A timely, vital account of California’s unique relationship with China, told through the exploits of the entrepreneurs, activists, and politicians driving transformations with international implications. Tensions between the world’s superpowers are mounting in Washington, D.C., and Beijing. Yet, the People's Republic of China and the state of California have built deep and interdependent socioeconomic exchanges that reverberate across the globe, making California and China a microcosm of the most important international relationship of the twenty–first century. In The Transpacific Experiment, journalist and China analyst Matt Sheehan chronicles the real people who are making these connections. Sheehan tells the story of a Southern Californian mayor who believes a Chinese electric bus factory will save his town from meth labs and skinheads. He follows a Chinese AI researcher who leaves Google to compete with his former employer from behind the Great Firewall. Sheehan joins a tour bus of wealthy Chinese families shopping for homes in the Bay Area, revealing disgruntled neighbors and raising important questions about California’s own narratives around immigration and the American Dream. Sheehan’s on–the–ground reporting reveals movie sets in the “Hollywood of China,” Chinese–funded housing projects in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants who support Donald Trump, and more. Each of these stories lays bare the new reality of twenty–first–century superpowers: the closer they get to one another, the more personal their frictions become. “Cuts right to the heart of the relationship between Silicon Valley and China: the tangled history, the current tensions, and the uncertain future . . . a must–read.”—Kai–Fu Lee, former president of Google China and founder of Sinovation Ventures

A timely, vital account of California’s unique relationship with China, told through the exploits of the entrepreneurs, activists, and politicians driving transformations with international implications. Tensions between the world’s superpowers are mounting in Washington, D.C., and Beijing. Yet, the People's Republic of China and the state of California have built deep and interdependent socioeconomic exchanges that reverberate across the globe, making California and China a microcosm of the most important international relationship of the twenty–first century. In The Transpacific Experiment, journalist and China analyst Matt Sheehan chronicles the real people who are making these connections. Sheehan tells the story of a Southern Californian mayor who believes a Chinese electric bus factory will save his town from meth labs and skinheads. He follows a Chinese AI researcher who leaves Google to compete with his former employer from behind the Great Firewall. Sheehan joins a tour bus of wealthy Chinese families shopping for homes in the Bay Area, revealing disgruntled neighbors and raising important questions about California’s own narratives around immigration and the American Dream. Sheehan’s on–the–ground reporting reveals movie sets in the “Hollywood of China,” Chinese–funded housing projects in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants who support Donald Trump, and more. Each of these stories lays bare the new reality of twenty–first–century superpowers: the closer they get to one another, the more personal their frictions become. “Cuts right to the heart of the relationship between Silicon Valley and China: the tangled history, the current tensions, and the uncertain future . . . a must–read.”—Kai–Fu Lee, former president of Google China and founder of Sinovation Ventures

In the turbulent years after World War I, a transpacific community of American and Chinese writers and artists emerged to forge new ideas regarding aesthetics, democracy, internationalism, and the political possibilities of art. Breaking with preconceived notions of an "exotic" East, the Americans found in China and in the works of Chinese intellectuals inspiration for leftist and civil rights movements. Chinese writers and intellectuals looked to the American tradition of political democracy to inform an emerging Chinese liberalism. This interaction reflected an unprecedented integration of American and Chinese cultures and a remarkable synthesis of shared ideals and political goals. The transpacific community that came together during this time took advantage of new advances in technology and media, such as the telegraph and radio, to accelerate the exchange of ideas. It created a fast-paced, cross-cultural dialogue that transformed the terms by which the United States and China—or, more broadly, "West" and "East"—knew each other. Transpacific Community follows the left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley's campaign to free the author Ding Ling from prison; Pearl Buck's attempt to fuse Jeffersonian democracy with late Qing visions of equality in The Good Earth; Paul Robeson's collaboration with the musician Liu Liangmo, which drew on Chinese and African American traditions; and the writer Lin Yutang's attempt to create a typewriter for Chinese characters. Together, these individuals produced political projects that synthesized American and Chinese visions of equality and democracy and imagined a new course for East-West relations.

A timely, vital account of California’s unique relationship with China, told through the exploits of the entrepreneurs, activists, and politicians driving transformations with international implications. Tensions between the world’s superpowers are mounting in Washington, D.C., and Beijing. Yet, the People's Republic of China and the state of California have built deep and interdependent socioeconomic exchanges that reverberate across the globe, making California and China a microcosm of the most important international relationship of the twenty–first century. In The Transpacific Experiment, journalist and China analyst Matt Sheehan chronicles the real people who are making these connections. Sheehan tells the story of a Southern Californian mayor who believes a Chinese electric bus factory will save his town from meth labs and skinheads. He follows a Chinese AI researcher who leaves Google to compete with his former employer from behind the Great Firewall. Sheehan joins a tour bus of wealthy Chinese families shopping for homes in the Bay Area, revealing disgruntled neighbors and raising important questions about California’s own narratives around immigration and the American Dream. Sheehan’s on–the–ground reporting reveals movie sets in the “Hollywood of China,” Chinese–funded housing projects in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants who support Donald Trump, and more. Each of these stories lays bare the new reality of twenty–first–century superpowers: the closer they get to one another, the more personal their frictions become. “Cuts right to the heart of the relationship between Silicon Valley and China: the tangled history, the current tensions, and the uncertain future . . . a must–read.”—Kai–Fu Lee, former president of Google China and founder of Sinovation Ventures

Baseball has joined America and Japan, even in times of strife, for over 150 years. After the "opening" of Japan by Commodore Perry, Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu explains, baseball was introduced there by American employees of the Japanese government tasked with bringing Western knowledge and technology to the country, and Japanese students in the United States soon became avid players. In the early twentieth century, visiting Japanese warships fielded teams that played against American teams, and a Negro League team arranged tours to Japan. By the 1930s, professional baseball was organized in Japan where it continued to be played during and after World War II; it was even played in Japanese American internment camps in the United States during the war. From early on, Guthrie-Shimizu argues, baseball carried American values to Japan, and by the mid-twentieth century, the sport had become emblematic of Japan's modernization and of America's growing influence in the Pacific world. Guthrie-Shimizu contends that baseball provides unique insight into U.S.-Japanese relations during times of war and peace and, in fact, is central to understanding postwar reconciliation. In telling this often surprising history, Transpacific Field of Dreams shines a light on globalization's unlikely, and at times accidental, participants.

Offers a history of African American exclusion from baseball, and assesses the changing racial attitudes that led up to Jackie Robinson's acceptance by the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Poetry. Pacific Studies. A TRANSPACIFIC POETICS is a collection of poetry, essays, and poetics committed to transcultural experimental witness in both hemispheres of the Pacific and Oceania. The works in ATPP re-map identity and locale in their modes of argumentation, resituated genres, and textual innovations. "A TRANSPACIFIC POETICS beautifully inscribes what the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite would call 'tidalectics' by following multiple voice waves across the region and by capturing their registers in an astounding range of genres. A collection of poetry and prose that includes entries such as memory cards, lists and palimpsests, counting journals, scripts, the necropastoral, and critical essays, readers will follow the rhythms of translation and the transcultural, where wavescrashwavescrashwavescrash." --Elizabeth Deloughrey