TO
LIGHT THE LAMPS OF CHINA
Sino-American
relations always seem to have at least a hint of the ridiculous
about them, and small wonder, since they tend to be more about
the images each nation projects upon the other than any objective
reality. Witness the last superpower brush-up, which involved
the death of a Chinese pilot who seemed most intent upon exchanging
e-mails, an unacknowledged hostage crisis, and a non-apology apology
from the United States.
All of this
fizzled away before it could become something more tragic, but
we can expect further confrontations to be just as edgy. The effort
by China’s rulers to join the world’s economy—while
still maintaining their dictatorial powers and asserting a regional
hegemony, has left the Bush administration in a quandary. Is China
to be regarded as the next great cold war threat, or our partner
in globalization?
Both of these
stances have their domestic attractions, which is the trouble.
A belligerent China makes a useful boogeyman for those pushing
for a defensive missile shield and a massive military build-up.
A China looming as the world’s greatest market and one of
its greatest producers is the vision dangled by those looking
to abolish trade barriers and “engage” China’s
dictators. Meanwhile, Americans on both the right and left wish
to hold China accountable for the its ongoing persecution of religious
and political dissidents.
Yet the worst
scenario of all would be to regard China as what we desire it
to be, as opposed to what it really is. We have done this all
too often in the past, and the results have usually been disastrous.
In the 1930s
and ’40s, Time magazine’s Henry Luce insisted
on viewing Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang through
the prism of his boyhood days as a Prebyterian missionary’s
son in China. Luce’s bully pulpit, sympathy for a China
reeling under Japan’s brutal aggression, and the Christianity
and adroit public relations skills of Madame Chiang (Mei-ling
Soong), created a “China Lobby” of American columnists,
politicians, businessmen, and labor organizers, all convinced
that the Chiangs were about to lead their nation forward into
a benevolent, Christianized, Westernized democracy.
“We
shall lift Shanghai up, up forever, until it is just like Kansas
City!” Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry promised at the height
of such fervor.
Others remained
more skeptical. “Too much ‘issimo’ and not enough
‘general’,” was Texas Senator Tom Connally’s
pronouncement upon Chiang, but when his corrupt and unpopular
regime did collapse in 1949, millions of Americans smelled betrayal.
“Who
lost China?” became the new rallying cry of the China Lobby.
Spearheaded now by one Alfred Kohlberg, a businessman and professional
conspiracy theorist known as “the Handkerchief King,”
the lobby instituted a McCarthyist witch hunt that drove one dedicated,
American foreign policy officer after another out of public life,
and freely accused men such as Harry Truman and George Marshall
of criminal incompetence at best, and outright treason at worst.
(The China
Lobby also picked up a recruit in a California congressman named
Richard Nixon, who would join the “Who lost China?”
chorus until just about the day he stepped on a plane to go meet
Chairman Mao.)
The whole
idea that the world’s most populous nation and one of its
most venerable civilizations was ever ours to “win”
or “lose” is one of breathtaking hubris, and we paid
a steep price for it. Our inability to now view China as anything
but another block of monolithic Communism, and our sudden lack
of experience in the East Asian bureaus of the State Department,
did much to elongate the Korean War, hasten our blunder into Vietnam,
and keep China a Soviet ally for longer than it might otherwise
have been.
Yet all this
is a familiar story. Less well-known is the business side of it—of
how we have also insisted on projecting China as the great market
of our dreams.
“Oil
for the lamps of China.” The very words convey a certain
romance, a tantalizing quest for riches, akin to the search for
the Northwest Passage, or El Dorado. Now mostly forgotten, they
once fired the imaginations of business tycoons and the American
public alike.
The words—and
the whole idea of China as our greatest trading partner—stemmed
from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Corporation. By
the early 1880s, 85 percent of the world’s crude oil was
still drilled in Pennsylvania, and of that amount more than two-thirds
went abroad. Oil being America’s fourth largest export—and
when you said oil you meant Standard Oil.
“In
the early 1870s, kerosene penetrated China, Japan, and other far-off
spots, and one American traveler in 1874 saw Standard kerosene
flickering in the ancient quarters of Babylon and Nineveh,”
Ron Chernow wrote in Titan, his prize-winning biography
of Rockefeller.
Though Standard
Oil already monopolized the domestic market, it was always looking
for new opportunities. In 1882, the company sent a merchant named
William Herbert Libby to East Asia, where he was soon distributing
pamphlets praising the safety of kerosene lamps—and the
lamps themselves. Like some latter-day software developer passing
out free laptops, Libby saw to it that eight million Mei Foo,
or “good luck” kerosene lamps were either sold for
a pittance or given away free, with millions more soon to follow.
“In
many countries, we had to teach the people…to burn oil by
making lamps for them;” Rockefeller wrote in his memoirs.
“we packed the oil to be carried by camels or on the backs
of runners in the most remote portions of the world; we adapted
the trade to the needs of strange folk.”
