Foreign trade in moral visions

Abstract

CHINA'S TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE, RICHARD MADSEN ARGUES, troubled Americans far out of proportion to its direct cost in human suffering. ... The tragedy in China was so upsetting for many Americans because it contradicted widely cherished American understandings about the meanings of their democratic values-it challenged common interpretations of the American Dream (xvi). China has indeed had an almost unique capacity to receive our projections of the American Dream. Rooted, I think, in deeper, older western imaginings of China, this capacity has a specifically American history which is Madsen's subject. He wants to show us how much our talk of China is also talk about ourselves, how much of ourselves we invest in certain visions of China, and how these shape and often distort the China we discover in our travels, our international politics and trade, and our mass media. For Americans, China has all but defined the exotic Other and defined it as simultaneously beautifully alluring and sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, as the daily prayer book of the Maryknoll Fathers put it in the 1960s (30). This was as true in the early years of missionaries and opium traders as in the present time of crushed democracy movements and fantasies of untapped market potential. In the other direction, though China encountered the west first in other guises, America has come to constitute the paradigmatic example of the wealth, power, progress, and danger that