From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda

CHAPTER 1

The Pendulum Swings . . . and Swings Again

Past and Present

This book is about the representations of China found in American films, Or, more precisely, about the images and myths regarding China found in such films. It is based on two underlying premises. First, that film both reflects and fuels widespread, and often deeply rooted, perceptions and attitudes. In a book about the interactions of film and history, French historian Marc Ferro argues that cinema is both a “source” and an “agent” of history. A film is a “source” in that it reveals not only the physical and social realities of the past but also the attitudes and beliefs of the period in which it was made. It acts as an “agent” in a two- fold way. That is, it shapes visions of the past—think, for example, of how Gone with the Wind has influenced memories and perceptions of the Civil War 1—that almost invariably have an impact on future behavior and decisions. “Attitudes and policies are formed,” writes Jerome Ch’en in a book about China and the West, “approaches and procedures are chosen, on the basis of things as they are perceived, not as they really are.”2 Ch’en may not have been thinking principally of how film shaped perceptions of China—he was concerned, rather r, with the role played by “missionaries and converts, scholars and students, traders and emigrants”—but no one would deny that, once film turned to China, it created powerful perceptions that became part of a landscape of shifting sympathies and strident fears.

This brings us to the second general premise: that is, in the case of American perceptions of China, screen images bear on a relationship between two countries—that is, China and America—that is as deeply problematic as it is critically important. No country has figured more prominently in recent American history: since the onset of the cold war the presence of China has loomed large in domestic American politics as well as foreign policy. Fears of China arguably prompted the United States to fight in Korea and, later, in Vietnam. Speaking of the Korean War, historian David Halberstam makes the point that the war “was never just about Korea. It was always joined to something infinitely larger—China, a country inspiring the most bitter kind of domestic political debate.”3 And if China was a critical player in the nation’s recent past, it has become abundantly clear that no country promises to play a more important role in America’s future. Even as early as 1970, China’s growing importance was sensed by historian Henry Steele Commager. “What was said of America in Tocqueville’s day,” wrote Commager, “can be said of China in ours, that no student can be indifferent to its existence, no economist omit it from his calculations, no statesman ignore its immense potentialities, and no phi los o pher or moralist refuse to accommodate his speculations to its presence.” 4

In the years since Commager wrote those words, China’s “immense potentialities” have loomed larger with every passing day. “the most important thing happening in the world today,” declared a succinct Nicholas Kristof in the pages of the New York Times on December 10, 2003, “is the rise of China.” Barely a week goes by that we do not read about how China appears to be catching up to, if not surpassing and challenging, the United States. Headlines tell us that “China is drawing high- tech research from the U.S.” even as it races to replace the United States “as economic power in Asia.” Its construction of a “vast network of fast trains” means that the United States “falls further behind.”5 Almost as if the re were no other important countries or national groups in the world—as if the Eu ro pe an Union, and the nations of Latin America barely existed—Americans tend to view the contest for global hegemony in terms of America and China. Every realm of experience—the Olympic medals won by athletes, the achievements of schoolchildren—is measured in terms of this contest. the coming century, suggests one commentator after another, will belong not to America but to the Chinese. “If the 20th was the American century,” writes William Grimes flatly, “then the 21st belongs to China. It’s that simple.” 6

In recent years, perceptions of this contest have given rise to insistent comparisons between China’s “rise”—as it is inevitably called—and America’s “fall.” Books about China’s rise and what it portends for this century—such as Ted C. Fishman’s China, Inc: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World (2005), Wendy Dobson’s Gravity Shift : How Asia’s New Economic Powerhouses Will Shape the 21st Century (2010), Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (2009), Clyde Prestowitz’ Three Billion New Capitalists: the Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East (2005), Stefan Halper’s the Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (2010), Aaron L. Friedberg’s A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (2012)—are matched only by those devoted to America’s imperial decline. A sampling includes Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome? the Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (2007), Amy Chua’s Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall (2008), and Robert Kagan’s the Return of History and the End of Dreams (2008).

Yet despite the important role China has played in the past, and will clearly play in the future, no country—as the films under consideration make clear—has been more enveloped in American ignorance or bathed in changing illusions and myths. In part, of course, such myths are symptomatic of a broader ethnocentric bias: Americans are not known for their interest in, or knowledge of, other places in the world. Long before the contemporary era, as historian Tony Judt once observed, “foreign visitors were criticizing [America’s] brash self- assurance, the narcissistic confi dence of Americans in the superiority of American values and practices, and their rootless inattentiveness to history and tradition—their own and other people’s.”7 Still, even within this general context of “inattentiveness,” Americans’ ignorance of China is striking. It may not be as acute as it was in the postwar era, when virtually all contacts between America and China—educational, cultural, and economic—were severed. Nonetheless, it is telling that an observation made in 1974 by the dean of American Sinologists, John K. Fairbank, still rings largely true. “At any given time,” said Fairbank wryly, “the ‘truth’ of China is in our heads, a notoriously unsafe repository for so valuable a commodity.”8 And well before Fairbank wrote those words, Harold Isaacs—author of what is widely considered a pathbreaking study of American attitudes toward China, Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India—declared that China “occupies a special place in a great many American minds. It is remote, strange, dim, little known.”9

