1850-1950
By Emily Hahn
Mainstream of the Modern World Series,
edited by John Gunther
Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
Garden City, N. Y., 1953, 423 pp.
Reviewed by Durham S. F. Chen
This is another delightful volume written by a woman who has already made a name for herself with a dozen other works. Though the book does not pretend to be the result of original research, Miss Hahn must have read extensively and made intensive studies before she sat down to chronicle the major events of Chinese history from the Opium War to the Communist seizure of the mainland.
It seems, however, that Miss Hahn is more interested in the history of the last decades of the Manchu Empire than in that of the Republican era. She spends almost three-fourths of her space (pp. 11-294) on the 60 years before the Republican Revolution and the remaining one-fourth (pp. 295-402) on the 40-year period from 1911 to 1950. She also seems to have a firmer grasp of her subject in the earlier period. It may be that there were more materials to draw upon in writing of the pre-Republican epoch.
Her portraits of Hung Hsiu-chuan, Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi, "Chinese" Gordon, and Horatio Nelson Lay are more vivid and convincing than those of Republican leaders in the last 100 pages. At the touch of Miss Hahn's pen, many a 19th century figure - foreign as well as Chinese - is brought to life again. A leading character is the Empress Dowager, who dominated the Manchu Court and China's political scene for the half century from the death of her husband, Emperor Hsien Feng, in 1861 to her own death and that of Emperor Kuang Hsu in 1908.
The reader learns how the crafty and unscrupulous Empress Dowager maneuvered for power by putting little boys on the throne. She dominated the emperors and chose wives for them when they came of age, killing off all who dared oppose her wishes. She entertained herself with theatricals and enjoyed the company of eunuchs. She put her faith in the Boxers in her desperate struggle to resist foreign encroachment, and took the Imperial Court to Sian in 1900. She returned from Sian to Peking to try to please the foreign diplomats and their wives and to initiate belated reforms which, if carried out earlier, might have saved the throne for the Manchu dynasty.
Miss Hahn does not portray the Republican leaders so colorfully. She seems to be unsympathetic toward Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Kuomintang and father of the Chinese Republic. She does not mention the immense economic strides made by the Chinese National Government in the early 1930s, nor do justice to the sufferings and contributions of the Chinese people during the Sino-Japanese War. She has failed to refer even casually to the Literary Movement and the Chinese Renaissance initiated by Dr. Hu Shih. As a matter of fact, the eminent philosopher's name does not appear in the book at all.
It is also in the inferior last part of the book that Miss Hahn lapses into a number of factual errors. Geographically, Hangchow does not lie in a "southwesterly direction" (p. 136) from Wuhu, but southeast of it; nor does Hsuchow lie "between Peking and Tientsin" (p. 334); nor was Chungking the "capital of Szechuan" (p. 378). The Chinese name for the Marco Polo Bridge where the eight-year Sino-Japanese War started on July 7, 1937, is not "Lukuochiao" (p. 376), but Lukiuchiao. The two famine years referred to on p. 253 should be 1898 and 1899 instead of 1888 and 1889. Other errors identify Chen Tu-hsiu as "Dean of the Department of Literature" (pp. 339, 358, and 404), National Peking University; refer to Hu Han-min as "President of the Executive Yuan" (p. 367); assert that General George C. Marshall "gave up his mission (to China) before a year was over" (p. 400). The correct facts are: Chen Tu-hsiu was dean of the college of liberal arts; Hu Han-min was President of the Legislative Yuan; and General Marshall was in China for more than a year from December, 1945 to January, 1947. The "war lord of Szechuan, Chen Huan," referred to on p. 331, should be Chen Yi ("i" pronounced short). The mistake arose from confusion between two Chinese characters, "宧'' and "宦" (yi and huan, respectively). These characters are confusing to many other Chinese students.
In spite of some lapses, Miss Hahn must be credited with having done a fairly good job. One of her best traits is the ability to maintain balance. This can be illustrated in two passages which are really commentaries on human nature. On hypocrisy she writes:
"Chinese venality has never been the cut-and-dried villainy it seems to Western minds. Westerners naturally thought the Chinese hypocritical. They heard the Orientals uttering pious maxims and saw them constantly flouting such noble principles in everyday practice, and put the discrepancy down to sheer flagrant cynicism. Yet from their own point of view the Chinese were not being hypocrites, any more than a Westerner when he says politely to the person who has just scalded him with a hot cup of tea, 'It doesn't matter in the least' " (p. 149).
