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Summary
Summary
A remarkable history of the two-centuries-old relationship between the United States and China, from the Revolutionary War to the present day
From the clipper ships that ventured to Canton hauling cargos of American ginseng to swap Chinese tea, to the US warships facing off against China's growing navy in the South China Sea, from the Yankee missionaries who brought Christianity and education to China, to the Chinese who built the American West, the United States and China have always been dramatically intertwined. For more than two centuries, American and Chinese statesmen, merchants, missionaries, and adventurers, men and women, have profoundly influenced the fate of these nations. While we tend to think of America's ties with China as starting in 1972 with the visit of President Richard Nixon to China, the patterns -- rapturous enchantment followed by angry disillusionment -- were set in motion hundreds of years earlier.
Drawing on personal letters, diaries, memoirs, government documents, and contemporary news reports, John Pomfret reconstructs the surprising, tragic, and marvelous ways Americans and Chinese have engaged with one another through the centuries. A fascinating and thrilling account, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom is also an indispensable book for understanding the most important -- and often the most perplexing -- relationship between any two countries in the world.
Author Notes
John Pomfret served as a correspondent for the Washington Post for two decades, covering wars, revolutions, and China. He is the author of the acclaimed book Chinese Lessons, and has won awards for his reporting on Asia, including the Osborne Elliot Prize. He holds a BA and MA from Stanford University and was one of the first American students to go to China after relations were normalized. Pomfret was expelled from China after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Most recently, he was a Fulbright senior scholar in Beijing.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Perkins does not try to dramatize one or another event, plays no vocal games with humor or irony, and makes no effort to distinguish the voices of the innumerable Chinese and American players in this history of U.S.-China relations from the 18th century to the Obama administration. The book is strongest when focusing on America's contributions to China, but Pomfret gives China some credit for cooperative periods and blames both countries for the recurring love-hate pattern in their relationship over the centuries. Reader Perkins offers a clear, well-paced, and perfectly serviceable rendering of Pomfret's comprehensive book. A Holt hardcover. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Pomfret (Chinese Lessons, 2006) offers a panoramic view of U.S.-Chinese interactions, emphasizing both constant motion and consistent mutual dependence. His narrative begins in 1776, and from the start, we see two nations infatuated with each other: the Chinese, seeing an ally against European influence, and the Americans, seeing the possibility of vast fortunes selling products to the vast Chinese market. But high hopes led to disappointments, resentment, and mistrust. Though Chinese workers built much of the infrastructure of the American West, discrimination and racism prevailed. Even though China was a crucial ally in WWII, diplomatic relations remained frosty. Pomfret's narrative stands out for his exploring not just political and diplomatic but also cultural aspects of the relationship, as missionaries and merchants import American arts into China, and China begins to feature more prominently in American film, literature, cuisine, spirituality, and innovation. If a pattern emerges, suggests Pomfret, it may be something like the Buddhist notion of reincarnation: a cycle of highs and lows; moments of enchantment and disgust; a long history filled with new beginnings.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
donald trump (or his next secretary of state) would be well advised to read this timely and comprehensively informative book, since no foreign topic will engage the 45th president more acutely than the currently fast-fraying relationship between the United States and the People's Republic of China. The coming trouble - if trouble it is to be - will be confusing, alarming, protracted and full of subtleties. This weighty history by a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, while not offering itself as a vade mecum for dealing with the slow-gathering storm, provides an exhaustive collection of names, dates and historical markers to show just how we reached this place, the jumping-off point for the coming decades of what men of menace like to term "interesting times." The underlying thesis of Pomfret's account is quite simple: that the United States and China are locked "in an entangling embrace that neither can quit" and that this mutual dependence is "vital to the fate of the world." The embrace's entanglement is demonstrated by way of all too many examples - from the mid-19th-century American envoy Anson Burlingame to World War Il's Gen. Joseph Stilwell, from Pearl Buck to Henry Luce, Henry Kissinger to the American table tennis team, Richard Nixon to the accused spy Wen Ho Lee. It is shown to be an acquaintanceship of bewildering complexity and capriciousness, with periods of adoration interrupted by decades of suspicion, loathing and fear. What only Chinese writers seem properly