Gordon H. Chang’s newest book, War, Race, and Culture: Journeys in Trans-Pacific and Asian American Histories (Stanford University Press, 2025), is a summation of the best of his past writings—articles and essays about the political and cultural relationship between the U.S. and Asia from a historical perspective. He is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities and a professor of American History at Stanford University, where he also received a PhD in History. He has been publishing extensively since the 1990s and his writings have focused on a subject that has been largely missing in the modern American cultural and scholarly landscape—the complex history between Asia and United States in terms of politics, culture, and diplomacy. Not only is Chang’s writing educational, he writes from a consciousness-raising perspective; he gives readers a more holistic understanding of how Americans’ connection to Asian culture was largely shaped by American political leaders of the past and how those same perceptions are still subtly operating to this day. Although Chang frames War, Race, and Culture as an intellectual memoir (which it surely is), it is also a stand-alone historical text that describes U.S.-Asian relations for the last 150 years. What makes this book even more significant is Chang’s plain-spoken, straight-forward writing style, which is fundamental in helping readers unpack the complex political relationship between the two cultures, and yet it also maintains its scholarly edge, which is a rare feat to accomplish in academic writing. Any reader who wants to learn more about how Asian culture developed in the United States from a balanced, historical perspective will get exactly that from War, Race, Culture, but in unexpected ways. Another strength of Chang’s book is that he highlights historical events regarding U.S.-Asian relations that have previously been ignored, skewed, or glossed over while also reframing these events with a more enlightened perspective. This review will seek to focus on the previously ignored topics Chang brings to light as a way to demonstrate the historical, political, and cultural importance of War, Race, and Culture.

In order to give readers more context for Chang’s writing, it will be necessary to talk a little bit about his background. Chang was born in Hong Kong in 1948 and grew up in San Francisco. His father was a well-known Chinese artist named Zhang Shuqi who helped to promote Chinese-American relations prior to World War II and who Chang writes about in “Chinese Painting Comes to America: Zhang Shuqi and the Diplomacy of Art.” The Vietnam War sparked Chang’s interest in American politics and he received a scholarship to attend Princeton (he was one of the few Asians to be admitted; women were still refused acceptance) where he read George F. Kennan’s memoir, a prominent Russian scholar and diplomat whose Memoirs 1925-1950 won the Pulitzer Prize. Kennan’s concept of Containment influenced United States’ foreign policy strategies toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War and resulted in the Marshall Plan (which gave $13 billion to a large chunk of countries in Europe as a way to discourage communism) and NATO. Chang thought he might become a diplomatic spokesperson for Chinese culture during a time when there were essentially no diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China, but as the war in Vietnam escalated, Chang’s politics became more radical as he realized “Washington was itself the world’s problem and the source of unjust wars.” He became a political activist who helped organize protests and started an independent newspaper called Prism. He also began to study Chinese and East Asian history, language, and culture and earned a degree in History and East Asian Studies. Although Chang initially began doctoral studies at Stanford, he dropped out because he felt that the academic life was not conducive to radicalism and political activism. He spent most of the 1970s pursuing activism, writing, and teaching in community colleges, but by 1980, the political and social climate had become less receptive to bringing about revolutionary changes in tangible ways, so Chang returned to Stanford, where he studied American History. His dissertation became his first book Friends and Enemies: the United States, China, and the Soviet Union: 1948-1972 (1990) and he received his PhD at the age of forty.

When Chang was offered a teaching position in the History Department at Stanford, there was resistance from right-wing students who attacked him in the university’s conservative newspaper for being radical. Even though Chang took the job and was able to move beyond the right-wing criticisms, he encountered a bigger problem—ignorance and racism in academia. As Chang explains

I found that some Standford faculty did not know how to think about, let alone fully respect, the different kinds of work I pursued. My work in diplomatic history was respected and helped legitimate me as a scholar, but Asian American Studies as a field of study was novel. Many at Stanford were skeptical at best. A senior Americanist ignorantly declared, I later heard, that Asian Americans had ‘no history.’ By that he meant that because there were no real archives and documentation to study, there could be no legitimate history, at least that a research institution such as Stanford could acknowledge. (He was grievously wrong about the lack of documentation.)

But it didn’t end there. After several years of working at Stanford, he was denied tenure. Although Chang received support from the history department, it was the higher-up administrators that did not recognize the importance of his work. He had to settle for “associate professor, untenured,” for the next few years. As Chang states, “I had to produce more work to prove my worthiness before I could advance.” He went through tenure review three times before he was finally promoted. However, what makes Chang unique in academia is the fact that he spent many years living outside of it, and being engaged with humanity in ways that makes his writing not just more direct and personable, but enriched with life experience. His hands-on activism and interaction with other activists from all walks of life have given him the ability to write from a more humanist rather than a purely intellectual perspective. In addition to that, Chang’s activist lifestyle was anything but comfortable and privileged: “Life itself was also challenging, having to live on modest means, make many personal sacrifices, and work in the knowledge that state authorities were closely monitoring my activities. At times it was perilous, as when I was knifed in the back over politics by rightest New York Chinatown street gang members and sent to the hospital.” What also makes Chang’s work significant is his unwavering faith in his radicalism. He did not succumb to cynicism or reject his political beliefs in favor of a more conventional framing of his work; his ability to overcome the challenges that come with being a radical thinker and to operate from that place as a scholar ultimately makes his work more interesting and engaging than much of the scholarly work that has been and is continuing to be done by liberal or so-called progressive academics. It’s important for readers to know that it’s not just the subject matter (the history of the relationship between Asia and the United States), but Chang’s radical perspective which helps to highlight this subject in truly enlightening ways. Chang’s radical political positioning must be accounted for while reading his work because it is that exact positioning which has yielded incredible insight about a relationship between two cultures that has been traditionally viewed on a surface level, and to be honest, with a bit of dismissiveness. Prior to widespread racism and paranoia toward Asians (Chinese and Japanese cultures in particular), Asian culture had a massive impact on American culture in the 1800s and this is not understood among the general public because of the decades of hostility and ignorance toward all Asian cultures since that time. Because of Chang’s radical positioning, his concern, especially in the writings chosen for this book, is rooted in investigating the systemic reasons that influenced how past events unfolded, and how those same systemic forces continue to perpetuate a false understanding of the history of U.S.-Asian relations. Chang summarizes this succinctly toward the end of the introduction:

The extreme, palpable fear of China seen in the height of the Cold War never disappeared and indeed has erupted again in American political discourse and culture. The complex position of the Asian immigrant in American life, welcomed as well as reviled, continues today. Asians almost overnight went from being celebrated as a putative ‘model minority’ to becoming a popular public target for hate and violence. They never escaped the burden of being a perpetual foreigner in American life, despite their visible presence in the worlds of business, academia, professions, and even sports. Being eternally alien is part and parcel of the inheritance of American empire in Asia, where its people have been mortal, deadly enemies as well as uneasy allies in American expansionism. Consequential wars, ‘incursions,’ and threats of brutal conflict characterize the relationship from its earliest times. Asians in America inherit the racialized imperial experience and can become what I call ‘transposed enemies’: the threat from without becomes the threat from within in the form of an ‘enemy race,’ an inassimilable migrant deluge, or an invasive medical peril within the borders of the country. The notion of the ‘transposed enemy’ points to the experiential origin, and historical source, of being seen as eternally foreign, the social stigma which Asian Americans bear.

The first essay to be discussed is “Eisenhower and Mao’s China,” an essay that was written in the 1990s, and was requested by Stephen E. Ambrose, the leading scholar on Dwight D. Eisenhower, primarily because he was impressed with how Chang had written about President Kennedy in a previous essay. The first essay of this book, “JFK, China, and the Bomb,” was first published in Journal of American History in 1988 (Chang’s first academic publication); Chang discusses information he received from a former high-ranking official in Kennedy’s administration that “a joint American-Soviet preemptive nuclear attack [on China] was actually discussed. One idea was to have a Soviet and an American bomber fly over the facilities at Lop Nor, with each dropping a bomb, only one of which would be set to go off.” Although this former official asserted “that the idea did not get into the planning stage,” Chang notes that American Journalist Joseph Alsop reported in the 1970s “that the Kremlin had been well aware of Kennedy’s interest in collaborating in an attack to destroy China’s nuclear program.” This essay, although eye-opening, understandably caused controversy because it challenged the standard narrative that Kennedy was primarily concerned with achieving peace on a global level. As Chang clearly states at the end of the essay

Kennedy’s foreign policy was touted as a ‘strategy of peace,’ a phrase from the title of his 1960 campaign book. Kennedy’s boosters, too, promoted the Limited Test Ban Treaty as a breakthrough in the struggle to make the world stable and to end the threat of war. But behind the rhetoric, Kennedy and his associates sought to aggravate tensions between the Soviet Union and China to the point that the Soviets might possibly join with the United States even in military action against China, an action that certainly would have thrown Asia into greater turmoil than any other single act since the Korean War.

As groundbreaking as that essay was, Chang’s reframing of Eisenhower is even more groundbreaking precisely because he does something that has never actually been done before: he compares Dwight D. Eisenhower to Mao Zedong. This reframing of two oppositional political leaders does something very fascinating: it places them at the same level and reconceptualizes them as two sides of the same coin. As Chang notes, “Kennedy’s and Eisenhower’s [Cold War] fears should be appreciated to understand their special dread of Asian communism and the extreme measures they were willing to consider to counter their perceived threat.” He also points out that those fears directly resulted in the United States involvement in Vietnam. To establish more historical context, it is important to clarifiy Eisenhower’s foreign policy sentiments toward China during his presidency:

During the 1950s the Eisenhower administration repeatedly discussed the possibility of general war with China and the use of nuclear weapons. If he had been asked at his last press conference what was America’s number-one enemy, the answer would likely have been, ‘Communist China’….In his first months in office, Eisenhower ordered that word be passed to Beijing that he was considering the use of atomic weapons if an armistice was not soon reached in Korea. Then in 1954, after the ceasefire, his principal national security advisers repeatedly recommended—five times in one year—that he militarily intervene again in Asia, even with the use of nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland or along its periphery.

Although Eisenhower was not interested in a physical war with China, his political rhetoric suggests that he and his administration were not above making good on their threats with actual military action. However, Eisenhower’s attitude toward nuclear weapons is incredibly telling: “During the 1955 crisis [a Communist attack on an offshore location held by Chinese Nationalist Forces], Eisenhower announced in public his opinion that he did not see why atomic weapons couldn’t be used like a bullet or any other munition. It was also during this crisis that the administration gained from Congress what became known as the Formosa Resolution, which gave the president a virtual blank check for the use of American military forces in the defense of Taiwan and the related Pescadores Islands.” The U.S. government at this time was not just flirting with the idea of nuclear warfare; the President’s own words paired with Congress’s legislative action show that they were preparing to engage in nuclear conflict. From a retrospective perspective, one has to wonder how justified these aggressive words and actions were. As Chang states

Historians in the 1960s and 1970s….interpreted the hostility based upon an emotional and myopic anti-communism. If it had not been for Eisenhower’s hard line toward China, it was charged, the United States might have been able to reduce tensions in Asia, which could have led to an earlier exploitation of the Sino-Soviet tensions, an interest in which helped lead Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972, and possibly an avoidance of the Vietnam tragedy—America’s entrance into the quagmire was to stop alleged Chinese Communist expansionism in Southeast Asia.

Going further, Chang mentions Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s assertion that the decisions made during the Eisenhower administration made it incredibly difficult for the JFK administration to shift the hostile political situation with China even if they wanted to. Schlesinger was a historian who was also very close with Kennedy. Eisenhower’s hostility toward China was so deep that, according to Schlesinger, he told Kennedy once he became president that “he would return to public life if Communist China threatened to enter the United Nations.” What is also evident is that Eisenhower wasn’t really in solidarity with Chinese Nationalists either, which suggests that Eisenhower’s dislike of China wasn’t primarily political in nature; obviously it went much deeper. If he was truly and passionately against communism, it would seem that he would’ve been more supportive of Chinese Nationalists, but that was not the case, interestingly enough. And even though Chang explains that Eisenhower played around with the idea of introducing limited trade options as a countermove against communist powers and even recognized that a wedge could perhaps be inserted between the Chinese and Soviets, these strategies were not acted upon. Eisenhower’s distrust and dislike of the Chinese (communist or non-communist) comes from an overall inherent racist attitude toward Asians that became solidified early on in his military career. In the 1930s, prior to World War II, Eisenhower was stationed in the Philippines. Although already in his forties, his perspective was shaped by the general racism toward Filipinos at the time. But it is also important to note that Eisenhower’s racism was quite typical. Chang reminds readers  “Eisenhower’s suspicion [toward Asia] was itself rooted in an American attitude of superiority that looked down upon nonwhite peoples of the world. Eisenhower was at best insensitive to the condition of blacks in America, and was known to engage in racial jokes as president. He believed in a racial hierarchy of humankind. On a number of occasions he expressed his belief that Orientals were devious and thought in ways profoundly different than Westerners.” For a brief time, Eisenhower was deputy chief for the Pacific and Far East, and he also visited China multiple times before and after World War II, and yet, his first-hand experience of China was still largely influenced by racism:

During these trips it seems that Eisenhower developed impressions that he kept for life. For one, he was struck by China’s huge population. He, like many of his generation, saw China’s masses as an ominous and threatening horde, a yellow peril. ‘China is a great mass of human beings, hundreds of millions,’ he observed as president. ‘Those of you who have traveled through China I know have been as astonished as I have that so many people could live in such a space.’ As he later stated in his memoirs, China’s leaders were ‘absolutely indifferent to the prospect of losing millions of people’ and that the Chinese held ‘peculiar attitudes’ toward human life. With such beliefs about the Chinese, it is no wonder that Eisenhower expected the worst from Asia throughout his life.

