“THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY AND THE MIDDLE KINGDOM: AMERICA AND CHINA, 1776 TO THE PRESENT”

By John Pomfret (Henry Holt; $40)

Most nations have traditional allies as well as longtime enemies. Think of the United States and Canada in the former category and Japan and China in the latter. Those relationships developed over decades and even centuries, and only cataclysmic events can alter them. But whereas the arc of such bilateral relations is long and rarely broken, a graph of U.S.-Chinese relations would look more like a ragged fever chart.

From the first encounters between our infant nation and ancient China, the relationship between the two countries can best be viewed as a love-hate melodrama. Jon Pomfret, in his timely book, “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom,” masterfully describes the love-at-first-sight enchantment and eventual disillusionment, followed, almost like clockwork, with reconciliations often as passionate as the first encounter.

China’s infatuation is encapsulated in its name for America, Mei Guo, or “The Beautiful Country” of Pomfret’s title, the nation that would treat the Middle Kingdom with the respect it deserved. For Americans, China was from the start a mysterious and populous land where opportunities both commercial and spiritual abounded. It was where many of the young republic’s founding fortunes were made and later the fantasy land of Christian missionaries eager to convert hundreds of millions of souls.

Chinese saw the United States as a place where fortunes could also be made, at first in the gold fields of California, though few struck it rich. Many more Chinese came as laborers and “wound up building the West. They drained the Sacramento River delta, creating one of the richest agricultural belts in history. They laid half of the Transcontinental Railroad,” Pomfret writes.

And China’s political activists mined America’s intellectual and spiritual resources. In 1879 Sun Yat-sen, China’s first modern politician, sailed to Sandalwood Mountain, as the Chinese called Hawaii, to work in his brother’s vegetable store. The impressionable 13-year-old quickly mastered English at ‘Iolani School and soon became enamored of Western culture and Christianity. He later told an audience in Honolulu he was born in China but that Hawaii was his spiritual home. It was in Honolulu in 1894 that he launched the Revive China Society, which later evolved into the Kuomintang.

Pomfret, a journalist who has covered China for three decades, skillfully describes the violent breakup that followed every passionate embrace. In 1882 the Chinese who helped build the West became the first ethnic group banned from the United States. The Chinese viewed the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries as a bulwark against the colonial powers that sought to dismember it. To be sure, the U.S. often played a positive role in that regard, but it was never as altruistic as we may have been taught in high school. Eventually, even Sun was disappointed, when America failed to stand up for China at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.

The most recent swings of the love-hate pendulum began in 1972, with President Richard Nixon’s opening to China, following a quarter-century of conflict between the two countries extreme even by the standards of their perpetually tumultuous relationship. All of a sudden, America was again entranced by Chinese culture — the Terracotta Warriors, the pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, Sichuan cuisine — and most of all, American businessmen were again seduced by the sheer size of the Chinese market.

The violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing in June 1989 marked a violent but brief swing back to intense enmity. President Bill Clinton had first run for the office in 1992 on an anti-Beijing platform, but by 2000 his administration had paved the way for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, perhaps the greatest gift the U.S. ever gave to any country.

The expectation was that economic development would lead China to political liberalization, but after more than a decade of unsustainable trade surpluses with the liberal democracies, China has become even more authoritarian. Ironically, it is some of its major trading partners — the United States, Britain — that have moved in a decidedly illiberal direction.

In the past decade China’s economic growth has morphed into greater military strength and a far more muscular projection of that might. The latter part of the Obama administration saw an increasingly dangerous game of cat and mouse between the Chinese and U.S. navies in and around the South China Sea, as China sought to enforce its claims on islands as far away as just off the coast of Borneo. So far, China has blinked when it came to a direct confrontation, but it continues to militarize sandbars it has claimed despite a resounding defeat in an international arbitration panel under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which China is a signatory.

The underlying theme of Pomfret’s book seems to be that the real problem is that we Americans have always believed that somehow the Chinese will become more like us if we just trade with them a bit more, cooperate with them a bit more, look the other way when they violate agreements a bit more. And when our irrational expectations are inevitably dashed, China-bashers like President Donald Trump return to the fore with promises of putting the ungrateful Middle Kingdom in its place.

Unsurprisingly, Pomfret takes the long view. He argues that even if Sino-American relations worsen considerably in the near future, the pendulum will eventually swing back to amity. Perhaps, but the two countries have never been so economically integrated, and our militaries have never been so evenly matched. The next big breakup may not be the last, but it most certainly will be the most dangerous.

Richard Hornik is a former Time magazine bureau chief in China and Hong Kong and a part-time Hawaii resident.