Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Global Cultural Network

By Richard Jean So

In the turbulent years after World War I, American novelist Pearl S. Buck, African American singer and activist Paul Robeson, left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley, and Chinese authors Lao She and Lin Yutang sought to transform the terms by which the United States and China, or more broadly East” and West,” knew each other. Individually, they produced works that altered American conceptions of China and vice versa. Together, they collaborated on political projects that synthesized American and Chinese visions of equality. Their network drew from radical visions of political revolution and new technologies of communication. Their transpacific community upset traditional routes of power and articulated a new course for East-West cultural exchange.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jul 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231541831

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Transpacific Community

Transpacific Community

America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network

Richard Jean So

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: So, Richard Jean.

Title: Transpacific community : America, China, and the rise and fall of a cultural network / Richard Jean So.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015036432 | ISBN 9780231176965 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541831 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: American literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Comparative literature—American and Chinese. | Comparative literature—Chinese and American. | American literature—Chinese influences. | Chinese literature—American influences. | United States—Relations—China. | China—Relations—United States.

Classification: LCC PS221 .S63 2016 | DDC 303.48/251073—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036432

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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COVER DESIGN: Martin Hinze

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Narrowing Circle: America and China Circa 1929

1. Long-Distance Realism: Agnes Smedley and the Transpacific Cultural Front

2. The Good Earth Effect: Pearl Buck and Natural Democracy

3. Pentatonic Democracy: Paul Robeson and the Black Voice in Chinese

4. Typographic Ethnic Modernism: Lin Yutang and the Republican Chinaman

5. Xuanchuan as World Literature: Lao She and the Uses of Global Propaganda

Epilogue. The Afterlife of Failure: Recentering Asian American and Chinese Histories

Notes

Index

Illustrations

0.1. Draft page of The Yellow Storm

1.1. Article from the New Masses on the Chinese League of Leftist Writers (1931)

1.2. Telegram from Agnes Smedley to Roger Baldwin (1933)

1.3. Telegram from Agnes Smedley to Roger Baldwin (1933)

1.4. Telegram from Agnes Smedley to Roger Baldwin (1933)

1.5. Article in the Daily Worker (November 7, 1945)

3.1. Page from Robeson’s musical notes

3.2. Page from Robeson’s musical notes

3.3. Page from Liu Liangmo’s The People’s Cry (1938)

3.4. Road Building Song from China Sings (1945)

3.5. Road Building Song from China Sings (1945)

4.1. Example of Lin Yutang’s xylography

4.2. Title page, A Leaf in the Storm (1941)

4.3. Advertisement for Lin Yutang’s typewriter

4.4. Lin Yutang’s typewriter notes

4.5. Page from Chinatown Family (1948)

5.1. Draft page of The Yellow Storm

5.2. Draft page of The Yellow Storm

5.3. Draft page of The Yellow Storm

Acknowledgments

Every book is an archive of thoughts, and my intellectual debts are in the notes. But every book is also an archive of the time and life lived writing it. The years spent researching and writing this book were some of the happiest of my life. And they were especially so because they were filled and made possible by friends and colleagues. Looking at this book now is a happy experience, most of all, because I am reminded of all those people.

The idea of this book, or the idea of writing such a book, first took shape at Brown University in the late 1990s. Friends: David Ramsey, Ben Healy, Anand Balakrishnan, Priya Motaparthy, Josh Levin, Madeline McDonnell. Teachers: Dan Kim, David Savran. But most of all, Jim Egan, who saw potential in me where I could see none and inspired me to take a risk. An engaging year in Washington, D.C., changed how I look at the world: Reihan Salam, John Mangin, Deepa Ranganathan. At Columbia University, advisors were patient, encouraging, and brilliant: Rachel Adams, Gauri Viswanathan, Gary Okihiro, Lydia H. Liu. Jonathan Arac directed my dissertation and launched my career, for which I am forever grateful. Broadly, the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia was a special place that tolerated a motley crew of intellectual misfits, many of whom had come to study with Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, and to do work that would be heretical in most any other Department of English. Friends: Ichiro Takayoshi, Avishek Ganguly, Jason Frydman, Matt Sandler, Wen Jin, Arunabh Ghosh, Anatoly Detwyler.

