Introduction The Narrowing Circle: America and China Circa 1929
It is vain to underestimate the character and force of the tendencies that are drawing the races and peoples about the Pacific into the ever narrowing circle of a common life. — RO B E RT PA R K
IN THE THREE DECADES AFTER WORLD WAR I ,
a group of American and Chinese writers set out to transform the terms by which the United States and China, and more broadly the “East” and “West,” might know each other. This group included Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist; Paul Robeson, the distinguished African American singer, actor, and activist; Lao She, the eminent Chinese writer and author of Rickshaw (骆驼祥子); Lin Yutang, the famous overseas Chinese satirist and public intellectual; and Agnes Smedley, the popular American left-wing journalist and novelist. These writers traversed the Pacific throughout the interwar years. They lived in American and Chinese cities—New York and Shanghai, Boston and Beijing. Individually, they produced a number of texts, such as The Good Earth, that transformed popular imaginings of America and China in both nations. Together, they organized a series of political movements, such as the Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign, that altered the contours of U.S.-China relations and decisively affected common understandings of the Pacific. By the late 1940s they had shared apartments and hotel rooms, exchanged hundreds of letters and telegrams, and marched together on streets. Over time other important cultural figures, such as Roger Baldwin in America and Lu Xun in China, joined their circle and expanded its influence. In the tumultuous decades between the wars, the Pacific was alive with movement: of people, objects, and ideas. This book tells their story.
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Sudden transformations in the world economy and international politics made possible this meeting of American and Chinese writers. In the early 1930s the Great Depression set into motion a number of radical global political movements, such as the Popular Front. The effects of the Depression were felt everywhere, and activists grew frustrated with nationbased political mobilization. They sought allies in other nations to grasp the global effects of the Depression and to devise effective projects to challenge them. Smedley and Buck were a part of this movement. After the First World War they became disenchanted with U.S. politics, traveling to China to seek alternative social models. There they met Chinese writers, such as Lin and Lao She, who also sought to expand Chinese politics through an encounter with U.S. political forms. The widening cascade of global economic collapse in the 1930s inspired new opportunities for cross-cultural interaction. This was particularly true across the Pacific, and with the outbreak of the Second World War, internationalism in the modern Pacific evolved to be even more focused on cultural cooperation between the United States and China. At the same time, recent developments in technology, such as the telegraph and radio, drew the United States and China together in ways previously unseen. Everything seemed faster: news, ideas, and literature now traveled at the speed of light, heightening the feeling that the two nations existed within a shared, simultaneous reality. The interwar period not only signaled a transformation in global politics; it marked a new era in media technologies and the rise of a ubiquitous discourse of “communications,” both of which served to alter the way that people in one nation thought of themselves in relation to another. It also changed the way that people physically communicated over sprawling distances, and how they imagined what it means to express thoughts. Compared to the Atlantic, the Pacific was relatively belated in adopting new “universal” modes of media communications, such as the radio. For example, the first transpacific telegraphic line was laid four decades after the first transatlantic one. Once this general infrastructure was put into place by the 1920s, however, writers such as Buck aggressively exploited it to develop new forms of transpacific cultural affiliation. The interwar period instigated a massive transformation in U.S.-China cultural relations. In the previous century, these relations had been shaped by a set of limiting political and economic conditions highly unfavor-
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able to the Chinese. The American state carried out a form of “gunboat diplomacy,” which secured trading privileges originally given to European imperial nations, such as England. These privileges had been first attained through military action during the Taiping Rebellion and were sustained by military deployments along China’s coasts throughout the 1860s. However, the largest U.S. presence in China came in the form of missionaries. By 1920 their numbers totaled more than fifteen hundred. American missionaries, particularly from the YMCA, were eager to spread the word of Christianity and the “American way of life,” yet the Chinese were highly resistant, and violence against missionaries and their property was common. Finally, evangelic visions of “uplifting” China also took the form of financial opportunism. American businessmen grew fixated on the idea of a vast, untapped transpacific trade market, while visions of “450 million consumers” filled their heads. The expression “China market” took hold in the American lexicon during this period.1 Literary interactions of this previous century largely bowed to the unidirectional force of political and economic conquest. They were constrained, limited. In America, writers such as Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson instantiated a tradition of Orientalist writing, which valorized China and “the East” as a source of mystical poetic inspiration, a tradition developed later in the twentieth century by Ezra Pound and others. The American aesthetic tendency to mythologize Asian culture acquired surest form and became a “resilient structure” in the nineteenth century.2 In China, intellectuals and writers responded to the reality of Western conquest and the resulting collapse of the Qing dynastic state by attempting to absorb Western intellectual and cultural concepts. They largely encountered the West through a series of translations of influential Euro-American texts, such as The Origin of the Species. This encounter, though, was largely felt as an anxious experience—the “anxiety” of embracing the West and breaking with the past without totally abandoning it.3 Nineteenth-century American-Chinese cultural relations, in sum, were largely restricted to fantasy and perception. Something changed in the interwar period. Historians and literary scholars have already noted that the 1930s and 1940s signaled a time of profound transformation in U.S.–East Asia cultural relations. From the view of American culture, David Palumbo-Liu argues that more simplistic Orientalist views of China (such as “the Yellow Peril”) became more
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nuanced. As a result of the First World War, changes in the international economy, and new technologies of communication, American writers began to move beyond the exoticist discourses of Emerson and Whitman.4 In China, the interwar era signaled an analogous turning point in perceptions of the United States. If, as David Arkush and Leo Lee argue, Chinese writers in the nineteenth century were limited to writing exotic fantasies of America, by the 1910s they had started to travel across the Pacific in larger numbers and encounter a richer array of American cultural texts as part of the May Fourth Enlightenment movement.5 Overall, the physical possibilities for cross-cultural interaction changed in the early twentieth century, and with this transformation, there arose new possibilities for knowing the other. Yet the full extent of this transformation has not been fully appreciated. The interwar period saw more than just an evolution or altering of American perceptions of the Chinese and vice versa; it witnessed an unprecedented integration of American and Chinese cultures, and their synthesis as a “community” of shared ideals. This period of transpacific interaction, in short, completely broke with its nineteenth-century identity. Writers such as Smedley and Lao She rejected entrenched, long-standing notions of the East’s eternal backwardness and the common belief that America and China represented fundamentally incommensurable civilizations. They rejected the idea that a permanent hierarchy must exist and forever put the West atop the East. In its place, they asserted a different epistemology of the Pacific. They used terms like “networks” to describe a world propelled by endless flows of cultural contact, unchecked by national borders. The essential way of comprehending the relationship between America and China, East and West, once perceived through an intractable lens of radical difference or antagonism, had evolved into a new epistemology of connectedness and “permanent equilibrium.”6 Most important, the Pacific became seen as a generative site: the place where new political genealogies, critical of existing arrangements of political and economic power, might arise. These writers dreamt up new configurations to undo the old ones. Two major obstacles have prevented us from recognizing this history. The first is conceptual. We do not have a good analytical model for understanding forms of East-West cultural relations that operate through reciprocal interaction rather than hegemony. We have countless studies of
