The dissertation’s fourth and final chapter follows the legacy of the collaboration, as it transformed into the Cold War rivalry over how best to transform rural Asia. Chapter one, “Food Empire, Trade Boycott: Literature and the Future of U.S.-China Relations in 1900,” analyzes food politics at the turn of the twentieth century, when the U.S. began to intervene more heavily in China, via both military action and resulting investment in binational educational initiatives. This is the moment that the U.S. military actions in Asia and the Pacific that began in 1898 extended all the way to Beijing to help put down the Boxer Rebellion in 1900—the event that Frank Norris identified as the definitive end of the American frontier—and when organizers built the first explicitly nationalist social movement in China, a boycott against American goods in 1905. Due to a discrepancy in the indemnity fund that the foreign powers exacted from China following the Rebellion, moreover, the U.S. designated a portion of this money to found three universities in China—including Nanjing University, where the Bucks would work from 1920 to 1933—and ongoing scholarships for Chinese students to study in the U.S. This chapter shows how writers and activists used food and agriculture to symbolize the growing political and economic connections between the two countries. Common to both the American and Chinese fiction that chapter one considers is a shared sense of futurity– a sense that a new age is dawning and that one’s own country will only be saved through its control of the food system.

Here, I analyze how Frank Norris, in his novel The Octopusand in his non-fiction writings,plastic planters bulk links the industrialization of agriculture to the U.S.-China trade, such that infinite American economic growth is secured by infinite Chinese hunger. The novel has received a great deal of critical attention for its representation of China,6 but this chapter is the first analysis of The Octopus in the context of Chinese writing on the two nations’ food trade. In fact, although the boycott is called the first Chinese social movement articulated in modern nationalist terms, very little has been written about the literary and cultural works produced to popularize it. I show that propaganda works popularizing the boycott used agricultural and alimentary metaphors to link the racist treatment of Chinese immigrants in America with American food exports to China. The anonymous novella Extraordinary Speeches of the Boycott goes as far as theorizing that China will only ever be free of the U.S. by developing its own agricultural production. The boycott discourse furthermore helps understand that the Chinese and the Americans both politicized the link between American exports to China and Chinese immigration to the U.S., and both shared a vocabulary of Social Darwinism. I argue that these discussions set the tone for the coming century.Turning to the early Cold War of the 1950’s, chapter four, “Cold War Modernity and its Pessimists: Hunger in Eileen Chang’s The Rice-Sprout Song,” analyzes the American and Chinese competing visions for rural modernization in the rest of Asia as building on their collaborative efforts before the war. As historian Nick Cullather shows, what Carruth calls American food power was key to the Cold War competition in Asia, especially in propaganda campaigns. Faced with the recent success of Chinese communism and land reform, American officials claimed to provide an even better future for the rest of Asia, through the Green Revolution.

Meanwhile China represented the U.S. as the true site of hunger, due to rampant inequality, where poor children had to eat out of garbage cans. The chapter reads Eileen Chang’s The Rice-Sprout Song , originally written in English and translated into Chinese by the author, as an engagement with this propaganda war but as nonetheless transcending it. A major Chinese-language writer in Shanghai in the 1940’s, Chang had left China for Hong Kong, where she found work with the United States Information Agency. I argue that the novel draws on tropes from the 1930’s discussed in chapter two to criticize the Communist program in the countryside, but goes beyond this to question the larger Enlightenment modernization project that unites the Chinese Communist and American technocratic objectives. I emphasize in this reading Chang’s use of premodern culture and her representations of animals. Although this novel is usually separated from Chang’s earlier Chinese-language writing, I demonstrate continuities with her short fiction and essays from her early period on Buddhist cosmology and classical Chinese painting. Even more than Lao Xiang, discussed in chapter three, Chang does not present rural subjects as the other of the urban readership. Where earlier chapters analyzed writers from multiple competing American and Chinese political positions, showing points of broad continuity, the dissertation ends with this novel that is both American and Chinese, which rejects the assumptions of both sides in the Cold War about the future of rural modernization. In terms of textual analysis, each chapter in the dissertation examines one main novel that it compares to multiple other shorter works of both American and Chinese literature. Chapter one, as a kind of prelude, takes up literature written in both the U.S. and China at the turn of the century that examined the same issue, the future of exchange between the two. As exchange increased over the next decades, then, chapters two, three, and four each analyze texts that were addressed to joint U.S.-China rural projects, and immediately translated and circulated in both English and Chinese.