It is also worth noting Eisenhower’s unexamined hypocrisy when he mentions that Chinese leaders saw their people as expendable while at the same time his own administration had no qualms about regularly threatening the use of nuclear weapons in a possible war against China. Chang is right; it’s not a surprise that U.S.-China relations during Eisenhower’s presidency were nothing less than hostile when one considers the president’s racism toward China and Asian culture in general.

This is why Chang’s comparisons to Eisenhower and Mao is so pertinent. The Eisenhower administration’s threatening official policies toward China and Eisenhower’s own racism are usually sidelined in favor of highlighting the Red Scare—the real “threat” of the spread of communism during the 1950s. It also creates a black and white scenario of good versus evil (Western capitalist democracy vs. Soviet/Chinese communism). And because Eisenhower falls on the “good” side, and the Communist threat was seen as overwhelmingly destructive to all of humanity, his racism and white male superiority typically gets passed over because he was seen as fighting a “true evil.” Chang’s comparisons of Eisenhower and Mao place them a little bit closer to each other on the human scale, and challenges the standard perspective that they were polar opposites in every way. And Chang makes an excellent point when he says that “Historians often compare leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler, but as far as I know there has been no effort to compare Ike and Chairman Mao….The popular image of Ike is that he was rather bland, colorless, a company man, unlike Mao, who is thought of as a charismatic revolutionary and messianic tyrant. But a comparison of the two helps highlight the qualities of the two leaders and may even help explain why the two countries under their respective leadership became such bitter enemies.” Chang begins with the early lives of Eisenhower and Mao:

Ike was born in 1890 and died in 1969; Mao was born in 1893 and died in 1976. They were both products of small communities in their countries’ heartlands: Kansas and its wheat, Mao’s Hunan Province and its rice. Their families were linked to the land, frugal, and somewhat better off than many others in their communities. They were not poor but neither were they prosperous. Their fathers were authoritarian, distant, prone to beating their children, and apparently unliked. Their mothers were kindly and, in the recollections of the two men, the greater parental influence on them. As young men, both were preoccupied with their physical strength, exercised assiduously, and associated early with the military. Mao was a private in a revolutionary army at the age of eighteen, two years younger than Ike when he entered West Point. Both men then devoted the rest of their lives to what one might loosely call public life: For Ike, it was the U.S. Army, supreme command of European Allied Forces in World War II, and then the presidency of the United States in 1952; for Mao it was the Communist party, the Chinese revolution, which was mainly a military struggle, and then the chairman of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Both men coincidentally also had brief but important experiences with university life, Ike with Columbia and Mao with Peking University.

Chang talks about Eisenhower’s and Mao’s military experience as being crucial to their abilities to lead:

Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and all other modern-day presidents of the United States had no comparable military experience to Eisenhower’s; nor did Churchill, Stalin, or Khrushchev have either Ike’s or Mao’s field, organizational, and command experience leading millions of soldiers….Neither man was mystified by the military and what military force could and could not do. Both clearly understood that military considerations were always subordinate to political ends. One of Mao’s best-known aphorisms was that the party always commands the gun. Throughout his career, he frequently had to oppose what was called the purely military point of view in the revolution. Ike too was never intimidated by his military advisers during his administration. He felt no hesitation in rejecting their advice—a man with less military experience might not have been as confident in his own opinion and decisions to buck the military professional. Both men refused to accept the recommendations of their military commanders during confrontations in the Taiwan Strait, for example, and kept decisions about the operations in their own hands….All the same, both men understood the efficacy of the use of military means to achieve specific national security purposes and were not hesitant to use military force or the threat of military force to achieve specific ends. One thinks of Ike’s threatened use of the atomic bomb to end the Korean War, his deployment of the Marines in Lebanon, and the CIA in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere. Of the evidence we now have, we also know that Mao employed military force in the Taiwan Strait less to achieve traditional military ends, such as gaining territory, then as a political instrument to probe the state of Nationalist China-U.S. relations.

Chang talks about Eisenhower’s and Mao’s use of public opinion and their psychological approach to politics:

Ike and Mao, as strategists, were also both keenly sensitive to popular opinion and actively sought in their own ways to cultivate domestic support and influence world public opinion. In the 1950s, both generally remained widely popular at home, which permitted them to pursue foreign policy aims with fewer constraints than other leaders would later face in China and in the United States. But Ike and Mao understood they were international leaders, who by their spoken word and gesture could influence millions around the world. Mao had messianic claims, and Eisenhower too was acutely sensitive about his public image, his legacy to history, and his responsibility as leader of the ‘free world.’

Closely linked to this sensitivity to public opinion was their attention to what one might call the psychological aspect of international politics. Mao was a master in conducting psychological-political warfare during the revolution—his writings are full of essays concerning propaganda, ideological, and cultural work. Mao’s concern for these areas came from his conviction that the human element was central in the conduct of war, both in leading one’s own forces and in defeating the enemy. On his part, Ike was the first American president to make psychological warfare a regular and high-level instrument of foreign policy.

And perhaps because of this sensitivity to the psychology of politics, both Mao and Ike favored cultivating deliberate ambiguity in their military and political campaigns, especially in the several crises between the United States and China in the 1950s. It has never been completely clear why and for what purposes Beijing initiated the two offshore island crises in 1955 and 1958. On the other hand, Eisenhower also tried to maintain a degree of ambiguity in America’s commitment to Chiang Kai-shek. Ike maintained this flexibility in opposition to the almost universal opinion of his military and political advisers, who wanted the president to define explicitly what the United States would or would not do given certain conditions.

Chang also talks about Eisenhower’s and Mao’s philosophical approach to war and peace:

The Eisenhower administration is known for practicing what was called ‘brinkmanship,’ taking the country to the verge of war to achieve political ends and, paradoxically, it seemed, to maintain peace….Mao’s statement about imperialism and the atom bomb being ‘paper tigers’ is similarly inspired. By paper tigers, Mao meant that war and the atom bomb were real threats and could kill people; one had to take them seriously tactically. But Mao encouraged his followers to despise war and the enemy strategically, firmly believing such an attitude was necessary to deflate the arrogance of the enemy and deter his threat. If, on the other hand, one is intimidated by the enemy and the threat of war, one is already defeated. The conduct of the two offshore island crises, which brought the two countries to the edge of war but were both firmly controlled by their leaders, is evidence of this philosophy. In a sense, their strategic sensibilities were mirror images of one another.

However, as Chang also reminds readers, ultimately, Eisenhower and Mao are fundamentally different because they operated from oppositional positions (Eisenhower from a Western perspective; Mao from an Asian perspective). Eisenhower “emphasized the massing of immense firepower and efficacy of weaponry, nuclear or conventional, in war…he tended to make firm distinctions between war and peace, offensive and defensive, and enemy and friendly positions. He tended to see the holding and winning of territory as decisive and a zero-sum game.” Mao “emphasized man over weapons, deception, and fluidity. Chinese strategists historically blurred the distinctions between war and peace, offense and defense, and interior and exterior lines. Territory was less important than time and psychological advantage.” And Chang identifies one other interesting similarity: Eisenhower and Mao both had a profound effect on Richard Nixon. These comparisons are good to think about because they successfully pull back the layers of standard political conditioning that emphasizes polarity rather than commonality when it comes Eisenhower and Mao and opens up new ways of looking at both men as political and military leaders. It also shows, interestingly enough, how their commonalities were ultimately influenced by their cultural-geographical positions which took them in completely different directions and eventually led them to become opponents:

…I also wonder if the differences between the two men derive from the fundamentally different strategic positions of the United States and China. Eisenhower’s responsibility in World War II was to restore the predominance of the United States and then as president to maintain its global hegemony. Mao was a revolutionary his entire life; he devoted the first half of his life to seizing power and then to constructing a radical socialist society and elevating China in the family of nations. Eisenhower was preeminently a leader of the status quo; Mao was never content with the status quo, even after the revolution.…One wonders to what extent these parallels contributed to the animosity in U.S.-China relations in the 1950s. The legacy of Korea, the foment in Indochina, the continuing Chinese civil war in the Taiwan Strait were fundamental sources of conflict, certainly. But Mao and Ike were also strangely contrasting and certainly capable adversaries. Their strategic approaches, similar as they may have been in odd ways, may have unwittingly heightened tensions and frustrations on both sides. And yet, with good fortune, after Korea, neither Dwight Eisenhower or Mao Tse-tung again committed his armed forces to wage war against those of his formidable opponent.

The next essay to be discussed is titled “Whose ‘Barbarism’? Whose ‘Treachery?’ Race and Civilization in the Unknown United States-Korea War of 1871” and interestingly enough, Chang himself did not even know about this war until he discovered documentation about it in the Library of Congress. To give a brief summary, the United States attempted to establish a trade relationship with Korea in the late nineteenth century that backfired on them and ultimately led to a military battle wherein a large number of Korean soldiers were essentially massacred (a modestly estimated 250 soldiers plus a high-ranking Korean military commander). However, U.S. military leaders portrayed the Koreans as the initiators of the battle, and this perspective was validated by the U.S. government. Hopefully it will become obvious to readers that the United States was the actual agitator and its strategies for establishing a commercial relationship with Korea were overly aggressive and condescending. As Chang points out, this essay was published in a timely moment, as the cover piece to Journal of American History in 2003, just as the Second Gulf War had begun: “The timing was a coincidence, as far as I know, but the connections were not lost on me. In both cases, important explanations for the wars focused on the economic dimensions which played upon American leadership: in 1871, the commercial possibilities for the country and, in 2003, oil. But in my view, ideological views must be appreciated to help explain the expedition leaders’ decisions, motivations, and public support.”

It is important to begin by making it clear that both sides view this war very differently. From an objective perspective, although the United States failed to achieve its goals of establishing trade relations and democracy in Korea, they also quite easily managed to sail their fleet right into the interior of Korea and massacre a large number of Korean soldiers in a short amount of time using the superior military weapons of the time. And because the United States was not interested in war or occupation, they did retreat, but the conflict exposed a major weakness on the Korean side—isolation from the rest of the world meant that they were not one of the major world powers, and because they were working with antiquated military technology, they would not have been able to hold the United States back during a full-on attack. However, Chang’s essay about the 1871 U.S.-Korean War is not only significant because he brings to light a war that had fallen into utter obscurity, he also provides a balanced perspective on it. As Chang explains, “When the incident has made its way into recent American historical literature, the account typically is misleading or incomplete, fundamentally wrong factually, or blatantly chauvinistic and one-sided. Only a handful of studies, most of them from the early twentieth century or obscure, offer more informed and thoughtful perspectives on the events.” He also explains that the Korean War (1950-1953) is the war that dominates popular American consciousness partially because it’s considered a more “noble” war (ultimately it was a war against communism), but it also overshadows the popular consensus about Korea prior to 1950; the 1871 war is still historically significant because it served as the first official point of contact between the U.S. and Korea which ultimately created the standard racist attitude toward Koreans for decades. It is also a war that is couched between two other significant wars involving the United States: the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Although those wars are more well-known, the U.S.-Korean war of 1871 is especially important because it is “the first time that American ground forces actually seized, held, and raised the American flag over territory in Asia, initiating a long and traumatic tradition of American military involvement there.”  But even more importantly, the 1871 war is a war about failure—diplomatic failure in particular—that needs to be reintroduced to the general public and examined in terms of how “the ways American ideas about race and civilization decisively shaped American decision making. Those ideas, informal and formal, shaped what the leaders of the expedition wanted, how they interpreted their encounters with Koreans, how they responded to Korean actions, and why they decided to go to war. The ideas were not peripheral to the main events, but central in determining their outcome.” The U.S.’s main diplomatic goals in Asia were concerned with developing and maintaining active trade relations with China, Japan, and Korea in particular, but the war of 1871 illustrates how “American assumptions about races and civilizations, about their own as well as those of others, powerfully influenced [their] behavior” and led to a bloodbath that never should have happened in the first place.