Throughout the years, the “strange” and “remote” place that China occupies in the American mind has been accompanied by a curious phenomenon. It is one that, as we will see, comes vividly to life in the films explored in these pages. That is, under the force of changing historical circumstances, Americans tend to swing from intensely positive images of China to those that are relentlessly negative. On the positive side, China is regarded as an ancient and wise civilization—a land blessed with citizens who are intelligent and industrious, peaceful and stoic, devoted to the values of family and the moral teachings of Confucius. But there is another—fearsome—China. This is the land of Oriental despots, of Genghis Khan and his marauding hordes, of strange practices and barbaric tortures. Noting that “the inhuman powers of endurance attributed to the Chinese are loosely related to the idea that they are also inhumanly cruel,” Harold Isaacs observes that “the term ‘Chinese torture’ has a place in our language signifying devilishly ingenious methods of inflicting pain and death.”10 A land of “devilish” methods of torture, this latter China is peopled, continues Isaacs, by “a faceless, impenetrable, overwhelming mass, irresistible if once loosed. Along this way we discover the devious and difficult heathen, the killers of girl infants, the binders of women’s feet, the torturers of a thousand cuts, the headsmen, the Boxer Rebellion and the yellow Peril.”11

Isaacs wrote those words more than a half century ago. But in the eyes of many Sinologists, historians, and political scientists, the schizophrenic view of China he describes is still alive and well. Reflecting on the dueling visions of China that seem to inhabit the American imagination, in the wake of a 1979 visit to China, David Chan underscored Americans’ “inability to be objective” about China even as he suggested that China either “seduces” or “repels.”12 Approaching this from a slightly different perspective, in a study published in the year 2000, Jasper Becker made much the same point. Noting that China is seen either as an “oriental utopia” or a “Communist hell,” he pointed out that then recent books portrayed China along characteristically dualistic lines, that is, “as the next superpower, the new evil empire or as descending into chaos and civil war.”13

In today’s media- saturated world, where images and perceptions change with astonishing speed, the swings of the pendulum and dueling images of China described by these commentators have, if anything, become more visible than before. To see this phenomenon at work, one has only to consider two important dates—1972 and 1989—when the pendulum governing perceptions of China took a violent swing. the first date represents the year that President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Chairman Mao Zedong in the course of a historic visit to Beijing. In the period that followed that visit, the “repulsion” that Americans had felt for China throughout the era of the cold war gave way to a moment of “seduction”—one marked by an infatuation with China so strong that Harry Harding likened it to a kind of “China fever.”14 the second date, of course, marks the year that viewers around the world witnessed soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army fire on unarmed student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Putting an end to what Richard Madsen calls the “liberal China myth” that had guided Americans’ relationship to China for a quarter century,15 the massacre at Tiananmen Square suddenly reawakened quasi- dormant fears of Chinese malevolence and brutality. This watershed event was, moreover, soon followed by a number of confrontations between America and China so tense that, as historian Warren Cohen writes, for a while it seemed as if a new cold war loomed on the horizon.16

As political tensions escalated and “seduction” gave way to “repulsion,” negative images of China—absent from view since 1972—came back to life with a vengeance. Nowhere was this phenomenon clearer, perhaps, than in America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times.17 Revealing the weight of ancient stereotypes, articles insistently brought to mind age-old images of Chinese torture and inhumanity, of weird practices and strange superstitions. For example, a June 29, 2001, report about the alleged harvesting of organs from executed Chinese prisoners was replete with grisly details that evoked the specter of Chinese torture.18 In other articles, China’s faceless bureaucratic leaders were described in ways that brought to mind visions of cruel and barbaric Oriental despots. Going so far as to use the term “satrap,” a report on May 29, 2001, sententiously declared that in China “might makes right, whether wielded by traditional clan chiefs, by cabals of corrupt police, Communist Party satraps and gangsters or . . . by all of the above.” And once the SARS crisis erupted, images of “devilish” methods of Chinese torture and of Oriental despotism were joined by those bearing on dirt and disease, on the perceived weirdness and degeneracy of Chinese habits and tastes. While some articles faulted China’s leaders for the ir response to the outbreak of illness, others lingered on what were, to American eyes, the strange foods, superstitions, and medicines used by the Chinese to battle the plague. A front- page article published on May 10, 2003, bore the deliberately shocking headline “Herbs? Bull Thymus? Beijing Leaps at Anti-SARS Potions.”19 Earlier images of a strange and barbaric people given to wearing pigtails and eating weird creatures assumed a contemporary cast even as rats—the symbol of Chinese dirt and deceit—surfaced everywhere in American media coverage of China. One article described an expensive Guangdong restaurant that featured on its menu small mammals like civet cats that, it said, “may have caused the original outbreak”; still another focused on a Chinese slaughter house where trucks arrive daily “with animals jammed into cages—cats, dogs, pigeons, goats, ostriches, even rats.”20

