Shadows and substance: the formation of a radical perspective in American China studies, 1968-1979

© 1987 Cheung Ching ChoyAmerican perceptions of China, according to Stanford Professor Harry Harding, were subject to “regular cycles of romanticism and cynicism, of idealization and disdain”. A quick glance at the American record does confirm that the Chinese have been repeatedly described as the most remarkable people on earth; or, in their faceless mass, the most fearful monsters. Despite American China specialists continuously confessing that China is “dim, distant and very little known,” American images of China keep flickering between the good and the evil. Just within the past fifty years, this perceptual pendulum has had several dramatic swings. From the faith expressed in Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), as a “sage” and a “man of destiny” and that the KMT was China’s last chance in the 1930s, to President Harry Truman’s final description of the KMT elite (including Chiang) as being “all thieves”; from the initial empathy which many China specialists felt for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a possibly better alternative for China in the 1940s to their later insistence that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was extreme, irrational and a dangerous enemy to the so-called “free-world”; from the unanticipated infatuation with the PRC in the early 1970s, which quickly replaced two decades of American hostility, to the new wave of negativism, which arrived at the end of the 1970s and loudly proclaimed “China stinks!” in the early 1980s. It is difficult to believe that China could actually have undergone such diverse changes to fit these various American descriptions. Given the fact that large-scale American China studies did not really take shape until the 1950s, and very little in the way of reliable data was available to the United States after it broke off diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1950, it is justifiable to argue that American perceptions of China might have less to do with the empirical reality of China at any given time than with that of the United States itself. This thesis analyses the swing of U.S. Sinophila and the beginning of disillusion which took place in the field of American China studies from 1968 through 1979. The author attempts to explain how different circumstances, frames of mind and sets of values which American scholars brought to their studies shaped their approaches and coloured their judgement. This inquiry had its initial genesis in an interest in the ideology and politics of American Sinology. However, given the scope and complexity of the issue, such a project is beyond a single person’s ability to comprehend, especially when working under an academic deadline. The task of a thorough study of all American China scholars who had romanticized the PRC in the 1970s also seemed impossible without making some very broad generalizations. Hence, the scope of this work is narrowed to simply focusing on the formation, growth and dissolution of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) from 1968 to 1979