MCLC: Sino-Americana

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: nico volland (nicovolland at gmail.com)
Subject: Sino-Americana
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Source: London Review of Books 34, 3 (2/9/12):
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana
  
Sino-Americana
By Perry Anderson

======================================================
* Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel
Harvard, 876 pp, £29.95, September 2011, ISBN 978 0 674 05544 5
* On China by Henry Kissinger
Allen Lane, 586 pp, £30.00, May 2011, ISBN 978 1 84614 346 5
* The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China by
Jay Taylor
Harvard, 736 pp, £14.95, April 2011, ISBN 978 0 674 06049 4
======================================================

Books about China, popular and scholarly, continue to pour off the
presses. In this ever expanding literature, there is a subdivision that
could be entitled ŒUnder Western Eyes¹. The larger part of it consists of
works that appear to be about China, or some figure or topic from China,
but whose real frame of reference, determining the optic, is the United
States. Typically written by functionaries of the state, co-opted or
career, they have as their underlying question: ŒChina ­ what¹s in it for
us?¹ Rather than Sinology proper, they are Sino-Americana. Ezra Vogel¹s
biography of Deng Xiaoping is an instructive example. Detached for duties
on the National Intelligence Council under Clinton (he assures the reader
that the CIA has vetted his book for improper disclosures), Vogel is a
fixture at Harvard, where the house magazine hails Deng Xiaoping and the
Transformation of China as the Œcapstone to a brilliant academic career¹.

Running to some 850 pages, the book is, formally speaking, a mismatch at
two levels. Explaining that his motive in writing it was to Œhelp
Americans understand key developments in Asia¹, Vogel clearly aimed to win
a wide public audience. But its sheer bulk of detail on matters far
removed from the interest of ordinary readers ensures that, whatever the
number of copies sold, it will be little read. Another, more serious,
misfit is between the author and his subject. By definition, if we exclude
puffs or barbs about contemporaries, a biography is an exercise of
historical imagination. Vogel, however, was trained as a sociologist, and
in mental equipment has always remained one, with little admixture. The
result is a study thick in girth and thin in texture. That would be
limitation enough in itself. But it is compounded by a temperamental
propensity more specific to Vogel. By nature, he is ­ putting it politely
­ a booster. The book which made his name, Japan as Number One, announced
in 1979 that ŒJapan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic
problems of post-industrial society than any other country.¹ The Japanese
themselves, he told them, had been too modest about their achievements. It
was time they realised that in the overall effectiveness of their
institutions, they were Œindisputably number one¹ ­ and time too that
Americans woke up to the fact, and put their own house in order.
Post-bubble, the book is no doubt remaindered in Japan. But at the time,
Vogel¹s flattery electrified sales. Moving on to Korea, he explained with
equal enthusiasm in The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South
Korea that Park was one of only four Œoutstanding national leaders in the
20th century¹ who had successfully modernised their country. In this
select pantheon, alongside Park was the next object of Vogel¹s admiration,
Deng Xiaoping.

Vogel ends his new account of the Paramount Leader by asking: ŒDid any
other leader in the 20th century do more to improve the lives of so many?
Did any other 20th-century leader have such a large and lasting influence
on world history?¹ Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China is an
exercise in unabashed adulation, sprinkled with a few pro forma
qualifications for domestic effect. ŒThe closest I ever came to Deng was a
few feet away at a reception Š¹ captures the general tone. Fortunately,
Deng¹s family and friends were able to make good the missing encounter,
with many a gracious interview illuminating the patriarch¹s life.
Supplemented by much official ­ properly respectful ­ documentation from
the Party, and a host of conversations with bureaucrats on both sides of
the Pacific, the outcome is a special kind of apologia, where the standard
of merit is less Deng¹s record as a politician in China than his
contribution to peace of mind in America.

Thus Vogel devotes just 30 pages, out of nearly 900, to the first 65 years
of Deng¹s life. The foreshortening is historically grotesque, but
perfectly logical from his standpoint. Of what relevance to policy-makers
and pundits in Washington is Deng¹s long career as a revolutionary,
steeled in clandestinity, insurrection and civil war, and the founding and
leading of the PRC under Mao? It is only when he is detached from this
history, and can be safely treated as a victim of the Cultural Revolution
whose triumphant comeback enabled a turn to the market ­ and the United
States ­ that Vogel¹s story gets underway. To a general lack of any of the
gifts of characterisation called for by a biography is added a lack of
interest in the context that formed his subject.

