China Views Nine-Eleven

China Views Nine-Eleven

China Views Nine-Eleven: Essays in Transnational American Studies

Edited by

Priscilla Roberts, Mei Renyi, and Yan Xunhua

China Views Nine-Eleven: Essays in Transnational American Studies, Edited by Priscilla Roberts, Mei Renyi, and Yan Xunhua This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2011 by Priscilla Roberts, Mei Renyi, and Yan Xunhua and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3444-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3444-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii List of Tables.............................................................................................. ix Preface ......................................................................................................... x Julia Chang Bloch Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 China Views Nine-Eleven Priscilla Roberts Part I: The International Setting Chapter One............................................................................................... 38 The Decline in the American Global Image Since 9/11 Mei Renyi Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 77 Anti-Americanism in the Post-9/11 Era Liu Mingzheng Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 96 Continuities in American Empire: The Nineteenth-Century Inheritance and the Return of History Ian Tyrrell Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 111 9/11 as Diplomatic Milestone and Turning Point Priscilla Roberts Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 126 Fluctuations and Adjustments in American Soft Power After September 11, 2001 Xiao Huan

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Table of Contents

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 136 Failed Empire: The United States in the Post-Iraq War Era Zhao Baomin Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 153 New Structures of American Foreign Strategy since September 11, 2001: Seeking Cooperation with Asia-Pacific Countries Qiu Huafei Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 170 9/11 and American Neo-Conservatives Li Zhidong Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 206 Neo-Conservatives and Nation-Building Shi Hongshen and Wang Enming Part II: The American Scene: Domestic Politics Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 224 American Electoral Politics: The Impact of September 11, 2001 Zhang Liping Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 244 Party Polarization in Congress: Change and Continuity After 9/11 Xie Tao Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 271 Presidential Practices After 9/11: Changes and Continuities Daniel Galvin Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 305 Evolving Post-9/11 Relations between the US Presidency and Congress Yuan Jirong Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 320 The Case Study of Illinois: The Impact of the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks on Separation of Powers in the United States Wang Yulan


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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 350 Samuel P. Huntington’s Who Are We? and the Prevailing Deadlock in US Immigration Mei Renyi and Chen Juebin Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 383 Paradox Unraveled: US Immigration after the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks Jia Ning Part III: The Cultural Impact Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 402 Three Perspectives on 9/11: Entertainment, Politics, Mentality John G. Blair Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 422 Ground Zero: Cultural Repercussions of 9/11 Alfred Hornung Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 434 History, Memory, and Fragmentation: Toward a Dialectical and Allegorical Vision of Commemorating 9/11 Kit Lam Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 456 From Complacency to Culpability: Conflict and Death in Post-9/11 Film Michele Aaron Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 471 No Direction Home: Protest Music at a Crossroads since 9/11 Teng Jimeng Contributors............................................................................................. 494 Index........................................................................................................ 501

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1-1 Trends in Satisfaction with the US Position in the World 11-1 The Ideological Distance Between the Two Congressional Parties, 46th-106th Congresses 11-2 The Proportion of Partisan Votes, 1954-2000 11-3 Party Unity Scores in the House, 1956-2000 11-4 Party Unity Scores in the Senate, 1956-2000 11-5 The Proportion of Partisan Votes by Month, 2001 11-6 The Proportion of Partisan Votes, 2000-2005 11-7 Party Unity Scores in the House, 2000-2005 11-8 Party Unity Scores in the Senate, 2000-2005 11-9 The Ideological Distance Between the Two Congressional Parties, 106th-109th Congresses 12-1 Rate of Challenge, 107th-109th Congresses 12-2 Rate of Challenge, 97th-109th Congresses 12-3 Percentage of Bills With Signing Statements Attached, 97th-109th Congresses 12-4 Average Number of Constitutional Challenges Per Signing Statement, George W. Bush Presidency 12-5 Average Number of Constitutional Challenges Per Signing Statement, Ronald Reagan-George W. Bush 15-1 US Population by Race and Ethnicity, 1966-2006 17-1 Prime Time Televised Scenes of Torture, 1995-2005 18-1 Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) 20-1 The Terrorist Explosion that Opens Children of Men 20-2 Looking On in Hotel Rwanda 20-3 In Children of Men, There Will Be a Tomorrow After All

LIST OF TABLES

1-1 Favorable Views of the United States, 1999-2006 1-2 Views of the Influence of the United States by Country 1-3The Deteriorating United States Image in Europe 1-4 Decline in Positive European Views of American “Influence in the World” 1-5 Muslim Views of the United States, 2007 (Based on Muslim Respondents) 1-6 Trends in Positive Muslim Opinions of the United States, 2002-2007 1-7 Belief in International Respect for the United States 1-8 Other Countries’ Opinion of the United States After September 11, 2001 1-9 Declining Favorable Views of the American People, 2002-2006 1-10 Why America Is Disliked 1-11 Threat Perception in the United States and Europe 1-12 Opinions on the US Government’s Handling of International issues 1-13 Falling Support for United States-Led War on Terror 1-14 How Many Agree That US Foreign Policy Considers Others’ Interests 1-15 Attitudes Toward Different Aspects of the United States 2-1 Favorable International Opinions of the United States 2-2 Declining International Views of the American People 15-1 Latinos’ Attitudes Toward English 15-2 Most Important Problems Facing the United States 15-3 How Serious A Problem Is Illegal Immigration in the United States Today? 15-4 How to Deal with Illegal Immigrants Already in the United States 15-5 State Plans for Immigration 15-6 Deport Illegal Immigrants or Let Them Stay Conditionally? 15-7 Immigration’s Political Divides: External and Internal 15-8 Which Political Party Handles Immigration Best? 15-9 Hispanic Views on Prospective Presidential Candidates, 2007 15-10 Immigration-Related State Laws Enacted 15-11 Differing Views of Hispanics Among Whites and Blacks 15-12 Do Illegal Immigrants Take Jobs Away from Americans? Do They Mostly Take Jobs Unwanted by Americans? 16-1 Gallup Poll Summaries, 2002-2007 16-2 NBC/Wall Street Journal Polls: The Impact of Immigration on the United States 16-3 NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll: Breakdown of the Effects of Immigration 17-1 Number of Prime Time Televised Torture Scenes, 1995-2005 17-2 US Television Seasonal Rankings of 24 on FOX

PREFACE JULIA CHANG BLOCH

On September 11, 2001, I was at my Peking University apartment in Beijing. Students called hysterically for me to turn on the television, and I watched in horror the now iconic images of two planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. As reports streamed in that the Pentagon had also been hit, I found it unnerving that the jammed phone lines would not connect me to my husband in Washington, DC. I was, however, comforted by the outpouring of sympathy and warmth toward America and Americans on campus, a feeling that remains with me today. Five years after 9/11 the US-China Education Trust began planning our annual American Studies Network conference in collaboration with the American Studies Center at Beijing Foreign Studies University (ASC) and the Institute of American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (IAS). We decided to assess the ramifications of the attacks on the US social, political, economic and cultural landscape and on its foreign policy. The conference, The United States After 9/11: Changes and Continuities, came to fruition in October, 2007, jointly co-sponsored by USCET, the ASC, and IAS. Ten years on, the American news media have been full of reflections and analyses of the meaning of 9/11, but ultimately each person attaches an individual meaning to that day when almost all Americans remember exactly where they were. Upon reflection, 9/11 validates my founding of the US-China Education Trust, an organization to which I have dedicated more than a decade of my life. Promoting US-China relations through education and exchange, USCET’s mission, is an antidote to the frightening possibility that another 9/11 might ever happen again. Promoting mutual understanding between peoples is essential not only to a stable US-China relationship, but also to seeking peace. And achieving peace is harder than waging war and requires effort and creativity. As we commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11, this offers an ideal opportunity to make a selection of the essays originating from the 2007 conference available to a wider audience around the world. As president of the US-China Education Trust, I am particularly pleased that this publication


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will bring Chinese writings and viewpoints on this horrific event to the broader intellectual debate on 9/11, as tangible illustration of the growing range and depth of scholarship produced by Chinese American Studies experts, including members of the American Studies Network. As the 9/11 conference continued the tradition of providing opportunities for dialogue and discussion among respected and emerging US-China scholars from China and abroad, it helped to strengthen the foundation for communication and collaboration within and beyond China in understanding the United States. It is USCET’s hope that the American Studies Network will serve as a vehicle to break down barriers of misunderstanding and build mutual trust between the Chinese and American peoples. The hope is well grounded. Since the 2007 9/11 conference, the American Studies Network, which from its 22 charter members in 2004 had already increased to 28 member institutions, has expanded its membership to embrace almost 50 Chinese universities and think tanks, and it is still growing. Without the sterling efforts and support of top administrators and academics at both the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU), the conference which produced this book would not have taken place. At BFSU Hao Ping, then president (now China’s Vice Minister of Education), and Vice President Jin Li both provided indispensable financial and administrative support. We were particularly indebted to Professor Sun Youzhong, Dean of the School of English and International Studies at BFSU, who went out of his way to do all he could to ensure the conference’s success. Sincere thanks are also due to Professor Huang Ping, director of the IAS, and Professor Zhang Liping, then a senior fellow in that institute, who both labored long and hard to make the conference happen, encouraging and funding the participation of many of their institute’s researchers. BFSU hosted the conference sessions, a demanding task of organization. Heartfelt gratitude is due to Professor Mei Renyi, head of the ASC, together with many of his center’s faculty members, PhD and MA students, and undergraduates, who with outstanding enthusiasm and dedication handled all the conference logistics, ensuring not merely that the conference ran smoothly but that it was a pleasure to attend. In USCET, particular credit for assisting with this event is due to Hoang Anh Lam. My thanks go to all of them.

INTRODUCTION CHINA VIEWS NINE-ELEVEN: ESSAYS IN TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES PRISCILLA ROBERTS

As the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, approached, a vast array of commemorative activities and events took place, while an outpouring of articles, essays, and books marked the occasion. The destruction of both towers of New York’s landmark World Trade Center by hijacked airliners loomed particularly large in the American and global psyche, implicitly symbolizing the other connected events of that day, including an attack by a third airliner on the Pentagon building in Washington, and the seizure of a fourth aircraft, whose passengers overcame their captors and crashed the plane, losing their own lives in the process. A decade later, Americans and others looked back, remembering the near 3,000 victims of those air strikes and seeking to assess the fall-out of every kind, over both the short and long term.1 A spectacular Tribute in Light illuminated the New York night sky, reaching up four miles, while museum and art exhibits, drama, dance, and musical performances, quilts, radio and television shows, movies, books, and multimedia electronic creations all remembered or meditated in some way upon the attacks and their consequences. On the tenth anniversary itself, President Barack Obama—who just one day before had visited Arlington National Cemetery, burial place of many American military personnel who had died in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq—together with numerous other dignitaries, as well as families of the victims of 9/11, attended 1

See, for example, “Artists Rise to an Occasion for Reflection,” and “9/11 in the Arts: An Anniversary Guide,” New York Times, August 26, 2011; “A Matter of Life and Death: University Exhibit About Buildings Looks Toward 9/11,” Town Topics, Princeton, N.J., August 24, 2011.

