In 1972, Richard Nixon shook Mao Zedong’s hand in Beijing, marking what many Americans perceived as the beginning of U.S.-China relations. This handshake symbolized a dream—a vision of Chinese children in denim overalls singing pop songs, a bone-dry Beijing showered in democracy, and a China transformed into an ally of the United States. Yet, to most Americans today, China is an authoritarian disappointment. This narrative, however, oversimplifies the rich and cyclical history between the two nations. The true story is more akin to a wheel- a slow revolution of fascination begetting hope, hope begetting disappointment, disappointment begetting bitterness, and bitterness revolving once more to fascination. To understand the relationship between America and China today, one must observe this wheel in its entirety.
The fascination between America and China did not begin with Nixon’s visit but rather with desperation—the purest kind of fascination. In 1784, Robert Morris sailed the Empress of China, laden with spirits and silver, from the fledgling United States to Guangzhou. This voyage was not merely an act of trade but a defiance against British imperialism. The ship was glutted with 30 tons of ginseng, highly valued by the Chinese, and returned to New York Harbor with a profit equivalent to nearly $1 million in today’s money, along with silk, tea, and exotic spices, all symbols of China’s mystique.
The voyage of the Empress of China carried “the hopes of a newly independent nation” with backers who were “all the signatories of the Independence agreement,” making it once a private enterprise but a national priority.” When the ship returned in May 1785 with 800 chests of tea, 20,000 pairs of nankeen trousers, and porcelain, Congress responded with “a peculiar satisfaction in the successful issue of this first effort of the citizens of America to establish a direct trade with China.”
This fascination was not limited to commerce; it extended into cultural admiration. To Philip Freneau, a poet of the American Revolution, the very act of trade with China represented lashing out against British dominance. Nowhere is this unique relationship more apparent than in the story of American women in China. In the 19th century, American women were afforded education yet were relegated to homemakers. They would paradoxically find freedom in China, a country where women’s rights were far less developed. But that was precisely the case for Adele Field. In May 1865, she was a widow in a wedding gown, sobbing on the shores of a strange land. She had traveled 149 days from New York to be married in Hong Kong, only to find her husband, a Baptist missionary, dead of typhoid fever. For most, this heartbreak would have been the defining moment of their life. But for Adele Field, it was merely a footnote.
Born in 1839 in upstate New York, she had already established herself as a principal of a girls’ school by 25 and was later hired by the Northern Baptist church as one of the first single women missionaries. Such women missionaries occupied a fascinating cultural position, coming to China in a period of cultural turmoil to help Chinese women become Christian, find a nice Chinese Christian husband, and settle into a life of Christian domesticity. Yet to Field, this was only the beginning of her education for her students, who would be remembered in history as “Bible women.” She taught her students hygiene, childcare, basic medical skills, and geography, unprecedented knowledge to a country still beginning to realize the harms of footbinding. And as Adele Field defied the norms set upon her by American womanhood, her defiance became contagious. Adele’s students, who eventually became the first graduating class of Jinling Women’s University, an American-funded institution in Nanjing, all took vows never to marry.
Adele’s story is but one of American missionary women who helped build up women’s rights in China. Such missionaries pushed for the unbinding of women’s feet in China, “freeing Chinese women literally to move up in the world,” while also campaigning against female infanticide by placing baskets on the side of Chinese lakes where babies would be thrown with the message “put your babies here.” Their impact lives on. Today, it is the same metaphorical baskets that exist, not as cruel, but only now in the form of countless American parents coming to adopt an influx of Chinese children. Yet perhaps the greatest reflection today of the legacy of women’s rights was Hillary Clinton’s 1995 speech at the UN International Women’s Conference in Beijing. She had been labeled a failure in America with her high-profile efforts to reform the nation’s health care system.
It is no coincidence that, following the footsteps of Adele Field and so many female missionaries before her, Clinton found her voice by inspiring Chinese womanhood. Clinton’s declaration that “women’s rights are human rights” marked a political turning point after difficult years as First Lady and inspired Chinese women to pursue freedom and equality. More than two decades later, that 21-minute speech lived on, standing out as a moment when Clinton began to forge an identity as a public figure on the world stage apart from her husband.
Yet, it isn’t accurate to think of this fascination as one-sided. Yung Wing, the first Chinese graduate from Yale University in 1854, envisioned a program where young Chinese boys would study Western science and engineering to modernize China. The Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) brought 120 boys to Hartford between 1872 and 1881. These students, some as young as eight or nine years old, lived with American families, attended local schools, and played baseball on weekends.
However, from the start, this exchange was fraught with tension. The Americanization of the boys alarmed Chinese officials in fear that they were neglecting their heritage. When some students began attending church with their American host families, Chinese officials pressured the emperor to shut the program down. Ultimately, the program was terminated in 1881, leaving behind both hope for modernization and disappointment over its abrupt end. The lost opportunity became immortalized in the poem of influential official Huang Zunxian, who wrote, “A decade’s effort in training youths / Will lay the foundation for a century’s wealth and strength.” Despite its premature end, many students later returned to China and significantly contributed to China’s civil services, engineering, and the sciences. Yet their legacy lives on; how many overseas Chinese students remained scattered across America, the blossoming flowers of the seeds scattered more than a century ago.
