The Journal of American-East Asian Relations

Volume 17       Number 1         2010

Editorial

A Note to Our Readers: The Journal of American-East Asian Relations and American-East Asian Relations

Charles W. Hayford

Articles

“For the Equality of Men – For the Equality of Nations”: Anson Burlingame and China’s First Embassy to the United States, 1868

John Schrecker

Abstract

Anson Burlingame (1820-1870), often neglected or misunderstood today, was an ardently anti-slavery congressman from Boston whom Abraham Lincoln appointed minister to China in 1861. Burlingame developed a Cooperative Policy that advocated peaceful means while upholding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Chinese government subsequently appointed him China’s first envoy to the Western powers. The first stop of the so-called Burlingame Mission was America, from March to September 1868. This article focuses on three topics: (1) How the mission’s reception reflected the partisan struggle over Reconstruction and the push for racial equality. Republicans, the party of Reconstruction, proved sympathetic to the mission and to China, while the opposition Democrats were hostile. (2) How Burlingame presented Americans with a strongly favorable image of China to emphasize treating it with full respect and as a normal nation. (3) The Burlingame Treaty, the first equal treaty between China and a Western power after the Opium War, which sought to place China on a full and equal status in international affairs and to place Chinese in America on an equal footing with immigrants from other nations. Burlingame’s friend, Mark Twain, wrote supportive articles.

China’s “Public Diplomacy” toward the United States before Pearl Harbor

Tsuchida Akio

Abstract

After the outbreak of Sino-Japanese War in 1937, China sought support and sanctions against Japan from the international community, especially the United States. The government strategy encompassed both official diplomatic channels and non-state channels such as propaganda and private organizations. Drawing from materials in the United States and China, this article presents the evolution of China’s “public diplomacy” toward the United States during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War. It argues: (1) China’s “public diplomacy” was conducted through the International Department of Ministry of Information of the Chinese Nationalist Party under the direct control of Chiang Kai-shek. (2) Resident agents of China played an indispensable role in forming the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, a private organization supporting China’s cause. (3) The Committee carried out intensive campaigns to bring about pro-China policies and to promote an embargo against Japan, (4) The Chinese government and its agents supported the Committee financially and organizationally until its disbandment in 1941. This article thus demonstrates that wartime China was attempting to compensate for its military weakness by manipulating American public opinion to achieve its own diplomatic goals.

Educational Exchange in Post-Mao U.S.-China Relations: The Hopkins-Nanjing Center

Norton Wheeler

Abstract

Founded in 1986, an educational joint venture between Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University has survived the trials of culture, geopolitics, and nature. As it entered its third decade, the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies offered the first ever Sino-U.S. joint master’s degree. This article traces the evolution of this bi-national institution, exploring its role in international relations, cultural exchange, economic globalization, and China’s post-Mao drive toward modernization. A risk-taking Chinese university president, his American counterpart, a Chinese-American scientist who served as cultural mediator, the Tiananmen crisis, the SARS epidemic, Chinese and American students seeking to advance careers and mutual understanding–all these factors play a role in the story. Though continuous in many ways with early twentieth-century exchanges, the Hopkins-Nanjing Center diverges from the former pattern by being an equal partnership. This difference reflects China’s growing economic and political power as well as a different American sensibility. In addition to reflecting the state of bilateral relations, the Center has contributed to relations through the symbolism of its survival and hopes, over the long term, to contribute by training future leaders in the government, business, and civil society sectors of the two societies.

