Eminentoes / Peking Duck

...Later, in 1981, an official Chinese journal, Economic Management, admitted to 10 million deaths from famine or malnutrition...

...Through his academic progeny, his publications and, not least, his institutionalization at Harvard, John King Fairbank has won the only immortality in which he b e l i e v e s - - h i s name on the lips of future scholars...

...Further cuts in paperwork will be tougher to make...

...It was in the dead heat of this time, in 1968, that Fairbank encouraged the formation of the disgracefully ideologized Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, which quickly got out of hand and turned even on its mentor...

...It was not long after the return to power of Deng Xiaoping that the Chinese p r e s s began to divulge crimes and corrupt practices previously r e p o r t e d only by r e f u g e e s . Deng himself summed up a goodly number in an important speech in 1980: " a r s o n , murder, bombings, robbery and theft...

...bound editions of the 1981 The American Spectator at $35 each...

...In his book China Perceived (1974) Fairbank r e p r i n t e d " w i t h modest pride" an article he had published in the Atlantic Monthly (September 1946), suggesting t h a t the United States would sooner or later have tocome to terms with Chinese Communism...

...In the case of the powerful Sinological establishment at Harvard and its academic outposts, we raise a few questions to intrigue some curious and dispassionate inquirer in the future: Did accurate knowledge of the flesh-and-bloodrealities 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 so hapTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 23 pens that 1974 was part of what has since been called China's " b l a c k decade" (1966-76), a time of savage r e p r e s s i o n and cultural darkness, when humanitarianism was a dirty " b o u r g e o i s " word and any courageous scholar who had survived humiliation and physical torment at the hands of the Red Guards was condemned to silence and despair...

...Our supply is limited, so send an order today to ensure yourself a copy of this collector's item, sure to increase in value...

...With the consolidation of 57 federal grant programs into nine new block grants, the required paperwork will be reduced this year by 83~ or 5.4 million work hours...

...b y Miriam and I v a n D. London Given the time and circumstances, such impressionability is understandable...

...career is that as a historian of China who has constantly insisted that study of the past informs present action and that historical knowledge is "the best protection against ideological fanatic i s m , " he has by his own example unwittingly disproved his thesis...

...What remains, then, but to close this handsome new book of triumphant autobiography with an approving pat and a platitude--"a full life well lived" or even "a good run for the money" ? What could possibly be wrong with the intellectual legacy of a life in which everything seemed so right...

...The cutback is equivalent to 95,000 work-years...

...Therefore, we must avoid extremes in evaluation--either simple enthusiasm over his " i n s p i r a t i o n a l mess a g e " or abject f e a r of Germany's "police-state authoritarianism...

...Undoubtedly, this fund helped create, under Fairbank's guidance and with his help, an important research base, rich in the bibliographical materials necessary to Sinological scholarship, which 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 resulted in the production of many excellent and useful studies...

...According to another source (John S. Aird) as cited by the specialist Vaclav Smil, "demographic analysis of the latest Chinese population data demands the conclusion that the net population loss during the famine years of 1959-61 reached perhaps as much as 25 million people...

...Qaddafi...

...A number of Fairbank's distinguished friends were among the many scholar-victims...

...We impose our self-image on the distant Chinese scene...

...I n developing his perspectives of Chinese history, Fairbank was by no means a lonely, embattled scholar, handicapped by any a f t e r e f f e c t of McCarthyist denunciations...

...Money and prestige add up to power as readily in academe as anywhere else...

...An index is also included...

...At the 1980 trial of the Gang of Four, this " h o n e s t r e v o l u t i o n a r y " was sentenced to death, with a two-year suspension of execution, for "counterrevolutionary crimes...

...Miriam London is a researcher in Soviet and Chinese studies...

...Any r e a d e r of Maoist China's "success story" according to Fairbank would have been totally unprepared for the dimensions of the economic disaster, ecological damage, and rural misery divulged after the Great Helmsman's death...

...Nor would such a reader understand the origins of current widespread disillusionment and i n t e l l e c t u a l ferment-the officially acknowledged " c r i s i s of confidence" in both the Communist Party and the "socialist system...

