2025/07/22

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Taiwan Review

Book Reviews: Postage Stamp Catalogue of the Republic of China 1878-1957; The Secret Name

June 01, 1959
POSTAGE STAMP CATALOGUE OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA 1878-1957
Published by The Directorate General Of Posts

Taipei, 1959, PP. 412, NT$50

Reviewed by Hang Chow

In this ambitious undertaking the Directorate General of Posts lists all the stamps issued in the past sixty-odd years since the inauguration of modern postal service in China in 1878. The main part of work is the English translation of the Chinese edition, which was published on March 20, 1956 in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Chinese Postal Service. In the two supplements stamps issued in 1957 are listed. Thus, this publication is a comprehensive and up-to-date catalogue on stamps of China.

Aside from philatelic interest, the book throws considerable light on the history of modern China. Politically the country changed from monarchy to democracy. In between times, there were bewildering changes in the political spectrum and foreign relations. In 1878, when the Postal Service was started, China was under the menace of Western imperialists. The Customs Service, from which the main portion of the revenue of the central government derived, was under foreign control. So were the railroads and mines. It was under this Custom Service that the first Post Office was inaugurated. At the turn of the century there was the Boxers' Rebellion. Though it was started by ultra-patriots for the purpose of driving out the "foreign devils" who had brought all the miseries upon the nation, including opium, its failure resulted in further weakening the country and strengthening foreign control and exploitation. The tide began to turn after the Revolution of 1911, though in the immediate years, which followed, the government was made weaker by the incessant strife among the warlords which had the effect of perpetuating the hold of foreigners for a few more years. Then came the establishment of the government by Dr. Sun Yat-sen in Canton and the subsequent Northern Expedition under the command of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. With the government established in Nanking, the whole country was unified, and some of the foreign concessions and rights and privileges in China were abolished. In the thirties China was the object of Japanese aggression. Japan first took over Manchuria, then North China. The second Sino-Japanese War began when she started to invade Shanghai and Nanking. In the eight years of war, which followed, both China and Japan were exhausted and devastated. Then came the victory and return to Nanking. No sooner than the war with Japan won than the Chinese Communists started their rebellion against the government with the backing and connivance of the Russians who handed over to them Manchuria and the large stock of arms and ammunitions surrendered by the Japanese. Operating from Manchuria and the few pockets inside the Great Wall, the Chinese Communists occupied the whole of the Chinese mainland in 1949. In the same year the government moved to Taiwan and started to make preparations to fight its way back to the mainland. All these changes are told in the stamps and fully described in this book.

The financial and economic progress of the country is also shown in the Catalogue. When the Postal Service was under the direction of the foreign controlled Customs Administration, the stamp issues had to be ordered from London, there being no printing press competent to do the job. After World War I with the growing American influence in China as elsewhere in the world, some issues were printed in the United States. After the establishment of the National Government at Nanking, postage stamps were increasingly printed at home. Because of the many printers, there were bound to be differences in the appearance and in the quality of the paper used. Here is where the usefulness of the Catalogue comes in, it gives detailed descriptions of the differences in the Chinese characters where such exist. Arrows are used to pinpoint the places where differences exist.

Toward the end of the Pacific War currency inflation began to haunt China. With each change of monetary value, the value of the stamps had to be surcharged. The Catalogue is of great help to strangers to understand the bewildering number of surcharges made during this period of China's history. As no amount of description will describe adequately the ways these surcharges were made, pictures of the characters used in the surcharges are mostly given.

The compilers of the Catalogue leave little to be desired in their attempt to make foreigners understand the Chinese postage stamps, for aside from the descriptions of the stamps themselves, they show two tables in the Appendix—one showing the changes in domestic letter rate and the other showing the currency changes during the last century in China.

