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        <dc:date>2012-02-13T22:39:02+16:00</dc:date>
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        <dc:creator>人文与社会</dc:creator>
        <title>安德森：Sino-Americana</title>
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        <description>学科: 书评&lt;br /&gt;关键词: 傅高义，perry anderson，邓小平&lt;br /&gt;摘要: 书评, 中文纲要编写中&lt;p&gt;Vol. 34 No. 3 &amp;middot; 9 February 2012 &amp;nbsp; London Review of Books&lt;br /&gt; pages 20-22 | 4814 words&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Sino-Americana&lt;br /&gt; Perry Anderson&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;BuyDeng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel&lt;br /&gt; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;Harvard, 876 pp, ￡29.95, September 2011, ISBN 978 0 674 05544 5&lt;br /&gt; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;BuyOn China by Henry Kissinger&lt;br /&gt; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;Allen Lane, 586 pp, ￡30.00, May 2011, ISBN 978 1 84614 346 5&lt;br /&gt; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;BuyThe Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China by Jay Taylor&lt;br /&gt; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;Harvard, 736 pp, ￡14.95, April 2011, ISBN 978 0 674 06049 4&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 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 'Under Western Eyes'. 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: 'China - what's in  it for us?' Rather than Sinology proper, they are Sino-Americana. Ezra  Vogel's 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 &lt;em&gt;Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China&lt;/em&gt; as the 'capstone to a  brilliant academic career'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;有一部分关于中国的作品以美国为参考系写作，一般来说，作者专职或兼职地为国家工作，他们的问题是，&amp;ldquo;中国，对我们来说有什么意义？&amp;rdquo;傅高义曾在克林顿治下的美国国家情报委员会做专门任命工作，他称CIA为保证不出现泄密，审阅了他的邓小平一书，他在哈佛教书，该校校刊称《邓》为 &amp;ldquo;辉煌学术工作的封顶石&amp;rdquo;.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Running to some 850 pages, the book is, formally speaking, a mismatch at  two levels. Explaining that his motive in writing it was to 'help  Americans understand key developments in Asia', 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 'Japan has dealt more successfully with more of  the basic problems of post-industrial society than any other country.'  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 'indisputably number one'  - 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, Vogel's 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  'outstanding national leaders in the 20th century' who had successfully  modernised their country. In this select pantheon, alongside Park was  the next object of Vogel's admiration, Deng Xiaoping.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt; 两大问题：该书850页，作者想让一般读者接受，但过于絮叨细节无论卖出多少本也不会有几人真正阅读；既是传记，需要历史想象力，傅高义从训练到思考却都是社会学者方式，而他个性又喜褒扬，写过《日本第一》，在1979年吹捧日本，日本泡沫破碎后继续称赞韩国朴正熙为20世纪成功现代化其国家的最杰出的四大国家领导人之一，邓也是其中之一&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Vogel ends his new account of the Paramount Leader by asking: 'Did 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?' Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of  China is an exercise in unabashed adulation, sprinkled with a few pro  forma qualifications for domestic effect. 'The closest I ever came to  Deng was a few feet away at a reception ...' captures the general tone.  Fortunately, Deng's family and friends were able to make good the  missing encounter, with many a gracious interview illuminating the  patriarch's 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 Deng's record as a  politician in China than his contribution to peace of mind in America.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;傅高义未见过本人，材料来自访问邓亲友及中美官员和官方记录&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Thus Vogel devotes just 30 pages, out of nearly 900, to the first 65  years of Deng's life. The foreshortening is historically grotesque, but  perfectly logical from his standpoint. Of what relevance to  policy-makers and pundits in Washington is Deng's 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 Vogel's 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.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;近900页中仅30页叙述邓的前65年生活，脱离人物成长背景&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; The result is a portrayal not much less lifeless than a dossier in the  Party's 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 Taubman's biography of Khrushchev - to take an  obvious parallel - is painful.[1] 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.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;书的感觉更像人事部的档案，与taubman的赫鲁晓夫传相形见绌&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 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 Vogel's 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 Mao's last  years. This, of course, is where Vogel's 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  Deng's 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 today's boilerplate: 'Under Deng's 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.' Indeed, he reports  with satisfaction, 'Deng advanced China's globalisation far more boldly  and thoroughly than did leaders of other large countries like India,  Russia and Brazil.' Understandably, pride of place in this progress is  given to Deng's trip to the US, which occupies the longest chapter in  the annals of 1977-79.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Anything in Deng's 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 'disturbed that some intellectuals  had arrogantly and unfairly criticised officials who were trying to cope  with their complex and difficult assignments'. Suppression of the first  halting demands for political democracy in 1978? 'As in imperial days,  order was maintained by a general decree and by publicising severe  punishment of a prominent case to deter others.' Incarceration of its  young spokesman for 15 years? Arrests were 'infinitesimal' compared with  days gone by, and 'no deaths were recorded.' Tibet? Despite enlightened  efforts to 'reduce the risk of separatism', Lhasa has had to witness a  'tragic cycle' of 'riots' and 'crackdowns'; still, 'Tibetans and Han  Chinese both recognise ... an improvement in the standard of living' and  Tibetans are slowly 'absorbing many aspects of Chinese culture and  becoming integrated into the outside economy'. Nothing shows Vogel's  sense of decorum, and priorities, better than his decision to omit so  much as a mention of the Stalinist show trial of Lin Biao's 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 Deng's 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 Deng's 'historic' - 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  'doll that could cry, suck and pee', which proved 'a great hit' when he  got home, further laden with 200 croissants from Paris.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; The great student rising and occupation of Tiananmen Square of 1989,  with massive popular support in Beijing, naturally poses the stiffest  challenge to Vogel's exercises in edulcoration. He rises to it in  inimitable style. What the students, actuated by resentment that they  were 'receiving fewer economic rewards for their ability and hard work  than were uneducated entrepreneurs', really wanted was improvements in  their living conditions. But learning from earlier failures, they 'used  slogans that resonated with the citizenry - democracy, freedom' and the  like - to win wider public support. A 'hothouse generation' with little  experience of life, their callow orators 'had no basis for negotiating  with political leaders on behalf of other students'. Wiser foreign  reporters soon tumbled to the fact that most of those in the square  'knew little about democracy and freedom and had little idea about how  to achieve such goals'. No surprise that Deng felt he had to put down  these ungrateful beneficiaries of 'the reform and opening that he had  helped to create and from the political stability that underpinned the  economic growth'.