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Western Orientalism toward China: the way that the West creates a fantasy representation of “China” that serves to reinforce the belief that the two are essentially different and exist in a binary that denigrates the non-West. And we have countless studies of the Chinese reception of Euro-American culture from the late Qing to the Republican period. Here, China historians tell us, the absorption of Western concepts such as “democracy” was highly ambivalent and fraught. But not entirely unlike the West’s imagining China, “America” was an abstract idea, an unwieldy signifier that had to be managed.7 In both cases, “America” and “China” are merely ideas for the other, not joined by a reciprocal space of interaction. The second obstacle relates to the afterlife of this history. This history is one of failure. With the onset of the Cold War, this community quickly fell apart, leaving virtually no traces. Retracing the threads that held this group together is difficult. Their collaborations were ephemeral, and the archive that documents their collaborations is scattered across three continents. Moreover, we typically don’t think of these writers as a community. Each belongs to a discrete identity category, such as American or Chinese, and political affiliation, such as Left or liberal. We lack a vocabulary to think about these categories together. Political developments after the Second World War only made things harder. Nineteenth-century visions of America and China as antagonistic civilizations grew reified in the Cold War. This book presents the first history of this community. Its importance and power consists in its articulating a new conceptual framework for understanding the intellectual and cultural relations between East and West, China and America. Such an account, it seems, is needed now more than ever. Despite the end of the Cold War, chatter about a perceived inevitable economic and military showdown between the United States and China with the ostensible hegemonic rise of the latter has become increasingly commonplace, echoing the antagonistic visions of an earlier nineteenthcentury model. The history of these writers, however, returns us to a different, less ideologically intractable vision of the Transpacific. It is a place not only subject to inexorable political and economic structures and their attendant discourses of Orientalism. It is a place in motion, filled with people, ideas, objects, technology, and texts. It is a place where literature mediates cultural difference and enables unexpected moments of social affiliation that stand beyond traditional political, economic, or institutional
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frameworks. This book reanimates this vision precisely to disrupt longheld, teleological notions of how American and Chinese cultures have always interacted, and must always do so. Reinventing Democracy In their time, all these figures represented major public intellectuals. Each was well-known to the American and/or Chinese public as an important artist and thinker, and each belonged to a significant social formation. Smedley helped to launch the American proletarian movement with her novel Daughter of Earth (1929); Buck became famous as a liberal in both the United States and China and espoused a series of liberal causes, such as civil rights, in novels as well as activism; Robeson played a central role in the development of interwar black internationalism and passionately spoke for a politics of racial equality; Lin Yutang advocated for Chinese liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s in Shanghai; and Lao She wrote a defining work of Chinese left-wing agitation, Rickshaw, and became a leader in the Chinese national liberation movement in the 1940s. This is one way of thinking about these writers as individuals: as representatives of the various key cultural and social movements of the interwar period, from hardcore communism to Chinese or American liberalism to the rise of the early civil rights movement. This is largely how scholars in American and China studies have categorized their work. More broadly, we can also place them within wider streams of international encounter. We could put the more left-leaning figures, such as Robeson and Lao She, into the period’s global aggregation of political radicals inspired by Russian socialism after the war;8 and, we could put the more liberal figures, such as Buck and Lin, into what Akira Iriye has identified as “cultural internationalism”—a vision of political solidarity across nations and races based on liberal ideas of self-determination and the rule of law.9 In this view, American and Chinese writers first belonged to some discernible national movement or institution. And when the 1930s set in, each traveled abroad to find allies and joined another discernible internationalist movement or institution. Thus Lao She occupies a central place in histories of the Chinese literary Left,10 while Robeson figures richly in scholarly accounts of interwar African American internationalism.11
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However, this is not entirely how the period worked when seen from the ground up. Interactions between individuals and categories of identification and political action were far more flexible than the mere title of the nominal categories alone. For example, consider a curious gathering of unexpected friends in New York City on March 12, 1944. As World War II raged in Europe, a group of committed American and Chinese activists got together to address a matter seemingly remote in importance: celebrating the life and death of Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), a Chinese revolutionary who helped to overthrow the Qing dynasty and served as the founder of the Republic of China. Pearl Buck took the stage to celebrate Sun’s “Three People’s Principles” as a shining example of liberalism. Next, Paul Robeson spoke in order to explicate the significance of Sun’s idea for black liberation thought and political mobilization. Last, Lin picked up the microphone and spent two hours explicating the democratic genius of Sun’s thought, a line of thinking that resonated with that of Thomas Jefferson (a figure also claimed by U.S. communists). The audience was packed with white, African American, Asian American, and Chinese men and women. Terrible events loomed in Europe. But in New York, for a moment, there appeared a happy melding of seemingly incompatible politics. Current historical narratives of this period help in part to explain this meeting. Douglas Rossinow has articulated a flexible U.S. historical framework to understand the interaction between American liberals and leftists in the interwar period. The interwar years saw the rise of a short-lived but significant coalition of anticapitalist liberals and socialists respectful of reform. There arose a series of collaborations that emphasized cooperation between radical rebellion and a liberal commitment to individual rights, the rule of law, and gradual social change. In the mid-1930s, this project reached its apex with the formation of the U.S. Popular Front, an organization that included a diverse group of activists. Categories of the Left and liberalism got blurred.12 On the face of it, this meeting of writers represents an example of American Left-liberal cooperation. For example, this coalition allowed Robeson and Buck to work together despite different degrees of left-wing commitment. Both were attracted to a strategic harmony between liberalism and socialism that brokered inclusive activist programs. This is the story of how leftists and liberals found common ground after the First World War.