The events that led to this war really began in the 1840s when the United States first became interested in initiating a commercial relationship with Korea and then in the 1860s when secretary of State William H. Seward made a push to begin seeking out a trade relationship with Korea, but made no headway. Chang describes Korea’s political positioning during this time period: “Korea, like China and Japan before they were forced to accept the Western international system, had been closed to foreign powers other than China and, to a lesser extent, Japan, since the early seventeenth century. Those and several other East Asian countries had formed an East Asian regional system that was based on shared Confucian norms of diplomacy, etiquette, and cultural values; they were uninterested in developing extensive contacts with westerners.” In 1870, secretary of state Hamilton Fish asked minister of China Frederick F. Low “to proceed to Korea with a naval expedition to negotiate a treaty ensuring the protection and good treatment of shipwrecked American seamen, a concern the United States commonly raised with other powers in the Pacific region during these years of expanded American naval activity.” Although that was the official reason for visiting Korea, establishing a commercial relationship with the country was a high priority. It is also important to note that Low was a well-seasoned politician and a successful businessman. He had already been a congressman and governor of California, and he wasn’t just an average businessman, he was a significant businessman. He had made his fortune in gold mining, owned a general store in San Francisco with a business partner, started a shipping company with his brothers, helped set up the California Steam Navigation Company which had a monopoly on all shipping routes to gold mines, and he was a banker. According to Chang, this is the extent of what the United States knew about Korea in 1870:

American contact with Korea had been limited to a handful of unofficial encounters, the most prominent being the experiences of two private vessels flying American flags that had ventured into Korean waters in 1866. Korean authorities had treated the shipwrecked crew of the Surprise well, but Washington believed that Korean soldiers had killed the entire crew of the General Sherman, an American ship with a mainly Chinese and Malay crew that had entered Korea under murky circumstances and for dubious purposes. Washington also knew about the few interactions between Koreans and Europeans, especially the French, who had sent a large punitive force in 1866 to avenge the killing of Catholic missionaries who had secretly entered Korea to proselytize, which the royal court had outlawed. Korean forces bloodied the French expedition after several days of fighting and forced them to withdraw.

That is to say, the United States knew very little about Korea in 1870. However, as Chang also points out, United States leaders used their racist perspectives about Asians and Asian culture to fill in the significant gap in their limited understanding about Korea:

Despite their declared ignorance of the country, American officials nevertheless formed quick and firm opinions of Korea based on their meager intelligence reports and negative impressions of the racial character of Asians. Their attitudes toward Asians as a ‘race’ were an unsystematic mix of ideas about character, behavior, ethics, and intelligence, based on a perceived similarity in physical appearance and a conflation of specific cultures into an ‘Oriental’ type of civilization. And Asians, compared to white Americans and Europeans, were not just different, but morally and socially deficient. With these notions, Washington officials, even when there was clearly contradictory evidence, assumed the worst about the Koreans and minimized or discounted information that suggested a more positive characterization of the people and the reasons for their suspicion of westerners. The dominant American attitude, as expressed in official as well as personal records, was that the Koreans were mendacious, backward, and simply barbaric.

It is very important for readers to understand that this was the standard attitude toward all Asian culture in the nineteenth century and this was the perspective U.S. officials took toward Korea in their strategizing and negotiation tactics leading up to, during, and after the 1871 war. In other words, this exact racist attitude is a primary reason the United States entered into a war with Korea. And even though Low had been the governor of California—a state with a large Chinese immigrant demographic—and according to Chang, he had also been a “young employee of Russell, Sturgis, and Company, one of the first American firms in the China trade,” his understanding of Asian culture was limited. Instead, he used his racist attitude based off his racist impressions of Asians as a guiding light in his diplomatic pursuits with the Koreans. That is also key. From the winter of 1870 until the spring of 1871, Low constantly begged the Chinese to deliver a letter to the Koreans on the United States’ behalf that described their intentions for visiting the country, which the Chinese refused to deliver until they finally gave in. Chang explains that the main reason the Chinese eventually agreed to deliver the letter is because they understood that the United States was planning to arrive in Korea no matter what, and the Chinese thought it would be best to give the Koreans a heads up (a warning) so they wouldn’t be surprised when the United States entered their waters with warships. And that is exactly what the United States did; they showed up in Korean waters with a fleet of warships. Although the Koreans did receive the United States’ letter of intention, they did not respond and Chang explains why:

…the Korean regent and de facto ruler of the country, the Taewon’gun (Yi Ha-Eung), the father of the teenage King Kojong, was personally anti-Western, anti-Christian, and opposed to changing the long-standing seclusion policy. He and others at the court believed that Korea was the last bastion of true Confucian morality and order, China and Japan having been corrupted when they were forced to engage in regularized relations with the westerners. To uphold civilization, in their view, required resisting the westerners and isolating virtue.

In other words, Korean leaders, by principle, weren’t interested in engaging in relations with any Western power because they wanted to remain independent of Western influence that they saw as ultimately threatening to their long-established culture. It’s extremely important for readers to know that this was not understood by United States officials. It was unthinkable to them that the Koreans (or any other non-western country for that matter) would not want to “enjoy” the supposed “fruits of progress” (politically, economically, and spiritually) that the West had to offer them.

Low and Admiral John Rodgers (appointed as the military leader of the expedition) decided to take the Korean’s lack of a response as permission to move forward with their objectives, and they proceeded to construct a flotilla for their “peaceful” mission. According to Chang, “Although the American flotilla might have not been a match for the advanced French or British navies, it was still formidable. It included five heavily armed warships carrying eighty-five cannons and 1,230 marines and sailors, the largest Western military force to enter Korean territory until the twentieth century. (The French had sent 600 men in 1866.).” And it’s also significant that Rodgers was chosen to lead the expedition because he “was one of the most distinguished officers in the U.S. Navy—he was commander in chief of its Asiatic squadron, son of a celebrated American commodore in the early republic [Commodore John Rodgers], and father of an even more important naval leader of the early twentieth century [Vice Admiral William Ledyard Rodgers]. John Rodgers, like many of the officers and men beneath him, had extensive battle experience, including fighting Seminoles in Florida, Mexicans during the 1846 war, and Confederates during the Civil War.” To go further, Rodgers was close with, and an admirer of, Commodore Matthew C. Perry (who he was also related to by marriage). Commodore Perry is most famously known for leading a naval expedition to Japan (1854-53), where he successfully forced the country to sign something called the Treaty of Kanagawa, which opened its ports to American Ships, assured that shipwrecked sailors would not be harmed, and established a consul in Japan. Perry used something called “gunboat diplomacy” to achieve his goal, which is essentially a show of force in an attempt to intimidate a country into conceding to communicated demands. In other words, he used naval bullying to get Japan to agree to sign the treaty. In 1853 he sailed into Tokyo Bay with four warships (called “Black Ships”) and brought with him a letter from President Millard Filmore, who didn’t request, but demanded that the country open itself to trade relations; in 1854 Perry returned with nine warships, which resulted in the forced signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa. It is completely safe to say that Rodgers wanted to use the exact same tactics as Commodore Perry to get Korea to concede to trade relations with the U.S. It is also important for readers to know that China closely monitored the U.S.’s activities in preparation for their expedition to Korea. Chang includes China’s perspective on the situation: “Americans had only base, acquisitive interests in Korea and, like the other Western powers, had no respect for the established East Asian moral order, which placed great value on ethics and proper behavior.” For this reason, China became the independent observer of the U.S.-Korea conflict, which helps to provide a more balanced insight into the 1871 war.  

Another key move U.S. expedition leaders made was anchoring near the Han River, because 50 miles up that river is where Seoul is located. According to Chang, “This site, which became the fleet’s operations base, was one of the most strategically sensitive in Korea….The French had begun their own 1866 attack from this very location, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur would do the same in his famous landing at Inch’on in 1950.” And then, almost immediately, the U.S. began surveying the area without permission, which caused Korean citizens to take flight. Chang also explains that “Unknown to the Americans, the Korean king had ordered all officials along the coastal areas to avoid provoking any conflict with the Americans.” That very same day (May 30th), “three Koreans of unclear rank and a clerk came on board and asked again about the fleet’s business” and Low refused to speak with them. He was only interested in talking to high-ranking Korean officials (just like Commodore Perry in his dealings with Japan). However, what the low-ranking Koreans were told was that the U.S. would continue to survey the area with the smaller ships and “the large ships may move nearer the capital, in case the [U.S.] minister deems it necessary.” The lower-ranked Koreans communicated to Low that although the Korean king had read their letter, they were not interested in negotiating anything in the current moment, but Low unsurprisingly dismissed their information. It’s also important to note that after the war, Low claimed that the low-ranked Korean officials had given him permission to survey the area, and yet, “Low never explained why, on the one hand, he refused to meet the Korean envoys because of their supposed low rank, yet, on the other hand, he presumed they could authorize the American advance into sensitive waters.” Here is what happened when the U.S. proceeded to sail into an unauthorized area:

…According to the American official reports, when the U.S. ships approached Kwangsong, the main fort that controlled Sondolmok, Korean cannons suddenly opened fire. Guns also opened up from Tokchin and Tokp’o, other strategically located forts along the sides of the river. The shelling was ferocious but inaccurate, and the American ships escaped damage. They immediately counterfired, apparently with considerable accuracy and consequence. The incident lasted no more than fifteen minutes, with some five hundred rounds exchanged. The untouched American ships then returned to their base anchorage, with just two wounded and no loss of life. Reports that the Americans later received put the number of Korean deaths at 30, with many more wounded. The Americans had knowingly ventured into one of the most sensitive sites of the country.

This quick battle, initiated by the Koreans in an effort to defend against a clear foreign threat, was incredibly uneven, and the U.S. was able to retreat back to their established base unscathed. Two things should have been obvious to U.S. expedition leaders at that point: 1) the Koreans did not have the military advantage in the situation and 2) the Koreans also did not want them there poking around their territory. However, the U.S. expedition leaders’ interpretation of the situation was not entirely accurate:

The Korean attack was not as sudden, unexpected, and unprovoked as Low and Rodgers reported. One purpose of the surveying parties was to unsettle the Koreans. Fifteen years after the expedition, an unidentified junior officer who was on the surveying mission published his recollection of the events, still controversial after many years. The vessels were originally unarmed, he recalled, but before setting out, the men outfitted the launches with howitzers (small cannon), highly visible on their bows, and were given rifles, all in anticipation of a possible clash. The two large gunboats that accompanied the launches were also heavily armed. Moreover, this memoir reconstructed the timing of events differently from the official reports. According to his detailed recollection, many moments passed from the time that the Americans first saw the massed Koreans armed forces, with their guns trained down the river, and the first shot.

This junior officer’s retrospective remembrance of the conflict lines up with Rodgers’s ultimate desire to employ “gunboat diplomacy” the exact same way Commodore Perry had; the survey parties were absolutely utilized to intimidate the Koreans, and the fact that they decided to arm them at the last minute is testament to that fact. Additionally, since the Korean attack was not immediate, the U.S. ships, once they saw the cannons pointed right at them, had time to back down, but made a conscious choice not to. In other words, the U.S. expedition leaders were looking to provoke a fight, and they got one. Interestingly enough, there was one U.S. official who did question the expedition leaders’ decisions, and that was George F. Seward, who was the consul general in Shanghai. According to Chang, “he…confidentially criticized the expedition’s decisions in his communications with the State Department. ‘I do not know why the surveying should have been pushed forward so rapidly,’ he wrote. He cited precedents for the violent Korean reaction, which he suggested might have been defensive. But Seward’s objection changed nothing and was never made public.”

U.S. expedition leaders made another key move; they came to the decision to land on Korean soil in an attempt to destroy the Korean forts that had attacked the armed U.S. survey ships. They would have enacted this decision immediately, but they had to wait ten days, because the waters were too rough. In order to justify this move, Low and Rodgers definitively concluded among themselves that the Koreans had baited them into sailing into a sensitive area all so they could ambush them. They had convinced themselves of the following:

Even though the American forces had handily rebuked the Korean attack, Low wrote, the Koreans were undoubtedly claiming victory. He argued that leaving the Koreans with this misimpression would be ‘injurious, if not disastrous’ to American interests, not only in Korea but also in China, where anti-Western sentiments were running high. The Koreans and possibly even the Chinese might conclude that they could successfully defy the West. Low therefore concluded that the American forces had to avenge ‘the wrongs and insults which our flag has suffered.’ Destroying the Korean fortifications would also leave the Americans in control of the Yomha and the entry to the Han, which they could blockade until the president sent further orders. Under such circumstances, the Korean government might feel compelled to negotiate, Low speculated.