to comprehend - and which goes largely unmentioned here - is the inherent imbalance of the relationship: that while America has been intimately involved with China for the entirety of this country's independent existence, China's roughly 250-year awareness of America amounts (once you recall that a sovereign Chinese state has been around for thousands of years) to a paltry few percent of China's own time on the planet. Simple arithmetic alone, then, gives China ample reason to feel a sense of haughty condescension toward the newmade state on the far side of the Pacific. Time and again, through periods both good and bad, a patronizing tone reveals itself: America is a barbarian nation, crude in its ways and shortsighted in its thinking, unable by its own immaturity to deal properly and fully with the wisest, most ancient nation ever known. Whenever a volume like Pomfret's thuds onto my study table, I flip to the bibliography to look for a citation of one Western book that I have long thought properly explores this deeply contextual aspect of Chinese thinking: Alain Peyrefitte's "The Immobile Empire," first published in Paris in 1989. That it does not appear on Pomfret's reading list is, I think, instructive, since Peyrefitte offers a perspective on China that might have made Pomfret's very good and important book even more valuable. Peyrefitte, a writer who was then researching much the same East-West relationship as Pomfret (though focused on the end of the 18th century and in connection with Britain alone), was granted unprecedented access to the imperial archives in Beijing. There he found a trove of private papers from the Emperor Qianlong, and within these files discovered notations in vermilion ink that had been written by no less than the Son of Heaven himself. With remarkable candor, the emperor showed just what he thought of the noblemen George III had sent out to China in hopes of spawning a friendship between what were then, at least in Britain's eyes, the world's two greatest nations. And it is clear the emperor thought precious little of them. His notes displayed a brutal condescension toward the visitors and an absolute, unwavering certainty of the superiority of Chinese civilization. What policy makers in America now need to grasp - and what isn't fully illustrated in this new book - is that little has changed today. There remains a deep-seated disdain among all too many Chinese toward upstart Westerners who crave the approval and affection of today's rulers of the People's Republic. Full acceptance that the relationship between China and America is now "vital to the fate of the world" has come rather late to Washington. Only during Barack Obama's presidency has it seemed necessary to begin to tilt, or to pivot, or to rebalance, toward the Pacific (the semantic uncertainty mirroring the hesitancy of the policy). And yet even now the policy still hasn't properly taken root: The distractions posed by the imbroglio in the Middle East have directed all too much muscle, money and mind away from what, in global terms, truly matters. Which is why it is so important for the next administration to become fully aware of what Washington faces from Beijing, since time is now running rather short. That's because the two and a half centuries of entanglement between America and China are about to reach their denouement. By 2049, a crucially symbolic date on the Chinese calendar that marks the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic, Beijing intends two things: to have recovered in full all the territory it lost during the long centuries of what it considers insulting foreign interference and to assert itself in and across the Pacific Ocean to the precise degree its duty and destiny now demand. Both aims are well on their way to realization. Almost all territory once held by foreigners is now back in the fold: after Ports Arthur and Edward, after Manchuria, after Shandong and Hainan, after Hong Kong and Macau, all that remains outside is the great island of Taiwan. And so far as the Pacific more generally is concerned, the South China Sea is now close to being under Chinese control. The three so-called "island chains" that serve to protect China's eastern shores, which extend, in some interpretations, as far out as Hawaii, will soon be dominated by an ever-enlarging Chinese Navy, shortly to be bigger and more powerful than anything the United States may be able to muster or afford. BEIJING'S INTENTIONS ARE certain to collide with what Washington has regarded as its own regional obligations. To avoid conflict, the diplomatic demands on both countries will be prodigious - so any knowledge gained during the past two and a half centuries by both sides, by the "beautiful country" and the Middle Kingdom, will be key factors in securing and maintaining an equitable peace. Pomfret has more than adequately told the story of the last quarter-millennium's acquaintanceship from America's standpoint. What we need now is to know just how the "entangling embrace" is regarded by China - whether the high panjandrums of today's China still echo old Qianlong's vermilion-brushed distemper and scorn. I rather suspect they do, but until we know for sure, we will have to be content with a history that tells us only half the story. And all the while the clock is ticking down to 2049. ? Pomfret shows us just how we reached what men of menace like to term 'interesting times.' SIMON winchester's most recent book is "Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers."