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The story in China, though, was quite different. If the 1920s and 1930s in America revealed ideological confluence, China in the same period witnessed the exact opposite process: the rise and triumph of leftism as the choice ideology of intellectuals. War with Japan put incalculable pressure on the ideals and hopes of the May Fourth movement (1919–1921). Practical needs of mobilizing the people and saving the nation made the otherwise noble goals of individual rights and informed social critique seem pointless or irrelevant. As Jerome Grieder has argued, liberalism simply could not exist or survive in a country defined by incessant military violence and political chaos.13 By 1937, the year of Japan’s invasion of North China, many Chinese writers had embraced the Left. Strong liberals, like Hu Shi and Lin Yutang, traveled to the United States to find a more open or tolerant environment to develop their thoughts about China. The discursive environment had become too rigid and ideologically militant at home. This is what Lin Yutang was doing in New York in the early 1940s: he was energetically exploring flexible, maybe incommensurable political positions regarding the future of “China.” Here are two historical narratives of liberalism and the radical Left: from one shore, liberalism melds with leftism to enable the rise of a powerful coalition, the U.S. Popular and Cultural Front. From the other shore, liberalism gives way to a muscular, more effective form of political action—the Chinese Left. However, this meeting of unlikely allies presents a third narrative. An important dimension of the American Left-liberal coalition was a desire to absorb non-American intellectuals, Chinese writers in particular. The purpose of this work was to test the viability of American concepts such as “democracy” in a foreign context. The more disparate the context, the better. Could American and Chinese political traditions be combined into a coherent whole? In China, by the 1940s, liberal democracy had largely been eviscerated, yet a number of writers, Lin Yutang and Lao She included, still believed that “Chinese liberalism,” as articulated by their colleague Hu Shi, could still be sustained in a transpacific context; ironically, somewhere that was not China. The third historical narrative this meeting describes is the synthesis of American and Chinese interwar political agendas. For these writers, the concept of democracy is what held it all together. This is the single term that appears in all their writings and speeches. American liberalism is a form of democracy. The struggle for black liberation is a form of democracy. So is Chinese liberalism. Class revolt is “democratic,” as
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is Mao Zedong. By the interwar period, of course, democracy had become more than just a political position or straight ideology. John Dewey described it as an “attitude,” a “word with many meanings.”14 Song Qingling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen and future vice president of the People’s Republic of China, identified it as a mere “form” (形式).15 From the vantage point of history, we know that “democracy” often simply meant “not fascism” for interwar intellectuals. From different shores, historians of the United States and of China, such as Robert Westbrook and Benjamin Schwarz, identify a powerful “liberal strain” or mood that compelled political thought across a wide range of political affiliations.16 The term “democracy” encapsulated this mood. For these figures, democracy proved attractive precisely because of its openness. Compared to terms such as “socialism,” it felt less calcified or intractable, and thus more enabling of political and cultural collaboration. For instance, Lao She repeatedly uses the term “democracy” in his application to serve as a visiting writer at the U.S. State Department in 1945, an application sponsored by Pearl Buck. He frames his visit as contributing to “worldwide democracy” despite also representing the interests of his Chinese leftist colleagues.17 The State Department eagerly approved his application. For Lao She, democracy signaled national self-determination, while for the U.S. government, it meant more an ethos or disposition. Lao She, in the State Department’s view, was a real “democratic author” who shared American “values.” Despite such blatant dissonance, each side hears in the other an agreeable harmony, a “democratic” melody. These writers took specific advantage of democracy’s open form by endowing it with a distinct “Pacific” genealogy. For figures like Buck or Lin, the Pacific possessed a weaker sense of political genealogy than, say, the Atlantic. No obvious line of political thought connected America and China to some single, grand intellectual tradition. They instead tried to invent new ones. Buck imagined something called “natural democracy,” a synthesis of late-Qing and Jeffersonian visions of social egalitarianism, while Robeson summoned the idea of “pentatonic democracy”—a seamless fusion of African American and Chinese folk cultures. We might think of these visions of democracy as spelling out a “lowercase” Marxism: a politics of class equality yet still invested in standard tropes of individual freedom, the rule of law, and gradual social reform. Or, we might think of them as an agonistic mode of democracy that interprets social conflict between various social groups as inevitable but is itself constitutive of democracy.