Revenge became the official order of the expedition mission. And although Low and Rodgers played around with the idea of taking Seoul, “In a private note to himself, Rodgers calculated that 5,000 men would be needed to take Seoul and subdue the surrounding fortresses,” they did not have the manpower to pull it off. But it’s important for readers to know that if the expedition had had adequate military power to force Korea’s hand with a takeover, they quite possibly would’ve attempted it. Instead, getting revenge for the attack was the most realistic option in the eyes of the expedition leaders. And another factor that is not at all surprising is western journalists’ overwhelming support of the expedition leaders’ decisions:

Though it [the English-run Shanghai Evening Quarter] said it usually rejected warmongering, the newspaper declared that in this case ‘the good of the civilized world must come before the good of a horde of semi-savages.’ It looked forward to American actions against the Koreans and expected ‘that now America is about to take her share in opening up the East to the peaceful and beneficent action of western civilization.’ The newspaper saw the United States as an ally in advancing a higher moral order, not as a commercial rival. Other Western papers in China and the press in the United States and Japan joined in praising the bravery of the American mission and eagerly anticipated an aggressive American response in the name of humanity.    

As Chang demonstrates, the motives of the U.S. expedition backed up by the support of Western journalists did much to fuel a climate of racial superiority in the larger culture of Western countries. The lack of criticism from government leaders and journalists meant that the U.S. expedition leaders were essentially given full control of how best to proceed, and it involved forcing the Koreans to suffer a humiliating military defeat. From the Korean perspective, the above incident reminded them of the 1866 conflict with the French, and also as an act intended to initiate war. Korea responded to this incident in two ways: they “dispatched several hundred additional soldiers and supplies to the Kanghwa area, especially strengthening Kwangsong. Miliary units around the capital were also mobilized.” They also sent official communication to U.S. expedition leaders in an attempt to explain their position:

In the messages the Koreans presented their view of what had transpired and an explanation for their actions. Not surprisingly, the Korean interpretation of events differed dramatically from the American. It was, however, fully consistent with Western notions about national rights and territorial integrity. But the Korean argument, though it revealed some familiarity with Western concepts of international relations, made no impression on the leadership of the American expedition—it was then commonly held that the principles of international law, such as respect for national boundaries, applied in full only to ‘civilized,’ Christian nations that accepted the rights and responsibilities of regularized diplomacy as practiced in the Western international system. Nations that did not, such as Korea, were by definition less civilized, morally inferior, and subject to treatment appropriate to their backwardness. The Korean court’s appeal to universal standards of international behavior therefore fell on deaf ears.

The important takeaway here is that because Korea, as a country, was not Westernized (Christian, democratic, etc.), it did not have permission to exercise the same international rights enjoyed by other Western or Westernized countries. The U.S. expedition leaders saw themselves as being completely justified in entering Korean waters and surveying their land because they were not “civilized” enough and had no recognized rights to object or resist. In other words, racism was the primary justification for the U.S. expedition leaders’ rejection of the Koreans’ explanation for why they opened fire (in an act of defense against a foreign threat). U.S. expedition leaders’ decisions to survey without permission and to load those survey ships with weapons and sail them right into sensitive Korean waters was a right they felt justified in exercising because they were “civilized,” which made them superior, and that superiority gave them the “right of way” in the situation. To make matters worse, communication between the Koreans and Americans was not the best: “Communications were affixed to a pole stuck in the mud flats near the fleet. Under cover of darkness, the Koreans left messages, which the Americans retrieved at this ‘post office,’ as it was called, the next morning. The Koreans picked up the American notes in reverse manner.” Low had a man named Edward B. Drew, “the acting secretary of the American legation in China,” write a response that demanded the following: an official apology from the king of Korea, and a high-ranking officer for the U.S. expedition leaders to communicate with. They gave the Koreans six days to meet these demands and if they didn’t, the U.S. would take more aggressive actions. The response concluded with a threat: “In closing, Drew pointed out that the fleet in Korean waters was just part of a larger and more powerful navy in the region. Those ships, the Koreans were informed, ‘are constantly within two or three days’ sail of your country, and if they choose, can destroy your towns and annoy your districts and departments for an unlimited number of years.’ But that was not what the United States wanted, Drew claimed: ‘We desire peace and friendly feelings to exist between our country and all others.’”

The Koreans chose not to meet either of the U.S. expedition leaders demands, and on June 10^th, U.S. expedition leaders sent out the following:

…an American punitive force set out from the fleet. It consisted of twenty-two vessels, including two of the large gunboats, several launches with cannon, and many troop transports. The total force contingent was 950 men, 650 of them ground troops, many with extensive Civil War battlefield experience. McLane Tilton led 105 marines. Winfield Scott Schley, celebrated in the Spanish-American War and eventually a rear admiral, was among the naval officers.

The Koreans attempted to stop the advance with a ship bearing a white flag along with a message from a high-ranking Korean official. However,  the message contained only a repeated explanation for why the Koreans opened fire on the (armed) U.S. survey ships—as an act of defense against a foreign threat. There was no apology. American forces consciously chose to ignore the Koreans’ attempt to diffuse the situation and continued on. Here is a description of the battle:

The punitive expedition advanced upriver, and when it reached the first of the defending forts, the vessels opened with artillery fire, destroying the ramparts and scattering the defenders. Then the American ground forces, with seven advanced howitzers in tow, landed under covering fire from the gunboats. Soldiers ransacked a nearby village for provisions, taking stores of grain and beans. With their vastly superior power, the Americans then easily captured the first of the five forts that fell over two days of fighting. Fires started by the attacking forces spread to nearby villages, which burned to the ground. But the high point of the engagement for the Americans was the battle for Kwangsong, the principal fortification overlooking the strategic turn in the Yomha. After tremendous shelling from land and water, the American forces stormed what they called the ‘citadel.’ Accounts tell of ferocious hand-to-hand combat, with the Korean soldiers fighting virtually to the last man….After the fighting was over, the Americans counted some 250 bodies, with many more assumed killed with their remains lost in the river, ravines, and burning rubble of the forts. The Americans spiked cannons, seized banners and supplies, destroyed fortifications, and took 15 prisoners. They reported that the scene inside Kwangsong was horrendous, with piles of burning and dismembered bodies two and three deep. The bodies of Korean soldiers, who had clothed themselves in protective vestments constructed of layers of tough, thick cotton, now lay smoldering in the dirt. The stench of roasting flesh was everywhere. American casualties, on the other hand, were just 3 killed and 9 wounded. The American leaders pointed to the disparity in human loss between the two sides (the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Vietnam War’s ‘body count’) as evidence of their victory and, of course, their superior civilization.

U.S. forces basically slaughtered the Korean soldiers, who (as U.S. expedition leaders already knew) were no match for the U.S. military’s power. However, one thing had become clear to U.S. forces: the Koreans had fought very passionately, and this puzzled them: “Was it because they believed neither escape nor surrender was an option, and so they fought to the death? Low did not even consider whether something so familiar and understandable such as loyalty to king or country was the explanation. No, there was something irrational in their fighting, in his view. The Korean tenacity was fanatical or bestial, other American soldiers concluded.” Because of their racist and culturally superior standpoint, they couldn’t conceive of Korean soldiers as being passionately dedicated to the protection of their homeland. They failed to have any empathy toward a people they viewed as inferior in every way. Tilton, who led the marines in the attack, had this to say about the Korean soldiers: “when he looked upon the dead enemy, to his own surprise, he felt little emotion. ‘It didn’t affect me more than looking at so many dead hogs,’ he wrote to his wife.” That type of sentiment is exactly what fueled the 1871 war, the U.S.’s refusal to treat the Koreans with the same kind of human dignity they would expect to be treated with. What is even more telling is how Low described the Korean soldiers in his diary:

Several days after the fighting had ended, Low inspected the Korean prisoners and reflected on the Asian enemy in his diary. Korean autocracy had reduced the common people to ‘serfs’ or ‘slaves,’ he wrote. They were ignorant and craven and the soldiers ‘mere automatons,’ their tenacious fighting mistakenly called ‘courage.’ In reality, Low wrote, it was ‘mere stolidity and indifference to death.’ Low ended his diary entry, ‘Human life is of considered little value, and soldiers, educated as they have been, meet death with the same indifference as the Indians of North America.

If there is any sympathy here, it is heavily tinged with hypocrisy. It’s very telling that Low would compare the Koreans to Native Americans, who were also regarded as racially, morally, and culturally inferior, and treated as such by the exact same U.S. military forces that brutally slaughtered Korean soldiers. It is also highly ironic that Low would compare the Korean soldiers to a group of people the U.S. government actively oppressed and used racial inferiority as a justification for it. He failed to see that his racist attitude is exactly what reinforced the oppression of the Native Americans, as well as the decision to get revenge on the Koreans because they couldn’t handle being fired upon by an “inferior race” when in reality they shouldn’t have been in sensitive waters with armed survey ships in the first place. And although ultimately the 1871 war backfired on the U.S. (it did not encourage the Koreans to open up to them commercially), it also reinforced the Koreans’ anti-Western stance. The king of Korea wrote: “‘The barbarians said they wanted peace, [but] we do not know what they want to do with us.’ The court decided to continue to have nothing to do with the Americans. Convinced that the events confirmed Korean righteousness and moral purity, the court reaffirmed its seclusion policy to protect its own civilization.” Instead of initiating diplomatic relations with the Koreans, the 1871 war created anti-diplomatic sentiments on the Korean side, which, in all honesty, is completely understandable. Logic dictates that a country is going to be less likely to interact with an aggressive force that chose to slaughter their soldiers along with a few of their military leaders in an incredibly uneven battle that was more about establishing dominance and enacting revenge than anything else. To make matters worse, after the battle ended, the U.S. forces returned to their ships and the two countries went back and forth about what had transpired, and this time, Low explicitly pointed out that after what happened, the U.S. technically would be completely justified in a full-on invasion:

On June 14 Low sent a long dispatch to the Korean king summarizing the American view of the events. After the Koreans had ‘wantonly fired’ on the American surveying team and when the Americans received no apology for the insult, the Americans could take no other course ‘than to seek redress by arms, as is usual among all civilised nations.’ That now had been done, Low pointed out, and ‘the events of the past few days afford convincing proofs of our power whenever we choose to exert it.’ Although ‘well-established precedent would sanction the moving of our forces against any and all places of the kingdom,’ and although the U.S. forces were ‘possessed of the power,’ Low assured the king that the United States had no interest in war or conquest. It only wanted to cultivate friendly relations with Korea and to establish formal arrangements, similar to those with its Asian neighbors. Low reiterated his demand that the Korean king send a ‘speedy and frank reply’ to negotiate.

Low was still intent on establishing a commercial and diplomatic relationship even though U.S. forces had just fiercely attacked the Koreans a few days earlier. He made the incorrect assumption that the U.S.’s expression of military power would force the Koreans to work with him. Interestingly enough, the Korean official he had given the dispatch to refused to deliver it to the king of Korea and here is how Low responded: “Low had his assistant threaten the local official for obstructing communications and inform him that the leadership of the U.S. expedition now ‘contemplates a prolonged stay in the vicinity of the capital,’ while waiting for the king’s response.” Not only could Low not be bothered to threaten the Korean official directly, he insisted that the U.S. would remain in Korean waters until they got what they wanted. It should be clear to readers that not only is this the absolutely wrong way to handle the situation from a diplomatic standpoint, it is also highly incriminating. If the U.S. had been in the right, then it would seem that they should invade Korea to further their point. However, they weren’t actually justified in their attack for the simple reason that they entered sensitive Korean waters with armed survey ships in an attempt to provoke them. As much as Low wanted to believe that their attack established their dominance in the situation, they couldn’t really enforce it with an invasion. And so, “Low never heard from the Korean king, the court, or any other high-ranking Korean official. Early in the morning of July 3, three long weeks after Korean and American forces had battled one another, the U.S. fleet pulled up anchor and withdrew from Korean waters.”