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; The result was a 'tragedy of enormous proportions' that stirred the  West, but Chinese reactions varied greatly. After citing some that were  critical, Vogel gives the last and longest word to those 'officials who  admire Deng's handling of the Tiananmen demonstrations', ending: 'They  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.' Of course, he  adds unctuously, 'all of us who care about human welfare are repulsed by  the brutal crackdown,' but who knows if they are not right? 'We 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.' 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 Deng's image remains intact.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; To understand why this is so important, it is helpful to turn to Henry  Kissinger's meditation On China, presented as 'an effort ... to explain  the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and  international order', from one whose career as a statesman and scholar  has been devoted to the first of these: 'All my life I have reflected on  the building of peace, largely from an American perspective.' 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 'quasi-alliance' 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 'fellow philosopher'. Deng could not live  up to the same standard, still less his successor.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Notwithstanding this drop in level, Kissinger gives Deng full credit for  what he terms 'a turning point of the Cold War' and the 'high point of  Sino-American strategic co-operation'. What was this? China's war on  Vietnam in 1979. Here Vogel and Kissinger converge, applauding Deng's  resolute action to thwart Vietnamese plans to encircle China in alliance  with the USSR, invade Thailand, and establish Hanoi's domination over  South-East Asia. Conscious that not even all Deng's colleagues approved  the assault, which was far from a military success, Vogel separates by  eight chapters and 150 pages Deng's tour of Thailand, Malaysia,  Singapore to ensure diplomatic cover for the attack he was planning,  from the war itself. The first, presented - along with Deng's 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  America's 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 Deng's 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: 'I believe it changed the history of East  Asia.'&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Vogel's account of China's war on Vietnam is that of a former servant of  a Democratic administration. Showering Carter's point men in the  tractations over Deng's 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. Deng's masterstroke required US 'moral  support'. 'We could not collude formally with the Chinese in sponsoring  what was tantamount to overt military aggression,' Brzezinski explained.  Kissinger's comment is crisp: 'Informal collusion was another matter.'&lt;br /&gt; Subscribe to the London Review of Books today&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 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 O'Dowd, has noted, 'in 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.' So  disastrous was the Chinese performance that all Deng's 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.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Joining him in helping the remnants of the world's 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 'reputation', 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 'sop to conscience' could 'change the reality that Washington  provided material and diplomatic support to the &quot;Cambodian resistance&quot;  in a manner that the administration must have known would benefit the  Khmer Rouge'. Rightly so, for 'American 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.'&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 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 wasn't just 'another  Cuba': 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 - China's entry ticket to  the world capitalist order, in which it would go on to flourish.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Hysteria, calculation or a mixture of the two, Deng's 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 China's 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 Leader's  preparations for war - 'Deng had had enough' 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. Kissinger's description of Carter's 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  'humanitarian intervention' in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya or elsewhere - can  stand for Vogel's treatment: informal collusion, in academic dress.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 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  Vogel's, Jay Taylor's 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.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; In large part, this is because Taylor makes a real attempt to capture  Chiang's 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 Vogel's 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 Chiang's vindictiveness, and of the low-grade  thuggishness of his regime, in which torture and assassination were  routine, can be gained from Jonathan Fenby's less inhibited account,  Chiang Kai-shek: The Generalissimo and the China He Lost.[2]&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; A larger drawback of Taylor's 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.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 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. Chiang's 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.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Taylor's attention is fixed elsewhere, however. Central to The  Generalissimo is the aim of reversing the verdict of Barbara Tuchman's  book on the American role, personified by General Stilwell, in the  Chinese theatre of the Pacific War.[3] For Taylor, it wasn't 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.&lt;br /&gt; London Review Bookshop&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 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 'loss of China' 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 'breathtaking' 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, 'extraordinary for its ignorant and  far-fetched analysis'. What remains constant, however, is the American  visor through which Chinese developments are perceived.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; In the last third of Taylor's book, devoted to Chiang's years after his  flight from the mainland, when Taiwan became a US protectorate, this is  obviously less of a handicap. Taylor's 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 'Kill All, Burn All, Loot  All' 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.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 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 Chiang's executor, and Western  visions of what China should be, and will become, are reassured.&lt;br /&gt; We hope you enjoyed reading this free book review from the London Review  of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly  issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire LRB archive of  over 12,500 essays and reviews.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; [1] Khrushchev: The Man and His Era was reviewed by Neal Ascherson in the LRB of 21 August 2003.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; [2] Reviewed by John Gittings in the LRB of 18 March 2004.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; [3] Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;</description>
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