of material forces ensured that images of China evolved. As such, it could be argued that those images ultimately played a largely redundant, secondary role in the process. However, and to reiterate, the United States did not consider every other economically significant and nuclear armed state to be a threat. Discourses about China had long been responsible for constructing its identity as that of a communist aggressor. In consequence, alternative discourses were necessarily responsible for China’s reconstruction from the late 1960s onward. Once again, ideas about the Cold War did not exist externally to the Cold War itself. The Cold War was constitutive of shared ideas about what it was. Those ideas were therefore also central to bringing about its end.103 As demonstrated earlier, the shift in imagery of China as a friend and ally of the United States to that of an imminent threat had occurred despite the capabilities of the former remaining largely unchanged. Now, as then, ideas were not secondary to global events; they were inextricable from global events and responsible for the creation of a modified China. Evelyn Goh describes this shift in terms of its evolution from ‘red menace’, to ‘revolutionary rival’, to ‘troubled moderniser’ to ‘resurgent power’.104 Each construction appeared gradually less threatening than the former and provided particular truths and realities about what China was. As Madsen explains, they ‘were all fictions, all socially constructed. [But] they all accounted for enough observable facts about China that each could be considered plausible by reasonable people’.105 As throughout the entirety of this book, the argument here is not that discourses and imagery were causal forces of US China policy. Throughout the mid to late 1960s they worked to give meaning to an imaginative geography with the capacity to create certain political potentialities and preclude others. At the beginning of the decade recommendations such as those of Adlai Stevenson and the Conlon Report, which had been intended to encourage closer relations with China, had been efficiently marginalised and discarded. By the end of the decade China’s material capabilities had undergone no radical change, yet the possibility of rapprochement with Beijing had become a viable option. Throughout the 1960s American imagery of China as an Uncivilised and Threatening other had been as resilient to contradiction and resistance as at any time during the twentieth century. In the 1970s representations of that country and its people began to provide a new reality in which an expanded range of possibilities was introduced. In 1967 future president Nixon argued that while the PRC remained Asia’s most threatening actor, the aim ‘should be to induce change’.106 In July 1971 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made his now famous, but then secret, trip to Beijing, during which he held talks with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.107 In February of the following year Nixon travelled to China for discussions with Mao. Upon his return he spoke warmly about the Chinese leadership and the prospects for peaceful relations, though stopped short of declaring a withdrawal of American troops from Taiwan and the end of US involvement in the region.108 The opposition Democratic Party also argued for improved relations with the Soviet Union and China.109 The PRC had seemingly 102

110   American images of China, 1949–1979 re-­emerged after a decade of political isolation and the American press contributed to a minor resurgence of Idealised China as a land of mystery and fascination to be rediscovered. The Chicago Tribune, for example, reported the contents of ‘secret papers’ which provided insight into Chinese Society and the government of Mao Zedong.110 It later presented facts which were ostensibly banal, but which evoked imagery of a distant and alien world: bicycles in China cost $63; a rented apartment cost $1 per month; people in Beijing were prohibited from marrying before the age of 20.111 The New York Times reported a proliferation of television documentaries about China which ‘dented the surface considerably’.112 ‘The China Myths Must Make Way for Facts’, a headline in the Los Angeles Times declared.113 Steven Mosher suggests that the brief period between 1972 and 1977 represented a ‘Second Age of Infatuation’ with China for many Americans.114 However, this is not reflected in public opinion polls of the time, which continued to show broadly unfavourable attitudes towards the PRC.115 Nonetheless, truths about China were shifting and, as Mosher observes, many of the discourses which had been silenced were now promoted. China’s leaders were quoted as saying that Western journalists in particular were misrepresenting their country as utopian.116 Idealised China could be unproblematically reintroduced to American imaginations by writers such as Tillman Durdin of the New York Times: ‘Today, the beauty of China’s rural landscape is, if anything, more pronounced than ever’, he wrote. In praise of China’s cultural and economic progress he suggested that ‘[t]he masses benefit, and that is the way Mao Tse-­tung planned it’.117 Harrison Salisbury also praised China, asserting that ‘a New Chinese Man and a New Chinese Woman [have] stood up’.118 China watchers identified that country as a place from which Americans could learn to improve their own society, temporarily destabilising assumptions of the country’s relative inferiority.119 Unlike so many times in the past, Uncivilised China was now becoming marginalised and silenced by more dominant representations of a less foreign, more familiar land and people. Resistance discourses of the PRC – once subjugated and forcefully suppressed, including those advanced so passionately by Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley – had become fashionable among circles of American society. China and the Chinese were being re-­classified through the production of power/knowledge which, as ever, dictated the potentialities of foreign policy. This was demonstrated by the efforts of the Nixon administration to have Beijing admitted to the United Nations while protecting the seat occupied by Taipei. A General Assembly Resolution, however, acknowledged those on the mainland as ‘the only lawful representatives of China’.120 Taiwan left the UN in protest and the PRC took its place, a development broadly welcomed by the American press. It would be naïve to assume that Americans had uniformly dismissed the established and less approving Cold War imagery of China. Attitudes towards Taiwan around this time remained broadly stable, with around half of Americans consistently reporting a favourable image. By comparison, in 1967 only 5 per cent of respondents held a favourable perception of the PRC, and by

American images of China, 1949–1979   111 1977 the figure had risen to just 26 per cent. In that year 52 per cent of Amer­ icans still held an unfavourable image of China.121 More specific and yet equally enduring stereotypes of (Threatening) China and its people endured. Figure 4.3, for example, shows an illustration from the New York Times in which an enormous bust of Mao is lowered onto the roof of the United Nations headquarters in New York. A headline caption on the cover of Time magazine declared ‘The Chinese are coming’.122 Such imagery continued to appeal to traditional fears of overwhelming numbers (or ‘floods’) of Chinese. As already

Figure 4.3 The PRC enters the United Nations.

112   American images of China, 1949–1979 shown, Figures I.2 and 4.2 additionally expose the longitudinal stability of this particular representation. Receding American imagery of Idealised China in the early to mid-­nineteenth century to that of an uncivilised, culturally backward land and people laid the foundations for US involvement in conflicts against them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s this process was, in many ways, repeated in reverse. The limits of political possibility had once again expanded and been redefined as a result of changing realities about what China was. Broadly speaking, the PRC was no more or less economically and militarily consequential to the United States than it had been five or even ten years earlier. However, discourse and identity processes attributed new meanings to Red China and ensured that the once unthinkable visits of Nixon and Kissinger to Beijing were enabled. Nonetheless, continuing anxieties and scepticism about China meant that those visits remained a secret for as long as possible.123 The most significant barrier to the re-­ establishment of formal diplomatic relations was still Taiwan; the joint statement issued shortly after Nixon’s visit to Beijing had stated this explicitly.124 Nixon was aware of the potential for the Taiwan Lobby in Washington to protest against diplomatic exchanges and derail his efforts.125 The Los Angeles Times articulated the views of many when it cautioned its readers against formulating unrealistic expectations of what the change in policy would deliver.126 Beijing and Washington could not resume full diplomatic ties immediately, but both governments were keen to facilitate closer relations. A move towards normalising relations was further delayed by the infamous Watergate affair. In 1974 Nixon resigned and his replacement, Gerald Ford, unelected and vulnerable to criticism, sought to avoid engagement with potentially controversial international issues like China.127 In addition, Mao Zedong died in September 1976 after a power struggle had already begun within the Chinese leadership, and these unsettled domestic environments prevented Sino-­ American relations from achieving full diplomacy. However, among hand­written notes made by President Nixon about his trip to Beijing in 1972, he had stated that ‘coming to Peking has itself created a new reality’.128 Within that reality new policies had been enabled. China had been reconstructed as an imaginative geography with which the United States could rebuild diplomatic relations. On 1 January 1979 the administration of President Jimmy Carter re-­established full bilateral ties with Beijing.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to examine American images of China between 1949 and 1979. It began by demonstrating that widespread, overtly positive images of the Chinese as friends and allies during the 1930s and 1940s shifted dramatically in the years immediately following the establishment of the PRC in 1949. The entrance of China into the Korean War in 1950 was the catalyst for its existence thereafter in American imaginations as a significant threat to US national security. However, it was not China’s material capabilities alone

American images of China, 1949–1979   113 which constituted the ‘threat’; its communist identity was deemed anathema to that of the United States as a global promoter of capitalism and democracy. Taiwan was simultaneously represented as a beacon of American values in a region under threat from communism. The regime of Chiang Kai-­shek was deemed corrupt and even dictatorial, but as non-­communist it could be the legitimate recipient of support and protection. As such, the intervention by the Amer­ ican Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait after the outbreak of the Korean War is inexplicable in terms of material forces alone. Representational processes once more gave China’s (and the United States’) physical realities meaning so that the possibility of anything other than Washington’s Two China policy appeared unthinkable. Only through such an interrogation of the most powerful ideational forces can the course of early Cold War Sino-­American relations be more satisfactorily explained. The containment of the PRC and the support for Taiwan was largely enabled and justified by images of Threatening China, but also by those of Uncivilised China. This construction resurfaced after 1949, when it was considered that the Chinese had rejected Western standards of civilisation by embracing the values of communism. Acts of US China policy – including a strict trade embargo, and the exclusion of the PRC from the United Nations and from membership of SEATO – were designed to marginalise China in the protection of American identity. They also functioned to reaffirm China as a member of the uncivilised communist world and perpetuate the cycle of discursive separation. As a projection of American identity the PRC necessarily reproduced the United States as free, civilised and ultimately superior. This was especially evident during the 1960s when it became more isolated from international activities and embarked upon such radical (and ultimately disastrous) policies as the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Discourse and identity processes, as well as US China policy itself, perpetuated understandings of the foreignness of China from the United States. Ideology had replaced race as the primary site at which their respective identities were distinguished. However, and just like in the late nineteenth century, the purpose of Washington’s policies was to marginalise Threatening and Uncivilised China during a moment of crisis, protecting what it meant to be American. As ever, discursive resistance towards the most powerful images of China was advanced throughout the period. Individuals such as Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley challenged pervasive and naturalised understandings of the Red PRC. They were ultimately silenced, however, in an era when many Americans considered China to be the greatest single threat to their security. Recommendations that Washington seek closer ties with Beijing were suppressed until the late 1960s when discourses of China increasingly began to accommodate this possibility. In the early 1970s the Nixon administration engaged in a policy of rapprochement, but not merely from realpolitik calculation. As always, China was not external to understandings about it. Societal representations continued to determine the truth and reality about that country which, whilst materially unchanged, was now imagined in modified forms. Unsettled political

114   American images of China, 1949–1979 environments in Washington and Beijing precluded the immediate resumption of diplomatic relations and many Americans still harboured unfavourable images of China. Ultimately, however, and as Nixon himself explicitly observed, a new reality had been constructed in which the Carter administration in 1979 could re-­ establish formal diplomacy for the first time in three decades. Since the 1980s China has become a far more significant and influential global actor, and in this ‘information age’ images of it have concurrently become far more readily available. The focus of the penultimate chapter is the period 1979–present, wherein China’s economic reforms in particular generated enormous changes in its fortunes and in its relations with the United States. Since the PRC has developed into a potential new superpower, an understanding of the images and representations which continue to occupy a central role in the advancement of US China policy has become more crucial than ever.

Notes    1 For the initiation of this policy see Jisi Wang, ‘The Origins of America’s “Two China” Policy’, in Harding and Ming, Sino-­American Relations; June M. Grasso, Truman’s Two China Policy (Armonk, NY: New York, 1987).    2 For an analysis of China’s motivations for entry into the war see Andrew Scobell, China’s Use of Military Force: Beyond the Great Wall and the Long March (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 4.    3 Kornberg and Faust, China in World Politics, p. 132.    4 Jonathan D. Pollock, ‘The Korean War and Sino-­American Relations’, in Harding and Yüan, Sino-­American Relations, p. 150.    5 Isaacs, Scratches, p. 71.    6 Department of State, Department of State Bulletin, vol. 9 (Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1944), pp. 254–255.    7 Department of State, Foreign Relations, 1948, 8, p. 147.    8 Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, vol. 9 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1974), pp. 826–834.    9 See Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. 7 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 203.   10 See, for example, Robert Accinelli, Crisis and Commitment: United States Policy Toward Taiwan, 1950–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Caroline Press, 1996), chapter 2; John W. Garver, The Sino-­American Alliance: Nationalist China and American Cold War Strategy in Asia (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), chapter 3.   11 This is a point made by Tunsjø, Constructing the Triangle, p. 21.   12 Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 81.   13 Department of State, Foreign Relations, 1949, 9, p. 466.   14 Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese–American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 187.   15 These types of questions are the principal investigative concern of Tunsjø, Constructing the Triangle.   16 Department of State, Foreign Relations, 1950, 7, p. 203.   17 Department of Defense, The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of

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the United States Decision Making on Vietnam, vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 373, emphases added. See Campbell, Writing Security, especially chapter 6. Alexander Wendt, ‘On Constitution and Causation in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), p. 109. See Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is What States Make of it’, International Organization, 46:2 (1992). Executive Order 9835, March 21, 1947. Reprinted in Barton J. Bernstein and Allen J. Matusow, The Truman Administration: A Documentary History (New York: Harper and Row), p. 363. This was an argument famously made by George Kennan in the Long Telegram of 1946. See Department of States, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. 6 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1969), pp. 696–709. See Campbell, Writing Security for a fuller exposition of the salience of American representational processes during the Cold War and the role of US foreign policy in the protection of its identity. Department of State, Department of State Bulletin, vol. 16 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1944), pp. 534–536. This phrase is taken from the title of a volume by Denise Bostdorff. See Denise M. Bostdorff, Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine: The Cold War Call to Arms (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2008). Department of State, Bulletin, 16, p. 535. National Security Council, NSC 68, April 14, 1950. Reprinted in May, Cold War Strategy, pp. 23–82. A point made in Christensen, Useful Adversaries, p. 126. National Security Council, NSC 68, p. 26. For an overview of US sanctions against China since 1949 see Hossein G. Askari, John Forrer, Hildy Teegen and Jiawen Yang, Case Studies of US Economic Sanctions: The Chinese, Cuban and Iranian Experience (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), chapter 2. Campbell, Writing Security, p. 61. Foot, Practice of Power, p. 54. Department of State, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1951 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), p. 316. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 107. Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 136–137. Persaud, ‘Situating Race’, p. 74. Immigration and Nationality Act (the McCarran-­Walter Act), June 27, 1952. University of Washington, Bothell, http://library.uwb.edu/guides/USimmigration/1952_ immigration_and_nationality_act.html, last accessed 4 July 2011. Isaacs, Scratches, p. 218. M. Keith Booker (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2010), p. 105. Cohen, America’s Response, chapter 7. This is a phrase borrowed from the historian Samuel Bemis in reference to the United States’ interference in Asian affairs at the end of the nineteenth century. See Samuel F. Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), chapter 26. New York Times, 3 September 1865. James B. Angell, The Reminiscences of James Burrill Angell (Salem, NH: Ayer Publishing, 1911), p. 129. Washington Post, 16 November 1958. New York Times, 7 September 1958. S.L.A. Marshall, The River and the Gauntlet: Defeat of the Eighth Army by the

116   American images of China, 1949–1979 Chinese Communist Forces, November, 1950 (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1950), p. 210.   45 Mark W. Clark, From the Danube to the Yalu (London: George G. Harrup, 1954), p. 88 and p. 180.   46 Robert B. Rigg, Red China’s Fighting Hordes: A Realistic Account of the Chinese Communist Army (Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing Co. 1951).   47 Isaacs, Scratches, p. 99.   48 See Persaud, ‘Situating Race’, p. 74.   49 Glenn D. Hook, ‘The Nuclearization of Language: Nuclear Allergy as Political Metaphor’, Journal of Peace Research, 21:3 (1984), p. 263.   50 United States–China Mutual Defense Treaty, 2 December 1954. Reprinted in Young Hum Kim, East Asia’s Turbulent Century (New York: Ardent Media, 1966). p. 341.   51 Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955, vol. 2 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1986), p. 118.   52 Harding, Fragile Relationship, p. 27.   53 Fairbank, China Perceived, p. xiv.   54 Bostdorff, Truman Doctrine, p. 146, emphasis added.   55 Department of State, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1949 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1953), p. 44.   56 See Foot, Practice of Power, chapter 2.   57 Woolley and Peters, Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25398, last accessed 27 March 2011.   58 Department of State, Foreign Relations, 1949, 9, p. 219.   59 See Peter H. Koehn and Yin Xiao-­huang (eds), The Expanding Roles of China Americans in U.S.–China Relations (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), pp. 109–110.   60 Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (Manila Pact), 8 September 1954. Yale Law School, the Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/usmu003. asp, last accessed 11 June 2011.   61 National Security Council, NSC 68, p. 26.   62 For Lattimore’s own account of this period see Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by Slander: The First Great Book of the McCarthy Era (London: Little, Brown, 1950).   63 Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (New York: Random House, 1938). See also Edgar Snow, Random Notes on Red China (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1957); Edgar Snow, The Other Side of the River (New York: Random House, 1962).   64 Snow, Red Star, pp. 36–38.   65 Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1943).   66 Ibid., p. 30.   67 See John Maxwell Hamilton, Edgar Snow: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Owen Lattimore also moved abroad, to the United Kingdom in 1963.   68 Mosher, China Misperceived, pp. 94–101.   69 Rigg, Fighting Hordes, p.  19. See also Edward Hunter, Brain-­Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds (New York: Vanguard, 1951); Albert Dunlap, Behind the Bamboo Curtain: The Experiences of an American Doctor in China (Washington DC: Public Affairs Press, 1956).   70 Shaw-­tong Liu, Out of Red China (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1953), p. ix.   71 See David Bachman, Bureaucracy, Economy and Leadership in China: The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 4–5.   72 See Harry Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis, 1966–9’, in Roderick MacFarquhar (ed.), The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (2nd edition) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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  90   91   92   93

  94   95   96

Los Angeles Times, 20 April 1962. Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1966. Time, 9 September 1966. James David Armstrong, Revolutionary Diplomacy: Chinese Foreign Policy and the United Front Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 91. MacFarquhar and Fairbank, Cambridge History of China, p. 248. Said, Orientalism, p. 12. Zhang, International Society, p. 20. Quoted in Robert Schulzinger, ‘The Johnson Administration, China and the Vietnam War’, in Robert Ross and Changbin Jiang (eds), Re-­examining the Cold War: US– China Diplomacy, 1954–1973 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), p. 238. Harding, Fragile Relationship, p. 34; Rosemary Foot, ‘Redefinitions: The Domestic Context of America’s China Policy in the 1960s’, in Ross and Jiang, Cold War, p. 265. Adlai E. Stevenson, ‘Putting First Things First: A Democratic View’, Foreign Affairs, 38 (1960), pp. 191–208. Zhang, International Society, p. 194. See Shu Guang Zhang, Economic Cold War: America’s Embargo Against China and the Sino-­Soviet Alliance, 1949–1963 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). The embargo was additionally intended to increase China’s dependence upon the Soviet Union so that it might encourage tensions between Beijing and Moscow. See Gaddis, John L., ‘The American “Wedge” Strategy’, 1949–1958, in Harry Harding and Ming Yüan (eds), Sino-­American Relations, 1945–1955: A Joint Reassessment of a Critical Decade (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1989). Warren Cohen and Akira Iriye, The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 111. Claude Buss, Asia in the Modern World: A History of China, Japan, South and Southeast Asia (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 10. Mary Austin Endicott, Five Stars Over China: The Story of our Return to New China (Toronto: Mary Endicott, 1952), p. 271. See Mark A. Ryan, David M. Finkelstein, Michael A. McDevitt, Chinese Warfighting: The PLA Experience Since 1949 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), chapter 8; A. Tom Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet (revised edn) (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), chapters 6 and 7. Time, 26 October 1962. Department of State, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1962 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 820. See John Kenneth Knaus, ‘Official Policies and Covert Programs: The US State Department, the CIA, and the Tibetan Resistance’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 5:3 (2003), pp. 54–79. See, for example, Mao Zedong, ‘Speech at the Supreme Soviet of the USSR’, in Michael Y.M. Kau and John K. Leung, The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976: January 1956–December 1957 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992); Mao Zedong, ‘Statement Supporting the People of the Congo Against US Aggression’, in Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (San Francisco: China Books, 1990). Roderick MacFarquhar and John King Fairbank, The Cambridge History of China, Vol.  15. The People’s Republic, pt.  2: Revolutions Within the Chinese Revolution, 1966–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 249. New York Times, 17 October 1964. Woolley and Peters, Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26615, last accessed 16 December 2010.

118   American images of China, 1949–1979   97 Isaacs, Scratches, p. xxvii.   98 See, for example, Chen Jian and Yang Kuisong, ‘Chinese Politics and the Collapse of the Sino-­Soviet Alliance’, in Odd Arne Westad, (ed.) Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-­Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).   99 See Gaddis, ‘ “Wedge” Strategy’. 100 Madsen, American Dream, p. 33. 101 Richard Nixon, ‘Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam, November 3, 1969’, in Gregory Allen Olsen (ed.), Landmark Speeches on the Vietnam War (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2010). 102 For strategic assessments of the period see Harding, Fragile Relationship, pp. 33–47; Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-­Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994), especially chapter 6; James Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, From Nixon to Clinton (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), chapter 1. 103 Wendt, ‘Constitution and Causation’, p. 109. 104 Goh, US Rapprochement, chapter 2. 105 Madsen, American Dream, p. 58. 106 Richard Nixon, ‘Asia after Viet Nam’, Foreign Affairs, 46:1 (1967), pp.  119 and 121. 107 See Yukinori Komine, Secrecy in US Foreign Policy: Nixon, Kissinger and the US Rapprochement with China (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), chapter 7. 108 See Department of State, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1972 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1974), pp.  376–379. For a discussion of the trip see Xia, Negotiating With the Enemy, chapter 8. 109 See Democratic Party Platform, July 1972. Reprinted in Donald Bruce Johnson (ed.), National Party Platforms, vol. 2: 1960–1976 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 814. 110 Chicago Tribune, 1 March 1970. 111 Chicago Tribune, 22 February 1972. 112 New York Times, 21 February 1972. 113 Los Angeles Times, 21 February 1972. 114 Mosher, China Misperceived, chapter 6. 115 Harding, Fragile Relationship, p. 363. 116 Mosher, China Misperceived, p. 160. 117 Tillman Durdin, ‘For Most of the Peasants Things are Better’, in Tillman Durdin, James Reston and Seymour Topping, The New York Times Report from Red China (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971), pp. 159–161. 118 Harrison E. Salisbury, To Peking – and Beyond: A Report on the New Asia (London: Arrow Books, 1973), pp. 300–301. 119 See Mosher, China Misperceived, chapter 7. 120 General Assembly Resolution 2758: Restoration of the Lawful Rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations. Reprinted in Dietrich Rausch­ ning, Katya Wiesbrock and Martin Lailach, Key Resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly, 1946–1996 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 572. 121 Kau et al., ‘Public Opinion’, p. 135. 122 Time, 9 April 1973. 123 Harding, Fragile Relationship, p. 40. 124 Department of State, Richard Nixon, 1972, pp. 376–379. 125 For a discussion of the emergence and influence of the Taiwan Lobby see Tsung Chi, ‘From the China Lobby to the Taiwan Lobby’, in Koehn and Xiao-­huang (eds), Chinese Americans.

American images of China, 1949–1979   119 126 See, for example, Los Angeles Times, 21 February 1972; Los Angeles Times, 22 February 1972. 127 Ezra F. Vogel, The Golden Age of the US–China–Japan Triangle, 1972–1989 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 84–88. 128 Quoted in Tunsjø, Constructing the Triangle, p. 71.

