Chapter 4 examines American soldiers’ actual and perceived sexual relations with Chinese women, the most sensitive subject that triggered the strongest anti-American sentiment. While Chinese conservatives, out of racial and sexual anxieties, maligned women who consorted with GIs, liberals and self-identified “Jeep girls” ingeniously invoked the language of modernity and patriotism. However, in the wake of the Peking rape incident, the once lively debate over modernity was quickly silenced as nationwide protests raged against American imperialism.

This chapter addressed a variety of changes that often took place at the level of specific goods or typologies of goods. Out of the complex constellation of individual object stories a richer material culture of food emerged, consisting of a higher level of possession or diffusion of already existing objects. This phenomenon shaped a more specialised and diverse material culture of food, which unfolded within the complex system of practices of usage defined in earlier parts of this book.

Chapter 2 explores American servicemen’s everyday lives through their sensory encounters with China. While largely maintaining a privileged lifestyle separate from Chinese society, they also forged intimate connections with local populations by exchanging goods, service, language, and culture, an encounter that both followed and contradicted official policies and popular representations. As tourists, consumers, cultural messengers, and diplomats in the field, their encounters with China were characterized by fascination and contempt, enchantment and alienation. While their sensorial experiences and narratives were conditioned by preexisting Orientalist beliefs and racist prejudices, GIs’ cultural identities were reshaped by daily interactions involving new sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and touches.

The violence in Sasun was interpreted differently after investigations by missionaries, by foreign consuls, and by the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. The Ottomans relied almost exclusively on a single legitimist report that became the state’s measure of "truth." To retain a monopoly of legitimate narrative, the Ottoman state utilized various forms of censorship – banning newspapers from abroad, forbidding any independent discussion of Sasun in the Ottoman press, preventing peasants from the area from traveling, and eventually banning all foreign journalists. At the same time, news of the massacres spread through word of mouth, and rumors of the Sasun violence increased tensions throughout the Ottoman Empire. When news of the violence reached London through missionary networks in mid-November 1894, it ignited a much larger debate about the British government’s support for the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II, a support understood by many as complicity. The same missionary networks in the United Kingdom and the United States that had taken up abolitionism in the early nineteenth century now focused their activist energy on the Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire.

This chapter examines political discourse at various meetings of the Estates General between 1561 and 1589. it shows the evolution from an emphasis on the common good (bien public) to the good of the state (bien détat). This new language of the royal state was introduced in the 1576 meeting at Blois, but it became even more widely used in the 1588–1589 meeting of the Estates General, also at Blois.

The epilogue explores the enduring legacies of this historical encounter between American soldiers and Chinese civilians. In the People’s Republic of China, the recurring persona of the Chinese victim facing American brutality, further popularized through propaganda during the Korean War, continues to influence popular Chinese anti-American nationalism. In the United States, while the occupation of China remains a largely forgotten history, practices in China created important precedents and patterns for US military involvement with other nations in the following decades. As tensions between the two nations reach new heights today, the legacy of this “lost era” continues to be contested through divergent historical accounts from both countries, shaped by radically changing geopolitical concerns. The shadow of the American occupation remains long and haunting.

This book is designed for readers interested in the rise of absolutism in seventeenth-century France, as well as those interested in language and political discourse of this period. It demonstrates how the political discourse in the late Middle Ages, based on ancient Roman ideas that government existed for the common good (le bien public, or la chose publique, a French translation of the Latin res publica), began to evolve in the 1570s. Though references to the common good continued to be used right up to the French Revolution, they began to be overtaken by the language of the State (le bien de l’État). This evolution in language existed at every social level from the peasant village up to the royal court, and they accompanied the rise of absolutism in France, as the book demonstrates by analyzing scores of local, regiona,l and national lists of grievances presented to provincial estates and the Estates-General.

In the late nineteenth century the Ottoman state grew increasingly anxious about perceived civil unrest in the mountainous eastern provinces. This concern was heightened by an uptick in reporting about the Armenian issue in the British press and by protests across central Anatolia. Convinced that history was repeating itself in the manner of the Bulgarian rebellion of 1876 – also highly reported in the British press – the Ottoman state sanctioned repression of any dissent. Some officials used this repression to enrich themselves by arresting and extorting Armenians. In the summer of 1894, the Governor General of Bitlis reported to the Sultan that there was an insurgency in the Sasun mountains, likely to distract from his own corruption. Orders were sent to the Ottoman military that “all of the bandits should be immediately violently obliterated in such a way that they are left with an extraordinary terror and this degree of discord would be prevented from repeating again.” The resulting state violence – clothed in the language of counterinsurgency against bandits – resulted in the massacre by Ottoman soldiers of 1,000 to 2,000 Armenian villagers. This massacre laid the groundwork for subsequent massacres throughout the Ottoman Empire in 1895–1897.

In these pages we have witnessed the deep degree to which architectural rebuilding, as a practice distinct from new construction, was embedded in the Roman patronage system and served as powerful social currency in cities throughout the Mediterranean in the centuries spanning the early imperial to late antique periods. Overall, architectural rebuilding continued to be publicly celebrated as an honorific virtue through the sixth century, though the reach and impact of architectural euergetism shrank as patronage patterns changed, the overall volume of architectural construction declined, and spending on it was increasingly directed toward ecclesiastical and monastic architecture. This, I suggest, was principally due to the unique ways in which rebuilding leveraged site- and audience-specific connections to past and future communities. The high public value placed on rebuilding was also due to the opportunities it offered emperors, bishops, and other patrons to inflect cyclical celebratory calendars that enacted present order and implied future stability through their regular renewal and reperformance. While events of architectural destruction sorely tested that stability and regularly signaled divine displeasure to contemporaries, rebuilding concomitantly asserted current and future security through the reaffirmation (and simultaneous opportunity for reframing) of the empire’s pious relationship to their god(s).

The introduction provides historical and theoretical framings for this book. It situates the American military presence in postwar China within two interconnected contexts of China’s civil war confrontations and America’s global occupation. It engages with existing historiographies by locating China in the American empire and locating America in Communist propaganda. Through the micro-lens of the everyday, it also analyzes the actual and critical links between grassroots frictions and Sino-US relations.