...It shows an office worker being swept along a corridor by an avalanche of paper as his co-workers duck into their cubicles to avoid being bowled over by the onrushing mass...

...Ah, but there's good news today...

...Too much still went to "hardware" rather than to "brainware...

...This means "sympathizing" as we try critically to comprehend, remembering that "instant morality is too easy" and that, above all, we must not be "culture-bound...

...Far from causing any soul-searching, these " e x c e s s e s " of the Cultural Revolution seem to confront him still as a painful non sequitur, which he is at a loss to explain...

...Pruning the Paper Pile T here's a commercial on TV plugging the services of an air express company...

...What Fairbank calls "some st~irvation" in the aftermath of Mao's great experiment may well have been the worst famine in modern Chinese history...

...His story, as recounted in a newly published memoir, Chinabound,* moves inexorably from sturdy seedling to brilliant fruit...

...From early times the courageous scholar has been the man entitled by his learning to speak out 'against the misdeeds of authority...

...The conclusion is inescapable...

...It tells the progress of a bright, confident little boy from South Dakota who found his way happily to the right schools, Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard...

...Any green student of Chinese Communist history would come away from this book impressed by what Fairbank calls Mao's "gargantuan achievements from 1949 to 1976...

...Finally, how detrimental to sober China study was the hysterical radicalism that swept academe during the anti-Vietnam war movement of the sixties, subverting the very notion of objective truth, not to speak of an "honorable opposition" ? While explicit in his memoir about the evils of McCarthyism, Fairbank skips past the more fundamental assault on rationality that took place during our own version of a "cultural revolution," when many professors and students held onanistic propaganda sessions called "teach-ins" and either dinned or forced spokesmen of unpopular views into silence...

...The trimming reflects some good old-fashioned horse sense: _9 a revision of program-logging rules for radio stations, the rules having been issued originally to monitor program content...

...who went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and thence to Peking, as a pioneering student of Chinese history...

...A great patron waited in the wings...

...From the front lines along the Potomac, OMB reports ground gained...

...Indeed, he concluded that the "Maoist revolution is on the BoundOS ,Es YOUR 1981 Edltlon 7"1-1 \ \ ~ TODAY.* rders for 1981 bound editions of The American Spectator (volume 14) are now being taken...

...The American Speetator bound volume is an excellent reference work for anyone interested in the year's past events and personalities --covering everything from the demise of Jimmy Carter's presidency to the maniacal rule of Col...

...We are all fallible and even the cleverest among us can at some point be taken in...

...Each was given the impression that he alone of all foreigners really understood the situation and could see into the hearts of the hitherto inscrutable Chinese...

...OMB's paper-cutters are making heartening headway...

...9 cutting back to a single page a multi-page quarterly tax form issued by the Internal Revenue Service for use by employers...

...1 want to order...

...Ivan D. London is Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York...

...Closer examination, however, reveals t h a t the ~'message" is the same and the factual content often spurious and u n c o r r e c t e d by more recent evidence...

...Their names and fates are finally recorded in Chinabound, like a wistful addendum, following for no a p p a r e n t reason an account of a VIP dinner in Peking, at which he was congratulated by Deng Xiaoping "on having helped Sino-American relations...

...This article also contains a few of his other thoughts at the time: We should also note that humanitarianism is an important part of Chinese Communist dogma . . . . Communist propaganda toward Kuomintang China has been increasingly on a liberal line, protesting violations of civil liberty, demanding freedom of speech, assembly, and publication, and denouncing the callousness of officialdom to human suffering...

...the growth of such criminal activities as smuggling, tax evasion, speculation and profiteering, bribery, graft and corruption, drug peddling and addiction and so forth . . . . " As to unemployment, the latest officially admitted figure is 20 million...

...The academic power centers thus created not only tend to nurture such ills as "consensus scholarship," whereby "top scholars" agree to agree about certain data and methods, in this way establishing an unassailable "authoritative position...