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Introduction

emotional, well choreographed ceremonies at all three locations hit by the hijacked airliners, occasions commemorating the dead and looking to the future.2 When one reviews the torrent of commentary of every kind produced in the past ten years, it soon becomes clear that—even though, according to the Library of Congress catalogue, well over 2,000 books related in some way to the events of 9/11 have already appeared, not to mention tens of thousands of articles, movies, television and radio reports and programs, polls, oral histories, and other material—it is still far too soon to expect any definitive verdict on the attacks and their outcome. As Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai famously said, when asked for his verdict on the French Revolution, it is too early to tell. In almost every aspect, 9/11—its causes, its meaning, the appropriate response, and its outcome—remains controversial and hotly contested, with no consensus even within the United States, let alone beyond, on the significance of the events of September 11, 2001. A cynic might even inquire whether, horrific though it was, too much has been made of this particular tragedy. Including the 19 hijackers, 2,996 people died during the attacks that day, numbers dwarfed by the 100,000 civilian deaths during the recent war in Iraq, and even by the several thousand civilians killed in the conflict in Afghanistan. The past decade also saw over 230,000 perish in December 2004, victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami; 69,197 dead and 18,222 missing in the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake; and 15,780 dead and 4,122 missing in the March 2011 earthquake in Japan.3 By the standards of international catastrophes, US losses on September 11, 2001 might even be considered modest. The operations on September 11, 2001 were, nonetheless, the worst single successful terrorist attack that any country has ever experienced, dwarfing the dozens, scores, or even hundreds of deaths that suicide bombers have managed to inflict on other occasions. Another casualty was the historic American sense of invulnerability. With the exception of the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, since the American Civil War of the 1860s the only combat fighting to take place on American soil consisted of decidedly one-sided small-scale frontier battles between the US military and the surviving native American tribes. The United States has almost always carried the battle to other countries. Even 2

Eric Pfanner, “The day that never ended,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011; “At site of terror, U.S. pays tribute,” International Herald Tribune, September 12, 2011; “Prayers at Ground Zero as the world remembers,” South China Morning Post, September 12, 2011. 3 These figures were taken from relevant Wikipedia articles.


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during the Cold War, however disquieting the constant lurking fear of a nuclear attack, the Soviet threat was many thousands of miles away. No matter how hazardous certain urban areas in the United States might be, most average Americans were unaccustomed to facing genuine threats from hostile external powers or groups that exposed them to physical danger. 9/11 shattered such complacency. The spectacular and symbolic targeting of the World Trade Towers in New York, a capitalist icon, and the Pentagon, the country’s defense headquarters—with the fourth, aborted air strike apparently intended to hit the US Congress building in Washington, the political heart of America—demonstrated the ineffectiveness of security measures in the world’s richest and militarily most powerful nation. Compounding the sense of helplessness, in a still mysterious episode, within months the American mails delivered deadly anthrax spores to assorted politically prominent individuals, killing a number of people who came into contact with them. Almost simultaneously, two snipers terrorized Washington, DC, virtually closing down the nation’s capital and murdering several children and adults before they were apprehended. If Americans felt beleaguered, they had some excuse for this. Even worse, perhaps, was the anxiety over what outrage—nuclear terrorism, for example, or chemical warfare—might strike them next. Everyday life suddenly seemed remarkably fragile. The 9/11 strikes also ended a decade and more of triumphalism for the United States. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the ending of the Cold War in Europe, and the apparent spread of capitalist, free-market norms around the world, left the United States by far the strongest power in the world in terms of both economic dominance and military might. The young diplomat Francis Fukuyama, then deputy director of the US State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, even echoed the authors of 1066 and All That, who closed their spoof historical overview, first published in the British magazine Punch, by suggesting that after World War I “America was thus clearly Top Nation and history came to a .[stop].”4 Fukuyama boldly suggested that the ending of the Cold War on Western terms genuinely represented “the end of history.” The entire world had, he argued, accepted the principles of liberal capitalist democracy, with the United States taking the lead in promulgating these on a global scale.5 With no serious competitor in sight, in 1998 the United States, then still led by President Bill Clinton, declared a strategic objective of maintaining American global military predominance for the indefinite future. 4 5

Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 and All That, 115. Fukuyama, “The End of History,” and The End of History and the Last Man.

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Introduction

The succeeding Bush administration, especially such figures as Donald Rumsfeld, the hawkish secretary of defense, shared this goal. Such hubris would be challenged not just by 9/11 itself, but by the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both countries, quick and easy ostensible victories over the existing holders of power—the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein and his supporters in Iraq—were followed by lengthy and complicated insurgencies, while the United States faced great difficulties as it tried to establish strong and competent successor governments that would enjoy popular support yet be reasonably proAmerican. The United States discovered that it was easier to intervene in a country than to leave, proving the truth of homespun warnings by Colin Powell, the cautious secretary of state, against assuming such responsibilities in the first place. George W. Bush eventually managed to reach a settlement under which all US forces were supposed to be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011, an outcome that seemed likely to be largely achieved by the deadline, although it appeared possible that a small US contingent would remain in Iraq to train that country’s own military and security personnel.6 Meanwhile, the influence Shiite Iran enjoyed in neighboring Iraq expanded, even as the United States attained little success in preventing Iran moving ever closer to its objective of producing nuclear weapons. In June 2010 Afghanistan became the longest war in US history, a dubious honor previously accorded to Vietnam. Although President Barack W. Obama, on taking office in January 2009, sought to facilitate American withdrawal from Iraq in order to concentrate upon Afghanistan, a conflict the Bush administration neglected for several years in its eagerness to invade Iraq, a decade after 9/11 it was still unclear whether Obama’s efforts to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan to a point where US forces felt secure in leaving the country would succeed. Taliban and Al Qaeda forces remained strong in substantial portions of Afghanistan.7 Influential political commentators, notably the British historian and politician Rory Stewart, repeatedly suggested that the United States had over-committed itself to Afghanistan, and that growing American involvement there was in fact counter-productive, making Afghanistan more rather than less unstable. Since Al Qaeda was unlikely to regain its former influence there, and the United States could in any case respond 6 “U.S. considers plan to keep small force in Iraq,” International Herald Tribune, September 8, 2011; “Reality of U.S. pullout hits home in Iraq,” International Herald Tribune, September 12, 2011. 7 Jill Abramson, “Mission unfinished,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011.


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forcefully should this seem likely, Stewart argued that the United States should simply withdraw.8 US politicians found such advice unpalatable. Yet the American public was increasingly frustrated with the continuing casualties inflicted on US troops—not to mention civilian deaths among private security forces, journalists, aid workers, and other foreigners in Iraq and Afghanistan—in two conflicts originally expected to be brief and easily winnable ‘splendid little wars.’ Both wars also revealed major shortcomings within the US military, in terms of inadequate numbers of personnel and substandard equipment, flaws that belied Rumsfeld’s early hubristic braggadocio on his country’s ability to overawe all military competitors. On May 2, 2011 a team of US Navy SEALs mounted a raid on the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where for several years Osama bin Laden and various family members and supporters had been living in a secluded, heavily guarded compound, close to a Pakistani military installation. American military personnel killed bin Laden, whose body was buried secretly at sea. American pilotless drone missile planes also proved increasingly successful in targeting and eliminating other Al Qaeda leaders based in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet removing the original instigator of the 9/11 attacks and his top lieutenants did not necessarily guarantee US security against future strikes. Many in Pakistan sympathized with Al Qaeda and deeply resented the operation against bin Laden that American military personnel had undertaken in great secrecy on their country’s soil, without seeking permission from or even consulting the government. While American officials grimly suspected that high-level members of the Pakistani security forces had known for years of bin Laden’s presence in their country and even facilitated this, May 2nd became a date of humiliation that resonated bitterly in Pakistani political lore. Pakistanis also complained bitterly of the deaths their own country and Afghanistan had suffered in the War on Terror. They condemned American nationbuilding efforts in both states as wasteful and poorly conceived ventures that had primarily boosted military spending rather than developing longterm infrastructure, thereby stoking corruption and enriching wellpositioned Afghan and Pakistani elites while bringing few lasting economic or political benefits.9 The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, themselves part of the broader ‘War on Terror’ that Bush proclaimed immediately after September 11, 2001, 8

Rory Stewart, “The momentum of war,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011; also Stewart, “Afghanistan: What Could Work.” 9 Ahmed Rashid, “Ten years of rising resentments,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011.

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also contributed to what developed in 2008 into a major international economic crisis, one that still dominated the headlines in the third year of Obama’s presidency. While precise estimates vary, on the tenth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, one newspaper calculated that, in return for the $500,000 that Al Qaeda had spent in mounting the four hijackings, the United States had subsequently expended $3.3 trillion in response, a return of $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda had invested. This included direct physical damage, the economic impact of 9/11, the costs of homeland security and financing two wars, plus anticipated future funding for these wars and for veterans’ care. Bin Laden subsequently gloated over the success of his objective of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” Other factors were undoubtedly at play here. George W. Bush, who inherited a balanced government budget from Bill Clinton, came into office in 2001 already determined to cut taxes and eager to mount a war against Iraq. After 9/11, he immediately pledged to spend all the money needed to fight the War on Terror, creating a vast homeland security apparatus as well as embarking on two wars whose costs spiraled out of control. In 2003 the Bush administration, optimistically assuming that the campaign in Afghanistan was fundamentally over, disputed estimates by the Congressional Budget Office that mounting a second war in Iraq would cost $100 to $200 billion, insisting on a lower figure of $50 to $60 billion. Both calculations were massively too low: by 2011 the war in Iraq had cost $872 billion, with estimates of future war costs there standing at $55 billion, while the bill for the conflict in Afghanistan had reached $468 billion, with a further $223 billion of spending on that country anticipated over the next five years. Ignoring the unexpectedly heavy expenditures demanded in response to 9/11, Bush nonetheless cut taxes; predictably, American government deficits soared. While the private sector absorbed part of the costs of 9/11, especially in areas such as the added inconveniences of air travel and insurance pay-outs for 9/11 related damage, at least onefifth of the current American national debt was probably due to 9/11.10 In an era of economic abundance, the price might have been acceptable. This meant, however, that when a global economic crisis developed in summer 2008, the United States enjoyed far less flexibility and latitude in devising tactics to meet these new problems than might otherwise have been the case. Economic stimulus plans were less easy to fund when the United States government was already running enormous budget deficits and trapped in two wars from which it could not easily 10

Amanda Cox, “A 9/11 tally: $3.3 trillion,” and David E. Sanger, “Grim Decade’s Huge Cost,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011; also Thomas L. Friedman, “The whole truth,” International Herald Tribune, September 8, 2011.