Volume 17       Number 2         2010

Theme Issue

American Informal Empire, Asian Power, and Culture in the 1940s

American Informal Empire, Asian Power, and Culture in the 1940s:

Editor’s Introduction

Charles W. Hayford

Articles

Representing China: Lin Yutang vs. American “China Hands” in the 1940s

Qian Suoqiao

Abstract

In the 1930s and 1940s, American representations of China were divided between pro-Nationalist groups, notably Henry Luce’s media enterprise, and a host of “China Hands” accused of being pro-Communist. Though these “China Hands” came from different professions – journalists (Edgar Snow, Theodore White), academics (Owen Lattimore, John Fairbank), political activists (Agnes Smedley) – they formed a distinct group of American liberal cosmopolitan intellectuals. They achieved their cultural capital through their writings on China as “China experts.” Unlike their predecessors, they were Progressive liberals who allied themselves with the cause of China’s modernization. But their vision ran against that of a Chinese cosmopolitan intellectual—Lin Yutang. With the initial support of Pearl Buck, Lin became the most well-known liberal intellectual from China and the self-styled cultural and political spokesman on U.S.-China relations in the 1940s America. Lin’s debate with the “China Hands” over American representation of China spelled the end of his “American success.” By revisiting this debate, I do not want to re-invoke the issue of “Who Lost China?” Instead, this article maps out a critical terrain for understanding and questioning liberal cosmopolitan difference over American representations of China.

No Lost Chance in China: The False Realism of American Foreign Service Officers, 1943-1945

Jingbin Wang

Abstract

This article reexamines the question of whether a chance was lost for the U.S. government to develop relations with Mao’s China in the 1940s. I focus on John S. Service and John Paton Davies, seeking along the way to illuminate the ideological roots of the Truman administration’s nonrecognition policy toward China. I argue that proponents of the “lost chance” thesis have misapplied the concept of realism in diplomacy, since realism is primarily concerned with power and security, not ideology such as democracy. These proponents overlook the assumptions on which American diplomats and leaders operated. The China Hands assumed that the Chinese Communists were social democrats, not revolutionaries controlled by Stalin. Dean Acheson embraced Davies’s assumption that Mao would reassert nationalism upon assuming power and might still be drawn away from Moscow toward Washington. Far from being realists, they were deeply ideological. They disagreed with their domestic rivals within a liberal consensus. None of them had the intention of recognizing a Communist government in China. This study reveals how unspoken shared assumptions shaped not only the dynamics of American policymaking toward China during World War II and in its aftermath, but also the work of many historians who have written about the “lost chance.” 

American Military Misconduct in Shanghai and the Chinese Civil War:

The Case of Zang Dayaozi

Mark F. Wilkinson

Abstract

In September 1946, an American navy sailor killed a Chinese ricksha puller named Zang Dayaozi in a pointless dispute over an allegedly unpaid fare. The American military shielded the assailant from justice, with the frustrated acquiescence of the Nationalist authorities. This seemingly minor event illustrates that the century-old patterns of personal abuse and legal privilege did not completely evaporate when the “unequal treaty” system ended in 1943. In the context of the Chinese Civil War, the event takes on political significance as well. Critics of the Guomindang government used the episode to illustrate the destructive impact of American interventionism and the callous disregard of the Nanjing government for its own people. Communist propagandists linked Zang’s death with the more famous rape of a Chinese college student involving two American Marines in Beiping. The episode further illustrates that American service personnel stationed abroad play multiple roles, interacting with the locals in particular “contact zones” but also serving as the personification of American foreign policy.

Participating in Nation-Building: The Role of the “Military Government Police” in South Korean Politics, 1946-1948

Jinwung Kim

Abstract

This study analyzes the role of the “military government police” in South Korean politics during American military occupation, 1946-48. It stresses that the Korean National Police (KNP), many of whose members had served in the police under the Japanese, was not a mere instrument of the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) but functioned as an active participant in the creation of a rightist regime in southern Korea. More specifically, the police were the undisputed “vanguard” of the rightist Syngman Rhee-Korean Democratic Party (KDP) coalition. The police force also functioned as the “big brother” of the rightist youth organizations which shared values and ideology with them. Finally, the police served as the “midwife” in the creation of the Rhee regime in the Republic of Korea. In sum, the KNP was an important political player actively taking part in the political process during U.S. military occupation. 