Choice Review
The literature on the complex relationship between the US and China continues to grow. Journalist Pomfret chronicles this saga from the late 18th century to current times. His volume is among the best that have been published on this subject in recent years. The author's research is comprehensive, based on both US and Chinese sources as well has his own observations derived from his many years as a journalist in China. The book is a delight to read. Pomfret has a genius for connecting the present with the past using evocative word pictures. His chapter "Bible women," which focuses on the work of US missionary women in China during the 19th century, is worth the price of the book by itself. The author brilliantly illustrates the growing tensions between the two countries, which may well result in a calamity that will impact virtually the entire world. This important book needs to be read by those in Washington, DC, and Beijing who make policy decisions in dangerous contemporary times. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --David L. Wilson, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Kirkus Review
An in-depth look at the historically deep and mutually influential relationship between the United States and China.Since the American Revolution, the Middle Kingdom (China) and Meiguo, the Beautiful Country (America), have enjoyed both a rich exchange of culture and trade and bitter enmity, especially during the early communist era. In this thoroughgoing study that moves from the revolutionary era to the present, former Washington Post foreign correspondent Pomfret (Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China, 2006), who was recently a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Beijing, delves into the historical relations between the two and offers a fresh appraisal of each nations contributions to the other. The author asserts that the U.S. has had a significant role in Chinas rise, reaching back to when the U.S. provided China an early market for its coveted china, tea, and drapery. On the other hand, in China, many Americans, such as John Perkins Cushing and Franklin Roosevelts grandfather Warren Delano, made their fortunes in pelts, silks, tea, opium, and other commodities. By the mid-19th century, missionaries had a huge influence on the Chinese, as China represented the big prize in missionary work during the series of Great Awakenings that swept America. Pomfret credits the early missionaries, especially women like Adele Fielde, with bringing Western medicine, education, and law to China and helping to outlaw infanticide and foot binding. The building of the First Transcontinental Railroad required enormous labor, and the Chinese stepped in where Americans would not; however, after the Civil War and the demobilization of soldiers moving West in search of work, the tables turned on the Chinese in the form of pogroms and anti-Chinese immigration legislation. In this highly detailed narrative, Pomfret moves chronologically through these developments, ably fleshing out the characters involved. Regarding recent events, he is not uncritical of Chinas cyberspying and aggression in the South China Sea. An occasionally too-dense but impressively wide-ranging history demonstrating that the U.S.China relationship began decades before Richard Nixon arrived on the scene. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Pomfret (Chinese Lessons) has written for the Washington Post and has been a Fulbright scholar in Beijing. His research into the culture of China and the nature of the relationship between China and America is on-going and thorough. His interest in the ways in which the history of the two countries and cultures have intersected and sometimes collided is broad. He refers to interactions between Chinese and American officials to illustrate the ways in which the cultures work for and against the best interests of each country on the world stage. He also offers insightful glimpses into the ways in which students, missionaries, and women have been treated in China and the ways in which Americans have interpreted its issues with civil rights. Tom Perkins offers a lively reading. VERDICT Recommended as interest warrants. ["Essential for anyone with an interest in the topic": LJ 10/1/16 review of the Holt hc.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue | p. 1 |
| Part I | |
| 1 A New Frontier | p. 9 |
| 2 Founding Fortunes | p. 25 |
| 3 Blitzconversion | p. 40 |
| 4 The Calm Minister | p. 56 |
| 5 Men of Iron | p. 69 |
| 6 A Good Thrashing | p. 89 |
| 7 Bible Women | p. 97 |
| 8 The Door Opens and Shuts | p. 106 |
| 9 Hot Air and Hope | p. 122 |
| Part II | |
| 10 American Dreams | p. 137 |
| 11 Mr. Science | p. 150 |
| 12 Fortune Cookies | p. 164 |
| 13 Up in Smoke | p. 177 |
| 14 The Soong Dynasty | p. 190 |
| 15 Opportunity or Threat | p. 204 |
| 16 A Red Star | p. 222 |
| 17 New Life | p. 234 |
| Part III | |
| 18 Bloody Saturday | p. 245 |
| 19 Little America | p. 261 |
| 20 Burmese Days | p. 280 |
| 21 Dangerous Liaisons | p. 292 |
| 22 The Rice Paddy Navy | p. 306 |
| 23 The East Is Red | p. 320 |
| 24 Keys to the Kingdom | p. 332 |
| 25 The Beginning of the End | p. 342 |
| 26 Mission Impossible | p. 356 |
| 27 A Third Force | p. 364 |
| Part IV | |
| 28 Hate America | p. 379 |
| 29 Hate China, | p. 389 |
| 30 A Cold War | p. 404 |
| 31 Dead Flowers | p. 415 |
| 32 Bloody Marys | p. 426 |
| 33 Pictures of Chairman Mao | p. 432 |
| 34 Out of Bad Things | p. 442 |
| 35 Not Because We love Them | p. 452 |
| 36 Tacit Allies | p. 462 |
| 37 We Are Very Sexy People | p. 477 |
| 38 China Rediscovers America | p. 489 |
| 39 Nobody Is Afraid of Anybody | p. 500 |
| 40 Deathsong | p. 510 |
| Part V | |
| 41 Kung Fu Fighting | p. 521 |
| 42 Patriotic Education | p. 535 |
| 43 From China with love | p. 551 |
| 44 Welcome to the Club | p. 564 |
| 45 Twin Towers | p. 587 |
| 46 G2? | p. 605 |
| 47 End of an Era | p. 622 |
| Afterword | p. 633 |
| Notes | p. 638 |
| Bibliography | p. 649 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 665 |
| Index | p. 668 |