Longtime China journalist John Pomfret regards the relationship between the United States and China as a grand, sweeping epic marked by many highs and lows. “If there is a pattern to this baffling complexity,” Pomfret writes in his 2016 history,* The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present, “it may be best described as a never-ending Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. Both sides experience rapturous enchantment begetting hope, followed by disappointment, repulsion, and disgust, only to return to fascination once again.”

Pomfret’s book is similarly epic, with over 600 pages of text followed by dozens more covering reference notes, the bibliography, and index. That length might make Beautiful Country appear to be an intimidating read, though Pomfret’s short chapters and straightforward prose ensure that it is not a difficult one.

Parts I and II, which cover interactions between Americans and Chinese from the founding of the United States through the early twentieth century, offer the most added value. Through brief biographies and lively anecdotes, Pomfret explains how U.S.-China relations were initially forged at the person-to-person level, with merchants, missionaries, laborers, and students moving across the Pacific. People on both sides of the ocean saw the opposite country as a land of opportunity. American traders and missionaries viewed China as a place where they could make money and save souls, respectively; in turn, Chinese laborers and students journeyed to the United States to increase their own wealth and power back home. American women, in particular, experienced China as a place where the freedom of expatriate life allowed them to break with social conventions and enjoy more independence than they would had they remained Stateside.

But from the start, the U.S.-China relationship was marked by an aggressive and patronizing—frequently racist—attitude on the American side. Filled with the swagger of a young country looking to make its mark on the world, many nineteenth-century Americans approached Qing China eager to transform the country by imposing their preferred business practices, religion, education, political theories, and more. “China was a place, often the place in the minds of many Americans, to which the high-minded principles of the United States could be transplanted,” Pomfret comments.

While these Americans regarded it as their right and duty to spread the gospels of wealth, Christianity, and/or democracy in China, there was a less welcoming attitude toward Chinese back home, where the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 severely restricted immigration, especially of those whom Americans regarded as lower class. Despite such legal obstacles and widespread xenophobia, a steady flow of Chinese continued to enter the United States, and by the early twentieth century “Chinese students were present on almost every campus of every major university in the nation.”

The early 1900s were also the time when the increasingly ascendant United States government became more consistently involved in the bilateral relationship, assuming “the role of the guardian of China.” Beginning in Part III and continuing through the end of Beautiful Country, Pomfret’s primary focus turns to high-level government-to-government interactions and diplomatic negotiations between the U.S. and China. This is all, most certainly, important material, but readers might get bogged down in the granular level of detail, a significant shift from the personal histories and fluid narrative of the book’s first two sections.

This is not to say, of course, that individuals were unimportant to U.S.-China relations during the twentieth century. Indeed, Pomfret’s chapters on the World War II alliance between the two countries depict a morass of personalities, competing constituencies, and cultural differences; he conveys a sense that the successes the United States and China achieved were almost in spite of the partnership, not due to it. In public, American propaganda campaigns celebrated the U.S.-China friendship and Song Meiling, wife of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, toured the United States and addressed Congress to solidify public support for the joint fight against Japan. Out of sight, however, Chiang clashed with U.S. military advisors and Franklin Roosevelt focused on a strategy of winning the war in Europe first; “in the face of fierce competition for resources,” Pomfret writes, “the US could only keep the Nationalists on life support.” Reports of corruption and mismanagement among the Nationalist elite also soured Washington on the strategic alliance.

That Nationalist corruption is often cited as one of the key reasons the United States didn’t throw significant support behind Chiang later in the 1940s as he battled Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for control of the country. Pomfret argues that this explanation gives insufficient attention to the successes of the CCP in winning sympathy in the U.S. via the use of propaganda and knowing what American interlocutors visiting the CCP base in Yan’an would best respond to when writing reports back home. From WWII days onward, there were American journalists and government officials arguing that Mao and the CCP were pragmatists, not ideologues—a line of thinking that reasserted itself in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the two countries became more economically intertwined, despite American concerns about Chinese Party-state human-rights abuses and political repression.