As in the past, the rise of such stereotypes was directly linked to the perception of threats or danger. In recent de cades, of course, fears have borne principally on China’s growing economic might. Portrayed as both a “Communist hell” and a country of cutthroat capitalism, China is seen as a menacing behemoth eager to devour U.S. markets, alienate U.S. friends and allies in Africa and Europe, exacerbate the U.S. trade imbalance, attract U.S. graduates with jobs, draw high-tech research from the United States, and challenge the U.S. military by stealing its secrets. Not surprisingly, reporters have been all too happy to chronicle the dark side of China’s stunning economic success. Sensationalistic headlines in the New York Times announce Dickensian portraits of the ravages wrought by unbridled capitalism: for example, “China’s Workers Risk Limbs in Export Drive” (July 4, 2003), “Making Trinkets in China, and a Deadly Dust” (June 18, 2003), “China Crushes Peasant Protest” (October 13, 2004), “When China’s ‘Haves’ Are Abusive, ‘Have Nots’ Respond with Violence” (December 31, 2004), “Rivers Run Black, and Chinese Die of Cancer” (September 12, 2004), “China’s Super Elite Learn to Flaunt It While the New Landless Weep” (December 25, 2004), “A Village Grows Rich Off Its Main Export: Its Daughters” (January 3, 2005), and “Rules Ignored: Toxic Sludge Sinks Chinese Village” (September 4, 2006).

As one might have expected, the drumbeat of negative articles intensified during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Even as China dazzled the world with its fl air for spectacle and its growing athletic prowess, readers learned about ordinary Chinese people whose homes were gutted in the name of “development,” about elderly women forced into “re-education” for complaining when their houses were seized, about protests (in Xinjiang and Tibet) carefully hidden and brutally suppressed.21 Every aspect, and detail, of the Olympics became symbolic of a country whose rulers would stop at nothing in their quest to impress viewers around the world. Even the fact that the young girl who sang at the opening ceremony lip-synched was taken, for example, as a sign of Chinese “deceit.”22 At least when Pavarotti lip-synched at the 2006 Olympics, waxed the indignant reporter for the New York Times, he did so to his own voice!

All this, of course, is not to defend the policies of the Chinese government. Nor is it to suggest that the reports are necessarily untrue or to ignore the extent of the problems the nation faces: no one could deny that China’s record on human rights is deplorable or that the country faces pressing social, economic, and environmental issues as it makes the difficult transition to a consumer capitalist culture. Still, without denying the truth of many journalistic reports—or the fact that they bear upon important problems—their tenor is nonetheless striking. Replete with the lingering presence of ancient stereotypes, they are often marked by a patronizing tone and an ethnographic bias that, ignoring Chinese history and values, applies American criteria to China.23 Their obvious determination to cast Chinese realities in the worst possible light frequently seems to defy common sense. Can we really believe, as New York Times reporter Mark Landler implies in a front- page feature, “Chinese Savings Helped Inflate American Bubble,” published on December 26, 2008, that China deliberately fueled American profligacy by lending the United States money at low rates? Why, too, with so many terrible and repressive regimes around the world (some of which are U.S. allies)—to say nothing of the United States’ own lamentable record on human rights in recent years—does the newspaper feel called upon, at every possible moment, to remind us of the authoritarian and repressive nature of China’s rulers past and present? Indeed, why are the problems of other emerging nations—the example of India immediately comes to mind—treated in a far more benign way that those confronting China?24 In short, why is China seen not as a country like any other—one with its own failings, virtues, and problems—but as a “paradise” or (as is far more often the case) a “hell”? In short, why, as Gore Vidal once wrote, is “the yellow peril [such] a permanent part of the American psyche?”25