5 American images of China, 1979–present

Introduction On 8 August 2008 President George W. Bush joined around 80 other world leaders at the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. The ceremony was widely declared the most visually spectacular ever achieved, and was interpreted as final confirmation of China’s ‘arrival’ as a new global power. The Games themselves were a great source of pride for many in China, especially when they closed two weeks later, as Chinese athletes had won more gold medals than any other nation to finish in first place, above the United States. Less than 30 years earlier the PRC had been embroiled in a long-­running political dispute with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) over Taiwan’s participation under the name the Republic of China, and had not competed in the Games since 1952. After re-­joining the Committee in 1979 and ending its self-­ imposed isolation1 China’s Olympic successes steadily grew, culminating in it hosting and winning the Games in 2008. So far, this analysis has demonstrated that at least until the middle of the Cold War Sino-­American relations of power were historically imbalanced very heavily in favour of the latter, both in material and ideational terms. Since the beginning of its reform era in the late 1970s, however, China has become far wealthier, more powerful and more politically influential. Thus, in many respects the PRC’s rapidly increased presence, involvement and achievements at the Olympics between 1979 and 2008 provide a dramatic allegory for the so-­called rise of China across the same period. The gap between China’s capabilities and those of the United States has narrowed significantly and, in many ways, the country is unrecognisable from that which Americans first encountered in the late eighteenth century. Yet, as an imaginative geography, China in the modern era has still been subjectively perceived and the object of American representations, many of which are directly traceable to times long past. China’s increased global presence over the past three decades, moreover, makes an understanding of those representations more pertinent than ever. The purpose of this chapter is to examine American images of China between 1979 and 2008. The chapter begins by exploring how Cold War Red China was reconstructed during the 1980s so that a new, less antagonistic land and people became far

American images of China, 1979–present   121 more prominent within American imaginations. It shows how, after the now infamous events in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, American representations shifted both quickly and dramatically, but that those shifts were underpinned by highly stable and enduring understandings about what China was. In particular, the events reproduced traditional and familiar ideas about Uncivilised China. During the 1990s Threatening China also resurfaced as the capabilities of the PRC increased and as the so-­called Beijing consensus became a significant arena of debate. It is also shown that Idealised and Opportunity China in particular have continued to circulate American society, remaining deeply integral to the mechanics of policymaking processes.

Reconstructing Red China The 1970s was the decade of China’s ‘de-­alienation’. Beijing and Washington had re-­established formal diplomatic ties and the PRC’s entry to the UN was confirmation of its international legitimacy.2 Throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s China had been perceived as a threat to American security. However, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, this is not explained merely with reference to its ability to cause physical harm to the United States, but through a complementary interrogation of the representations which ensured the reality of that ‘threat’. Between 1973 and 1979 the PRC’s defence spending rose by an average of nearly 5 per cent in real terms per annum.3 Since 1964 it had possessed nuclear weapons. Yet, by the end of the 1970s it was no longer widely identified as a danger to US security. In 1979, for example, 65 per cent of Americans held a favourable image of the PRC. By 1982 only 23 per cent considered it an enemy.4 Throughout the early Cold War period discourse and identity processes had been of vital significance to the construction of a China threat. Thereafter, they were equally pivotal to its abeyance within American imaginations and to the purposeful reconstruction of Red China. From the beginning of the 1970s the Nixon administration ceased referring to the PRC as communist. Official press releases and public statements consistently omitted the term and, rather than ‘Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’, Mao Zedong was instead merely ‘Chairman’.5 This is also true of the Joint Communiqué of 1 January 1979, produced after the re-­establishment of Sino-­ American diplomatic relations, in which the word communism never appeared.6 Communist China had long been stigmatised as threatening and uncivilised, and now had to be redefined. Power/knowledge advanced new controlling imagery of an imaginative geography with which Americans could work. Seymour Topping, for example, observed that Chinese villages functioned with economic independence and structures of democracy.7 A more suitable blueprint for an increasingly ‘American’ China could hardly have been described. In his book, Harrison Salisbury quoted a Chinese official as saying that China’s development ‘was now up to the people – the people in both China and America’.8 Significantly, shortly after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 (and following a brief spell in power by his chosen successor, Hua Guofeng) Deng

122   American images of China, 1979–present Xiaoping became Paramount Leader of the PRC.9 Deng was a central figure of the CCP, yet was intent on injecting free market forces into China’s inefficient and ailing economy. As a result, he became the latest Chinese moderniser to be lauded in the United States. Like Hong Xiuquan, Sun Yat-­sen and Chiang Kai-­shek (who had died in 1975) before him, Deng was a Chinese leader to whom Americans could relate. His vision of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ was a world away from Western-­style democracy and capitalism.10 Nonetheless, he fitted perfectly into American visions of a more progressive, post-­Mao ‘New China’. In 1979 Deng toured the United States, promoting China’s image and becoming popular among Americans.11 A year earlier he had been named Time’s Man of the Year, as shown in Figure 5.1. Like Charlie Chan (Figure 3.4) and the characters in promotional posters for United China Relief during the Second World War (Figure 3.5), Deng’s Asian appearance is not exaggerated. His ‘Chineseness’, in fact, is carefully moderated, as the intention is to articulate his familiarity to Americans. This contrasts with the photography of Arnold Genthe, for

Figure 5.1 1978 Time Man of the Year, Deng Xiaoping (Time, 1 January, 1979).

American images of China, 1979–present   123 example, who purposefully misrepresented turn-­of-the-­century Chinese as mysterious, exotic and ultimately inassimilable to American society. His work also served to reinforce assumptions of their inferiority and, as we have seen, nineteenth-­century Chinese in particular were routinely represented in these terms (see in particular Figure 2.3). In order to become more civilised and less inferior China was still expected to adhere to, and reproduce, the norms and values of the West. Deng Xiaoping, and by extension the Chinese, were depicted in the early 1980s as less foreign and necessarily less inferior.12 Still, Time reinforced common sense paternalistic assumptions about China which remained in circulation by invoking the words of the nineteenth-­century moderniser Feng Guifen. The quote was used to convey Deng’s (albeit cautious) admiration for the West: ‘use the instruments of the foreign barbarians without adopting their ways’.13 In doing so, Time informed its readers that, while the Chinese were comparatively less inferior than before, they still required American help. From this type of understanding organisations such as the Ford Foundation took advantage of the new cooperative environment by becoming active in China after 1979. The Foundation taught Chinese students economics, law and international relations. Its overriding purpose, framed within an enduring sense of American exceptionalism, was described by former employee Francis X. Sutton who is worth quoting at length: We felt we had something to give to the rest of the world: modernisation, education, bringing people out of age-­old prejudices . . . we all believed that if we could only transmit to other societies the ideology that had made us rich and great, poor societies would be able to develop themselves also.14 It is also worth noting that the Ford Foundation was only the latest in a succession of philanthropic American bodies to operate there. The first American-­run medical college in China had opened in Canton in 1835 and in 1921 the Rocke­ feller Foundation had established the Peking Union Medical College.15 The Rockefeller Foundation in particular had a long history of activity in China, while contributing to the exportation of what were deemed superior American values and culture.16 Evolving discourses had changed the reality of China and hence the potentialities of American foreign policy. An additional resurgence of Opportunity China, for example, reintroduced the idea of the PRC as a potentially lucrative source of commerce. During the 1950s China’s international trade activities had increased, but had also been attributed certain meanings which precluded its consideration as an opportunity. Now, societal rules of discursive regulation accommodated this possibility, as illustrated by the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, which likened China to a ‘gigantic, juicy new plum for [American] business’.17 Coca Cola, among the most iconic symbols of American capitalism, was imported to China for the first time in 30 years. On its cover, Time magazine presented a photograph of a Chinese man drinking from a bottle of what appears to be Coca Cola.18 The unequivocal message was that China had re-­entered the

124   American images of China, 1979–present modern, civilised world and was ready to conform to American expectations for international trade. Indeed, in his announcement of the re-­establishment of bilateral relations in 1979, President Jimmy Carter had specifically highlighted the need to resume patterns of commercial exchange.19 In 1981 Ronald Reagan was elected president in place of Carter. Reagan was similarly enthusiastic about the United States’ improving relations with the PRC, not least because he considered it a valuable strategic counterbalance to the Soviet Union. Yet, he did not consider this to preclude strengthening Washington’s relations with Taipei. In the 1980 Republican Party Platform he articulated his support for Taiwan and his intention to reaffirm American commitments there in the event of his election.20 His campaign team recognised that this approach could damage any future relationship with Beijing and the possibility of re-­establishing diplomatic ties with the island was discarded. Economic and strategic considerations thus help to explain why Washington now favoured closer relations with China. However, the PRC had represented a potentially valuable ally against Soviet aggression for decades and, as already noted, the potentialities for increased bilateral trade existed during the 1950s. Taiwan, in contrast, had been ruled by a government in which American administrations had long lost faith, but which had been unwaveringly privileged since the Second World War. The question which remains, then, is how was a ‘Beijing-­ first’ approach now the only logical option, when before it had been deemed impossible? For much of the Cold War dominant discourses of Threatening and Uncivilised China had done much to frame the boundaries of political possibility. Those boundaries had been unable to accommodate diplomatic recognition of the PRC. Now, equally powerful discourses of the same territorial physicality as a less threatening and less uncivilised polity worked to marginalise those used in support of Taiwan. Those constructions overlapped and worked in conjunction with Opportunity China to help create a reality in which the United States could now justifiably share formal diplomacy with the PRC. While still communist, China was no longer Red China. It was the People’s Republic of China, or just China. This approach, in turn, actively reproduced the United States as constitutive of the same values of which the PRC (to a lesser extent) was now imagined to be: modern, progressive and capitalist. As always, the advancement of US foreign policy necessarily projected American interpretations of the world, thereby reaffirming them. This was how it became possible for the two to talk and trade with one another in a way deemed unthinkable for much of the Cold War. In 1982 Reagan assured his counterparts in Beijing that the United States had no intention of compromising China’s sovereignty or its territorial integrity. He declared that China’s internal affairs would remain free of American interference and that his administration would not pursue a Two China policy.21 However, Washington continued to adhere to the terms of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which allowed for the sale of military weaponry to the island. The treaty also reiterated the intention of the United States to protect Taiwan’s

American images of China, 1979–present   125 security. In particular, it asserted the need to defend the island’s ‘social [and] economic system’.22 Accordingly, the assumed right of the United States to become involved militarily in any future conflict over Taiwan remained (the implication, of course, was that the PRC would be the other principal actor in such hostilities). Power/knowledge thus sustained the truth that the United States could in fact infringe upon Chinese sovereignty and its presumed territorial integrity, since Deng’s government considered Taiwan an integral part of China. American discourses were reconstructing (in some ways dismantling) Red China so that closer bilateral relations were now possible. Attitudes and opinions of the PRC were far more complimentary than they had been in previous decades, characterising a brief period of ‘euphoria’.23 In 1985, for example, opinion polls found that 71 per cent of respondents held a favourable view of China. Even the issue of human rights, of significant concern to American administrations around this time, was overlooked until the late 1980s.24 The societal regulation of discourse was such that, during these ‘golden years’, publications critical of China’s human rights record had little impact upon an American public disinclined to afford them attention.25 In effect, they ‘all fell dead off the presses’.26 Nonetheless, it was still unthinkable that the United States should relinquish its influence in China. The understanding that Washington could act with force to defend its core values, as they still existed in the ‘social [and] economic system’ of Taiwan, remained in circulation as it had during the opium wars and the Korean war of previous eras. Once again, the most powerful and enduring images of China, rather than the more fleeting opinions of the day, were most highly complicit in the formulation of suitable realities for policy. Societal American discourses of China had evolved immeasurably over the centuries. Most notably, overt displays of racism and anti-­Chinese rhetoric were muted by regulations now far less accommodating of such representational practices. However, the implicit assumption that the core values of American identity had to be protected remained, and China’s communist ideals continued to reproduce the United States as implicitly superior in this way: ‘The communist system is not working well these days,’ observed the Washington Post, ‘and the solution recommended . . . is to look at the capitalist way’.27 Durable assumptions of the PRC’s inherent inferiority once again proved their resilience and their significance to the politically possible. So ingrained was this understanding that Reagan could inform Deng’s government that the United States would not interfere in China’s domestic affairs while sharing unique treaty relations with a polity Beijing considered an internal component of its territory. This was enabled within Sino-­US relations of power still dominated by the latter. Washington could retain its Two China policy and legitimise its presence in Chinese affairs while claiming to have become distanced from them. Moreover, US China policy itself continued to function in the production of imagery. The Taiwan Relations Act reconfirmed the imagined superiority of American identity by asserting Washington’s right to intervene in its defence against a necessarily inferior alternative. In doing so, it perpetuated the idea of US exceptionalism, as that nation with a duty to disseminate its core

126   American images of China, 1979–present values. Indeed, in 1983 Reagan labelled communism ‘another sad, bizarre chapter in human history’. He cited Thomas Paine, arguing that, as Americans, ‘[we] have it in our power to begin the world over again’.28 Ultimately, negation strategies disregarded China’s pre-­capitalist history so that a new chapter, framed within an identifiably (superior) American model of development, was all that was ultimately of consequence. Reagan visited China in 1984 and, in a speech in the Great Hall of the People of Beijing, he declared that ‘[w]e have begun to write a new chapter for peace and progress in our histories, with America and China going forward hand in hand’.29 Certainly, throughout the Reagan administration of 1981–1989 Sino-­US relations remained diplomatically unstable, principally as a result of continuing disagreements over Taiwan. However, with China now apparently less threatening and more civilised, the focus reverted back to the Soviet Union as the nation’s most immediate ‘threat’. This seemed particularly apparent after Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979. China did not figure prominently in the presidential campaigns of 1984 or 1988. The more urgent task of societal discourse, as boundary-­producing rituals of separation and difference which locate external dangers,30 was now to make the Soviet Union identifiably foreign from the United States. Indeed, Reagan made it clear that Moscow and Washington were not simply engaged in an arms race.31 Danger was still socially constructed and an imagined challenge to the contours of American identity wherever it was found.32 Threats remained transferable, and now it was the hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union which, Reagan argued, represented the ‘struggle between right and wrong and good and evil’.33 In 1985 Deng was once again named Time’s Man of the Year.34 Mosher notes that this ‘Age of Benevolence’, a period of overtly positive imagery of China, was driven by the PRC’s own motivations and behaviour. ‘Once again’, he argues, ‘Americans found themselves gazing through a Chinese looking glass lovingly ground and polished . . . to Beijing’s specifications.35 Certainly, China’s efforts at reform were a highly important development. As demonstrated throughout this analysis, however, understandings about China in the United States have always ultimately been formulated according to American, rather than Chinese, specifications. Since the emergence of frustrations among nineteenth-­century traders and missionaries, in response to what they considered primitive and anachronistic practices in Canton, China had been located within Americans’ own subjective frames of reference. Nearly two centuries later the understanding that China could still learn from the superior United States meant that the results of its modernisation were once again judged through the gaze of an American looking glass. This was confirmed in the summer of 1989, as events in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing brought the widespread ‘infatuation’ and ‘euphoria’ of previous few decades to an abrupt end.36 Another of China’s revolutionary movements was interpreted and articulated through American power/knowledge, existing for American imaginations. It is to these developments which the chapter now turns.

American images of China, 1979–present   127

The ‘butchers of Beijing’ and the resurgence of uncivilised China Following the death of the popular statesman Hu Yaobang in April 1989, a number of student groups organised marches to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Hu had been in favour of political and intellectual liberalisation in China, and the students wanted to ensure that conservative elements of the CCP did not suppress the changes he had encouraged. Demands were made of the government, including that it reform the political system and move towards democratisation, allow more freedom of speech and of the press, and address corruption, inefficiency and incompetence in Beijing.37 Prominent intellectuals soon joined the protesters, the number of which eventually reached approximately a million.38 While martial law was declared, the protests remained relatively peaceful until government troops were ordered to restore control on the evening of 3 June. Throughout the night and into the early morning the scene became chaotic and violent as the protests were broken up by force. The Chinese government claimed that around 300 people were killed (including ‘soldiers, bad elements who deserve this . . . and people who were killed by mistake’), with another 7,000 injured; 5,000 were said to have been members of the PLA.39 These figures are heavily disputed and some estimate that at least 10,000 civilians may have died.40 An Amnesty International Report later suggested that at least 1,000 people had been killed.41 However, the events in Tiananmen caused revulsion for Americans not only because of the deaths that occurred, but because the episode did not end as they had hoped.42 As demonstrated within the list of demands first presented to the government, many protesters sought democratisation and economic reforms of various kinds. A number of art students also famously erected the Goddess of Democracy which, as shown in Figure 5.2, bore close resemblance to the Statue of Liberty. As a result, many Americans recognised Western influences within the movement. Illusions of an impending ‘free China’ had appeared, but the American understanding of freedom, of the mutually reinforcing liberalisation of the economic and political, was not shared by the majority of Chinese. As Hobson explains, in the modern era American understandings of liberal democracy have become synonymous and interchangeable with the idea of democracy in the widest sense. In consequence, the possibility of there being multiple types of democracy is frequently overlooked.43 The Chinese protesters’ demands for political reform in 1989 were particularly misrepresented for this reason, as their understanding of democracy diverged significantly from that which circulates most prominently throughout the West. The majority of student participants demanded an end to corruption, nepotism and economic disparity, rather than Western-­style democratic elections. Yet this was not the story told by the Western media.44 It could be argued, in fact, that American interpretations of the events in Tiananmen can be most effectively explained via an analysis of the bias of American news networks. It was they who were responsible for repeatedly referring to a ‘democracy movement’.45

Figure 5.2 The Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square, 1989 (Press Association).

American images of China, 1979–present   129 They also broadly failed to acknowledge that the Goddess of Democracy was not a pure homage to the Statue of Liberty, but a combination of foreign as well as Chinese influences.46 One television reporter stated openly that the networks ‘tried to put “a made in the USA” democracy stamp on [the coverage]’.47 However, a more satisfactory explanation is less convenient. Media bias was just one (important) component and one manifestation of societal American discourse, the regulation of which has always been tied to the contours of a uniquely American identity and its democratic-­capitalist ideology. Discourse of China remained controlled and organised so that the protest movement in toto was interpreted through an American lens. As demonstrated throughout this book, American images of China have long been framed around the expectation that it adheres to Western standards of civilisation, and in particular to the core values of democracy and capitalism. The Chinese were rarely identified as ‘contemptible’ or ‘inferior’, as they had been so frequently in the past.48 Nonetheless, Uncivilised China resurfaced in the absence of explicit vocabulary as Americans witnessed the unfolding events in Tiananmen Square. For instance, the cover of Time magazine simply declared ‘Massacre in Beijing’.49 The New York Times reported ‘Crackdown in Beijing; Troops attack and crush Beijing Protest; Thousands fight back, scores are killed’.50 Once again, China had failed to embrace more civilised Western values, as articulated most vividly by the New York Times. The newspaper reported on a visit to China in December 1989 by National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, the intention of which was to repair the damage to Sino-­American diplomatic relations. Scowcroft was photographed raising a toast with the PRC’s Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, and the Times accused the administration of President George H.W. Bush of ‘hailing the Butchers of Beijing’.51 Uncivilised China remained a product of American identity and re-­emerged as it had done during both China’s Taiping rebellion of the mid-­nineteenth century and its revolutionary movement of the early twentieth century. Time informed its readers that on the morning of 4 June, ‘the great, peaceful dream for democracy had become a horrible nightmare’.52 However, that dream was American, not Chinese. China was a projection of the United States as inherently more civilised, but also of American exceptionalism. The understanding that the US remained tasked with disseminating its core values around the world was once again articulated and reinforced by Uncivilised China, as demonstrated by President Bush on 6 June: ‘The momentous, tragic events in China,’ he asserted, ‘give us reason to redouble our efforts to continue the spread of freedom and democracy around the globe . . . to broaden the community of free nations, and to reaffirm the rights of man’.53 In 1992 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell would declare that ‘America is a remarkable nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a nation that “cannot escape history” because we are “the last best hope of earth” ’.54 Despite apparent signals from China since the early years of rapprochement that it was following in the footsteps of the West, yet another of its ‘revolutions’ had seemingly failed to conform to American standards. Genuine grief was expressed for the innocents

130   American images of China, 1979–present who had died, but Tiananmen caused anxiety in the United States not in proportion to the human suffering which occurred.55 Positive American imagery of China quickly dissipated after the events in Tiananmen Square. In February 1989 polls had suggested that 72 per cent of Americans held a favourable view of the PRC.56 By June this had more than halved, to 34 per cent (although this was still far higher than during the 1960s and even the 1970s).57 Weapons sales to the PRC were banned and high-­level military exchanges were postponed. Another round of sanctions later followed in which lending to China by international financial institutions and official diplomatic exchanges both ceased. These actions reconfirmed China’s location at the periphery of civilisation and were mirrored by other governments and multilateral organisations. The West, argues Robert Suettinger, ‘recoiled in horror and disgust, expelling it from the company of modern civilised nations’.58 However, while action was taken, the initiatives themselves were relatively muted. Bush wanted to avoid a total breakdown of Washington’s relationship with China and the risk of Beijing reformulating closer ties with Moscow.59 Strategic, realpolitik thinking was therefore not insignificant to the enactment of those policies. However, that thinking was still constitutive of the same kinds of representational processes which had determined the truth and reality about the PRC since the outset of the Cold War. Harry Harding casts doubt on the notion that American imagery of Tiananmen played any role in the formulation of policy responses in Washington, arguing that, despite a radical shift in American perceptions of the PRC, US China policy remained broadly unchanged and favourably disposed towards relations with Beijing.60 However, it is this type of logic which has perpetuated a particular weakness of the existing literatures, and which this book seeks to address. As established in Chapter 1, Harding is representative of the relevant literatures by conceiving of imagery primarily as temporally specific attitudes and opinion. From this understanding it is certainly the case that images shifted dramatically while Washington’s approach towards China remained comparatively stable. It is for this reason that one author has described the relationship between image and policy as ‘notoriously slippery’.61 However, Harding – along with others, including Warren Cohen who notes (entirely accurately, on one level) that the popular American image of China changed ‘irrevocably’ in the wake of the events in Tiananmen Square62 – fails to acknowledge the relative endurance of constructions including Uncivilised and Threatening China and their particular significance to the enactment of American policy. Bush wanted to prevent a return of the old Threatening and Uncivilised communist China of the past. To reaffirm, however, communism itself does not represent a threat: it requires the understanding that it represents a threat to a non-­communist identity.63 Hence, the policies of the Bush administration were not mere reactions to a changing situation ‘out there’. They were embedded within that situation by adhering to traditional understandings of communism, the Soviet Union, China and, of course, the United States. The meanings of each were socially constructed so that the strategic thinking of the moment was a

