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China by the Book: China Hands and China Stories, 1848–1949 Charles W

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China by the Book: China Hands and China Stories, 1848–1949 Charles W China by the Book: China Hands and China Stories, 1848–1949 Charles W. Hayford Northwestern University From the Opium Wars down to the revolution of 1949, American mis- sionaries, diplomats, businessmen, and novelists who lived in China— China Hands—wrote a series of popular books which construed China not just as a geographical space but as a virtual fable of modernization and proving ground of the American way of life. These men and women based their authority on personal experience—”forty years in a Chinese village,” “dateline Shanghai”—and formed what Paul Cohen calls the “amateur phase” of American writing about China; only after World War II was there a “true professional field.” Cogent scholars such as Harold Isaacs and T. Christopher Jespersen argue that Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, or the Dragon Lady often drowned out the voices of the China Hands and that Americans viewed China with “images” rooted in racism, fears of Chinese immigration, Orientalist fantasies, historicist mythology, diplomatic strategizing, and wholesale ignorance. Ameri- cans had come, in Jonathan Spence’s now obligatory phrase, “to change China” and Michael Adas has recently described “technological im- peratives” and “America’s civilizing mission,” including the mission in China.1 In spite of all, these China Hands worked to find the words, meta- phors, and stories to grasp and explain China, though the public failed to comprehend their stories and policy-makers mostly ignored them. True, like their British cousins who established the Raj in India, Ameri- cans in China took up the “White Man’s Burden” and like their country- men on the North American frontier used military violence to enforce their right to do so. But even careful scholars like Adas miss the perplex- The Journal of American–East Asian Relations, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter 2009) © Copyright 2009 by Imprint Publications. All rights reserved. 1. Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York; London: Columbia University Press, 1984), 1–3; T. Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China, 1931–1949 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), xv; Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India (New York: John Day, 1958; White Plains, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1980, reprint with new preface); Jonathan Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620–1960 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969); Michael Adas, Dominance by De- sign: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). 285 286 The Journal of American–East Asian Relations ity which marked the China Hands’ debate as both they and China changed. In the 1920s, young Chinese turned to Leninist revolution as a rival tool for building a modern nation, and in the 1930s Japanese ag- gression redefined the American mission. China was now viewed as a strategic ally first against Japan, then against the Soviet Union. China Hands both feared and acknowledged Mao’s revolution, but lost com- munications with their public and lost their authority too, as profes- sional academics edged them out. When “China” became toxic, they went mostly silent for fear of being charged with its “loss.” Eternal China: To Christianize But Not Europeanize When S. Wells Williams (1812–83) returned home from more than a de- cade in Canton, in the judgment of John Rogers Haddad, he “knew more about China than anyone in the United States and perhaps as much as anyone in the entire Western world.” Americans in the early nineteenth century could read extensive European sources going back to Marco Polo, but just as important were the oral and face-to-face experiences which fed the eye and ear: lectures, Chatauquas, museums, exhibitions, and fairs. The gatekeepers were clergy, traders, and politicians, not ex- perts. Williams stepped in to fill a pedagogic gap. The full title of his two- volume book reads almost like a syllabus: The Middle Kingdom: A Survey of the Geography, Government, Literature, Social Life, Arts, and History of the Chinese Empire and Its Inhabitants (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1848). The book is a monument to facts.2 In 1833, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had sent the twenty-one-year-old Williams to Canton as a printer, not technically a missionary. Westerners were forbidden to enter China or study the language—one language teacher carried samples of leather shoes with him to provide cover as a merchant if the authorities discov- ered him. Williams espoused the “silent gospel,” the spread of the printed word, rather than evangelization, and became publisher of The Chinese Repository, for which he wrote more than one hundred learned articles. While he despised the opium trade for poisoning Chinese bodies and hardening Chinese minds against the gospel, Williams was exhilarated when British cannons and steam warships opened China by force. God had a divine plan. But when he returned home on furlough in 1844, determined to raise money and buy a set of Chinese type for his press, 2. John Rogers Haddad, The Romance of China: Excursions to China in U.S. Culture, 1776–1876 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 15; Alfred Owen Aldridge, The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the American Enlightenment (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1993), lists American imprints on China before 1826..
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