Air University Review, September-October 1967

China and the Publication Explosion

Dr. Kenneth R. Whiting

And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end…

Ecclesiastes 12:12

The prophetic writer of those lines, if he were alive today, could add: “and the worth of the many books is becoming ever more transient or even ephemeral.” Each world crisis brings forth an abundant harvest of instant wisdom embodied in hundreds of books cranked out by publishers eager to get in on the latest boom. Any survey of the plethora of works turned out since 1945 in which Soviet society is definitively analyzed reveals an inordinate amount of gross fabrication. The last decade has witnessed a flood of books which “analyze in depth” the underdeveloped world, especially Africa, but which did so in anything but depth. And now the China boom is on. Many of the current crop of books on Communist China fall into one of two categories: books written by people with little or no expertise on things Chinese, and those produced by acknowledged experts but obviously rushed into print while the market is still on the upswing. Harrison E. Salisbury’s recent book on China* is in the first category, and that of John King Fairbank**is in the second. 

Salisbury’s Orbit of China, as befits a top New York Times reporter, does at least have an interesting gimmick: a trip around the periphery of mainland China. The author began his journey in Tokyo, proceeded to Hong Kong, and then went into orbit around the Chinese land mass, touching down in Cambodia, Bangkok, Vientiane, Calcutta, Gangtok, New Delhi, Moscow, Omsk, Irkutsk, Ulan Bator, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Nakhodka, and finally back to Tokyo—with a day or two in Kyoto to get the “sense of Japan’s timelessness.”

Salisbury’s style is vigorous, and the book holds the reader’s interest—as a travelogue if nothing else. Furthermore, interviews with such personages as Prince Sihanouk, Ne Win, and Hope Cooke (late of Sarah Lawrence and now the Gyalmo of Sikkim) are bound to be interesting. But Salisbury’s analyses of these characters have all the profundity of a Reader’s Digest “most interesting character” essay, while the descriptions of the countries are on a par with the jollier vignettes in Holiday but without the color pictures. His best reporting is done on Outer Mongolia, an area he knows more about one that he has visited several times and also one that allows him to use his Russian expertise to advantage.

In his wanderings in Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, Salisbury seems to have stumbled upon an unusual number of “ugly Americans” and to have found out about the usual number of CIA plots gone awry—two rather overdone targets that help give an “international muckraker” tone to his book. The reader also gains the impression that two of nature’s noblemen, Sihanouk and Ne Win, are struggling valiantly to save something worthwhile out of the chaos being engendered by American policies in Southeast Asia.

Salisbury’s real focus, however, is not the trip around China, but China itself. And it is his analysis of the China situation that leaves the reader disappointed. At this point the travelogue, which has something to be said for it, stops and the author becomes a “pundit” with an aura of impending doom about him. In spite of his numerous conversations with recent visitors to China and specialists on China, he comes up with nothing that he could not have found out in New York by reading his own newspaper. He waxes profound over China’s population explosion, its nuclear development, and the imminence of a Sino-American conflict. Finally, in the last chapter, he pontificates at some length about the absolute necessity of a rapprochement with Peking if global disaster is to be averted. But he has nothing other than a few pious exhortations to offer. Any constructive suggestions about how American policy-makers can get through the xenophobic barriers erected by Peking are noticeably absent. One gets the impression that Salisbury is suggesting policy but is leaving the dirty details of its implementation to the same people whom he found botching things so badly all around China during his orbit.

Professor Fairbank produces a far wiser book. The disappointment comes mostly from the implications of the title, China: The People’s Middle Kingdom and the U.S.A., which promises too much. Actually, the book is a collection of his occasional pieces written for Life, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, Diplomat and Christianity and Crisis. The articles cover a multitude of topics ranging from a review of Edgar Snow’s The Other Side of the River to the impact of Protestant missions on China. The eager reader who seizes upon this book in expectation of a solid discussion of Chinese-American relations by one of America’s foremost authorities on Chinese affairs finds himself instead jumping about from the Boxer Rebellion to Taiwan’s role in the Peking Weltanschauung. Each essay is a gem in itself, but it was just as good when it first appeared in the mass media—I guess Life and the New York Times Magazine can be called that.

In an introductory apologia, Professor Fairbank points out that in addition to teaching their specialty in the groves of academe, the area specialists now go “further and tell their fellow citizens about it in speech and writing. When the area is a big public problem like China, the specialist may soon become a pundit and dispense instant wisdom like a columnist.” Aside from the sardonic humor of the comment, Professor Fairbank has put his finger on an important role now being played by the scholar—the attempt to present to the public a reasonably accurate picture of the alien culture in which he is a specialist and in terms that are understandable to the nonspecialist. Although Professor Fairbank would be the first to deride his articles as “instant wisdom,” nevertheless these brief essays cannot but leave the reader somewhat wiser, or at least not as apprehensive of a bewilderingly vague impending doom that looms from the Salisbury book.

Professor Fairbank sets the tone of the book in the first essay, “A Nation Imprisoned by Her History,” in which he shows that the more Mao Tse-tung tries “to make China new, the more he seems to fall back on old Chinese ways of doing it.” The rest of the essays fall into that pattern—the difficulties of trying to modernize China given the enormous friction of a cultural tradition several millenniums old. Professor Fairbank, by putting recent events in China info the overall context of the nation’s long history, is less astonished at some of the latest developments than are observers without his grasp of the eternal verifies of things Chinese. For example, he sees the Red Guard movement as quite similar to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900—and for more or less the same historical reasons. In his last chapter, “Reflexions on ‘The China Problem,’” he does not belittle the Armageddon that may ensue in the next twenty years, but he does point out that, given China’s history, we must not expect the Chinese to come up with a system of values like those generally accepted in the West. To quote Dr. Fairbank: “ ... Americans may develop the insight and self-control to deal with and contain the Chinese revolution, in the proper sense of the term.”

The usual cliché that has become so monotonous in reviews in scholarly journals, namely, that “this work deserves a place on the shelf of every student in this field,” does not apply this time. No shelf will be noticeably weakened by the absence of Salisbury’s book, and the Fairbank opus should be enjoyed for what it is: a good collection of occasional pieces already available in widely circulated journals but conveniently put together in one book—probably with the intention of cashing in on a booming market.

Aerospace Studies Institute, AU

*Harrison E. Salisbury, Orbit of China (New York: Harper and Row, 1967, $4.95), xvi and 204 pp.

**John King Fairbank, China: The People’s Middle Kingdom and the U.S.A. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967, $3.95), xi and 145 pp.

 

Contributor

Dr. Kenneth R. Whiting (Ph.D., Harvard University) is a member of the Aerospace Studies Institute and of the faculty, Air University. He formerly taught Russian history at Tufts College. Dr. Whiting is the author of The Soviet Union Today: A Concise Handbook (1962) and of numerous studies and monographs on Russian subjects, including Readings in Soviet Military Theory, Essays on Soviet Problems of Nationality and Industrial Management, Iron Ore Resources of the U. S. S. R., and Materials on the Soviet Petroleum Industry. He also contributed two chapters to Asher Lee’s book, The Soviet Air Force, and an article to Eugene Emme’s book, The Impact of Air Power.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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