Clearly, the specter of the yellow peril has waxed and waned in relation to American fears of China. Such fears of China may be particularly intense at the present time, but, as Robert McClellan reminds us, even in the nineteenth century, the Chinese—as non-Christians—were perceived as a “different kind of people whose very nature was threatening to Western civilization.” Moreover, as he points out, the obvious greatness of Chinese civilization seemed to challenge the belief in “American uniqueness”—a belief that justifi ed America’s expansion westward and across the Pacific. Americans, he writes, “seemed unable to face the possibility of China’s being a great civilization and a possible power in the Far East, because it would require a reevaluation of basic values.”26 And the challenge China posed to American “superiority” in the nineteenth century paled, of course, alongside that which occurred a century later: that is, China’s embrace of Communism in 1949 seemed to threaten the universality of U.S. values as well as America’s exceptional role as a nation. In this sense, China’s choice of Communism seemed, to borrow a phrase from historian Henry Steele Commager, nothing short of “treasonous.” Noting that Americans “must be first in everything,” Commager goes on to say that “their system must not only be the best in the world, but must be acknowledged to be the best; preference for another system is regarded as a kind of treason. . . . It is American standards that must be accepted as the norm everywhere.”27

The fury evoked by China’s “treason” had still another dimension—one rooted in the nineteenth century rather r than in the politics of the cold war. That is, Mao’s victory was not merely a rejection of America’s deeply rooted belief in its own “system.” It was also the last act, the convulsive end, of a towering historical phenomenon that had done more to shape American perceptions of China than any other single factor. I am referring, of course, to the missionary enterprise. Again and again, commentators have underscored the role played by nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries—usually from America’s heartland—in creating the United States’ first, crucial, images of China. the letters and reports missionaries sent back from the field, as well as the accounts of China they gave to church audiences while on furlough, writes Paul A. Varg, “did more to give form to the American image of China than all the other factors combined.”28 Similarly emphasizing the tremendous legacy of the missionary enterprise, in a vivid passage Harold Isaacs writes that the men and women who went to China as missionaries “placed a permanent and decisive impress on the emotional underpinning of American thinking about China. the scratches they left on American minds over the generations, through the nineteenth-century and into our own time, are often the most powerfully influential of all. More than any other single thing, the American missionary effort in China is responsible for the unique place China occupies in the American cosmos, for the special claim it has on the American conscience.”29

The “scratches” etched by missionaries were fundamental in two critical, deeply interrelated ways. First, they created an image of radical “otherness”—an image based principally on the fact that the Chinese were regarded as “heathens.” (Indeed, it was precisely because of its huge population of heathe ns that China was regarded not only as the “the key to world- wide salvation” but also as “Satan’s chief fortress.”30) Perceived as an inferior people who “lacked the light of God,”31 the Chinese were considered, as nineteenthcentury writer Bret Harte wrote in a famous couplet of “Plain Language from Truthful James,” pitiful and deceitful. “For ways that are dark / And for tricks that are vain,” wrote Harte, “the Heathen Chinee is peculiar.”32 In utter contrast to the “the heathen Chinee,” the missionaries—as still another well-known poem had it—were “heavenly troops” assigned a divine mission. the men and women who went to China were nothing less, enthused poet Vachel Lindsay, than

An endless line of splendor, These troops with heaven for home . . . These, in the name of Jesus, Against the dark gods stand, They gird the earth with valor, They heed their King’s command.33

The martial tone of Lindsay’s poem opens upon still another critical dimension of the missionary enterprise. For if the missionaries went to China in search of souls, they also played an important and multifaceted role in the imperial project itself—that is, America’s march westward and then across the Pacific and into China. For one thing, the presence of American missionaries in China justified the use of military force; that is, they had to be protected by American gunboats. For another, their mission both fueled and embodied the sense of “benevolence” and “mission” that served to legitimize the imperial project itself. As Lian Xi writes, “America’s incorporation of all adjacent lands was virtually the inevitable fulfillment of a moral mission delegated to the nation by Providence itself.”34 Lastly, their involvement in the imperial project meant that their charge—or what William Hutchison deems their “errand”—was double: both “Christian soldiers” and “couriers” for the nation, America’s missionaries were to spread the Gospel even as they helped create a new society modeled on the values and the religion of the country they had left behind.35 As one missionary declared, “Wherever on pagan shores the voice of the American missionary and teacher is heard, there is fulfi lled the manifest destiny of the Christian Republic.”36 This sentiment was echoed, by one president after another, from the bully pulpit of the White House. “Christianity,” declared President William Howard Taft , “and the spread of Christianity are the only basis for the hope of modern civilization.”37

