Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

Why China Understands America

Oddly enough, it's not the Chinese who wear ideological blinders ...

Jul 1

∙

Guest post

Old Penn Station, New York City (prior to its demolition in 1963)

Thanks for reading Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Pledge your support

(Epilogue to Matthew Franklin Cooper’s five-part series for Landmarks.)

Wang Huning’s America against America, already reviewed in a series for Landmarks, is of obvious importance for understanding how today’s Chinese leadership views the United States. Nonetheless, it is just one entry among many in the wider genre of Chinese studies of the US based on first-hand Chinese encounters with the United States, a country that has been all three of friend, foil and foe to the Chinese people since the Treaty of Wangxia in 1844.

Over the past century and a half, China’s interest in understanding the United States has inspired an enormous body of work written by Chinese diplomats, scholars, journalists, litterateurs, students, tourists, and more.

To get a sense of the overall tenor of this literature, and to place Wang Huning’s seminal volume within its proper historical and intellectual context, one can hardly do better than to consult R. David Arkush’s and Leo O. Lee’s impressive Land Without Ghosts, a title taken from Fei Xiaotong’s sociological observations about America’s neophilia and cult of adolescence. This book represents, in fact, a compilation of excerpts from Fei’s, and various other authors’, forays and explorations of ‘the beautiful country’ – or Meiguo 美国 – which is the Chinese word for the United States.

“The U.S. still struggles to interpret China without filtering it through the lens of racial, ideological or geopolitical preferences …

The Ghosts volume covers material written over a nearly 140-year timeframe: from 1848 to 1987. (America against America, for its part, was written in 1988 and published in 1991.) The contributors are quite a varied bunch, with everyone from dignitaries to cannery workers to nannies contributing. However, as one might expect from a volume like this, scholars and literary men predominate. At the same time, one can see in these collected writings, already outlined in the rough, the broad contours of Wang Huning’s critique of an American society beset by bewildering contradictions. One is immediately struck, upon reading this group of essays, by the contrast between Chinese attitudes toward America and the reverse. Over the past 180 years, China has made considerable efforts to understand America as it objectively is, in accordance with observed fact. The U.S. still struggles to interpret China without filtering it through the lens of racial, ideological or geopolitical preferences; as such, our analyses of China continue to be colored by iterating extremes of condescension and paranoia, complacency and panic.

Compare-and-contrast is the typical analytical style in these sorts of travelogue accounts. The Chinese authors tend to focus on those aspects of American society — its manners, styles of personal _expression_, architecture, allocation of public space, economy, gastronomy, social and gender relations, governmental structure, literature, art, music—which are either similar in ways that make America relatable to a Chinese reader, or different in ways that spark a Chinese reader’s curiosity, envy, delight or disgust.

Of course this is true not only of Chinese travelogues. As Arkush notes in his introduction to Land Without Ghosts, Tocqueville’s reflections on his own famous tour of mid-19^th century America gravitated towards: the lack of refinement in American manners, artistic taste and intellectual life; the absence of social class as a constraining factor -- with the notable exception of the racial divide; and the general religious fervor and personal moral decency he observed among American citizens. These observations, Arkush notes, are reflective of a certain European cultural superiority complex, but also Tocqueville’s sensitivity to the class rigidity and moral and sexual hypocrisy of Europe itself.

By contrast, Chinese observers virtually never approach America with any sort of condescension. The one notable exception to this rule is the near-universal Chinese disdain for American cuisine (!). The Chinese gaze across the Pacific was, from the start, open and earnest in its desire for understanding and free of any hint of affected cultural superiority. It is in this register that we can best understand how Chinese observers are so impressed with America’s boisterous dynamism and optimism, its work ethic and can-do attitude. And yet they are also far less apt than their European counterparts to mistake Americans’ lack of class awareness for an absence of actual class dynamics in the U.S.

Arkush suggests a historical rationale for China’s humble and scholarly approach to these visits. Given the conditions of the time, it was natural for China’s leaders and thinkers to embark on a search for models of how to strengthen and defend their country. It is hardly surprising, then, that early Chinese observers were most intrigued by American feats of engineering, mechanical ingenuity and technological prowess. The Manchu diplomat Zhigang provides detailed technical descriptions of the rail system and locomotives he observed… as well as of a hydroelectric plant, paper, steel and textile mills, a mint, a shipyard and an artillery embankment. Official Li Gui, who attended the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, was impressed by the steam-driven fire engines. Chen Lanbin, an academic dean, divides his attention between mines and factories on the one hand, and exotic descriptions of the Mormon faith on the other. Progressive Party statesman Tang Hualong remarks on the patience and depth of planning that went into such civil engineering projects as the Brooklyn Bridge, the New York subway system, and the Smith Building in Seattle. But he also notes with irony that these massive public infrastructure projects were so painstakingly planned and built with the end goal of catering to the sloth, hurry and short attention spans of a commuter public.

