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206 Notes to pages 149–151 Duke University Press journal, Positions, under the editorship of Tani Barlow, has done much to develop the same sort of interests, deepening the applicability of Western critical categories and systems to Asian and Chinese realities. See, for example, Tani Barlow’s edited volume, “Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution,” 13.1. 2. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations have supported the journal Diplomatic History since 1976, but recently have added cultural materials to inflect their own discourses. See, for example, Joan Huff, “American Diplomacy from a Postmodern Perspective,” 33.3 (2009): 512–6. 3. Andy Xie, “If China Loses Faith the Dollar Will Collapse,” The Financial Times (May 4, 2009), http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f842dec-38d8-11de-8cfe-00144feabdc0. html?nclick_check=1 (accessed May 16, 2009). 4. See the informative and challenging book by The New Yorker writer Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). 5. The State is not a subject and we should not attempt to interpret it psychologically or in any way that suggests it is available for analysis and description in terms derived from theories of subjectivity. Those who approach the state in this way are guilty of anthropocentrism and commit the same faults as those who anthropomorphize a divinity. In essence, such an error is metaphysical and at worst magical thinking that substitutes its own discursive fantasies for the hard details of state operations. Scholars of the weak US state, with its divisions of government, and its highly regionalized and fragmented economic interests , especially within large capital formations, should especially understand the inapplicability of subject-based theories to thinking about the state. For an understanding of the basic errors involved in such anthropomorphism, see David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998). 6. “The Opening to China Part I: the First Opium War, the United States, and the Treaty of Wangxia, 1839–1844,” Timeline of U. S. Diplomatic History, produced by the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/dwe/82011.htm (accessed May 16, 2009). 7. See, for example, David Gedalecia, “Letters from the Middle Kingdom: The Origins of American’s China Policy,” Prologue Magazine, 34.4 (Winter 2002). Prologue is a publication of the US State Department. 8. Implicit in my discussion and in the State Department’s history stands an important fact that I cannot treat in this space. In a way that Henry Adams later theorizes in his letters on China and John Hay, we come to see that the Europeans, especially the British, operated to impose on China a form of international and internal order parallel to that established by the Treaty of Westphalia. Just as China and Russia were themselves outside this order by virtue of what Europeans would call “under-development,” so America was outside it, Notes to pages 151–163 207 self-defined as uniquely exceptional it could not understand itself nor act on itself as a Westphalian state. 9. “The Burlingame-Seward Treaty, 1868,” at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/ gp/82013.htm (accessed May 19, 2009). 10. Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, Vol. 3 (New York: Gordian Press, 1969; printed in 1908 but not published), 139f. These volumes were edited by Henry Adams but redacted by Hay’s widow. Adams’s name does not appear. 11. Cf. “Henry Adams and the ‘American System,’” translated in Hindi as “Henry Adams O Markini Byabosthya,” Abobhash 3.2 (July–September 2003). 12. Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). 13. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 1077. 14. ———, 1077. 15. ———, 1020. 16. ———, 1120–1. 17. ———, 1121. 18. ———, 1121. 19. Letters of John Hay, 153. 20. ———, 171. 21. ———, 192–3. 22. ———, 142–3. 23. ———, 195. 24. Adams, 1077. 25. ———, 1078. 26. ———, 1078. 27. ———, 1078. 28. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (New York: Dover Publications, 1987; originally published in 1894). 29. H. J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” a paper presented in 1904 to the Royal Geographical Society, meeting in London. For a record of the meeting, see The National Geographic Magazine 15 (1904), especially pages 331ff. 30. Mackinder, quoted in The National Geographic, 331. 31. ———, 332. 32. ———, 334. 33. ———, 333. 34. ———, 333...

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