The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik
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China’s disappearance from lowbrow literature was sealed when, on 7 December 1941, that new Japanese order required an attack on Pearl Harbor. American popular literature naturally pressed the Yellow Peril paradigm into service. The yellow was now purely Japanese hue. The effort to demonize the Japanese in the pulp magazines and the comic books could only be complicated by excessive discrimination between the good and bad yellows. Only after Japan was defeated (and, in defeat, Americanized) could China again seize the American imagination, and now it was no comic opera. It was now China that presented a unified and “very grim” face to the West.
When Marquand visited the orient a final time in 1955, he could not visit mainland China. He could only make a brief excursion to the border between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic. When, in 1956, he composed the final Mr. Moto novel, Stopover: Tokyo (= Rendezvous in Tokyo or Right You Are, Mr. Moto), the action took place entirely in Japan.
AND VAN GULIK
China after 1949 was, to Western eyes, not the fragmented world of treaty ports and warlords and puppet states and Nationalist-Communist rivalries that it had been for the first half of the 20th century. It was now a vast monolithic state, with a totalitarian central government. And it was apparently absorbed into the even larger monolith of international Communism, which constituted a new “East” that stretched from the borders of West Germany, Austria, and Italy to the 38th parallel of Korea and, after 1954, to the 17th parallel in Vietnam. The peril was now Red rather than Yellow, and when popular literature dealt with the Red Peril, it generally focused upon its western, Russian face. The vogue for spy fiction, for example, almost always dealt with the Soviet threat. (The noteworthy exception is Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959), and it is more about a joint Soviet-Chinese threat which takes place primarily in America, featuring American protagonists.) James Bond’s initial adversary was the Soviet SMERSH (Smert’ Shpionam; “Death to Spies”); when he finally did travel to the Far East in You Only Live Twice (1964), it was to confront Ernst Stavro Blofeld, mastermind of the apolitical S.P.E.C.T.R.E. in Tokyo. Nor was China any longer a fertile source of villainy (or, in Charlie Chan fashion, of virtue) in detective fiction more narrowly defined. When Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer discovers geopolitics in One Lonely Night (1951), the “Commie bastards” dedicated to the subversion of the American values Hammer defends with fist and gun are agents of the Soviet MVD (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del), led by General Osilov. At a somewhat more elevated level, it is again Soviet Communism that embodies the threat to the West in novels such Agatha Christie novels as They Came to Baghdad (1951) and So Many Steps to Death (1955). Just as mainland China had ceased to matter to Mr. Moto when he reappeared in Stopover: Tokyo, it seemed to have stopped mattering in popular literature.
And then van Gulik began to publish his detective stories set entirely in China, with a Chinese detective, Chinese victims and Chinese villains, and, always implicit, a Chinese emperor ruling over the Middle Kingdom under the Mandate of Heaven. Most importantly, Judge Dee’s China was distant from the People’s Republic that promised to use the thought of Chairman Mao to banish all reactionary colonialist regimes to the dustbin of history and did deploy its foot soldiers in Korea and its artillery in the Straits of Taiwan. Judge Dee’s China might be surrounded by barbarians, but it was the barbarians who were threatening China. The armies of Dee’s Middle Kingdom were not intent upon exporting a radical Chinese future (and certainly not a Marx-Lenin-Mao future); they were defending their own civilization built upon their storied civilized past. As a result, the Judge Dee novels carried a quite conservative message. For the most part, as in all classical detective fiction, social disorder (murder, theft) is usually the product of local, private motives (greed, lust, revenge), and Judge Dee’s task is to identify and eliminate the villains and to vindicate the justly accused. But when the disorder is the product of a larger conspiracy—to seize a Chinese province as an independent Uygher princedom, to abet a Korean infiltration, to instigate a White Lotus rebellion—Judge Dee’s energies are all devoted to suppressing the revolutions and sustaining the existing order.
Because that existing order seems to be, from the distance of 1200 years, an unblemished island of aesthetic achievement in world history, defending it required none of the concessions that might be required of a defender of American democratic capitalism in the 20th century. Judge Dee’s China—a China of poets and monks, of courtesans and winehouses—is a China that is unquestionably worth defending, especially when justice is administered by “father-mother officials” such as District Magistrates like Judge Dee.
Appendix 1: The Six Ages of American Relations with China
Van Gulik’s first Judge Dee publication, the translation of Dee Goong An, coincided with that watershed in Chinese history, the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Mao Zedong’s October 1, 1949 proclamation in Tiananmen Square that “the Chinese people have stood up” began a new phase in the relationship between China and the West. The next landmark would be Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to the People’s Republic, four and a half years after van Gulik’s death. The visit opened on February 21 with the President and the Chairman shaking hands, an image that inaugurated a new phase in the American view of Chinese culture. The interval between the two events—the Judge Dee interval—was characterized by deep hostility and considerable ignorance. Travel between the two countries was prohibited, and news from China consisted largely of official reports issued in Beijing and whatever additional information could be derived from listening posts in Hong Kong and elsewhere.
