To the Editor:

As a China-watcher since World War II, I agree on the whole with the thrust of Charles Horner’s article, “Sinology in Crisis” [February]. Mr. Horner, however, gives the impression that he thinks no American China-watcher was seriously critical of Mao & Co. before about 1970. Not so. One exception is Richard Walker (in China under Communism, 1955), to whom Mr. Horner gives honorable mention in the post-1970 context. Another exception is me (in Major Governments of Asia, 1958, and elsewhere), to whom Horner does not. There are others, to whom I say, in the spirit of the future Priscilla Alden, why don’t you speak for yourselves?

Harold C. Hinton
George Washington University
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Charles Horner . . . has drawn a gross caricature of contemporary Chinese studies. First, his criticism of John K. Fairbank is quite unfair. I believe Fairbank was wrong in his rosy assessment of President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, and that he has been consistently wrong for several decades. However, his towering achievements as an educator and scholar are nowhere mentioned in Mr. Horner’s indictment. Some of us in contemporary Chinese studies have long disagreed with Fairbank, and have lectured and written at length to that effect, but we have never doubted his sincerity and honesty. To my knowledge, no one before Mr. Horner has questioned Fairbank’s integrity. . . .

Now, a small, selected contribution to Mr. Horner’s broader education in contemporary Chinese studies: to begin with, journalists were not the “first” challengers of what I would call the “benign” or “romantic” view of Chinese Communism. The late Laszlo Ladany, S.J., started his hard-headed weekly, China News Analysis (CNA), in 1953, and it remained a widely-read, essential source until well into the 1980’s. Mr. Horner can find CNA in the Library of Congress . . . or he can order a copy of Ladany’s 1988 work, The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1986, from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Next, Mr. Horner should read Michael Lindsay’s China and the Cold War (Melbourne, 1954). Lord Lindsay, who taught for many years at the American University in Washington, D.C., had spent the Sino-Japanese war years in Mao’s capital of Yenan, and was very favorably disposed toward Chinese Communism until he returned to China for a visit after “liberation” in 1949. His work is a devastating analysis of the early years of Mao’s tyranny.

Next (but here Mr. Horner must monitor his blood pressure), he should peruse Stuart Schram’s The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (1963), and Franz Schurmann’s Ideology and Organization in Communist China (1966). Both books admirably fit his thesis. To Schram, Mao was an intellectual warrior-type, a revolutionary romantic (and poet, to boot). To Schurmann, the Chinese Communist party is really just another organization (like, say, General Electric), and can best be understood by reading Reinhard Bendix and other organizational theorists, rather than by a close comparative study of Mao, Lenin, and Stalin. I am surprised Mr. Horner did not mention these well-known monographs, and can only assume they predate his limited area of interest and study.

The point, however, is that neither work went unchallenged. Arthur A. Cohen’s brilliant study, The Communism of Mao Tse-tung (1964), clearly shows Mao to be nothing less than a Chinese Stalin. Cohen and Schram later joined in a lively debate, “What is Maoism?,” in Problems of Communism (September-October 1966, and March-April 1967). Cohen won by a knockout.

Now Mr. Horner is ready to familiarize himself with the China Quarterly (London), the premier scholarly journal in the field for some 30 years. He could start with any of the several critical analyses by Philip Bridgham—for example, “Mao’s Cultural Revolution: Origins and Development,” in the January-March 1967 issue. These are solid, rigorous assessments of Mao’s dictatorship. In several of my own books and articles over the last 28 years (I have written twelve books and numerous articles on the subject, and am currently director of Asian Studies for the Asian division of the University of Maryland, in Tokyo), I have dealt at length with Mao’s fanaticism, his megalomania, and the terrible cost he was exacting from the Chinese people. In short, we did not need finally to have our eyes opened by the excellent journalism of Fox Butterfield and John Fraser, nor did they “pioneer in reporting on Chinese dissidence.”

Finally, Mr. Horner should secure a set of the three-volume masterpiece by the late Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, especially the first volume, The Problem of Intellectual Continuity (1958). Turn to page 162 and read the following:

The categories of Chinese Communist thought are not traditional. This is the salient fact. . . . For the substance of the respective orthodoxies must count for something, and Confucian harmony is not Marxist struggle, Confucian permanence is not Marxist process, Confucian moralism is not Marxist materialism.

Written over 30 years ago, true then and true now, this judgment was and still is shared by many of Joseph Levenson’s colleagues. He is sorely missed.

