US-China relations

When I did my talk last week about the vastly changed American image of Japan and the Japanese in the 40 years since the sneak attack – the devastatingly successful attack – on the main base of the American Pacific fleet, I assumed that, this past weekend, most newspapers would have commemorative pieces and so I imagine they did but I hadn't guessed how lavishly these memories would be recalled here on the coast of California where I arrived just before the weekend.

If December 7 1941 was, as President Roosevelt declared at the time, a date which will live in infamy, I think most of us had forgotten how it was a day lived through, in something close to panic, by many inhabitants of the Pacific coast of the United States. If it had happened today, of course, panic would be justified since, with or without a declaration of war, any large power could, within about 15 minutes, deliver an intercontinental missile but in 1941 there was no nuclear bomb. There were no jet planes. Flights across the Pacific were all done by propeller planes which had to make many stops for refuelling.

But when you lived on this coast and all the tall buildings looked out across the Pacific Ocean, the war was 'out' there as it was 'out' there to the people of Dover looking across the 18 miles of the English Channel and the day after the Sunday attack on Pearl Harbor, the commanding general of the west coast stood before a hastily summoned group of city officials and shouted, 'Last night, there were planes over this community. They were Japanese planes and they were tracked out to sea. Bombing is bound to come. Don't get jittery, learn to take it!'. Well, there were never any Japanese planes or invasion fleets or bombs and the submarine net secretly slung across the entrance to San Francisco Bay was never pierced.

Recalling all this from full-page reprints and memoirs published this week in the San Francisco papers reminded me forcibly of something that Americans who live on the east coast or in the South or in the Midwest either forget, or are mostly unaware of, which is the special relation between Californians and the peoples in the Pacific and beyond the Pacific; the Hawaiian Islands, of course, which were admitted as the fiftieth state of the union in 1959 but I'm thinking more of the special awareness of the oriental peoples, of the Japanese and, most of all, of the Chinese.

It was Chinese coolies who were brought in here in the 1860s only a dozen years after the Gold Rush and performed the main labour of laying down the tracks of the Central Pacific Railroad though the mountains of the Coast Range and the Central Valley and the High Sierra in every sort of hideous heat and Arctic winters to join the tracks of the Union Pacific Company pushing westward – the Irish were the slave labourers on that one – to meet, at last, in 1869, in Utah.

The Chinese rail splitters, some of them settled in small western towns, most of them retreated to California, not greatly rewarded for their appalling ordeal, and formed the humble labour pool for the booming city of San Francisco. They did the laundry, they fetched and carried, they opened restaurants. There must be more Chinese restaurants in San Francisco than in the rest of the United States. They were employed by importers to take over raw materials brought in from China and weave and sew them and make gowns and slippers and toys and such. They started as the depressed working population of this city and have mostly remained so.

I should throw in the reminder that the American connection with China started long before the Gold Rush. On the east coast, in the late eighteenth century, the New England clipper ships did such a prosperous and continuous trade with China for its silks and screens and ivories and paintings that, for a couple of decades or so, the Chinese were under the impression that there were two countries, two nations in America, one called the United States and the other called Salem.

Salem, Massachusetts was then the main and the most lucrative port of entry for the China trade, even though it was the remotest possible market since ships had to cross the Pacific and go round the Horn and sail all the way up the east coasts of South and North America. From that connection, however, some of the divines and scholars of New England came to take a lively interest in China which is firmly maintained today in distinguished departments of Chinese history at both Harvard and at Boston Universities and, maybe I ought to mention too that on this coast, the California coast, at the end of the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth, the Spanish, who owned California as part of New Spain, had a very flourishing China trade exchanging the pelts of the sea otter for mercury from China, which was vital to working the California silver mines.

But, the main western connection, as I say, was the labour connection with the Chinese who came here during the Gold Rush and later were drafted in large numbers to build the first transcontinental railroad.