There was, of course a pre-history to the Judge Dee interval, a pre-history that sets the context for van Gulik’s achievement. It can be briefly outlined using the rubrics developed by Harold Isaacs in his influential 1956 study, Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India.
1. The Age of Respect (18th Century)
China was still an exotic empire in the 18th century, largely closed to the Western world, but through the “Canton System” (1757–1842), the Qing dynasty authorized European traders to operate thirteen trading posts in Canton (Guangzhou). Europe and America soon developed an appetite for Chinese goods: tea, porcelain, silks, and lacquerware, and, as well, cottons, rhubarb, cassia, nankeens (durable, yellow cloth), floor-matting, fans, and furniture. With the Atlantic trade dominated by the powerful (and after 1776, the alienated) British navy, American merchants at the end of the 18th century were inspired to exploit new opportunities in the Pacific. In 1784, Samuel Shaw’s ship the Empress, docked in Canton and brought first the load of tea back to New York, beginning what came to be known as the Old China Trade. An imbalance in the trade resulted when the Chinese appetite for American (or European) goods proved to be incommensurate to the American (and European) appetite for Chinese goods. American ginseng and furs could supplement specie, but eventually it would be opium that famously underwrote the West’s excess demand for China’s products.
2. The Age of Contempt (1840–1905)
It would be the Opium Wars that led to the second of Isaacs’s phases, The Age of Contempt. The contempt, today, tends to be directed toward the West, especially the British, who fought wars to force the sale of an addictive drug upon a vulnerable population in order to finance their own imperial glory; then it was directed upon the civilization which had rendered its population so vulnerable. The First Opium War, 1839–1842, was largely a British exercise, and the British ships and troops engaged in asserting British prerogatives in Chinese territory clearly demonstrated the superiority of European military technology over Chinese. The Treaty of Nanking compelled the Qing dynasty to pay an indemnity, open four ports, and cede Hong Kong. The 1844 Treaty of Wang Hiya gave U.S. citizens comparable rights. The Second Opium War, 1856–60, reinforced for both the West and the Chinese a sense of China’s weakness. It was primarily an Anglo-French adventure, but U.S. naval forces did become involved in two campaigns, once retaliating for an attack o
n a navy officer, and once with a bombardment in support of British and French troops. The humiliations suffered by China in the Opium Wars certainly diminished the status of the Celestial Empire in the eyes of Americans and the West more broadly.
A second factor affecting American attitudes toward China was the migration of a large number of Chinese laborers to California and the American West and the consequent stereotyping of the immigrants as untutored and clannish foreigners who could not be assimilated as citizens of the republic. In 1848, there were 325 Chinese Americans; by 1880, there were more than 300,000, mostly from southern China, and mostly living in California. Horace Greeley, in a New York Tribune editorial of 29 September 1854, could write, “The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order” (qtd. in Yang). The following year, Bayard Taylor, “The Great American Traveler,” published his Visit to India, China, and Japan. Taylor prided himself on his cosmopolitan openness to foreign cultures; he had kind words for the Indians (especially the Parsees) and for the Japanese (“agreeable and expressive” faces, “unstudied grace,” “as perfect gentlemen as could be found in any part of the world” 434), and in earlier travel volumes he had actively embraced natives of Africa and the Middle East. But the Chinese disgusted him: “It is my deliberate opinion that the Chinese are, morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth,” and he joined in Greeley’s view that they must be excluded from the American polity: “Their touch is pollution, and, harsh as the opinion may seem, justice to our own race demands that they should not be allowed to settle on our soil” (354).1 Taylor concludes his chapters on China with a flourish: “The reader may have rightly conjectured that I am not partial to China, but this much I must admit: it is the very best country in the world—to leave” (499).2 The visceral revulsion expressed by otherwise liberal opinion-makers like Greeley and Taylor found a ready response in the American public, and anti–Chinese sentiment eventually led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which specifically prohibited the admission of Chinese into the United States for a period of ten years. The act was renewed for ten years in 1892, and renewed for an indefinite term in 1902; it was repealed in 1943.
3. The Age of Benevolence (1905–1937)
By the beginning of the 20th century, China, backward and unthreatening, could be viewed as an object of pity and as an opportunity for America’s manifest destiny to work the salvation of hundreds of millions of benighted persons. This was the great age of Protestant missionary activity. The first American mission to China had been established by the American Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Canton in 1830, funded by D.W.C. Olyphant (1789–1851), a China trader from Newport, Rhode Island. It was followed by an explosion of missionary activity through the 19th century. The effort peaked in the 1920s, and among the prominent figures were the Presbyterian parents of two figures who would play a major role in defining the American view of China in the mid–20th century: Pearl Buck’s parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, labored in China from 1880 until their deaths in 1921 and 1931, and Henry Luce’s parents, Henry W. and Elizabeth Luce, spent 31 years teaching and proselytizing in China (1897–1928). The necessity of constantly raising funds to support their missions meant that the missionaries had to engage in extensive publicity campaigns, making the case that China held a vast reservoir of potential converts. They promoted widely an image of the hard-working, could-be Christian Chinese masses. As a result, Americans were encouraged to see the Chinese as virtually American. An observer in 1948 noted this characteristic impulse to Americanize the Chinese: “judging by the majority of books and speeches on that country [China] one would imagine that only the most superficial differences distinguished the valley of the Yangtze from that of the Mississippi” (Gorer 223). When Isaacs polled 181 representative men (academics, media figures, government and ex-government officials, business leaders, and others) in 1954–55, he found that of the 145 Christians in the group, 123 mentioned missionaries as a source of some of their earliest associations with “China” (128).
