Document created: 26 July 01
Air University Review, May-June 1981

China and Revolution

Dr. Paul H. B. Godwin

A Note on Romanization

Even though the official romanization of Chinese words in the United States and the People's Republic of China uses the Han pinyin system, this review retains the more traditional Wade-Giles method. This choice was made to avoid confusing the potential reader because only one of the six books under review uses the pinyin system.

For the past one hundred years and more, the quest for a modernized and powerful China has been at the root of Chinese politics. Within the ranks of those seeking a new China, opinions ran the gamut from total rejection of the Middle Kingdom’s Confucian past to preservation of what was uniquely Chinese while adapting those values and technologies from the West that would once again permit China to stand among the world’s most powerful nations. Thus nationalism came to embrace a divergent set of beliefs, and, like all simple explanations, the concept has become practically useless in explaining the contemporary history of China. From Mao Tse-tung, who sought to apply "the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete practices of the Chinese revolution," to Chiang Kaishek, who sought to build a modern China on the basis of reverence for the traditional and Confucian values, the form and content of what the new China should be have been a crucial issue in Chinese politics. With the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, the basic conflict continued even though the boundaries of the dispute narrowed. In his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao Tse-tung hoped to settle once and for all the shape of the new and communist China, but the anarchy and turmoil created by Mao’s final mass campaign led not to a nation led by "Mao Tse tung Thought" but to a new leadership dominated by economic and political pragmatists whose concern is catching mice rather than the color of the cat. The books before this reviewer are remarkable in their diversity, but given the complexity of describing China’s quest and the forces that drive it, such diversity reflects the complexity of the search for modernity within a traditional society.

The diversity of these volumes derives not only from the variety of "cuts" they take out of the phenomenon we call China but also from the readership they seek. Professor John K. Fairbank’s classic work, The United States and China, now in its fourth edition, was written for the general reader, rather than the specialist in Chinese affairs. The collection of 15 essays edited by Ross Terrill under the title The China Difference seeks the same audience. However, the reader looking at China for the first time would be well advised to pick up the Fairbank volume first in order to obtain the broad historical background necessary for a thorough reading of the Terrill collection, whose essayists’ narrower analyses are the result of both academic research and recent visits to the mainland. The four additional volumes are designed primarily for the specialist. The biographies of Li Tsung-jen and Liang Shuming are both fascinating and illuminating reading for those whose search to understand modern China leads them to look for the intricate detail and personal evaluations such biographies provide. The Crooks’ Ten Mile Inn takes the reader into a northern Chinese community to observe the social, political, and economic foci of communist land reform campaigns in the late 1940s, while the Joint Economic Committee’s (JEC) fourth in a series of sponsored essay collections on contemporary China’s economy provides the latest in academic and governmental analyses of China’s progress toward economic self-sufficiency and modernization.

For the general reader, Fairbank’s The United States and China,* seeks to "explain" China to Americans so they could live in peace and friendship." (p. xv) Professor Fairbank rightfully holds the status of Dean of China studies in the United States, and since the first edition of this work was published in 1948, he has watched his students make their contribution to the field, observing that it is their work as much as his that led to subsequent revisions of The United States and China in 1958, 1971, and 1979. The second edition was published five years after the conclusion of a bitter war with China on the Korean peninsula; the third as normalization of relations with China was under way, but the United States remained deeply involved in a war on China’s southwestern border; and the fourth after the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic.

*John K. Fairbank, The United States and China, fourth edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979, $18.50, $6.95 paper), 606 pages.

The thirty years of postwar relations with China have seen the American link move from war, to proxy war, to friendship and the exchange of senior military delegations as well as negotiations over the sale of military-related technologies. It is this latest change in the historical pattern of Sino-American relations that recommends this classic work once again, for as the United States and China reestablish more cordial relations, so the need for the professional soldier to understand China and the way in which the Chinese view themselves and the West is increased. One can argue that in war it is necessary to understand the enemy, but when conflict is high, current events and the immediacy of the conflict make understanding difficult. In the absence of war and when relations are cordial, it is easier to focus on the larger patterns of human behavior and understanding. John King Fairbank’s careful and witty writing, discrete analyses, and absolute command of the sweep of Chinese politics and culture make this perhaps the book for Americans to begin their understanding of Sino-American relations.

More difficult to assess is Ross Terrill’s The China Difference.* Although clearly designed for the general reader, its essays are frequently highly specialized. They do not necessarily lend themselves to easy reading, and a working acquaintanceship with Fairbank’s volume would be a definite advantage. What the authors do address from a variety of approaches and attitudes is in one sense a basic question: What has a foreign political, social, and economic philosophy—Marxism-Leninism—brought to China through the policies of the Chinese Communist Party? Perhaps equally important, the essays by Donald J. Munro, John K. Fairbank, and Harriet Mills raise the issue of what aspects of China’s traditional culture have influenced the social, economic, and political systems developed by the CCP.

