China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry Andrew Wells China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry. Richard Madsen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 265pp. $27.50/Cloth. My deepest initial impressions of China came from the demonstrations and massacre around Tiananmen Square in 1989. Virtually every American who was in Beijing at the time has written an account of the events leading up to June 4, 1989. Sociologist Richard Madsen’s book is thus hardly the first of its kind. However, Madsen probes far more deeply than most. In searching for an answer as to why the Tiananmen massacre provoked such an extreme, even irrational, response among Americans, Madsen intensely scrutinizes both Chinese and American culture. This study offers no policy analysis, but rather searches for an understanding of the “public philosophy” and “moral drama” that undergird Chinese and Americans’ views of each other. Tiananmen “discredited an important American myth about China,” yet Madsen contends that the roots of mythmaking on both sides of the Pacific extend well beyond 1989. Madsen has received the most acclaim for his coauthorship of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, but he also has a solid background as a China-watcher, beginning his career as a Maryknoll missionary in Taiwan in the 1960s. Although drawing from both Chinese and American sources, China and the American Dream does concentrate more on American than Chinese experience. Madsen traces the origins of a dominant “liberal myth” about China to academic and religious circles in the mid-1960s. In contrast to prevalent views of China as “Red menace” or “leftist paradise,” the liberals saw China as a “troubled modernizer” which could be helped by American support. As SAIS Professor Emeritus, A. Doak Barnett—himself a missionary kid—testified before Senator Fulbright’s Foreign Affairs Committee in 1966, American recognition of the People’s Republic would strengthen “technical bureaucrats” over Maoist revolutionaries, thus helping China modernize “pragmatically.” This concept, Madsen argues, formed the basis for associations such as the National Committee on US-China relations and eventually Kissinger’s and Nixon’s trips to China in the early 1970s. [End Page 189] While conceding that this liberal myth was closer to the truth than its alternatives, Madsen nevertheless sees more psychology and “well-constructed theater” than geopolitical calculation in its application. Whereas a theoretical realist would argue that Kissinger and Nixon acted on power interests, Madsen places the dreams first and rationality second. After Vietnam and Watergate, the “opening” of China—a metaphor Madsen is right to resist—did indeed seem like “a breath of fresh air” (Kissinger). With newfound optimism about the Chinese revolution, academic, religious, and scientific exchanges began in earnest as “missionaries of the American dream.” Not until Tiananmen did it become clear that the optimists had taken too much for granted. In the 1970s and 1980s, Madsen contends, “Americans looking to China usually saw what they wanted to see, or more precisely what their institutional commitments wanted them to see. Chinese looking at the United States were allowed only a few tantalizing glimpses of American life.” The often superficial goodwill of the “liberal center... underestimated the depths of cruelty the Chinese revolution had brought upon the Chinese people, and it overestimated the power of technical reason to bring peace and prosperity to China.” As one American student said of the Tiananmen demonstrators, “They want just what we have”—implying, says Madsen, “a universal model of the good society” based on American capitalism. Hence our appalled reactions to the massacre; All the “right” elements for the realization of the American dream in China were in place, but the ending did not follow the script of the drama. On the Chinese side, which Madsen treats with insight but less depth, contact with the United States accentuated an ongoing debate between tradition and industrial modernism. The fragmentation of Chinese culture in the post-Mao era came about, however, more from internal causes than from any validation by American liberal democracy. For some Chinese, certainly, Western culture brought an “awakening.” For others, the cultural self-confidence, already weakened by the Cultural Revolution, was destroyed by a growing, but false, perception that China...