This shows the enduring importance of literature throughout these decades in imagining the problems and potential solutions in the countryside, and how Americans and Chinese were simultaneously invested in them. I begin with two canonical American works that both, in their own way, reassure the reader about the future of American-Chinese relations, and end with two lesser-known Chinese works that both, in their own way, challenge both American and Chinese hegemonic approaches to the countryside. Organized in this way, the latter two works are seen to speak back to the earlier ones, emphasizing the semi-colonial dimension of the U.S.-China relationship during this period.The Octopus imagines a transpacific wheat trade on such a scale as to reorient U.S. production for export rather than domestic consumption, and this before the wheat trade approached anything like this scale, or even before the widespread industrialization of American agriculture imagined in the novel that would make it possible. I will extend this reading to argue that food is the specific commodity whose symbolic role comes to exceed even its material economic importance in the transpacific relationship,collection pot the one that most clearly links producers and consumers, precisely because of its status as life-giving necessity rather than luxury good. Moreover, just as Eperjesi has argued that The Octopus influenced how Americans imagined the China market, William Conlogue has shown that the novel popularized an image of industrial agriculture that had been unknown to most Americans and would only be fully implemented in the coming decades. In fact we need to see these two future developments as intrinsically linked. For Norris, the closing of the frontier involves simultaneously the reorganization of agricultural labor and a new connection with China. In the novel, it is only the infinite, insatiable Chinese hunger that will make possible an equally infinite growth in American industrial production. As Lye and David Palumbo-Liu rightly argue, American writers use East Asian racial form to mediate an understanding of economic change. We can understand this in a larger context as food is also a key symbol in structuring the imagination of Chinese boycott literature and propaganda. Just as The Octopus draws on economic boosterism and political speeches of the day, the Chinese boycott literature is only minimally removed from political action. And yet writers use that distance, however small, to imagine larger changes needed beyond the boycott itself.

One novella in particular, Extraordinary Speeches of the Boycott , foregrounds its rhetorical position by narrating a series of dialogues among fictional boycott participants. The central character argues for the importance of developing domestic agriculture if China is ever to be truly independent of U.S. control, and at the end of the text he turns from urban activism to large scale farming to achieve food sovereignty, which will be a major focus of the Communist Party. This chapter thus contributes to Transnational American Studies by approaching U.S. ambitions in China through a transnational framework. In their critique of U.S. imperialism, New Americanists such as Amy Kaplan took The Octopus as a key text for linkage of continental expansion with military control of the Pacific , as it linked what had been seen as “regional” literature of the American West with international capitalism and foreign military strategy. One of the limitations of the New Americanists, however, was that their object of study, the “Cultures of U.S. Imperialism,” is basically the same as the older nationally-defined American literature, even as they submit it to a scathing ideological critique.This limitation was addressed in the late 1990s by a group of PostMarxists who perhaps went to the other extreme, downplaying the level of the nation to focus on the Pacific as a regional space crossed by global flows. For Rob Wilson in particular, the contemporary Pacific has been forged through these flows of capital, labor, information, and media images which simultaneously invest the Pacific with a privileged status in the history of capitalism since the late nineteenth century, and also limit it to a minor, regional status which cannot claim global authority. The paradigm of Transnational American Studies seeks both to critique U.S. imperialism and understand cultural production as emerging out of cross-cultural encounter. This mode of scholarship attempts to be anti-imperial in its choice of texts as well as what it says about them. These studies demonstrate that cultural and political changes during this period should be understood as contested and contingent, rather than as the unfolding of an ideal “imperial logic.” This chapter contributes to this project by adding a transnational cultural study of the U.S.-China relationship during this period. In the first sentence of his introduction, Hsu explains the title Circa 1898 by listing a number of events immediately before and after the critical year 1898 that has become synonymoUS with U.S. imperialism, among them “the China Relief Expedition in which U.S. troops participated in 1900-1901” . And yet, beyond this sentence there is no discussion of China in the issue, as there is very little scholarship in American Studies that meets the issue’s standard for transnational study by working with Chinese materials. I seek to remedy that by bringing Chinese anti-American literature and cultural production into conversation, or argument, with its American contemporaries.By comparing American and Chinese texts from the same period, I wish to take seriously both sides’ contention that this is an imperial relationship. Again, these fantasies are not simply projections but inform the material relations between them. Both American Studies and Chinese Studies have been relatively late in accepting the implications of Postcolonial Theory, due to the resistance to the idea that the U.S. was or is a colonial power, and the fact that China was never formally colonized.Yet Americans were very clear in debating the pros and cons of imperialism in 1898 before deciding in favor of it, and were equally clear once they felt they had finally “lost” China with the Communist victory in 1949, a time when Mao celebrated the fall of “the American colonial government in Nanking.”In 1962, at the height of the Cold War and the year after the end of the policy disaster that was Great Famine, the PRC memorialized the 1905 boycott of American goods as the opening of resistance to American imperialism. Researchers gathered and published hundreds of pages of poems, short stories, novellas, newspaper articles, posters, and other ephemera . In their polemics around 1900, both the anti-Chinese American labor leaders and the anti-American Chinese activists understood their struggle in Social Darwinist terms. Both calls to action warned that they were newly unfit for the changing modern environment and would have to act accordingly. The difference is that in the U.S. social Darwinism in understood in terms of biological race, where the “Anglo-Saxon” body could not keep up with the more efficient “Asiatic” body, while in China the Darwinist competition was understood to be between forms of political organization that were more or less for different historical environments.