Duck Soup
Fairbank, JohnK.
"Foolishness is the prerogative of anyone in our society, and there are certainly as many foolish people in the private sector as the public sector." Some private sector foolishness does...
...Suggests a step-by-step procedure for creating mdlvlduaksurvlval plans, including previously uncollected mformauon about shelters, food storage, home medical,techniques, and the psychology of survival...
...Let us explain it this wa3;: Shortly before the cover was lifted from the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, a reviewer in the New York Times Book Review faulted William Shawcross for "uncritically" accepting and repeating "atrocity s t o r i e s . . , based on interviews with only 1,000 [sic] refugees, that about one-fourth of the population has died of starvation, disease, and execut i o n . " How many thousands of Chinese refugees would it have taken before.1976 to persuade--well, for example, a Professor Fairbank, of the No, it mus...
...Judging by that yardstick, some felt that I had Lat,~l on, ~om~: ;ci~ ;i~a~ I c~avcx~iy kept silent when China was off the air in the 1950s, that I callously abetted American imperialism in the 1960s, and that I insidiously undermined Taiwan in the 1970s...
...They have been staunch anti-totalitarians from way back, appalled at uncritical American acceptance of the Maoist revolution's ideal image in the 1950s, and committed ever since to exposing its evils through refugee interviews...
...Surely they must realize that this dominant truth of the day is a thoroughly political statement, necessary to give today's CCP legitimacy by assigning responsibility for evils or disasters in which much of the CCP earlier participated...
...I could select a string of quotations to portray Fairbank (incorrectly, I hope) as Such a purblind reactionary that even Bill Buckley would applaud, in his fortunately inimitable way...
...Today when the big truth about China is Mao's crimes, the Londons find I have tried to cover them up...
...John K. F a i r b a n k , with a reply from Miriam and Ivan D. London DUCK SOUP A d i s t i n g u i s h e d Harvard Sinologist d e f e n d s his methods o f China w a t c h i n g . Anyone who lets himself be advertised as " t h e dean" of something asks for trouble...
...Selecting quotations is a game all can play...
...Understanding history is in this country a personal effort, always imperfect...
...Small truths before big ones...
...Fox Butterfie.ld and Richard Bernstein, for example, began by doing history Ph.D...
...By truth we mean, of course, that hard-to-define but recognizable constant so resistant to time...
...She thinks that we have already seen dangerous instances of the latter kind, which cannot be justified because the victims happen to be corporations...
...By that time, the early sixties, history had begun both to confirm our data and justify our conclusions...
...It is educating a tiny elite for government service, properly intent on technological quality, but meanwhile distrusting free expression...
...In this passage I am not trying to attack the PRC, nor am I trying to Salvage its image...
...Few from Harvard did refugee interviews before Ezra Vogel's Canton under Communism of 1969...
...Such a comment could be dismissed as a clever bit of pro-business apologetics were it not for Karmel's professional record and longstanding support for strong government agencies...
...Some of what they say about Fairbank seems to me valid, but not all of it...
...as, presumably, they did...
...John K. Fairbank Miriam and Ivan D. london reply: Dear Professor.Fairbank: First, may we introduce ourselves, since you seem not to have the foggiest notion who we are...
...The question arises, are we to remain simply adversarial, righteously attacking injustices in China with no view of the past or future, or should we try to understand causes in China as we do in looking at America...
...Only those powerful enough to have cast the spell can break it...
...What have you in mind as "the dominant truth of the day' '--current fashion...
...The collapse of Mao's roseate image that currently forms the dominant truth about China's revolution has been a personal vindication for the Londons, and the "self-satisfied" tone of Chinabound as a minor success story has no doubt provoked their review of it...
...If, these many years later, our work turns out to reflect truth, it seems to us hardly a matter of "personal vindication," but rather vindication of our methods ~ i n which, alas, you have shown not the slightest intellectual curiosity...
...When the Maoist revolution began in the fifties, we humbly confess we scarcely noticed, for we knew little of China then or of Communist totalitarianism, we were university graduates just beginning with great good will to investigate the "Soviet social system"~at Harvard's well-funded Russian Research Center, in fact...