Well, along about the end of the nineteenth century, high-minded white people – in the main, Episcopalian and Methodist parsons and also philanthropists with a passion for improving what were then called the less fortunate – they looked at the condition of the Chinese here and began to, well, the word was 'civilise' them, and this meant, in the well-known nineteenth-century way, to convert them to Christianity. The movement didn't do too well and some of these clerics and philanthropists felt the call to attack the problem at the root, namely to civilise the Chinese in their native land. It sounds crass and condescending today but, heaven knows, Britain had done the same thing on a grand scale throughout its burgeoning empire.

In other words, the Americans started Christian missions in China. The founding editor of America's first weekly new magazine, nearly 60 years ago, was born in China, the son of a missionary, which both his friends and a biographer agree was the very good reason why Henry Luce was so unflagging an admirer of Chiang Kai-shek throughout the Second War and so deeply concerned by China's conversion to Communism.

These missionaries, both religious and medical, went out from California and from New England and, until the late 1940s, the line of communication with China, by way of scholarship and even family ties, held. Well, today you walk around San Francisco and it's impossible not to recognise that China has had a permanent effect on Californians, superficially on tastes in food and decoration, art objects, exhibitions, clothes, so on, but it has meant, too, that the ordinary educated American takes as much of an interest, if not more of an interest, in China, its people, its policies than in remote Europe.

I don't believe it was an accident that the president who reversed a lifetime's commitment, an almost ferocious commitment, against Communism, and who decided that a link must be forged with Communist China was a native Californian, Richard Nixon. At any rate, I've often noticed and rarely commented on the fact that when I come out here, my California friends are more likely than my eastern friends to talk about China more readily than they talk about Poland or British politics.

So, the other day, it was no surprise to see much emphasis given to a book and a report coming out of Boston about what people here are beginning to call the 'double standard' that Americans apply to the treatment of dissidents in the Soviet Union and in China. Ever since Mr Nixon's breakthrough in the early Seventies, Americans have tended to emphasise the Soviet Union's violations of human rights as they have underplayed similar violations in China. In the past few years, the tourist trade from this country to China has quintupled and the proper reaction of returning American tourists has been, in the main, one of unbounded admiration for Chinese art, Chinese food, the Chinese people, not to mention Chinese acupuncture. Most visitors, it seems, have wanted to feel that they have seen a great light, that China has lain there, a neglected continent, a culture too long ignored.

When you challenge such people on the awkward fact that China is a Communist nation and must maintain its hold on the people by the unchanging controls of a dictatorship – conformity enforced by secret police, by political arrests and imprisonment, by labour camps and the removal of intellectuals – these tourist converts either bluster that things have all changed since the death of Mao Tse-tung or admit that they ought to have deplored these horrors during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and '76. During that time, it's true, the United States had no diplomats in China or journalists or scholars, whereas in the Soviet Union, we did have such resident observers during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.

The professor of Chinese history at Boston University who has raised this question of a double standard is a Mrs Merle Goldman and she has brought up horrifying statistics about the imprisonment, torture and deaths of millions of Chinese under what we'd been led to believe was the beneficent rule of Mao Tse-tung and Wan Li. The point comes up now because every American newspaper in the past month or so has been concerned about the plight of Andrei Sakharov and his wife and before them, of course, it was Solzhenitsyn and Sharansky. No such concern has ever been expressed by the Red Guards' drowning of Lao She, the most popular of Chinese writers in the 1960s, or today by the whereabouts of Bai Hua, the author of a movie that questioned the success of Chinese Communism.

The China lovers can, at least, breathe a belated sigh of relief that the half-million and more intellectuals who were in prison in the late Fifties have either quietly died off or been rehabilitated and brought back into respectability.

This is not a question, I imagine, that disturbs the average householder in Sheffield or Philadelphia but it crosses the mind and disturbs it when, every morning, I look out from my hotel window down on to a little park and watch three or four Chinese, old and young, going through their morning exercises, grave and delicate gestures down in slow motion, like Buddhist statues brought to life.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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