America Thought It Could Shape China. But China Is Shaping America.

From the late 19th century up to World War II, Americans were seized with the idea of transforming China into a Christian, capitalist America on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

The word “plastic” pops up again and again in American statements about China from that era. China is “plastic” in the hands of “strong and capable Westerners,” announced President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. “China has become plastic after centuries of rigid conventionalism,”declared Selskar M. Gunn, a vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, in May 1933.

But from the beginning, Americans were also afraid that China — or the Chinese — would change them, too. In 1870, following the Civil War, Congress limited naturalization to whites and blacks. Later, the United States tried to inoculate itself against the influence of the Chinese by banning many of them from America’s shores. Starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. Congress passed a series of racist immigration laws which would not be significantly modified until World War II, when China was an ally in America’s fight against Japan. It looked bad for the US to deny Chinese the right to travel in America while Chinese under