It is against this background—amid what James Thomson calls the “tides of missionary and manifest destiny”38—that one sees the full impact and lasting resonance of the missionary advance into nineteenth-century China. It is not only that missionaries created the crucial first images of China and its people. It is also that the missionary enterprise interacted with Americans’ history and selfimage in a profound way. For, as Harold Isaacs writes in a particularly dramatic and important passage, the missionaries’ dream of saving “400 million souls from damnation” inspired a larger national dream—that is, it inspired “the role of benevolent guardian in which the American saw himself in relation to the Chinese and which is so heavily stamped on the American view of all this history.”39 For more than a century this role enhanced the American ego—“we felt ourselves,” writes Fairbank, “on the giving end and enjoyed the feeling” 40—even as it heightened the conviction that, in China, America had been chosen to play a special role. That is, America had been assigned nothing less than what Lian Xi describes as “a disproportionately large role in God’s saving plan for humankind.” 41

Given the psychological dimension of this “disproportionately large role,” it is hardly surprisingly that when it came to an end, in 1949, the results were dramatic. As the recipient of American benevolence for as long as people could remember, China had enhanced Americans’ self- image and off ered proof of America’s exceptional nature and special destiny. Now, in rejecting a long tradition of evangelical effort and paternalistic benevolence, China not only dealt what Fairbank calls a “grievous blow” to Americans’ self-confidence42 but also challenged the American belief in the superiority and universality of American values. Noting that the repercussions of this “blow” would reach far into the future, Shirley Stone Garrett does not exaggerate when she writes that

with the Communist takeover hope gave way to frustration, friendship to bitterness, and the collapse of the missionary era left a deep sense of betrayal. . . . China’s repudiation of the missionary gift worked like a disease in the consciousness of many Americans, infecting the relationship between the two countries more than has yet been assessed. the connection is too subtle to be traced precisely, but is nevertheless worth close attention, for it may indicate why the American passion for China turned to rage, and why for twenty years America blotted the Chinese state from its map of the world.43

As Garrett suggests, once this “disease” took hold, China morphed from its role as the principal theater of U.S. benevolence into that of America’s worst enemy. As it did so, ancient images roared back in ways that, as I hope to show, continue to reverberate into the present day.

Dueling Images

Nowhere do the impulses I have just described—the centrality of the missionary enterprise, the perceived otherness of the Chinese, the ebb and flow of fears—come to life more vividly, more nakedly, than in cinema. In some sense, of course, films echo information that can be gleaned from more orthodox historical documents. Like historical documents, films mirror the dramatic shifts of the pendulum, the opposing constellations of images, that have marked the United States’ relationship to China. But films also allow us to glimpse beliefs and emotions—often welling up from a kind of collective unconscious—that may resist clear articulation. At the same time, by giving concrete form to relatively abstract ideas or concepts, films suggest not only the presence but also the intensity of certain desires and fears. For example, it is one thing to speak about America’s belief in its benevolence. It is another to glimpse the almost desperate quality of that belief in one cold war film after another. Even the improbabilities and erasures, the contradictions and tensions, of films are telling. It is signifi - cant, surely, that films as otherwise diverse as Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919) and the Sand Pebbles (Robert Wise, 1966) bear witness to similar tension—that is, although both consciously espouse the values of tolerance and humanism, they are permeated by currents of deep, undoubtedly unconscious, racism.

Paying close attention to telling inconsistencies and tensions such as these, this study follows the arc of history as it traces how films both reflected and fueled the swings taken by the pendulum governing images of China for nearly a century. On rare occasions, these swings take place within a single film: in Mr. Wu (William Nigh, 1927), the Chinese protagonist morphs from a cultivated mandarin into an obsessed murderer before our eyes.

More often, though, we are at one end of the pendulum or the other. When the pendulum is at its most positive, we see images of self- sacrificing Buddhist scholars (Broken Blossoms), hardworking laundrymen (Shadows; Tom Forman, 1922), noble peasants (the Good Earth; Sidney Franklin, 1937), and courageous allies (Thirty Seconds over Tokyo; Mervyn LeRoy, 1944). When, instead, the pendulum swings to its negative pole, these images are replaced by those of devious torturers like Fu Manchu, evil warlords and perverse half- castes (Shanghai Express; Josef von Sternberg, 1932), scheming Chinese dragon ladies (the Shanghai Gesture; Josef von Sternberg, 1941), and treacherous “allies” (the Mountain Road; Daniel Mann, 1960). But whether films depict the Chinese as good or evil, they rarely acknowledge the complex dimension of otherness—that is, the ways the Chinese are, in fact, both like and unlike ourselves. Instead, almost invariably, diff erence is either fear—or erased.

