The great American dream
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Washington The announcement that Taiwan was to be abandoned and communist China embraced came at a peculiar time — Friday evenin-, g after the close of business hours. With the president doing the announcing himself, it gave what had been a foregone act a needless and puzzling aura of drama and novelty. It had been surmised for months that the administration, once the elections were safely passed, would declare the late Chiang Kai-Shek's place of refuge a bastard state out of harmony with its legitimate mainland parent. Had that benign human potato, Cyrus Vance, read the news to the usual gang of State Department correspondents, the recognition might not have set off the level of hyperbole it has. A portion of the Senate is furious, or at least is pretending to be furious. It is impossible to divine whether Senator Goldwater means it, or just thinks his followers' lives would be clouded by d, isaPpointment unless he said the verbal illegnimation of Taiwan was 'one of the Most cowardly acts ever performed by a President of the United States.' One sscntigte man, an amusing kneejerk reac
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-narY, called it 'the greatest act of appeasement since Neville Chamberlain went to Munich.' The president's sup Porters were less vehement in their support. There were few statements claiming this Was one of the most courageous acts ever Performed by a president. In between the president received a lot of tentative but somewhat puzzled support. Many, who have no problems about sending an ambassador to Peking, do Wonder about the abrogation of America's treaty obligations to a friend, trading partner and ally of a number of years' standing. To them, the question is how untrustworthy does this Make us look in the eyes of those other allies whom we might have a motive for throwing over? A smaller group wonders about playing balance of power games against the Russians with the excessively numerous but not too terribly powerful Chinese. The cynics, of course, presume that with the turning to dust of the one thousandth and first prediction of a Middle East Peace treaty, and the mess in Iran and a dull domestic situation, the president was looking for cheap Christmas victories. The truth may be that the timing was accidental. No time would be a good time for those who see America trading diplomatic recognition of a small dictatorship for the world's largest. What may have been the motivating force to commit this unpleasant but inevitable act is a hungry hope that a great deal of trade will follow the exchange of ambassadors. It's the most frequently proferred argument by President Carter's supporters, and it gets a positive hearing because it conforms to an old American delusionary obsession about China.
A small but zealous group of Americans have since the middle of the nineteenth century been possessed with a dream that China would someday be our best customer, the land where our perennial agricultural surpluses and manufacturing excesses will go at great gain and profit to ourselves. In fact, no significant amount of trade with China has ever existed and it's highly unlikely any ever will, but that hasn't stopped generation after generation of American bankers, railroad builders and entrepreneurs of every sort hallucinating about the riches of Cathay. At the turn of the century, it was this opium dream which led to the formulation of the 'open door' policy which had the American State Department working to ensure equal access to Chinese markets with Japan and the European powers. It was Japan, of course, that the United States, or at least that small sector of the population which gave a damn about the orient, was most concerned with. By the time of the Wilson administration, Japanese efforts to monopolise the Chinese market, such as it was, brought war-like thoughts to the more volatile people in Washington.
The same reoccurred with the breakdown of the naval disarmament treaties at the end of the Twenties and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. In the next decade, while the sons of Nikon from the Land of the Rising Sony continued to spread their hegemony over more and more of China, Americans fed their trade fantasy by reading a quasibest seller called Four Hundred Million Customers.
Trade alone can't explain this continuing interest in China. Americans who get bitten by the China bug come down with a kind of metaphysical disease, a mad Chinoiserie of the mind. Either they want to convert all 900 million into Prcsbyterihns or they impute some special wisdom and virtue to the Chinese people and their culture which only occidentals from Omaha, Nebraska, can appreciate and protect. Either way it produces a fascinated intrusive interest in all matters Chinese and helps explain the especially bitter reaction of the Sinophiles to the communist conquest. They regarded it as China, the real China, destroying itself.
China and America are probably the two most naturally isolationist of the great national states. The political leaders in both places have to flog the populace to get it to pay attention to anything past its borders.
The vast indifference to China by the majority of Americans permits our media and politicians to depict China to us as a hilariously ever changing revolution: 'Chairman Egg Foo Young today said he was gratified at the manifestations of butterfly shrimp on wall posters in Hankow. Observers in Hong Kong believe this may mean that the egg roll gang, turned out of office with the death of Chairman Mousie-Tongue, will fail in the chop suey attempt. Further support for that point of view is the reappearance in public of Vice Premier Mo Shi Pork, who had been thought to have been relegated to the man gership of a Chinese laundry commune, a position roughly equivalent in America to a street car conductor, if we had any street cars or they had conductors. Vice Chairman Pork personally went to the writing wall and in the elegant calligraphy for which he is famous — the vice chairman is of mandarin descent —wrote these words: "We will make Peking duck out of all evil feathered friends." This has been taken to mean that the drive for the modernisation of China is gathering steam under Chairman Egg Foo Young's leadership.'
Beyond that, history of sorts was made when Chai Tse-Min (real person), head of the Chinese liaison office here (real office), arrived at the State Department (unreal department) the other day wearing not a Mao jacket but a western suit, shirt and tie. Along Seventh Avenue in New York you could hear the halleluiiahs.
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