Taiwan Today

New books CHINA IN CRISIS
Edited by Ping-ti Ho and Tang Tsou
Vol. I of "China's Heritage and the Communist Political System"
University of Chicago Press
1969, 803 pp., US$20
Reviewed by Charles C. Clayton

Interest in the Far East in general and China problems in particular continues to grow in American academic circles. The evidence is to be found not only in publications but in the establishment of centers of Asian studies and the increase in the number of conferences and seminars sponsored by these new institutions.

One of the most ambitious of such gatherings was that held at the University of Chicago in 1966 and 1967 under auspices of the Center for Policy Study directed by Charles U. Daly. A year-long series of lectures and seminars was climaxed at two five-day conferences in February of 1967. Some 70 China specialists from Asia, Europe and North and South America participated. Twenty-eight of them presented papers and 39 others contributed comments and criticisms of the reports.

These proceedings have been edited and published in three books under the general title China in Crisis. Volume I includes two of the books and deals with China's heritage and the Communist political system. The result is one of the most comprehensive and significant studies yet made of the Chinese Communist regime. Because it is impractical to do justice to both volumes (totaling more than 1,200 pages) in a single article, Volume I will be reviewed first and Volume II in a subsequent article.

Material in the first volume comes from the first five-day conference. Dr. Daly, who is also a vice president of the University of Chicago, explains in his foreword that this meeting brought together "the leading historians specializing in pre-1949 China". Their assignment was to examine the process of changes leading to the establishment of the Communist regime and the major aspects of the political system of Communist China in the light of Chinese political tradition".

Dr. Daly points out that China, as perhaps no other country, "offers an opportunity to examine the dynamics of revolution which may shed light on important issues affecting nations today". Certainly a better understanding of recent Chinese history is vital to the free World as a guide to the formulation of international policies. The difficulty lies in the realization that even the experts can at most make only "educated guesses" about what is going on behind the rigid censorship of Red China. In this reviewer's judgment, the best China watchers we have are in Taiwan and their assessment of what is happening on the mainland and who holds power is as realistic as any available.

The papers and commentaries presented in Volume I cover a wide range of subjects. Two deal with the economic development of Communist China and the impact of the economic successes and failures on the Communist Party. Six other papers review China's heritage and the influence of the West, as well as the military strategy of the period from 1911 to 1949. Four others examine Communist policies and ideology.

One of the papers of special interest in Taiwan is contributed by Dr. C. Martin Wilbur, who is the George Sansom professor of history in the School of International Affairs at Columbia University. Dr. Wilbur spent 10 months in Taiwan in 1961-1962 studying the history· of the 1920s and early 1930s. His paper is entitled "Military Separatism and the Process of Reunification Under the Nationalist Regime, 1922-1937." He says this period appears to have been "a turning point in modern China's political history, the period in which regional military separatism was reversed by the Kuomintang". Militarism, he believes, was one of the three basic problems facing the Chinese nation in the first half of this century. Moreover, he adds, "it was indissolubly linked to the solution of the other two-alien control Cover important aspects of Chinese life and the need to modernize the Chinese state and society".

It is significant that this eminent scholar reveals President Chiang Kai-shek in a more favorable perspective than some historians of the period. Dr. Wilbur's appraisal recognizes the many difficult problems President Chiang faced and he gives an honest and sympathetic evaluation of the achievements of the Kuomintang in that transitional period of modern Chinese history. It was the war with Japan beginning in 1937, Dr. Wilbur believes, which "proved to be the National Government's undoing". China, he explains, was not adequately prepared for war, "nor was there any ally or combination of powers that would join in the war".

Dr. Wilbur sums up his appraisal this way: "The Nationalist interregnum helped to shape the future by its accomplishments before 1937. The National Government had reduced regional separatism and had started a process of modernization in some aspects of the society and economy. By 1945 it had engaged Japan in a long and costly war and won back most 'lost rights'. The Chinese People's Republic inherited a somewhat modernized and professionally trained bureaucracy, an expanded public school system, an enlarged and improved transportation network, a modernized system of public information, the foundations of a coherent monetary and banking system, the beginnings of a national public health service, a rudimentary state statistical system, a crop-reporting service, and many other elements of the infrastructure for a modern state and society ... These not inconsiderable achievements opened a path to the future."

Chalmers Johnson, associate professor of political science and chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, theorizes that Mao Tse-tung's gains during the Yenan period from 1937 to 1947 can be attributed to correctly interpreting the desires of the people. What he describes as this "mass line" approach failed in the Socialist Education Campaign, 1962-1966, because Mao did not "investigate the interests and aspirations of the people; he defined them". If this conclusion is valid, he adds, Mao must either replace the mass line approach with a policy of coercion or must "abandon his Communist vision in favor of some form of modern revisionism".

