Chinese Encounters with America

"Before the People's Republic was established in 1949, American missionaries, businessmen, and diplomats sought to remake China in their own image, only to be soundly rejected as capitalists and imperialists after the Communists came to power. What followed was a twenty-year period of mutual hostility and isolation. When China's leaders turned to the West and Japan in the 1980s, their goal was to attract investment and to absorb ideas, methods, and technologies for Chinese purposes. Their goal, as Mao put it, was "to make the foreign serve China." Chinese Encounters with America tells the stories of twelve women and men whose experiences with America transformed their lives and careers. Neither immigrants nor exiles, they came to the United States seeking knowledge and skills that would advance their country's modernization. Upon returning to the People's Republic of China they made significant contributions in the fields of diplomacy, science, business, academia, policy studies, civil society, sports, dance, music, media, and the environment. Each chapter shows how they interpreted and adapted their understanding of America to China's ever-changing social, political, and economic circumstances. Their individual stories, focused mainly on the past fifty years of engagement, offer unique insights on China, the United States, and relations between our two countries. The personalities described in this book are vastly different from the nineteenth-century laborers who came to mine gold and build railroads in America's West and they are unlike those who fled from wars to seek safe haven in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. Neither sojourners nor refugees, the figures in this book are "returnees"--those who went abroad and came back to the People's Republic of China. Each chapter tells the story of one individual and each is informed by several shared questions: Why did these Chinese men and women go the United States and why did they return to China? What were their expectations and how did their perceptions change after seeing the complicated realities of the United States firsthand? What difference did their American encounters make in their lives and professions after went back to China? What do their lives tell us about the complexities of Sino-American relations?"--