Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, May Fourth and the Nation: the Chinese and the Americans as Historian Xu Guoqi Sees Them | Interviews

"If we don't use this year to think hard — above all by examining the May Fourth Movement, the Paris Peace Conference and China-U.S. relations together, in detail — we really won't work our way out of the tangle we're in now, a knot that can't be cut and won't come undone."

For Xu Guoqi, 2019 was a particular sort of year.

Personally, it was his 29th year away from mainland China — meaning he had now been away longer than he had lived there, which sharpened his sense of himself as a citizen of the world and a marginal man. Professionally, it was an anniversary year for a long list of events: 100 years since the May Fourth Movement and the Paris Peace Conference, 40 years since China and the United States established diplomatic relations, 30 years since the end of the Cold War. As a historian, he had a great deal to think about.

Xu Guoqi is Chair Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong, working on China-centered international history and shared history. He has written many books in Chinese and English, among them China and the Great War, Strangers on the Western Front, Chinese and Americans, Olympic Dreams and Asia and the Great War.

His own life reads a little like a legend, and he set it out in detail in his Chinese-language academic memoir Random Notes of a Marginal Man (《边缘人偶记》).

He was born in 1962 in Xiaqiao Village, Zongyang County, Anhui province — poor and backward at the time. When the Cultural Revolution ended and the college entrance exam was restored, he had barely studied at all; wanting to take his fate into his own hands and get out of the countryside and out of poverty, he threw himself at his books as if his life depended on it and came out the top liberal-arts scorer in Zongyang County in the 1980 exam. But he scored close to zero on the English paper and had no idea how to fill in his university preferences, so by an accident of fate he landed in the history department at Anhui Normal University.

In 1984 he was admitted to Nankai University's history department for a master's in American diplomatic history, under Professor Yang Shengmao — the point he considers "the beginning of my real education." He stayed on at Nankai to teach after finishing the degree. In 1990 he left for Harvard University to do a PhD in history, with the eminent international historian Akira Iriye as his main advisor. He received the degree in 1999, taught for ten years at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and in 2009 moved to the University of Hong Kong, where he has been ever since.

Because he works in international history and shared history, Xu calls his own scholarship "neither Chinese nor Western, neither ancient nor modern, of no recognizable kind." Both fields are new ways of doing history. International history sets out to be "interdisciplinary, cross-national, inclusive and integrative"; it wants to break completely free of the "nation-state" constraints of history as it is practiced now, stresses the part played by forces that are neither political nor tied to the nation-state, and insists on archival work across several countries and a "bottom-up" approach. Shared history takes the international-history method a step further, looking at common experiences and common pursuits, leaning on the cultural dimension and on the role of individuals and non-governmental bodies. It is Xu's own invention.

"As genuine intellectuals we have to struggle free of every constraint, whether we impose it on ourselves or it is imposed from outside — birth, religion, language and the rest. ... For a scholar like me, working in transnational history and shared history, being a citizen of the world matters especially. To a considerable degree my profession and my line of research have made me one," he wrote in Random Notes of a Marginal Man.

Besides a citizen of the world, he thinks of himself as a permanent marginal man. Being born in the poor countryside is one kind of margin; being a Chinese scholar who studies, teaches and writes in the United States is another; teaching in Hong Kong, a place neither Chinese nor Western, without speaking Cantonese, is a third. He goes further: intellectuals ought to put themselves at the margins deliberately, because only there can they hold on to "freedom of thought and independence of spirit."

Marginality is always relative, of course, and Xu's scholarly record is anything but marginal. He has won the Shigemitsu Award from the Japan Society of Boston for his contribution to research and writing on contemporary Asian international relations. All five of the English-language books he has published came out with leading Western university presses — Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. And he believes some of his work has set a marker that other scholars entering the field can hardly get around.

He says he has always been after the state Lin Yutang once described — "a foot in each of the Eastern and Western cultures, one mind writing for the whole universe" — hoping to find a footing between the two cultures and win wider recognition, though "it has been a stumbling road the whole way."

In January 2019 his English book Chinese and Americans appeared in simplified Chinese translation. It is the first volume of his "shared history trilogy." Working from the standpoint of shared history, it goes through six cases — Anson Burlingame, the Chinese Educational Mission students sent to the United States, Ge Kunhua, Frank Goodnow, John Dewey, and international sport — in order to "show how the shared historical past of Chinese and Americans has shaped each nation's pursuit of development, and to point out the great historical significance of what the two peoples have experienced together."