...Instead of mutual sniping, what shared sense of common problem can we develop among Americans (and also between Americans and Chinese...
...But this may apply to'the Londons as well as to me...
...Who will survive the nuclear war that many experts predict is coming 7 Life After Doomsday tells you how to survive through such a nuclear mghtmare It IS an exhaustive mvestlgatmn of the strategies needed to survive an atomic war, and of the problems that wall face those who do hve through it...
...I think the Londons and I differ first in our focus of interest and sense of problem...
...If the Londons subscribe to this demonology in China, I can better understand their casting me in the role of devil in USA (instead of a mere dean, which is bad enough...
...My aim is to try to understand how the present-day China hasemerged from the past...
...By the time it was in print, the wily Fairbank had even tried to cover up his "salvage" of the CCP regime by describing in historical terms how the Chinese "authoritarian state has taken over the society . . . . Before this century Chinese g o v e r n m e n t s . . , maintained themselves by a combination of indoctrination, surveillance and intimidation...
...Now that Mao has botched his social revolution, do they think any of its original causes remain still un...
...r,~d :4- , ~ ~ ,~ ,~,~, +~,~ ~-~ percent are still there, crowded, poor, tied to their villages, undereducated and no doubt feeling underserviced, available for political mobilization...
...be ?~i~y c , j ~ d ~ d that at times only the Communist Party can impart the truth...
...Includes dozens of useful charts, drawlngs, and photos 81,5 x 11, hardcover, d l u s , 200 pp THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 19...
...A constant theme of my book," she emphasized in our interview, " i s that there should be less reliance on ad hoc prosecution and more reliance on rule-making...
...Indeed, her book and career suggest how debased the current political language has become: She was dismissed by "public interest" lawyers as the "most conservative" member of the SEC during the Carter Administration, yet what she was trying to conserve was the SEC's liberal mandate as conceived in the early years of the New Deal and based on an insight by Louis Brandeis, the original public interest lawyer...
...If you really wish not to sport the title of " d e v i l , " which literally means "slanderer" (from the Greek), it may avail you to know a tiny bit of our personal history...
...We had underestimated the difficulties...
...In the personal style of Chinese politics, the CCP judgment of its own past explains disasters as due to the evil intent of a few errant individuals...
...What is the Londons' view of China's long-term problems...
...It was there that we learned at first hand the pitfalls of a large-scale social-science research project and at the same time became intrigued by the refugee-interview method...
...work before becoming journalists...
...China's government is still saddled with its outworn traditions of centralized unity and bureaucratic authority-from-the-top-down...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 In the China field one learns quite early to expect to be judged by the dominant truth of the day...
...What worries Karmel is the tendency of those in tffe public sector to seek short-cuts in the search for a public consensus by relying on regulators ahd the courts...
...When this dubious deanship is combined with seeming soft on Mao, surely it should be shown UP, preferably before the incumbent loses, like all deans, his faculties...
...We were long in learning and slow to publish...
...Again, a confession in retrospect--it was a rash idea...
...As to our quoting present Chinese Communist officials when they happen to be on target about the misdeeds of the Mao regime, it is not that we use their words as a touchstone or ignore their obvious political purposes...
...In China now history all too often is politicized, used for political purposes...
...Evidently I am now promoted from dean to devil...
...First within this group must come true Sinologists with formidable backgrounds like L. La Dany, Jiirgen Domes, and.Simon Leys, who, each in his own way, had no difficulty "maturing" rapidly enough to discard assumptions illfitted to Chinese reality...
...Some private sector foolishness does not matter much, and some of it is penalized by the market...
...I note with surprise that the Londons quote with evident approval the CCP judgment on Mao's errors and the Gang of...
...This conclusion of the Londons suggests an ideologically blinded incapacity to distinguish between analysis and advocacy...
...The different sense of problem in the Harvard graduate school is indicated by the fact that out of 124 volumes on China published by the center there from 1955 to 1975, only 18 dealt with the People's Republic after 1949...