A small emblem of America’s benevolent view of China: in 1920 Joseph Park Babcock, having returned from a tour in China as an engineer for Standard Oil, published Rules of Mah-Jongg, a simplification of the tile game whose origins have been attributed to Confucius. American promoters imported sets from China, and soon had to begin manufacturing them in the States to meet the demand. “By 1923, people who were beginning to take their radio sets for granted now simply left them turned on while they ‘broke the wall’ and called ‘pung’ or ‘chow’ and wielded the Ming box and talked learnedly of bamboos, flowers, seasons, South Wind, and Red Dragon” (Allen 72). The learned talk did not, of course, imply a deep understanding of China, or even of the Chinese rules for the game. But it did mean that Americans were at least receptive to the strangenesses of Chinese culture.
4. The Age of Admiration (1937–1944)
Imperial Japanese expansion in the 1930s led to the next phase. It was the time of the Japanese creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo in northern China and, in 1937, the Rape of Nanking, six weeks of looting, rape, mutilation, and murder in which up to 300,000 people were killed. Because major American journalists (Frank Tillman Durdin of The New York Times, Archibald Steele of the Chicago Daily News, and C. Yates McDaniel of the Associated Press) were present at the beginning of the massacre, the news reached a large public, and sympathy for the victims was widespread. China’s resistance to the Japanese war machine was depicted as heroic. Time put Chiang’s face on its cover eight times between 1931 and 1949, more than any other person; it anointed Chiang and his wife “Man and Woman of the Year” in 1937. But 1937 was also the year when, with greater foresight, Edgar Snow published Red Star Over China, his laudatory account of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist resistance to the Japanese, based at the time in Bao’an, in northwestern China. After Pearl Harbor, Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang (Guomindang) was identified as an essential ally in the war against Japan, and Madame Chiang (Soong May-ling) made a triumphal tour of the United States in 1943, becoming the first Chinese (and the second woman) to address a joint session of Congress.
5. The Age of Disenchantment (1944–1949)
The defeat of Japan led not to an admirable new China, but rather to a civil war in which Americans had difficulty identifying a worthy side. The American left never lost its fascination with Mao, and the American right persisted in admiring Chiang, though with some reservations. While Henry Luce’s Time/Life empire remained committed to Chiang as the only hope for postwar China, Theodore White, reporting from Chungking for Time and Life, was able on at least one occasion to warn American readers of the flaws in the Chiang regime, and his 1946 best seller, Thunder Out of China (co-written with Annalee Jacoby), was a strong denunciation of the corruption of the Kuomintang and its failure to provide China with a credible democratic government. When, in 1949, Chiang’s regime collapsed and Mao’s Communists triumphed, there was a widespread sense that China had been “lost,” and “Who lost China?” became a political question that not only sought to assign blame, but also served as a caution to later politicians, who feared to be accused of “losing” some other nation to the Communists. The corruption and venality of the Guomindang made it an obvious villain in the eyes of most informed analysts, but the charismatic and ruthless Mao Zedong and his Communists were also unacceptable. When General George Marshall failed in his December 1945 mission to secure a unity government, he returned to the States “infuriated” with Chiang Kai-Shek, and as Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, he effectively minimized American aid to the Guomindang (Lumbers 16). But if the Nationalists could not be easily embraced, a powerful anti–Communist “China lobby” insured that Mao’s party was anathema. Alfred Kohlberg, a former importer of Chinese textiles, helped found the America China Policy Association in 1946 to supp
ort Chiang and the Nationalists; Kohlberg also financed the strongly anti–Communist, pro–Chiang journal, Plain Talk, 1946–1950 (Mayer 403).
6. The Age of Hostility (1949–1972)
The next phase in Chinese-American relations was, of course, the phase introduced by Mao’s proclamation of The People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square in 1949. The U.S. government refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, and endorsed the fiction that the remnant of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime that had forced its way onto the island of Taiwan constituted the legitimate government of China. When the North Korean army crossed the 38 Parallel and invaded the South in June 1950, one of the first U.S. responses was to send the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait between China and Taiwan as a demonstration of U.S. power and resolve. Then, in October 1950, as General MacArthur’s forces were advancing past Pyongyang in the North, Mao Zedong authorized the People’s Liberation Army (more precisely, units of the PLA, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, rebranded as the People’s Volunteer Army) to enter the conflict. A massive Chinese counteroffensive in November pushed the Americans back toward the 38th Parallel, and led to the uneasy armistice that has persisted for more than six decades. China had become an actual rather than a potential enemy.