Book by Hongshan Li: Fighting on the Cultural Front: U.S.-China Relations in the Cold War - Review by Zeno Leoni (H-Diplo)

H-Diplo: New posted content

• H-Diplo Review Essay 597: Leoni on Li, _Fighting on the Cultural Front_

H-Diplo: New posted content

H-Diplo Review Essay 597: Leoni on Li, _Fighting on the Cultural Front_

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H-Diplo Review Essay 597

Hongshan Li. Fighting on the Cultural Front: U.S.-China Relations in the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780231207041 (hardcover, $150.00); 780231207058 (paperback, $37.00); 9780231556781 (e-book, $36.99).

27 November 2024 | PDF: https://hdiplo.org/to/E597 | X: @HDiplo | BlueSky: @h-diplo.bsky.social

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Kevin Grimm | Production Editor: Christopher Ball

Review by Zeno Leoni, King’s College London

At the end of the 1940s, shortly after the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), William Johnstone Jr., director of the Office of Education Exchange within the Department of State, “proposed a meeting with presidents from more than a dozen universities to solicit their views on how to deal with Chinese students [in the US] so as to ‘strengthen and encourage democratic forces in China’” (43). As part of an “anti-communist ideological campaign,” US legislation offered financial support for Chinese students who were stuck in the United States in the aftermath of the civil war (41). This also involved, among many other things, “helping liberal Chinese writers publish periodicals, pamphlets, and books in Chinese,” or “strengthening the Voice of America (VOA).” Not long before that, meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was keen to “establish absolute control over all cultural institutions and activities in the newly liberated areas” as the Chinese civil war was approaching the end (17). The rationale for this was the principle of dasao fangzi—“cleaning house,” in the sense that China was “like a dirty house” that was “filled with trash, dirt, flea, bedbugs, and lice”—a metaphor for imperialist forces and their friends (16).

In 1950, furthermore, 961 faculty and staff from Peking University “signed a convention refusing to listen to the VOA and issued a statement to call on the people of the nation to do the same” (56). Later on, the CCP pursued an “alliance between Beijing and several radical African American leaders” in the United States, which is reminiscent of China’s critique of the United States when on 25 of May 2020, George Perry Floyd, Jr. was murdered by a police officer while held on the ground, while the United States issued a travel ban to “American leftists” (242-245). Considering that “[w]hen American and Chinese merchants met for the first time in 1784, they knew practically nothing about each other” (2), there was quite a lot going on during the Cold War. Yet these are just a handful of examples extracted among many other anecdotes that Hongshan Li discusses in his rich history of cultural war, Fighting on the Cultural Front: US-China Relations in the Cold War.

One is tempted to say that, overall, nothing has changed between the United States and China since then. Nor had anything changed then compared to the previous century. On the one hand, the United States—like other Western countries, especially the United Kingdom—has sought to influence China and to open it up to the global economy, ultimately for their own benefit, since the time of the Open Door policy at the end of nineteenth century and with even greater energy and success since the rapprochement in 1972. On the other hand, China continues to be ruled by elites who seek to control both the material and ideological dimensions of state borders, and to protect a relatively closed society and culture whose “fundamental precepts,” as the US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger put it, “endured, tested by the strain of periodic calamity.”[1]

Aficionados of the study of US-China relations will be able to relate to the essence and the continuity of this relationship in the longue durée in light of Li’s statement that the United States and China “kept viewing each other as their most dangerous enemy” while they also “became aware that it was extremely difficult if not impossible for either side to win a prolonged military confrontation against the other” (85-86). In other words, the United States and China, back then as much as nowadays, have continued to be entangled in what seems to be a forced coexistence. Rivalry has never disappeared though, and if nowadays there are references to a divide marked by democracy versus authoritarianism, in the past Beijing and Washington clashed as the United States was said to be “built on clearly articulated ideals and values,” while China had an “enduring cultural legacy” (2).

This overall picture emerges from a very thorough analysis which offers many more nuances and details than those that can be captured in a review. The author endeavors to answer three main questions in this book: first, “why were the [positive] historical trends in Sino-American cultural relations reversed during the Cold War, and why did the United States and the PRC become mortal enemies on the cultural front?”; second, “[h]ow did the two sides utilize cultural interactions as weapons against each other in the Cold War years?”; and third, “[w]hat impact did the Sino-American confrontation on the cultural front have in shaping US-China Cold War relations and rebuilding bilateral cultural ties during as well as after the rapprochement?” (4). Ultimately, by addressing these questions, Li aims to provide the very first study of this kind on US-China cultural exchanges during the Cold War that considers both state and non-state actors. 