The result is a portrayal not much less lifeless than a dossier in the
Party¹s personnel department, assorted with anecdotes of irreproachable
family life. Indeed, when it comes to other dramatis personae, those with
whom Deng worked or disputed from the late 1970s onwards, Vogel proceeds
exactly in such filing clerk fashion, tacking bureaucratic CVs (typically
quite selective) onto the narrative in a clumsy appendix. The contrast
with William Taubman¹s biography of Khrushchev ­ to take an obvious
parallel ­ is painful.[1]
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana/print#fn-01>
Taubman started out much more explicitly than Vogel with the intention of
studying his subject from the angle of his relations with the US, but
became so imaginatively gripped by the figure of Khrushchev that he
widened his vision and ended by producing a remarkably vivid and
penetrating portrait, far removed from this wooden effigy.

Once Mao has died, Vogel can concentrate on the success story that it is
his purpose to tell. Even here, however, there is a flagrant disproportion
in his coverage. Nearly as many pages are dedicated to the three years
1977-79, when Deng was manoeuvring towards supreme power, as to the ten
from 1979 to 1989, when the economic reforms with which he is usually
credited were introduced. The conventional judgment is that these were his
principal achievement as a ruler, and one might have expected them to loom
equally large in Vogel¹s laudatio. But they occupy only three out of 24
chapters. If they add little to economic histories of the period, they do
make clear ­ a merit of the account ­ that Deng himself, who was aware of
his limited economic competence, was rarely the initiator of the domestic
changes over which he presided. What possessed him was rather an
enthusiasm for science, and a belief that to acquire its fruits China had
to emerge from the isolation of Mao¹s last years. This, of course, is
where Vogel¹s own attention and admiration lie. Not agrarian reform, by
any measure the most beneficial single change for the people of China in
the 1980s, but the Open Door becomes Deng¹s greatest achievement ­ its
very name a welcome embrace of the slogan with which the US secretary of
state John Hay bid for a slice of the Chinese market after the American
conquest of the Philippines. Or, as Vogel puts it in today¹s boilerplate:
ŒUnder Deng¹s leadership, China truly joined the world community, becoming
an active part of international organisations and of the global system of
trade, finance and relations among citizens of all walks of life.¹ Indeed,
he reports with satisfaction, ŒDeng advanced China¹s globalisation far
more boldly and thoroughly than did leaders of other large countries like
India, Russia and Brazil.¹ Understandably, pride of place in this progress
is given to Deng¹s trip to the US, which occupies the longest chapter in
the annals of 1977-79.

Anything in Deng¹s career that might seriously mar the general encomium is
sponged away. Of the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957-58 of which he was the
executor, dispatching half a million suspects to ostracism, exile or
death, we learn that he was Œdisturbed that some intellectuals had
arrogantly and unfairly criticised officials who were trying to cope with
their complex and difficult assignments¹. Suppression of the first halting
demands for political democracy in 1978? ŒAs in imperial days, order was
maintained by a general decree and by publicising severe punishment of a
prominent case to deter others.¹ Incarceration of its young spokesman for
15 years? Arrests were Œinfinitesimal¹ compared with days gone by, and Œno
deaths were recorded.¹ Tibet? Despite enlightened efforts to Œreduce the
risk of separatism¹, Lhasa has had to witness a Œtragic cycle¹ of Œriots¹
and Œcrackdowns¹; still, ŒTibetans and Han Chinese both recognise Š an
improvement in the standard of living¹ and Tibetans are slowly Œabsorbing
many aspects of Chinese culture and becoming integrated into the outside
economy¹. Nothing shows Vogel¹s sense of decorum, and priorities, better
than his decision to omit so much as a mention of the Stalinist show trial
of Lin Biao¹s hapless subordinates, brigaded on trumped up charges with
the Gang of Four, with whom they had nothing in common, a decade after the
death of their commander, and on Deng¹s orders condemned to long terms in
jail in the full glare of publicity ­ a top political episode of 1980-81.
Instead, we are regaled with five pages on Deng¹s Œhistoric¹ ­ universally
forgotten ­ speech to the UN in early 1974, while Mao was still alive, and
such important episodes as the purchase for him in New York of a Œdoll
that could cry, suck and pee¹, which proved Œa great hit¹ when he got
home, further laden with 200 croissants from Paris.