...My own approach was largely historical...
...Miriam and Ivan London's eloquent review of Fairbank's Chinabound (TAS, July 1982) is appropriately entitled Peking Duck," suggesting how the targeted creature is hung up, drained dry, then thoroughly roasted, and finally carved into slices, eaten, and in due time no doubt eliminated...
...After several more years of independent research we were convinced beyond co~dd no~ be aaders~o+d apa~ f~'o:;~ the detailed life experience of its subjects, for whom refugees, when properly interviewed, were reliable proxies...
...If a historian needs be slower at this game, then he might prudently refrain from punditry on contemporary affairs...
...For example, comparing the countryside and people of 1972 with the countryside and people we had seen in 1932-35 showed an amazing improvement...
...Were it not for the cultural enlightenment and help we received from our Chinese colleagues and assistants--no, no, Professor Fairbank, not Taiwa n agents, but diverse independent souls, mavericks in fact like ourselves--we might never have got very far...
...Tells you the prime nuclear target a'rea's in the U S., as well as those ai(as least hkely to be attacked Dr...
...Some of it, of course, must be constrained by the government, but only after public consensus establishes that it is foolishness, or worse...
...And in his fervor he has also become a m i s s i o n a r y . . , to salvage the image of the Chinese Communist regime...
...I would not have thought to compare them...
...Deans are authority figures, manipulators of money and people, usually appointed by management...
...We are, a f t e r all, upstarts in Sinology, more like visiting anthropologists than conventional China scholars...
...But who, except his publishers and nervous chairmen of meetings, ever appointed John King Fairbank to be "dean of Chinese studies...
...theses by teachers training in language and history...
...Her other great theme is the evil inherent in the neglect of due process-whether by a McCarthy "exposing" bureaucrats or by bureaucrats "exposing" business...
...Was Mao simply a Chinese Hitler...
...The difficult problem of shelter defense is also closely examined...
...Yes, we include ourselves among the productive shoestringers~but not primarily...
...The social sciences took longer to get started...
...This type of work gives us a perspective on the Chinese revolution, though it seldom can compete with journalism in reporting on the current situation...
...Their feelings of grievance surface when they speak of Harvard's getting Ford Foundation money and then ask, "Did accurate knowledge of the flesh-and-blood realities of China under Mao emerge from this establishment or rather from the works of a few scattered outsiders and foreigners, often operating on a shoestring...
...It is no doubt true, for example, that scholars maturing in a field pick up a set of assumptions that they have difficulty modifying or discarding as rapidly as circumstances and the dominant truth of the day keep on changing...
...Clayton offers a pracucal discusslonof both the short- and long-term effects of nuclear weapons' use, and ensuing medtcal consequences Explains how to measure fallout radiation, and braid an expedient fallout shelter on short nonce One of the most comprehensive and up-todate works ever compded on modern survsvallsm, Life After Doomsday is also an excellent reference on surwwng through any malor d~saster An invaluable a.ddmon to your s u ~ i v a l hbrary...
...It was then that the idea occurred to us to try the methods we had developed on the Chinese Communist scene...
...But in the old d a y s . . . there was a rough balance between the centralized despotism at Peking and the dispersed village communities held together by the Confucian family system . . . . Modern times have seen this central/local balance d e s t r o y e d . . . Party dictatorship has brought modernized indoctrination, surveillance and intimidation into every village and every urban family"(New York Review of Books, May 27, 1982...
...In other words, more than five:sixths of these books were on pre-1949 topics, mainly begun as Ph.D...
...Is China simply a backward Europe...
...Four's evil deeds...
...I f the government can capriciously deal with the powerful and respected," she writes, "consider how easily it can tyrannize the weak and the scorned...
...Because they say I believe ideologically in "the cult of M a o . . . the cult of a new earthly order with the magical power to transform men . . . . The conclusion is inescapable...
...I personally did not feel as conspiratorial, craven, callous, or insidious as I was d e - picted...
Vol. 15 • November 1982 • No. 11