In sum, then, I am sure many students of Chinese Communist affairs would resent being tarred with the brush of Mr. Horner’s blanket indictment. I know I do.

Dennis J. Doolin
Tokyo, Japan

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To the Editor:

As one who has had experience with the shallowness of American Sinology, I agree totally with Charles Horner’s brief description of the fallacies perpetrated by American Sinologists.

John K. Fairbank, the so-called “dean” of American Sinologists, is the one who most needs scrutiny. After the Tiananmen massacre, Fairbank wrote in the New York Review of Books that the students and the Red Guards “seemed superficially two of a kind, foreboding chaos and anarchy.” Unfortunately, the poison of this remark may outlast the beast itself. Fair-bank’s status as a Harvard professor for 41 years enabled him to train a large number of students who now occupy teaching positions in prominent universities throughout the U.S. Even though Fairbank himself may fade away, the “Fair-bank school” is definitely still in its heyday. If American Sinologists really want to correct the wrong course taken in the past, their very first step should be to renounce Fairbankism.

One of the reasons American Sinologists have been so ignorant of China is their low level of proficiency in the Chinese language. It sounds odd that an “expert” in Chinese studies should not have a solid grasp of Chinese, yet, speaking from personal experience, I know this to be the case. The eminent Simon Leys, who first began the process of examining the integrity of Sinology twenty years ago, once described himself as someone “who has not been shielded from the truth by a blessed ignorance of the Chinese language.” If all those Sinologists are unwilling to sharpen their basic tool—the Chinese language—perhaps they should abandon the title. . . .

I share Mr. Horner’s skepticism about current attempts at “self-criticism” within the profession. To be frank, I have already given up all hope where Sinologists are concerned and agree instead with Steven Mosher:

If we in the West understand the People’s Republic better today, our clearer vision does not come from academic China-watchers, foreign-policy experts, or politicians, whose past portraits often have been misleading, self-serving, even false. It comes from the Chinese people, who have begun speaking to us directly about their aspirations for democracy, economic freedom, and human rights.

Kin-ming Liu
Missoula, Montana

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Charles Horner writes:

I appreciate Harold Hinton’s reminder that there were indeed China-watchers who parted from the dominant outlook in the profession. I am, in another way, also pleased that Dennis J. Doolin seems to have responded to Mr. Hinton’s suggestion that they come forward and identify themselves. I am happy to accept his own description of himself, and even the bibliography (of which I am aware), but his writing about the profession as a whole, I fear, underscores my main point. He leaps to its defense mostly by adopting the snide condescension of the “expert” who, unable to recall meeting me at an Association of Asian Studies convention, assumes I need to be directed toward the card catalogue.

But that particular pose aside, Mr. Doolin’s case is weak. Does he really think that the skeptics and critics of Mao’s China ever carried the debate in the intra-professional disputes on the moral, political, and economic worth of Maoism? He refers me to a summary quotation from a book by the late Joseph Levenson. I have no quarrel with the point of the sentences but, as an honorable Sinologist’s indictment of Maoist mass murder, I find it a bit too subtle. As the teller of the joke that falls flat often says, “I guess ya hadda be there.”

Kin-ming Liu reminds us of the impatience of Chinese themselves with the American Sinologists who explained away China’s sufferings under Communism. In particular, the Chinese students in this country continue to express their astonishment at “mainstream” opinion about their country. And why not? Only lately has there been any major challenge to the dominant assumption that the Maoist regime was anything other than the logical, natural, even desirable outcome of China’s “modernization.” Only lately have earlier democratic movements been accorded anything other than, well, snide condescension.

The argument used to be that Chinese totalitarianism was the necessary cost of the country’s economic development, but the Chinese themselves are also educating the rest of the world about that. A recent item in the Wall Street Journal, worth quoting in full, puts it thus:

China has published an official estimate of the nation’s economic losses due to Mao’s Communist experiments. A dispatch by the state-run Xinhua news agency cited in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post confesses that those crazed political movements cost China some $115 billion in economic damage.

Consider the alternative. Figure that under a free-market system the mainland Chinese might be earning somewhere in the ballpark of their Taiwan free-market cousins. Say, about $10,000 a year. Take half that, or $5,000, just to guard against overestimating. Subtracting China’s current per-capita annual income of about $350, that means a truly capitalist China would this past year have earned about $4,650 per person more than it did. Multiply that by China’s 1.1 billion people, to get a probable loss in 1990 alone—due to Communism—of some $5.1 trillion.

Now, that’s something worth writing home about.