The great student rising and occupation of Tiananmen Square of 1989, with
massive popular support in Beijing, naturally poses the stiffest challenge
to Vogel¹s exercises in edulcoration. He rises to it in inimitable style.
What the students, actuated by resentment that they were Œreceiving fewer
economic rewards for their ability and hard work than were uneducated
entrepreneurs¹, really wanted was improvements in their living conditions.
But learning from earlier failures, they Œused slogans that resonated with
the citizenry ­ democracy, freedom¹ and the like ­ to win wider public
support. A Œhothouse generation¹ with little experience of life, their
callow orators Œhad no basis for negotiating with political leaders on
behalf of other students¹. Wiser foreign reporters soon tumbled to the
fact that most of those in the square Œknew little about democracy and
freedom and had little idea about how to achieve such goals¹. No surprise
that Deng felt he had to put down these ungrateful beneficiaries of Œthe
reform and opening that he had helped to create and from the political
stability that underpinned the economic growth¹.

The result was a Œtragedy of enormous proportions¹ that stirred the West,
but Chinese reactions varied greatly. After citing some that were
critical, Vogel gives the last and longest word to those Œofficials who
admire Deng¹s handling of the Tiananmen demonstrations¹, ending: ŒThey
acknowledge the seriousness of the tragedy of 1989, but they believe that
even greater tragedies would have befallen China had Deng failed to bring
an end to the two months of chaos in June 1989.¹ Of course, he adds
unctuously, Œall of us who care about human welfare are repulsed by the
brutal crackdown,¹ but who knows if they are not right? ŒWe must admit
that we do not know. What we do know is that in the two decades after
Tiananmen, China enjoyed relative stability and rapid ­ even spectacular ­
economic growth.¹ How little Vogel cares to know about the upheaval of
1989 can be seen from his extraordinary claim that there were days during
it when no newspapers appeared. The imperative is to ensure that Deng¹s
image remains intact.

To understand why this is so important, it is helpful to turn to Henry
Kissinger¹s meditation On China, presented as Œan effort Š to explain the
conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and
international order¹, from one whose career as a statesman and scholar has
been devoted to the first of these: ŒAll my life I have reflected on the
building of peace, largely from an American perspective.¹ Comparing the
Chinese approach to inter-state relations with go, the Western to chess,
Kissinger offers a potted history of what he takes to be conflicts between
the two from the late 18th to the late 19th century, before jumping to Mao
in the Cold War, and the story, often retold, of the Œquasi-alliance¹
between the PRC and the US that he negotiated in Beijing in the early
1970s. In the years since his exit from the State Department, he explains,
he has been to China more than fifty times, hobnobbing with its leaders,
but his conversations with these epigones dwindle to banalities after the
heights of his dialogues with Mao. The Chairman had treated him as a
Œfellow philosopher¹. Deng could not live up to the same standard, still
less his successor.

Notwithstanding this drop in level, Kissinger gives Deng full credit for
what he terms Œa turning point of the Cold War¹ and the Œhigh point of
Sino-American strategic co-operation¹. What was this? China¹s war on
Vietnam in 1979. Here Vogel and Kissinger converge, applauding Deng¹s
resolute action to thwart Vietnamese plans to encircle China in alliance
with the USSR, invade Thailand, and establish Hanoi¹s domination over
South-East Asia. Conscious that not even all Deng¹s colleagues approved
the assault, which was far from a military success, Vogel separates by
eight chapters and 150 pages Deng¹s tour of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore
to ensure diplomatic cover for the attack he was planning, from the war
itself. The first, presented ­ along with Deng¹s far more important tour
of the United States two months later ­ as a triumph of far-sighted
statesmanship, receives lavish coverage; the second, less than half the
space. In part, this distribution is designed to protect America¹s image
in the affair: Deng launched the war just five days after getting back
from Washington with the US placet in his pocket. But it is also to gloss
over Deng¹s misadventure on the battlefield as expeditiously as possible.
The last word, as usual, goes to an apologist, through whom Vogel can
convey his standpoint without being directly identified with it. Lee Kuan
Yew, an ardent supporter of the war, has told the world: ŒI believe it
changed the history of East Asia.¹

Vogel¹s account of China¹s war on Vietnam is that of a former servant of a
Democratic administration. Showering Carter¹s point men in the tractations
over Deng¹s visit with effusive epithets, he is careful to shield the
president himself from any too explicit responsibility for giving the war
the go-ahead. Kissinger, a Republican and once head of the National
Security establishment where Vogel was an underling, can afford to be more
forthright. Deng¹s masterstroke required US Œmoral support¹. ŒWe could not
collude formally with the Chinese in sponsoring what was tantamount to
overt military aggression,¹ Brzezinski explained. Kissinger¹s comment is
crisp: ŒInformal collusion was another matter.¹