The book is structured chronologically and divided in three parts. Part 1 focuses on the aftermath of World War II and, in particular, on the shift from cultural engagement to “termination of existing cultural ties” (8). The “cultural front” arises in the aftermath of the Second World War, during which the United States had supported the Chinese nationalists, when the “limited collaboration” with communists against Japan ended (14-15). Prior to the late 1940s, there were “three clear trends,” such as the “constant expansion of Sino-American cultural interactions [,]…. increasing government involvement in bilateral cultural interactions …[and] continued improvement in mutual knowledge and understanding” (2-3). But as the Communists were getting closer to victory in the civil war, they started to “prohibit foreigners from publishing newspapers or magazines” that were produced in liberated areas (17). These tough restrictions brought “immediate and drastic changes” to US-China cultural relations (20). The United States became the enemy because it was imperialist and supported the Nationalists in an anti-communist perspective. The CCP was determined to establish “absolute control” over all cultural institutions and activities in the newly liberated areas” (17). 

Since then, the author tells us, “Sino-American cultural relations [have been] transformed from mostly a constructive force in the making of bilateral relations into sharp swords constantly wielded in hot as well as cold wars since the late 1940s” (1). Part 1 explores how the United States and China became “open enemies” since the late 1940s; the involvement in the Korean War (25 June 1950–27 July 1953); and competition for influencing “Chinese students and scholars stranded in the United States” (8-9). Part 2’s focus is on the cultural front “at the height of the Cold War” (9). Chapters in this part cover issues such as the US cultural offensive against China by supporting Chinese students in Taiwan; the relationship between Beijing, Washington, and American journalists, and efforts in the 1950s to keep the cultural relationship “as dead as could be”; Beijing’s efforts to control and influence US citizens, for instance by inviting “a carefully selected small group of American citizens to China for a short amount of time”; and the fascinating history of efforts by Beijing to spread communist ideology to the United States through African American activists (9-11). 

Part 3 of the book covers less ground, as it seeks to capture a mild “brief de-escalation” in the early 1970s, in line with the process of rapprochement and normalization which was happening during those years (11). The epilogue maintains that the business of cultural confrontation continued as usual, with China seeking to prevent “bourgeois spiritual pollution”—jingshen wuran—while seeking to access US technology (page citation). With an emerging pragmatism dictated by China’s need for modernization and US interests at including China in the global economy, cultural confrontation might have been a relief valve for tensions.

The book puts forward three arguments. First, the United States and China competed in the cultural front after the 1940s not only because they were “foes” in “hot” wars, but specifically because they “each viewed the ideas and values espoused and disseminated by the other as real threats to its security and survival” (4). Second, because of these competing political systems and social values, the United States and China confronted one another in different approaches, the United States through laws and regulation and China through “violent political movements and tight ideological control.” Third, such cultural confrontation had a “profound and lasting impact” on the Cold War experience of US and Chinese people and on US-China relations before and after normalization (6-8).

The narrative of the book is successful in smoothly merging specific details with international events and the diplomatic development of US-China relations, which is always in the background. Li introduces the geopolitical context at the start of each chapter, and is very careful to provide a clear signposting for the reader. From a methodological viewpoint, while also relying on secondary sources, the book is distinguished by the author’s gathering of a rich amount of primary sources from archives in the United States, the PRC, and Taiwan, including local and national archives, institutional archives, and libraries.

This book makes for a rare contribution to the literature. The study of cultural relations between the United States and China remains underexplored, not only with regard to the Cold War era, but also with respect to more recent events, as the hard diplomatic dimension tends to gather greater interest. At the same time, it could have been even more engaging. a summary of the literature on this or closely related topics would have offered a background to readers who are not familiar with the topic. More to the point, it would have been interesting to get a sense of how the author sees this work situated in the context of previous publications on the history of US-China relations during the Cold War.[2] Some of these contributions are those of Hongshan Li himself.[3] There have been publications focusing specifically on a cultural perspective of the relationship between the US and China. One paper provided an analysis of the wartime years of WWII.[4] Others have looked at the Cold War period more broadly.[5]

This would emphasize even more the book’s value. While Fighting on the Cultural Front is based on rigorous historical research, it would have been interesting to see the author’s personal viewpoint emerge more from the narrative. The book could bear even greater contemporary relevance had it contained a reflection on the “so what” for current US-China relations, at a time when ideology appears again to have become a battleground, albeit in a much less prominent manner compared to the confrontation between NATO and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Nonetheless, Hongshan Li’s exploration of the relationship between the United States and China with this sort of long term perspective reveals a positive message in the sense that it shows that the relationship has had highs and lows; that this has been going on for a long time; that the two countries often managed to move on from dangerous impasses; and that they need each other to achieve important interests.

Zeno Leoni is a Lecturer at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London, and an Affiliate to the Lau China Institute of the same university. His latest work is A New Cold War: US-China Relations in the 21st Century (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2024).

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[1] Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014).

[2] Rosemary Foot, The Practice of Power: US Relations with China since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Gregg A. Brazinsky, Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War(Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2017); Yafeng Xia, Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks during the Cold War, 1949–1972 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

[3] Xiaobing Li and Hongshan Li, China and the United States: A New Cold War History (New York: University Press of America, 1998).

[4] Frank Ninkovich, “Cultural Relations and American China Policy, 1942–1945,” Pacific Historical Review 49: 3 (1980): 471-498.

[5] Ellen D. Wu “‘America's Chinese’: Anti-Communism, Citizenship, and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War,” Pacific Historical Review 77:3 (2008): 391-422.