200 years of U.S.-China links

Press, 24 April 1984, Page 12

200 years of U.S.-China links

NZPA-Reuter Peking President Reagan’s visit to Peking this week comes almost exactly 200 years after the United States began its often stormy relationship with China. In 1784, the 360-ton privateer Empress of China became the first vessel from the newly-independent United States to reach the mysterious land then known as Cathay. • The ship, which left Boston, Massachusetts, on February 22, arrived in Canton to trade with a cargo of furs, lead, tar, turpentine, silver dollars, and ginseng root.

By the time master John Green sailed back to New England in May, 1785, he had made a profit for his owners of about $30,000 on their $120,000 investment.

It was a promising start, and by 1829 bilateral trade had risen to $4 million, one quarter of it in opium. For a host of reasons, SinoAmerican relations were not to continue their smooth expansion. There were fat years and lean years in China, imperialist “opium wars,” civil wars and revolutions. It was not until 1972 that the United States established full commercial ties with a unified, strong China, and not until 1979 that diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic were normalised.

Ghosts from bygone eras still stalk the halls of state. Last year, for example, Sino-U.S. exchanges were seriously ruffled by a dispute over unpaid dues to U.S. holders of imperial railway bonds. The main obstacle still blocking full Chinese-American amity — Washington’s refusal to break completely with Nationalist-ruled Taiwan — dates back to a U.S. commitment to Chiang Kai-shek in the 19405, when Franklin Roosevelt saw the Generalissimo as a vital

ally against Japan. The Sino-American relationship has not been motivated only by self-interest. A seemingly endless stream of American missionaries, philanthropists and benefactors has gone into China in the last 150 years, many with the genuine intention of bettering the lot of the vast country's people. They included men and women prepared to brave hardship, isolation and, more recently, political opprobrium at home for their commitment to the communist revolution.

Several still live in Peking, weighed down with honours by the People’s Republic. They include a Lebanese-born American doctor, George Hatem, credited with eradicating venereal disease from China after 1949, and now on a crusade to stamp out leprosy. The first U.S. missionary whose arrival in China was chronicled was one Elijah Bridgman, who set up in Canton in 1830. In 1834 another Protestant clergyman, Peter Parker, landed in south China. After the fashion of the 17th century Jesuits, he was determined to use science to win souls for God. Whereas Matteo Ricci and the other early Jesuits used their knowledge of astronomy to impress the Manchu court, Parker aimed to gain his entree into Chinese society by his medical skills, and launch his evangelical mission later. Faced with the abject suffering of Canton’s teeming population, Parker was forced to abandon gospel-teaching altogether, to devote his time to surgery.

His hospital won him such fame that Lin Tse-hsu, the emperor’s special commissioner charged with smashing the opium trade, consulted him for treatment of a hernia.

Parker, later pressed into ser-

vice as aide to U.S. diplomats in China in a series of frustrating trade wrangles, finally became so disillusioned with the Manchu court that he left China calling publicly for the U.S. seizure of Taiwan. An American who came to China with quite different motives was Frederick Townsend Ward, a young adventurer who arrived in 1859 just as the "Taiping" rebels began their bid for power. Mocked by Shanghai's foreign military establishment. Ward formed a motley Chinese force to combat the rebels, and its success earned the imperial title of “Ever Victorious Army.” When Ward died in battle, aged 30, in 1862, he was an imperial t general, admiral and high-grade* Mandarin.

Then came more scholars, the first of whom was a Calvinist missionary, William Martin, who decided he should concentrate on Westernising the Chinese, and proselytise later. He spent more than half a century in China, teaching English, science and international law, and rising to become president of Peking University. Like other foreign residents, he was trapped in China when the Boxer Rebellion erupted in 1900. Martin survived, but a young Yale University missionary was beheaded by the fiercely xenophobic Boxers.

His fate inspired another U.S. venture — the Yale-in-China project, which aimed “to furnish a centre of Christian education in the interior of the Chinese empire.”

Yale scholars installed themselves in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, where they set up a middle school in 1906, and later a teaching hospital. In 1919, the school provided

shelter and printing facilities for a young radical called Mao Tse-tung. Yet in spite of generous funds, devoted staff and abundant good will, the project foundered in the 1920 s as China moved inexorably towards civil war. Another idealistic American, a civil engineer, Oliver J. Todd, came to China in the 19205. For the best part of two decades he battled not only Chinese apathy, but nature itself in the form of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers.

Determined to twin Western technology with the Chinese capacity for labour, Todd embarked on a series of huge, mainly successful projects to divert the flood-prone rivers away from cities or, where that was impossible, to build reliable dykes.

Historian Jonathan Spence, who described Todd's herculean labours in his book “To Change China." commented: "The major impediment to his success was surely his status as the representative of foreign powers, however strenuous his own disclaimers. "For as long as the West played so great a part in Chinese affairs, there could be no true neutrality for a Westerner." Two men who worked tirelessly for China's anti-Japanese war effort. yet both of whom left the country disillusioned and with a sense of failure, were a retired air force general. Claire Lee Chennault, and an infantry general. Joseph Stilwell. Chennault. fiercely loyal to Chiang Kai-shek, formed a force of expatriate aviators known popularly as the Flying Tigers to battle the Japanese invaders. After Pearl Harbour, he became Chinese Air Force chief of staff, but serious supply problems were to limit his success. Stilwell, assigned by Roosevelt to be Chiang's over-all chief of staff, spent years attempting to build an efficient Chinese army. He eventually fell foul of Chiang's insistence that the best troops be held in readiness for the showdown with the communists, rather than fighting the Japanese. After Mao Tse-tung's civil war victory in 1949, influential voices in Washington argued for U.S. recognition of the new People’s Republic. China’s intervention in the Korean War, lending weight to the anti-communist campaign of Senator Joseph McCarthy, ensured that relations between Washington and Peking went into a prolonged freeze. It was to last until Richard Nixon broke the ice with his Peking visit in February, 1972.