Chinese and Americans: A Shared History

349 Pages·2014·2.212 MB·English

by  Guoqi Xu, Akira Iriye

Chinese and Americans

Chinese and Americans
A Shared History
XU GUOQI
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2014
Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Xu, Guoqi.
Chinese and Americans : a shared history / Xu Guoqi.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-05253-6 (alk. paper)
1. United States—Relations—China.
2. China—Relations—United States.
3. Americans—China—History.
4. Chinese—United States—History. I. Title.
E183.8.C5X8 2014
327.73051—dc23 2014005705
To Margaret, Julia, and Tom
They represent the best of Chinese and Americans

Contents
Foreword by Akira Iriye ix
A Note on the Spelling of Chinese Names xiii
Introduction: The Surprising Shared History of Chinese
and Americans 1
Part One
Messengers of the Nineteenth Century
1. Anson Burlingame: China’s First Messenger to the World 25
2. The Chinese Education Mission: Chinese Schoolboys
in Nineteenth- Century America 74
3. Ge Kunhua: America’s First Chinese Language Teacher 105
Part Two
The Internationalization of China and the United States
4. Frank Goodnow: An American Adviser in China 139
5. John Dewey: A Yankee Confucius and Cultural Ambassador 204
viii Contents
Part Three
Pop u lar Culture and Sino- American Relations
6. Shared Diplomatic Journey through Sports 235
Conclusion 259
Notes 267
Selected Glossary 301
Selected Bibliography 303
Ac know ledg ments 317
Index 321
Foreword
The subtitle of this important book, “a shared history,” provides the key
not only to Xu Guoqi’s understanding of the history of U.S.- China re-
lations but also to one of the signifi cant historiographic developments
today.
Xu himself exemplifi es the spirit of “shared history” in that he has
been an integral part of Chinese history from his birth in Anhui Prov-
ince in 1962 to his American education and now as a distinguished histo-
rian whose work has made signifi cant contributions to the history of
China, the United States, and indeed the whole world.
The village where he was born was in one of the poorest parts of China
and did not have electricity until 1993. His parents were unable to read
or write, but Guoqi was an exceptional student and was admitted to An-
hui Normal University in 1980, from which he proceeded to Nankai Uni-
versity for graduate work in American history. There he studied with
Yang Shengmao, who had studied with Thomas Bailey at Stanford Uni-
versity in the 1940s. Xu received a master’s degree in 1987 and taught
for a while at Nankai’s Institute of History before receiving a Harvard-
Yenching fellowship to enroll at Harvard as a graduate student.
He began his studies at Harvard in 1991, which was when I met him
for the fi rst time. As with many foreign students—i ncluding myself—h is
oral and written En glish was initially not quite adequate, and, more im-
portantly, he had not been fully immersed in the scholarly literature that
ix