American sociosexual behavior, particularly that of our women, is of particular interest to Chinese authors of both sexes. The translator Zhang Deyi, who was part of the same 1868 delegation as Zhigang, remarks in Land Without Ghosts on the personal independence of American women. It is a cultural trait that fills him with a mixture of admiration and astonishment. He is drawn to what he sees as the ‘graceful’ self-assurance of American women, but also remarks with censure on the penchant of American lovers for showing ‘obscene’ public displays of affection – such as blowing kisses to each other. (Even today, though to a far lesser extent, public displays of affection are rarely seen in China, and are thought of as rouma 肉麻 ‘corny, cheesy, mushy.’) Similarly, the visiting dignitary Governor Li Hongzhang apparently fell in love at first sight with a female cyclist in New York City; he talked with her and invited her back to his house. The record falls silent there. However, after returning to China, Governor Li sent the young woman an embroidered sachet from the Empress Dowager. In 1881, the diplomat Cai Jun wrote a handbook explaining social etiquette at American dinner parties in a mixed company of men and women, clearly hoping to put readers at ease about American notions of propriety. Eighty years later, Chinese-American humorist George Kao put a capstone on this cultural discomfort with American candor, by penning a satirical treatment of those uniquely American contributions to the performing arts: burlesque and striptease.

Later commentators found much to admire about the independent spirit of American women. Academician Hu Shi, for example, recounts his fond but apparently platonic relationship with a rather unconventional bohemian woman named Edith C. Williams. Writing in the 1940s, journalist Yang Gang offers the dark counterpoint in her treatment of her semi-fictionalized roommate ‘Betty.’ Betty’s willingness to live on her own ends up subjecting her to the whims of a series of exploitative bosses and faithless boyfriends, ultimately presenting the reader with a rather pathetic portrait of female economic precarity and loneliness – showing thereby the flip side of this ‘rugged individualism.’

‘Precarity’ and ‘loneliness’ are the exact same words that recur in Chinese assessments of growing old in America. To Chinese observers, accustomed as they are to living together with elderly members of their extended family, the expected and usual practice in America of children moving out of their parents’ homes and living on their own in an entirely different city, seems unconscionably cruel. Fei Xiaotong in particular openly remarks on his ‘outrage’ that an elderly Harvard professor with bad legs is stuck living in an upstairs apartment away from any younger relatives that might be able to take care of him. The Taiwanese nanny ‘Jiejun’, who is employed by a Minneapolis family in the 1970s, recounts the elderly Mrs. White joining her children and grandchildren for the Christmas holiday. Jiejun, in her own words, is ‘dumbfounded’ with mortification on behalf of the elderly Mrs. White. Even though the elderly lady is accustomed to being ignored in preference to her grandchildren, Jiejun is driven to tears at the small, casual indifferences Mrs. White suffers: from not having the final choice of TV program to watch, to being the last to finish her Christmas dinner alone after everyone else has risen from the table.

“Wang’s innovation is his ability to intuit and express the causal linkages between high technology and social alienation, between capitalist commodification and the culture of sexual permissiveness.”

It is precisely this same tradition of acute observation, of moral response, of registering both admiration and alarm, which Wang Huning inherits. What makes his thesis in America against America so convincing (and so discomfiting) isn’t that he observes anything novel. Indeed, what he observes in his travels is quite similar in content to what Zhang Deyi and Yang Gang and Fei Xiaotong observed in Land Without Ghosts. Wang’s innovation is his ability to intuit and express the causal linkages between high technology and social alienation, between capitalist commodification and the culture of sexual permissiveness. He borrows the earlier work’s penchant for bringing to light America’s contradictions, and takes it to its next logical step.

Geopolitics has, from the beginning, haunted Chinese observations about the U.S. (and the West more generally). The historical setting of even the earliest of the writings collected in Land Without Ghosts is the aftermath of the Opium War. China’s defeat in the Opium War was not only a national humiliation, but it also impoverished the Chinese populace, weakened the Chinese state, and contributed to massive sanguinary uprisings such as the Taiping Rebellion which killed over 20 million people. Beginning in 1860 with the deliberately-humiliating sack of the Summer Palace by British troops, ziqiang 自强 or ‘self-strengthening’ was the watchword, the motto and proximate political aim of the country. Fujian governor Xu Jiyu’s gazetteer-like account of America is punctuated with praise for its founding father George Washington, someone he admired as much for his defeat of the mighty British Empire (for which Xu compares him to Three Kingdoms-era generals Cao Cao and Liu Bei) as for his later retirement from public life (for which Xu compares him to the progenitors of the three dynasties of Chinese antiquity).

The more perspicacious contributors noted, at the same time, that burgeoning American power wasn’t necessarily a good thing for China. The U.S. opium trade was nowhere close to as high-volume as the British, which had a nearby supply under its direct control in Burma; but the Chinese intelligentsia were by no means ignorant of the U.S. traders peddling Turkish-grown opiates in the treaty ports. And the Chinese homeland couldn’t remain long ignorant, either, of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the racial ideology which had prompted it, or the geopolitical ramifications of that ideology: particularly not after reports of diplomats like Huang Zunxian and Zhang Yinhuan about the discrimination their countrymen abroad were facing. Intellectuals like Lin Shu and politicians like Liang Qichao issued urgent warnings about not merely the burgeoning power but also the dangers of expansionist jingoism and the ideologies of social Darwinism and racial superiority that were in the ascendant in America at the end of the nineteenth century.

