The Flip Side

Benefiting from recently catalogued archival materials, The Flip Side: Old China Hands and the American Popular Imagination, 1935–1985 evaluates the influence of an ensemble of well-known Americans born or bred in China – Pearl S. Buck, Henry R. Luce, Owen Lattimore and John Hersey – after their return to the United States of America.

The children of missionaries and others serving China, all contributed in significant ways to the globalisation of the American ideal in the 20th century, even as each sought in different roles – as publishers, as novelists, as scholars – to centre Chinese values and concerns in the anglophone public sphere. As Chinese ideas and values met the projection of American soft power and governmentality, a uniquely bilateral, global imaginary arose, wherein respect for China as an emerging force encountered Western reaction. For these “old China hands”, the return to the USA resulted in unique and differing sociocultural formations: Buck’s intersectional literary populism on behalf of “the Chinese people”; Henry R. Luce’s press internationalism; Lattimore’s “inner Asian” regional imaginaries; and Hersey’s China trilogy allegories. All were keen observers of and participants in international networks combining a diversity of China-based expertise and resources that continued to inform their everyday work at a great distance. Both public and private, these networks, onshore and off, enabled and energised their own advocacy that dared to imagine a Chinese future distinct from its colonial or semi-feudal past.

The Flip Side asserts that these American stakeholders occupied a transitional but crucial role in the rise of China in Western imagination, prior to China’s assertion of sovereignty over its own global role and message.

Acknowledgements

Prologue: China colony

Introduction

Part 1 the friend

• Chapter 1 The anachronistic novel: Pearl S. Buck and the vernacularisation of China
• Chapter 2 Buck’s FBI file

Part 2 the builder

• Chapter 3 Building “free China”: Henry R. Luce and a Chinese basis for the “American century”
• Chapter 4 Disenchanting China: Luce and the politicisation of China relief

Part 3 the geographer

• Chapter 5 Owen Lattimore, geopolitics and Chinese “frontier genesis”
• Chapter 6 Ordeal by slander: Lattimore’s treason on the flip side

Part 4 the fabulist

• Chapter 7 Reading China allegory in John Hersey’s A single pebble and White Lotus
• Chapter 8 Los ing China: The erosion of faith in Hersey’s The call

References

Index

“This is that rare creature, a book that will attract students and colleagues in many disciplines and reading groups looking for an intriguing book that shows these Old China Hands in a new light.”

– Charles Hayford, independent scholar, Emeritus

 

“As an American living long-term in Hong Kong, Christie knows China as well as he understands the US. The Flip Side is essential reading if you want to understand the relationship between these countries.”

– Helen Pitt, former Sydney Morning Herald opinion editor and Walkley Award-winning author of The House

 

“Stuart Christie’s analysis of the careers of four of mid-twentieth century America’s most influential interpreters of China is a refreshingly original, deeply penetrating contribution to the study of American literary and intellectual history. No scholar has established nearly as convincingly as Christie the cultural and psychological continuities between Pearl Buck, Henry Luce, Owen Lattimore and John Hersey. While respecting the honesty of his subjects’ efforts to get China ‘right’, Christie shows how each of these writers, even while having spent their childhood and youth in China, depended on a distinctly American inventory of conceptual tools.”

– David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley and author of Protestants Abroad: How missionaries tried to change the world but changed America

 

Format: paperback
Size: 210 × 148 mm
352 pages
bibliographies and indexes
Copyright: © 2024
ISBN: 9781743329931
Publication: 01 Dec 2024
Series: China and the West in the Modern World