US and China's 'entangling embrace'

Book review of 'The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom'

The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom

America and China, 1776 to the present

John Pomfret

Henry Holt & Company

693 pages; Rs 1,360

It is a popular perception that America’s relationship with China — now rapidly spiralling into a superpower competition — began in the early 20th century with the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the creation of republican and then communist China. John Pomfret’s excellent book provides valuable historical context to a relationship that actually stretches back to the first years of American independence. From those times, Americans have been consistently drawn to China, enticed by the opportunities for trade and influence, even as Chinese immigrants have flocked to the New World in search of work and security.

This relationship is the subject of Mr Pomfret’s important new work. His relationship with China began in 1980, when he was amongst the first American students to study in China in Nanjing University. He covered China as a journalist for the Associated Press, and was expelled from that country in 1989 for his alleged links with leaders of the student protests that ended bloodily in Tiananmen Square that year. Fluent in Mandarin, Mr Pomfret married Zhang Mei, a Chinese entrepreneur who runs a travel company, WildChina. He has earlier written Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China, which traced the transformation of China from the late 1950s onwards through the lives of his contemporaries at Nanjing University.

Mr Pomfret’s title plays on the Chinese name for their country — Zhongguo, or Middle Kingdom — and for the United States, which China calls Meiguo, or “The Beautiful Country”. Challenging the conventional wisdom, that mainly European powers pulled an insular China towards modernity, the book documents the important role played by early Americans, who did roaring business in the seal and sea otter pelts, sea cucumbers, ginseng and sandalwood. In exchange, they took back Chinese silks, tea, art and philosophy. Many early American fortunes, including those of Warren Delano — the grandfather of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — were made through trade with China. For early American missionaries, bringing God to 400 million Chinese heathens was the biggest prize in Christendom. The book describes how American missionaries, many of them single women defying the times, brought Western medicine, education and emancipation to China, playing major roles in the eventual outlawing of regressive practices like foot-binding and infanticide.

Nor was this a one-way flow. Vast numbers of Chinese immigrants swarmed to participate in the California gold rush, serving as the working hands that built institutions like the transcontinental railways that undergirded the building of the American west. By 1860, Chinese immigrants constituted the largest immigrant population in western United States. But when work ran short, mainstream Americans turned on Chinese immigrants, killing and maiming large numbers. In 1882, the US Congress blocked Chinese workers from America, making them the first ethnic group to be banned from the US. President Donald Trump’s ban on certain Muslim travellers is not without precedent.

The book fascinatingly describes key early players in the US-China relationship, men like Anson Burlingame, who was America’s first envoy to China in the mid-19th century. Burlingame had little with which to push American influence in a region where Great Britain was the undisputed power, with the Royal Navy fielding 66 warships and 8,000 men. In contrast, the US had in the region only Commodore Perry’s modest East India Squadron, which was continually diverted to cater to other American interests in Japan or back home. But Burlingame, armed with little more than personal charm, established enormous influence with the Qing rulers, who were — as Chinese rulers are doing even today — figuring out how to use the Americans to further Chinese interests. In a strategy document he drew up for the Qing emperor in 1861, a Chinese nobleman wrote: “The American barbarians are pure-minded and honest in disposition and have always been loyal to China… The problem is how to control them to make them exploitable by us.” Burlingame, meanwhile, was advocating in Washington that the best way to draw advantage from China’s immense potential was to “nudge it gently” — the earlier version of today’s “managing China’s rise” — in the direction that suited America. 

The author argues that America and China have, from the start, remained locked “in an entangling embrace that neither can quit”. In his words, “If there is a pattern to this baffling complexity, it may be best described as a never-ending Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. Both sides experience rapturous enchantment begetting hope, followed by disappointment, repulsion and disgust, only to return to fascination once again.”

Mr Pomfret traces this cycle through the passage of the last quarter millennium: The fall of the Qing Empire, the communist rise, the World War II and the growing conflicts of today. Writing with the easy flair of an accomplished journalist, Mr Pomfret takes the reader through almost 700 pages without being fatigued. For so many of us today whose gazes are fixed on the growing tussle between America and China, this look back into history should be essential reading.