Volume 17       Number 3         2010

Editor’s Note

Charles W. Hayford

Articles

Kissinger, China, Congress, and the Lost Chance for Cambodia

Chris A. Connolly

Abstract

Henry Kissinger has been persistent in his claim that the U.S. Congress’s failure to adequately supply South Vietnam was the ultimate cause of its collapse in 1975 – a claim many historians dispute. An incident that has received less attention is the role of Congress in terminating a potential negotiated settlement of the civil war in Cambodia by imposing a halt of U.S. bombing there in the summer of 1973. This article demonstrates that in this case, Kissinger’s claims are not without foundation. Although the conclusions are tentative without the full Chinese record, the evidence suggests that terminating U.S. military operations in Cambodia fatally undermined Chinese efforts to negotiate the removal of Lon Nol as Cambodian head of state and the establishment of a coalition government involving the Khmer Rouge but with Sihanouk at its head.

Contesting Famine: Hunger and Nutrition in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952

Chris Aldous

Abstract

This article analyzes both the policy debates within the American Occupation over famine, food relief and nutrition in Occupied Japan (1945-52) and the contested terms in which the debate was conducted. Conflict arose over muddled accounting of food intake in calories, a rampant black market that suggested a failure of equitable distribution, and the absence of serious unrest despite imports falling short of minimal stated requirements. Occupation authorities questioned estimates made by the Japanese government. There was internal disagreement among American authorities in Japan and between interested parties in Washington, as well as among the Allies in the Far Eastern Commission. Herbert Hoover’s Famine Emergency Committee of 1946 sounded an alarm, and the Food and Fertilizer Mission of February 1947 marked a shift away from rather crude quantitative measures of caloric intake to more subtle qualitative ones of dietary balance and combinations of nutrients. The Occupation’s chief concern then became the dearth of animal protein. Attempts to correct this shortfall by reestablishing Japan’s fishing and whaling industries proved unpopular with U.S. allies. The Occupation preferred to champion the success of its school lunch program, whose core component – powdered skim milk imported from the United States – was viewed as an invaluable weapon in the Cold War.

Birth Control and Socialism: The Frustration of Margaret Sanger and Ishimoto Shizue’s Mission

Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci

(Winner of the Frank B. Gibney Student Essay Award for 2010)

Abstract

This article explores the ties between the early birth control movements in the United States and Japan, both of which emerged from a transnational socialist network after the Russian Revolution of 1917. By closely examining the activism of two symbolic figures in the movements, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Ishimoto Shizue (1897-2001), their roles abroad, and the public responses in both nations, the article studies the possibilities and limits of the transnational birth control movement in the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that, while the socialist network helped expand their original goal of relieving working women across the world from the dual burden of reproductive and wage labor, the moment they crossed national borders, they simultaneously became bound by nationalist frameworks and gender biases. Their liberal and reformist, rather than revolutionary, approaches to birth control based on the Western model of progress and the eugenic concept of racial survival ultimately blunted the dream of universal sisterhood and female liberation.

Speech of Anson Burlingame, 23 June 1868, New York

Books Reviews

Iguchi Takeo, Demystifying Pearl Harbor: A New Perspective from Japan,

trans. David Noble.

Reviewed by Roger Dingman

Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.

Reviewed by James Stanlaw

Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History, ed.  Gordon H. Chang and Eiichiro Azuma.

Reviewed by Nobuko Adachi

Volume 17       Number 4         2010

Theme Issue

Film Across the Pacific: Projections, Screens, and Mirrors – Part One

Editor’s Introduction to Part One, “Film Across the Pacific: Projections, Screens, and Mirrors”

Charles W. Hayford

Articles

Chinese Screen Depiction of America, 1910-2010

Zhiwei Xiao

Abstract

No serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.

