Everyday Diplomacy: U.S. Servicemen in Post-World War II China

The U.S. occupation of north China after World War II exposed tens of thousands of servicemen to lives beyond their comfort zones. They served as both a military and a diplomatic force representing America, which an Army official guide to China called “ambassador[s] of the American people,” and were seen as such by members of the Chinese population, who had rarely encountered Americans in their lives. Drawing on a variety of materials in both languages, including memoirs, oral history records, military and government publications, and popular periodicals, this paper examines American soldiers’ everyday diplomacy in China in the late 1940s, focusing on material, bodily, and symbolic exchanges. While performing assigned missions, determined by high-level diplomatic exchanges, political negotiations, and military strategies, U.S. soldiers on the ground also forged intimate connections with Chinese locals, such as rickshaw coolies, “Jeep girls,” thieves, merchants, and black-market customers. Upon their return, China was embodied, enacted, and brought home via souvenirs, photos, spouses, and maids, as well as tastes, vocabularies, tales, aesthetics, and identities, which became part of America’s postwar sociocultural fabric. Overall, this paper hopes to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of postwar Sino-U.S. relations beyond the “loss of China” narrative, defined by the country’s drastic regime change and ideological conflicts with America in the subsequent years. It also contributes to the study of the mid-twentieth century American ideology of global integration by highlighting how these informal ambassadors' actual experience belied the rhetoric of reciprocity.