What the West Forgets about China

September 25, 2026

In September 2015, Xi Jinping made his first state visit to Washington, DC. During a six-day American itinerary, he made the usual rounds: the summits, the forums, the dinners. Yet during his first speech in the country, Xi also mentioned that he had read some of Walt Whitman’s poetry. This should not surprise us, since Whitman has had a rather strong reception in China. In the Twenties, the avant-gardists of China’s New Culture Movement held him up as an icon, and by knowing some of Whitman’s verse, Xi showed that he’s familiar with a figure who inspired modern China’s literati.

It seems doubtful that the sitting US president will have spent much time with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I feel confident that several of his lines in the “Song of Myself” might still resonate with Donald Trump. “I know perfectly well”, the poet says, “my own egotism”. Whitman is not alone in this self-consciousness. “I chant the chant of dilation or pride”, he goes on, “I show that size is only development”. A line like that could be the motto of any New York property developer. Whitman then asks, bringing a rare end-rhyme to development: “Have you outstripped the rest? are you the President?” Mr Trump could coolly answer: Yes.

With all this in mind, it is worth noting that Whitman penned a fair number of fraternal lines about China. In a poem of delirious cosmopolitanism, “Salut au monde”, he claimed: “I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River, the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl.” We would now write Whitman’s “Yiang-tse” as Yangtze and his “Amour” as Amur; but what matters is that China’s rivers were flowing in the Brooklyn poet’s mind in the middle of the 19th century.

Whitman even went to Qing-dynasty China, in a poetic transport, to see for himself how the common people lived. “I go among them”, he dreamed. “I mix indiscriminately”. And he found the people of China to be, in the blinding light of his ecstasy, no different from him or from the Americans of his day. “Each of us [is] inevitable”, he thrummed, “Each of us [is] limitless.”

Full piece in UnHerd