As expected, there was overwhelming support from the American public for how the conflict was handled, led by none other than American journalists: “Most major newspapers echoed the official reports, accepting without question the Grant administration’s version of the events. The periodicals duly repeated the demeaning racial and cultural characterizations. The New York Times’s headlines promised to deliver a ‘Detailed Account of the Treacherous Attack of the Coreans on Our Launches’ and news of the ‘Speedy and Effective Punishment of the Barbarians.’ The New York Herald labeled the conflict ‘Our Little War with the Heathen.’ However, there was one newspaper that criticized the 1871 war and they hit the nail on the head with their assessment:

At the time of the expedition, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which was generally critical of the Grant administration, condemned the expedition and its pretensions. The paper mocked the American claims of superior morality and justice and turned the idea of civilization back upon the United States. Under the sarcastic title ‘Civilizing the Coreans,’ an editorial focused on the arrogance of the Low-Rodgers mission’s declaration that it only wanted to have the Koreans ‘partake of the sweets of American civilization.’ What else could be expected but armed clashes, the paper argued, when ‘armed foreigners [the Americans] [went] poking about [the Korean] coast?’ and after the Koreans attacked, the paper continued, the American admiral took ‘such measures as the interests of ‘civilization required’’: ‘the taking of the Corean forts, guns numberless, and the slaughter of all the natives who did not get to the tall timber.’ The newspaper ended its editorial with rhetorical questions that would be repeated many years later during other American conflicts in Asia: ‘What right [do] we have in Corean waters, what [are] we to gain by killing these people, how many more are to be killed, and where [is] this fierce diplomacy to land us—all these questions will become interesting as we find how much easier it is to go to war than to get out of it.’

In addition to that, the only other official criticisms of the event came from Low’s own chief assistant, Edward B. Drew, a decade after the 1871 war, while giving a lecture in China. He gave this statement, which was also quite accurate: “‘…having trailed their coats before the faces of the Coreans, and having at last persuaded the Coreans to step on them, demanded an apology for the insult.’” But otherwise, support was unanimous, and President Ulysses S. Grant even went so far as to encourage congress to take more aggressive action toward Korea (including possibly declaring war), which they did not do. And naturally, Low and Rodgers strongly contributed to anti-Chinese sentiments that were building in the United States. According to Chang, “In the fall of 1876, both men appeared as expert witnesses before a special joint congressional committee investigating Chinese immigration….both strongly endorsed legislation restricting further Chinese entry into the country.” On the Korean side, the king of Korea sent Chinese officials a detailed explanation of what had happened from their perspective, primarily because they wanted to maintain civil relations with the Chinese. The Korean king did not understand why the Americans claimed to have peaceful intent even though they had brought armed ships and demanded to meet with high-ranking officials. He could only conclude that the Americans were really trying to claim Korean territory for themselves, beyond merely establishing a formal treaty. As a side note, it seems clear that the Korean king also did not understand the “gunboat diplomacy” strategy that was being employed, the same strategy that was successful in bullying Japan into a commercial relationship with the U.S. But, as Chang explains, “The Americans sincerely believed they had come in peace and harbored no malice toward Korea. Representing the purposes of a greater civilization, however, the Americans also believed they were in Korean waters only to raise the barbarous and inferior Koreans to a higher standard of behavior in international relations. The American display of force and its actual use had been fully justified and even necessary, in their view.” The “show of force” was meant to announce their superiority and “encourage” the Koreans to be amenable to their wants, which they weren’t, but it goes without saying that when an armed fleet shows up into a non-westernized country’s waters, it would make sense that they would see it as threatening and undiplomatic, because ultimately, that’s exactly what it is. And yet, both countries saw themselves as the victors of the 1871 war: Low falsely believed that the U.S. had put Korea in its place and “the Korean court used the successful repulse of the Americans to elevate its prestige among the Korean officialdom and intelligentsia. Korean Confucian virtue and moral determination, it seemed to many in the country, had triumphed over the unruly Western barbarians, confirming the rightness of the state’s policy. For the next ten years, the Korean court held that a state of war existed between Korea and America.” The Taewon’gun also wrote a couplet to commemorate the Korean victory over Western intimidation: “‘The smoke and dust of the vessels of Westerners cover the world with darkness, but the great light of the East enlightens it throughout eternity.’” In all honesty, the Koreans should have considered themselves lucky that the U.S. did not initiate a full-on attack because they were ill-prepared from a military standpoint: “…when the Americans occupied the forts, they found antiquated weaponry, with many pieces dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One captured cannon had been cast in 1313.” Although the U.S. expedition leaders were not justified in their attack, the Koreans were not justified in celebrating any kind of official victory either. It would have been much wiser for them to recognize that they needed to modernize a bit so that they would find themselves in a better position if and when a situation like the 1871 war happened again.

It wasn’t until 1882 that any official attempt was made on the U.S.’s part to reconcile with the Koreans. In fact, the U.S. had spent the last decade keeping their distance from the country. However, “a treaty of ‘amity and commerce’” was established (“the first between Korea and a Western power”) thanks to Admiral Robert Shufeldt, who “was conciliatory toward King Kojong from the very start of the overture. In a letter to the king, Shufeldt expressed his wish to bring about an ‘amicable intercourse’ between the two countries, which ‘owing to a misunderstanding [had] been unfortunately interrupted,’ as he wrote in oblique reference to the 1871 conflict.” However, privately, Shufeldt was much more critical of the U.S.’s behavior toward Asian countries:

In a private note to himself, [Adm. Robert] Shufeldt went further and blamed the historic exclusion of the West from Japan, China, and Korea ‘entirely to their [Westerners] own acts & machinations.’ Perhaps thinking specifically about Low and Rodgers in 1871, Shufeldt criticized Western behavior in Asia. ‘Our prejudices are continually finding arguments wherewith to advance our interests,’ he wrote sarcastically, ‘these people, we say, have no right, natural, or acquired to this haughty, contemptuous, indifference to our commerce or to our civilization.’

And although Shufeldt’s official stance is more enlightened than other U.S. leaders before him, Chang makes an excellent point when he says that  

It was not that Shufeldt was averse to the use of force or that he accepted Asians as racial equals—like Low and Rodgers, he believed that Asians were inferior and supported legislation to control Chinese immigration into the United States. But Shufeldt did not want what he considered prejudiced cultural attitudes to interfere with the advancement of vital U.S. commercial interests. East-West interaction and trade were too important an end. The result for Shufeldt was diplomatic success, not war.

In other words, Shufeldt’s enlightened perspective had more to do with practicing civility when it came to diplomacy. By Shufeldt’s thinking, if you want to establish commercial relations with a country you perceive as morally inferior, it’s best to aspire to achieve that goal without complicating it with an explicit need to assert superiority. As Chang discusses earlier in the essay, one of the most popular poems in the Westernized part of Shanghai during the 1871 conflict was Bret Harte’s “The Heathen Chinee”: “The recently published verse by the popular poet was a demeaning portrait of Chinese immigrants in California, embodied in the character of Ah Sin. According to Rodgers, the poem marvelously captured the ‘astuteness; of the Chinese; coupled with his knavery and apparent simplicity.’ Rodgers admired the poem so much that he felt the need to talk about it in a letter he wrote to his family back home. Chang talks about how the poem had a detrimental effect on Chinese and Asian culture in general:

‘Ah Sin’ and ‘the heathen Chinee’ quickly became popular metonyms for the Chinese in the United States and Chinese generally. The poem describes the trickery of a Chinese cardplayer, who bests his opponents through feigned naivete and cheating. Only after he is physically beaten is his description unmasked, and the poem quickly became symbolic of the proper and efficacious way to handle Orientals. As the North China Herald, the major English-language newspaper published in Shanghai, observed at the time, the moral of Harte’s poem is that Chinese ‘double-dealing’ must be met by physical force.”

This is exactly how Commodore Perry treated the Japanese, and it’s exactly how Low and Rodgers treated the Koreans, which ultimately led to the 1871 war. They used physical force (military power) to assert their racial superiority over what they perceived as an “immoral” people. Although Shufeldt was critical of the 1871 war, he was not for racial equality either. He just privileged civility over intimidation when it came to diplomatic and commercial relations. In closing, it’s also important for readers to know that although the 1871 war is obscure, it is still well-represented at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis: “The captured Korean artifacts, banners, flags, cannons, and guns have been on public display….The Annapolis chapel contains a memorial plaque to one of the fallen American heroes, Hugh McKee, the eponym for all U.S. ships named McKee. Six American soldiers on the expedition were immortalized with the congressional Medal of Honor.” Chang also notes that “Military historians have even studied the 1871 events for its lessons regarding coordinated amphibious operations.” In addition to that, Felice Beato, one of the earliest photographers, was present during the 1871 war and his photographs serve as the only visual documentation of the conflict. As Chang points out

[Beato] made his career largely on the basis of his images on the work of the British army in Africa, the Holy Land, the Near East, India, and China. In the latter years of his life, when he lived in Asia, he was celebrated for his delicate photography of Japan. But it was his association with British colonialism and his images of war from the vantage point of the conqueror that made his name and for which he is chiefly remembered. He is credited with being the first photographer to show the dead on a battlefield (in images of Indian soldiers killed during the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857-1858). His work continues to circulate widely—in 1999 the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, in California, held a major exhibition of his images depicting the destruction wrought by the British and French invasion of north China in 1860.

Beato’s photographs of the 1871 war “appear today in pictorial books on modern Korean history, on subway station walls in Seoul, and even in the hallways of the Korean embassy in Washington, D.C. That the images are entwined with war and that the photographer occupied the position of an intruder into Korea is often understood only vaguely, if at all. Yet this victor’s nineteenth-century photographic eye continues to influence the way historical Korea is viewed today.” Chang includes Beato’s images all through the essay to demonstrate how the Koreans were seen from the Western standpoint. And although these images are still widely viewed, they have been wiped clean of their context. It is also important to note that when photographing battlefield scenes, Beato “sometimes rearranged elements, including corpses—even on occasion exhuming them—to create a dramatic moment.” Apparently a death scene from war in its natural state wasn’t “dramatic” enough. But to return to Chang’s overall point, because Beato’s photographs are taken from a racist perspective, and it is the only photographic evidence that we have, this is how the public is trained to view the “conquered”—through a racist lens. And this is why it is important for the 1871 war to be remembered from a balanced perspective—so that it can raise public consciousness about racism as a primary motivation for U.S. expedition leaders’ decision to initiate the conflict with Korea, and their ultimate failure to achieve diplomatic and commercial relations with them as a result.

The next essay to be discussed is “China and the Pursuit of America’s Destiny: Nineteenth-century Imagining and Why Immigration Restriction Took So Long”—a groundbreaking essay that talks about the events that led to the historic 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act from an interesting perspective. In the essay, Chang takes up this brilliant question: If anti-Chinese sentiment was widespread, “Why did it take so long for Washington to pass anti-Chinese immigration legislation?” To give a brief overview, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the first definitive piece of legislation that set the tone for how immigration was to be handled from a national, federal standpoint and it did the following: banned all Chinese laborers from entering the country; denied all Chinese residents the ability to become U.S. citizens; early on, people of Chinese descent who briefly left the country were required to get re-entry certificates so they could reenter the U.S. (later on, people of Chinese descent who briefly left the country were not permitted to come back); only Chinese diplomats, teachers, students, merchants, and tourists were allowed in the country, but it was extremely difficult to prove the legitimacy of the above statuses. The Chinese Exclusion Act was only “intended” to last ten years, but the Geary Act of 1892 extended it for another ten years, and required all people of Chinese descent to carry identification cards to avoid immediate deportation. Then, in 1904, Congress made Chinese exclusion permanent. It wasn’t until 1943 that Congress lifted Chinese exclusion with the Magnuson Act (primarily because China had become the U.S.’s ally during World War II), but it only allowed around 100 Chinese immigrants into the country per year. To readers in the current moment, these exclusion laws might sound drastic and extreme—and they were. Chang argues that the primary reason it took so long for Congress to enact such harsh restriction laws against the Chinese is because the Chinese were actually a welcomed demographic in the United States for a good portion of the nineteenth century. Anti-Chinese sentiment didn’t gain momentum until U.S. leadership interests changed, and it became seemingly more beneficial for them to ban the Chinese than to embrace them. As Chang points out

Thirty years passed between the arrival of more than 20,000 Chinese in the single year of 1852 and the passage of the Restriction Act in 1882. Some 300,000 Chinese landed in America during these three decades, though some anti-Chinese agitators believed many more had actually arrived. Most of the Chinese did not stay, but 100,000 did. Certainly, national political leaders had a lot on their plates at the time—the sectional crisis, slavery, civil war, and reconstruction—but we know that anti-Chinese sentiment, especially on the West Coast, soared in these years supported by white southern forces.

And yet, as Chang also reveals, even with racism as a powerful motivator, it still took thirty years for restriction laws to be enacted. That is precisely because, as Chang demonstrates in this essay, those that embraced the Chinese outweighed and out-influenced anti-Chinese sentiment for quite some time. The presence of Chinese people in the United States was actually seen as a good thing for the United States for decades, until it wasn’t.