He agrees with what Henry Kissinger argued in On China: China and the United States need each other, because each is too big to be controlled by the other, too much itself to defer to the other, and too dependent on the other to absorb the cost of going separate ways.

"History, even shared history, does not hand people 'lessons' the way an old textbook does. But it does supply examples to draw on, examples that can encourage us or make us remember what we regret. As the Chinese and the Americans set out on a road ahead full of dangers, a history like this can be their best guide," he wrote in Chinese and Americans.

In March 2019 we interviewed Xu Guoqi by phone in Hong Kong. His Mandarin carries an Anhui accent, and he joked about it: "Hu Shi was from Anhui too. If you heard Hu Shi speak Chinese it wouldn't be much better than mine. A native accent is hard to shake."

As he sees it, Chinese and Americans aims to pick up where the first book on China-U.S. relations left off — John K. Fairbank's The United States and China, published in 1948 — and to give a full account of the history of the relationship from the standpoint of international culturalism.

Given how things have changed, publishing a Chinese translation of this 2014 book now has more bearing on the present than it once would have. "I'm optimistic about China-U.S. relations. The ones who aren't optimistic are us. At this turning point in the relationship we should be learning the lessons of history," Xu, 57, told QDaily.

Q = Qdaily

Xu = Xu Guoqi

The Valuable Advice Goodnow, a Backer of Yuan Shikai's Monarchy, Gave 100 Years Ago

Q: You discuss six cases in Chinese and Americans. Reading it, I was most interested in Goodnow and Dewey. Take Goodnow first: you lay out a great many of his views on China and the Chinese, but since historical research is about uncovering the truth, you never say what you think of those views. Would you share some of your thinking on them?

Xu: All my books have one thing in common: I let the stories do the talking. My scholarly concerns are fairly wide, but what I generally do is tell you a story, and in this book I told six. Burlingame, the Chinese Educational Mission students, Ge Kunhua, then Goodnow and Dewey, and then a broader one about sport — how sport, as an international culture, built a shared history between Chinese and Americans. The six interlock. Without Burlingame there would have been no story of the Chinese Educational Mission students afterwards, and probably no Goodnow coming to China either.

Goodnow's arrival in China traces back to a visit by a former Harvard president. In 1912 Charles Eliot, Harvard's former president, visited China and Japan on behalf of the Carnegie Endowment. He told the Chinese government the Endowment was willing to find China the best constitutional advisor available, to help it build a new state and draft a constitution. While in China, Eliot happened to meet two men: Tang Shaoyi, then premier of the Republic, and Cai Tinggan, a trusted aide of Yuan Shikai's. Both had been Chinese Educational Mission students in America, both spoke excellent English, and both held real power. To a considerable degree, these two are why Goodnow ended up as China's constitutional advisor. His job in coming to China was to help draft the constitution. And here is the interesting part: at the time China's radicals controlled the legislature, and the constitution they wanted to copy was not the American one but the French, so what they were after was a French constitutional expert. Goodnow knew nothing whatever about China and was not a French constitutional expert either. He had been teaching at Columbia University since 1882; his field was comparative law and administrative law. But through one coincidence after another, he was the one chosen.

His term in China was meant to run from 1913 to 1916. In fact he left after a year, on the pretext of taking up the presidency of Johns Hopkins University, though on paper he remained China's advisor until 1917. He did produce a draft constitution, he met Yuan Shikai, he talked with a great many people at the top of Chinese society, and he spoke especially often with Yuan's son, Yuan Keding. So he had close-range access to the summit of Chinese politics, and the reports and letters he sent back to the United States are excellent material for studying the politics and diplomacy of that period. As far as I know, though, very few scholars in China have used this archive. The questions and letters American officials sent him, meanwhile, show how Americans were thinking about China.

Goodnow had never paid the slightest attention to China before he came and knew nothing about it — but ignorance has one advantage. He had no preconceptions, he was curious, and he observed. So once he arrived and looked around, he arrived at a lot of interesting conclusions, and a lot of questions. His conclusion was that China at the time might not be ready to become a full democracy, but that whatever form of government China had, the key was the rule of law: things had to be done by legal means. Call yourself an emperor, call yourself a republic, call yourself anything you like, he said — whatever the society, the background, the system, you have to operate inside a legal framework. Without one you end up a sheet of loose sand. People had touched on this vaguely before, but very few went through his own observations and reports to work it out and look at it closely. In that chapter I quote a lot from the original documents, letting him speak through his own long letters, reports and impressions. I wanted him to speak for himself.