Yet it is equally ignorant to view the history of the countries illuminated in the warm light of nostalgia. The tension today is nothing new. In the spring of 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur. This act slapped a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States. For the first time, federal law prohibited the entry of an ethnic working group because it endangered the good order of certain regions. Following the expiration of the Exclusion Act in 1892, Congress extended it for 10 more years in the form of the Geary Act, requiring each Chinese resident to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without a certificate, they faced deportation.
More than a century later, Florida passed SB 264 in 2023, banning Chinese immigrants from buying a home in large swaths of the state. The law singles out people from China for especially draconian restrictions and harsher criminal penalties, including up to five years in prison for the person trying to buy a home. Ironically, the same country was built by “Chinese capital, funneled through Boston investment banks,” a vital funding source for the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s. John Forbes, an ancestor of former Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry, made millions in Guangzhou and returned to America with not only his silver “but also the silver of many of his Chinese colleagues,” which funded railroad construction from the East Coast to Chicago.
Furthermore, more than “half of the transcontinental railroad” was built by Chinese immigrants under brutal conditions. Between 1863 and 1869, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese migrants laid the tracks of the western half of the railroad. Those workers pounded on solid rock from sunrise to sunset, hung off steep mountain cliffs in woven reed baskets, and withstood the harshest winters on record in the Sierra Nevada. Around 90% of the railroad workforce was Chinese at the height of construction. In an infamous bet made between Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific and Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific, Crocker proclaimed that his mostly Chinese crew could build 10 miles of track in one day in Utah. Between 7:00 am and 7:00 pm, the workers completed the ten miles and an extra 56 feet, laying nearly one mile of track per hour- a construction feat matched only today in the age of machines.
Americans know theirs is a country built upon law, but less is known about the Chinese’s helping to build America in this regard. Wong Kim Ark was born in the United States and regularly visited family in China. On returning from one trip, immigration officers barred his entry because of his ethnicity. Wong asserted his right to enter as a U.S. citizen and dared to challenge the Immigration Bureau. The result was the Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), birthing the precedent that any person born in the United States is a citizen by birth. Despite enduring significant humiliation and mistreatment during the Chinese Exclusion Movement of 1882, Chinese immigrants utilized American law as a courageous means to combat racial discrimination. In the first decade of the Chinese Exclusion Act alone, Chinese Americans fought more than 7000 court cases, most of which they won.
Bitterness can only last so long. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 thawed diplomatic channels that had been frozen throughout the Cold War. The visit was a visual spectacle for the U.S. President, his entourage, and the rest of the world, who watched with bated breath as the leader of the free world traveled to the largest Communist nation. A whirlwind tour through three of China’s major cities brought Nixon to several famed historical sites and cultural performances and face-to-face with many senior Chinese leaders. A few weeks later, the Shanghai Communiqué established the “One China” policy and set the stage for normalized relations. However, it also revealed fundamental misunderstandings between the two sides. While the U.S. believed engagement would mold China into a democratic ally, Mao Zedong still clung to his mistrust, viewing America as “both a huge opportunity and a huge threat.”
Those words might be the greatest summary of the relationship today. In 2015, China’s education minister demanded “a ban on textbooks promoting Western values in all of China’s schools.” The government has ordered artists and architects to “serve socialism” and renamed housing developments that had been given Western names like “Yosemite” or “Manhattan Golden Dream Village.” The number of Chinese students coming to study in the U.S. has also declined, reflecting a significant shift in both policy and public perception as many Chinese students reconsider their educational options.
The relationship between America and China is akin to Buddhist reincarnation or the spinning tires of a Ford Mustang- a cycle of enchantment followed by hope, disappointment, bitterness, and renewed fascination. As both nations rise on parallel trajectories toward global power, their intertwined histories offer lessons for navigating future challenges. The contradictory ways Americans approach China, as both threat and opportunity, with fear and benevolence, are “hardwired in America’s DNA.” Similarly, China remains conflicted about America, seeking its technology and education while fearing its cultural and political influence.
This relationship has become “the most consequential relationship between any two countries in the world.” To move forward constructively requires acknowledging shared contributions while addressing ideological differences. Whether through scientific collaboration or cultural exchange programs like those pioneered by Yung Wing or Adele Field centuries ago, the wheel must continue turning toward mutual understanding rather than conflict. In observing this wheel’s revolution across 250 years, from Robert Morris’ voyage on the Empress of China to today’s geopolitical tensions, we find that history offers not only cautionary tales but also reasons for optimism. China and America are entangled, and understanding our shared past is essential for navigating this complex relationship in the years to come.
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: American Paddle Steamer ‘Willamette’ at Canton (Guangzhou), Image sourced from Picryl | CC License, no changes made