The primary reason the Chinese were embraced by influential U.S. figures during the nineteenth century is because access to China was seen as the ultimate result of Manifest Destiny (the U.S.’s “divine right” to expand westward). Chang asserts that

Access to China, and Pacific commerce more generally, free Chinese immigration, and America’s future welfare formed one integrated vision in the minds of important Americans—business, political, and religious leaders among them—through much of the nineteenth century. This vision inspired their powerful opposition to immigration restriction and frustrated exclusionists until altered national and international diplomatic landscapes created the conditions for successful exclusion.

Although the phrase “Manifest Destiny” wasn’t introduced until 1845 by a man named John O’Sullivan, a journalist who ran United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and encouraged the annexation of Texas and Oregon, the desire to expand westward really stems from the early years of the U.S.’s existence:

Leading figures in the early republic held audacious, bold visions about a continental empire that spanned North America. From the beginning of the republic, Americans believed that the defense of their treasured political independence required economic well-being. Their vision of national greatness required economic self-sufficiency, and they pursued every possible opportunity for commercial advantage….The rapid and seemingly irresistible westward expansion of the United States from east to west, to go past the Alleghenies and then the Missouri and Mississippi Valleys, to cross the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, and then to reach the Pacific, became the national epic immortalized in countless cultural forms, from music, drama, and literature to the textbooks read by every school student for the past 150 years….Often overlooked in the mythologizing of the westward movement however is the lure that lay beyond the continent and the Pacific Coast—China, the object of national desire.

Self-sufficiency and commerce became intertwined, and so, having direct access to the Pacific Ocean as a way to enhance commercial relations with Asian countries—China, in particular—makes practical sense from an economic perspective. And contrary to popular belief, westward expansion was about more than just establishing a nation that controlled the Atlantic and the Pacific: “For many Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, China, and the Far East more generally, was the reason to go to the Far West. The Far West was not an end, but a means.” In fact, the earliest colonists who came to North America were encouraged to “locate a passage that would link the Atlantic to the Pacific and thus open the way to the markets of the East.” And even though this desire was economically driven, it was also encouraged from a religious standpoint: “Early Americans and Europeans took the existence of such a route as a matter of literal faith. None believed that the Holy Father would have created the New World as an impassible barrier to their capacious ambitions to reach the Far East.” This belief was accepted on an international level as well: “English, Spanish, and French explorers all were convinced that such a route existed, and they incessantly sought to locate it.” However, once the U.S. established independence, it became primarily the nation’s obsession: “After independence, the dream of the passage to the East, through the West, continued to inspire Americans to explore the continent, to covet the expansive Oregon Country, to help justify the war with Mexico, and then to annex golden California with its vital harbors. Spanning the continent was America’s given fate, and controlling the West would bring America closer to the East.” As Chang asserts, the Louisiana Purchase was motivated by this same desire to bring the U.S. that much closer to the East. From a political standpoint, U.S. leaders made sure to keep the idea of commercial access to China in the American public’s consciousness: “They frequently invoked the importance of China to America in the public debates and discussions about the occupation of Oregon and California as early as the 1820s.” As Chang explains, John Floyd, initially a Congressman representing Virginia (who later became governor of the same state), was the earliest supporter of annexing Oregon County—“an immense swatch of land that reached from what is today’s northern California to southern Alaska and east into Wyoming.” He explicitly argued that it was highly valuable because it gave the U.S. the opportunity to “exploit the great trading potential of Asia.” He also used biblical and classical references to back up his argument:

Asia, he declared, was the goal ‘which with the West has been seeking ever since Solomon sent out his ships in search of the gold of Ophir.’ He conjured the prospect of an American Tyre, the fabled Phoenician trading city that commanded the wealth of the ancient world, at the mouth of the Columbia River that could supply China’s millions with American flour, cotton, and tobacco.

And Floyd wasn’t alone in pursuing this endeavor:

Political figures from the southerner John C. Calhoun to New Englander Daniel Webster in the antebellum years similarly trumpeted the importance of the China trade for America. Ardent expansionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri envisioned the Columbia River Valley becoming the granary of Asia. Others declared that American tobacco could replace British opium in China and that American Wheat would replace Chinese rice. The possibilities were limitless in their imaginations.

President James K. Polk, who was also an expansionist, articulated the ultimate goal of westward expansion as well:

Midway through the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, Polk spoke to Congress to rally support for the plan to annex what is now called California. The region, said the president, would soon be settled by Americans, and San Francisco Bay and other ports along the coast would harbor an American navy, whalers, and other ‘merchant vessels,’ and these ports would soon ‘become the marts of an extensive and profitable commerce with China and other countries of the East.’ In other addresses, Polk repeatedly spoke about the importance of California and the China trade for America.

Historically speaking, it would seem that the U.S. had clear intentions of expanding westward primarily so they could have direct access to China, so logically, it would make perfect sense that any anti-Chinese sentiment during this time would have been seen as incompatible with U.S. commercial interests. Any restrictive laws toward the Chinese would have been unthinkable to U.S. leaders in the early to mid-nineteenth century.

Another prominent U.S. leader who was for U.S.-China commercial relations was Asa Whitney. Here is Chang’s description of Whitney’s connection to and interest in China:

Whitney came from a comfortable New England family (he was distantly related to the inventor of the cotton gin) and had made a fortune in the China trade around the time of the 1839-1842 Opium War. During his two years of living in China, he studied the economies and societies of China, the rest of Asia, and the Pacific Islands and concluded that America was singularly positioned between ‘Europe, with a starving, destitute population of 250,000,000’ and Asia with a population of ‘700,000,000 of souls still more destitute.’ This position placed an immense responsibility (and opportunity) upon America, he believed, a responsibility that required the construction of the transcontinental link. Convinced that ‘vast commercial, moral, and political results’ resided in the project, he returned to America from China resolved, as he said, ‘to devote my life to the work which I believed promised so much good to all mankind.’ As he immodestly but piously claimed, ‘nature’s God’ had made absolutely clear that the rail route he proposed across the continent was ‘the grand highway, to civilize and Christianize all mankind.’ Whitney rejected the idea he would personally gain from the proposal, declaring he was willing to risk his very life and fortune for his historic vision.

Not only did Whitney see America as the superior nation—it was a superior nation situated between the declining civilizations of Europe and Asia. This is key. The U.S. was in a unique position to “save” human civilization by uplifting it through religious and economic means. And the grand method for “saving humanity” included the transcontinental railroad. According to Chang, “…Whitney believed the poor masses of Europe would flock to America with its plentiful land now within reach because of the rail line. And as for the peopling of the Pacific? Why, ‘millions of Chinese would emigrate’ and it would be American ships that would move them.” Additionally, Chang explains how the U.S. had already become linked with China economically around the time of independence: 

The port cities of Salem, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore all depended on the lucrative China trade, and the American commercial elite—the Cabots, Lowells, Browns, Perkins, Delanos, Astors, and Forbes, among others—all thrived from the tea, furs, textiles, ceramics, housewares, and other goods that the Yankee traders plied across the seas. Trade in African slaves and that in Chinese goods were pillars of the early American economy. It was not a coincidence that the first, or at least one of the first, ships to fly the new Stars and Stripes after the winning of independence was the Empress of China, a three-mast sailing ship outfitted by Robert Morris, ‘the financier of the American revolution’ and one of the wealthiest men in America. It departed New York harbor on February 22, 1784, George Washington’s birthday, bound for China with a hold full of American ginseng that was to appeal to the Chinese male market.

Whitney’s desire to increase commercial relations with China not only stemmed from his personal business interests, but from the fact that the China trade was already a fundamental aspect to U.S. economic stability. However, a transcontinental railroad would take commercial and cultural U.S.-China relations to a whole new level. Interestingly enough, U.S. religious leaders were passionately for increased interactions with the Chinese people because it meant they could bring more of them to Christ: “Thousands of ministers, their families, and many more volunteer church workers and lay evangelicals made their way to China through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, making it the largest American missionary effort in the world.” According to their logic, increased commercial relations with China also meant increased opportunities for religious conversion. And to go further, American religious individuals welcomed the Chinese into the U.S. because it also created more opportunities to convert them at home. From a religious standpoint, ultimately their interests in communing with the Chinese did go beyond commercial concerns:

Many believed that the mingling of Chinese with others on North American soil was a historic inevitability and, in the minds of some, the actual culmination of a human drama that began in the early moments of human civilization. This was not about real immigrants so much as it was about an idealized version of migration and heavenly intentions. In the thinking of many prominent Americans in the early nineteenth century, the white and yellow ‘races,’ separated in the distant past, were destined to meet again and amalgamate America.

But at the same time, commercial relations was seen as the great unifier. According to Thomas Hart Benton, who had served as a senator for Missouri for thirty years (he was elected to five consecutive terms from 1821 to 1851):

Though ‘far below the White,’ the Yellow was ‘far above’ ‘the Black,’ ‘the Malay, or Brown,’ and ‘Red,’ and inevitably the white would uplift eastern Asia. ‘The sun of civilization,’ Benton pronounced, ‘must shine across the sea’ and the white and yellow ‘must intermix.’ The two races would once again unite. And in what must have shocked many of his fellow senators, he declared, ‘They must talk together, and trade together and marry together. Commerce is a great civilizer—social intercourse as great—and marriage greater. The White and Yellow races can marry together, as well as eat and trade together.’

Although Benton’s racist perspective wasn’t unique to him, he saw an opportunity to “uplift” the Chinese, not just for historical and religious reasons, but because he saw the Asian race as the most “primed” to intermix with the Causassion race. Interestingly enough, the reason Benton no longer served as senator of Missouri after 1851 is due to the fact that he switched his position on slavery (he decided to oppose introducing slavery to new U.S. territories and was voted out of office as a result). William H. Seward, along with the men discussed above, believed that “Controlling the China trade was essential for America’s future, as would be the acquisition of islands and strategic points all along the Pacific.” Seward, also an expansionist, was a New York senator and New York governor (1839-1842); he lost to Lincoln, who received the republican nomination to run for president in 1860; he was also secretary of state for Lincoln and Anderson, and he negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. It is safe to say that Seward was a highly influential political leader and he was convinced of the same beliefs other expansionists held about accessing China from the Pacific:

In 1852, he declared from the floor of the Senate, ‘[T]he commercial, social, political movements of the world, are now in the direction of California,’ and in turn California was the gateway to the grand Pacific. Da Gama, Columbus, Americus, Cabot, Hudson, and even the discovery of New World and its settlement, he believed, ‘were but conditional, preliminary, and ancillary to the more sublime result, now in the act of consummation—the reunion of the two civilizations, which, having parted on the plains of Asia four thousand years ago, and having travelled ever afterward in opposite directions around the world, now meet again on the coasts and islands of the Pacific Ocean. Certainly, no mere human event of equal dignity and importance has ever occurred upon the earth.’

Belief is absolutely key here. These U.S. leaders believed in the destiny that was meant to play out between American Caucasians and the Chinese, so much so that they went to great lengths to not only convince the American public of this destiny, but to impress it upon their political peers. To put it more bluntly, these U.S. leaders were passionate about interacting with the Chinese and their political decisions and actions during the nineteenth century reflected that. Chang also explains that Seward was the “secret author of the 1869 Burlingame Treaty, the most equitable and favorable treaty China concluded with any Western nation in the nineteenth century” and that free immigration was one of the central elements of the treaty“ but that would soon change.

Throughout the 1870s, anti-Chinese sentiment was continually combated by the efforts of expansionists who promoted Chinese immigration. However, “in the late 1870s, widespread social unrest and political disaffection in the West fueled the belief that the Chinese were labor competitors and louder demands for federal efforts to control their entry into the country.” But their agenda to restrict the Chinese was not easily achieved. They attempted to pass something called the Fifteen Passenger Bill, which limited the number of Chinese passengers on American ships, but it was vetoed by President Rutherford B. Hayes, who was decidedly for U.S.-Chinese commercial relations. At the beginning of 1882, exclusionists tried to pass restrictive legislation in regards to the Chinese, but it was again vetoed, this time by President Chester Arthur, who “emphasized the importance of upholding the country’s treaty obligations with China but also reminded the nation that Chinese labor had brought great benefit to the country. The Chinese were ‘largely instrumental in constructing the railways which connect the Atlantic with the Pacific,’ he wrote in his long veto passage.” So how did restrictive anti-Chinese legislation become the standard of U.S. immigration policy? Interestingly enough, it’s directly connected to the influence of expansionism paired with the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Democratic Party:

The Compromise of 1877 ending federal Reconstruction marked the resurrection of racist politics nationally, represented largely by the Democratic Party and the return of a white South to national prominence. The anti-black South was becoming a powerful ally of the anti-Chinese elements in the West—West-South coalitions formed the heart of restriction efforts in Congress. The Democrats would actually take the White House in 1884—the previous presidential victory of the Democratic Party had been way back in 1856. Economic depression and white labor unrest also swept the country in the late 1870s. Paradoxically, it was the fulfillment of the dreams of Manifest Destiny boosters and developers that created conditions that anti-Chinese agitators exploited. Chinese had begun to populate the West; the railroad, built with Chinese labor, enabled whites to populate the Far West; and the very growth of the West, which had been encouraged by the lure of the Far East and trade, enhanced the domestic political importance of California, Oregon, and the Washington Territory. Now that section could not be ignored by the eastern establishment, which had formed the bulwark of sentiment supporting open immigration.