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withdraw. The original causes of the economic meltdown that began in summer 2008 were probably more closely related to housing and stock market bubbles, unrealistic credit policies, and flawed financial instruments than to 9/11 and its aftermath, but the economic effects of 9/11 almost certainly helped to intensify the financial crisis. To many, it seemed that in economic terms Bush’s policies had been almost criminally irresponsible. Sobering data released just after the tenth anniversary of 9/11 revealed that the number of Americans—46.2 million, 15.1 percent of the population— living below the poverty line was the highest in the fifty-two years such statistics had been kept. Not since 1993 had a greater percentage of Americans lived in poverty. Meanwhile, median incomes had fallen to the level of 1996. Adjusting for inflation, for the first time since the Great Depression, the median American family income was lower than thirteen years earlier. Economists expected the situation to deteriorate further in the year to come.11 As Americans became increasingly preoccupied with whether they could hold on to their houses and jobs and survive the economic downturn, interest in international affairs dropped precipitously.12 While Americans jubilantly and publicly celebrated the death of bin Laden in May 2011, the fact that he could no longer threaten the United States perhaps even helped to shift attention further away from 9/11. Symptomatically, American school textbooks produced in 2010 contained much less detail on the 9/11 attacks and their consequences than did those published only a few years earlier.13 However successful he may prove in extricating the United States from Afghanistan and targeting yet more terrorists, for Barack Obama the next presidential election is likely to revolve first of all on how well he tackles the persistent economic recession. Short of another major terrorist strike against the United States, foreign policy is now likely to be judged first of all in its relation to economic issues. Yet 9/11 and especially its aftermath has also heightened and perhaps even produced a sense that the era of American global hegemony is over for good. Ten years later, many ruefully believed that the United States had over-reacted to 9/11, and that the Bush administration had exaggerated the extent of the threat that terrorism, however destructive the successful attacks in 2001 had been, genuinely posed to the United States. Retrospectively, in terms of rhetoric 11

Sabrina Tavernise, “Poverty rate in U.S. hits highest mark on record,” International Herald Tribune, September 15, 2011. 12 Bruce Stokes, “Signs of US turning its back on the world,” South China Morning Post, September 16, 2011. 13 Tamar Lewin, “A changing narrative,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011.

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and action alike, at almost every level—including money spent, military operations, and the repressive measures imposed not just on terrorist suspects but on the general public—the American response seemed disproportionate and overblown, at times a panicky, near-hysterical whiplash recoil from shock and horror. “The attacks,” a journalist wrote, “inflicted on the American psyche a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder, producing at a societal level the hypervigilance that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan know too well.”14 Americans, accustomed to excess and hyperbole, faced the brutally disquieting suspicion that doing and spending less might well have accomplished more. One commentator, lamenting the carefree insouciance with which Bush launched a costly war against Iraq, diverting resources that could have been used more profitably elsewhere, went so far as to state that 9/11 “did not signal the arrival of a new world, but it has accelerated the end of the American Century.”15 Another journalist shared his sentiments, proclaiming: “The early 21st century has been a period of gathering American doubt. The American Century is behind us; this one still seeks its epithet among the emergent powers.” He considered this “power shift...inevitable but accelerated by 9/11 and by chance.”16 Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, seeking to assess how 9/11 changed the United States, believed that “the largest effect of 9/11 upon America is that it became distracted. Distracted in two very important ways. In the first place, it was distracted from many other things going on in the world. Secondly, it’s been distracted from the erosion of its financial strength and international competitiveness.”17 Another commentator highlighted the sense that, for the United States, the ten years following 9/11 had been a “lost decade,” when American preoccupation with the “global war on terror” allowed other nations, China, India, and Brazil, for example, to make economic and even—at least in China’s case—strategic gains at US expense.18 It seems unlikely that this damage can be reversed in the foreseeable future. 14

Scott Shane, “The fear that outstripped the threat,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011. 15 Dominique Moïsi, “An infamy in history,” International Herald Tribune, September 8, 2011. 16 Roger Cohen, “Imagining 9/11,” International Herald Tribune, September 9, 2011. 17 Paul Kennedy, “An America adrift,” International Herald Tribune, September 7, 2011. 18 Rupert Cornwell, “The Lost Decade,” The Independent on Sunday, September 11, 2011.


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9/11 was not merely a domestic tragedy for the United States, affecting almost every aspect of daily life in that country, but an event of which the ramifications were felt in every corner of the globe. It had a huge impact upon American foreign policies, in terms of reordering US priorities, and also upon the country’s relations with the rest of the world. Of nowhere, perhaps, was this more true than China. The Bush administration came to power with many of its members still seeking a new long-term opponent or threat to replace the Cold War’s Soviet Russia. In 1993 Samuel P. Huntington, in his well-known essay “The Clash of Civilizations,” later expanded into a book, had already suggested that in future international politics and rivalries would revolve around competition between radically different and mutually antagonistic cultural blocs, including the Western Judeo-Christian grouping, the Asian Confucian alignment, and the Muslim bloc of the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa.19 Some in the Bush administration, notably the neo-conservatives of the Project for the New American Century, anticipated that the next American rival, the desirable target and international enemy against whom American power should be mustered, would be Iraq, with the largely Muslim Middle East providing the focus of US policy. Others, particularly the so-called ‘Team Blue,’ a group of congressional aides, journalists, think tank personnel, and some junior- to mid-level officials within the Pentagon, many of whom had strong ties to Taiwan, preferred to view China as the foremost potential candidate for this role. They highlighted the economic and strategic threats that China presented to the United States, its harsh human rights record, its repressive policies toward Tibet and Xinjiang, and its readiness to supply weaponry to countries at odds with the United States, such as Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. The first months of Bush’s administration were indeed difficult ones for Sino-American relations, especially after an American spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet off the coast of China, an encounter that resulted in the fighter pilot’s death and the forced landing of the American aircraft on Hainan Island. A tense confrontation ensued, with the new American ambassador virtually besieged and imprisoned in his Beijing embassy by a screaming mob of student protesters. With a newly elected Democratic People’s Party president in Taiwan, committed to the island’s independence, many anticipated China’s relationship with the United States would continue to deteriorate.

19

Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations” 22-49; Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; also Huntington, ed., The Clash of Civilizations?

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Introduction

After 9/11, however, China swiftly moved to the back burner of American foreign policy concerns. While the advocates of war against Iraq still had sufficient clout and influence with the president to move it up the agenda as soon as the war with Afghanistan was over, this was not true of China.20 Not all Chinese were necessarily sympathetic to the United States after 9/11. Nationalist resentment of the United States soared during the 1990s. Younger Chinese often deeply resented what they perceived as American condescension and bullying of China. In online chat rooms, many Chinese students suggested that the United States had deserved the September 11 attacks and that these represented the justified fruit of global American arrogance. That month, irate American officials abruptly sent home one group of Chinese journalists hosted by the International Institute of Education. Visiting the State Department on September 11, some of them very undiplomatically cheered and applauded as they watched television footage showing the Twin Towers disintegrating.21 The Chinese government displayed considerably more savoir-faire, sending condolences to the Bush administration, and offering its cooperation in moves against terrorism. Facing its own problems with Muslim insurgents in Xinjiang, China was willing to assist the United States in apprehending terrorist suspects, help the Americans appreciated. A recent newspaper report based on newly available Libyan documents detailed how in 2006 the Hong Kong government, working closely with American CIA and British intelligence operatives, arranged the rendition to Libya of a suspected Libyan terrorist and alleged Al Qaeda trainee then living in China. With or without the knowledge of the mainland Chinese authorities, he and his family were lured to Hong Kong, arrested, and sent on to Libya, where he was allegedly tortured.22 Although China subsequently opposed the American and British war against Iraq, fearing that this intervention in another nation’s affairs set undesirable precedents that might be used against itself, it cannily refrained from exercising its UN Security Council veto to prevent this, thereby leaving the Bush administration in its debt. Chinese school and college textbooks nonetheless stress that the United States began the war in Iraq “without 20

Lind, “A World Without 9/11: No President Obama, more China trouble, same debt crisis,” Washington Post, September 10, 2011. 21 Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 297-298. 22 Greg Torode, Lana Lam, and John Carney, “HK Link in Suspect’s Rendition to Libya,” Greg Torode, “H.K. Still Active as Spy Hub of the East,” and Lana Lam, “Assurances sought on suspect’s rights, fax shows,” South China Morning Post, September 11, 2011; Greg Torode and Teddy Ng, “HK ‘acted on its own’ in Libyan rendition case,” South China Morning Post, September 18, 2011.


