Novus Ordo Seclorum
1989; Oxford University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-7709.1989.tb00046.x
ISSN1467-7709
Autores Tópico(s)Asian American and Pacific Histories
ResumoAt the end of his highly regarded work, The Making of a Special Relationship, Michael Hunt cast a critical eye on the history of American-Chinese relations. The problem, as he saw it, derived from American ethnocentricity (a quality surely not in short supply in Imperial China), our tendency to “reduce cultures radically different from our own to familiar, easily manageable terms” (a general human failing), and our inability “to recognize the limits … to the changes the United States can hope to effect” in such cultures. These factors, after more than one hundred years of contact, had led by the early twentieth century to a “commitment to China's reform and protection against aggression” incomprehensible in strategic or economic terms and explicable only in the light of American “national fantasies of redemption and dominion.”1 That such fantasies exerted such power seemed to point to some strongly held national ideology deserving of investigation. Hence this book.
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