Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 314 pp. US$32.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-05039-6.
In his most recent book on US-China relations, Gordon H. Chang presents how generations of Americans perceived and interacted with China. Believing that China was a nation with strong implications for the destiny of the United States, these Americans actively engaged in Chinese affairs and by doing so actually made China part of the US national experience.
Chang states in the introduction to his book that Fateful Ties “speaks to those beyond China specialists” (8). He has done well in achieving this goal. Carefully crafted and smoothly written, the book is rich in details, which Chang successfully brought together to create a mosaic that is at once colourful and revealing. Featured in Chang’s tale are Americans of diverse backgrounds, whose lives intersected Chinese history. Some of these Americans are high-profile figures, but their involvements with China are not as well known. Patriarchs bearing names that later became easily recognizable in the US—Astor, Cabot, Lowell, Russell, Peabody, and Forbes—championed the Old China Trade that was as old as the United States itself. George Washington, until a friend corrected him, long assumed that the Chinese were a white people. W.E.B. Du Bois, the eminent African-American scholar, visited China in 1959 when he was ninety-one years old. As the guest of Chairman Mao Zedong, he composed a long poem, “I Sing to China,” to celebrate the liberation of an oppressed people. Carl Crow, journalist and businessman in China, brought with him his best-selling book 400 Million Customers in 1937, which made a notable episode in America’s continuous endeavour to crack that famous but ever elusive market of China.
Chang’s narrative begins with America’s colonial era in the late eighteenth century, when pioneering American merchants started the trans-Pacific trade with China, exchanging furs, ginseng, and the infamous opium for Chinese tea. In the nineteenth century, two conflicting trends dominated US-China relations. On one hand, numerous dedicated missionaries journeyed to China to bring the Chinese into Christendom. On the other hand, Chinese labourers who came to work in America encountered open discrimination, which culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Entering the twentieth century, China and the US developed a greater sense of solidarity, partly because of Japan’s imperialist expansion in East Asia. Many Americans advocated support for China as a way to help America. Philosopher John Dewey, for his part, very much hoped that his pragmatic philosophy would assist the Chinese in their struggle to solve many of their difficult problems. Along with John Dewey, Chang introduces quite a few other Americans who during this period tried to influence the newly created Republic of China with the American Way, and one additional figure that could have been included in the book is Frank J. Goodnow, the renowned legal scholar who for three years served as a constitutional advisor to President Yuan Shikai, and who, in an ironic turn of events, seemed to have endorsed Yuan in his ultimately disastrous scheme for an imperial restoration.
To the bitter disappointment of many Americans, events in China did not turn out as they expected. The Chinese Communists, taking advantage of domestic strife and Japanese invasion, rallied the vast masses of Chinese peasants and fought their way to power in China. Chang depicts how, as all this took place, concerned Americans such as Franklin Roosevelt, Patrick Hurley, General Joseph Stilwell, journalist Edgar Snow, and Times magazine owner Henry Luce argued over the course to follow but in the end were unable to prevent the “loss of China.” Ideological differences and conflicts of national interests would freeze US-China relations for over twenty years. But, as Chang demonstrates, even during this period of virtual separation, interesting undercurrents flowed beneath the surface. Years before he became US president, Richard Nixon confided that one day he would travel to China, and he dismissed Chiang Kaishek, the Chinese Nationalist leader whom he publicly supported, as “a small man” only capable of “running a small island” (222). It is also here that Chang takes care to report on some African-American leaders’ associations with Communist China, a subject often overlooked in the context of US-China relations.
In the chapter that deals with the most recent period of US-China relations, Chang highlights the contradicting views of China held by Americans. For some Americans, China’s recent economic success means that the long-awaited modernization of China is finally materializing, and this offers a great opportunity for the United States to continue its westward movement. For some other Americans, however, China’s rise poses a threat. As Chang points out, such conflicting views have their historical origins, and that’s the way the Americans are currently carrying on their reflection and debate on China and on their own nation.
At one point in his book, Chang acknowledges that Fateful Ties represents views expressed by leading Americans, namely Americans who have left behind written records. Historians work with sources, and the lack of records certainly makes it difficult to reconstruct average men’s opinions, especially in projects that cover periods extending far back and investigate topics that are foreign in nature. Despite this, Fateful Ties makes excellent reading for readers who are generally interested in US-China relations and for specialists who are looking for a well-written text on American views of China from early times to the present era.
Given the intended readership of the book, it may be helpful to mention here the difference between Gordon H. Chang and Gordon G. Chang. The former, author of the book under current review, is a university professor; the latter is a lawyer by training who works as a commentator on US-China relations for various media outlets. In the afterword to Fateful Ties Gordon H. Chang writes about the history of his family and himself in the United States, which in itself is part of the US-China relations that he examines.
Jing Li
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA
pp. 878-880