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3 China Magic When I was a grade school kid back in the early 1950s, I couldn’t understand how one country—even a country as important as my own—could just make another—one of the biggest and most populated in the world, not to mention one of the most culturally rich and ancient—simply vanish from the earth. But that is basically what we did with China, starting in 1948 and 1949, and then carrying on for what now seems a nearly impossible twenty-five more years. It was a great geopolitical magic act—to this day, perhaps, the most astounding in our history, and with consequences as yet to be reckoned. For someone coming of age during those years, it was all very confusing . As every American schoolchild was taught, Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, championing democracy over the imperialists and the warlords, had bequeathed his work to Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists ; they in turn, while striving against Mao Tse-tung and the Communists , had fought against the Japanese to sustain and preserve democratic China as the great World War II member of the victorious Allies and to make possible its emergence as the representative Asian power in the postwar Big Four. Suddenly, from around 1950 onward, everything was Formosa, with the name itself an index of the shabby, neocolonialism of the political fiction being instituted—an abridgment of the sixteenth-century Portuguese Ilha Formosa, or “beautiful island.” (As late as the Vietnam War, it was still being thus listed as an R&R destination. Only in the 1970s did 50 / Chapter 3 “Taiwan” gain official currency.) Along with the names of offshore islands such as Quemoy and Matsu, intermittently shelled during the 1950s by mainland communist artillery, the word quickly became a touchstone of cold war–era current events reference in Asia. Everyone was comforted when the mighty U.S. Seventh Fleet threatened retaliation. Meanwhile new instruction was given to the effect that Taipei was the capital of the real China, not “Peking.” It was that China, the one now called Nationalist China, and not the communist one, which had been awarded United Nations charter membership in 1945, as well as a permanent seat with veto power on the Security Council. Somehow, it followed, as of November 8, 1949, it was that China, along with all the good anticommunist Chinese people and their leader Chiang Kai-shek, which had been magically translated to this new place called Formosa. By mid-1950, Time magazine could adoringly describe a resolute, unbowed “Gimo,” as he was still being called, short for his wartime title of “Generalissimo,” proclaiming the mainland a Soviet Russian client state in revolution against lawful government. Never mind that for a full twenty-five years before that—including all of World War II—the Chinese nation itself had consisted, if at all, largely of a Chinese civil war pitting the Kuomintang/Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists of Mao Tse-tung for control of the mainland, interspersed with sporadic but largely ineffective resistance to Japanese invaders occupying vast swaths of the country and population. Never mind that Formosa for the fifty years preceding the defeat of Japan had not been Chinese at all but a Japanese-occupied island fortress, or for centuries before that had been considered by the indigenous Taiwanese as a nation independent of China itself. Never mind that the new “nation” created overnight amounted to barely 2 million exiles superadded to a native population of 6 million, descended from aboriginal Malay-Polynesians, as opposed to the nearly 500 million mainland Chinese somehow erased from existence. To the tune of a half-billion souls, all the bad people had simply gone someplace where no one even had to pretend they existed. The geopolitical sleight of hand that willed into nonexistence Albania—the tiniest and most intransigent of post1945 Communist nations of Europe—was likewise practiced on vast, teeming China. China became Albania. China Magic / 51 As perplexing, in retrospect, was the degree to which all these developments furthermore required the erasure of a whole apparatus of golden-age American popular sinophilia that for the decades preceding had seemed so completely omnipresent in the mass-culture media. Unloaded , as if it were an attic full of worn-out trunks and suitcases with queer travel stickers and customs declarations, was a whole cultural baggage : the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mythology of a vast, striving, mighty China, democratic and Christian...

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