《纸牌屋》中的中国新形象

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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.

A decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, as China’s economy thrust the country into the role of an emerging superpower, the narrative took a new turn. Instead of being depicted as mysterious or thuggish, the Chinese characters in “Syriana” (2005), the Middle East thriller directed by Stephen Gaghan, were framed as formidable, sophisticated opponents. A Chinese delegation seeking natural-gas drilling rights from an Arab prince arrives speaking fluent Arabic, in contrast to Matt Damon’s American energy analyst, who knows only a few pleasantries. As a plot element, it was brief and secondary, but it was unprecedented, as far as I could tell, and it gave way to a new generation of onscreen Chinese villains: in “Batman: The Dark Knight” and the latest Bond, “Skyfall,” in which our hero battles the usual onslaught against spectacular futuristic backdrops in Shanghai and Macau.

With the Netflix series “House of Cards” (adapted from the British television show of the same name), the onscreen China has taken another turn. I watched the first season with trepidation: at the time, I was living in Beijing and preparing to move to Washington, D.C. (Are congressmen really lurking in parking garages waiting to snuff each other out?) It’s more relaxing, a year later, to watch Frank Underwood as one of his neighbors. (Members of Congress, it turns out, don’t lurk in parking garages. They Uber.)

When the “House of Cards” plot turns to China, the themes are contemporary and plausible: cyber espionage, rare earths, territorial disputes, and a cunning, meditative, libertine plutocrat who plays on his connections at the highest ranks in Beijing. By the low standards of cinematic history, the depiction of China rings true enough—the show is a hit, with subtitles, in China—and it does a fine job of capturing a moment in time when it can be difficult to know if a man like the character Xander Feng, the emissary from Beijing, speaks for the leaders whom he purports to represent. Retiring the image of a monolithic Chinese government is one of the show’s innovations.

But, now that we’ve mastered the latest incarnation of the Chinese onscreen villain, maybe the time has come for popular American productions to explore other elements of the modern-day Chinese story: the dramas of aspiration and social mobility; the struggles around identity and patriotism and who speaks for the country; the fights over education, the environment, and employment.

If those plotlines sound familiar to Americans, they should; never have the engines of middle-class drama in China and America had so much in common. For the moment, though, it’s refreshing to watch a production in which it is the Americans, not the Chinese, who are expected to be beguiling, reflective—and fundamentally dangerous.