Beijing’s official media revels in chances to present the American political system in the worst possible light — and they have never had an easier time doing so. When I visited Shanghai at the start of November, I expected to see television reports on the unusually nasty US presidential campaign with the same “we told you so” feel as past coverage of government shutdowns, high school shootings and police violence against unarmed African-Americans. China Central Television did not disappoint. And yet once again I was left with a sense of the complex range of responses elicited by news of distress and dysfunction across the Pacific, in a land whose name in Chinese is composed of a character meaning “beautiful” and the character for “country”. Amid the schadenfreude was a genuine sense of let-down, the kind one feels upon discovering how deeply flawed an idealised figure really is.
One thing that John Pomfret does very effectively in The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom is help us appreciate just how long Chinese views of America have been shaped, as they are now, by a mix of feelings including admiration, attraction, disappointment and disdain. Pomfret, a veteran journalist and author of the well-received Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China (2006), reminds us that we are dealing with a love-hate relationship that dates back to the years following the American Revolution. During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), for example, officials vacillated between viewing Americans as just another set of bloodthirsty barbarians, intent on bringing evil products such as opium and the dangerous creed of Christianity into the empire, and seeing them as a people who stood apart from the rapacious pack. This was due to such things as Washington’s leaders resisting the temptation to seek formal control of pieces of the empire in the way that their counterparts in London, Paris and, eventually, Tokyo did.
The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, though containing clear arguments, including the idea that there is a related love-hate dynamic in American views of China, is ultimately a biographically driven work. Its strength lies in the cumulative effect of seeing recurring patterns revealed via skilfully drawn character sketches. Some of its subjects are famous, such as Sun Yat-sen, while others are familiar to specialists but otherwise little known in the west. Early on, for example, comes the story of Hong Xiuquan, a failed candidate for the imperial exams who had hallucinations shaped by tracts distributed in China after the first opium war (1839-1842) by a “fire-and-brimstone preacher from backwoods Tennessee” named Issachar Jacox Roberts. Hong’s Biblically infused visions convinced him that he had a mission to exterminate the monstrous Manchus of the Qing ruling family. He led an uprising known as the Taiping Rebellion that overlapped temporally with the American civil war but had a death toll many times higher.