11

permission from the United Nations,” and conclude that American unilateralism means it will be a long time before “a multipolar world” comes into being.23 The war itself proved something of a bonus to China. Already embroiled in two difficult conflicts and suffering from military overstretch, the United States could not contemplate a further international confrontation over Taiwan. The Bush administration, by then grown decidedly disillusioned with and distrustful of the erratic President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan, therefore put pressure on him to moderate his rhetoric and reach some kind of informal modus vivendi with China. China, meanwhile, concentrated on its own economic development, which took off dramatically during this decade. This did not, however, mean that China abandoned all interest in the outside world. With government encouragement, Chinese businessmen invested heavily in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Central Asia, and Africa, winning access to massive agricultural, timber, food, and mineral resources around the world. By 2010 competitors complained that Chinese firms were buying up the production of entire mines across Latin America. Growing international political influence in these regions went hand in hand with economic investment, often at the expense of US or European interests. China ran a massive and what seemed—until 2009, when some temporary but substantial contraction occurred, a trend possibly resumed in fall 2011—ever growing trade surplus with the United States, supplying American consumers with inexpensive clothes, shoes, electronic goods, toys, furniture, and a wide range of other products.24 Many of the profits were invested in US Treasury bonds, which helped to keep the interest rate on American government borrowing low, but also gave China a major financial stake in the United States, while leaving the US economy uncomfortably dependent on continued Chinese purchases of these securities. According to Forbes magazine, by April 2011 China—not including Hong Kong—had 115 billionaires, almost double the 64 of one year earlier, and more than any other country in the world except the United States, home to 413 billionaires.25 A few months later another survey, the Hurun Rich List, gave the number of Chinese billionaires as 271, up from

23

Lewin, “A Changing Narrative.” “As pattern shifts, China surplus falls,” International Herald Tribune, September 27-18, 2011. 25 Russell Flannery, “It’s China’s Year on the Forbes Billionaire List,” Forbes online (March 10, 2011), http://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2011/03/10/its-chinas-year-on-the2011-forbes-billionaires-list/, accessed September 11, 2011. 24

12

Introduction

189 the previous year.26 Whichever figure was correct, China’s cohort of super-rich was undoubtedly increasing dramatically. Despite the West’s sustained economic difficulties, the international art market was flourishing, due in part to extensive purchases by newly rich Chinese buyers.27 During the summer months, European universities were swamped by Chinese teenagers attending summer school programs, while groups of Chinese tourists trooped through the cities and scenic sites of Europe and the United States, and designer shops hired salespersons who were fluent in Putonghua. In April 2011, the International Monetary Fund predicted that by 2016 China would overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy.28 Speaking as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached, one German think tank executive observed: “What’s clear, 10 years after Sept. 11, is that there are no winners. Both Al Qaeda and the United States are tired combatants and both Europe and the United States are in deep crisis. Maybe the winner is China.”29 By 2011 the level of international respect China commanded made even its leaders nervous, as did continuing tensions with the United States over trade and economic issues and human rights, and international political and strategic competition between the two. This reportedly led Chinese officials to prefer a ‘G-3’ world based on a triangular relationship between the United States, China, and Europe, rather than a bipolar international system with only two major players, China and the United States.30 While Chinese leaders had since the early 1970s regarded their relationship with the United States as more significant than any other, US officials now likewise described their relationship with China as the “most important bar none,” a distinction once reserved for Japan. An entire cohort of think tanks, academics, political commentators, and journalists devoted themselves to the growth industry of predicting and managing the future course of Sino-American relations.31 These were by no means 26

Cary Huang, “Rapid Rise of Chinese Billionaires,” South China Morning Post, September 8, 2011. 27 Robin Pogrebin, “Art market welcomes rise of Chinese collectors,” International Herald Tribune, September 8, 2011. 28 David Gardner, “The Age of America Ends in 2016: IMF Predicts the Year China’s Economy will Surpass U.S.,” Mail online (April 26, 2011), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1380486/The-Age-America-ends-2016IMF-predicts-year-Chinas-economy-surpass-US.html, accessed September 11, 2011. 29 “The day that never ended,” International Herald Tribune, September 9, 2011. 30 Parag Khanna and Mark Leonard, “Why China wants a G-3 world,” International Herald Tribune, September 8, 2011. 31 For just a few examples, see Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy; Brown et al.,


13

entirely smooth, on either the military or economic front. As the Chinese navy expanded, a process that is continuing, clashes and military competition between US and Chinese forces in the Pacific became more frequent. In protest against continuing US arms sales to Taiwan, in 2010 China temporarily cut off military-to-military contacts with the United States.32 Western officials urged China to take a greater role in international organizations and the world economy, while persistently pressuring China to allow its currency to rise against the dollar and to import more American-made goods, thereby reducing the US trade deficit with China. In return, Chinese officials suggested that Americans should save more and display greater fiscal discipline. It was perhaps symbolic that two days before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, US Vice President Joseph R. Biden, who had just returned from a visit to China, published an article affirming just how essential it was to maintain good Sino-American relations and close cooperation between the two countries. Denying that the United States was a power in decline, Biden pointed out that the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was still twice that of China, and American per capita GDP eleven times China’s. He also affirmed that the US government would never default on its debt obligations, 70 percent of which were held by Americans and only 8 percent by Chinese. Biden argued that China’s rising economic might would ultimately benefit the United States, as Chinese consumers would provide a market for American exports. He also asserted that militarily the United States was determined to maintain “a strong presence” in the Pacific region. Declaring that the United States sought to assist and work with China in making its rise smooth and peaceful, Biden urged Chinese officials to engage in military and strategic exchanges and dialogue with the United States, upwardly revalue their currency, the renminbi, and improve their human rights practices.33 Biden’s article encapsulated the present official American line toward China, as American leaders sought

eds., The Rise of China; Buttsworth, The Dragon Wakes; Jacques, When China Rules the World; Li Minqi, The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy; Bergsten et al., eds., China’s Rise; Schmitt, ed., The Rise of China; Walter and Howie, Red Capitalism; Fishman, China, Inc.; Womack, ed., China’s Rise in Historical Perspective; Kynge, China Shakes the World; Yoshihara and Holmes, Red Star Over the Pacific. The list could be extended almost indefinitely. 32 Austin Ramzy, “Troubled Waters,” Time, August 22, 2011; see also Yoshihara and Holmes, Red Star Over the Pacific. 33 Joseph R. Biden, Jr., “China’s rise isn’t America’s demise,” International Herald Tribune, September 9, 2011.

14

Introduction

to attest to their own country’s continuing viability, while seeking to persuade China to follow policies congenial to the United States. If American leaders now devote enormous attention to China, the United States looms extremely large in China’s consciousness, far more so than any individual European nation. The tenth anniversary of September 11, 2011, has provided the impetus for publishing a selection of essays originating from a conference held in China in the autumn of 2007, an occasion where scholars sought to assess the political, economic, and cultural impact of 9/11 upon the United States both domestically and internationally. Since the reopening of relations between China and the United States in the 1970s, and even more since Deng Xiaoping launched his modernization policies, Chinese scholars, academics, and students have scrutinized the United States and sought to learn more about the country. Their reasons for doing so range from the need of government officials at every level, whether central, provincial, or municipal, and in a wide range of areas—diplomatic, economic, cultural, and military—for accurate information and understanding of the United States, to the fascination that American culture and society holds for so many Chinese, even those who detest many US policies. Some Chinese also find studying the United States—and sometimes other foreign countries—a lens through which to approach subjects that are still problematic in their own country, such as women’s rights or economic inequality.34 Later in this volume, the Beijing academic Teng Jimeng speaks of the lessons he feels the American Sixties carry for China as it develops. The past three decades, therefore, have seen the rapid growth of American Studies in China, together with an ongoing debate as to precisely what American Studies as a discipline should mean in China, and just how much it should follow or diverge from patterns adopted elsewhere, both within and outside the United States.35 Among the major forces driving American Studies in China since the beginning of this century has been the US-China Education Trust, founded 34

See Shambaugh, Beautiful Imperialist; Wang, Limited Adversaries; Shen, Redefining Nationalism in Modern China; McGiffert, ed., Chinese Images of the United States; Roberts, “Introduction,” in American Studies with Chinese Characteristics, 1-32, also available at Journal of Transnational American Studies 3:1 (2011), 1-36, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0ng0v7gc, accessed September 12, 2011; and Roberts, “American Studies in China,” in Sichuan University American Studies Research Center, America in the Age of Globalization, 355-363. 35 See esp. the essays in Part I of Roberts, ed., Bridging the Sino-American Divide; and the various reports in Priscilla Roberts, ed., American Studies in China: A 30 Years Retrospective (2011), US-China Education Trust Website, http://www.uscet.net/template/page.cfm?id=211, accessed September 12, 2011.


15

in 1998 by Julia Chang Bloch, the first Asian American ambassador ever appointed in the United States, and the American Studies Network of Chinese academic institutions the organization established shortly afterwards. The American Studies Network holds annual conferences at which scholars drawn from the various different streams of the discipline, politics, history, international relations, economics, literature, culture, and social studies, come together to bring their varied expertise to bear on a single theme.36 In 2007 over sixty such scholars gathered in Beijing to focus upon the United States since September 11, 2001. Joining them were several American Studies specialists from outside China, most of them individuals who already had substantial academic links to China, including some visiting China under the Fulbright program. In 2009 a selection of these essays were published in Chinese in Beijing.37 The tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001, seemed an ideal opportunity to make these available to a wider audience, and to incorporate Chinese scholarship and viewpoints into the broader intellectual debate on 9/11. The essays included here range across the spectrum of American Studies, approaching 9/11 from the perspectives of political science, international relations, history, literature, culture, and film studies. They address a wide range of issues, including anti-Americanism, soft power, international diplomacy, US and Chinese strategic policies, neoconservatism, the US electoral system, congressional-presidential relations, immigration, the media, the commemoration of 9/11, and its impact upon novels, films, and popular music. Sixteen of the authors are Chinese, one from Taiwan and the others from mainland China, with the remaining six drawn from the United States, Britain, Germany, and Australia. Many of the Chinese authors have spent lengthy periods conducting research and in several cases earning degrees at a variety of American institutions, examples of the growing number of Chinese scholars who return to their own country to teach after undergoing training overseas. Many of these essays also illustrate the huge boost that the Internet has given to Chinese academics, and indeed to international scholarship as a whole, with a wide range of sources, including leading print newspapers, magazines, and journals, polls, and government 36

Volumes resulting from several of these conferences have already been published in English or Chinese. See Roberts, ed., Bridging the Sino-American Divide; Mei Renyi and Fu Meirong, eds., Changes and Continuities: The United States After 9-11; and Sichuan University American Studies Research Center, America in the Age of Globalization. 37 Mei Renyi and Fu Meirong, eds., Changes and Continuities: The United States After 9-11.