To put it more bluntly, racist backlash partially ignited by the growing demographic of the West encouraged anti-Chinese legislation. But there is another important factor that further encouraged Chinese restriction: China itself. According to Chang

…the predatory ambitions of European nations and Japan, which were then actually seizing Chinese territory and eroding regional prerogatives, heightened the security concerns of the Chinese elite. Beijing believed America’s goodwill was needed to counterbalance the other aggressive foreign powers. Worried that the rising sentiment against Chinese laborers, whose welfare was of little concern to the imperial court, might jeopardize American friendship, Beijing signaled its willingness to accept immigration restriction. This new attitude was expressed in the Angell Treaty of 1880, in which Beijing expressed it might accept moderate immigration limitations while keeping its own doors open to American traders and missionaries.

This act directly led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that was put into effect by President Arthur, who had previously been an adamant supporter of Chinese immigration. What’s even more interesting is that, in retrospect, the legislation seems incredibly harsh, but it was actually seen at the time as a compromise intended to appease exclusionists, and yet, “it still failed to mollify,” and “For more than the next two decades, they agitated for more stringent restrictions against the continued entry of Chinese into the country.” Racism became the primary motivator for not only Chinese restriction, but all of immigration legislation in the late nineteenth century, driven overwhelmingly by the interests of democratic party leaders who had gained control of the government at this time. They singlehandedly succeeded in switching the national narrative from encouraging communion with the Chinese commercially, culturally, and religiously, to portraying them as threatening labor competitors and problematic to their desire to maintain and perpetuate the one thing that mattered to them above all else: White Supremacy.

The final essay to be discussed in this review is “Social Darwinism Versus Social Engineering: The ‘Education’ of Japanese Americans During World War II” which was a result of a Stanford conference Chang participated in that dealt with “state-sponsored efforts at mass population control, especially during World War II.” Chang also notes that the focus was primarily on European examples, whereas Chang’s contribution to the conference focused on the Japanese internment camps. Chang asserts “that the global war was a racialized experience in part for the United States, not just for the fascists that espoused the most extreme forms of racial chauvinism.” Japanese internment is a subject that is rarely discussed, and when it is, it is severely glossed over. Chang’s examination of this troubling moment in U.S. history is critically significant not merely because he takes a deeper dive into the incident, but because he “highlights two forms of racism endured by Japanese Americans in the war years. One was based on biologically based assumptions that located blood or genetics as the source of social behavior and, for the Japanese, their alleged security threat to the nation. The other was based in more ‘modern’ and liberal notions of human malleability and state ambitions to change human behavior and identity through social engineering [italics mine].” The second form of racism is Chang’s primary focus of the essay, and rightfully so, because Japanese Internment during World War II is typically seen through the lens of the first form of racism, which tends to leave out the ulterior motives for initiating and maintaining the mass incarceration of an entire race of people. Chang clarifies the ultimate truth about why the Japanese were interned, beyond their supposed security threat:

Many in the administrative and teaching staff of the federal government’s camps that held Japanese Americans believed they could make positive contributions to the war effort by transforming prisoners into what constituted, in their view, model Americans. The state efforts were supposedly for the good of the Japanese Americans themselves. In this way, the U.S. camps were akin to many other population control mechanisms instituted by states around the world that aimed to dramatically reshape human communities and often rationalized as serving the interests of the victims.      

More simply put, those that were running the camps believed they could turn the Japanese into better people. It wasn’t just about containing an entire race of people to ensure the safety of the majority; it was about reconstructing a particular demographic so that it would serve a more beneficial purpose for the whole of American society. But it is also important for readers to understand that this was not the publicized reason for establishing the camps. As Chang explains, most Americans supported the Japanese internment camps because they saw the Japanese as a literal threat and it was generally in alignment with the following official statement released by General John L. DeWitt, commander of the Western Military Command:

In the war which we are now engaged racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted….That Japan is allied with Germany and Italy in this struggle is no ground for assuming that any Japanese, barred from assimilation by convention as he is, though born and raised in the United States, will not turn against the nation when the final test of loyalty comes. It, therefore, follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies of Japanese extraction, are at large today.

The main fear around the Japanese had to do with racism. Most people on a global level “had been nurtured on nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century assumptions about a genetically based racial hierarchy of humankind and the claims of a ‘biology’-based social Darwinism that linked social behavior, psychology and culture to blood.”  Many Americans saw the Japanese as racially inferior and racially suspect. But it is also important for readers to know that the support for Japanese internment was embraced across the board; those who considered themselves more liberal and progressive supported Japanese internment as well, not necessarily because of race, but because of the following: “military necessity.” However, as Chang states,

…the federal government’s invocation of ‘military necessity’ was never substantiated by evidence; within the government, military intelligence and law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, had actually opposed the unselective internment of persons of Japanese ancestry. (In 1982, the federal commission appointed by President Jimmy Carter, which reviewed the history of internment, declared that it was ‘not justified by military necessity. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.’)

This is also key. The U.S. government never had to provide any solid evidence that Japanese Americans were a real threat, this was just accepted as truth even by the most liberal-minded individuals within the U.S. population. Additionally, many of them saw internment as “somehow in the interests of Japanese Americans.” And yet Congress was the most harsh in how it wanted to handle Japanese Americans. They “publicly pressed for more extreme measures against the internees, including wholesale deportation, abolition of citizenship for the American-born, permanent segregation of male and female to prevent further reproduction of the population, sterilization, and even death.” Although these measures were not acted upon, readers need to have a clear understanding of just how hostile U.S. politicians were toward Japanese Americans during World War II. Above all, though, the shared consensus among Americans, whether conservative or liberal, was that Japanese Americans should be collectively interned.

In this essay, Chang talks about one of the individuals who was ultimately responsible for establishing the internment camps: John J. McCloy. He was assistant secretary of war; he was the high commissioner of occupied Germany; he was the World Bank President; he was a presidential advisor (beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt and ending with Ronald Reagan); he was part of the Warren Commission, which investigated and determined the official cause of John F. Kennedy’s assassination; he was also an influential force for Chase Manhattan Bank and the Ford Foundation. In short, McCloy was a significant U.S. government official. McCloy was quite interested in utilizing the internment camps for social engineering purposes. He even wrote to Alexander Meiklejohn about it. To give readers a bit of context, Meiklejohn was not only a former president of Amherst College, he had studied and taught philosophy at Brown University where he was also the Dean. And he was more than just a philosopher; he was a defender of free speech, and later on in life, he took up law and became a defender of those who engaged in radical politics (like communism, for example). Additionally, right before he died, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Kennedy. It’s safe to say that Meiklejohn was quite progressive for his time. McCloy himself had attended Amherst and had to have been aware of Meiklejohn’s political and philosophical beliefs. Here is an excerpt from that letter:

We would be missing a very big opportunity if we failed to study the Japanese in these Camps at some length before they are dispersed. We have not done a very good job thus far in solving the Japanese problem in this country. I believe we have a great opportunity to give the thing intelligent thought now and to reach solid conclusions for the future. These people, gathered as they are in these communities, afford a means of sampling their opinion and studying their customs and habits in a way we have never before had possible. We could find out what they are thinking about and we might very well influence their thinking in the right direction before they are again distributed into communities [italics mine].

I am aware that such suggestion may provoke a charge that we have no right to treat these people as ‘guinea pigs,’ but I would rather treat them as guinea pigs and learn something useful than merely to treat them, or have them treated, as they have been in the past with such unsuccessful results.

This shows that the possibility of using the internment camps as a social engineering experiment was being considered at the very beginning, on a private level. According to Chang, McCloy never reversed his feelings about the internment camps in retrospect: “as late as the 1980s McCloy continued to defend the decision, arguing that it was ‘entirely just and reasonable’ because of the demands of wartime security,” but it wasn’t just about “security,” because as readers know, Japanese Americans were never a real threat. It’s safe to say that McCloy ardently defended the internment camps because their underlying purpose was to study the Japanese American population to see if they could “improve” them. If they were successful, they could use it as a benchmark for larger social engineering projects. This is an aspect of Japanese internment that never gets discussed. As Chang brilliantly reveals, for government officials like McCloy, there was “an opportunity…to study and shape the confined population in the interests of the state….The internees, racially defined, incarcerated against their will, and in violation of constitutional practices and principles, were indeed treated as ‘guinea pigs.’” When viewed through this lens, Japanese internment takes on a whole new shape.

Another significant figure in regards to the internment camps was a man named Carey McWilliam, who, interestingly enough, was the chief of the Division of Immigration and Housing for the State of California in the early forties. He had published a significant book in 1939 called Factories in the Field, which exposed the brutal reality of California migrant workers. As would be expected, McWilliams was very much against the Japanese internment camps; however, he changed his mind: “‘Evacuation and resettlement,’ as McWilliams put it in the summer of 1942, “can be handled democratically and fairly for the attainment of highly desirable social objectives.’” Why the sudden change of heart? McWilliams clearly stated it himself: “for the attainment of highly desirable social objectives.” By social objectives, he meant, social engineering experimentation. He came to the exact same conclusions as McCloy; he saw the internment of a large number of Japanese American as an opportunity to “improve them,” and if it was successful, apply the social engineering methods in a more standardized way. Chang goes into more detail:

He [McWilliams] seemed to have been persuaded by what he called the ‘unique opportunity’ relocation offered to develop underutilized lands, to “democratize” the Japanese [italics mine], and to improve the economic resources of the Japanese community. ‘I see in the resettlement of the Japanese,’ McWilliams emphasized, ‘a unique opportunity to work out not only new community patterns…but the necessary administrative skills and techniques for dealing with the whole problem of rural and urban reconstruction in the post-war period [italics mine]. Like McCloy, he saw the possibilities that internment offered for social engineers [italics mine]. In a major article for Harper’s, McWilliams, acknowledging that he had originally opposed the idea of relocation, nevertheless praised the government’s actual roundup and incarceration of Japanese Americans as ‘a miracle of effective organization.’ [italics mine] ‘There is no reason why the relocation projects cannot be successful,’ he concluded his article, and ‘cannot in fact reflect a great credit upon us as a nation—provided a majority of the American people will insist upon fair treatment of the Japanese and not succumb to demagogues and race-baiters.’

McWilliams’s overwhelming support for the Japanese internment camps should be troubling for readers for the mere fact that he did not prioritize human rights as the central factor for why internment camps are incredibly problematic. Instead, he chose to prioritize social engineering experimentation: using the internment camps to “democratize” i.e. “normalize” the Japanese. But even more than that, he saw it as having a “practical” function: the internment camps were placed in remote locations that could be “developed” and offered opportunities for the Japanese to somehow become more economically successful. And to go even further, he saw an opportunity for developing “new community patterns” i.e. restructuring of social groups within a given landscape and establishing “necessary administrative skills and techniques for dealing with…rural and urban reconstruction” i.e. coming up with a systematic way for the government to reorganize society as a whole. The Japanese American internees would be the test group for these purposes. This is even more troubling given the fact that McWilliams seemed to be keyed in on the migrant and immigrant experience; unfortunately, he was more interested in promoting assimilation through social engineering. It’s also important for readers to know that McWilliams became a highly-influential journalist. He was the editor of the Nation for twenty years (1955-75), which continues to be a prominent liberal publication. He was also a supporter of radical thinkers such as Howard Zinn. This is a classic example of how liberal-minded people can be susceptible to going against their own principles in an attempt to “better society.” They were perfectly willing to use anti-democratic methods (internment camps) to improve a “democratized” society by making it even more “democratic”—sectioned off and standardized into safe, “Americanized” communities. The Japanese internment camps weren’t just utilized for “security” measures or to appease racists; they were utilized by the most prominent liberal thinkers of the time to experiment with creating an even more Americanized society.

