My plane arrived February 12 in Shanghai from Detroit, Michigan, after a 14-hour flight. Instead of 6:20 am, it was already 7:20 pm in China because of the time difference. We stumbled out of the plane, still groggy and stiff from trying to sleep on unyielding plane seats, and dutifully stood in serpentine lines for health clearance, passport check, custom declarations and then for our luggage. It went smoothly since Shanghai, a city of 20 million, is a major international airport.

Shanghai Mom & Daughter

The following day I spent trying to overcome jet lag, with my body clock totally confused regarding times for sleep and daytime activities. I walked to the major Shanghai shopping area full of Chinese families looking for new clothes and gifts. The impact of China’s one-child policy becomes evident after a while: no large families. Entering the smaller shops with special sale items reminded me of New York City; all the salespersons hustled you to buy. I used the Chinese phrase “bu yao,” “I don’t want it,” quite often!

That evening, on Chinese New Years Eve, I was awakened by loud fireworks bursts before midnight. My hotel room enjoyed a river view and when I opened the curtains I enjoyed a 180-degree panorama of red, green and white fireworks displays shooting into the sky from about 24 locations. The colorfully lighted skyscrapers, towers and monuments provided a backdrop. Suddenly, from the street below, rockets shot up past my window as my hotel joined the celebration. It was a boisterous, cheerful and memorable display, lasting about 45 minutes. According to ancient legend, the fireworks and red lanterns keep demons at bay.

Chinese New Year Celebration

The fireworks heralded the arrival of the Year of the Tiger, according to the Chinese Lunar Calendar, which features twelve animals. In honoring tradition, many residents had left Shanghai to visit their ancestors’ villages to reunite with their family and honor their ancestors’ graves in the Confucian tradition. According to the China Daily newspaper, 65 million Chinese people took long distance buses or ships and another 5.2 million people took trains on the Spring Festival holiday. Heavy snows in northern China hampered this huge migration by closing at least 30 highways, not unlike the recent snowstorms that shut down Washington, D.C.

On China’s New Years Day, which fell on February 14 in 2010, everyone wished you a Happy New Year. Since February 14 was also Valentine Day, you could also buy Valentine gifts for loved ones. I had thought Valentine’s Day was only an American holiday, promoted by Hallmark, but the Chinese saw business opportunities as well. Most Chinese celebrated the Spring Festival with family dinners, children receiving from relatives red envelopes containing money, but for good luck, an even amount. Experts say the custom is at least 1,800 years.

After meeting another Fulbright Lecturer and his wife, we ate in a restaurant in the picturesque French concession area. Around the corner was a museum in the original Shanghai building where the Communist Party of China (CPC) was created in 1921. The documents and pictures on display were interesting, highlighting the unequal treaties with foreign nations, the nationalist “bourgeois revolution” of l911, and then Mao Tse-tung’s key role in establishing the nation’s Communist Party. We were struck by the youth of the founders as well as the implied historical determinism in the course of the 1949 Revolution, portrayed as a continuation of the earlier revolts against imperialism and feudalism.

In an ironic clash with traditional China, as we left the museum dedicated to the founding of the Communist Party of China we encountered the Chinese New Year’s dragon dancers, accompanied by drums, gongs and cymbals. The children had their pictures taken with the fierce yellow dragon carried aloft by about a dozen yellow-garbed dancers.

Shanghai Boy & Dragon Dancers

Shanghai is a bustling city of commerce, with construction evident everywhere as the city prepares to host the World Expo that opens in May, expected to bring in millions of tourists. China’s superhero NBA basketball player, Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets, called his hometown of Shanghai the “Paris in the Orient.”

One must learn quickly to respect the unwritten law of the road jungle here, with its pecking order of deference to buses, then taxis and cars, motor scooters, and bikes; pedestrians fall at the bottom of the street food chain.

Bob Welcomes Year of Tiger

Confucius (551-479 BC)

Despite China’s long, expansive history under powerful emperors, the 1842 British defeat of China in the First Opium War starkly revealed the weakness of the Qing dynasty, encouraging European governments to demand territorial concessions through humiliating unequal treaties.

In l899 U.S. President William McKinley called for an Open Door Policy with China, calling for all nations to have equal access to the Chinese market, even those (like the United States) without a sphere of influence. Despite this apparent concern for China’s sovereignty, American sailors and marines joined European powers in suppressing the 1900 Boxer Rebellion against foreigners carving up Chinese territory.

Boxer Rebellion 1900

After the 1945 defeat of Japan, a civil war raged between the Nationalist and Communist forces. The victory of the Chinese Revolution in l949 forced Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist troops to flee to the island of Taiwan. The Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung proclaimed, “China has stood up.”

In the emotional clamor of partisan politics in the l950s, the hot issue of “Who lost China?” led America to adopt a Cold War foreign policy that attempted to isolate the People’s Republic of China, a nation of over 500 million people at that time.

The United States orchestrated United Nations voting to recognize Taiwan as China, granting the Republic of China (Taiwan) China’s permanent seat on the Security Council. In 1950 U.S. armed forces and the mainland’s Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) became embroiled in the Korean War as American-led U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel and approached China’s border.

