{"id":6981,"date":"2017-01-04T13:08:15","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T08:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/jwt2015\/?p=6981"},"modified":"2017-01-04T13:08:16","modified_gmt":"2017-01-04T08:08:16","slug":"gathering-storm-a-history-of-the-complicated-u-s-china-relationship-since-1776","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/studykit\/book-review\/gathering-storm-a-history-of-the-complicated-u-s-china-relationship-since-1776\/","title":{"rendered":"Gathering Storm: A History of the Complicated U.S.-China Relationship Since 1776"},"content":{"rendered":"

By SIMON WINCHESTER<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY AND THE MIDDLE KINGDOM<\/strong>
\nAmerica and China, 1776 to the Present<\/strong><\/p>\n

By John Pomfret<\/p>\n

Illustrated. 693 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $40.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump (or his next secretary of state) would be well advised to read this timely and comprehensively informative book, since no foreign topic will engage the 45th president more acutely than the currently fast-fraying relationship between the United States and the People\u2019s Republic of China. The coming trouble \u2014 if trouble it is to be \u2014 will be confusing, alarming, protracted and full of subtleties. This weighty history by a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, while not offering itself as a vade mecum<\/em> for dealing with the slow-gathering storm, provides an exhaustive collection of names, dates and historical markers to show just how we reached this place, the jumping-off point for the coming decades of what men of menace like to term \u201cinteresting times.\u201d<\/p>\n

The underlying thesis of Pomfret\u2019s account is quite simple: that the United States and China are locked \u201cin an entangling embrace that neither can quit\u201d and that this mutual dependence is \u201cvital to the fate of the world.\u201d The embrace\u2019s entanglement is demonstrated by way of all too many examples \u2014 from the mid-19th-century American envoy Anson Burlingame to World War II\u2019s Gen. Joseph Stilwell, from Pearl Buck to Henry Luce, Henry Kissinger to the American table tennis team, Richard Nixon to the accused spy Wen Ho Lee. It is shown to be an acquaintanceship of bewildering complexity and capriciousness, with periods of adoration interrupted by decades of suspicion, loathing and fear.<\/p>\n

What only Chinese writers seem properly to comprehend \u2014 and which goes largely unmentioned here \u2014 is the inherent imbalance of the relationship: that while America has been intimately involved with China for the entirety of this country\u2019s independent existence, China\u2019s roughly 250-year awareness of America amounts (once you recall that a sovereign Chinese state has been around for thousands of years) to a paltry few percent of China\u2019s own time on the planet. Simple arithmetic alone, then, gives China ample reason to feel a sense of haughty condescension toward the new-made state on the far side of the Pacific. Time and again, through periods both good and bad, a patronizing tone reveals itself: America is a barbarian nation, crude in its ways and shortsighted in its thinking, unable by its own immaturity to deal properly and fully with the wisest, most ancient nation ever known.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\n
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Whenever a volume like Pomfret\u2019s thuds onto my study table, I flip to the bibliography to look for a citation of one Western book that I have long thought properly explores this deeply contextual aspect of Chinese thinking: Alain Peyrefitte\u2019s \u201cThe Immobile Empire,\u201d first published in Paris in 1989. That it does not appear on Pomfret\u2019s reading list is, I think, instructive, since Peyrefitte offers a perspective on China that might have made Pomfret\u2019s very good and important book even more valuable.<\/p>\n

Peyrefitte, a writer who was then researching much the same East-West relationship as Pomfret (though focused on the end of the 18th century and in connection with Britain alone), was granted unprecedented access to the imperial archives in Beijing. There he found a trove of private papers from the Emperor Qianlong, and within these files discovered notations in vermilion ink that had been written by no less than the Son of Heaven himself.<\/p>\n

With remarkable candor, the emperor showed just what he thought of the noblemen George III had sent out to China in hopes of spawning a friendship between what were then, at least in Britain\u2019s eyes, the world\u2019s two greatest nations. And it is clear the emperor thought precious little of them. His notes displayed a brutal condescension toward the visitors and an absolute, unwavering certainty of the superiority of Chinese civilization. What policy makers in America now need to grasp \u2014 and what isn\u2019t fully illustrated in this new book \u2014 is that little has changed today. There remains a deep-seated disdain among all too many Chinese toward upstart Westerners who crave the approval and affection of today\u2019s rulers of the People\u2019s Republic.<\/p>\n

Full acceptance that the relationship between China and America is now \u201cvital to the fate of the world\u201d has come rather late to Washington. Only during Barack Obama\u2019s presidency has it seemed necessary to begin to tilt, or to pivot, or to rebalance, toward the Pacific (the semantic uncertainty mirroring the hesitancy of the policy). And yet even now the policy still hasn\u2019t properly taken root: The distractions posed by the imbroglio in the Middle East have directed all too much muscle, money and mind away from what, in global terms, truly matters. Which is why it is so important for the next administration to become fully aware of what Washington faces from Beijing, since time is now running rather short.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because the two and a half centuries of entanglement between America and China are about to reach their denouement. By 2049, a crucially symbolic date on the Chinese calendar that marks the centenary of the founding of the People\u2019s Republic, Beijing intends two things: to have recovered in full all the territory it lost during the long centuries of what it considers insulting foreign interference and to assert itself in and across the Pacific Ocean to the precise degree its duty and destiny now demand.<\/p>\n

Both aims are well on their way to realization. Almost all territory once held by foreigners is now back in the fold: after Ports Arthur and Edward, after Manchuria, after Shandong and Hainan, after Hong Kong and Macau, all that remains outside is the great island of Taiwan. And so far as the Pacific more generally is concerned, the South China Sea is now close to being under Chinese control. The three so-called \u201cisland chains\u201d that serve to protect China\u2019s eastern shores, which extend, in some interpretations, as far out as Hawaii, will soon be dominated by an ever-enlarging Chinese Navy, shortly to be bigger and more powerful than anything the United States may be able to muster or afford.<\/p>\n

Beijing\u2019s intentions are certain to collide with what Washington has regarded as its own regional obligations. To avoid conflict, the diplomatic demands on both countries will be prodigious \u2014 so any knowledge gained during the past two and a half centuries by both sides, by the \u201cbeautiful country\u201d and the Middle Kingdom, will be key factors in securing and maintaining an equitable peace.<\/p>\n

Pomfret has more than adequately told the story of the last quarter-millennium\u2019s acquaintanceship from America\u2019s standpoint. What we need now is to know just how the \u201centangling embrace\u201d is regarded by China \u2014 whether the high panjandrums of today\u2019s China still echo old Qianlong\u2019s vermilion-brushed distemper and scorn. I rather suspect they do, but until we know for sure, we will have to be content with a history that tells us only half the story. And all the while the clock is ticking down to 2049.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By SIMON WINCHESTER THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY AND THE MIDDLE KINGDOM America and China, 1776 to the Present By John Pomfret Illustrated. 693 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $40. Donald Trump (or his next secretary of state) would be well advised to read this timely and comprehensively informative book, since no foreign topic will engage the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5612],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}