7 - American Peace Movements and the Legacies of Transpacific Wartime Activism

Summary

This chapter examines how the China Institute in America, a New York-based cultural organization that promoted public understandings of China since its founding in 1926, weathered unprecedented financial challenges in the 1940s and 1950s. Much more than a single cultural organization’s bottom line, the China Institute’s trans-Pacific fundraising with different American philanthropists and the Chinese Nationalist government was an understudied bellwether of the shifting political and philanthropic foundations of public discussions of China in the mid-twentieth century United States. Given existing evidence, these efforts were more about the Institute’s survival and its adaptation to increasingly politicized philanthropy than any inherent ideological orientation. A nodal point, active participant, strategic beneficiary, and collateral damage in this philanthropic Cold War, the China Institute amplifies the uneasy engagement between China and the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Following the money allows historians to make better sense of the China Institute’s political posturing in a tumultuous period rather than simply take its public rhetoric at face value.