*Ross Terrill, editor, The China Difference: A Portrait of Life Today inside the Country of One Billion (New York: Harper and Row, 1979, $12.95), 355 pages.

Answers to these questions do not provide a full understanding of contemporary China, for, as the authors so frequently state, the China of Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-p’ing is diverging quite radically from the China sought by Mao Tse-tung. Thus change in China is not restricted to traditional versus communist but also to Mao and post-Mao. A volume that presents carefully constructed essays in fields and areas as divergent as philosophy, law, the theater, factory life, student life, popular religion, and political participation is perhaps presenting too complex an image of contemporary Chinese society for the general reader, but a modernizing society deeply rooted in a traditional culture is a complex phenomenon to grasp. At the very least, these essays should prompt the thoughtful reader to rethink his or her views not only of contemporary Chinese society but also of their own, for ultimately the difference the authors seek to explain is the difference between the United States and China.

Where the reader will delve deeper into the CCP’s political techniques is in reading Ten Mile Inn: Mass Movement in a Chinese Village by David and Isabel Crook.** The Crooks themselves are fascinating. David Crook was born in England and educated at Cheltenham College, Columbia University, and the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University. Isabel was born in Chengtu, China, of Canadian missionaries and received her education at the University of Toronto. David went to China in 1938 while Isabel returned to Tibet and west China to conduct anthropological field work. Both went to CCP-controlled areas to observe land reform programs in 1947 and 1948, and from there they went to Peking where they now teach in the Foreign Languages Institute.

**Isabel and David Crook, Ten Mile Inn: Mass Movement in a Chinese Village (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979, $15.95, $6.95 paper), 291 pages.

This volume is the result of direct observation of the implementation of the Agrarian Law between 26 February and 15 April 1948. For the student of the political techniques of a CCP mass movement campaign, this book is invaluable. Central to the CCP’s methods of political mobilization is the "mass line," and the details of the Crooks’ description bring the discrete sociopolitical processes involved into clear light. For the general reader, this volume provides insights into life in a Chinese village and the manner in which CCP cadres used the economic and social structures of a village to press forward with their political as well as economic programs. Perhaps it may even persuade the reader to look at the Crooks’ earlier study of Ten Mile Inn¹ and William Hinton’s Fanshen.² In a nation of peasants the village became the focus of the basic work of the Chinese Communist Party. To understand the success of the CCP in the 1930s and 1940s, it is essential to have a good grasp of the political techniques the communists applied in rural China.

If the political, social, and economic philosophies of Marx and Lenin came to dominate China, there remains yet another question: Why Marxism-Leninism? The simple answer is that Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) lost the civil war. Here we can look at the oral biography of Li Tsung-jen for an insider’s view of the military aspects of the Chinese revolution.* Autobiographies are, of course, dangerous, for they are frequently self-justifying and self-inflating while being designed to prove that those who opposed them were wrong on all counts. Columbia University Press, the sponsor of the memoirs, has commissioned sixteen autobiographies but has sought to control the elements of narcissism by making them oral histories under the direction of trained historians. Li was interviewed in the early 1960s, and this volume is a condensed version of the original Chinese text. The Columbia University series, therefore, is a skillful combination of scholarly research and participant memory.

*Te-Kong Tong and Li Tsung-jen, The Memoirs of Li Tsung-jen ( Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1979, $30.00), 642 pages.

If the path of the Chinese revolution was the result of the interaction between soldier, peasant-activist, and scholar-intellectual, as I believe it was, then The Memoirs of Li Tsung-jen should tell us much about the soldiers’ view— and from a soldier who not only fought for the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek but who also served as the acting president of the Republic of China in 1949 as it crumbled before the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Born in southwest China in 1891 and graduating from the Kwangsi Military Elementary School in 1913, Li obviously has far more to offer the professional soldier than simply his interpretation of the failure of the KMT to prevail in a civil war, but he phrases the question properly: With an army of "several millions" trained and equipped by the United States, the KMT "was beaten and overthrown on the mainland by the Communists, who had begun as nothing more than a band of drifting bandits. Was this not a strange thing?" (p. 433) Li’s answer to this question came more than 200 pages earlier when he stated that after Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat in the battle of Hsü-chou in 1927, he was convinced that Chiang "was neither an acceptable field commander nor a qualified strategist. He did not know how to command troops or plan a war." (p. 220) Major General David Goodwin Barr, head of the American Advisory Group to China, would agree.

There is clearly much more to these memoirs than Li’s evaluation of Chiang as a military leader, and for the professional soldier interested in the Chinese revolution, they provide a wealth of information on the emergence of a modern military system from the warlord armies that dominated China in the early years of the twentieth century.

