China in the American Imagination

...THE POPULIST position, which is based in the interests of workers and small-business owners and finds representation in Congress, human-rights organizations, and religious and secular advocacy groups, consists of people who see the Chinese world from a more communitarian perspective...

...The left, which is based primarily in the American labor movement, is especially interested in promoting the rights of Chinese laborers, and advocates at least limited protectionism to defend American labor against competition from cheap, repressed Chinese labor...

...The answer has to do not just with China's economic and strategic importance but with its symbolic place in twentieth-century American intellectual history...

...In Mao's China, leftist intellectuals saw a model of antiimperialist participatory democracy—a more authentic representation of those values of democratic community that were at the core of American identity...

...Intellectuals on the left, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, often writing in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, emphasized the "great human gains of the Chinese revolution," praised Mao Tse-Tung as a revolutionary genius, and condemned the dictatorship of Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek...

...For the New Left, the Chinese revolution vividly exposed the hypocrisy involved in American professions of democratic values...

...These same divisions shape the debate over Taiwan...

...And both right and left (joined temporarily by presidential candidate Bill Clinton) voiced anger over the efforts of the Bush administration to enter into dialogue with the "butchers of Beijing"—and criticized the business leaders who were all too eager to resume commercial relations with China...

...America has, on the one hand, long been seen as a land of individual opportunity—a place where entrepreneurial individuals can get rich...

...Just as the left noticed only a partial truth about Mao, so they see only a partial truth about Taiwan...

...RICHARD MADSEN teaches sociology at the University of California at San Diego and is the author of China and the American Dream...

...China policy has, for the first time since the seventies, become a hot, contentious, partisan issue, It arouses a lot of emotion, often over matters more symbolic than substantive...

...its main opponents are state-sector workers and peasants...

...In a multicultural world, how do we avoid complete value relativism on the one hand and an arrogant insistence on our own cultural superiority on the other...

...The right sees the relationship with China in more competitive terms...

...The main difference with the other East Asian NICs is that the Chinese repressive apparatus is harsher, more totalitarian, less accountable, and, ironically, less able to impart a coherent direction to China's vast, regionally divided population...

...By the early 1970s, it seemed vindicated, however, by Richard Nixon's successful rapprochement with China, based on Henry Kissinger's geopolitical calculations...

...As Chalmers Johnson once remarked, we might see "NIC China" with rapid economic growth leading to the emergence of a civil society in the coastal areas and especially the South...

...The challenge was mainly ideological rather than economic or military...

...Maybe, as populist thinkers hope, enough Chinese will be attracted by Western versions of political freedom to make a smooth transition to a democratic polity, if they are given sufficient help and encouragement...

...This cultural ferment offers some hope for a new vision about how Chinese and Americans might create a common home in the intricately interdependent world of the twenty-first century...

...Now one must consider a division between a left and right establishment on the one hand and a left and right populism on the other...

...How can we expand our horizons so as to enter into dialogue with other cultures about the meaning of a good life in an interdependent world...

...Openness to a world market economy would lead to the development of a democratic political community...

...Such thinking is reflected in the writings of A.M...

...If that were to happen, there would be debate among the left and right wings of the establishment about how vigorously the United States should help Taiwan defend itself from mainland assault...

...At the same time, it has been very difficult for even sophisticated Americans to gain a comprehensive understanding of 54 • DISSENT / Winter 1998 China, not just because its language and culture are exotic, but, more important, because China is simply too big, diverse, and disorganized to sustain systematic generalizations...

...This faith had to be maintained in spite of China's extremely militant Cultural Revolution rhetoric...

...Tom Brokaw recalls that while he was doing a story on Los Angeles street gangs, the Crips wanted to ask him about what was going on in Tiananmen Square...

...Viewed from across the American political spectrum, things seemed to be going so well with U.S.-China relations that the management of these relations was left to government experts...

...But the challenge is different than it was during the cold war...

...Such antecedents have led Americans to see China in strongly moralistic terms...

...What is it about China that makes even the Crips interested in foreign affairs, while uniting Helms and Gephardt against Clinton and Bush and wreaking creative destruction within the ideological ranks of American intellectuals...

...Consciously or not, Americans have used China to construct and sustain important ideological myths about our own identity and place in the world...

...government's muscle to confront or contain China in such a way as to protect American economic and political interests...

...At the end of the twentieth century, the rise of a postsocialist China presses us to ask these questions in new ways...

...There are left and right versions of this establishment position (as well as an ambivalent center...

...Too often, in the past, the immensity and complexity of China has provoked both left and right to defensive closed-mindedness rather than to open dialogue...

...As far as China is concerned, this means that American policy should be oriented toward expanding commercial ties with the People's Republic, even if that means neglecting human-rights issues...

