Research Essay: Portrayal of China in Western Media

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Jonathan D. Spence

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Copyright ©1998 by Jonathan D. Spence

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The Chan's great continent : China in western minds /Jonathan D. Spence.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-393-02747-3 L China. 2. China—Civilization. I. Title.

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Introduction

One aspect of a country's greatness is surely its capacity to attract and retain the attention of others. This

capacity has been evident from the very beginnings ofthe West's

encounter with China; the passing centuries have never man- aged to obliterate it altogether, even though vagaries of fashion

and shifting political stances have at times dulled the sheen.

The sharpness of the feelings aroused by China in the West, the reiterated attempts to describe and analyze the country and its people, the apparently unending receptivity of Westerners to

news from China, all testify to the levels offascination the coun-

try has generated.

This book seeks to give a sense of the multiplicity ofintellec- tual and emotional attitudes that Westerners have brought to

their attempts to deal with the phenomenon ofChina. So as not to give too formalized or deliberate an air to this process, I bor-

row the title from Hart Crane's idea of China as imagined by

Columbus, sensed rather than seen in the pre-dawn dimness.

The Chan (or Khan) had ruled China at the time ofMarco Polo's thirteenth century account of the fabled land. In Columbus's

mind he ruled it still. Drawing the term from the history ofnav- igation and exploration, we would call such a moment a "sight- ing." A sighting in those contexts was fleeting or intermittent: one seized on whatever chance one had to get one's bearings; one found oneself by the often random viewing of the antici- pated destination. By extension of this idea, in gunnery the act ofsighting was the act of finding the range, of getting a balance

or a bracketing effect so that one's own shots would hit the tar-

xii Introduction

get. In earlier times, for example in the 1750s when Oliver Gold- smith, Commodore Anson, and Montesquieu were all writing in their very different ways about China, "sighting" was also used as a gaming term, specifically in the sense of cheating at dice. In the thirteenth century, at the time William of Rubruck and Marco Polo were first sharing their thoughts on the Chinese with a select few Western readers and listeners, "sighting" served as an alternate form for "sighing," and "weeping and sighting" were not uncommonly found in conjunction.^ The sightings of China that we will be considering were

passed on to others in many forms, as diplomatic reports or as poems, as stage plays or as letters home, as philosophical tracts or novels. In the course of this book we look at forty-eight such sightings in some detail, spread across a period of over seven hundred years, from 1253 down to 1985. The first ofthese dates marks the year that Friar William ofRubruck set offon an eccle- siastical and diplomatic mission to the Great Khan in Karako- rum, and his experience feeds inevitably into that ofMarco Polo, at once the most celebrated and the most problematical of all the sightings we will be considering. The legacy of Polo lay to some extent in the data that he pro-

vided, but even more in the curiosity that he aroused. The devel- opment ofprinting in the West in the fifteenth century brought published versions ofhis earlier manuscripts into readers' hands

by the 1480s, and it was one ofthese early editions that was read and annotated by Christopher Columbus. By the 1540s, the

spillover from Columbus's discoveries had brought the Por-

tuguese to Macao and the Spaniards to the Philippines, inaugu- rating what can be fittingly called the "Catholic century" of

China sightings. The reports, polemical tracts, and the novels that were written at this time—we look at five such examples- rooted China with a totally new level of specificity into Western minds, and introduced strong currents of emotion into what

was becoming a heated European debate over the nature of

Introduction xiii

China and its people, and over the uses to which one might put

the new information. As the seventeenth century waned, and with it the peak ofthe

CathoHc nations' program ofoverseas conquest and expansion,

the naval powers ofthe emerging Protestant states were ready to

seize the opportunities this offered. Diplomats and soldiers

from the Netherlands and Great Britain became the next group

to explore China. These men saw themselves as realists, with cer- tain tasks to perform; they viewed with a new kind of hostility China's attempts to force them to accept traditional forms of ritualized subservience, especially the kowtow, involving a series

of nine prostrations before the figure of the emperor or even

before the symbols of his authority in his absence. The British, who saw in such ritual observances an abandonment ofnational dignity rather than a convention of international relations,

were inevitably headed for confrontation: such a passage can be

traced through three of the sightings left to us across the cen-

tury by Bell, Anson, and Lord Macartney.

It is an assumption of mine that the impact of China need have little or anything to do with the literalness or precision of

an actual experience. Thus I follow the diplomats—who would have claimed to be realists—with their contemporaries who stayed away from China, content to transpose it into fiction.