I tell stories rather than give my own opinions because what a historian should fear most is a preconception. What is distinctive about me is that I let readers finish the story and then work out for themselves what I am getting at. You read it, you turn it over, and it is like an olive — the taste stays with you. I am not like most historians, who enjoy playing the teacher, telling you what happened and what the conclusion is. I generally gesture at it and stop, but the substance of the story itself is perfectly clear.

So if you really want me to interpret his insights, I will tell you: he had a great many. Even now, looking back at what this American saw and felt more than 100 years ago, I think plenty of questions ought to surface in our minds. And since you have raised the question, I imagine plenty have surfaced in yours. Besides, everyone knows Yuan Shikai has become something of a sensitive word in recent years. I haven't read the Chinese edition closely, so I don't know how much has been cut. If it has been kept whole, readers will find a lot that is interesting, especially in Goodnow's own words.

Making Chinese People Long for Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science May Be Dewey's Greatest Contribution

Q: Now Dewey. You write: "Perhaps the greatest irony is that Dewey worked so hard to change China and to deepen mutual understanding between China and the United States, and in the end the person changed most was himself." Why do you think that irony is there?

Xu: Dewey's coming to China was another accident. In 1919 he was 60. His scholarship and his life had reached a turning point. He took a sabbatical in 1918 and spent a few weeks lecturing in Japan. His Chinese students — a large group of former Columbia students, Hu Shi among them, who by then could make things happen in China — heard about it and invited him to lecture in China. When Dewey first arrived he was like his Columbia colleague Goodnow: he knew nothing about China, had never been there, and China was not his field. But he came, and the timing was remarkable. He landed in Shanghai on April 30, 1919 — the day the great powers handed Shandong to Japan. Four days later the May Fourth Movement broke out. Dewey had meant to stay a few weeks; he stayed more than two years. He did not go home until the end of July 1921, by which time the Chinese Communist Party had already been founded.

So it is no exaggeration to say the trip changed him. First, outside the United States, China is the country Dewey lived in longest. Second, Dewey was not a good public speaker at all. The FBI was tailing him at the time and reported that his lectures had nothing to recommend them — yet in China his lectures swept the country. Why? Most of them were translated by his brilliant Chinese students, Hu Shi among them, and those students used Dewey's mouth to sell goods of their own. After he left China he set himself up as China's spokesman, writing back to the United States regularly with his views on the country. He turned himself into a China expert, a friend of China. During the Second World War, by then very old, he still wanted to visit again and do something for China's war of resistance, but his health kept him away.

The greatest irony is that after 1949 the name Dewey became an enemy's name. He was set on changing China, and looking at the reality — at least so far — he has not changed it. In China, Dewey was not only Hu Shi's teacher; he was also the embodiment of Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, which is an irony too. To this day we are still looking for those two. Dewey died in 1952. When he died, China and the United States were at war. There is another tragedy I mention in the book: to show his love for Dewey, Hu Shi named his younger son Hu Sidu, which means "longing for Dewey." That son, whose thinking was on the radical side, chose to stay on the mainland, and in 1957, persecuted politically, he killed himself.

There is no space to open this up properly, but the story runs much as Goodnow's does. And as you say, this year is the 100th anniversary of May Fourth — in his lectures Dewey was in fact strongly against socialism. I later found the report on conditions in China he wrote for the U.S. government, in which he judged that socialism could not succeed, and opposed it. History turned out otherwise. The things he gave himself to — saving the nation through education, Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science — are still, today, something we catch a glimpse of and never see whole.

Q: You write: "Perhaps the time has come, for Chinese and Americans alike, to rethink the part Dewey played as a spokesman for both sides, and to learn from his experience." This year happens to be the 100th anniversary of his visit to China. What lessons do you think we can take from it?

Xu: I think Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science are still needed. A hundred years have gone by and neither of them seems ever to have formally turned up in China. Making Chinese people long for the two of them may be Dewey's greatest contribution. And don't forget: Dewey was in his sixties while he was in China, and he covered 18 provinces and gave close to 500 talks, large and small. Did he influence the Chinese, did the Chinese influence him, or was it both ways? On this point — speaking calmly about these three Americans, Burlingame, Goodnow and Dewey — they wanted to do something to help China. The latter two were scholars, with a critical turn of mind, but they wanted to help China too.