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In any case, U.S. intellectuals saw in China, in rural peasants in particular, a useful case to conceptualize a radical, class-driven version of liberal democracy that was not beholden to socialist ideology, while Chinese writers discovered in American thought a chance to integrate popular Soviet views of class revolution with normative Western liberal notions of the sanctity of the individual. Underlying all this was the belief that the Pacific represented an open or flexible place to rethink, as well as transform, political ideas. It was a place where ostensibly formalized concepts, such as “civil rights,” could be filled with new contents. In the interface between America and China, these writers believed that no single intellectual genealogy held sway. It stood at the literal midpoint between “new” Soviet Russia and “old” Enlightenment Europe. While these writers often draw from both of these traditions, neither is given primacy or absolute authority. The idea of democracy as an open form that individuals of all political stripes could get behind was an ephemeral phenomenon, an artifact of the interwar period in which it stood for whatever was not fascism. This effect was especially pronounced in the context of U.S.-China cultural relations and how this context imagined the Pacific. So far historians have not taken too seriously the fact that writers as disparate as Smedley, Buck, Robeson, Lin, and Lao She all used the term “democracy.” It was just rhetoric. As a result, scholarship has largely kept these figures to their respective ideological corners: they don’t belong together, even if they were using the same language. But their use of the term did real work in the world that moved well beyond mere rhetoric. It facilitated cross-cultural collaboration and communication. It allowed each figure to transcend standard divisions of Left and liberal, East and West. In sum, democracy as an idea served as a locus or node for affiliation, the association of positions and individuals typically separated by ideology, gender, race, or nation. These writers aggressively exploited the term’s brief historical flexibility to pursue new alliances. Technology and the Speed of Words If the concept of democracy animated new modes of connectivity among American and Chinese writers, inducing a broader transformed vision of the Pacific, new physical changes in their environment facilitated this transformation. The formation of a massive technological infrastructure between the United States and East Asia in the first half of the century
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underwrote increasing opportunities for writers to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. The time frame of this history is relatively compressed, yet it was an era of unprecedented changes in how people imagined the Pacific as a physically connected place. Not only had the idea of the Pacific evolved; its very materiality had altered as well. New forms of transpacific media and telecommunications started to explode in the first decade of the twentieth century. Some figures: the first transpacific telegraph line was laid in 1902–1903 and connected the United States to Hawaii, while the first direct telegraphic link between the United States and China was established in late January 1921. During this period the number of international cable messages exploded to exceed one million in China, and the cable link between Shanghai and San Francisco accounted for more than 10 percent of that total.18 The radio appeared in China just a decade later. In 1928 the American-based company RCA brokered a deal with the Nationalist state to introduce radio technology, construct several broadcast stations, and begin the work of selling radio sets commercially to the Chinese people. Between 1931 and 1935 China’s domestic radio telegraphic network expanded aggressively from thirtytwo to sixty-five stations, and an agreement was also reached to create a Shanghai–San Francisco circuit.19 Through the 1930s, American programming dominated radio broadcasting in China. Finally, this period witnessed the emergence of an efficient transpacific transportation system, which facilitated the rapid exchange and dissemination of physical texts. Starting in late 1932 one could send letter packages across the Pacific by a newly established Pacific air mail system, while by the mid-1930s one could also mail parcels from America to China, and vice versa, via the SS Tatsuma Maru, the famous Japanese “book boat” that shipped hundreds of manuscripts.20 The infrastructure of the Pacific had evolved. Scholarship on cultural encounters between the United States and East Asia has been generally silent on this history. When one reads the voluminous amounts of writing on the subject, one is struck by a certain consistency of rhetoric: interactions are usually defined by “imbalance,” “myth,” “fantasy,” “projection,” and “apparitions.”21 The idea of a transpacific world is less an actual sphere of interaction and more a simple fantasy space of cultural projection and introjection, Orientalism and reverse Orientalism. Specifically, when scholars today talk about cultural contact between China and the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Pacific
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often appears as an austere place. Writers sit in their apartments alone and dream up fantasies of China or America by pen and paper. Visions and ideas are hallucinated in quiet contemplation and magically materialize as novels and poems. This epistemology of how the Pacific operates ignores the fact that writers lived within complex ecologies of media and technology that shaped their ability to think, write, and come up with new ideas. When Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth, she wrote it on a typewriter in a room with a phonograph that played music, and when it was done, she sent the book to her editor via airmail. She lived within an encompassing mediated environment that conditioned what it meant to write or have thoughts, especially ideas about a theme as complex as “China.” Her novel formed within this ecology. Here, recent scholarship in new media studies is instructive; most obviously, for example, Friedrich Kittler’s polemic that “media determine our situation,”22 and Marshall McLuhan’s argument that “all media [are] extensions of ourselves that serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness.”23 The insight that machines and technology not merely are exterior to our behavior or our ability to have thoughts but instead actively determine and alter what it means to be human is now a commonplace and has inspired numerous media histories of the typewriter, the phonograph, and so forth. But the recent interest in media history has been slow to penetrate scholarship focused on transnational and cross-cultural studies, particularly East-West relations. This is a paradox: there is a sense that the farther two cultures physically are from each other (say, America and China), the less important an account of media becomes, when in fact the opposite is true. In the modern period the very notion of U.S.Chinese cultural interaction was closely related to and dependent on new technologies of communication, such as the telegraph and radio. Behind all the texts that animate critiques of Orientalism or the Chinese reception of Western culture there lies an archive of telegrams, airmail, radio broadcasts, and phonograph records. The belief that someone can make sense of one without the other is itself a fantasy. Historians have done a better job of exploring the relationship between new media technologies and internationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Armand Mattelart documents the era’s “networking of the world” made possible by technological innovations, such as the international telegraph.24 Christopher Bayly describes this period as
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“the Great Acceleration,” the “observation that the late nineteenth century revolutions in transportation, communication, finance, and commerce were transforming loyalties and sensibilities, limiting or even eliminating spatial distance, [which] animated the creation of an ever-widening array of international and transnational networks during the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century.”25 Emily Rosenberg more simply asserts that the period’s revolutions in communications and transportation “promoted a flowering of efforts to reimagine the world as a single field.”26 All this is true, and these historians do well in maintaining a critical attitude toward the spirit of technological utopianism that underlay such revolutions. The spread of new media networks often went hand in hand with endorsing “Western universalism.”27 This book applies this framework to the analysis of East-West cultural encounter in the first half of the twentieth century. Rosenberg’s and Mattelart’s critical language of “currents” and “electricity” is compelling in reframing our understanding of interactions between America and China as more than just the disembodied diffusion of ideas across shores; they were also intertwined with the period’s revolution in technology. The way that American writers wrote about China, and the way that Chinese writers wrote about the West, could not be the same as it was in the century before. Tracking these changes as they transpired on the ground is the purpose of this book. Yet, at the same time, the book provides a view somewhat askance to the story told by Bayly and Rosenberg: the Pacific is an especially interesting place to see how technological changes transformed conventional cross-cultural perceptions because it stood outside of the era’s dominant modes of internationalism. America and China fell beyond the purview of a purported grand line of Euro-American civilization, while at the same time the Pacific did not belong to the framework of Western colonialism, which accounted for cultures outside of that line. It was somewhere in between. As such, the potential for the Pacific to not only participate in this period’s transformed world of communications but also push it to its limit was great. The Pacific held a special form of “electrified” cultural encounter. A central claim of this book, therefore, is that literary histories of U.S.China cultural encounter in the twentieth century must also, in part, be histories of media. Two subclaims follow from this argument. The first concerns what we might call the velocity of literature in an age of global