How is this zenith of Sino-American collaboration, as Kissinger repeatedly
calls it, to be judged? Militarily, it was a fiasco. Deng threw 11 Chinese
armies or 450,000 troops, the size of the force that routed the US on the
Yalu in 1950, against Vietnam, a country with a population a twentieth
that of China. As the chief military historian of the campaign, Edward
O¹Dowd, has noted, Œin the Korean War a similar-sized PLA force had moved
further in 24 hours against a larger defending force than it moved in two
weeks against fewer Vietnamese.¹ So disastrous was the Chinese performance
that all Deng¹s wartime pep talks were expunged from his collected works,
the commander of the air force excised any reference to the campaign from
his memoirs, and it became effectively a taboo topic thereafter.
Politically, as an attempt to force Vietnam out of Cambodia and restore
Pol Pot to power, it was a complete failure. Deng, who regretted not
having persisted with his onslaught on Vietnam, despite the thrashing his
troops had endured, tried to save face by funnelling arms to Pol Pot
through successive Thai military dictators.

Joining him in helping the remnants of the world¹s most genocidal regime
continue to maul border regions of Cambodia adjoining Thailand, and to
keep its seat in the UN, was the United States. Vogel, who mentions Pol
Pot only to explain that despite his negative Œreputation¹, Deng saw him
as the only man to resist the Vietnamese, banishes this delicate subject
from his pages altogether. Kissinger has little trouble with it. No Œsop
to conscience¹ could Œchange the reality that Washington provided material
and diplomatic support to the ³Cambodian resistance² in a manner that the
administration must have known would benefit the Khmer Rouge¹. Rightly so,
for ŒAmerican ideals had encountered the imperatives of geopolitical
reality. It was not cynicism, even less hypocrisy, that forged this
attitude: the Carter administration had to choose between strategic
necessities and moral conviction. They decided that for their moral
convictions to be implemented ultimately they needed first to prevail in
the geopolitical struggle.¹

The struggle in question was against the USSR. In these years, Deng
continually berated his American interlocutors for insufficient hostility
to Moscow, warning them that Vietnam wasn¹t just Œanother Cuba¹: it was
planning to conquer Thailand, and open the gates of South-East Asia to the
Red Army. The stridency of his fulminations against the Soviet menace rang
like an Oriental version of the paranoia of the John Birch Society.
Whether he actually believed what he was saying is less clear than its
intended effect. He wanted to convince Washington that there could be no
stauncher ally in the Cold War than the PRC under his command. Mao had
seen his entente with Nixon as another Stalin-Hitler Pact ­ in the
formulation of one of his generals ­ with Kissinger featuring as
Ribbentrop: a tactical deal with one enemy to ward off dangers from
another. Deng, however, sought more than this. His aim was strategic
acceptance within the American imperial system, to gain access to the
technology and capital needed for his drive to modernise the Chinese
economy. This was the true, unspoken rationale for his assault on Vietnam.
The US was still smarting from its defeat in Indochina. What better way of
gaining its trust than offering it vengeance by proxy? The war misfired,
but it bought something more valuable to Deng than the 60,000 lives it
cost ­ China¹s entry ticket to the world capitalist order, in which it
would go on to flourish.

Hysteria, calculation or a mixture of the two, Deng¹s motives at the time
are one thing. Endorsement of the claims he pressed on his interlocutors ­
South-East Asian and American ­ to justify his aggression, in works
supposedly of scholarship thirty years after the event, are another.
Kissinger, for whom the history of the period is little more than a
grab-bag for his own self-glorification as an actor in it, can be forgiven
for maintaining that China¹s war on Vietnam was a vital blow against the
Soviet Union and a stepping-stone to victory in the Cold War. That the
Sino-American alliance he negotiated, and Deng escalated, had scant
bearing on the dissolution of the USSR hardly matters. Whatever his other
gifts, truth is not one that can reasonably be expected of him. Vogel,
with more pretensions to scholarship, is a different case. His fawning
account of the Paramount Leader¹s preparations for war ­ ŒDeng had had
enough¹ etc ­ not only repeats the fantasy of Vietnamese designs on
Bangkok, imminent Soviet takeover of South-East Asia and the rest, but
blacks out all mention of American aid and comfort to Pol Pot, in the
common cause of resisting these phantasms. Kissinger¹s description of
Carter¹s actions in assisting the perpetrators of one of the few true
genocides of the last half-century ­ not killings on a far smaller scale,
blown up as genocide to decorate Œhumanitarian intervention¹ in Kosovo,
Iraq, Libya or elsewhere ­ can stand for Vogel¹s treatment: informal
collusion, in academic dress.

