The Original America-China Partnership
(Valley Forge, PA—October 2011) As nations and cultures go, China and the United States do not seem to have the clearest understanding of one another. The moment we lecture them on civil rights, they respond by lecturing us on currency and debt: it is a partnership flawed by miscommunication and mistaken assumptions. Yet, according to Vice President Biden, there is “no more important relationship” in the world right now. All of our lives may be affected by how well these two cultures are able to read one another’s signals.
An article in the new online scholarly journal, the Journal of Empire Studies, spotlights a moment in recent history when these two nations were very much partners. It details how the two victorious allies made grand plans to take over Japan’s Pacific empire at the end of the war, and how those mutual plans fell apart. Scholar Xiaoyuan Liu reminds us just how much disastrous misunderstanding over vital global issues can take place in a very short time in “A Partnership for Disorder: China and America in World War II.”
Here you will find a powerful excerpt from Professor Liu’s thesis and eventual book as well as a recent interview with the author on the specifics and the legacy of that brief partnership. One of the partnership’s false assumptions, according to the author, was the idea that a government can speak for an entire nation. Soon after this episode, China fell into four years of civil war that changed everything about Asia; other revolutions drastically altered the entire Pacific region. America was left with an inflated plan on paper that bore little relevance to political realities.
Miscalculations abound in this narrative. Here is what Prof. Liu writes about the split between the Kuomintang (KMT) aspirations and reality:
KMT officials awakened to the reality that their aspiration of “restoring China’s spiritual leadership in East Asia for millennia” through patronizing Japan was unattainable.
As we now know, the KMT could not only NOT patronize Japan, they could not contribute a single soldier to the effort of occupying Japan, nor could they control their own hold over China. Yet China’s ambition to dominate Asia may be no less today, while its means of doing so may have grown far more realistic.
Prof. Liu goes on to quote Chiang Kai Shek regarding his assessment of other cultures:
We have nothing to learn from the Japanese—their goods are too cheaply made. The Americans are too fancy, the British too slow. Germany is the only country from which we can learn something.
Americans may be startled to hear themselves called too “fancy.” If China’s view of us was somewhat skewed, America was equally bewildered by China, and somewhat clueless as to the Middle Kingdom’s internal machinations. Here is FDR’s grasp of internal affairs within China:
I think we are going through a transition period—especially the part relating to North China.
This “transition period” would, of course, turn out to be the resumption of full-scale civil war, the rise of Mao Zedong, and the creation of the Chinese Communist Party that still rules China today. Prof. Liu praises FDR’s acumen, but criticizes him for being cautious in acting “ahead of events.”
If all this sounds familiar, it should. America is today deeply involved in the exact same kind of bewilderment at the internal affairs of other nations—it seems to be part of global life. Americans may need to remind themselves that China’s history is nothing like American history. While this should be no surprise, it is easy to see today’s industrialized China and to forget how very different our 20th centuries were. Journal editor Tom Durwood says, “Prof. Liu gives us a wonderful, in-depth look at how two nations can completely misread both one another as well as political reality, something that is easy to do for all of us.”
The journal will feature articles on radar, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the documentary film Scarred Lands in upcoming issues.
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The Journal of Empire Studies (JES) is a new online journal devoted to the study of empire, east and west, across a number of disciplines—science, literature, technology, commerce and finance, military studies, art, music, linguistics, gender and architecture. As western and eastern schools struggle to bring global perspective to their students, we will actively promote this content to teachers as an ongoing resource, so they can assign our articles or printed anthologies to their classes.
We are seeking collaboration with universities on all continents. We don’t need funding: becoming a sponsor university means you will encourage your faculty to use JES as a classroom resource.