So Dewey in China played three roles: envoy, learner, educator. Whether you are Chinese or foreign, those three things really matter. He learned humbly, observed, asked for guidance, and then shared what he had in earnest, without forcing you to accept that he was right. On that score I think our scholars fall badly short. Why do we have no real think tank today? Do we have think-tank people the way American scholars do? You can put it down to ideology or political system, of course, but really — are our own scholars of America willing to play those three roles?

Nationalism, of All Things, Has Become May Fourth's Supposedly Important Legacy Today

Q: We keep coming back to May Fourth. You once made a well-known argument — "Without the First World War, how could there have been May Fourth?" — holding that May Fourth has always been politicized in China and needs to be examined as history. But that interview with West Lake magazine was done in 2009, the 90th anniversary. Ten years on, do you have any new thoughts about May Fourth?

Xu: Back then I felt that people studying May Fourth rarely brought the First World War into it, still less the Chinese laborers of that war. But history is history; it is an objective fact. Without the war, how could there have been May Fourth? The outbreak of May Fourth is directly tied to it. It was China's so-called defeat at the postwar peace conference, and the famous telegram Liang Qichao sent home reporting the result, that produced May Fourth. May Fourth is of a piece with what China had been demanding through the war.

To talk about May Fourth you have to talk about the First Sino-Japanese War. After it, conservatives and radicals alike agreed the Qing dynasty was beyond saving and China had to change. In 1912 China became what is called Asia's first republic, holding up two models: the United States and France. From that war on, both the court and the public were transformed. It is also because of that war that China acquired what you would call real media for the first time.

So there is a straight line from the Sino-Japanese War to May Fourth. Once the First World War broke out, the Chinese believed their chance had finally come, that the imperialist rope around China's neck might come off. The imperialist camp was fighting itself — the war was in theory a civil war inside Western civilization, Western countries fighting Western countries, before it became a world war. So China believed the old international order was collapsing and a new one had not yet formed, and that China could use the opening: not only to revive the nation but to become an equal among nations. China sent 140,000 laborers to the war, sent its finest people to the Paris Peace Conference, and in the end the Chinese believed China had failed at Paris — hence May Fourth.

So without the First World War, without the international setting, without the lens of shared history or international history, you cannot explain May Fourth. In the past, for ideological reasons, we didn't discuss the war. In China it used to be regarded as a bad war, a dogfight among imperialists, and the Beiyang government as a bad government, a traitorous one, so there was no discussing May Fourth calmly. And now that Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science can't be discussed either, it is harder still.

This year is the 100th anniversary of May Fourth, and unfortunately we still can't reflect on it properly. There is far too much here that needs examining and thinking through, things that ought to push us to change something.

Q: Could you say more about what specifically needs examining and thinking through? I have seen you say, for instance, that May Fourth was the starting point of radical politics in modern China — that after it, Chinese politics centralized, ideology centralized, academic thought centralized, and political behavior turned violent.

Xu: May Fourth later became a synonym in China for radicalism, and radicalism is no good for any country or any society, because it means you aren't mature yet. Take Goodnow, whom I mentioned: he too thought China's education was undeveloped at the time and Chinese society had no accumulated experience of democracy, so it could not become a genuine republican democracy overnight. When you go radical, the medicine doesn't match the disease. In the end, because of that radicalism, Vietnam, China, Russia and North Korea all became socialist states after the First World War, while other countries went differently — Japan became one of the so-called Five Great Powers after that war, was crushed in the Second, and changed again. It isn't only China; it is the same everywhere. Rush ahead, go radical, and you get problems. If radicalism is to be treated as May Fourth's legacy, I think it deserves reflection. We paid dearly for it later, the Cultural Revolution included — all a product of that radicalism.

What else did May Fourth leave behind that was big? Mass education for ordinary people. Today we have turned that into wiping out poverty: the government wants to eliminate poverty. People wanted to eliminate poverty back then too, but how did someone like Yan Yangchu go about it? He built mass education. Education wasn't only teaching you to read and write; it taught you how to be a citizen. Do we do anything like that today? And that was 100 years ago. It comes out of Dewey's experimentalism, his new approach to education.

How many people today realize how great Yan Yangchu was? Working with the Chinese laborers of the First World War, he decided what the Chinese lacked was education, and after he came home he gave his whole life to mass education and the rural reconstruction movement. The rural education movements of Liang Shuming and Tao Xingzhi follow straight on from his. Mass education is May Fourth's finest legacy, and we could absolutely draw on it today. I come from the countryside, and I find more and more that today's villages are not beautiful countryside but hollowed-out shells, left with the old, the children and the women. On top of that, people's hearts are not what they were, morals have slipped, and some of the old virtues are gone. Should we go back to May Fourth's mass education and rural movement? How should it be run?