S.Y. Teng, a member of the Organizational Committee at the Ming Biographical History Project and now on the faculty of Indiana University, reminds us in his commentary on Professor Johnson's paper that In most cases in Chinese history the destiny of a government bas been determined by internal factors rather than external forces. He notes that the dynastic cycle operates within revolutionary movements. "After the conquest of power, he writes, "the leaders and followers have a tendency to dislike hard work and to prefer an easy life. Unless there are frequent purges, corruption, personal rivalries and inefficiency are unavoidable." The purges since those words were written, the rise and fall of the Red Guard and the eclipse of many of the old guard bear out this theory.

Only time can test the validity of this prediction and other speculations advanced in the papers presented at Chicago. The widening breach between Moscow and Peiping injects new external forces which could drastically upset the course of Communist China and affect the rest of the world. The material presented in these two books will help give perspective to whatever the future headlines may say.

THE CENTER OF THE WORLD
By Robert: S. Elegant
Funk & Wagnalls, New York
Rev. 1968, 477 pp., US$6.95
Reviewed by Kuo Yao-hua

Robert Elegant, now with the Los Angeles Times, is one of the most respected of the Red China watchers stationed in Hongkong. He is a student of Chinese life and culture as well as of the Chinese and Japanese languages. His China days go back to wire service reporting from Shanghai before the Communists took over. He was with Newsweek before joining the Times.

In the sizable Hongkong community of correspondents, Robert Elegant is less visible than most, because he is busy doing his "homework"-which means wading through the masses of Chinese-language and translated materials that come out of the mainland. He and a few others like him contradict the supposition that the free world can know very little about what is going on behind the bamboo curtain. Most of the ignorance about the Chinese Communists stems from unwillingness to read and study and analyze, not from any shortage of the raw material called news or intelligence.

This book was first published in 1964. The New York-born author has undertaken a revision that brings the record and his interpretation down to the summer of 1968. Editing and rewriting has taken place throughout the volume and a chapter added on the "great proletarian cultural revolution". Possibly author and publishers missed an opportunity for larger sales by not changing the title to include the key words "cultural revolution". Many leaders of the West have confessed themselves bewildered by events on the Chinese mainland and any book purporting to explain them should be assured of financial success.

How well Elegant succeeds in ills explanation is another matter. He himself admits to fallibility and to the "tentative character of some judgments, while pleading in mitigation that I am writing about the incomplete present". In his view, the "cultural revolution" is unique. "Never before 1966," he writes in the Preface, "had the respected leaders of a major nation deliberately destroyed the machinery through which authority was exercised." He gives much more weight to the idea that Mao Tse-tung was trying to create a "perfect mass democracy" than to the "cultural revolution" as a struggle for personal power.

Maoist doctrines, he says, "have by and large been discredited in China. But a substantial success in South Vietnam could impel the successor Communist regime to rededicate itself to the Maoist ideal of 'world liberation'. While rejecting Mao Tse-tung's domestic policies, the anti-Maoists might yield to the temptation to remake the outside world. Rekindled by a victory in South Vietnam, Messianic Maoists and the instinctive Chinese movement outward could together seek a violent consummation. The danger of nuclear confrontation between the United States and (Red) China could once again become acute".

Many political observers of the Republic of China will agree with Elegant up to this point. He is to be respected, too, for his recognition that the free Chinese National Government "might seek to reassert their authority ... over a number of coastal provinces". But why should Elegant go on to maintain that the United States can best influence the process of Chinese change by "offering friendship" to the Peiping regime? He advocates diplomatic recognition, U.S. support of entry into the United Nations, and normal commercial and cultural relations. This position seems to conflict both with the facts he presents and his penetrating interpretation of them.

Contents of The Center of the World are set forth by the author toward the end of the second chapter (a strange place, perhaps, but the material is useful in a review). He writes: "This book, which attempts a certain comprehensiveness because it is intended for the general reader rather than the specialist, follows an unusual plan. After two general chapters ... dealing with the present state of China and the major reasons for that state, two Parts, comprising six chapters in all, take the reader chronologically through vital events from 1600 to 1967. Although this is not a history, a knowledge of those events appears to me essential to understanding the influences which have shaped the minds of the Communist leaders and their responses. Part Two ... therefore deals with the arrival of the first Westerners to reside in modern China, with the economic disasters produced by overpopulation, with the reaction of the Westerners to China in the nineteenth century, and with the Chinese reaction to the West during that same period. Part Three describes, in Chapter 7, the collapse of the Manchu Empire and the establishment of the Republic of China, touching on the intellectual currents of the time. The following chapter begins with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, concluding with a chronology of the chief events between that date and the present.

