Foreign trade in moral visions

China’s Tiananmen Square massacre, Richard Madsen argues, “troubled Americans far out of proportion to its direct cost in human suffering. . . . The tragedy in China was so upsetting for many Americans because it contradicted widely cherished American understandings about the meanings of their democratic values—it challenged common interpretations of the American Dream” (xvi). China has indeed had an almost unique capacity to receive our projections of the American Dream. Rooted, I think, in deeper, older western imaginings of China, this capacity has a specifically American history which is Madsen’s subject. He wants to show us how much our talk of China is also talk about ourselves, how much of ourselves we invest in certain visions of China, and how these shape and often distort the China we discover in our travels, our international politics and trade, and our mass media.

For Americans, China has all but defined the exotic “Other,” and defined it as simultaneously beautifully alluring and “sitting in darkness and the shadow of death,” as the daily prayer book of the Maryknoll Fathers put it in the 1960s (30). This was as true in the early years of missionaries and opium traders as in the present time of crushed democracy movements and fantasies of untapped market potential. In the other direction, though China encountered the west first in other guises, America has come to constitute the paradigmatic example of the wealth, power, progress, and danger that inform Chinese fascination with the “modern.” Each country figures powerfully in the other’s dreams. Converting China to a capitalist democracy would constitute the greatest imaginable international validation of the American Dream. Gaining the economic and technical might of America without succumbing to her real or imagined spiritual weaknesses has long been the dominant aspiration of Chinese elites (and many non-elites). If Americans seek to make over China in our image, the Chinese wrestle with whether they can have the advantages they see in American life without giving up Chinese identity. Throughout the twentieth century, the two countries have understood and misunderstood each other through lenses shaped by these intersecting dreams.

Though Richard Madsen’s title suggests an emphasis on one direction of this trade in dreams, his book in fact explores both sides of the troubled mutual fascination. Madsen shows how missionary zeal motivated not only Christians but also secular prophets of modernization and the American way of life. He shows how this background of understanding China as potential object of conversion shaped the massive interest and momentous misunderstandings of the great encounters between Nixon and Mao, and the whole story of the “opening” of China. In and after 1989, for example, “the whole story of Tiananmen was framed in a way that confirmed rather than challenged common assumptions” (26). Likewise, Madsen shows the power exerted in China by ideas such as science and democracy, and images of an America defined by wealth and personal freedom. From the first Chinese students sent to study in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century to those whose experiences in the 1980s informed eventual student rebellion, there was an unequal trade in ideas and moral visions. But there was also a continuous process of remaking imported ideas into indigenous Chinese ones.

This is not to say that throughout the modern era the Chinese have enjoyed the easy self-confidence that has—at least until recently—been a hallmark of Americans. Arriving on the modern world stage was a shock for the world’s oldest and once-richest country. It took substantial redefinition to think of the “middle kingdom” as one nation among many, and at least formally equivalent to the others. It was enormously painful to discover that China was all but powerless to resist invasions. Discovering at once barbarians of unexpected technological ingenuity and corruption in the whole Chinese imperial system, Chinese intellectuals suffered a crisis of cultural confidence from which they have not yet recovered. As one Chinese intellectual told a 1989 academic conference that...