In the texts that I examine, the causes of famine are generally represented as at once “natural” and social—the typical example is a drought compounding the already unequal distribution of grain—and while one or the other may be portrayed as dominant for particular political goals, the text’s reflection on the interconnections between them leads to a picture of rural life as an ecosystem including both human and non-human forces. The second reason for the importance of famine as a trope is that the situation of starvation often serves in the texts as a great leveler, reflecting on the shared underlying biological basis of human life, and even a nature shared with other animals. This project thus delineates two dialectical relationships, one the relationship between literature and food production, and the other the relationship between these discourses in the US and in China. This builds on the work of David Palumbo Liu , John Eperjesi , Colleen Lye , and others who see a relationship between American literary representations of East Asia and East Asian Americans and those communities’ self-understanding of their own economic power and development. By situating this American literary production in counterpoint with Chinese cultural production, a larger shared, asymmetrical context becomes more apparent. For example, Chapter Two is informed by Lye’s comparisons between Pearl S. Buck and her contemporary American agricultural experts. In this way Lye reads Buck,blueberry production as well as other writers such as Edgar Snow, as projecting American pastoral fantasies onto China.
By examining Chinese literary writers such as Ding Ling or Mao Dun, however, we find continuities in their idealized visions of the countryside, and even literary formal elements. At the same time, while the dissertation is likewise inspired by Richard So’s bilingual readings in English and Chinese, it does not follow his central concept of the transpacific as a unit and method of cultural analysis that contrasts with national and colonial histories. To take Buck again, whereas So celebrates her as escaping the tradition of Orientalism, I instead read The Good Earth within a longer history of overlapping American and Chinese ideas about the countryside and the concept of “Chinese agriculture.” Following Arif Dirlik’s argument that a new concept called “traditional Chinese culture” was the joint production of Western Orientalist writers and Chinese self-Orientalist writers during the colonial period, I show that both Chinese and Americans sought to forge ideas of traditional Chinese agriculture as an ahistorical institution and cultural system in tension with the modernizing West. For tracing how these two national discourses overlapped and interacted, it is less helpful to posit a third space of the transpacific between the two nations, than it is to see the “contact zone” extending into the rural space that was the site of so much ideological investment during this period in both countries. Moreover, then, to emphasize the Pacific Ocean through the use of “transpacific” would be evocative but potentially distracting for this study of ideas about agriculture and land use. Firstly, even as a geographical term the transpacific works less well than the transatlantic studies from which it derives by analogy.
Like the transatlantic, the transpacific attends to the two edges of the ocean, with the water as a space of crossing and transformation, but it thus excludes the Pacific Islands and their very different colonial histories. Secondly, as this dissertation in particular analyzes literature about farming, transpacific imaginary is arguably not as apt to scholarship centered on rural land use and intra-national migrations. In an early critique of the concept of the Pacific Rim, Christopher Connery argued that “perhaps there is a danger in working within the dominant conceptual category of the ocean, given that it is capital’s favored myth-element. We should likewise be wary of constructing an oppositional Pacific Rim, seeing in its ‘dynamism’ a new challenge to U.S. and European hegemony” . Emergent transpacific movement is, through such a lens, imagined to be dynamic in contrast with a presumed fixity of the continents and their nation states. Notably, the ocean only appears in one of the texts in this dissertation, The Octopus, which is also the most politically reactionary and racist, the boldest celebration of the circulation of capital through technological development. By contrast, my project’s focus on agriculture brings into view the transformation of the continents themselves through agricultural development—and the transformation of the multiple articulations of national identity in reference to the other. Rather than transpacific, then, this project could be identified as intercontinental. Emphasizing the uneven power dynamic through which American and Chinese authors worked during this period, this study begins by recognizing the connection between China and the various encroaching powers during this period as semicolonial.
Chinese Marxists of the 1920’s invoked this term to indicate their complex political and cultural situation, according to which China was subjected to foreign power without the structures of formal colonialism. The “semi” in Chinese self-identification with semicolonialism should not be understood as a hesitant or partial colonialism, but rather as a variation on the more common conception of colonialism, characterized by several interrelated phenomena . First, no foreign power was hegemonic in the early twentieth century, but instead China became a site of economic competition between the imperialist powers of Britain, the U.S., Russia, France, Japan, and others, all secured by military force and unequal treaty agreements. Second, Chinese reformers overthrew the imperial state in 1911, but the new republican government likewise could not establish hegemony and competed with regional warlords. Thus the term was often used in a pair as “semicolonial, semifeudal,” to stress that a national capitalist economy had not developed. Third, as a result, there was great regional variation in politics, economy, and culture. Hence a formulation such as “China today is colonial in the Japanese-occupied areas and basically semicolonial in the Kuomintang [Nationalist] areas, and it is predominantly feudal or semi-feudal in both” . Semicolonialism as a term thus does not define a strict, coherent concept such as a mode of production or a formal distribution of power, but rather indexes the unevenness of political and economic development across China and the complex competition between several national and international power blocks. What does this view of semicolonial China mean for the particular role of the U.S. in East Asia? In the first place,blueberry in container the U.S. should be recognized as one of multiple imperialist powers in China. To say that the two countries were linked through semicolonial domination directs researchers to investigate the cultural dimensions of this relationship—both how each represented the other and also how cultural forms circulated between them. For American studies, this perspective can enlarge an understanding of American imperialism as a whole. For example, a special issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies edited by Hsuan Hsu, titled Circa 1898: Overseas Empire and Transnational American Studies provides compelling comparative readings of U.S. and East- and Southeast Asian writings on the military actions of that period. Although a central motivation for interventions in Southeast Asia was to gain better access to the China market, and American troops fought in China itself, the collection does not include writing about and from China, in the way that it pairs writing about and from the Philippines and other territories that the U.S. invaded. Because not much is known about Chinese writing in American Studies, scholars have not ventured comparative postcolonial studies of Chinese and American perspectives to complement cultural studies of other U.S. interventions. This dissertation fills that gap for the period around the turn-of-the-century, and builds from that to understand early twentieth-century cultural production within the two countries’ semi-colonial relationship.