"Thereafter the emphasis shifts from the chronological to the particular. Part Four, in two chapters, attempts to set forth the intellectual bases of the regime. Chapter 9 therein outlines the traditional political and social philosophy. Chapter 10 describes the influences that acted upon Mao Tse-tung and the manner in which he adapted traditional Chinese thought to his own interpretation of Marxism-Leninism.

"Part Five, in four chapters, tells of the organs and the methods by which the Communists rule China: the Communist Party, the People's Government, the recurrent campaigns that are the Chinese Communist contribution to modern political techniques, and the methods developed to 'reform' the thinking of the Chinese people. Part Six is concerned with the results produced. Chapter 15 therein relates the first culmination of Communist thinking and ambitions in the creation of the People's Communes. The next two chapters are concerned respectively with (Red) China's relations with the outside world, including the Sino-Soviet quarrel, and with the state to which China was reduced by the Maoist excesses. Chapter 18 describes the Grand Climacteric of the Red Guards, called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Epilogue offers some tentative conclusions and suggestions based upon the evidence presented throughout the book.

"The central motif is what I consider the single most important theme in modern Chinese history-the nation's alternating attempts and refusals to adjust to the West. China has never succeeded in reconciling herself to living on the terms of the outside world, nor has she been able to attain the power to force the world o live on her terms. During somewhat more than a century of intimate contact with the West the Chinese lave attempted to gain their ends by a variety of means. The adoption of Communism was the culminating device, which the zealots were convinced would solve all China's problems-economic, social, spiritual, and military. They were understandably dismayed when they discovered that Moscow was subtly recasting the doctrine into a shape that would make it impossible for them to attain their most cherished objectives. They had, therefore, no alternative but to fight for the preservation of orthodoxy, even at the risk of splitting the Communist world. Finally, the great catharsis of the Cultural Revolution forced realistic Communists to try to come to terms with the reality of a world China could not dominate."

Elegant's "center of the world" interpretation of China emerges in the preceding paragraph. Not everyone will agree with his central motif and some of those who do so will not go on to accept the idea that Communism's temporary mainland triumph was the "culminating device" in undertakings to assure that China would have its way in confrontation with the West. Communism was fastened on the mainland in the late 1940s by a combination of factors; to blame a chauvinistic anti-Western orientation is oversimplification.

Elegant opens his chapter on the "cultural revolution" with these passages: "It all seemed more like an Antonioni film with a script by Kafka than any political development conceivable in any civilized nation of the twentieth century. (Red) China was exploding in a gaudy conflagration of verbal pyrotechnics accompanied by vicious street fighting. Old revolutionary comrades howled for each other's heads, and industrial workers, the 'vanguard of the proletariat', fought with wrenches and handmade knives against Red Guards ... The cataclysm that began in 1966 might have been the characteristically confused death throes of one more Chinese dynasty -and the anarchy that broke in 1967 could have engulfed more than 700 million people. It might, rather, have been the violent birth throes of a new totalitarianism, more rigid, more dedicated, and more dangerous than any the world has ever seen-the hordes of Genghis Khan inspired by an implacably militant ideology and armed with nuclear weapons." He traces the factual course of developments and in doing so arrives at these conclusions, among others:

-The "People's Liberation Army" was able to maintain a degree of aloofness and emerge with its units intact.

-Mao was at war not merely against the Chinese Communist Party and the government "but with China itself".

-Red Guards evaded the control of their creators. While they were on their rampage, there was "no effective government" on most of the mainland.

-Mao himself was spurred on by "the severe illness he apparently underwent late in 1965" and his fears about what would happen to Marxism-Lenin ism-Maoism after his passing.

-The PLA would appear to rule the mainland but actually would rather not because of its own divisions and commitments to regional loyalties and alliances with local powerholders.

"In the long run," Elegant writes near the end of his concluding chapter, "the temper of the Chinese people would determine the shape of the Chinese nation ... Brought into the political turmoil by the Maoists, who believed the popular will would support them, the masses turned against the extremism of the Maoists. Since the masses decided the outcome of the struggle, the remaking of the nation would depend largely on their wishes. They must be wooed with measures of which they approve, since they can no longer either be hypnotized by demagoguery or be compelled by coercion."

There are a brief bibliography and an index. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with the writer, he will find that book moves briskly. The style is neither too journalistic nor too academic. A paperbound edition is available at US$2.95.