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communications technology. Recently, several excellent histories of the circulation of major texts, such as Hamlet, from their country of origin to the rest of the world have appeared.28 Such studies explore the circulation of a single text over a longue durée, tracking its migration and eventual reception and adaptation in foreign contexts. An important aspect of this history is duration: the dissemination of texts such as The Pilgrim’s Progress often took centuries, whereby the penetration and transformation of the text was slow but deep.29 The early twentieth century, however, represented a period in which the speed at which texts could move accelerated. Speed matters; crossing the Pacific got faster. For example, while it took The Pilgrim’s Progress some one hundred years to fully penetrate Africa and become indigenized in the age of print media, The Good Earth appeared in Chinese in China within nine months of its original publication in the United States. Advances in airmail technology made this rapid diffusion of the text possible. Very quickly, Chinese readers embraced the novel as “Chinese.” Many did not know it was a Western work.30 This phenomenon disrupts more traditional notions of the global diffusion of literature, such that texts in the age of telecommunications seem to exist simultaneously in places as disparate as America and China. The sense of a temporal lag between the two is attenuated. The accelerated diffusion of culture in the Pacific made America and China feel as if they lived within a coeval, shared sense of temporal experience. Readers in China did not get literary accounts of historical reality in America twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred years after they happened; they got them quickly. This fast reception of novels such as The Good Earth made the Chinese feel as if they participated in the same temporality as America. And the increasing exportation of Chinese works to America, along with the often recursive reimportation of novels such as The Good Earth after their “Sinification” in China, made Americans also believe that culture joined the two countries in a common historical reality. This book thus offers a major challenge to a core assertion of East-West cultural critique: the denial of coevality. Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, researchers invested in postcolonial studies have also drawn heavily from Johannes Fabian’s thesis that an inherent weakness of modern anthropological writing and Western portrayals of the nonWest is a perception of their subjects as living in a time outside or before modernity: the time of the author. “We” forever see the West as more
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advanced than the non-West because we inhabit a more modern period, while those who do not live in the West are trapped in the past.31 A different dynamic appears in a new era made possible by the technological acceleration of culture. This acceleration brokers the rise of what is seen as crucial to breaking the denial of coevality: an “intersubjective communication” between allegedly antagonistic cultures.32 The Mediation of Cultures Transpacific Community attempts to recast the Pacific in the twentieth century as a site of mediation. I mean this term in a literal sense: the negotiation and reconciliation of opposing, antithetical positions. Different cultures and political concepts, such as democracy, are brokered and ultimately reconstituted. New forms of communications technology made what one scholar calls this “milieu of mediation” possible.33 Yet if the Pacific was also a “thick environment” in which people and things endlessly interacted with other people and things to induce such mediations, it was literature that played a central role in this process. In particular, it was literature’s involvement with the era’s media infrastructure that endowed it with new capacities. It could suddenly do much more than just represent the “Other” for a domestic audience hungry for exoticism. It bore the capacity to reconcile different cultural forms through its own design. Literary works, such as The Good Earth and Lao She’s Rickshaw, filled the space of the Pacific in the 1930s and 1940s. These texts are both constituted by and generative of even larger networks of other texts, aesthetic forms, writers, technologies, and institutions. Literary texts served to coordinate all these things, and in turn, this process helped to shape their form and meaning. We need to think of these works as inseparable from the thick environment within which they were produced and circulated. It allows us to discern works of literature as objects that both represent and mediate reality. How do we read these texts? From the perspective of American literary studies, the influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism has been profound. His thesis that works of art and literature, such as the novel, function as self-reinforcing systems of knowledge that distill complex reality into ideologically agreeable “consolidated visions” has decisively affected most recent writings on America’s meeting with China.34 Said’s claim is most convincing within the context of imperialism, where the realities of
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socioeconomic interaction are so fraught and unpleasant that one’s culture requires imaginative resolutions to the very real problem of subjecting an entire nation or peoples. Literary critics such as David Palumbo-Liu, Colleen Lye, and Josephine Park, focused on U.S.-East Asia cultural encounter, have rightfully moved this framework to study the often unsettling phenomenon of American perceptions of “China” and Asia.35 This form of analysis, though, has begun to reach a limit. In the several decades since Said’s intervention, readings of “Orientalism” have become both numerous and increasingly sophisticated. However, they often end up at the same place conceptually—a critique of the West’s self-serving cultural fantasies—and this conceptual investment has in many cases flattened works such as The Good Earth, making them predictable. The overall terms of the debate have themselves become somewhat predictable. We discover that texts are either toxic versions of U.S. Orientalism or surprising, insightful examples of U.S. Orientalism. In both cases, the rhetoric of “grids” and “filters,” which figures squarely in Said’s work, is typically present.36 Take, for example, Eric Hayot’s study of the place of “China” in the history of sympathy and suffering. His argument starts from a familiar place (“There, China has been most consistently characterized as a limit or potential limit”) but becomes more interesting in extending Said’s critique to say that there exists an important relation between how we understand “China” as an object and “the West” itself, which he calls “the ecliptic”: “it is a figure of the relation between two things rather than a sign for one or the other of them; it is the figure, I repeat, of a relation, and not of the things related.”37 I cite this work because it is virtuosic, yet it ultimately still reproduces the core parameters of Said’s argument. Literary texts such as The Good Earth suggest the need for a different reading apparatus. Buck’s constant melding of American and Chinese figurations at the level of language, as well as form, and its larger framework of combining American and Chinese cultural patterns indicate less a desire to make China embody an epistemological limit or threshold for the West and more a wish to mediate otherwise incommensurable and disparate cultural systems. My readings highlight the process by which a literary text serves as the basis by which two cultural systems interact and find provisional accord. Rather than simply index or represent a different culture, a process that we have been taught inevitably leads to patronizing ii
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projections, distortions, or wild fantasies of totality, these works deploy formal resources, such as metaphor and imagery, as well as the text’s own materiality, to negotiate and incorporate opposing ways of knowing and thinking. The work of managing that first encounter and then synthesizing such systems takes place within both the aesthetic form and material body of the text itself. Literary historians of China’s meeting with the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have already noted the importance of mediation within that interface. In general, given their attention to both Chinese- and Western-language texts, China scholars have developed more robust models of cross-cultural contact that move beyond simple critiques of Orientalism (or Occidentalism). Lydia Liu’s work on translingual practice—the way that foreign words and forms of representation in China arise, circulate, and gain legitimacy—has proven compelling and enduring. In particular, her account of translation as a form of mediation is insightful. Liu sees the translation of key foreign words into Chinese as a collision of different cultural systems, and through the process of making different cultural concepts agree at the level of words, we observe acts of meaning making. Liu views language as a kind of medium that washes over the world and forces a generative meeting of highly disparate cultural systems.38 Shu-mei Shih, in her research on Chinese literary modernism, also uses the concept of “mediation” (an “aesthetics of correspondence”) to analyze East-West cultural meetings.39 This book pushes this thesis to argue that U.S. and Chinese writers not only saw words as a linguistic medium to translate cultural difference but also began to see literature itself as a kind of communications tool that contributed to their era’s larger media ecology of the radio and telegraph. Here I draw from the work of Richard Menke, Mark Wollaeger, and Mark Goble.40 These scholars have shown that modernist authors discerned the powers of communication evinced by new media as not unique to those devices but instead a power already contained within literature, and, through the new innovations of modernism, one that could be taken even further. The first few decades of the twentieth century marked a decisive moment in the history of media. New electric media, such as the telegraph, were still new, and writers were eager to explore the capacity of literature to compete with, enhance, and integrate with such technologies.