I fell off of the academic wagon for a year and a half when I relocated to Taipei and began pursuing a second life of academic work. This was the happiest year of my life, and I am grateful to my teachers at ICLP and my friends—Rivi Handler-Spitz, Quinn Javers, Harrison Huang, Kate Baldanza, and Anatoly Detwyler—for making this so. Back in the game, now based at Williams College, I saw this project finally take hold, and I richly benefited from the support and camaraderie of Christian Thorne, Yuan Ye, and Gayle Newman.

Most recently, my time at the University of Chicago has been transformative. This book most decisively formed through my interactions with colleagues here: John Muse, Hillary Chute, Adrienne Brown, Chris Taylor, Sonali Thakkar, Ken Warren, Bill Brown, Jim Chandler, Elaine Hadley, Lisa Ruddick, Debbie Nelson, Lauren Berlant, Haun Saussy, Patrick Jagoda, Mark Miller, Benjamin Morgan, Raul Coronado, Eric Slauter, Leela Gandhi, David Simon, Maud Ellmann. A long-standing collaboration with Hoyt Long has been invaluable.

Beyond Chicago, Jeremy Braddock, Michael Hill, Colleen Lye, and Andrew Jones intervened at crucial moments. And beyond institutions, three friends have made a difference in how I think: Julia Chuang, Hua Hsu, Anatoly Detwyler. Xinyu Dong deserves special acknowledgment: long conversations about this book and ideas in general excited new ideas and thoughts, which made this book better, and the life spent writing it better as well.

At Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal acquired the book and expertly steered it to publication. Miriam Grossman effectively facilitated the final preparation of the manuscript, and Anita O’Brien provided superb copyediting. Reader reports from four anonymous colleagues were incredibly helpful in revising the manuscript; they will be able to see their impact on the final version here. Modern Fiction Studies and Representations allowed me to reprint parts of articles as chapters. The Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies provided invaluable research support.

Finally, there is gratitude that is more than gratitude. To my brother, John, who has challenged me and taught me how to be a better, more thoughtful person; to my father, Hee Young, who has always been my intellectual role model, the purest and deepest thinker I know; and to my mother, Keum Im, who raised me and drove me to be the person I am today, who sacrificed much so I can pursue my dream—she should know how much I respect her and how grateful I am. I think about it very often.

Introduction

The Narrowing Circle: America and China Circa 1929

It is vain to underestimate the character and force of the tendencies that are drawing the races and peoples about the Pacific into the ever narrowing circle of a common life.

—Robert Park

In the three decades after World War I, a group of American and Chinese writers set out to transform the terms by which the United States and China, and more broadly the East and West, might know each other. This group included Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist; Paul Robeson, the distinguished African American singer, actor, and activist; Lao She, the eminent Chinese writer and author of Rickshaw (骆驼祥子); Lin Yutang, the famous overseas Chinese satirist and public intellectual; and Agnes Smedley, the popular American left-wing journalist and novelist. These writers traversed the Pacific throughout the interwar years. They lived in American and Chinese cities—New York and Shanghai, Boston and Beijing. Individually, they produced a number of texts, such as The Good Earth, that transformed popular imaginings of America and China in both nations. Together, they organized a series of political movements, such as the Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign, that altered the contours of U.S.-China relations and decisively affected common understandings of the Pacific. By the late 1940s they had shared apartments and hotel rooms, exchanged hundreds of letters and telegrams, and marched together on streets. Over time other important cultural figures, such as Roger Baldwin in America and Lu Xun in China, joined their circle and expanded its influence. In the tumultuous decades between the wars, the Pacific was alive with movement: of people, objects, and ideas. This book tells their story.

