Apostles of Modernity: American Writers in the Age of Development

4. Sinophilia: China and the Writers

 I am appalled and oppressed by the discovery that American people are almost totally ignorant of China, nor have they any great desire to learn more about this ancient and mighty nation who will and must affect our own nation and people in the future more than any other. —Pearl S. Buck, China Past and Present (1972) What had China been? Yearning, one needful commingled entity looking towards the West, its great democratic President, Chiang Kai-shek, who had led the Chinese people through the years of war, now into the years of peace, into the Decade of Rebuilding. But for China it was not a rebuilding, for that almost supernaturally vast flat land had never been built, lay still slumbering in the ancient dream. Arousing; yes, the entity, the giant, had to partake at last of full consciousness ,had to waken into the modern world with its jet airplanes and atomic power, its autobahns and factories, and medicines. And from whence would come the crack of thunder which would rouse the giant? Chiang had known that, even during the struggle to defeat Japan. It would come from the United States. And, by 1950, American technicians and engineers,teachers,doctors,agronomists, swarming like some new life form into each province.1 Sinophilia China and the Writers 4 82  Sinophilia In Philip Dick’s alternate postwar history, The Man in the High Castle (1962), the Germans and Japanese have triumphed. The United States has been divided into three parts, between the victors and a remaining rump state in the Midwest. An underground novelist writes a counterhistory of the period, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, from which the above quotation is taken, where he imagines the triumph of the Allies over the Nazis and, in a further twist, the Chinese nationalists’ victory under Chiang Kai-shek rather than Mao’s triumph and the “loss of China.” Dick’s imagined China is one typical U.S. vision of that country : China as a huge market, modernized under American commercial tutelage. The imagined nationalist victory, and the resulting flood of American technicians,is a good example of Dick’s ability to identify the culture’s subliminal preoccupations. Elsewhere, Dick’s fiction features representations of another China, an avenging militaristic state that will eventually become a nemesis.2 But it is this image, a counterfantasy where Chinese patriots have Americanized their entire nation, that typifies one major twentieth-century representation of the Asian Other: the dream of China as a vast project for Western modernization. These two Chinas—the market and the nemesis—circulate through postwar culture, engendering a constellation of representations in fiction , memoir, and political journalism.3 To this day, as even a cursory survey of foreign policy writing amply demonstrates, the dialectic has a central significance to commentary on the United States’s place in the globe. Joseph Nye Jr. argues that China’s “high annual growth rate of 8 to 9 percent led to a remarkable tripling of its gnp in the last two decades of the twentieth century.”4 Here is China as market. However, “it is hardly inevitable that China will be a threat to American interests, but the United States is much more likely to go to war with China than it is with any other major power.”5 China might, then, become a nemesis . There are deep historical roots to these representations. Frank Ninkovich sees the relationship with China as a distinctive blend of an American form of empire (so-called “treaty port imperialism”) with an urge toward the modernization of preindustrial cultures: “China was a prime site for testing the American yearning to modernize preindustrial societies while promoting great power cooperation.”6 China be- Sinophilia  83 came a focus for the American ideology of development. “With God’s help,” stated Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska in 1940, “we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.”7 A century of missionary activity in China by America evangelists had left its trace on Nebraska. As James Thomson and his fellow Sinologists demonstrate in their essential history of American engagement with East Asia,the long-term trajectory of thinking about China compounded missionary fervor and an expansionist version of Manifest Destiny. This “sentimental imperialism ” arose from a sense that American civilization’s historical significance would be marked by Westward expansion across the American continent, into the Paci...