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John Dewey wrote: “The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. . . . It has its seer in Walt Whitman.”41 Here, early twentieth-century cultural theorists, such as Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and Walter Lippmann, assert literature’s ability to act broadly and communicatively in large networks of interaction. This view puts a different spin on postwar, Foucault-inspired interpretations of literature as merely reinforcing or contributing to already existing systems of knowledge. The text, in that view, is not generous. This book combines the insights of Liu with those of early twentiethcentury U.S. communications theorists. I argue that the dynamics of mediation we identify in U.S. modernism become intensified in a transnational context. The need to communicate—to make literary texts function as communicative objects—was particularly pressing in the encounter between East and West. Ultimately, writers in the Pacific often chose to do more than merely represent or portray the opposite culture through a grid of pure fantasy or ideology. Rather, they sought to use literature as a means to communicate and mediate cultural difference. Not unlike Dewey, they found themselves in a rich new world of infinite connection and global dependency, and they believed that the literary artifact, more than any other mode of communication, technological or not, could perform the crucial work of making different cultures speak to each other. In the always perilous encounter with foreign cultures, literature could do more than just generate interesting “hallucinations” of the Other.42 It stood between cultures, sitting at their apparent unbridgeable impasse, and built reciprocal channels of communication. A concrete example would be useful here. Figure 0.1 reproduces a page of edited text from a draft of Lao She’s English translation of Four Generations Under One House (四世同堂), published in English in 1952 as The Yellow Storm. Lao She worked with Ida Pruitt, an American novelist, to translate the text into English. Each day he would read his Chinese text to Pruitt, who was fluent in Chinese, and Pruitt would then instantly mentally translate the spoken Chinese into typed English. Once the words were typed on the paper, the two would look at the prose and make changes based on vigorous debate over the best way to express Lao She’s original thought. Thus the two decide to revise Pruitt’s original ren-
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FIGURE 0.1 Page from a draft of The Yellow Storm, written by Lao She and cotranslated by Ida Pruitt. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
dering of mimi huhu (迷迷糊糊), a four-character expression in Chinese that functions as a set phrase, as “as in a dream,” a more natural figurative phrase in English.43 They also make a crucial distinction between “mind” and “heart” in English: in Chinese, xin (心) can contain both meanings, but in English the two are far more distinct and do not represent obvious
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synonyms. As indicated by the corrected typed comments on top of the original typed text, as well as handwritten remarks, Lao She and Pruitt go back and forth to sort out their meanings. The text is the site in which the two writers work out cultural difference. It is the place where Lao She and Pruitt effectively communicate and merge their understanding of American and Chinese cultures, blending the two in the process. The two manipulate the novel as an aesthetic object, transforming a Chinese four-character set phrase into an English simile, to broker agreement between American and Chinese linguistic-cultural systems. They speak through the formal dimensions of the text. Yet, at the same time, it is the material text itself that facilitates this mediation. The physical text is imagined to be what Lao She calls a “communications tool.”44 It is a device for people to inscribe their thoughts and revise them based on what other people inscribe onto that material surface. Importantly, the object—here, a page of text, but in other examples a telegram and a vinyl record—alters one’s ability to express oneself and how one can interact with others. Communication flows from this process. The text is an agent that links writers to other writers and to the world they live in. This example enables some useful distinctions. First, my account of “mediation” is distinct from theoretical accounts of the work that literature can do in negotiating the relationship between a reader and the text, or, more broadly, a text and its public. This is a different genealogy of mediation as articulated by Raymond Williams and other scholars of Marxism and culture.45 My account is more straightforward: here, textual mediation is the process of writers using texts as a tool to communicate with one another and merge seemingly antithetical cultural ideas and values. Moreover, I stress that textual mediation is never imagined to completely overtake “representation.” The two are best thought of as supplements. For example, Lao She’s novel is still very much about World War II in China and uses language to represent that experience. Yet behind that process is another process: one that attempts to encode the various cross-cultural movements and networks of interaction that make representation possible within the text itself, beneath its more apparent surfaces. Edward Said famously drew from Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis to create his theory of Orientalism, both of which see representation as the key to uncovering how a particular social epoch understood “reality” by examining how it tried to describe that reality.46 For these writers, though, representation was not always enough to i
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capture a reality that always seemed in process, on the verge of becoming one. That reality also had to be mediated in order to be known. The Transpacific as Cultural Network This book seeks to bring together concepts of open democracy, technology and media, and textual mediation to articulate a new model of the Transpacific. In recent years, the Transpacific has coalesced as a focused object of study for scholars across a range of fields (American studies, East Asian studies, Asian American studies) and disciplines (literary criticism, history, art, anthropology, cultural studies). Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, in an important new edited volume, find that this scholarship largely articulates two visions of the Pacific: “as a space of exploration, exploitation, and expansion advanced by European, American, and Asian powers” and “as a contact zone, its history defined not only by conquest, colonialism, and conflict but also alternate narratives of translocalism, oppositional localism and oppositional regionalism.” While the first vision identifies “the Pacific as an arena of economic development and imperial fantasy,” the second represents “the Pacific as a site of critical engagement with and evaluation of such development and fantasy.”47 Research by David Palumbo-Liu, Arif Dirlik, and Rob Wilson from the 1990s has developed this second vision, which takes as its object a critique of the first.48 In this case, the Transpacific is generally interpreted as an “ideology” created by powerful nations to subject less powerful peoples. Yet more recent work by Yunte Huang has shifted this view to grasp the Transpacific as, at the same time, formed through an interplay of these visions, normative and subversive. He discerns the space of the Transpacific as more chaotic and up for grabs: “as subject to competing interpretations made from different shores.” No single vision holds sway. Many visions compete for legibility within a flexible and open “terrain.”49 This book takes the cultural relations between the United States and China as an exemplary form of the Transpacific in the twentieth century. The Pacific, of course, was much more than just America and China during this time. It was Japan and Southeast Asia; it was Hawaii and the Philippines; it was Canada and Brazil. Further, as Dirlik and Wilson have shown, imperialism often represented a determining force in how the Transpacific took shape and operated. Thus this space typically materializes as a kind x
