Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2014. xiii, 332 pp. (Illustrations.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-05253-6.
Untimely deaths punctuate Xu Guoqi’s engagingly written “shared history” of Chinese and American attempts to cooperate toward China’s self-strengthening and modernization. Anson Burlingame succumbed to illness while touring Europe as China’s representative seeking more favourable treaty terms; several students in the Chinese Educational Mission passed away before returning home; Ge Kunhua, the first Chinese native hired to teach the language at Harvard, died from pneumonia only three years into his posting; uremia claimed Yuan Shikai before he could expand presidential powers as advised by the constitutional law advisor Frank Goodnow.
Apart from Yung Wing’s Chinese Educational Mission and John Dewey, the individuals and projects featured in Chinese and Americans have previously received little scholarly attention. Echoing Prasenjit Duara’s interventions in Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 1997), they seem not to have contributed to the dominant turns taken in China’s unruly recent history. Xu argues that the many abrupt starts and stops in China’s long quest for self-strengthening via Westernization have obscured but not necessarily rendered inconsequential those efforts that produced few short-term outcomes. He suggests persuasively that the fraught image of Western domination, poor communications, and Chinese corruption and incompetence that has tended to characterize this era should be leavened with consideration of these carefully developed and mutually constituted efforts toward integrating China into the circle of modern nations. A striking example is the scrupulous attention brought by both Ge Kunhua and his advocate Francis Knight to the selection of textbooks and adapting of pedagogical approaches for Ge’s pioneering efforts to teach Chinese to Americans in the United States.
Chinese and Americans is perhaps most expressive in conveying the dedication, talents, and creative adaptability of Qing dynasty and Republican Chinese leaders such as Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Prince Gong, Sun Jiagu, Wu Tingfang, Tang Shaoyi, Cai Tinggan, and Hu Shi in seeking purchase in a world dominated by militaristic powers who operated by vastly different rules. They proactively sought support and advice from Americans and other foreigners whom they had identified as well-qualified and sympathetic to China, and hired not a few, including Anson Burlingame, who negotiated on China’s behalf the first equal treaty since the First Opium War. This unprecedented gain in status for China reflected Burlingame’s conviction, unfortunately then shared by too few other Americans, that China must be allowed and encouraged to develop into a sovereign, independent nation. The Qing funded the Chinese Educational Mission, as described most authoritatively by Edward Rhoads in Stepping Forth into the World: The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States, 1872–81 (University of Hong Kong Press, 2011), under the access to public military schools secured in this agreement. Within a scant dozen years, however, the White House and US Congress moved to renegotiate the treaty terms so that the United States could restrict the immigration of Chinese, reflecting a majority view that a strong America should press its advantages over a weak China.
Even the efforts of liberals such as Goodnow and Dewey to facilitate China’s modernization were motivated in part by the goal of spreading American influence. This self-interest and overconfidence has on frequent occasions blinded Americans in their dealings with Chinese by limiting capacities to discern and comprehend how the intense forces of nationalism and self-determination moved China away from US influence and toward communism.
Xu argues that “despite giving a general impression of isolation and stagnation, Chinese civilization was not bankrupt, nor was ‘China’ or ‘Chinese culture’ at a dead end; it only needed to work out a way forward in a very different world system.” As Goodnow concluded, this required a dominant, centralized authority and not necessarily a republican form of government poorly directed by a mass of population as yet unprepared to meaningfully cast votes. China had to wait until “a nationalist revolution . . . concentrated the power by which a Chinese nation could develop internally and protect itself internationally” (260–261). Communist successes justify Xu’s final substantive chapter surveying sports as a site of mutual endeavour and subsumed nationalist competition, but also as a vehicle to strengthen international alliances. The “ping pong” diplomacy of 1972 warmed the chill of the Cold War, followed by unified action in Olympic boycotts targeting the Soviet Union during the 1980s which affirmed China’s common cause with America. Forty years of economic integration logically culminated in Beijing’s triumphant hosting of the Games in 2008 with a dazzling display of cutting-edge technology and wealth that emphatically proclaimed China’s return as a major world power.
Although selective in its narration of the past 150 years of entwined history, Chinese and Americans recalls key conjunctures of amity and cooperation during times of even the greatest misunderstanding and conflict, endowing hope in personal friendships when political negotiations fail to find a way to move forward.
Madeline Y. Hsu
The University of Texas, Austin, USA
pp. 415-417