Trans-Pacific Interactions: The United States and China, 1880-1950

Trans-Pacific Interactions

Previous Publications by Ruth Mayer Books: Diaspora: Eine kritische Begriffsbestimmung, 2005. Artificial Africas: Images of Colonialism in the Times of Globalization, 2002. Selbsterkenntnis, Körperfühlen: Medizin, Philosophie und die amerikanische Renaissance, 1997. Edited Volumes: With Gesine Krüger and Marianne Sommer (Eds). Ich Tarzan! Menschenaffen und Affenmenschen zwischen Science und Fiction, 2008. With Frank Kelleter and Barbara Krah (Eds). Melodrama! The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood, 2007. With Brigitte Weingart (Eds). VIRUS! Mutationen einer Metapher, 2004. With Mark Terkessidis (Eds). Globalkolorit: Multikulturalismus und Populärkultur, 1998. With Martin Klepper and Ernst-Peter Schneck (Eds). Hyperkultur: Zur Fiktion des Computerzeitalters, 1996.

Trans-Pacific Interactions The United States and China, 1880–1950

Edited by Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer

TRANS-PACIFIC INTERACTIONS

Copyright © Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer, 2009 All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61905–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trans-Pacific interactions : the United States and China, 1880–1950 / edited by Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–61905–3 1. United States—Relations—China. 2. China—Relations— United States. 3. Transnationalism. 4. National characteristics, American. 5. National characteristics, Chinese. 6. Chinese Americans—History. 7. Chinese Americans—Ethnic identity. 8. Missionaries—China—History. I. Künnemann, Vanessa. II. Mayer, Ruth, 1965– E183.8.C5T677 2009 327.73051—dc22 2009017902 Design by Integra Software Services First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Transnational Nationalisms–China and the United States in a Pacific World: An Introduction

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Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer

Part I Nationalisms and Configurations of National Identity in China and the United States 1 The American Dream and Dreams of China: A Transnational Approach to Chinese American History

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Yong Chen

2 National Studies and Global Entanglements: The Reenvisioning of China in the Early Twentieth Century

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Klaus Mühlhahn

3 China in the World: Constructions of a Chinese Identity in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

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Nicola Spakowski

Part II Chinese America, Citizenship, Nationality, and the World 4 Paper Citizens and Biometrical Identification: Immigration, Nationality, and Belonging in Chinese America during the Exclusion Era

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Ruth Mayer

5 Befriending the Yellow Peril: Student Migration and the Warming of American Attitudes toward Chinese, 1905–1950 Madeline Y. Hsu

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6 Between the “Mountain of Tang” and the “Adopted Land”: The Chinese American Periodical Press and the Emergence of Chinese American Identities in the Face of Exclusion

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K. Scott Wong

Part III Missionary Interventions: Cultural Mediation in China and the United States 7 Christian Mission and the Internationalization of China, 1830–1950

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Thoralf Klein

8 “Following with Bleeding Footsteps?” American Missions in China and the (Gendered) Critique of Pearl S. Buck

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Vanessa Künnemann

9 The Deserving Heathen: Missionary Ethnography of China and Its American Converts

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Dominika Ferens

About the Contributors

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Index

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List of Figures and Tables

Figures 4.1 “The Last Addition to the Family” 9.1 “Honorary Stone Portal to the Memory of Virtuous and Filial Widows”

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Tables 5.1 Numbers of Chinese Students in the United States (Wang 1966: 158) 5.2 Countries of Origin of Foreign Students in the United States for the Academic Year 1923–1924 (Bieler 2004: 379–280)

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Transnational Nationalisms–China and the United States in a Pacific World: An Introduction Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer

he general trend in world affairs is daily concentrating more and more on the Pacific, as those with even a little knowledge in world affairs will confirm,” wrote the Chinese historian and public intellectual Liang Qichao in 1903, after a trip to the United States and Canada (1903: 89). For Liang, the upcoming “Pacific century” was determined by political and economic processes that were not confined to or controlled by one society or nation-state alone. Yet it was in the United States that the forces that would shape the future became most conspicuous, as Liang noted with a characteristic mix of fascination and deep concern. He was particularly worried about two—tightly interlinked—trends, which became apparent at the time of his travels and which seemed to gain a momentum that boded ill for the future: American imperialist ambitions and the emergence of America-based global business ventures. Two persons whom Liang made a point of meeting while in the United States personified these trends and their concatenation: Theodore Roosevelt and John Pierpont Morgan. The president stood for an agenda of American expansion, free trade, and laissez-faire progressivism, and the financier who had founded the giant United States Steel Corporation in 1901 was about to establish an increasingly transnational network of banks, life insurance companies, and railroad and public utility businesses. For Liang, Roosevelt embodied the ideology of “the world belong[ing] to the United States” (p. 90), as he sardonically paraphrased the Monroe Doctrine. J.P. Morgan, conversely, figured as the spearhead of a new world order in which trusts and corporations, the “monster[s] . . . spreading over the whole world” (p. 88), determined the lives of millions: “the trust is the darling of the twentieth century, and certainly cannot be destroyed by human effort” (p. 89). Liang’s

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assessment ironically echoes and inverts Theodore Roosevelt’s admonition, voiced in his Annual Message to Congress of 1901, that the “great industrial combinations which are popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as ‘trusts’ ” should be left alone, since they were “so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with [them] in a spirit of rashness or ignorance” (n.p.). Liang Qichao’s political conclusions from his trip to the United States and other travels are debatable (Chang 1971; Duara 1995: 33–36, 170–174; Tang 1996; Wong 1996; cf. also the essay by Nicola Spakowski in this book), but his observations on the joint forces of imperialism and corporate capitalism bring to the fore major developments that would indeed shape the future of China and the United States, and the future of the Pacific world. In many respects, Liang’s reflections of 1903 pinpoint the issues and processes whose historical unfolding will be addressed in our volume—the interlinkage of economics and politics in the world at the turn of the century, the relevance of a global perspective with local focuses, the emergence of alternative value systems which still must not be seen in isolation. Economic and geopolitical reformations are approximated in close conjunction with cultural and political developments in our volume. Thus, we lay emphasis on the human and cultural implications of the multifaceted repercussions and reciprocities of Chinese–American exchanges. We will be concerned with the differently inflected processes of nation formation and the advent of nationalism in the Pacific Rim area, and look into the patterns of mobility and the role of cultural forces and movements—religion, literature, the media—in this amalgam of interests and influences. What Liang Qichao wrote about the phenomenon of the trust—“we cannot look at this problem as if observing a fire from the opposite shore” (1903: 89)—could serve as a motto for our study, since it leads to a diagnosis of the trans-pacific status quo: what happened on one side of the Pacific invariably affected the other side, too. Trans-Pacific Interactions is structured in three sections, which are intricately interconnected. The first two parts revolve around the insight that “all good nationalisms have a transnational vision,” as Prasenjit Duara put it (1995: 13). The book’s first part, “Nationalisms and Configurations of National Identity in China and the United States,” traces reciprocal developments, exchange lines, and rifts between China and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The second part, “Chinese America, Citizenship, Nationality, and the World,” is more closely concerned with particular instances of managing the flow of exchange and contact, and of conceptualizing and representing processes of cultural contact and cultural transformation. Here, the Chinese diaspora is of central importance, since it participated in, was affected by, and engaged in American and (early) Chinese

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conceptualizations of citizenship and national identity. The book’s third part, “Missionary Interventions: Cultural Mediation in China and the United States,” widens the perspective to embrace religious contact zones. While “education and medical mission were foremost among the social and cultural activities that had made [European and American] missionaries’ rapprochement with Chinese society possible,” as Thoralf Klein points out in his essay to the book, this rapprochement was neither straightforward nor untroubled. Like other lines of interaction, the missionary project cut both ways, affecting everybody involved, although in fundamentally different ways. Often, missionaries to China went beyond their function of spreading the evangelical gospel to assume the roles of cultural mediators in ways that point to the intricate relations between religion, politics, and economics. The reflection of missionary interventions thus concretizes and complicates the observations put forth in the book’s first two parts. All three parts demonstrate the need to draw on many disciplines and discourses in order to make sense of the Pacific century. Trans-Pacific Interactions focuses on the exchanges between the United States and China from the 1880s to the 1950s. With this, we cover a time span that proved crucial to the relations between the two countries and their peoples. While interactions had obviously taken place before, it was in the 1880s and early 1890s—when influences like the U.S. politics of exclusion, the increasing involvement of the United States in imperial politics, or the formation of a concept of national identity in China set in—that these interactions gained a new momentum and became more complex than ever before. Reaching into the 1950s, our volume ends at a time when Chinese Americans were turning into the so-called “model minority” in the United States and were perceived much more favorably than before. On the other side of the Pacific, this was also the time when China had turned to Communism and American–Chinese relations were becoming differently problematical. Traffic in Goods: The Open-Door Policy Liang Qichao’s insights formulated during his travels to North America correspond closely with the ideas of Theodore Roosevelt, even if the two men’s interests obviously did not coincide. Like Liang Qichao, Roosevelt insisted that the economic and political histories of China and the United States were interconnected. In his Annual Message of 1901, the American president propounded the continuation of an “open-door” policy toward China (cf. McKee 1977, Neu 1996). This policy had been established in the late nineteenth century with the goal of allowing Europe and the United States equal access to the Chinese market. In Roosevelt’s endorsement of the

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policy, American commercial interests became an integral part of the political ideology of Manifest Destiny: We advocate the “open door” with all that it implies; not merely the procurement of enlarged commercial opportunities on the coasts, but access to the interior by the waterways with which China has been so extraordinarily favored. Only by bringing the people of China into peaceful and friendly community of trade with all the peoples of the earth can the work now auspiciously begun be carried to fruition. In the attainment of this purpose we necessarily claim parity of treatment, under the conventions, throughout the Empire for our trade and our citizens with those of all other powers. (Roosevelt 1901: n.p.)

Roosevelt’s rhetoric relies heavily on a logic established before in the context of European colonialism. His remarks resonate particularly strongly with Otto von Bismarck’s claims at the Berlin Conference in 1884 when he presented colonialism as a philanthropic, missionary project which unfolds naturally and inevitably in the wake of commercial and administrative expansion. The “civilization of the African natives,” Bismarck famously proclaimed, was to be achieved “by opening the interior of the continent to commerce” (quoted in Pakenham 1991: 241; cf. also Mayer 2002: 166). In these political reflections from around the turn of the twentieth century, capitalism is cast as an autonomous force, advantageous to everybody involved. With respect to China, which could hardly be called “uncivilized,” the emphasis was placed on the benefits of modernity and Christianity—a “more beneficial intercourse between the Empire and the modern world” was to be established, as Roosevelt wrote in allusion to the traumatic events of the anti-Christian Boxer Revolution which had just taken place (n.p.). Significantly enough, this argumentative pattern, which associates the West with modernity and casts China as “backward,” not only is developed in political speeches advocating the politics of the open door, but also registers in the writings of Chinese intellectuals and reformers—if with radically different implications, as Rebecca Karl has shown and as Nicola Spakowski and Klaus Mühlhahn argue in this book. At the turn of the twentieth century, it seems, the question was not so much whether one took part in transnational political and economic operations, but rather how to do so and with what consequences. When one explores this period of time, one quickly notices that the phenomena of economic globalization, transnationalism, and diasporic dispersal are not as recent as it is often assumed. Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier coined the felicitous term “global moments” to delineate historical instances of worldwide convergence, instances which attest to an

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awareness that what was being thought, discussed, and implemented in one part of the globe invariably resonated with and affected other areas of the world. In particular, “[c]onceptions of world order were part of an arsenal of political and cultural alternatives that rivaled one another on a global scale, even if the manifestation of the programs and agendas varied depending on the social and cultural context” (Conrad and Sachsenmaier 2007, p. 8; cf. also Mayer 2005, Dirlik 2006, Conrad and Mühlhahn 2007). One such “moment” relates to the emergence of nationalist movements the world over at the turn of the twentieth century. These movements paradoxically insist on the particularity and specificity of their cause, while drawing on a repertory of ideas and tropes which quickly become “modular” in Benedict Anderson’s words—“capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations” (1983: 4). For China, which characteristically experienced a “simultaneous growth of nationalism and a global historical logic” (Karl 2002: 8) at the turn of the twentieth century, the United States served both as an important model and as a counter-concept in the quest for a national self-enactment, even though it would be most problematical to see the Chinese developments only as a belated imitation of Western processes of nation-state formation (cf. also Klaus Mühlhahn’s essay in this book). In any case, political and ideological matters were increasingly cast in the rhetoric of business and commerce. This is not only true for the developments in the West and its mode and legitimation of expansion—“during the 1890s,” wrote Edward Said, “the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business” (1994: 25)— but the same pattern of thought manifests itself in other parts of the world, and with respect to these other expansive movements paralleling the imperial spread of the West—labor migration and diasporization—as we shall see. Traffic in People: Labor Migration and Nation Formation The fact that new means of transport and communication fostered transnational interactions in the early twentieth century, and that colonial and imperialist expansion as well as global economic ventures contributed to the emergence of a tightly interlinked world, triggered many apprehensions from the very beginning. Especially the aftereffects of capitalist expansion—labor migration and the emergence of diasporic communities in the entire Pacific Rim region—raised great concerns. In the United States, it was very obvious, if paradoxical, that the policy of the open door was by no means universal, since it applied to China only and coincided with the politics of Chinese

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exclusion. Again, Theodore Roosevelt exemplifies the contradictory stances of his country: he was, after all, not only the moving force behind the opendoor policy, but also an ardent backer of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (cf. McKee 1977). In his address of 1901, he demanded a deep-going revision of the laws and conditions of immigration to the United States, in particular “a more thorough system of inspection abroad and a more rigid system of examination at our immigration ports” (n.p.). It is no accident that it was at precisely this moment in time that the ideas of national belonging and of a citizenship status based on categories such as race and ethnicity (rather than birth or residence) became more and more important, and that identificatory systems and devices (passports, anthropometrical technologies, birth certificates) gained an unprecedented popularity and were implemented more forcefully than ever before (cf. Salyer 1995, Torpey 2000, Cole 2001; see also Ruth Mayer’s essay in this book). Increasingly, the movement of people was approached just like the traffic in goods—as revolving around problems of supply and demand, of warrantees and risks, of assets and deficits. And again, the debates on one side of the Atlantic resonated with developments on the other side. While the politics of Chinese exclusion in the United States has been made out as a pivotal point in the history of modern immigration, it coincided with developments in China that were no less incisive for the future of diasporic communities and migrant lifestyles. In the 1880s, the Qing dynasty finally redefined its concept of Chineseness, deciding that territoriality was not the only grounds for determining national belonging. Suddenly, the vast populace living outside of the borders of China was considered an asset rather than a loss. Thus, the Chinese practice of disavowing overseas Chinese subjects as Chinese nationals was discontinued at the very moment when measures were taken in the United States to systematically determine and classify citizenship status—in particular, the status of Chinese American citizens. In China, again just as in the United States, this political turn was fraught with economic considerations—after all, the Chinese overseas “had become impressively rich” by the turn of the twentieth century while retaining their loyalty to China, as Madeline Hsu wrote, concluding that “[t]o a nearly bankrupt regime, the possibilities seemed promising” (Hsu 2000: 9). For Chinese living in the United States this meant that they met with the fervent rejection of American exclusionist politics, while being for the first time acknowledged as Chinese citizens even though living abroad. This policy constituted another important backdrop for the debates around immigration in the United States—both for the immigrants themselves and for the proponents of immigration restrictions. “The Chinese coolie is the ideal industrial machine, the perfect human ox,” wrote the Californian journalist, progressivist activist, and Republican

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politician Chester H. Rowell in 1909 (p. 224)—contrasting a Chinese with a Japanese work ethics with regard to each group’s capability of adaptation. He concluded that “the Chinese labor-machine” (p. 224) might have been important for the tasks of the past, but that the Chinese were “a disappearing problem” in the United States of the twentieth century, due to the politics of exclusion but also due to their own lack of flexibility. For Rowell, just as for Roosevelt, the world of the future was the world of trusts, of corporations, of commerce, a world for which he considered the Chinese American community unfit, since it was marked not by the flow and flexibility of modern business but by self-chosen isolation and backwardness: “The Chinaman spends his money with his own merchants, for Chinese goods, or sends it back to China directly. Therefore he is not a mercantile asset” (p. 224). One could argue that one of the central aims of the Chinese American establishment in the growing Chinatowns in the United States was to counter precisely this assumption of a Chinese parochialism. By consequence, affluent Chinese tended to emphasize their difference to the Chinese population at large: “Anxiety over commercial viability . . . animated the class antagonism between the Chinese elite and the laborers and petty merchants,” writes Nayan Shah about the class conflicts in San Francisco Chinatown at the outset of the twentieth century, which complicated and intersected with the conflicts of race at the time. Increasingly, “sharp political differences between the merchant elite, on the one hand, and small shopkeepers and laborers, on the other,” came to the fore in the Chinese community of the time (2001: 131). This latter aspect is further elaborated by Erica Lee, who discusses the reasons for the dissent between different groups in Chinese America when it came to immigration restrictions, highlighting the efforts of Chinese American merchants to “distance themselves from returning laborers and other Chinese attempting to enter the country illegally” (2003: 129; on the increasing stratification of Chinese America, cf. also Wong 1996). These developments were paralleled in turn by similar processes of cultural and social stratification that evolved in China at the same time (Goodman 1995). In her essay in this book, Madeline Hsu explores the implications of such class divisions of the Chinese American community—focusing on the emergence of the notion of a “model minority” in regard to the role of Chinese students in the United States. Time and again, what was at stake in acts of class differentiation, stereotyping, discrimination, and selffashioning were (re)conceptualizations of the fraught terms “Americanness” and “Chineseness,” and “modernity” and “backwardness” (cf. also K. Scott Wong’s essay in this book). In their attempt to come to terms with a reality defined by the forces of migration and transculturation, (Chinese) Americans struggled to define these concepts in accordance with various—often

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mutually exclusive and intersecting—interests: the interests of workers and merchants, the interests of the political establishment and political reform movements, the interests of proponents and enemies of immigration restrictions. Moreover, the effort of Chinese Americans to counter the stereotype of the mindless “labor-machine” with the evidence of “progressive” lifestyles and “enlightened” social structures coincided with attempts of a reformist elite in China to gain international respect as a “modern” nation, as Nicola Spakowski shows in her essay in this book, and with the endeavor of Chinese intellectuals to position themselves in a framework of global academic interactions, as Klaus Mühlhahn elaborates. What Yong Chen wrote about the spirit of San Francisco Chinatown in the early twentieth century could thus be applied to cultural and political debates in China just as well: “words such as ‘new’, ‘progress’, ‘reform’, and, later on, ‘revolution’, all of which defied the notion of tradition, bespoke a hope for the regeneration of China and the immigrant community and became extremely fashionable” (2000: 178; cf. also Karl 2002: 27–49). Of course, the meanings of “modernity” and “newness” varied markedly in the many attempts at appropriation and control of the time (cf. Eisenstadt/Riedel/Sachsenmaier 2002; see also Klaus Mühlhahn’s essay in this book). It is in light of such strategic rearrangements and reinterpretations that Theodore Roosevelt came to reassess his diagnosis of a dichotomous Western modernity and Eastern backwardness in 1908, when he celebrated in “The Awakening of China” China’s break with the past and optimistically predicted an easier “implantation of [modern] Western ideals in the Orient” (Lian 1997: 5). While merchants and intellectuals played an important role in these processes of global reconceptualization (cf. Goodman 1995, McKeown 2001), it was the diasporic Chinese working classes which were the most instrumental in bringing about political change in China. The Chinese revolution in 1911 was backed (emotionally and financially) by Chinese laborers who lived abroad (Ma 1990; Duara 1997; Chen 2000: 168–172; Anthony Lee 2001: 161–167; Conrad and Mühlhahn 2007). In this light, what Rowell dismissed as Chinese backwardness—the tendency to engage in Chinese rather than American business (and political) activities—presents itself as an early instance of transnational commitment and as evidence that the Chinese were by no means as economically inflexible as they seemed to Rowell. “The Chinese American economy was closely tied to the China market,” wrote Yong Chen (2000: 237), highlighting the interests the community had in maintaining ties to China, while on the other hand stabilizing and consolidating its status in the United States. The lifestyles of Chinese Americans at the turn of the century could thus very well be read as an anticipation of the “long-distance nationalism” which Benedict Anderson sees as such a striking

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concomitant to the present-day “ethnicization of political life in the wealthy, postindustrial states” (1994: 326; cf. also Ong 1999, Mayer 2005: 123–167). The multiple investments of Chinese Americans in China—whether they were emotional, political, or economic—reflected a change in the larger value system in China and in the Chinese communities overseas. Yong Chen shows in his essay in this book how economic interactions and interventions from the United States furthered the demise of the Confucian ideals of scholarship and learning as the major conditions for community leadership—conditions which had functioned as means of exclusion for most émigrés’ families for a long time. Migration was, after all, a reaction to precisely the sense of being caught in a centuries-old order which did not allow for transformation. Still, the transition to a different ideology and value system must not be understood as sudden, all-comprising, and universal. Of course there was no clear-cut break between a past of Confucian ideals and a modern system of nationalism, neither in China nor in Chinese America. Various, often contradictory systems of belief and modes of thinking coexisted and informed each other; it is only in retrospect that we construct historical consecutivity from a reality that is organized in a tangled rather than linear fashion, as Prasenjit Duara has pointed out among many others (Duara 1995). This tangled structure of reality—and, conversely, the tendency to smoothen historical contradictions and cross-current developments in historical representation—comes to the fore most strikingly when one turns to the phenomenon of religion in trans-pacific scenarios at the turn of the twentieth century. The importance of religion, it seemed for a long time, was declining as other systems of meaning making—Darwinism, nationalism, modernism, corporate capitalism—were on the rise. In China, modern historiography was suffused with “campaigns against religion” (Duara 1995: 32), relying strongly upon the notion of a neat progression from “backwardness” (in the form of religious and “traditional” thinking) to “modernity” (in the form of nationalist and statist ideas). But religious belief systems and nationalist ideas, folk practices and intellectual strategies, traditions and innovations often coexisted and intermingled—in China as well as in the United States. Traffic in Beliefs: Missionary Exchanges Traditions, systems of thought, and structures of community organization were transported from China to the diaspora. However, to conceive of American Chinatowns as of “residual Chinas” or “fossilized” remnants of the homeland (Pan 1994: 98, 124) is to miss the radical transformations, subtle adaptations, and profound hybridizations which these traditions underwent once Chinese became Chinese Americans (cf. Hsu 2000, Chen 2000, Erica

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Lee 2003, Mayer 2005; cf. also K. Scott Wong’s essay in this book). Nevertheless, the conviction that “a Californian Chinatown is simply a miniature section of Canton, transported bodily” and that “a few years of unrestricted Chinese immigration would leave California American only in the sense in which Hongkong [sic!] is English,” as Chester Rowell wrote with characteristic anxiety (1909: 7, 9), precipitated not only measures of immigration restriction, but also more humanitarian efforts of fostering Chinese Americanization, such as the American home missions. There is perhaps no other cultural project which illustrates as strikingly the reciprocities and broken reflections between China and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century as the home missions. Some figures in the missions “at home” had been active in the foreign missions—that is, in China—before. In the home mission movement, these returned missionaries collaborated closely with converted Chinese Americans and white men and women who did volunteer work. Like the popular American press of the day, the home mission movement relied upon the notion that Chinatowns formed small enclaves of Chineseness within the American cities. Yet by contrast to the press, which was often anti-Chinese, the activists, professional preachers, and volunteers that constituted the mission movement mostly aimed at representing the Chinese in America in positive terms. The home mission movement was largely anxious to “paint a nonthreatening, orderly Chinese community; [its publications] implied that the manners and customs of the Chinese left a lot to be desired, but they were more likely to show Chinese in well-lit public places, assimilating,” as Dominika Ferens pointed out with respect to the Presbyterian community in Montreal (Ferens 2002: 55–57). The missionaries in America considered themselves as cultural mediators and go-betweens, facilitating the Americanization and assimilation of the Chinese rather than keeping the cultures at bay. Still, the functions of mediator and border patrol prove to be closely related in the missionary project, as Nayan Shah highlighted when he traced the propensity of missionaries in American Chinatowns to uphold a sharp boundary between civilized “Christian homes” and “ordinary heathen homes” (2001: 115). The ambivalence of the missionary project manifested itself not only in the United States but in China just as well. In the nineteenth century, Western missionaries “were the only group to settle down [in China], establishing mission stations as permanent bridgeheads of their evangelistic enterprise,” as Thoralf Klein elaborates in his contribution to this volume (cf. also Fairbank 1994, Klein 2002). The extended stays in China were bound to have an effect on both parties involved—the Chinese communities and the Western missionaries. These effects often differed radically from the expectations that had originally inspired the missionary enterprise, since they did not manifest

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themselves as one-sided change, but constituted rather some sort of crossfertilization. While one outcome of this exchange was a syncretization of Christianity in a Chinese appropriation marked by Confucianism and other systems of belief, as Klein shows, another was the transformation of the missionaries’ own belief systems and convictions, as Dominika Ferens argues in her contribution to this study. Increasingly, missionaries were willing to modify and examine their quasi-imperialist strategies and attitudes to convert the Chinese, with some of them truly engaging in intercultural communication, and thus developing an understanding and putting into practice the idea of a “social gospel” (cf. Fairbank 1974). The period between 1900 and 1920 has been rightfully called the “golden age” of missions in China (Cohen 1978), but it is also the time in which the Boxer Rebellion with its international impact took place. Obviously, missionary work was not situated in a vacuum. It was informed by the very forces of imperial and commercial expansion, and by the organized and spontaneous acts of resistance against these forces which we discussed above. In a sense, the American missionary engagement in China can thus be seen as an extension of the free trade ideology and open-door policy, aiming at a “civilizatory” effect that would pave the way for easy and frictionless SinoAmerican commercial interaction (cf. Yu 2001: 19–30). Seen that way, the radical leader of an anti-Christian uprising in Sichuan, Yu Dongchen, had a point when he stipulated provocatively in an 1898 pamphlet: “Nowadays foreign merchants come for trade and Christian missionaries come to preach Christianity. . . . They . . . wished to dismember our country as if it were a melon” (quoted in Duara 1995: 123). That such allegations were by no means exclusively polemical is further underlined by the fact that one of the most prominent and influential missionary voices in Europe, Karl Gützlaff, “stressed not only the importance of Christianizing China, but also of opening the country to free trade,” as Thoralf Klein points out in his essay in this book. The global project of evangelization was entangled in business interests and was “accompanied by America’s growing conception of China as a vast, undeveloped market for its products.” The credo that “commerce follows the missionary” all too often pinpointed the logic of the day (Lian 1997: 6). However, to reduce the missionary project to these interests would mean to miss other—often conflicting and contradictory—aspects marking the same project (Fairbank 1974, Lian 1997). The intricate interlinkage of the ideological spheres of politics, economics, and religion also manifests itself in the writing of missionaries, even in its most intimate variants—in diaries or private letters. Yet it is in these sources that the inherent contradictions between an evangelist ethos and a functionalist model of thought or an ideology of power turn out to be most

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difficult to suppress. Vanessa Künnemann’s essay in this book discusses the experiences of female American missionaries in China. It brings to light particularly the tensions between an imagery of missionary self-sacrifice and exile on the one hand, and the rhetoric of imperialism on the other (cf. also Welter 1993, Kaplan 2002). However, the ambivalences of the missionary enterprise were not only expressed privately and tentatively, but also came to bear on its official representations. Many American and European missionaries were well-versed in the strategies of public relations and participated busily and expertly in an international discourse on China. While they doubtlessly influenced and shaped the form of this discourse, they were also subjected to its logic and its ideological repertory, so that the official writings about missions in China often come across as ambivalent or double-edged, as both Thoralf Klein’s and Dominika Ferens’ essays in this book exemplify. The American and European missionaries in China can thus be seen as counterparts to the Chinese scholars and journalists, such as Liang Qichao, who traveled in the West and recorded their experiences. All of them acted as ethnographers who reported their observations to an increasingly globalized media system, for which private experiences and impressions needed to be brushed up and adapted, yet which was conversely affected and transformed by individual interventions and interests. The considerable flexibility of this official discourse might be best exemplified by the writings of an author who was—as the daughter of American missionaries to China—deeply steeped in the missionary rhetoric, yet inverted it to formulate an ardent critique of the practices and ideology of the field: Pearl S. Buck (see Vanessa Künnemann’s essay in this book). Buck’s career as a popular writer testified to the fact that China did not only leave traces in American mainstream culture through the effort of Chinese Americans, but that the progressing Pacific century increasingly shaped lifestyles and biographies that were difficult to capture in the exclusive categories of “Chineseness” or “Americanness.” Pacific Studies “The history of China can no longer be innocently a history of the West or the history of the true China,” wrote Prasenjit Duara in 1995, summing up the heated debates in the field at the time (p. 27; cf. also Kirby 1997). Indeed, to look for a “true China”—pristine and unaffected by Western politics and Western influences—would be as futile as the attempt to conceive of China only in terms of Western concepts and Western developments. By the turn of the twentieth century, Western ideas and Western material objects had mixed themselves into the intellectual and material reality of China, just as Chinese ideas and objects had for a long time found their way into the

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Western world (Dikötter 2006; Tchen 1999: 3–24; see also the essays of Klaus Mühlhahn and K. Scott Wong in this book). The complicated mix of fear and fascination that fed the American approach to China and the Chinese was reciprocated on the Chinese side when the fascination for Western things and ideas mingled with apprehensions vis-à-vis a Western takeover, and anti-imperialist schemes were expressed in the rhetoric of Social Darwinism or race, which revolutionary and reformist leaders had picked up in their travels and in their reading (Dikötter 1992; Duara 1995; Karl 2002). The broken translations, correspondences, appropriations, and misunderstandings that mark the contact zones between China and the United States in the early twentieth century call for a comparative perspective, and for a cooperation of the disciplines (Asian) American Studies and Chinese Studies. Yet to talk about interactions between China and the United States as they materialized from the nineteenth century onward, invariably also means to talk about Europe. After all, as Arif Dirlik put it, the Pacific was a Euro-American invention: The Pacific was “invented” as it was conceptualized in terms of a EuroAmerican global vision that incorporated the region’s peoples into a new inventory of the world and established relationships that bound them together in a regional structure. This structure expressed the demands of the nascent capitalist order that informed the new vision, rather than expressing needs intrinsic to the region. The EuroAmerican Pacific also gave birth to the Asian Pacific. (Dirlik 1998: 24)

To look at the Pacific region from this vantage point is to take into consideration that American and Asian interactions occur against a backdrop of European interests, strategies, and presences. We are interested in disclosing this European backdrop, in addition to introducing to an American audience the work of well-established European scholars in the field, many of whom have published important studies in languages other than English. The papers in this collection show that Asian American and Asian Studies in Europe, and in particular in Germany, have been a site of intense and lively discussions in recent years. Thus, several of the essays in this book will complement their comparative explorations of the United States and China with observations and contrastive reflections on European developments of the time. But perhaps it is equally important to demonstrate with this book that it does not matter these days as much as it did before where researchers are located and where they were born or live. Books, theories, and ideas travel even faster now, in the days of electronic communication and publishing, than they did in the early twentieth century. Young scholars working

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in transnational studies, global history, and postcolonial theory today have perhaps more in common with their peers all over the world than with many of their disciplinary predecessors in their home countries. Still, there are clearly questions of difference that matter, with language constituting the most obvious one. In this book we mean to overcome this deficit, and widen the perspective on current projects about transnational processes and transcultural interactions. ∗

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∗

Trans-Pacific Interactions is the first book-length publication emerging from a four-year research project, “Diasporic Self-Fashionings: Exchanges of Chinese-American and American-Chinese Identities,” generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In the course of this project, we organized the international and interdisciplinary conference “Pacific Interactions,” which took place at the Leibniz University of Hannover in November 2006. This conference’s stimulating debates triggered this volume. Neither the conference nor this book would have been possible without Yuliya Kozyrakis, our research assistant at Hannover. She has been the heart and soul of the project for two years, shielding us from the annoyances that administrative matters can carry and from the editorial work on the manuscript. Her astute observations, her critical engagement, her quick reactions have proven of inestimable importance to us. We would also like to thank Janna Wanagas and Dario Bayat Sarmadi, who took over as research assistants in the last stages of the editorial process and whose eagle-eyed editing helped us finish the manuscript on time. Our final thanks go to the anonymous reader who recommended our manuscript for publication and to Palgrave Macmillan for their support and interest. Vanessa Künnemann, Ruth Mayer, Hannover, Germany, Dec. 2008 References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Benedict. 1994. “Exodus.” Critical Inquiry 20, 314–327. Chang, Hao. 1971. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chen, Yong. 2000. Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943. A Trans-Pacific Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Cohen, Paul A. 1978. “Christian Missions and Their Impact to 1900.” The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Ed. John K. Fairbank. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 543–590. Cole, Simon A. 2001. Suspect Identities. A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Conrad, Sebastian and Dominic Sachsenmaier. 2007. “Introduction: Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s.” Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s. Eds. Sebastian Conrad, Dominic Sachsenmaier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–25. Conrad, Sebastian and Klaus Mühlhahn. 2007. “Global Mobility and Nationalism. Chinese Migration and the Ethnicization of Belonging, 1880–1910.” Competing Visions of World Order, 181–211. Dikötter, Frank. 1992. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. London: Hurst. Dikötter, Frank. 2006. Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China. New York: Columbia University Press. Dirlik, Arif. 1998. “The Asia Pacific Idea. Reality and Representations in the Invention of a Regional Structure.” What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Ed. Arif Dirlik. 2nd ed., Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 15–36. Dirlik, Arif. 2006. “Globalization Now and Then. Some Thoughts on Contemporary Readings of Late 19th/Early 20th Century Responses to Modernity.” Journal of Modern European History 4, 137–157. Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation. Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duara, Prasenjit. 1997. “Nationalists among Transnationals: Overseas Chinese and the Idea of China, 1900–1911.” Ungrounded Empires. The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. Eds. Aihwa Ong, Donald Nonini. New York: Routledge, 39–60. Eisenstadt, Shmuel, Jens Riedel, and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds). 2002. Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese and Other Approaches. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Fairbank, John King (ed.) 1974. The Missionary Enterprise in China and America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ferens, Dominika. 2002. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Goodman, Bryna. 1995. Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hsu, Madeline Y. 2000. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kaplan, Amy. 2002. “Manifest Domesticity.” The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 111–134. Karl, Rebecca E. 2002. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Kirby, William C. 1997. “The Internationalization of China: Foreign Relations at Home and Abroad in the Republican Era”. China Quarterly 150, 433–458. Klein, Thoralf. 2002. Die Basler Mission in der Provinz Guangdong (Südchina), 1859–1931. Akkulturationsprozesse und kulturelle Grenzziehungen zwischen Missionaren, chinesischen Christen und lokaler Gesellschaft. Munich, Germany: Iudicium. Lee, Anthony W. 2001. Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lee, Erica. 2003. At America’s Gates. Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Lian, Xi. 1997. The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University. Liang Qichao. 1990. “The Power and Threat of America.” In: Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-nineteenth Century to the Present. Eds. R. David Arkush, Leo O. Lee. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 81–95. Ma, L. Eve Armentrout. 1990. Revolutionaries, Monarchists, and Chinatowns: Chinese Politics in the Americas and the 1911 Revolution. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Mayer, Ruth. 2002. Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Mayer, Ruth. 2005. Diaspora. Eine kritische Begriffsbestimmung. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. McKee, Delber. 1977. Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door Policy, 1900–1906: Clashes over China Policy in the Roosevelt Era. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. McKeown, Adam. 2001. Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Neu, Charles E. 1996. “Theodore Roosevelt and American Involvement in the Far East, 1901–1909.” The Pacific Historical Review 35:4, 433–449. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pakenham, Thomas. 1991. The Scramble for Africa. White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. New York: Avon Books. Pan, Lynn. 1994. Sons of the Yellow Empire: The History of the Chinese Diaspora. New York: Kodansha International. Roosevelt, Theodore. 1901. “First Annual Message” (December 3, 1901). The American Presidency Project [online]. Eds. John T. Woolley, Gerhard Peters. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database). Available via World Wide Web: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29542, accessed Jan. 24, 2008. Rowell, Chester H. 1909. “Chinese and Japanese Immigrants: A Comparison.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 34:2, 3–10. Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism [1993]. New York: Vintage. Salyer, Lucy E. 1995. Laws Harsh as Tigers. Chinese Immigration and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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Shah, Nayan. 2001. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tang, Xiaobing. 1996. Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tchen, John Kuo Wei. 1999. New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Torpey, John. 2000. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Welter, Barbara. 1993. “She Hath Done What She Could: Protestant Women’s Missionary Careers in Nineteenth-Century America.” History of Women in the United States. Vol. 13. Ed. Nancy F. Cott. Munich: K.G. Saur, 192–206. Wong, K. Scott. 1996. “The Transformation of Culture: Three Chinese Views of America.” American Quarterly 48:2, 201–232. Yu, Henry. 2001. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press.

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PART I

Nationalisms and Configurations of National Identity in China and the United States

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CHAPTER 1

The American Dream and Dreams of China: A Transnational Approach to Chinese American History Yong Chen

A

h Quin, a native of the Pearl River Delta region in Guangdong Province in south China, the source of almost all pre-World War II United States-bound emigration, arrived in the United States in 1863 at the age of 15 as a laborer. Showing a determination to transplant his roots in the New World, he endeavored to improve his English by keeping a diary for a period of at least 25 years. He became a Christian and later settled and raised a large family in San Diego, where he died as a small businessman in 1914. His conscious efforts to become Americanized, however, did not erase his Chinese identity. He stayed in the trans-pacific network pioneered by the Chinese 49’ers, sending letters and money to loved ones in the native community. He also dreamed of his parents in China, which he called “my country.” Chen Yixi was also 15 years old upon his landing in America in 1860. Like Ah Quin, he converted to Christianity and worked hard to learn English. Also like Ah Quin, he kept China in his heart while pursuing his American dream and Americanization. Unlike Ah Quin, who remained in the United States, however, Chen Yixi used the capital and skills he accumulated in the United States later in his life to start a railroad enterprise in China, spending the rest of his life there. These two stories vividly illustrate the importance of transnationalism in the lives of Chinese Americans, who created and navigated their own trans-pacific spaces, continuously searching for economic opportunities and

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constructing their sense of belonging. In the Chinese trans-pacific world, China and America stood as points of continuity, and the consciousness of being Chinese and desire to become American were mutually dependent. This essay seeks to comprehend and gauge Chinese American transnationalism and how it was shaped by specific material conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A transnational approach will significantly help us to more fully appreciate the historical agency of Chinese Americans as a racially oppressed and economically exploited minority in the United States. This historical agency manifested itself most clearly in how Chinese Americans constructed their distinctive identity—an identity that was not simply a state of mind but was also manifested through the choices they made—in the prewar Chinese trans-pacific world. Negotiating that world, they gained respect and reclaimed their Americanness. At strategic moments such as the 1905 boycott and World War II, they loudly embraced Chinese nationalism while turning their trans-pacific connections into weapons against racism. The trans-pacific context also gave the immigrants opportunities to renegotiate their class status. Their saved American dollars elevated immigrant laborers to the middle or upper-middle classes in China.

Developing a Transnational Approach to Chinese American History A transnational approach to Chinese American history transcends boundaries set by two old paradigms and resonates with important developments in recent scholarship of American history. Developing such an approach also compels us to reconsider key conceptions, such as transnationalism and diaspora. A decentered diasporic framework that recognizes the plurality of what used to be called the Chinese diaspora, in particular, would broaden our perspectives on Chinese American history. The first old paradigm comes from the assimilation ideology that was populated and theorized by the Chicago School of Sociology. A comprehensive analysis of the long-lasting influence of the Chicago School of Sociology is beyond the scope of this essay and has been done by others (Cortese 1995). Also extensively challenged by many scholars (Glazer 1993, Rumbaut 1997), the assimilation model is characterized by its focus on the experiences of the immigrants (and their children) primarily within the context of American society, especially their efforts to assimilate into it. As evidence of the tremendous impact of the assimilation perspective, immigration historians wrote of immigration as a rupture and of immigrants coming to the New World as being “uprooted” (Handlin 1951).

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The second old paradigm is found in Asian American Studies, which encompasses the study of Chinese American history. Emerging in the late 1960s, it represented part of the long struggle for political socioeconomic justice and for societal and cultural acceptance by Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans, who have been excluded from American history and society as perpetual foreigners. Expressing a strong yearning for inclusion, Asian Americanists stressed the Americanness of the Asian American experience and deemphasized its Asian ties. Echoing such a yearning, Ronald Takaki declares emphatically: “We need to ‘re-vision’ history to include Asians in the history of America” (Takaki 1989: 7). Today, transnational perspectives have gained much currency in Chinese American history as well as in Asian American Studies in general, reflecting fundamental social changes that have taken place. As the influence of racism declines, Asian America has grown significantly in size and confidence. The Asian population grew from 1.5 million in 1970 to 14.4 million in 2005 (U.S. Census Bureau 2002, 2007). Post-1965 immigration is the main reason of such population growth, magnifying the importance of transnationalism. In a broader context, scholars of American history are increasingly recognizing the imperative of taking a global approach to their respective subjects of study, as is evidenced by the promise this brings to the “new Western history” (Limerick 2002). The paradigm shift is especially clear in American immigration history, where “the uprooted” is replaced by the new “transplanted” (Bodnar 1985) perspective, which acknowledges lasting connections between the Old World and the New. This perspective has also enriched our understanding of Chinese American history and generated a direct assault on nation-based disciplinary boundaries (McKeown 2001). Scholars of global connections, however, have yet to develop a coherent methodology and terminology to capture such connections. It is therefore necessary to discuss key terms I use in this essay, especially transnationalism and diaspora. Many have used these two terms interchangeably in other contexts. The journal Diaspora for instance also claims itself to be “a journal of transnational studies.” While sharing common grounds, however, the two terms also have vital differences. As a term that began to gain currency in the 1990s, “transnationalism” refers to the process in which immigrants and their communities develop and maintain “multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994: 7). I use the term to characterize the cultural, socioeconomic, and political connections across national borders that Chinese Americans have maintained through their history. I also use the word “trans-pacific,” because during the period

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under discussion such connections took place primarily within the Pacific region. The prominence of such trans-pacific connections reveals the problematic tendency among scholars to see transnationalism as a recent phenomenon (Foner 1997). Some of these scholars also regard it as the antithesis of the nation-state (Miyoshi 1993, Ong 1999). But evidence from prewar Chinese America strongly suggests that within transnational spaces, the territorial nation-state can stay vitally relevant and important. A notion that originally referred to the global dispersal of Jews, “diaspora” is an older and more controversial term than transnationalism. A wide variety of academic programs, scholarly publications, journals, and conferences devoted to various kinds of diaspora studies that have mushroomed in recent decades attest to its enormous popularity. The American Historical Association’s 1999 annual meeting, for instance, adopted “Diasporas and Migrations in History” as its general theme. Despite its popularity, there is lack of a coherent and consensus definition in many areas, including the “growth industry” of African diaspora studies (Palmer 2000: 27). There is also a tendency to associate the concept with a preexisting, overshadowing homeland, depicting diasporas as “nations abroad” (King and Melvin 1998). In a 1991 classic essay, William Safran defines the diaspora community almost exclusively in terms of its relationship and commitment to its “ancestral,” “original,” and “ideal” homeland (Safran 1991: 83–84). Traditional studies of the Chinese diaspora also tend to center the homeland, though scholars have recently started to distance themselves from Safran’s model and acknowledge that the term now carries “an array of definitions” (Leung 2003: 237). As Yunte Huang noted a few years ago, “much of the current writing about the Chinese Diaspora is contingent upon the idea of a preexisting homogenous ‘mainland’ China” (Huang 1999: 145). Diaspora nevertheless remains a constructive concept when we acknowledge its plurality as well as the fluidity of what are called the “homeland,” the diasporas, and their relations. Such a concept allows us to capture, more specifically than the notion of transnationalism does, specific historical moments in the history of Chinese Americans—when their experiences were significantly affected by events in a trans-pacific context and when they displayed a strong commitment to China. Recognizing such “diasporic moments” in Chinese American history, however, does not signal a return to the prejudiced view of Chinese Americans as un-American and inassimilable aliens. Nor does it mean an uncritical acceptance of a China-centered approach that sees the Chinese American experience merely as an extension of Chinese history. Chinese Americans’ diasporic sentiments did not represent a one-directional attachment to the

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homeland. Rather, they coexisted with Americanism in the Chinese American experience. Moreover, the use of the word “diaspora” directs our attention to parallel developments in other Chinese settlements. Chinese nationalism, in particular, spread not only to Chinese America but also to all other “modern” Chinese diasporas (McKeown 1999: 237). Indeed, placing Chinese American history in a diasporic framework would improve our appreciation of not only Chinese America’s transnationalism but also the impact of U.S. domestic conditions on it. For example, in the United States, as well as other places such as Australia and French Indo-China, where the Chinese encountered hostility, Chinese nationalism was predominantly political, expressing a longing for protection from a more prosperous China. The less hostile environment in Singapore and Malaya, in contrast, gave rise to cultural nationalism, marked by the Confucian revival movement (Yen 1982). The trajectory and positive reception of Chinese America’s political nationalism were not universally shared, either. In Thailand, for example, the government “squashed” the activities of Thai Chinese to aid China in 1939 (Skinner 1957: 245). Acknowledging diasporic moments represents an important step toward developing a transnational approach to Chinese American history. Doing so helps us to better comprehend Chinese Americans’ transnationalism in a diasporic, comparative framework, not as an indication of a peculiar, unchangeable character, but as a result of the interplay between international and domestic circumstances. Such interplay is most clearly demonstrated in the construction of Chinese American identities. The Trans-pacific Context of Identity: Defining Americanness in the Emigrant Region The formation and transformation of Chinese American identities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are complex processes that took place in the Chinese American Pacific world. Rejected in America, Chinese Americans developed and defended their Americanness in a transnational context. An important fact in early Chinese American history is blatant racism. A powerful and often violent anti-Chinese movement emerged shortly after the arrival of the Chinese 49’ers in California. Anti-Chinese prejudice permeated mainstream society, in which few were willing to consider them as Americans, and even the most sympathetic white Americans called them “Chinamen” (Condit 1900). Such prejudice quickly became institutionalized. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It banned Chinese

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immigration and denied Chinese immigrants the right of naturalization, reaffirming a principle first established in the 1790 Naturalization Act that only “free white” men could be naturalized. Anti-Chinese forces also targeted the native-born Chinese, trying to keep them out of regular public schools and deprive them of their citizenship. Chinese Americans did not remain passive victims but fought for their rights within the legal and political systems. They launched public opinion campaigns and legal battles, conveying a profound desire to enjoy the same acceptance and rights as other Americans. They filed voluminous legal cases to obtain the right of entry and the education rights for their children. In a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Wong Kim Ark v. United States (1898), they successfully defended the citizenship of their native-born children as a birth right. The desire for acceptance in America began to surface during the early years of Chinese immigration. In 1855 the Chinese community in San Francisco openly responded to a racist speech by Governor John Bigler, who attacked the Chinese as being unassimilable. Published as a pamphlet, the English-language version of the response carried a strong tone of defiance, asking why Americans in China were not “rebuked for not knowing our language, or for not being acquainted with our affairs” (Chinese Merchants 1855: 5). The Chinese-language version, however, which was published in a Chinese-language newspaper, advised the immigrants to change the manner in which they dressed (Chinese Merchants Feb. 15, 1855). Here, defiance and a seemingly assimilationist approach were diverse strategies aiming at the same goal: acceptance. As a politically powerless, numerically small, and economically oppressed minority group, however, Chinese Americans could not win the war for social justice and acceptance within the U.S. domestic setting alone. Chinese Americans’ distinctive identity first emerged in China, which encompassed their American experience and gave them the respect and acceptance that evaded them in America. It recognized, in particular, the economic benefits that such an experience was expected to bring. Such an economic definition of the immigrants’ Americanness divulges a crucial reality in the trans-pacific world, namely, the enormous economic gulf separating China and the United States. This reality dictated the direction and nature of much of the interaction between the two countries. It also reveals the meaning of New World—bound journeys of emigrants, mostly young men, in search of a better economic future for themselves as well as their families. It would require much more space to systematically examine the economic gulf between the two countries at the time. The following numbers give us a good sense of the depth of that gulf. During the 1860s, when Ah

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Quin and Chen Yixi came to America, for example, the average income of a Chinese immigrant laborer in America was 24–46 times more than what an agricultural worker in south China earned (Chiu 1967: 45, 72; Barth 1974: 196, Mei 1984: 240, Chan 1991: 82). According to the data generated by Ta Chen and his research team during the 1930s for his study of emigrant communities in east Guangdong Province and south Fujian Province, the remittances from Chinese in Southeast Asia represented “an important part” of the income of their family (Chen 1940: 85). This is also the case with the native communities of Chinese immigrants in America. A Cantonese folksong goes: “Father went to the Gold Mountain; please send money quickly; our whole family depends on you” (Hu 1970: 102). The trails of money and letters sent to China help to chart the informal but extensive and long-lasting trans-pacific networks that emerged shortly after the Gold Rush. The addresses and the records of letters and money sent to China that Ah Quin kept over the years afford us an intimate glance into the extent of such networks. Consisting of loved ones, friends, and business contacts, his network spanned from the Pearl River Delta to America, and it also extended to Canton, Hong Kong, and Manila. In 1880 he recorded that on January 13 he gave a letter and $10 to a fellow townsman named Tang Xihong to deliver to “my mother” and “one dollar to my Grand Mother. All in gold.” The word “gold” carried a strong New World connotation in the emigrant region, where California was called the “Gold Mountain,” and the emigrants “Gold Mountaineers.” Cantonese folk songs shed light on the distinctive identity and the respect that Chinese Americans received as “Gold Mountaineers.” One folk song advised parents to marry their daughters not to scholars or farmers but to immigrants in America. It reads: “If you have a daughter, do not hesitate to marry her to a Gold Mountaineer, [who] upon boarding a ship, [brings] hundreds of silver” (Hu 1970: 51). In the emigration region, emigration to America helped create a cultural departure from the centuries-old Confucian value system, which revered the pursuit of scholarship and despised financial and commercial activities. In voyaging to trans-pacific spaces and maintaining the networks therein, the immigrants not just made sacrifices but also improved their own socioeconomic standing. The financial resources stemming from their overseas adventures earned them respect and gave them more authority in family affairs. This experience was also shared by emigrants to Southeast Asia, as is supported by evidence from Ta Chen’s comprehensive study of their communities in the 1930s. Chen quoted a social worker saying, “When a son abroad earns substantial sums of money and sends them home, the father’s attitude toward him is likely to depart somewhat from that customary in China. He

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will respect the wishes of the absent member of the family as to the ways in which the money is to be spent” (Chen 1940: 85). In the Chinese trans-pacific world, immigrant workers in America could become members of the middle and upper-middle classes in south China, drawing attention to the often-neglected spatial dimension in class formation. Chicago’s Chinese laundrymen, for instance, developed a pattern to acquire real estate property in China—first in their native villages and later in the cities. Many American laundrymen lived “like a ‘bourgeois’ ” in China (Siu 1987: 180). Chinese Americans also won public respect and recognition in the emigrant region through their direct investments. They were joined by people from other diasporas. Most investments came from Chinese in the United States and Southeast Asia, and these investments had noticeable commonalities. First, they went to their respective emigrant regions in the two provinces of Guangdong and adjacent Fujian, demonstrating persistent regionalism. Second, and more important, despite the tremendous difference in size and length of settlement, Chinese American and Southeast Asian Chinese communities started to make direct investments around the 1870s and 1880s, showing a striking degree of simultaneity. This resulted from developments in China, especially a shift in the government’s policies toward the overseas emigration and the budding modernization movement. Leaders of that movement, such as the Governor-General of Guangdong Province, Li Hongzhang, were directly or indirectly involved in raising capital from the Chinese in Southeast Asia and elsewhere (Godley 1975: 370). Third, in the first few decades after the 1870s, while diasporic capital went into an array of sectors, there was also a detectably deliberate attempt to introduce modern technology, such as electricity, to China. In 1890, a Chinese newspaper reported that “soon the city of Guangzhou [Canton] will have electric lights” because of the investment venture of a San Francisco-based Chinese merchant. The venture also drew the attention and support from the region’s senior officials, including Governor-General Li Hongzhang (Lin 1989: 167). Diasporic investors would add four more power companies in the next two decades to Guangdong Province. More important, they also made concerted efforts to invest in transportation, a sector that attracted more than one of every five investment dollars. Of particular importance was the building of railroads, which was a matter of highly symbolic importance in the nationalist movement. Three diasporic railroad enterprises commenced around 1905, one in Fujian and two in Guangdong, including the ambitious and risky 3-milliondollar venture of the Xinning railroad in Xinning (later renamed Taishan) County.