Sudden transformations in the world economy and international politics made possible this meeting of American and Chinese writers. In the early 1930s the Great Depression set into motion a number of radical global political movements, such as the Popular Front. The effects of the Depression were felt everywhere, and activists grew frustrated with nation-based political mobilization. They sought allies in other nations to grasp the global effects of the Depression and to devise effective projects to challenge them. Smedley and Buck were a part of this movement. After the First World War they became disenchanted with U.S. politics, traveling to China to seek alternative social models. There they met Chinese writers, such as Lin and Lao She, who also sought to expand Chinese politics through an encounter with U.S. political forms. The widening cascade of global economic collapse in the 1930s inspired new opportunities for cross-cultural interaction. This was particularly true across the Pacific, and with the outbreak of the Second World War, internationalism in the modern Pacific evolved to be even more focused on cultural cooperation between the United States and China.

At the same time, recent developments in technology, such as the telegraph and radio, drew the United States and China together in ways previously unseen. Everything seemed faster: news, ideas, and literature now traveled at the speed of light, heightening the feeling that the two nations existed within a shared, simultaneous reality. The interwar period not only signaled a transformation in global politics; it marked a new era in media technologies and the rise of a ubiquitous discourse of communications, both of which served to alter the way that people in one nation thought of themselves in relation to another. It also changed the way that people physically communicated over sprawling distances, and how they imagined what it means to express thoughts. Compared to the Atlantic, the Pacific was relatively belated in adopting new universal modes of media communications, such as the radio. For example, the first trans pacific telegraphic line was laid four decades after the first transatlantic one. Once this general infrastructure was put into place by the 1920s, however, writers such as Buck aggressively exploited it to develop new forms of transpacific cultural affiliation.

The interwar period instigated a massive transformation in U.S.-China cultural relations. In the previous century, these relations had been shaped by a set of limiting political and economic conditions highly unfavorable to the Chinese. The American state carried out a form of gunboat diplomacy, which secured trading privileges originally given to European imperial nations, such as England. These privileges had been first attained through military action during the Taiping Rebellion and were sustained by military deployments along China’s coasts throughout the 1860s. However, the largest U.S. presence in China came in the form of missionaries. By 1920 their numbers totaled more than fifteen hundred. American missionaries, particularly from the YMCA, were eager to spread the word of Christianity and the American way of life, yet the Chinese were highly resistant, and violence against missionaries and their property was common. Finally, evangelic visions of uplifting China also took the form of financial opportunism. American businessmen grew fixated on the idea of a vast, untapped transpacific trade market, while visions of 450 million consumers filled their heads. The expression China market took hold in the American lexicon during this period.¹

Literary interactions of this previous century largely bowed to the unidirectional force of political and economic conquest. They were constrained, limited. In America, writers such as Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson instantiated a tradition of Orientalist writing, which valorized China and the East as a source of mystical poetic inspiration, a tradition developed later in the twentieth century by Ezra Pound and others. The American aesthetic tendency to mythologize Asian culture acquired surest form and became a resilient structure in the nineteenth century.² In China, intellectuals and writers responded to the reality of Western conquest and the resulting collapse of the Qing dynastic state by attempting to absorb Western intellectual and cultural concepts. They largely encountered the West through a series of translations of influential Euro-American texts, such as The Origin of the Species. This encounter, though, was largely felt as an anxious experience—the anxiety of embracing the West and breaking with the past without totally abandoning it.³ Nineteenth-century American-Chinese cultural relations, in sum, were largely restricted to fantasy and perception.

Something changed in the interwar period. Historians and literary scholars have already noted that the 1930s and 1940s signaled a time of profound transformation in U.S.–East Asia cultural relations. From the view of American culture, David Palumbo-Liu argues that more simplistic Orientalist views of China (such as the Yellow Peril) became more nuanced. As a result of the First World War, changes in the international economy, and new technologies of communication, American writers began to move beyond the exoticist discourses of Emerson and Whitman.⁴ In China, the interwar era signaled an analogous turning point in perceptions of the United States. If, as David Arkush and Leo Lee argue, Chinese writers in the nineteenth century were limited to writing exotic fantasies of America, by the 1910s they had started to travel across the Pacific in larger numbers and encounter a richer array of American cultural texts as part of the May Fourth Enlightenment movement.⁵ Overall, the physical possibilities for cross-cultural interaction changed in the early twentieth century, and with this transformation, there arose new possibilities for knowing the other.