American images of China, 1979–present   131 product of a fantasised world in which the Soviet Union was necessarily a threat, and in which China could become a threat again if Beijing realigned itself with Moscow. A new China threat, in other words, would still be socially constructed and its material capabilities would be attributed the same meanings as those in the 1950s and 1960s. Opinions of China had thus changed rapidly and dramatically, but familiar and more powerful underlying discourses of Uncivilised China resurfaced. The existence of this construction as a discursively produced imaginative geography is indirectly articulated by Harding himself, who explains: The same phenomena were now viewed very differently than they had been before. The Chinese economy, described in the mid-­1980s as having virtually gone capitalist, was now portrayed in one typical account as being ‘rigidly centralized’. . . . Members of Congress had once noted that the human rights situation in post-­Mao China was ‘better now than at any time since 1949,’ but they now depicted China as the ‘most repressive nation on Earth’.64 ‘The same phenomenon’ that Harding describes were indeed now viewed very differently. American imagery – rather than being inconsequential – was central to the enactment of sanctions and other restrictions by Washington as China was reinterpreted to be ‘repressive’ and ‘rigidly centralised’. These truths and realities were the characteristics of Uncivilised China, the existence of which once more explains how US policy was enabled and, indeed, how more aggressive policies were precluded. It could also be argued that the United States’ relationship with China was too economically rewarding to be jeopardised by more assertive policies. Indeed, in the years preceding the events in Tiananmen Square the PRC had become an increasingly significant trading partner of the United States. In 1985 the value of exports plus imports with China had totalled $7,714 million. By 1989 that figure had more than doubled to $17,745.65 Yet, Washington had afforded the PRC diplomatic recognition at the expense of Taiwan in 1979 despite bilateral trade with the latter being far more significant. In 1989 US trade with Taiwan was worth $35,647 million and was also following a trend of continual growth.66 The significance of economic calculations to US China policy around this time is not disregarded. However, the centrality of representational processes to those calculations is revealed when it is acknowledged that the more commercially significant relationship with Taiwan had been purposefully destabilised in 1979, and remained devoid of formal diplomacy a decade later. The types of imagery now reintroduced continued to circulate after 1989, with further ramifications upon US foreign policy. Indeed, Uncivilised China was attributed extra meaning throughout 1990 and 1991 with the collapse of communism in Europe. At that time, the ideological environment in Eastern Europe was considered by the Chinese leadership to be more threatening to its future than that found in the West.67 ‘If East Germany and Romania can make democratic changes, why can’t China?’ enquired the New York Times.68

132   American images of China, 1979–present Sino-­American relations in the early 1990s thus continued to be complicated by the events of 1989, not least in terms of China’s protracted efforts to be granted Most Favoured Nation (MFN) economic status by Washington. The re-­establishment of formal Sino-­US relations in 1979 had been followed in 1980 by the awarding of MFN status to China. The Jackson–Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 allowed non-­market economies to be granted MFN status by presidential approval and China’s had been awarded every year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, from 1989 this process became more problematic, and during the 1992 presidential election campaign every Democratic candidate, including then-­Senator Bill Clinton, criticised Bush for its unconditional renewal. After his election, Clinton placed conditions on China’s MFN renewal which required Beijing to reassure the West that it was working to improve the standard of human rights it afforded Chinese citizens. During the early part of the decade this linkage between China’s MFN status and its record on human rights became a significant point of debate, for both Congress and the public alike.69 Yet as ever, the question of why China was subjected to MFN status renewal conditions is ultimately of less concern here than how such a policy approach was able to happen. Beneath the debates as to whether or not China should have been awarded MFN remained the traditional and underlying understanding that China could be legitimately subjected to the decision-­making process in the first place. The Chinese themselves considered the process humiliating, primarily because it drew attention to critics of China’s human rights record and those who campaigned on behalf of Tibet and Taiwan.70 The point, of course, is not to dismiss or belittle the issue of human rights. It is to demonstrate that the imbalance of Sino-­American relations of discursive and political power remained such that, regardless of whether or not China’s MFN renewal was supported, the contours of the debate itself were left broadly unattended. Proponents of China’s MFN renewal argued that not doing so might inaugurate a trade war or damage the economy of Hong Kong, through which many Chinese goods passed en route to the United States. It was therefore suggested that denying MFN status might punish the very Chinese people (entrepreneurs, small-­scale industries, etc.) that Americans wanted to help.71 Absent from these concerns, however, was an interrogation of the naturalised, common sense assumptions upon which they relied. As already noted, the Chinese were no longer explicitly classified as uncivilised and the ‘unequal treaties’ of the past had long been abolished.72 Nonetheless, American power/knowledge was still able to perpetuate certain truths about China (and of the United States) in the enactment of policy. In the nineteenth century China had been forcibly opened to foreign trade, and the expectation had always been that it should conform to the more civilised ideals of the West. As a non-­market economy, the PRC of the 1990s was still a fundamentally uncivilised outsider which had yet to conform fully to those ideals. As US National Security Advisor Anthony Lake observed in 1993, ‘[w]e seek a strong relationship with China that reflects both our values and our interests’.73

American images of China, 1979–present   133 When exploring imperial and colonial practises of the nineteenth century, the question is not so much whether or not that era has finally been transcended. It is how its effects within the contemporary legal system may be obscured from view.74 To a significant extent, the most essential elements of Uncivilised China remained. They were implicit and below the surface, but the power of American discourse still helped to determine the boundaries of political possibility as the PRC remained a legitimate target of annual MFN renewal. Further – and just as policies in Washington such as membership of SEATO and a strict trade embargo had worked to marginalise Cold War China and confirm its location at the periphery of the free world – the Jackson-­Vanik amendment itself reproduced Uncivilised China as beyond the family of civilised nations. In particular, it stated that, as a non-­market economy, the PRC was ‘ineligible for normal trade relations’.75 Normal trade relations were those conducted with more civilised market economies, whose values distinguished them from those less civilised and whose identities necessitated abnormal relations. Thus, China was still deemed an unequal in American imaginations and Sino­US relations of power remained imbalanced in favour of the latter. However, those relations were at least partly destabilised during the 1990s and beyond as China’s material capabilities began to increase. During this period, and into the present day, Threatening China re-­emerged as a more prominent social construction. It is this period to which the chapter now turns.

Chinese power and the modern-­day China ‘threat’ William Overholt notes that the so-­called China Threat Theory of modern times is based at least partly on the representation of China as a post-­Cold War communist successor to the Soviet Union. Yet, he argues, this is to overlook the pattern of China’s behaviour since 1989 which, as generally cooperative and peaceful, does much to challenge that perception.76 Certainly, the PRC’s capabilities have increased substantially in recent years. Among other things China now has the world’s largest population, the fastest growing economy, the largest army, the largest middle class, a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a manned space programme and a nuclear arsenal.77 However, these things do not necessarily make China a threat. Certain other countries which share variations of these characteristics, such as rapidly growing economies, active space programmes and the possession of nuclear weapons, are not perceived in this way. India, for example, is very rarely considered a danger to Western interests or security. Moreover, the PRC has had a large population for centuries, a significant standing army since its founding in 1949, nuclear weapons since 1964 and a seat on the Security Council since 1971 without consistently being interpreted as a threat. As ever, then, it is impossible to explain the recent resurgence of Threatening China within American imaginations in terms of material forces alone. While China’s military and economic strengths are far greater now than at any point in history, Threatening China is another social construction. Joseph

134   American images of China, 1979–present Nye reinforces this understanding by noting that the China Threat Theory, rather than being neutral and unproblematic, has the potential to become a self-­ fulfilling prophecy. Based on the crude hypothetical assumption that there exists a 50 per cent chance of China becoming aggressive and a 50 per cent chance of it not, Nye explains that to treat China as an enemy now effectively discounts 50 per cent of the future.78 In this way, he emphasises the ideational constitution of material forces and the power of discourse to create particular truths about the world while marginalising others, with important implications for Sino-­US relations. Indeed, Chengxin Pan argues that China’s material capabilities are a distraction to the extent that its mere existence makes it a strategic other to the United States. In consequence, the China threat exists for, and as a product of, American identity.79 Modern-­day China (along with the ‘dangers’ it presents), in other words, is still largely what American discourses allow it to be.80 This is reflected in the proliferation over the past two decades of popular and academic China threat literatures which do much to establish and perpetuate truths about the real or potential ‘dangers’ China represents.81 In Death by China by Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, for example, the foreword reads: facts are facts and the truth is the truth . . . the rulers in Beijing . . . flood the world with dangerous products, use a potent arsenal of mercantilist and protectionist weapons to destroy the economies of America and the West, and rapidly arm themselves with the best weapons systems their elaborate spy network can steal from the Pentagon.82 These ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ are, as ever, subjective interpretations of the world rather than unquestionable realities. Moreover, they are exaggerated and misleading, not least because myriad other nations – in particular the United States – possess and use against others mercantilist trade policies, high-­tech weapons systems and elaborate spy networks. This, however, is seemingly of little interest in Navarro and Autry’s hyperbolic vision of the China ‘threat’: ‘It’s Not China Bashing If It’s True,’ the opening chapter irresponsibly proclaims. ‘We Will Bury You, Chinese Style’, Part III somewhat bizarrely suggests.83 Elsewhere, Robert Kaplan states that ‘[t]he American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty first century’.84 He does not question if or even when China might become a threat. He emphasises its inevitability. Warren Cohen argues that ‘historically, a strong China has brutalized the weak’, and points to a likelihood that it will now follow great powers of the past by seeking regional dominance before expanding its influence further.85 In Showdown: Why China Wants War With the United States, Babbin and Timperlake provide a fictional narrative of rising Sino-­American tensions in which, among other things, China uses cyber warfare to shut down American defence systems. The hostile scenario they present, it is argued, ‘could easily become fact. . . . The Verdict: China means war’.86 This type of imagery is lamentably comparable in tone to the types which circulated in the late 1800s and the mid-­twentieth century. As we have seen, in these moments China ‘threats’ were emotively

American images of China, 1979–present   135 constructed for the purpose of establishing realities in which particular responses to the ‘threats’ could be seen as justified and even seemingly unavoidable, because to not respond would be to risk US ‘defeat’. Resistance discourses continue to be produced.87 ‘Sino-­American relations in the 21st century . . . will not inevitably be conflictual’, declares Peter Hays Gries.88 ‘The nature of any threat’, argues Al-­Rodhan, ‘is far more nuanced than the “China Threat” theorists claim it to be’.89 Nonetheless, powerful circulating truths about Threatening China work to shape the contours of the literature itself. For example, the British writer Will Hutton’s 2007 volume The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century was published in the United States as The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy.90 In the same year Edgar Snow’s 1938 volume Red Star Over China was reprinted in as Red Star Over China – The Rise of the Red Army.91 This title is particularly misrepresentative, and is illustrative of the fantasised constitution of Threatening China, since the content of Snow’s book is fundamentally sympathetic to China’s communist forces. The key messages of volumes such as The Coming Conflict with China and When China Rules the World are also significantly less alarmist than their titles suggest.92 Each of these examples demonstrates the tight regulation of discourse and how certain ideas about China continue to be promoted while others are actively suppressed. An example of the type of visual imagery of Threatening China which has become widespread since the 1990s – and which complements Figure I.2 in the introduction – is provided in Figure 5.3. A 1996 cover of Newsweek magazine not only depicts China as a threat to the United States, but also highlights the various ways in which that threat might be projected. Newsweek imagined a modern and technologically advanced society which is at least half militaristic and aggressive: ‘The “New Giant” Flexes Its Muscles’, the magazine observed. The Chinese themselves are depicted as soulless and machine-­like. Importantly, its red flag is prominent so as to emphasise a continued threat to non-­communist American identity. The importance of communism to the construction of modern-­day Threatening China is reflected in American anxieties and suspicion of the so-­called Beijing Consensus. The Beijing Consensus is a political and economic model of growth and development which is understood to be advanced by the PRC.93 For some it represents a challenge to the traditional development model of the United States and the wider West – the so-­called Washington Consensus.94 The Washington Consensus utilises policy instruments such as free market forces and private property ownership as key components of development. The Beijing Consensus, in contrast, has been described as ‘state-­led development’, and is advanced today particularly within less developed regions of Africa and South America.95 Stefan Halper argues that while China’s ‘market-­authoritarian model’ provides high rates of growth and stability and promises of improved living conditions, it is devoid of the norms and values expected in the West. ‘Absent are the freedoms we believe essential – freedoms of speech, belief and assembly, and the notion of the loyal opposition’, he asserts.96

136   American images of China, 1979–present

Figure 5.3  Contemporary Threatening China (Newsweek, 1 April, 1996).

The existence of the Beijing Consensus as a Western social construct is demonstrated by it only emerging as a topic of debate in China after the Amer­ ican Joshua Ramo of The Foreign Policy Centre in London coined the term in 2004.97 The anxieties the Beijing Consensus generates, argue Cho and Jeong, are not primarily due to what it actually prescribes, but to the challenges it appears to present to the West. Indeed, Chinese leaders refrain from promoting the Beijing Consensus internationally because they are keen to avoid tensions with the United States.98 The aim in Beijing has been to project the image of a responsible new power, and yet China’s development is itself less stable, organised and coherent than many assume.99 A clear Beijing Consensus, in short, has

American images of China, 1979–present   137 never existed. Moreover, China’s broad global approach to international politics (its soft power strategy) is often misinterpreted as being targeted directly at the West, when it is actually intended for multiple audiences.100 The contemporary China threat as a ‘danger’ to the American values of democracy and free markets has many parallels with that which became so pervasive during the Cold War. In addition, however, it also intrinsically threatens notions of American exceptionalism and the understanding that the US exists as Madsen’s ‘redeemer nation’, the responsibility of which is to disseminate Enlightenment values abroad.101 If, as Halper explains, the Beijing consensus is successful in providing high rates of growth and improved living standards around the world, it renders vulnerable the idea that the United States, as both Thomas Paine and Ronald Reagan declared, retains the power to ‘begin the world over again’.102 China, in other words, is not the object of attention simply because of its physical and historical attributes. It is interpreted as a potential rival to established frameworks of Western-­led development, with the intention to replace them with an alternative paradigm. Threatening China, then, (along with American identity) has evolved over time so that it is no longer widely perceived as, for example, a racial threat to an imagined White United States. As such it remains a socially constructed threat and a product of American imaginations in the same way it always has been. Viewed through an American lens, it is not interpreted dispassionately, but from subjective understandings about the United States itself. Ultimately, it is still integral to the enactment of US China policy. This was demonstrated between 1995 and 1996 when the PRC conducted a series of provocative missile tests in the Taiwan Strait. The aim was to influence presidential elections on the island and deter voters from appointing a pro-­independence candidate.103 In the previous chapter it was established that the United States’ Two China policy throughout the Cold War was partly enabled by imagery of Taiwan as a threatened bastion of American values, and Eisenhower’s intention to ‘preserve the vital stake of the free world in a free Formosa’104 was shared by President Bill Clinton four decades later. In response to the PRC tests, Clinton ordered more American vessels into the Strait than had been assembled in East Asia since the end of the Vietnam War.105 In 1996, as in the past, American policy itself served to reproduce China as an uncivilised and threatening polity beyond the free world and as the legitimate subject of disciplinary measures. By exporting American interpretations of the world it also reconfirmed the United States as the necessarily more civilised entity. The China of the late twentieth century remained a projection of Amer– ican imaginations and its democratic-­capitalist ideology. So, Taiwan was still not just any island or any population threatened by a larger aggressor; this scenario is played out in various regions throughout the world in the absence of US intervention. When Clinton sent American warships to Taiwan the aim was to defend American interests there. However, those interests were still constitutive of particular discourses which gave them meaning. Specifically, they were interests grounded upon the core values of American identity which were still present

138   American images of China, 1979–present and vulnerable there. The goal, Clinton asserted, was to encourage the long-­term process of ‘deepening the roots of democracy in Asia’.106 Of course, efforts to lessen the possibility of conflict are rarely to be condemned, but the events confirmed the salience of Threatening (and Uncivilised) China within the US political process. China’s material capabilities were increasing. However, the imbalance of Sino-­US relations of power remained such that American discourse could construct a reality in which Washington was able to legitimately intervene in the region in order to protect its interests and values. In fact, the most powerful representational processes ensured that anything other than intervention was deemed unthinkable. In July 1996 the Clinton administration declared that ‘the United States has a continuing interest . . . in the Asia-­Pacific region and . . . we’re not going anywhere’.107 Once again, American discourses contained inconsistencies which helped them function consistently in the service of power.108 They allowed the United States to justify behaviours identical to those for which it has long criticised the PRC. In particular, Washington could seek to strengthen democracy in Asia and facilitate the survival of its core values in Taiwan, while simultaneously accusing China of attempting to do the same. Washington also maintained the embargo on the sale of military equipment to China first implemented after the events in Tiananmen Square. The embargo was less a continuing punishment for a past misdemeanour, however, than it was a policy performance complicit within the protection of American identity. In 2005, for example, it was argued in the Senate that China specifically threatened Taiwan and the United States.109 The continuing isolation of these two polities within the context of the China ‘threat’ exposes their inextricability so that a danger to Taiwan is necessarily still a danger to the United States. The embargo reaffirmed China as uncivilised in comparable terms to states such as North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Burma, to which Washington has also long prohibited the sale of arms. To reiterate, China’s increasing material power is not considered inconsequential here; however, that power remains constitutive of certain ideas which make it threatening (and uncivilised) to the United States, regardless of Beijing’s intentions. In Chapter 3 it was shown that during the Second World War the Japanese seamlessly replaced the Chinese as a perceived danger to White American women, in demonstration of the socially constructed nature of threat and its capacity to be purposefully transferred from one object to another for political gain. A comparable shift occurred during the 1980s when the Red Menace of China was swiftly replaced by the Soviet Union as the main source of fear among Americans.110 Following the appalling attacks of 11 September 2001 which destroyed the World Trade Center complex in New York City, the fear of terrorism saturated American imaginations. The type of anxious delirium over China generated in the early Cold War had not re-­emerged in the 1990s, but after 9/11 US attention diverted to Afghanistan (and later Iraq) as a perceived shelter and breeding ground for enemies of the United States. In 2006 President George W. Bush sought to remind Americans that terrorists ‘operate in the shadows of society. They send small teams of operatives to

American images of China, 1979–present   139 infiltrate free nations. They live quietly among their victims. They conspire in  secret. And then they strike without warning’.111 For years this narrative of  fear was used to justify a deeply destructive and ill-­conceived ‘War on Terror’. Importantly, it worked to China’s advantage throughout the early 2000s in the sense that Cold War security paradigms of ‘great power’ threats were pushed aside. ‘The enemy’ was now detached from the state and, for the purpose of coalition-­building, portrayed as a threat to The State, no matter the nationality. This image of a universal terrorist threat was a key tool in Washington’s project to rally support among its friends and allies, and from nations with which it shared occasionally strained relations, like China. (Indeed, during his election campaign in 1999 Bush had labelled China ‘a competitor, not a partner’).112 Sympathy in Washington for Beijing’s suppression of Muslim Uyghur separatists in China’s western Xinjiang region increased after a number of Uyghur ‘terrorists’ were found by US troops in Pakistan and Afghanistan.113 In this way Tibetan ‘freedom fighters’, for example, could continue to rely on (cautious) American support, while Uyghurs became nefarious protagonists in the story of global terrorism being written. As the ‘war’ dragged on it became increasingly clear that the terrorist threat had been misunderstood and exaggerated. Events such as 9/11 were evidently possible, but terrorism was not nearly as organised or pervasive as had been asserted. A very particular type of China ‘threat’ had been emphatically replaced by an equally particular and discursively formulated terrorist ‘threat’.114 China’s physical capabilities, then, are not the only important factor in understandings about the modern-­day ‘China threat’. The ‘threat’ first (re)emerged during a window between the demise of the Soviet ‘Evil Empire’ and the perceived emergence of terrorism as a threat to the so-­called civilised world. This was no coincidence. During the United States’ ‘unipolar moment’, in which it seemed for the first time in at least half a century that the nation faced no imminent external dangers, salient others like China were actively sought out. The notion of ‘threat inflation’ in international relations is an established one. Political leaders and other elites may exaggerate the dangers to national security posed by ‘outside’ actors in the service of their own interests – for example, in pursuit of voter support, justifying defence spending or to ease the passage of controversial domestic laws which appear to infringe civil liberties. In the case of the media, as illustrated in Figure 5.3, it can be convincingly argued that ‘threat inflation’ serves simple economic motivations by gaining the attention of a paying audience. Fundamentally, however, the construction of a new China threat stemmed, as always, from assumptions about the identity of the United States itself. As Samuel Huntington asserts, ‘if being an American means being committed to the principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property, and if there is no evil empire out there threatening those principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American . . .?’115 In the 1990s the China ‘threat’ therefore was – and today remains – a fiction to the extent that it is not simply ‘there’, but another self-­projection of American society.

140   American images of China, 1979–present Thus, while it may be tempting to suggest that in the modern information age – particularly in which we enjoy independent access to the internet and an almost immeasurable array of images, depictions, descriptions, ideas and assertions about China, not to mention the ability to travel there more easily than ever before – we are now able to decide for ourselves what China ‘is’ and what its intentions are without being swayed or mislead by others. There is some logic to this notion. Broadly speaking, our assumptions about China are no longer nearly as malleable by visitors and scholars of China as were those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century Westerners, who almost exclusively knew China only as a faraway place of fantasy and exoticism. Yet what we ‘know’ about China remains socially engineered and framed by the capacity of discourse to manufacture the world around us. Nowhere is this more evident than in our understandings about the ‘threat’ China poses today, as Washington’s expensive and misguided ‘War on Terror’ dissipates under the administration of President Barack Obama (as further described in the following chapter) and as US attention reverts back to China as a key security issue. Consider, for example, popular assumptions about China’s defence budget. Beijing’s expenditure on the People’s Liberation Army, as already noted, has increased dramatically in recent years. This constitutes a persuasive component of the modern-­day China Threat Theory; China is now undeniably more capable than before of causing physical harm to others, including the United States. But this realm of discourse is still controlled, and still tells a very particular story. Commonly absent from this story, for example, is the chapter which shows that China’s defence spending remains easily dwarfed by that of the United States. In 2012, for instance, US defence expenditure was lower than in 2011, and yet 4.4 per cent of national GDP, or around US$682 million, was still set aside for defence. In the same year China allocated around 2 per cent of its GDP to defence, spending less than a quarter of the US budget: around US$166 million. This means that the United States still currently accounts for almost 40 per cent of global defence expenditure, while China accounts for approximately 9 per cent.116 As importantly – perhaps more importantly – as of 2013 the amount China spends on its military is lower than that which it spends on internal security, including policing and surveillance.117 The Chinese government is not entirely transparent about its military and internal security budgets, but it is at least clear that the two are now highly comparable in scale. Moreover, in 2013 Beijing announced an increase in healthcare spending of 27 per cent to US$41 billion. This followed an increase of 16 per cent in 2012. China’s education budget also increased significantly in 2013, by more than 9 per cent.118 The 4 per cent of its GDP that China now allocates to education is double the amount it spends on defence.119 That these statistics are so commonly omitted from the story of the contemporary China ‘threat’ – and subsumed by an overriding focus on China’s comparatively less remarkable (through of course still important) defence spending – is additionally reflective of the discursively engineered contours of  the reality China commonly inhabits, especially within many American

American images of China, 1979–present   141 imaginations. The absence of this type of discourse and information should at least make us regularly revisit and reassess what we ‘know’ about China, especially when statements such as ‘It’s Not China Bashing If It’s True’ can circulate so freely.120 It is not simply the case, therefore, that a rapidly developing China is only looking outwards in a quest to become more powerful and influential. The Chinese Communist Party is an especially paranoid and insecure regime, and is as heavily occupied with the tasks of maintaining internal stability, suppressing dissent and ensuring its own long-­term survival as it is with increasing China’s global presence.121 A broad failure to perceive or accept this is also indicative of American and Western European paranoia, and a tendency to assume that everything China does somehow implicates or is even directed towards the interests of the West, serving prominently in representations of today’s China ‘threat’. Once again, this is not to refute the possibility that China can endanger the United States and others; it is to further demonstrate that forces commonly overlooked are working beneath the surface to shape seemingly objective facts about China, and create subjective, discursively constructed realities in which a very specific, fantasised danger can reside.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to explore American images of China between 1979 and the present day. It first described how, throughout the 1980s, those images became more overtly positive as Red China was purposefully reconstructed into a less foreign and more familiar polity. The constructions of Uncivilised and Threatening China abated within American imaginations and the PRC was deemed less inferior by having seemingly embraced capitalist Western values. This evolution of imagery was personified by China’s latest ‘moderniser’, Deng Xioaping. The chapter also demonstrated how the most stable and enduring constructions of China’s identity continued to be comparatively active within US China policy. During the 1980s in particular a re-­emergence of Opportunity China enabled more intensive trade ties with the PRC. China’s reconstruction simultaneously worked to preclude a resumption of formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which had been privileged since 1949. Yet Sino-­US relations of power remained imbalanced in favour of the latter so that the Reagan administration could legitimately retain its Two China policy, thus protecting the values of American identity in Taiwan while claiming to distance itself from interfering in Chinese affairs. The chapter showed that much of the broadly positive societal American imagery of China of the 1980s disappeared after the ‘massacre’ in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Americans were distressed by the violence they witnessed, but the protests were viewed through a uniquely Western lens. As such, they were interpreted as another failure of China to attain imagined standards of civilisation. Uncivilised China quickly resurfaced and helped enable Washington to respond with sanctions and restrictions. These actions, along with Washington’s

142   American images of China, 1979–present refusal to grant China permanent MFN status and establish ‘normal’ trade relations, worked to reaffirm the PRC’s location at the periphery of the civilised world. In the 1990s discourses of Threatening China also re-­emerged as Beijing’s increasing material capabilities began to generate concern. But the modern-­day China ‘threat’ is a constructed entity in the same way it always has been. This chapter has shown that China’s increased capabilities are an extremely important development. Yet discourses of the ‘threat’ are still controlled and manipulated so that selective and selected understandings of what it ‘is’ now circulate. This ‘threat’ once again emanates from the democratic-­capitalist identity of the United States, as reflected in its ability to create a reality in which Washington can logically continue to defend Taiwan. In many respects the protection of a small island nation at great expense, and which risks inflaming relations with a newly powerful China, makes little sense. However, an exploration of the power of American representations of democracy, capitalism and anti-­ communism, and their constitution of the material world, reveals how this commitment is allowed to be sustained. We have seen, then, that the ‘story’ of the modern-­day China threat – just like those of the ‘dangers’ it posed in the late-­ nineteenth and mid-­twentieth centuries – have been written with the image of a particular character in mind. Salient details which reveal an alternative side of China’s development are commonly excluded, so that while the ‘threat’ is not necessarily absent, it is at the very least a fiction. Sino-­US relations of the modern day may ostensibly appear irreconcilable with those of historical eras, yet they are characterised and steered by ideas which first circulated and became established more than two centuries ago. Indeed, in this twenty-­first century information age Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China, along with other comparatively stable representations, co-­exist and circulate within the United States perhaps as widely and pervasively as at any other time in history. They also serve within the continuous re-­evaluation of potentialities of policy as saliently as ever before. It is an examination of this issue, and a concluding exploration of American images of China since the election of US President Barack Obama, to which the book now turns.

