Fateful Ties: A History of America's Preoccupation with China by Gordon H. Chang

Abstract

Fateful Ties: A History of America's Preoccupation with by Gordon H. Chang. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015. 314 pp. $32.95 US (cloth). This study offers a sweeping overview of America's relations with last 400 years. Uniquely, book's focus on those Americans whose creative imaginations considered what meant for United States (6). Although use of previously unknown archival materials is limited, author's argument is powerful. He contends that American preoccupation with from seventeenth century to present day has been so fateful that it deeply affected formation of American identity. Manifest Destiny and Open Door were two of most important concepts that shaped US foreign relations nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and both stemmed from American preoccupation with China. While US inherited mystique from Europe, was not just a marketplace to Americans; the Far East was reason to reach far west, to fulfill nation's Manifest Destiny. To Americans, was a matter of mind and spirit more than of pocketbook. To prove his point author considers ways of thinking, values and attitudes, and cultural assumptions rather than particulars of diplomacy and politics of policy (3-6). Thus, book is filled with direct and indirect quotations from prominent American politicians, missionaries, merchants, writers, philosophers, and entertainers; from George Washington and Alfred Mahan to Shirley MacLaine. The impression reader is left with is that America's lasting preoccupation with was almost a romantic infatuation. According to Gordon H. Chang, while Western Europe remains fulcrum of American foreign policy, in terms of perceived future of nation, no other country looms as importantly as China (258). Early Americans, such as Benjamin Franklin and Amasa Delano, initially praised as a place of wealth, culture, and wisdom, which could be emulated by their young nation. This perspective changed, however, around 1840 during First Opium War and caused to appear backward, idolatrous, and resistant to change. Nevertheless, Chang argues that and US continued to have a special relationship or spiritual connection as well as a power over American imagination (47-51). The US maintained its official position of neutrality during various conflicts between and Western powers until turn of twentieth century, when Washington's Open Door doctrine intervened and prevented realization of threats to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity from Western powers and Japan. When Japan invaded 1930s, America consistently and firmly sided with China, a position that led to attack on Pearl Harbor 1941. The author writes with obvious sentimentality that [f]or many, war and its aftermath confirmed conviction that fates of America and were intimately intertwined (170). …