Zhang Tao, a professor at Sichuan International Studies University, thought Americans lacked a basic understanding of China, when he first went to the United States as a visiting scholar.

At the time, Zhang was looking through early U.S. media archives to study the formation of American national consciousness. Much to his surprise, he found Chinese cultural traces in this "purely American" academic field.

Zhang ran across an issue of the New York Weekly Journal published in 1743, when the country had not become independent, at the library of the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. The four-page newspaper devoted its entire front page to an article about the morals of Confucius and the Chinese people's advocacy of Confucianism.

Afterward, Zhang spent seven years collecting nearly 10,000 Confucius-related articles from 15 U.S. newspapers and studying the image changes of Confucius in these newspapers. Based on his studies, Zhang wrote a book named "Confucius in the United States of America."