Gordon Chang's Fateful Ties traces the relationship between the United States and China over 400 years, and deftly builds up the drama between a nation whose culture developed over millennia and one that is in its embryonic stages. Chang extracts from the history of interactions between them some unforgettably efficient summations, among them “There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be” (p. 1); “many American missionaries understood every Western invasion of China as an act of Providence, the gun making the way for the Bible” (p. 59); and “China embodied the underdog, long the worthy recipient of support and sympathy in American history. China's very backwardness was endearing” (p. 145).

Literally and metaphorically, the relationship between the two countries moved through a series of paradigms: parasitic, commensal, and sometimes, though rarely, mutual. In the 1700s, trade was not mutual but parasitic towards the ancient country. China fed the American imagination with its luxury goods and antiquities, but, in the 1800s, when America was a pioneer land of only 4 million, the older and larger country also supplied workers from its population of 400 million. The Chinese built much of America, not only its railroads but also its mining industry of gold, quartz, and other natural resources.

America's distaste for English imperialism made it schizophrenic about the Opium War, with some politicians decrying it as a war of English rapacity while others saw it as a path to penetration into an ancient country that had closed its doors to aggressive trading. Missionaries would also find moral justification for opium trade difficult, but in the end they contorted their religion to fit a bad situation; still, Chang remarks upon individual missionaries and politicians who spoke their conscience and did not support aggression towards China as a matter of principle. America would later provide real estate—though not a warm welcome—for Chinese settlers to populate. And many of these settlers tentatively stayed despite monstrous racism and legislation. Chinese built the Gold Mountain of myth into a reality, laying railroads that would enrich financiers such as Leland Stanford and Jacob Astor.

Chang shows how key figures in American politics, the arts and letters, and science felt about China. Among the politicians he includes are Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, Jack London, Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ulysses S. Grant, who was offered the wonders of China on a trip in 1879, during which he may have secured a bit of China's trust. The language borders on the poetic in a litany of foods served to Grant on a visit, which featured “bellies of fat fish, roast mutton, pears in honey, soles of pigeons’ feet, wild ducks, thorn-apple jelly, egg-balls, steaming white rolls, lotus-seed soup” (p. 98). In 1899 and 1900, the Open Door Policy once again shows an America whose intentions were steeped in hypocrisy—they supported China's self-rule but only because it granted them as much access to exploit her as Europe and other countries had. America's behavior during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion would help it retain somewhat civil relations with China, as it exercised restraint in comparison to the behavior of the Germans and Russians, whose violence and wanton pillaging of China were a stark contrast to American discipline, imposed by American Secretary John Hay.

The art world also harbored a fascination for China and the Buddhist traditions that emerged from Asia. Mary Cassatt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Max Weber, Alfred Stieglitz, and Georgia O'Keefe collected books about and wares from Chinese art history. Philosophers—including John Dewey—developed an enduring scholarly relationship with China as a country, and individually with Hu Shi, a leading liberal intellectual from China who was also a Boxer Indemnity student. Others wrestled with understanding the ideologies of Confucius, Mencius, and Taoism. Those afflicted with “Chinomania” (p. 25) also included heads of influential educational establishments such as Charles Eliot (Harvard's president for 40 years) and Frank J. Goodnow (president of Johns Hopkins.)

Covering the first part of the twentieth century, Chang's canvassing for Chinomaniacs or those who were Chinafied (p. 127) is wide-ranging and diverse, including Ezra Pound, Pearl Buck, Evans Carlson, Henry Luce, and Claire Booth Luce, among others. A special case is Will Rogers. The popular entertainer and vaudeville performer said in 1927:

In order to maintain the linear narrative, Chang touches briefly on familiar ground that has been traversed in depth by earlier scholarship, such as the rise and fall of Chiang Kai-shek, the diplomatic successes of Soong Mayling, the charisma of Mao (with a backstory on Edgar Snow), the rise of the Communists, the Rape of Nanjing, and other pivotal moments in the Sino-Japanese conflict. Chang relays details including the fact that Ernest Hemingway disliked Chiang Kai-shek but was charmed by Zhou Enlai (p. 175). He adds that, before the rise of McCarthyism, Americans were happy to socialize with Mao and the Communists. American journalists visiting China brought Laurel and Hardy films, which Mao watched with his visitors (p. 187). But just as many Americans, including, notably, the poet Langston Hughes and singer Paul Robeson (p. 210), were protesting Japanese aggression towards the Chinese and asserting their support for Mao, the US declared their support of Chiang Kai-Shek, in a document called “China White Paper.” Despite the diversity of views that actually existed in the United States, this official “China White Paper” destroyed any remaining relationship between the US and Mao's Communists (p. 195). Furthermore, McCarthyism prevented Americans from supporting Communists in China, and American passports contained the explicit directive that they would be invalid in Communist-controlled areas of China (p. 202).

Discussing the battle between the Nationalists and Communists in China, Chang powerfully magnifies America's role in and intentions towards China: ultimately America vacillated between wanting to patronize China and vilify Communist China as an ally of Russia and proponent of Stalinism. But Chang concentrates his efforts on American reactions to Chinese internecine battles, showing how American disenchantment with Chiang and their inability to collaborate with a unified China caused China to construct, as Chang writes, “one of the strangest (and most strained) relationships [with the world] in modern history.” From 1949 until 1979, “regular governmental relations did not exist” (p. 203), and “there was no direct mail, telegraph, or telephone communications” (p. 203). Chang's reading of the “hot war” between the US and China is that it fueled the Cold War between the US and Russia. Moreover, had the US not isolated China and encouraged hostile regimes around it, as well as threatening China with nuclear missiles, a rapprochement between the US and China may have occurred much earlier. The list goes on. This book is a cornucopia of detail, and the masterful historical presentation that Chang makes in order to elucidate the relationship between these two powers is the accomplishment of a visionary scholar whose passion for his subject is apparent on every page.