It is true that, over the course of time, certain images—and the attitudes they embody—have faded or receded into the past so deeply that they leave few traces behind. Religion and sexuality—issues at the center of early films such as Broken Blossoms and the Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1933)—are no longer used as markers of Chinese otherness. If the use of yellowface has disappeared, so, too, has the swirl of fascination and fear that surrounded the Chinese other in, say, Shanghai Express and the Shanghai Gesture. While Kundun (Martin Scorsese, 1997) resembles cold war films in that its portrayal of China harks back to images of Genghis Khan and his marauding hordes, it contains no Chinese villains like Fu Manchu or his later incarnation, the ruthless brainwashing expert at the center of the Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962). In recent de cades, as I suggest in Chapter 6, changes have been even more dramatic. Faced with competing images coming both from Chinese films and from Chinese American films, as well as the demands of a globalized film industry, films deliberately avoid the stereotypes of an earlier era even as they suggest the stilling of the pendulum.

And yet, despite these changes, one fundamental impulse—at the root, perhaps, of all the others—has remained constant. That is, from first to last, cinematic portrayals of China and the Chinese inevitably raise the division between the self and the other. In this sense, they confirm Gary Y. Okihiro’s argument that we still live in a world permeated by rigid dichotomies, or what he calls binaries.” Suggesting that the “attributions of ‘West’ and ‘East’ ” constitute the “principal geographical binary in American history,” Okihiro underscores the long- lived nature of these binaries. Comparing the m to often detested but indomitable insects like cockroaches, he observes that binaries “survive, may thrive, in environments old and new, diminutive and prodigious, noxious and wholesome. They scurry about, those binaries, despite ice ages, urban pollution, and exterminators. . . . They seem to persist, over decades, over centuries.” 44

There is no question but that these “binaries” haunt films about China: every aspect of these works—characters, emotions, actions, visual style—feeds into and reflects the fundamental divide between East and West, between the (American) self and the (Chinese) other. When, for example, the pendulum is at its positive end, the Chinese characters seen on-screen bear a distinct resemblance to the self—at least to our better self. the virtuous scholar of Broken Blossoms and the stoic laundryman of Shadows could hardly be more Christian; the noble peasants of the Good Earth would not be out of place on a midwestern farm; the courageous Chinese soldiers in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo are, we are told, just “like our boys.” When, instead, negative images dominate, a towering chasm separates the self from the other: there is absolutely no resemblance between the bloodthirsty Boxers of 55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963) and their Western opponents; no understanding or dialogue is possible between the American businessman of Red Corner (Jon Avnet, 1997) and the Chinese officials who frame him for a murder he did not commit.

At times, this fundamental divide, or binary division, seems to recede or even disappear. This is especially true in the case of films that paint a rosy picture of China. Take, for example, a 1934 film directed by Sam Taylor with comedian Harold Lloyd—the Cat’s-Paw. Not only does this film mock Chinese stereotypes but also it seems to bridge the gap between the self and the other by creating a protagonist who, thought American, was inculcated with Chinese virtues during his missionary upbringing in China. But the disappearance of this divide is ultimately more apparent than real; that is, as I make clear in Chapter 2, the film actually erases the other by turning China into a nostalgic version of an earlier America. This erasure becomes even more sweeping in the animated features discussed in Chapter 6, Mulan (Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook, 1998) and Kung Fu Panda (John Wayne Stevenson and Mark Osborne, 2008). Both films create a mythic, one- dimensional China in which everyone thinks and behaves like Americans. Far from destroying binary divisions, then, all these works create a world in which the self has engulfed the other.

In the end, of course, the divide between the self and the other reflects and fuels, at the individual level, the distinction between two countries, the United States and China. Speaking of still another divide—that between East and West—in his now classic book, Orientalism, Edward W. Said makes the following observation: “the Orient,” he writes, “is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also . . . its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” 45 It seems to me that, framed somewhat differently, a similar observation can be made about China and America. That is, just as “the Orient has helped to define Europe,” I would argue that, more than any other country, China has helped define America. China has served not only as America’s absolute “other” but also as America’s “contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” Films about China illustrate this phenomenon in a particularly dramatic way. In other words, as I argue throughout these pages, films about China are, inevitably, films about America itself. Informed both by the crucial dialectic between the self and the other, and by unacknowledged or even unconscious desires and fears, they are often revealing mirrors—what one critic has called Rorschach tests—of our deepest selves.

One of the most obvious examples of this phenomenon stems from the ways early films in par tic u lar portray Chinese sexuality. For, like all binary divisions, those bearing on sexual difference bring us back to the self. Perceptions of the sexual other speak of our own sexual longings and fears. Thus the taboo forbidding miscegenation, or “love between the races”—a taboo at the heart of many early melodramas—reveals not only the heavy weight of Puritanism but also the suffocating legacy of America’s own unhappy racial history. That is, behind the anxiety produced by the possible Chinese lover—or would- be lover—lurked sexual fears bearing on relations between black men and white women. Foregrounding this taboo, the films explored in Chapters 2 and 3 approach it in ways that say much about American views of sexuality. In Broken Blossoms, for example, this taboo merges with a Victorian perception of the dangers inherent in all sexuality; in Shanghai Express and the Shanghai Gesture, instead, the taboo fuels an obsession with the darkest, most death- infused corners of desire. Only the Bitter Tea of General Yen dares to challenge this taboo—to probe how racial prejudice seeps into and corrupts love itself.

