PDF Ebook The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present

PDF Ebook The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present

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The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present

PDF Ebook The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present

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Audible Audiobook

Listening Length: 30 hours and 3 minutes

Program Type: Audiobook

Version: Unabridged

Publisher: HighBridge Company

Audible.com Release Date: November 29, 2016

Whispersync for Voice: Ready

Language: English, English

ASIN: B01N3Q5O5R

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

This book is about the co-evolution of the USA and China --- the intimate, and often surprising, ways that each nation shaped the development of the other. Author John Pomfret, who is deeply rooted in both nations, explains it thus:===Many Americans believe that their country’s ties to China began when Richard Nixon traveled there in 1972, ending the Cold War between the two nations.In fact, the two sides have been interacting with and influencing each other since the founding of the United States. It wasn’t just free land that lured American settlers westward. It was also the dream of selling to China.The idea of America also inspired the Chinese, pulling them toward modernity and the outside world. American science, educational theory, and technology flowed into China; Chinese art, food, and philosophy flowed out.Since then, thread by thread, the two peoples and their various governments have crafted the most multifaceted— and today the most important— relationship between any two nations in the world. Now is the time to retell the story of the United States and China. Today, these two nations face each other— not quite friends, not yet enemies— pursuing parallel quests for power while the world watches.No problem of worldwide concern— from global warming, to terrorism, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to the economy— can be solved unless Washington and Beijing find a way to work together.===Pomfret explains how the USA broke away from the British Empire in part so that our “Yankee Traders” could trade freely with China, which even in the 1700’s was viewed as a treasure house of silk, fine art, tableware, tea, and spices. We took possession of the Oregon Ports and Hawaii, as way stations to China, soon after 1800, at a time when we had not yet secured possession of our Trans-Appalachian West. If China had not existed, the USA might have remained a middling nation confined to eastern North America instead of becoming a global superpower. The lure of trade with China carried our flag to the Pacific Coast and then to the Orient. He explains that had the USA not become a global power, because of China, then China might have remained a collection of disunited petty fiefdoms carved up by the European empires.He explains how our cultures complement each other. China looks to the USA to strengthen its mastery of science, technology, and economic development. They admire our modern free-wheeling culture of innovation, and have a profound liking for Americans. The name for America as written in Chinese characters as “The Beautiful Country.” Likewise Americans have admired China’s ancient culture of wisdom, patience, and beauty. “The Middle Kingdom filled the role as a wiser, more exotic civilization than the well-oiled if somewhat antiseptic one that Americans were forging.”Both countries value a classless society with upward mobility for all people. This shared value made us allies when the European Empires, Russia, and Japan have threatened China’s independence. America was drawn into WWII when Japan attacked us after we insisted that it abandon its brutal attempt at conquest of China. In the 1970s the USA and China again became allies, after a period of dreadful relations, when China feared that the neighboring Soviets would launch a preemptive attack against China’s emerging nuclear program.Unfortunately, in the interim between these alliances, the USA was drawn into wars in Korea and Vietnam to contain Chinese Communist expansion. Even after periods of hostility, such as these, the “pursuit of the Great Harmony” between the USA and China resumed.I approached this book being somewhat knowledgeable on these points. My father, a foreign policy buff who had campaigned for President Nixon, taught me the nuances of American and Chinese relations during the time of Nixon’s great overture to China in the 1970s. Even so, this book provided a depth of knowledge about the interactions between Americans and Chinese that I was not aware of.The book is objective, without ideological axes to grind. It explodes myths, such as that the Chinese Communists bore the lion’s share of fighting against the Japanese in WWII, while the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek were corrupt slackers. This was a myth that my father, a China buff, taught me. Pomfret says the reality is that the Chinese Nationalists did most of the fighting, thereby wearing themselves down to the point where Mao’s Communist could take over the country.Pomfret advises us to be objective in furthering our own best interests as our relationship with China continues to deepen: “In the pursuit of the Great Harmony, rapturous enchantment is not America’s ally; realism is.” At the moment, that means constraining China’s ambitions to extend its territory far out into the Pacific, thereby encroaching on our allies’ claims to islands and control of the sea lanes. It means coming to terms with our trade with China, which results in $367 billion trade deficits each year.Americans who want to thoroughly understand our relations with China during our 240 years as a nation will be educated by this book. China has always shaped our history --- mostly in positive ways, but also by the inevitable rivalries of two great powers. We may be nearing some choppy waters in our relations with China, in trade and territorial disputes in the Western Pacific. This book has arrived at an opportune time to help us understand how to negotiate with China to get through the choppy seas together.

