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When the history of America’s onscreen visions of China is written, from Charlie Chan to “House of Cards,” it may be that a turning point came with a film that had almost nothing to do with China at all. Instead, it was one about the Middle East. Representations of China began to appear on the American movie screen in the nineteen-twenties. Back then, the country was generally cast in the role of a beguiling, reflective, and fundamentally dangerous counterpart. In “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1933), a warlord on the make casually orders the execution of his captives, then justifies it to his comely American guest as a more humane solution than letting them die of starvation in prison. Consistent with the clichés of the day, the general had a lascivious streak—he foists “sing-song” girls on an American missionary—but he remains a man of depths; he sweetly recites love poems and waxes philosophical to the heroine. To a viewer with no knowledge of China, the country, which was then in a state of upheaval, seemed intrinsically menacing. “No attempt was made to understand why the wars occurred, nor the role of imperialism in precipitating the crisis, which led to the downfall of the Manchu dynasty and the ensuing anarchy,” Richard Oehling, who writes on film and history, observed in an essay. Worse, he noticed, many of the films on the subject “suggest or imply an alien civilization.” After a brief interlude around the Second World War, when the role of villain was assigned to Japanese characters, the American renderings of Asia drifted back to China, without much sophistication acquired along the way. There was “The Manchurian Candidate” (brainwashers); Wo Fat, of “Hawaii Five-O” (general turned super-criminal); and Julius No, in James Bond’s “Dr. No” (the “unwanted child of a German missionary and a Chinese girl” who eventually meets his end when he is buried under a giant pile of guano). Rarely were the actors any more genuinely Chinese than the characters. Charlie Chan was played by Warner Oland, a Swede. Wo Fat was portrayed by Khigh Dhiegh, who was a mix of American, Egyptian, and Sudanese. | 