This was,
of course, an exaggeration. The “strange folk” of
China had been burning oil in lamps for millenia before anyone
had ever dreamed of the Standard Oil Company.
Yet Libby’s
strategy was a great success. The lamps were indeed moved deep
into the heart of China, in caravans of carts or on sampans. Before
long, Standard Oil had broken both the monopoly on peanut oil
exercised by mandarin merchants, and swept aside the prejudice
village priests had against kerosene. Even when empty, the tin
cans and wood frames the kerosene was packed in made useful household
additions for poor Chinese peasants.
The whole
endeavor seemed to be a shining example of pragmatic, Yankee ingenuity.
Sell them the lamps and they will buy the fuel! “Oil for
the lamps of China” soon became a byword among American
businessmen and internationalists. It was even the title of a
highly popular, 1932 novel, written by Alice Tisdale Hobart, an
American woman who had married an oilman stationed in China.
Her story
followed the rise of Stephen Chase, a young oil executive captivated
by a vision of an industrialized China. In the novel, it is Chase
who comes up with the idea for the Mei Foo lamps, by
recalling his childhood night light.
“A tiny
chimney, tiny bowl that would hold a coppers’ worth of oil!
A lamp that peasants and coolies could afford to buy! Stephen
smiled to himself, seeing their childish delight, remembering
the pleasure they took in examining his watch, his flashlight...His
dream expanded. In time the Company could put a lamp in every
inn, every hut in Manchuria, in China! Four hundred million people,
millions of lamps.”
Herein lay
one of the very cornerstones of American optimism. The idea, tracing
back to Puritans, that there need be no conflict between doing
well and doing good. The Chinese would have light, China would
rise, and the stockholders would get rich!
Like any good
novelist, Ms. Hobart probed beneath the outlook of the annual
report. As Richard O’Connor describes it in his history,
The Oil Barons, Stephen Chase devolves into “a
company man, completely dedicated to his career and to the higher
echelon, and the Chinese world receded from his consciousness.
The Chinese themselves were only faceless consumers—actors
in a corporate drama.”
That corporate
drama would play out a little differently, but it would indeed
undermine John D. Rockefeller’s loftier ideals. Even as
Standard Oil expanded into China, it was losing its worldwide
monopoly on crude oil. Discoveries of massive deposits at Baku
and elsewhere soon made it clear that the world’s oil had
not all been providentially placed in western Pennsylvania.
Before long,
companies led by Sweden’s famous Nobel brothers, the Rothschilds,
and the Anglo-Dutch combine of Shell Oil and Royal Dutch, were
drawing on enormous new fields and refineries from the Black Sea
to the Dutch East Indies, and challenging Standard Oil’s
hegemony around the world. By the 1890s, Russian crude oil production
would even briefly surpass that of the U.S., and Rockefeller responded
to the challenge with alacrity—and some less than savory
methods. Trying to create alarm in Russia’s main superpower
rival, Standard Oil hired British solicitors to spread rumors
of a cabal under “Hebrew influence” who were trying
to take Russian tankers through the Suez Canal.
Rockefeller
himself railed against “our Asiatic competitors controlled
by Jewish men who cry ‘Wolf! Wolf! Standard Oil Company!’
and keep moving in and getting control of markets,” and
contrasted Standard Oil’s “fair-minded” practices
with “the old, old, Jew method of treating one customer
one way and another in another [way].”
This took
considerable chutzpah, coming as it did from a man who
had built his own company in good part by concluding secret, illegal
preferential rate deals with American railroads. It was also disingenuous;
the Rothschilds had been on the verge of reaching a deal with
Standard Oil before it was scotched by Count Sergie Witte, Russia’s
finance minister.
Much to Rockefeller’s
chagrin, he would have to share the Asian market with Jewish and
non-Jewish men alike (and soon, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, the
American market as well). Chinese peasants proved to know a little
bit about capitalism themselves, and before long many of them
were burning cheaper, Shell oil in their good-luck lamps. Finally,
the civil and foreign wars that would soon convulse China for
decades, followed by the Communist takeover, would prevent the
Middle Kingdom from ever quite developing into the surefire market
that the Rockefellers and the Stephen Chases had envisioned.
Another Rockefeller
venture in China would prove more enduring. As part of its immensely
beneficial, worldwide program of medical research and disease
control, the Rockefeller Foundation opened the Peking Union Medical
College in 1921. Even after being nationalized by the Communists
the college, in Chernow’s words, “introduced a generation
of Chinese doctors to modern medicine.”
The lesson
in all this, perhaps, is that we deal best with China as we do
with all countries, when we are clear in our motives and objectives.
We only set ourselves up for disappointment when we insist upon
seeing China and the Chinese as something infinitely fungible,
capable of being whatever we want it to be, when we want it. We
need to remember that we’re not in Kansas City anymore.