16

Introduction

publications readily accessible to serious researchers. Whereas thirty years ago the finer points of the American political system, notably the relationship between Congress and the presidency, often baffled Chinese researchers, by now, as several of these essays reveal, most are extremely familiar with the complexities of the separation of powers and the US Constitution. Conspicuously absent is the Marxist interpretive ideological framework that would once have been de rigueur for mainland Chinese scholars writing about the United States. Empiricism, it seems, is now largely dominant in Chinese American Studies. Prof. Mei Renyi, the doyen of American Studies in China, admired teacher and mentor to scores of younger scholars, opens the volume with a densely researched and tightly argued analysis of what might seem the surprising global upsurge of anti-Americanism in the aftermath of 9/11. Although the United States briefly attracted sympathy from around the world, with even communist Cuba offering condolences and assistance, the actions of the Bush administration, especially its determination to invade Iraq in defiance of much international opinion, soon reversed this trend. Muslims particularly resented what they perceived as the administration’s bias in favor of Israel, and most nations disliked American unilateralism in international affairs, as well as its repressive disregard for human rights at home and abroad, as evidenced by its domestic surveillance policies and the tactics of kidnapping, rendition, and torture employed against terrorist suspects. On the more mundane level, other countries often resented aggressive US demands that their citizens and institutions must comply with, for example, highly restrictive and intrusive American financial regulations on foreign transactions that were supposedly designed to prevent money-laundering by terrorists. Heavyhanded employment of American coercive power wrought havoc upon what Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the well-known Harvard political scientist, terms ‘soft power,’ a nation’s ability to win the support of other governments and their peoples due to the excellence and attractive qualities of its institutions, culture, and way of life.38 Around the world, American prestige plummeted. Aggressively unilateralist tendencies in American policy were, Mei argues, reinforced by the longstanding exceptionalist American heritage of mission, expansionism, and manifest destiny, and the belief that the United 38 The evolution of Nye’s thinking on ‘soft power,’ its role in US foreign policy, and its relationship to the international standing of the United States, can be traced through several books he has published in the past two decades: Bound to Lead (1990), The Paradox of American Power (2002), Soft Power (2004), The Powers to Lead (2008), and The Future of Power (2011).


17

States was a uniquely virtuous nation entrusted with a duty of global leadership. He also points to the historic tendency of Americans to construct the world in terms of We and Others, and to perceive and demonize the Other as an enemy and morally inferior being, a heritage that underpinned the attitudes of Bush administration officials toward the rest of the world. All these factors had also characterized US policies during the Cold War, a legacy that greatly affected the mindset of many Bush administration officials. Americans therefore failed to recognize that they were largely unwelcome in Iraq, most of whose people wished them to leave rather than welcoming them as liberators. Mei nonetheless remains optimistic that the American people would ultimately be wise enough to turn against such policies. In November 2008, the election as president of the more conciliatory Barack Obama seemed to demonstrate that Americans had indeed recognized the value of a modicum of humility. Obama’s self-effacing style as well as his ethnic background initially entranced the world, and the American image overseas improved dramatically. Almost three years into Obama’s presidency, European views of the United States were still appreciably more favorable than during the Bush years.39 By 2011, however, Obama’s failure to win effective control of US domestic politics had eroded his image, as did his inability—despite his coup in dispatching Osama bin Laden—to bring the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan to a speedy end. International resentment of US unilateralism after 9/11 lingered, and was being passed on to a younger generation. In France, China, Brazil, and India, among other countries, high school textbooks were critical of the American response to the attacks, with Indian authors terming this “a kind of cowboy justice that did not much defer to diplomacy.” A 2007 Indian textbook highlighted illegal US renditions of terrorist suspects around the world into secret prisons where they were subjected to torture. A government-sponsored French textbook scheduled for introduction in 2012 argued that the 9/11 attacks marked the end of US world hegemony, inaugurating “a new era in international relations, marked by the definite abandonment of the belief in the capacity for a single State, be it endowed with all of the attributes of power, to ensure the stability of global order in an international environment in profound transformation.”40 While a degree of wishful thinking may have informed such narratives, the rejection of US pretensions to international primacy was clear. So, too, was the official intention to ensure that young people in 39

“The day that never ended,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011. 40 Lewin, “A changing narrative.”

18

Introduction

these countries were indoctrinated in this outlook, lessons that might well affect their future views of the United States. Liu Mingzheng addresses the question of anti-Americanism from a slightly different perspective than Mei Renyi, tracing its European roots back to the eighteenth century, well before the very establishment of the United States. Using some of the same poll data as Mei Renyi, he highlights some broad trends, including the global nature of post-9/11 antiAmericanism and the failure of Bush administration initiatives to remedy the defects in the US international image. He also points to rising dislike of Americans—as opposed to their country—among young people around the world during the Bush years. Like Mei Renyi, Liu notes the particular strength of anti-Americanism among Muslim fundamentalists. Besides tracing the roots of American policies to the country’s Puritan heritage and exceptionalist beliefs, he also suggests that US consciousness of its status as the ‘sole superpower’ and its concomitant desire to promote the global spread of what Americans considered to be democracy had much to do with the country’s international unpopularity. He characterized the early twenty-first century United States as “virtually an imperial power,” however reluctant it might be to admit this, with military bases, satellites, and naval and air power spread all around the world, assets that encouraged a hubristic outlook among American policymakers and the general public. The unilateralism of post-9/11 US foreign policy was also, he argues, responsible for its growing unpopularity. The increasing cultural Americanization of much of the world likewise encouraged antiAmericanism, almost as a reflex response. Unless Americans paid more attention to international opinion and displayed greater multilateralism in international affairs, Liu warned, their contempt for the rest of the world was likely to undermine their ability to deploy ‘soft power’ to their country’s advantage. Both Liu and Mei refer to well-established traditions of American foreign policy dating back to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, a legacy on which, they argue, Bush administration officials drew when responding to 9/11. The distinguished Australian scholar Ian Tyrrell describes in detail the longstanding traditions of imperialism that informed US reactions to the attacks, stressing the long-term continuities in American foreign policy thinking and practice. Like several other authors in this volume, Tyrrell disputes the idea, so often expressed at the time, that the events of September 11, 2001, had ‘changed everything.’ In reality, Tyrrell argues, during its lengthy period of territorial and cultural expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the United States had a long heritage of fighting small border wars, often using allies and proxy


19

forces, and of military interventions in smaller states in which it had an interest, traditions that have in many ways been revived since the 1990s. Using advanced technology to fight remote virtual wars against smaller, distant opponents represented a change in tactics, rather than in the broader pattern of such encounters. In his view the large-scale total wars of the twentieth century represented something of an aberrant break from earlier practices. The Bush administration’s rhetoric after 9/11 drew on moralistic religious imagery embodying an exceptionalist strain of Christian evangelism that had been common in previous American conflicts, and also deployed language and concepts drawn from US frontier wars of the nineteenth century. Tyrrell also agrees with Liu Mingzheng that the United States is an imperial power, which has possessed a formal empire since at least the late 1890s. Perhaps even more important, he points out, has been the ‘informal empire’ of trade and commerce, one that went hand in hand with US efforts—often private rather than strictly governmental—from the nineteenth century onward to reform and Americanize the rest of the world and to attain “moral and cultural hegemony” internationally. Even though the term had not then been invented, what Harvard academic Joseph S. Nye, Jr., described in the 1990s as ‘soft power,’ efforts to advance US interests through non-confrontational, peaceable instrumentalities, date back to at least the nineteenth century. Tyrrell concludes by highlighting the longstanding tension in American thinking between exceptionalism, “the idea of the United States as a unique and indeed superior civilization outside the normal historically determined path of human history,” and its “deep connections” to the rest of the world, a dichotomy that has existed for more than two centuries. This means Americans find it extremely difficult to decide whether to follow a unilateral path or to cooperate with other nations. Such tensions bedeviled US policies after September 11, 2001. Turning to the more recent past, Priscilla Roberts describes in detail the overall trends of post-9/11 US foreign policy, drawing particular attention to the way in which the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon reordered the Bush administration’s foreign policy priorities. This soon led to improved relations with both Russia and China, despite the opposition of both those states to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, a move Russian and Chinese leaders alike feared set an undesirable international precedent. For a while the United States gloried in its unrivaled military power, but by the middle of Bush’s second term, American involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan had become increasingly problematic, with US forces suffering constant wearing attrition as relatively low-level casualties

20

Introduction

gradually mounted, while civil war afflicted both countries. Devising a manageable and feasible exit strategy from Iraq, one that would not leave the country under the control of anti-American elements or Iran, became an overriding compulsion for the Bush administration. The Obama administration soon faced similar difficulties in extricating American forces from Afghanistan. In general, Americans were increasingly disillusioned with the outcome of these two costly, messy wars. During the 2011 ‘Arab spring,’ the emergence of popular democratic movements elsewhere in the Middle East, in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and the Arab emirates, suggested that there was indeed a demand for democracy in much of the region, something the Obama administration sought to encourage. In the case of Libya, the United States used NATO airpower to assist the rebels, who faced military opposition from President Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. Even so, many feared that fundamentalist Islamic elements would dominate whatever new regimes emerged in those countries, possibly further enhancing existing anti-American tendencies throughout the always volatile Middle East. Xiao Huan takes up the theme of ‘soft power,’ a country’s ability to use its prestige and reputation to enhance its international standing and achieve its objectives. Like Mei Renyi and Liu Mingzheng, he argues that US unilateralism and overbearing grandiosity in the wake of 9/11 quickly dispelled the strongly pro-American feelings that initially prevailed in most countries at this time. This, in turn, diminished the popular appeal of the United States around the world. Although after 2006 the Bush administration, alarmed by the precipitate fall in non-Americans’ views of the United States, made some efforts to repair the position, these remained tentative and fragile in nature. Obama had more of an opportunity to do so, taking office in January 2009 with extremely high international approval ratings, though these dropped appreciably during the following years, in part because he was perceived as a decent but less than totally effective president. During these years China, by contrast, according to Xiao, ably deployed soft power to enhance its international standing, especially in Southeast Asia and Africa but also elsewhere. Sponsoring spectacular exhibitions and artistic performances, the founding of Confucius Institutes to promote knowledge of China’s language, history, and traditions, and even constructing architecturally acclaimed embassies and other public buildings, all formed part of the panoply of China’s overall rise to global power. So, too, did its hosting of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Soft power became a barometer calibrating the country’s international prestige. Some Chinese scholars and officials, particularly those connected to the military, saw the US preoccupation with Iraq, Afghanistan, and the


21

War on Terror as offering further opportunities for China. The controversial Zhao Baomin argues forcefully, as he has done elsewhere, that the United States is an imperial power in decline. In other writings, he has gone further and urged China to join together with other Asian nations to force the United States out of Asia altogether, a strategy reminiscent of some slogans of pre-World War II Japan.41 Zhao’s presentation gave rise to heated discussion among other Chinese scholars at the conference, many of whom disagreed fiercely with his analysis, which they feared would simply provoke unnecessary Sino-American tensions. Qiu Huafei, by contrast, agrees with Priscilla Roberts in noting how the 9/11 attacks quickly brought major improvements in US relations with both China and Russia, as well as a new level of strategic cooperation with the ASEAN nations, notably Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. All became vital partners in US efforts to eradicate Islamic terrorism around the world. So, too, did both India and Pakistan, though in the aftermath of the American discovery and assassination of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the US relationship with Pakistan deteriorated significantly. In practice, the United States could not pursue its efforts to eliminate terrorism without close cooperation with other nations. It is worth noting that, in a comparable development, problems over SinoAmerican trade diminished after 9/11, even though they did not entirely disappear. Toward the end of Bush’s presidency, however, such tensions began mounting once more, a development undoubtedly intensified by the major economic downturn that began in summer 2008. In October 2011 the Chinese government voiced strong objections to legislation under debate in the US Congress, that would impose heavy trade sanctions on China unless it allowed its currency to rise considerably more than it had done to date. Chinese leaders warned that the proposed legislation violated World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, and might cause a major trade war.42 Yet for at least two decades trade disputes have been a near constant feature of Sino-American relations, with both sides normally managing to resolve their arguments and reach some tolerable last-minute settlement. Three scholars scrutinize the neo-conservative movement and its role in the Bush administration’s policies. Li Zhidong describes how prominent neo-conservatives who held official positions under Bush were able to use the 9/11 attacks to win greater power over American foreign policy and to gain the president’s assent to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Neo-conservatives 41

See Zhao Baomin, “Rival Masterminds in Northeast Asia,” in Roberts, ed., Bridging the Sino-American Divide, 468-484. 42 “Beijing warns US of ‘trade war’ risk,” South China Morning Post, October 5, 2011.

