The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present

"It’s a big history book, we’re going from 1776 to the present. China’s history fascinates me. I’ve always wanted to go. The reason I jumped on this book as soon as I saw it is that what particularly fascinates me is the relationship between the US and China. It’s way more complex than people realize and Pomfret does a fabulous job of covering it. His own experiences in China are interspersed in there—first as a student, and then as somebody reporting on it. He’s telling the history, but when his own experience can be illustrative of what he’s talking about, he drops things in. He puts funny things in there, like how he discovered that if his mother sent him a new pair of shoes, he never got them. So she learned to send one shoe in one package, and one in another because no one steals just one shoe. Isn’t that a hoot? This is ‘big history’ done really well. China’s history is long and complex. The US has a shorter history, but it’s complicated in its own way. His main reason for writing this book, he says, was to expose the pattern in US-China relations. His point is that we in the US—and it’s very much from a US view—make the same mistakes over and over again. The other part of it is myth-busting, what we think we know about China , and we don’t. In the United States, we have it in our head that if we just go in, China, having been exposed to Western values and to democracy and capitalism, will embrace it. He says, ‘That’s naïve. That’s not paying attention to thousands of years of Chinese history. In their mind, we’re just a blip on the timescale.’ We ignore those facts and, by ignoring them, we keep repeating the same pattern. Two good examples of that would be: the US coming to China in the 19th century, primarily through the missionary movement. We brought in Christianity and Western education. Well, the Chinese said, ‘thank you very much to Western education, to Western medicine, to Western technology. But no thank you to Christian values.’ Then we turn around, in the 20th century, and this time, if we just bring them into the capitalist family, they will certainly embrace capitalism. So, in 1980, we give them ‘most favoured nation’ status. We don’t demand that they make human rights changes, because it’ll just happen naturally. Well, they said, ‘Thank you to the money, and no thank you to human rights.’ Then we turned around and did it again in 2001. ‘Come into the World Trade Organization, become part of this capitalist world.’ And they took, again, what they wanted out of it, but they did not want entrepreneurial capitalism, for example. So China cherry-picks what it wants—understandably—and the US keeps on thinking that there’s something so wonderful about us, that if we just bring them in, they’re automatically going to grab onto that. And so Pomfret’s exasperation is that we don’t seem to learn that that’s true. I should also say that he does make the point that the US has an interesting relationship with China because there’s a lot of gratitude for the fact that the US was not part of the gobbling up of China in the 19th century. They remember us as an ally fighting against the Japanese. So those are connectors for the US and China that China doesn’t really have with other countries."