Yet the full extent of this transformation has not been fully appreciated. The interwar period saw more than just an evolution or altering of American perceptions of the Chinese and vice versa; it witnessed an unprecedented integration of American and Chinese cultures, and their synthesis as a community of shared ideals. This period of transpacific interaction, in short, completely broke with its nineteenth-century identity. Writers such as Smedley and Lao She rejected entrenched, long-standing notions of the East’s eternal backwardness and the common belief that America and China represented fundamentally incommensurable civilizations. They rejected the idea that a permanent hierarchy must exist and forever put the West atop the East. In its place, they asserted a different epistemology of the Pacific. They used terms like networks to describe a world propelled by endless flows of cultural contact, unchecked by national borders. The essential way of comprehending the relationship between America and China, East and West, once perceived through an intractable lens of radical difference or antagonism, had evolved into a new epistemology of connectedness and permanent equilibrium.⁶ Most important, the Pacific became seen as a generative site: the place where new political genealogies, critical of existing arrangements of political and economic power, might arise. These writers dreamt up new configurations to undo the old ones.

Two major obstacles have prevented us from recognizing this history. The first is conceptual. We do not have a good analytical model for understanding forms of East-West cultural relations that operate through reciprocal interaction rather than hegemony. We have countless studies of Western Orientalism toward China: the way that the West creates a fantasy representation of China that serves to reinforce the belief that the two are essentially different and exist in a binary that denigrates the non-West. And we have countless studies of the Chinese reception of Euro-American culture from the late Qing to the Republican period. Here, China historians tell us, the absorption of Western concepts such as democracy was highly ambivalent and fraught. But not entirely unlike the West’s imagining China, America was an abstract idea, an unwieldy signifier that had to be managed.⁷ In both cases, America and China are merely ideas for the other, not joined by a reciprocal space of interaction.

The second obstacle relates to the afterlife of this history. This history is one of failure. With the onset of the Cold War, this community quickly fell apart, leaving virtually no traces. Retracing the threads that held this group together is difficult. Their collaborations were ephemeral, and the archive that documents their collaborations is scattered across three continents. Moreover, we typically don’t think of these writers as a community. Each belongs to a discrete identity category, such as American or Chinese, and political affiliation, such as Left or liberal. We lack a vocabulary to think about these categories together. Political developments after the Second World War only made things harder. Nineteenth-century visions of America and China as antagonistic civilizations grew reified in the Cold War.

This book presents the first history of this community. Its importance and power consists in its articulating a new conceptual framework for understanding the intellectual and cultural relations between East and West, China and America. Such an account, it seems, is needed now more than ever. Despite the end of the Cold War, chatter about a perceived inevitable economic and military showdown between the United States and China with the ostensible hegemonic rise of the latter has become increasingly commonplace, echoing the antagonistic visions of an earlier nineteenth-century model. The history of these writers, however, returns us to a different, less ideologically intractable vision of the Transpacific. It is a place not only subject to inexorable political and economic structures and their attendant discourses of Orientalism. It is a place in motion, filled with people, ideas, objects, technology, and texts. It is a place where literature mediates cultural difference and enables unexpected moments of social affiliation that stand beyond traditional political, economic, or institutional frameworks. This book reanimates this vision precisely to disrupt long-held, teleological notions of how American and Chinese cultures have always interacted, and must always do so.