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National Recognition: Government Policies and the Notion of Huaqiao The continuously increasing flow of investment money from Chinese Americans and their counterparts elsewhere soon brought them recognition and respect at a national level in China. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese American capital reached areas far beyond the emigrant region: Chinese Americans raised money for the relief of famine victims in central China and supported various political parties, including what would become the Nationalist Party. Nothing illustrates the respect and recognition for Chinese Americans more dramatically than the nationwide boycott of American goods in 1905 in protest of America’s exclusion policies. Triggered by debates over the expiring 1894 Sino-American treaty, which had sanctioned such policies, the boycott reflected a growing awareness among China’s elites of Chinese Americans’ contributions to the national economy. During the movement, its organizers publicized the magnitude of remittances from Chinese America. Chinese Americans themselves knew the political weight their economic resources carried. In a letter written in 1905, a Chinese merchant in San Francisco urged the Chinese government to stand up to America’s anti-Chinese policies, pointing out that failure to do so would destroy an important source of revenue for China (Lu 1995: 224). The historian Delber L. McKee notes the influence of Chinese America: “The tiny community in mainland America had temporarily acquired a special leverage with influential Chinese leaders and with groups both in and out of government” (McKee 1986: 169). Chinese America was indeed very small, with a population of less than 100,000 people in 1900, but the significance of its economic leverage was anything but temporary. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, overseas emigrant remittances grew significantly, providing much-needed foreign currency to an impoverished economy. Chinese American remittances represented a big part of the story. According to Remer’s 1933 conservative estimate, which failed to include the funds that had evaded banks in Hong Kong (Yao 1943: 32–33, 41; Remer 1968: 220–221, 225), remittances were big enough to wipe out more than 70 percent of China’s trade deficit from 1914 through 1930. For the same period, the remittances were more than 80 percent of the average revenue of the Chinese central government (Hou 1964: 44). From 1937 to 1939 remittances were more than four times the size of the Chinese international trade deficit (Wu 1967: 16; Huang and Xu 1991: 60). Chinese Americans, who accounted for less than 2 percent of the overseas Chinese population (Lin and Zhuang, 1989: 31–32), made disproportionately

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important contributions. For several years in the 1930s, for instance, Chinese American dollars accounted for half of all diasporic remittances (Xia 1992: 139, 141). Chinese Americans were well aware of their economic leverage in China. An article published on October 8, 1943, in Jinshan Shibao (“GoldMountain Times”), a newspaper run by America-born Chinese, concluded that “the voluminous remittances from overseas Chinese have significantly enhanced China’s national wealth” and represented “the largest source” of revenue for balancing its “huge trade deficit.” China’s growing awareness of the importance of diasporic capital provides the context in which to understand the emergence of a new identity for Chinese Americans and their compatriots in other parts of the world. It is an identity that is defined, first and foremost, in economic terms. Moreover, it encompassed not only Chinese America but also other international Chinese settlements. Its emergence accompanied government policy changes. The Qing court’s long-standing restrictive policies on overseas emigration, accompanied by an open contempt for the emigrants, remained intact until the late nineteenth century, at which time China’s elites realized that protecting overseas communities was also to protect an important source of revenue. It is no accident, therefore, that the initial actions the Qing court took to protect Chinese emigrants, including the Burlingame Mission and the establishment of China’s diplomatic missions, coincided with the initial wave of diasporic investments in China during the 1860s and 1870s. Anson Burlingame, an American and China’s first envoy to visit the United States, signed the Burlingame Treaty with the American government in 1868. Also called the “Cheap Labor Treaty” (Armstrong 1962: 91), it paved the way for more Chinese workers to arrive for the development of the U.S. West. It also included important provisions for safeguarding the Chinese in America and acknowledged the legitimacy of emigration by Chinese people. The treaty, however, made unequivocally clear in both the Chinese and English texts that the privileges, immunities, and exemptions promised to Chinese in the United States did not grant them the right to naturalization. There is no evidence that the Chinese government fought for that right. Its failure to do so was consistent with its desire to maintain jurisdiction over overseas Chinese—a persistent theme in its emerging policies. After 1893 the Qing government officially allowed people to leave the country and return. In 1903 it established a commerce department for handling overseas Chinese investments and helping investors. To reward overseas Chinese investors with official titles, the Commerce Department drafted detailed regulations in 1908, specifying the required investment amount for each official title.

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The Qing government’s first citizenship law of 1909, Daqing Quoji Tiaoli or Citizenship Regulations of the Great Qing, once again showed its efforts to protect, as well as maintain control over overseas Chinese. By declaring that all children born of a Chinese father or, in the absence of a father, a Chinese mother in China or abroad were Chinese citizens, it extended recognition and acceptance to those born on foreign soil. In doing so, meanwhile, the government was also directly competing for jurisdiction over the Chinese in the Dutch East Indies with the Dutch colonial power, which officially declared in 1910 that those born in the Indies were Dutch subjects. Policies designed to cultivate the commitment of overseas Chinese as well as their investments were continued and expanded after the 1911 Revolution. Chinese Americans and their compatriots in other diasporas elected and sent their own representatives to the national assembly of the new republic. As all these policy changes were taking place, new terms appeared as signifiers of the Chinese in America and other diasporas (Yen 1981: 282–283), including the notion of huaqiao, which can be roughly translated as “overseas Chinese.” A conception that has remained in prominent and frequent use and has generated considerable ambiguity and controversy, it has come to signify a lasting framework of analysis and therefore deserves a brief discussion. The notion of huaqiao quietly emerged sometime in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and quickly gained wide usage. Its growing prevalence in popular and official use beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century throughout China represents another indication of overseas Chinese people’s elevated status and the recognition of their distinctiveness in public discourses at a national level. We must also note, however, that the word huaqiao, which did not accentuate Chinese Americans’ distinctive Americanness as clearly as did local terms like “Gold Mountaineers,” did not apply exclusively to Chinese Americans, but referred to a global Chinese diasporic world. The huaqiao paradigm defined overseas Chinese and their Chineseness primarily in terms of their presupposed connections or attachment to China. Coined initially in China, the term reflected, to a significant degree, efforts by Chinese elites and authorities to channel diasporic Chinese transnational activities and resources into China’s national and nationalist projects. Opposition to such a paradigm surfaced as early as 1925, when the Chinese American Citizens Alliance issued a public objection to a pledge of allegiance to China (Chinese American Citizens Alliance 1925: 24). Needless to say, the increasing diversity in geographical origin, demographic characteristics, and socioeconomic standing, as well as in the understanding of what it meant to be Chinese that characterized postwar Chinese America and other diasporas, has since then further exposed the deficiency of the huaqiao

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paradigm. Reflecting such diversity, an increasing number of Chinese Americans have constructed Chineseness beyond the huaqiao framework. Some reduced it to something biologically “accidental” (Liu 1998). The limitations of the huaqiao paradigm and the challenges it has received, however, must not prevent us from acknowledging the extent of its historical validity. Two points deserve our special attention. First, we need to rectify one long-standing misassumption about the term huaqiao, namely the belief that it contains “the sense of ‘Chinese sojourners’ ” (Wang 1981: 119). While many early immigrants harbored a desire to return to their native places, there is no evidence that promoters of the huaqiao paradigm, especially policy makers, viewed them as sojourners. Such a view would contradict China’s economic interest. Second and more important, the huaqiao framework during this period must not be construed as merely representing the hegemonic interest of the Chinese nation-state. Closely associated with China’s emerging nationalism (Wang 1985: 71), the huaqiao concept gave Chinese Americans not only respect and acceptance but also hope. The zealous nationalistic sentiments found across class lines in Chinese America and other diasporas constitute convincing evidence that they welcomed the new huaqiao designation, which linked their fate with that of China. Furthermore, Chinese in America and elsewhere demonstrated their own historical agency by appropriating the huaqiao paradigm as a vehicle for justice in their respective domestic settings. Lea Williams’s analysis of Chinese nationalism in Indonesia illustrates this aspect succinctly: “When the homeland seemed capable of winning a political place in the world or of serving the interests of the Indies Chinese, overseas support of Peking was fairly generous . . . . A natural desire to obtain solutions to their own problems, not a purely idealistic interest in China’s future, appears to have been the motivating power behind many of the actions of the Indies Chinese” (Williams 1960: 200–201). In such moments, which I characterize with the adjective “diasporic,” the agendas of China and its emigrants overlapped. Three Diasporic Moments: Articulating Chineseness No events in the first century of Chinese America are better qualified to be called “diasporic moments” than the 1905 boycott, the 1937–1945 Chinese Pacific War against Japan, and the building of the Xinning railroad. Closely related to Chinese nationalism, these events amply reveal the extent of Chinese American transnationalism in a diasporic context. While they played a major role in all three events, Chinese Americans also found an arena therein to combat American racism.

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The 1905 boycott movement, which reached different cities across China, represents the first time in history when the plight of Chinese Americans and their struggle for justice took center stage in the national political arena of China. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Chen 2000), the 1905 boycott signaled the rise of modern Chinese nationalism. Its leaders were heavily influenced by, and appropriated, Western ideas, especially Social Darwinism. Such ideas shaped their view of China in world geopolitics as an increasingly weak nation facing a national crisis in the global survival-of-the-fittest competition. It became the top priority of the Chinese nationalist movement to renew China and restore national dignity. Leaders of the nationalist movement saw the mistreatment of Chinese America, the first large Chinese settlement in the West, as part of the humiliation inflicted on their nation by the West in modern times. This is also because they gradually began to see Chinese Americans as Chinese. A popular pamphlet during the 1905 boycott stated: “Although most Chinese laborers in America today are Cantonese, they are like our brothers.” “If we do not fight [against the mistreatment on their behalf ],” it concluded, “it will come to all of us” (Ying 1960: 546). Flyers, plays, public speeches, and other kinds of promotion materials during the boycott frequently identified Chinese Americans as “fellow countrymen” (Ying 1960: 546). In acknowledging their Chineseness and their distinctiveness from people in China, such materials used three terms in reference to Chinese in America: huaren (Chinese people), huagong (Chinese laborers), and huaqiao. Liang Qichao, a leader of the new nationalist movement, was the first to draw attention to the plight of Chinese Americans. His widely circulated On the Exclusion of Chinese Laborers of 1904 publicized America’s anti-Chinese racism. In it, he never used the word huaqiao but called Chinese Americans huagong and huaren. In the 1905 boycott promotion publications, the latter two terms were also widely used, while the notion huaqiao appeared with the least frequency. A reference exclusively to Chinese Americans as laborers, huagong signified a recognition of their Americanness. The popularity of the term huaren, which does not have the connotation of “sojourner,” strongly suggests that Chinese nationalists did not see the Chinese presence in the United States as temporary. It also contradicts the belief that the huaren concept represents a later stage of identity construction in Chinese American history (Lai 1992). The affirmation of Chinese Americans’ Chineseness in such terms resonated with their self-perception, which had remained unrecognized beforehand. Reflecting such self-identification, they had identified themselves as tangren (people of China) in private and public documents—the word tang came from the Tang Dynasty, one of the most prosperous Chinese dynasties.

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Such identification resulted from not only cultural and historical ties but also a longing for political support. Before the boycott started, Chinese Americans had asked China not to renew the 1894 treaty, as is evidenced by the lengthy and emotional plea that the Chinese community in San Francisco submitted to the Chinese government (Liang 1904: 469–488). Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese Americans replaced the word tang with terms like huaqiao and huaren. The 1905 boycott significantly reinforced the ties between China and Chinese Americans, showing China’s willingness to accept them and fight on their behalf. Therefore, they embraced Chinese nationalism and the ideology of strengthening China with increasing enthusiasm, hoping that helping China would in turn help themselves. They expressed their nationalistic sentiments not only in words but also through their hard-earned American dollars by investing in China’s economic infrastructure. Starting also in 1905, the building of the Xinning railroad best illustrates “the role of emigrant capital and nationalism in the development of enterprises in the emigrant motherland” (Cheng and Liu 1982: 60). In newspaper ads and other fund-raising venues, the railway company appealed persistently to the nationalism of Chinese Americans, whose fervent response brought early success to the venture. Construction began one year after the initial capital raising efforts started in 1905. In just three years, the first line opened for business. Much of the initial capital came from small investors, especially Xinning immigrants (the poorest group in Chinese America). Nationalistic sentiments also penetrated company policies, the most radical of which was the “three no” promise, namely, it would have “no foreign stock holders, no foreign loans, and no foreign personnel.” This policy directly answered the growing call of the nationalist movement to reclaim railroad ownership rights from foreign powers. Located in Xinning country, the railroad epitomized the union of Chinese Americans’ regionalism, modern Chinese nationalism, and transnationalism. Designed to improve transportation in the emigrant region, it reinforced connections between Chinese Americans and their native community. Chen Yixi, its founder, envisioned a railroad empire to connect Xinning to Canton, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and Europe (Hsu 2000: 166). Before long, the company encountered a series of problems, including disputes with local authorities, robbery, and the inability to generate sufficient revenue. According to a report issued to shareholders in 1918, the company accrued more than $267,000 in debt in 1916, which increased to more than $477,000 two years later (Xinning Railroad Company 1918: 6). In 1926 the provincial government took over control of the company. Chen Yixi was later forced to retire to his native village, where he died almost penniless in 1930

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at the age of 85. After immigrating to America at the age of 15, this native of Xinning had spent his formative years in the New World, which transformed him from a peasant boy into a real railroad man. Before starting the railroad in 1905 Chen had spent almost 40 years in Seattle, working his way up from a railroad track laborer to one of the contracting builders of the old Front Street Cable Line. In a letter to the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in 1922 during his last visit there, Chen Yixi acknowledged the importance of his American experience: “Seattle gave me the biggest gift that made the President of the Sunning [Xinning] Railroad Company” (Jue 1983: 35). Chen’s life embodies the interconnectedness of China and America in the Chinese American trans-pacific world. That world engendered varied opportunities for individual Chinese Americans at different times. Returning to China to build a railroad in his sixties was the choice Chen made, divergent from that of Ah Quin, who after one visit to China in 1867, never traveled there again. But in their respective ways, they both remained in the same trans-pacific Chinese American world and strove to maintain the connections therein. The demise of Chen’s enterprise, meanwhile, demonstrates the fragility of such connections. It was a tragedy of epic proportions, a fate that was shared by the hundreds of ventures started with diasporic funds from Chinese America and elsewhere. By the end of the 1940s, almost all Chinese American investment ventures in transportation and financial institutions had collapsed. Japan’s all-out invasion of China that started in 1937 dealt the last blow to the Xinning railroad, destroying all that was left of it. The war also threatened the existence of the entire Chinese nation. Chinese Americans’ participation in that war marked the climax of their expanding transnational political connections with China, which, in turn, gave them the most powerful leverage in fighting racism in America. “To save China, to save ourselves” (Yu 1992), a slogan that Chinese Americans developed during the war years, vividly captures the rationale behind the coming together of Chinese nationalism and Chinese American transnationalism. The fund-raising efforts to aid China mobilized the entire Chinese American population to unprecedented levels. Fund-raising organizations mushroomed throughout Chinese America, with San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Honolulu functioning as regional headquarters. Of particular importance was Chinese San Francisco’s China War Relief Association of America (its Chinese name translates into “Association to Save China”). A Chinese American newspaper named Chung Sai Yat Po reported on December 11, 1937, that by then the organization had sent more than 2 million Chinese dollars to China. During the eight years of the SinoJapanese War (1937–1945), it sent at least 5 million American dollars to

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China. Chinese America as a whole donated $25,000,000 directly to China’s war effort during the eight-year Chinese Pacific War (Lai 1992: 300). For a population that was slightly over 100,000 in 1940 with a significant portion of it trapped in low-paying service jobs, this was a remarkable achievement. Much of the money came directly from the pockets of Chinese Americans, as we can tell from the long lists of donors that frequently filled the news sections of Chinese newspapers. So much indeed that the five major Chinese newspapers announced in mid-November 1937 they would not publicly acknowledge donations below $100. Nonetheless, the extraordinary effectiveness of fund-raising campaigns did not mean that diasporic sentiments were universally shared. It sometimes required coercion. At a national meeting in 1943 fund-raising organizations made a monthly donation an obligation for all over the age of 16. Chinese Americans also raised money from mainstream society. In San Francisco, for example, they held events like “Chinatown Night,” a festive fund-raiser, which featured Chinese cultural traditions such as dancing dragons, Chinese plays, and Cantonese music. In 1940 they held a public fund-raising event at the Chinese New Year’s celebration. Such events became a public display of their Chineseness. While enhancing their status in China, the millions of dollars that traveled from Chinese America to China empowered Chinese Americans in the struggle against racism in the United States. To a large degree, the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 was a result of the Chinese role in the Pacific War. Despite its apparent limitations, the repeal represented a landmark victory for Chinese Americans, won through their transnationalism. It ended, legally as well as symbolically, the exclusion of Chinese immigration. More important, it allowed an Asian group to become naturalized U.S. citizens for the first time in U.S. history. It is their American resources that helped to earn Chinese Americans recognition in China. And it is their reinforced Chineseness that assisted them to reclaim their political rights in the United States as Americans. Afterword This essay on Chinese transnationalism is an endeavor in historicism, representing an attempt to describe and comprehend the specific prewar circumstances that produced trans-pacific connections. In other words, the preceding discussions are not intended to propose a general pattern of transnationalism as a linear progression that leads inevitably to empowerment and liberation. Japanese Americans held, and benefited from, similar transnational ties in the prewar years but suffered from their perceived military connections to Japan during World War II. Similarly, during the Cold

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War years, Chinese Americans were politically seen as suspicious because of their alleged ties to Communist China. Postwar developments have changed the demographic and socioeconomic character of Chinese America profoundly. Originating no longer just from the Pearl River Delta but also from a multitude of sources throughout the world, post-1965 Chinese immigration has decisively reenergized a shrinking and quickly aging community and has helped expand the scope of Chinese transnationalism beyond the prewar trans-pacific spaces. The meaning of being Chinese has also acquired new and greater complexity as a result of developments, both international and domestic. Chinese words like huaqiao have lost much of their relevance for many Chinese Americans. An increasing number of them do not even speak Chinese. Evidence shows that in the vital area of language, American-born Chinese are becoming English-only speakers at the same rate as their European counterparts did in the 1930s and 1960s (Alba et al. 2002). Within the old trans-pacific Chinese American world, China’s economic development in recent years is starting to shake the long-standing power structure. Of the depth and width of that development, Ted C. Fishman writes: “No country has ever before made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once . . . . No country shocks the global economic hierarchy like China” (Fishman 2005: 1). Just in the 15 years between 1989 and 2004, China’s GDP experienced a ninefold increase, making it the fourth largest economy in the world. Driven largely by export, China’s economic growth has ended the country’s centuries-old shortage of foreign currency, and China has been reinventing itself as the world’s largest holder of foreign exchange reserves with more than 1.1 trillion U.S. dollars in 2006. Such unparalleled economic developments begin to shift old patterns in the flow of people, goods, and capital. For more and more Chinese Americans, including native-born individuals who travel westward to China in search of economic opportunities, an emerging Chinese dream is destabilizing the dominance of the American dream. More and more Chinese students in the United States also choose to return to China rather than continue staying there. According to numbers distributed by the Chinese Ministry of Education at its 14th press conference of 2006, the number of such students and other foreign-trained Chinese natives returning to China grew almost 40 percent between 2004 and 2005. An economically strong China that Chen Yixi, Ah Quin, and tens of thousands of other Chinese Americans aspired to is finally coming into sight. And the growth of the Chinese economy, significantly fueled by foreign direct investment (FDI), is also attributable to investment capital from Chinese American and other ethnic Chinese communities. According to

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figures published in the central government’s official newspaper Renming Ribao (“People’s Daily”), overseas ethnic Chinese were among the first to invest in post-Mao China. And by 2005 such investments represent more than 60 percent of all FDI (US$670 billion) that China has received since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began, the Renming Ribao reported on October 31, 2006. The arrival of a new Chinese economy pronounces the dawning of a new era in Chinese American transnationalism with new circumstances and new challenges.

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Wu, Chun-his. 1967. Dollars Dependents and Dogma: Overseas Chinese Remittances to Communist China. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. Xia, Chenghua. 1992. Jingdai Guangdong Sheng Qiaohui Yanjiu (1862–1949) [“A Study of Modern Overseas Chinese Remittances, 1862–1949”]. Singapore: Singapore South Seas Society. Xinning Railroad Company. 1918. Shangban Guangdong Xinning Tielu Shiye Guzhi Tongji Ce. (“Statistical Handbook of the Estimated Value of the Private Enterprise of the Guangdong Xinning Railroad”). Yao, Zengyin. 1943. Guangdong Sheng De Huaqiao Huikuan [“Overseas Chinese Remittances to Guangdong Province”]. Shanghai, China: Shangwu. Yen, Ching-hwang. 1981. “Ch’ing Changing Images of the Overseas Chinese (1644–1912).” Modern Asian Studies 15: 261–285. Yen, Ching-hwang. 1982. “Overseas Chinese Nationalism in Singapore and Malaya 1877–1912.” Modern Asian Studies 16: 397–425. Ying, A. 1960. Fanmei Huagong Jinyue Wenji (Collection of the Literature of the [1905] Protest against American Anti-Chinese Exclusion). Beijing, China: Zhonghua Shuju. Yu, Renqiu. 1992. To Save China, to Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York. Philadelphia: Temple University.

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CHAPTER 2

National Studies and Global Entanglements: The Reenvisioning of China in the Early Twentieth Century Klaus Mühlhahn

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his essay examines the development of a field of study, guoxue or National Studies, that commanded much interest and prestige in the academic world of Republican China (1911–1949). The study of Chinese history and classics was traditionally associated with an esteemed genealogy, a gentry-elite background, or channels of upward mobility. In the early twentieth century, this field was profoundly transformed by global exchanges and interactions, and thus acquired new meanings in global contexts. International exchange not only came to constitute an integral part of a broad range of scientific disciplines of foreign provenance, reaching from astronomy to zoology, but even began to influence the study of the Chinese classical tradition. The very notion of a “Chinese national learning” outside of its classical tradition was in fact the result of a global system of knowledge production (Yeh 2006). Thus, the exchanges between various kinds of historical scholarship, in this instance between China, Japan, Europe (particularly France and Germany), and the United States, came to shape the study of China, in China and abroad. As a result, the development of National Studies in China took place within the framework of global academic interactions and was linked to an extended scholarly exchange between intellectuals from different nations for several decades. Rather than aiming at an overall engagement with this large issue of National Studies here, I will offer some reflections on how we can understand national “historiography” vis-à-vis currents in the global scientific

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community.1 This essay therefore attempts to shed light on how historical knowledge about China was produced through an often contentious process of negotiations and exchanges across cultural and national boundaries. On the one hand, such an approach allows us to see how “China knowledge” was generated and disseminated in the context of (or within) a global process of knowledge acquisition and utilization. On the other hand, this study also intends to analyze the production of the nationalist discourse in China. The historical knowledge that was produced by National Studies facilitated, conditioned, shaped, and disciplined nationalistic thinking in China. Thus, the trajectories of Chinese nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came to be deeply affected by the processes of global exchanges in the field of historical scholarship. While the literature on the subject has largely remained within the confines of a national history paradigm, this article uses the example of nationalist historiography to show to what extent Chinese nationalism was transformed under the auspices of global integration. The article argues that not only the “nation state form,” but also the way that the nation was defined, understood, and practiced, owed more to the global context in which it was constituted than is commonly acknowledged. Power, Knowledge, and History Histories of China at the turn of the twentieth century still have to fully account for the production, acquisition, and transmission of knowledge between China and the outside world. A binary structure of thought, which sharply pitted China against the West, informed a whole generation of scholarship on modern China. In the words of Philip Huang, “the West and China have remained sharply dichotomized” (Huang 2000: 20) in most historical studies. For a long time, Western historians saw the cause of China’s decline in the nineteenth century in its so-called stubborn refusal to abandon the traditional Sinocentric worldview and to join the rest of the world in the practice of free trade and diplomatic exchange. Historians of international relations used to resort to the well-known master narrative of Sinocentrism when they tried to explain why China was so prone to disastrous mistakes in handling “barbarian affairs” in the nineteenth century or why it “provoked” measures of punishment and retaliation by the Western powers. Narratives of Sino-Western relations suggested that the Manchus and Chinese were entrenched in the ancient rites of the tribute system and consequently incapable of meeting the challenges of modern European diplomacy. The resistance to British demands for trade and diplomatic representation was thus conveniently dismissed as a traditionalist response to modernity and progress.

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The interpretation of Chinese strategies as “traditional” lies at the center of a set of knowledge or a discourse in the study of Sino-Western relations in the age of imperialism that has been described as historicism (Chakrabarty 2007: 3–47). It implies a Eurocentric, but nonetheless universalist model of development toward a telos that all nations aspire to. According to this discourse, Western nations have already progressed considerably on this route (toward the end of history), while non-Western nations lag behind and are still in need of enlightenment and liberation from the burden of traditional culture and thinking. This historicist discourse—which is expressed here in the Foucauldian sense of knowledge formation or structures of knowing—has played an important historical role. For the project of empire building and the imperial history of the West, for example, this discourse proved highly effective by lending universal validity to Western international law, to modern diplomatic approaches and fiscal standards, while simultaneously translating everything else into particular, hence less committing and culturally specific practices. In the history of Sino-Western relations during the time period of imperialism in the nineteenth century, this led to the dissemination of a certain image of China. Culture and civilization became key concepts in Western representations of China. This facilitated a process of Western self-definition by means of distinction from cultural characteristics that were ascribed to the colonized other. While Western societies defined themselves in terms of rationalization and secularization, China was represented as determined by culture and tradition. Western powers stressed their obligation to educate and develop China: Western “reason” should be brought to Oriental “culture” (Farquhar/Hevia 1993: 488; Barlow 1993: 251/253). Scholars such as Paul Cohen (Cohen 1984), Jim Hevia (Hevia 1995), Lydia Liu (Liu 1995, 2004), and others have argued that the Chinese resistance to Western imperialism did not need to be “traditional” in order to be meaningful. They stressed that these conventional explanations are essentialist and cultural: instead of illuminating the history of the Sino-Western encounter, they actually obfuscate it because the political strategies implemented by the Manchu Court and Chinese officials were not identified as political strategies responding to the novel phenomenon of global imperialist expansion. The encounter between China and the West was neither unilateral nor unidirectional. Lydia Liu (Liu 1999: 127–164, 2004: 108–139), for instance, points to the well-known example of the Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, first published in 1836. Wheaton’s text frequently served as a main reference for many of the important negotiations concerning international disputes in the nineteenth century. It was the first law book to be translated into Chinese. The text was published as Wanguo gongfa in China in 1864 by the newly established Zongli

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Yamen. It was subsequently adopted by the Chinese government and became a textbook of sorts for the officials in service of the Chinese empire. The translation was the first of several major translation projects initiated and brought to fruition by the American missionary W.A.P. Martin, who was appointed president of the language school Tongwenguan in Beijing in 1869 (Spence 1980). Assisted by his Chinese colleagues, Martin translated and published, in addition to Wanguo gongfa, several other seminal studies of international law: T.D. Woolsey’s Introduction to the Study of International Law (1878), Bluntschli’s Das Moderne Völkerrecht der Civilisierten Staaten als Rechtsbuch dargestellt (1879), rendered from Lardy’s French version [Le droit international codifié] of the same text, and W.E. Hall’s Treatise on International Law (1903). This significant effort of translating and transferring knowledge allowed China to gain some control over the impact of Western imperialism in order to avoid conflicts for a few decades and to pursue self-strengthening strategies. However, the relationship between a translated text and its application in diplomatic practice is never simple and self-evident. Instead of assuming a direct or indirect relationship between text and practice, it is useful to first examine how a translated text produces meaning—both intended and unintended—between the discursive contexts of two languages, for neither international law nor its application can possibly exist independently of the discursive interpretation in diplomatic negotiations. Translations do not simply create equivalents, but rather constitute a “fluid middle zone” between the host and guest languages (Liu 1999: 137). This middle zone is marked by destabilized meanings and neologistic imagination. The act of translation opens up possibilities for semantic transformations, modifications, creative adoption, and “différance” (Derrida 1978). The translation negotiates between established systems of meaning and thus holds the potential for knowledge revision, for the subversion of established categories, and for the hybrid formation of new heretical knowledge. Thus, Chinese translations of international law have newly accentuated their source texts, adopting the principles of international law in order to delegitimize imperialist politics and practices. One of the most striking examples of this approach to international law is the invocation of the human rights idiom by Chinese officials in order to criticize the treatment of Chinese workers (“coolies”) overseas (Mühlhahn 2006). This added a whole new layer of meaning to international law, it changed its scope and promoted the rise of legal internationalism. The translation of texts like Wheaton’s and their unintended multiple effects of semantic innovation in history points to the intrinsic and complicated relationship between power, knowledge, and history in a global age. The historicist discourse emanating from the West and identified within the

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structures of control and domination provided the imperialist powers with an ideology that underpinned the exercise of power in Sino-Western relations. But through translation and transfer this very discourse also turned out to be an obstacle to Western superiority. Michel Foucault has underscored the destabilizing double structure of power in discourse: Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowance for the concept’s complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. (Foucault 1980: 100–1)

Although often overlooked, the history of Sino-Western relations is fraught with subversive processes of translation and knowledge appropriation through various Chinese and Western intermediaries. After all, Chinese officials and writers all were trying to introduce and utilize new knowledge and to make it productive for Chinese interests. Western projects of power and discourses of superiority were not only imposed, but also adopted and contested. In fact, the debate within, about, and against Western historical and political discourse has engendered not only the possibility of accepting or rejecting Western discourses with reference to China, but also the possibility of transforming these very discourses. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the rise of Chinese nationalism. With Etienne Balibar, the nation form can be described as an imaginary construct of a people’s common origin, a joint ethnicity, territorial rights, and the goal to achieve progress (Balibar 1991: 86–106). Nationalism in China represents an effort to particularize the universalism of the nation-state. The implementation of nationalism involved a “complex process of both recognition and misrecognition of its belonging in a new world order” (Duara 2008: 155). The nation-state is on the one hand a globally circulating model that originated in the West, but on the other hand it has to conceal its Western origins to become endorsed by non-Western societies. For Chinese nationalists, this project involved the rearticulation and reenvisioning of Sinocentrism (or, in other words, a privileging of China in historical narratives). The nationalist project invariably implies an appropriation and reinterpretation of Western concepts regarding Chinese history. The belief in the possibility of profound changes and the great potential of the Chinese nation was particularly popular among the younger generation

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of students and scholars in the early twentieth century who in many cases had access to translations of foreign works or attended English-language institutions of higher learning. In addition, mass migration brought tens of thousands of students to Japan and substantial groups to Europe and the United States. To these students, nationalism thus did not necessarily mean a mere defense of their heritage, but rather came to be identified with the need to (re)define China and thereby the aim of reinvigorating Chinese society.

Defining China at the Turn of the Century Nationalists at the turn of the century faced the problem of a tangible ethnic and cultural diversity in the Qing Empire. The empire was of such cultural and ethnic composition that Edward Schafer has wondered whether the very concept of China simply “did not exist, except as an alien fiction” (Schafer 1990: 148). The late imperial state is in fact a historical legacy of the various different groups that dominated it, including the Mongols and the Manchus. By late imperial times, Confucianism had become a legitimizing principle among others for this imperial state, and the Manchus had contributed as much to it as the Han Chinese (Crossley 1999). Thus, the empire was a pluralistic formation, which engendered a particular mode of dealing with different ethnicities. Given this historical legacy, the empire could not be simply pulled apart to create a special nationality. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was no clear-cut, mutual (Manchu, Chinese, and non-Chinese) recognition of “China.” The word “China” is a foreign coinage (Lydia Liu 2004: 80). Whereas the Western powers would refer to the Qing as “China” or “the Chinese Empire,” domestically or in the region of East Asia the term “China” was not used. Chinese ministers served the guo chao [national dynasty] and bowed to the Great Qing (Da Qing). In the emerging system of international relations governed by treaties, it was the foreign powers that signed treaties with “Chinese” authorities of various sorts (Kirby 2005). In domestic political terms in particular, there was no equivalent of “China” in a formal sense. Before the twentieth century, Chinese terms for China such as Zhonghua and Zhongguo did not manage to establish a definitive meaning in indigenous discourses. Nor can one assume concepts such as “nation” and “nationalism” to apply before the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, it is not surprising to read Liang Qichao’s critique in his 1900 essay on “China’s weakness” that the Chinese people by and large had no idea of what “country” they were living in. Liang wrote: “China is what people of other races call us. It is not

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a name the people of this country have selected for themselves” (quoted in Fitzgerald 1996: 117; see also ibid. 366n). “China” as an official term was not used before it became a part of the name of the Republic of China [Zhonghua minguo] after 1911. It was only then that a clearer notion of China emerged, in large part also due to the subsequent efforts of historians to fill this diffuse term with content and meaning. Another good example of the ambivalences and tensions surfacing in all sorts of contemporaneous efforts to define China is Zou Rong’s well-known tractate “Revolutionary Army,” which he published in 1903, at the age of 18 (Lust 1968). Essentially, he argued in this text that the Manchus were foreigners, that as foreigners they had no right to rule China, that they were in any case an inferior race who could not rule well, that they nonetheless persisted in oppressing the Chinese, and that, therefore, the Chinese needed to overthrow them and their government. This argument rested on premises that were already widespread, although Zou was among the first to formulate them so plainly and turn them into a call for revolution. What made the pamphlet popular at the time, however, was Zou’s sweeping language and his emotional condemnation of all Manchus as Manchus. He graphically attacked “the furry and horned Manchu race” and “the wolfish ambitions of this inferior race of nomads, the brigand Manchus” (Lust 1968: 58, 65; see also Zarrow 2004). For Zou, as for many of his contemporaries, the Han people were literal descendants of the Yellow Emperor—in marked contrast to others who were “others” precisely because they lacked this shared descent. Zou’s essay was above all concerned with questions of history, in particular the history of the relationship between the Manchus and the Chinese. His preface was dated “the 260th year after the fall of the state of the great Han race.” Thus, Zou’s article for the first time raised the issue of who could rightfully claim to be Chinese and participate in Chinese political affairs on these grounds. This tract also contained a call to systematically study China’s history to answer this question. Similar views have afterwards been put forward by Tan Sitong, Sun Yatsen, and many others. China had an ancient civilization, but at the turn of the century it was in fact a very new nation. This was recognized by many Chinese, from scholars to the republic’s first president, Yuan Shikai, not to mention the teams of international advisers that sought to influence what was widely seen as a great political experiment: the birth of Asia’s first republic and the transition from a dynastic to a national state. But it soon turned out that the principal stalemate remained unsolved: the Qing gave way not to one but to several “Chinas,” to alternative conceptions of a republic, and to decades of contestation as to what “China” should or would be.

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The Rise of National Learning [Guoxue] in Twentieth-Century China It is in this context of ambiguity that the study of Chinese classics became an important and eminent political enterprise. Broadly speaking it arose out of the need to define China and to produce a stable tradition and a fixed meaning that would foster the project of building a strong and modern nation. Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) and Wang Guowei (1877–1928) were two of the most illustrious scholars in early twentieth-century China that were engaged in defining China through the study of the classics and ancient history (Brown 2003: 41–50). They contributed greatly to the development of the fields of paleography, art collection, literature, and philosophy in China at the turn of the century. They also collected archival materials in privately funded efforts to keep the past alive and accessible for future generations of Chinese (Brown 2007). Most notable perhaps was their contribution to National Studies [guoxue], a turn-of-the-century movement whose central concept, namely that China had a “national essence” which needed to be preserved in the face of rapid modernization, was itself borrowed from Japan (Wang 2002). Many intellectuals of their period spent considerable time in Japan, working as publishers, art dealers, and researchers. It is no coincidence that Chinese intellectuals sought affiliation with institutions in Japan dedicated to the promotion of Japanese and Asian learning. For many scholars of their generation Japan was a gateway to the West. At the same time, Japanese intellectuals also strove to formulate their version of modernity, by combining Western element with East Asian traditions. In addition, Japan was easily accessible to Chinese scholars, since it had a long tradition of participating in the cultural exchanges of the Chinese world. Japanese sinologists studied classical Chinese [kanbun], practiced calligraphy, and exchanged presents of Chinese poems on scrolls. For scholars like Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei, therefore, contact with Japanese scholarship served several objectives: their interest in the Japanese brand of intellectual and scholarly modernity, as well as their profound interests in Chinese history and culture. The interactions of Luo Zhenyu and, to a lesser extent, Wang Guowei with Japanese collectors and historians over the period from 1900 to 1919 were significant. Their involvement in National Studies was triggered and shaped by extended contacts with Japanese scholars. At the center of their academic activities in Japan was the publication of historical books and sources that should develop and deepen the study of the Chinese classical tradition. In 1899 Wang Guowei and Luo Zhenyu collaborated on their first book project, an edition of an 1886 Japanese kanbun text on Chinese history, Zhina tongshi/Shina ts¯ushi [“Comprehensive History of China”], by Naka Michiyo (1851–1908). The text was highly esteemed in Japan, and was

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published at least three times between 1886 and 1888 alone. Zhina tongshi was one of Luo Zhenyu’s first book-length publications. It was probably the first comprehensive history of China to be published in any language. In his introduction to Zhina tongshi, Luo Zhenyu noted that the study of China’s history could help to explain “the origins of [a nation’s] poverty or wealth, strength or weakness.” This kind of historical writing seemed to gain importance, as he continued: . . . in the last one hundred years, knowledge has increased daily, and new theories have appeared daily. Scholars, particularly those today, have based their works on ancient books, and concentrate on political policies, social customs, and scholarship. My Japanese friend Fujita [Toyohachi] says the success of scholarship comes from the progress of theory, especially in history. (Luo Zhenyu 1899)

Statements such as these reflect central concerns of the National Studies movement: to apply new research methods to the study of Chinese history in order to help develop a clear sense of China’s weaknesses and strengths. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a rapid increase of activities, both scholarly and political, that aimed at promoting guoxue abroad and in China. Arguably the first group to carry the name guoxue in its title was the Association for the Preservation of National Learning [Guoxue baocun hui], founded in 1905. It was an anti-Manchu organization located in the international concession of Shanghai (Hon 2007: 95–96), thus profiting from the protection of the foreign powers. Financially supported by wealthy circles, the association published the journal Guocui xuebao. It carried a wide range of articles on historical topics dealing with both Europe and China. Although its members emphasized the study of China’s ancient history in culture, they did so with recourse to new historical methodologies, breaking with previous scholarship, and paving the way for a twentieth-century national historiography. Politically, they were radically anti-Qing and anti-Manchu, helping to develop a form of ethnically derived political consciousness that furthered the revolutionary activities of contemporaries like Sun Yatsen. Roughly at the same time, Zhang Taiyan (perhaps better known as Zhang Binglin, 1868–1936) founded a National Studies Speech Practicing Society in Tokyo. National Studies associations emerged in China, too. Hangzhou, Beijing, Chengdu—all witnessed the founding of societies dedicated to the promotion of National Studies. Even more important than the mere fact of their foundation might have been their publishing activities. A number of National Studies journals started (Sang Bing 2001: 9–10). The first was National Studies Miscellaneous [Guoxue zabian], which began to come out in Beijing in 1908. Luo Zhenyu began publishing his National Studies Serial [Guoxue congkan] in Japan in 1910. The publication of similar periodicals

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such as the National Studies Magazine [Guoxue zashi] in Shanghai in 1915 or the National Studies Periodical [Guoxue zhi] by Gu Jiegang in the 1920s (Hon 1996) ensued. In his introduction to the first issue of the National Studies Serial, Luo Zhenyu emphasized the contributions of Qing scholars like Wang Niansun, Duan Yucai, Ruan Yuan, and Wu Dacheng (Luo Zhenyu 1999: 130–132). Rather than seeking to simply break from the established scholarly traditions, he sought to forge a link between their work and his own scholarly endeavors, even as he also began to embrace certain Japanese and European methodological approaches and terminologies. This was in line with Japanese scholars like Naka Michiyo, Kan¯o Naoki, and Nait¯o K¯onan, who actively appreciated and sought to maintain certain Qing research methodologies, specifically kaozheng textual analysis, by combining them with philological approaches derived from European scholarship (Fogel 2003). National Studies sought to creatively merge traditions of Chinese scholarship with Western methodologies. The 1920s and 1930s were the heyday of National Studies. It was then that National Studies were institutionalized in the most respected universities of the country. What had started as a privately funded initiative to strengthen national self-awareness and further national emancipation and enlightenment, now turned into a state-sponsored, government-financed cluster of institutes, departments, and programs. With the state acquiring a larger stake in National Studies, the movement changed its character: It matured and became more international and sophisticated. At the same time, state sponsorship also meant that the project of National Studies became more involved with endeavors to establish principles of citizenship, and to channel loyalties and construct concepts of acceptable identities. The dependence on government funding and support went along with the obligation to carry out government policies. One of the leading universities, Qinghua University, launched the Institute for National Learning (Guoxue yanjiu suo) in 1926. It enjoyed a special reputation as the most important center for guoxue in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike the rest of the university that had fashioned itself after the MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the institute organized its study programs with little regard for concerns such as degrees or disciplines. It assembled a stellar roster of academic advisors and enrolled a large number of students. These students each pursued individual study programs. The arrangements were sometimes celebrated as an indication of the university’s admirable notion of academic freedom. The institute was short-lived, but its demise did little to diminish its reputation and intellectual significance (Yeh 2006).

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This high significance was primarily based on the fame and accomplishments of the institute’s faculty members: Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei, Chen Yinke, Zhao Yuanren (Y.R. Chao), and Li Ji (Wang 2001: 111, 192). Their research and publications contributed greatly to the emergence of Chinese historiography in the twentieth century. They were convinced that China needed a “new history” [xin shixue] that would constitute a history of the “nation” rather than court annals of the ruling dynasty. In general, this history would be evolutionary and map stages of progress (from primitive tribal forms of social organization to feudal-aristocratic to the centralized monarchy). National Studies placed China within a universal framework of progress for explaining the course of Chinese history. Many historians were, above all, interested in situating China in a world that was actually larger than China. Some studied Sanskrit and other languages to relate China to other cultures and nations. Broadly speaking, this group of historians tried to read Chinese history in a way that would make sense of the historical origins of China that was now becoming a new nation. The Institute of National Learning was not just a continuation of longstanding Chinese scholarship. Despite their deep intellectual connections with the philologists of the Qing, Qinghua classicists were innovators pushing and transforming the very nature of their scholarship. All five members of the faculty of the Institute for National Learning had either received their training overseas, traveled extensively abroad, acquired working proficiency in foreign languages, or worked intensively with foreign scholars trained in other traditions. Liang Qichao and Wang Guowei, for instance, were among the first Chinese to work closely with Japanese colleagues. The former had traveled extensively around the globe and had recorded his intellectual trajectory in travelogues about America and Europe. The latter had spent his youth as a student of Japanese language and was by and large a product of a new cultural milieu unimaginable without the treaty ports. Y.R. Chao and Li Ji had each earned a doctorate from an American university. And, most importantly, Chen Yinke’s (1890–1969) scholarly credentials, when he returned from Berlin to assume a professorship at Qinghua in 1926, included over a full decade of studies in Japan, America, and Europe. The mutual influence of various strands of historical scholarship has been the subject of much recent interest (Wang 2001: 6). In particular, the development of “Sinology” as an academic field can be linked to an extended exchange over several decades between scholars from different nations (San Bing 1999; Xu Guansan 2003). Any study of National Studies has to be aware of the close collaboration of Chinese scholars with several European scholars and sinologists, such as Aurel Stein (England), Edouard Chavannes (France), and, in particular, Paul Pelliot (France). These exchanges between

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Chinese, European, American, and Japanese historians were far reaching, going beyond mere academic research. Another area was the preservation and exhibition of historical artifacts that was unknown in imperial China. As a China-wide intellectual movement, National Studies encouraged scholars to rescue premodern texts and artifacts, both as a form of cultural nationalism and as objects of modern scholarship. Significantly, one of the most effective initiatives was the establishment of libraries, museums, archives, and research institutes throughout China. This was intended in part to counteract the overwhelming emphasis on science in China’s new educational system, but it was also to protect and preserve the “national essence” [guocui] (Brown 2007). Intertwined with the trend of National Studies, exhibitive culture was encouraged and public space was developed. It was also in the first decades of the twentieth century that the culture of exhibition gained unprecedented momentum in China, a historical phenomenon worthy of further exploration. Exhibitions as a form of public space blossomed in big cities from Shanghai to Beijing, ranging from the numerous small-scale displays of contemporary mediocre artworks and high-school student assignments to the first world’s fair of domestic and international manufacturers, held in Nanjing of 1910. These institutions—which were again modeled after foreign institutions and practices—were necessary to support archaeological and other kinds of scholarship. Many promoters of National Studies were greatly encouraged by foreign scholars to pursue such projects of collecting, exhibiting, and studying historical artifacts, since the foreign scholars were also eager to purchase, collect, and study ancient Chinese materials, and doubtlessly grateful for the expertise of Chinese colleagues. But there were also tensions: scholars like Luo Zhenyu published ancient texts, both to satisfy the demand for these materials and to keep texts available in China that had already left China physically (and were now on display in Paris or Berlin). Chinese governments in the twentieth century had already issued orders to prohibit the export of historical objects. The flow of objects out of China created a cultural crisis and several scholars protested against the export and exploitation of Chinese antiquities. There was a unanimous consensus within National Studies on cultural conservation and keeping Chinese historical artifacts in China. Conclusion The global dimension of the study of China, and the role of travel, translation, and transfer in this context in the early twentieth century can be approached at two levels. First, this nexus of interests and activities entailed a reconstitution of “China” as a subject of study in a global context. And second, it involved these scholars in an international framework of Sinological

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studies. Issues concerning the national and the global were negotiated in the Chinese study of old classics and consequently also shaped the discourse on what it meant to be a nation. Chinese heritage was re-created outside of the Confucian canon and recast, so that the past could be enlisted in the creation of the nation and mobilized for nationalism. Chinese thinkers thus became active agents in the processes of appropriating Western ideas of national history, race, and civilization, forming their own counter-narratives and fashioning their own visions of the Chinese nation. Their re-vision of Orientalist knowledge categories of East and West for nationalist purposes generated the somewhat paradoxical emphasis on China, the Han race, and Eastern identities at a time when these intellectual elites were self-consciously Eurocentric in their visions of scholarship and a national awakening. In short, Chinese elites delegitimized Eurocentric discourses by re-implementing and adapting them to their own purposes. Yet, in all of these non-Western challenges, the idea of Europe’s universality was ironically sustained to the extent that European scholarship was strongly endorsed in non-Western discourses at a time when European pessimists were deploring the “decline of the West.” It is in this spirit that the peaks of anti-Western and anti-imperial emotions and ideas in China can paradoxically be seen at the same time as moments of powerful pro-Western thinking, in particular in the field of scholarship and historical research. What is also at issue here, then, is a revision of common assumptions concerning the history of nationalism. While an earlier trust in the traditions and continuities of a national “essence” has long been deconstructed, most current theories of nationalism nevertheless privilege the temporal dimension of modern “imagined communities.” These theories emphasize that national genealogies were constructed in retrospect, yet their analytical focus remains on the connections of past, present, and future as they are conceptualized strictly within national borders. My essay has shown, however, that nationalism and the representation of the nation-state in scholarly discourse around 1900 not only took the guise of “invented traditions,” but also attested to interactions and entanglements on a global scale. The shifts and transformations in the discourse of nationalism thus appear not only as effects of internal trajectories, as the familiar picture would suggest, but owe just as much to the larger process we retrospectively call globalization. Note 1. In the 1970s Laurence Schneider (1976: 57–59) described National Studies scholars as conservative, both politically and in their methodologies. Newer research, particularly by Q. Edward Wang (2002: 186–188), tends to see it as a progressive movement.

