Good Deeds & Gun Boats: Two Centuries of American-Chinese Encounters

Book by Deane, Hugh

Deane, a former correspondent in China, analyzes in historical context the reactions of individual Americans to China over the last 200 years. Represented are presidents, traders, poets, engineers, students, generals, diplomats, mercenaries and journalists: Herbert Hoover, Joseph Stilwell, Edgar Snow, Paul Robeson, Douglas MacArthur, Agnes Smedley, Paul Theroux. Attitudes run the gamut from the rabid Sinophobia of Theodore Roosevelt ("an immoral, degraded and worthless race") to the passionate partisanship of Koli Ariyoshi, a Honolulu newspaper editor who suffered persecution for his sympathy with the Communist revolution. Deane's affectionate reminiscences of his own experiences in China, combined with clear-eyed analysis, eloquently illustrate Service's observation in the foreword that there is a chemistry between Americans and Chinese that favors friendship. Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Contrasts between Americans who sought to intervene in and control China and those who came to assist pose the dialectic of this book. The author was a Chinese exchange student in 1936 and a wartime journalist in the 1940s. He first surveys the history of U.S.-China relations through the early 1980s and then narrates many individual episodes, e.g., Herbert Hoover's takeover of a Chinese mining company, Paul Robeson's support of China's self-determination in the 1940s, CIA subversion in Tibet. Deane's sympathies are noninterventionist. Not covered is the recent Tiananmen uprising. Still, this is an insightful, useful resource for larger subject collections.
-Elizabeth A. Teo, Moraine Valley Community Coll. Lib., Palos Hills, Ill.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.