By Simon Schama
Published: November 16 2009 20:00
Finding something American to sell to the Chinese, whether democracy or widgets, has always been a problem. The first merchant vessel to sail from New York to Canton in 1784 was on a tea-buying voyage, but the cargo it had to exchange was ginseng. American ginseng was consumed by the Chinese for its yin: the female properties of cool, while the native product was thought more yang-heavy. A population explosion may have made it difficult for domestic production to keep up with demand, hence the opening for American ginseng merchants who made a nifty profit.
Thus was born a trading connection in which, for long stretches, the Chinese assumed they had the upper hand. They required silver in return for tea, without which, some believed, western barbarians would go blind and develop intestinal tumours.
As barbarians went, the Americans seemed a milder version of the British pest. It helped that British merchants initially shut US competitors out of the opium trade, and that American missionaries inveighed against the evils of the drug traffic. So the image of the US benefited from being perceived as less vicious than the Brits.
Anson Burlingame, Lincoln’s envoy to China, reciprocated by leading a mission back to the US on behalf of China, beating the drum for a “great awakening” of the sleeping giant with which, he argued, America would have a naturally cordial connection. Non-imperialist America would provide the kiss of life (and capital) to modernise China; 400m peasants would be brought into the modern market and, as thrifty savers, would accumulate enough disposable income to become consumers of American industrial products. A perfect loop.
At first the truth was the opposite. It was Chinese labour, pushing the railroads through the Sierra Nevada – work too dangerous for anyone else to attempt – that completed the transcontinental unification of the American market. Their reward was pogroms unleashed on Chinatowns on the west coast: forced evictions, burnings and murders; and legislation prohibiting Chinese immigrants from becoming American citizens.
Yet the mysterious attraction of yang and yin continued to draw the two continental empires towards each other in an enduring, if bitterly unequal relationship. Following the revolution of 1911-12 that polished off the Manchu empire, American writers, politicians and businessmen all patronisingly cheered on a democratic China, liberated from its self-destructive torpor and restored to the hard-working ingenuity that had made it one of the world’s great civilizations.
American enterprise and capital poured into republican China. Sun Yat-sen was hailed as the Chinese George Washington. Of course, business was not in China to do charity. The British American Tobacco Company made a killing by marketing cigarettes to the millions from whom opium had been locked off. Standard Oil did well with kerosene no longer needed in an electrified United States.
Profits may have been pushed too hard. As Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist party, the Kuomintang, became aggressively anti-imperialist, American motives came to seem as predatory as those of the Europeans.
But what brought America and China back into each others arms was Japan. In Shanghai people still say they have more in common with America than either do with Japan. And Chiang’s assumption – sealed in the treaty of 1943 (which finally made it possible for Chinese immigrants to become US citizens) – was America would always support “Free China”.
Generations of “China hands” – American experts on China – such as Henry Luce, the publisher of Time Magazine, who was raised as the son of missionaries in China, felt the same way. No exposure of Chiang as corrupt, autocratic and militarily incompetent would shift their view.
The moment of truth came following the defeat of Japan. Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, decided Chinese Communists had become a mere satrap of Stalin. Mao’s distinction between “reactionary forces” and “the American people” offered a way for the Truman administration to get off the Kuomintang hook. Mao’s demand was for a coalition government, but for Acheson that was merely a Trojan horse for communist domination. With the US delivering massive military aid to the nationalists, the notion that Chiang’s army would go down before Mao’s peasant army was greeted in Washington with incredulity.
Never was so wrong a horse backed with such obtuse stubbornness. It was only when American troops got a direct taste of the People’s Liberation Army’s almost suicidal tenacity in Korea that the magnitude of the Chinese revolution sunk in. Through the 1950s, President Eisenhower believed China would collapse economically from within (he was nearly right) and stood committed to the defence of Taiwan by nuclear war if necessary. At home, China hands in the state department, accused of losing China by selling Chiang short, were purged, and along with them went expertise about Chinese realities.
So what of this on-off romance now? The Chinese government wags its fingers at American fiscal profligacy not least because it has no wish to see its bond holdings devalued from a collapsing dollar. But unloading T-bills carries the risk of shoving the American economy off a cliff with severe collateral damage to exports.
The secret truth is the Chinese have not yet become accustomed to being the strong party in this relationship. The communist oligarchs who have made eyes at the American model for so long can hardly bear to see it as it is: lying in the dust, reduced to just another broken idol, no more attractive than the dim and dusty memory of Karl Marx. So perhaps, when they saw the swoon-inducing figure of the 44th president on Sunday, they fell head over heels all over again. Just don’t bet your bonds on it.
The writer is an FT contributing editor
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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