Abstract
This essay brings Los Angeles's short-lived China City into a broader narrative of United States Orientalist fantasy, comparative racial formation, and imperial multiculturalism in the 1930s and 1940s. On June 7, 1938, wealthy socialite Christine Sterling unveiled her latest tourist and commercial project to the public: China City. For the next ten years, before it burned down for the second and last time in 1948, China City existed as a commercial tourist attraction to outsiders who came to enjoy the Orientalist spectacle captured by Sterling's vision, which included set pieces and costumes taken from the film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, and a “Great Wall” motif donated by filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. Through the examination of mainstream newspaper accounts, this essay locates a domesticating mode of white supremacy in China City and argues that Christine Sterling's “dreams of Oriental romance” in China City represented a mode of white supremacy that attempted to mobilize images of Chine...
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