Deng, a far more uneven, explosive and complex figure, at once more
radical and more traditional than the now standard images of him, awaits
his biographer. That book will not be written as another page in US
self-satisfaction. Works of Sino-Americana are not, it should be said,
automatically characterised by servility or opportunism. Books of more
spirit have been, and continue to be, written within its limiting
framework. A case in point is a study that can be read as a pendant to
Vogel¹s, Jay Taylor¹s biography of Chiang Kai-shek, The Generalissimo. In
many ways, the starting points are close. Taylor too is a former official,
a career diplomat in the intelligence apparatus of the State Department,
with postings in Taipei, Beijing and Havana. His enterprise is likewise a
eulogy. It relies on similarly brittle sources supplied by self-interested
parties, redacted diaries or memoirs, conversations with family members
and placemen. Its concerns are also thoroughly Americo-centric. Yet with
all these failings, and more, the result is still refreshingly different.
In large part, this is because Taylor makes a real attempt to capture
Chiang¹s tortuous personality. Seething with an inner violence that
exploded in volcanic rages as a young man, once in power he succeeded in
outwardly controlling it beneath a mask so rigid and cold that it isolated
him even from his followers. Sexual rapacity was combined with puritan
self-discipline, skills in political manoeuvre with bungling in military
command, nationalist pride with retreatist instinct, threadbare education
with mandarin pretension. In a narrative that is far more readable than
Vogel¹s plodding compendium, Taylor gives us a vivid sense of many of
these contradictions, even if he looks away from others. Writing to
rehabilitate the Generalissimo, whose reputation is not high in the West,
he is driven, not to deny outright, but to minimise the murders and
mismanagements of his reign. He does so principally by giving him ­
repeatedly, although not invariably ­ the benefit of the doubt. A better
sense of Chiang¹s vindictiveness, and of the low-grade thuggishness of his
regime, in which torture and assassination were routine, can be gained
from Jonathan Fenby¹s less inhibited account, Chiang Kai-shek: The
Generalissimo and the China He Lost.[2]
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana/print#fn-02>

A larger drawback of Taylor¹s approach is his single-minded focus on
Chiang alone, detached from his peers. No other figure in the tangled
constellation of the interwar Kuomintang acquires any relief in his story.
The reasons why Chiang could rise to power require a contextual
explanation, however. They do not lie in his individual abilities. For
these were, on any reckoning, very limited. The extremes of his
psychological make-up cohabited with his mediocrity as a ruler. He was a
poor administrator, incapable of properly co-ordinating and controlling
his subordinates, and so of running an efficient government. He had no
original ideas, filling his mind with dog-eared snippets from the Bible.
Most strikingly, he was a military incompetent, a general who never won a
really major battle ­ decisive victories in the Northern Expedition that
brought him to power going to other, superior commanders. What
distinguished him from these were political cunning and ruthlessness, but
not by a great margin. They were not enough on their own to take him to
the top.

The historical reality was that no outstanding leaders emerged from the
confused morass of the KMT in the Republican period. The contrast between
Nationalists and Communists was not just ideological. It was one of sheer
talent. The CCP produced not simply one leader of remarkable gifts, but an
entire, formidable cohort, of which Deng was one among several. By
comparison, the KMT was a kingdom of the blind. Chiang¹s one eye was a
function of two accidental advantages. The first was his regimental
training in Japan, which made him the only younger associate of Sun
Yat-sen with a military background, and so at the Whampoa Academy
commanding at the start of his career means of violence that his rivals in
Guangzhou lacked. The second, and more important, was his regional
background. Coming from the hinterland of Ningbo, with whose accent he
always spoke, his political roots were in the ganglands of nearby
Shanghai, with its large community of Ningbo merchants. It was this base
in Shanghai and Zhejiang, and the surrounding Yangtze delta region, where
he cultivated connections in both criminal and business worlds, in what
was by far the richest and most industrialised zone in China, that gave
him his edge over his peers. The military clique that ruled Guangxi, on
the border with Indochina, were better generals and ran a more progressive
and efficient government, but their province was too poor and remote for
them to be able to compete successfully against Chiang.

