Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century ed. by Joanne Miyang Cho and David M. Crowe (review)

Since the 1990s, historians have deliberated on the transnational as an essential category of analysis, on the one hand tracking the transformative movement of ideas, people, and objects across national borders, and on the other hand renouncing the ethnocentrism of liberal historiography. Drawing upon concepts such as diaspora, translation, and circulation in cultural studies, they have illuminated how the modern world has undergone both synchronization and fragmentation as two sides of globalization in its broadest sense. Germany and China is a rich book that extends this transnational approach to Asian-German studies in general and to the study of Sino-German relations in particular.

Illustrative of the methodological diversity in transnationalism, the fourteen chapters and editors’ introduction move from Germany to China, and vice versa, without setting up a cohesive—and thus limiting—paradigm. Each essay lays out a network of border-crossing subjects, either fictional or historical, whose conception of China is intricately related to a broader history of international relations, economic transactions, and transcultural mediations. To provide readers with some form of order, though, Joanne Cho and David Crowe present the essays in three chronological parts: “Between Sinophilia and Sinophobia: The Eighteenth Century to World War I,” “The Uncertain Partnership: China and Germany, 1918–1945,” and “Sino-German Relations after 1945.”

Peter Park’s essay “Leibniz and Wolff on China” revisits an array of scholarly publications on these early Enlightenment thinkers to document how their celebration of Confucianism owes much to the writing of contemporary Jesuit missionaries. “Equality without Freedom” by Nicholas Germana examines family as an essential principle with which Hegel differentiates the monarchical government of ancient China from the communal state of modern Prussia while responding to the growing interest in Orientalism around 1800. Martin Rosenstock’s essay, titled “Writing for the China Mission,” focuses on the controversial missionary Karl Gützlaff to tell a striking story of Christian evangelism, tireless self-promotion, and moral complicity during the First Opium War. David Crowe offers a detailed account of diplomatic relations between Wilhelmine Germany and the Qing court, the emphasis being on the prominent role German military officers play in the modernization of Chinese armed forces prior to the Boxer Rebellion and the violent colonization of Qingdao by German soldiers. The aim of Lydia Gerber’s, “Mediating Medicine,” is to recount the fascinating, yet elusive story of Li Benjing, whose training in Western medicine through the Weimar Mission near Qingdao made possible an unusual cooperation between Germans and Chinese in caring for the local population during military occupation.

The coauthored chapter by Christine Swanson and David Crowe outlines a new phase in Sino-German relations during the interwar years. By investigating international arms trade and Chinese military organization, they examine the close connections between these countries after the Treaty of Versailles. In her chapter “From Berlin to Chongqing,” Shellen Wu concentrates on the brief, yet influential history of a wartime journal, Warring States Policies, to tease out how discussing the works of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche allows some Chinese intellectuals to reflect on their country’s geopolitical position in the world without being subject to domestic censorship. Whereas the preceding chapters are mostly historical in analysis, Volker Wehdeking’s “Weimar and the Advent of the Third Reich in the Writings of Hermann Hesse” sheds light on the writer’s representation of Buddhist and Daoist motifs in Siddhartha and Das Glasperlenspiel as a way to oppose National Socialism during “inner emigration.” In “The Privileged Place of China in Albert Schweitzer’s Politics of Civilization,” Joanne Cho picks up the controversial notion of civilization to interrogate how arguably the most famous humanitarian missionary of the twentieth century places the Chinese above Africans in a profoundly problematic, yet widely accepted hierarchy of world cultures. She also explains his privileging of Confucianism over Hinduism—in fact, over the Christian ideal of neighborly love—as...