The Flip Side: Old China Hands and the American Popular Imagination, 1935–1985

Stuart Christie

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 and 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, 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 and “Asian” values and concerns in the anglophone public sphere. The resulting torque, as Chinese ideas and values met the projection of American “soft” power and governmentality, created a uniquely bilateral, global imaginary where respect for China as an emerging force encountered Western reaction. For these “old China hands”, the return to the USA resulted in then-unique and discrepant socio-cultural formations: Buck’s intersectional literary populism on behalf of “the Chinese people”; Hersey’s China trilogy allegories; Henry R. Luce’s press internationalism; and Lattimore’s “inner Asian” regional imaginaries. As old China hands, all were keen observers of (and active 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 Western 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.