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Luo Zhenyu. 1899. “Chongke Zhina tongshi xu.” Zhina tongshi. Trans. Wang Guowei. Shanghai, China: Guangxu Yihaidong. 1b–2b. Luo Zhenyu. 1999. “Guoxue congkan xu.” Xuetang zixu. Ed. Huang Aimei. Nanjing, China: Jiangsu Renmin. 130–132. Lust, John. 1968. The Revolutionary Army: A Chinese Nationalist Tract of 1903. Paris: Mouton. Mühlhahn, Klaus. 2006. “Zwischen Ablehnung und Akzeptanz—Menschenrechte und Geschichte im modernen China.” China aktuell 1: 7–40. Sang Bing. 1999. Guozue yu Hanxue—Jindai Zhongwai Xuejie Jiaowanlu. Suzhou: Jiangsu Renmin. Sang Bing. 2001. Wan Qing Minguo de Guoxue Yanjiu. Shanghai, China: Guji. Schafer, Edward H. 1990. “The Yeh Chung Chi.” T’oung Pao 76:147–207. Schneider, Laurence. 1976. “National Essence and the New Intelligentsia.” In: Charlotte Furth (ed), The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Attitudes in Republican China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spence, J.D. 1980. To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620–1960. Harmondsworth & New York: Penguin Books. Wang, Edward. 2002. “China’s Search for National Identity.” In: Q. Edward Wang and Georg I. Iggers (eds), Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross-cultural Perspective. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Wang, Q.E. 2001. Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Xu Guansan. 2003. Xin Shixue Jiushi Nian. Changsha, China: Yuelin. Yeh Wen-hsin. 2006. “National Learning and International Study: Travel and Translation in the Writing of Chinese History.” In: William C. Kirby, Mechthild Leutner, and Klaus Mühlhahn (eds), Global Conjectures: China in Transnational Perspective. Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag. Zarrow, Peter Gue. 2004. “Historical Trauma: Anti-Manchuism and Memories of Atrocity in Late Qing China.” History & Memory 16(2): 67–107.

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CHAPTER 3

China in the World: Constructions of a Chinese Identity in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Nicola Spakowski

D

iscussions of Chinese nationalism or national identity usually take the turn of the twentieth century as the decisive point in a transition from an ideology of “culturalism” (the claim of China’s central position in and cultural superiority over the world) to the ideology of “nationalism” (the idea that China figures as one among many nation-states) and for the emergence of Chinese nationalism. They substantiate this claim with the fact that the very terms “nation” (minzu) and “nationalism” (minzuzhuyi) appeared in the early 1900s in China, and quickly became key terms in the political discussions of the following years and even decades.1 However, these terminological innovations should not lead us to assume a clear-cut transition from one ideology to another. As Prasenjit Duara has demonstrated, culturalism in premodern China was an ideal that was challenged by alternative concepts of a Chinese community—concepts that often resembled ideas of national identity in the modern sense. By the same token, from the late nineteenth century to the present, a great number of rival definitions of the nation came to the fore in China. The multiplicity of these definitions defies the narrative of a “rise” of Chinese nationalism as a homogeneous political force at one moment in time (Duara 1993). Obviously, it is only in a broader historical perspective that the particular meaning of terms like “nation” and “nationalism” and the historicity of particular definitions of

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a Chinese identity are revealed. For this essay, I therefore choose a broader framework adopting an approach that might be called “China in the world.” With this approach I intend to highlight the relational aspects of identity constructions and nationalism in late imperial and early republican China. Relationality is particularly emphasized in poststructuralist and narrativist theories of identity. Identities, these theories hold, “are not states but positions, . . . they are differential or relational entities” (Cabrera 2001: 93). Where the narrative character of identity constructions is stressed, authors point to the basic features of narratives that also shape the formation of identities: “Above all, narratives are constellations of relationships (connected parts) embedded in time and space, constituted by what I call causal emplotment” (Somers 2001: 360, emphasis added).2 Relationality thus requires us to look at the position that is assigned to a person or collective vis-à-vis others (or the Other), within a network of relationships, and within a world that is constituted by particular temporal and spatial structures. For my topic, this relationality manifests itself in the close dependence of Chinese identity definitions on what I will call “knowledge of the world.” “Knowledge of the world” is used here in two senses. For one, it relates to concrete information about foreign countries and their histories as reference points for the construction of a Chinese identity. Liang Qichao, for instance, one of the paramount figures in the late-nineteenth-century discourse of the nation, claimed that China should no longer see itself in the “mirror” of Chinese history only, but also in the “mirror” of the history of “East and West” (quoted in Pusey 1983: 130). He thus expanded the traditional topos of past experience as a “mirror” for guidance in the present to include the experience of the entire globe.3 From the mid-nineteenth century, growing knowledge of the world provided scholars and political actors in China with an increasingly differentiated understanding of the world beyond China. This knowledge disclosed a broad range of potential references, which theoretically could have generated a great variety of identity definitions. However, knowledge of the world also manifested itself in the form of politico-philosophical concepts of world orders and world history. These concepts of the world, the origins of which could lie in China or the West, provided a more patterned view of the world in its spatial and temporal dimensions. They fostered a reduction of the theoretically open range of potential identity constructions to a limited number of ideas about China’s place in the world and in world history, which had repercussions also on the definition of China as a nation. Relationality is also a feature of the historical contexts in which the construction of identities takes place. Margaret Somers uses the term “relational setting,” which she defines as “a pattern of relationships among institutions, public narratives, and social practices” (Somers 2001: 366). Her dynamic and interactive concept of “context” is particularly useful for my analysis because it

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helps to highlight the shifting position of China in international relations and the interaction between Chinese and non-Chinese actors as decisive factors in the formation of Chinese concepts of the nation. In this essay I will explore how Chinese intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tried to find a definition of China’s identity in the relational setting of a quickly changing world, expanding knowledge about the world outside China and the interaction between Chinese and Western concepts of world history and world orders. In particular, I will show which basic redefinitions of China’s identity were proposed in the face of an experience of cultural difference and loss of sovereignty that followed Western intrusion since the mid-nineteenth century. Of course, these basic redefinitions were then elaborated into more refined concepts of the nation, its essence, and its history—but this process goes beyond the scope of this essay. The essay is structured chronologically, and focuses on the years 1860, 1895, and 1919 as major moments of a redefinition of China’s national identity. I will start my discussion with the 1860s when China’s external situation necessitated a fundamental reconsideration of China’s place in the world, resulting in the broadening of spatial horizons and the undermining of Sinocentric perspectives. In the next part, I will demonstrate how in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 Eurocentric concepts of world history and world order became dominant and led to the introduction of the concept of the “nation.” While universal progress was considered to be the motor moving world history, concrete concepts of a Chinese identity either emphasized China’s civilizational status in a world of temporalized difference (“backwardness”), its place in a hierarchically structured, imperialist world order (a “perishing” state and potential colony), or the cultural distinctiveness and historical evolution that would integrate China into the spatially structured family of nation states. Finally, I will look at the 1920s, when new international constellations fostered a shift in the balance between existing concepts of a Chinese identity and their inclusion in transnational ideologies of world orders. My discussion ends with an outlook on the following decades where these basic constructs were reactivated, privileged, marginalized, or reversed, depending on shifting political and discursive constellations in the question of China’s place in the world. Western Intrusion, the Widening of Spatial Horizons, and the Ambiguous Status of Sinocentric Perspectives (1860s–1890s) China’s defeat in the Opium War in 1842 and its enforced “opening” stipulated in the unequal treaties after the war resulted in increasing contacts with the West and growing knowledge about the world beyond China. In

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the treaty ports and especially in Shanghai, foreigners settled in rapidly growing numbers. Chinese diplomats, exiles, and travelers gave direct evidence of living conditions and institutions of foreign countries in their diaries and reports of travels to the West. Additional information was introduced through the translation of Western books, Western education in China, and study abroad. The collaboration between Chinese intellectuals and Western missionaries was particularly important for the translation and introduction of Western knowledge. The process of relocating China in a changing world started with the widening of spatial horizons. Geographical works such as Wei Yuan’s Haiguo tuzhi (“Illustrated Treatise on the Sea Kingdoms,” 1842) and Xu Jiyu’s Yinghuan zhilüe (“A Short Account of the Maritime Circuit,” 1848) were responses to the sudden awareness of the existence of new powers on China’s maritime periphery and at its borders. Both geographers made use of Western books to increase China’s knowledge of the world. However, these works did not focus on the Western powers as such but rather on the way they penetrated the Chinese periphery (Drake 1975; Leonard 1984). They presented a changing but still Sinocentric view of the world where China’s influence in the region was contested but its basic place in the world was not questioned. The new horizons opened in these works did not reflect back on China’s identity. As Xu Jiyu puts it, “China cannot be treated in a history of foreign places” (quoted in Drake 1975: 68, emphasis added). It was only in the 1860s that, under the impact of the Anglo-French occupation of Beijing, the pressure on China increased to an extent that the structure of the world and China’s place therein had to be reconsidered in a more fundamental way (Hao/Wang 1980: 156; Kwong 2001: 170; Jin/Liu 2006: 44). In the period between the 1860s and 1890s, spatial horizons were further extended and the world was explored in a much more comprehensive way. This is reflected in the growing number of translations of Western works (Hao/Wang 1980: 169–171) and in the increasing use of the term wan guo (myriad states, literally: ten thousand states) for the world. Wan guo replaced the traditional term tian xia (all under heaven) which drew on the Sinocentric assumption that Chinese civilization and the world were one (Hao/Wang 1980: 188–189; Wang 1999; Jin/Liu 2006; Zhang Qing 2006). The use of wan guo, in contrast, had the implication that states were the basic unit of interest and that these foreign states were assigned a status independent of China. The “myriad” states of the world all had histories, lifestyles, and institutions of their own and they became of interest as more than just political factors influencing China’s periphery (Cohen 1987: 96–109). Also, Chinese authors acknowledged that the Western powers could not simply be assigned a status inferior to China: “Today’s barbarians are different from those before.

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They, too, have a civilization of two thousand years.”4 The qualification of China’s place in the world reflected in this and many other statements, however, did not preclude the persistence of Sinocentric perspectives in the way the world of the “myriad states” was interpreted. If we take a look at how the “myriad states” were integrated into more inclusive concepts of world orders and world history, and at the place China was given in these concepts, we will see both the persistence or reactivation of indigenous concepts as well as the emergence of totally new ones.5 Sinocentrism, first of all, expressed itself in the fact that the world beyond China was subjected to concepts of time and “laws” of history that had been developed in the indigenous historiographical tradition of China. Chinese intellectuals fitted the history of European states into the concept of cycles of dynastic rise and decline, on which history writing in traditional China used to rely heavily.6 This Sinocentric universalism is most obvious in Wang Tao’s Faguo zhilüe (“History of France,” 1890), which is based on the following philosophy of history: “[All countries], when they reach the pinnacle of success, will begin to decline. Such change is governed by laws as constant as those which cause the sun to go down after reaching its zenith or the moon to darken by degrees after it has passed through its full phase” (quoted in Wang 2001: 40–41). At a more concrete level, contemporary Europe and the interactions between states in the Western world—which were of focal importance to Chinese intellectuals—were cast into the pattern of Chinese history. Many authors compared nineteenth-century Europe to the Late Zhou period (770–221 BC) and in particular interpreted it as a repetition of the “warring states” (zhan guo) scenario that had preceded the unification of China under the Qin in 221 BC: “The general situation in Europe today is no different from that which prevailed in earlier times in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods” (quoted in Cohen 1987: 93).7 The states of Europe, in the view of Chinese observers, were in the middle of a struggle for hegemony and power. They were divided into “strong” and “weak” or “rising” and “declining” states, forged alliances similar to those of the pre-Qin time, and searched for “wealth and power” (fuqiang) similar to examples of Chinese statecraft in the tradition of the philosophical school of legalism.8 History, thus, was seen as a coherent space of experience in which European developments in the late nineteenth century followed the pattern of China’s own experiences two millennia earlier. China’s place in this concept of “myriad” and “warring” states was ambiguous. Those arguing for the “self-strengthening” of China were preoccupied with rules of statecraft and the search for “wealth and power” (Hao/Wang 1980: 166–172). They turned to European history in order to find rules of statecraft that were universally manifest and applicable. Here, China was

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integrated into the world of “myriad” states—at least at the conceptual level. Some authors also noted how close to China this belligerent West had already come in a physical sense: Today, when I look around at our borders, in the north I can see Russia, in the west the British in India, in the south Annam belonging to France, in the east Japan and the Americans. On the continent they are reaching us by railway, on the sea they surround us with steamboats. Although these states are ten thousands of miles away from China, in a distance no one can reach, their paw is already very close. [ . . . ] Today, when I look at the situation of the world, the globe is in a state of warring states. (Zheng Changyan 1882, quoted in Tian 2003: 2)

This statement from 1882 shows that changes in China’s periphery were now perceived as much more threatening than before. China was being included in the scenario of “warring states,” which later would be called “imperialism.” As other sources indicate, Chinese authors also began to envision the possibility that China, like India or Africa, might be subjugated by Western powers (Hao/Wang 1980: 176–179). The “weak” states of the world thus came into scope as well. Still, the concept of the “myriad states” did not always end up in a worldview that integrated China and the outside world but in most cases referred only to the world beyond China. This trend is visible where discussions of China in the context of the “myriad states” were simply omitted.9 It is even more obvious where China explicitly was set apart from the late-nineteenthcentury European (and thus also Late Zhou Chinese) preoccupation with the struggle for power and assigned its own principles of rule based on the Confucian tradition of the imperial (i.e., Post-Qin) state as one ruled by virtue. In this view, the contemporary world was divided by rule through power (li) exercised in the West and rule through virtue (de) prevailing in China.10 Thus, power and virtue as the core terms in a distinction between two “indigenous” traditions of statecraft (legalism vs. Confucianism) associated with two distinctive periods of Chinese history (Late Zhou vs Post-Qin) became the distinguishing features in these first spatial comparisons between China and the West. A more explicit step toward creating an East–West divide was taken in the famous ti–yong formula championed by Zhang Zhidong: “Chinese learning for fundamental principles (ti); Western learning for practical application (yong).” The distinction between an essential core and a sphere around it of more instrumental considerations was expressed in various terms such as dao and qi (“the Way” and “the instrument”), ben and shu (“root” and

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“ramifications”), and nei and wai (“inner” and “outer”), the roots of which lay in traditional Chinese philosophy (Alitto 1976: 215–221; Meissner 1994: 75–81). They are typical for a model of “conservative modernization” in societies where modernization was perceived as a force coming from the outside and thus bearing the potential to undermine the very foundation of these societies (Alitto 1996: 215). Definitions of the concrete core or essence (ti) of Chinese culture, however, were rather vague. Scholars and politicians spoke of “Chinese learning” versus “Western learning” (Zhong xue, xi xue) and seem to have referred to scholarship and knowledge from which principles of statecraft could be derived (Alitto 1976: 215; Meissner 1994: 80). The ti–yong debate thus referred to traditions of knowledge and not to a presumed national character. Still, with the ti–yong formula, Chinese scholars and politicians laid the ground for a relational identification of China vis-àvis the West and clearly expressed their recognition of the existence of a world different from China. One last indicator of the qualification of the Chinese experience and the dissolution of Sinocentric universalism was the reference to “unprecedented” or “extraordinary events” (Hao/Wang 1980: 156–161; Kwong 2001), which reflected a fundamental disruption of the homogeneous space of experience that had figured as the prerequisite for a conceptualization of Europe in terms of the Chinese scheme of “warring states.” Governor-General Li Hongzhang, in 1874 in a memorial submitted to the Qing Court, described the traces of Western intrusion along China’s coasts as “a situation without precedent in the past several thousand years” (quoted in Kwong 2001: 173). He thus acknowledged a total break with the past. This notion of a break would later become a central element in periodizations of Chinese history where Europe replaced China as the paradigmatic case of world history. Defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, the Temporalization of Difference, and the Dominance of Eurocentric Perspectives (1895–late 1910s) China’s defeat in the war with Japan in 1895, the debacle of the Boxer Rebellion, and the Allied Expedition of 1900 were serious blows to what had been left of Sinocentrism. The claim of a central position in a regional order was no longer tenable and the imperialist powers were to be perceived as a serious threat to China’s integrity. Contacts with the outside world were intensifying further, and the necessity of acquiring more knowledge about the world became even more pressing. The more systematic search for knowledge about the outside world after 1895 is reflected in the rapid increase in publications on world history in China (Liu Yajun 2005: 99). Remarkably, the

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non-Western, colonized world became an additional focus of attention and contributed to a much more differentiated understanding of foreign countries and the variety of state actors on the global stage (Tang 1996; Karl 2002). In addition to that, basic concepts of space and time provided patterns for categorizing these states and their interrelations. The Eurocentric theories of history, which became dominant after 1895, reduced the explanations for the situation of the world, the role of Western and non-Western powers, and, in particular, China’s place in the world to a more narrow range of possible constructs of a Chinese identity. In his book Rescuing History from the Nation, Prasenjit Duara has demonstrated how the import of evolutionism and Social Darwinism to China contributed to the emergence of a totally new concept of history, which combined the notions of linear time and unilinear historical progress, and cast the nation as the principal subject of history. States were perceived as competitors in the struggle for existence and their place in the world was assessed according to their (relative) development on a scale of civilizational progress. Thus, difference was temporalized and expressed in more or less refined patterns of “advanced” and “backward,” “civilized” and “uncivilized” states. Based on Eurocentric definitions of civilizational standards, Chinese intellectuals now started to see China as part of the group of “backward” nations (Pusey 1983; Duara 1995; Tang 1996). This shift in conceptualizing the world was most conspicuous in the introduction of the terms “nation” (minzu) and “nationalism” (minzuzhuyi), which soon became key terms in publications on China’s political situation (Jin/Liu 2006). However, the meaning of these terms was blurred. On the one hand, authors started to emphasize the significance of the people (min) in political affairs (Tang 1996: 21, 50). On the other hand, they continued to be concerned about the fate of the state and promulgated nationalism in the form of “state nationalism” (Dabringhaus 2006: 8). This can be seen from the persistence of the state-centered notion of “becoming rich and powerful” (fuqiang), which went well together with the Social Darwinist scenario of states as competing forces. Besides, the nation quite often appeared as a mere function of the state and national consciousness was regarded as a tool in China’s struggle for survival (Schwartz 1964: 117). The introductory paragraph of Liang Qichao’s Xin min shuo (“On the New Citizen”) of 1902, which is regarded as one of the paradigmatic texts for the emergence of nationalism in China, leaves no doubt about the ongoing concern for the fate of the state. Liang asks, “What are the reasons for some states to prosper and some to perish, some to be weak and some to be strong?” He answers: “The state is made up of the people. A state that has a people resembles the body that has four limbs, five internal organs, muscles, veins and blood circulation.” Without

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these parts, according to Liang, the body cannot live nor can the state exist without the people. “If one wants the state to be in peace, rich, and of high standing one has to talk about the way of the new citizen” (Liang 2006: 588). Chinese authors saw nationalism, and group or race consciousness, primarily as instruments of cohesion that would unite the people in their struggle against outside intruders (Pusey 1983: 197; Dikötter 1992: 118). As such, nationalism gained an important part in programs of political reform or revolution. Still, the idea of China as a potential nation-state participating in a global competition was an empty formula that was yet to be filled with substance. Where Chinese authors started to ponder the implications of China as a nation, it is almost impossible to delineate either clearly defined concepts of the nation or a stringent development of ideas. Breaks and ambiguities existed even within the work of individual authors, as has been shown for Liang Qichao and Yan Fu (Schwartz 1964; Tang 1996). What many of them had in common, though, was a concern for national history because the concept of the nation implied its rootedness in the past. In the new national history, the “people” were moved to the center of interest and the history of the nation was conceptualized in terms of linear time: it was given a “birth date,” a genealogy, and a definition of the historical stages it had gone through (Duara 1995; Hu 1995; Tang 1996; Kwong 2001). Another feature shared by authors engaged in defining the Chinese nation was their Eurocentric outlook which expressed itself either in the form of underlying concepts of time, space, and the nation, or in the form of assigning Europe a particular place in world history. Three closely related and often overlapping concepts of a Chinese identity can be distinguished. A first one can be called liberal or universalist. It made the West the yardstick of civilization and thus was a clear expression of Eurocentrism in contemporary Chinese discourse. Here, China was seen as a “backward” country whose only option to avoid extinction was to take the West as a model and to try to “catch up” with Western ways. Conceptually, this assumption relied upon a notion of temporalized difference based on models of linear time and universal history. China was perceived as an early stage in the scheme of a Eurocentric universal development (Hu 1995). Notions of time were at the center of this concept of China’s identity. For one thing, the idea of emulating the West required a break with China’s past. Yan Fu, for instance, proposed a dichotomous distinction between East and West as ancient versus modern: “The greatest difference in the principles of West and East, that which is most irreconcilable, is the fact that, while the Chinese love the ancient and ignore the modern, Westerners stress the new in order to overcome the old” (quoted in Schwartz 1964: 44).

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Liang Qichao glorified everything “new”—“new citizen,” “new historiography,” “new China” (Tang 1996: 12)—and pondered the question of whether China—negatively portrayed as a nation that was stuck in tradition—had the potential for rejuvenation. Could the “ancient empire” (lao da diguo) China be turned into “young China” (shao nian Zhongguo), as Liang Qichao puts it with reference to Giuseppe Mazzini’s “Young Italy” of the 1830s (Liang 2006: 534–539)? More precisely, authors of various political inclinations asked whether and how time gaps between China and the West could be overcome: Could China reach Western advancement by simply jumping over the development stages the West had gone through? This question reveals how time became an instrument of change in the hands of political activists (Hu 1995: 333; Tang 1996: 26). A second concept of China’s identity focused on the idea of China as a victim of Western imperialism and colonialism and the notion of China as a “perishing state” (wang guo). While imperialist encroachment had been observed before, the term “imperialism” (diguozhuyi) seems not to have been used before 1901.11 What is most remarkable about the narrative of imperialism as compared to the liberal view is that it situated China in an entangled and interconnected world. It integrated the stronger and weaker nations of the world into a “synchronic historical space” (Karl 1998: 1103) and shifted attention from the West as a “model” within a diachronic structure of progress to the West as “aggressor” within a synchronic system of unequal power relations.12 The notion of imperialism at the same time drew much more attention to the non-Western world. India, Korea, or Vietnam became new reference points of identity construction and also, at least within certain political circles and for a particular historical moment, potential allies in the struggle against the West (Karl 2002: 15; Yu 2004: 6). This widening horizon made Chinese visions of the world also much more global. The roots of Chinese interpretations of imperialism were twofold. On the one hand, they bore clear traces of indigenous historico-political concepts of the “rise and fall” of states and the juxtaposition of “strong” and “weak” states that had influenced earlier discussions of political constellations in Europe.13 Now they were further extended to a global scenario of colonizing and colonized states that placed China next to the “weak,” “declining,” or even “perishing” states on the world stage. On the other hand, Eurocentric accounts of modern history as the history of Western expansion introduced a temporal dynamic into this rather polarized vision of “strong” versus “weak” states and transformed it into an integrated history of imperialism: Europe has evolved and the world has progressed since the sixteenth century for no reason other than the enormous power of nationalism. [. . .] National

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imperialism (minzu diguozhuyi), an outgrowth of nationalism, seeks to expand the territory of one nation and colonize other nations. By means of either military force, or trade, or industry, or the church, every effort is coordinated and directed by the national government. . . . Therefore in today’s situation if we want to counteract the national imperialism of all those world powers so as to save the country from total catastrophe, we must develop a nationalism of our own. In order to institute nationalism in China, there is no other way than to renew the people. (Liang 2006: 588–678)

This quote from Liang Qichao’s “On the New Citizen” illustrates how Social Darwinism and the notion of the struggle for existence played into Chinese interpretations of imperialism. Social Darwinism also contributed to a naturalization of imperialism that left the blame for China’s deplorable situation with China itself. Although Chinese intellectuals such as Yan Fu or Liang Qichao were quite aware of the double standard of Western powers in the use of either international law (“reason”) or force, moral categories had no place in their Social Darwinist depictions of global power struggles. Liang Qichao claimed: When European countries meet with other European countries, they all take reason to be force, but, when European countries meet non-European countries, they all use force for reason. And so they must, because of evolution. The struggle for existence makes it natural. So what cause can there be for blame? What cause can there be for hate? (quoted in Pusey 1983: 315)14

Cultural conservatism was a third trend in conceptualizing China’s national identity. Identity constructions centering on Chinese culture during that time typically relied upon the separation of culture and politics and the instrumentalization of culture for progressive political programs. Particular definitions of the nation were thus clearly linked to specific concepts of political reform or revolution (Furth 1976). Reformers such as Kang Youwei who wanted to preserve the Qing rule saw Confucianism as the binding ideology for a new constitutional system. Radicals such as Zhang Binglin and Liu Shipei, who fought for the overthrow of the Qing and the founding of a republic, based their political vision on the concept of race and ethnicity, which allowed them to reject the Qing as illegitimate rulers of a “Han” nation. Their search for the “national essence” (guocui) consequently led them beyond Confucianism as the state ideology of dynastic rule and to a more pluralist definition of the cultural essence of China (Furth 1976: 30–36; Karl 2002: 85, 146). As for China’s history as “national” history, again, authors differed in their

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definition of historical roots and stages in correspondence with their political inclinations. The revolutionary Liu Shipei, for instance, in 1904 directly related new modes of measuring time to particular concepts of the nation: They [the reformers] see the preservation of religion (baojiao) as a handle, so they use the birth of Confucius as the starting date of the calendar; the purpose of our generation is the preservation of the race (baozhong), so we use the birth of the Yellow Emperor as a founding date. (quoted in Dikötter 1992: 116)

Clearly, for these particular definitions of Chinese culture, internal divisions over reform or revolution were more important than the articulation of an identity vis-à-vis the West. World War I and Shifting Affiliations to Competing Ideologies of World Orders (late 1910s/1920s) Nationalism was the driving force that led to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and to the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. It is not surprising, therefore, that the ideas of the nation and nation building were central issues in the political, social, and cultural life of Republican China. Articulations of national identity were no longer limited to the elite discourse but were also reflected in customs, symbols, and even material culture and had thus found their way into the daily lives of ordinary Chinese (Harrison 2000; Gerth 2003). At the same time, the nation—its history, territory, and culture—became an object of specialized research and teaching at universities and from there also spread into the curricula of elementary and middle schools (Hung 1985; Wang 2001; Zarrow 2005: 188–189). The empty formula of the Chinese nation was being gradually filled with substance. Political reality, however, drew attention to the deficiencies of China as a nation. Internally, President Yuan Shikai’s plans to restore monarchy, and the disintegration of China into warlord regimes after Yuan’s death in 1916, clearly showed the weakness of the young republic and the lack of democracy in political practice. Externally, in spite of huge diplomatic efforts to achieve recognition as an equal member in the family of nations, China continued to be the object of power politics in the political practice of Western nations and Japan (Xu 2001). The constructs of a Chinese identity were not entirely different from those of earlier periods. Still, while certain ideas that had developed earlier remained part of China’s self-definition, the experience of World War I and its aftermath fostered shifts in demarcations, the reversal of hierarchies, and

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changes in the balance between major groups. Also, more than before, the Chinese discourse about the nation was becoming part of transnational discussions in which Chinese, Asian, and Western intellectuals all contributed to the construction of new visions for the world (Sachsenmaier 2006: 241– 242). And finally, these various visions provided the Chinese with more integrated and more comprehensive ideas of world orders, each of which assigned China a particular place in the world. Three major concepts of the Chinese nation can be distinguished, which were to a greater or lesser extent linked to transnational ideologies of liberalism, socialism, and (cultural) conservatism.15 Liberalism was at its peak before World War I and had an internal and an external dimension. Internally, the New Culture Movement, which started in 1915, propagated a fundamental cultural reorientation as the only way for China to overcome its deficiencies (Chow 1967). Cultural activists carried the liberal program of Westernization to extremes by further dramatizing China’s alleged backwardness, its being caught in tradition and stagnation.16 In an essay titled “The Way of Confucius and Modern Life,” Chen Duxiu in December 1916 juxtaposed Western “modern” and Chinese contemporary but still “feudal” ways. Confucianism, in his view, was irreconcilable with modernity: Confucius lived in a feudal age. The ethics he promoted is the ethics of the feudal age. The social mores he taught and even his own mode of living were teachings and modes of a feudal age. The political institutions he advocated were those of a feudal age. (quoted in Bary 1960: 156)

Chen and many other young intellectuals were obsessed with the idea of China’s rejuvenation, which was reflected in journal titles such as New Youth, New Tide (Renaissance), New Century, New Life, New Women, New Epoch (Tang 1996: 171). The iconoclasm expressed in their texts and the New Culture’s “denunciation of history” (Duara 1995: 92) was part of a negative concept of Chinese identity, namely the idea of China as not (or, in the more optimistic form: not yet) the West. Individualism, science, and democracy were seen as the epitomes of Western culture. Towards the end of World War I, however, the idea of liberalism gained an additional, external dimension. Woodrow Wilson had proclaimed his concept of democracy, self-determination, and international law as the framework of a new world order where “might” should be replaced with “right.”17 This concept was propagated in China as well, and it was quickly embraced by the Chinese intellectuals who saw this as a chance to gain international

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recognition for China as a full and sovereign member of the family of nations. Wilsonianism fostered a reevaluation of imperialism and strengthened the notion of justice in Chinese perceptions of international relations. It also resonated with indigenous concepts of a world of “great unity” (datong), which was rooted in traditional Chinese philosophy but had been rearticulated by Kang Youwei since the 1880s.18 Differing from the Social Darwinist notion of “survival of the fittest” and of imperialism as a “natural” result of the “struggle for existence,” in a Wilsonian perspective the blame for China’s situation no longer exclusively lay with China. At a more concrete level, Wilsonianism supported Chinese hopes that Jiaozhou, the former German concession that had been occupied by the Japanese in 1915, would be returned to China. A crowd in Beijing expressed these hopes at the end of the war with slogans such as “Long live justice! Long live national independence!” (Xu 2005: 244). The Paris Peace Conference, however, decided to leave Jiaozhou under Japanese control and thus destroyed Chinese hopes for independence. Chinese students reacted with an anti-imperialist outburst—later known as the May Fourth Movement—that spread into other segments of society and included merchants, industrialists, and even workers (Chow 1967). Remarkably, the students’ activities during May and June 1919 had strong transnational dimensions because they were quite aware of similar movements in other parts of the world where the “Wilsonian moment” (Manela 2006: 1350) had gained momentum as well.19 A participant in the May Fourth demonstrations later explained the students’ disappointment in the Western powers and their motives for forming an anti-imperialist protest movement: “. . . we could no longer depend upon the principles of any so-called great leader like Woodrow Wilson, for example. Looking at our people and at the pitiful ignorant masses, we couldn’t help but feel that we must struggle” (quoted in Chow 1967: 93). Second, the strong anti-imperialist element in Chinese nationalism triggered by the decisions at the Paris Peace Conference led to more radical forms of nationalist mobilization. As the above-quoted statement indicates, after 1919 the moderate tool of international law proposed by Wilson was replaced by the notion of “struggle” in the fight against imperialism. Mass movements in the form of demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts, and, beginning in the 1920s, party politics became new organizational forms of nationalism that would control the direction of politics in China after the mid-1920s (Schmidt 1998: 12; Zarrow 2005). At the ideological level, for many activists the notion of “struggle” formed the link to the more radical anti-imperialism of Lenin. Leninism provided Chinese intellectuals with a more comprehensive interpretation of imperialism and with the idea of anti-imperialist revolution as the legitimate tool to overthrow an imperialist world order.20 Nationalism was

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a dominant feature of Chinese Marxism early on, and one particular Marxist definition of China’s identity was that of China as a “proletarian nation,” which implies that internal class divisions were subordinated to the “class status” of China in the world (Meisner 1967: 223). Third, the destructive power of the war itself further increased skepticism about the superiority of Western culture and its possible model function for non-Western nations. The brutality of the war and the devastation it had caused in Europe was interpreted as a failure of Western civilization. This disillusionment fostered the emergence of more conservative concepts of China’s identity. It led to a particularization of Western culture—Europe was no longer seen as a model for the entire world (Sachsenmaier 2006: 254)—and to a reconsideration of the nature of Chinese culture and its status in world civilization (Furth 1976; Duara 1995: 205–227). This change in attitudes toward the West is most obvious with those who had been known for their Social Darwinist outlook and their urgent calls for emulating the West. Liang Qichao, during his travels in postwar Europe, had observed the destruction caused by the war. In his Ou you xinying lu jielu (“Selections from a Record of Impressions of Travels in Europe”) he traced the disaster of the war back to materialism, which he saw as the core of European culture: “The material progress of the last one hundred years has been several times that of the preceding three thousand years, and yet, not only has our human race not gotten happiness out of it, it has brought us a host of disasters” (Liang 2006: 423). Similarly, Yan Fu, a few years later, took back his earlier admiration of Western ways: As I have grown older and observed the seven years of republican government in China and the four years of bloody war in Europe—a war such as the world has never known—I have come to feel that their [the West’s] progress during the last three hundred years has only led to selfishness, slaughter, corruption, and shamelessness. When I look back on the way of Confucius and Mencius, I find that they are truly the equivalent of heaven and earth and have profoundly benefited the realm. This is not my opinion alone. Many thinking people in the West have gradually come to feel this way. (quoted in Schwartz 1964: 235)

The conservative turn indicated in this statement was symptomatic not only of Yan Fu’s individual development; it manifested itself on a much broader scale and led to systematic reevaluations of Chinese culture and its particular place in world civilization.21 However, the cultural conservatism of two quite influential thinkers of the time, Liang Qichao and Zhang Junmai, did not amount to a radical rejection of Western culture. Rather, they envisioned

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a world civilization where East and West would each contribute their own genuine cultural achievements to a synthesis or “composite view of a new world civilization” (Zarrow 2005: 179).22 According to Liang Qichao, the duty for China was [ . . . ] first, to sincerely respect and protect the culture of our country; second, to use the methods of Western research and learning to study it and thus understand its true nature; third, to synthesize our own culture and supplement it with that of others in order for it then to unite into one and form a new cultural system; fourth, to expand this new cultural system to the outside and thus enable the entire mankind to profit from its advantages. (Liang 2006: 450–451)

These authors divided the world into two cultural hemispheres: a “materialist” West and a “spiritual” East. They thus took up a theme that had been nascent in the ti–yong formula of the late nineteenth century but was now further developed into the vision of two essentialized cultural spheres.23 One of the most famous works that contributed to this reevaluation of Chinese culture was Liang Shuming’s book Dong xi wenhua ji qi zhexue (“Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies,” 1921). Liang Shuming was most explicit in reversing former hierarchies by defining Western “materialist” culture as the most primitive stage in a linear progression through ideal cultural types represented by Western, Chinese, and Indian cultures (Alitto 1976). Interestingly, the cultural East–West divide apparent in all these statements and texts was not an invention of Chinese scholars alone but the product of transnational collaborations with intellectuals from Europe (Romain Rolland, Hermann Hesse, and others) and also other Asian nations (Rabindranath Tagore) (Sachsenmaier 2006). They all saw mutual learning as the only way out of the crisis of Western civilization. Difference was re-spatialized in a model where Chinese culture—or Eastern culture in general—was no longer assigned the position of a primitive stage of civilization but was attributed a significant role in the construction of a new, peaceful future world culture.24 Conclusion: From “Perishing” to “Rising” By the 1920s, three fundamental visions of China’s place in the world had emerged: a universalist or liberal one of a China that took the West as its model; a Marxist-Leninist one of an interconnected and hierarchical world where China figured as a victim of Western imperialism and a potentially “perishing” state; and a particularist or conservative one that emphasized China’s cultural distinctiveness in a world divided into clear-cut cultural spheres.

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In the two decades that followed, these identity constructions became involved in contradictory processes. On the one hand, the question of China’s national identity was translated into more concrete academic problems that became the object of specialized research in university departments of history, sociology, and culture. On the other hand, the idea of the nation became a mobilization ground for various political groups and parties. The latter trend became all the more pervasive with the Japanese expansion and aggression and the obvious threat it posed to China’s integrity and sovereignty. MarxismLeninism proved to be particularly attractive in a situation where “perishing” seemed even more imminent than before. With the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, Marxism-Leninism gained the status of a doctrine. “Liberation” from national oppression and the recovery of national sovereignty was one of the major elements in the CCP’s claim for legitimacy. The Party therefore defined China’s national identity as a particular historical experience (i.e., the transition from oppression to liberation). Still, even under Mao Zedong, the discourse of the nation was not as homogeneous as one would expect. Also, the resurgence of earlier concepts of a Chinese identity after Mao’s death in 1976 shows that Maoism could not totally wipe out alternative constructions of a Chinese identity. The loosening of political control under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, and the CCP’s own search for a new definition of China and its place in the world, brought earlier concepts to the fore, each of which turned out to be popular in a particular phase of the reform process. The initial reform motto of “opening” China to the outside world fostered a liberal outlook that reached its peak in the intellectual debates of the late 1980s where China once more was perceived as a “backward” country seriously lagging behind the “model” Western developed world. In the 1990s, based on a variety of factors—state propaganda, the astonishing success of resumed economic reforms, doubts about the “Soviet” model of radical reform, and instances of national humiliation—China witnessed a nationalist and conservative turn. In the “National Studies fever” (guoxue re) of this period, Chinese intellectuals reverted to the idea of a distinctiveness about China rooted in its traditional (Confucian) culture.25 Most remarkable, however, are recent efforts to construct the totally new identity of a “rising” China. The current debate in China of “China’s rise” (Zhongguo jueqi) takes up the late-nineteenth-century legalist-cum-Social Darwinist focus on the state and laws of statecraft, and the distinction between “strong” and “weak,” “rising” and “declining” states. Needless to say, today, China is compared to the strong and rising states in world history. In the debate over China’s rise, once more knowledge of the world and world history and questions of national identity are closely connected. In

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2003, the CCP’s Politburo organized a study session on “The Development of the Major States of the World since the Fifteenth Century.” After a lecture by two renowned world historians and a question-and-answer session, CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao gave a speech that outlined the relation between knowledge of the world, the assessment of China’s place in the world, and the definition of China’s identity: We must treasure highly the valuable experience that China has gathered during its long practice of revolution, construction and reform. We must also be conscientious in studying and using the experience and lessons provided by the historical development of other nations. We must view the development of world civilization from the high level of history in order to gain a better understanding of the patterns in the development of the contemporary world and of the basic national conditions (guoqing) and development trends of China.26

At the level of the general public, the very popular TV series Da guo jue qi (“The Rise of Big Powers”), which was broadcast in China in 2006, is the most recent manifestation of an interest in world history as a mirror for China’s own condition and future development.27 As in the case of the latenineteenth-century scenario of the “myriad states,” China is not included in this and other depictions of the rise of successive world powers. Still, China’s potential to become one is implied.

Notes 1. For the discussion of Chinese nationalism as a theoretical problem see Duara 1993 and Spakowski 1999: 61–70. The persistence of the theory of a transition from culturalism to nationalism can still be found in discussions of Chinese nationalism; see, for instance, Zhao (2004: 17–18, 46). 2. In the field of Chinese studies, Prasenjit Duara defined nationalism as “a relationship between a constantly changing Self and Other rather than a pristine subject gathering self-awareness in a manner similar to the evolution of a species” (Duara 1993: 9). 3. For the topos of history as a “mirror,” see Spakowski (1999: 47). 4. These are purported to be the words of Guo Songtao, the first Qing ambassador to a Western country (Zhang Qing 2006: 59). 5. For the relation between traditional concepts and new knowledge in the process of identity formation, see Tian (2003), Zhang Qing (2006), and Jin/Liu (2006). See also Wang (2001: 36–42) on the historical work of Wang Tao. 6. For cyclical time as a general feature of Chinese history writing, see Kwong (2001: 160–165) and Spakowski (1999: 46–48). The notion of the “rise and fall” of states and kingdoms was at the core of the descriptions in the work of the early

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

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geographers (Drak 1975: 54; Leonard 1984: 103). For Wang Tao’s cyclical perspective on history, see Cohen (1987: 31). For the prevalence of other thinkers’ interest in the laws of the “rise and fall of states,” see Liu Yajun (2005: 98). Wang Tao around 1873–1874. For a great number of similar quotes from Wang Tao and various other authors, see Tian (2003). For the comparison of Europe with the “warring states” in general see Tian (2003), Jin/Liu (2006: 44), and Cohen (1987: 93). This view was in fact already evident in the work of the early geographers (see Drake 1975: 103, 113, 152). For “wealth and power” as a core idea of legalism and its complex interaction with Confucianism in Chinese ideas of statecraft, see Schwartz (1964: 8–18). “Wealth” and “power” as categories of political analysis could be found in the works of the early geographers (see Drake 1975: 103, 113, 152) as well as their successors beginning in the 1850s. On the general trend of excluding China from the world of the “myriad states,” see Tian (2003: 4), and Zhang Qing (2006: 57); for Wang Tao, see Cohen (1987: 96). For a general discussion of the power – virtue distinction in the work of the intellectuals of this period and their preference of a world order governed by virtue, see Tian (2003: 7). For Wang Tao, see Cohen (1987: 27–29, 91–109). The origin and first use of the term is not clear. Liang Qichao started to use it in 1901 (Pusey 1983: 310). For a discussion of Chinese perceptions of imperialism around 1900, see Karl (2002: 64, 84). For the distinction between these two different concepts, also see Karl (2002: 83). For these terms, see, for instance, the introductory part of Liang Qichao’s “On the New Citizen”, in: Liang Qichao xuanji 2006, vol. 2: 588–678, here: 588. For the link to earlier concepts of dynastic history, see Karl (2002: 15). See also Schwartz (1964: 89) and Suzuki (2004). See also Conrad/Sachsenmaier (2007). For Yan Fu and Liang Qichao as predecessors of the iconoclastic antiConfucianism of the May Fourth Movement, see Pusey (1983: 216, 437–8) and Tang (1996: 170). For the general appeal of Wilsonianism in China and the colonial world, see Manela (2006). For the propagation of Wilsonianism in China, see Schmidt (1998). For earlier discussions on the relation between “right” and “might,” see Pusey (1983: 137–144). Sun Yatsen in 1912 had denounced Social Darwinism and the notion of “might” as a “barbaric form of learning” (Pusey 1983: 435). See also Duara (1995: 144) on the decline of the appeal of Social Darwinism in the 1910s. For Kang Youwei’s datong ideal and the complex history of the publication of his Datong shu (“Book of Great Unity”), see Zarrow (2005: 28, 369, Fn 20). For the relation between the Chinese ideal of datong and the Wilsonian concept of international law, see Manela (2006: 1341–1342), Schmidt (1998: 7), and Pusey (1983: 137–144).

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19. For liberation movements as a reaction to the Paris Peace Conference in many places in the world, see Manela (2006: 1329f ). For the relation between the May Fourth Movement in China and the March First Movement in Korea as well as the awareness of liberation movements elsewhere, see Wagner (2001: 82–95). 20. For the relation between Wilsonianism and Leninism in their respective definitions of “self-determination,” see Manela (2006: 1330). For the anti-imperialist element in Chinese nationalism, see Osterhammel (1997: 115–6). 21. My emphasis here is on the defining features of Chinese culture. For distinctions among specific models of cultural conservatism, see Zarrow (2005: 179–180), Furth (1976), and Duara (1995, ch. 7). 22. See also Duara (1995: 207) on the “redemptive universalist model” and Tang (1996: 183) on the “vision of creative and combinatory completion.” 23. For the continuities in conservative concepts of Chinese culture, see Alitto (1976). 24. For the notion of “reaffirmed spatiality” in the outlook of Liang Qichao, see Tang (1996: 194). 25. For intellectual developments in the 1980s and 1990s, see Xu (2000). See also Klaus Mühlhahn’s essay in this book. 26. Zhongyang zhengzhiju xuexi 15 shiji yilai shijie zhyao guojia fazhan shi (The Politburo studies the history of development of the major states of the world since the fifteenth century), 26 November 2003, http://www.southcn. com/nflr/llzhuanti/zhengzxuex/200507080476.htm, retrieved 3 May 2006. One of the historians who gave the lecture at the study session published a book titled The Historical Evolvement of the Nine World Powers since the Fifteenth Century (Qi 2005). 27. For the text see Ren/Chen (2007).

References Alitto, Guy. 1976. “The Conservative as Sage: Liang Shu-ming.” In: Furth, Charlotte (ed.), The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 213–241. Cabrera, Miguel A. 2001. “On Language, Culture, and Social Action.” History and Theory 40(4): 82–100. Chow, Tse-tsung. 1967. The May Fourth Movement. Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cohen, Paul A. 1987. Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late ch’ing China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Conrad, Sebastian and Sachsenmaier, Dominic. 2007. “Introduction: Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s.” In: Conrad, Sebastian and Sachsenmaier, Dominic (eds.), Competing Visions of World Order. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–25. Dabringhaus, Sabine. 2006. Territorialer Nationalismus in China. Historischgeographisches Denken 1900–1949. Cologne, Germany: Böhlau.

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de Bary, Wm. Theodore (ed.). 1960. Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press. Dikötter, Frank. 1992. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. London: Hurst & Company. Drake, Fred W. 1975. China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-Yü and His Geography of 1848. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Duara, Prasenjit. 1993. “De-constructing the Chinese Nation.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 30: 1–26. Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation. Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Duara, Prasenjit. 2002. “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism.” In: Starrs, Roy (ed.), Nations under Siege: Globalization and Nationalism in Asia. New York: Palgrave, 63–101. Furth, Charlotte. 1976. “Culture and Politics in Modern Chinese Conservatism.” In Furth, Charlotte (ed.), The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 22–53. Gerth, Karl, 2003. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harrison, Henrietta. 2000. The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hao, Yen-p’ing and Wang, Erh-min. 1980. “Changing Chinese Views of Western Relations, 1840–95”. In: Fairbank, John K. and Liu, Kwang-ching (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 11, Part 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 142–201. Hu, Chang-tze. 1995. “Historical Time Pressure: An Analysis of Min Pao (1905– 1908)”. Huang/Zürcher: 329–340. Hung, Chang-tai. 1985. Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature 1918–1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jin, Guantao and Liu, Qingfeng. 2006. “Cong ‘tianxia’, ‘wanguo’ dao ‘shijie’—wan Qing minzuzhuyi xingcheng de zhongjian huanjie” [“From ‘all under heaven’ over ‘ten thousand countries’ to the ‘world’—intermediary links in the formation of nationalism in the late Qing”]. Ershiyi shiji 4: 40–53. Karl, Rebecca E. 1998. “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”. American Historical Review: 1096–1118. Karl, Rebecca E. 2002. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kwong, Luke S.K. 2001. “The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China c. 1860–1911.” Past and Present 173: 157–190. Leonard, Jane K. 1984. Wei Yuan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liang, Qichao. 2006. In: Yi, Xinding (ed.), Liang Qichao xuanji [“Selected works of Liang Qichao”], Vol. 2. Beijing, China: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe. Liu, Yajun. 2005. “Wan Qing xueren ‘shijie lishi’ guannian de bianqian” [“The change of concepts of ‘world history’ among scholars of the late Qing”]. Shixue yuekan (10): 97–103.