Just as soldiers played their role in the revolution, so did the scholars. In Liang Shu-ming’s biography, Professor Alitto provides not only a diligently researched and sympathetic analysis of the man he refers to as The Last Confucian but he does so with such skill that his work is as fascinating to read as a novel.* Liang was born in Peking in 1893, but his family home was Kweilin in the province of Kwangsi, and it was his association with Kwangsi that brought about his connection with Li Tsung-jen.

*Guy S. Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, $17.50), 396 pages.

In the late 1930s Liang advised General Li on mass mobilization techniques, arguing, as did Mao Tse-tung, that the war with Japan could be won only with a mass mobilization of the peasants through social reform and education. In his friendship with Mao, Liang completes the pattern of the Chinese revolution where soldier, scholar, and peasant-activist all provide the critical core of ingredients. The differences between Liang and Mao, debated through long nights in the Communist headquarters in Yenan, were not so much a function of the differences between a Marxist-Leninist and a Confucian but of differences that were formed by Liang’s background as a scholar and an intellectual, both in his own training and in his family tradition, and Mao’s background as a peasant-activist from rural China whose concerns were based as much in a need for political pragmatism as they were in philosophy and ideology. In the words of Guy Alitto, both men "shared a bone-deep Chineseness." (p. 285) For Liang, it was the destructive conflict he saw between the CCP and the KMT that led him into political activism. Liang saw his role in the 1930s as one of leading a third force composed of uncommitted intellectuals that would keep the United Front between the CCP and the Nationalists from breaking apart. In this role and in his concern for building a new China, Liang came to see himself as China’s new sage and saviour. As it was, the peasant-activist assumed this mantle, not the Confucian scholar. It is perhaps ironic, as Professor Alitto suggests, that Liang Shu-ming should live long enough to see Mao, who ultimately turned against him, rejected by the economic pragmatists who succeeded him. Liang may even have gained secret satisfaction from these events, for Mao’s vicious attack on Liang in the middle 1950s makes no sense except in the most Byzantine analysis of Chinese politics.

In any modernizing revolution, economics plays a central role. By far the best collection of analyses available for any library is the compendium of papers collected and released by the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the United States Congress: An Economic Profile of Mainland China (1967); People’s Republic of China: An Economic Assessment (1972); China: A Reassessment of the Economy (1975); and most recently Chinese Economy Post-Mao.** This latest volume of twenty-six essays carries on the tradition of presenting both broad interpretive analyses of the economy as a whole and of major issues in Chinese economic development as well as tight empirical analyses of specialized sectors of the economy. The 37 contributors to this publication are specialists in various departments of the United States government, private research institutions, and universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Canada. Thus, their analyses and interpretations do not represent ally particular institutional bias. The essays are grouped into five sections: Policy Perspectives, Manufacturing and Extractive Industries, Population and Labor Utilization, Agriculture, and Foreign Economic Relations. It is regrettable, however, that the 1978 volume does not contain an update of the defense sector of the economy. To some extent this omission is alleviated by a publication from the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Foreign Assessment Center, Chinese Defense Spending, 1965-1979 (SR80 10091, July 1980), itself update of an earlier work by Ronald G. Mitchell and Edward R. Parris.³ Mitchell and Parris’s focus, however, is much narrower than the defense sector as a whole; thus, it is hoped that the next collection published will contain a review of the defense industries and the defense sector of the economy. Nonetheless, this volume as well as its predecessors belongs on the library shelf of anyone seriously interested in the People’s Republic of China.

**Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, Chinese Economy Post-Mao, a Compendium of Papers, vol. I, Policy and Performance (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 9 November 1978, $7.00), 880 pages.

This diverse collection of volumes presents in a very real way problems involved in understanding a modernizing revolutionary movement. That the communists were the victors in a civil war does not permit any facile explanation of what drove the revolutionary movement or any simple predictions of what the revolutionaries would do once they came to power. To obtain a firm grasp of what drove the revolutionaries, it is necessary not only to review the history of the revolution but also to gain an understanding of the revolutionaries themselves—the soldiers like Li Tsung-jen, the scholar intellectuals such as Liang Shu-ming, and the peasant-activists such as Mao Tse-tung. For an agrarian society, it is essential to understand what the revolution meant to the peasants themselves and how they were viewed by the revolutionary elite. Once the communists came to power, a new set of questions arose as the CCP sought rapid, radical change in China’s social, economic, and political systems. The authors reviewed here have made significant contributions to the ability of the professional soldier to understand what contemporary China means to the Chinese, and to understand that helps us understand what the future relationship between the United States and China is very likely to be.

1. David and Isabel Crook, Ten Mile Inn: Revolution in a Chinese Village (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

2. William Hinton, Fanshen (New York: Vintage Books, 1966).

3. Ronald G. Mitchell and Edward R. Parris, "Chinese Defense Spending, 1965-1978," in Allocation of Resources in the Soviet Union and China—1979 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1979).

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