22

Introduction

were further responsible for formulating the controversial strategic ‘Bush Doctrine’ of pre-emption, whereby Bush arrogated to the United States the right to attack potential enemies before they were in any position to threaten the United States, on the grounds that they might one day seek to do so, a possibility the United States therefore ought to preclude. The Iraq War also, however, helped to destroy the neo-conservatives’ onetime dominance of policymaking. The failure of American forces to locate significant caches of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, despite fervent earlier US asseverations that these existed, posing a potential threat that justified the Anglo-American invasion, damaged their credibility. So, too, did the fact that American casualties in Iraq and the cost of the war kept on mounting steadily long after May 1, 2003, the date when the president declared the end of major hostilities there, triumphantly proclaiming the American “mission accomplished.” Military operations continued almost without a break, as the situation in Iraq deteriorated into virtual civil war, and by 2006 the American public was increasingly disillusioned with protracted American involvement in the war. Although neo-conservatism seemed to offer an attractive balance between idealism and realism in US foreign policy, presenting the promotion of democracy in other countries as an objective that would enhance American security, the attempt to implement these prescriptions revealed neo-conservatism’s limitations. American primacy was not necessarily synonymous with omnipotence, and as US intervention in Iraq demonstrated, other nations disbelieved in the benevolence of American motives. The near exclusive focus of neo-conservatives upon Iraq meant that they had few suggestions to offer on other vexed international issues, such as the nuclear ventures of Iran and North Korea, omissions that left them somewhat irrelevant to debates on these subjects, and their influence waned. By 2006, most were departing from the Bush administration, their reputations decidedly in eclipse. Wang Enming of Shanghai Foreign Studies University and his former postgraduate student, Shi Hongsheng, expand on the neo-conservatives’ shortcomings by scrutinizing one aspect of their thinking on foreign policy, namely, their views on nation-building in failed or rogue states. They highlight persistent and well-publicized calls by the neo-conservatives for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, appeals addressed to Bill Clinton in the final years of his presidency, as well as to Bush both before and after 9/11. Neo-conservatives, the authors argue, focused almost exclusively on the need for military intervention to bring about regime change, while largely ignoring post-war issues, especially the measures that would be required to rebuild Iraq as a functioning


23

democracy. This deficiency meant that the US Defense Department went to war with no real plan for reconstructing Iraq once the war was over, instead optimistically assuming that sympathetic Iraqis would themselves take over almost immediately and then promptly establish a new government on lines acceptable to the United States. The limitations of this approach quickly became apparent as Iraq descended into brutal civil war between contending militias and political factions, with US forces unpopular with virtually all parties. Several chapters deal with the impact of 9/11 on US domestic politics, especially its effects in terms of electoral fallout, relations between the parties, the powers of the presidency, and the balance of power between the president and Congress. All offer sophisticated, knowledgeable, and nuanced assessments of the long-term effects of 9/11, with a particular interest in discerning whether or not 9/11 permanently altered the workings of the US political system. Zhang Liping, a leading Chinese scholar of US politics, carefully scrutinizes the three post-9/11 elections of 2002, 2004, and 2006. The short-term impact was significant, she argues, inasmuch as the Republicans made gains at all political levels in 2002, breaking the standard mid-term pattern whereby the party in power normally sustains political losses. Despite a lackluster economy, in the aftermath of 9/11 concerns for national and homeland security and approval of Bush’s handling of these issues overwhelmed the pocketbook concerns that usually drive voting patterns. Bush’s presidential victory of 2004 can also, she believes, be ascribed to the effect of Osama bin Laden, who enabled Bush “to mature from a controversial and weak president into a strong chief executive.” Republicans overall also profited, maintaining control of both houses of Congress in 2004 and even increasing their majorities. By 2006, however, normal patterns of voting once again held sway, with voters weary of what seemed an open-ended, inconclusive war in Iraq and disturbed by the president’s handling not just of US overseas commitments, but also his bumbling response to the national emergency of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. The Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress and even took a majority of governorships. This pattern continued in 2008 when Barack Obama, a Democrat, won the presidency in a time of massive economic crisis, problems that many voters blamed at least in part upon Bush’s preoccupation with the War on Terror, as well as his simplistic belief in cutting taxes and dismantling government economic regulation of a capitalist system’s excesses. Many Americans felt that both domestically and internationally their country was weaker, not stronger, than when Bush first took office. Within five years politics were, it seems, back to normal.

24

Introduction

Xie Tao takes a similar approach to the issue of party polarization after 9/11. As usually happens in times of national crisis, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, leaders of both major parties, Republicans and Democrats alike, pledged to set aside partisan wrangling and put the national interest first. This supposed reconciliation came in the wake of at least ten years of bitter conflicts between Republicans and Democrats that had characterized both Bill Clinton’s presidential terms as well as the early months in office of George W. Bush, a president who had won fewer popular votes in November 2000 than his Democratic opponent and whose eventual victory many considered suspect. Xie carefully analyzes how brief an adjournment the purported jettisoning of party politics proved to be. After a temporary drop in polarization, as the Senate and Congress rallied behind the president on issues of homeland security and defense, a pattern that largely continued during 2002, party struggles resumed and even intensified. By “2003, Congress as a whole was more polarized than at any time since 1953.” While Democrats still largely deferred to presidential authority on such national security issues as war against Iraq, with relatively few opposing the war, partisan conflict over divisive domestic matters was reinvigorated. These patterns persisted conspicuously into Obama’s presidency, with fierce Republican opposition to presidential initiatives blocking progress on efforts to address the ongoing economic crisis. If as often as not brutal partisan conflict is almost a given within the American political system, so too is competition between the president, the head of the executive branch, and Congress. Daniel Galvin and Yuan Jirong both explore the evolution of presidential-congressional relations after 9/11. Again, both seek to discover whether 9/11 brought lasting change to the American political system. Galvin examines how, in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush made almost an art form of the presidential signing statement, the practice whereby a president, when signing into law a bill even though he might dislike some of its provisions, can issue a public statement detailing his disagreement with portions of the bill and his reasons for doing so, and declaring his intention of refusing to implement the offending sections. To a degree unprecedented among his predecessors, after 9/11 Bush attached signing statements to legislation sent to him by Congress, in the process drawing attention to the practice and making it notorious. Despite Bush’s near addiction to this device, Galvin suggests—and Obama’s record since taking office confirms this— that his successors will probably not be so profligate in issuing signing statements, in part because Bush’s overuse has brought them into disrepute. Somewhat cynically, Galvin also thinks it likely that presidents


25

will employ other, less public methods available to them to undercut legislation they think unacceptable. Galvin also draws attention to Bush’s success in using 9/11 to boost efforts to build up the Republican Party’s machinery at the national level and thereby enhance its opportunities of electoral success. Yet, Galvin argues, while Bush showed great skill in exploiting 9/11 to his party’s advantage, every Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has devoted much attention to improving his party’s infrastructure. 9/11, though an admirable tool for this purpose, did not in itself inaugurate a new era in terms of presidential preoccupation with Republican party building. Yuan Jirong agrees with Galvin that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Bush greatly expanded the powers of the presidency in areas seen as pertaining in any way to national security and homeland defense. This enabled him not only to launch a war in Afghanistan, but also to establish a massive homeland security bureaucracy and implement major infractions of civil rights of every kind within and beyond US borders. In these areas, Congress initially virtually relinquished its oversight of presidential actions and subordinated its own authority to Bush’s leadership. During Bush’s second term, however, Congress resumed its normal pattern of suspecting and resisting the expansion of presidential power. This was particularly the case where civil liberties were concerned. As Xie Tao has likewise suggested, Congress also began to resist the president’s domestic initiatives, especially on such sensitive topics as social security reform and immigration reform. The era of presidential-congressional harmony proved shortlived. As global American imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere proved ever more problematic for the United States, the luster of the imperial presidency swiftly became equally tarnished. This was equally true of cooperation between the federal government and the states. Wang Yulan, who earned her PhD at Northwestern University and still maintains close ties with Illinois, presents a case study of the implementation of anti-terrorist measures in Illinois. The state was well ahead of the national curve in introducing new measures intended to enhance homeland security. Its efforts as a leader in this area won wide recognition, as Tom Ridge, the first director of homeland security, applauded its accomplishments. Illinois passed a wide range of legislation designed to implement numerous national initiatives at the state level, cooperating closely with federal authorities in doing so. The parting of the ways apparently came with the introduction of the federal Real ID Act of 2005, legislation that attempted to keep track of immigrants in the United States not only by issuing them with non-standard driving licenses, but by imposing special requirements upon immigrants and their employers. The