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Manela, Erez. 2006. “Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East–West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919.” American Historical Review: 1327–1351. Meisner, Maurice. 1967. Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meissner, Werner. 1994. China zwischen nationalem “Sonderweg” und universaler Modernisierung. Zur Rezeption westlichen Denkens in China. Munich, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 1997. Shanghai, 30. Mai 1925. Die chinesische Revolution. Munich, Germany: dtv. Pusey, James Reeve. 1983. China and Charles Darwin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Qi, Shirong. 2005. 15 shiji yilai shijie jiu qiang de lishi yanbian [“The historical evolvement of the nine world powers since the fifteenth century”]. Guangzhou, China: Guangdong Renmin Chubanshe. Ren, Xuean and Chen, Pu. 2007. Da guo jueqi [“The rise of big powers”]. Beijing, China: Zhongguo minzhu fazhi chubanshe. Sachsenmaier, Dominic. 2006. “Searching for Alternatives to Western Modernity— Cross-cultural Approaches in the Aftermath of the Great War.” Journal of Modern European History 4(2): 241–259. Schmidt, Hans. 1998. “Democracy for China: American Propaganda and the May Fourth Movement.” Diplomatic History 22(1): 1–28. Schwartz, Benjamin. 1964. In Search of Wealth and Power. Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Somers, Margaret R. 2001. “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation.” In: Roberts, Geoffrey (ed.), The History and Narrative Reader. London: Routledge, 354–374. Spakowski, Nicola. 1999. Helden, Monumente, Traditionen. Nationale Identität und historisches Bewußtsein in der VR China. Hamburg, Germany: LIT. Suzuki, Shogo. 2004. “China’s Perceptions of International Society in the Nineteenth Century: Learning More about Power Politics?” Asian Perspective 28(3): 115–144. Tang Xiaobing. 1996. Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity. The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tian, Tao. 2003. Yangwu shiqi Zhongguo ren dui shijie jushi de renshi [“Chinese perception of the world of the situation of the world during the Yangwu period”]. Tianjin, China: History Department of Tianjin Normal University. Wagner, Rudolf. 2001. “The Canonization of May Fourth.” In: DolezelovaVelingerova, Milena and Kral, Oldrich (eds.), The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 66–120. Wang, Edward Q. 1999. “World History in Traditional China.” Storia della Storiografia 35: 83–96. Wang, Edward Q. 2001. Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Xu, Guoqi. 2001. “Nationalism, Internationalism, and National Identity: China from 1895 to 1919.” Wei/Liu: 101–120. Xu, Guoqi. 2005. China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Xu, Jilin. 2000. “The Fate of an Enlightenment: Twenty Years in the Chinese Intellectual Sphere (1978–98).” East Asian History 20: 169–186. Yu, Pei. 2004. “Hongyang Zhongguo shijieshi yanjiu de minzu jingshen—jinian Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan shijie lishi yanjiusuo chengli 40 zhou nian” [“Praising the national spirit of Chinese world history writing—commemorating the founding of the Institute of World History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences”]. Shijie lishi (5): 4–12. Zarrow, Peter. 2005. China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949. London: Routledge. Zhang, Qing. 2006. “Wan Qing ‘tianxia wanguo’ yu ‘pubian lishi’ linian de fuxian ji ti yiyi” [“From ‘all under heaven’ over ‘ten thousand countries’ to the ‘world’— intermediary links in the formation of nationalism in the late Qing”]. Ershiyi shiji 4: 54–62. Zhao, Suisheng. 2004. A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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PART II

Chinese America, Citizenship, Nationality, and the World

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CHAPTER 4

Paper Citizens and Biometrical Identification: Immigration, Nationality, and Belonging in Chinese America during the Exclusion Era Ruth Mayer

Nation-as-Family

T

here is perhaps no trope that has been mobilized as often in order to evoke a sense of national coherence as the trope of the nation-asfamily. At first glance, this trope does not only seem omnipresent in nineteenth- (as well as twentieth-) century thought, it also seems to derive much of its appeal from its simplicity and conclusiveness.1 The trope’s representation of familial and national correspondences evokes a structure of concentric circles: It suggests that every individual belongs to a patriarchal nuclear family, which in turn is framed by the larger order of the nation. In this way, the concepts of family membership and national citizenship become tightly connected by association. This logic of belonging has much to do with the fact that in nineteenth-century America “family was at times used as a synonym for race,” as Susan Ryan has pointed out (2000: 756; emphasis in the original). Of course, both terms, “family” and “race,” are correlated by their joint reliance on the conceptual repertory of biology: races, like families, are—to draw on the vocabulary of the day—of one blood. By dint of the association with families and races, the nation could be imagined not only as a patriarchally hierarchized structure, but also as an ethnically homogeneous entity: a contained sphere rather than a rhizome. The concatenation of imageries—family and nation, or, by extension, domesticity

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and state—depends upon a spatialized logic of enclosure or inclusion, and its congruent principle of exclusion. “Domestic [sic] has a double meaning that links the space of the familial household to that of the nation by imagining both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home,” writes Amy Kaplan about this pattern of thought in nineteenth-century American culture (Kaplan 2002: 25). An anonymous reviewer of a popular nineteenth-century medical treatise pins this logic down: “A family is an epitome of a nation. If the heads be in opposition, there will be anarchy. It differs in this. A woman may be chief of it, because domestic duties are the very object of her existence. She cannot be chief of a nation, because nature abhors it” (p. 297).2 This usage of the trope of the nation-as-family does not only illustrate the logic at work, but also (and much more interestingly) brings to the fore the trope’s liability to run out of control. It is thus significant that the reviewer states the analogies between the family and the nation only to complicate the harmonious picture immediately afterward. He obviously sees the need to curb and qualify the trope as soon as it has been established. And indeed, to conceive of the family as a blueprint for the nation, and of the nation as modeled after a family, is to conjure up ideological implications that are far more difficult to contain than the simple trope suggests at first glance. The underlying logic of patriarchal hierarchy and biological uniformity which informs the ideal of the nation-state starts to give once one takes into account the multifarious and variegated reality of family relations and family arrangements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture. In what follows I want to show that the imagery of the nation-as-family is fraught with conceptual problems that tend to surface even though (and especially when) they are generally anxiously repressed or denied. The metaphorical components—family, race, nation—which initially seem to harmoniously reflect one another, often enough turn out to stand in awkward juxtaposition. The geometrical figures that ultimately come to mind as illustrations of the familial/national order are not so much concentric circles or contained spheres, but rather uneven intersections—more complicated spatial relations, as it were. In particular, the configurations of inclusion and exclusion turn out to be not so much oppositional but rather entangled in this conceptual scheme. This complication of the ideological pattern is epitomized in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates around Asian—most notably Chinese—immigration. The parallels and breaks between the imageries of familial and national belonging—blood relations and citizenship—gain a heavily loaded significance in the context of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and in the era of Chinese exclusion that followed.

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Here the idea of a “foreign” element on the “domestic” front takes center stage. And, furthermore, it was family membership that came to prominently determine the citizenship status of Chinese subjects in America. This is not the place to resume the complex practices and the complicated reasoning around the concept of “paper citizenship” of Chinese Americans in the first half of the twentieth century.3 Suffice it to point out that the interrogations at the Angel Island detention center which the immigration authorities conducted after 1910 with Chinese immigrants in order to find out whether their claims to American citizenship were true or false revolved around the issue of family membership. Every Chinese who sought admittance to the United States had to prove that he or she belonged to one of the few admissible professional groups, that he or she was a citizen or was related as a spouse, son, or daughter of an American citizen. “Some of the most heavily scrutinized cases were those involving families,” writes Erica Lee about the Angel Island interrogations (2003: 209), and Madeline Hsu has shown that while the family relations that immigrants professed were often made up and while there were professional agencies involved in the purchase of fake papers, the organization of paper identities still depended primarily on “networks of kinship and native place” (2000: 87),4 so that the “ties of fictive kinship” (Hsu 2000: 106) interacted with actual family relations and added further layers of complication to the already complicatedly convoluted process of “naturalization.” The efforts of immigration officers to determine the family status and the complex structures of (self-)identification in the lives of the immigrants arriving at Angel Island brought about increasingly complicated techniques of questioning. As a consequence, the “coaching books”—manuals which were originally geared toward immigrants claiming a false citizenship (and family) status and containing all the information that was likely to be asked about the Chinese family background—soon came to be used by travelers with citizenship status as well, because “[m]any simply believed it was humanly impossible to answer [the interrogations] without preparation” (Lee 2003: 217). An interpreter elaborates on this phenomenon in his memories of Angel Island interrogation practices: What happened was that in many cases there were not real sons but paper sons, they were so well coached that their testimonies jibed. Whereas in the legitimate cases, they hadn’t gone to the trouble of making up coaching books and preparing for it. They were the ones that got the wrong answers, because they thought it was going to be cut and dry. (Lai 1980: 114)

In the course of these practices, as Erica Lee has elaborated, illegal immigration “became normalized, affecting entire families and communities

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regardless of class background and immigration status” (Lee 2003: 216). By extension, one could argue, the very ideas of “family,” “nationality,” and “belonging” became volatile, detached from personal memories and experiences—part of a performance which needed to be practiced, tested out, enacted, and brought across. Or rather, the concepts bifurcated into a private and a public, a personal and an official, an emotional and a politico-legal line of usage. Increasingly, emotional and political definitions of belonging (to a family or a nation) split apart, or at least came to coexist in awkward tension.5 In the case of Chinese families living in America, as the “lines between legal and illegal immigrants became blurred” (Lee 2003: 216), the question of who belonged where on what grounds became increasingly difficult to determine. Legal citizens might have taken recourse to fraud, fake family members by the American definition might be real kin on the basis of Chinese definitions of familial bonds, a “paper son” of the first generation might get his own children into the country and thus establish a genuine genealogy but perpetuate the cycle of deception, and so on. And the concept of the nation as a homogeneous, hierarchically structured, organically grown entity became doubtful, as family structures became subject to reinterpretations and manipulations. Paper Identities From today’s vantage point, the Chinese practice of forging “paper identities” may be seen as an anticipation of the transnational lifestyles of the current period of globalization.6 Thus, at times this practice tends to be presented as a strategic turn against repression, as a subversive measure that highlights the very constructedness of the categories of citizenship and nationality. By contrast, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century proponents of immigration restrictions in the United States saw “paper citizenship” as an evidence that both “family values” and a “national order” were being undermined. The Chinese presence in the United States, these critics feared, threatened to hollow out the categories of familial and national belonging even more than African American or Native American claims to equality and full citizenship status.7 A popular anti-Chinese cartoon of the day, titled “The Last Addition to the Family,” illustrates this fear succinctly, showing the United States as a loving mother holding a grotesquely childish Chinaman in her arms (see Figure 4.1). Both the celebratory and the phobic ascriptions ignore, however, that the paper identities, fake genealogies, and made-up life stories are deeply entangled in a repressive and biased system of immigration restriction and racist discrimination, that they constitute a reaction and not a carefully designed (subversive) action or a succinct, linear, conscious strategy. This fact makes

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“The Last Addition to the Family”

it so difficult to come to terms with the cultural memory of and around Chinese America. Cultural memory is always intricately entangled in collective fantasies and in processes of repression, reinvention, narrative recycling, and appropriation. Yet the cultural memory of “paper citizenship” is not only formally shaped by the forces of fabrication and narration—fabrication and narration constitute its very subject matter. Therefore, fiction might very well be the appropriate form of representation to come to terms with the ideological and conceptual implications of this phenomenon, for it is the one mode of

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representation that focuses most persistently on spheres of experience beyond the outspoken, the rational, the strategic. Hence, throughout this essay, I will alternate between references to historical practice and references to its literary representation, in order to get a grip on the bifurcation of political necessities and emotional needs in Chinese America at the turn of the twentieth century. As fictional points of reference I will take the stories of the Chinese American author Edith Maud Eaton. I focus on Eaton not because I conceive of her as a representative speaker of the Chinese American community of her days—in fact, I do not;8 but rather because I believe that her fictional approach and highly stylized form of narration manages to express and highlight ambivalences and paradoxes that tend to get obfuscated in other—more personalized or more analytical—forms of representation or reflection. In particular, Eaton’s juggling of registers, her oscillation between the rhetoric of politics and the rhetoric of sentimentality, brings to the fore the intricate complications in the subject matter, as we shall see. The first story I want to consider is titled “The Smuggling of Tie Co.” It is one of the short pieces which Eaton published under her pen name Sui Sin Far between 1898 and 1903 in the magazine Land of Sunshine, edited by the journalist, activist, and amateur ethnographer Charles Lummis. All of these pieces reflect Eaton’s characteristic mix of ethnographic recording, political critique, and melodramatic narration—“parables for progressives” in Dominika Ferens’s words (2002: 81).9 “The Smuggling of Tie Co” revolves around a Canadian, Jack Fabian, who is engaged in the business of “contrabanding Chinese from Canada into the United States,” and one of his pieces of “human goods” (Eaton 1995: 104). Fabian is being pressed out of business by a newly evolving trade: Some ingenious lawyers had devised a scheme by which any young Chinaman on payment of a couple of hundred dollars could procure a father which father would swear the young Chinaman was born in America—thus proving him to be an American citizen with the right to breathe United States air. And the Chinese themselves, assisted by some white men, were manufacturing certificates establishing their right to cross the border, and in that way were crossing over in large batches. (Eaton 1995: 105)

Due to these new practices, Jack Fabian has fallen into dire straits and is only too relieved when a young Chinese, Tie Co, asks him to take him to New York the old way—by means of crossing the border on the sly. On the road, where Tie Co appears “dressed in citizen’s clothes” (Eaton 1995: 106), Fabian tries to make conversation, bringing up the seemingly safe and light topic of

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his companion’s family history and domestic background “at home.” But this is when their relationship takes a melodramatic turn: “Haven’t you gotten a nice little wife at home?” [Fabian] continued. “I hear you people marry very young.” “No, I no wife,” asserted his companion with a choky little laugh. “I never have no wife.” “Nonsense,” joked Fabian. “Why, Tie Co, think how nice it would be to have a little woman cook your rice and to love you.” “I not have wife,” repeated Tie Co seriously. “I not like woman, I like man.” “You confirmed old bachelor,” ejaculated Fabian. “I like you,” said Tie Co, his boyish voice sounding clear and sweet in the wet woods. “I like you so much that I want to go to New York, so you make fifty dollars. I no flend in New York.” (Eaton 1995: 107)

From this charged scene in the “wet woods,” when the specters of miscegenation and homosexual desire complicate the certainties of familial, racial, and national belonging, things go quickly downhill—Fabian wants Tie Co to return to Canada, Tie Co sees some men coming after them and sacrifices himself by jumping into a river, so that Fabian will not be caught with evidence on his hands. In this strange story, the theme of deception and deviation abounds: the criminal business of human smuggling is being contrasted not with legal immigration but with the no less criminal business of paper forgery. Tie Co deceives Fabian about his true motives, which seem to be steeped in the deviant desires of homosexuality and miscegenation. The fact that we learn at the very end that Tie Co was not a boy but a girl rescues both men from the suspicion of homosexuality, but adds the dubious practices of crossdressing and gender masquerade to the list.10 Eaton presents a world in which “normality”—legal immigration, a patriarchal family order, heterosexuality, and carefully segregated race relations—figures only as a shady horizon. This is a criminal universe and a men’s world in which women disappear, feelings need to be hidden, and desires have to be pushed underground. The illegal border crossing thematized here seems to involve not only the geographical and political border between Canada and the United States, but also all kinds of moral borders—after all, Tie Co does not strive for a Chinese family or American citizenship, (s)he wants the white man. And still, the sentimental narration leaves no doubt that what is to be condemned in this fictional universe are not the practices of deception and deviancy, but the dominant system which makes these practices necessary in the first place. Thus, while deviancy is not condoned by the story, it does

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effect a strong critique of the framework of “normality” established by legal institutions, social practice, and moral authorities. The melodramatic dimension of the story comes to the fore most strikingly in scenes such as the one in the woods. The scene unfolds according to the logic of the tableau, and thus makes use of a structure borrowed from stage melodramas which highlight crucial moments by having the action on stage “freeze” “into an arrangement that starkly reveal[s] the dramatic conflict among opposing parties” (Singer 2001: 41–42). In such scenes, a moral order evolves that stands in stark (conceptual and spatial) contradistinction to the dominant order, based upon legal and political parameters—Eaton literally figures forth an illegal and illicit “world apart,” which threatens to encroach upon the “known world” of law and order. We shall see that Eaton’s story can be read as an indirect commentary on political debates around immigration, immigration fraud, and citizenship in the early twentieth century. But while Eaton’s moral seems to be that arbitrary borders will be crossed, no matter how anxiously they are guarded, of course the authorities who were concerned with Chinese immigration saw matters differently—and sought ever more intricate and reliable means to solidify borders, avoid deception, and determine identity once and for all.

Detention In Edith Eaton’s story, the “American” order, epitomized by the nuclear family, is no longer visible, but its moral significance is far from defunct.11 By drawing on the mode of melodrama, Eaton time and again insists that legal and political conditions need to be adjusted to the deeper and more immediate demands of the heart (romantic love, affection for blood relations, sibling solidarity, etc.) (cf. Kelleter/Mayer 2007). Very much in line with the traditions of abolitionist writing, Eaton points to the distortion and violation that the laws of immigration and exclusion bring about by showing the perverting impact of these measures on race and gender relations: where the family is absent, the nation can only be a sham. In a way, the scenario of a world without women, in which “bachelors” engage in all kinds of suspicious relations and where illegal action abounds, could be seen as an indirect comment on the reality of contemporary Chinatowns and immigration practices. Chinatowns at the turn of the twentieth century were male sites, and Chinese immigration was predominantly a male practice.12 The setup of the Chinatown as a “transient working-class world [in which] single men lived herded together in bunk-rooms, and the few Chinese women who had immigrated were considered to be prostitutes” gave ample

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cause to phobic projections from the sides of anti-immigrationists who contended that these lifestyles “were . . . contrary to respectable domesticity and capable of undermining American morality and family life” (Shah 2001: 77). The domestic arrangements of the early Chinatowns did not mirror the larger urban order, but constituted an independent system—a system that was seen as deviant and threatening, as Nayan Shah has shown. The Chinatown, then, is envisioned and experienced as a world of its own, a closed-off space, part of, yet also apart from, the “homeland.” Yet these associations are not unique to the Chinatown; they are even more apparent with regard to the design and the experiences of Angel Island. After all, the detention center was not only close to Alcatraz prison, but had been modeled after it, since its location had been chosen for its escape-proof isolation (Lai 1980: 13). In addition, the one association that comes up most often in the Chinese poems carved into the detention center’s walls is precisely that of a prison: “Now on an extended sojourn in jail, I am subject to the ordeals of prison life,” as one writer puts it (Lai 1980: 40). “How was anyone to know that my dwelling place would be a prison?” writes another detainee (p. 40). Other inscriptions read: “Up to now, I am still trapped on a lonely island” (p. 42), or “Curled up in an enclosure, my movements are dictated by others” (p. 60). A prison, an island, an enclosure—the people on Angel Island see themselves as having fallen into a liminal space, their goal of entering a new world suddenly out of reach. “Who would have known I would be imprisoned on Island?” (p. 92). One writer captures the spirit of an enforced time-out which suffuses so many of the writings on the wall by simply listing the sights from the center: . . . there are watchmen guarding during the night. ... I gaze to the south at the hospital, And look to the west at the army camp. This author says, “What happiness is there in this?” (Lai 1980: 70)13

The detention center resembles a prison with watchmen controlling the detainees, and the view from the cell shows a world ruled by disciplinary institutions: a military camp and a hospital come into view—sites which like the prison and the detention center aim at normalizing control and surveillance. The disciplinary project of Angel Island was based upon a concatenation of juridical and political measures and it was geared toward regulating the flow of immigration and securing corrosive borderlines.14 Yet like so many other

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institutions aiming at the erection of clear-cut boundaries and sharply drawn distinctions, Angel Island ended up being highly ambivalent. In a sense, it was unclear where Angel Island belonged since it was neither completely in the country, nor completely outside of it—a territory which seemed “neither quite foreign nor domestic,” as Amy Kaplan wrote with respect to the legal category of “Insular Cases” which the Supreme Court established in a series of decisions from 1902 to 1922.15 Thus, the detainees on Angel Island are like the characters in Eaton’s short story—they find themselves in the “wet woods” or in a no-man’s-land, maneuvering an uncertain and precarious territory, and epitomizing in this very maneuver the extraordinary (or abnormal) situation at large. For the many immigrants who had to spend an extended period of time in the detention center and who did not see an end to their situation, living in a state of exception began “to become the rule,” as Giorgio Agamben wrote with respect to the concept of the camp (1998: 169; emphasis in original). For Agamben, this concept is epitomized in the concentration camp, but it is by no means exhaustively captured in the concentration camp’s extreme conditions. The “essence of the camp” consists in a demarcated space in which “the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign” (p. 174). It is important to consider, though, that the camp is not an extralegal space: The camp is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space. What is excluded in the camp is, according to the etymological sense of the term “exception” (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own exclusion. But what is first of all taken into the juridical order is the state of exception itself. . . . The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception—the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power—is realized normally. (Agamben 998: 170; emphases in original)

The state of exception mapped by Agamben demarcates enclaves of the abnormal and extraordinary within the normalized system. These enclaves need to be bracketed off, quarantined, so to speak, so that the overall system can be thought as normal in the first place. By the same token, Angel Island and other “insular cases” in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America constitute a barely repressed evidence that the nation—like the family— cannot be neatly defined on the grounds of an inside and an outside, the domestic and the foreign, the familiar and the alien—since these states and concepts intermingle and condition each other indissolubly.

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This is what came to the fore in the patterns of interrogation at Angel Island, which were designed to separate the familiar (and familial or domestic) from the alien (and foreign). They failed to do so because the claims of belonging (to a family or the nation) that were at stake were subject to manipulation and fabrication, and entangled in emotional and political appropriations. The different conceptions and expectations around kinship and family relations in the United States and China together with the flourishing industry of immigration fraud created more ambivalences and uncertainties than the interviews could possibly clarify, as we have seen. As Eaton’s story exemplifies, the notion of normality was precariously perched on a system which fostered practices of deviation and deception. As a consequence, the authorities in charge of Angel Island and of immigration procedures at large increasingly turned to methods of identification that did not rely upon communication and language. The solution, this logic ran, was to be found in biological measures of identification which would establish unquestionable categories of belonging and exclusion: “One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside” (Agamben 1998: 131). One of the crucial sites of this process of distinction or separation is the issue of citizenship—the nexus of “nativity and nationality,” as Agamben writes (p. 131; emphasis in original)—an issue that is circumscribed by means of the discourses of politics and biology. Significantly enough, it was precisely in the debates around Chinese immigration or exclusion that the issue of a concatenation of nativity and nationality came up most urgently in the United States16 —and in the years to follow in China and the Chinese diaspora just as well.17 The Chinese Exclusion Act, writes John Torpey in his history of practices of documentary identification, “constituted the first serious attempt in American history specifically to exclude members of a particular group whose relevant characteristics were knowable only on the basis of documents” (2000: 97). And the project of documentary identification soon came to be informed with biopolitical ambitions, as “eugenics and other race-conscious approaches” took over the field of “population management” (Torpey 2000: 102). The immigrants’ “fitness” to be integrated into the American national body (or the family of the nation) was determined by means of medical examinations: “Unlike immigration interrogations that required oral verifications of ‘authentic’ life narratives and relied upon the subjective judgment of officers, medical investigation provided seemingly incontrovertible evidence of an individual’s fitness for entry based on a normative notion of good health,” writes Nayan Shah about the routine examinations conducted on Angel Island (2001: 197). However, the investigative regime of the island did

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not only rely upon the idea of biopolitical management; it also aimed at a scientific determination of identity. Erica Lee notes that as late as 1918, medical examiners would conduct extensive “measurements of body parts” in order to determine the age (and thereby the veracity of the life history given in the interrogations) of the immigrants (2003: 211). At this time, the unreliability of this method of measuring was already widely known, but these methods “were nevertheless allowed and even recommended by immigration officials” (p. 211). The method of examination is reminiscent of the much-maligned Bertillon system of identification. This system had been developed by the French researcher and police official Alphonse Bertillon in the nineteenth century for purposes of criminal investigation, and had been introduced to the United States in 1903 in the course of an “internationalization and standardization of police methods” (Sekula 1986: 34) with the goal of ensuring more regularized and reliable standards of selection and rejection in immigration procedures (especially Chinese immigration). The system was based upon biometrical measurements documented by means of photographs and numerical charts, and relied heavily on the insights of modern statistics. In the United States, it had been discontinued in 1906 after protests by the Chinese government over the treatment of immigrants as criminals. As a consequence of these vehement protests, in the 1910s, anthropometrical practices of identification were no longer foregrounded in immigration procedures. But they were obviously still considered efficient—and their attraction, I argue, consisted in the fact that they relied upon visual and numerical data rather than stories in order to determine a person’s identity. The Bertillon system was first promoted as a means of government surveillance in the late nineteenth century in France, in response to the widespread skepticism vis-à-vis working-class mobility: “During the Commune, all city records prior to 1859 had been burned; any Parisian over twenty-two years old was at liberty to invent and reinvent an entirely bogus nativity,” writes Allan Sekula in an extensive reflection on the implications of anthropometrical identification (1986: 33–4; see also Torpey 2000: 107–8). The system, which had originally been devised with the goal to “break the professional criminal’s mastery of disguises, false identities, multiple biographies, and alibis” (Sekula 1986:27), seemed to lend itself ideally to the purpose of curbing an “extraordinary traffic in false documents” (Sekula 1986: 34; cf. also Cole 2001: 33). The analogies between this original scenario in France and the situation in the United States after the earthquake in San Francisco in 1906 when central municipal buildings and almost all of the city’s official records were destroyed are clear. The San Francisco earthquake triggered the paper son system, which in turn led to the establishment of the Angel Island detention center with its tacit reintroduction of biometrical examinations.

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Alphonse Bertillon’s theories of anthropometrical data gathering were largely forgotten as the less complicated method of identification provided by Francis Galton’s system of fingerprinting was being adopted by immigration agencies over the world. The theories rested on different basic assumptions, as Allan Sekula has pointed out (1986: 34), but both share “a new emphasis on the individual criminal body rather than on the generic criminal act,” as Simon Cole argued. Of course, this individualization of crime (or the criminal) went hand in hand with a professionalization and standardization of the systems of criminal investigation, the dream of Bertillonage providing “a sort of international language that could transcend national and linguistic boundaries” (Cole 2001: 53). The survival of the biometrical methods of identification “in the operations of the national security state, in the condition of intensive and extensive surveillance that characterizes both everyday life and the geopolitical sphere,” as Sekula put it as early as 1986, testifies to the striking and frightening actuality of the measures implemented in France, the United States, and many other countries in the 1880s and 1890s, and thus to the actuality of patterns of thought that also proved central for the organization of Angel Island and the Chinese exclusion laws at large. It is interesting to see the manifold parallels between the reasoning around biometrics and the melodramatic imagination. The idea of an order underneath all sorts of masks, disguises, false stories, and subterfuges, which needs to be restored, rules supreme in the world of melodrama and in the texts arguing for international cooperation in criminal investigation and immigration management. Alphonse Bertillon himself apparently felt that he had to justify the measures of identification and surveillance with reference to familial rather than political or administrative needs: “Is it not at bottom a problem of this sort that forms the basis of the everlasting popular melodrama about lost, exchanged, and recovered children?” (quoted in Sekula 1986: 34). It seems as if this method of identification was driven from the outset by the simultaneous desire for scientific precision and the longing for a heartfelt, intuitive order: a system of nationas-family in which the necessity of identification fuses harmoniously with the need for emotional belonging, where self-identification and state classification fall into one. Ironically, of course, on Angel Island and elsewhere, the scientific system of identification was implemented precisely because the rhetoric of national and familial belonging had proven to be vague and unreliable. The system of detention, interrogation, and biometrical examination aimed at getting the family and the nation together again, and to define who belonged where once and for all and without any doubt.

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Belonging Alphonse Bertillon had aimed at establishing a method which would lend scientific solidity to processes of identification. Yet his very own recourse to a melodramatic line of legitimation, imagining his system’s use in the healing reunification of families separated by the cruel circumstances of fate, inadvertently points to the limits of his technique. Even though it was quickly appropriated in order to sort criminals “back into general types” (Cole 2001: 57), it does not allow for familial or ethnic classification. Moreover, it is because nativity and nationality do not obviously and unequivocally fall into one that measures such as the ones taken during the French Commune or at Angel Island need to be implemented. The nation, the family, and the individual are not organically related entities, but relational concepts which are predicated on definitions and conceptions subject to change. The administrators, criminal investigators, and immigration officials at the turn of the twentieth century did not and would not face the consequences of this circumstance. Again it is in a text by Edith Maud Eaton that the paradoxes of the matter at hand are addressed and epitomized. In a short story ironically titled “In the Land of the Free” and first published in 1909, she anticipates the events to come in the period of exclusion—the measures of detention and segregation that Chinese Americans would be subjected to. And this story highlights these events by focusing on the fate of a family in which the conditions of nativity and nationality do not coincide. The story opens with a view on Lae Choo, a Chinese American woman, wife of a merchant and American citizen, who returns to San Francisco from China, where she has given birth to a son. The husband “wished [his] son to be born in [their] country” and his wife “complied with [his] wish” (Eaton 1995: 94), returning to China to give birth, and staying on afterward to take care of the ailing parents of the couple. When she returns to be reunited with her husband and to introduce son and father, they are inadvertently confronted by the customs officers who notice that “there is nothing in the papers that you have shown us—your wife’s papers and your own—having any bearing upon the child” (p. 94). Lae Choo may enter the country, but her son is detained until his identity can be determined, according to the “law of the land” (Eaton 1995: 95) and in disregard of the mother’s and the child’s pain at being separated. It will take 10 months for mother and son to be reunited and the reunion only comes about through the intervention of a young white lawyer who demands all the family’s possessions for his efforts. And when it happens, it is not the happy event the mother was hoping for. The parents are told to pick up their son at the mission nursery school. Dressed in “blue cotton overalls

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and white-soled shoes” the little boy reencounters his mother: “‘Little One, ah, my Little One!’ cried Lae Choo. She fell on her knees and stretched her hungry arms toward her son. But the Little One shrunk from her and tried to hide himself in the folds of the white woman’s skirt. ‘Go ‘way’, go ‘way!’ he bade his mother” (p. 101). The story’s melodramatic ending epitomizes that the discourses of legality and nationality—embodied in the lawyer’s economic reasoning—do not coincide with the emotional truth informing family relations. Once it has been determined technically how the melodrama of this “lost . . . and recovered” child, to use Alphonse Bertillon’s words once more, is to be resolved, the child does not feel the family bonds any longer—they have become a mere paper trace. Once more, as in “The Smuggling of Tie Co,” Eaton’s narration brings to the fore the contradictions that inhere in the political logic of belonging—the fact that identity is not to be determined on the grounds of paperwork and measuring, and that in a world in which such methods abound, fake identities and make-belief autobiographies may very well be more adequate than authenticity and truth. Here, the mission nursery school represents the place of detention, which becomes, at the same time, a place of forgetting. The “mission woman” that gets Lae Choo’s little boy for her explains that he “had been rather difficult to manage at first . . . , but children so soon forget, and after a month he seemed quite at home” (Eaton 1995: 102). Once the in-between space, the no-man’sland of detention, becomes home, however, and once forgetting replaces the (cultural) memory and the emotional truth of family membership, the very concept of the nation-as-family becomes seriously questionable. At the end of Eaton’s story the question whether the little boy is Chinese or American is left precariously pending. Thus, this story’s ending resonates strangely with the dilemma formulated in Edith Maud Eaton’s autobiographical “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”: “I am different to both of them—a stranger, tho their own child,” she writes about her English father and Chinese mother: “ ‘What are we?’ I ask my brother. ‘It does not matter, sissy,’ he responds. But it does” (p. 222). “I have no nationality and I am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is stronger than nationality,” concluded Edith Maud Eaton bravely in her autobiographical piece (p. 230). The melodramatic ending of “In the Land of the Free” adds a note of doubt to this insight. Individuality, which is forced into relational systems of identification within the modern nationstate, might very well be swallowed up by the powerful rhetoric of nationality and ethnicity, after all (and the very fact that Edith Maud Eaton has been rediscovered as the “Chinese American” author Sui Sin Far is a case in point). While the terms individuality and nationality are hard to reconcile

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for Chinese Americans in the early twentieth century, they are just as hard to keep apart, it seems. The politics of exclusion failed, yet the strategies of inclusion were not entirely successful either. Exclusion and inclusion stay in precarious balance, forming a difficult and paradoxical correlation in this history. Even though the political and the emotional rhetoric and logic of identification refer to and rely upon each other, they are distinctly and differently organized, and—especially in situations that call for a definition of national or familial coherence—clash more often than they coincide harmoniously. Yet these clashes tend to be obscured by the discourses of normalization and regularization that suffuse definitions of nationhood and identity. It is only when the mechanisms of biometrical and “paper” identification are foregrounded and denaturalized (as in Eaton’s stories) that the logic of concentric circles of belonging—spreading from individual to family to nation—starts to give, and a system of intersections, enclaves, states of exception, and “included exclusion” comes into view which might be so much more adequate to represent the processes of twentieth- (and twenty-first) century (im)migration, nationalization, and identification.

Notes 1. This is exactly how the linguist George Lakoff lays out the trope—for him it works as an immediately accessible figural formation that organizes political thinking to our days unconsciously and almost universally. While I agree that the concepts of family and nation are entangled, especially in an American history of thought, in what follows it will become clear that I understand the trope of the nation-as-family as a much more complicated and ambivalent correlation than Lakoff did, a correlation which raises as many problems as it suggests solutions. 2. On the implications of this logic with respect to a medicalization of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century thought, see Mayer (1999). 3. For a delineation of this practice see Island, Lai (1980: 8–29), Salyer (1995: 58– 68), Hsu (2000: 74–85), and Lee (2003: 189–220). 4. On transnational family arrangements and kinship structures, also see Chen (2000: 145–185). 5. “I did not learn about these things from my own family,” writes historian Erica Lee in the introduction to her study on immigration patterns and paper identities, after outlining her own family’s intricate involvement in this history (2003: 5). Of course, she is not the only third- or fourth-generation scholar or writer who faced a confusing tangle of fake and true stories—and much silence— when researching her family past. The most famous and popular version of such a search of familial patterns of belonging is doubtlessly laid out in Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical novel China Men (1980)—a girl’s speculation about

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the family background and Americanization of a Chinese father who would not talk. On this dimension of the theme, see Mayer (2005: 123–167). On the modes of transnationality anticipated by the “paper practices,” see Ong (1999). On the debates around the other ethnic minorities’ challenge to the notion of a uniform and racially homogeneous national family, see, apart from Kaplan (2002), Shklar (1991), Ngai (2004), and the volume Legal Borderlands, Dudziak et al. (2006). Edith Maud Eaton has been cast as a “native informant” in Chinese American research (cf. here Ling 1990; Yin 2006); I will rather regard her as a commentator, somebody who was familiar with certain aspects of the racial politics of the day yet still a linguistic and cultural outsider (Eaton did not speak Chinese and her background differed strongly from average Chinese American immigration histories of her day). For an excellent reflection on Eaton’s status and self-fashioning between native informant and reporter, see Ferens (2001: esp. 80–110). Also see White-Parks (1995). Together with the other stories first published in Lummis’s magazine, “The Smuggling of Tie Co” was then republished in Edith Maud Eaton’s collection of stories, Mrs Spring Fragrance (1995: 11–16). For a reading of the text which focuses on its sexual politics, and goes into a somewhat different direction than my own, see Song (1998). Dominika Ferens has pointed out that “The Smuggling of Tie Co” is one of three thematic exceptions among the stories written by Eaton for Land of Sunshine— and that the general leaning toward more conventional sentimental themes might have had to do with contemporary reader expectations and ascriptions to a writer “using a Chinese byline and specializing in Chinatown ethnography”: “Despite her deep interest in interracial relations, in seven of the ten Land of Sunshine stories, Edith represents Chinatown as virtually homogeneous, with barely a hint of the society at large” (2002: 95). “Chinese male outnumbered Chinese female immigrants throughout the exclusion era,” writes Erica Lee (2003: 115). This uneven ratio had to do with the sexist tendencies inscribed into the exclusion laws, but was also enforced by the patriarchal Chinese ideology of the day. Also see Chan (1991a). The editors of the collection Island, Lai et al. (1980), point out that the writer seems to have got the directions wrong: “The occupants can see the hospital to the north from windows in the building’s north wall. Looking east, the Ft McDowell buildings can be seen. No buildings can be seen from the south wall windows which face the hillside” (70N34). Of course, these structures of surveillance and control were not total and they were countered by Chinese strategies of defiance which attested to the community’s agency. These instances of subversive agency anticipate more systematic Chinese American strategies of legal redress, political intervention, lobbying efforts, and other means of protest against discrimination affecting

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the Chinese in the United States. Cf. Chen (2000: esp. 186–216), Lee (2003: 111–145), Shah (2001: esp. 120–157), and Salyer (1995: esp. 37–68). 15. Of course, this series of decisions relates to the territories annexed by the United States after the Spanish–American War, and not to Angel Island. But there are clear analogies between the debates around territories “ ‘belonging to’ but ‘not a part of the United States’, whose inhabitants were neither aliens nor citizens,” as Kaplan cites the court’s definition of Puerto Rico (Kaplan 2006: 249), and the discussions on the legal grounds of detention or, for that matter, the legal justification for Guantánamo Bay, about which Kaplan writes. 16. On the logic and argumentation of American nativism, see Higham (1988) and Knobel (1996). On this ideology’s impact on Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, see Saxton (1995) and Lee (2003). 17. On the concatenation of nationality and nativity in the emergence of a Chinese nationalist movement, see Goodman (1995); on the ramifications of these developments in the Chinese diaspora in the United States, see Hsu (2000: 124–155) and Chen (2000: 162–185).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, 1995, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [Anonymous]. 1842. “[Review of ] Woman, Physiologically Considered as to Mind, Morals, Marriage, . . . , By Alexander Walker.” Southern Quarterly Review II, 4(Oct.): 279–311. Chan, Sucheng. 1991a. “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1875–1943.” In: Sucheng Chan, ed. Entry Denied. Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Chan, Sucheng. 1991b. Asian Americans. An Interpretive History. New York: Twayne. Chen, Yong. 2000. Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943. A Trans-Pacific Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cole, Simon A. 2001. Suspect Identities. A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dudziak, Mary L. and Leti Volpp, eds. 2006. Legal Borderlands. Law and the Construction of American Borders. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Eaton, Edith Maud/Sui Sin Far. 1995. Mrs Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Ed. Amy Ling, Annette White-Parks. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Ferens, Dominika. 2002. Edith and Winnifred Eaton. Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Tr. Robert Hurley. 1976, New York: Vintage. Goodman, Bryna. 1995. Native Place, City, and Nation. Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937. Berkeley, CA: University of Berkeley Press.

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Higham, John. 1988. Strangers in the Land. Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1925. 1978, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hsu, Madeline Yuan-yin. 2000. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home. Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kaplan, Amy. 2002. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaplan, Amy. 2006. “Where Is Guantánamo?” In: Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp, eds. Legal Borderlands. Law and the Construction of American Borders. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 239–266. Kelleter, Frank, and Ruth Mayer. 2007. “The Melodramatic Mode Revisited. An Introduction.” In: Frank Kelleter, Barbara Krah, and Ruth Mayer, eds. Melodrama! The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood. Heidelberg, Germany: Winter. Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1980. China Men. London: Picador. Knobel, Dale T. 1996. “America for the Americans.” The Nativist Movement in the United States. New York: Twayne. Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, eds. 1980. Island. Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Lakoff, George. 1996. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lee, Erica. 2003. At America’s Gates. Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1942. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Ling, Amy. 1990. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon. Mayer, Ruth. 1999. “ ‘Arousing the slumbering woman’s nature.’ Poetry, Pornography, and other 19th Century Writing on Female Passion.” Nineteenth Century Studies 13: 83–101. Mayer, Ruth. 2005. Diaspora. Eine kritische Begriffsbestimmung. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. Ngai, Mae. 2004. Impossible Subjects. Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logic of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ryan, Susan M. 2000. “Charity Begins at Home. Stowe’s Antislavery Novels and the Forms of Benevolent Citizenship.” American Literature 72.4 (Dec.): 752–81. Salyer, Lucy E. 1995. Laws Harsh as Tigers. Chinese Immigration and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Saxton, Alexander. 1995. The Indispensable Enemy. Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, 1971, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39: 3–64. Shah, Nayan. 2001. Contagious Divides. Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shklar, Judith. 1991. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Singer, Ben. 2001. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press. Song, Min. 1998. “The Unknowable and Sui Sin Far: The Epistomological Limits of ‘Oriental’ Sexuality.” In: David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, eds. Q & A. Queer in Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 304–322. Takaki, Ronald. 1998. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Updated and revised edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Torpey, John. 2000. The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. White-Parks, Annette. 1995. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maud Eaton: A Literary Biography. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Yin, Xiao-huang. 2006. Chinese Literature since the 1850s. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER 5

Befriending the Yellow Peril: Student Migration and the Warming of American Attitudes toward Chinese, 1905–1950 Madeline Y. Hsu

A

merica’s exclusion of Asians—beginning with Chinese in 1882 and extending to Japanese and Koreans (1907), South Asians (1917), and Filipinos (1934)—fully merits the careful scrutiny it has received from critical race, legal, ethnic, and migration studies scholars. Asians were the earliest targets of immigration and citizenship laws that imposed racially defined entry restrictions and bars against citizenship.1 Although their relative numbers in the United States have remained low, this long history of exclusion locates Asians at the center of America’s ideological, legal, and bureaucratic self-constructions as a nation-state. In this article, I complicate this well-developed narrative by emphasizing that the laborers who were the chief targets of exclusion were presumed by race, but also by class, to be inassimilable threats to the United States. Here I focus on the experiences of those entering as students and intellectuals to argue that a relatively cosmopolitan class of Chinese—worldly, well educated, and multilingual— served as conceptual hinges that helped to swing American opinions of Asian immigrants from the Yellow Peril threats of the early twentieth century to model immigrants and minorities by the century’s end. Unlike monolingual, working-class Chinese who seemed encased in semi-hostile Chinatown ghettos, highly educated Chinese could speak to Americans in their own language, represent the elegance and allure of China’s high culture, and thereby

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embody the desirability and the possibility of building bridges, rather than walls, between China and the United States. The potential benefits of admitting Chinese students gained public attention with debates concerning remission of excess funds extracted from China in punishment for the Boxer uprisings. Even before signing the final papers, the U.S. government already knew the indemnity amount was set too high and would significantly impede China’s ability to invest in its own development in ways that might help it gain leverage to stave off the pending aggressions of rising imperialist neighbors such as Japan and Russia (Hunt 1972: 542).2 America’s share of the punitive indemnity was $25,000,000, more than double its actual costs (Hunt 1972: 545–546). The U.S. government could not justify keeping the excess money particularly when a weak China faced the very real threat of conquest by hovering imperial powers. Under concerted lobbying from Chinese government representatives, American missionaries and educators, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, their respective Secretaries of State, and certain members of Congress came to believe that offering scholarships for Chinese to study in America might be a successful “soft” strategy for cultivating better relations with China and thereby maintain access to its fabled cornucopia of consumers.3 Between 1909 and 1929, the Boxer Indemnity scholarships funded about 1300 Chinese to receive B.A. and graduate education in the United States (Ye 2001: 51). The recruitment of Chinese students—with scholarships specifically set aside for their use—contrasts starkly with the harsh tales of exclusion that dominate our understandings of this era of Asian American history. The very different conditions experienced by working-class and intellectual Chinese stemmed from America’s hopes that by influencing future generations of Chinese leaders, it might foster a more positive international image after the widespread 1905 anti-American boycott protesting the exclusion laws and cultivate better trade relations with China. The dichotomous treatment meted out to different classes of Chinese illustrates that when their presence in the United States could be construed as advancing practical goals—such as improving America’s foreign relations and economic reach—the Chinese were welcomed and strategically cultivated as bridges to a potentially valuable ally rather than repulsed as the vanguard of a racially constructed Yellow Peril invasion. An Exempt Class: Laws Concerning the Entry of Chinese Students Most scholarship concerning Chinese migration emphasizes the Chinese exclusion laws, their prohibition against the entry of laborers, and how this

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legally defined class of immigrants came to subsume almost every kind of Chinese person. As the first racially defined immigration restrictions, the Chinese exclusion laws established legal and bureaucratic precedents for all the immigration laws and practices that followed. What receives less attention, however, is that embedded within these earliest immigration restrictions— and reiterated in the 1917, 1924, and 1952 versions—were exemptions for students to continue entering the United States under increasingly privileged conditions.4 Legal differentiation between despised Asian laborers and students began as early as 1880. That year, in preparation for passage of Chinese exclusion, the U.S. government renegotiated the Burlingame Treaty with China so that it could “regulate, limit, or suspend” the “coming or residence” of Chinese laborers when their presence in the U.S. “affects or threatens to affect the interests of that country.” However, certain categories of Chinese were not considered potential problems and retained the right “to go and come of their own free will and accord, and . . . be accorded all the rights, privileges, immunities, and exemptions which are accorded to the citizens and subjects of the most favored nation.” The unthreatening, and therefore more privileged, categories of Chinese included “teachers, students, [and] merchants”5 (Treaty Nov. 17, 1880: 826–827). The 1882 exclusion law excepted “every Chinese person other than a laborer who may be entitled by said treaty and this act to come within the United States.”6 In practice, the exempt classes included students along with diplomats and their servants, merchants and their families, tourists, and, for a brief six years, properly certified returning laborers. As described by Chen Wen-hsien, the U.S. courts also tended to distinguish between Chinese students and laborers. In U.S. v. Chu Shee (87 Fed. 312 (1898)), the courts ruled that the children of laborers do not assume their father’s status if lawfully admitted as students. The courts also protected students from deportation if they had “temporarily engaged in manual labor while attending school” or had worked in a laundry (Moy Kong Chui v. U.S. (246 Fed. 94 (1917)) and Ex parte Lam Pui (277 Fed. 456 (1914)) (Chen 1940: 378). This comparative lack of concern regarding student entry and activities while in residence continued into the twentieth century. The 1917 Barred Zone Act also exempted students along with “[g]overnment officers, ministers or religious teachers, missionaries, lawyers, physicians, chemists, civil engineers, teachers . . . authors, artists, merchants, and travelers for curiosity or pleasure . . . their legal wives or their children under sixteen years of age” from its ban against immigration by most natives of “the Continent of Asia west of the one hundred and tenth meridian of longitude east from Greenwich and

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east of the fiftieth meridian of longitude east of Greenwich” (Immigration Act of 1917, Feb. 5, 1917). Although Chinese immigrants remained subject to the Chinese exclusion laws, the 1917 act extended its exemptions for student entry to a more general population and gave them the right to bring families with them. The 1924 Immigration Act added further refinements of the distinctive immigration trajectory of students by defining them as “non-quota immigrants,” whose entry would not be counted against the quotas used to limit immigration and settlement by national origin. Along with ministers, professors, and their families, “a bona fide student at least 15 years of age and who seeks to enter the United States solely for the purpose of study at an accredited school, college, academy, seminary, or university” would not be subject to the same numerical restrictions on entry that were then being imposed against immigrants from most parts of the world (Act of May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924). Bureaucratic practices also improved the situation of Chinese student status. After 1924, supervision of their cases gradually shifted from the field offices to be handled in Washington, DC (Chen 1940: 381). The 1952 McCarran–Walter Act continued these rights of non-quota entry and further enhanced the situation of students and intellectuals who received first preference in converting to immigrant status and permanent residency. This priority was allotted by the Attorney General to those nonquota immigrants determined “to be urgently needed in the United States because of the high education, technical training, specialized experience, or exceptional ability of such immigrants and to be substantially beneficial prospectively to the national economy, cultural interests, or welfare of the United States” (McCarran–Walter Act 1952 Sec. 203(a)). By the midtwentieth century, students and intellectuals not only found it easier to enter the United States, but also enjoyed better access to the legal processes of becoming American. Historical Background of Chinese Students in America Even in the throes of the anti-Chinese movement, as organized labor leaders and presidential candidates traversed the nation during the 1870s proclaiming that “The Chinese must go!”, approximately 120 young Chinese men arrived to study in New England under the auspices of the Chinese Educational Mission. In contrast with the majority of their countrymen who lived and worked under segregated conditions as manual laborers and service workers, these students lived with Euro-American families, danced at their socials, competed in their athletic events, and attended their schools.

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The first Chinese graduate of an American university (Yale 1854), Yung Wing (1828–1912), conceived and founded the Chinese Educational Mission. As a committed Chinese nationalist, Yung Wing believed that China’s modernization efforts required more Chinese educated in Western approaches to subjects considered vital to China’s self-strengthening efforts such as mathematics, science, technology, and military science.7 After 17 years of struggle, he persuaded influential ministers in the Qing government to back his plan to train future officials by sending them to study in America. He recruited young men to embark on this unprecedented career path primarily from his native region of Guangdong. They studied English in Shanghai and the best of this group sailed onward to continue their studies in America in 1872. From the outset, tensions beset the Chinese Educational Mission concerning the attempted melding of Chinese and American knowledge and social behaviors, and whether China could learn from the West in ways that did not undermine the integrity of Confucian civilization and values. The Qing emissaries who managed the program doubted whether the students and even Yung Wing himself would prove useful to China because they had become too irreconcilably foreign. Despite these doubts, the program continued and ended only when the U.S. government revoked stipulations in the Burlingame Treaty that had guaranteed admission for Chinese students to enter the U.S. Naval Academy and West Point. With these ultimate targets of American education beyond their grasp, the Chinese government withdrew from the attempt altogether (LaFargue 1987: 47). In 1881, it seems that neither the Chinese nor the Americans thought that the benefits of educating Chinese in America were worth the effort to learn to work with each other. Through the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese in small numbers continued to come to study in the United States, primarily under missionary sponsorship or through private family funds. The latter was a costly route that few were able to afford or choose. Just after the turn of the twentieth century, however, a confluence of circumstances rapidly enhanced the attractions of educating Chinese in America from the perspectives of both sides: the abolishing of the traditional examination system in China that had emphasized Confucian texts, Roosevelt’s desire to ameliorate the anger expressed through the 1905 anti-American boycotts, the rise of Japanese influence in the Western Pacific, and the need to return the Boxer Indemnity excess in a way that minimized America’s imperialist actions. These conditions converged to channel American efforts to court Chinese by offering scholarships for Chinese students to study in the United States.