THE SECRET NAME
by Lin Yutang

Farrar, Straus and Cudahy 1958

Reviewed by Chang Hao

In the past forty years, Soviet Russia has poured out a flood of propaganda for the mass hypnotization of the people in the non-Communist world. Compared with this torrent of Communist propaganda, the publications devoted to the cause of democracy are few in number and poor in quality. This fact explains, in part at least, why the power of Soviet Communism has grown and expanded so startlingly in a short period of only four decades, and also why the democratic camp, in battling Soviet Communism, has almost always stood on the defensive.

Indeed, things have begun to take a turn for the better. Since the end of the Second World War, there has been a growing consciousness of this problem on the part of the free world. Publications which criticize the totalitarian character of Communism have since been published in great numbers. These publications can be generally divided into two kinds. One kind treats Communism as an ideology or social philosophy and therefore aims at a theoretical criticism of its superficialities and contradictions. The other sees Communism as a reality and seeks to expose its inhumanity and absurdities in practice by factual reports. While theoretical criticism may mean much to intellectuals, the brandishing of arguments and analyses usually proves unintelligible and therefore uninteresting to ordinary people. In this regard the purely factual reports also fare no better, because people not only need concrete facts to impress them, but also need some explanations to clarify their puzzles and doubts. In view of these conditions, the free world is in urgent need of a book which illustrates the ghastly reality behind the Iron Curtain. And this need is recently met by Dr. Lin Yutang's book The Secret Name.

Dr. Lin sees the Communist problem as essentially a human problem. The masters of the Kremlin as well as the Soviet people are not incomprehensible persons. They have the same basic needs as we do, and are subjected to the same human frailties. Consequently what they have done during the past four decades is comprehensible and should therefore be understood in human terms. But the method he uses to uncover the complexities of the Soviet systems and Soviet life is that of a poet, because he believes that the best way to understand human problems is through a poet's intuition. In the introduction to his book, Dr. Lin quotes some passages of a poem written by a Polish poet. His opinion of this poet indicates the method he used to study Soviet Russia. "Because he (the Polish poet) speaks in human terms, we can hear through him the voice of the men, women and children in the Communist-dominated countries. He talks to us in common everyday terms, with­ out falsification and without distortion, but with warmth about people, about what the world might be and what it is not against the cold, gray sky of Warsaw. A poet does not analyze, he does not rationalize, he is almost ignorant—happily for him—of polemic cliches and controversial theories. He reaches clarity. He speaks of people, not a people, or the people, not even with a capital letter, just people. When he speaks of the pain and hurt and unquenched longings of people, he really expresses himself."

Dr. Lin has not had the opportunity to travel behind the Iron Curtain. He has never had any personal contact with prominent Communists. The knowledge and understanding he has of Soviet Russia is almost entirely derived from other sources. Yet he relates stories about Soviet Russia with vividness and an air of realism, which seem to come from the pen of an on-the-spot investigator. In reading this book, the leader is often possessed by a feeling that he himself is witnessing this Soviet tragicomedy. Sometimes he feels as if he were talking face to face with the Kremlin rulers. Sometimes he seems to walk in the gloomy streets of Moscow, everywhere meeting the suspicious eyes of the secret police. Sometimes he is led to a distant collective farm and sees the dreary conditions of slave labor. All these mental pictures enable the reader to have an intuitive grasp of what has happened behind the ideological facade and propaganda screen of Soviet Russia.

As Dr. Lin treats the subject from the human approach, three human motivations which he loosely groups under the trite term of 'human nature' are singled out to characterize the post-revolutionary history of Soviet Russia. Thus he explains the purges and trials, which occurred from time to time in Soviet history in terms of human desire for power. He sees the shackling of labor and the rise of the new class in Soviet Russia as a reflection of the human desire for comfort, privileges and security. He finds the colonial expansion of Soviet Russia rooted in the human desire for national glory. Although we can largely agree with his psychological explanation, we cannot endorse his careless use of the term "human natures."

Dr. Lin is after all a popular writer. His book is written for popular consumption. Bearing this fact in mind, we should not demand too much from this work and judge it by purely academic standards; because, in order to be popular, books are often written at the cost of academic exactness and profundity.

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