Taylor¹s attention is fixed elsewhere, however. Central to The
Generalissimo is the aim of reversing the verdict of Barbara Tuchman¹s
book on the American role, personified by General Stilwell, in the Chinese
theatre of the Pacific War.[3]
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana/print#fn-03>
For Taylor, it wasn¹t the long-suffering Chiang, but the arrant bully and
incompetent meddler Stilwell who was to blame for disputes between the
two, and failures in the Burma campaign. Stilwell was no great commander.
Taylor documents his abundant failings and eccentricities well enough. But
they scarcely exonerate Chiang from his disastrous sequence of decisions
in the war against Japan, many of them ­ even at the height of the fateful
Ichigo offensive of 1944 ­ motivated by his conviction that Communism was
the greater danger. From the futile sacrifice of his best troops in
Shanghai and Nanjing in 1937 to the gratuitous burning of Changsha in
1944, it was a story without good sense or glory. Despite strenuous
scrubbings by recent historians to blanco his military record, it is no
surprise that, from a position of apparent overwhelming strength after the
surrender of Japan, he crumpled so quickly against the PLA in the Civil
War.

There too Taylor tends to attribute to the US substantial blame for the
debacle ­ Marshall, who had picked Stilwell, cutting a not much better
figure in this part of his narrative ­ which he hints could have been
avoided had Washington been willing to provide the massive support needed
to help Chiang hold North China or, failing that, a line south of the
Yangtze. These are not the sentiments of the Republican lobby that
denounced the Œloss of China¹ in the 1950s. Taylor has an independent
mind. Describing himself as a moderate liberal and foreign policy
pragmatist, he is quite capable of scathing criticism of US policies in
full support of Chiang ­ attacking the Œbreathtaking¹ irresponsibility of
Eisenhower in threatening war with the PRC during the Quemoy crisis of
1955, and composing with Dulles a secret policy document on the same
island three years later, Œextraordinary for its ignorant and far-fetched
analysis¹. What remains constant, however, is the American visor through
which Chinese developments are perceived.

In the last third of Taylor¹s book, devoted to Chiang¹s years after his
flight from the mainland, when Taiwan became a US protectorate, this is
obviously less of a handicap. Taylor¹s grasp of the reconstruction of the
KMT regime on the island, of which he was a witness, is much firmer than
of its time in Nanjing. It is also, though admiring, less apologetic, not
minimising the White Terror that Chiang unleashed in Taiwan, nor glossing
over his use of General Okamura, commander of the Japanese occupation of
China and author of the ŒKill All, Burn All, Loot All¹ order responsible
for the deaths of more than two million civilians, to help him out on the
island. For Chiang, patriotism came second to personal power. But now able
to rule as an extraneous force, with full-bore American assistance and
without ties to local landlords, he could preside over an agrarian reform
designed by US advisers, and industrialisation funded by US capital, in a
society that fifty years of modernisation under colonial rule had left
substantially more advanced in popular literacy and rural productivity
than the mainland. Economic success stabilised but scarcely liberalised
his regime, which ended as it had begun under martial law.

Taylor concludes his story with the claim that Chiang has triumphed
posthumously, since the China of today embodies his vision for the
country, not that of the Communists he fought. This trope is increasingly
common. Fenby retails a lachrymose variant of it, quite out of character
with the rest of his book, a tourist guide in the PRC ­ as good as a
taxi-driver for any passing reporter ­ telling him what an unnecessary
tragedy KMT defeat in the Civil War was. In such compensation fantasies,
Deng becomes Chiang¹s executor, and Western visions of what China should
be, and will become, are reassured.

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[1] 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana/print#fn-ref-01
> Khrushchev: The Man and His Era was reviewed by Neal Ascherson in the
>LRB of 21 August 2003 <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n16/neal-ascherson/oo-oo>.
[2] 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana/print#fn-ref-02
> Reviewed by John Gittings in the LRB of 18 March 2004
><http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n06/john-gittings/would-he-have-been-better>.
[3] 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana/print#fn-ref-03
> Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971).

Vol. 34 No. 3 · 9 February 2012 <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/contents> »
Perry Anderson <http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/perry-anderson> »
Sino-Americana 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana> (print
version)
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