If the past, as is often said, is a foreign country, scholars of Sino-American relations have tended to reinforce this perception by emphasizing the otherness of both societies in relation to each other. For example, in his classic work, Americans and Chinese: Passage to Differences, Francis L. K. Hsu asserts that “this fundamental contrast … is at the core of the unique and deeply embedded problems and weaknesses which plague each society.”Footnote 8
Recent studies emphasizing the place of both countries in world and transnational history have sought a more balanced picture of this mutual relationship. Here, Xu Guoqi's Chinese and Americans: A Shared History represents an important step. A student of Akira Iriye (who also supplies a foreword to the book), Xu takes up Iriye's concept of “cultural internationalism [which] refers to a surprising array of efforts that attempt to build and foster cultural understanding, cooperation, and a sense of shared values across national borders” (p. 3). Using this approach, he posits a “new paradigm” in which cultural internationalism becomes central, thereby moving beyond the present construct in which it “has clearly served as an important though rarely acknowledged theme” (p. 3). Thus the format of the book consists of six chapter-length essays that use cases of shared Sino-American history to provide examples of cultural internationalism in action.
Most of these cases are familiar, though some, like those of Ge Kunhua and Frank Goodnow, are less so to non-specialists. The first essay deals with Lincoln's minister to China, Anson Burlingame, whose qualities convinced the Qing to send him abroad to represent Chinese interests from 1868 until his death in 1870. The treaty he signed with the United States marked the first “equal” agreement between China and a foreign power during the treaty-port era.
Perhaps the most studied of the cases, the Chinese Education Mission, was the brainchild of Rong Hong (Yung Wing), whose American education (Yale, 1854) inspired him to create a cadre of similarly trained Chinese students as an aid to modernization. From 1872 until the Mission's premature recall in 1881, 113 Chinese boys lived with New England families, attended local schools, and studied the Confucian classics at the Mission's Hartford headquarters. Though its supporters included Mark Twain and President Grant, the refusal of American military institutes to admit the students, their putative “Americanization,” and growing tensions over Chinese immigration ultimately induced the Qing to cancel the experiment.
The next two essays involve lesser-known individuals. Ge Kunhua's direct impact on Sino-American “shared history” was arguably minimal but of considerable symbolic importance. His ease with foreigners and willingness to go abroad brought him to the attention of Francis P. Knight, the American consul at Niuzhuang, who arranged for Ge to become the first Chinese language instructor at Harvard from 1879 till his death in 1882, thus serving as a cultural ambassador to one of America's elite institutions. Frank Goodnow, a noted constitutional scholar, was an advisor to Chinese president Yuan Shikai. Whipsawed by political factions in the opening years of the Chinese Republic, he was accused of inspiring Yuan's failed bid to restore the monarchy, for which he faced severe criticism in China and abroad.
The theories of pragmatism espoused by the subject of the fifth essay, John Dewey, were eagerly taken up by many of those involved in the Chinese Literary Renaissance and the May Fourth Movement, especially his former students Hu Shi and Jiang Menglin. His stay in China as “visitor, spectator, observer, and educated learner as well as teacher,” makes him an especially important figure in Xu's schema (p. 214).
The last essay traces the role of the YMCA in the transition in attitudes toward physical fitness and sports prowess as marks of a “modern” nation, the phenomenon of “ping-pong diplomacy” in the early 1970s, and the culmination of the People's Republic's new athletic preeminence at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
All of these examples are persuasive, the scholarship extensive, and the essays well-crafted and a pleasure to read. But do they really represent a new paradigm? If cultural internationalism has long been an important, albeit largely implicit, theme, does acknowledging it now and reexamining cases in light of their shared history fundamentally change how we look at Sino-American relations? Certainly, it seems safe to say that this approach gives us a potentially powerful methodological tool to add nuance to a rapidly evolving transnational framework. As Xu observes, “The study of the internationalization of the United States and China is just taking shape” (p. 3). Chinese and Americans: A Shared History should go a long way toward determining its direction.