There is far too much to say about all this. I'm not an expert in this area myself, but dig into it and there is a great deal worth examining. The history I do is probably different from other people's — I don't much like talking about that so-called grand politics. Nationalism has become May Fourth's supposedly important legacy today, and nationalism, handled badly, is in fact a bad thing.

Difference and Conflict Are Only One Side — "Shared History" Deserves More Attention

Q: The real-world concern behind Chinese and Americans is your hope of offering a key to a better shared future for China and the United States. But as your advisor Akira Iriye notes in the preface, international relations have two dimensions: one in which differences and potential conflict exist, and another of boundless global interaction. So I have seen people ask whether it is too idealistic of you to pin the future of China-U.S. relations on culture.

Xu: Not too idealistic, surely? Putting forward "shared history" doesn't mean difference, conflict and confrontation don't exist. They do. As a historian I insist that history is an objective fact; nobody has the right or the ability to change it. So the historian's largest task is to restore history truthfully and objectively, to recover historical memory, and to draw experience and lessons from it.

In the past we put too much weight on conflict and confrontation, too much on diplomacy, politics and the military, and very few people discussed cultural exchange from the angle of shared history. So this isn't idealism, and I'm not saying this is the future. But if difference, conflict and confrontation are one side, history has another side too: cooperation, and what is held in common. The future is undetermined; it depends on how we handle the present. Learning from history may well be the best option we have.

What I mainly want to stress is history's other side, the shared history, the side of cultural exchange. Today the whole world is watching the trade friction between China and the United States, but how many people realize that trade between the two is a phenomenon of only the last 30 years or so? From the founding of the United States all the way to 1978, trade and economic ties were never an important part of the relationship; China's share of American international trade never went above 2%. Economic and trade problems between the two countries only became problems in the last few years.

We are tangled in trade friction now. That so-called conflict and confrontation is a matter of the past few years; for most of the time before that, both sides sought common ground and set differences aside. Take the Cultural Revolution period: Nixon came, Mao Zedong and his colleagues did ping-pong diplomacy with the Americans, and China and the United States reconciled across the board. The two countries came together then because they had a common enemy, the Soviet Union. The same goes for Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up, which is exactly why he made a point of visiting the United States.

So I am stressing that the history of the relationship has another layer. If we fully understand the shared chapters in the history of Chinese and Americans, we can cooperate going forward and draw broadly on history for the future of the relationship — but that doesn't mean difference and confrontation are absent. If we fail to take the lessons, or take the wrong ones, things could get more dangerous. People often say Professor Iriye is too idealistic; nobody ever says it about me, because I have written three books about war. I have also written a book about sport. Do you know how Orwell defined sport? He called it "war minus the shooting" — so it is a kind of war too.

Q: There is no shortage of talk now about a "new Cold War." Do you think China and the United States are heading into one?

Xu: The "new Cold War" is a false question. "New Cold War" implies an old one, and the old one was the United States and the Soviet Union. That relationship was a zero-sum game, one or the other, which is why the Americans threw everything into bringing the Soviets down. China and the United States today are not a zero-sum game. Here is an example: if China's economy collapsed, Americans would suffer with it. If every Chinese student in America went home, a great many American universities would essentially have to shut. During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union never had a relationship this close, never had this much cooperation. And on many issues the two countries need to cooperate — the Korean peninsula, the environment, fighting terrorism, science and technology.

Each country has the other inside it. In Hillary Clinton's phrase, we are in the same boat. So I am optimistic about the relationship; the ones who aren't optimistic are us. If it really did take you as an ideological enemy and turn you into an adversary, going back to the days of bringing the Soviet Union down — implacable, a fight to the death — that would be irreversible, a road with no way back, and China would be in trouble.

I think this is the best opportunity history has given China, and we need to take it. From 1979 until now China has been living off a peace dividend. If China now doesn't want peace, doesn't want to keep its head, that is when the trouble starts. We get a bit swollen-headed sometimes, thinking our economy has grown large and our country strong. But go and look in the countryside, look at our healthcare, look at how much is unfair — the gap is enormous, and there is a great deal left to do. Why go to the trouble of making another enemy? Besides, the United States has never really wanted to treat you as one; leave it no choice and it will fight you with its back to the wall.

So, first, I don't endorse the "new Cold War" talk; it is a false proposition. Second, whether we actually enter one — Chinese people themselves have a large say in that; it comes down to our own choices. Choose one way and the outcome is hard to predict. The Americans, over all these years, really haven't changed much.