26

Introduction

federal government also failed to provide the funding needed to finance the new requirement that all residents in the United States must carry standard identification in some machine-readable form. The state of Illinois and many others opposed this legislation and refused to implement it, leading to its repeated deferment, at present until the end of 2012. The failure on the part of Illinois to implement the provisions regarding immigrants also provoked a major lawsuit with the federal government. Even a cooperative heartland state that prided itself on its patriotism and its ability to combat terrorism eventually turned against the federal government’s overreaching grab for power. It was perhaps significant that immigration was one major issue on which both Congress and the states parted company with the federal government and the Bush administration. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen the largest wave of immigration in US history, as immigrants from around the world—Hispanics from Latin America, Asians, and Africans—have arrived by the millions. Their demographic and social impact has been comparable to that of the massive inflows of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Growing numbers of mainland Chinese are now living and working in the United States, seeking their fortunes there. Some are highly qualified professionals, most of whom enter the United States legally. In addition, many tens of thousands of less skilled working class migrants have entered the country. While some arrive legally, in many cases these incomers have paid large sums to intermediaries to transport them illegally by sea, air, or land across the American borders, often by hazardous routes in conditions of considerable personal danger. These immigrants tend to cluster—often working for low wages and in seriously substandard conditions—in such economic sectors as the restaurant trade, garment manufacturing, construction, and agriculture. Whether for official or personal reasons, just how the American government and people treat individual immigrants and handle the often contentious issue of policy toward immigration, legal and illegal, is therefore of steadily growing salience across a wide swathe of mainland China’s bureaucracy and populace. Many Americans of European origin have found the influx of new immigrants extremely disturbing, fearing that their presence disrupted existing social patterns and threatened established American values. The perennially controversial Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington expressed these feelings in his 2004 book Who Are We?, a work recommending that, if they are to integrate fully into US society, new immigrants must be forced to learn English and accept the national


27

American Creed, an outlook that incorporates Anglo-Christian culture and values. In the wake of 9/11, improving the effectiveness of border controls and tracking immigrants and visitors to the United States became major preoccupations of the new homeland security apparatus. The Bush administration also introduced legislation intended to overhaul the immigration system by regularizing the position of illegal immigrants already living in the United States, while tightening controls to prevent the entry of new unauthorized aliens. In a carefully researched chapter, Mei Renyi and his colleague and former student Chen Juebin explore how in the aftermath of 9/11 the coincidence of these various impulses brought deadlock in immigration legislation, a situation that perhaps mirrors the broader political stasis characterizing the United States as a whole, with the ‘red’ Republican and ‘blue’ Democratic political forces close to evenly balanced, and with little if any willingness to compromise linking the two sides. After deftly describing in the following chapter how the immigration legislation sponsored by the Bush administration ultimately failed to achieve passage, and depicting the contending forces within the United States, Jia Ning suggests that future administrations will be compelled to deal with this issue. The Obama presidency, however, has faced other, more pressing problems, especially economic recovery, health legislation, and managing the gradual extrication of US forces from Iraq and eventually, it hopes, Afghanistan. For the time being immigration, yet another highly controversial, stalemated issue, one that will undoubtedly reemerge in the future, enjoys relatively low priority on the political agenda. The impact of 9/11 was felt well beyond the international and American domestic political arenas. Inevitably, these spectacular events resonated in popular and elite culture, eliciting an enormous variety of responses. 9/11 changed the lives of at least some individuals who encountered its shock waves. As the tenth anniversary of the attacks approached, Americans and others recounted the effect these had upon their own personal lives. Some who narrowly escaped death that day were inspired to change careers and move to what seemed more worthwhile jobs, while placing greater emphasis on such personal concerns as starting a family. A woman in Illinois tried to do more to help others in need, giving money and food to the homeless and taking part in fundraising efforts for the impoverished and ill. One foreign exchange trader in New York joined the US military and spent several years in the US Marines, serving in Iraq.43 Even non-Americans from Hong Kong and India who 43

“The day that changed everything,” South China Morning Post, September 11,

28

Introduction

worked in New York at that time and were lucky not to be killed could fall victim to survivor’s guilt and deep depression. In an effort to compensate, one who panicked on the day and ran away rather than helping others later undertook a great deal of charity work.44 One young American man who lost his father and realized he would have to rely on his own efforts to succeed in life pushed himself to become an ambitious self-starter.45 Beyond the personal impact on individuals, 9/11 inspired an enormous range of films, novels, movies, television documentaries and fictional series, plays, music, and artworks of every kind, as well as myriad commemorative events. Part of the site of the Twin Towers in New York has been rebuilt as a memorial to the victims, a museum officially opened on the tenth anniversary of the attacks. (In a gesture of defiance that might be read as metaphorically proclaiming “Up Yours!” in glass and concrete, soon 9/11’s Ground Zero will also be home to the tallest skyscraper in the United States.)46 After the invasion of Iraq, performances of The Arabian Nights, a play by Mary Zimmerman based on the Arab classic collection of stories The Thousand Nights and One Nights, set in Baghdad and first performed in New York in 1994, carried a subtext as an affirmation of belief in the humanity and value of Iraq and its people. Such theatrical events were an implicit rebuke to the remote American occupying forces and administrators, encapsulated in a closely guarded ‘Green Zone’ in central Iraq intended to insulate them from the dangers, hardships, and privations of daily life there that ordinary Iraqis had to endure. The Green Zone itself became the subject of a bestselling prize-winning book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, bureau chief for The Washington Post, that was later adapted into a fictional thriller movie, an example of the porous boundearyr separating fact from fiction.47 The War on Terror and the Iraq War also generated prominent new theatrical works, largely skeptical in attitude. The British playwright David Hare’s Stuff Happens premiered at the prestigious National Theatre in London in 2004, presenting a predominantly unflattering view of the 2011; “The remains of the day: Did it change the world?,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011. 44 “For two HK survivors of 9/11, a long journey from guilt to solace,” South China Morning Post, September 11, 2011; John Carney, “9/11 Visit Exorcises Survivor’s Demons,” South China Morning Post, September 18, 2011. 45 David Gonzalez, “Outrunning a ghost,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011. 46 Pfanner, “The day that never ended”; “At site of terror, U.S. pays tribute”; “Prayers at Ground Zero as the world remembers.” 47 Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City.


29

decisions by the British and American governments to invade Iraq. Around the same time, the British Timeline Theatre Company commissioned and directed the play Guantánamo, a harshly critical appraisal of US detention and rendition policies, especially the internment of foreign suspects without trial in the American overseas military base of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Prominent productions of both plays were soon mounted in the United States itself, giving new heart to the downcast American anti-war movement. Much of what has appeared to date may well, as some critics claim, be flawed and self-indulgent, and one suspects the final, considered cultural and artistic engagement with the subject will probably have to be left until some time in the still fairly distant future. But in terms of what they tell us about the American psyche, the immediate responses of the past decade are extremely revealing.48 The final section of this volume discusses merely a sample taken from the near infinite variety of cultural responses to 9/11. John G. Blair, an American academic who has spent most of his distinguished teaching career outside the United States, interpreting his own country from a distance, crosses the barriers separating entertainment, media, and politics when he provides a stimulating assessment of one particular television series, 24, that focused upon the efforts of US intelligence operatives to combat extreme terrorist threats to their country. First aired less than two months after September 11, 2001, and already in production before then, the series featured graphic scenes involving the use of torture to extract crucial information from captives, a practice the Bush administration defiantly sanctioned despite the fact that this contravened international agreements and was widely believed to be ineffective. Top American military officers actually deplored 24’s advocacy of torture, which they feared undercut their own efforts to convince serving soldiers that its use to obtain information was generally counterproductive and unreliable. For six or seven years the series attracted large and steadily growing audiences in the United States, though its appeal diminished somewhat in its final two seasons in 2009 and 2010, by which time Barack Obama was in office and the dismal economic situation had come to rank higher than international terrorism as the foremost danger threatening Americans. Blair also joins Li Zhidong in suggesting that 9/11 merely gave neoconservative Bush administration officials the opportunity they had for some time been seeking to implement the recommendations of the Project for the New American Century, particularly in terms of justifying an 48

Michiko Kakutani, “In art, the ripples continue,” International Herald Tribune, September 10-11, 2011.

30

Introduction

invasion of Iraq. He suggests that exaggerated media emphasis on the enormity of the perils facing the United States and Americans is a longterm pattern, a tendency dating back at least to the 1930s but accelerated since World War II, that has repeatedly helped to create a climate of fearful apprehension of often unspecified menaces. If one follows Mei Renyi’s emphasis in his earlier chapter, one might even suggest that this may be related to the traditional lurking American dread of ‘the Other.’ Here again, one encounters the implicit question informing many of the essays in this volume: has the cost of 9/11, be it in the form of lives lost or permanently damaged by serious injuries, at the economic level, or in terms of the damage inflicted upon American values, been too high? Perhaps unrealistically, Blair recommends that Americans should learn to accept a certain level of risk, rather than trying to safeguard and protect themselves from every kind of potential threat or danger, an inherently unattainable goal. The distinguished German scholar Alfred Hornung likewise refers to the Manichean Puritan heritage of the United States, the roots to which its claims to both exceptionalism and global leadership can be traced, when addressing the cultural repercussions of 9/11. He further juxtaposes efforts to remember 9/11 with responses both to the use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, and to the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust during that war. Some might indeed wish to dispute whether the 3,000 deaths of 9/11 can rightly be compared to any of these events, but the invocation of these analogies is perhaps a measure of the psychological impact of September 11, 2001, upon the United States. Hornung reminds us that, rather than following the contentions of Bush administration officials, that Muslim fundamentalists had without provocation simply attacked innocent American civilians, such political commentators as Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Susan Sontag argued that the 9/11 strikes against American targets were at least partly a reaction to assertive American policies in the Middle East. Hornung explores in some detail several of the more finished artistic and literary responses to 9/11, works that had some political content, but focused primarily upon the implications for ordinary individuals of these events. In the 2003 play Anthems, Washington, D.C., the Latino performance group Culture Clash confronted questions of American identity and just who could be considered an American, seeking to include African Americans, Arab Americans, and Latinos in a broader and harmonious community. The Jewish American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in his series In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), affirmed his loyalty to New York


31

even as he condemned many of the Bush administration’s policies. The male protagonist of the New York writer Paul Auster’s novel Brooklyn Follies (2005) seems to undertake the same kind of personal journey experienced by some real-life survivors of 9/11, turning to an affirmation of family and personal relationships and efforts to help others. This theme also informs Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), a work with a subplot involving World War II survivors of the destructive bombings of Dresden and of Hiroshima. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), the final work considered here, likewise features family reunions, as well as attempts by children, Alzheimer’s patients, and a performance artist to make sense of the 9/11 attacks and to comprehend the motivations of the terrorists. In Hornung’s interpretation, American writers have sought to “replace the militant divisions of the political world” and “the ideological dichotomy of the political agenda” with a more humanistic and inclusive potential vision of the United States. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 brought a global array of commemorative events, of which the most significant were those that took place in New York, followed by those in Washington, DC. On September 11, 2011, the memorial to the victims of 9/11 constructed on ‘Ground Zero,’ the former site of the two World Trade Center towers, was formally opened, with relatives of the victims the first people admitted.49 Commemorations can also be occasions for healing. The Taiwan scholar Kit Lam considers one such event held in New York a few weeks after 9/11, The Concert for New York City, a blockbuster live broadcast concert and film benefit event to raise money for the victims. Participants and performers included bigname Hollywood and international stars, sports personalities, and politicians, as well as New York firefighters, police, and their families. The five-hour Concert mounted on October 20, 2001 was, by her account, a collage of fragments and images, videos, speeches, performances, songs, and artifacts, some contradictory and even unflattering to New York, that together amounted to a celebration of an often flawed and difficult city. This format also allowed for differing interpretations of and perspectives on what had happened just a few weeks earlier, conveying messages of mingled destruction and hope. In a speech that many in the audience resented, for example, the movie star and peace activist Richard Gere asked Americans to renounce violence and revenge in favor of love, compassion, and understanding. This near anarchic montage of short fragments left space for the audience to find their own meaning and 49

Pfanner, “The day that never ended”; “At site of terror, U.S. pays tribute”; “Prayers at Ground Zero as the world remembers.”