The other passage has to do with Western reaction to the barefaced lies contained in the first Penitential Decree issued by the Manchu Court on February 13, 1901, shortly after its return from Sian following the Boxer uprising:
"The Westerner, reading this farrago (in the Penitential Decree), may feel a surge of shock and fury, since in our philosophy it is insulting to be presented with such a lot of barefaced lies. What did the Empress take us for-blithering idiots? A little thought will abate the reaction. In Tzu-hsi's world it was not necessarily an insult to express misstatements of fact. One lied because it was conventional, and to save face, and in general to smooth over the awkward, ugly moment. One lied to spare embarrassment all round. The liar was not foolish enough to suppose he was believed: he was simply following the code. One keeps up appearances, just as one makes fantastically pretty speeches that could not possibly be true. For our part, our comparative fidelity to the truth—only comparative; who among us has not signed a letter, 'Sincerely yours,' when it was not in the least sincere?—has often been a source of confusion and mirth to the Chinese. It is simply a matter of learning the code. A Westerner knows enough to discount the protestation of another Westerner; a Spaniard, for example, who says, 'Everything in my house is yours.' Little by little, the foreign diplomats in China were learning. At least, none of them fell dead of apoplexy when the Penitential Decrees appeared" (p. 283).
In these passages the reader finds balance and humor and sweet reasonableness, a quality which has become so rare in a world beset with prejudice and ignorance and refusal to look at both sides of a question.
The glossary and the bibliography are helpful.
STALIN'S FOREIGN POLICY REAPPRAISED
By Marshall D. Shulman
Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1963, 320 pp. $6.50
Reviewed by Charles C. Clayton
The widening rift between Moscow and Peiping gives added significance to this new study of Communism. It is, in fact, a study to determine whether the breach between Stalin and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, is as great as our wishful thinking has led us to assume, and by the same token whether the rivalry between Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung is as serious as the free world would like to think.
The author served as a special assistant to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and for eight years was the associate director of Harvard University's Russian Research Center. He is now professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The book has been expanded from the doctoral dissertation of the author.
It is a testimonial to the effectiveness of Soviet propaganda that the free world has been convinced that Khrushchev is the antithesis of Stalin. Stalin was a brutal tyrant who ruled Russia with an iron hand to further his own international ambitions; a malevolent maniac. Khrushchev, on the other hand, is assumed to be a man of prudence and restraint, concerned with improving the lot of his people and espousing the doctrine of peaceful coexistence.
If this view is accepted, then it follows that the free world should revise its own policies. Presumably if Khrushchev is such an improvement over his predecessor, we aid in his survival as the leader of the Communist world and the man who can control the more warlike leaders, such as Mao Tse-tung.
However, it is the thesis of Mr. Shulman's book that this view of Communism is in serious error. Khrushchev, he insists, was not the original Communist peacemonger, but only the clever adaptor of the strategy of his predecessor and of his principal rival, Georgi Malenkov. Soviet aggression after World War II, Mr. Shulman suggests, was not a revival of a drive for world revolution, but was primarily an effort to hold the positions gained by the Red armies and to capture such others as could be gobbled up without serious risk. This view is borne out by what happened in China after World War II, and later when Russia helped plan and equip the Chinese Reds for intervention in South Korea.
The author believes that Soviet policy, developed before Stalin's death and continuing to the present, is concerned more with power-bloc politics and less with revolutionary awakening of the proletariat. He says the Russians were the earliest to recognize that the revolutionary impulses in the postwar world have come from nationalism and from technology, not from the proletariat, and they have acted accordingly.
This study shows how Soviet caution and restraint invariably follow demonstrations of Western strength and resistance. It suggests that Stalin, as much as Khrushchev, turned to a massive peace offensive to reduce tensions and to instigate quarrels and rivalries among the Western powers. In the case of the Korean War, he believes the free world was wrong to assume that the attack was the sign of a general offensive.
While this study was completed before the open rift between the two powers of the Communist world, the lesson is plain. It would be a serious mistake to assume that the basic policy of Communism has changed, or that the rift is permanent. It may well be, but the history of Communism refutes this kind of wishful thinking, and it is idle to assume that Communism will ultimately destroy itself.