There was now more than enough material around for them to do so, and the creativity and stylistic force of a Defoe or a Gold- smith, along with the irony ofa Walpole, spread thoughts about

China to a far wider audience than ever before. This populariza-

tion ofChina, along with the fashion ofimitating aspects ofChi-

nese culture, was given the name of "Chinoiserie" in the French circles where it received its greatest welcome. In yet a third

reprise over the course ofthe eighteenth century, we can see how powerful synthetic minds were also drawn to the China they had never seen. Goldsmith had his fictional Chinese narrator won-

drously observe that the English were trying to reason him out

xiv Introduction

of his own country. Leibniz, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Herder can perhaps be charged with doing that, as each of them made his own cut into the available historical records in an attempt to create a system into which the totality of China as they under- stood it could be inserted—though at least the first three writers corresponded or conferred with those who did know China at firsthand.

The poets of the Romantic movement clearly offer one con- venient bridge for moving from the revolutionary epoch that cli- maxed the period ofthe Enlightenment into the different world of the nineteenth century. But Jane Austen forms another kind ofbridge, by marking the emergence ofwomen as the makers of China sightings. Though it is only a premonitory flash, her use ofLord Macartney's journal in her novel Mansfield Park, and the lived experiences ofher brother Frank in Canton, prepare us for the new generations of Western women who made more per- sonal and protracted China sightings in the nineteenth century. Many of these women were Americans, who thus brought twin new perspectives ofgender and nation to the China scene: as we move from Eliza Bridgman at the century's beginning, to Jane Edkins in its middle, and on to Sarah Conger and Eva Price at the end, through their eyes we see the charm of China tinged with deeper dangers, with the Boxer Uprising of 1900 serving as

the fitting coda to their experiences.

In the mid-nineteenth century, for the first time Chinese

laborers began to travel to the United States in search of work,

and to construct around themselves their own frail simulacra of their native land in the form of American Chinatowns. For a

generation of Americans, China had now come home, and the experience was unnerving to them. The sightings of China by Mark Twain and Bret Harte were compounded of bemuse- ment, affection, and irritation; it was hard for them to see these new settlers in the context of an existing Chinese culture, and accordingly they tried to humanize their misapprehensions,

blending their own experiences into fictional forms in which

Introduction xv

they both absorbed and opposed the impHcit rules of racial dis-

crimination. Other writers who came after took the process a step further, and a specific new series of hostile stereotypes was the result: the Chinatown fictions of the later nineteenth cen-

tury blended insensibly into the world of Fu-Manchu.

The French, at the same time, had been distilling the expe- riences and collective China sightings of two centuries into a fairly coherent type of vision which I term a "new exotic," one

compounded of violence, allure, and nostalgia. The three writ- ers Loti, Claudel, and Segalen all lived in China for periods of

time between 1895 and 1915, and believed they had caught its

true sights, sounds, and smells. As writers ofconsiderable power,

they enlarged Western literary vocabulary even as they restricted

the full play ofChinese personality in their own imaginative ren- derings.

Having identified—perhaps overconfidently—what seems to be a French exotic, I move to the question ofwhether some kind of American China exotic was also in formation, replacing the

crudities of Chinatown characterizations with something at least partly rooted within China and Chinese culture. A film like D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms perpetuated a view of China

that blended threat with vulnerability, but at the same time sought for some universal values at the culture's heart. Ezra Pound's protracted explorations into Chinese poetics and his-

tory, or Pearl Buck's detailed attempt at a reconstruction of the

values of Chinese rural life, in almost inconceivably different

ways pursued similar themes. Harsher were the views of Eugene

O'Neill in his retelling of Polo's relationship with Kublai Khan as an anti-capitalist parable, or John Steinbeck's tale of the destruction wrought by Chinese passions in a small western

American town. But still, one could argue, they gave a universal

dimension to what they depicted as a localized Chinese reality.

