"How Could I Not Love You?": Transnational Feminism and US-Chinese Relations during the Cold War

Abstract

This article explores how American women reshaped US-Chinese relations in the 1960s and 1970s. The first section discusses the activities of the League of Women Voters to challenge hostile US policy toward China in the 1960s. The second section analyzes Chinese gender propaganda toward American guests after the resumption of bilateral contacts in the early 1970s, which highlighted the liberation of Chinese women after the Communist Revolution. The third section examines a delegation of ordinary American women in 1973 led by the actress Shirley MacLaine, which aroused controversy at home due to its quixotic depiction of Chinese society. This article concludes that although American women had little impact on policymaking, their activism facilitated the rise of a new discourse on Chinese socialism and feminism characterized by what the historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu calls "radical orientalism"—a tendency among activists at the time to idealize the East and criticize the West.