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Building Alliances through Scholarships: Remitting the Boxer Indemnity Excess In 1905, Chinese resentment of American discrimination and mistreatment came to a head just as the United States had increasing need to seek a more conciliatory relationship with China in the wake of Japan’s rise as a modern world power. In 1904, Congress had voted to extend the Chinese exclusion laws in perpetuity, rather than reconsidering them every ten years. Overzealous enforcement of the exclusion laws subjected Chinese with legal rights of entry such as students, merchants, and even diplomatic representatives to humiliating scrutiny and harassment by immigration authorities. In a widespread and protracted expression of anger, Chinese merchants based in Shanghai and Guangzhou coordinated boycotts of American goods that encompassed the treaty ports and Chinese overseas in cities like Rangoon and Singapore. The boycott lasted about five months and was accompanied by rising levels of anti-Western violence. Although they died down by late 1905, the protests ended fully only when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake wholly absorbed all the resources of its Chinese American backers. The boycott did not compel changes in the exclusion laws, but it did lead to improved treatment of merchants, diplomats, and students and attracted the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In his annual address of 1905, Roosevelt affirmed the continuing need to exclude Chinese laborers but asserted the importance of treating its merchants, students, and diplomats on equitable terms. But in the effort to carry out the policy of excluding Chinese laborers, Chinese coolies, grave injustice and wrong have been done by this Nation to the people of China, and therefore ultimately to this Nation itself. Chinese students, business and professional men of all kinds—not only merchants, but bankers, doctors, manufacturers, professors, travelers, and the like—should be encouraged to come here and treated on precisely the same footing that we treat students, business men, travelers, and the like of other nations. . . . As a people we have talked much of the open door in China, and we expect, and quite rightly intend to insist upon, justice being shown us by the Chinese. But we can not expect to receive equity unless we do equity. (Message of the President. FRUS 1905, XLVIX.)

In this speech, Roosevelt explicitly linked immigration laws and practices to America’s foreign policy goals. Maintaining American access to Chinese markets required that Chinese subjects of certain classes be treated on a par with those of other nations and the United States itself. Other foreign policy considerations raised the importance of China in American eyes. The United States had limited naval capacities to protect its

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recently acquired colony of the Philippines in case of Japanese attack, leading Roosevelt to seek other methods to sustain American influence in the Western Pacific.8 According to Walter La Feber, “During 1905–1908, the possibility of war between Americans and Japanese was much in the air” (La Feber 1997: 89). Both countries competed for shares of the Chinese market and feared moves by the other to block their own access. For example, American construction of the Panama Canal between 1903 and 1914 seemed to threaten Japanese interests whereas the American president feared that the country that had just defeated Russia could also attack and occupy the Philippines. Roosevelt and his advisors first began planning for a possible war against Japan in 1906. War Plan Orange “concluded that, first, Japan was now a possible enemy in the Pacific; and second, U.S. forces could probably defend Guam and Hawaii, but not the Philippines” (p. 90). Roosevelt faced the difficulty of defending the Philippines as well as the need to protect the open door in China by developing alliances because the United States could not manage alone. In 1905, Roosevelt and Congress also faced the challenge of deciding how to return the excessive indemnity funds which it had extracted from China as punishment for the Boxer uprisings. American missionaries and leading educators and Chinese themselves publicly campaigned for the return of the funds and criticized the inequitable, and unfriendly, relationship between the two nations that the indemnity represented. Returning the indemnity in the form of scholarships for students seemed strategic for multiple reasons for it could strengthen ties between the United States and China without antagonizing Japan. Under such conditions, the Chinese minister to the United States, Liang Cheng, a former Chinese Educational Mission student, began courting both the press and sympathetic Congressmen to request the return of the excess funds in 1905. The idea of using the Boxer Indemnity remission to fund education “strongly appealed to Protestant missionaries in China and to educators” and Liang received considerable support from missionaries such as Arthur Smith, “the dean of American missionary educators” and one of a handful of American China experts of the time who visited with Roosevelt in 1906 and raised the issue (Hunt 1972: 549). The demise of the traditional examination system in 1905 left the Chinese government scrambling to construct an almost entirely new educational system on short notice. The decentering of Confucian texts from their millennia of dominance over China’s intellectual and political systems provided unprecedented opportunities for foreign powers to make inroads into influencing the shape of China’s future. Missionaries such as Smith hoped to extend the influence of the colleges they had established in China and also to dispel some of the ill-will

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generated by immigration controversies “by creating an influential body of Chinese leaders of American education” (La Feber 1997: 66).9 In 1907, he wrote: The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of the present generation will be the nation for which a given expenditure of effort will reap the largest possible returns in moral, intellectual, and commercial influence. If the United States had succeeded thirty-five years ago, as it looked at one time as if it might, in turning the current of Chinese students to this country, and had succeeded in keeping that current large, we should to-day be controlling the development of China in that most satisfactory and subtle of all ways—through the intellectual and spiritual domination of its leaders. (China and America Today 1907: 214–215)

Educators shared Smith’s ambitions for educating elite Chinese in the United States. They noted the role students had played in organizing the 1905 Boycott and sought to win them over with education and scholarships in the United States. In February 1906, Harvard President Charles Eliot made the argument that the boycott would come to an early end if Harvard offered full scholarships to some Chinese young men. The scholarship carrot seemed effective for when Yale, Cornell, and Wellesley offered scholarships for ten men and three women in 1907, 600 candidates competed for them through examinations held in Nanjing (Bieler 2004: 40). American China experts claimed the indemnity program would benefit China, but also the United States: They will be studying American institutions, making American friends, and coming back here to favor America for China in its foreign relations. Talk about a Chinese alliance! The return of that indemnity was the most profitable work Uncle Sam ever did. . . . They will form a force in our favor so strong that no other government or trade element of Europe can compete with it. (Hunt 1972: 557–558)10

Many Chinese also thought study in the United States would help China. W.W. Yen, another former CEM student and official in the Waiwubu, wrote in 1905: [W]e are to be the interpreters and expositors of America to our own people. . . . I think we are able to bring to our own people a knowledge of the American people that no amount of explaining in books or by Americans themselves could accomplish. We constitute a bridge across the Pacific Ocean over which American education, American ideals, American machinery and manufactures, and all that is best of America pass to the Flowery Kingdom. We

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constitute the strongest link in the bond of friendship between China and the United States, strong because it is based on intellectual and disinterested reasons.11 (Yen May 1911: 496–499)

Pressed by this coalition of interested parties, Roosevelt let himself be persuaded “to view educational work as a civilizing force among this backward race” by April 1906 and spoke of this intent in his annual address in 1907 (Hunt 1972: 550). Despite this public expression of support, Roosevelt left it to his successor, William Howard Taft, and his Secretary of State, Philander Knox, to work out the details with Liang Cheng’s successor, Wu Tingfang. Although China would have preferred to be able to invest the money into industrial developments such as railroads or a bank, Americans remained firmly committed to the goal of educating Chinese.12 Chinese Students in the United States In 1908 the United States began returning the Boxer Indemnity to China. Some of the money was used to establish Qinghua College in 1909 as a prep school run “in the American way, with American personnel and an American curriculum” (Wang 1966: 71). The Chinese government also began holding competitive exams in 1909 to select scholarship recipients. Some of these applicants had already studied in the United States but returned to compete for the prestigious scholarships. Others received scholarships by government order without taking exams. Some of the most prominent of Boxer Indemnity students included the likes of Hu Shi and the future finance minister T.V. Soong. From early on, government guidelines emphasized support for those studying engineering, mining, or agriculture. Of the first cohort of 47 indemnity students, 43 were in science or technical fields (Ye 2001: 53). Even after the fall of the Qing, and the absence of centralized authority, this emphasis continued although more students would also enter the social sciences and humanities. Between 1909 and 1920, one-third of Qinghua graduates majored in engineering, more than those in the social sciences and humanities combined. The natural sciences and agriculture were also popular majors (Ye 2001: 54–55). Chinese students in the United States increased steadily from 1900 to 1927, partially in response to greater incentives to go to America for studying but also because of rising levels of xenophobia in Japan—the previous destination of choice for foreign education (see Table 5.1). In 1906,

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Table 5.1

Madeline Y. Hsu Numbers of Chinese Students in the United States (Wang 1966: 158)

Year No. of Chinese students in the U.S.

1903

1909

1910

1911

1914

1918

1921

1943

1945

50

239

292

490

830

990

679

1191

1972

Note: These numbers are probably not complete as the Chinese government had a hard time tracking selfsupporting students until after 1943.

Table 5.2 Countries of Origin of Foreign Students in the United States for the Academic Year 1923–1924 (Bieler 2004: 379–280) Country

China Japan Canada Philippines Russia India Mexico Puerto England Rico

No. of int’l students

1467

708

684

591

391

231

198

181

170

Source: This information was originally compiled by the Institute of International Education and appears in the Annual Report of the Director, New York.

there were about 300 Chinese students in the United States, roughly 650 in 1911, and an estimated 1600 by 1925 and 1926. A select minority were Boxer scholars but others came through family backing, provincial scholarships, or through scholarships offered by some U.S. universities and colleges specifically for Chinese students. Most attended schools in the East and Midwest, with much smaller numbers in the West and South. Despite the restrictions of the exclusion period, China was among the top senders of students to the United States (see Table 5.2). These numbers suggest the enthusiasm with which both Chinese and Americans embraced the idea of how beneficial the latter’s tutelage of the former could be. Over time, this idea penetrated even the Immigration Bureau—perhaps the site of the most concentrated anti-Chinese fervor. In the 1910s, the bureau still viewed the category of Chinese students chiefly as causing problems in its enforcement of exclusion. For example, in 1914, the bureau’s annual report noted with satisfaction a 29 percent decline in the numbers of “exempt” new arrivals, and attributed it “to the firm stand taken by the bureau against the soliciting of so-called students in China by Americans who apparently were commercializing the movement” (Commissioner General of Immigration 1914: 309). In 1915, the annual report reiterated concerns regarding use of the student status to commit immigration fraud and called for greater resources to bolster its enforcement powers:

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Perhaps the two greatest abuses [of the spirit of the exclusion laws] arise in the cases of “students” and “minor sons of merchants.” The policy of the Government to welcome to our schools and colleges students of all races and nations ought to be so supported by positive provisions of law that abuse of the hospitality extended by using it to further the plans of parties interested to secure admission of those who will be members of the inhibited classes here would not be possible. (Commissioner General of Immigration, 1915: 110)

But by 1931, the bureau had transformed its attitudes so completely that it described with unreserved approval the presence of Chinese students within American borders: One pleasing feature of the immigration question concerning Chinese has to do with the body of students who are in attendance at our institutions of learning. The students who have come from China are almost invariably of a fine type, earnest and intelligent, who eagerly embrace the opportunity to secure advanced instruction. After the termination of their courses, many request and are granted permission to remain for a longer period in order to gain practical experience along the line of their studies, so that they may be better fitted to apply their knowledge upon their return to China. (Commissioner General of Immigration 1931: 52)

Rather than the suspicion and antagonism we find in most exclusion-era accounts of encounters with Chinese immigrants, the Immigration Bureau welcomed the presence of students in the United States and lauded the benefits that China would thereby gain. American and Chinese concurrence regarding the benefits of educating Chinese in America assumed institutional forms as well. In 1924, Congress voted to establish the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture to handle the remaining indemnity funds. The first board included ten Chinese and five Americans. Most of the Chinese members were American-trained diplomats and educators such as Premier W.W. Yen, V.K. Wellington Koo, Jiang Menglin (President of Beijing University), Zhang Boling (President of Nankai University), and Hu Shih. The Americans included the likes of John Dewey, Paul Monroe of Columbia University, and J.E. Baker of the Ministry of Communications in Beijing (Bieler 2004: 79). By the 1930s, American hopes of influencing China by educating its leaders appeared to have borne fruit. Although figures are somewhat unreliable, Y.C. Wang estimated that 20,906 Chinese studied in the United States between 1854 and 1953, most after 1905. These privileged few came to assume great importance in China. Wang surveyed Who’s Who lists for China

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and found that by 1939, an astonishing 71 percent had been educated abroad. Of these, about 36 percent studied in the United States, a sharp rise in American-educated Chinese leaders from the 9.5 percent of 1916 out of a total 49.5 percent educated abroad (Wang 1996: 177).13 This elite group played influential roles in promoting Nationalist China’s orientation toward the United States during its brief two decades of power on the mainland (1927–1949). However, this relationship was often rocky and demonstrated that the influences forged in student–teacher bonds ran both ways. Members of the influential Soong family—including Wellesley graduate Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Oberlin and Yale graduate H.H. Kung, and Harvard- and Columbia-educated T.V. Soong—shaped China’s warming relationship with the United States during the 1930s and throughout World War II but effectively courted America for considerable support and resources as well. It is less clear what the United States received from this partnership, apart from an unreliable wartime ally against Japan and some satisfaction in trying to edge China closer to democratic forms of government. Cosmopolitan Bridges: Yuen Ren and Buwei Yang Chao Well-educated Chinese who remained in America revealed a different set of possibilities regarding settlement and integration. To illustrate the greater ease of travel and access to mainstream society enjoyed by the intellectual class, I will discuss Yuen Ren (1892–1982) and Buwei Yang Chao (1889–1981), the internationally renowned linguist and his wife who wrote the first bestselling English-language Chinese cookbook, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (New York, 1945), and Autobiography of a Chinese Woman (New York, 1947). Chao was a pioneer in applying Western linguistic systems to the Chinese language and helped to develop early romanization systems and transcription methods for notating its tonal pitch variations. He was a Boxer Indemnity scholarship student who traveled back and forth several times between China and the United States under a variety of statuses including student, professor, and government representative accompanied by his family. Although the Chaos represent but a tiny proportion of the Chinese community in the United States, their impact and symbolic weight are considerable because they served as highly visible examples of how well Chinese could adapt to life in the United States. Buwei Yang Chao was born into a highly elite Nanjing family and completed her medical studies in Japan. In 1921, she married Yuen Ren Chao after he returned from his first trip to study mathematics and philosophy at Cornell. Chao returned to the United States again in 1921, with his new wife, at Harvard where he received a doctorate in philosophy while pursuing

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interests in musicology and linguistics. The couple returned to China in 1925 where Chao worked at the Academia Sinica and conducted linguistic fieldwork throughout China along with Yang Chao who spent her time collecting recipes. They returned to the United States from 1932 until 1933 while Chao headed the Chinese Educational Mission in DC and again in 1938 when Chao was invited to teach at the University of Hawaii and then at Yale. The outbreak of World War II forced them to stay in the United States and changes in attitudes and legal conditions after the war permitted them to remain permanently. In her autobiography, which Chao translated into English, Yang Chao described their various sojourns in the United States and their relatively unimpeded access to varied classes and races of people. They seemed to enjoy opportunities and acceptance that enabled them to think of transplanting to the United States. Yang Chao described Chao’s level of Americanization after his first stay: “When Chao Yuen Ren returned to China in 1920, he did not return sincerely. He got a leave of absence from Cornell to have a look at things, possibly to get his freedom, and would return to his job in America in a year’s time. He had been thoroughly Americanized and wanted to live in America” (Chao 1947: 181). Although he was not legally able to gain permanent residency at that time, Chao would continue traveling to the United States long enough for laws and attitudes toward Chinese to change. In Yang Chao’s account, the family never seemed to encounter problems because they were Chinese. For example, in 1921, as poor students, they managed to sublet a third-floor flat in Cambridge at 7 Francis Avenue from Professor William McDougall, who also lent them a “very welcome mattress” (Chao 1947: 202). Yang Chao did encounter racism, but not against Chinese. In 1922, they moved to a regular flat at 3 Sacramento Place with only one flight of stairs for the now pregnant Yang Chao to climb. Their apartment was sandwiched between those of two “Negro” families. “Some American friends said that we should not live with colored people. I did not understand what they meant until I learned that yellow and red were not colors, but that black was” (Chao 1947: 205). Yang Chao chose not to abide by these racial demarcations and often turned to these neighbors for help with babysitting while she worked on her sewing business (Chao 1947: 210). Nor did the Chaos seem to encounter problems either entering or leaving the United States. In stark contrast to the anxiety and angst associated with Angel Island experiences, the Chaos seemed to come and go freely—almost like white Americans. In 1924, the couple took a trip to Europe. On the way over they passed through New York, a stay that Buwei Yang Chao described as follows: “[We] put up in grand style at the Hotel Commodore, with clam bouillon for breakfast, served in a silver tureen. America stands for equality

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and material comforts” (Chao 1947: 214). They departed by steamship for Europe in a scene reminiscent of Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember, except that Hollywood of the 1920s never featured Chinese in such a way. Leaving New York Harbor was even more of an experience than entering the Golden Gate. After the crowd of people waving handkerchiefs on the dock were no longer distinguishable, the scene seemed to be repeated once more by the friendly tall buildings waving smoke and mist along the skyline, with the Statue of Liberty standing far out at the end of the dock, also waving goodbye to us in her dignified way. (Chao 1947: 214)

America bade farewell in a manner that beckoned them to return. Their third, and final, return took place in 1938 at the invitation of Gregg Sinclair, director of the Oriental Institute of University of Hawaii. They remained a year, then moved on to Yale where Chao taught as a visiting professor of linguistics. During their two-year stay in New Haven, Yang Chao recalled encountering hostile behavior only once, from a traffic policeman who stopped her husband when he tried to make an illegal turn. She noted of her time in New Haven: I soon found myself a natural part of the community with surprisingly little self-consciousness. So far as social life went, Yale might as well be a Tsing Hua University or an Academia Sinica. . . . When I watched Leonard Bloomfield think on his feet, which he did by tilting his head and looking at the left front corner of the ceiling, I immediately recalled Li Fangkuei doing exactly the same thing when he lectured in Nanking. And no wonder, since Li had been Bloomfield’s pupil in Chicago. (Chao 1947: 295)

Through the lens of Yang Chao’s experiences, American places and people were readily overlaid and mapped onto Chinese ones. Chinese seemed able to readily absorb American ideas and even personal mannerisms just as naturally as Yuen Ren and Buwei Yang Chao moved through American society. As intellectuals and cosmopolitans, they embodied the possibility that Chinese could interact graciously and seamlessly with their white counterparts. Conclusion In 1935, this advertisement for the American Mail steamship line appeared in The Handbook of Chinese Students in the U.S.A.:14

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Continue your American sojourn until you step ashore in China! The good opinion of American institutions that you have gained during your stay in America will continue as you return to China on one of the world-famous President Liners sailing from Seattle. It is an ideal and a pleasure to show our Chinese passengers true shipboard courtesy—an inviolable company rule. (15:30)

That such an ad targeted Chinese, and assumed that they enjoyed their experiences in exclusion-era America enough to wish them to continue while on the voyage home, differs dramatically from the paranoia and discrimination that we associate with Chinese travel experiences during the exclusion period. The student class of Chinese was intended to value their encounters with things American and to bring this appreciation home to spread to their fellow Chinese. They had practical roles to perform in serving as bridges between China and the United States. To prepare them for such vital roles in support of American influence in China, they had to experience an America that presented at least the appearance of hospitality. As such, they occupied very different locations in America’s racial and socioeconomic hierarchies than did working-class, Chinatown Chinese. The students and intellectuals were welcome to come because they would eventually leave to spread word of America’s greatness. I will end with the Chaos and an indication of the future of Chinese in America. Yuen Ren and Buwei Yang Chao illustrate not only the possibility that educated Chinese could operate as racial and cultural bridges between China and America, but that they might also find real homes in the United States, bolstered by a multiracial community of friends and neighbors, comfortable homes, and satisfying professional lives. When the Chaos left New Haven, they sent cards to their friends saying “thank you for having added for us one more place in the world returning to which will always be like returning home” (Chao 1947: 301). Although they did not know it at the time, America would indeed become their home with the outbreak of World War II and shifting legal possibilities that allowed Chinese to remain. In return, the Chaos made accessible to non-Chinese the Chinese language and the art of cooking Chinese food in American kitchens and provided as well the model of a Chinese family enjoying seemingly effortless lives in the United States. These two strands of possibility—that Chinese could coexist on equal terms with whites and adapt their culture to American tastes— suggested how America might vindicate its post-World War II claims to have realized a truly multiracial democratic society. This version of egalitarianism has required, however, that middle-class Asian Americans remain ethnically marked as a “model minority” while denying the persistence of anti-Asian

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discrimination in a newer, but no less pernicious, late-twentieth-century incarnation of inequality. Notes 1. The Chinese Exclusion Law was enacted in 1882 and remained in force until 1943. The 1790 Nationality Act restricted the right to citizenship by naturalization to “free white persons.” Not until the 1952 McCarran–Walter Act did all races gain the same rights to citizenship. 2. At $330,000,000, the indemnity imposed by a coalition of 20-odd nations was far beyond the estimated $150,000,000 that China could actually afford to pay (Hunt 1972: 542). 3. This article is part of a larger project that explores intersections between America’s domestic racial ideologies and its foreign policy goals by tracing how Cold War configurations of First World friends and Second World enemies influenced immigration laws and practices, as refracted through the “brain drain” immigration of Chinese and Taiwanese students and intellectuals. Here I trace a longer history of these linkages to the turn of the twentieth century and the initial ascendance of the idea that the United States might benefit from admitting certain kinds of Chinese—educated elites who might contribute to the well-being of the United States. For some provocative images of how the allure of China’s markets influenced U.S. foreign-policy making during the 1890s, see Abe Ignacio et al., eds, The Forbidden Book: The Philippine–American War in Political Cartoons (San Francisco: T’Boli, 2004). 4. See Chapter IX of Chen Wen-hsien, “Chinese under Both Exclusion and Immigration Laws,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1940) for an extensive discussion of how immigration officials handled cases of Chinese student entry. 5. Treaty between the United States and China, concerning immigration. Concluded Nov. 17, 1880. 826–827. 6. Chinese exclusion law, sec. 6. p. 60. Act of May 6, 1882: To Execute Certain Treaty Stipulations Relating to Chinese (“Chinese Exclusion Act”) 22 Stat. 58; 8 USC. Act of June 27, 1952: The Immigration and Nationality Act (“McCarran– Walter Act”) 66 Stat. 163. 7. See Yung Wing’s autobiography, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt, 1909) and Thomas La Fargue, China’s First One Hundred (Pullman: State College of Washington, 1942). Upon graduating from Yale, Yung Wing wrote to the university’s president of his hope that “the rising generation of China should enjoy the same educational advantages that I had enjoyed; that through Western education China might be regenerated, become enlightened and powerful.” 8. In 1908, after a tour of the world intended to demonstrate U.S. naval strength that only demonstrated its limitations, Roosevelt pulled the fleet back to Hawaii, “thus giving up hope of defending the Philippines.” One military official noted that Japanese could land 100,000 men in a week. The United States faced the problem of this military imbalance as well as the belief that the United States

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had to maintain access to Asian markets to avoid recessions like those of the 1890s. Roosevelt left this problem for his successor, Taft, to deal with (La Feber 1997: 92). At the turn of the twentieth century, China was of particular interest to American missionaries. In the first decade, of nearly 3800 Protestant missionaries sent overseas, 3100 worked in China (La Feber 1997: 66). Hunt, 557–558. Quoting Frank G. Carpenter in “The Awakening of China,” Daily Consular and Trade Reports, no. 3636 (Nov. 15, 1909), 8–9. Yen graduated from Yale and would later serve as a secretary with the Waiwubu. 499. This is Hunt’s key argument. The very high numbers of prominent foreign-educated Chinese stemmed in part from the low numbers of institutions of higher education within China. After the rapid decline of the Confucian academies which had once dominated the educational system, China was not able to quickly establish new universities and colleges modeled on Western institutions. Many of China’s early postsecondary schools were founded by American missionaries. (New York: The Chinese Students Handbook Co., 1935). Yuk Ow collection UCB ES library AAS ARC 2000/70 15:30.

References Act of May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 (“Johnson–Reed Act”) 43 Stat. 153; 8 U.S.C. 201. Bieler, Stacey. 2004.“Patriots” or “Traitors”? A History of American-Educated Chinese Students. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Chao, Buwei Yang. 1945. How to Cook and Eat in Chinese. New York: John Day Company. Chao, Buwei Yang. 1947. Autobiography of a Chinese Woman. New York: John Day Company. Chen, Wen-hsien. 1940. “Chinese under Both Exclusion and Immigration Laws”. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago). Hunt, Michael H. 1972. “The American Remission of the Boxer Indemnity: A Reappraisal.” Journal of Asian Studies 31:3 (May): 539–559. Immigration Act of 1917, Feb. 5, 1917. Statutes at Large of the United States of America, vol. XXXIX, part 1. Washington, DC: GPO, 1917. La Fargue, Thomas E. 1987. China’s First One Hundred: Educational Mission Students in the United States 1872–1881. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press. La Feber, Walter. 1997. The Clash: A History of U.S.–Japan Relations. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company. Message of the President. FRUS 1905, XLVIX. McCarran–Walter Act 1952 Sec. 203(a) [8 U.S.C. 1101]. Smith, Arthur Handerson. 1907. China and America To-day: A Study of Conditions and Relations. Fleming H. Revell Company.

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The Chinese Students Handbook Co. (New York, 1935). Yuk Ow collection UCB ES library AAS ARC 2000/70 15:30. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration. Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, 1914. Washington, DC: GPO 1915. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration. Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, 1915. Washington, DC: GPO 1916. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration. Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, 1931. Washington, DC: GPO 1931. Wang, Y.C. 1966. Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872–1949. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Ye, Weili. 2001. Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yen, W.W. 1911. “The Chinese Student’s View.” Overland Monthly (May 1911): 496–499. Him Mark Lai Collection UCB ES library AAS ARC 2000/80 44:3.

CHAPTER 6

Between the “Mountain of Tang” and the “Adopted Land”: The Chinese American Periodical Press and the Emergence of Chinese American Identities in the Face of Exclusion K. Scott Wong

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thnic, racial, and national identities are now generally accepted as social constructions. These identities, moreover, are not static, but often shift, especially among immigrant populations, depending on how much time they spend in their adopted countries and the changing sociopolitical conditions in their home country. Using a sample of writings produced by Chinese immigrants and American-born Chinese Americans, published primarily in the Chinese American periodical press, this essay will offer some observations of how the identities of Chinese Americans evolved and developed over time, during what is generally called the “age of exclusion,” from 1882 to 1943. These examples will demonstrate that these individual and group identities did not develop in a linear, strictly chronological fashion, but were shifting, overlapping, and, at times, in conflict with one another. The Chinese immigrant population was prevented by law from becoming naturalized citizens and was thus caught between shifting loyalties for the land of their birth and the country to which they had immigrated. Second-generation Chinese Americans, however, though American by birth, were often denied the acceptance they sought by white Americans, who saw them as perpetually foreign. Coming from a culture that tended to consider itself the most advanced in the world, Chinese visitors and immigrants to the United States soon found

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themselves as the targets of derision and racial discrimination. In 1882, the United States Congress passed the first of a series of exclusion acts that were aimed at prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers and their wives, and preventing Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens. Those detained on Angel Island often saw themselves as victims of harsh immigration laws and a weak and ineffectual Chinese government which could not protect its citizens abroad. One such detainee wrote: For what reason must I sit in jail? It is only because my country is weak and my family poor. My parents wait at the door but there is no news. My wife and child wrap themselves in quilt, sighing with loneliness. Even if my petition is approved and I can enter the country When can I return to the Mountains of Tang with a full load? From ancient times, those who venture out usually become worthless. How many people ever return from battles?1 (Lai, Lim, & Yung 1980: 84)

This poem, carved into the wall of the detention barracks of Angel Island, reflects many of the frustrations felt by Chinese immigrants who encountered the harsh realities of the exclusion period. They resented the weakness of the Chinese government and the poverty endured by their families at home. Many also knew that even once they were admitted into the United States, it was not guaranteed that they would be able to make the fortunes for which they had traveled so far. In many ways, these immigrants saw themselves as victims of both China’s diminished position in the world and America’s increasing animosity toward unwanted immigrants. It would be their children, American citizens by birth, who would eventually claim America as their rightful home and find a voice with which to frame their Chinese American identities. This process would be long and arduous. While they did not face the same exclusionary laws and the denial of legal citizenship as their parents, they inherited the legacy of anti-Chinese racism and they faced the task of achieving “cultural citizenship,” a level of acceptance in American society that was not conferred upon them simply by birthright citizenship. It is this process of claiming a space and finding a voice in the American sociopolitical and cultural landscape that the remainder of this essay will address. One of the most important venues for American-born Chinese Americans to articulate their concerns about their place in American society were the pages of the Chinese American periodical press. Although there were a number of Chinese-language newspapers available, most American-born Chinese did not know Chinese well enough to be able to read those newspapers; thus an English-language publication was vital. Typical among Chinese

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Americans who were teenagers during this period, Dorothy Eng of Oakland, CA, remarked: “Our generation couldn’t read or write Chinese, we spoke English among themselves, as it was faster thinking in English. By the time you could figure the Chinese, the person had left.” On the other side of the country, Mary Wong of Philadelphia, PA, expressed a similar experience: “Our parents spoke Chinese and we would usually answer them in Chinese, or the parents of our friends. But among ourselves, my brothers and sisters, and friends, we only spoke English to each other.”2 Hence a newspaper, specifically directed toward American-born Chinese, published in English, filled an important need among these second-generation Chinese Americans. The Chinese literary form used in newspapers was usually a blend of classical and modern Chinese, making it difficult to read, especially for those without the necessary language skills, namely those of the American-born generation. These newspapers which gave voice to the second generation have long been overlooked in Chinese American history, but are vital to our understanding of the formation of the racial and ethnic identities of second-generation Chinese Americans as they negotiated their relationship to Chinatown and the larger American society. The newspapers printed editorials and essays by American-born Chinese who sought to express their dissatisfaction with American society as well as their simultaneous desire to be part of it. These publications also ran advertisements for goods and activities that revealed this generation’s embrace of American culture beyond that of their ethnic enclave. At the same time, these trends also signaled a fundamental split between the immigrant generation and their American-born children. As Chinese immigrants struggled to find a balance between their roots in China and their restricted lives in the United States, the second generation struggled to maintain a respect for China and Chinese culture while attempting to fully establish themselves as Americans. The Chinese Digest The first newspaper to give voice to the concerns of the American-born generation and to reveal the tensions between the immigrant and second generation was the Chinese Digest, founded in San Francisco in 1935 by Thomas Chinn and Chingwah Lee. It was published as a weekly and later, a monthly, until 1939. Eventually, it appeared only irregularly until the paper ceased publication in 1940. Thomas Chinn was born in Oregon in 1909 to immigrant parents and the family moved to San Francisco Chinatown in 1919. When he reached adulthood, Chinn was committed to the idea that Chinese Americans should leave their ethnic enclave and adapt more readily to American society. He came to believe that an English-language

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publication devoted to second-generation Chinese American concerns would help facilitate that transition. At the same time, he also believed that knowledge of Chinese history and culture would benefit the second generation. In this sense, Chinn was trying to bridge both sides of the Pacific. He wanted Chinese Americans to better assimilate into American society, but he also believed that they should be well-versed in the culture of their parents, a combination that would not necessarily take hold with all second-, and especially third-, generation Chinese Americans. With these goals in mind, Chinn sought financial backing for his newspaper.3 Chinn acquired his initial financial support from his friend Chingwah Lee. Lee, eight years Chinn’s senior, was also America-born and an advocate of Chinese American acculturation. Lee was well known in the community for his knowledge of Chinese culture, and he had begun serving as a technical consultant to Hollywood for films requiring Chinese art objects in certain scenes. When the film version of Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth went into production, Lee was called upon to recruit Chinese actors for the film. Eventually, he landed a significant on-screen part for himself as well (Chinn 1989: 226). Lee then used the money he made from his work on the film to fund the paper, with Chinn as Editor and Lee and William Hoy, another Chinese American who sought greater access to American society, as Associate Editors.4 During its five-year run, the Chinese Digest tried to serve as a means to bridge the gap between the second generation’s ties to the culture of their parents and Chinatown and express their own attempts to enter the American mainstream. In its inaugural issue, an editorial titled “Why the Digest?” clearly stated the mission of the paper. It began: “The Chinese Digest is not just a hobby or a business–it is all that with a full-sized battle thrown in. We are fighting on five fronts.” These “five fronts” are significant in understanding the issues confronting the second generation as they reveal not only close ties to China but an overriding concern for their generation’s welfare in America. The first front was “Killing a Celestial.” This battle was perhaps the most significant in disclosing their desire for self-representation and claiming a place in America and is worth quoting in full: There are no people in America more misunderstood than the Chinese. From the time of “Sand-lot Kearny” [sic] to the present, the Chinese is pictured as a sleepy Celestial enveloped in the mists of opium fumes or a halo of Oriental philosophy, but never as a human being. The pulp magazines and Hollywood have served to keep this illusion alive. The “Chinese Digest” is fighting this Celestial bogey and substitutes a normal being who drives automobiles, shops for the latest gadgets, and speaks good English. (Chinn Nov. 15, 1935: 8)

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The second front was “The Truth Is Our Battle Cry,” meaning that the paper wanted to publish more accurate accounts of Japanese aggression in Asia. The third, “Bridging the Pacific,” referred to the desire to cultivate an appreciation for and understanding of Chinese history and culture among Chinese Americans. The fourth, “Inter-trench Communication,” was a call for better ties among the Chinese American communities in America as the editors recognized that “Chinese in Boston or Portland have natural ties and common interests. Adverse legislation in one is adverse to all.” This last statement refers clearly to the restrictive and discriminatory legislation plaguing Chinatowns and to the fact that Chinese Americans were well aware of its effects. The final front was “The War on Neglect,” which was a call for more economic opportunities for Chinese Americans. It claimed that “At present Chinatowns everywhere are filled to the bursting point with well trained young men and women eager to find a chance to make their way in the world” (Chinn Nov. 15, 1935: 8). As in later articles lamenting the limited opportunities afforded to Chinese Americans, the editors of the Chinese Digest took the lead in opening this topic of discussion with their readers. This initial editorial showed a very conscious effort on the part of the editors to articulate the concerns of their generation, and to educate, unify, and uplift the community. The editors of the paper viewed themselves as important spokespersons for the community. They consistently urged Chinatown residents to stand up for their equal rights, to take pride in being Chinese Americans, and to serve the community. In an editorial of November 22, 1935, the staff of the Chinese Digest also warned against a group of “Eastern capitalists” who were said to have been interested in constructing a “Little China” in a corner of Chinatown as a tourist attraction during the 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition.5 The Digest declared, We must make haste to inform our city officials that we do not contemplate having outsiders represent us. These easterner adventurers cannot adequately portray our customs, habits, and culture. Their one aim would be to extract money from tourists at our expense. At best they will arrive at a Hollywood version of long-fingered Mandarins chasing sing-song girls across a chop suey joint. We are tired of comedies. (Chinn November 22, 1935: 8)

Although many may have wanted the opportunity to leave the confines of Chinatown, second-generation Chinese American residents of the community still viewed Chinatown as their cultural base. Chinatown, after all, was where they lived and where many assumed their lives would unfold. They realized the importance of self-representation, and they wanted American

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mainstream society to have a better understanding of their community. In the same issue, the editors also called for a stop to Japanese American business activity in Chinatown. They stated “the Japanese have already taken the southern half of Chinatown—our best bazaar section—and we are reminded what harm is being done [to] our bazaars when cheap imitations and flimsy curios flood Grant Ave. . . . We must post up a warning sign: Keep Chinatown Chinese.” And in another editorial, they referred to that part of Chinatown as “another Manchukuo” in reference to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (Chinn December 6, 1935: 8). Chinese Americans had long resented the influx of Japanese American—owned stores in Chinatown, seeing their presence as an extension to Japanese imperialism in China.6 The editors thus sought to protect their community from being stereotyped and exploited by those who had little connection to or concern for the actual residents and cultural integrity of the community. In appearance, the paper was an interesting blend of Chinese and Western motifs. The title “Chinese Digest” was set in “Oriental bamboo lettering,” flanked by the Chinese characters “Hua Mei zhoukan” meaning “Chinese American Weekly.” There were also two pictures in the upper section of the cover page, one on each side of the title. On the left was a drawing of an old-style Chinese ship and on the right a modern steamship, perhaps signifying the progress of modernization in China as well as changes in the mode of transportation that brought Chinese immigrants to America. Below the title, also in “bamboo lettering,” was a list of the topics the paper was concerned with: comment, social, sports, news, culture, and literature. The cover pages changed over time. At first they were simple, with the title and the accompanying characters and pictures occupying the top portion of the page with the text of the feature article below. By the second year, covers featured photographs of Chinese or Chinese American art and architecture, Chinese philosophers or statesmen, and local (San Francisco Chinatown) scenes or people. In keeping with the broad trend among magazines to enhance their marketability with eye-catching covers, toward the end of the paper’s existence the covers featured attractive Chinese American women in stylish Chinese clothes. By this time, the pictures of the boats and the list of topics had disappeared, but the title remained in “bamboo lettering” along with the Chinese characters. The covers became increasingly professional and artistic, but there was always an obvious, commercialized blend of Chinese and Western aesthetics. Inside the magazine, the Chinese Digest usually carried news of events in China, especially concerning the increasing Japanese aggression in Asia. There were also feature articles on traditional Chinese history and art. The majority of the paper, however, was devoted to articles about San Francisco

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Chinatown, news of other Chinese American communities, Chinese American sports events, fashion tips, and some advertisements for Chineseowned stores or stores with Chinese American employees. A men’s clothing store, Moore’s, located on the edge of Chinatown, regularly took out ads in the Chinese Digest, always mentioning that they employed Edward Leong, their “Chinese representative.” Advertisements for fashionable clothes, milk, sports equipment, and beauty shops all spoke to an increasingly affluent and Americanized audience. As one resident of San Francisco Chinatown recalled, By the time I was in high school, the big thing, if you had money, was to have a car. . . . Then a girl. You would have to dress fairly well, not in dress-up clothing but in sports clothing. My father wouldn’t give us any money for working in the store, but we did get an allowance, and I’d use that to try to get the right clothes. Of course, athletics was very important. I guess you could just call us all-American types. (Nee 1972: 152)

In this sense, it was evident that second-generation Chinese Americans were very much like their counterparts of other racial and ethnic groups. Regardless of the degree of attachment to Chinese culture, many exhibited an overriding identification with mainstream American youth culture. As with most immigrant communities, this desire among the American-born to identify with their American peers created some tension between themselves and their parents. Dating habits, dress, hair styles, and career goals often went against the grain of their parents’ expectations. However, the persistence of white racism limited the opportunities of Chinese Americans, and these limitations were foremost in the minds of young Chinese Americans. The Second Generation Speaks Out Despite this identification with American culture, many of the secondgeneration Chinese Americans expressed concern about the limitations racism put on their prospects in the United States. Two Chinese American women delivered speeches in 1936 and 1941 that were emblematic of this apprehension. These two speeches are especially important, not only because of their content, but also because it is imperative that we continue to mine these underused sources that contain the voices of this generation of Chinese Americans, voices that are often lost in the historical record and the subsequent narrative of American history that tends to favor the model of immigrant assimilation. These speeches not only reflect a desire among this generation to be seen as Americans, but to have their history as Chinese

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Americans acknowledged as well. Furthermore, the fact that these speeches were both delivered by young women demonstrates that the dissatisfaction with the social status of Chinese Americans was a concern that crossed gender lines and that their voices and opinions were valued by their peers and the community at large. In 1936, Grace W. Wang, a speaker for the New York-based Chinese Women’s Association, delivered a speech on the state of second-generation Chinese Americans, which was reprinted in the Chinese Digest. She began her speech by stressing that Chinese Americans were not very different from other Americans, pointing out that “the notorious movie character, Dr. Fu Manchu, is indeed a rare specimen among my countrymen, if ever there was any such creature.” Wang then went on to describe the common scene in American public schools, where Chinese American children would pledge allegiance to the flag, study history and geography, “determined to absorb the knowledge that would one day make them responsible citizens of their adopted land.” However, many of these children would not be able to continue their education after grammar school because they would be needed in their parents’ stores, restaurants, and laundries. Some would be able to finish high school but only a small number would even consider going to college, and these would be considered the “cream of Second Generation Chinese” (Wang 1936: 6). But even with a college degree, Wang argued that a Chinese American faced limited possibilities. She maintained, “The minute that the Chinese college graduate leaves his racial group to seek a position elsewhere marks his introduction into a world of professional rivalry, racial antagonism, petty jealousy and social maneuvering.” She then offered a scenario that today would be termed an example of the “glass ceiling” which is often constructed by race and gender biases, and nepotism: He goes perchance into a well-established organization, believing that he is on his way to success. He works harder than most of his American colleagues and he tries to be more accurate, more painstaking, more industrious. He attracts the attention of one or two men on the staff. They notice his standard of production and plan to promote him. But circumstances intervene. The Vicepresident has a son just out of college whom he would like to place. As a result, the Chinese, who has been promised advancement, is shoved aside and forgotten. (Wang 1936: 14)

To lend credence to her scenarios, Wang then offered five cases in which similar developments unfolded: a draftsman passed over for promotion for nine years though he had more education than those promoted; an MIT-trained

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engineer who could only find work as a salesman for a Jewish meatpacking concern taking orders from Chinese restaurants and stores; a Master of Arts recipient who could not purchase a home on Long Island because of his skin color; another college graduate who could only find work as a clerk in a Chinatown bazaar; and a Chinese American graduate of medical school who had trouble finding an internship because of the racial attitudes of the patients. Wang also pointed out that Chinese American women fared as poorly as Chinese American men in the public sphere—or perhaps even worse. She claimed, “There is one Chinese girl reporter in the West, one movie star in Hollywood, a few successful private secretaries, one public school teacher, one restaurant manager, a few banking clerks, one magazine and feature writer, several well known club leaders and church workers, that’s about all” (Wang 1936: 14). Finally, in desperation, Wang wondered if the prize was worth the struggle. She finished her speech with a pessimism that appears to have been present among many of the second generation: “With thousands of fair-haired, blueeyed collegians at his elbows looking for jobs, and thousands of others looking for a raise, ready to take his place the moment he slips, is there any chance for a person with a darker complexion to succeed in an Anglo-Saxon country?” (Wang 1936: 14). Five years later, these sentiments remained. William Hoy used his column in the California Chinese Press, “Through a Chinatown Window,” to explore “The Second-Generation Problem” by introducing a speech delivered by Maxine Chinn, a student at Oregon State College, entitled “We Who Are Without a Country.” Hoy wrote, “Throughout the past two decades articulate members among the American-born Chinese have occasionally raised their voices in protest, in anger, and in rebellion against the unendurable social and economic conditions of which they are helpless victims.” However, he also made it very clear that even with the various impediments to social mobility faced by the second generation, he believed that their future was not in China, but in the United States. Hoy continued, Growing up in an era of social ferment in America and the cutting loose of old cultural ties with a civilization of which they have little or no knowledge, the second generation found themselves alienated from the older generation of their own people by lack of understanding, and yet not accepted by the Americans of other racial stocks, particularly those of Anglo-Saxon strains. The thesis of these occasional outbursts usually follow the same general pattern of thinking: that being born, reared and educated in this land we are Americans in name and in fact: that we belong to this country and not to China; but that we are treated nevertheless as foreigners still. (Hoy 1941: 3)

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Maxine Chinn was very forthcoming in her views on the predicament faced by the second generation. She began her speech by referring to Philip Nolan of the story “Man Without a Country” to frame her picture of young Chinese Americans. Chinn declared, Born of Oriental parents, but reared in an American environment, and educated in the American way, while at the same time retaining many of our Oriental characteristics and culture, our position, indeed, is a difficult one. We are neither wholly American nor completely Oriental, but a coalition of the two. East is East, and West is West, but in us the twain have met. (Chinn 1941: 3)

Seeing Chinese American youth as “without a country,” Chinn reflected a change in attitude from those who sought their salvation in “returning” to China. Instead, she viewed going to China as potentially disillusioning. Because of our Occidental ways, if we return to China, we are looked upon as foreigners. There we are handicapped, since we neither speak real Chinese nor know modern Chinese culture. . . . Then, too, our roots are here in America. We know no other home, so have no desire to transplant ourselves to an entirely new and different environment. (Chinn 1941: 3)

Simultaneously, their acceptance in American society was also unlikely, with dire consequences. Chinn maintained, In the United States, likewise, we are regarded as foreigners; because of the color of our skin we bear a double yoke. Because our parents and grandparents were ground into the depths of degradation by fear and intolerance, many of the younger Chinese have grown up fearing the white man, and allow themselves to be beaten into feeling inferior—so much so, that the majority of them cringe and creep back further into the black depths of Chinatown, afraid to come out and prove that they can be a desirable element of American society. (Chinn 1941: 3)

One of the most important consequences of this retreat into Chinatown was the relatively low numbers of Chinese Americans in higher education. According to her research, only 210 Chinese Americans (out of almost 14,000) in the cities of San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle were enrolled in college. She pointed out that these low numbers did not reflect a lack of ambition, but, rather, a realization that a college education would not guarantee gainful employment. Instead, Chinese Americans were “doomed to Chinatown [with its] crowded conditions, rooms with insufficient light,

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little electricity, ancient plumbing, and utter lack of proper sanitary facilities” (Chinn 1941: 3). At the end of her speech, Chinn called for a mutual effort on the part of whites and Chinese Americans to open American society to diversity. She stated: The problem, we who are without a country, want solved is not an impossible one. We do not want nor expect you to take us to your hearts as members of your own family or your own social set. We want only to be accepted as Americans and to be able to enjoy the privileges of Americans. We do not want to be an outside group looking in. (Chinn 1941: 3)

Chinn’s speech was so important because it revealed the position of many second-generation Chinese Americans. They were not satisfied with the restricted lives within Chinatown, but they did not see China as a viable alternative nor were they seeking a false security in full-scale assimilation into white American society. They simply wanted to be seen as “American” as anyone else. Hemmed in by racial antagonism and low expectations for meaningful employment, second-generation Chinese Americans felt alienated from much of American society. They often referred to themselves as “Chinese” and whites as “Americans,” even though they too were American citizens. Excluded from fully participating in American society, Chinese Americans were made to feel “less American” than their white counterparts and were therefore less certain as to where to place their loyalty. Over time, however, as their lives continued to develop and they became more accepted in American society, they created a consciousness that acknowledged their Chinese heritage and the culture of their parents, an identity that they would eventually come to call “Chinese American.” The Chinese Press Soon after the Chinese Digest folded, William Hoy and Charles Leong began another Chinese American publication, the California Chinese Press (the title would later be shortened to the Chinese Press) in the fall of 1940. The Chinese Press would become the most professional of the English-language Chinese American newspapers. While the Chinese Digest was printed on coated paper in a magazine format, the Chinese Press was the first of these papers to be printed on newsprint. The circulation of the Chinese Press was also much larger. According to Karl Lo and Him Mark Lai, the circulation of the

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Chinese Digest never reached a thousand. The Chinese Press, however, enjoyed a national readership (Lo and Lai 1977: 14; Lee 1984: 57). In fact, it may have had a circulation of 1000–1500 copies.7 In the opening editorial, Hoy made it very clear that this paper would also be geared toward second-generation concerns. He wrote, Over sixty per cent of the 30,000 Chinese [in California] are those of the second or younger generation, the generation that speaks, reads and writes predominantly in the English language. The language of the California Chinese today is the language of their fellow Americans, and therefore their voice should also be in English. (Hoy 1940: 1)

Hoy went on to declare that this paper would serve to unite and inform the Chinese American community about their mutual interests and to “help them establish and develop good will and friendship among fellow Americans of racial groups.” The next two paragraphs, however, set the California Chinese Press apart from its predecessors, the Chinese Digest and the short-lived Chinese News.8 They read, The California Chinese today are predominantly Americans, either through the privilege of birth or by derivative citizenship. As Americans of Chinese descent their future is the future of America, and their social and political ideals are those of American democracy. As they become rapidly Americanized there is an urgent need for a newspaper to act as a voice for this large group. The California Chinese Press hopes to become this voice. The California Chinese also look across the Pacific Ocean, seeking opportunities to help China in her present plight and to plan for the reconstruction of a greater China to come. The American people have always been the staunchest helpers of China. And the California Chinese, bound by the ties of race to the people of that Republic across the Pacific, can do no less than to bend their every effort in helping China emerge victorious from her present war with Japan, and later aid her in the gigantic task of reconstruction. (Hoy 1940: 1)

There is a very important shift in language in this editorial compared to earlier writings in Chinese American periodicals. Although the Chinese Digest was geared toward the second generation as well, there was still a sense of conflict between its desire to honor Chinese tradition and to adopt American cultural mores. This first editorial in the California Chinese Press makes a very clear statement that the second generation saw their lives as wedded to America. Without rejecting China or Chinese culture, the editors fully

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embraced the United States as the land where their futures would unfold. Even though they referred to themselves as “California Chinese,” they also called themselves “Americans,” thereby fully claiming a place and role in American society. Still concerned with the fate of China, it was now “that Republic across the Pacific” rather than the “motherland.” Although Chinese immigrants and their offspring had long desired to claim America as their rightful home, social, cultural, and legislative pressures had constrained them. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, they had come to the point of doing so with strong conviction. As Chinese Americans were constructing identities based on their claims to their “Americanness” during this time period, World War II would prove to be an era during which they could make even further gains in “becoming American.” While the war should not be construed as the watershed in which all anti-Chinese prejudice in the United States disappeared and as a moment when Chinese Americans were fully accepted in American mainstream culture and society, it did mark an important turning point because the war brought about opportunities for Chinese Americans to venture beyond the confines of Chinatowns and it also gave other Americans the chance to associate with Americans of Chinese descent in ways that many previously had not. Chinese American men and women, like those of other ethnic and racial groups, joined the American armed forces and the workforce in unprecedented numbers in order to assist the war effort. Because the United States and China were allies against Japan and due to increasing support among white Americans, the Chinese exclusion acts were repealed and Chinese immigrants were finally able to apply for citizenship. In the postwar era, there continued to be more job opportunities for Chinese Americans and they entered professions that were outside of the Chinatown economy and many attended college, often as a benefit of the GI Bill of Rights. These advances, however, did not mean that all prejudice against Chinese Americans disappeared with the Allied victory. The Chinese immigration quota remained very low (105 per annum) and many Americans still perceived Chinese Americans as foreigners and a threat to American society, especially after the Communist victory in China in 1949. Nonetheless, despite how other Americans viewed Chinese Americans, by the end of the war and into the postwar period, building on the identities they had constructed for themselves during the 1930s, Chinese Americans had come to see themselves in a much different light than they had a few decades earlier. Having been born and raised in the United States, most did not see themselves as “overseas Chinese” with strong, if any, ties to China. But with increased job opportunities, a new level of acceptance from other Americans, and the birth of their children, a third generation of Chinese

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Americans, the Chinese Americans who reached adulthood in the 1940s, embraced the notion of the “internal experience of citizenship” and moved beyond the identity of victims to that of Americans with a future that would unfold in the land of their birth. Notes 1. Angel Island, located in San Francisco Bay, served as an immigration station for those arriving from Asia during 1910–1940. It is most famous for the long and arduous interrogations that aspiring Chinese immigrants endured in order to prove their legal status to gain entry into the United States. 2. Author interview with Dorothy Eng, June 9, 1995; and Mary Wong, August 20, 2002. All of the people interviewed in this article are part of the 100 people I interviewed in person or corresponded with while conducting research on the impact of World War II on the Chinese American community. I met them through veterans’ reunions, at academic conferences, and through each other as word spread through their circles of friends that I was interested in their life stories. For many of them, I was the first person to ever ask about their experiences of growing up Chinese in America. 3. The history of Chinn’s involvement with the Chinese Digest can be found in Chinn, Bridging the Pacific, 1989: 144–147 and Thomas W. Chinn, “A Historian’s Reflections on Chinese-American Life in San Francisco, 1919–1991,” Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1993: 98–99. After the Chinese Digest folded, Chinn started the Chinese News, which also covered both Chinese and Chinese American news. Aside from coverage of the war in China and Chinese American relief efforts, it carried stories about Chinese American sporting events, dances, marriages and births, and social “gossip.” Its layout was very simple and did not continue many of the “Oriental” styles found in the Chinese Digest. The best account detailing the history of English-language Chinese American newspapers in English is Marjorie Lee, “Hu-Jee: The Forgotten Second Generation of Chinese America, 1930–1950” (M.A. Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984), esp. 48–64. See also Karl Lo and H.M. Lai, Chinese Newspapers Published in North America, 1854–1975 (Washington, DC: Center for Chinese Research Materials, 1977); and Julie Shuk-yee Lam, “The Chinese Digest, 1935 to 1940,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1987 (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1987), 118–135. 4. Interview with Thomas W. Chinn, June 6, 1995. William Hoy eventually became editor of the Chinese Digest and later the Chinese Press, and was known as a local historian as well. He joined the military during World War II and wrote a newsletter in China for Chinese American service personnel. A brief biography of Hoy can be found in H.K. Wong, Gum Shan Yun (“Gold Mountain Men”) (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1987), 209–235. 5. According to historian Chris Friday, the “Eastern capitalists” who wanted to create a “Little China” in Chinatown were “Japanese immigrants and Japanese

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Americans.” See Chris Friday, “Recasting Identities: American-Born Chinese and Nisei in the Era of the Pacific War.” in Power and Place in the North American West, Richard White and John Findlay, eds (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 160. 6. Even as late as 1993, a Chinese American veteran of World War II informed me as we walked down Grant Avenue in San Francisco, “All these stores here were owned by Japanese. But after the war started they all had to close and Chinese were able to move back in. Hell, it’s Chinatown.” Interview with Harvey Wong, Aug. 25, 1993. 7. Correspondence with Him Mark Lai, April 16, 1999. 8. Thomas Chinn published the Chinese News irregularly from 1940 to 1942. He ceased publication when he entered government service during the war.