Notes    1 The IOC vote meant the island of Taiwan would henceforth be required to compete as Chinese Taipei.    2 Zhang, International Society, p. 92.    3 Edward Parris, ‘China’s Defense Expenditure’, in United States Congress, Joint Economic Commission, China’s Economy Looks Toward the Year 2000, vol.  2 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1986), pp. 148–168.    4 Harding, Fragile Relationship, p. 363.    5 Mosher, China Misperceived, p. 140.    6 See Department of State, American Foreign Policy, pp. 967–968.    7 Seymour Topping, ‘Rural China: Change and Continuity’, in Durdin et al., Report from Red China, p. 153.    8 Salisbury, To Peking, p. 301.

American images of China, 1979–present   143    9 For an examination of Deng’s succession to Paramount leader after the death of Mao Zedong see Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xioaping (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), chapters 1 and 2.   10 Deng first used this term in his opening speech of the CCP’s Twelfth National Congress on 1 September 1982.   11 See Whitney Stewart, Deng Xiaoping: Leader in a Changing China (Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 2001), chapter 1.   12 Henry Kissinger once described Deng as ‘a nasty little man’ and the latter’s representational evolution mirrored that of China itself. See Benjamin Yang, Deng: A Political Biography (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), p. 259.   13 Time, 1 January 1979.   14 Quoted in Madsen, American Dream, p. 158.   15 See Mary Brown Bullock, An American Transplant: The Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), especially chapter 2.   16 See Inderjeet Parmar, ‘To Relate Knowledge and Action: The Impact of the Rocke­ feller Foundation on Foreign Policy thinking During America’s Rise to Globalism 1939–1945’, Minerva, 40 (2002), pp. 235–263. See also Bullock, American Transplant; E. Richard Brown, ‘Rockefeller Medicine in China: Professionalism and Imperialism’, in Robert F. Arnove, Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1980).   17 Quoted in Harding, Fragile Relationship, p. 102.   18 See Time, 30 April 1984.   19 Department of State, American Foreign Policy, pp. 967–968.   20 See Republican Party, 1980 Republican Party Platform, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 38:27 (1980), p. 2055.   21 See Department of State, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan 1982, vol. 2 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1983), pp. 1052–1053.   22 Taiwan Relations Act, 1 January, 1979. American Institute in Taiwan, www.ait.org. tw/uploads/4a/a3/4aa32aa18ebf1b04607a971d743aae96/Taiwan-­Relations-Act-­PL96– 8–96th-congress.pdf, last accessed 23 February 2011.   23 Harding, Fragile Relationship, pp. 169–172.   24 As demonstrated shortly, this became an increasing site of Sino-­American tension from the end of the 1980s.   25 Scott Kennedy (ed.), China Cross Talk: The American Debate over China Policy  Since Normalization, a Reader (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 51.   26 Mosher, China Misperceived, p. 195.   27 Washington Post, 7 September 1980.   28 See J.F. Watts and Fred L. Israel (eds), Presidential Documents: The Speeches, Proclamations, and Policies That Have Shaped the Nation from Washington to Clinton (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 368.   29 Quoted in Time, 7 May 1984.   30 Ashley, ‘Border Lines’, p. 304.   31 See Watts and Israel (eds), Presidential Documents, pp. 367–368.   32 Der Derian, ‘War of Networks’.   33 See Watts and Israel (eds), Presidential Documents, pp. 367–368.   34 See Time, 6 January 1986.   35 Mosher, China Misperceived, p. 188.   36 Ibid., chapter 6; Harding, A Fragile Relationship, pp. 169–172.   37 See Thirty Three Chinese Intellectuals, ‘Open Letter to the Party Central Committee, Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and State Council. April 21–25, 1989’, in Suzanne Ogden, Kathleen Hartford, Lawrence Sullivan and David

144   American images of China, 1979–present   38

  39   40   41   42   43   44

  45   46   47

  48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67

Zweig (eds), China’s Search for Democracy: The Student and the Mass Movement of 1989 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992). For a concise history of the main events of the protest movement in and around Tiananmen Square see Dingxin Zhao, The Power of Tiananmen: State-­Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially chapter 6. Quoted in Michel Oksenberg, Lawrence R. Sullivan and Marc Lambert (eds), Beijing Spring, 1989: Confrontation and Conflict, The Basic Conflict (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990), p. 364. See, for example, Timothy Brook, Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 153. See Amnesty International, ‘China: The Massacre of June 1989 and its Aftermath’, 31 March 1990: www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ASA17/009/1990/en, last accessed 13 January 2011. See Madsen, American Dream, chapter 1. Hobson, ‘Democracy as Civilization’, p. 86. Andrew Lui, ‘Looking Back at Tiananmen Square’, Peace Review, 12:1 (2000), pp.  141–142. See also Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, China’s Brave New World – and  Other Tales for Global Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 6. Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen, p. 32. For a volume-­length analysis of the activities and influence of the media during the events in Tiananmen Square see Zhou He, Mass Media and Tiananmen Square (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 1996). Wasserstrom. Brave New World, p. 6; Madsen, American Dream, p. 193. The Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, ‘Turmoil at Tiananmen: A Study of US coverage of the Beijing Spring of 1989’, June 1992: www.tsquare.tv/themes/TatTcover.html#anchor225216, last accessed 4 April 2011. Syrett and Cooke, Papers, p. 50; New York Times, 29 June 1869. Time, 12 June 1989. New York Times, 4 June 1989. New York Times, 12 December 1989. Time, 12 June 1989. Woolley and Peters, Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=17117, last accessed 11 February 2011. Colin L. Powell, ‘US Forces: Challenges Ahead’, Foreign Affairs, 71:5 (1992), p. 32. Madsen, American Exceptionalism, p. xvi. George Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1999 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). See Kau et al., ‘Public Opinion’, pp. 135. Suettinger, Beyond Tiananmen, p. 1. Cohen, America’s Response, p. 227. Harding, Fragile Relationship, p. 243. Akira Iriye, ‘Images and Diplomacy in Sino-­American Relations’, in Hunt et al., Mutual Images, p. 38. Cohen, America’s Response, p. 239. Campbell, Writing Security, especially chapter 6. Harding, Fragile Relationship, p. 291, emphasis added. US Census Bureau, Trade in Goods with China, www.census.gov/foreign-­trade/ balance/c5700.html, last accessed 15 February 2011. Ibid. Robert G. Sutter, ‘Changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the Effects

American images of China, 1979–present   145

  68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81

  82   83   84   85   86   87

  88   89   90   91   92   93   94

on China: A US Perspective’, in Young C. Kim and Gaston J. Sigur (eds), Asia and the Decline of Communism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992), p. 254. New York Times, 12 June 1990. Ming Wan, Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Relations: Defining and Defending National Interests (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 43. Cohen, America’s Response, p. 249. Harding, Fragile Relationship, pp. 266–267. Notable exceptions to this include the foreign administration of such Chinese territories as Hong Kong and Macau, which remained in effect. Anthony Lake, ‘From Containment to Enlargement’, US Department of State Dispatch, 4:39 (1993), p. 662. Antony Anghie, ‘Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth Century International Law’, Harvard International Law Journal, 40 (1999), p. 68. US Government, United States Code, 2006, p. 185. William Overholt, Asia, America and the Transformation of Geopolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 113. William A. Callahan, ‘How to Understand China: The Dangers and Opportunities of Being a Rising Power’, Review of International Studies, 31:4 (2005), pp. 701–714. Joseph Nye, ‘The Case for Deep Engagement’, Foreign Affairs, 44:4 (1995), p. 94. Pan, ‘China Threat’, p. 314. See Turner, ‘ “Threatening China” ’. As explored in Chapter 1, the academic literature includes Mearsheimer, ‘China’s Unpeaceful Rise’; Christensen, ‘Posing Problems’; Roy, ‘Hegemon’. The popular literature includes, for example, Bill Gertz, The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000); Jed L. Babbin and Edward Timperlake, Showdown: Why China Wants War With the United States (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2006); Constantine C. Menges, China: The Gathering Threat (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2005); Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett, Red Dragon Rising: Communist China’s Military Threat to America (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2002). Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action (New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2011), p. xiv. Ibid. Kaplan, ‘Fight China’, p. 49. Warren Cohen, ‘China’s Rise in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 30:4–5 (2007), p. 703. Babbin and Timperlake, Showdown, pp. 23–24. See, for example, Gerald Segal, ‘Does China Matter?’, Foreign Affairs, 78:5 (1999), pp. 24–36.; Michael G. Gallagher, ‘China’s Illusory Threat to the South China Sea’, International Security, 19:1 (1994), pp.  169–194. Friedberg, ‘Is Conflict Inevitable?’. Gries, ‘China Threat’, p. 257, emphasis in original. Al-­Rhodan, ‘Critique’, p. 41. Will Hutton, The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy (New York: Free Press, 2006). Edgar Snow, Red Star over China – The Rise of the Red Army (London: Hespirides Press, 2006). Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World (London: Allen Lane, 2009). See Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Beijing Consensus (London: Foreign Policy Centre, 2004). The term ‘Washington Consensus’ was first introduced in 1989. See John Williamson,

146   American images of China, 1979–present   95

  96   97   98   99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? (Washington DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990), chapter 2. For examinations of the Beijing Consensus as state-­led development see Charles Burton, ‘The “Beijing Consensus” and China’s Quest for Legitimacy on the International Stage’, in André Laliberté and Marc Lanteigne (eds), The Chinese Party-­ State in the 21st Century: Adaptation and the Reinvention of Legitimacy (New York: Routledge, 2008). For discussions of the global impact of the Beijing Consensus see, for example, Dorothy Grace Guerrero and Firoze Manji (eds), China’s New Role in Africa and the South: A Search for a New Perspective (Oxford: Fahamu Books, 2008); Riordan Roett and Guadalupe Paz (eds), China’s Expansion into the Western Hemisphere: Implications for Latin America and the United States (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 2008). Stefan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. x. Ramo, The Beijing Consensus. Young Nam Cho and Jong Ho Jeong, ‘China’s Soft Power: Discussions, Recourses and Prospects’, Asian Survey, 48:3 (2008), p. 462. See Shaun Breslin, ‘Developmental State or Dysfunctional Development?’, Third World Quarterly, 17:4 (1996), pp. 689–706. Shogo Suzuki, ‘The Myth and Reality of China’s “Soft Power” ’, in Inderjeet Parmar and Michael Cox, Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 209. Madsen, American Exceptionalism, pp. 1–2. Paine, ‘Common Sense’, p. 5; Watts and Israel, Presidential Documents, p. 368. For examinations of these events see Robert Ross, ‘The 1995–96 Taiwan Strait Confrontation: Coercion, Credibility and the Use of Force’, International Security, 25:2 (2000), pp.  87–123; John W. Garver, Face Off: China, the United States and Taiwan’s Democratization (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). Department of State, Foreign Relations 1955, 2, p. 118. Garver, Face Off, p. 3. See Alvin Z. Rubinstein, Albina Shayevich and Boris Zlotnikov, The Clinton Foreign Policy Reader: Presidential Speeches with Commentary (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), p. 116. Woolley and Peters, Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=59401, last accessed 10 October 2010. Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, pp. 168–169. US Senate, Congressional Record: Proceeding and Debates of the 109th Congress, First Session, vol. 151, pt. 6 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2005), p. 7592. Goh, US Rapprochement, chapter 2. Reprinted in New York Times, ‘President Bush’s Speech on Terrorism,’ 6 September 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/washington/06bush_transcript.html?pagewanted =all&_r=0. BBC, ‘Bush Outlines Foreign Policy’, 20 November 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/world/americas/529018.stm. Graham E. Fuller and Jonathan N. Lipman, ‘Islam in Xinjiang’, in S. Frederick Starr (ed.), Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), pp. 341–342. See, for example, Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counter-­Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); John Mueller, ‘Simplicity and Spook: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration’, International Studies Perspectives, 6:2 (2005), pp. 208–234.

American images of China, 1979–present   147 115 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Erosion of American National Interests’, Foreign Affairs, 765 (1997), pp. 29–30. 116 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database 2012, http://milexdata.sipri.org/files/?file=SIPRI+military+expenditure+database +1988–2012.xlsx. 117 Reuters, ‘China Hikes Defense Budget, to Spend More on Internal Security’, http:// uk.reuters.com/article/2013/03/05/us-­china-parliament-­defence-idUSBRE92403620 130305, last accessed 30 May 2013. 118 Wall Street Journal, ‘China Steps Up Spending to Rebalance Economy’, http:// online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324178904578341134253943270.html, last accessed 30 May 2013. 119 Bloomberg, ‘Chinese Education: The Truth Behind the Boasts’, http://www. businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-04/chinese-­education-the-­truth-behind-­theboasts, last accessed 30 May 2013. 120 Navarro and Autry, Death by China. 121 See Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 52–55.

6 American images of China The Obama presidency and beyond

Introduction In early 2013 the Korean peninsula became a site of dramatically increased tension as the totalitarian ruling regime of the North made bellicose threats against both the South and the United States. Fears were raised that the government of new leader Kim Jong-­un was preparing missile tests, and foreign diplomats were advised to consider leaving their embassies in Pyongyang. Aggressive rhetoric from the North has been advanced many times in the past, although this time it was unusually extreme,. The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (the DPRK) and South Korea (the RoK) have technically remained in conflict since 1953 when a truce ended major hostilities in the Korean War. For 60 years the United States has supported the South while the impoverished North – a primary beneficiary of support from the Soviet Union until the near total collapse of communism in 1989 – receives significant aid from China. As this book has already shown, for much of the period since 1949 the communist PRC has been represented in the United States as at best an outsider of the ‘international community’ and at worst a salient threat to national security. Indeed, since the very beginnings of Sino-­US relations in the late eighteenth century China has rarely been perceived as anything other than a land and people foreign from the United States by virtue of their contrasting race, religion, trading system, structure of government, political ideology, and so on. During the latest ‘crisis’ on the Korean peninsula, however, China was recognised as key to persuading the new reluctance to defend the actions of the government of Pyongyang. This raised questions around the extent to which China is now perceived in the West as a member of the mythical ‘international community’. Is China the ‘rising power’ now ‘in’ or ‘out’? Is it one of ‘us’, or still a nation of which to be wary? China–US relations since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 have, as throughout the preceding administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, been largely cordial but with clear potential for animosity and friction. Uncertainties over ‘what China represents’ (most commonly either a threat or an opportunity) and ‘what to do about China’ are now especially prominent, however, with potentially critical ramifications for the future course of this now highly consequential relationship.

American images of China: Obama and beyond   149 The purpose of this chapter is to explore American images of China and their role within China policy during the US presidency of Barack Obama. It begins by recalling the presence of China in the election contest of 2008 and highlighting how its identity continued to be engineered and malleable, like that of any socially constructed imaginative geography. It then explains that, to a significant extent, a ‘rising’ China today is often fundamentally and automatically viewed in American society as a ‘problem to be resolved’. The chapter then briefly examines the images of China which circulated (and continue to circulate) around the 2012 US presidential elections, such as those of a currency manipulator and a leading offender of ‘cyber warfare’, and which concomitantly affirm the United States as the defender of the rules of the international system. It is shown that these truths are central to the existence of a reality which now accommodates and makes logical the implementation of Obama’s so-­called ‘pivot’ towards the Asia Pacific, as well as how discourses of the ‘pivot’ itself help to perpetuate the ideas which enable it. Finally, the chapter demonstrates that the enduring constructions of Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China highlighted for particular attention throughout this book are still reproduced throughout American society. It also shows that these images remain especially complicit within the formulation, enactment and justification of US China policy.

Obama’s election and ‘rising’ China Rarely in the history of Sino-­American relations has a US presidential election campaign been characterised by, or even heavily influenced by, strong societal interest in China. In recent decades the ‘China factor’ has become increasingly conspicuous as the PRC’s economic and political influence has been enhanced, but the 2008 campaign was largely reflective of broad historical trends. In 2004 President George W. Bush and John Kerry had sparred mainly over how best to conduct the ‘War on Terror’, and four years later this remained a key issue as Obama criticised Bush’s record in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, in 2008 Obama prevailed over his Republican opponent John McCain in a contest dominated principally by domestic economic problems and the so-­called global financial crisis. Just as overwhelmingly powerful discourses and imagery of a monolithic terrorist threat after 9/11 had effectively silenced the voices of those with alternative concerns, in 2008 domestic economic anxieties outweighed all others in the public consciousness. Obama’s campaign was conducted most intensively in the months following the Olympic Games in Beijing which, as noted in the previous chapter and as discussed again later in this chapter, drew considerable international attention and were widely perceived as confirmation of China’s ‘arrival’ as a new global power. Moreover, where China did emerge as an election issue a certain conformity with traditional patterns was evident. In the past, presidential candidates have depicted themselves as tougher and more assertive towards China than the incumbent administration, before adopting a more moderate stance if elected.1

150   American images of China: Obama and beyond In 2007 Obama asserted that ‘China is neither our enemy nor our friend. They’re competitors.’2 Such a stark observation complemented the type of imagery of China seen in Figure 5.3, which depicts a newly capable international rival in robotic and emotionless terms. In 2008 Obama endorsed the proposed (but never enacted) China Currency Manipulation Act.3 Since becoming president Obama’s rhetoric and approach towards China has indeed softened. His pre-­election labelling of China as a ‘competitor’ chimed with former president George W. Bush’s description of a ‘strategic competitor’ (to distance himself from Clinton’s US–China ‘strategic partnership’), but the White House has since remoulded these understandings. During his first trip to China as president in November 2009, for instance, Obama emphasised to President Hu Jintao the importance of cooperation over confrontation. He also sought to reassure Beijing’s leadership that Washington did not intend to hinder China’s growth.4 Earlier that year Obama had worked with President Hu to establish the US–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, a bilateral forum for discussion with the purpose of ‘advancing a positive, constructive, and comprehensive relationship between the two countries’.5 It is also worth noting that in 2008 Senator Hillary Clinton isolated China for particular criticism during her bid for nomination as Democratic Presidential candidate, especially on the issue of human rights. During her time as US Secretary of State (2009–2013) she adopted a similarly less combative stance. In February 2009, for example, only a month after taking up her post, Clinton argued that the issue of China’s human rights was a less urgent priority than the global economic crisis, climate change and issues of international security.6 This use of China as a modern-­day election tool is a useful reminder of its continued existence as a manufactured imaginative geography of the type Edward Said first described.7 Like any other territory, twenty-­first-century China is malleable and adaptive for political purposes. The shift in Obama’s rhetoric following his election is contemporary evidence of the agency of discourse in helping to steer the everyday functioning of global affairs. In November 2009 Obama said, ‘we welcome China’s efforts to play a greater role on the world stage. . . . Power does not need to be a zero-­sum game and nations need not fear the success of another’.8 In doing so, Obama sought to temper the kind of anxieties over Threatening China to which he had contributed during his own campaign for presidency. Peter Hays Gries and H. Michael Crowson observe how American views of modern-­day China are at least partially dependent upon political ideology. Self-­ reported ‘conservatives’, they assert, are more likely to perceive a contemporary China threat to US security, and hold more negative views of the Chinese government and people, than are self-­reported ‘liberals’. More anecdotally, they note that differences of opinion towards China exist in both the Democrat and Republican camps. While some Democrats, they argue, promote engagement with China in order to encourage its integration into the existing global structures of economic, political and security governance, others reveal their ‘Big Labour’ roots by criticising China for perceived unfair trade activities and

American images of China: Obama and beyond   151 supporting more hard-­line policies in response. Among Republicans, business leaders often endorse cooperative relations with China to help ensure future trade and investment opportunities while ‘military hawks and Christian conservatives’ are more likely to demand much firmer approaches.9 From here, and for reasons best explained through the type of historical and cultural analysis conducted throughout this book, we can also say that in important ways these varying types of viewpoints are perhaps less distinguishable than they first appear. Indeed, they are frequently bound by the logic of powerful and historically stable representations of China and its people. For instance, Democrats and Republicans who support ‘pro-­China’ policies and the integration of that country into existing frameworks and norms of global practice – whether in the realms of trade, business or human rights – are bound by the resilient notion that, in order to be ‘better’, the Chinese must become more like ‘us’. In this sense, surface-­level variations of focus are jointly underpinned by the constructed truth that a desirable and well-­functioning system exists, and that China must learn from its (Western) gatekeepers to become one of the community. This understanding famously led former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick to insist that China becomes a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the international system.10 The implication is that the United States represents one such established stakeholder and that, as a newcomer, China should conform to the rules by which every member of the system is bound. Of course, the United States – or indeed any nation state – cannot be said to impeccably ‘follow the rules’. It would be controversial to argue that a ‘responsible stakeholder’, for example, would invade another sovereign territory without the consent of the United Nations, as the United States did in Iraq in 2003. Indeed, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan later described the invasion as illegal.11 The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which provides subsidies to EU farmers, has long been criticised as unfair and damaging. African farmers in particular struggle to export their produce to a region which purposefully hinders outside access, and it is argued that the CAP has unbalanced global food prices and exacerbated food insecurity. These types of ‘double standards’12 can only occur in a world given meaning by discourses which tell us that certain actors are ‘responsible’ and legitimately able to judge the responsibility of others, despite engaging in ostensibly irresponsible and even deeply harmful behaviours themselves. This was how Great Britain and the United States could forcibly open up China to foreign trade and demand concessions from Beijing in the name of ‘civilisation’ in the mid-­nineteenth century. During today’s Obama era, the discursively controlled dichotomies of civilised/uncivilised, responsible/irresponsible, etc., continue to operate in the representation of China as an ‘other’ which must uphold a set of standards of international conduct that are purely illusionary, but which nonetheless operate in the service of power. The differing views of Democrats and Republicans who advocate tougher US policies towards Beijing, whether resulting from human rights concerns or those of business leaders, are also frequently bound by the underlying doctrine of