Scholars of Chinese literature have long argued that modern Chinese cultural production cannot be understood on purely national terms, nor as the importation of foreign elements from the West, but as the invention of new terms and cultural practices in reference to multiple international predecessors.This project approaches American ideas about China as likewise part of this larger, shared whole. For example, the first chapter analyzes the Social Darwinist arguments of anti-Chinese, anti-immigrant racism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, comparing them to Chinese discussions of Social Darwinism at the same time. In the pamphlet Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood or Asiatic Coolieism, AFL leader Samuel Gompers dwells on food practices to argue that “Anglo-Saxons” are biologically dependent on meat, which is comparatively expensive, arguing by extension that their labor power is more expensive than that of the Chinese, who, Gompers observes, subsist on less expensive rice. The conclusion is that white U.S. workers are less fit for modern urban labor and will lose in the direct competition of a free labor market, so the market must be manipulated through anti-immigrant legislation. At the same time, Chinese readers of Darwin worried that their political system was out of date, and ill-fitted to modern industrial economies. Reformers called for political action to create a nation-state that would be able to compete with countries like the United States, and also to guarantee China’s food sovereignty. Both the Americans and the Chinese, then, worried that they were out-of-date, that they were fit for the past but not the present—and these fears in turn informed calls for nationalist political intervention. Both sides participate in a larger international discourse of Social Darwinism that naturalizes production, consumption, and imperial power, and in which food appears as a useful synecdoche. Moreover, Shu-mei Shih, in analyzing intellectual life and cultural production during the era, argues that “the fragmentation and multiplicity of foreign powers implies that each power potentially occupied a different place within the Chinese cultural imaginary, as indeed was the case in the distinction most Chinese made between Japanese and Euro-American imperialisms.” Specifically, then, this dissertation argues that one important association that the U.S. evoked for Chinese readers was agrarianism, taking the U.S. and China as two continent-sized agrarian nations. For Shih notes that because there was no formal colonial apparatus, and so no ideological indoctrination, little or no ideological anti-Westernism and anti-modernism of the kind seen in India and other colonial societies developed in China. Instead, while Chinese intellectuals were divided on a wide range of issues, none challenged basic enlightenment values of reason and progress. Even those who rejected Hegelian ideas of teleological progress and Western supremacy, did so informed by and with the support of Westerners critical of certain developments in the West—above all the destruction of World War I—such as Bertrand Russell and Henri Bergson. Thus in Chapter Two I will read Pearl S. Buck in the context of writers such as Liang Shuming who celebrated “traditional” Chinese rural society as not a rejection of modernity but rather an appropriate and valuable balancing force in the modern world. To say this is not so much to celebrate Buck as a cosmopolitan figure, as to explore how Chinese intellectuals themselves shared many assumptions with Buck and other Americans. Unable to locate a pure Chineseness in their urban environment, as Dirlik shows, they projected this idea onto the countryside. In Meleine Yueh Dong’s words, many Shanghai Chinese “evinced the mentality of a semi-colonizer vis-à-vis the rest of China” . Despite these inventions of timeless tradition, this dissertation will reconstruct how Chinese developing ideas about their own agriculture were bound up with Americans, and how American ideas about their own agriculture were bound up with Chinese. The academic network of which Buck was a part is the clearest example, but is in fact one of several such connections in the early twentieth century.In arguing that U.S-Chinese relations have long been imagined in terms of food and agriculture, the dissertation is organized around the shifts between three historical moments: U.S.-China trade competition at the turn of the century, transnational networks of agricultural and other experts in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and the competing Communist and Capitalist models for rural modernization in Asian nations outside China during the early Cold War. Chapter one begins at the turn of the century, when relations were understood strictly in terms of trade and immigration, that is circulation. This provides a prehistory to the coming decades of collaboration as well as international investment in agricultural production itself. Chapters two and three then address the transnational connections of the 1920’s and 1930’s, each taking up a different network, one working for technical improvement and one for rural education, and central literary-political figure, Pearl S. Buck and James C. Yen respectively.