If sexuality is the most striking aspect of the mirror that films such as these hold up to America, it is by no means the only one. In fact, works as otherwise diverse as Broken Blossoms, Shadows, the Bitter Tea of General Yen, and the Cat’s-Paw all draw a comparison—implicit or explicit—between China and America. Indeed, they create an idealized vision of China—as a spiritual civilization given to nonviolence and harmony—from which to cast a jaundiced eye on the failings of the West. So, too, is the Good Earth marked by an idealized China, but here, explicit comparisons are replaced by a tendency to project American realities and mythologies onto a Chinese landscape. Not surprisingly, comparisons such as the se—whether implicit or explicit—vanished after 1949. At that time, it became impossible to compare two civilizations that were so radically, unalterably opposed to each other.

But even as such comparisons disappeared, as I suggest in Chapter 4, films about China continued to say a great deal about America. In fact, in many ways, the often murky reflection of America seen in films made after 1949 is more intriguing than the more transparent gaze of earlier works. They offer a kind of distorting mirror marked by omissions and denials, by repetitions as revealing as they are strident. Darkened by the paranoia of the era, some films expressed the anguish of the present—the doubts and anxieties that began to assail the nation as we went from the war in Korea to the war in Vietnam. Thus, for example, behind the fears surrounding China in both the Manchurian Candidate and the Sand Pebbles, one senses still deeper fears—those bearing on the collapse of American political institutions (the Manchurian Candidate) and on the failure of its imperial mission (the Sand Pebbles).

While these films expressed contemporary anxieties, still other cold war films seemed to take refuge in an idealized past. But they, too, said much about the mood of the country. It is telling, for example, that at the very moment when China’s “betrayal” challenged Americans’ self-image and sense of mission, one film after another took care to remind viewers of the good faith, the benevolence, that had marked American conduct the re in the past. the memory of a time when benevolence was generously given and gratefully received was so important that it permeated even action films and melodramas. It was not only selfsacrificing missionaries—like Ingrid Bergman in the Inn of the Sixth Happiness (Mark Robson, 1958)—who stood ready to come to the aid of the Chinese people but also, and far more improbably, rough- and- tumble heroes like John Wayne in Blood Alley (William Wellman, 1955) and Charlton Heston in 55 Days at Peking. In these films—and even more dramatically in Kundun—binaries have expanded to the point where they suff use, and divide, the entire world.

Even when films about China turned their back on history—and, indeed, on the real world itself—they continued to reflect telling images of America. At least this is the case, I think, of the two animated features—Mulan and Kung Fu Panda—discussed in Chapter 6. Set in a mythical China, both films pull us into a postmodernist world of pastiche and parody marked by many of the strategies seen in children’s cartoons. Here, distinctions—between the real and the unreal, history and myth, animals and humans—dissolve amid frenzied swirls of slapstick and farce. But if the fantasy realm they create is deliberately unreal, it also testifies to impulses that could hardly be more real: that is, they reflect the ultimate triumph of the self as well as the centrifugal force of American popular culture that pulls everything into its orbit. In Mulan, a legendary Chinese heroine is transformed into an American teenager; in Kung Fu Panda, the age- old Chinese tradition of the martial arts is emptied of weight and meaning. In both films, China itself is reduced to a heap of motifs in which the Forbidden Palace and the Great Wall have no more meaning—and probably less—than egg rolls and chopsticks. Projecting American values onto a Chinese landscape, not only do these films absorb the other but also, as if they had a magic wand, they make the real China vanish before our eyes.