Is China a Civilization or a Nation-State?

Q: You just mentioned that China also faces a serious crisis of identity. In the book you write: "When the Chinese discarded Confucian culture in the early 20th century and turned toward Western civilization, they were forced into another kind of doubt: is China a civilization, or a nation-state? Is China a party-state, or the ruins of a civilization? ... Today's China has inherited the legacy of the past, and yet wants to piece together a new national identity on the basis of an imported system it has not digested." These are enormously important questions, and the subject of your next book. Could you say more?

Xu: Everything we have talked about so far has circled around China's national identity. A hundred years ago we were looking for Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. After the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, the Chinese had to move from being a civilization to being a nation-state. Before 1895 the Chinese often thought of themselves as a civilization, not a nation-state. After 1895 we decided that would no longer do — we had to join the West, become a republic, a nation-state. Back then the Kuomintang ran a one-party state, and it is a one-party state now too, not a nation-state, and today in particular it is stated plainly that the Party leads everything. So when we talk today about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, what exactly are we rejuvenating? Confucian civilization? Or shutting the country off from the world? Do we have an answer now? Where exactly do we go from here?

There are clearly a lot of problems the way things stand, so things need to change. How? We are facing a crisis of national identity more severe than America's. Before he died, Huntington wrote Who Are We? Chinese people have even more reason to ask: what is China? What is a Chinese person? It is a huge question. I am writing a book now called Idea of China, which works through the very concept of "China" from an overseas vantage point, from the standpoint of shared history.

Q: Would you share the core argument?

Xu: The core argument is simple. China as an idea is singular — one concept, and one made jointly by Chinese and foreigners. Before 1912 China had no symbol of a nation-state at all, no formal name for the state. China became China's official name in 1912, as the Republic of China. Before that, would you say you were Chinese, or that you were from Anhui? There was the Great Ming, the Great Qing; only in the modern era, once Westerners forced the door open, did you have to enter international society. So I am coming at this from the angle of shared history. This is the last book of my "shared history trilogy," and it is about where the concept came from. It involves Westerners and Chinese both, which is exactly what makes it so hard to write.

Q: In the preface to the new edition of China and the Great War you mention that scholars internationally will meet in Paris this June to discuss the meaning and legacy of the Paris Peace Conference on its 100th anniversary, and that you have been invited onto the conference's international organizing committee. What are the important discussions going on internationally about the Paris Peace Conference? And how do you see its meaning and its legacy?

Xu: The legacy of the Paris Peace Conference is bound up with the legacy of May Fourth, and with many legacies in China's relations with the outside world. I wrote Asia and the Great War: the Paris Peace Conference remade the whole of Asia. Research on this is extremely thin, not only for China but for Asian countries generally. I sit on what is called the scientific committee, which decides whose papers are accepted and who gets to attend. Sadly there are very few Asian scholars, and as far as I know no scholar genuinely based in mainland China was selected. I'm not going either, because I am about to shut myself away to write Idea of China.

For China, the Paris Peace Conference is bound together with May Fourth. In fact Chinese people have long held a mistaken belief that China failed at Paris. I have always held that China did not fail there at all — it succeeded. For the first time, the Chinese used the highest international stage to say out loud what they wanted, dreamed of and believed. Gu Weijun — V.K. Wellington Koo — was plenipotentiary representative and Liang Qichao a civilian representative; many people took part, students abroad and labor delegations among them. On the diplomatic stage of the day, no one on the Japanese side could match Gu Weijun. The concepts he used were Western ones — the whole world, a community of humankind — freedom, equality and justice were all on his lips, while what the Japanese pursued was secret diplomacy and the so-called principle that might makes right. China defeated Japan morally, which put Japan in the moral dock at the conference and left it no choice, at the Washington Conference of 1921, but to give Shandong back.

On this 100th anniversary of the Paris Peace Conference we ought to reflect from every angle on the century of legacy it left. If we don't use this year to think hard — above all by examining the May Fourth Movement, the Paris Peace Conference and China-U.S. relations together, in detail — we really won't work our way out of the tangle we're in now, a knot that can't be cut and won't come undone.

The cover image shows a baseball team made up of Chinese students studying in the United States during the Qing dynasty, Hartford, 1878 (University of Washington Libraries); the banner image shows Anson Burlingame, the first envoy China sent out into the world, with his Chinese aides Zhigang and Sun Jiagu (Harvard University Library Special Collections).