152   American images of China: Obama and beyond ‘better like us’. The question here is rarely ‘what can be learnt from China?’, or ‘how can the system better accommodate Chinese ideas and values?’, as throughout the history of Sino-­US relations, the question more commonly remains, ‘what to do about China?’ During the opium wars of the mid-­1800s it was considered that China’s alien trading system had to change; at the time of the Boxer Rebellion of 1899, the 1911 revolution and the violence in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, it was similarly believed that China had to join the imaginary family of civilised nations; during the 1990s the new China ‘threat’ (just as today and during the Cold War) had to be addressed, and so on. Resistance discourses continue to be produced, but remain marginalised by prevailing assumptions of China ‘the problem to be resolved’. Thus, whether the preferred policy strategy is to ‘get tough’ with China or to pursue a more measured, cooperative approach, the framework of understanding which guides those political performances is most commonly that problems and issues, where they exist, are found at China’s door. This automatic and relatively unproblematic construction of a ‘problem China’ is found today in images of an implicitly unwelcome ‘rising’ power. The category of ‘rising power’ has become increasingly prominent in the American consciousness throughout the Obama presidency, as already suggested, alongside the abatement of fears about terrorism. It is now typically represented by the ‘BRICS’ group of nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Aside from their comparatively large populations and land masses, however, these states have very little common. In some cases their growth rates are high and stable (especially China and India), while in others they are less predictable and more vulnerable to external forces, most notably the demand for raw materials (especially Brazil and Russia). Most share few cultural or historical links, and in some cases their bilateral relations are antagonistic and occasionally hostile (in particular neighbouring China, India and Russia). The most powerful force which binds them, in fact, is the crude Western perception that they are large and growing and a destabilising influence upon the established structures of global affairs. In November 2011, for example, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned that the United States is threatened by ‘rising powers’ such as China and India, as ‘challenges that we are going to have to deal with’.13 Most important to recognise, then, is that the term ‘rising power’ is not an objective description of a newly influential state actor. It is heavily loaded, with inherent connotations of a newly influential state actor to be wary of because, as a nation ‘rises’ (as opposed to ‘develops’, for example), it is assumed to create problems to be resolved. This is the traditional logic of Western realist International Relations theory in particular, which stresses the importance of balances of power in global affairs. ‘Rising powers’ such as China are said to destabilise status quo power structures because they prompt suspicion and anxiety from the dominant actor (or actors) in the system – currently the United States. The theory is argued to be universally applicable and ahistorical, and therefore unbiased and non-­partisan. However, as the product of a Western (and especially American) academic discipline and of unique conceptions of how the world works, it has

American images of China: Obama and beyond   153 long been used to promote the interests of the United States, not least in legitimising responses towards ‘rising powers’, perhaps most notably the Soviet Union. From this starting point a ‘rising China’ is automatically identified as disruptive and even threatening because it fits the category of a challenge to the current (US-­led) structures of global governance and of a problem ‘we’ must address and resolve.14 This rationalises a tendency now discernibly common in American society (and others), which is to conceive of China’s ‘rise’ in monolithic, ‘all-­ornothing’ terms. Figure 6.1 below is representative of images designed to inform us that China is an actor either intent on global domination, or at least one on course to achieve such a position. The red and the stars of the Chinese flag are superimposed onto a world seemingly destined to be monopolised by China. Typical variations of this new type of image include maps of Africa coloured in ‘China red’ as Chinese investment rapidly increases there, and depictions of the ‘China dragon’ perched menacingly atop the world. Of course, the likelihood of China attaining such extreme heights of power – which could logically only be attained through the successful and prolonged exportation of its industry, currency, political and economic ideologies, culture, language, etc. – is almost inconceivable. The nature and trajectory of China’s (albeit currently impressive) ‘rise’ will almost certainly not mimic that of the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it does not share such intimate (especially cultural and linguistic) ties with other nations and peoples through whom it can expand and advance with relative ease. The US did this via the UK, Canada, Australia/New Zealand and Western Europe, among others. China has no such luxury. Yet, vivid depictions of a monolithic, all-­conquering China such as in those advanced by Figure 6.1 now routinely go unchallenged. There are obvious weaknesses to these assumptions, however, which stem from a fundamental lack of concern for the power of identity dynamics. By way

Figure 6.1  China’s imagined global dominance (The American).

154   American images of China: Obama and beyond of illustration, and as mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, India’s military and economic resources are increasing exponentially and it shares many other key characteristics with China. It is (less commonly than China) termed a ‘rising power’ and thus collectively implicated in umbrella discourses of contemporary challenges to US hegemony, as demonstrated by the words of Panetta in November 2011.15 Yet, individually it is rarely interpreted as a problem or a threat to US security in a comparable manner to China because, among other things, its identity is more familiar and hence less ‘foreign’ and different. Consider also Australia and Canada, whose economies are growing relatively strongly. Geographically they are both very large, possess modern militaries and are spending proportions of their annual GDP on defence roughly equal to or higher than some BRICS members.16 Yet, in the West we never speak of a ‘rising Canada’ or a ‘rising Australia’, and the notion of doing so seems illogical. This is because the term ‘rising powers’ is (subconsciously or otherwise) only used to refer to non-­Western ‘rising powers’ which present challenges to established global relations of power and US/Western dominance. Regardless of their physical attributes, Canada or Australia – as members of the Western ‘in-­group’ – could axiomatically never represent external challenges to Western power because of our ideas about what they ‘are’, namely ‘one of us’. China, simply as a result of being China, is implicitly demonised in this way. The domestic and foreign policies formulated in Beijing are rarely paragons of good governance and, to reaffirm an earlier point, China should not be portrayed as a helpless victim of Western power. The actions of China, like those of all sovereign states, should not escape critical examination, not least in such arenas as the environment, freedom of the press/information and human rights. Yet in many ways China today is deemed guilty until able to prove itself innocent, especially in the context of US security concerns in the Obama era. This is not simply because China and its people are considered non-­Western, but because China’s identity is perceived as foreign in certain pertinent ways which this book has sought to demonstrate. As noted above, India shares numerable characteristics with China, including a nuclear capability, a large population and a rapidly growing economy, and yet it is rarely considered a threat to the United States. To a significant extent this is because India’s identity is identified as relatively ‘less foreign’ to that of the United States. Most importantly, India is democratic rather than communist. It is (in broad terms and especially in its international activities) English speaking. It also has strong historical ties to the West, primarily through its status as a former British colony. Principally for these reasons India is considered more familiar than China, and as such appears less threatening. Such representations of a non-­Western, ‘rising’ China have circulated widely throughout the years of the Obama presidency. During his time in office to date Obama has not steered a radically different course from that of his Republican predecessor George W. Bush, or indeed from that of Bill Clinton. American governmental rhetoric over the past two decades has very infrequently become overtly aggressive or been designed to foster the type of close relationship

American images of China: Obama and beyond   155 Washington shares with European countries or others such as South Korea and Japan. Similarly, policies have rarely lurched from one position to another in any given arena. To a significant extent this is due to the material structures of the United States’ and China’s (somewhat fragile and sensitive) relations which, as Sutter observes, are now based primarily on positive engagement and interdependence.17 Yet China ‘the rising power’ represents a key foreign policy issue for the current Obama administration, and the types of images outlined above are no less important to the implementation of contemporary political strategy than they were in the past.

Obama’s second term and the US ‘pivot’ to Asia In November 2012 Barack Obama was voted in as US president for a second term. Just as in the election of 2008, and so many of previous eras, China was not the primary topic of concern among American voters. The nation’s ongoing economic problems took particular precedence, along with other domestic and foreign issues including healthcare and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Still, the PRC maintained a notable presence in the election, not least because Washington’s China strategy was once more challenged by opposition candidates. Commonly, the types of widely accepted fears of a threatening and ‘rising’ modern-­day China explored already were reproduced by presidential challengers critical of Obama’s management of Sino-­US relations. Of particular note were the opinions of Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s ultimately unsuccessful White House nominee. In November 2011 Romney argued: China is playing by different rules. One, they are stealing intellectual property. Number two, they’re hacking into our computer systems, both government and corporate. . . . And finally, they are manipulating their currency, and by doing so, holding down the price of Chinese goods, and making sure their products are artificially low-­priced . . . I will crack down on cheaters like China.18 Republican candidate Newt Gingrich similarly declared that the US should ‘find ways to dramatically raise the pain level for the Chinese cheating, both in the hacking side, but also on the stealing and intellectual property side. I don’t think anybody today has a particularly good strategy for doing that’.19 Chinese businesses and institutions are known to engage in these practices, and because the ruling CCP enjoys almost absolute political freedom its active involvement in their formulation and advancement routinely goes unchallenged. However, equally important to note is that the accepted reality of China’s involvement in these areas is a discursively synthesised one. This reality can only exist because the United States’ complicity in arguably identical practices is allowed to occur with less scrutiny, as it is buried beneath simple yet powerful dichotomous discourses of an imagined world in which ‘cheating’ China is breaking the rules and the United States upholds them.

156   American images of China: Obama and beyond For instance, the theft of intellectual property (IP) by Chinese firms – and a widespread tendency for Chinese authorities to overlook such infringements – is well documented and widely estimated to cost American and other global firms significantly in terms of lost revenue each year. However, in December 2012 the US Chamber of Commerce identified India as the world’s weakest protector of IP.20 China ranked tenth out of eleven nations examined, but only just behind Brazil and Russia which, like India, are far less frequently discussed in this context. Chinese IP theft, therefore, is an important issue, but only one of many. Romney’s assertion that China frequently engages in ‘cyber warfare’ by hacking into US computer systems is also supported. But the United States itself is argued to be comparably active in this arena. In June 2012. for example. it was reported that, shortly after being elected as president, Barack Obama ordered a covert ‘cyber attack’ on Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme which only came to light after accidentally becoming visible on the internet.21 Further, as of 2013, and at a time of national budgetary cutbacks, the US Department of Defense will receive an extra $800 million for its Cyber Command.22 Cyber Command ‘conduct[s] full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries’.23 In 2013, after the release of classified documents by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency (NSA) was accused of spying on the delegates and heads of states of China, Russia,24 Brazil, Mexico,25 Germany, France and Spain,26 among others. The organisation was also reported to have breached privacy rules and legal frameworks thousands of times between 2011 and 2012, in its active surveillance of American and foreign citizens.27 Thus, while China is presented as a leading perpetrator of ‘cyber crime’ and espionage, the United States, almost by default, is imagined as a victim of this new and growing threat, such that its only logical course of action is to defend itself. Yet the activities of such American institutions as Cyber Command and the NSA reveal inconsistencies which work as fluidly in the modern day as ever in the consistent service of American power,28 burying contradictions in the moulding of truth and facilitating the construction of particular desired realities. Indeed, and in the case of China’s currency manipulation, in November 2012 Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argued that the irony which escapes Mitt Romney (and many others), is that here too Washington itself is now accused of the very same thing: ‘after all, one of the main benefits of the Federal Reserve’s policy of “quantitative easing” – perhaps the only channel with a significant effect on the real economy – derives from the depreciation of the US dollar’.29 In July 2011 the Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantego drew attention to government-­induced currency revaluations by both China and the United States, and criticised Washington’s policy of quantitative easing.30 Stiglitz additionally draws attention to the overlooked appreciation of the Chinese yuan in recent years,31 and argues that in any case movements in the US–China exchange rate will likely do little for the United States’ overall trade

American images of China: Obama and beyond   157 deficit. A stronger yuan, he observes, would likely simply result in American manufacturers seeking lower-­cost sites of production elsewhere.32 Fareed Zakaria reinforces this claim by observing that the US runs a trade deficit with 90 different countries, suggesting that its most fundamental problem lies with choices made by American producers and consumers.33 Therefore, it is at least worth questioning why the cause of these job losses is so commonly attributed to China. In 2003 Ron Paul contested prevailing ideas of China’s ‘rise’ by pursuing this line of argument: ‘. . . [i]nstead of debating America’s monetary policy, we are debating China’s monetary policy’, he informed the House of Representatives. ‘Therefore, China makes a good scapegoat for our economic problems’, he concluded.34 During the 2010 US mid-­term elections it was observed that at least 29 candidates on both sides of the Democrat-­Republican divide produced campaign adverts which blamed their political rivals for the loss of US jobs to China.35 One of these adverts is seen in Figure 6.2 below. It illustrates the simplistic appropriation of China as Ron Paul’s scapegoat for deep and complex American economic problems, and of its existence as an object onto which American fears can be usefully projected. Outsourcing to China and the almost inevitable replacement of American jobs is driven by Americans themselves who demand the lowest possible prices for goods and services. But US politicians cannot easily blame their electorate, and a more acceptable truth can always be devised.36 Also in 2010 Citizens Against Government Waste and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation produced a short propaganda video of a futuristic lecture theatre in Beijing in 2030. A Chinese lecturer explains to his attentive students that ‘great nations’ of the past, most recently the United States, ‘failed’ because they each ‘turn[ed] their back on the principles that made them great’. In the

Figure 6.2 China in the 2010 US mid-term elections (The Zack Space for Congress campaign).

158   American images of China: Obama and beyond case of the US, it spent and taxed too highly. ‘Of course,’ the lecturer explains, ‘we owned most of their debt . . . so now they work for us’. The lecturer and students laugh.37 As of late 2013 less than 8 per cent of the US national debt is owned by China, with the majority owned domestically by American financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Citibank.38 Nonetheless, a home-­grown American problem is once more presented as external in origin in the service of apportioning blame. Of all the possible sources of the problem, a ‘rising’ China is a phenomenon many Americans consider they should logically fear. Thus, while China may certainly be guilty of some of the crimes of which it is accused, it is one perpetrator among many, not least the United States. It remains a politically useful imaginative geography in its representation as a primary source of global problems which inflict the United States and in the reaffirmation of the US itself as the defender of what is ‘right’. This key point is typically kept absent from understandings of modern-­day Threatening/rising China, however, because it contradicts the most powerful images and understandings, or the story, of what we ‘know’. As explained in the previous chapter, twenty-­first-century China is a character in a story whose role – like that of every actor involved – is written in very particular ways. As we have seen throughout this book, the story is what provides the setting for behaviour, and today a ‘rising’ China is a principal component in allowing Obama’s ‘pivot’ strategy towards the Asia Pacific. The ‘pivot’ was announced in November 2011 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.39 Presented as a shift in overseas priorities, it is ostensibly designed to shift the focus of US foreign policy away from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which the US has long been engaged as part of its global ‘war on terror’, and towards the East Asian region. This ‘pivot’ was implemented despite widespread contractions in national economic (including defence) spending, as Obama confirmed that ‘budget reductions will not come at the expense of that critical region’.40 China is not explicitly identified as the primary motivating factor behind this strategic realignment, but, nonetheless, it is clear that the PRC is central to the Asia Pacific becoming a firmer foreign policy priority in Washington. In January 2012 Secretary of Defense Panetta isolated the Asia Pacific, along with the Middle East, as the two regions the Pentagon considers key to long-­term American interests abroad.41 Of course, the United States has long held influence in the region. As this book has already shown, John Hay’s ‘splendid little war’42 of 1898 resulted in Washington first gaining control over Spain’s Asia Pacific territories. Since the Second World War and the Korean War in particular the US has retained a significant presence in Japan, South Korea, Guam and Taiwan, as well as many other places. Today’s ‘pivot’ is unfolding in large part through the transference of further military resources to the region and the reinforcement of security ties. For instance, in November 2011 it was announced that around 200 US troops would become based in Australia, with the number expected to rise to around 2,500 by 2015.43 In August 2011 the Philippine navy acquired from the US a Hamilton Class cutter,44 and in May the following year a second was transferred.45 In April

American images of China: Obama and beyond   159 2012 Washington and Singapore agreed to intensify military training exercises, to ‘enhance interoperability and promote greater co-­operation between both armed forces’.46 The US Department of Defense also seeks closer maritime relations with Vietnam47 and has stated that increased access for US ships to Vietnam’s ports will help the US ‘achieve its objectives in the Asia Pacific’.48 In May 2012 the House of Representatives voted in favour of selling the government in Taipei 66 new fighter aircraft,49 although a trade deal has since stalled. More broadly, the proportion of overall US navy resources in the region is set to rise from 50 to 60 per cent.50 Despite the reaffirmation of security ties with many of China’s neighbours, however, it is important to note that the increasing wealth and influence of the PRC is not the sole motivating factor behind the ‘pivot’. Between 1973 and 2010 Asia as a whole doubled its share of global trade, to just over 30 per cent.51 India’s economy has grown consistently since the 1970s so that, with the inclusion of China and Japan, three of the world’s five biggest economies are Asian for the first time in centuries. Australia, Vietnam and the Philippines have also experienced broadly healthy growth rates in recent years, especially in comparison with the more stagnant economies of Europe and North America. To isolate China, then, would be to misrepresent an economically dynamic region and to ignore the broader conditions in which Washington’s ‘pivot’ is being conducted. Moreover, Washington’s renewed focus upon the Asia Pacific is not constituted by military-­security activities alone. In March 2011 the United States secured its first resident ambassador in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). That year the US also became a full member of the East Asia Summit and Hillary Clinton became the first US Secretary of State since 1955 to visit Burma. Most importantly, in broad terms the ‘pivot’ is framed by ideas – often ingrained and familiar – of what Asia, China and the United States ‘are’ and these ideas are being reproduced by the policy itself. Key is the truth that China’s increasing wealth and development, as discussed in the previous section, necessarily means that it represents a destabilising influence in global affairs and a ‘problem to be resolved’. Publicly, the Obama administration states that China’s growth is a welcome development, and yet the ‘pivot’ is a pertinent illustration of the anxieties it causes in Washington. As already noted, in 2011 former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described ‘rising powers’ as ‘challenges that we are going to have to deal with’.52 He later informed Americans that the Asia Pacific (along with the Middle East) contains ‘the greatest challenges for the future’. Because of this, he asserted, ‘the US military will increase its institutional weight and focus on enhanced presence, power projection, and deterrence in the Asia Pacific’.53 Selective, subjective images of a ‘rising’ China of which we must foremost be wary are central to the moulding of a reality in which not formulating a strategy such the ‘pivot’ becomes illogical. In the future China may become overtly aggressive towards the United States or pursue expansionist and violent foreign policies. Some argue that this is already evident towards Taiwan54 or Tibet,55 for example, or through the

160   American images of China: Obama and beyond mercantilist accumulation of the world’s natural resources.56 Yet China’s ‘guilt’ as today’s principal ‘rising’ power is an important component in the legitimisation of political performances such as those which constitute the ‘pivot’ towards the Asia Pacific. The strategy is one element of an approach which in all but name represents a (arguably continuing rather than novel) broad containment approach comparable to that exercised during the Cold War. Washington’s reaffirmation of security ties with almost every nation surrounding China, its refusal to sell military equipment to Beijing and its close relationship with Taiwan which China’s government so publicly denounces all point to an underlying desire to limit China’s regional and subsequently global influence. This is made unproblematic by discursively manufactured truths about China’s rapid development. Furthermore, those truths are, as ever, reproduced through the performance of US foreign policy, which itself still constitutes far more than a mere end point of representational practices. Leon Panetta’s identification of ‘rising powers’ and the resulting ‘challenges that we are going to have to deal with’57 is a timely reminder of the role of foreign policy discourse in the affirmation of (both China’s and the United States’) identity. To recap, at the turn of the twentieth century, as the United States’ capabilities were being applied more willingly and confidently abroad, the country was lauded from within as a newly powerful yet civilised world leader. Senator Albert Beveridge argued for the exercise of American material power in Asia to be in the service of promoting ‘American law . . . order . . . [and] civilization . . . on shores hitherto bloody and benighted’.58 More than a century later, in 2011, Secretary of State Clinton argued that the purpose of Washington’s new ‘pivot’ strategy was ‘to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values’ across the region’.59 Clinton’s announcement – which complements enduring wider rhetoric of exporting core American values abroad (seen for example in the wake of the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, during the ‘Taiwan Straits crisis’ of 1996 and in fears of the so-­called modern-­ day Beijing Consensus) – additionally reinforces the United States as Thomas Jefferson’s ‘empire for liberty’, and China as a place where that empire’s influence is still required. Contemporary US China policy is thus as active today as ever in the perpetuation of discursive separation and difference, not least between a ‘rising’ China whose communist values threaten the stability of an imagined orderly, rule-­ determined international system, and a United States whose superior values should be adopted in Beijing. As suggested by the resilience of Threatening China within American imaginations, the most historically stable constructions of that country and its people interrogated throughout this book are still very much in circulation today. Their appearance may often be disguised and they have continued to evolve, but their essential elements remain such that the logic of their existence can still commonly go unquestioned in order to be utilised in the policy foreign arena. This is the focus of the final analytical section of both this chapter and the book.