Reinventing Democracy

In their time, all these figures represented major public intellectuals. Each was well-known to the American and/or Chinese public as an important artist and thinker, and each belonged to a significant social formation. Smedley helped to launch the American proletarian movement with her novel Daughter of Earth (1929); Buck became famous as a liberal in both the United States and China and espoused a series of liberal causes, such as civil rights, in novels as well as activism; Robeson played a central role in the development of interwar black internationalism and passionately spoke for a politics of racial equality; Lin Yutang advocated for Chinese liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s in Shanghai; and Lao She wrote a defining work of Chinese left-wing agitation, Rickshaw, and became a leader in the Chinese national liberation movement in the 1940s. This is one way of thinking about these writers as individuals: as representatives of the various key cultural and social movements of the interwar period, from hardcore communism to Chinese or American liberalism to the rise of the early civil rights movement. This is largely how scholars in American and China studies have categorized their work. More broadly, we can also place them within wider streams of international encounter. We could put the more left-leaning figures, such as Robeson and Lao She, into the period’s global aggregation of political radicals inspired by Russian socialism after the war;⁸ and, we could put the more liberal figures, such as Buck and Lin, into what Akira Iriye has identified as cultural internationalism—a vision of political solidarity across nations and races based on liberal ideas of self-determination and the rule of law.⁹ In this view, American and Chinese writers first belonged to some discernible national movement or institution. And when the 1930s set in, each traveled abroad to find allies and joined another discernible internationalist movement or institution. Thus Lao She occupies a central place in histories of the Chinese literary Left,¹⁰ while Robeson figures richly in scholarly accounts of interwar African American internationalism.¹¹

However, this is not entirely how the period worked when seen from the ground up. Interactions between individuals and categories of identification and political action were far more flexible than the mere title of the nominal categories alone. For example, consider a curious gathering of unexpected friends in New York City on March 12, 1944. As World War II raged in Europe, a group of committed American and Chinese activists got together to address a matter seemingly remote in importance: celebrating the life and death of Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), a Chinese revolutionary who helped to overthrow the Qing dynasty and served as the founder of the Republic of China. Pearl Buck took the stage to celebrate Sun’s Three People’s Principles as a shining example of liberalism. Next, Paul Robeson spoke in order to explicate the significance of Sun’s idea for black liberation thought and political mobilization. Last, Lin picked up the microphone and spent two hours explicating the democratic genius of Sun’s thought, a line of thinking that resonated with that of Thomas Jefferson (a figure also claimed by U.S. communists). The audience was packed with white, African American, Asian American, and Chinese men and women. Terrible events loomed in Europe. But in New York, for a moment, there appeared a happy melding of seemingly incompatible politics.

Current historical narratives of this period help in part to explain this meeting. Douglas Rossinow has articulated a flexible U.S. historical framework to understand the interaction between American liberals and leftists in the interwar period. The interwar years saw the rise of a short-lived but significant coalition of anticapitalist liberals and socialists respectful of reform. There arose a series of collaborations that emphasized cooperation between radical rebellion and a liberal commitment to individual rights, the rule of law, and gradual social change. In the mid-1930s, this project reached its apex with the formation of the U.S. Popular Front, an organization that included a diverse group of activists. Categories of the Left and liberalism got blurred.¹² On the face of it, this meeting of writers represents an example of American Left-liberal cooperation. For example, this coalition allowed Robeson and Buck to work together despite different degrees of left-wing commitment. Both were attracted to a strategic harmony between liberalism and socialism that brokered inclusive activist programs. This is the story of how leftists and liberals found common ground after the First World War.

The story in China, though, was quite different. If the 1920s and 1930s in America revealed ideological confluence, China in the same period witnessed the exact opposite process: the rise and triumph of leftism as the choice ideology of intellectuals. War with Japan put incalculable pressure on the ideals and hopes of the May Fourth movement (1919–1921). Practical needs of mobilizing the people and saving the nation made the otherwise noble goals of individual rights and informed social critique seem pointless or irrelevant. As Jerome Grieder has argued, liberalism simply could not exist or survive in a country defined by incessant military violence and political chaos.¹³ By 1937, the year of Japan’s invasion of North China, many Chinese writers had embraced the Left. Strong liberals, like Hu Shi and Lin Yutang, traveled to the United States to find a more open or tolerant environment to develop their thoughts about China. The discursive environment had become too rigid and ideologically militant at home. This is what Lin Yutang was doing in New York in the early 1940s: he was energetically exploring flexible, maybe incommensurable political positions regarding the future of China.