...IN THE middle of the political spectrum were "an assorted group of scholars, bureaucrats, ministers, Congressmen, newsmen, ladies, and old China hands," as the Nation described the participants in a "National Conference on United States and China" that was held in 1965 and was one of the first efforts since the McCarthy era to develop a centrist national consensus about the need for a more flexible China policy...

...The main beneficiaries of China's present "socialist market economy" are tycoons and corrupt officials...

...The evolution of China seemed proof to many in the United States that unleashing the power of free enterprise would lead inevitably to the creation of a democratic community, and thus to a vindication of the American faith...

...Such myths are usually fragile attempts to reconcile contradictory elements in our common aspirations, and they are vulnerable to being shattered by dramatic, unanticipated events like the Tiananmen massacre...

...But it has also been seen as a national democratic community, whose members need to bear one another's burdens and to promote the sacred principles, especially respect for human rights, on which the nation was founded...

...The public debate continues to produce strange alliances: Jesse Helms and Richard Gephardt advocate a confrontational China policy against the "constructive engagement" of Bill Clinton...

...Especially during the decade between the normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979 and the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, it seemed that developments in China gave reason to believe that the myth was still sustainable...

...Although the assertive rise of this new China leads to emotional, polarizing debates, as it did during the cold war, the content of the debates and the political divisions among the protagonists are different...

...Faced with a rising China that challenges the key myth binding together disparate parts of the American ideology, American politics begins to coalesce into strange new alliances...

...They saw China less as an ideological threat than as a lost field of opportunities for American enterprise...

...At the same time, Mao's revolution became an object of fascination for the American left, influenced by the vivid reportage of journalists like Edgar Snow and Theodore White...

...A good example of this position is the recent book by Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, The Coming Conflict with China...

...Rosenthal of the New York Times, who draws information on the persecution of underground Christians in China from such sources as the Cardinal Kung Foundation and the Puebla Institute of Freedom House...

...It is difficult to make these visions compatible, especially in a society as divided along lines of class and race as this one, but the legitimacy of our institutions rests on a myth of compatibility...

...DISSENT / Winter 1998 59...

...A demonic Other (all the more demonic because of its Asian culture) that defied American ideals, it was the Red Menace of the McCarthy years...

...Taiwanese businessmen going abroad in search of cheap labor run some of the harshest sweatshops in mainland China and Vietnam...

...The left is more partial, though, toward the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the party of the native Taiwanese, some of whose leaders spent decades as political prisoners under the rule of the Nationalist Party (KMT), until the end of martial law in 1987...

...In the 1930s and 1940s, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Republic of China and a baptized Methodist, was effusively championed by Henry Luce, himself the son of China missionaries, and by his friends in the Eastern Establishment...

...The conventional three-part political spectrum gives way to a four-part configuration...

...But there is no evidence that this is happening, at least in the short run...

...In the mid-sixties, the New Left that mobilized around opposition to the Vietnam War embraced China as the "revolutionary redeemer society" Because China was closed off from communication with the West, the New Left knew even less about China than did the old right...

...They tend to have a missionary attitude about their values, believing that they are universal and that their strength is best proven by getting people around the world to believe in them...

...China was a troubled modernizer, whose extremist revolutionary ideology would change, as long as China was open to trade and communication with America...

...There are right-wing and left-wing (as well as more centrist) populists...

...An irrational fear of Chinese communist expansion helped lead to the disastrous involvement in Vietnam...

...But now there are new dialogues taking place among a large number of diverse Americans and Chinese interacting within the fertile spaces on the edges of both societies: in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and in multiethnic metropolises such as San Francisco and Los Angeles...

...At the same time, China's leaders, appealing to nationalistic impulses to legitimate their rule, take pride in defying American criticism of their treatment of dissidents and some religious believers, and challenging the universal validity of conventional American understandings of human rights...

...Composed of business leaders, successful professionals, mid- to upper-level bureaucrats, the spokespersons for the center clung to the faith that American communitarian values were compatible with, and indeed grounded in, American commercial ambitions...

...Those advocating little to no help would probably prevail...

...In the late seventies and early eighties, the development of U.S...

...Meanwhile, the establishment worries that democratic pressures may push leaders in Tai58 DISSENT / Winter 1998 wan to do something provocative, such as declaring independence from the mainland, thus inciting military conflict in East Asia...

...They wanted to understand it better, to discuss it openly without being hounded by McCarthyites, and eventually to enter into dialogue with China's leaders with the goal of resuming trade relations and cultural exchanges with the Chinese people...

...Populists on both left and right tend to see the island as a brave but resourceful David against a huge, bullying Goliath...

...As long as the rights of labor can be sufficiently protected, however, it is willing to cooperate with China's government...