American images of China: Obama and beyond   161

The past as prologue The historical development of American images of China has been a long and complex process of evolution. Knowledges about that country and its people have been produced and modified, then marginalised and silenced at various moments, before later re-­emerging to become more influential and even dominant. In many respects, twenty-­first-century American representations of China and the Chinese are irreconcilable with those of the earliest years of Sino­US relations. It could be argued that those representations have changed for the better. China and the Chinese are no longer considered fundamentally barbarous, heathen or lacking intelligence in the ways they once were throughout the West. For the most part, societal understandings about the ‘exoticness’ of China are no longer as patronising and debates are rarely structured around ideas of racial disparity and inequality. Yet, the discourse and identity processes of the past do much to enhance our understanding of their existence today. Indeed, a central message of this book is that their legacies remain in stable and naturalised understandings about China as projections of the United States itself. Further, they provide valuable insights into how contemporary US China policies are both enabled and legitimised, and thus into the present day composition of Sino-­US relations in broad terms. As established in Chapter 2, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries China existed for many Americans as a land of myth and fascination. Idealised China was a prominent societal construction, as demonstrated by the widespread popularity of chinoiserie and the (often fanciful) stories of writers and travellers. In part, it served to also affirm the identity of the United States as more technologically enlightened and culturally superior. The Idealised China of that period no longer exists exactly as it did, not least because China today is more widely acknowledged as an increasingly developed and (in certain regions) modern and advanced society. However, it remains an enduring image to the extent that truths about China’s inherent exoticism can be reproduced and disseminated, often without controversy. In 2009, for example, a popular children’s book called The Five Chinese Brothers was republished in the United States.60 Originally written in 1938 the story is set in a rural Chinese village and describes the adventures of five siblings. Each exhibits a different mystical power, such as being impervious to fire or being able to swallow almost limitless amounts of water. Each is physically indistinguishable from the next, with yellow skin and pig-­tails (traditional ‘queues’). The fact that the fictitious brothers are Chinese is inconsequential to the story – they could be Spanish, Ugandan, Canadian or any other nationality – but rural China is purposefully selected as the context because understandings of Idealised China provide a convenient stereotype, or controlling image, for the fantasy­world they need to inhabit.61 Indeed, the re-­emergence of this book is consistent with a wider trend throughout the contemporary literature of romanticising China in traditional forms. Perhaps most notably, several volumes recently published in the United States rely upon the outmoded epithet ‘Middle Kingdom’,

162   American images of China: Obama and beyond often in the absence of any significant historical content which might serve to justify its place.62 Further, in Chapter 3 it was shown that ‘exotic’ Chinatowns were places White Americans went to be entertained, and Idealised China is still pervasive in the American entertainment industry today. Esther Kim Lee argues that modern-­ day Asian actors might be admired by White audiences, but that it is not unheard of for them to be told that they are either ‘too Asian’ or ‘not Asian enough’.63 The Hong Kong actor Bruce Lee was a pioneer of American television and cinema but remained a stereotype of a fundamentally alien people. He was famous for his skills in ancient martial arts. Indeed, this was principally why he became famous. Contemporary Asian actors such as Jet Li and Jackie Chan conform to similar assumptions, and film director Ang Lee has been criticised for perpetuating outdated Asian stereotypes in his films.64 This also shows that while overtly racist discourse of the Chinese may have diminished, Chinese in America can still easily be made foreign and viewed as fundamentally different to the White American majority. A large-­scale art exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC in 2011 was based to a significant extent upon this theme.65 In many respects imagery of Idealised China continues to reinforce traditional understandings of an anachronistic and culturally inferior China in comparison to the more modern, scientific and enlightened United States. Historically, and as this analysis has already shown, understandings of an inferior and less civilised China have worked in the service of justifying policy performances by a necessarily superior United States, such as involvement in the opium wars of the mid-­ nineteenth century to encourage the modernisation of a backward nation, and at least as recently as 1989 when sanctions were imposed on a PRC which had seemingly failed to conform to Western standards of conduct. Today, Idealised China may not circulate American society as it once did. However, the argument here is that particular images of China have long been produced and reproduced and that especially durable representations such as Idealised China display commonalities and continuities which can be clearly traced to their emergence in the earliest periods of Sino-­American relations. Thus, where Idealised China does circulate, it still reinforces stereotypes and truths of a culturally inferior China and traditional binary oppositions of what Hobson identifies as a dynamic West in comparison with an unchanging East.66 Just as Edward Said observed that Asia was deemed inferior to the West largely because it was exotic, Idealised China continues to reinforce notions of ‘cultural chauvinism’, and the relative superiority of American society.67 The assertion, of course, is not that a children’s book like The Five Chinese Brothers or the publication of books bearing the appellation ‘Middle Kingdom’ can be considered directly responsible for enactments of US foreign policy. The purpose of this analysis, to reconfirm, is not to seek lines of causality between images and policy. It is to demonstrate how circulating truths contribute to the creation of accommodating realities in which policy can occur. US influence over China has long been justified in part through understandings of the

American images of China: Obama and beyond   163 fundamental superiority of core American ideals and values and, accordingly, that China benefits from Western cultural intervention. This was implicit in the 1996 statement by the Clinton administration which declared that the United States had continuing interests in China and that the US was not ‘going anywhere’.68 The resilient policy goal of ‘deepening the roots of democracy in Asia’ is inextricably tied to implicit ideas of a culturally inferior China (and wider Asian region).69 This book has shown that, at various historical moments, the perceived inferiorities of China have lessened in American imaginations when it has appeared to conform to American values. Chinese leaders such as Sun Yat-­sen, Chiang Kai-­shek and Deng Xiaoping were lauded in the United States for representing a more Western China. Charlie Chan’s popularity was based in large part upon his Americanisation. Now, and while for many it represents a threat to US security, twenty-­first-century China, after more than three decades of reform, has to some extent become more familiar again. It has embraced a particular model of capitalist reform, partially discarding its central economic planning strategies of the Cold War and those of its dynastic, imperial heritage before that. Alastair Iain Johnston notes that China is now more integrated within, and cooperative towards, international institutions than ever before.70 Indeed, by 2000 the PRC had become a member of around fifty intergovernmental organisations.71 Thus, while post-­Tiananmen China may be understood to have become more modern and more enlightened, it is understood to have done so by becoming more like ‘us’. Any abatement of China’s imagined inferiority is therefore grounded on the understanding that the West remains inherently superior.72 In this way imagery of Idealised China as a fundamentally anachronistic and un-­Enlightened land and people still ultimately contributes towards the legitimisation of continuing (superior) American influence in the region.73 This superior/inferior binary remains additionally supported by the endurance of Uncivilised China, discourses of which also continue to regenerate and resurface. However, in the same way that discursive regulations no longer tend to accommodate the explicit classification of China as an inferior land and people, neither do they promote its representation as overtly uncivilised. The previous chapter exposed the events in Tiananmen Square as an extreme example of how Uncivilised China can still become highly prominent, but its presence has since been revealed elsewhere. It re-­emerged, for example, around the time of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.74 Labelled the ‘Genocide Olympics’, the Games attracted especially fierce criticism from (particularly Western) groups and organisations critical of Beijing’s human rights record, its tight control over the media and information and a perceived intolerance of (Western-­style) democratic reform.75 On the opening day of the Games President Bush asserted that they were a chance for China to demonstrate a commitment to ‘openness and tolerance’.76 Time magazine argued, ‘[i]t’s one thing to host the Games. The real test is learning to play by the rules of the civilized world’.77 Twenty-­first-century organisations also follow in the footsteps of those such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations discussed earlier, which sought,

164   American images of China: Obama and beyond indirectly, to promote American values in Uncivilised China. Radio Free Asia (RFA) for example is a non-­profit news service funded primarily by the Amer­ ican government. Its mandate is to provide information to Asian countries whose governments restrict their citizens’ access to the press.78 The station, launched in 1996 but with roots in the Cold War, is a manifestation of paternalistic American discourses of a China still in need of civilised Western tutelage.79 As one Amer­ ican political commentator explained, ‘Rome was great not because of its trade balance but because of its power, its culture, and its law. . .We will pursue democracy even if it hurts us economically. This is the ethos of the Radio Free Asia program’.80 Importantly, RFA demonstrates the significance of American power/knowledge of China and the centrality of ideational forces to contemporary US China policy. In 2000 the United States Code explicitly asserted that establishing a new American broadcasting service aimed at the PRC would help further disseminate ideas and information and be conducive to American policy there.81 Alongside Idealised and Uncivilised China (and as shown in the previous chapter), Threatening China circulates modern American society as the PRC’s capabilities and influence increases. Images such as I.2 in the introduction, which depicts rows of Chinese military personnel, are still used to invoke traditional anxieties of China’s supposedly limitless population. In the nineteenth century Americans feared ‘swarms’ of Chinese immigrants,82 and during the Cold War they were imagined as ‘a yellow tide’ and a ‘faceless mass’.83 The Five Chinese Brothers perpetuates these racial stereotypes of the Chinese: there are five of them, a relatively high number (in Chapter 3 it was noted that Charlie Chan has 12 children84), and the brothers are not just identical, they are identical because they are Chinese. Overtly racist American discourses of minority ethnic groups have dissipated over time, and yet the Chinese, like all non-­Whites, are still regularly objectified as foreign or alien to the White United States.85 In the past overtly racist representations of the Chinese, particularly as a potentially limitless people who could destabilise and threaten White American society, helped legitimise domestic restrictions. They were also inextricable from such policies as the establishment and maintenance of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Today, naturalised understandings of the Chinese as a mass of anonymous, homogenous people are still widespread and are even used to entertain children, perpetuating the logic they claim to advance. Discourses of Threatening China today remain significant to Washington’s commitment to defend its core values in Taiwan, and to the truth that this remains a justified policy strategy. Every year, for example, the US Department of Defense (DoD) publishes an annual report on the military capabilities of the PRC, including a dedicated section on Taiwan’s security. In 2008, during the island’s presidential elections, American aircraft carriers were deployed to the area to act as a deterrent to interference from Beijing.86 The same year, the DoD clarified its policy approach: ‘The United States supports peaceful resolution of cross-­Strait differences’ it stated, ‘. . . and opposes unilateral changes to the status quo’.87 By referring to the current situation as the status quo, the DoD performed

American images of China: Obama and beyond   165 what Fairclough calls an ‘ideological sleight of hand’ by advancing a point of view disguised as fact.88 That status quo is Washington’s traditional Two China policy, which was presented by the DoD as the natural order, or just the way things are. Such common sense American discourses are complicit within the advancement of American power, by sustaining the truth that the status quo in China remains desirable and that it can be defended with military force.89 In early 2010 the United States announced its latest major arms sale to Taiwan, against which Beijing protested,90 and, as noted earlier, in May 2012 the US House of Representatives voted to sell to Taipei 66 new fighter aircraft,91 The United States’ embargo on military sales to the PRC remains in effect today. In many ways, this performance itself continues to reproduce China as a threatening and uncivilised outsider. In 2005, for example, President George W. Bush stated that ‘there is deep concern in our country that a transfer of weapons . . . would change the balance of relations between China and Taiwan’.92 As such, the embargo reaffirms the inside/outside, good/evil dichotomy which is understood to define the relationship between the RoC and the United States on the one hand, and the PRC on the other. These are the processes which illustrate not why but how the embargo can be maintained. Once again, China’s existence as an imagined strategic other is enough to frame US China policy and ensure that it exists as a fantasised projection of American identity.93 The significance of Threatening China to American policy also extends beyond Taiwan. In the context of East Asia, for example, the 2011 DoD report on China’s military argues that Beijing’s capabilities have the potential to facilitate regional cooperation, but also to become destabilising. As such, it emphasises the importance of maintaining a presence in the region and manipulating the situation there: ‘Strengthening our military-­to-military relationship is a critical part of our strategy to shape China’s choices as we seek to capitalize on opportunities for cooperation while mitigating risks’.94 In the previous section the United States’ new ‘pivot’ strategy towards the Asia Pacific was explored, along with the discursive reality in which a ‘rising’ China exists and ensures such a policy approach can be enabled. It should be noted that today’s China ‘threat’ is yet to provoke a crisis of American identity as it has done in the past. In the late-­nineteenth and mid-­ twentieth centuries representations of the ‘threat’ were often far more hyperbolic. The realities of the dangers posed by China and its people were more acute and, as a result, the existing order was perceived as less stable and more liable to rupture. In part, this is because China has historically been less familiar to those in the West. In the nineteenth century, for example, China was something of an enigma, such that Western representations of the ‘dangers’ it presented could more readily appear convincing, be less frequently challenged and were less constrained in the production of fantasy. Throughout the early Cold War period the PRC was a new and still comparatively mysterious entity whose future intentions were poorly understood. In short, discourses of separation and difference were more effective than in the modern information age, where cross cultural contact is deeper and where China appears fundamentally less alien.

166   American images of China: Obama and beyond In addition, for many there is less incentive today to construct an immediate China threat to US security. The Cold War was a period of intense and passionate debate over how to contain and restrict communism. During the late nineteenth century Americans argued vehemently for a cessation of Chinese immigration. At both of these moments the crises served relatively well defined policy strategies which required the existence of a threat. Today, the benefits of a China ‘threat’ are perhaps less widely acknowledged. More than ever, China and the United States share complex and in many respects mutually beneficial political and economic relations which are generally managed with care. While tensions between Beijing and Washington exist, and while the China ‘threat’ is often misrepresented, the reality of danger is less useful in an era when a corresponding policy response is less immediately desirable. Despite this, and as we have seen, certain realities are still able to be created within which policies are made possible and justified, primarily for those who continue to make China’s identity foreign from that of the United States. Finally, twenty-­first-century Opportunity China additionally remains a relatively prominent and powerful construction of American design. Sino-­US trade relations are now more significant than at any point in their history, not least because China’s economy is now the second largest in the world.95 This is a crucial element of modern-­day Chinese–American relations. Nonetheless, particular ideas of which China’s economy is constituted are still inextricable from its significance to American policy. To reassert, the economic practices of states are interpretable not merely through the calculated significance of material gain, but through examination of the ideas which give those gains meaning.96 In the 1950s Washington had maintained an embargo on China despite its international trade activities expanding. The military sales embargo of the present day, examined briefly in Chapter 5, further demonstrates that while potential economic opportunities with China exist, their interpretation as opportunities is contingent upon discourse and representation. As Shaun Breslin observes, China is likely to encounter foreign (especially Western) pressure to liberalise its economy into the foreseeable future.97 Nonetheless, the boundaries of political performance are now far more accommodating of China’s membership to the imagined family of civilised nations. In 2000, for example, China was granted Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR; the equivalent of permanent MFN status) with the United States. Like Bush, Clinton revealed that Opportunity China was still an imaginative geography expected to conform to the ideals of American identity. ‘Economically’, he argued, ‘this agreement is the equivalent of a one-­way street. It requires China to open its markets . . . in unprecedented new ways’.98 In 2001 China was granted membership to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Throughout the Cold War the PRC had been marginalised from the most powerful international institutions, but this was now a possibility accepted by the regulatory processes of American discourse. The American press, for example, broadly supported China’s WTO entry: ‘The news of [the] agreement is worth celebrating’, noted the Wall Street Journal after China had been granted PNTR, establishing the basis for WTO membership. 99

American images of China: Obama and beyond   167 As ever, then, the endurance of Opportunity China stems from the expectation that it conforms to American ideals of international trade. Its significance to US China policy has always been that it works to legitimise actions aimed at facilitating this goal. This was reaffirmed in 2008 by President Bush, who asserted that ‘[t]he key to ensuring that all sides benefit is insisting that China adhere to the rules of the international economic system’.100 As noted earlier in this chapter, these rules are consistently broken. The widespread use of tariffs, trade barriers and other protectionist measures by the United States, the EU and countless other state actors illustrates the imaginary existence of these rules as building blocks of a purely fictional ‘civilised’ and orderly system. As the supposed defender of the rules and still the most powerful international actor, not least in the dissemination of information and knowledge, the United States can attribute their abuse to others for selected reasons. Once again, China may indeed be guilty of rule infractions, yet it is one perpetrator among many, and as an imaginative geography of subjective design can be an opportunity only when others – most notably the United States – deem it to be so.

Conclusion To recap, Chapter 5 interrogated societal American images of China and its people throughout the modern age. The purpose of this chapter has been to similarly explore contemporary American perceptions and interpretations of China, but with a keener focus upon the presidency of Barack Obama. It began by outlining China’s presence within the election contest of 2008. Obama’s rhetoric towards Beijing softened after securing the presidency, in further affirmation of China’s continuing existence as an imaginative geography whose identity is not simply there to see, but is discursively manufactured and controlled. It then showed that while American politicians may adopt varying positions on China as a result of their contrasting ideologies, their underlying concern is still for a country and people which to some extent constitutes a ‘problem to be resolved’. It was argued that this is inextricably tied to modern-­day representations of a ‘rising’ China which, rather than merely a description of a rapidly developing state, carries powerful connotations of a non-­Western challenger to a US-­led global status quo. The chapter then briefly examined some of the imagery of China generated by the 2012 presidential elections, and in particular that which followed traditional patterns of opposition candidates criticising US China policy and portraying the PRC in broadly negative terms. It also showed how China’s representation as a manipulator of its currency and a principal offender in the realm of ‘cyber warfare’ simultaneously confirms the United States as the defender of the rules of the international system despite it (and many other others) being guilty of identical ‘crimes’. Like so many times in the past, Amer­ ican discourse and imagery utilises inconsistency and contradiction to sustain the accepted binary opposites of a good/civilised United States in comparison with a bad/uncivilised China. The chapter explored how understandings of a ‘rising’

168   American images of China: Obama and beyond China, tied inexorably to imagery of Threatening China, are working to enable the implementation of Obama’s so-­called ‘pivot’ towards the Asia Pacific, as well as how the discourses of the ‘pivot’ itself sustain and reinforce the ideas on which it is grounded. Finally, this chapter has demonstrated how the four highly stable and enduring constructions of Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China continue to be reproduced throughout American society today. In the modern information age they co-­exist perhaps more prominently than ever. Each has evolved and modified over time but, in many ways, they retain the basic foundations upon which they were first established. Perhaps most importantly, the chapter has shown that these constructions are still actively complicit in the creation of realities in which American foreign policy towards China can be enabled and legitimised. As ever, the most powerful representations of China can be used to best explain how that policy is made possible. Moreover, they allow an interrogation of how US China policy itself serves in the production and reproduction of imagery so that China’s foreignness from the United States can be perpetually reaffirmed.

Notes    1 See Dittmer, ‘China and Obama: What Lies Ahead?’, in Hao (ed.), Sino-­American Relations, pp. 196–197.    2 Quoted in the Washington Times, ‘Editorial: China’s Alarming Arsenal’, 22 December 2008, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/22/chinas-­alarming-arsenal/, accessed 6 June 2013.    3 See Peter Cohn, ‘Clinton, Obama Both Throw Weight Behind Chinese Currency Legislation’, NationalJournal, www.nationaljournal.com/daily/clinton-­obama-both-­throwweight-­behind-chinese-­currency-legislation-­20080502, last accessed 1 June 2013.    4 See Jeffrey A. Bader, Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy (Washington DC: The Brooking’s Institution, 2012), pp. 54–61.    5 Department of the Treasury, US–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, www. treasury.gov/initiatives/Pages/china.aspx, last accessed 8 June 2013.    6 Department of State, ‘Working Toward Change in Perceptions of US Engagement Around the World’, 20 February 2009, www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/02/ 119430.htm, last accessed 14 July 2013. Clinton has, however, retained a concern with China’s human rights record which periodically reappears. See, for example, The Atlantic, ‘Hillary Clinton: Chinese System is Doomed, Leader’s on a Fool’s Errand’, 10 May 2011, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/05/hillary-­ clinton-chinese-­system-is-­doomed-leaders-­on-a-­fools-errand/238591/, last accessed 12 June 2013.    7 Said, Orientalism, p. 49.    8 Tania Branigan, ‘China’s role on world stage is no cause for alarm, says Barack Obama’, the Observer, Sunday 15 November 2009: www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2009/nov/15/obama-­japan-china-­visit    9 Peter Hays Gries and H. Michael Crowson, ‘Political Orientation and American Attitudes Towards China’ in Hao, Sino-­American Relations.   10 Robert Zoellick, ‘Whither China: From membership to responsibility’, remarks to National Committee on US–China Relations, 21 September 2005. Available online: www.cfr.org/china/whither-­china-membership-­responsibility/p8916, last accessed 17 July 2012.

American images of China: Obama and beyond   169   11 BBC, ‘Iraq War Illegal, Says Annan’, 16 September 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/world/middle_east/3661134.stm, last accessed 18 July 2013.   12 Oxfam, Rigged Rules and Double Standards – Trade, Globalisation and the Fight Against Poverty, Comments From the Commission, 17 April 2002, http://trade.ec. europa.eu/doclib/docs/2004/april/tradoc_111249.pdf, last accessed 20 July 2013.   13 Department of Defense, ‘Remarks by Secretary Panetta at Electric Boat in Groton, Conn.’, 17 November, 2011. Available online: www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4929, last accessed 10 December 2012.   14 See Turner, ‘China’s Recovery’. For the application of this idea in the context of contemporary US foreign policy towards China and the Asia Pacific see Oliver Turner, ‘The US “Pivot” to the Asia Pacific’, in Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller and Mark Ledwidge (eds), New Directions in US Foreign Policy, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2014). See also Pan, Knowledge, Desire and Power.   15 Department of Defense, ‘Remarks by Secretary Panetta’, 17 November 2011.   16 Between 2005 and 2012 Canada invested between 1.1 and 1.4 per cent of its GDP in its military. Australia invested between 1.7 and 1.9 per cent. In the same period neither South Africa nor Brazil invested more than 1.6 per cent of their annual GDP on their militaries. Mexico, which is represented in the so-­called BRICSAM group of ‘rising powers’, consistently allocates less than 1 per cent of its GDP to its military.   17 Robert G. Sutter, Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy Since the Cold War, 3rd edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), p. 151.   18 ‘Talking Points, December 18–31, 2011’, www.china.usc.edu/%28S%284v5zz245q fmxt055vepkahie%29A%288KYJJmq-zQEkAAAAZTU1OTA5OWEtZDQ1MC00ZTU1LWE2ZmYtYWUwYzNkZjNlODc1_tohJEsqG_ZR992cvt18TUA4lpg1% 29%29/ShowArticle.aspx?articleID=2639&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1   19 Anneleen Roggeman, ‘The US Presidential Candidates on Cybersecurity, 24 March 2012’, www.internationalpolicydigest.org/2012/03/24/the-­u-s-­presidential-candidates-­ on-cybersecurity/.   20 Reuters, ‘India Scores Lowest on Intellectual Property Protection-­Index’, 11 December 2012, http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/12/11/trade-­copyright-countries-­idIND EE8BA0AX20121211, last accessed 4 June 2013.   21 New York Times, ‘Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyber Attacks Against Iran’, 1 June 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-­ordered-wave-­ of-cyberattacks-­against-iran.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, accessed 4 June 2012.   22 Reuters, ‘Obama Budget Makes Cybersecurity a Growing US Priority’, www.reuters. com/article/2013/04/11/us-­usa-fiscal-­cybersecurity-idUSBRE93913S20130411, accessed 4 June 2013.   23 US Army, Cyber Command, www.arcyber.army.mil/org-­uscc.html, accessed 4 June 2013.   24 The Washington Post, ‘US Spy Agencies Mounted 231 Offensive Cyber-­Operations in 2011, Documents Show’, 31 August 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/world/ national-­security/us-­spy-agencies-­mounted-231-offensive-­cyber-operations-­in-2011documents-­show/2013/08/30/d090a6ae-119e-11e3-b4cb-fd7ce041d814_story.html? hpid=z3, accessed 30 September 2013.   25 BBC, ‘NSA “Spied on Brazil and Mexico” – Brazilian TV Report’, 2 September 2013, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­latin-america-­23929257, last accessed 30 September 2013.   26 BBC, ‘Germany’s Merkel Sends Intelligence Delegation to US’, 30 October 2013, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­us-canada-­24740284, last accessed 30 October 2013.   27 The Washington Post, ‘NSA Broke Privacy Rules Thousands of Times Per Year, Audit Finds’, 16 August 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-­ security/nsa-­broke-privacy-­rules-thousands-­of-times-­per-year-­audit-finds/2013/08/ 15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html, last accessed 30 September 2013.

170   American images of China: Obama and beyond   28 Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, pp. 168–169.   29 Joseph Stiglitz, ‘World Wants Obama to Win US Election’, Guardian, 2 November 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-­blog/2012/nov/02/world-­wants-obama­win-us-­election, accessed 6 April 2013. See also, for example, William Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari, The Strong Dollar Policy of the US: Alice-­in-Wonderland Semantics vs. Economic Reality, Citigroup Global Markets, 2 May 2011, http://econ.sciences-­po. fr/sites/default/files/file/pmartin/secondyear/SDlong.pdf.   30 World Trade Organization, World Trade News 8 July 2011, no. 2391, www. wtocenter.org.tw/SmartKMS/fileviewer?id=118541, last accessed 4 June 2013.   31 See also New York Times, ‘On China Currency, Hot Topic in Debate, Truth is More  Nuanced’, 17 October 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/world/asia/ chinas-­renminbi-has-­strengthened-during-­obamas-term.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, accessed 5 June 2013.   32 Joseph Stiglitz, ‘World Wants Obama to Win US Election’, Guardian, 2 November 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-­blog/2012/nov/02/world-­wants-obama­win-us-­election, accessed 6 April 2013.   33 Fareed Zakaria, ‘The Real Challenge from China: Its People, Not Its Currency’, Time, 7 October 2010, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2024220,00. html.   34 US Congress, Congressional Record, v.149, pt.19, 24 October 2003–4 November 2003, ‘Encouraging People’s Republic of China to fulfil commitments under international trade agreements support United States manufacturing sector, and establish monetary and financial market reforms’, p. 26771 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 2003).   35 New York Times, ‘China Emerges as a Scapegoat in Campaign Ads’, 9 October 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/us/politics/10outsource.html, accessed 6 June 2013.   36 Reinforcing the earlier discussion of China’s identity as a manufactured election tool, Zachary Space – the US politician whose election campaign team was responsible for Figure 6.2 – informed me in October 2013 that in hindsight he regretted the tone of the poster. In personal correspondence he stated that ‘China-­bashing’ seemed at the time to represent an effective means of communicating his ideas on trade policy, but with hindsight he wanted more ‘rational and effective’ methods of debate.   37 Citizens Against Government Waste and Americans for Prosperity Foundation, ‘Chinese Professor’. Available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSQozWP­rM, last accessed 1 October 2013.   38 Forbes, ‘Is China’s ownership of US debt a national security threat?’, 23 January 2013. Available online: www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/01/23/is-­chinasownership-­of-u-­s-debt-­a-national-­security-threat/, last accessed 30 October 2013.   39 Hillary Clinton, ‘America’s Pacific Century’, Foreign Policy, November 2011. Available online: www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/11/americas_pacific_ century?page=full, last accessed 24 January 2013. For a fuller examination of the ‘pivot’ see Turner, ‘The US “Pivot” to the Asia Pacific’.   40 Department of Defense (5 January, 2012), ‘Defense Strategic Guidance Briefing from the Pentagon’. Available online: www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript. aspx?transcriptid=4953, last accessed 10 December 2012.   41 Department of Defense, ‘Defense Strategic Guidance Briefing from the Pentagon’, 5 January 2012. Available online: www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx? transcriptid=4953, last accessed 10 December 2012.   42 Thayer, Life and Letters of John Hay, p. 337.   43 Department of State, ‘Obama: US–Australia Security Deal will Bring Regional Stability’, 16 November 2011. Available online: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/ english/article/2011/11/20111116115300nehpets0.2824213.html#axzz1qyKTfsG4, last accessed 12 December 2012.