A Deepening Disbelief: The American Movie Hero in Vietnam, 1958-1968

Jon Cowans

Abstract

Three important films reveal changing American attitudes toward the Cold War in Southeast Asia in the years of growing U.S. involvement there: Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American (1958), George Englund’s The Ugly American (1963), and John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968). All three feature idealistic American heroes fighting communism in Vietnam – and, in the later two films, fighting American ignorance and apathy as well. Using some two dozen reviews in a wide range of periodicals, including daily newspapers outside of New York and Los Angeles, this article finds a growing skepticism about the mythology of the Cold War in Vietnam. Critics in 1958 supported the mission of fighting communism and the methods outlined in the film, but knew little about Vietnam. In 1963, critics were more pessimistic about America’s methods and prospects in Vietnam but still overwhelmingly supported the mission. By 1968, a collapse of America’s Cold War consensus became obvious as critics panned The Green Berets, a remarkable box-office success, deriding the filmmaking but also rejecting the film’s ideology and even questioning the struggle against communism. We thus see a fundamental erosion of American belief in its own Cold War mythology just as the country was venturing deeper into war in Southeast Asia.

Revisiting Cold War Propaganda: Close Readings of Chinese and American Film Representations of the Korean War

Paul G. Pickowicz

Abstract

No doubt the most memorable 1950s American propaganda film on the Korean War was Pork Chop Hill (1959), directed by Lewis Milestone, who made the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The most popular and influential on the Chinese side was Shangganling (The Battle of Sangkumryung Ridge or The Battle of Triangle Hill; 1956). Both deal with a single battle in which a small, dedicated unit is seen defending a remote hill top in the face of an overwhelming enemy onslaught. Their purpose was to convey political messages and teach long-term lessons to members of the audience well after the Korean War was over. But a shot by shot and character by character comparison and close reading reveals both parallels and differences.

Soo Yong (1903-1984): Hollywood Celebrity and Cultural Interpreter

Yunxiang Gao

Abstract

Following Broadway roles in the 1920s and serving as cultural translator for Mei Lanfang’s Peking Opera tour of North America in 1930, Soo Yong (1903-84) acted in twenty-three Hollywood films and numerous television shows. Born in Hawaii to Chinese immigrant parents who were supporters of Sun Yat-sen and educated at Columbia Teachers College, Soo Yong combined Chinese and Western values without becoming the type of Westernized “Modern Girl” represented by Anna May Wong. Her roles present a softer Orientalism that allowed ethnic dignity and did not offend her Chinese-American audiences or her Nationalist friends in China. In contrast to the two-year younger Anna May Wong, she was able to balance several worlds and to sustain a position as an off-screen, cultural translator.

Volume 18       Number 1         2011

Theme Issue

Film Across the Pacific: Projections, Screens, and Mirrors – Part Two

Editor’s Introduction to Part Two, “Crossing the Rivers of Time and Oceans of Culture: The Uses of Film in American-East Asian Relations”

Charles W. Hayford

Abstract

The Editor’s Introduction to Part One of this two-part theme issue described the articles and offered thoughts on ways of looking at film in American-East Asian relations. This essay, the Introduction to Part Two, weighs the rewards and problems of using fiction film to represent history and other cultures. The dilemma inherent in fiction is that if we portray the past and foreign cultures as being “just like us,” we gain immediacy and connection, but at the cost of ignoring cultural difference and historical change. On the other hand, if we respect the “strangeness of the past,” we gain authenticity, analytic truth, and responsibility but invite sterility, academic solipsism, and isolation from the public. The essay concludes with a list of questions on how to learn about art, politics, and business when we compare film cultures and national projects across the Pacific.

Articles

Movies Without Mercy: Race, War, and Images of Japanese People in American Films, 1942-1945

Wang Xiaofei

Abstract

Historian John Dower titles his book War Without Mercy. Similarly, wartime Hollywood showed no mercy when depicting Japanese. Negative portrayals were often based on actual atrocities, but it was racism to demonize an entire people and culture. The story of how politics in Hollywood and Washington, the conduct of war, and international relations shaped and changed film racism involves a much more complex approach than has been practiced to date. Using archives of film studios and governmental agencies such as the Production Code Administration (PCA) and Office of War Information (OWI), this article traces the power struggle among them and a new racism which emerged after 1941.  Filmmakers now projected favorable images of Chinese to distinguish their new allies from the Japanese enemy. OWI struggled to promote a liberal agenda which saw the enemy as world fascism, not the Japanese people. The article analyzes more than two dozen films to trace the complications in three types of wartime screen racism: (1) “Verbal racism,” such as derogating words like “Jap.” (2) “Physical racism,” which dramatized and ridiculed physical characteristics of Japanese people. (3) “Psychological racism,” which saw all Japanese soldiers as cruel and all Japanese people as treacherous.