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of ideological construction or fantasy. These readings are no doubt correct, but American and Chinese writers, such as Smedley and Lao She, reveal a different version of the Transpacific. So far I have referred to these writers as a “group” or “community.” This language is meant to mark a mode of interaction that stands at an angle to normative forms of aggregation, such as “the nation,” or interaction, such as “markets.” This group of writers did not assemble or collaborate via formal categories of political identity, such as “nationalism,” official institutions, such as “the state,” or financial/market relations. Top-down political forces such as empire did not exclusively mold whom they met or worked with. Rather, each meeting was ad hoc and improvised, determined within a flowing and unstable social space. Here, Huang’s account of the Transpacific as an open site of interaction is helpful. It is within this space of possibility that these writers became a group and constructed an imagining of the Transpacific as a place in which to live and do things. Imperialism, markets, and the state often intrude on this space, but their relationship to such top-down entities was not merely acquiescent or subversive. They used these entities to do things, to build generative relations between people. In a conceptual vein, the idea of a network became the core form through which this group understood the Pacific and their place within it. Often this formulation took on self-aware articulation, as when Lao She refers to a great “literary network” (文网) that connects the United States and China via creative writing. But the concept emerged most emphatically as a kind of practice or behavior—a way of conducting oneself with others, and grasping the possibilities for action and thought, in the brave new world of the Pacific. Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory is a useful concept to think with here. Latour reimagines the space of the social as not constituted by “top-down” categories, such as “the state,” which determine the shape of social behavior, but instead as formed “bottom-up” through individual human actions and their relationship to other human actions and objects, which shape the meaning of such categories. He asserts a vision of the social as a “network” of an infinite “string of actions” that link people to objects and then to other things and objects. All this constitutes “the social” as a “circulating entity.”50 This is a helpful framework to think about how this group, as a “network,” generates the space of the Transpacific in this era. If we only read each individual’s texts or speeches, we do not get a good sense of the real heat of that person’s work. v
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We get an artificial sense of what the writer actually wanted to say and do: the polished, final version. However, what most excited these writers was the possibility for social affiliation and communication. The real energy of their work lay in transmission: the telegraphs and radio signals that became stories, and essays that became speeches and movements. All this congealed to form, in Latour’s sense, a network of endless action and reaction. This is how they thought the Transpacific worked. This idea of the Transpacific focuses on the role that cultural gobetweens and mediators play in the formation of global cultural formation and practice. Rather than assume that all forms of cross-cultural encounter, particularly in an East-West context, must result in collision or fantasy (following the traditional Orientalist thesis), we might instead look at how go-betweens “articulate relationships between disparate worlds or cultures by being able to translate between them.”51 The object of this study is not simply a certain writer writing about China or America or a novel that talks about China or America in a particular way, on a case-by-case basis, but rather the Transpacific as a thick environment composed of hundreds of agents, objects, texts, technologies, and institutions, all interacting together. This terrain was a mediated space—brokered not only by individuals but also by objects and texts. It is a process in which “startling performances of mediation and translation” come into view as writers attempt to assemble a connected world.52 Call it the Transpacific in action. What is at stake in conceptualizing the Transpacific as a type of network? This formulation provides useful leverage to think about this space, and its history, in terms more flexible than previously available. Again, we typically think of the Transpacific in binary terms of either (1) a site of imperial capitalist exploitation or (2) the critique and resistance of that exploitation by subaltern populations. The network concept, however, allows us to think about the Transpacific as formed through less predictable and more unevenly distributed patterns of power. Network theorists, such as Tiziana Terranova and Manuel Castells, emphasize ideas such as “open structures” and the “multiplicity of communication channels” to assert the sheer dynamism of networks as imagined social spaces.53 Their point is that power moves chaotically through this space and is regularly deformed as it travels. Importantly, this makes possible unexpected, sudden moments of political reinvention and intervention—what Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker call “exploits.”54 There emerge opportunities to “exploit”
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gaps in power in the network. Of course, Galloway warns against the tendency to romanticize the idea of networks as innately liberatory (they are still often aligned with capitalism and the state).55 But in sum, imagining the Transpacific as a network encourages us to think about power beyond a binary frame and rediscover this space as animated by exploits. My use of the term “networks” is a deliberate anachronism. The concept gained definitive traction only after the Second World War and is usually associated with the rise of new information technologies in the 1970s and what broadly has been called “a new era of capitalism.”56 One is thus particularly skeptical of the term as it appears in the U.S.–East Asia context: one thinks of endless flows of capital and technology that sprawl across the Pacific, joining all to a juggernaut of economic development. These writers, however, allow us to reclaim the network concept as not merely linked to an expression of capitalist expansion. Rather, they take literature and art as the basis for imagining connectivity between America and China. Speaking to others through the form of culture presents an opportunity to find some underlying commonality that exists between different types of people. Each moment of encounter therefore places in the foreground a moment of affective relation, human meaning, and human value. It is an opportunity to extend the basis for a common humanity across “East” and “West.” If anything, in the interwar period, it is this vision of a “cultural network” that often animates the material versions of the Transpacific as a political or economic network. Thus, while my use of the term is anachronistic, it seeks to locate an alternative genealogy of the Transpacific within the interwar period that swerves from postwar accounts of this space as relentlessly constituted by flows of capital that one resists or kneels to. tracks an individual member of this group and his or her encounters with other American and Chinese writers and gradual integration into a broader cultural network. The chapters allow us to see how each of these writers typically starts alone from a familiar place, such as the U.S. Cultural Front, but comes to seek more dynamic, robust forms of international affiliation. Each becomes involved in a flashpoint of exchange: of cultural forms, media technologies, and political agendas. All these things weave together, drawing the writers into an unexpected whirlpool of cross-cultural connection. Together they tell the story of how literary, political, and technological forms combined to generate the bigEACH CHAPTER OF THIS BOOK