When President Lyndon Johnson escalated America’s troop levels in Vietnam in the mid-l960s, he worried that China might enter the conflict. However, Beijing provided Hanoi with only economic and military aid, not combat forces as in Korea.

In l971, after undisclosed negotiations with the Nixon administration, the Peoples Republic of China received China’s permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council—and its veto power.

The following year President Richard Nixon stunned the American people when he secretly flew to Beijing to initiate a new détente with China and its Communist leader Mao Tse-tung. A shrewd strategic thinker, the realist Nixon also sought to play the “China card” to counter the Soviet Union’s influence in Asia.

China invaded Vietnam in February l979 to teach its fellow-communist neighbor a “lesson.” Beijing justified its short, punitive, and costly border offensive by pointing to Vietnam’s mistreatment of ethnic Chinese on its soil, Hanoi’s provocative “friendship” treaty with the USSR, and the Vietnamese government’s 1978 overthrow of Beijing’s Cambodian ally, the Pol Pot regime.

President George H.W. Bush’s close relations with the Chinese leadership, after serving as Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in China, helped him obtain the U.N. Security Council’s 1990 approval for collective security action to end Saddam Hussein’s aggressive takeover of Kuwait in the first Gulf War.

Presidents Hu Jintao, Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush

The hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics by the Peoples Republic of China brought the emergent nation of 1.3 billion people to the attention of the world. Global media coverage highlighted China’s long history, remarkable economic growth, and unique “socialist market economy”–to many Americans a contradiction in terms.

In July 2009 the Obama administration held a Strategic Economic Dialogue with Chinese leaders in Washington, D.C. President Obama presciently observed, “The relationship between the United States and China will shape the 21st century.”

Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao

This overview of United States-China relations since the late 19th century reveals the ups and downs in our relationship with the Middle Kingdom. Past misunderstandings and conflicts complicate our shared interest in beneficial economic relations and a peaceful world.

Pearl Buck's THE GOOD EARTH

In 1800, Napoleon allegedly said, “Let the sleeping giant (China) sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world.” In recent years that Asian giant clearly awoke, emerging as a rising global force, powered by an extraordinary rate of economic growth. Underscoring the mounting strength of that ancient country, a recent book by British writer Martin Jacques bears the provocative title, When China Rules the World.

I hope that during my spring semester experience as a Fulbright Scholar living, teaching, and traveling in China, I will gain insights about this formidable rising global power. I leave for Chengdu in February 2010 to teach at Sichuan University in southwest China.

The immense size of China’s population quickly became evident to me. Chengdu, my host city, has a population of about 12 million, twice the number of people living in the entire state of Tennessee! Chengdu also promotes itself as the “giant panda’s hometown.”

The Sichuan University campus has about 60,000 students. In contrast, my fine institution—the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, which I’ve seen grow in students, faculty, and quality since the l970s—celebrated last fall an enrollment of 10,000 students. And we think UTC has classroom space problems.

During my younger years as a Navy destroyer officer, I served in the Western Pacific (WestPac). During the Cold War years I visited then-British owned Hong Kong as well as Taiwan, so I became somewhat acquainted and fascinated with Chinese culture.

But in those not-so-distant days, we were not permitted to buy products manufactured in “Red China.” Ironically, in preparing for my forthcoming teaching duties at Sichuan University—courses on American Government and U.S. Foreign Policy—I discovered most of my clothing and supplies were “made in China!”

In my subsequent blogs I want to provide readers with a better understanding of Chinese students and universities, the dynamic economic growth of the “Middle Kingdom,” and the richness of China’s long history and culture, illustrated with photos. As a guest of the Chinese government, deemed a “cultural ambassador” by the U.S. Department of State, I will candidly discuss America’s democratic principles and core concepts of foreign policy that guide our nation in my classes and lectures.

In my application essay to become a Fulbright Scholar, I emphasized my interest in learning more about how China, with its lengthy history, takes a long-term perspective when setting policy goals.

In America, our foreign policy may change every four or eight years as a new president enters the Oval Office. The economic globalism of Bill Clinton preceded the muscular neo-conservatism of George W. Bush, now followed by the “principled pragmatism” of Barack Obama. The zig-zags of U.S. foreign policy often confuse both our friends and foes.

Critics often accuse United States corporations and American voters of also focusing too much on each year’s “bottom-line,” not long-term plans and prospects. Certainly our recent financial crisis revealed the major banks’ drive for high short-term profits and huge bonuses dominating over concerns for stable growth.

Likewise, President George W. Bush encountered rising public calls to quickly end the Iraq War and withdraw troops, leading to the Republicans’ loss of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. Americans would not patiently wait for the re-trained Iraqi military to “step up, so America could stand down.”

Currently President Obama faces voter pressures to immediately create jobs and restore a thriving American economy. Otherwise, a voter backlash in November 2010 could threaten the Democratic Party’s control over Congress. Patience is not always an attribute of voters in our democratic political system, particularly during difficult times.

However, an old Chinese proverb colorfully illustrates the advantage of an extended outlook: “Patience is power; with time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.”

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