References Chinn, Maxine. “The Second-Generation Problem,” Chinese Digest, May 9, 1941. Chinn, Thomas W. “Why the Digest?” Chinese Digest, November 15, 1935. Chinn, Thomas W. “Exploit Chinatown?” Chinese Digest, November 22, 1935. Chinn, Thomas W. “Seven Steps to Fame,” Chinese Digest, December 6, 1935. Chinn, Thomas W. 1989. Bridging the Pacific: San Francisco Chinatown and Its People. San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America. Hoy, William. “Editorial,” California Chinese Press, November 22, 1940. Hoy, William. “Through a Chinatown Window,” California Chinese Press, May 9, 1941. Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. 1980, 1991. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Lee, Marjorie. Hu-Jee: The Forgotten Second Generation of Chinese America, 1930– 1950, M.A. Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984. Lo, Karl and H.M. Lai. 1977. Chinese Newspapers Published in North America, 1854– 1975. Washington, DC: Center for Chinese Research Materials. Nee, Victor and Brett De Bary. 1972. Long Time Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. New York: Pantheon Books. Wang, Grace. “A Speech on Second-Generation Chinese in U.S.A.” Chinese Digest, August 7, 1936.

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PART III

Missionary Interventions: Cultural Mediation in China and the United States

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CHAPTER 7

Christian Mission and the Internationalization of China, 1830–1950 Thoralf Klein

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he debate over whether external or domestic factors should be given priority in narrating China’s modern history has fueled an enormous amount of Western scholarship on China in the twentieth century (cf. Cohen 1984). As this century drew to a close and a new one began, scholars began to realize that distinctions between the two were in fact rather blurred. Of the various theoretical and methodological innovations, the concept of internationalization as developed by William Kirby (1997) has gained much practical relevance as a rather pragmatic attempt to look at the modern history of China from a fresh perspective. Kirby starts from the simple empirical observation that foreign relations became “all penetrating, all prevailing . . . ultimately forcing their way into every part of Chinese society” (Kirby 1997: 433). While accepting Western influence as a matter of fact, he nevertheless acknowledges the active role of the Chinese in what he calls “the self-conscious attempt to overhaul Chinese culture, particularly political culture, according to international categories” (Kirby 1997: 434). More recently, Kirby has confirmed this reading in stating that “the lines between things international, or global, or external, on the one hand, and things ‘Chinese’, on the other hand, are in many realms nearly impossible to draw” (Kirby 2006: 4). Although the latter statement betrays the influence of transnational and global approaches to history, Kirby assigns far greater significance to the nation-state than the proponents of these approaches (Kirby 2006: 5). But

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perhaps only ostensibly so. Even Prasenjit Duara (1995, 1997a, 1997b), who has forcefully deconstructed many of the theoretical pretensions of national history, both with regard to China and beyond, accepts the world of nationstates as an empirical reality. Nor does Kirby differ so much from studies on China’s globalization in construing China as an entity for heuristic purposes (Waley-Cohen 1999; Karl 2002; Sachsenmaier 2003). Certainly, it is true that the word “China,” or rather its Chinese equivalents, meant different things at different times. Moreover, the application of that term to the premodern era is somewhat misleading, because it was never used to refer to a political entity or nation-state until the end of the nineteenth century (Cohen 1984; Kirby 2005). Yet I think this is a legitimate way to understand that country’s interactions with the outside world. This is the backdrop against which my subsequent analysis of the role of Christian missions in China’s internationalization unfolds. In my view, internalization is not a unitary or homogeneous phenomenon, but entails various processes, which can be described as interaction, internalization, externalization, and—in the case of Christianity—indigenization. In my subsequent analysis, I shall link each of these terms with one particular empirical phenomenon: the so-called “missionary cases,” processes of cultural transfer, especially in the fields of education and health care, missionary reports on China, and the process by which Christianity became a Chinese religion. In pointing out the different roles that Christian missionaries acted out in China, I intend to show that the internationalization of China was an asymmetrical, yet to some extent also a reciprocal process. Interaction: Missionaries, Local Conflicts, and the International Framework In the second half of the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries emerged as the group of foreigners that interacted most closely with Chinese society. While many of them preferred to remain in the safety of the treaty ports, a significant portion chose the hinterland as their sphere of work, attempting to spread Christianity even in the most remote corners of the empire. True, members of other professional groups, such as scientists or merchants, also ventured into the interior of China. But missionaries were the only group to settle down, establishing mission stations as permanent bridgeheads of their evangelistic enterprise. Moreover, the social environment of stations outside the treaty ports was entirely Chinese. Not only their relative isolation from other Europeans (except rare visitors), but also their profession brought them into close touch with local Chinese. Chinese were not only objects of missionaries’ evangelizing efforts, but native assistants were indispensable as language

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instructors, preachers, and school teachers. It was mainly with their help that Catholic and Protestant missions were able to create an institutional structure that by 1900 included nearly all of China. Missionary interactions with Chinese local society were complex and varied. For the purpose of this paper I have singled out the confrontations usually known as “missionary cases” [jiao’an]. Although the relationship between Chinese society and Christianity was not always, and maybe not primarily, conflictual, these incidents provide a very good illustration of how Christianity contributed to China’s internationalization. Missionary work in nineteenth-century China would have been impossible but for the political, legal, and military framework provided by imperialism. The emperors of the ruling Qing dynasty (1644–1911) had outlawed Christianity in the eighteenth century, and it was only after the disastrous Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s that the Beijing court was gradually forced to allow missionaries to preach the Gospel in the interior of China. Like all other foreigners, Christian missionaries enjoyed the privileges of extraterritoriality and consular jurisdiction that the imperialist powers had obtained in the “unequal treaties,” as they came to be called since about 1920. More specifically, Catholics (and at a later date also Protestants) enjoyed the right to reside in the Chinese hinterland and to acquire real estate there. At the behest of France, whose protectorate over Catholic missions in China remained undisputed until the late 1880s, the Chinese emperor issued several toleration edicts on behalf of Chinese Christians. The most far-reaching of these edicts, issued in 1862, exempted Christians from donations to “heathen” religious activities (Tiedemann 1996). To uphold the treaties (and de facto also the toleration edicts), the imperialist states established two protective systems, one diplomatic and the other military: the foreign ministers residing in Peking and the consuls stationed in the treaty ports saw to it that China respected the treaties. To back them, a quasi-international gunboat flotilla was stationed in China’s seaports and inland waterways. Under this threefold legal, diplomatic, and military protection, most missionaries felt they could pursue an aggressive strategy of evangelization. This strategy was deeply rooted in their dualistic worldview, as they regarded their work as part of the perennial struggle between good and evil, God and Satan. This ruled out any compromise between Christianity and the religions of China, and the missionaries accordingly forbade “their” Chinese converts to participate in any “heathen” ritual (though reality was often different and sometimes missionaries had to tolerate practices they could not condone). Non-Chinese Christians frequently interpreted this policy as a threat to the basic social institutions of local Chinese society—family, descent group or lineage, and village—which also served as the centers of religious activities. The

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belief that religious practices were only effective if all members of a group took part and that leaving the religious community might subject the remaining members to all kinds of misfortunes made it difficult for converts to coexist with their non-Christian relatives and neighbors. Violent disputes between Christians and non-Christians accompanied the expansion of Christian congregations, and sometimes missionaries became the targets of attacks that could even take the form of outright massacres (cf. Cohen 1963; Litzinger 1996). In such cases, missionaries appealed either to local Chinese officials or to the nearest consul who could then pressure the higher Chinese authorities to bring about a settlement. If peaceful negotiation did not lead to a settlement in cases of imminent danger, he would call for military (usually: gunboat) action. The missionaries were thus able to mobilize external support for the Christians. It is easy to scoff at the intolerance, aggressiveness, and double standards of the missionaries, who often quite naively assumed that in intra-Chinese political conflicts, the Chinese Christians were always in the right. There is also ample evidence that missionaries served—sometimes unwillingly— as the vanguard of imperialism, contributing to “incidents” that prompted diplomatic or military interventions by the foreign representatives. And yet it would be misleading to conclude that Christian missions sowed the seeds of discord in a hitherto harmonious and peaceful society. On the contrary, they encountered a society where violent disputes and armed feuds between local communities as well as various forms of banditry were endemic (Perry 1980: 48–95; Lamley 1990). Local Chinese may have lacked a clear understanding of international politics, but they gradually came to realize that the missionaries were able to act as power brokers whose assistance it might be advisable to obtain. Although recent research tends to emphasize the religious motives of converts (Mühlhahn 2000: 354–363; Tiedemann 2001), there is still a general consensus that the desire for protection was an important, though not the only driving force behind conversions. At the outset in the 1860s, this was a strategy involving individuals and weak local communities hoping to reverse power relations. By the 1890s, a more complex pattern had emerged: Whenever the weaker side had successfully secured the assistance of a group of missionaries, its adversaries, now seriously weakened, had to approach missionaries of a different persuasion. Local Chinese thus exploited confessional or denominational differences that in turn could bring about diplomatic imbroglios between the representatives of different powers (Jörgensen 2001; Lee 2003: 119–161). Hence the international framework was “functionalized” by the local population as much as vice versa. As this brief sketch shows, “missionary cases” linked local affairs with the international framework to an unprecedented degree. It was only after 1900

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that missionaries and diplomats began to reconsider their policies vis-à-vis the “missionary incidents.” The debate about whether or not Christian missions were responsible for the outbreak of the Boxer uprising made diplomats more reluctant to lend unequivocal support to the missionaries (Gu 1996: 353– 354). In the decade that followed the Boxer war, the number of “missionary cases” gradually subsided, and by the early 1910s Christian missionaries and Chinese society had reached a kind of peaceful coexistence. It is possible to interpret the changing reactions of the local populace to Christianity as a process of cultural change, since it led to a new understanding of the “foreign” religion. This understanding, in turn, enabled Christian missions to engage in manifold social and cultural activities supported by cross-cultural networks encompassing missionaries and members of the local elites (cf. Klein 2005). Internalization: Social and Cultural Activities of Missionaries Much like the “missionary cases,” philanthropic, medical, and educational activities occupy a prominent place in any standard account of the history of Christianity in China. What I am concerned with here is how they reflected and contributed to China’s internationalization. I shall focus on two fields of activity: dissemination of knowledge and health care. Neither of these was an end in itself. They were part of an indirect mission strategy that complemented (and at times substituted) direct evangelization. Missionaries were not necessarily modernizers (cf. Evers 1996: 188–189), but even the conservatives that made up the bulk of the mission staff agreed that secular activities could usefully supplement direct evangelization. This attitude supported the remarkable boom in secular activities after 1900, foremost among Protestants who championed the idea of the “Social Gospel,” that is, indirect evangelization through philanthropic activities (Anon. 1912). Missionary diffusion of knowledge took on two forms: publication and education. Publications in Chinese were an outgrowth of those linguistic activities of missionaries that had immediate evangelistic value, such as the compilation of dictionaries, Bible translation, and the translation of prayers and hymns (cf. Zetzsche 1999). Missionaries did not stop there, however. Even prior to the Opium War, some pioneers had begun to edit magazines and publish books on Western knowledge. The German Karl Gützlaff (1803– 1851), who played a crucial role in promoting the China mission in Europe and North America, was also the editor of a Chinese-language periodical called Dong-Xiyang kao meiyue tongjizhuan [“Eastern Western Monthly Magazine”] and wrote several books on political economy, commerce, universal history, and world geography in Chinese (Walravens 2001: 121–152). By

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the 1860s, missionary publications had begun to include science, especially mathematics, international law, and other topics. American Protestants, who were usually better educated and trained than their European colleagues, took the lead in all of these activities. As editors of magazines and newspapers, missionaries also helped to lay the groundwork for professional Chinese journalism (Vittinghoff 2002: 78–80, 103; Liu 2004: 108–120; Elman 2005: 281–319). Missionaries took somewhat more time until they adopted the principles that governed their publishing activities as the basis for their educational work. Until the late 1870s, the majority seems to have pursued an approach that linked education directly to evangelization. Apart from providing education for the children of converts, schools were regarded as a means to influence adults by way of their children and to attract girls to Christianity. It was not until the late 1870s that schools ceased to be regarded exclusively as evangelizing agencies. Increasingly, they were to provide Western education, which combined scientific instruction with moral training and which was equated with Christian education (Weber 1990). From the missionary viewpoint, dissemination of secular knowledge did not contradict the purpose of spreading the Gospel, but rather supported it. Many missionaries shared the view that Christianity was based on knowledge, whereas paganism was accompanied by ignorance (cf. Lechler 1877: 162). Even though missionaries usually had a pietist or evangelical background, a significant number accepted the results of modern science so long as they were not opposed to the teachings of the Bible. In fact, they regarded science as a tool to shatter the ethnocentrism of the Chinese so that they would more readily accept the truth of the Christian message. This, in turn, would foster China’s well-being. In the missionaries’ worldview, religious and secular motives were inseparably intertwined. The Chinese, for their part, harbored more worldly expectations. Missionaries came to be regarded as a source of knowledge that seemed critical if China wanted to reconstruct and stand on equal footing with foreign countries. Western learning, however, could only flourish if cultural conditions were favorable. As long as education was based on the Confucian classics, this was not the case. It was not until the abolition of state examinations in 1905 that Chinese were encouraged to attend the foreigners’ schools and that the missionaries expanded their educational enterprise (Pepper 1996: 54–58). From then on, mission education benefited from the inability of the Chinese state to effectively maintain its multitiered education system, although the newly created educational bureaucracy at times refused to officially recognize mission schools as part of the Chinese education system. American (and to some extent British) mission societies began to establish themselves

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in the tertiary sector, founding colleges and universities. With few exceptions missionaries from other countries mostly confined themselves to secondary and primary schools, as did the Catholics (Deng 1997: 67–71; Cohen 1978: 557). Mission schools thus constituted an important avenue to Western learning, though modern education was also available in secular private schools and of course abroad (Deng 1997: 39–61; Bieler 2004). Generally speaking, however, it is important to note that missionaries helped to spread modern Western education, and especially female education, even to the remotest corners of China. Arguably no other field of missionary activity required a higher degree of professionalization than health care. The importance of this sector stemmed from a number of reasons: Missionaries discovered that effective medical treatment helped to win over the Chinese population, and indeed healing experience (whether through medical treatment or through prayer) has remained an important agent of conversion to this day (Währisch-Oblau 2001). Health care was also seen as an act of charity, and as such as an imitation of Christ (Grundmann 1992: 290–302; Minden 1994: 96–97). The first mission hospital was founded in 1820 in Macau, but it was only in the 1870s that medical work began to expand. Around 1905 there were about 300 medical missionaries and 250 Christian hospitals in China (Cohen 1978: 575). Especially in the early years, facilities were often simple, and even professional missionary doctors were unable to offer the most recent treatment. Besides, the Chinese had a medical tradition of their own and were sometimes suspicious of the methods used by foreign doctors (Yip 1995: 12). Yet on the whole the medical mission in China was quite successful, not the least because the missionaries trained the first modern Chinese physicians (Minden 1994: 146–151). If the two decades from 1900 to 1920 have been rightfully called the “golden age” of mission in China (Gu 1996: 351), then education and medical mission were foremost among the social and cultural activities that had made missionaries’ rapprochement with Chinese society possible. Mission schools and hospitals were cut part of China’s attempt to reshape its culture and society according to international standards. They were thus part of a process of cultural change that the missionaries had not initiated, but made significant contributions to. It is noteworthy that although the nationalist Chinese government of the late 1920s tried to combat the “cultural imperialism” of the missionaries and brought the mission schools under the ideological control by the state (Yip 1980; Lutz 1988; Klein 2002b), it allowed them as well as the hospitals to continue to function. It was only after the Communists had expelled all missionaries in 1950 that these institutions were fully nationalized.

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Externalization: Mission and the Western Discourse on China Missionary activity in China was not an isolated phenomenon, but took place within the context of an international mission movement that reached global dimensions. Events and developments in the mission field had repercussions back home, as they had to be communicated to the home constituencies upon which all missions depended for financial support. This necessitated a regular flow of information from China to Europe and North America—mostly through periodicals and calendars, but also in the form of books or small tracts—that contributed to the Western perception and discourse on China (cf. Tyrell 2004: 76–91). In contrast to the Jesuits of the early modern period, their nineteenthcentury successors targeted an audience from the same modest social background from which they themselves came. These were mostly farmers, artisans, and members of the petty bourgeoisie—the “middling classes,” as they have been called, situated in between the middle and working classes (Williams 1980; cf. Mühlhahn 2000: 321–324; Altena 2003: 206–214). For these people, the spreading of Christianity acquired a sense of immediate urgency, especially for the Protestants, who were usually under the influence of the revivalist and evangelical movements in continental Europe, Great Britain, and North America. In their view, successes of the missionary enterprise would contribute to the Kingdom of God and hence have a direct impact upon their own fate. In this way of thinking, China occupied a central place because it was the most populous country in the world—nineteenthcentury publications often referred to the Chinese as one third of humanity (not one quarter, as we are wont to do today). Although the eschatological dimension of revivalist Protestantism subsided somewhat in the course of the nineteenth century, it continued to occupy a far more important place than was the case among Catholics, who instead put greater emphasis on martyrdom (Mühlhahn 2000: 321–331). Yet it would seem that a similar sense of imminence and urgency also governed Catholic missionaries and their constituencies. What kind of information did mission societies and missionaries pass on to their audiences? In the first place, it should be noted that information passed certain filters until it reached the readers. To my knowledge, there is no comprehensive survey on the editorial policies of the various mission periodicals, but from individual case studies we may assume that they were usually rigid. Administrative matters as well as hints at tensions within the mission society were carefully eliminated from the published versions of missionary reports. Sometimes the editor would abridge the text to make the message clearer, but of course this could mean that important information

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was lost. At the same time, the missionaries adapted their reports to what they thought was expected from them, a phenomenon that amounted to internal censorship (Ruegg 1988: 176). These editorial policies reinforced tendencies that are already visible in the missionaries’ reports to their home boards, the source of a great number of publications. The perspective of the missionary authors greatly influenced and limited these reports. Judging from a bird’s-eye view on Chinese society, one might argue that the missionaries accorded an overproportional role to Chinese Christians. Reports on the development of Christianity are often interspersed with information concerning the Chinese Lebenswelt in a piecemeal fashion. This, of course, reflected the missionaries’ professional outlook, and in fact they seldom lost an opportunity to point out the insignificant number of Christians to stimulate financial support of the missionary enterprise. Especially missionaries in remote areas were preoccupied with local affairs and sometimes showed difficulties in placing their experiences into a broader perspective. At the same time, the opposite was also true, as missionaries often prematurely made generalizing conclusions from their on-the-spot observations (cf. Glüer 1982: 54; Heylen 2004: 15–25). And not until the early twentieth century, when missionaries were drawn more closely into political developments, did they concern themselves more with politics in their reports. It was, however, the dichotomic worldview of the missionaries that had the strongest influence on missionary reports. This influence is not only reflected in a language replete with biblical allusions and quotations and an antithetical rhetoric juxtaposing “good” and “evil,” “light” and “darkness,” “Christian” and “pagan” (or “heathen”). More importantly, information on economic and social life or the judicial system in China, to name but a few aspects, was often couched in moral terms. Social problems were often portrayed as moral issues, and an all-Chinese conversion to Christianity appeared as the only imaginable alternative that the missionaries had to offer. On the one hand, this envisioned solution was the result of the religious convictions of the missionaries; on the other their modest education and insufficient training also prevented many of them from taking the cultures of their mission fields seriously. Only American and to some extent British Protestant missions could boast of a higher percentage of academically trained workers (Walls 1975; Tyrell 2004: 115–116). To criticize the obvious bias in missionary reports is easy, but it misses the point. For one thing, such a judgment rests on the assumption that there is such a thing as objective reporting, which to me is an epistemological impossibility. Besides, despite their prejudices missionaries were often astute observers who developed an understanding of ordinary people in China. And it is the very fact that the missionary authors shared a number

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of presuppositions with their readers that made possible an understanding between the two sides. In other words, the supporters of the mission movement formed an international audience that was attracted to China precisely because the information it received was biased. What was perhaps more problematic was that the majority of missionaries were unable to reach a wider public beyond their own, rather circumscribed constituency. Indeed the social base of Christian missions was rather narrow, except perhaps in the United States, where missionaries had better access to communication channels outside the mission movement (cf. Neils 1990). Individual missionaries were able to successfully address a wider audience if they included secular issues in their message. For example, Karl Gützlaff, one of the most influential missionary publicists in the first half of the nineteenth century, was able to mobilize widespread popular support for the China mission not only in his native Germany, but also in Great Britain, the United States, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia in the 1830s and 1840s. His brilliant handling of the print media and his rhetorical talent guaranteed his success with a heterogeneous audience. For Gützlaff stressed not only the importance of Christianizing China, but also of opening the country to free trade. Besides, he flattered his audience in the various countries by pointing to the particular national characters and assigning each nation a specific historical mission in the opening of China. Last but not least, Gützlaff ’s writings were not confined to religious issues, but he also published numerous articles on the geography, history, and economy of China in widely read periodicals (Lutz/Lutz 2006). Whereas Gützlaff was more or less self-trained, the Scottish missionary James Legge (1815–1897), his one-time adversary, had obtained a university degree before leaving for China. In contrast to Gützlaff, he had less immediate success; however, his achievements were more lasting. Legge’s fame rested on his monumental bilingual edition and translation of Confucian texts, known as The Chinese Classics. Additional translations of Confucian and some Daoist texts were published in the series The Sacred Books of the East. His translations not only helped Legge to secure an academic position as Chair of Chinese Studies at Oxford, but they have also remained indispensable for any university library to this day (Wong 1996: 80–85, 114–115). A similarly prolific and in some ways even more successful translator was the German missionary Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930). Although Wilhelm was an academic theologian, his translations were not intended for scholarly use like Legge’s, but rather for that part of the educated classes in fin-desiècle Germany who despaired of the shortcomings of European modernity and were now looking for new, uncorrupted sources of spirituality in the civilizations of Asia (Bauer 1993: 15–17; Klein 2004: 383–385). As Wilhelm

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managed to render the unfamiliar contents of the Chinese classics in a highly comprehensible language, his books met with tremendous success and have continued to be on the book market until today. Although only some of Wilhelm’s later translations also appealed to an academic audience, he again followed Legge’s example in obtaining a professorship in Sinology before becoming the director of the China Institute in Frankfurt. At this time, Wilhelm had gradually withdrawn from mission work and by the mid-1920s, he had become an outspoken critic of Christian missions in China, eventually resigning membership with his mission society. Yet he started his translation work when still teaching at a mission school, and without his missionary activities he certainly would not have become a translator. The audience that missionary publications managed to attract to China can be grouped into two categories: First, there were the supporters of missions who believed to have a stake in the progress of Christianity in China. They formed a small, but dedicated group interested chiefly in topics related to evangelization. Second, there was a wider public whose interest in China resulted from various motives, such as commercial ventures, philanthropic concerns, or the search for alternatives to modern European civilization. Missionaries who wanted to address this second group had to step out of the confines of ordinary mission literature, using different channels, addressing different topics, and employing a different rhetoric. As we have seen, individual missionaries, including borderline cases such as Wilhelm, were quite successful. This applies even more to Pearl S. Buck (Hunt 1977; Conn 1996; cf. also Vanessa Künnemann’s essay in this book). If the globalization of the media system in the nineteenth and twentieth century gave China an importance it had not previously enjoyed, then missionaries had a crucial part in this development. The Cultural Dimension of Internationalization: Christianity as a Chinese Religion So far I have focused on the interaction between missionaries and Chinese society on the one hand and on the incorporation of China in a global media system on the other. Neither perspective, however, pays sufficient attention to the cultural processes that accompanied the internationalization of China. It is to this aspect that I shall turn now. Christianity was the last of a number of religions imported to China from abroad, its forerunners being Buddhism, first introduced to China in the first century AD, and Islam, whose roots date back to the early Song period (960– 1279). In the period up to 1949, Christianity was less successful than these two religions, since Catholics and Protestants together made up only about

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1 percent of the entire Chinese population. Christianity differed from Buddhism and Islam in fundamental ways. Unlike Buddhism, it was incompatible with the pluralism of Chinese religious life, which combined a state cult and forms of organized religion (monastic and lay Buddhism and Daoism) with the “diffused” forms of popular religion, such as ancestor worship, a pantheon of gods, and various forms of divination (including feng shui and shamanism). From a Chinese perspective, Christianity shared its monotheistic standpoint with Islam and was thus equally problematic (cf. Israeli 1984). However, in the nineteenth century Islam was more strongly Sinicized than Christianity (cf. Benite 2005) and less powerful, since it lacked the backing of the foreign powers. Christian missionaries, both Catholics and Protestants, took pains to detach Chinese Christians from all forms of Chinese religion. This made Christianity highly unattractive, since converts had to renounce all they had previously taken for granted, and were at the same time held responsible by their non-Christian kin and neighbors for all kinds of misfortunes (Klein 2002a: 206). As the missionaries submitted members of Christian congregations to a harsh religious discipline, expelling them from the religious community, if necessary, they usually had the upper hand. Missionaries passed on their principles to a Chinese clergy they had trained themselves, notwithstanding the fact that devolution of authority from Europeans to indigenous churchmen was a long and conflict-ridden process. It is therefore little surprising that contemporary observers still characterize Chinese Protestant congregations as “evangelical” or “fundamentalist” or point to the Western forms of Catholic worship (Plate 1987: 21; Zhang 1998: 120). These traits can be traced back to the period of missionary leadership and have been reinforced during the reckless persecutions of the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, Christianity broke the principle according to which religious and social communities were identical. One might argue that the “foreign religion” or yangjiao, as Christianity came to be called as in early as the mid-nineteenth century, internationalized China’s religious landscape, fundamentally altering the relationship between the various religions. On the other hand, however, Chinese Christians appropriated the “foreign religion” in ways that contradicted the expectations of the missionaries (Ma Jianhua 1997: 67–71; Madsen 2001). Here I am less concerned with indigenization theology, a generic term that comprises the various approaches of individual Chinese theologians to reconcile Christianity and Chinese culture, more precisely Confucianism, through some sort of integration (Chao 1992; Lin 1995). In fact, even these theologians were more strongly influenced by Western concepts than they were ready to admit. In contrast, the relationship

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between Christianity and popular religion is much better suited to address the cultural dynamics of Christianity in China. The growth of Christianity in China has always rested chiefly on the conversion of non-Christians, especially since 1978, after which Christian congregations grew on an unprecedented scale. The form of Chinese religiosity to which the majority of neophytes subscribed prior to their conversion was (and still is) Chinese popular religion. Its heterogeneous and eclectic concepts and practices also guided the conversion process, even if their motivation was not primarily religious. While it is difficult to distinguish sharply between religious and secular motives (such as poverty or the desire for protection) for conversion in the first place, it must be noted that recent studies have generally attributed a greater role to genuinely religious motives in the process of conversion to Christianity than was previously the case. According to anthropologist David Jordan (1993), this process has three characteristics: First, it is conditional in that the new belief is measured against concepts that one already holds and that it can be rejected if it does not meet one’s expectations. These expectations involve physical and economic well-being, often as a result of a stroke of fate, in which case conversion becomes a means to bring about a “change of fortune.” Second, conversion is additive, which means that Christianity does not replace the concepts and practices of Chinese popular religion, but instead is added to them. Third, it involves “pantheon interchangeability,” a concept of trial and error that makes it possible to shift one’s allegiance from one deity to another provided the latter has given a favorable response. This anthropological perspective has been sufficiently corroborated by historical research to show that these are not merely contemporary problems, but date back to the origins of modern Chinese Christianity when the missionaries were still in control of the churches (Mühlhahn 2000: 355–363; Klein 2002a: 193–205). From the beginning, missionaries and Chinese were thus confronted with a number of interrelated problems. Many Christians continued to participate in the worship of the popular gods and above all in ancestor worship and adhered to a series of social practices linked with the latter, such as concubinage and infant marriage. If Christians encountered a blow of fate, they hired the services of geomancers and other forms of religious specialists, turning away from the Christian God who in their eyes had withheld his protection. The missionaries’ responses were by no means uniform. In Catholicism, for example, the saint cult created a gray area in which patron saints could be more or less directly identified with gods from the popular pantheon (Reis-Habito 1993; Madsen 2001: 242). Protestantism, of course, had no alternative to offer. Ancestor worship was a widely discussed issue among

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missionaries of all persuasions, and suggestions to solve it ranged from outright displacement to various forms of compromise that sought for Christian substitutes or suggested a reinterpretation of ancestor worship in Christian terms (Smith 1989). Often, however, missionaries and their home boards insisted on rigidly enforcing church discipline. As only a minority of Chinese Christians actually left the congregations or were expelled from them, we may expect the majority to have at least openly acknowledged the standards set by the missionaries. On the other hand, Christians continued to be influenced by concepts and practices of popular religion, as the dynamics of evangelization led to a permanent influx of new converts. Notwithstanding the missionaries’ readiness to compromise in a number of issues, Chinese congregations were characterized by a fundamental tension: The “international” standards of Christianity were only upheld by the leadership, that is, the missionaries themselves and the Chinese clergy. Whenever their control was lacking, Christian laymen tended to reconcile their Christian belief with the concepts and practices of Chinese popular religion. This was an act of appropriation of the “foreign religion,” but could also lead to a transformation of indigenous religiosity. One of the earliest manifestations of an independent religion inspired by both Christianity and Chinese religious concepts was the Taiping movement (1851–1864), which was both a culturally creative and devastating force. It was based on the vision of its leader, Hong Xiuquan, that he was the younger brother of Jesus and had been called by God to purge China from idolatry. Hong defended his vision against Western missionaries who attempted to convert him to an orthodox form of Christianity (Spence 1996: 285–289; Wagner 1998: 134). It is interesting to note the striking similarities between the Taiping movement and the new religious groups that have emerged at the fringes of Chinese Christianity since the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s reform policy. Much like the Taiping, these reform groups were founded by charismatic leaders claiming to be reincarnations or second manifestations of Jesus. These groups usually take the Biblical message as their point of departure and adapt it to their local Chinese context. Like Christianity, many of them leave no room for the worship of gods and spirits, but the reason is that usually their leader occupies the role of deity. The flourishing of these groups probably has to do with the character of the tremendous expansion of Christianity in the past decades. The Christian message is no longer chiefly transmitted by missionaries and native pastors, but by ordinary, mostly rural and poorly educated Christians who often have little knowledge of the Bible. What matters in their perspective is not the spiritual content, but the promise that believing in God actually improves people’s lives. In this context, Christianity is no longer perceived as something “foreign” or “international,” but indeed as a Chinese religion. This process of

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cultural appropriation has to be acknowledged as a consequence of China’s internationalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Conclusion In this paper, I have used the history of Christian missions in China as a testing ground for widening the perspective on China’s internationalization in two ways. First, it struck me as unsatisfactory to look only at the effects that internationalization had in China. It seems appropriate to assume that this was a reciprocal process that also affected the international pacesetters in North America and Europe, though perhaps to a lesser degree. My discussion of missionary publications was intended to show how China became the object of a globalizing media system that drew Europeans and Americans closer to one of the world’s largest countries. It is true that in most countries the audience for which missionary publications were intended constituted only a small fraction of the population—except in the United States, where missionary publications actually were quite popular. Yet in those countries where the missionaries’ constituency was marginal, it often took a special interest in China that was matched by only a few, if any other social groups. Whether the information these people received from the missionaries was “objective” is of no consequence, since there is no such thing as objective information. In my view, it is important to note that the information system was effective and reached its goal of emotionalizing its target audience, which resulted both in donations and in recruits for mission societies. I have also shown that once missionaries stepped out of the narrow confines of the mission movement and used other channels of transmission, they could emerge as influential opinion-shapers on a national as well as international scene. Second, it seemed to me that a discussion of the internationalization of China must take into account the cultural dynamics behind the encounter between the Chinese and foreigners. I have tried to highlight these dynamics both by pointing to the Chinese agency in bringing together the international and local levels in the framework of “missionary cases” and by showing to what extent Christianity became an indigenous religion. I have shown that Christianity is an “international” religion as far as missionaries and Chinese theologians are in control of its message and spirituality, but that wherever laymen have room to pursue their own concepts and practices, Christianity has been and still is interpreted in Chinese terms. In some cases, such as the Taiping or some contemporary religious groups, the results are such that Christians who adhere to an international mainstream Christianity would have difficulties to find common ground with these

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groups. Internationalization therefore does not rule out the possibility of cultural appropriation. References Altena, Thorsten. 2003. “Ein Häuflein Christen mitten in der Heidenwelt des dunklen Erdteils”. Zum Selbst-und Fremdverständnis protestantischer Missionare im kolonialen Afrika 1884–1918. Münster, Germany: Waxmann. [Anonymous]. 1912. “The Social Gospel”. Biblical World 40, 147–151. Bauer, Wolfgang. 1993. Entfremdung, Verklärung, Entschlüsselung. Grundlinien der deutschen Übersetzungsliteratur aus dem Chinesischen. Bochum, Germany: RichardWilhelm-Übersetzungszentrum. Benite, Zvi Ben-dor. 2005. The Dao of Muhammad. A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Chao, Jonathan T’ien-en. 1992. “Toward a Chinese Christianity. A Protestant Response to the Anti-Imperialist Movement.” Republican China 17: 95–109. Cohen, Paul A. 1963. China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Antiforeignism, 1860–1870. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Paul A. 1978. “Christian Missions and Their Impact to 1900.” The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Ed. J.K. Fairbank. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 543–590. Cohen, Paul A. 1984. Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Conn, Peter. 1996. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Deng, Peng. 1997. Private Education in Modern China. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger. Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation. Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago, and London: University of Chicago Press. Duara, Prasenjit. 1997a. “Transnational Sovereignty and the Predicament of History: China, 1900–1945.” American Historical Review 102: 1030–1051. Duara, Prasenjit. 1997b. “State and Civil Society in the History of Chinese Modernity.” In: F. Wakeman and X. Wang, eds. China’s Quest for Modernization. A Historical Perspective. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 300–324. Elman, Benjamin A. 2005. On Their Own Terms. Science in China, 1550–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Evers, Georg. 1996. “Die Rolle der christlichen Mission als Werkzeug gesellschaftlicher und kultureller Veränderung am Beispiel Chinas.” In: R. Malek, ed. “Fallbeispiel China”. Ökumenische Beiträge zu Religion, Theologie und Kirche im chinesischen Kontext. Nettetal, Germany: Steyler Verlag, 185–208. Glüer, Winfried. 1982. “German Protestant Missions in China.” In: T. Christensen and W.R. Hutchinson, eds. Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era: 1880–1920. Århus, Denmark: Aros, 51–61. Grundmann, Christoffer H. 1992. Gesandt zu heilen! Aufkommen und Entwicklung der ärztlichen Mission im 19. Jahrhundert. Gütersloh, Germany: Mohn 1992.

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Gu, Weimin. 1996. Jidujiao yu jindai Zhongguo shehui. Shanghai, China: Renmin Chubanshe. Heylen, Ann. 2004. Chronique du Toumet-Ortos. Looking through the Lens of Joseph van Oost, Missionary in Inner Mongolia (1915–1921). Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press & Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation. Hunt, Michael H. 1977. “Pearl Buck—Popular Expert on China, 1931–1949.” Modern China 3, 33–64. Jörgensen, Helle. 2001. “Funktionalisierung der Mission durch chinesische Christen: Die protestantische Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft im Kreis Dongguan in der Provinz Guangdong, 1896–1902.” In: M. Leutner and K. Mühlhahn, eds. Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen im 19. Jahrhundert. Mission und Wirtschaft in interkultureller Perspektive. Münster, Germany: LIT, 219–260. Jordan, David K. 1993. “The Glyphomancy Factor: Observations on Chinese Conversion.” In: R.H. Hefner, ed. Conversion to Christianity. Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 285–303. Karl, Rebecca E. 2002. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kirby, William C. 1997. “The Internationalization of China: Foreign Relations at Home and Abroad in the Republican Era”. China Quarterly 150, 433–458. Kirby, William C. 2005. “When Did China Become China? Thoughts on the Twentieth Century.” In: J.A. Fogel, ed. The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State. Japan and China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 105–114. Kirby, William C. 2006. “China in Transnational Perspective. Introductory Remarks.” Berliner China-Hefte 30, 3–7. Klein, Thoralf. 2002a. Die Basler Mission in der Provinz Guangdong (Südchina), 1859– 1931. Akkulturationsprozesse und kulturelle Grenzziehungen zwischen Missionaren, chinesischen Christen und lokaler Gesellschaft. Munich, Germany: Iudicium. Klein, Thoralf. 2002b. “Anti-imperialism at Grassroots: Christianity and the AntiChristian Movement in Northeast Guangdong, 1919–1930.” In: M. Leutner, R. Felber et al., eds. The Chinese Revolution in the 1920s. Between Triumph and Disaster. London: Routledge, 289–306. Klein, Thoralf. 2004. “Lutherische Mission und chinesische Kultur: Karl F.A. Gützlaff, Richard Wilhelm und Karl Ludvig Reichelt.” In: H. Medick, P. Schmidt, eds. Luther zwischen den Kulturen. Zeitgenossenschaft–Weltwirkung. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 373–395. Klein, Thoralf. 2005. “Missionarische Netzwerke und gesellschaftliche Transformation: Am Beispiel von Nordost-Guangdong.” Periplus 15, 41–71. Kupfer, Kristin. 2002. “Christlich inspirierte, spirituell-religiöse Gruppierungen in der VR China (I–II).” China heute 21, 119–127, 169–175. Lamley, Harry J. 1990. “Lineage Feuding in Southern Fujian and Eastern Guangdong under Qing Rule.” In: J.N. Lipman and S. Harrell, eds. Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 27–64.

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Lechler, Rudolf. 1877. “On the Relation of Protestant Missions to Education.” Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China Held at Shanghai, May 10–24, 1877. Shanghai, China: Presbyterian Mission Press, 160–171. Lee, Joseph Tse-hei. 2003. The Bible and the Gun. Christianity in South China, 1860– 1900. London: Routledge. Lin, Hongrong. 1995. “ ‘Wu Si’ shiqi de bense shenxue sichao.” In: X. Liu, ed. “Dao” yu “xin”. Huaxia wenhua yu Jidu wenhua xiangyu. 2nd ed. Shanghai, China: Sanlian Shuju, 661–686. Litzinger, Charles Albert. 1996. “Rural Religion and Village Organization in North China: The Catholic Challenge in the Late Nineteenth Century.” In: D.H. Bays, ed. Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 41–52. Liu, Lydia H. 2004. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lutz, Jessie. 1988. Chinese Politics and Christian Missions. The Anti-Christian Movements of 1920–28. Notre Dame, IN: Cross Cultural Publications. Lutz, Jessie G., and Lutz, R.R. 2006. “Karl Gützlaff as Propagandist and Fund Raiser, 1826–1849: Some Comparisons of Appeals and Sources of Support.” In: T. Klein and R. Zöllner, eds. Karl Gützlaff und das Christentum in Ostasien. Ein Missionar zwischen den Kulturen. Nettetal, Germany: Steyler Verlag, 105–139. Ma, Jianhua. 1997. “The Development of Rural Christianity in China and Its Challenges”. Chinese Theological Review 13, 65–71. Madsen, Madsen. 2001. “Beyond Orthodoxy: Catholicism as Chinese Folk Religion.” In: S. Uhalley and X. Wu, eds. Christianity in China. Burdened Past, Hopeful Future. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 233–249. Minden, Karen. 1994. Bamboo Stone: The Evolution of a Chinese Medical Elite. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Mühlhahn, Klaus. 2000. Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou. Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland, 1897–1914. Munich, Germany: Oldenbourg. Neils, Patricia, ed. 1990. United States Attitudes and Politics towards China: The Impact of American Missionaries. Armonk, NY: Sharpe. Pepper, Suzanne. 1996. Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th-Century China: The Search for an Ideal Developmental Model. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Perry, Elizabeth. 1980. Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Plate, Manfred. 1987. “Von Chinesen und von katholischen Chinesen.” In: M. Plate and R. Malek, eds. Chinas Katholiken suchen neue Wege. Freiburg, Germany: Herder, 13–27. Reis-Habito, Maria. 1993. “The Bodhisattva Guanyin and the Virgin Mary”. Buddhist – Christian Studies 13, 61–69.

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Rüegg, Willy. 1988. Die Chinesische Revolution in der Berichterstattung der Basler Mission. Zürich, Switzerland: ADAG. Sachsenmaier, Dominic. 2003. “Politische Debatten in China nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg—Gedanken zu einer globalhistorischen Perspektive”. Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte 4, 55–68. Smith, Henry N. 1989. “A Typology of Christian Responses to Chinese Ancestor Worship.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 26, 628–647. Spence, Jonathan D. 1996. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: HarperCollins. Tiedemann, R.G. 1996. “Christian Missions in Shandong in the Context of China’s National and Revolutionary Development.” In: U. van der Heyden and H. Liebau, eds. Missionsgeschichte—Kirchengeschichte—Weltgeschichte. Stuttgart, Germany: Steiner, 396–404. Tiedemann, R.G. 2001. “Conversion Patterns in North China. Sociological Profiles of Chinese Christians, 1860–1912.” In: W. Ku and K. de Ridder, eds. Authentic Chinese Christianity: Preludes to Its Development. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven Institute for Sino-Mongol Studies/Leuven University Press, 107–133. Tyrell, Hartmann. 2004. “Weltgesellschaft, Weltmission und religiöse Organisationen–Einleitung.” In: A. Bogner, B. Holtwick, and B.H. Tyrell, eds. Weltmission und religiöse Organisationen. Protestantische Missionsgesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Würzburg, Germany: Ergon, 13–134. Vittinghoff, Natascha. 2002. Die Anfänge des Journalismus in China (1860–1911). Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz. Währisch-Oblau, Claudia. 2001. “God Can Make Us Healthy Through and Through. On Prayers for the Sick and the Interpretation of Healing Experiences in Christian Churches in China and African Immigrant Congregations in Germany”. International Review of Mission 356/357, 87–102. Wagner, Rudolf G. 1998. “Understanding Taiping Christian China: Analogy, Interest, and Policy.” In: K. Koschorke, ed. “Christen und Gewürze”. Konfrontation und Interaktion kolonialer und indigener Christentumsvarianten. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 132–157. Waley-Cohen, Joanna. 1999. The Sextants of Beijing. Global Currents in Chinese History. New York: Norton. Walls, A.F. 1975. “The nineteenth century missionary as scholar.” In: n.E. BlockHoell, ed. Misjonskall og forskersglede. Festskrift til professor Olov Guttorm Myklebust. Oslo, Bergen, and Tromsø, Norway: Universitetsforlaget, 209–221. Walravens, Hartmut. 2001. Karl Friedrich Neumann (1793–1870) und Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (1803–1851). Zwei deutsche Chinakundige im 19. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz. Weber, Charles W. 1990. “Protestant Mission Education in Nineteenth Century China”. Evangelical Review of Theology 14, 150–167. Williams, C.P. 1980. “ ‘Not Quite Gentlemen’: An Examination of ‘Middling Class’. Protestant Missionaries from Britain, c. 1850–1900.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31, 301–315.

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Wong, Man Kong. 1996. James Legge: Pioneer at Crossroads of East and West. Hong Kong, China: Educational Publishing. Yip, Ka-che. 1980. Religion, Nationalism and Chinese Students: The Anti-Christian Movement of 1922–1927. Bellingham, WA: Western Washington University Press. Yip, Ka-che. 1995. Health and National Reconstruction in Nationalist China: The Development of Modern Health Services, 1928–1937. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies. Zetzsche, Jost. 1999. The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version or the Culmination of Protestant Missionary Bible Translation in China. Nettetal, Germany: Steyler Verlag. Zhang, Yan. 1998. “Kirchlicher Alltag und Feste.” In: M. Gänßbauer, ed. Christentum im Reich der Mitte. Hamburg, Germany: China Info-Stelle, 120–125.