By the early 1950s, it had become widely apparent that Mao was, actually, a real Communist, one who sought to lead the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to victory against American imperialism. Despite the Korean War, anti-American propaganda, and the outwardly Manichean capitalism-versus-communism conflict of the Cold War, however, there were still voices in Washington, D.C. speaking in favor of improving relations with Beijing. Chiang and Taiwan may have officially been U.S. allies, but support for them was inconsistent and frequently debated. After the Sino-Soviet Split in the early 1960s, John F. Kennedy saw an opportunity to align with Beijing against Moscow, though plans for such accommodation did not involve terminating U.S.-Taiwan ties, the PRC’s precondition for any improvement in relations. This potential shift in policy ended with Kennedy’s assassination; Lyndon Johnson brought in hard-line anti-communists as foreign-policy advisors and the subsequent escalation of the Vietnam War, as well as China’s Cultural Revolution, froze the possibility of rapprochement. Beautiful Country benefits from the discussion of these stops and starts, which adds nuance to the often monolithic us-versus-them depictions of the Cold War and help illuminates the contingent nature of history. Considering the roads not taken in American China policy prior to Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to the PRC also shows, as Pomfret contends, that Nixon’s trip wasn’t “a bombshell decision of stupendous political risk”: “In reality, starting in the late 1950s, America moved in fits and starts toward an awareness that it needed a relationship with the world’s most populous country.”

The course of that relationship since normalization in 1979 has not been a smooth one. Pomfret traces the push-pull nature of contemporary U.S.-China engagement, which involves a tangled mix of politics, money, and people-to-people ties. In recent decades U.S. administrations have repeatedly wavered between “America’s missionary impulse to reform China and its strategic desire to keep it stable,” almost always coming down on the side of stability and commerce. Even after the June Fourth Massacre in 1989, the interruption in bilateral relations was comparatively brief. It has become commonplace among China scholars to assert that post-Tiananmen the CCP invoked an unspoken bargain with the country’s citizens: the Party would loosen restrictions on society, as long as people stayed out of politics and focused their energies on building the economy instead. Pomfret’s analysis finds a similar bargain in U.S.-China relations. While past American leaders have met with the Dalai Lama, continued engagement with Taiwan, and publicly condemned human-rights violations in the PRC, these are all relatively small frictions, not impediments to an enduring relationship.

Pomfret completed Beautiful Country prior to the 2016 presidential election, so the book does not carry forward to trace the tumultuous Trump I years or the lackluster Biden interregnum. What comes next is anyone’s guess—another chapter to be written in the grand epic of relations between the United States and China.

I was interested in The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, by John Pomfret, because I’d really enjoyed Chinese Lessons, his narrative nonfiction look at the stories of five classmates and how their lives show greater changes in Chinese life.

The “beautiful country” of the title is Mei Guo, the Mandarin name for the USA, and the “middle kingdom” is Zhong Guo, the traditional Mandarin name for China. This book explores the complicated relationship between China and the United States, and uses Pomfret’s years in China to deepen this analysis. I’d already read some of his work about China and Chinese life in Chinese Lessons. This one is a bit drier, but still has that understanding from an American living in China for years.

The book offers insight and explanation of the history of the US-China relationship. This gives context to modern issues. Pomfret traces the two countries’ relationship back to the 18th century, when American merchants, missionaries. and explorers first began to engage with China. This was interesting to me because Yantai, where I first lived in China, had been one of the treaty ports, and also when I stayed in Shanghai, I visited the French Concession area. Looking at the historical relationships between China and the west, especially when China had closed borders, adds perspective to the current relationship. He also looks at how China saw America and Americans over the years. I liked this because it was informative about general trends without stereotyping.

Pomfret describes the US and China as nuanced societies, with a more complicated relationship than we usually hear in a headline (or tweet of a clickbait headline). It can be a little slow in places, because he explains carefully how he’s drawn his conclusions, but it’s worth it for the layered understanding in this book. This is a rare non-fiction book for me, a very interesting and engaging read for anyone with an interest in China.

This is a fascinating history book that looks at the relationship between the United States and China, from the Revolutionary War to the present day. It is a detailed account of the relationship that has spanned over two centuries. The research is simply remarkable. Hands down, one of the best history books I've ever read! Highly Recommend!

A well written historically accurate account of the often complex and turbulent relationship between China and the US. A must read for everyone who wants to understand the current state of affairs between China and the US