The History of America’s Influence on China

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Although America only recently started grappling with Beijing’s influence, China’s worry about American influence stretches back to the mid-­nineteenth century, when the country entered a period of decline and decay that didn’t end until the 1990s.

It was a new direction for a proud and often isolated civilization. Before the mid-­nineteenth century, China had largely ignored America. Chinese elites believed that foreign countries were necessarily inferior to China—­literally the Middle, or Central, Kingdom. “The location of the United States is in the Far West,” wrote the diplomat Qiying to the emperor in 1844.“It is the most uncivilized and remote of all countries . . . an isolated place outside the pale, solitary and ignorant. Not only are the people entirely unversed in the forms of edicts and laws, but if the meaning be rather deep, they would probably not even be able to comprehend. It would seem that we must make our words somewhat simple.”

This diplomat’s views of China’s superiority were not that uncommon. After all, Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492 to find a shorter route to the fabled riches of the Far East, and London sent colonists to Jamestown in the early seventeenth century in part to find a route linking the Atlantic to the riches of the Pacific. To these early European explorers and colonialists, the Americas were a waypoint.

As a European civilization took root in the United States, the European image of China as an exemplar of refinement and progress re­mained. The pamphleteer Thomas Paine called the Chinese “people of mild manner and good morals,” Thomas Jefferson flirted with the idea of imitating China and remaining isolated from Europe, and Benjamin Franklin described China as the “wisest of nations,” and even once argued that the Chinese, and not the Europeans, served as a better model for America. George Washington owned hundreds of luxury Chinese products, including a fine collection of porcelain, while the tea dumped into the harbor during the Boston Tea Party all came from China. Many Americans saw China as a “storied source of wealth and wisdom, and a country from whom the young republic might learn,” the historian Gordon H. Chang writes in his book Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China. Until the mid-­nineteenth century China was the world’s richest nation and the tea merchant Wu Bingjian, who invested in railroad construction in the United States, probably the world’s richest man.

Several major factors changed that dynamic and, with it, the image of China in America. Before the industrial age, the size of a country’s economy basically reflected the size of its population; so China was seen as wealthy, even if millions of Chinese lived in serf-­like conditions and regularly faced famines. “China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world,” the Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, but “the poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations of Europe”—­a characterization that remained accurate until the 1990s.

Throughout the nineteenth century, America followed the European path and industrialized and urbanized, while China remained deeply agrarian. Corruption and widespread opium addiction weakened both the country and the Qing dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644.

The philosophy of Manifest Destiny and America’s westward expansion, and America’s massive economic growth in the mid-­nineteenth century, ended the period in which China served as a moral inspiration for some Americans. Perhaps the best description of the mid-­century shifting of power and perceptions between the two nations came from Commodore Matthew Perry, who in 1853 famously “opened up” Japan to the world by sailing a threatening squadron of ships into Tokyo’s harbor.4 “With our territory spreading from ocean to ocean, and placed midway between Europe and Asia,” Perry wrote in a book about his trip, published in 1856, eight years after the discovery of gold and six years after California obtained statehood, “it seemed that we might with propriety apply to ourselves the name by which China has loved to designate herself, and deem that we were, in truth, ‘the Middle Kingdom.’ 

As power shifted from China to the United States, so too did the direction of anxiety. In the eighteenth century, some elite American observers fretted whether their remote outpost could ever aspire to the greatness of China. But in the second half of the nineteenth century it was the turn of the Chinese to look to Americans and wonder about their future. Much of these Chinese anxieties concerned Christianity: thousands of American missionaries, influenced by a millenarian strand of Christianity that believed the second coming of Jesus Christ required global conversion, saw China as the key to fulfilling the “manifest destiny of the Christian Republic,” in the words of one missionary. “Look where we may, beneath the wide ex­panse of the heavens, we can find no distinct enterprise so laudable, so imperious, so inconceivable in its results, as the conversion of China,” wrote another. More so than merchants and the military, missionaries shaped the country’s nineteenth century.

Christianity’s biggest influence on China was, in a word, disastrous. Inspired by missionary texts translated into Chinese, the failed Confucian scholar Hong Xiuquan believed he was the brother of Jesus Christ. And so he wandered the countryside in the 1840s, preaching about the one true god Ye-­huo-­hua, baptizing converts, and raising an army of the faithful. Wielding his “sword for exterminating demons,” Hong and his army captured the city of Nanjing and established New Jerusalem, the de facto capital of their Kingdom of Taiping, or Heavenly Peace, governed by a prime minister who called himself the Holy Ghost. In the roughly two decades it took the Qing to destroy the movement, the fighting led to the death of more than twenty million people from violence or famine—­one of the most devastating rebellions the world has ever seen. Hong died of illness or suicide in 1864 in New Jerusalem, after exhorting his faithful to follow the book of Exodus and, like the Israelis in the desert, eat manna to stay alive.

Besides raising an army to fight the Taiping, the Qing waged a propaganda battle to stop the spread of Christian ideas. “A Record of Truth to Ward Off the Cult,” published in 1861 under the name “the Most Heartbroken Man in the World,” is an astonishing invective, more graphic than the notorious 1903 Russian anti-­Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which concocted a Jewish plot for global domination. Probably written by a Qing general, the text warns of a dangerous religion where men marry their daughters, “practice sodomy with the priests without restraint,” and seek to obtain the organs of children.

American missionaries in China remained divided on whether Hong was a Christian or a blasphemer. But besides the astonishing impact of the Taiping rebellion, Christianity suffered a vanishingly low rate of actual converts. (“What infatuation to embrace such a religion as this!” the “Record of Truth” exhorts.) And so late in the nineteenth century, a group of American and British Protestant missionaries tried a new tact, packaging Christianity “together with Western education, science, capitalism, and political theory, offering the combination as a remedy that would strengthen China,” writes the journalist John Pomfret in his 2016 book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. “With their Chinese partners, they built China’s modern education system, introduced Western medicine, print media, science, and sports, fought foot-­binding and female infanticide, organized antipoverty and rural reconstruction efforts, and nurtured generations of Chinese modernizers,” Pomfret writes.

This new approach was more effective than sheer proselytizing, but it engendered another round of backlash. Incited by their resentment of Christian and foreign influence and supported by the Qing, in 1898 a secret sect by the name of the Society of Righteousness and Harmony (called the Boxers, in English) started attacking foreigners throughout the country. In a move that embarrassed many local reformers, in June 1900 the de facto ruler of China, the empress dowager Cixi, declared war on the foreigners. They “blaspheme our gods,” she wrote in her war declaration.“Thus it is that the brave followers of the Boxers have been burning churches and killing Christians.” The foreigners fought back against the Boxers and the Qing dynasty, forming a partnership called the Eight-­Nation Alliance—­the only time in history that Russia, Japan, the United States, and Germany all fought on the same side. The New York Sun called the Boxer Rebellion “the most exciting episode known to civilization.”

The Boxer Rebellion worsened relations between China and the West. After the Eight-­Nation Alliance defeated the Boxers and the Qing army in August 1900, some of the victorious soldiers rampaged across Beijing, looting, raping, and burning. “A great spirit of fear still holds this vast city of ruins,” wrote the British journalist George Lynch, who visited Beijing after the foreign powers won. “There are the things that I must not write, and that may not be printed in England, which would seem to show that this Western civilization of ours is merely a veneer over savagery.” The victors demanded an indemnity over four decades of 450 million taels of silver—­an imperial Chinese currency—­and the government ended up paying the equivalent of billions of dollars over that...