Here are two historical narratives of liberalism and the radical Left: from one shore, liberalism melds with leftism to enable the rise of a powerful coalition, the U.S. Popular and Cultural Front. From the other shore, liberalism gives way to a muscular, more effective form of political action—the Chinese Left. However, this meeting of unlikely allies presents a third narrative. An important dimension of the American Left-liberal coalition was a desire to absorb non-American intellectuals, Chinese writers in particular. The purpose of this work was to test the viability of American concepts such as democracy in a foreign context. The more disparate the context, the better. Could American and Chinese political traditions be combined into a coherent whole? In China, by the 1940s, liberal democracy had largely been eviscerated, yet a number of writers, Lin Yutang and Lao She included, still believed that Chinese liberalism, as articulated by their colleague Hu Shi, could still be sustained in a transpacific context; ironically, somewhere that was not China. The third historical narrative this meeting describes is the synthesis of American and Chinese interwar political agendas.

For these writers, the concept of democracy is what held it all together. This is the single term that appears in all their writings and speeches. American liberalism is a form of democracy. The struggle for black liberation is a form of democracy. So is Chinese liberalism. Class revolt is democratic, as is Mao Zedong. By the interwar period, of course, democracy had become more than just a political position or straight ideology. John Dewey described it as an attitude, a word with many meanings.¹⁴ Song Qingling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen and future vice president of the People’s Republic of China, identified it as a mere form (形式).¹⁵ From the vantage point of history, we know that democracy often simply meant not fascism for interwar intellectuals. From different shores, historians of the United States and of China, such as Robert Westbrook and Benjamin Schwarz, identify a powerful liberal strain or mood that compelled political thought across a wide range of political affiliations.¹⁶ The term democracy encapsulated this mood. For these figures, democracy proved attractive precisely because of its openness. Compared to terms such as socialism, it felt less calcified or intractable, and thus more enabling of political and cultural collaboration. For instance, Lao She repeatedly uses the term democracy in his application to serve as a visiting writer at the U.S. State Department in 1945, an application sponsored by Pearl Buck. He frames his visit as contributing to worldwide democracy despite also representing the interests of his Chinese leftist colleagues.¹⁷ The State Department eagerly approved his application. For Lao She, democracy signaled national self-determination, while for the U.S. government, it meant more an ethos or disposition. Lao She, in the State Department’s view, was a real democratic author who shared American values. Despite such blatant dissonance, each side hears in the other an agreeable harmony, a democratic melody.

These writers took specific advantage of democracy’s open form by endowing it with a distinct Pacific genealogy. For figures like Buck or Lin, the Pacific possessed a weaker sense of political genealogy than, say, the Atlantic. No obvious line of political thought connected America and China to some single, grand intellectual tradition. They instead tried to invent new ones. Buck imagined something called natural democracy, a synthesis of late-Qing and Jeffersonian visions of social egalitarianism, while Robeson summoned the idea of pentatonic democracy—a seamless fusion of African American and Chinese folk cultures. We might think of these visions of democracy as spelling out a lowercase Marxism: a politics of class equality yet still invested in standard tropes of individual freedom, the rule of law, and gradual social reform. Or, we might think of them as an agonistic mode of democracy that interprets social conflict between various social groups as inevitable but is itself constitutive of democracy. In any case, U.S. intellectuals saw in China, in rural peasants in particular, a useful case to conceptualize a radical, class-driven version of liberal democracy that was not beholden to socialist ideology, while Chinese writers discovered in American thought a chance to integrate popular Soviet views of class revolution with normative Western liberal notions of the sanctity of the individual. Underlying all this was the belief that the Pacific represented an open or flexible place to rethink, as well as transform, political ideas. It was a place where ostensibly formalized concepts, such as civil rights, could be filled with new contents. In the interface between America and China, these writers believed that no single intellectual genealogy held sway. It stood at the literal midpoint between new Soviet Russia and old Enlightenment Europe. While these writers often draw from both of these traditions, neither is given primacy or absolute authority.

