For over a century, American news media have viewed China through the prism of our most extreme hopes and fears. The Chinese themselves are rendered as one-dimensional figures -- either frightening Fu Manchu-like demons or people whose greatest hope is to become like us. The time has come to lay the ghost of Fu Manchu to rest before it perpetuates another century of distortions. PNS commentator Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, an associate professor of history at Indiana University, is author of "Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China" (Stanford University Press).

Reading U.S. press coverage of China today, an historian has to wonder which century we're living in -- this one or the last?

In the 1890s, strange tales about China circulated in the American press. Many portrayed a particular group of Chinese as diabolical figures who routinely engaged in acts of cruelty -- a preview of how Hollywood would later sensationalize the exploits of archvillain Fu Manchu. Others depicted all of China as a barbaric land whose inhabitants routinely ate things no civilized person would consume. The optimistic take was that China was awakening from a long sleep whose people aspired to be just like Americans who would ultimately transform their country into a giant market for U.S. goods. The darker view described China as a changeless land whose despotic rulers would always pose a threat to world peace.

In the 1990s the same menacing dragon American newspapers used to illustrate the Yellow Peril decades ago glares ominously from the covers of today's most sophisticated magazines and political cartoons -- its sharp talons now pointed at Taiwan.

Western reporters' descriptions of the perpetrators of China's Boxer rebellion could easily substitute for descriptions of leaders of China's Communist party today. Just as Boxers were portrayed as murdering missionaries intent on Christianizing China, we read about the "old men" of Beijing using tanks to mow down pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square or staging missile tests to block Taiwan from evolving a political system much like our own.

To realize just how much continuity there has been in American media images of China, one has only to look at recent best sellers by American journalists. On the pessimistic side, there is Harrison Salisbury's "The New Emperors," which portrays China as so immune to change that when a communist revolution occurred, all that happened was that one despotic dynasty replaced another. Then there is "China Wakes" by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which paints a rosier picture of the People's Republic but bears a title that would sound very familiar to readers of the 1890s, as the authors themselves note.

American imagery, of course, is not oblivious to surface change. Optimists now talk of selling Big Macs and Guess jeans to the Chinese. Pessimists add new twists to the old demonizing themes. The most bizarre case in point refers to Chinese eating habits. Once these focused on the Chinese preference for dog; today some American politicians give credence to rumors, first circulated by a Hong Kong newspaper, that aborted fetuses are routinely sold in China as a means of prolonging youth. One newspaper column by an anti-abortion activist referred to "trendy cannibalism" in the PRC.

What has not changed is the tendency to stereotype and sensationalize Chinese affairs and personalities. Americans insist on viewing China solely through the prism of our most extreme hopes and fears. Chinese people and their leaders are reduced to either one-dimensional Fu Manchu-like demons or individuals whose greatest aspirations are to become just like us.

Both stereotypes lead us to misunderstand or misinterpret Chinese events -- to distort discussions of everything from trade issues to military maneuvers and human rights.

The dramatic protests and repression of 1989 -- known worldwide as the Tiananmen Square uprising -- offer a case in point. The massacres in Beijing and Chengdu need to be remembered and condemned, not the least because the Deng Xiaoping regime continues to deny that they took place. But we need to get the facts straight.

In the Beijing massacre of June 4, the main killing fields were not on Tiananmen Square itself but on the streets of the city; most of those killed -- both in Beijing and Chengdu -- were not students but workers and other ordinary urbanites who had turned out to voice their sympathy with the students and express grievances of their own. The dramatic scene of the student blocking a caravan of tanks with his body occurred not on the day of the massacre but the day after, the heroic figure in the white shirt was a worker, not a student, and the tanks didn't crush him, they stopped and waited until his friends dragged him away.

The American impulse is to simplify Tiananmen into a struggle by an all-powerful despotic regime bent on destroying students yearning to Americanize China. Many student protesters explained it at the time as not so much a movement to institute democratic institutions based on one Western model but a patriotic attempt to end official corruption and get China's revolution back on track.

We have good reason to be concerned with the callous fashion in which China's leaders have treated and continue to treat many of the people their revolution was supposed to benefit. But surely as this century closes, the ghost of Fu Manchu that has haunted Sino-American relations should be laid to rest.