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Full Description
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.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue: China colony
Introduction
Part 1 the friend
Chapter 1 The anachronistic novel: Pearl S. Buck and the vernacularisation of China
Chapter 2 Buck's FBI file
Part 2 the builder
Chapter 3 Building "free China": Henry R. Luce and a Chinese basis for the "American century"
Chapter 4 Disenchanting China: Luce and the politicisation of China relief
Part 3 the geographer
Chapter 5 Owen Lattimore, geopolitics and Chinese "frontier genesis"
Chapter 6 Ordeal by slander: Lattimore's treason on the flip side
Part 4 the fabulist
Chapter 7 Reading China allegory in John Hersey's A single pebble and White Lotus
Chapter 8 Los ing China: The erosion of faith in Hersey's The call
References
Index