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ger history of U.S.-China cultural relations, and one version of the Transpacific, in the mid-twentieth century. Each chapter focuses on a single major concept, such as Robeson’s “Pentatonic Democracy,” to see how this cultural network strategically crystallized to affect the social world at different moments. In terms of overall structure, the book develops chronologically from the start of the Great Depression to the 1950s, each chapter exploring a crucial historical episode: the Cultural Front, Chinese liberalism, black internationalism, postwar U.S. multiculturalism, and the early Cold War. With each writer typically appearing in another’s story, the chapters chart the evolution of these writers as a community and document their eventual disintegration. The first chapter reconstructs a collaboration between Agnes Smedley and Ding Ling, a famous Chinese writer. It explores Smedley’s attempt to publicize the Chinese Nationalist state’s imprisonment of Ding Ling in 1932. Smedley coordinated a partnership between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the China League for Civil Rights to produce a transpacific political campaign to effect her release. Enabling this project was the global dissemination of Ding Ling’s short stories, which were meant to serve as an alibi by proxy for Ding Ling’s humanity. Key to this work was the synthesis of literary realism and the telegraph—a “longdistance realism”—to most effectively transmit their message. Smedley’s work raised important questions about the viability of the Cultural Front in China and the effectiveness of art (realism, in particular) to render the Cultural Front’s core ideas legible abroad. This work set the stage for future transpacific activism. The second chapter looks at Pearl Buck’s relationship with Chinese culture and writers through the lens of The Good Earth. I contend that the novel’s core idea—“natural democracy,” a synthesis of Jeffersonian democracy and late Qing Chinese visions of equality—emerged through Buck’s participation within a rich network of intellectual debate in 1920s Nanjing. I argue that Buck wrote The Good Earth to instantiate this idea within literature. She specifically created a hybrid form of realism—a mixture of American realism and the classical Chinese novel—to articulate “natural democracy” as a coherent and attractive idea. Last, I track the novel’s popular reception in both China and America as a function of a recently established Pacific book trade made possible by new developments in airmail. In sum, Buck’s novel unleashed a series of effects that spurred the x
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formation of a lively U.S.-China cultural public. It also served to sustain Smedley’s project, while recasting it in liberal terms. The third chapter recovers a partnership between Paul Robeson and Liu Liangmo, a left-wing Chinese musician and author. In the 1930s Robeson formed a profound interest in Chinese culture and developed a theory of Afro-Chinese cultural convergence and affinity. He believed that both cultures held a shared basis in the pentatonic scale, and that this basis brokered a common social and political disposition: democracy. In his music, Robeson wanted to restore what he deemed to be the missing links between blacks and Chinese in the present. He met and partnered with Liu in Harlem in late 1941 to record a series of bilingual songs, China Sings!. Here, the two musicians leverage sound technology to articulate a vision of democracy based on Afro-Chinese harmony, which circumvented the West and its noninclusive, Eurocentric notion of the people. Robeson and Liu’s collaboration pushes the vision of U.S.-China cultural exchange imagined by Smedley and Buck to its threshold. In the fourth chapter I explore Lin Yutang’s work with Pearl Buck and her husband, Richard Walsh. Although in China Lin had created a robust theory of liberal aesthetic expression, the Chinese intellectual scene’s hard left-wing turn in the 1930s forced him to flee to America. Lin found refuge with Buck and Walsh, who published his work in the United States and made him famous. I examine how works such as Moment in Peking aim to reconstruct his failed vision of Chinese liberal politics within the U.S. novel, and I pay close attention to the ways he made use of new technologies, such as the typewriter, to extend the limits of what that novel could do. The outcome was a new style of writing, a “typographic ethnic modernism,” that sought to integrate American and Chinese cultures and imagine a postwar, “Chinese-American” subject. With the help of technology, Lin sought to domesticate Buck’s “natural democracy” concept as a version of U.S. multiculturalism. The final chapter explores Lao She’s visit to the United States (1946– 1950) as a guest of the U.S. State Department. In China, Lao She had developed a rich theory of literature as propaganda (xuanchuan 宣传), which coincided perfectly with the State Department’s own ideas about propaganda. He came to the United States to work with the government, as well as a group of American writers at the Yaddo artists’ colony, to produce a new form of writing that synthesized the “universal” code of iii
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propaganda with what they perceived to be the unique powers of art. This chapter tracks a series of debates between Lao She and American writers (including Smedley) over the proper function of literature in an age of mass communication. Ultimately, he rejected the American literary scene and returned to China. While the American domestic scene had won over Lin Yutang and made him famous, Lao She’s rejection marked the Cold War decline of this group’s vision of U.S.-China cultural cooperation. In the epilogue I reflect on the consequences of Lao She leaving. The question “what if he had chosen to stay in America and accept U.S. citizenship?” represents an intriguing counterfactual question. It is possible that the bonds between American and Chinese writers would have been sustained during the Cold War era, decisively altering the path of American and Chinese cultures after the war. Moreover, his presence in America in the 1960s and 1970s would have likely affected the emergence of Asian American politics and literature, possibly strengthening otherwise muted ties to the Chinese Communist state. Asian American literature would have looked different; so too would have Chinese literature in the Communist period. This speculation gets at the reason I have written this book. My reconstruction of this history is not merely a scholarly exercise; I seek to make this history a central part of how we understand American, Chinese, and Asian American cultures after the war, and how they overlap to express the idea of a common community of political and economic interests. I have been most compelled by the belief that our available cultural models, such as Orientalism or Cold War visions of “clashing” civilizations, do not fully explain present U.S.-China cultural relations. Much of what happens today is driven by talk of “democracy” and new technologies of communication. Flexible networks of cultural exchange that deform established routes of power and make new ones possible rule the Transpacific. The eclipsed world of these writers thus has much to teach us about our own.
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