To be sure, the Chinese voices in Land Without Ghosts are all over the place in terms of their own racial attitudes. Lin Shu, who translated Uncle Tom’s Cabin together with his own notes and afterword, displays an early and admirable attempt to enlist Chinese empathy on behalf of Black Americans. The same can be said of Zou Taofen – at this point in his career a Christian activist – who exemplifies a thoroughly-sympathetic attitude toward the plight of Blacks in Alabama. Far less appealing are Liang Qichao’s uncritical parroting of white-supremacist bromides and Yu Guangzhong’s rank bigotry. Even my intellectual hero Fei Xiaotong (to my dismay) voiced, in his earlier prose, some lazy caricatures of American Indians.

The lens through which the Chinese subject observes the American object is inexorably colored by political and geopolitical uncertainties. And that is true whether the United States is being appreciated as a potential model for imitation, pointed to as a potential cautionary tale, or sized up as a likely rival. Wang Huning is by no means an outlier in this respect. Wang’s present political position as a high-ranking Politburo member notwithstanding, there is nothing peculiarly insidious or ‘totalitarian’ about the motives behind Wang’s observations, any more than for liberal-minded men like the pedagogue Huang Yanpei or labor activist Li Gongpu. Rather, from a standpoint of realist strategic empathy, any Chinese observer is going to look at American institutions and political practices with both a comparative and a defensive eye. Indeed, America’s political institutions have always been of interest to Chinese observers. Huang Zunxuan and Li Gongpu, for example, both undertake incisive and trenchant critiques of the American two-party political system. Even though Huang Zunxuan is a representative of the Qing Imperial government and Li Gongpu a convinced democrat, both men come to similar conclusions about the venality and perfidy of America’s two main political parties when it comes to keeping their campaign promises, and both evince skepticism about whether American electoral institutions actually reflect the will of the American people.

Land Without Ghosts makes it easy to see from where Wang Huning inherited his keen interest in studying the American political party system, to say nothing of its educational institutions, public utilities, police precincts and the like. It shows his grounds for exploring the linkages between these institutions, and the philosophies of efficiency and standardization which impel them to constantly expand their scope of activity and control.

As I mentioned in my essay series on America against America, Wang Huning’s perspective, though primarily colored by Marxist-Leninist theoretical commitments, is not interested in the kinds of simplistic blanket denunciations that were popular in China twenty or thirty years before he put pen to paper. Unlike some of his more hidebound predecessors in the seventies, we read no ‘paper tiger’ and ‘capitalist running-dogs’ rhetoric from him! His interest is in objectively describing and analyzing the mechanisms of America’s political and economic institutions, in sketching the broad dynamics of American cultural life, and articulating a set of prescriptions for China’s future. Wang Huning clearly had an extensive ‘literature review’ from which to work, and he clearly availed himself of it. (Lin Yutang and Fei Xiaotong, whose writings are both profiled in Arkush’s anthology, are the two influences whose presence is felt the strongest in America against America, but it’s a far longer and deeper conversation into which his book wades.)

Speaking from my own perspective, I feel it’s high time that Americans did something similar, if only because, in all honesty, many of Wang Huning’s characterizations of America’s weaknesses strike far too close to home for comfort. The alienation of Americans from places and practices that produce any sort of common life is now glaringly obvious. American society is awash in drugs and porn. Both predominant political parties have been completely hollowed out. Both serve as vehicles for advancing endless war against endless enemies, for outsourcing as much of public life to private for-profit corporations as possible, and for stifling the American populace in an ever-thickening swathe of behavioral and surveillance technologies. We are seeing unfold before our eyes how the ‘sacralization’ of our institutions in fact empties those institutions of content. ‘Democracy’ no longer reflects popular will and ‘human rights’ has become an empty slogan to be weaponized against geopolitical enemies. As such it is never applied to the murder of schools full of innocent children, when such is committed by our government or its vassal-‘allies.’ And we are watching as the walls of a securitized, technologically-driven, increasingly-autonomous ‘bunker state’ are being constructed around us.

“This isn’t to say that China is now doing everything right. But it has been my experience that neither paranoia nor contempt produce good analysis.”

As Arkush mentions in the conclusion to Land Without Ghosts, American engagement with China has historically been shaded over by a certain attitude of paternalistic condescension and contempt. Even well-intentioned and progressive-minded authors like Pearl Buck, whose powers of observation and art of prose both bespeak her intellect and intense empathic attachment to the country, tend to depict China in caricature or cliché. During the Cold War, this contempt was replaced by ideological denunciation and paranoia. After 1978, only gradually did a certain recognition and respect take hold. After 2008 in particular, this degree of recognition and respect has eroded at an alarming pace. Simply because China wasn’t becoming ‘more like us,’ as our policymakers hoped they inevitably would, the attitude of those same policymakers has begun sliding back into the bad old habits of paranoia and contempt. This isn’t to say that China is now doing everything right. But it has been my experience that neither paranoia nor contempt produce good analysis.