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 or 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 and others serving China, 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 values and concerns in the anglophone public sphere. As Chinese ideas and values met the projection of American soft power and governmentality, a uniquely bilateral, global imaginary arose, wherein respect for China as an emerging force encountered Western reaction. For these “old China hands”, the return to the USA resulted in unique and differing sociocultural formations: Buck’s intersectional literary populism on behalf of “the Chinese people”; Henry R. Luce’s press internationalism; Lattimore’s “inner Asian” regional imaginaries; and Hersey’s China trilogy allegories. All were keen observers of and 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 American 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.
The latest China Books Review podcast with Alec Ash – yes, we talk about my new book, Her Lotus Year, but I also get to talk about the state of the China books market. As someone who has written, published, commissioned, edited and reviewed books on China for going on 30 years now, through the good times and the bad, in Asia, Europe and the US, I have thoughts…..
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Her Lotus Year pops up on the Best China Books of 2024 list from the China Books Review alongside some good company. Many thanks to Bethany Allen for nominating!
Wallis Simpson (then Spencer) loved horse racing – she went to the autumn races in Shanghai 1924, the spring races at Paomachang in Peking in 1925 and finally squeezed in some late spring/summer meetings back in Shanghai….. more on those courses, clubs, the runners & riders, the parties and who she was with in Her Lotus Year…
Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea? Based on ten years of research and a lifetime of immersion in Mongol culture and tradition, Emperor of the Seas brings this little-known story vibrantly to life.
Kublai Khan is one of history’s most fascinating characters. He brought Islamic mathematicians to his court, where they invented modern cartography and celestial measurement. He transformed the world’s largest land mass into a unified, diverse and economically progressive empire, introducing paper money. And, after bitter early setbacks, he transformed China into an outward looking sea-faring empire.
By the end of his reign, the Chinese were building and supplying remarkable ships to transport men, grain, and weapons over vast distances, of a size and dexterity that would be inconceivable in Europe for hundreds of years. Khan had come to a brilliant realization: control the sea, and you control everything.
A master storyteller with an unparalleled grasp of Mongol sources, Jack Weatherford shows how Chinese naval hegemony changed the world forever – revolutionizing world commerce and transforming tastes as far away as England and France.
Chinese male idols continue to be incredible economic engines- my final China-Britain Business Council Focus magazine author Q&A of the year with Amanda Sikarskie, one of the authors (along with Peng Liu & Lan Lan) of Male Idols & Branding in Chinese Luxury(Bloomsbury)….click here…
A lovely copy of Peking-Paris im Automobile by Italian journalist Luigi Barzini & Prince Scipione Borghese (who owned the car!) about their adventures on the Peking-Paris car race of 1907 (for more see Kassia St Clair’s Race to the Future, John Murray, 2023)