Censorship and Sovereignty: Shanghai and the Struggle to Regulate Film Content in the International Settlement

Michael C. Wall

Abstract

The Nationalist government struggled to control the showing and contents of motion pictures in Shanghai in the 1920s. Officials of the Shanghai Municipal Council in the foreign-controlled International Settlement, empowered by the right of extraterritoriality, stymied Chinese efforts to control foreign – predominantly American – motion pictures shown in the enclave. The struggle over political control was exacerbated by increasing nationalist sentiment and belief that foreign motion pictures contained distorted and unflattering images of China and its people. Demonstrations targeted Hollywood films by Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd. Ultimately, neither strenuous Chinese efforts nor stubborn foreign resistance could resolve the matter satisfactorily, but the dispute became moot with Japan's seizure of Shanghai in 1937.

Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960): The Trans-Pacific American Film Entrepreneur – Part One, Making A Trip Thru China

Ramona Curry

Abstract

Authoritative statements have long credited the elusive American immigrant entrepreneur Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960) with founding film production companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong as early as 1909 and initiating filmmaking collaborations with local Chinese.  Yet those histories prove on close examination to consist mostly of sketchy assertions offered without clear evidence. This essay draws on original archival research and recent work of scholars in Hong Kong, Europe, and Japan to reframe the historical narrative, dating most developments a few years later while revealing fresh aspects of Brodsky’s trans-Pacific operations and high-level Chinese involvement. The new findings have intriguing implications for our understanding of early twentieth-century trans-Pacific cultural associations as well as Chinese cinema. Part One of this article reconstructs Brodsky’s early career and reveals new evidence of his interactions with Chinese returned students and government officials, with a focus on the production in China of Brodsky’s feature-length travel documentary A Trip Thru China (1916).

We’ll Always Have Chengdu: East Meets West on the Silver Screen

Peter J. Vernezze

Abstract

From 2006 to 2008, Peter J. Vernezze served as a Peace Corps volunteer at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, taking a two-year leave of absence from his regular job as a philosophy professor. During this time he facilitated a film series for his Chinese undergraduate students which showed classic and contemporary American films – everything from Casablanca to the Marx brothers to Brokeback Mountain. The goal of the series was “to use film in order to shed light on and increase the understanding of American culture and values.” This essay is a personal account of the discussions which took place after the screenings and what this American and these Chinese students may or may not have learned from each other about universalities and differences in cultures.

Volume 18       Number 2         2011

Articles

A Reinvestigation of Japan’s Final Memorandum to the United States and the Decoding of Roosevelt’s Message to the Emperor, December 1941

Takeo Iguchi

Abstract

At the final phase of the negotiations in the fall of 1941, the Japanese government set a deadline of 30 November to reach a modus vivendi with the United States. After the failure of several proposals, on 6 December, Roosevelt sent a telegram directly to the emperor proposing further negotiations. This article draws on the author’s extensive publications in Japanese to demonstrate that the Japanese Army intercepted Roosevelt’s telegram and secretly decoded it before it reached the emperor and the Foreign Ministry had to amend the Memorandum to preclude further negotiation. The Army and the Foreign Ministry, which succumbed to the Army, further interfered with the transmission of the Final Memorandum, and confused the Japanese embassy’s handling. Its delivery was made after the commencement of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Foreign Minister TÇgÇ, facing prosecution in 1945, falsely shifted blame for the delay to the embassy in Washington, and the Foreign Ministry has released misleading documents to strengthen that accusation.

Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960): The Trans-Pacific American Film Entrepreneur –

Part Two, Taking A Trip Thru China to America

Ramona Curry

Abstract

Part One of this essay traced a biography for Benjamin Brodsky and revealed surprising facets of the production of his 1916 feature-length travelogue A Trip Thru China. Part Two addresses the film’s genre inscription and cinematic qualities and relates its embedded values to its enthusiastic reception across America 1916-18. Although the ethnographic documentary pays admiring tribute to laboring men and women throughout China, it also valorizes the moribund Chinese empire, as embodied in Brodsky’s ultimate patron in China, President Yuan Shikai. While fully eschewing the “Yellow Menace” U.S. discourse of its period, Trip humorously delineates the East and West as essentially different. The rare work’s exceptional critical and popular success from California to New York City points to Brodsky’s skilled showmanship and ability to engage the support of independent movie distributors and investors. Why, then, the essay considers in conclusion, did Brodsky’s subsequent experiences after his shift in 1917 to making films in Japan, including the feature-length travelogue Beautiful Japan (1918), so diverge in its outcome from his early filmmaking career in China?

Review Article

“Into the Wild Blue Yonder”: Ten Novels of the U.S. Air Force and the Wars in Asia

Phillip S. Meilinger

Abstract

War Narratives, unit histories, memoirs, and letters home from the combatants offer good accounts, but they cannot always convey the tension, violence, fear, dedication, futility, and chance that are so a part of war and that are more easily drawn by a good novelist. This review article discusses the ten top air war novels involving the U.S. Air Force (or the U.S. Army Air Forces as it was known during World War II) and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. These ten novels most accurately reflect the unique character, culture, and achievements of air power in those Asian wars.

Review Essay

Shoji Yamada, Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen, and the West, trans. Earl Hartman;

Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, with an introduction by D. T. Suzuki, trans. R. F. C. Hull

Reviewed by John C. Maraldo

Volume 18       Numbers 3-4       2011

Articles

Making “The Tragedy of Bataan”: The Bataan Death March through the Lens of a Filmmaker

Jan Thompson

Abstract

The television and radio documentary “The Tragedy of Bataan” uses extensive interviews with survivors to bring the 1942 Bataan Death March to life for contemporary viewers. The filmmaker, whose father was a POW in the Philippines, describes the process of gathering the interviews and putting them together into a compelling story. She describes the film strategy of having the men and women involved tell the story in their own words, with no historians or experts on camera; explains how a documentary film differs from a written monograph; and explores the constraints set by television and by the television audience. Allowing these participants and eye-witnesses to tell the story conveys their perceptions of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army, of General Douglas MacArthur, and of the suffering, the humor, and the heroism of the common American soldiers.

With this Lingo, I Thee Wed: Language and Marriage in Autobiography of A Chinese Woman

Jin Feng

Abstract

In Autobiography of A Chinese Woman (1947), Yang Buwei (1889-1981) asserted that her husband, Zhao Yuanren, “found his work and his country … because he found me,” that is to say, because Yang, a “thoroughly Chinese” woman, rekindled his interest in Chinese dialects and thus “repatriated” this “English-speaking and American-feeling” man. Yet scrutiny of Yang’s representation of their marriage belies her claim to an uncomplicated link between their shared mother tongue and their national identity. To be sure, her narrative gestures and topos widely differed from those of the more “Americanized” Zhao. Rather than looking to a Western model as legitimization of their unconventional marriage, Yang deployed the figure of her female Chinese colleague, a “traditional lady,” as a foil against which she painted herself as a liberated and self-reliant modern Chinese woman favored by Zhao. However, she also published different versions of her autobiography in Chinese and English. Thus, despite her linguistic and narrative maneuvers, Yang could accomplish only a partial reconciliation of conflicting gender and national identities through the written word. By telling the story of a happy marriage of Chinese and American values she temporarily acquired a fluidity that enabled her to redefine and cross national and gender boundaries.

