[After a mild start, it ended up being a long, cold, very wintry winter. But all winters end, metaphorically as well as seasonally, and in this week’s series I’ll be AmericanStudying a few cultural and historical such American thaws—leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on what Spring means to you in literature, culture, history, and more!]
On two ways to
better contextualize and AmericanStudy an undeniable turning point.
By any measure, President Richard Nixon’s February
1972 trip to the People’s Republic of China was a stunning moment in
American and international history. It wasn’t just that no prior president had
visited the PRC since its 1949 founding, but more that the two nations had
barely recognized each other’s existence over that quarter century, at least
outside of stereotypical
narratives of evil enemies and occasional
wartime foes. Moreover, the broader Cold War contexts add at least two more
layers of stunning to the mix: the U.S. was still entrenched
in a prolonged Southeast Asian war against “Communism” at the time; and
that political concept, one tied nearly as strongly to the PRC as it was to the
USSR, remained the nation’s most
significant and terrifying boogeyman (and would for at
least another decade and a half). For a leader who had come
to prominence as a crusader against Communism, and one who had recently
deepened the war in Vietnam to boot, to make this historic trip was, again,
nothing short of stunning.
Yet we can
recognize a moment’s truly unexpected nature and still find ways to contextualize
it, to connect it to longstanding and ongoing histories and narratives. For one
thing, if for the quarter century leading up to Nixon’s visit the U.S. had had
no diplomatic relations with China, that period marked a turning point from the
prior century’s worth of exchanges and encounters between the two nations. The
individual identity and story of Yung Wing, the 19th
century Chinese American student, diplomat, soldier, and educator about whom I’ve
written at length in multiple
places (and on whom part of my
next book will likewise focus), offers a particularly salient starting
point for engaging with those long-term US-China relationships. Over the course
of the nearly eight decades between Yung’s 1840s arrival to the United States
and his 1912 death “at his home in Hartford” (as his New York Times obituary put it), Yung experienced and exemplified
numerous stages and shifts in those diplomatic and political relationships:
from the most friendly, as illustrated by his Civil War-era mission to secure
American arms for Chinese military needs (during which he also volunteered to
serve in the U.S. Army); to the most hostile, as illustrated by his exclusion
from the United States after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the concurrent
threats to his life he faced in China because of his prior American activities.
To treat Nixon in China as a starting point for a relationship would be to
forget these prior centuries of history.
Across the same
centuries that those histories were unfolding, however, a longstanding and
multi-layered narrative of bigotry and discrimination toward the Chinese was
also developing in America. That narrative is best summed up by the phrase “Yellow
Peril,” as it consistently depicted the Chinese as a threat to the United
States in a variety of ways: physically,
through diseases, drug addictions and other vices, rape and sexual dangers;
economically, through everything from low-wage workers to the destruction of communal businesses
and neighborhoods; internationally, through the image of an alien foreign
power hell-bent on taking over the world; and more. (I imagine that China had
its own, perhaps parallel developing narratives and stereotypes about America
over the same years—I just am not familiar with them, and would welcome any
thoughts in comments.) It’s important to note that the Cold War fears of
“Red China,” despite the color shift, strongly echoed and extended the
Yellow Peril narratives—and that those fears and narratives continued after
Nixon’s visit, and indeed have endured into
our present moment in many ways. Which is to say, stunning and
transformative as Nixon’s trip was, there are longer histories to which it must
be connected, contexts that help us understand the moment and the two nations
far more fully.
Guest Post this
weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: What do you think? Other thaws you’d highlight?
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