American images of China: Obama and beyond   171   44 Embassy of the United States, ‘Testimony Before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade’, 7 February 2012. Available online: http://manila.usembassy.gov/security_and_trade_ties.html, last accessed 19 November 2012.   45 Embassy of the Philippines, ‘PH Navy Receives US Coast Guard Cutter Dallas’, 25 May 2012. Available online: www.philippineembassy-­usa.org/news/2572/300/ PH-­NAVY-RECEIVES-­US-COAST-­GUARD-CUTTER-­DALLAS/d,phildet/, last accessed 5 November 2012.   46 Department of Defense, ‘Joint Statement from Secretary Panetta and Singapore Minister for Defence Ng’, 4 April 2012. Available online: www.defense.gov/ releases/release.aspx?releaseid=15160, last accessed 10 December 2012.   47 Department of Defense, ‘Panetta’s Cam Ranh Bay Visit Symbolizes Growing U.S.Vietnam Ties’, 3 June 2012. Available online: www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle. aspx?id=116597, last accessed 8 November 2012.   48 Department of Defense, ‘Secretary Panetta Speaking to the Crew of USNS Byrd in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam’, 3 June 2012. Available online: www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=5050, last accessed 4 December 2012.   49 Kay Granger, ‘Granger Amendment Adopted into Defense Authorization Bill’, 18 May 2012. Available online: http://kaygranger.house.gov/press-­release/granger-­ amendment-adopted-­defense-authorization-­bill, last accessed 13 December 2012.   50 Department of Defense, ‘Remarks by Secretary Panetta at the Shangri-­La Dialogue in Singapore’, 2 June 2012. Available online: www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=5049, last accessed 11 December 2012.   51 World Trade Organization, International Trade Statistics 2010 (Geneva: World Trade Organization, 2010).   52 Department of Defense, ‘Remarks by Secretary Panetta at Electric Boat in Groton, Conn.’, 17 November 2011. Available online: www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4929, last accessed 10 December 2012.   53 Department of Defense, ‘Defense Strategic Guidance Briefing from the Pentagon’, 5 January 2012. Available online: www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?t ranscriptid=4953, last accessed 10 December 2012.   54 See, for example, Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, Death by China; John F. Copper, Consolidating Taiwan’s Democracy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America), especially chapter 1.   55 See, for example, Warren W. Smith Jr., Tibet’s Last Stand? The Tibetan Uprising of 2008 and China’s Response (Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield).   56 See Dambisa Moyo, Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What it Means For Us (London: Penguin, 2012); Sigfrido Burgos Cáceres and Sophal Ear, The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resource Quest is Shaping the World (London: Routledge, 2013).   57 Department of Defense, ‘Remarks by Secretary Panetta at Electric Boat in Groton, Conn.’, 17 November, 2011. Available online: www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4929, last accessed 10 December 2012.   58 Beveridge, Meaning of the Times, p. 43.   59 Clinton, ‘America’s Pacific Century’.   60 Claire Hutchet Bishop, The Five Chinese Brothers (Mooresville, NC: Paw Print Press, 2009).   61 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 114.   62 See, for example, Jacques, Middle Kingdom; Riccards, Middle Kingdom; Yuan Tsung-­chen, Return to the Middle Kingdom: One Family, Three Revolutionaries, and the Birth of Modern China (New York: Stirling Publishing Company, 2008); Chiara Betta, The Other Middle Kingdom: A Brief History of Muslims in China (Bloomington, IN: University of Indianapolis Press, 2004); Randall Doyle and Zhang Boshu, Modern China and the New World: The Re-­emergence of the Middle

172   American images of China: Obama and beyond

  63   64

  65   66   67   68

  69   70   71   72   73   74

  75   76

  77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85

  86   87

Kingdom in the 21st Century (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2011); Aron Patrick, The Reinstatement of the Middle Kingdom: China’s Vision for the Future of the International System (self published, 2008). Lee, Asian American Theatre, p. 24. Wei Ming Dariotis and Eileen Fung, ‘Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar: Diaspora and Displacement in the Films of Ang Lee’, in Sheldon Hsiao-­peng Lu (ed.), Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997). BBC, ‘Artists Explore the Asian American Experience’, www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-­us-canada-­14500419, last accessed 14 September 2011. Hobson, ‘Oriental West’, p. 45. Said, Orientalism; Mgbeoji, ‘The Civilised Self ’, p. 857.  William J. Clinton, ‘Press Briefing by David Johnson, Deputy White House Press Secretary and Senior Director of Public Affairs for the National Security Council’, 3 July 1996. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. Available online at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=59401. Rubinstein et al., Clinton Policy Reader, p. 116. Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Is China a Status Quo Power?’, International Security, 27:4 (2003), pp. 5–56. Ann Kent, ‘China’s International Socialisation: The Role of International Organisations’, Global Governance, 8(3) (2002), p. 345. Mgbeoji, ‘The Civilised Self ’, p. 857. Hobson, ‘Oriental West’, p. 45. See Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, ‘Dreams and Nightmares: History and US Visions of the Beijing Games’, in Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dyan (eds), Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). For an overview of this type of Western reaction to the Beijing Games, see Elizabeth C. Economy and Adam Segal, ‘China’s Olympic Nightmare: What the Games mean for Beijing’s Future’, Foreign Affairs, 87:4 (2008), pp. 47–57. George W. Bush, ‘Remarks at the Asia-­Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Summit in Sydney’, 7 September 2007. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. Available online at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=75753., last accessed 1 June 2011. Time, 24 July 2008. Radio Free Asia, ‘Mission Statement’, www.rfa.org/english/about, last accessed 16 March 2011. Richard H. Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s ‘Crusade for Freedom’: Rallying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), p. 52. Quoted in Lampton, Same Bed, p. 261. US Government, United States Code, 2000: Title 22: Foreign Relations and Intercourse (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2002), p. 1364, emphasis added. Circular, 20 November 1852. Marshall, River, p. 210; Isaacs, Scratches, p. 99. Hanke, Charlie Chan, p. 66. Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-­Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), especially chapter 1; Wendy Leo Moore, Reproducing Racism: White Space, Elite Law Schools, and Racial Inequality (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), pp. 1–4. See Cohen, America’s Response, p. 279. Department of Defense, Annual Report on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, 2002 (Washington DC: US Department of Defense, 2002), p. 40.

American images of China: Obama and beyond   173   88 Fairclough, Language and Power, p. 94.   89 Ibid., p. 92.   90 Shirley A. Kan, Taiwan: Major US Arms Sales Since 1990 (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 2010).   91 Kay Granger, ‘Granger Amendment Adopted into Defense Authorization Bill’, 18 May 2012. Available online: http://kaygranger.house.gov/press-­release/granger-­ amendment-adopted-­defense-authorization-­bill, last accessed 13 December 2012.   92 Department of State, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, George W. Bush, 2005, bk.1 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2009), p. 286.   93 Pan, ‘China Threat’, p. 314.   94 Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People’s Republic of China. 2011 (Washington DC: US Department of Defense, 2011), p. I.   95 Financial Times, 14 February 2011.   96 Audie Klotz, Norms.   97 Shaun Breslin, China and the Global Political Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 105.   98 William J. Clinton, ‘Remarks at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies’, 8 March 2000. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. Available online at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=87714, last accessed 27 June 2011.   99 The Wall Street Journal, 16 November 1999. See also The Wall Street Journal, 23 May 2000; Los Angeles Times, 12 May 2000. 100 George W. Bush, ‘Remarks in Bangkok’, 7 August 2008. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. Available online at www.presidency. ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=77812, last accessed 21 April 2011.

Conclusion

Across much of the history of Sino-­US relations Americans have known relatively little about China, regarding it as a land and people of general inconsequence. For example, John Green – the captain of the first American ship to complete the journey to Canton – left a record of the expedition entitled, ‘A Journal of an Intended Voyage on Board the Ship Empress of China, Bound from New York to Canton in India’.1 In the mid-­1960s, at the height of the Cold War, a majority of newspaper editors reported that their readers were at best mildly interested in stories about China, or interested only in ‘sensational developments’.2 As recently as the 1980s, magazines such as Time and Newsweek produced a feature story or special issue on China only occasionally.3 In the twenty-­first century this traditional indifference is becoming increasingly less widespread. However, a lack of knowledge has never been enough to preclude the continual production and reproduction of truth about the imaginative geography of China. William Faulkner once wrote that ‘[t]he past is not dead; it is not even past’.4 A central purpose of this analysis has been to demonstrate that historical American images of China are not as disconnected from those of today as they may first appear, especially within the enactment and justification of US China policy. The purpose of this book has been to examine American images, or representations, of China and the Chinese across the full lifespan of Sino-­US relations. Further, it has been to expose the significance of those representations to US foreign policy towards China, as well as the role of that policy itself within the reproduction of imagery and identity. In Chapter 2 it was established that the existing bodies of relevant literature collectively provide the intellectual foundations upon which the book rests. Yet it was also established that the authors of those literatures have left a number of especially notable silences, to which this analysis has been designed to speak. In order to address these silences three specific arguments were made: 1 2

Across the duration of Sino-US relations, powerful societal images of China have always provided truths and realities about that country and its people within the United States. American images of China have always been central to the formulation, enactment and justification of US China policy in Washington.

Conclusion   175 3

US China policy has always been active in the production and reproduction of imagery and in the reaffirmation of the identities of both China and the United States.

With regard to the first argument, in Chapter 2 it was shown that contributors to both the ‘imagery’ and ‘policy’ literatures have most commonly explored American representations of China in broadly superficial terms. Those images have been conceived primarily, or even solely, as temporally specific attitudes and opinions of given moments in response to events ‘out there’. As a result, analyses have largely been restricted to assessments of their relative positivity or negativity at given moments. This was shown to be the primary weakness of the imagery literature. With regard to the second question, and again as outlined in Chapter 2, contributors have largely failed to examine the significance of American images of China to the enactment of US China policy. Where images and policy have been interrogated, authors have almost exclusively privileged material over ideational forces so that the latter is deemed to be of either secondary or no consequence. The result is that policy has been interrogated in the absence of concern for the extent to which representational processes actively create political possibilities while precluding others.5 This was shown to be the primary weakness of the policy literature. With regard to the third question, Chapter 2 showed that US China policy has been understood to represent the observable actions, or a ‘bridge’, of one given actor towards another.6 The possibility that it functions within the production of imagery, and in the construction of China’s identity as well as that of the United States, has been almost entirely overlooked. To reaffirm, the conclusions of this book are aimed primarily – though not exclusively – at the policy literature. This is because the majority of contributors to the imagery literature (as historians, area specialists, etc.) have rarely and understandably concerned themselves with explorations of US China policy. A corresponding neglect for imagery throughout the policy literature, however, is considered a weakness in need of more urgent attention because it exposes a salient knowledge gap in how US China policies are enabled. The purpose of this final chapter is to bring together and review the principal findings of each of those which precede it. It does this by revisiting the most powerful societal images of China identified and explored, the role they have played in the advancement of US China policy over time, and the importance of that policy itself in the reproduction of imagery. Ultimately, the aim is to clarify the central messages articulated throughout the book and conclude with some final thoughts on their applicability to twenty-­first-century Sino-­US relations.

American images of China: identity, power, policy Stuart Creighton Miller argues that, throughout the nineteenth century, American images of China repeatedly fluctuated between expectation and disappointment.7

176   Conclusion Thomson and colleagues similarly observe that American hopes for improved relations with China have been repeatedly unrealised.8 ‘For the past two centuries’, observes Steven Mosher, ‘American perceptions of China have oscillated between the poles of love and hate’.9 This book has shown that, across the lifespan of Sino-­US relations, American images of China have certainly followed this type of pattern. In 1950, for example, representations shifted dramatically from that of a valuable wartime ally to that of Red China and the imminent ‘threat’ it presented to American security. In 1989 the events in Tiananmen Square transformed largely favourable perceptions of China from those of an increasingly Westernised capitalist reformer to those of a brutal dictatorship. Yet while such shifts have been examined throughout the preceding chapters, a key aim has been to demonstrate that beneath superficial fluctuations of attitudes and opinion particularly powerful images have remained far more stable and enduring. Chapter 2 explained that the focus of the existing literatures upon American perceptions of China at given moments has ensured that images have most commonly been perceived as objective interpretations of observable events. In addition, however, it was shown that authors including Chengxin Pan, Evelyn Goh, Richard Madsen and Jie Chen describe how those images have always been produced from understandings about the United States itself. In doing so, they have variously been able to highlight the relative endurance of particular representations, along with commonalities and continuities which have occurred.10 They have successfully revealed, in other words, how American images of China have never simply been observations of events and actions ‘out there’, but are always subjective interpretations of a China whose identity is subjectively perceived through an American lens, and hence are consistently products of American imaginations and identity. To refer to Fairbank’s succinct observation a final time: ‘At any given time the “truth” about China is in our heads’. As noted in the Introduction, Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan are illustrative of how especially salient American representations of China and the Chinese have been continuously reproduced over time. Today Fu Manchu is still immediately recognisable as a personification of the Yellow Peril, an image which at the time of his creation almost a century ago had already circulated American society for generations. Similarly, Charlie Chan reflects stereotypes of the Chinese as a model minority, another classification to which they had traditionally been assigned. This book has shown that four especially prominent constructions of China (among any number of potential others) have remained comparatively stable within American imaginations over time. Since their emergence and establishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China have each endured and retained the capacity for resurgence at future moments. A central contention of this book has been that the endurance of these representations is due primarily to their construction from among the most intrinsic components of American identity. From the preceding analysis it can be argued that, of these four constructions, Uncivilised China has been the most historically pervasive and frequently

Conclusion   177 recurring. Uncivilised China has always been a discursive projection of Amer­ ican understandings that it fundamentally lacks the standards of civilisation attained by the United States. It was Uncivilised China, for example, which frustrated traders and missionaries in the early nineteenth century and which was contained at the periphery of the civilised world from the beginning of the Cold War. It was also Uncivilised China which embarked upon the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s and which, for some, hosted the 2008 ‘Genocide Olympics’ in Beijing. Uncivilised China has historically emerged through interpretations of Chinese revolutionary movements, such as the Taiping rebellion, the revolution of 1911 and the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. At these moments, expectations that China should embrace Western-­style reform have been heightened. Negation strategies have worked to represent Uncivilised China as a blank slate upon which a new and more civilised entity could be written. The central importance of demonstrating the relative durability of ideas such as Uncivilised China is that it is these which have been traditionally more active within US China policy. Sino-­American relations of power have been traditionally imbalanced in favour of the latter, but not merely in terms of the United States’ material capabilities. Those capabilities have been utilised within ideational realities constructed by representations with the power to enable and legitimise actions in Washington. As the most prominent of the four constructions, Uncivilised China has been the most frequently complicit in this regard. For example, it did much to ensure that the United States – despite having being founded in reaction to imperialist and colonial practises – could justify supporting the British in the opium wars of the mid-­nineteenth century. During the Cold War Washington could marginalise a nation of roughly 600 million people while privileging the island of Taiwan, largely from the circulating truth that Uncivilised China had to be kept at the periphery of the so-­called free and civilised world. Today, the US government funds Radio Free Asia, and maintains that establishing a new broadcasting service for China would facilitate the advancement of selected information and be conducive to its policy in Asia.11 These are the processes which explain not why, but how US foreign policies towards China have been made possible, through the continual production and reproduction of truth. As established in Chapter 2, US China policy has always additionally functioned in the reproduction of imagery and identity. In the nineteenth century, for example, American demands for the right of extraterritoriality in (Uncivilised) China confirmed the latter’s legal system as less capable and sophisticated. By extension, it reaffirmed China’s location as beyond the imagined family of modern civilised nations, perpetuating the discourses of difference and separation upon which the policy itself relied. During the Cold War Washington’s containment policy towards the PRC similarly marginalised Uncivilised and Threatening China at the edge of the free world. The texts of containment, such as the Truman Doctrine and NSC  68, reproduced the ideas which had enabled them in the first place. As with more contemporary policies, including the annual

178   Conclusion renewal of China’s MFN status and Washington’s funding of Radio Free Asia, containment served in the production of imagery and in the continual reaffirmation of China’s foreignness from the necessarily more civilised United States. In such a way, the preceding chapters have sought to illustrate how American images of China and US China policy are not only inextricable, but are mutually reinforcing. Acts of American foreign policy have always advanced and imposed particular interpretations of the world and, in doing so, continually reproduced them. After Uncivilised China we can say that Threatening China has historically been the next most prominent and enduring construction across the lifespan of Sino-­US relations. In addition, this image has once again always been highly complicit within the enactment of US China policy. As an alternative imaginative geography and a socially constructed product of American discourse, Threatening China has never been explicable in pure material terms. The contemporary China ‘threat’ is based partly upon the PRC’s rapidly increasingly material capabilities, and the potential for that country to present a danger to the United States has not been refuted here. However, those capabilities are not, and have never been, viewed objectively or dispassionately. Its capabilities have always been attributed particular subjective meanings which make them threatening, and today those meanings inform many Americans that, regardless of Beijing’s cooperation and increasing engagement in international diplomacy, China’s capabilities present a danger to American security. Such truths enable and legitimise Washington’s continuing defence of Taiwan and its embargo on military sales to Beijing, and functioned within the possibility of President Obama’s new ‘pivot’ strategy towards the Asia Pacific. Each of these strategies is deemed logical and appropriate within realities accommodating of such policy approaches. To some extent Threatening China has always represented a danger to the identity of the United States.12 Yet this has been especially evident during moments of crisis, or ‘rupture’.13 One such crisis occurred when Threatening China posed a ‘danger’ to nineteenth-­century White American society through the arrival of increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants. During the Cold War Threatening (Red) China constituted a fantasised danger to the core American values of democracy and the free market. On these occasions it has been shown that American policy functioned not only to reaffirm the identities of China and the United States, but to protect the identity of the latter. In the late nineteenth century it shielded American identity through a near total ban on Chinese entering the country. The boundaries of political possibility had expanded so that such an extreme decision appeared logical and justifiable in the defence of (White) American values. In the Cold War American identity was protected through Washington’s policy of containment. The tiny proportion of the American population the Chinese represented in the nineteenth century, and the relatively modest material capabilities of early Cold War China, both provide unsatisfactory explanations of the intensity and severity of the political performances enacted. An additional interrogation of ideational forces, and of

Conclusion   179 the requirement to secure American identity from external ‘threat’, introduces a more complete and illuminating analysis. At this point it is useful to reassert that while images such as Uncivilised and Threatening China have been especially pervasive and durable, the conclusion is not that any have previously attained complete hegemony. Discursive resistance has always had the potential to be advanced and the coexistence of competing ideas has ensured that the balance of imagery has shifted and transformed over time. From 1950, for example, China was reconstructed from a valuable wartime ally to that of an aggressive and threatening polity. In the late 1960s China was re-­imagined again, through resurgent discourses of a more familiar and less antagonistic land and people. Images of China have also coexisted and overlapped. Indeed, this analysis has shown that the boundaries of Uncivilised and Threatening China in particular have repeatedly become interwoven. This was the case during the late nineteenth century, as well as during the Cold War. At these moments it was understood that to be uncivilised was also to be threatening, by virtue of the imagined foreignness of China’s identity from that of the United States. During the opium wars, Uncivilised China overlapped considerably with Opportunity China in the justification of American support for conflict. The analysis has shown that the endurance of the third most prominent construction, Opportunity China, has been primarily rooted within American ideals of free international trade and open markets.14 Just as Threatening China’s material capabilities have always been attributed particular meaning, Opportunity China has always represented a particular type of imagined opportunity. As such, it has always been more than the target of a realpolitik American desire for increased commercial relations. This was demonstrated throughout much of the nineteenth century, when China was considered a commercial opportunity despite the reluctance of the Chinese themselves to conform to Western expectations. During the early Cold War the potentialities for trade with China grew as its international commerce increased, yet it was not considered an opportunity because it was more pervasively imagined as a dangerous and uncivilised polity which had to be contained. The construction of Opportunity China, then, has traditionally enabled policy performances designed to facilitate the establishment of American conceptions of free and open trade. For example, it helped create a reality in which Washington could demand a treaty with Beijing which guaranteed American access to Chinese ports after the opium wars of the nineteenth century. Those ports had been opened by force, and so China was not an objectively observable opportunity. It was deemed an opportunity because American discourse (and that of the wider West) represented it in such a way. In the twenty-­first century China is similarly expected to adapt to particular expectations for international trade – for example, as asserted in 2008 by President Bush, who stated that China had to ‘adhere to the rules of the international economic system’.15 In turn, these policies themselves have reproduced imagery of the United States as constitutive of the values of commerce and trade it seeks to impart upon China.

180   Conclusion The last of the four key identity constructions identified in this analysis is Idealised China. To varying degrees, Idealised China has always been imagined as distant, mysterious and exotic in relation to the more rational, scientific and enlightened United States. These types of discourses circulated widely in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but also resurfaced at future moments. It has been seen that Idealised China has worked comparatively less actively than Uncivilised and Threatening China within the enactment of American foreign policy. Nonetheless, it has worked perhaps most notably to reinforce assumptions of China’s cultural inferiority and unequal status and, in this sense, has contributed strongly to ongoing assessments of the potentialities for Washington’s US China strategies. The conflation of exoticism and inferiority described by Said and others was demonstrated within the photography of Arnold Genthe, for instance, who perpetuated already powerful discourses of the Chinese in America as foreign and inassimilable.16 His Chinese were ornately dressed and the inhabitants of unfamiliar Chinatowns devoid of Western influence. The truth that Idealised China occupied a different era – and even a different world – reinforced relations of power dominated by the United States and helped enable policy accordingly. It was this type of knowledge which had helped make possible the Exclusion Act of 1882 and which worked to sustain it for many decades. Today, authors still utilise (often redundantly) the appellation ‘Middle Kingdom’, and the American entertainment industry continues to romanticise Asian culture. In this way stereotypes of an essentially anachronistic land and people which remains less scientific and enlightened than the United States are reproduced and ideas about China as an unequal are perpetuated. Ultimately, these understandings still contribute to the legitimisation of US policy performances and, in particular, to the justification of maintaining superior American influence in the region. Indeed, throughout this book it has been shown that paternalistic images of China’s inherent inferiority or unequal status have proven stable across much of the lifespan of Sino-­US relations. Crucially, they have repeatedly served in the justification of American policy. Articulated openly and powerfully during the opium wars, for example, discourses of China’s inferiority allowed Washington to demand the privilege of extraterritoriality to protect Americans in Canton with its own superior judicial system. In turn, this act of policy itself served in the  reproduction of the imagined super/inferior binary on which it rested. The implantation of Western values in China continued with the activities of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in the twentieth century. During the Cold War it was understood that American values remained superior to those of the communist PRC. Threatening and Uncivilised China endured to serve in the legitimisation of China’s containment. However, they were complemented by naturalised assumptions that such core American values as a commitment to democracy and free trade were superior to those of communism and had to be defended, as they were, and continue to be today, in Taiwan. Common sense assumptions of China’s unequal status have retained their presence even beneath ostensibly positive imagery of that country and its people.