Polemics find a natural home in politics, and there was cer- tainly a residue ofWestern rhetoric that could be applied to what were seen as new political forces emanating from China after the

xvi Introduction

Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921, the first great purges of the party by the Nationalist forces took place in 1927, to be followed by the

period of rural guerrilla socialism, and the anti-Japanese war. The radicalization of China sightings crossed many national and perceptual boundaries. Andre Malraux moved from a stance steeped in the French exotic perception ofChina to a passionate

fictional involvement with China's revolution as representative

of man's fate. Bertolt Brecht saw within Chinese experience a

way to grasp the levels of revolutionary ruthlessness and the paradoxes of compassion in such a context. American anti-

authoritarians like Edgar Snow could find in China's guerrilla socialism and Mao's rustic ways a potential promise ofsalvation for the people as a whole. Graham Peck could fasten on the enig- matic smile of Chinese as the flickering point of focus for his

own experiences. The mystique of the rulers' power in China had dominated

manyWestern sightings, ever since Polo's depiction ofthe mighty Kublai in the 1270s. During the late nineteenth-century period

of China's weakness, and the forty years that followed the col-

lapse ofChina's last dynasty in 1911, such a vision ofcentralized

power had yielded place to one oflocalized violence and implicit

threat. The re-establishment ofChinese central power under the Communists, and especially the nature of that regime and the

violence of the Korean War, drew some observers' minds back to the earlier mystiques. But these views were tinged now with other dark experiences, those of Stalinism and Nazism, which

between them seemed to have fostered new levels of totalitarian organization that could be blended into new forms of total tyranny and total power. Such a dark vision was spelled out by

Karl Wittfogel in an analysis that deliberately recalled the great

system-building attempts ofthe past two centuries, but also drew

on historical records ofChina's emperors' past excesses. Though softer, the view ofMao's presence as in some ways close to impe-

rial was shared by both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger

Introduction xvii

when they made their celebrated 1972 visits to China in a bid to reopen relations between China and the United States. The mys-

tique of the abuse and inner hollowness of allegedly absolute

power was restated in fictional form by the French novelist Jean

Levi, whose own depictions of the imperial character circled back into the French exotic of a century before.

The book ends with the China sightings made by three twen- tieth-century writers ofacknowledged genius, even though they

never set foot in the country at all. But to close with them is to reemphasize a thought that runs through this book, that one of

the proofs of China's strength is its capacity to stimulate and

to focus creative energies at specific moments in time. In these three cases, we see how China for Franz Kafka served to channel his ideas on authority and individual endeavor, how for Borges it drew together the flow of time and the apparently endless

permutations of human consciousness, and how for Calvino it allowed the intersecting of cross-cultural contact with the vary-

ing layers ofmemory and experience. One can see that this is a book about cultural stimulus and

response as much as it is in any way a book about China. As such, it is not in the business of assigning blame or praise to

those who made the sightings. Often the stimulus was viewed as a negative one, and the response was correspondingly harsh. But

at other times the stimulus was sweet, and those making the sightings remained in a state ofblissful self-denial, regardless of

other levels of reality that swirled around them. More often, as one might expect, the responses were mixed, and overlapped in

space and time in ways that make tight categorizations virtually impossible.^

It can be objected that many of these sightings reified or in other ways denigrated China, and that is certainly true. Assess- ments of China and the Chinese people were often coarse- grained or inaccurate; they drew on imagination and stereotype as much as on any kind ofinformed application of intellect. By using the terms "Western" and "the West," I am similarly reify-

xviii Introduction

ing the culture in which I was born and raised, and one could argue—as so many have—that there is simply no such thing as the West. So be it. But those making the sightings we examine here felt that they shared in certain traditions that were differ-

ent from those they encountered in China, or thought that they encountered, or imagined that they might have encountered.

Throughout this book we are dealing with individuals reach- ing out in their various ways toward another world, which each of them saw differently, but which they gave the same name, that ofChina. They did not necessarily understand it, or seek to do so. Most of them knew, as most of us know, that bigotry, gullibility, and ignorance are closely entwined. Most of them knew, too, that words can be violent and wound deeply. Cer- tainly amongst them we find many examples of a language of dominance or dismissal; at the same time, we find many exam- ples of a language of respect, affection, and awe. One can find cultural and historical roots for both sets of reactions.

As a historian, I am interested in the ways that levels of real- ity intersect and overlap. It is my implicit belief that bold gener- alizations are usually wide of the mark, and that the individual

experience rarely matches the allegedly universal trend. It is in

that spirit that I offer these sightings of a great but distant cul-

ture. We must imagine our pilots and navigators—and perhaps also our cheats, and those with broken hearts—holding rather

simple instruments in their hands as they make those sightings. Furthermore, the hands that hold the instruments are often

chapped with cold or sleek with sweat. Our guides are standing on sloping decks that shift angle without warning, and are often blinded by a burst ofspray or dazzled by an unexpected dart from

the previously beclouded sun. And the target of their curiosity remains distant and often somber—"the color of mourning," as Loti wrote. And then, too, they cannot even be sure that they have come to the right place. But that, after all, is a risk that all of us must take.