The idea of democracy as an open form that individuals of all political stripes could get behind was an ephemeral phenomenon, an artifact of the interwar period in which it stood for whatever was not fascism. This effect was especially pronounced in the context of U.S.-China cultural relations and how this context imagined the Pacific. So far historians have not taken too seriously the fact that writers as disparate as Smedley, Buck, Robeson, Lin, and Lao She all used the term democracy. It was just rhetoric. As a result, scholarship has largely kept these figures to their respective ideological corners: they don’t belong together, even if they were using the same language. But their use of the term did real work in the world that moved well beyond mere rhetoric. It facilitated cross-cultural collaboration and communication. It allowed each figure to transcend standard divisions of Left and liberal, East and West. In sum, democracy as an idea served as a locus or node for affiliation, the association of positions and individuals typically separated by ideology, gender, race, or nation. These writers aggressively exploited the term’s brief historical flexibility to pursue new alliances.

Technology and the Speed of Words

If the concept of democracy animated new modes of connectivity among American and Chinese writers, inducing a broader transformed vision of the Pacific, new physical changes in their environment facilitated this transformation. The formation of a massive technological infrastructure between the United States and East Asia in the first half of the century underwrote increasing opportunities for writers to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. The time frame of this history is relatively compressed, yet it was an era of unprecedented changes in how people imagined the Pacific as a physically connected place. Not only had the idea of the Pacific evolved; its very materiality had altered as well.

New forms of transpacific media and telecommunications started to explode in the first decade of the twentieth century. Some figures: the first transpacific telegraph line was laid in 1902–1903 and connected the United States to Hawaii, while the first direct telegraphic link between the United States and China was established in late January 1921. During this period the number of international cable messages exploded to exceed one million in China, and the cable link between Shanghai and San Francisco accounted for more than 10 percent of that total.¹⁸ The radio appeared in China just a decade later. In 1928 the American-based company RCA brokered a deal with the Nationalist state to introduce radio technology, construct several broadcast stations, and begin the work of selling radio sets commercially to the Chinese people. Between 1931 and 1935 China’s domestic radio telegraphic network expanded aggressively from thirty-two to sixty-five stations, and an agreement was also reached to create a Shanghai–San Francisco circuit.¹⁹ Through the 1930s, American programming dominated radio broadcasting in China. Finally, this period witnessed the emergence of an efficient transpacific transportation system, which facilitated the rapid exchange and dissemination of physical texts. Starting in late 1932 one could send letter packages across the Pacific by a newly established Pacific air mail system, while by the mid-1930s one could also mail parcels from America to China, and vice versa, via the SS Tatsuma Maru, the famous Japanese book boat that shipped hundreds of manuscripts.²⁰ The infrastructure of the Pacific had evolved.

Scholarship on cultural encounters between the United States and East Asia has been generally silent on this history. When one reads the voluminous amounts of writing on the subject, one is struck by a certain consistency of rhetoric: interactions are usually defined by imbalance, myth, fantasy, projection, and apparitions.²¹ The idea of a transpacific world is less an actual sphere of interaction and more a simple fantasy space of cultural projection and introjection, Orientalism and reverse Orientalism. Specifically, when scholars today talk about cultural contact between China and the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Pacific often appears as an austere place. Writers sit in their apartments alone and dream up fantasies of China or America by pen and paper. Visions and ideas are hallucinated in quiet contemplation and magically materialize as novels and poems. This epistemology of how the Pacific operates ignores the fact that writers lived within complex ecologies of media and technology that shaped their ability to think, write, and come up with new ideas. When Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth, she wrote it on a typewriter in a room with a phonograph that