Organizer and Chair: Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern University
Discussant: Winston Hsieh, University of Missouri, St. Louis
Eileen P. Scully, Princeton University
The longstanding assumption among historians has been that social marginals and criminal elements of all nationalities were a pestiferous but politically impotent presence in the sixteen or so foreign-run settlements that had grown up along the China coast by 1917. This view has been challenged by the recent work of Frederick Wakeman, Gail Hershatter, Jonathan Marshall and Brian Martin, among others, who argue that the historically specific forces at work in the treaty ports, most especially the system of extraterritoriality which brought foreign nationals (and their indigenous protégés) under the legal jurisidiction not of Chinese officials but rather of their own home authorities, ultimately spawned a cosmopolitan netherworld in which "government depended upon organized crime as an instrument for social control." Also, social history's "from the bottom up" perspectives, together with deconstructionism's penetrative strategies, have irrevocably altered the basic operative understandings of power and resistance scholars bring to their study of marginalized groups. In the service of social history, the premise that "where there is power, there is resistance" has opened the field up to considerations of music, humor, law, slang, and "knowledge" more generally, as arenas in which the domination of some over others is simultaneously reinforced and contested.
Both the revised portrait of the treaty port complex Wakeman and his colleagues have made available, and the more expansive definitions of power and resistance now in general use among social historians, make it possible, necessary and timely to think anew about the relevance and legacy of wayward Americans in China. This paper explores the role of marginal treaty port U.S. nationals on Sino-American relations, arguing that these groups prospered in the black market of commodified foreign privilege and used the rhetoric of consular reform to undermine the State Department's efforts to rein them in on behalf of indigenous collaborators.
Yu Shen, University of Illinois
This paper deals with Chinese-American interactions during World War II, the experience which has shaped both American and Chinese attitudes toward each other and continued to affect the relations between the United States and China after the war. The Sino-American Cooperative Organization, short as SACO, operated in China jointly by the secret service of the Chinese Nationalist government and American Naval intelligence for the duration of the war. Among all the wartime missions that Americans set up in China, SACO was the only one that adopted a policy of "total immersion" with the Chinese. The American participants, most of whom were ignorant of the intensity of China's internal political struggle, were very proud of their close alliance with the Nationalists' secret police chief whom they believed to be one of the most powerful figures in China. Out of their wartime acquaintance with the Chinese grew a life-long commitment to anti-Communism in the years after World War II. The Chinese Communists and their liberal supporters, on the other hand, condemned SACO experience as the epitome of American imperialistic policy of allying with reactionary forces against the Chinese people's search for liberation. The Beijing government has never forgiven what these Americans did in collaboration with the Chinese secret police during World War II, and this resentment was reflected in Communist shrill political campaigns against the United States after 1949. My paper will illustrate different interpretations of the SACO experience by both Chinese and Americans, and explain why this case has provoked so many conflicting images in the two countries.
Rhoads Murphey, University of Michigan
The KMT had entered a phase in the war when I arrived in China in 1942 which was to characterize the remainder of the time until August, 1945, namely a largely inactive holding action with no new offensives. The KMT army gave way to Japanese advances wherever they occurred, most importantly in their conquest of Changsha, Hengyang, and Kueilin in 1944 and their probe northwestward toward Kueiyang later that year. Those of us who were living and working in west China in those years saw increasing demoralization, especially in Chungking, and also saw the KMT troops, ill fed, ill supplied, and often brutalized, marched along the roads of west China. We heard quite different accounts of the Communist areas in the north, and once the anti-Japanese war was over, we saw them at first hand. There were still occasional air raids at Chunking during these late years of the war, but far more depressing was the plight of most people there as inflation destroyed their savings and reduced most of them to penury, except for the KMT higher ups, including, of course, Chiang and his wife, whom we saw on occasion. Pa Chin's novel Cold Nights, based on his own experiences in those years in Chungking, captures the atmosphere effectively. As foreign observers we were not dragged down like most others, and we had a different, though empathetic perspective. The paper combines vignettes of wartime Chungking and elsewhere in west China with some efforts at assessment.
Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern University
Best known for its work on Taiwan, the JCRR sponsored successful rural development projects and land reforms for more than a year on the mainland before being forced to leave. In many ways, the JCRR symbolized the fate of the Sino-American Raj. The five commissioners (Chiang Monlin, James Yen, John Earl Baker, Raymond Moyer, and Shen Tsung-han) had all been for more than two decades part of the liberal, Sino American approach to rural reform.
The JCRR's roots extend back to the 1920s when many non-governmental organizations brought together American money and values with Chinese politics and citizens to form Sino-Western institutions which were not "Chinese" in the essentialist sense, but also were not "not Chinese." These NGO's were as various as Yenching University, Peking Union Medical College, The China Foundation, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and the Mass Education Movement's "experiment" at Ting Hsien, with all of one or more of the founders of the JCRR worked. In the 1930s, the Nanking government asserted political control of cultural boundaries while Mao's revolution laid claim to the village. In 1947, James Yen convinced the US Congress to fund a JCRR as a last gesture against the revolution.
This paper will use new material as well as my book, To The People: James Yen and Village China (Columbia UP, l990), to describe the cultural and political significance of the JCRR's pre-Taiwan achievement.
Would you like to return to the China & Inner Asia Table of Contents? Choose another area?