Some Americans seem to have the impression that the U.S. relationship with China began in 1972 when Richard Nixon flew to Beijing. In The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, journalist and long-time Beijing resident John Pomfret puts this mistaken impression decisively to rest. In truth, the destinies of the two countries have been closely linked for more than a century—and began when the U.S. shed its identity as a British colony in 1776. As Pomfret writes, “America’s first fortunes were made in the China trade from 1783 until the early 1800s.” And American missionaries began arriving in the 1830s.The world’s wealthiest nationFew Americans are aware that in 1800 China was the world’s wealthiest nation. Its factories produced one-third of all the world’s goods. The world’s wealthiest businessman was a Chinese trader. And a single Chinese city—Guangzhou (formerly Canton)—harbored a population of one million people. That was the equivalent of one-fourth of the U.S. population. Though China’s relative position in the world economy declined rapidly in the course of the 19th century, the country still loomed large in the eyes of American business and represented the number one target of the fast-growing evangelistic faiths that dominated religion in the U.S.The central importance of bilateral tradePomfret surveys the two-and-a-half centuries that have elapsed since English-turned-American traders first visited China. In fact, trade between the U.S. and China is one of the dominant themes of that history. Many great American fortunes were built on the opium trade, which dominated bilateral commerce throughout the 19th century. In more recent years, beginning in earnest in the 1980s in the wake of Deng Xiao-Peng’s economic reforms, trade has loomed large in the economies of both countries. Today, of course, the U.S. exports more than $100 billion annually to China—and imports $400 billion. “America has been China’s top trading partner since the 1990s,” Pomfret writes. “China surpassed Canada to become America’s top partner in 2015.”Missionaries and education in U.S.-China relationsTwo other themes emerge clearly in The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: the disproportionately large role played by American Protestant missionaries, and the importance of U.S. influence both in building China’s educational system and in educating millions of Chinese in American universities. As Pomfret writes, “During the heyday of American missionary activity from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, Americans funded a majority of China’s colleges and high schools and scores of . . . YMCA and YWCA centers as well as agricultural extensions, charities, and research institutes.” Even today, privileged young Chinese commonly seek out higher education in the U.S. Pomfret: “From Deng Xiaoping on, every Communist leader has sent at least one of his children to the US to study, including the Harvard-educated daughter of the current president, Xi Jinping.”Throughout most of the 20th century, American-educated Chinese played outsized roles in their country’s history. In the closing years of the 19th century and the first several decades of the 20th, most of those who attended American colleges and universities were Protestants. The range of their studies was as broad as that of American students. In more recent decades, a large proportion of Chinese students in the United States have obtained degrees in science and engineering. As a result, they have helped China attain ever-growing prominence in the sciences. And those who have chosen to remain in the U.S. have played a role in building the American high-tech sector far out of proportion to their share of the population.An intimate relationship despite outward hostilityPomfret emphasizes that the current hostility between the U.S. and China is largely a recent phenomenon. Until the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, the U.S. was generally held in high regard in China despite episodes such as the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 when American troops invaded China. While Britain, Germany, France, Russia, and Japan repeatedly carved out portions of Chinese cities where their own laws applied, the anti-colonial U.S. rarely collaborated. This helped Americans gain a reputation as friendy and respectful by comparison. American support for Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government, the U.S. role in the Korean War, and the Communist Chinese government’s need to elevate a single foreign enemy as a scapegoat were principally responsible for souring the relationship. Outwardly, the two countries have been hostile in recent decades. However, in reality, the relationship in recent years has been more intimate than ever.The high regard in which most Chinese held Americans was not reciprocated. America’s attitude toward China and the Chinese was dominated by racism throughout much of the last two-and-a-half centuries. It’s well known that immigrant Chinese laborers played a major role in building the transcontinental railroad, less widely recognized that the same was true of the Western mining industry. Yet, as Pomfret notes, the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to combat the so-called Yellow Peril “resulted in an epidemic of mass roundups, expulsions, arson, and murder that spread from California to Colorado, from Washington state to the South. The scattered violence of the 1870s turned into a systematic purge.” The law was not repealed until 1943. “The vast federal bureaucracy designed to limit immigration to America,” Pomfret explains, “was originally created not in response to Mexicans [and now Muslims], but to the Chinese.”A lively account of U.S.-China relationsPomfret’s account of U.S.-China relations is lively. Working chronologically, he paints sketchy portraits of many of the fascinating characters who have dominated this still unfolding drama. All the familiar names are there, of course—from the Dowager Empress Cixi, Sun Yat-Sen, and Mao Tse-Tung to Pearl Buck, John Dewey, and Richard Nixon—but most of the people who played major roles are unfamiliar to American readers. There are a lot of them: The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom consists of 700 pages of densely written text.There are many surprises in the book. For me, the biggest of these was the revelation that, contrary to generally accepted scholarly opinion, the Chinese resistance to the Japanese was not led by Mao’s Communists but by the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek. The Red Army rarely engaged the Japanese, while the Nationalists lost hundreds of thousands of troops doing so. Another surprise was to learn that Barbara Tuchman’s laudatory biography of U.S. General Joseph (“Vinegar Joe”) Stillwell was based in large part on misinformation. Pomfret documents the general’s repeated strategic and tactical errors in “advising” Chiang Kai-Shek. Pomfret concludes that “Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning work on Joseph Stilwell was magisterial but deeply unfair.”The title of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom reflects the English translation of the names by which the two countries are sometimes rendered in Mandarin. “The Beautiful Country,” of course, refers to the United States, as it was regarded by many Chinese visitors beginning in the 19th century.About the authorJohn Pomfret speaks, reads, and writes Mandarin as well as several European languages. In an Afterword, he writes “As a reporter for the Associated Press, I was tossed out of China in 1989 following the June Fourth massacre. The government accused me of being one of the ‘black hands’ behind the protests. Later, as the China bureau chief for the Washington Post, I had my share of run-ins with China’s security services . . .” He researched The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom as a Fulbright senior scholar in China.

Written by one of the last US-Sino journalistic experts out there, Mr Promfret's work is a true tour de force of the complexity of the entwined US/China relationship. You will lean more in this one volume than in a whole college course. From our two nations' love/hate relationship at the end of the 1900s to our current interdependence. From failed American missionaries to revered US science and educational philanthropists in early decades of the 20th century China - even Mao liked us for a while; to America's absorption of Chinese art, philosophy and cuisine. No more pertinent or timely book out there. A few more volumes like this and Mr Promfret will deservedly surpass Jonathan Spence as the go-to authority on China.

Mr. Pomfret has written a fascinating history of the relationship between the United States and China from the 18th century to the present. The book is not limited to political and military history but also sets out in detail the rich cultural connections between the countries. Despite the tensions and disappointments each country has caused the other over many years, the book ends on an optimistic note. While it is excellent for the general reader of history, I think the book is indispensable for anyone whose affairs involve China.

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