CHAPTER 8

“Following with Bleeding Footsteps?” American Missions in China and the (Gendered) Critique of Pearl S. Buck Vanessa Künnemann

The Ambivalent Nature of American Foreign Missions Carie, gazing back at the mass of brown faces, was sorely divided in her heart. Here were the “heathen,” the people for whom she had given up her own country, for whom she had given her life—oh, she would give herself for them—she would spend herself for them! Then she was moved with revulsion. How dreadful they were to look upon, how cruel their narrow eyes, how cold their curiosity! (Buck 1936a: 98–99)

T

his is the description of a female missionary’s very first encounter with “her” Chinese converts-to-be upon her arrival in Hangchow in 1880, following a long and tiresome sea journey with her husband. A journey that had almost not come about for her, because her newly wedded husband—in his missionary and adventurous zeal—had initially forgotten to purchase a ticket for his young wife. The inattentive husband and the woman introduced as sacrificing herself for the “heathen” Chinese while feeling an inner division and revulsion toward the heathens’ very physical appearance are Absalom and Carolyn (Carie) Sydenstricker, Presbyterian American missionaries to China and the parents of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and essayist Pearl S. Buck. Buck, who spent the first half of her life in China, was celebrated as America’s “best-known authority on Asia” in the middle

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of the twentieth century (Conn 1996: 257) or “the singularly significant spokeswoman for China” (Liao 1997: 15) and widely considered “one of the most successful offshoots that Christian missions in China ever produced.”1 In the above-quoted passage from her fictional biography on her mother, The Exile, and its counterpart on her father’s life story, Fighting Angel, as well as in many of her political essays and fictional works, Pearl Buck pointed to the ambivalences and tensions that she saw at the heart of American foreign missions (to China). In her critique—which culminated in her controversial speech “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” from 1932—Buck openly attacked the motives, ideologies, and practices of American missionaries and missionary boards, thereby also questioning the missionary projects of her own parents. In her line of argumentation, she time and again drew on the category of gender when (re)assessing the American missionary presence in China and pointed to the doubly marginalized position of women—both in terms of “foreignness” and gender—in the missionary movement. Buck stylized her mother as an exile in China and presented this fate as exemplary of many cases of missionary women who suffered from feelings of alienation and isolation far away from the American home they so desperately longed for and which they sought to reenact abroad. By contrast, as Buck had it, the male missionary project, as epitomized through the figure of her father, largely represented an aggressive version or interpretation of foreign missions suffused with an imperialist ideology. I argue in this essay that with these binary oppositions, Pearl Buck oversimplified the manifold experiences and contradictory attitudes of female missionaries in China. Still, Buck’s representation of her own family history may serve to reflect upon the intricacies and developments of female missions to China on a larger scale: despite a male dominance in the (hi)story of American foreign missions, many women missionaries still managed to make an asset out of their position, and sometimes found ways of selfempowerment (especially in the fields of education and medicine). Depicting female missionaries as submissive and suffering exiles, as Buck tended to do in the case of her mother, is thus a purposeful or strategic distortion of a very complex reality, as I would like to suggest. It is certainly true that some women—predominantly missionaries of the first generation and those who were married—shared feelings of insularity and alienation reminiscent of the Carie that Buck introduces in her biography. Among this group were women who, like Carolyn Sydenstricker, followed their husbands to China “with bleeding footsteps,” to take up the title quote of this essay, a phrase by Harriet Beecher Stowe from her “evangelical novel” The Minister’s Wooing (1859: 25). These women were not independent or emancipated enough to make active and unique paths of their own, but were instead passive appendages

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of male missionaries. While their husbands pursued missions in the Chinese hinterlands, they mostly stayed behind in their homes on missionary compounds and, not unlike Chinese women suffering from the practice of bound feet, were bound to the constraints of these diasporic homes (frequently stylized as a miniature America, as we shall see in the case of Buck’s mother). Carie’s revulsion upon looking into the Chinese “cruel” narrow eyes full of “cold curiosity” thus indicates wider apprehensions among Western female missionaries: that they were “forever foreign” in China.2 Seen that way, the image of the “bleeding footsteps” also discloses an understanding of the female participation in missions in terms of passivity, pain, and suffering. However, the metaphor of blood might also be seen from a different angle, namely as an indication of guilt or missionary aggressiveness on the part of women missionaries: as they walk in foreign fields, they figuratively “shed blood” too and thereby pollute or penetrate a foreign people’s land (and its ideology and lifestyle). In contrast to Buck’s portrayal of her mother, this latter metaphorical dimension points to the fact that the foreign missionary enterprise allowed many women to display power and exercise an influence inaccessible to them in the United States at the time. In fact, many missionary women (especially single women) could rid themselves of the prevalent Victorian concept of womanhood imposed on them at home. In this sense, the American foreign mission was highly complex vis-à-vis the role of women as it also carried a potential of female emancipation and did not necessarily presuppose women’s passivity. The American missionary enterprise was thus replete with ambivalences: on the one hand, it intensified female submission abroad, yet on the other, it also implied a promise of emancipatory quests. Considering these tensions, this paper traces the following questions: why did Pearl Buck, who was one of the most outspoken American advocates of women’s rights in the twentieth century, present such a one-dimensional, distorted (hi)story of gender in American missions? What precisely did she attack in the missionary activities and for what ends? And, how can her argument, predominantly fleshed out in the realm of her (biographical) fiction, be linked with the history of female mission? To find answers to these questions, I will first turn to Buck’s pivotal speech “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” to explain the core, backgrounds, and premises of her critique of missions as an imperialist endeavor. In a second step, I will analyze the two biographies in order to sketch out how Buck juxtaposed her parents and envisioned her mother as a counterexample to this imperialist model—an example which follows the logic of exile but which is not unproblematic either. As indicated above, Buck’s portrayal of female victimization and isolation in foreign missions was but one side or version of

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the multifaceted experiences of women missionaries in China: consequently, I will then focus on these alternative figures in the missionary movement to show where and how their attitudes deviated from Buck’s assessment and to what extent continuities or analogies to Buck’s (fictional) account existed. “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” Pearl Buck’s Critique of Missions Of course, it would be oversimplified and somewhat polemic to pinpoint one particular date that changed American foreign missions once and for all. Rather, the changes in missionary thought, ideology, and influence in Asia in the early twentieth century were the results of complex and gradual processes of transition and transformation (Lutz 1965; Fairbank 1974; Cohen 1978; Lian 1997). Still, in early November 1932, a speech delivered to an audience of some 2000 Presbyterian women in New York City’s Astor Hotel created “a stir” and “raised havoc” (Lian 1997: 114, 120) among the American missionary community. Not surprisingly, the woman who gave this speech was Pearl Buck. Some days after her speech, missionary authorities called her an “outstanding advocate of modern unbelief,” some demanded her dismissal from the Presbyterian Missions Board which she was still a member of, and one reverend said he was glad Buck’s missionary father had died one year earlier and did not have to witness the “etherealized animalism” of his daughter (Wacker 2003: 188; cf. also Lian 1997: 119–123). What did Buck say in her speech that had this tremendous impact? And, more importantly, what made her come to these controversial remarks? In her speech titled “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” Buck came out with a scathing attack on the mediocrity, arrogance, and narrowmindedness of missionaries sent abroad by the Church, men and women fresh from college who were “disdainful of a great culture.” Those “scornful, vulgar, [uncharitable, unappreciative,] ignorant and superstitious” missionaries repeated to the suffering, uncomprehending peoples in the East their “memorized jargon.” They were the lonely little figures, she said, who lived on a theological “formula” and who were “dwarfed” by the “vast people, the age-old history, the fathomless difference of race.” (Lian 1997: 120)

In Buck’s eyes, a new, inefficient, and badly trained generation of missionaries did not share a life with the Chinese, but simply preached to them (Buck 1932: 154) and arrogantly dismissed them as xenophobic when they realized their Western doctrines and missionary attempts had failed. These missionaries who came under Buck’s attack were in fact increasingly seen as “cultural imperialists” in the wake of the Chinese revolution (Fairbank 1974: 3; cf. Lutz

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1965; Hutchison 1987; Lian 1997; Schlesinger 1974)—embracing Western political ideologies, teaching methods, and lifestyles and being ignorant of the needs of the Chinese. Buck bluntly stated that “[t]here can be no thoughtful missionary abroad to-day who has not seriously questioned his mission” (1932: 144), interestingly alluding to her own mother’s religious doubts here. Full of “anger and indignation” (p. 145), she also dismissed those achievements of missions that were generally praised as humanitarian or secular (such as hospitals, schools, or relief programs), arguing that frequently the underlying purpose of setting up these institutions too was to “inveigle people to hear the gospel” (p. 146). Moreover, Buck accused the American constituency of wasting money for superfluous, luxurious Christian symbols in China such as costly churches in the vicinity of poor neighborhoods (pp. 153–54) and of sending abroad only mediocre missionaries (“Frankly, you wanted the best for yourselves,” p. 146). At a first glance, Buck did not broach the category of gender in her critique when she concluded: The basic reason for the lack of the success in spreading the spirit of Christianity has been because neither the messenger nor the message has been suited to the needs of the people. The truth is we have never considered the people. (Buck 1932: 154)

Yet, Buck was implicitly referring to the impracticality and stubbornness of male missionaries who often insisted on their own missionary projects rather than actually communicating with the Chinese and listening to their needs. “Considering the people” and running schools and hospitals for the right reasons, according to Buck, often became the task of female missionaries, as we shall see by the example of her mother.3 For Buck, the only case for foreign missions could be one in which Christians were willing to truly share Christ and to genuinely become part of Chinese life. Only such a transformed future mission, defined in broad humanist terms and also carried out at home, held out a promise to Buck: It is essential that we strive to apply to ourselves those principles which we are asking others to apply. One of the great indignations of my life was to find certain women in Christian churches in America who would give money and time to a foreign missionary society for work among peoples ten thousand miles away but who would not open the doors of their homes to students and persons of other races in their own cities, strangers and foreigners in America. What is the use of preaching Christ abroad when we deny him by such acts as these at home? (Buck 1932: 154–55)

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While it would be worth analyzing this paragraph for what it says about the position of American women at home, their roles in the operation of missionary boards, or race relations in the United States on a more general scale, it is Buck’s reference to the geographical remoteness of American foreign missionaries and their “work among peoples ten thousand miles away” that interests me most, for here she points to the isolation and exiled existence of missionaries in China and to their (re)negotiations and (re)interpretations of the very category and meaning of “home.” The notion of “home” and its implications stood at the center of Buck’s biographies of her parents in which she further stretched her vehement critique of missions already expressed in this speech.

“The American Mother and the Saintly Prophet”: Pearl Buck’s Missionary Parents The overall isolation and marginalization of women missionaries “among peoples ten thousand miles away” becomes particularly visible in Pearl Buck’s fictional biographies of her parents, The Exile and Fighting Angel. These texts, both published in 1936 as The Spirit and the Flesh but already written in the late 1920s, represented a gendered critique on the American missionary activity in China and are in many ways programmatic of Buck’s turn away from her missionary upbringing. Both biographies introduce a larger-than-life missionary father, who is detached from his family and pursues nothing but his religious zeal, and a warm-hearted mother depicted as a Victorian woman. In both texts, and particularly in The Exile, Buck indeed draws a picture of her mother, Carie, as an exile in rural China: Carie suffers from her isolated existence as a missionary wife, a portrayal that is epitomized by the loss of three of her seven children at infant age due to fever and disease. She is American to the core and in the texts generally referred to as an “American woman” (Buck 1936a: 180) or “American mother” (p. 184) who stages a miniature America for her children so that they will not forget about their origin. Carie provides her children with American music, American books, American furniture, and an American garden in a home with clean whitewashed walls . . . , wide windows opened in the walls and fresh ruffled curtains, clean matting on the floors, the court planted with grass, flowers again, chrysanthemums bought from flower vendors and gay little single roses of red and pink and yellow. Then when the beloved organ and table were in their places and beds and a few reed chairs and a kitchen made, there was home again. Outside the noisy street ran east and west through the city and was the great thoroughfare for business, and there was the roar of the city, the shouts of hawkers, the cries of chair coolies wending their way through the crowd, the

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squeak of wheelbarrows. But inside the wall and the gate there was this spot of peace and cleanliness where the American woman built again a little fragment of her own country where she might rear her children and into which she often brought Chinese women who marveled and sighed to see how fair it was. (Buck 1936a: 152)

In this home, Carie thus creates an American outpost of civilization that she holds up to Chinese women as a model of cleanliness and order.4 Buck’s mother invests in her Western notion of home while constantly searching for a divine sign that could legitimize her missionary presence in China. Where her husband finds fulfillment in his life as a missionary, Carie is described as an unhappy woman whose initial motive to serve as a missionary derived from a sad event. On her mother’s deathbed, she had promised that she would give herself to God and go to China as a missionary. However, although thoroughly prepared after attending a Presbyterian seminary, and even after living in China for many years, Carie is still in search of that one important divine sign. Unlike her husband, she never really feels the “Call” that would justify sacrificing her own life. Living in China, she is exposed to many hardships, raises her children largely without her often-absent husband, and—like her three deceased children—finally dies because of the poor hygienic conditions when she catches a tropical disease. The mother’s displacement in China and her insistence on a Western lifestyle particularly come to the fore in those passages where Buck juxtaposes Carie with her husband: He was a man like Saint Paul, indeed, to whom he has been likened by many; a man by nature religious and a pioneer, in many ways fearless, devoted to his duty as he conceived it, seeing nothing else. To his children he was a figure always a little dim, living outside their world. He was strict with them when he thought of them, truly desiring the righteousness above all else, yet through some lack of understanding never able to make righteousness beautiful to them. They preferred their mother’s swift impetuosities, her sudden little tempers and warm instant apologies, her close embraces and her little jokes and merry looks to all the cool goodness of their father. (Buck 1936a: 188)

In Buck’s imagery, maternal warmth is pitted against paternal cold and detachment, and almost inevitably, the Sydenstricker children link their mother’s humanity, closeness, and liveliness (“their mother’s swift impetuosities, her sudden little tempers and warm instant apologies, her close embraces and her little jokes and merry looks”) with her Americanness. They prefer these qualities to the remote, “dim” figure of the righteous and fearless, but

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distanced father who is living “outside their world”—in a most literal sense in the world of the hinterlands of China. His family thus perceives Absalom (called Andrew in the two biographies) as a figure almost as foreign to them as the Chinese. The mother’s Americanness, then, is contrasted with the father’s strangeness, a strangeness that calls to mind at times these other “aliens” in the text: the Chinese. Andrew is indeed the “fighting angel” of the title of Buck’s biography, an agent of God rather than a man made out of flesh. His view on the world is uncompromising and characterized by black-andwhite judgments. At first glance, he personifies everything that Buck publicly attacked in missionaries: his Work, capitalized throughout in the two biographies, is his sole purpose for living. To point to her parents’ differences, Buck makes ample use of the imagery of intoxication when describing both of them: Andrew’s “Work” is the only thing that makes him feel “intoxicated” (Buck 1936b: 130), and with respect to his work ethos: “. . . Andrew’s soul touched ecstasy. He was literally transfigured with a joy not of this earth. He came home to Sunday dinner looking as though a lamp were burning brightly within him. He was not gay—his joy was too deep for that” (Buck 1936b: 136). The portrayal of Carie, too, is infused with this imagery of intoxication, but significantly, in her case her face takes on “the look of ecstasy” (Buck 1936a: 181) when she does her gardening work, cultivating American roses to replicate American surroundings for her children and herself. It is furthermore interesting that Buck presents a Carie clad all in white on these occasions (Buck 1936a: 181), thus employing an image of the “woman in white” which was frequently used in English Romantic poetry in order to point to the innocence, purity, and fragility of (Western) women. Carie as a Victorian “woman in white”—despite her overall “warm humanity” (p. 108) and her growing appreciation of the “sunbrowned, kindly farming folk” (p. 100)—is disgusted by the filth that surrounds her (p. 108) and feels the urge to “shield her children from the Oriental life about them” (p. 117). Although Carie, like many missionary mothers, hires a Chinese nurse (amah) to support her and to familiarize her children with Chinese customs, she—again like most women missionaries—remains “uncomfortable about the nature of an amah’s influence” on her offspring (Hunter 1984: 108). The amah as a symbol of closeness to Chinese customs and lifestyles and as a potential source of pollution because of these very aspects (p. 109; cf. Grimshaw 1993: 270–71) thus needs to be balanced by motherly protection. These attempts to “shield” and protect her children from an exposure to foreign influences are once again indicative of an exile’s strategy to retreat into the realm of the home and create a zone of protection from everything alien in order to come to terms with one’s own unhappiness and sense of

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displacement and find consolation. Andrew, the “born prophet and saint, [the] man far from the daily life of mankind” (Buck 1936a: 188), is associated with the “alien” influences of the external Chinese world that Carie so eagerly tries to keep at bay. Similar to the father figures in domestic novels, Buck’s Andrew remains a distanced stranger to his family. He is a man outside of the family circle and Carie’s zone of protection—a detached head of the family who frequently retreats to “his study for many hours” (Buck 1936b: 136). Buck highlights her mother’s victimization, and by adopting an apologetic tone she excuses Carie’s behavior by the fact that her mother “was always oppressed with the too abundant humanity of the Orient, with its acceptance of human suffering and human passion” (Buck 1936a: 117). Carie finally finds her niche in order to fight the deplorable conditions of the Chinese—and her own isolation. In accordance with what was expected of married female missionaries, she increasingly supports her husband in his attempts to convert the Chinese, and thereby becomes an “assistant missionary” to her husband (Welter 1993: 196): . . . she went often to the chapels and played the baby organ, leading the singing in her clear voice, and after Andrew had preached she taught little groups of women who came to hear what the strange doctrine was about. Most of these women were sad, disappointed creatures, weary of life and borne down by some sorrow, and disgusted with the exactions of the priests in their own religions. Some could not understand the new religion; indeed, it is doubtful if the words Carie spoke ever carried the message she tried to put into them. Stronger message than her words was the swift and native sympathy of her nature when she listened to their sad stories. Her instant impulse was always “to do something about it.” They learned to call her “The American of Good Works,” and many women came to her at her home, women whom she had never seen but who had heard of her, and when their stories were told the end was always wistfully said, “They tell me you always can do something—that you always think of a way.” (Buck 1936a: 153)

“The American of Good Works” becomes an active “doer” in this scene. Carie experiences a subtle form of empowerment by the “Work of Women for Women” (Welter 1993: 200), but it is predominantly by means of discussing mundane issues that she gains access to these women. If Carie cannot create the exilic sisterhood with fellow American missionaries that Patricia Grimshaw describes as being common among female missionaries (1993: 256), then one could interpret the advice-seeking Chinese women as an alternative sisterhood of female solidarity which helps Carie to overcome her own isolation.5 This solidarity is thus not an organized or strategic political

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resistance, but it is an alignment of victims that derives from the marginalization on the basis of their gender—as Chinese women in highly patriarchal structures and as missionary women in a male-dominated movement. Significantly, this bonding is not created on the grounds of religion. In fact, Carie is described as seriously questioning her “Call” or even her religion as a whole, wondering what she knew “of God except the empty words she had been taught” (Buck 1936a: 168). Buck identifies this self-reflexive questioning as yet another instance of her mother’s Americanness: “I think in no part of her life was she more typically American than in the mental doubt and secret unsurety [sic] of her theoretical beliefs and in the swift and responsive generosities of her nature” (p. 193). Carie, in constant search of “a definite sign of approval [by God]” (p. 117), is successful in her efforts to convert the Chinese precisely because she acts on the basis of humanity and pragmatism. “I do not think one of us would have called her a saintly woman. She was far too practical, far too vivid and passionate, too full of humor and change and temper for that. She was the most human person we have ever known,” writes Buck of her mother (p. 314). It is therefore not surprising that Carie also—in truly female missionary style—opens a clinic for mothers and babies and teaches reading classes (p. 183). Carie’s missionary activity, while not altogether freeing her from her exilic and isolated existence, consequently forms a stark counterpoint to her husband’s project, as Buck presents it. Where Buck’s ambivalence toward her mother’s mission is rather hidden, it is openly expressed in her attitude vis-àvis her father: on the one hand, she admires him for his devotion and passion, his urge to help the common Chinese, and for his intelligence; yet on the other hand, Buck occasionally takes on a superior, sometimes pitiful tone and describes her father as “God’s fool” (Buck 1936b: 219). Despite the fact that Andrew has felt the “Call” inside him since his youth and can therefore be seen as the more “serious” and devoted part of the couple, his methods and styles are inferior to those of his wife: for instance, during one of his lengthy sermons, the Chinese congregation becomes restless and some start to walk out. Buck, a child witness to the scene, later recalls in her autobiography: My father was disturbed, however, and a kindly old lady on the front seat, seeing this, was moved to turn her head and address the people thus: “Do not offend this good foreigner! He is making a pilgrimage in our country so that he may acquire merit in heaven. Let us help him to save his soul!” (My Several Worlds, 1954: 199).

While Buck in this episode still expresses sympathy for her helpless and ineffective father, there are also passages in the narratives in which Buck’s

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revulsion of his arrogant and even misogynist attitude becomes visible. Like many other male missionaries, Andrew lives according to St Paul’s doctrine and does not really take female missionaries seriously. At annual mission meetings, “no woman ever raise[s] her voice” when he is present (Buck 1936b: 187), and the conversion of a Chinese woman’s “soul could scarcely count as a full soul” for him (p. 93). Buck’s critique of this all too patriarchal and oftentimes misogynist missionary project is epitomized through her opposition between her father’s story that carries quasi-imperialistic undertones and the depiction of her mother’s displacement and sufferings. Carie’s alignment with China is that of a victim, and it further adds to her portrayal as an isolated exile. According to Buck, her mother’s humanitarian mission—serving as a model for many other (married) women missionaries—is not effective enough to change the structures of the American missionary movement. With a mixture of bitterness, frustration, and sympathy, Buck thus judges her mother’s life as “tragic in its wastefulness” (quoted in Lian 1997: 101) and thereby points to a hidden potential in the female missionary activity that in her eyes could be made much more productive for American missions: the role as intercultural bridge builders. But in order for this potential to come into its own, the mission has to become secularized. “The Female Evangelism of Love?” Experiences of Female Missionaries As the only Western group to seek “direct contact with the common people in the two civilizations,” missionaries “were the principal if not the sole link between village China and small-town America” (Fairbank 1985: 2) and thus potentially ideal bridge builders (Liao 1997) or “intercultural translator figures” (Conn 1996). While transnational interdependencies between the United States and the Pacific Rim region at the turn of the twentieth century manifested themselves most visibly on the level of economy and within structures of a growing global capitalism, cultural contacts and human conflicts in this period unfolded to a large extent in religious interrelations, and specifically in the field of missions. The missionary project, however, as we have seen so far in the case of the Sydenstricker family, was far from being exclusively concerned with religion and the effort to Christianize a foreign people, but in fact revolved around questions of identity formation, cultural dominance, and discourses of nationalism and political imperialism. It is precisely the example of female missionaries that exemplifies this conflict between cultural mediation/bridge building and imperialism so pointedly: their oscillation between those poles and their transcending of their assigned roles as keepers

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of American morality perfectly illustrates the complexity and the many contradictions of American foreign missions which Pearl Buck tended to subdue and homogenize in her critique. Buck’s Carie certainly is a keeper of American morality when she upholds American values to her children in the Chinese diaspora, but she is incapable of turning this survival strategy into a more pervasive program of resistance or self-determination. As indicated above, there were indeed aspects in this rhetoric of morality that implied certain possibilities for female missionaries to transgress the passivity that Buck described. According to the logic of the Cult of True Womanhood,6 the female capacity to redeem and reform the home and the family was extended to the public sphere of missionary activity, and missionary women were credited with a potential to conquer and redeem the entire world by means of a distinct “female evangelism of love” (Hunter 1984: xiv). Consequently, women missionaries could have a more active— and ambivalent—impact on American missions than suggested in Buck’s portrayal of her mother—once they made proper use of their home and turned it into a place of (subtle) power. Rather than being a zone of exilic retreat, the missionary home could become an “empire,” making permeable the boundaries between the interior and the exterior, as Amy Kaplan suggests in what she calls the concept of “Manifest Domesticity” or “traveling domesticity” (2002: 113): The border between the domestic and the foreign . . . deconstructs when we think of domesticity not as a static condition but as a process of domestication, which entails conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien. Domestic in this sense is related to the imperial project of civilizing . . . . (Kaplan 2002: 112)7

Women’s transgression of the “fraught and contingent nature of the boundary between the domestic and the foreign” (Kaplan 2002: 115) can therefore be seen in the context of the notion of the “empire of the mother” or “empire of the home,” which Mary P. Ryan (with reference to the educational reformer Horace Mann) has used in order to refer to women’s political involvement through “the back door” in the larger framework of domesticity and the Cult of True Womanhood.8 Debates around American (inter)national expansion in the nineteenth century were thus based on the close entanglement of Manifest Destiny and domesticity. As Kaplan aptly observes, The rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and domesticity share a vocabulary that turns imperial conquest into spiritual regeneration in order to efface internal conflict or external resistance in visions of geopolitical domination as global harmony. . . . The empire of the mother thus shares the logic of the American

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empire; both follow a double compulsion to conquer and domesticate the foreign, thus incorporating and controlling a threatening foreignness within the borders of the home and the nation. (Kaplan 2002: 118, 120)

It can be argued that female missionaries were the ideal agents to bring about this “global harmony” and control of “threatening foreignness”—for example in their “secular” versions of missions, namely educational and medical missions. Although the “empire of the [missionary] mother” was undeniably infused with “ethnocentric attitude and national and religious absolutism” of (female) missionaries (Welter 1993: 205), the concept can be seen as a counterpart to that of the rugged imperialism of male missionaries that critics like John King Fairbank have seen as displays of “aggressive individualis[m]” (Fairbank 1985: 2). The idea of motherhood in this context gains central importance. In A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1842), Catharine Beecher, a nineteenthcentury reformer and women’s educator and sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, placed missionary women’s “maternal responsibility for molding the character of men and children” at the center of her argument, thereby linking “women’s work at home to the unfolding of America’s global mission of ‘exhibiting to the world the beneficent influences of Christianity, when carried into every social, civil, and political institution’ ” (quoted in Kaplan 2002: 116). Catharine Beecher in A Treatise saw married women and mothers—“true women”—as gaining their “symbolic sovereignty at the cost of withdrawal from the outside world” (Kaplan 2002: 115–116). According to this logic, then, even an exile like Carie, who withdrew from the outside world, could gain a certain degree of power, albeit in a rather subtle way. While Buck neglects this notion of the “empire of the mother” in her portrayal of Carie, she is more accurate in the depiction of her parents’ marriage. It was indeed not rare among missionary women to marry a man they hardly knew. Sometimes they were even picked by their future husband on the basis of photographs—calling to mind bachelors in American Chinatowns choosing their “picture brides.” Barbara Welter writes on the driving forces behind missionary marriages in this first generation: If a woman had a call to this life of self-denying love it could, in the period before the Civil War, be fulfilled only by marriage to an appointed missionary, with certain rare exceptions. God who gave the vocation would provide the means, and the Mission Board sometimes played the role of marriage arranger or, more precisely, coordinator of marriages presumably already arranged in heaven. (Welter 1993: 194–195)

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Marriages of missionaries were thus widely seen as either predetermined by God, as Welter explains, or as pragmatic arrangements because male missionaries believed they would be better off in the foreign hinterlands with a companion who would provide “protection among savages” or even—like Carolyn Sydenstricker—represent a “cheap” missionary addition to the male missionary’s work (Welter 1993: 194). In terms of the preparation of missionary couples for their “field,” both male and female missionaries were trained in preparatory seminaries, which, in addition to courses in religion, taught Chinese history, politics, and language. These preparatory institutions and language schools provided equal training for both genders, although there were sometimes additional household economics and childcare classes for women. The level of language proficiency, though, was not tested until the “real-life” conditions of missionary daily routine in China set in. Knowledge of Mandarin or standard Cantonese turned out to be futile in the hinterlands where varieties of Chinese were spoken. Thus, due to their work in the field, some husbands soon gained a linguistic advantage over their wives (Grimshaw 1993: 265). In many cases, though, missionary wives—despite their confinement to the home—“found the spoken language easier to learn than did their husbands,” and thus the issue of language acquisition was likely to cause “dismay” between couples (Hunter 1984: 95–96). In the marriage of Pearl Buck’s parents, for instance, language became a source of power, as Absalom Sydenstricker found his wife’s skill “a little trying . . . reared as he had been in the doctrine of male superiority.” . . . [He] exerted himself in the mastery of written characters, rarely considered necessary for women to acquire, thus making him a “real scholar” and reestablishing his linguistic preeminence in this marriage. (Hunter 1984: 96)

Like Carolyn Sydenstricker, missionary wives occasionally made attempts to work outside of their home and concentrated on those areas and people that their husbands did not have access to. “The prohibitions which barred male missionaries from converting Chinese women reserved them for Western women,” writes Hunter (1984: 15), who goes on to state that the “gender stratification of Chinese society worked to [female missionaries’] benefit” (p. 15).9 Where their husbands mostly did missionary fieldwork, women missionaries’ tasks focused on educational or medical matters—if they had a chance to turn away from their domestic sphere at all. However, this chance to enter the public sphere most often vanished with the arrival of children: frequently, it proved too difficult to reconcile child-rearing responsibilities

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and missionary tasks because the replication of American domestic ideology and values now became a priority, as we have seen in the case of Carie. In fact, the little moves some women had made toward emancipation saw severe backlashes with the new duties of motherhood: confinement to the home and isolation within the walls of missionary compounds were most often intensified in the years of child raising (pp. 112–117). The “burden of child-rearing” (Grimshaw 1993: 267) was later on also paralleled by the burden of losing one’s adolescent children once they were sent home to the United States for secondary education. Also, many women that did (continue to) work often felt they were still “under the salary and support of the parent men’s [missionary] boards” (Hunter 1984: 98), and thus that their projects mostly remained subordinate to those of their husbands (p. 102). It was precisely this lack of institutional support by the home boards, the hierarchical structures inherent in foreign missions and the denial of fullscale membership in their parent missionary societies that enhanced married women missionaries’ self-perception as exiles and triggered their marginalization in the movement. Running through the secondary literature is an imagery of female sacrifice and a language that—in accordance with Pearl Buck—stylizes women missionaries as martyrs, saints, or silently suffering heroines. In addition to these discourses, however, there are alternative assessments of the female missionary enterprise that reflect the two competing concepts of nineteenth-century American womanhood which were also at odds in the arena of foreign missions: true womanhood and new womanhood. “True women” like missionary mothers and wives were perceived (and perceived themselves) as the antithesis to unmarried women who, starting in the years after the Civil War, increasingly went abroad to pursue their own missionary careers.10 The latter, not unlike the New Women at home, found it easier to occupy “rooms of their own,” since they did fieldwork like their male counterparts. The feelings of married women vis-à-vis their unmarried “sisters” were ambivalent: on the one hand, they envied their autonomy, but on the other hand, they occasionally expressed resentment toward them and regarded their presence in China as disruptive (Hunter 1984: 101). Thus, married and single woman missionaries were often seen as being in a competition of “true” versus “new” women. Such a juxtaposition—evoked by missionary boards as well as by some female missionaries themselves and repeated by the cultural histories of missions—was, however, not invariably given, and in some respects, both married and single women engaged in missionary projects that promised to be alternative versions to the imperialistically colored male projects. The female activities I am referring to here anticipated a more general transformation

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of foreign missions into a “social gospel” that was to form the center of the liberal missionary enterprise in the twentieth century (cf. Hutchison 1974: 110–131): medicine and education—although single women were often more visibly active in these areas than married women. Medical work was the smaller area of the two, but the need for female doctors to attend to Chinese women illustrates the way in which Chinese sex segregation proved an important opportunity for Western women to leave the sphere of the home. Christianity here served as a “liberator” not only for Chinese but also for American women (Welter 1993: 198), for in those years female doctors could practice their profession more easily in Asia than back home (Robert 2002: 70). I would not go as far as Barbara Welter (1993: 202) and claim that the influx of female doctors was a real threat for male missionaries, though, because women doctors’ medical treatment was restricted to Chinese women and children—thus to groups that male missionaries did not have access to or did not show an interest in anyway.11 Still, these medical and educational missions were important because they were acts of charity and helped win over the Chinese population.12 Although not a strategic feminist move, Carolyn Sydenstricker’s little step to open a clinic for Chinese women can thus be read as part of this liberal turn of foreign missions into the “social gospel.” A significant part of this shift from “pure” evangelism to the social gospel was women’s work of reforming the educational and social system for Chinese girls and women. For example, the tradition of female footbinding was abolished due to the intervention of women missionaries, who initiated a reform campaign that led to the anti-footbinding edict of 1902. However, it is equally true that many missionaries in an almost arrogant way liked to take the exclusive credit for achievements like this when they “contended to be ‘largely responsible’ for the awakening and the new ambition of the Chinese women” (Hunter 1984: 25). The tensions and the paradox inherent in women’s missions are very strikingly apparent in this case, as I would like to suggest: the focus on the deprivation of women and children in an alien culture and the attempts to improve these conditions allowed women missionaries to present themselves as altruistic and charitable people and to use “American expansion in their own interest” (Brumberg 1982: 367). On the other hand, helping others let the female missionaries forget or suspend the fact that their own feet, too, were often bound in a figurative sense, namely by the supremacy of male missionaries in the movement. In this sense, then, the “otherness” of the “heathens” was instrumentalized by many missionary women: “Rather than examine their own social relations, the bulk of American Protestant women sought to define themselves by what they were not. Indeed, the ‘otherness’ of the non-Christian became the central message of their ethnology” (Brumberg 1982: 355). It can be argued that many

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missionary women in their attempts to define their own identity thus relied on a strategy that Julia Kristeva calls “counterinvestment” (1981: 24): much as they tried to break away from the patriarchal structures of missions, they were still caught in them and aligned with the male missionary project as they adopted this rhetoric of “otherness.” Thus, in their attempts to overcome their position as exiles and (re)define themselves, women missionaries sometimes adopted strategies reminiscent of the more aggressive or even imperialistic understanding of the male mission, and hierarchies of gender were sometimes replicated as hierarchies of race. A crucial question is also to whom missionaries communicated these ambiguous feelings and which channels they used in order to tell of their experiences. One important and general contrast between male and female missionaries’ accounts and testimonies of their activity lies in their choice of genre. While the experiences of men were typically communicated through the genre of (auto)biography in the twentieth century, we learn about women’s experiences and perspectives mostly through private correspondence, namely in letters to family and friends at home, or in diary entries. Also, an abundance of missionary publications designed for women gave a voice to missionary women.13 In them, one can find affirmations of the fact that “years of exile did not distance these women from their American origins” (Grimshaw 1993: 256). However, it would be oversimplified to think of letters by missionary women as more intimate and balanced accounts than the oftentimes heroic descriptions of a virile male activity in men’s accounts: while the contemporary “organizational leadership clearly expected them to be ‘frank and confiding, such as can only be written to mothers and sisters”’ (Brumberg 1982: 353), these letters were simultaneously expected to be composed in a “formulaic uplifting tone” which was set by missionary boards. Consequently, we often look in vain for displays of frustrations, loneliness, or depression in these letters. Pearl Buck’s turn to her parents’ life stories thus helps to gain another perspective on the conditions of American foreign missions and its participants. Seen that way, Buck engages in a project of rescuing or recreating silenced or marginalized voices that Rey Chow calls the “ecology of waste” (1995: 179). This attempt to rescue her parents’ (and especially her mother’s) voice(s) is exactly the purpose which lies at the heart of Buck’s critique of missions. “Making Use of Missionary Pamphlets?”: The Missionary Theme in Buck’s Fiction I would finally like to focus on the question why Pearl Buck downplayed the cultural impact of women missionaries in China and why she presented the

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role of female missionaries in such a one-dimensional or distorted manner when she rescued her missionary parents’ voices by means of the two biographies. If we consider the fact that Buck was a feminist, wouldn’t it make sense for her to turn to the alternative examples of more emancipated women missionaries rather than emphasizing her mother’s victimization? In fact, in view of her critique of foreign missions presented above, the often-voiced verdict on Buck as an “embittered child of Presbyterian missionaries” (Welter 1993: 205) who in her own career became an “ex-missionary” who barely “revisited the subject” (Wacker 2003: 199) seems to ring true, after all. But still, I argue that it would be wrong to assume that Pearl Buck’s missionary heritage evaporated altogether. Rather, she should be placed in line with a younger generation of missionaries in the 1920s and 1930s whom historian Xi Lian has called “liberal missionaries.”14 As the daughters and sons of missionary parents, these younger missionaries (like Henry Luce or Edward Hicks Hume) had become increasingly involved in and entangled with Chinese life and culture. Despite her critique of his narrow-mindedness, naivety, and stubbornness, Pearl Buck shared many of the traits of her father and displayed them in her own project. She had the same “determination to press her views on anyone who would listen” (Wacker 2003: 204), and in this sense really was her father’s daughter. At the same time, however, the shape Buck’s mission took was crucially different from the paternal example. It can be argued that Buck, like the younger generation of missionaries among whom she counts, underwent processes of assimilation and cultural appropriation which can be read as direct responses and renegotiations of the hierarchical and patriarchal missionary projects of the parental generation.15 Thus, Buck did make use of the missionary theme in her fiction, but she left out these alternative, stronger versions of woman missionaries. On the basis of my discussions above, I suggest that Buck did not turn to these figures because a depiction of emancipated woman missionaries and victimized male missionaries would have undermined or complicated her project: in order to document and criticize all facets of the American foreign missions that she considered relevant, Buck had to rely on the dichotomy of a male missionary enterprise that was misogynist and arrogant, and a female missionary experience characterized by exilic passivity and victimization. If she had subverted this model and given a more resonant voice to versions of a female missionary activity suffused with imperialistic undertones, Buck would have needed to revise her entire project of criticizing the misogyny of missions and develop more complex patterns of reasoning instead. In her fiction, Buck, however, reflected upon and addressed the more complex reality in the sense that she created more ambivalent missionary figures. Thus, she tried to correct the image of her father, “humanize” him, and

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expand the (female) ideal of the social gospel to men. It is therefore certainly no coincidence that “neo-missionary” figures abound in the fictional work of Pearl Buck and that these are predominantly male: physicians, philanthropists, or social workers who share some of the qualities of the humanity Buck credited to her mother. In turn, the patriarchal missionary project of her father’s generation clearly loses its momentum in Buck’s fiction. But the legacy of her stern missionary father lived on in her texts. A case in point may be her most celebrated novel, The Good Earth, in which Buck pays a doubtful tribute to her missionary father when she introduces his doppelgänger in a marginal, but revealing episode: A “man, very tall, and lean as a tree that has been blown by bitter winds [with] eyes as blue as ice and a hairy face” (The Good Earth, 1994: 125) hands a pamphlet to Wang Lung, the novel’s protagonist, which shows a picture of Jesus on the cross. Perfectly ignorant of the image and its meaning, Wang Lung carelessly gives the paper to his wife, O-lan. In a move that restores order in the Buckean sense and that resonates with the imagery of (female) feet in missionary and ethnographic writing on China, O-lan—endowed with a pragmatism reminiscent of the one which Buck so much admired in her mother—proves the male missionary’s methods ineffective and futile: she “[takes] it and [sows] it into a shoe sole together with other bits of paper she pick[s] up here and there to make the soles firm” (p. 126).

Notes 1. Thoralf Klein in his talk “Christian Mission and the Internationalization of China, 1830–1950” at the conference Pacific Interactions at the University of Hanover, November 17, 2006. For a written version of this talk, see Klein’s essay in this book. For a summary of the Sydenstrickers’ background in Buck’s missionary childhood in China, consult Peter Conn’s cultural biography on Pearl S. Buck (chapter I). 2. K. Scott Wong uses this term with respect to Chinese American experiences in American Chinatowns. See K. Scott Wong, “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain,” MELUS 20 (Spring 1995), 3–16. It is interesting that this perception of the “forever foreign” links American women in China with another marginalized group, overseas Chinese in the United States, because it suggests an emotional bonding that sometimes triggered the continuation of missionary work in American Chinatowns after female missionaries’ return from Asia. 3. Admittedly, Pearl Buck did not dismiss missions altogether in this speech. She juxtaposed a new generation of missionaries and their flaws with the older generation of “a few great missionaries” (1932: 149) like her father to whom Christ was the cause of going abroad, who were altruistic and self-denying. That this “old”

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patriarchal project was not without its deficiencies, either, shall be discussed in my passages on her parents’ biographies. Carie Sydenstricker’s staging of the home calls to mind the homes of Eastern greenhorns on the Western frontier. For example, Caroline Kirkland in her frontier novel A New Home, Who’ll Follow (1839) presents a similar attempt by her heroine, Mary Clavers, to stage a miniature civilized American East in the West. Jane Hunter draws attention to the similarities between missionary women and pioneer women with respect to their social deprivation, but she also points to a crucial difference between the two groups: “Unlike pioneer women, who often protested the westward move, missionary wives had embarked voluntarily on their perilous adventure and sailed with a sense of vocation in the service of their God” (Hunter 1984: 117). In the case of Carie Sydenstricker and her desperate longing for “the Call,” I would, however, question this assessment. Cf. Welter’s notion of sisterhood between “heathen” and American women (1993: 199); also Brumberg (1982: 362). The Cult of True Womanhood is an American version of the concept of Victorian womanhood, which emerged in the late eighteenth century and idealized the domestic, private, and passive woman in the house. The concept does not allow for an idea of woman “except as something to be perceived and reacted to; she has no body and no personality” (Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1977, 45, 46). A “true woman” is thus a woman who is submissive, pious, domestic, sensitive, affective, and motherly. On the concept of “true womanhood,” also cf. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860” (1966) (Repr. in: Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline, Lucy Maddox, ed. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 43–66). Amy Kaplan discusses the trope of “manifest domesticity” with respect to a variety of examples—both political and literary. She points to the “visions of imperial expansion as martial union” in the context of the annexation of Texas and Mexico (Kaplan 2002: 114) in order to show the relations between the domestic and the foreign. As literary examples of the permeable boundaries between internal and external spaces, she refers to domestic novels like The Lamplighter, The Hidden Hand, and The Wide, Wide World (pp. 129–130). In a similar vein, Kaplan discusses the imperial dimensions of domesticity with respect to the novelist and editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who “gave [ . . . ] attention to the expansion of female influence through her advocacy of female medical missionaries abroad and the colonization of Africa by former black slaves” (p. 121). See also Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830 to 1860 (New York: Haworth, 1982), which Kaplan discusses in her paper. On the separate spheres of male and female missionary activity, also cf. Barbara Welter (1993: 192) or Dana Robert (2002: 70). Most critics agree on the Civil War as a turning point as far as the outlook of female missions is concerned. After the war, American women increasingly “founded agencies of their own to send unmarried women missionaries to the

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heathen in foreign lands. By 1890, the married women of the general mission boards and the single women of the women’s boards together composed 60 percent of the [entire] mission force,” writes Jane Hunter in her seminal study The Gospel of Gentility (1984: xiii). For an in-depth discussion of the roles of single women in the missionary movement see Hunter’s chapter “Single Women and Missionary Community” in The Gospel of Gentility. Also, Robert (2002: 68) and Brumberg (1982: 350) provide useful information on the numerical and institutional developments of women’s missionary boards. Welter, like some other critics, stylizes these female missionaries in a way that depicts them as new women who pose threats to men. This argument obscures the fact that—despite a number of missionary publications that focused on new women such as female missionary doctors—these women for the most part did not really present a challenge to their own society at home. Although analogies, for example, between female missionaries and the Social Reform Movement and the Temperance Movement were sometimes evoked, more “radical women at home” (like Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman) were more accessible and more widely covered than the missionary women battling “only alien forces [. . .] of another society or a ‘lesser’ race” (Hunter 1984: xvi). Cf. Brumberg (1982: 369) and Robert (2002: 69). For a detailed discussion of this aspect see Thoralf Klein’s essay in this book. Heathen Women’s Friend or Light and Life for Heathen Women are but two examples of such missionary journals that, with a high degree of didacticism, consisted of “ethnological descriptions of manners, family life, politics, and culture [. . .] to articulate distinctions between Christian and heathens” (Brumberg 1982: 349). For a discussion of these journals, cf. Brumberg (1982: 349–352). Cf. Xi Lian’s insightful study The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932, in which he particularly focuses on the “liberal missionaries” Pearl S. Buck, Edward H. Hume, and Frank J. Rawlinson. On the (neo-)missionary commitment of these “second generation missionaries,” see Barbara Welter (1993: 197), Patricia Grimshaw (1993: 276), or Xi Lian (1997: 13–17).

References Beecher, Catharine E. 1841. A Treatise on Domestic Economy. Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. “Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology of American Evangelical Women, 1870–1910.” The Journal of American History 69.2 (Sept. 1982): 347–371. Buck, Pearl S. 1932. “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” Harper’s Magazine 166 (1933): 143–155. Buck, Pearl S. 1936a. The Exile. New York: John Day. Buck, Pearl S. 1936b. Fighting Angel. New York: John Day.

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Buck, Pearl S. 1954. My Several Worlds: A Personal Record. New York: John Day. Buck, Pearl S. 1994. The Good Earth [1931]. New York: Washington Square Press. Chow, Rey. 1995. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Cohen, Paul A. 1978. “Christian Missions and Their Impact to 1900.” In: John K. Fairbank, ed. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 543–590. Conn, Peter. 1996. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, Ann. 1977. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: A.A. Knopf. Fairbank, John K. 1974. “Introduction: The Many Faces of Protestant Missions in China and the United States.” In: John K. Fairbank, ed. The Missionary Enterprise in China and America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1–19. Fairbank, John K. 1985. “Introduction: The Place of Protestant Writings in China’s Cultural History.” In: Suzanne Wilson Barnett and John King Fairbank, eds. Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1–18. Grimshaw, Patricia. 1993. “‘Christian Woman, Pious Wife, Faithful Mother, Devoted Missionary’: Conflicts in Roles of American Missionary Women in NineteenthCentury Hawaii.” In: Nancy F. Cott, ed. History of Women in the United States, Vol. 13. Munich, Germany: K.G. Saur, 254–285. Hunter, Jane. 1984. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-ofthe-Century China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hutchison, William R. 1974. “Modernism and Missions: The Liberal Search for an Exportable Christianity, 1875–1935.” In: John K. Fairbank, ed. The Missionary Enterprise in China and America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 110–131. Hutchison, William R. 1987. Errand to the World. American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago, and London: The University of Chicago Press. Kaplan, Amy. 2002. “Manifest Domesticity.” In: Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wieman, eds. The Futures of American Studies. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 111–134. Klein, Thoralf. 2006. “Christian Mission and the Internationalization of China, 1830–1950.” Talk at the Pacific Interactions Conference at the University of Hannover. November 17, 2006. Kristeva, Julia. 1981. “Women’s Time.” Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. Signs 7.1 (Autumn 1981): 13–35. Lian, Xi. 1997. The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University. Liao, Kang. 1997. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge across the Pacific. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Lutz, Jessie G., ed. 1965. Christian Missions in China: Evangelists of What? Boston: D.C. Heath & Co.

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Pascoe, Peggy. 1989. “Gender Systems in Conflict: The Marriages of MissionEducated Chinese American Women, 1874–1939.” Journal of Social History 22.4 (Summer 1989): 631–652. Robert, Dana L. 2002. “The Influence of American Missionary Women on the World Back Home.” Religion and American Culture 12.1 (Winter 2002): 59–89. Ryan, Mary P. 1982. The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830 to 1860. New York: Haworth. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. 1974. “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism.” In: John K. Fairbank, ed. The Missionary Enterprise in China and America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 336–373. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1859. The Minister’s Wooing. New York: Derby and Jackson. Wacker, Grant. 2003. “The Waning of the Missionary Impulse: The Case of Pearl S. Buck.” In: Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker, eds. The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home. Tuscaloosa, AL, and London: The University of Alabama Press, 191–205. Welter, Barbara. 1993. “She Hath Done What She Could: Protestant Women’s Missionary Careers in Nineteenth-Century America.” In: Nancy F. Cott, ed. History of Women in the United States. Vol. 13. Munich, Germany: K.G. Saur, 192–206. Welter, Barbara. 1999. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860” [1966]. Repr. in: Lucy Maddox, ed. Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 43–66. Wong, K. Scott. 1995. “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain.” MELUS 20 (Spring 1995): 3–16.

