Made in China: How Ideas About China Have Defined America

Depending on President Trump's fidelity to his campaign promises, U.S.-Chinese relations could be headed for a major recalibration. After more than four decades of slow but upward growth in the relationship, the United States might be returning to the days when its economic policies flowed from, rather than belied, anti-Chinese rhetoric. This chilling combination of right-wing nationalism with a confrontational foreign policy necessitates now, more than ever, a deeper understanding of America's history with China. Gordon Chang's Fateful Ties: A History of America's Preoccupation with China and Terry Lautz's John Birch: A Life should be essential reading for anyone concerned about the nexus of radical conservative thought and U.S.-China policy.

With Fateful Ties, Gordon Chang delivers what is arguably the most important book on the history of U.S.-Chinese relations since Michael Hunt's seminal The Making of a Special Relationship, first published in 1983. While many of Hunt's central findings still inform Chang's overarching narrative, because of its longer timespan (Hunt's book ended in 1914), Fateful Ties represents the most authoritative survey on U.S.-Chinese relations to date. Moreover, while not rejecting the sense of paternalism that Hunt identified as key to America's approach to China, Chang's view is a little softer and more empathetic. Although the "growth, prosperity, protection, and stature of America in the world" was almost always on their minds, many of the central figures in Chang's book also exhibit genuine interest in the welfare of China (p. 261). More importantly still, and whatever the intentions, Chang argues that, since the colonial period, Americans consistently "perceived China as a critical element in their fate and thus in their history" (p. 4).

One of the major strengths of the book is Chang's methodology. To make sense of China's place in the American psyche, he elevates important and often colorful individuals—some well known to this history, others less so—to investigate the contours of what Chang calls America's "preoccupation" with China. In the Revolutionary Era, for instance, Chang notes how Benjamin Franklin, "the first, but not last, of America's Sinophiles," along with other leading figures like Thomas Jefferson, Ezra Stiles, and Thomas Paine, "formed a reservoir of positive feelings [towards China] that long endured in American life and legend" (pp. 24, 29). Franklin even predicted that symbols or characters like Chinese hanzi would one day replace the English alphabet.

By the nineteenth century, U.S. trade interests in China were becoming almost as fantastical and determinative as Europe's. Although the gunboats that triggered China's "Century of Humiliation" with the First Opium War (1839–41) were British, Chang argues that Americans also used war to enhance their country's position vis-à-vis China. "The desire to acquire the port of San Francisco and the West Coast," he writes, "inspired expansionists such as President James K. Polk to wage a predatory war on Mexico and seize its northern territories" (p. 43). Chang even quotes Polk highlighting "commerce with China" in the midst of the U.S.–Mexican war. Polk—the only president known to have bought and sold slaves while in office—was, of course, more compelled to attack Mexico for the benefit of American cotton, not to mention the dream of continental dominion, than for synching up the distance between the United States and China. But the fact that China entered into the discourse at all is interesting, and it reflects the attitudes of other nineteenth-century Americans, including one of the visionaries behind the transcontinental railroad: Asa Whitney, who believed America's development should always be aimed in China's direction.

The importance of China to Americans only grew after the Civil War. Chang's analysis of U...