Passing the baton

Carrying forward the legacy of Sino-US bonds of contact, commerce and civility

On the east pediment of the US Supreme Court stands a sculpture of Confucius, alongside Moses and the Athenian political philosopher Solon, honoring the contributions of ancient legal traditions and civilizations to the foundations of law. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, modeled himself on the Confucian virtues of self-cultivation and moral perfection and strived to integrate elements from traditional Chinese culture into the young nation-in-being's way of life. During Franklin's time, wealthy merchants tied to Philadelphia helped finance the start of the US' seaborne trade with China. Ginseng, the main outbound cargo of the Empress of China's maiden voyage from New York in February 1784, had fittingly been promoted by Franklin in his writings decades earlier.

A century later, embedded in the interior walls at the 10th landing of the Washington Monument, the obelisk that dominates the US capital's skyline, is an inscription in Chinese honoring the memory of the US' first president, George Washington. An "extraordinary man" he was, it reads. The inscription goes on to praise the US' kingless form of government with its "unprecedented" appeal to public opinion, shorn as it is of the trappings of a hereditary ruling class. Its author was Xu Jiyu, a pioneering mid-19th century geographer and Fujian provincial governor, whose generation encountered Western sciences and government through US Protestant missionaries. Decades later, from that same missionary milieu emerged Pearl S. Buck — a missionary's daughter raised in China — whose 1931 novel The Good Earth gave millions of US readers their first unsentimental portrait of Chinese peasants as diligent, land-bound and irreducibly human.

If a few instructive pointers are to be gleaned from this earlier age of contact, it is these.

First, along the vast arc of Sino-US relations, admiration of the other traveled in both directions. The philosophical depth of China's cultural traditions, the sophistication of its bureaucratic machinery and the practicality and industry of the Chinese people appealed to US sentiment. For their part, many Chinese saw the US as a golden land of opportunity and important thought-leaders were inspired by its republican political system built on public consent instead of hereditary aristocracy. In both societies, honor ascended, not descended, based on a person's virtuosity, learning and capabilities. The common dream of a better life united both societies and continues to do so today.

Second, commercial contacts and people-to-people bonds long predated relations between the two governments, laying deep roots that continue to hold both societies in good stead to this day. Long before formal treaty relations were established in the 1840s, the homes of the US city-dwelling merchants had been steadily filled with Chinese or Chinese-style things, and the Empress of China had in fact arrived back in New York Harbor in May 1785 with sets of fine tea table china. For their part, early-19th century Chinese geographers and strategic scholars drew upon Western cartographic techniques introduced by the early Protestant missionaries and translated works that helped them form a synthesized view of the empire's frontiers. Today, the equalizing landscape of social media is forming cross-border friendships and followings that transcend national boundaries, creating a layer of people-to-people connections that runs alongside official channels.

Finally, government-to-government support and sponsorship served as an accelerant for people-to-people networks, widening the channels through which individuals, ideas and institutions crossed the Pacific. The 1979 US-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement has led to an efflorescence of academic exchanges. China and the US have become each other's top scientific partners in co-authored papers, and Sino-US collaboration has become a defining feature of high-impact research in fields from genomics to AI.

Today, as China's modernization unfolds on a scale no less consequential than the US' own ascent a century and a half earlier, anxieties are unfortunately creeping into public discourse once again. People-to-people ties must craft an alternative narrative — one that champions a new vision of an equal partnership of two great societies and categorically rejects the false appeals of nativism, exclusivity and exclusion. The students and youth of the two countries, as well as businesspeople and entrepreneurs, must serve as cultural ambassadors. Both groups subscribe to worldviews that transcend ideological divides and are more at ease with the shifting terms of Sino-US power dynamics. And governments on both shores of the Pacific must support such people-to-people emissaries, including through programs such as China's invitation to 100,000 US youths over five years and the US' own "100,000 Strong Initiative" launched during the Barack Obama administration.

Founded on the timeless principles that have informed and sustained the remarkable character of Sino-US people-to-people ties, a new chapter of contact, commerce and civility waits to be written.

The author is a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, DC.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.