...Last year, at a meeting in Beijing, a well-placed Party member who was defending child labor ("It's better that they go to work than not earn enough to live on") seemed bemused when I said that classical Marxists would object to his arguments...

...As Nixon and Kissinger portray it in their memoirs, this balance-of-power strategy was a hardheaded exercise in realpolitik...

...Like so many white groups in the anti-war movement," wrote Jim Peck, one of the founders of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS), "we came to political awareness on DISSENT / Winter 1998 55 the backs of the Vietnamese and the blacks...

...From this point of view, China's Mao TseTung was a hero of the world wide anti-imperialist movement and thus a champion of the dignity of oppressed people of color in the United States as well as in Asia...

...But it gained widespread legitimacy because it was perceived by many Americans—and perhaps deep down by Nixon and Kissinger themselves—not simply as clever geopolitics but as an exciting moral enterprise, breaking down walls of fear and ignorance: reconciliation with a great people that had, through misunderstandings, become estranged...

...In the first half of the century, China was one of the main fields for American Protestant missionary endeavor and, later, for secular philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation...

...The establishment, which is based in the interests of corporate and military elites and dominates the major think tanks and the staffs of the White House and State Department, consists of people who see the Chinese world from a classical individualist perspective: the American national interest is best served by expanding the opportunities of entrepreneurs DISSENT / Winter 1998 57 to pursue their economic interests in a global market...

...WHILE ENABLING some Americans to get rich, increasing trade with China also "helps" others to become poor, because China has a vast supply of cheap labor that competes with American labor...

...And in the twentieth century, they were maintained in spite of, and partially because of, segregation at home and imperialism abroad...

...Many leftist intellectuals from the sixties and seventies now admire Taiwan for the same reason they thought they admired Mao TseTung—for championing the cause of the virtuous poor against the oppressive strong...

...They are concerned with preserving classic American values, respect for the rights of the individual above all...

...After the massacre, Pat Buchanan ("Now we must choose—between the people of China and their now naked enemy, the Stalinist regime of Deng Xiaoping") made statements very similar to those of intellectuals who had been associated with the left-wing Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars ("We urge you not to forget the brave martyrs of Tiananmen . . . or to give succor to the perpetrators of the massacre...

...As long as the individual pursuit of profit seemed to be generating an expanding economy that benefited all members of their society, Americans did not have to worry too much about social responsibilities, and as long as their society could be imagined as relatively homogeneous, Americans could ground the relatively light burden of social responsibility on a thin layer of common pieties drawn from biblical religion and civic republicanism...

...But no one has enough evidence to predict confidently how and when this might happen...

...But revolutionary China represented an affront to the democratic values that Americans liked to think were at the basis of their political community...

...At the same time, many Chinese students and intellectuals began hungrily devouring books on Western political theory, and, in spite of government opposition, began calling for a democratization of their society and for protection of basic human rights...

...But as Americans have become entangled with a global economy that leads to increasing levels of inequality and insecurity, and as they have been drawn into a global confluence of cultures and into rivalries with conflicting political systems, they have had a more difficult time reconciling their individualistic ambitions and community solidarities...

...New Left enthusiasm for China was largely a way of expressing disdain for the right...

...The right, which is based especially in American evangelical churches, is more prone to denounce Chinese society as a whole for its corrupt, godless ways, and tends to see the necessity of a complete overthrow of the communist government...

...Tiananmen smashed this comforting illusion, which was why the event so gripped the attention of the American public...

...It wants to engage China with the freest possible trade...

...he temporarily dampened the critical voices of the left—after all he had shaken hands with their great revolutionary hero, Chairman Mao...

...relations with China helped to sustain faith in the American myth at a time when it was being severely challenged by events at home—the loss of faith in American political institutions brought about by Vietnam and Watergate, increasing social conflict produced by income polarization, and the celebration of radical, opportunistic individualism during the Reagan years...

...So, as earlier in this century, we are thrown back on our own cultural and ideological resources and our own capacities for open conversation...

...IHAVE ARGUED in my China and the American Dream that it was a myth that reconciled two contradictory versions of American identity—individualistic and communitarian...

...Once again, China presents a challenge to the American myth that entrepreneurial individualism and democratic communitarianism can be reconciled...

...I 4 IKE DEBATES earlier in this century, these new debates about China and Taiwan are long on passion and short on facts...

...Perhaps because of the weakness of the labor movement, however, there are not many academic representatives of this point of view...

...During the cold war, the Chinese revolution confronted Americans with a set of challenges to their national myth, challenges that led to bitter ideological polarization between right and left...

...Following the inevitable logic of modernization, China, in the view of scholars like Robert Scalipino, would become a society governed by "technical bureaucrats" who acted "pragmatically" rather than "ideologically" In other words, China's leaders would eventually become like our own...