To a large extent, the focus of this study—the changing perceptions of China and what they say about America—has determined the choice of films explored. That is, insofar as possible, I have chosen images that bear on China and its people rather r than on Chinese immigrants to America’s shores or on Chinese Americans. True, it is often very difficult to make this distinction: not only do the two sets of images tend to blur into one another but also they have had a profound impact on one another. As Harold Isaacs notes, “the experience with Chinese in the United States is second only to the missionary experience as a source of some of the principal images and emotions about the Chinese to be found in contemporary American minds.” 46 the corollary to this is also true; that is, America’s changing relationship to China has deeply affected perceptions of both Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans. It is telling that during periods of great anti-Chinese sentiment, Chinese Americans have become targets of persecution. For example, as Lynn Pan observes, after 1949 “federal agents swooped the Chinatowns repeatedly, to sniff out ‘un-American’ activities.” 47 Similar instances of persecution were also visible during the tense decade of the 1990s: the most notorious of these occurred when, in charges later proved baseless, Chinese American scientist Wen Ho Lee was accused of spying for the Chinese.48

It is no surprise, then, that films, like Americans at large, have frequently blurred similar distinctions. Take, for example, the case of two of the most enduring Chinese stereotypes: the sinister Fu Manchu and immensely sympathetic San Francisco detective Charlie Chan. the two figures clearly represent a study in opposites: in fact, Richard Bernstein reminds us that in creating the figure of Charlie Chan, novelist Earl Derr Biggers “wanted to counter the demeaning portrayals of Asians that were standard at the time, particularly the evil Fu Manchu, the most recognizable Chinese character in Western books and movies before Chan came along.” 49 Lynn Pan tells us that the producers of the original Charlie Chan films at Fox Studios nourished a similar hope: they wanted their portrait of an amiable, Confucius-spouting detective to “counter the characterizations of Chinese as Fu Manchus.”50

Times change. And one of the ironies of changing mores is that today, Charlie Chan—with his inexhaustible fund of Chinese proverbs and his inscrutable “Eastern” wisdom—is often perceived as no less a detestable racist stereotype than Fu Manchu. In fact, as historian Jill Lepore observes, Charlie Chan is “one of the most hated characters in American popular culture—a kind of yellow Uncle Tom.”51 As for Fu Manchu, while he has hardly become more sympathetic, he, too, has changed. That is, the resurgence of fears of a powerful China has meant that he has taken on new interest. In fact, when Yungte Huang, the author of Charlie Chan: the Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, suggested the possibility of translating his book into Mandarin, he was told politely by one Chinese publisher, “Right now, we’re actually more interested in Fu Manchu.”52 What ever the changing resonance of these two archetypal figures, the fact remains that when they first came to prominence, the geographical and national divide separating the m was lost on viewers and critics alike. Although Fu Manchu plotted revenge on America from the plains of Central Asia while Charlie Chan won sympathizers and fans on the streets of San Francisco, viewers saw both men in exactly the same way, that is, as “Chinese.”53

For many years, scholars and critics alike seemed more interested in Charlie Chan—and what he represented in terms of Chinese American stereotypes—than in Fu Manchu. This may be because many Chinese American critics, as well as filmmakers, were touched by such stereotypes in a deep, existential way. In any case, while recent decades have seen the publication of numerous books and articles devoted to the repre sen ta tion of Chinese Americans in the media,54 the situation is quite different when it comes to books dealing with screen representations of China. In fact, for many years, the only work principally devoted to this topic was one written more than a half century ago: Dorothy B. Jones’ the Portrayal of China and India on the American Screen, 1896– 1955 (1955). This began to change in the 1990s as scholars began to look at screen repre sen ta tions of China from a variety of perspectives. For example, both Gina Marchetti’s Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (1993) and Mari Yoshihara’s Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (2003) view such repre sen ta tions through the prism of romance and sex, while Homay King’s Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (2010) brings a psychoanalytic lens to the visual tropes that signify Orientalism. Still other critical works have begun to examine how China is represented not only in American films but also in those coming from mainland China as well as from various communities of the Chinese diaspora. I am thinking here of studies such as Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (a 1997 collection of essays edited by Sheldon H. Lu), Gary G. Xu’s Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (2007), and Kenneth Chan’s Remade in Hollywood: the Global Chinese Presence in Transnational Cinemas (2009).

Although many of these works touch on issues and films explored in these pages, none explores the historical arc of American film representations of China from the point of view of the tensions between the self and the other or, broader still, those between America and China. the films I have chosen to explore in terms of these tensions clearly constitute but a limited sample of those that portray China and its people in one way or another. But arguably, they are among the most revealing and compelling. Marked by ambiguities, they suggest some of the complex and often conflicting emotions and perceptions that characterize American beliefs about China. I am not sure that we can ever give an adequate answer to the rhetorical question posed by Fairbank decades ago: “How,” he asked in 1974, “could the Chinese be such ‘bad guys’ in the America of the 1950’s and 1960’s and such ‘good guys’ today?”55 But films remind us of how easy it was to move from perceptions of the Chinese as “our kind of people” to a worldview in which China was seen as the embodiment of betrayal and deceit. Films may not tell the whole story, but they make it easier to understand how the “good guys” of yesterday became the villains of today. If, as it is said, the past is another country, then as seen in these films, this “country” speaks all too eloquently about the present.