32

Introduction

messages, interpretations that might even be subject to change over time. Here too the personal and the political impacts of these events can be seen to intersect. Michele Aaron likewise argues that one can trace back to the influence of 9/11 a redemptive theme she discerns in a number of popular warrelated movies that appeared in the following five or six years. None of those discussed in this chapter—Blood Diamond, Children of Men, The Constant Gardener, and Hotel Rwanda—deals directly with 9/11. Each focuses upon the moral dilemma of a male protagonist caught on the fringes of some kind of inhumane conflict, a man who initially seeks to remain uninvolved and have nothing to do with the problems he at least indirectly encounters. Each protagonist, however, eventually feels forced to take action to help the innocent victims, in several cases sacrificing his life to that end. Aaron argues that the redemptive dynamics of these movies also imply a rejection of the division of the world between the Self and the Other, a pattern that several other chapters in this volume argue has permeated Americans’ thinking about their country’s place in the world ever since the seventeenth century. After 9/11, many on the American Left were, as she points out, heavily criticized for refusing to place all blame for these events on the evil Other, in this case radical Islam or even Muslims in general, and instead suggesting that American policies toward the Middle East bore some of the responsibility for Al Qaeda’s alienation from the West. In Aaron’s view, in these particular movies and several similar films that appeared around the same time, the protagonist abandons self-interest in order to save the Other, a strategy that she clearly believes the United States would likewise profit by adopting. The final chapter in this volume, by Teng Jimeng, a leading Chinese expert on 1960s America, turns from the movies to the response to 9/11 of American popular music. For Teng, the politicized protest music of the 1960s carried clear messages not just for Americans or even for all young people of that period, but also provided a model for Chinese social reformers of the 1980s. He is therefore particularly struck that 9/11 and especially the American invasion of Iraq failed to generate the kind of memorable protest anthems for which the 1960s, particularly the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, are remembered. The 2000s were, by contrast, he complains, a period when “love, fornication, and the mysteries of the opposite sex remained the central themes of popular music” in the United States. While some anti-war songs were produced, after 9/11 American radio stations tended to censor any—including old Beatles and Bob Dylan classics—that might be considered subversive of the war effort. Musicians who publicly questioned the war often found that


33

their songs would not be performed. One female band, the Dixie Chicks, even attracted public opprobrium when the lead singer publicly condemned the invasion of Iraq, with some radio stations staging smashins in which their recordings were destroyed. Many hip-hop artists supported the war and were themselves wedded to a capitalist, consumer society. Even such a working-class dissenter as Bruce Springsteen called for revenge for 9/11, commemorating its victims as heroes. Teng concludes that the protest folk-songs of the 1960s were the products of a particular time and set of circumstances, and that changes since then in the way in which music is both produced and listened to, as well as the backgrounds and sympathies of many musicians, militate against the emergence of instantly recognizable, powerful, and popular protest anthems that may easily become identified with a particular cause. Yet, while accepting that American protest music may be in temporary decline, Teng notes that some dissenting musicians have managed to produce anti-war albums. In the longer term, he still hopes for a resurgence of this honorable tradition. Uniting all the chapters in this volume is the effort to view the events of September 11, 2001, not in isolation but in a much broader context, a framework encompassing the entire sweep of US involvement in the world since the seventeenth century, and the country’s political, intellectual, cultural, and literary history and traditions. Implicitly, all the authors are asking whether 9/11 brought lasting changes, or simply gave an additional twist to trends already evolving in American domestic and international policy alike. Two overriding themes stand out. One is the current bitter polarization of the United States between conservatives and liberals, red and blue states, Republicans and Democrats, divisions that 9/11—despite professed hopes that the national reaction to these events would mark a new beginning of domestic harmony—did little to change and even less to remedy or alleviate. If anything, political combativeness gained new momentum from September 11 within two to three years. Consensus was conspicuously absent, and even the readiness to tolerate different viewpoints decidedly rare. The second theme is the longstanding tension in American views of the outside world between those who advocate cooperation with other states and cultures and those who fear and distrust the Other and seek to organize US international policies around unilateral action and a central core of antagonism to dangerous external opponents. Should the United States form part of a broader global community, or should it remain sufficient unto itself, pursuing only its own interests, as defined by Americans themselves? No matter whether the subject is global images of the United States, the nation’s international position and policies, the mindset and

34

Introduction

influence of neo-conservatives, American internal politics, debates over immigration, the cultural repercussions of 9/11 for television, literature, drama, art, and music, or the implications of efforts to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001, these two broad themes pervade all the following essays. The result is to produce a complicated and fruitful dialectical network of cross-fertilization across different areas, a stimulating and intricate cat’s cradle from which the enterprising reader will, one hopes, be able to draw new and profitable intellectual discoveries.

Works Cited Bergsten, C. Fred; Charles Freeman; Nicholas R. Lardy; and Derek J. Mitchell, eds. China’s Rise: Challenges and Opportunities. Washington, DC: Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009. Brown, Michael E.; Owen R. Coté, Jr.; Sean M. Lynn-Jones; and Steven E. Miller, eds. The Rise of China: An International Security Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Buttsworth, Matt. The Dragon Wakes: The Rise and Future of China. Kindle e-book, 2011. Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. New York: Knopf, 2006. Cornwell, Rupert. “The Lost Decade.” The Independent on Sunday (September 11, 2011): 2-5. Fishman, Ted C. China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World. Updated ed. New York: Scribner, 2006. Forbes online Website. http://www.forbes.com. Friedberg, Aaron L. A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. New York: Norton, 2011. Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18. —. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations.” Foreign Affairs 72:3 (Summer 1993): 22-49. —. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. —. ed. The Clash of Civilizations?: The Debate. New York: Foreign Affairs, 1996. International Herald Tribune.


35

Jacques, Martin. When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Kynge, James. China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future—and the Challenge for America. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006. Li Minqi. The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009. Mail online. http://www.dailymail.co.uk. Mann, Jim. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet. New York: Viking, 2004. McGiffert, Carola, ed. Chinese Images of the United States. Washington, DC: CSIS Press, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2005. Mei Renyi and Fu Meirong, eds. Changes and Continuities: The United States After 9-11. Beijing: World Affairs Press, 2009. [In Chinese]. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. New York: Basic Books, 1990. —. The Future of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. —. The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. —. The Powers to Lead. New York : Oxford University Press, 2008. —. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004. Roberts, Priscilla, ed. Bridging the Sino-American Divide: American Studies with Chinese Characteristics. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Schmitt, Gary, ed. The Rise of China: Essays on the Future Competition. New York: Encounter Books, 2009. Sellar, W. C., and R. J. Yeatman. 1066 and All That. London: Methuen, 1930. Shambaugh, David. Beautiful Imperialist: China Perceives America, 1972-1990. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Shen, Simon. Redefining Nationalism in Modern China: Sino-American Relations and the Emergence of Chinese Public Opinion in the 21st Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Sichuan University American Studies Research Center. America in the Age of Globalization. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 2010. South China Morning Post. Stewart, Rory. “Afghanistan: What Could Work.” New York Review of Books (January 14, 2010). Town Topics, Princeton, N.J.

36

Introduction

Time magazine. US-China Education Trust Website. http://www.uscet.net. Walter, Carl E., and Fraser J. T. Howie. Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise. New York: Wiley, 2011. Wang Jianwei. Limited Adversaries: Post-Cold War Sino-American Mutual Images. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Washington Post online. http://www.washingtonpost.com. Womack, Brantly, ed. China’s Rise in Historical Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. Yoshihara, Toshi, and James R. Holmes. Red Star Over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010.

PART I: THE INTERNATIONAL SETTING

CHAPTER ONE THE DECLINE IN THE AMERICAN GLOBAL IMAGE SINCE 9/11 MEI RENYI

The decline in the American image around the world after 9/11 soon became incontrovertible, arousing concern among officials and the public in the United States and across the globe. Numerous books and articles appeared analyzing worldwide anti-Americanism and offering solutions to the problem. This chapter surveys the actual decline and the analyses offered, pointing out some elements missing from these analyses. It traces the causes to American history and culture and offers its own evaluation.

The Decline in the American Image In late 2006 and early 2007 the Pew Global Attitudes Project conducted a survey in 46 countries and the Palestinian territories, interviewing 45,239 people. It released its report on June 27, 2007. The survey found that antiAmericanism had grown deeper but not wider, and that in thirty-one of the forty countries for which data on trends are available, favorable ratings of America had decreased. (See Table 1-1.) The BBC World Service Poll of 2007 (Table 1-2) told the same story. This poll of more than 26,000 people across twenty-five countries revealed that the majority in eighteen out of twenty-four countries (excluding the United States) held that the United States had a negative impact on the world. On average 36 percent of those polled in 2006 thought that the United States had a positive influence on the world, a figure that fell to 29 percent in 2007. According to the 2007 survey, 49 percent of those polled at that time said that the United States was playing a negative international role.

The Decline in the American Global Image Since 9/11

39

Table 1-1: Favorable Views of the United States, 1999-2006 Country USA Canada Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Mexico Peru Venezuela France Germany Great Britain Italy Spain Sweden Bulgaria Czech Rep. Poland Russia Slovakia Ukraine Turkey Egypt Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Morocco Palest. Ter. Israel Pakistan Bangladesh Indonesia Malaysia China India Japan South Korea

1999-2000 % 71 50 66 56 68 74 89

2001 % 72 34 57 51 64 67 82

2002 % 63 35 -

2003 % -

2004 % 83 59 -

2005 % 76 -

2006 % 80 55 16 42 44 55 56 61 56

62 78 82 76 50 76 77 86 37 74 70 52 23

62 60 75 70 72 71 79 61 60 80 30 21 36 10

42 45 70 60 38 50 37 15 1 63 27

China Views Nine-Eleven

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