...What was the myth that was shattered by Tiananmen...

...Some of the populists would like the American government to do more to spread democracy in China through such methods as Radio Free Asia...

...Together with its Stalinist cousin, Maoist communism contradicted the assumption that American values were universal...

...American intellectuals who showed the least bit of sympathy for China ran the risk of being stigmatized not merely as misinformed but as unAmerican...

...What is most likely, in my view, is a division of China—probably de facto rather than officially—into different regions with distinctive styles of political economy and different trajectories of political development...

...In effecting a rapprochement with China, Nixon angered the American right, although he had done enough for them in the past to retain their loyalty...

...Communist China" with a stagnant state-directed economy and a quasi-Stalinist political system in the north...

...In China policy, one can no longer talk of a left, right, and center...

...These values had been celebrated by white people who enslaved Africans and killed Indians—and were now bombing Vietnamese...

...Since 1989, the fissures have grown even wider...

...Even more scandalous to American ideology, the suppression of democratic aspirations in China seems—contrary to all predictions by American pundits in the wake of Tiananmen—to have helped China's economy to grow at a spectacular rate, by inhibiting the protests of workers and peasants over increasing insecurity and harsh working conditions...

...China, in short, is entering a new "spring and autumn" period (like the tumultuous transitional period that produced Confucianism together with a hundred other schools of contending thought), and—although one would hope that it would avoid a subsequent "warring states" period—one might expect that it will be a long time before China has any coherent lessons to teach us...

...China is no longer communist in any meaningful ideological sense, but is a particularly rough-edged version of a more general East Asian development model...

...Economic engagement with China thus intensifies the class polarization that tears at the community fabric of the United States...

...Under some social circumstances, the myth has seemed plausible...

...In a country whose economy is dominated by huge multinational corporations, how do we balance the benefits of global commerce with the need to ensure a decent livelihood for all our citizens...

...Some wholeheartedly support the radio broadcasts and Bible smuggling operations of evangelical missionaries, and they want the United States government to do more to protect Chinese converts from persecution...

...The Chinese government under Deng Xiaoping began to dismantle many of its socialist institutions, to create a market economy that celebrated individual entrepreneurship, and to open China to foreign commerce...

...Without their success in beginning our liberation, CCAS would have little prospect of being anything else than an intellectual ornament...

...At the same time, China itself is too big, dynamic, and diverse to provide clear answers...

...Because China is a big, important place that isn't well understood but evokes strong feelings, American discourse about China has long been as much about ourselves as about China...

...And sometimes they find common cause with erstwhile right-wing opponents who extolled Chiang Kai-shek as another Abraham Lincoln —while criticizing former colleagues for joining think tanks that emphasize business relations with China to the exclusion of the moral and political issues raised by the suppression of human rights...

...Tiananmen dramatically demonstrated that the creation of a market economy did not inevitably bring democratic community...

...The left sees the relationship in more cooperative terms...

...One of the most articulate spokespersons for this point of view is the philosopher Henry Rosemont, Jr...

...China's current pattern of economic development has almost nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with the growth strategy of the East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs), based on authoritarian governments (although there have been significant moves in both Taiwan and South Korea toward democratization), mercantilistic trade policies, export-oriented development, and a docile labor force...

...Concerned about the proclivity of the Chinese to steal American technology or divert it to military purposes, the establishment right would use more of the U.S...

...The debates stimulated by this multifaceted, ambiguous, "spring and autumn" China are once again debates mostly about ourselves...

...China was never threatening to American economic interests in Asia—it was too poor to provide much of a market for American products and (unlike the Soviet Union) too weak to threaten external expansion...

...People in the center did not want to condemn or glorify China...

...China began to emerge as a potentially vast market for Amefi56 DISSENT / Winter 1998 can commodities—an exciting field of opportunities for enrichment...

...But most of all he excited the American political center: he seemingly enacted the approach toward China that they had recommended and held out some hope for the triumph of the values they cherished...

...Maybe, as establishment thinkers predict, the spread of commercial ties with China will lead to the formation of a democratic polity...

...A good example of this position would be found in the publications of the U.S.-China Business Council...

...and "Third World China" with widespread poverty, bitter ethnic strife, and a fragile but repressive government in the west...

...Like a seismic blast that produces anomalous data, the Tiananmen Square massacre revealed previously unnoticed cultural and social fissures under the surface of American public life...

...As far as China is concerned, this means that the United States should stop the Chinese government from maltreating political dissidents, and that American business executives should refuse to encourage the corruption that is endemic among Chinese officials today...

...The right, however, has long been enamored of the KMT...

...Now, many of these same intellectuals champion Taiwan's emerging democracy against the tyranny of the Communist Party in mainland China...

...Political repression has actually increased during the expansion of commercial ties over the last five years...