In this meticulously researched and fluently written book, historian Xu Guoqi presents what he describes as a “new paradigm” for the study of Sino-American relations: that of a complex and intertwined “shared history”. Examining relations between Chinese and Americans mainly in the spheres of education and culture, rather than those of high politics, the author elucidates “shared national experiences in the nineteenth century” and “the value and role of culture in linking both nations and their people in the twentieth century” (p. 17). While publications on Sino-American relations have largely focused on differences and confrontations between the two nations, Xu states, his book is aimed at “emphasizing the positive aspects” of the relationship (p. 16).
The book is divided into three parts which focus on different but complementary aspects of the two nations’ “shared history”, mostly through encounters between a few individuals (all male) whom Xu selected as having so far received little scholarly attention. Part 1, entitled “Messengers of the Nineteenth Century”, includes two virtual mini-biographies. Anson Burlingame, described as “China's first messenger to the outside world”, was not just President Abraham Lincoln's United States minister to China but also served the Qing Dynasty and led China's first diplomatic mission to the West. Burlingame “worked brilliantly for both the Americans and the Chinese”, Xu concludes, even though he was not immune from frustrations (p. 73). The less well known Ge Kunhua, America's first Chinese language teacher, taught at Harvard for two and a half years (though there was little interest in learning Chinese and he had only five students) before dying prematurely of pneumonia. There is also an intriguing discussion of the 120 Chinese schoolboys sent by the Qing government to the United States from 1872 – part of the study abroad drive – to gain firsthand knowledge of modern American education and Western civilization.
Part 2 of the book, “The Internationalization of China and the United States”, examines the roles of two Columbia University professors who became advisers in China in the late 1910s. Frank Goodnow was sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment to help draft the new Republic's first constitution, though because of the high level of political instability he actually became an advocate of monarchical restoration. The influential American educator and philosopher John Dewey, described by the author as “a Yankee Confucius and cultural ambassador”, spent more than two years travelling and lecturing in China at the invitation of reformist scholars. The chapter focuses on Dewey's struggle to understand China and to explain himself and Americans to the Chinese.
Part 3 of the book, “Popular Culture and Sino-American Relations”, moves from individuals to a “shared diplomatic journey through sports” (p. viii). After briefly describing the introduction of modern sports to China through the YMCA from the early years of the twentieth century, it discusses how “ping pong diplomacy” provided a breakthrough in relations between the United States and the People's Republic in 1971, and how the Chinese have used sports in recent years “as a platform from which to inform the world of their desire to be treated with respect and equality” (p. 15). For this reviewer, the chapter sits rather oddly with the rest of the book, both focusing more on the diplomatic arena and jumping chronologically from a focus mainly from around 1860 to 1920 to the 1970s and beyond.
These six self-contained chapters on very diverse topics, which the author presents as being unified by his theme of a “shared history”, give the reader intriguing glimpses of the worlds of a few Americans in China and Chinese in America, mostly over a period of around sixty years. The author explores each topic in substantial detail, weaving together an abundance of stories and anecdotes, based on an impressive range of archival and other sources, into his presentation of what he sees as individual shared histories.
Viewed as a whole, the book illuminates patterns of cooperation, as well as those of frustration and disappointment, between Americans and Chinese mainly in the realms of advisers and education: realms where Americans played a substantial role in the broader Western encounter with China during the period of self-strengthening and modernization. Xu Guoqi is not the first author to highlight the interactions and mutual cooperation that occurred in individual encounters between foreigners (including Americans) and Chinese in these spheres, one of the more recent publications being Anne-Marie Brady and Douglas Brown’s Foreigners and Foreign Institutions in Republican China which, with its main focus on the 1920s to the 1940s, to some extent extends and complements the studies in Xu's book.Footnote 1
Chinese and Americans does illustrate, as Xu concludes, that the unfolding patterns of cooperation between Chinese and Americans included “developing avenues of communication to overcome ignorance, fear, and spite” (p. 260). The question is how far the topics covered, which the author admits were “carefully selected for the thematic thread of ‘shared history’” (p. 17), can be generalized to create a new – and positive – paradigm for the history of Sino-American relations which prioritizes culture over elite politics and diplomatic relations. Such a paradigm for the scholarly study of the relationship – both past and present – is appealing at a time when confrontation is often more prevalent than cooperation, and the author himself claims that the “future of Sino-American relations depends on both countries learning from the past and valuing shared traditions” (p. 21). It is, though, one that needs further scholarly research and debate.
Overall, Chinese and Americans: A Shared History makes an innovative contribution to scholarship on the history of Sino-American relations, with an engaging narrative that will appeal not just to specialists but to anyone with a general interest in this topic.
