ABSTRACT
In the title of his Beautiful Imperialist: China Perceives America, 1972–1990, David Shambaugh (1991) made a rather clever play on the Chinese characters, Mei Di, which could be translated literally as ‘beautiful imperialist’, but in the Chinese political lexicon are in fact a sort of Chinese acronym for ‘American imperialism’, which in Chinese is Meiguo diguo zhuyi, or meidi for short. Shambaugh’s point was that, for the Chinese, the USA was beautiful or admir-able, as its Chinese name Meiguo—beautiful country—coincidentally suggests, for the Chinese admired America’s wealth, its powerful military, and its technological prowess. Yet, at the same time, the post-1949 Chinese leadership has traditionally viewed US foreign policy as essentially imperialistic in nature. In other words, the USA was the ‘beautiful imperialist’.