A Comparative Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Californian and New Zealand Newspaper Representations of Chinese Gold Miners

Grant Hannis

Abstract

During the nineteenth-century gold rush era, Chinese gold miners arrived spontaneously in California and, later, were invited in to work the Otago goldfields in New Zealand. This article considers how the initial arrival of Chinese in those areas was represented in two major newspapers of the time, the Daily Alta California and the Otago Witness. Both newspapers initially favored Chinese immigration, due to the economic benefits that accrued and the generally tolerant outlook of the newspapers’ editors. The structure of the papers’ coverage differed, however, reflecting the differing historical circumstances of California and Otago. Both papers gave little space to reporting Chinese in their own voices. The newspapers editors played the crucial role in shaping each newspaper’s coverage over time. The editor of the Witness remained at the helm of his newspaper throughout the survey period and his newspaper consequently did not waver in its support of the Chinese. The editor of the Alta, by contrast, died toward the end of the survey period and his newspaper subsequently descended into racist, anti-Chinese rhetoric.

Underdevelopment of American Studies in South Korea: Power and Ignorance

Jooyoung Lee

Abstract

This article asks why the disciplines of American Studies and U.S. history are so markedly underdeveloped in South Korea (Republic of Korea) and what this underdevelopment implies about U.S.-South Korean relations. Under Japanese colonial rule, the study of English in Korea was important for studying abroad, but few students studied America itself. Under American occupation and the following military rule in South Korea, American studies were not attractive to nationalist youth even though the English language remained useful. American cultural diplomacy fostered a small group of Americanists, but university enrollments were small. In the 1980s, Americans were blamed for their support of authoritarian rule. Japanese-trained historians saw American history as too short to be significant, and Japanese institutional legacies were an obstacle. Americans have also been too constricted in imagining who Koreans were, where Korean ambitions lay, and how Korean society worked. In a sense, the very differences between the two nations hindered them from realizing what those differences were.

“To Sympathize and Exploit”: Filipinos, Americans, and the Bataan Death March

Kevin Murphy

Abstract

The Bataan Death March of 1942 has entered historical consciousness as one of the ultimate measures of Japanese wartime barbarity. At a level bound up with deference to the veterans who experienced such hardship, a compelling reality emerges: Helpless Americans marched under the watchful eyes and cruel bayonets of the Japanese oppressor, and the Filipinos, in despair over the defeat of their defenders, wept in sympathy as they watched. The pattern reinforces pleasing notions of a benevolent colonial relation, the “good war” against a barbarous enemy, and loyal allies enlisted in a righteous cause. Yet thousands of men, women, and children of three nationalities and various classes participated in the complex drama that came to represent the Death March. Their complexity demands an interpretation that goes beyond the simplicity of “oppressor – victim – sympathetic observer.” This article finds another story which does not replace the first but which includes American racism and colonial support for Filipino elites, and Filipino divisiveness, poverty, resentment, and Death March exploitation of American weakness and need.

Research Note

Charity Stamps and Famine Relief in China in the 1920s: The American Connection

William Moskoff

Abstract

When famine overwhelmed five North China provinces in 1920, one of the ways that funds were raised to combat the disaster was through the sale of “cinderella” stamps, stamps that could not be used as legal postage but rather could be pasted onto envelopes or packages as decorations. There were two such efforts during the 1920s and both mainly sold their stamps in the United States. The first fundraising drive was organized by the American Committee for the China Famine Relief Fund which sold a 3-cent stamp, the announced cost of feeding one Chinese person for one day. This effort raised nearly $4.4 million and ceased operations in early June 1921 after only about three months of activity. The second campaign, organized by the China International Famine Relief Commission (CIFRC), was considerably less successful in raising money. It issued a wider variety of stamps, probably between 1923 and 1929 and in 1924, the CIFRC even established a special department to coordinate the sale of stamps in China and the United States, mostly during the Christmas and New Year’s season. Sales were uneven and always low; even in years where there were profits, they were trivial. The sale of these stamps ceased at the end of the decade.

Book Review

Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment.

Reviewed by Nobuko Adachi