Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520084241 ISBN 13: 9780520084247

Verlag: University of California Press, 1993

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R. David Arkush is Professor of History at the University of Iowa. Leo O. Lee is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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"At last we have a wonderful book which makes us privy to these Chinese images of the West and lets us see how they were formed and how they changed over the last century and a half."—Orville Schell, author of Discos and Democracy

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"At last we have a wonderful book which makes us privy to these Chinese images of the West and lets us see how they were formed and how they changed over the last century and a half." Orville Schell, author of Discos and Democracy

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Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present

By R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, editors

University of California Press

Copyright 1993 R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, editors
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520084241


Introduction
R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee

During his visit to the United States in 1946, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg is said to have remarked that to know a woman or a nation takes either thirty days or thirty years.1 Leaving aside the bit about women, we can see what he meant about the advantage a newcomer has in perceiving another society. The visitor's impressions of a new country are fresh and sharp; he sees with a comparative perspective and is struck by things natives in their everyday familiarity do not notice. Accounts by foreigners can sometimes be startlingly perceptive. One of the best works ever written about the United States, it hardly needs to be said, was by an aristocratic French prison inspector who spent nine months on these shores 150 years ago. Democracy in America is not, to be sure, a simple first impression; after returning to France, Alexis de Tocqueville labored eight years researching and writing his twovolume masterwork. Still, his outsider's perspective on American society has much to do with the book's insights and fascination.

The volume of European writings about America is enormous and well known. By contrast, Americans are almost wholly ignorant of the impressive body of literature in Chinese about them and their country.2 Henry Steele Commager, who had compiled an anthology of

According to the late William Nelson, who traveled with Ehrenburg as his State Department interpreter.

A partial bibliography of Chinese writing about the United States may be found in Robert L. Irick, Y. S. Y, and K. C. Liu, American-Chinese Relations, 17841941: A Survey of Chinese Language Materials at Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1968), 16898. For a succinct overview of Chinese views of the United States and the West (as well as of Chinese laborers and Chinese students in the U.S.), Jerome Ch'en, China and the West: Society and Culture, 18151937 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) is excellent except for the infuriating absence of footnotes. An interesting short account is Wei-ming Tu, "Chinese Perceptions of America," in M. Oksenberg and R. B. Oxnam, eds., Dragon and Eagle: United States-Chinese Relations, Past and Future (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 87106. An early, brief discussion is W. A. P. Martin, "As the Chinese See Us," The Forum 10 (1891):67888.

largely European writings about America, once claimed that there were only two serious books about the United States written by Chinese authors: An Oriental View of American Civilization by No-yong Park (Boston, 1934) and Francis Hsu's Americans and Chinese (1953).3 Commager was speaking of works available in English, of course, and while he might have mentioned a few others, it is true there is not much. Moreover, the works written in English for an American audience by Westernized Chinese expatriates who have lived for decades in the United States are in many ways less interesting than the more truly outsider accounts intended for Chinese readers. (A surprising number of nominally Oriental views of the West in Western languages are counterfeit, but that is another story.)4

H. S. Commager, Foreword to Francis L. K. Hsu, Americans and Chinese: Passage to Difference , 3d ed. (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1981), xiii. Commager's own anthology is America in Perspective: The United States Through Foreign Eyes (New York: Random House, 1947). Other books in English by Chinese on America are Chiang Yee's many "Silent Traveler" books, and No-yong Park's A Squint-Eye View of America (Boston: Meador, 1951); the ingratiating self-mockery of Park's title marks one difference between works written in English and those intended for a Chinese audience. Most recently there is also Liu Zongren, Two Years in the Melting Pot (San Francisco: China Books, 1984), and Wang Tsomin, American KaleidoscopeA Chinese View (Beijing: New World Press, 1986). There are some interesting observations, and much whimsy, in George Kao, "Your Country and My People," in B. P. Adams, ed., You Americans: Fifteen Foreign Press Correspondents Report Their Impressions of the United States and Its People (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1939), 21945. For an analysis based exclusively on Western-language materials, see Merle Curti and John Stalker, "The Flowery Flag DevilsThe American Image in China, 18401900," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 96 (1952):66390.

Because these counterfeit "Oriental" views of the West have too often been accepted as genuine, they are worth mentioning briefly here. Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World: Or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the East (1762) is probably the oldest, though preceded by several dozen earlier "Oriental," but not Chinese, views of European lands. G. Lowes Dickinson's Letters from John Chinaman (1901; published in the United States as Letters from a Chinese Official: Being an Eastern View of Western Civilization ) provoked a serious reply, Letters to a Chinese Official , by William Jennings Bryan. In 1972 Dickinson's book was reissued by an American publisher as "the work of an anonymous official of the Chinese government," and the newly written introduction earnestly suggested that, on the occasion of Nixon's trip to China, "in the mirror of China we may take a fresh look at ourselves."

Opinions chinoises sur les barbares d'Occident (1909) by Comte Harfeld purports to be a translation of documents and a conversation about the West by Chinese officials and others, but scattered throughout are the telltale marks of a fraud: improbable comments (Westerners spend money on dikes instead of pagodas because they do not realize a pagoda will prevent floods) and explanations aimed at a Western audience (age fourteen in China is "really thirteen because we count from conception"). A Chinaman's Opinion of Us (1927), "by Hwuy-Ung" and "translated by" the Australian missionary J. A. Makepeace, is likewise, to us, clearly a fabrication (T. L. Yuan, China in Western Literature [New Haven: Yale University, 1958] gives the author as Theodore Tourrier), though it was excerpted by the French sinologue Roger Plissier in The Awakening of China , 17931949, trans. Martin Kieffer (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967).

As a Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home (1905), an unsigned work with a preface by Henry Pearson Gratton, seems also a patent fraud, though it is among the primary texts cited by the scholar Andr Chih in L'Occident "chrtien" vu par les Chinois vers la fin du XIXme sicle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). A different kind of forgery is The Memoirs of Li Hung-Chang (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), with two chapters on the famous official's 1896 trip to the United States; it is now known to be a fabrication by William Francis Mannix, an American journalist.

Works about the United States written in Chinese, however, are abundant. One bibliography of books and articles on American studies, though limited to items published in Taiwan and Hong Kong between 1948 and 1972, runs to no...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1993
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520084241
• ISBN 13: 9780520084247
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Herausgeber: Arkush R. David, Lee Leo O.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: De Gruyter Saur; orders-books@degruyter.com; ; Genthiner Str. 13; Berlin; 10785; Deutschland