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1 Statesmen, Scholars, and the Men in the Street, 1900–1949 On New Year’s Eve 1900, Liang Qichao—thirty years old and already a prominent Chinese scholar and political activist of his time—was aboard a ship sailing across the Pacific to North America. Too excited to sleep, Liang stayed up that night and composed a long, passionate poem to mark the his‑ toric moment that he was experiencing: “At the turn of the century / astride the East and West.”1 Reflecting on the rise and fall of various civilizations around the world in the past, Liang hailed the dawn of a new epoch, the Pacific Century. The new era, as Liang saw it, was full of potential and grave danger for his motherland, China, which, as an ailing empire, was struggling for survival and renewal. Eagerly, Liang anticipated his upcoming visit of the United States, “a wondrous republic” as he put it, so that he could “study her learning, inspect her polity, and behold her dazzling brilliance.”2 In his outburst of enthusiasm for the United States of America, Liang Qichao exemplified a keen interest shared by many Chinese at the time. Deeply troubled by a severe national survival crisis that China had experienced ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, these Chinese recognized the urgent need for changes. The Western Powers, armed with modern technology, had repeatedly defeated the once‑proud Chinese empire and were poised to carve up the ancient land as their colonies. Anxiously the Chinese looked abroad for secrets of national success and, from early on in their quest, a young republic sitting on the other side of the Pacific Ocean drew their attention. The United States, so extraordinarily different from China, was thriving splendidly. Not surprisingly, therefore, Liang Qichao, a perceptive scholar and an idealistic statesman recently exiled from China for his reformist efforts, had high hopes for his upcoming tour of America. Fifty years later, the Chinese admiration and enthusiasm for America so typical of Liang and his generation would have all but evaporated, replaced by scorn and hostility. By then, the Chinese Nationalist government led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai‑shek (Jiang Jieshi), which the U.S. strongly 11 12 / China’s America supported, had just lost a war to Communist rebels. The People’s Republic of China thus created would soon confront the United States in a war on the Korean peninsula. These larger historical events alone would have been suf‑ ficient to turn warm feelings into bitter antagonism. Still, evidence indicates that the seeds of hostility had been sown long before the sharp downturn in Sino‑American relations in the late 1940s. During the half‑century between Liang Qichao’s first visit to the United States and Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s famous farewell to U.S. Ambassador Leighton Stuart, the Chinese nation had heatedly debated the proper understanding and assessment of the United States—what kind of a country it was, and what lessons China might or might not learn from it. This was far from a leisurely discussion, because the argument had everything to do with what the Chinese people wanted to make of their own country. The Chinese debate on America during this period thus gives us more than a hint of how the Chinese would contemplate the United States in the coming decades. I Liang Qichao did not actually reach North America on his 1900 voyage. As it happened, upon arrival in Hawaii, he received news that some of his fel‑ low reformers back in China would stage an uprising against the ruling Qing Dynasty. Two years before this time, in 1898, Liang and some progressive Chinese had pushed a reform movement to modernize China. That earlier endeavor had the backing of the young emperor then, Guangxu, but it was hated by many of the old guard in the government, who were led by the emperor’s ultra‑conservative aunt, Cixi. The dominant Empress Dowager put up with the idealistic reformers for about three months before she decided to crack down. She put the young emperor under house arrest and executed six of Liang’s colleagues. The Hundred‑Day Reform ended abruptly. Liang himself managed to flee abroad and that was when he set out for America. From Hawaii Liang hurried home, only to find out that the new plot against the Empress Dowager was yet another false start. No sooner had he returned to China than the news came that the Qing court...

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