Conclusion   181 The examination of American imagery merely as the attitudes and opinions of given moments is reconfirmed as unsatisfactory in this way. For example, after the Second World War the decision to afford comparatively less material support to China than to Europe was legitimised relatively unproblematically. Material forces were important to this policy and explain why such a policy was implemented, but the meanings attributed to those forces informed Americans that an inferior China could logically be granted less support in a way that Europe could not. As ever, material forces alone fail to adequately explain how such practices have been enabled and how other theoretically alternative policies have been disregarded. Images of China as inferior or an unequal have occasionally been destabilised. This occurred during the 1940s, for example (although, as noted above, not to the extent that it was considered a true equal), as well as during the 1970s and 1980s when it was argued that Americans could learn from Chinese society.17 At such moments representations of China have often emphasised its relative familiarity with, rather than foreignness from, the United States. This is seen in the ‘Western’ Chinese characters of 1940s UCR posters (Figure 3.5) designed to generate American sympathies. Charlie Chan embraced American culture and defended law and order, but these were not unconnected traits: each reinforced and complemented the other. Chinese ‘modernisers’ such as Hong Xiuquan, Sun Yat-­sen, Chiang Kai-­shek and Deng Xiaoping were each applauded for their apparent efforts to Westernise China. A profusion of imagery of a more familiar China has historically worked to justify closer and more intimate ties, as it did in the 1940s, 1970s and 1980s, for example. Conversely, imagery which has exaggerated the Asian appearance of Chinese, such as the hyper-­stereotypical Fu Manchu (Figure 3.1), has worked in the opposite manner. As ever, this is not to suggest a relationship of cause and effect, but rather the construction of accommodating realities in which policies could occur. Today, China is imagined in many respects to be less unequal than before. To a significant extent, however, this is because it is once again perceived to have at least partially embraced the values of the West. After instigating capitalist reform and integrating more into the structures of global governance, China is understood to have become less unequal by becoming more like ‘us’, ultimately reaffirming the inherent superiority of the United States and the wider West.18 Up until the mid to late twentieth century images of China’s inferiority were regularly expressed through overtly racist sentiment. The argument here has not been that American society has ever been uniquely racist or xenophobic towards non-­White peoples. It is that race, as a political category, has traditionally represented among the most powerful sites of identity construction from which China and the Chinese have been produced, in relation to an imagined Caucasian United States. Indeed, in the modern era overtly racist American discourses of China and its people have broadly diminished. Nonetheless, it has been shown that the Chinese remain classified as a fundamentally different people. This is illustrated by the popularity of Chinese television and film characters on the

182   Conclusion basis of their ‘Chineseness’, and in what we might term covertly racist forms such as those advanced by The Five Chinese Brothers or the contemporary re-­ emergence of Fu Manchu.19 The significance of race was especially evident throughout the nineteenth century and was used most emphatically within the passage and continued maintenance of the Chinese Exclusion Act, along with the myriad domestic restrictions upon the immigrant Chinese population. Thus, race has been a powerful site from which the Chinese have been made foreign from the United States. As one component of the boundary-­producing performances of representation, racial images have at certain moments been key to framing the contours of American policy. A central aim of this analysis, then, has been to demonstrate that societal American discourses of difference and separation have made China foreign from the United States across the entire history of Sino-­US relations. Images of China have often been advanced with a discernible agenda, such as when ideas about a nineteenth-­century China ‘threat’ were promoted by those in favour of restrictions against Chinese immigration, and when Cold War propaganda depicted ‘Red’ China in threatening terms to support a communist containment policy. Thus, representations of a threatening China, for example, have most commonly been advanced by those whose interests lie in supporting actions to defend that identity. At other times images have been perpetuated almost unconsciously in line with Edward Said’s notion of Latent Orientalism, whereby individuals and institutions have ‘come late’ to naturalised imagery accepted as ‘fact’, reproducing its apparently sound logic. A key intention has been to reveal how American images and policies in the modern day are intimately tied to those of the often distant past. When Norman Fairclough argues that discourses can shift quickly and yet also remain highly durable, he affirms the potential for American representations of China to endure beneath superficial changes in perceptions.20 This has been a central argument of the preceding chapters. Evolutions of American understandings about China have often been epochs in the making. New generations have come late to images of an inferior and an Uncivilised China, among many others, absorbing and reproducing their logic. Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan today are still instantly recognisable to many in the West, and while they may now be unfashionable, both continue to advance familiar and naturalised assumptions. Figure I.2, for example, shows how the Yellow Peril, or Threatening China, in a modified form, still circulates with the same purpose as before. This type of analysis has been conspicuously absent throughout the relevant literatures. Importantly, such a core observation has the potential to transcend the immediate frames of this book. Certain ideas about the world endure. They are perpetuated and reinforced almost unconsciously and establish truths from which governmental policies are made possible. As such, the international relations of all states are, to varying degrees, inevitably shaped in part by the endurance of particularly pervasive discourses and representations and the power they hold to enable and legitimise political practice.

Conclusion   183 Importantly, however, this book has also shown that the most durable constructions of China have not been static nor impervious to change. The ‘sanguinary barbarism’ of Uncivilised China once observed by Caleb Cushing, for example, is no longer widely described in the way that it once was.21 Each has evolved and adapted to new circumstances across the centuries of Sino-­American relations, but has remained essentially stable to the extent that imagistic shifts have occurred within knowable boundaries. As demonstrated in Chapters 5 and 6 in particular, the underlying expectation that China conforms to Western standards of civilisation, for example, remains implicit and assumed today. The stability and endurance of any image of China serves to demonstrate how American discourses of that country and its people have always been contained and controlled. Societal rules of discursive regulation have ensured that only selected ideas about China and its people have circulated to become established and naturalised, while others have been discarded and silenced. In the mid to late nineteenth century, for example, Anson Burlingame supported China in its affairs with the West, but still considered unproblematic the ‘unequal treaties’ which governed their relations. In doing so, Burlingame demonstrated that even friends of China could reproduce common sense assumptions of an inherently inferior land and people, exposing the capacity of rules of exclusion to govern the flow of ideas. Later, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, calls for Washington to re-­establish closer diplomatic relations with Beijing were disregarded. In the 1980s the circulation of concerns about China’s human rights record was tightly restricted and contained.22 In sum, historical and contemporary American images of China should not merely be conceived in relatively superficial terms as the attitudes and opinions of isolated time periods. Nor have they represented neutral or objective observations of a China ‘out there’. They have always been subjectively produced from understandings about American identity and the United States itself and, as a result, have displayed commonalities and continuities across the entire lifespan of Sino-­US relations. Certain images have remained stable and have retained the capacity for resurgence (and even dominance) at future moments. These images have been especially significant to the enactment and justification of Washington’s China policies. By shifting and modifying the boundaries of political possibility, they have worked to create the necessary realities within which certain actions towards China have been enabled and legitimised while the potentiality of others has been disregarded or precluded. Finally, US China policy itself has never represented a mere ‘bridge’ between pre-­existing states. It has been actively complicit within the production and reproduction of imagery, reaffirming the identity of China as well as that of the United States and protecting the latter when seemingly threatened by the former. As the twenty-­first century progresses China’s ability to exert influence in a multitude of international arenas will almost certainly continue to increase. For the foreseeable future the perception of China as a rival to the United States, particularly in economic and military terms, will also likely become more entrenched throughout American society and the wider West. These developments are

184   Conclusion already central to the advancement of US foreign policy, and do much to explain the key motivations behind decisions made in Washington. Yet, as this book has shown, what China does and what China is have always been subjective understandings, and so assessments of its material capabilities – and those of the United States – will only ever be part of the story. The Sino-­US relations of the Obama presidency are to a significant extent being steered by the kinds of interpretations, discourses and images so frequently overlooked as peripheral and less consequential than the ‘big issues’. ‘Guns and money’23 are of undoubted significance, but that significance is fundamentally and invariably constituted by ideas – some far more historically durable than is often appreciated – which are anything but inconsequential. This less tangible and less conveniently measurable realm of power, and its centrality to the contours of US–China relations, has been the principal concern of this book. As those relations become ever more salient to the functioning of global affairs the intention must be for representational processes to become the focus of more concerted attention. Only in this way can the contours of the relationship between the United States and China be more satisfactorily interrogated, so that historical episodes we wish not to be repeated might be avoided in the future, and so that the relationship can progress along peaceful and productive lines.

Notes   1 See Smith, Empress of China, p. 78, emphasis added.   2 Steele, American People, pp. 166–167.   3 Wasserstrom, Brave New World, p. xvii.   4 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 91.   5 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 4.   6 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 61.   7 Miller, Unwelcome Immigrant, p. 203.   8 Thomson et al., Sentimental Imperialists, p. 308.   9 Mosher, China Misperceived, p. 214. 10 See in particular Madsen, American Dream; Chen, Ideology. 11 US Government, United States Code, 2000, p. 1364. 12 Ashley, ‘Border Lines’, p. 304. 13 Doty, Imperial Encounters, p. 13. 14 As noted in Chapter 3, during the nineteenth century in particular Opportunity China was also imagined by missionaries as a land of potentially limitless converts. 15 Woolley and Peters, Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=77812, last accessed 21 April 2011. 16 See, for example, Said, Orientalism; Hobson, ‘Oriental West’, p. 45. 17 Mosher, China Misperceived, chapter 7. 18 Mgbeoji, ‘The Civilised Self ’, p. 857. 19 Maynard, Terror; Bishop, Five Chinese Brothers. 20 Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, p. 124. 21 Quoted in Dennett, Americans, p. 164. 22 Mosher, China Misperceived, p. 195; Harding, Fragile Relationship, pp. 169–172. 23 Christian Reus-­Smit (ed.), The Politics of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 2.

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Online resources Woolley, John T. and Peters, Gerhard, The American Presidency Project (online), www. presidency.ucsb.edu.

Index

Page numbers in bold denote figures. 1911 revolution 69–71, 103 art: production of imagery 11, 24, 162; source of data 11; see also chinoiserie Asia: US policy 46, 65–6, 68, 85–6, 103, 158–60 Beijing Consensus 135–7 Boxer Rebellion 66, 67, 68, 69, 152 BRICS 152, 154 Buck, Pearl 11, 80 Burlingame, Anson 50, 52 Burlingame Treaty 52–3 Campbell, David 24, 28, 29; see also foreign policy: as discursive performance Chan, Charlie 1, 2, 50, 70, 78–9, 80–1, 94 China see Republic of China; People’s Republic of China; inferior/unequal China; Idealised China; Opportunity China; Threatening China; Uncivilised China; rising China Chinatown: and power 67; San Francisco 2, 67 China threat: literature 20–2, 134–5; see also Threatening China Chinese: character, perceptions of 45, 52, 69; hordes/as ‘faceless mass’ 3, 47, 98, 100, 101, 111–12; physically inferior 47, 84 Chinese civil war 85–7, 96 Chinese Communist Party 104, 121, 141; see also Chinese civil war; Kuomintang/ nationalists chinoiserie 11, 41, 43 civilisation: and China see Uncivilised

China: constituted by ideas/US identity; value-laden concept 42, 86 classification, strategy of 27, 51, 68, 163 Cold War: discursive construction 96, 109 (see also communism: threat to US identity; containment, US policy of); NSC-68 common sense 26, 27–8, 45, 132, 165 communism: threat to US identity 4, 96–8, 99, 102–3, 130–1 containment, US policy of 96, 97–8, 100–2, 105, 113, 160, 177–8 crisis see identity: crisis of cyber warfare 155–6 danger see threat, social construction of democracy: perceptions of in China 84, 127–8, 129; and US identity see United States: democratic-capitalist identity; see also Taiwan: construction from ideas/US identity discourse: control/regulation of 26–7, 50, 55, 86, 104–6, 125, 129, 135, 140; and foreign policy see images/imagery: importance to US China policy; and imagery 24; inconsistencies in 64–5, 107, 138, 156, 167; naturalisation of 26, 28, 32; and power 27; see also images/ imagery; resistance, strategy of Doty, Roxanne Lynn 14n10, 28 exceptionalism, American 26, 45, 101, 123, 125–6, 129, 137; Chinese 44 extraterritoriality 48, 49, 73, 84 Fairbank, John King xi, 17, 22–3, 63, 86, 101

212   Index First World War 71 Ford Foundation 123, 163–4 foreign policy: as discursive performance 28, 29; and image production see US China policy: and (re)production of imagery/identity Foucault, Michel: discourse 24, 26; and power see discourse: and power; power/ knowledge: Foucault free world 94, 97, 100, 101, 102, 133, 137; see also international system, China in Genthe, Arnold 67, 122–3 Gramsci, Antonio see organic intellectuals Great Leap Forward 104–5 Harding, Harry 19, 100, 130, 131 ‘how’ questions: importance/purpose of 3–5, 7, 23–4, 28–9; in the comparable literature 21–2; and US China policy 46–7, 56, 65, 102, 124, 132, 165 human rights 125, 132, 150, 151, 163 Idealised China: abatement of 67, 106; constitutive of ideas/US identity 6, 24–5, 67, 161–3, 180; emergence/ re-emergence of 24–5, 41–2, 110, 161–3; endurance of 6, 24–5, 180; inferiority of 44–5, 162; see also inferior/unequal China; as entertainment 44–5, 48–9, 67; in the literature 161–2; resistance discourse 67; and US China policy 47–9, 68, 162–3 ideas see ideational forces ideational forces: in the literature 17–22; inextricability from material forces 3–5, 8, 22–3, 27–8, 30 identity: crisis of 30, 55, 56, 58, 98, 165; dangers to 30; self/other 24; see also exceptionalism: American; separation/ difference; United States: democraticcapitalist identity images/imagery: controlling 27, 97, 121, 161; and discourse see discourse: and imagery; dissemination of 9–11; endurance of 5–6, 24–5, 32; evolution of 27; overlaps of 27, 47–8, 52, 67, 73, 102; synonymous with representation 24; temporary positive/negative attitudes 5, 17–1, 70, 73, 84, 95, 130, 175–6; and US China policy 3–5, 7–8, 23, 28–9, 32, 177; visual 24; see also literature: ‘imagery’; public opinion; reality: discursive/subjective nature of

imaginative geography: concept of 1, 2, 23; China as 40, 41, 50–1, 73, 105, 109, 131, 150; United States as 68, 107 immigration, Chinese to US: beginnings of 51, 54; ideological restrictions on 98; racial restrictions on 51, 55–7, 64, 78, 84; media response to 51, 52, 54–5; perceived threat from 54–7 imperialism: legitimised through imagery 47, 68; modern day 133; and race 29; and US identity 3–4, 46–7; and US foreign policy 65–6, 96 India: identity in West 133, 152, 154, 156; relations with China 107 inferior/unequal China: cultural/ technological 25–6, 44–5, 48, 49, 68, 162–3; to democratic/capitalist US 6–7, 29, 50, 69–71, 125; evolution of 27; as non-Western 25–6, 50; racial 7, 29, 51–2, 54, 56, 85; religious 44–5, 49–50; resistance to 70, 82, 84, 110, 123, 163; and US foreign policy 29, 49, 53, 67–72, 73, 84–7, 125, 133 international community see international system, China in International Relations, discipline of: importance of imagery in 2–3; images and US China policy in 21–4 International system, China in 148, 151–2 Iriye, Akira 17–18, 65 Isaacs, Harold 17–18, 80, 98, 100 Japan: conflict with China 74, 80–2; relations with China 71–2; threat to US 74, 76, 78 Japanese: immigration to US 78; character, perceptions of 82 Kai-shek, Chiang 81, 84, 86, 87, 95, 104, 122 Korea, North 24, 95, 138, 148 Korea, South 103, 148, 155, 158 Korean War 95–6, 97, 100, 102–3, 104, 158 Kuomintang/nationalists 81, 86 Lattimore, Owen 104 League of Nations 72, 81 literature: ‘imagery’ 17–19, 31; ‘policy’ 19–22, 31; source of data 10; production of imagery 11 logic of explanation 23 logic of interpretation 23 Luce, Henry 72, 84; see also Time magazine

Index   213 Manchu, Fu 1, 2, 5, 74–5, 77–9, 82, 94 material forces: in the literature 17–22, 32; regulation by ideas see ideational forces: inextricability from material forces McCarthy, Joseph 104 media: journalistic 10; mass 10; production of imagery 10; simplification of China 2; source of data 10 Middle Kingdom: concept of 42; in contemporary literature 161–2, 171n62 missionaries: to China 44, 50, 56; David Abeel 44, 45–6, 49 model minority 1, 52, 70, 80 Most Favoured Nation (MFN) 132–3, 166, 178 Nationalists, Chinese see Kuomintang; see also Kai-shek, Chiang negation, strategy of 26, 45–6, 71, 126 Nine Power Treaty 72 NSC-68, 97, 103, 177 Obama, Barack: construction of China by 150; China and 2008 election 149; China and 2012 election objectivity, and images of China 6, 23, 141, 152, 183 Olympics 120, 149, 163 Open Door 66–7, 68, 72–3 opium: trade 46; wars 3–4, 46–8, 49, 50, 125, 152 Opportunity China: abatement of 106; constitutive of ideas/US identity 6, 24–5, 48, 65–6, 73, 106, 123–4, 166–7; emergence/re-emergence of 24–5, 41–2, 105; endurance of 6, 24–5, 179; religious 44; reproduction through US China policy 68, 73; and US China policy 48–9, 65–6, 72–3, 123–4, 166–7 organic intellectuals: importance of 9; and image production 9, 28 Orientalism see Said, Edward: Orientalism Paris Peace Conference 71–2 paternalism 26, 66, 70, 80, 82, 102, 123, 164 People’s Republic of China: diplomatic relations with US 95, 106, 108–12, 121–3, 124–6; establishment of 86, 95; welfare spending 140–1; see also Taiwan: diplomatic relations with US; Two China policy Philippines 65, 103, 158–9

Pivot, US to Asia 158–60, 178 Plan Dog Memorandum 84–5 postcolonialism 23, 26 power: challenges to see resistance, strategy of; and ideas 28; in International Relations 23, 27, 28; and knowledge see power/knowledge power/knowledge: concept of 27–8; and images of China 42, 48, 71, 87, 97, 125, 132 public opinion, US: of China/Chinese 82, 107, 110–11, 121, 125, 130; in literature 18, 20–1 race: and American identity 7, 25; and China as inferior see inferior/unequal China: racial; political category 25, 53; and internal colonialism 25, 67; and US China policy 7, 29, 54–7; see also racism racism: abatement of 125; Chinese 44; ‘scientific’ 51–2 Radio Free Asia 164, 177 rapprochement, Sino-US 108–12 Reagan, Ronald 124, 126, 137 realism, IR 21, 152–3 reality: discursive/subjective nature of 1, 22–3, 24–5, 27; relationship to US China policy 3–5, 21; see also truth religion: see inferior/unequal China: religious; missionaries representation see images/imagery Republic of China: after 1949 see Taiwan; establishment of 69; diplomatic relations with US 69–71 resistance, strategy of 26–7 rising China: in the literature 20, 134; as problem to resolve 136, 148, 152–3, 154–5, 157–60; resistance to notion of 157; and US China policy see Pivot, US to Asia; see also Threatening China Rockefeller Foundation 82, 123 Said, Edward 1, 9, 49, 66, 105, 162; Orientalism 23, 25, 28, 84, 105 Second World War 81, 84, 85 security see threat, social construction of; US China policy: protecting American identity separation/difference: concept of 24, 28–9, 33; and US China policy 28, 51, 56, 65, 87, 182 Smedley, Agnes 104 Snow, Edgar 104

214   Index Social Constructivism 23 Soviet Union: relations with China 95, 108–9; relations with US 126 South East Asia Treaty Organisation 103, 133 Steele, A.T. 17, 18 Taiping rebellion 49–50, 69, 103, 129, 177; see also Xiuquan, Hong Taiwan: constitutive of ideas/US identity 94, 100–2, 113, 125, 137–8, 164–5; diplomatic relations with US 95, 100, 124; see also Kuomintang/nationalists threat, social construction of 30 Threatening China: abatement of 109, 121; and American women 74–6, 77; constituted by ideas/US identity 24–5, 55, 78–80, 95–102, 107–8, 133–41, 157–8, 164; emergence of 24–5, 51–7; endurance of 6, 24–5, 178; in the literature 20, 134; and political ideology 150–1; political usefulness of 30, 139, 157–8, 166; and popular culture 74, 99, 101; racial 54–7, 74, 164; reproduction through US China policy 56, 97, 160, 165, 177–8; resistance to 52, 53, 56, 79–80, 104, 135; and US China policy 55–7, 96–102, 137–41, 164–6; see also Chinese: hordes/as ‘faceless mass’; Manchu, Fu; rising China Tiananmen Square 127–31, 138 Tibet 107, 132, 139, 159 Time magazine: importance of 72, 84, 85; Chinese People of the Year 84, 126 trade, US-China: beginnings of 41–4; importance of ideas in 48; opium see opium: trade; see also Opportunity China; World Trade Organization Treaty of Wanghia 48 Truman, Harry 86, 87, 96–7, 102–3; see also Truman Doctrine Truman Doctrine 97, 102 truth: and discourse/imagery of China 1–2, 5, 22–3, 24; dissemination of see images/imagery: dissemination of; and power/US China policy 7, 27–30 Two China policy 95, 101, 102, 124–5, 165

Uncivilised China: abatement of 109–10; constituted by ideas/US identity 24–5, 42–4, 45, 47, 52–3, 102–3, 129, 163–4; emergence of 24–5, 42–5; endurance of 6, 24–5, 176–7; reproduction through US China policy 49, 68, 73, 87, 97, 165, 177–8; resistance to 52, 53, 82, 83, 104; and US China policy 47–9, 55–7, 66, 71, 85–7, 103, 130–3, 137; see also international system, China in unequal treaties 50, 52–3, 66, 73, 84, 132; see also Burlingame Treaty; extraterritoriality; Nine Power Treaty; Treaty of Wanghia United China Relief 82, 83, 122 United Nations 103, 110, 111, 151 United States: democratic-capitalist identity 6–7, 25, 98, 101–3, 107–8, 112–13, 129, 137; and reproduction of identity through China policy 49, 87, 125–6, 137, 177–8; see also exceptionalism: American; race: and American identity US China policy: and (re)production of imagery/identity 8, 29–30; and protection of American identity 8–9, 30, 33, 55–7, 78, 97–100, 113, 125, 138 Uyghurs 139 Washington Consensus see Beijing Consensus Wendt, Alexander 23, 30, 96 ‘why’ questions: importance/purpose of see ‘how’ questions: importance/ purpose of; in the literature 19, 21; and US China policy 46–7, 73, 85, 100, 106, 124, 132 Wilson, Woodrow 71–2 World Trade Organization 166 Xiaoping, Deng 121, 122, 123, 126, 163 Xiuquan, Hong 49–50, 69, 122; see also Taiping rebellion Yat-sen, Sun 69–70, 71, 122, 163 Yellow Peril 1, 74, 80, 182 Zedong, Mao 95, 104–5, 107, 108, 111, 112, 121