Foreign Trade in Moral Visions

Craig Calhoun

Journal article · 1997

Abstract

China's Tiananmen Square massacre, Richard Madsen argues, “troubled Americans far out of proportion to its direct cost in human suffering. . . . The tragedy in China was so upsetting for many Americans because it contradicted widely cherished American understandings about the meanings of their democratic values—it challenged common interpretations of the American Dream” (xvi). China has indeed had an almost unique capacity to receive our projections of the American Dream. Rooted, I think, in deeper, older western imaginings of China, this capacity has a specifically American history which is Madsen's subject. He wants to show us how much our talk of China is also talk about ourselves, how much of ourselves we invest in certain visions of China, and how these shape and often distort the China we discover in our travels, our international politics and trade, and our mass media.

Citation

“Foreign Trade in Moral Visions,” Review of R. Madsen: China and the American Dream, The American Quarterly, vol. 49, No. 4, pp. 882-889.

DOI: 10.1353/aq.1997.0029