This desire to create a hyper-Americanized society spread to all sorts of liberal-minded individuals. According to Chang

…A regiment of teachers, social scientists, and government administrators explored the possibilities in scores of internal government reports, published articles, and books. The WRA itself employed some thirty anthropologists as analysts who closely monitored the interned population and reported to camp authorities. The responsibilities of these specialists, most trained at leading research universities, was to help administrators improve social controls. According to one of these analysts, they worked at ‘sizing up [internment] problems which stood in the way of executing the basic policies, and to a lesser extent at devising means for solving these problems.’ In typical WRA bureaucratic language that obfuscated the actual social and racial relations between the powerless, who were incarcerated, and the authorities, the analyst concluded, ‘The role of Community Analysis was that of an aid in maintaining communication between a group of administrators and a group of administered people.’

The WRA went out of its way to blatantly use the interned Japanese Americans as literal guinea pigs for their social engineering ambitions, and all of the work was done by those with liberal politics. They produced writings, they worked as analysts, they consulted with specialists in an attempt to “improve social controls.” And then, in typical bureaucratic fashion, it was justified with the claim they were going to all these great lengths for the sake of “communication between a group of administrators and a group of administered people.” That statement in itself is highly avoidant of the truth. If we translate it out of bureaucratic terminology it’s really about social engineering experimenters engaging in highly detailed observation of a controlled group (oppressed Japanese American internees without their consent) in an attempt to find out if they could achieve hyper-Americanization on a national scale. If this was simply about containing a group of people for “security” reasons, they would not have needed “a regiment of teachers, social scientists, and government administrators” and they certainly would not have needed “thirty anthropologists.” They simply would’ve needed military guards. Chang also points out that later on this particular analyst came to a more accurate understanding of what was really going on with these internment camps:

Years later, this same analyst assumed a much more jaundiced view of the internment enterprise in which he had been involved. He came to characterize camp officials as administrative technicians steeped in the Western tradition of ‘getting things done.’ The WRA administrators made decisions for the internees ‘and then asked for cooperation in accomplishing what they had decided on.’ The result was a ‘paternalistic set of decisions.’ Though still employing euphemistic terms, the former analyst had come to sense not only the antidemocratic nature of internment but the liberal, technomanagerial ethos that imbued the entire experience.

These contributors did not just see the internment camps as a temporary necessary evil. They hoped it would have a ripple effect in terms of overall “societal improvement” after the war: “like McCloy and McWilliams, [they] saw their work as possibly helping address what they believed would be American needs in the postwar period. Their outlook, as revealed in their own writings, displays a confidence, even hubris, in the morality of their mission and rationality of their intentions and actions.” Again, if it was just about detainment, there wouldn’t be a need for so much “experimentation” and “research.” Obviously, it was never just about detainment. Chang lists some of the essays that were published as a result of the internment camps and the titles are quite telling:

Emory S. Bogardus, “Relocation Centers as Planned Communities,” (Sociology and Social Research, 1944); Bureau of Sociological Research (WRA), “The Psychiatric Approach in Problems of Community Management: From a Study of a Japanese Relocation Cener” (American Journal of Psychiatry, 1943); Wanda Robertson, “Developing World Citizens in a Japanese Relocation Center” (Childhood Education, 1943); Monica Kehoe, “Japanese Become Americans: Adult Education at Gila River Relocation Project, Rivers, Arizona” (Adult Education Journal, 1944); John U. Provinse, “Building New Communities During War Time” (American Sociological Review, 1946); and Edward H. Spicer, “Reluctant Cotton-Pickers: Incentive to Work in a Japanese Relocation Center,” in E.H. Spicer, ed., Human Problems in Technological Change (1952).

Not only were these essays conscientiously published by prominent journals, they all swirl around one particular topic: social engineering. They aren’t about safety, security, or defense; they’re about sociological and psychological research geared toward the hope of restructuring a larger society.

Within the camps themselves, the desire to apply social engineering strategies was taken extremely seriously. According to Chang

…the WRA strove to build what it believed were ideal American communities, with town councils, pseudoelections, Americanization classes, and organized celebrations of American holidays. These efforts, occurring within confinement and directed toward those who were already in fact Americans, were by nature highly contrived, artificial, prescribed, and orchestrated….The WRA teachers’ handbook stated explicitly that education should ‘lead each individual to practice American manners and customs.’ Instruction was given on proper ways to shop and recreate and on acceptable etiquette and mores. In the prison camp classrooms for children as well as for the adult education classes, teachers were to promote new gender relationships by encouraging ‘the American ideal of the equality of women.’

And as Chang reveals, those running the camps “never appreciated the cruel irony of these proposals being advanced under the banner of democracy.” In other words, in order to condition a group of incarcerated Japanese Americans (who were already American citizen) into a state of hyper-Americanism, they employed highly anti-democratic strategies (like forced incarceration) in the supposed name of social good will. And that’s how they justified it. They believed they were doing a good thing for Japanese Americans and they believed they were doing a good thing for American society by essentially force feeding them American customs, beliefs, and values. To show just how blindly dedicated these camp “administrators” were to their cause, Chang offers a perfect example, a man named Jerome T. Light. He worked at the camp school in Minidoka, Idaho, and he was so dedicated to showing the Japanese American internees that he was in solidarity with them that he even sent his own children to the camp school. Later on, he received his doctoral degree in education from Standford where he wrote a “two-volume, twelve-hundred-age thesis” that discussed his experiences teaching in the school camp. Here is a sample of his highly academic interpretation of what he encountered:

The educational program itself could be expected to increase the use and appreciation of American social customs. Studies of vocations dealt with occupations in the United States. The science courses, although not exclusively American, pointed out the scientific advances made in the United Sates. Vocational education, including home economics and commercial courses as well as shop courses, inevitably taught American practices. The reading instruction presented American literature, the books in the library were American….The American History and Government taught in grade 11 was enriched as much as possible for this same purpose. The study of World Problems in grade 12 was oriented inevitably with the American viewpoint. In dealing with the 10th grade theme, The Community: A Human Invention to Serve Human Needs, the American communities were studied most of the time, and when foreign communities were studied they were inevitably viewed through American eyes. The theme in the 7th grade, How Man Utilizes Science and Inventions, illustrated how it was done in the United States more than elsewhere. And, the very method of instruction and the organization of the school were typically American as was realized by students.

Although Light was supposedly one of the more sympathetic people toward the Japanese internees, ultimately he was primarily concerned with performing his task and articulating his findings for research purposes, so that those who came after him would have his articulate knowledge and experience to pull from for their own social engineering projects. However, one question does remain about this social experiment: how did the Japanese feel about it? Chang gives a good answer:

Most Japanese Americans were confused, angry, and certainly frightened by the 1942 internment order. Their futures were completely uncertain and unguaranteed by the state. But most publicly responded to the order with relatively little opposition and protest. Some believed internment was a necessary evil demanded by a good government, and they complied and cooperated. Cooperation with whatever the state demanded could prove loyalty. For others, internment confirmed the basically racist nature of American society and resistance within the centers, which included political and cultural forms, often frustrated administrators. The differences of opinion and attitudes among the internees ran deep and produced sharp, even violent conflicts. It was not at all clear to them whether internment was a result of a racism that assumed Japanese biological inferiority and disloyalty or of wartime overreaction to security concerns. Once in the camps, Japanese Americans did not know whether they faced possible future elimination, through deportation or physical extermination (a bleak social Darwinist ‘fate’), or a benign bureaucratic paternalism of Americanism (a social-engineering ‘project’) upon them.

As expected, Japanese Americans, being a nuanced people, and not merely a one-dimensional demographic, had a variety of responses and feelings about being forcibly interned by their government. However, there is one constant that links them: compliance. They did as they were asked; they participated in internment by allowing themselves to be interned. Was it because they were “weak” or “inferior”? No. They did it because they were not guilty. The Japanese Americans responded the same way any targeted group during this time would: with innocent compliance. They allowed themselves to be interned for the greater good. Chang talks about one Japanese individual who was interned by the name of Yamato Ichihashi, who was also an academic: a historian. Born in Japan (his father was a samurai), he received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Economics and a Ph.D. from Harvard. In the early twentieth century, he taught the following subjects at Stanford: history, government, international relations, and the Japanese experience. During the war, he was interned with other Japanese Americans, at the Santa Anita race track, in the horse stables, and then later moved to Sharp Park Detention Center. Ichihashi kept an extensive diary during his experience in the camps and as Chang explains, “His record is perhaps the only extant complete first-person account of the experience as events actually unfolded.” Although Ichihashi had intended to write more extensively about his experiences in the internment camp, the experience itself affected him, and when he was finally released, he had become “a bitter, cynical man whose family had disintegrated around him and whose intellectual life had died.” Understandably so. According to Chang

Examining Ichihashi’s effort to try to describe his unfolding experience reveals the conflicting ideologies that controlled the camps and the difficulty he had in comprehending exactly what was happening to him and the other internees. There was no clear precedent upon which he could base his interpretation. The internment centers were not prison camps for convicted persons or prisoners of war; they were not reservations for subjugated, indigenous peoples; they were not forced labor camps; they were not reeducation centers for the politically degenerate. They were none of these but also a bit of all of them at the same time.

And as Chang informs readers, Ichihashi and the rest of the Japanese internees did not have knowledge of the Nazi camps, but maybe if they had, that might have created different types of feelings toward the internment camps. Nevertheless, it is clear that Japanese internment was not implemented solely because of “security” but for reasons that were primarily social in nature and highly contradictory:

…political leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt and implementers such as Jerome Light were on the whole consciously ‘antiracist.’ They did not share the openly racist view of those who retained social Darwinian notions about the genetic differences among so-called racial groups. In fact, those responsible for the camps went out of their way to oppose the open racists—the assumption of the WRA’s Americanization programs was that the internees could become just as American as any other people. Any [sic] yet, the entire internment enterprise and its operation were imbued with what can only be called racist policies and actions. The original internment decision, which made no distinction between the rights of alien and citizen, separated persons of Japanese ancestry from those of German or Italian descent. The camp education and Americanization campaigns sought to impose regimes that were in fact racially based and similar to efforts long directed against native Indian populations.

However, there was one strong dissenting voice that accurately described what the U.S. government was actually after with Japanese internment, and his name was Norman Thomas. He was a socialist and a pacifist, and he was the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate from 1928-1948. Here is what he had to say about Japanese internment: “‘For the first time in American history,’ he wrote, ‘men, committees and publications boasting of their ‘liberalism’ as against ‘fascism’ are in the vanguard in justifying the presidential assumption of dictatorial power.’” And to go further, Chang elaborates by saying that “More troubling perhaps was the embrace of the possibilities of mass, ‘scientific’ population control by everyday liberal Americans [italics mine]. The enthusiastic use of various methods of technoadministration employed by the liberals directing America’s internment camps [italics mine] was a sign of the fascination with state manipulation of populations for their own ‘interests’ [italics mine] that become ubiquitous in the postwar period.” Moving forward, readers should no longer see the Japanese internment camps as a response to wartime security concerns, but rather, a full-on attempt by liberal-minded individuals to make use of a confined demographic in order to experiment with and refine methods of social control.

In 2015, Gordon Chang was inducted as a member of a group called C-100 (Committee of 100), which was created in 1989-1990 after the Tiananmen Square Massacre by significant Chinese individuals, such as the architect I.M. Pei and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. According to Google AI, Henry Kissinger advised the creation of the group which has two main goals: 1) to increase Chinese American involvement in all aspects of American life and 2) to improve U.S.-China relations. However, C-100 is more than just a group—they produce research and they are involved in government and law. According to Chang, another primary concern of the C-100 is the unfair treatment of Chinese Americans who have been wrongly accused of espionage and essentially have had their lives ruined as a result. In 2018, Shelly Chen, a Department of Commerce worker, was wrongfully accused of espionage, and was not permitted to return to her job even though the charges against her were dropped. It just goes to show that Chinese Americans are still stigmatized as suspicious and unworthy of trust even by modern day standards. In this sense, Gordon Chang’s War, Race, Culture can also be interpreted by readers as a text designed to do to what C-100 does: reverse racial stigmatization of Asian people in the modern moment. Those who read Chang’s work will not only become more enlightened and educated about the history of U.S-Asian relations, they will also be able to more properly identify injustices enacted toward Asian people when they are presented in any media format. Recognizing these incidences as they occur will go a long way to correct and reduce modern-day racism towards Asians in a more concrete and comprehensive way. Chang’s work is not only valuable because of what it reveals about history, but because of what it can help us achieve in the present so that we can more actively and effectively cultivate a future that operates from a humanist, rather than a racist standpoint.

October 12, 2026