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CHAPTER 9

The Deserving Heathen: Missionary Ethnography of China and Its American Converts Dominika Ferens

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issionary accounts of China had been appearing steadily in the West after 1807 (the year Protestant missionaries designate as the date of their first entry into “the field”), but the turn of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented flow of China-related publications from missionary presses. Whereas around 1860 Protestant missionary presses printed 100,000 copies of tracts and books a year, by 1905 that number rose to 3,700,000 (Fairbank 1985: 50). This figure included religious tracts, Bible translations, and secular tracts about the West in Chinese on the one hand, and, on the other, descriptions of China and study aids for prospective missionaries in English. Responding to this and other stimuli, unprecedented numbers of American Christians of all denominations crossed the Pacific to work as missionaries, teachers, and medical personnel. Meanwhile, many Chinese converts traveled in the opposite direction to study or solicit financial support for their missions. It was also at the turn of the century that a number of American liberal arts colleges (including Claremont, Mt Holyoke, Oberlin, Wellesley, and Wesleyan) established Christian colleges in China and introduced programs at home to educate both American and Chinese college teachers. According to one source, by 1904, 2708 white missionaries were working in China (Dwight et al. 1904: Appendix I). But the numbers of lay Americans involved in the mission movement far exceeded this figure. (For instance, few people are aware today that home missionary societies drew far more women than did the suffrage movement.)1

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It would be reductive to attribute Americans’ avid interest in the Chinese solely to missionary writings; geopolitical and economic factors surely played an important role, too. I do, however, want to argue that it was predominantly missionary discourse that shaped the American public’s perception of the Chinese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and that it was the construction of the Chinese as what I call the “deserving heathen” that elicited the Americans’ vigorous response. In the first part of this essay, I shall trace the emergence of the idea of the “deserving heathen” in opposition to the “desirable heathen” of Japan (another Asian country subject to intensive textualization in the second half of the nineteenth century2 ). I shall then discuss four missionary ethnographies of China to show how they negotiated mainstream discourses of race, depending on the historical moment and circumstances in which they were written. Missionary publishing was a male-dominated arena; even when in the second half of the nineteenth century Bible women made up 30–50 percent of the white personnel of mission stations, women wrote letters home and occasional conference articles, not books.3 Therefore the four missionary ethnographies analyzed below are by male authors. The claim I shall attempt to substantiate here is that the ideology of religious and cultural conversion, which requires a malleable and receptive “heathen” subject, made some—if not all—missionary writers resistant to racial determinism at a historical moment when essentialist conceptions of race became dominant in the social sciences and in travel writing. In my conclusion, I shall briefly survey some of the long-term consequences of the China mission movement for American academia and for gender and race relations in the United States. While there is ample textual evidence to show that China missionaries were generally more open-minded and more conscious of the precariousness of their enterprise than postcolonial critics are willing to admit, the entanglement of missions with Euro-American imperialism is undeniable; I attempt to address this problem in the final paragraphs. Missionary versus Travel Ethnography When academic ethnography began to define its goals and methods in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, China and Japan fell outside its purview. Professional ethnographers were interested in cultures that had had little or no contact with the West, and neither China nor Japan qualified as “primitive.” Consequently, most of the ethnographic writings we have on China and Japan from that period are those by Protestant missionaries, diplomats, and tourists. For reasons I discuss below, two of these groups—missionaries and lay travelers—wrote a great deal, each generating something of a tradition.4 As I have argued elsewhere (Ferens 2002), Far-Eastern Orientalism split into

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polarized discourses of China and Japan because ethnography in China was first and most influentially done by Protestant missionaries, whereas the most widely read ethnographers of the Japanese were lay travelers in the last quarter of the century.5 Missionaries and lay travelers went to both China and Japan, but there was historically an asymmetry in their respective numbers and in the timing of the two enterprises: proselytizing and tourism. As a rule, British and American missionaries of all Protestant denominations worked on noncompetitive terms: Asia was a large enough field for all (Latourette 1929: 410–15). Significantly, all of them labored in the shadow of the more firmly established Roman Catholic missions active since 1581, which had claimed thousands of converts. Unlike China, Japan remained more or less closed to foreign traffic until 1856, when, by means of a show of power, American Commodore Matthew Perry “opened” the port of Yokohama to foreign trade. However, the Japanese government banned proselytizing until 1873. Interest in Christianity picked up between 1885 and 1895, after which Christian missions, increasingly mistrusted for their association with foreign powers, began steadily losing ground (Cagan 1992: 82–85). By the 1880s, tourism began to flourish. Japan rapidly modernized its tourist infrastructure to cater to Western capitalism’s new leisure class, which flocked to see the famed “ancient Japan” before modernity engulfed it altogether. For a brief moment, it seemed, one could enjoy a glimpse of a “Medieval” Japan in modern comfort and safety. Missionaries and tourists were certainly not the only Westerners to write about the Orient for Western audiences. Yet no other groups made the printed word so central to their enterprise, and none enjoyed the publishing infrastructures that missionaries and travel writers relied on. John K. Fairbank notes that in nineteenth-century China “only missionaries sought direct contact with the common people in the two civilizations [Chinese and Western],” since merchants and diplomats communicated and collaborated only with their “opposite numbers.” Missionaries were, in fact, “the principal if not the sole link between village China and small-town America [and] wrote almost as much as they preached” (Fairbank 1985: 2). To cope with the enormous flow of polyglot writing, mission societies operated presses throughout Asia as well as in the West (Latourette 1929: 437–41). Tourists, on the other hand, came to Asia later in the century, when the commercial press was already large enough to absorb their texts. Writing transformed their experience into a valued commodity that could be sent in installments to a popular magazine or consolidated into a book. Judging by the outpouring of Orientalist travel writings published in London and New York at the turn of the century, few travelers left Japan without a written trace. The operating

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principles behind the two types of presses—one run by charitable organizations, the other commercial—coupled with the different expectations of their readerships—one amenable to a call to Christian endeavor, the other desirous of vicarious travel—made for two distinct literary genres. For both missionaries and travelers, writing was a way to assure the continuity of their respective enterprises. Few ventured into a foreign land without reading around in the vast tradition of relevant geographical and ethnographic texts; in fact, reading often served as a catalyst for travel and a call to Christian duty. The same missionaries who wrote religious tracts in Chinese would occasionally write books and articles on China for their home constituencies in order to maintain the financial support of mission boards and draw new recruits. Travelers likewise envisioned their readers as following in their footsteps. They left trails of landmarks and practical advice in their narratives. Some even brought the reader directly into the text which functioned as an intimate guided tour. Travel was textualized, circulated among readers, and reenacted. Throughout the nineteenth century, missionaries went “into the field” from a deep conviction that Asians needed to be saved from a fate worse than death. When studying an ethnic group they tended to perceive a “lack” to be filled or a cultural difference to be modified. As the very verb “convert” suggests, their purpose was to initiate change. In encounters with non-Christian peoples missionaries had to resolve dilemmas about how much of the Other’s culture they should change before it became Christian. Some were exceedingly attentive to local sensibilities and lifeways; others worked to eradicate “paganism” at any cost. Consequently, missionary ethnographies conceived as both a call to Christian duty and a tool for others “in the field” emphasized those aspects of Chinese culture that were incompatible with Christian morality, and conversely, those which might make the Chinese receptive to change. As Susan Stewart proposes in discussing anthropology’s “missionary connections,” the writings of missionaries rely on “the rhetoric of transformation projected as a rhetoric of writing—the conversion of ‘experience’ or ‘spectacle’ into detail, the conversion of ‘the scene’ into form, and the conversion, ultimately, of ‘other’ into self, ‘self ’ into other” (Stewart 1989: 67). Lay travelers may have observed those same foreign cultural practices, and even imagined change as imminent, but usually wished only for the kind of change that would improve their own comfort on the road. While a handful were no less concerned about the introduction of Western moral, hygienic, and educational standards than were the missionaries, the majority savored exotic differences and moved on. If, like missionaries, travelers exaggerated or exoticized racial and cultural difference, they did so using a vocabulary of “fullness,” not “lack.” Consequently, Japan emerges as a country from which

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one draws aesthetic or spiritual inspiration and takes home a trunkful of precious collectibles. Missionaries tended to see China as a locus of responsibility, long-term commitment, and delayed gratification. For morally responsible Christians, then, China functioned as a vast receptacle into which the Word of the Gospel and the fruits of Western progress must be poured. Travelers might initially come across as more tolerant of difference and more receptive to the non-Western thought. Yet the fact that they were “just passing through,” often without learning the local language, precluded all but the most superficial exchange. Unlike tourists, missionaries needed to communicate directly with Asians, for they were charged with conveying a complex philosophical message. This forced them to acquire a linguistic and cultural proficiency seldom matched by lay travelers in Asia. For instance, writing in 1869, John Nevius relates his efforts to make American churchgoers understand why distributing Bible fragments to Chinese audiences with no prior exposure to Christianity is ineffectual. To his compatriots’ insistence that the language of the Bible is universal, he responds, The difficulties in the right understanding of the Bible by the heathen are of two kinds: the one growing out of the inability of their language to express Christian ideas; and the other relating to allusions to historical facts and personages, and national usages and religious rites, with which they are entirely unacquainted. (John Nevius 1869: 351)

Having pinpointed the cultural—not essential—incompatibility, missionaries set to writing commentaries, moral tales, and essays in dialogue form in Chinese. To persuade effectively, they had to collaborate closely with their Chinese “ghostwriters,” study local rhetorical conventions and literary genres, and shed their cultural naïveté. Cultural confrontation, which was a necessary part of missionary life, worked on both sides, and many missionaries were never quite the same afterwards. The ethnocentric attitude and national and religious absolutism of these men and women cannot be denied [yet] missionaries were far more sensitive to the societies in which they worked than is generally believed. (Welter 1993: 205)

While they inevitably assumed Western cultural superiority, the precariousness of their position6 pushed some missionaries to study Chinese ways seriously and grant intellectual sophistication to those they would convert. More importantly, perhaps, when addressing Western readers they countered scientific efforts to conflate race and culture with what George Stocking

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describes as “the optimistic and embracive egalitarian humanitarianism” of the late eighteenth century, which assumed all races to be capable of cultural progress (Stocking 1968: 28). For missionaries and their sponsors, the belief that culture was not essentially tied to race remained an important way of justifying the project of religious conversion. Meanwhile, the majority of Westerners were gradually swayed by the essentialist arguments of physical anthropology. Again, at the risk of overgeneralizing the differences between the writings of missionaries and travelers, I suggest that the degree of financial dependence and accountability of the writer to an institution or a higher authority left its stamp on the ethnographic narrative. Missionaries were not, as a rule, people of means; for many lower-middle-class men and women without an independent income, mission work was a welcome and respectable if unenviable career (Hunter 1984: 11). As salaried workers of European or American religious societies, missionaries were accountable for the results of their work; their ethnographic writings are, in a sense, an ongoing dialogue with the constituency that delegated them. Such accounts often focus on the hardships of fieldwork, or recite a litany of difficulties in approaching the Chinese and making oneself understood–as illustrated by the case of Rev. Arthur Smith below. Travelers were less likely to have such concerns. They rarely became engaged with a single group for any length of time, had no urgent message to communicate to the “natives,” and no employer to report to. One-Third of Humanity: W.H. Medhurst’s China: Its State and Prospects In the early years of the nineteenth century, ethnographic accounts of China appeared sporadically in missionary journals, reports, and letters. Among the first book-length works was China: Its State and Prospects by W.H. Medhurst, first published in England in 1838 and reprinted in the United States in the same year.7 His book was the direct result of the need to communicate to Protestants in the West the enormous extent of work to be done in China and its potential benefits. China is not straightforward ethnography. Part statistical study, part history, part ethnographic investigation, and part travel narrative, its underlying motive is to study the Chinese: “As we contemplate the introduction of a new religion into the country, it is natural to enquire, what are their present views of divine and eternal things; to show the defects of their own systems, as a prelude to the recommendation of another” (Medhurst 1838: vi). Once we know the custom of the country, the text argues, we will be in a better position to “turn” that custom around, “bring people aright” and “bring them under instruction” (Medhurst 1838: 69). But

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the description of specific “superstitions” and “pagan rituals” is mostly left to future writers. What Medhurst wants to establish in the minds of his readers is the concept of a great and deserving nation, one that “rises superior to every unevangelized country” (Medhurst 1838: 14). This he does, among other things, by devoting over 50 pages to various estimates of China’s population. Based on available statistics he presents a dismal vision of one-third of humanity unenlightened by the Gospel, a full million Chinese dying every month with no hope of salvation. The hundred pages Medhurst allots to China’s technological and cultural achievements present a positive image of a country that possesses “as much civilization as Turkey now, or England a few centuries ago” (Medhurst 1838: 87). As something quantifiable, civilization can and ought to be shared— poured through the presses in the form of Chinese-language Bibles and tracts. Rude or polite, suspicious or trusting, indifferent or eager: these are the terms which limit Medhurst’s study of the Chinese as he encounters them on his voyage. But whether ignorant or shy or prejudiced against foreigners, the Chinese are invariably imagined as needy, capable of change, and deserving. Should these arguments not move the reader sufficiently, Medhurst, still representing Chinese en masse, proposes that the gospel and trade can advance hand in hand in China, a giant market for Western manufactured goods. Still more urgently, he presents the Chinese as a potential emigration threat: they “are bursting forth at every side” (Medhurst 1838: 74). While Christianizing the Chinese may not help to contain them, Christian migrants are certainly less threatening than “heathens.” A Prayer for the Heathen Tea-Picker: Justus Doolittle’s Social Life of the Chinese Justus Doolittle, who served in China in the years 1850–1873, took up where Medhurst left off: he produced Social Life of the Chinese (1865), a book that is virtually all ethnography, bracketed by descriptions of Fuchau (Fuzhou) and Peking (Beijing). The 800 or so pages in between are divided into chapters on such topics as “Betrothal and Marriage,” “Superstitious Treatment of Disease,” “Death, Mourning, and Burial,” and “Meritorious and Charitable Practices.” Doolittle was a master collector of all cultural deviations from the Christian norm. It is only as a matter of form that in the preface Doolittle states his intent to let Chinese speak for themselves about “their singular customs and opinions [and give the] rationale of some of them” (Doolittle 1865: I, i). Emphasizing rituals and traditions for which even his Chinese informants seem to have no rational explanation, Doolittle delineates a whole sphere of activities and beliefs that, interesting as they are, beg to be

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eradicated. The effect of absurdity is magnified by the piling on of endless detail, the more peculiar or sensational the better. Reading Doolittle, one begins to understand that his goal is to compile a catalog of sinful practices on an unprecedented scale, both as a manual for future missionaries, and as a way of convincing readers back home of the enormity of the task ahead. As a rule, the page headings in the book reflect the most sensational piece of information on the page, even if it is marginal. “MARRYING THE WIFE OF A LIVING MAN” heads page 107 in Vol. I, though the page ends with the words, “The custom of marrying the wife of a living man is not very common.” And yet no matter how unsympathetic Doolittle’s treatment of Chinese practices, it bears no trace of racial determinism. In the opening he argues that Chinese have merely been held back by Buddhist and Daoist beliefs, but are otherwise remarkably receptive and advanced. Ending the book, Doolittle returns to his antiracist argument. He attacks American congregations for their inability to sympathize with China while “their interest, and sympathy, and prayers are freely bestowed on many other lands.” It is inhumane, he argues, to withhold prayer (and perhaps funds) merely because China appears to his readers as “an uninteresting field” and its people as “unattractive” (Doolittle 1865: II, 430–31). Alluding to his own vivid description of tea production, Doolittle attempts to infuse tea with a symbolic value, making it a daily reminder of Western obligations toward China whose cheap labor it exploits: May the connection between tea and missions—between the drinking of tea and the offering of prayer for the heathen tea-picker—in the experience of Christians, be very evident and intimate. May the tea-drinker become a constant and ardent prayer-offerer in [sic] behalf of the Chinese, as well as a liberal supporter of the missions among them. (Doolittle 1865: II, 436)

Thus Doolittle attempts to make the Chinese real to his audience, to bind the reader of ethnography in the metropolis to the ethnographic subject on the imperial periphery, to make the tea-drinker aware of the economic and moral ties that bind him or her to the tea-picker—and to make the missionary an indispensable link between them. Not surprisingly perhaps, 30 years after it was first published, Social Life of the Chinese remained one of the most widely used resources on Chinese culture. Even 60 years later, mission historian Kenneth Scott Latourette classified it as “popular or semi-popular,” but recommended it as a significant contribution to the missionary effort in China (Latourette 1929: 436).

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A Nation of Prosperity, Happiness, and Refinement: John L. Nevius’s China and the Chinese Just eight years after Doolittle’s Social Life of the Chinese was first serialized in a missionary periodical, Rev. John L. Nevius, who lived in China from 1854 to 1868, began to question Doolittle’s ways of knowing the Chinese. In China and the Chinese he writes, “Correspondents and editors of newspapers who wish to make their articles on China and the Chinese readable and interesting, gladly seize and exaggerate upon anything which can be made to appear grotesque and ridiculous” (John Nevius 1869: 275). Without naming his precursor, Nevius declares his intent to “go in opposition to generally received conclusions” (John Nevius 1869: 275). His book is not a radical departure from established ethical and ethnographic standards: it, too, is organized around clusters of Chinese cultural practices incompatible with Christianity, and it shares its layout and even many standard illustrations with Doolittle’s book. Nonetheless, it does spring from a critical awareness of the missionary tradition, and tries to work against it in small ways. More vehemently than Medhurst or Doolittle, Nevius rejects the discourse of racial inferiority and superiority: What did we know fifty years ago of the steam-boat, the railroad, and the telegraph? And is our comparative want of knowledge a few years ago and that of our ancestors to be taken as evidence of inferiority of race and intellect? . . . Intellectual power manifests itself in many ways. (John Nevius 1869: 281)

Similarly, he repeatedly counters Western stereotypes of the Chinese with Chinese stereotypes of Westerners. To illustrate how cultural stereotypes are formed, at one point he recounts an incident of being drawn to a street crowd in an inland city to find that, to his chagrin, a “Chinaman recently returned from the West” was showing lewd “stereoscopic” images (presumably of white women) at a small fee in the streets of Chinese cities (284). Since Chinese public opinion of Westerners could make or mar the work of missionaries, people like Nevius had not only to be attuned to it but also to shape it as best they could by projecting appropriate images of Westernness. To take a specific case of Nevius’s rewriting of Doolittle, we may look at their treatment of widowhood. Both writers make use of the same illustration captioned “Honorary Stone Portal to the Memory of Virtuous and Filial Widows” (Figure 9.1). Doolittle inserts the drawing into a four-page section on various modes of “sutteeism” or ritual suicide, though he mentions that such portals are usually erected to honor women who choose not to remarry. Nevius, on the other hand, uses the same plate in a chapter titled “Benevolent

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“Honorary Stone Portal to the Memory of Virtuous and Filial Widows”

Institutions of China” in which for two pages he discusses societies that, by funding stipends and asylums, support widows and orphaned children. While his predecessors emphasized dirt and poverty, Nevius writes about a China of “general prosperity, happiness, and refinement” (John Nevius 1869: 46). He locates the source of this prosperity in Confucianism, a moral code that makes for rational and benevolent human relations. While he, too, lays out the standard ethnographic material—religious beliefs and rites, superstitions, modes of divination, and linguistic issues—he omits other social customs that concerned Doolittle. Even more importantly, in China and the Chinese most practices and institutions are discussed in a matter-offact tone, rationalized wherever possible, and even compared favorably with Western ones. Writing a deliberately anti-sensationalist ethnography, Nevius also takes a stand against scientific race discourses. In the following passage he attempts to discredit the authority of polygenism, an anthropological theory according to which the human races are not descended from a common ancestry, their differences thus being unbridgeable.8

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Not long since a course of popular and scientific lectures was delivered in Western New York by an individual from one of our Eastern cities. The object of the lecturer appears to have been the glorification of the great Anglo-Saxon race. He had human skulls and portraitures, and historical facts, and scientific deductions, to prove conclusively to his delighted and complacent auditors that they belonged to a race far superior to all others. Other peoples and tribes were the results of separate creations, and could never share with us either our form of civilization or of religion. (John Nevius 1869: 359)

The armchair anthropologist with his “skulls, and portraitures, and historical facts” would, within the next two decades, displace the authority of the missionary fieldworker. But in 1869, Nevius demonstrates his confidence by merely casting a shadow of doubt over his opponent’s “facts,” and lets his own book stand as counterevidence. As a mission worker sensitive to the conflation of race and culture, Nevius pinpoints the direct correlation between the ideology of white supremacy and the anthropological objectification of racial Others. Though only four years separate his work from Doolittle’s, Nevius wrote after the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which he hoped would normalize United States – China relations and revitalize the traffic of people, goods, and ideas between the two nations.9 He was a strong defender of Chinese immigration to the United States and, contrary to public opinion on the West Coast where the majority of Chinese immigrants resided, he argued that Chinese people’s “quiet habits and industry are gradually winning the esteem and confidence of our people; and it is to be hoped that they will receive such treatment from our government and citizens as to attract to our shores a large number of persons from the more intelligent and influential classes” (John Nevius 1869: 436).

Inflexible Obstinacy and Absence of Nerves: Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics China missionaries of Nevius’s generation continued to write against both Sinophobia and scientific racism; meanwhile, Social Darwinism and notions like Paul Broca’s theory of “zoological distance” between the races were gaining strength in the West.10 Cultural difference was slowly being reified—even by missionaries. Soon after Nevius published China and the Chinese, Arthur H. Smith began his missionary service in China. Twenty years later, Smith wrote a series of articles on “Chinese characteristics” for the North-China Daily News, naturalizing the ostensible backwardness of the Chinese. Much

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had happened since the 1860s to alter Western attitudes toward China. The accelerating industrial development at the time gave Smith and his contemporaries a sense of cultural and technological superiority that Nevius was still able to keep in check a few decades earlier by reminding his readers that the steamboat and telegraph were relatively new inventions. Smith quotes freely from British and American secular thinkers, makes references to Matthew Arnold’s cultural theory and Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest,” and employs the fashionable notion of “race decay.” His commentary on “The Absence of Nerves” in the Chinese is informed by George M. Beard’s popular-scientific study of American Neurasthenia (1884). He is careful to establish himself as an erudite and broad-minded man, as well as a Sinologist whose authority rests solidly on 22 years of experience in China. Assuming the stance of a scientist, he insists that Chinese Characteristics is “not intended to represent the point of view of a missionary, but that of an observer not consciously prejudiced, who simply reports what he sees” (Smith 1894: 14). The language of science legitimates his study and dictates its central terms. It also legitimates his frustration with the Chinese, whom he has utterly failed to convert. Where his predecessors spoke of the Chinese as a “nation” or “people,” only occasionally using “race,” Smith treats his subjects as a homogenous “race” throughout. What the Chinese do, Smith argues, must be understood in terms of what they are—as a race. Smith’s psychological portrait of Chinese society is organized in terms of racial traits. Each trait is amply illustrated with anecdotal evidence and linked to a set of others, showing how Chinese institutions function, or rather fail to function. Like his scholarly counterparts, Smith uses the “ethnographic present” even for some of the personal anecdotes. Single events acquire a timeless quality—the quality Smith calls “general truth”—as in the chapter entitled “A Talent for Misunderstanding”: A boatman or a carter who is engaged to go wherever the foreigner who hires his boat may direct, sometimes positively refuses to fulfill his contract. The inflexible obstinacy of a Chinese carter on such occasions is aptly illustrated by the behavior of one of his mules, which, on coming to a particularly dusty place in the road, lies down with great deliberation to its dust bath. The carter meantime lashes the mule with his whip to the utmost limit of his strength, but in vain. The mule is as indifferent as if a fly were tickling it. (Smith 1894: 60)

It is difficult to read this passage without picturing a vast landscape inhabited by obstinate carters lashing their equally obstinate mules as the latter roll in the dust. Twenty of Smith’s 26 chapter headings carry negative judgments

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(“Intellectual Turbidity,” “Contempt for Foreigners,” “Absence of Sincerity,” and so on), and even the chapters in “Economy” or “Benevolence” tend to stress the absurd lengths to which the Chinese take these virtues. The image of the speaker that emerges on page after page is that of an aging man who has spent the best part of his life on a dusty road or muddy canal, lodging in a farmer’s hut or recovering in his own well-staffed mission home after another trip to the interior—a man listing his frustrations with an unrewarding job. Despite the initial claim to a morally neutral standpoint, Smith ends the study with the following conclusions: “What the Chinese lack is not intellectual ability. It is not patience, practicality, nor cheerfulness, for in all these qualities they greatly excel. What they lack is character and conscience” (Smith 1894: 317). The lack that Smith’s text constructs for us—that glaring absence of character—can only be filled by the “Christian civilisation” (Smith, 1894: 330). Smith’s focus on Chinese character traits is symptomatic of his era, when the notion of “character” covered everything we would now subsume under “culture.” But whereas for Smith’s anthropologically minded contemporaries “character” was hereditary and virtually immutable, Smith, despite his disheartening experience, continued to believe Christianity could change “character” (Boeckmann 2000: 37). As Cathy Boeckmann explains, this particular brand of American scientific racism evolved during the era of reconstruction as a way to reinforce the color line. When it became increasingly difficult to defend racial determinism based on physical racial traits (cranium size, skin color, and so on),11 scientists shifted their attention to the invisible workings of the brain, the seat of character (Boeckmann 2000: 47). “Human evolution is spiritual, not bodily” argued Joseph Le Conte, a proponent of this new racialism. “Organic evolution is the change of form and making of new species. . . . Man, on the other hand, changes the environment . . . therefore, his evolution is not by change of form . . . but by the change of character and elevation of the plane of his activity” (Le Conte quoted in Boeckmann 2000: 35). Since the “character” of some racial groups such as “the colored race . . . is on the downward grade,” as claimed Frederick Hoffman in Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), it is pointless for “superior races to lift the inferior races to their own elevated position” (Hoffman quoted in Boeckmann 2000: 17). As a missionary, Smith continued to believe in “uplifting” the Chinese, even as he described their character in the language of contemporary science. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, infused as it is with a variety of lay and scientific racist discourses, may appear to be a radically different text from his missionary predecessors’, when in fact it springs from the same thematic preoccupations as Medhurst’s China or Doolittle’s Social Life of the Chinese, and

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posits Christian moral responsibility to uplift the Chinese. It merely changes the terms of the debate about heathen cultural practices, making them an expression of racial predispositions. The race itself is nonetheless worth saving for Christ. Conclusion: The American Converts Such ethnographies as Smith’s called Americans to take responsibility for the spiritual and material well-being of the “deserving heathen.” Written in the spirit of long-term commitment to the Chinese, these texts were usually based on many years of cross-cultural contacts. But where travel writers (particularly those who went to Japan) regretted or were ambivalent about the modernization of Asia, the purpose of missionaries was precisely the opposite: to effect cultural change and make the Other more like the Self. Given this aim, their writings tended not to glamorize indigenous traditions; they argued for the conversion of the Other, and attempted to convert Christian readers in the West to the missionary cause. Just how successful they were in this last respect few Europeans or Americans today are likely to realize. Documenting the many consequences of the China mission movement is beyond the scope of this paper: such work is being carried out by scholars with better access to archival resources.12 I shall only point to several areas of American life altered by missionary writings about China. Not only did thousands of individual Americans commit themselves to years of proselytizing, operating orphanages, schools, and hospitals “in the field,” but whole institutions, such as small liberal arts colleges, embraced mission work by establishing branches in Chinese cities. The traffic of people and ideas between the Chinese Christian colleges and their founding institutions is currently being investigated under a project titled “The American Context of China’s Christian Colleges.” Its coordinators highlight what they call the “reflux story”: the reverberations of the China experience at home, in the United States, particularly its effects on the American colleges closely associated with colleges in China. Among the changes affecting the American colleges the project enumerates: the constant movement of American graduates between China and the United States during the Republican Era; the internationalization of the student body at these college campuses with the enrolment of Chinese students; the initiation of a course at Wesleyan in 1914 on comparative government, including units on India, China, and Japan; the influence of Americans with China missionary experience on such emerging academic disciplines as anthropology, linguistics, and area studies programs, as well as their contributions to the study of comparative religion and comparative botany. “Thus, even decades after the Christian college era ended in

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China in the early 1950s, important traces of its impact continue to be visible on the US and Chinese sides” (“American Context”). In the first decades of the twentieth century, the voice of American missionaries was heeded in Washington. According to historian Marius B. Jansen, unlike President Taft, Woodrow Wilson “showed a more idealistic and even visionary approach that was informed by his missionary friends.. . . The missionary opinion . . . was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, indeed euphoric, about the Revolution of 1911 [which] seemed to augur well for the evangelization of China” (1984: 259). Wilson’s policy toward China was, to some extent, shaped by his missionary correspondents’ conviction that the United States could help bring about a political as well as a moral revolution in China. Also, in this period, former China missionaries established missions in several American Chinatowns. In addition to proselytizing, they spoke out against Sinophobia and racial discrimination, including the exclusion laws. Although Chinese exclusion continued until after World War II, such missionary interventions may have helped to quell racial crises at the local level. As several historians have also argued, the foreign mission movement enabled many American middle-class women to challenge the ideology of the separate spheres and carve out professional careers in education and medicine. Other women rose to positions of relative power as fund-raisers and administrators of missionary societies, including some, like the Woman’s Union Missionary Society (est. 1861), operated exclusively by women.13 Once firmly established in the mission movement, individual women began to challenge sex discrimination and claim both lay and clergy rights for women (Robert 1996: 173–189). Missionary women’s conferences held annually in China allowed women to see each other as a critical mass and to address what today might be seen as feminist concerns. Historian Barbara Welter suggests that, paradoxically, the chief beneficiaries of American women’s involvement in mission work were the women themselves: The logic of women influencing women did not bring about converts; nothing the missionaries did, with few exceptions, paid off numerically. But the recruiting of women for nineteenth-century Protestant missions created a new role and status for them within one of the most important movements of organized religion. (1993: 205)

The teleology of this story of trans-pacific exchange must, however, be tempered by a reflection on the missionary discourse of the “deserving heathen” and its “opposite number”: the white missionary. Perhaps most disturbingly, the “deserving heathen” played a role in justifications of American cultural

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imperialism. In his 1907 handbook for prospective missionaries, The Uplift of China, Rev. Arthur H. Smith repeatedly drew on the language of Manifest Destiny, moving the Frontier across the Pacific. About China missionaries he wrote: “The men and women who did this pioneering in the face of howling mobs, often with scarcely a moment of assured respite, are certainly worthy of as much honor as those who first subdued the primeval wilderness of America in the face of hostile Indians” (Smith 1907: 158). In Smith’s vision, the Chinese become the agents of colonization: Their capacity for work, for adaptation, and for content, make the Chinese in every land where they have settled excellent immigrants. Without their assistance it is difficult to see what is to be done to develop the tropics. With their assistance, in due time the whole earth may be subdued. (Smith 1907: 42)

Several pages later this idea is restated: “To capture this race for Christ means the early conquest of the whole world” (Smith 1907: 47). When contrasted with the “deserving heathen,” Americans could feel generous, progressive, “easy-going,” and “emancipated from the rule of custom” (Smith 1907: 66). Ethnographic accounts of Chinese women, in turn, allowed white American women to construct themselves as fully emancipated, and thus had the effect of naturalizing their position in American society. While they waged campaigns against such drastically discriminatory practices as footbinding and polygamy in China, they generally failed to perceive patriarchal practices within their own culture, let alone challenge discrimination against African American women. Returning to China, missionaries may have been instrumental in establishing comparative government courses and area studies at American colleges, but they also played a significant role in formulating the “Oriental problem” at the Chicago School of Sociology. The problematic assumptions underlying the Pacific Survey of Race Relations and the many subsequent studies of Chinese and Japanese American communities conducted by the Chicago School are analyzed in Henry Yu’s Thinking Orientals (2001), which includes a balanced assessment of missionary involvement in the social sciences. What Yu’s study and my own encounter with missionary writers suggest is that while scholars today should be more attentive to the once powerful missionary voice and acknowledge that the missionaries’ (not their lay counterparts’) understanding of race and culture may have been closer to our own, we should also rigorously analyze their writings’ entanglement with imperialist religious discourses and American foreign policy toward China.

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Notes 1. Because twentieth-century feminists have so thoroughly documented the history of the Woman Suffrage Movement, and because this history fits neatly into the broader American narrative of the progressive extension of civil rights, it looms large in our collective memory of nineteenth-century social history. Yet, as Ellen DuBois points out, woman suffrage remained a “guerilla force,” “a distinctly minority movement in the nineteenth century. The very thing that made suffragism the most radical aspect of nineteenth-century feminism—its focus on the public sphere and on the non-familial role of women—was the cause of its failure to establish a broad base” (1993: 8). Most middle-class women at the time embraced the doctrine of separate spheres and saw in woman suffrage little more than a potential source of conflict in the family (p. 7). By contrast, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and missionary societies did have enormous popular support. For instance, in the 1890s, Americans were donating as much as $1.5 million annually to missionary boards (Welter 1993: 200). 2. There are of course many reasons for this discursive split: the war between China and Japan at the end of the nineteenth century and the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 are often cited as reasons for this divergent perception of the two countries in the United States. Other factors include China’s economic and political decline in the second half of the nineteenth century paralleled by Japan’s technological and military advances, the differences in how the two governments regulated foreign traffic within their territories, as well as the emigration restrictions they placed on their own citizens. Even the relative size of Japan and China contributed to the disparate images: one was smaller and easily accessible by sea, the other loomed large and impenetrable; one, though densely populated, restricted emigration and focused on colonizing its Asian neighbors, the other seemed ready to spill its untold “hungry millions” across the world. My intention is not to displace these well-documented geopolitical explanations, but to show that nineteenth-century missionary writings equipped Westerners with ways of understanding geopolitical change. See Ferens (2002). 3. “Bible women” were usually lower-ranking missionaries, though stations staffed entirely by women were not uncommon toward the end of the century. They proselytized mostly to women, ran orphanages, hospitals, and schools. Jane Hunter’s The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-theCentury China (1984) is almost entirely based on women’s letters. Rosemary Cagan, author of A Sensitive Independence: Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient (1992), draws on letters and articles in missionary periodicals. Unexplored private correspondence still fills archives across the United States; see Archie Crouch et al., eds. Christianity in China: A Scholar’s Guide to Resources in the Libraries and Archives of the United States (1989). Helen Nevius, the author of Our Life in China (1869), probably had better publishing opportunities as the wife of Rev. John Nevius, a prominent figure in China missionary circles.

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4. The middle sections of this paper—“Missionary versus Travel Ethnography” and the discussion of missionary ethnographies—are excerpted and revised fragments from my earlier work, Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (2002). 5. Although I argue for the predominance of a missionary ethnographic tradition in literature about China and a distinct strand of secular travel writing on Japan, I hope my two provisional categories will not obscure the wide range of genres and perspectives within each group. 6. In the economic and political turmoil of nineteenth-century China, missionaries were frequently the targets of nationalistic reaction; reports of violent crimes against missionaries and their families were not infrequent. Thoralf Klein in this book discusses the “missionary cases” in greater detail. Treated as intruders, foreign missionaries usually remained in China on sufferance, even when backed by the power of Britain and the United States, which were vying for economic and political influence in Asia. 7. For a detailed account of Medhurst’s career, see Jane Kate Leonard, “W.H. Medhurst: Rewriting the Missionary Message (1985).” 8. For a historical interpretation of polygenism, see George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution, 1968: 42–68. 9. The Burlingame Treaty, whose text Nevius cites in an appendix, states that American missionaries and their converts in China “shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience,” while “Chinese subjects visiting or residing in the United States shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, and exemptions in respect to travel and residence as may be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation” (John Nevius 1869: 456). 10. Broca used the concept of “zoological distance” to explain the alleged infertility of certain interracial unions. See Broca, On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo (1864). For an extended discussion of mid-nineteenth-century race theories, including Gobineau, Hotze, and Knox, see Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (1995). 11. At this time the United States witnessed momentous social change, including an increase in bi/multiraciality, racial passing, and the rise of individuals of color to positions of prominence, all of which undermined biological determinism grounded solely on external markers of race. 12. Thoralf Klein’s essay in this book is a prime example. An extensive bibliography of American China Mission by Charles W. Hayford is available at . Another valuable resource is the ongoing Web-based archival project funded by the Ricci Institute, the Ricci 21st Century Roundtable Database, which allows users to browse and search information related to contributions of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox missionaries to China. . Eleven American liberal arts colleges now collaborate on a project investigating the interaction between the China Christian colleges and American liberal arts colleges between 1900 and 1950; it includes a Web-based archive at

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. Women’s involvement in the China mission movement has been amply documented by Susan E. Warrick in a bibliography titled “Women in the Wesleyan and United Methodist Traditions” . 13. Whereas in 1830 women made up around 49 percent of all American mission workers (mostly as wives of male missionaries), by 1893 they accounted for over 60 percent (Welter 1993: 200). Barbara Welter wryly points out that women’s entry into the mission field should be understood not so much in terms of a victory won but rather as the result of “strategic retreat by the opposition,” whereby women took on tedious and largely unrewarding work (Welter 1993: 192).

References “American Context of China’s Christian Colleges.” Wesleyan University. Aug. 29, 2003. Oct. 20, 2007 . Boeckmann, Cathy. 2000. A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892–1912. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Broca, Paul. 1864. On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo. London: Longman. Cagan, Rosemary R. 1992. A Sensitive Independence: Canadian Methodist Missionary Women in the Orient, 1881–1925. Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Crouch, Archie R. et al., eds. 1989. Christianity in China: A Scholar’s Guide to Resources in the Libraries and Archives of the United States. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. “Chinese Women Doctors.” The New York Times (July 21, 1915): 20. Doolittle, Rev. Justus. 1865. Social Life of the Chinese, Vols I and II. New York: Harper. “Dr. Yamei Kin’s Lecture.” College News (December 2, 1903): 8. DuBois, Ellen. 1993. “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes towards the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism.” In: Nancy F. Cott, ed. History of Women in the United States. Vol. 19. Munich, Germany: K.G. Saur, 3–11. Dwight, H.O., et al., eds. 1904. The Encyclopaedia of Missions. Second Edition. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. Fairbank, John K. 1985. “Introduction: The Place of Protestant Writings in China’s Cultural History.” In: Suzanne Wilson Barnett and John King Fairbank, eds. Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1–18. Ferens, Dominika. 2002. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hayford, Charles W., ed. 2003. “American China Missions: An Introductory Bibliography.” Apr. 23, 2003. Oct. 28, 2007. Hunter, Jane. 1984. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-ofthe-Century China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Jansen, Marius B. 1984. “The 1911 Revolution and the United States East Asian Policy.” In: Eto Shinkichi and Harold U. Schiff, eds. The 1911 Revolution in China. Tokyo, Japan: University of Tokyo Press. Latourette, Kenneth Scott. 1929. A History of Christian Missions in China. New York: Macmillan. Leonard, Kate. 1985. “W.H. Medhurst: Rewriting the Missionary Message.” In: Suzanne Wilson Barnett and John King Fairbank, eds. Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 47–59. Medhurst, W.H. 1838. China: Its State and Prospects. Boston: Crocker and Brewster. Nevius, Helen. 1869. Our Life in China. New York: Robert Carter. Nevius, John L. 1869. China and the Chinese. New York: Harper. Robert, Dana Lee. 1996. “The Methodist struggle over higher education in Fuzhou, China, 1877–1883.” Methodist History 34 (April): 173–189. “Ricci 21st Century Roundtable on the History of Christianity in China.” Ricci Institute for Chinese – Western Cultural History. Mar. 26, 2007. Oct. 26, 2007. . Smith, Arthur H. 1894. Chinese Characteristics. New York: Fleming H. Revell. Smith, Arthur H. 1907/1912. The Uplift of China. New York: Missionary Education Movement. Stewart, Susan. 1989. “Antipodal Expectations: Notes on the Formosan ‘Ethnography’ of George Psalmanazar.” In: George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 44–73. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1968. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. New York: Macmillan. Warrick, Susan E., ed. 2007. “Women in the Wesleyan and United Methodist Traditions: A Bibliography.” General Commission on Archives and History. United Methodist Church. Oct. 26, 2007 . Welter, Barbara. 1993. “She Hath Done What She Could: Protestant Women’s Missionary Careers in Nineteenth-Century America.” In: Nancy F. Cott, ed. History of Women in the United States. Vol. 13. Munich, Germany: K.G. Saur, 192–206. Young, Robert J.C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge. Yu, Henry. 2001. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

About the Contributors

Yong Chen is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where he also served as the University’s Associate Dean of Graduate Studies from 1999 to 2004. He received his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University. He is the author of Chinese San Francisco 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community (Stanford University Press, 2000). His research on diverse topics such as Chinese American history, U.S. ethnic food, and higher education has been published in various leading academic journals and has received much public attention in the United States and China. He has been appointed Guest Professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Senior Research Fellow at Peking University. Dominika Ferens is Adjunct Professor at the Institute of English Studies, Wroclaw University, Poland. She received an M.A. in English from Wroclaw University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her interests include Asian American literature, ethnography and ethnographic fiction, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, travel narratives, and popular fiction. She is the author of a study on early Asian American literature, Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (University of Illinois Press, 2002), as well as the coeditor of Traveling Subjects: American Journeys in Space and Time (Rabid, 2004). Madeline Hsu is Director of the Center for Asian American Studies and Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1996. In Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882– 1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000; 2002 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award) she explored the intricate interactions between South Chinese and Chinese American structures of self-identification and representation, and the numerous interlinkages that suffused Chinese and Chinese American communities. Thoralf Klein is Assistant Professor in East Asian History at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He is a specialist in Chinese cultural and social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the history of religion (especially Christianity) in China.

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His more recent projects focus on the incorporation of China in transnational and transcultural processes. Recent publications include Geschichte Chinas von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart [“A History of China from 1800 to the Present”] (Schöningh 2007). Vanessa Künnemann is Assistant Professor in American Studies at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany. Her research focuses on questions of gender and ethnicity in American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century, on intercultural exchange, and on popular culture. Her current project is concerned with missionary potentials in the oeuvre of the American bestselling novelist Pearl S. Buck. Ruth Mayer holds the Chair of American Studies at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany. She has published widely on phenomena of cultural contact, scientific conceptualization, diasporization, and globalization. Her publications include Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization (University Press of New England 2002) and Diaspora: Eine kritische Begriffsbestimmung (Transcript, 2005). Since November 2006, she has been the head of a four-year research project on Chinese/American interactions around the turn of the twentieth century, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG]). Klaus Mühlhahn is Professor of History and of East Asian Cultures and Languages at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research focuses on modern Chinese social and cultural history, in particular Chinese legal history, human rights, and the history of Sino-Western interactions. His most recent publications are Criminal Justice in China– A History (Harvard University Press, 2009) and two edited volumes The Limits of Empire, New Perspectives on Imperialism in Modern China (LIT, 2008) and (coedited with Mechthild Leutner and Izabella Goikhmann) Reisen in chinesischer Geschichte und Gegenwart: Erfahrungen, Berichte, Zeugnisse, (Harrassowitz, 2008). Nicola Spakowski is Professor of History at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. Her main research interest is the history of modern and contemporary China. In particular, she has worked on historiography, feminism, military history, and processes of internationalization, globalization, and regionalization in China. She is the author of Helden, Monumente, Traditionen: Nationale Identität und historisches Bewußtsein in der VR China [“Heroes, Monuments, Traditions: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in the PRC”] (LIT, 1999). K. Scott Wong is the James Phinney Baxter III Professor of History and Public Affairs (and the current Chair of the American Studies Program) at Williams College. He has written numerous articles in journals and anthologies and with Sucheng Chan has coedited Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era (Temple University Press, 1998). Most recently, he published “Americans First”: Chinese Americans and the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2005).

Index

Agamben, Giorgio, 94–5, 96 Ah Quin, 21, 26–7, 35 Americanization, 21–2, 26, 108–9, 112, 114, 119, 126–36, 198–9 Anderson, Benedict, 5, 8–9 Angel Island, 87–8, 93–5, 96, 97, 98, 117, 123 Angel Island poetry, 93, 123 Asian American Studies, 13, 23 Asian Studies, 13 Beecher, Catharine, 173 Bertillon, Alphonse, see biometrics biometrics, 95–8, 99, 100 Boxer Indemnity scholarships, 106, 109, 110–13, 114, 115, 116 Boxer uprising, 4, 11, 65, 106, 109, 110–13, 114, 115, 116 Boycott, 190–5, 22, 29, 32–4, 96, 106, 109, 110, 112 Buck, Pearl S., 12, 126, 151, 161–79 The Exile, 161–3, 166–71 Fighting Angel, 162, 166–71 The Good Earth, 126, 179 “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions”, 162, 163–6 Buddhism, 151–2 Burlingame Treaty, 30, 107, 109, 195 California Chinese Press, see Chinese Press capitalism, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 27–30, 34–7, 114, 150, 191 and colonialism, 4, 5 and globalization, 1, 37

and immigration, 27–30, 34–6, 114 and labor, 7 and missions, 11, 150, 191 see also free trade Chao, Buwei Yang and Yuan Rei, 116–18, 119 Chen Yixi, 21, 27, 34–5 Chicago School of Sociology, 22, 200 Chinatown, American, 9–10, 36, 92–3, 127–9, 132–3, 135, 199 Chinese Digest (periodical), 125–31, 133 Chinese Exclusion, 6, 25, 29, 36, 95, 105, 106, 107–8, 110–13, 118–19, 123–4, 199 exemptions from, 107–8, 118–19 repeal of 1943, 36 Chineseness, 6, 10, 12–13, 32, 33, 36, 48–9, 50–4, 66–70, 76, 135 see also nationalism Chinese-Pacific War (1937–45), 32, 35–6 Chinese Press (periodical), 131–5 Chinn, Maxine, see Chinese Press Chinn, Thomas, see Chinese Digest citizenship, American, 6, 26, 30–1, 36, 52, 87–9, 95–100, 105, 108, 123, 124, 133, 136 paper citizens, 87–9, 99 class, 7–8, 22, 28, 73, 105–20, 148, 190 in Chinese diaspora, 7–8, 22, 28, 105–20 and missions, 148, 190 see also cosmopolitanism; labor migration

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colonialism, European, 4, 45, 68, 200 see also capitalism Confucianism, 9, 48, 64, 69, 71, 75, 109, 110, 145, 150, 152, 194 Conrad, Sebastian, 4–5 cosmopolitanism, in Chinese diaspora, 105–20, 198–9 see also class cultural memory, 89–90, 99 Darwinism, see Social Darwinism diaspora, 2–6, 8, 22–5, 30, 32 Chinese, 2–3, 5–6, 8, 22–5, 30, 32 see also Chinatown; immigration; labor migration; nationalism; overseas Chinese; transnationalism Dirlik, Arif, 13 domesticity, 86, 92–3, 162–3, 166–7, 168, 169–70, 172–4, 176, 199 see also home missions; missions Doolittle, Justus, 191–2, 193, 194, 197 Duara, Prasenjit, 2, 9, 11, 12, 47, 59, 66, 71, 73, 142 Eaton, Edith Maud, 90–2, 95, 98–100 “In the Land of the Free”, 98–9 “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian”, 99–100 “The Smuggling of Tie Co”, 90–2, 99 ethnography, 12, 149–50, 176, 185–200 and missions, 149–50, 176, 185–200 exile, 12, 163, 166, 168–9, 177 Fairbank, John K., 173, 187 Ferens, Dominika, 10, 90 Foucault, Michel, 46–7, 96 free trade, 1, 3, 7, 11, 150, 191 see also capitalism; colonialism; imperialism globalization, 12, 17, 43–4, 55, 60, 65–6, 68, 75, 76, 141–2, 148, 151, 171 and media, 12, 17 and missions, 148, 151, 171

and scholarly discourse, 43–4, 55, 60, 65–6, 68, 75, 76 see also capitalism Gützlaff, Karl, 11, 145, 150 home missions, American, 10, 108–9, 117, 155, 198–9 Chinese Educational Mission, 108–9, 117 Hsu, Madeline, 6, 87 huaqiao, see overseas Chinese immigration, Chinese to United States, 6, 7, 22–3, 27–30, 31, 37, 87–8, 92, 95–100, 105–28, 195 post-1965, 37 see also Angel Island; biometrics; citizenship; Chinatown; Chinese Exclusion; diaspora; model minority myth; overseas Chinese imperialism, 1, 11–12, 45, 64, 65, 68–70, 72, 74, 106, 109, 143, 144, 147, 162, 163–6, 171, 172–3, 175, 177, 186, 199–200 Chinese understanding of, 68–70 and missions, 11–12, 144, 147, 162, 163–6, 171, 172–3, 175, 177, 186, 199–200 and United States, 1, 45, 64, 65, 68, 72, 74, 106, 109, 143, 173 Institute for National Learning, see Qinghua University Kang Youwei, 69, 72 Kaplan, Amy, 86, 94, 172–3 Karl, Rebecca, 68 Kirby, William, 141–2 labor migration, 5–7, 8, 30, 46, 105, 107, 119 see also class; cosmopolitanism Lee, Chingwa, see Chinese Digest Lee, Erica, 7, 87–8, 96 Legge, James, 150–1 Liang Qichao, 1, 2, 3, 12, 33, 53, 60, 66–7, 68, 69, 73, 74

Index Li Hongzhang, 28, 65 Liu, Lydia, 45 Liu Shipei, 69, 70 Luo Zhenyu, 50–2, 54 Manifest Destiny, 4, 172–3, 200 Marxism, Chinese, 72–3, 74, 75 May Fourth Movement, 72 Medhurst, W. H., 190–1, 197 melodrama, 90–1, 97, 98, 99 missions, 3, 10–12, 62, 108–9, 111, 141–56, 161–79, 185–200 critique of, 149–50, 151, 162, 163–6, 170–1, 191–5 as cultural mediation, 3, 10, 142–3, 144, 171 and education, 145–7, 162, 165, 173, 174, 176, 199 and gender, 146, 147, 162–79, 199–200 and health care, 147, 162, 165, 170, 173, 176, 199 “missionary cases”, 142, 143–5 and politics, 149 see also class; ethnography; globalization; home missions; imperialism; religion; “Social Gospel” model minority myth, 3, 7, 105, 119 national identity, see Americanization; Chineseness; nationalism nationalism, 2, 5, 9, 22, 25, 29, 32–6, 44, 47–9, 54–5, 59–60, 66–76, 128 Chinese, 5, 22, 25, 32, 33, 44, 47–9, 54–5, 59–60, 66–76 and diaspora, 29, 32–6, 128 see also Chineseness; nation state formation; “National Studies”; transnationalism “National Studies” (guoxue), 43, 50–4, 75 nation state formation, 3, 47, 49, 87, 88, 105, 142 see also revolution, Chinese

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Nevius, John, 189, 192–5 “new history” (xin shixue), 53, 67 Opium War, 61, 143, 145 orientalism, 55, 186–7, 188 overseas Chinese (huaqiao), 31–2, 33, 34, 37, 135–6 see also diaspora Pacific rim, 2, 12–14, 22–4, 25 paper citizens, see citizenship Qinghua University, 52–3, 113 Institute of National Learning, 52–3 see also “National Studies” religion, 9–12, 19, 142, 143–4, 145, 148, 149, 151–5, 165, 173, 188, 189 see also Buddhism; Confucianism; missions revolution, Chinese, 31, 70, 72, 199 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1, 3–4, 5–6, 8, 106, 109, 110–13 open door policy, 3–4, 5 Rowell, Chester H., 7, 8, 10 Sachsenmaier, Dominic, 4–5, 71, 73, 74 Said, Edward, 5 see also orientalism Sekula, Allan, 96–8 Shah, Nayan, 7, 92–3, 96 sinocentrism, 44, 47, 61–3, 65 Sino-Japanese War (1895), 61, 65 sinology, 53, 54 Smith, Arthur H., 190, 195–8, 200 Social Darwinism, 9, 13, 33, 66, 69, 72, 73, 75, 196 “Social Gospel”, 145, 151, 155, 162, 171, 173, 176, 178 see also missions Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 162–3, 173 Sui Sin Far, see Eaton, Edith Maud Sun Yatsen, 49, 51 Sydenstricker, Absalom and Carolyn (Carie), see Buck, Pearl S

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Taft, William Howard, 106, 113, 199 Taiping Movement, 154 Taishan Railroad, see Xinning Railroad translation, 45–8, 62, 142–3, 150–1 transnationalism, 2, 4–5, 22–5, 71, 88, 141–2 see also diaspora; nation state formation; nationalism travel writing, 186–90 Wang, Grace W, see Chinese Digest Wang Guowei, 50–1, 53 Welter, Barbara, 169, 173–4, 176, 178, 199 see also domesticity

William, Richard, 150–1 Williams, Hoy, see Chinese Press Wilson, Woodrow, 71–2, 199 Xinning Railroad, 21, 28, 32–3, 34–5 see also Chen Yixi Yan Fu, 67, 69, 73 Yuan, Ren Chao, 116–19 Yu, Henry, 200 Zhang Binglin, 51, 69 Zhang Zhidong, 64–5