...Fairbankian assumptions about the present realities of China date back to his 1942-43 sojourn in the Chinese wartime capital of Chungking, where, along with many other foreigners, he was repelled by the corrupt and inept Kuomintang (KMT) regime headed by Chiang Kai-shek and began to look toward "the sunny vitality and homespun egalitarianism of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] at [its stronghold] Yenan . . . . " Fairbank fit very much into a picture t h a t the writer Emily Hahn once described of Americans then in Chungking and of the "quiet, industrious push on the part of the communists" to capture their sympathies...

...Knowledge" i t s e l f is a full-time goal, and reason can be a tricky instrument...

...Thus, for example, in The United States and China Fairbank reported in 1979 that during the early sixties, following the collapse of the Great Leap Forward, "malnutrition was widespread and some starvation occurred...

...One e f f e c t of this sympathetic approach has been to downplay Mao's gargantuan failures...

...Vice-Premier Zhang Chunqiao, member of the Politburo Standing Committee, was one of the so-called Gang of Four s e c r e t l y a r r e s t e d on October 6, 1976--a coup revealed to the world later that month, evidently just after Fairbank's inimitable comments had gone to press...

...They say that a two-party system should be adopted as in the United States . . . . " Has Fairbank been listening to these "few people"--a few always means a disturbing number in Chinese political parlance--as he once did so avidly in Chungking during the decline of another corrupt regime...

...That's because so much of it is linked to deeply entrenched procedures and programs...

...His former s t u d e n t s , associates, and friends are prominent everywhere-in universities, government service, and the news media...

...No small problem, we can aver...

...Financial support for academic research is both essential and desirable-and many forms f scientific investigation require huge expendit u r e s - b u t such support is not unattended by dangers, especially in the "social sciences...

...As to the striving for civil liberties and the "Chinese liberal tradition," which so preoccupied him in 1946, Fairbank seemed to have tossed these back into history's bottomless grab bag...

...PEKING DUCK John King Fairbank--one is tempted to call him John Fairbank Rex of American Sinology--has led a long, wondrously fortunate, productive, interesting, satisfi/ing--and yes, self-satisfied--life...

...W]ithout funding not much happens," Fairbank says, although he still feels that these and other monies poured into American universities during the same period--about $40 million-were peanuts compared with those allocated to defense...

...In his view, this was simply trying to lower China, which, "unlike us . . . has no crisis of inflation, unemployment, crime, or corruption," to our own nasty level: Ford vs...

...In his persistent trumpeting of "reason," Fairbank comes across for all the world like the most unenlightened latter-day apostle of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who n e v e r realizes that reason is actually a guided object, and that extrarational and often murky assumptions sit at the controls...

...Compared with his journalism, F a i r b a n k ' s " c l a s s i c " work The United States and China (4th edition, 1979) appears more solid and judicious...

...It was also in the midst of the black decade that Fairbank again went to China and afterward r e p o r t e d in Foreign Affairs (October 1972): "The stress and even violence of 1966-69 have now been s u c c e e d e d . . , by a sense of relaxation and euphoria that makes 1972 a happy time to be in China...

...The goal is admirable, as long as one holds in mind that humble man, not God, is its pursuer...

...Last year federal paperwork was slashed 13 ~ or by nearly 200 million of what OMB calls "burden hours".., a "burden hour" being one hour's paperwork by one person...

...These [American] newcomers found it pleasant and titivating to be permitted a glimpse of a mysterious, romantic minority group...

...Enclosed is my check for...

...Well, a great deal was wrong--and wrongest of all is that Fairbank still cannot see it...

...9 revising the requirements for truck drivers' daily logs and exempting certain drivers from the logging requirement...

...In some cases, new legislation will be required to ease the load...

...To what extent was any seriously realistic view of life in the Chinese People's Republic discredited by gratuitous association with KMT propaganda from Taiwan, just as, a few decades before, any attempt to depict Soviet reality was automatically linked with fascism...

...If he knew this in 1974, he also did not say...

...Such an inundation, however, is as nothing compared to the load of paperwork the federal government heaps on businesses large and small, state and local governments, and everyday citizens ~ at substantial cost to all...

...Box 1969, Bloomington, IN 47402 v r whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in many c e n t u r i e s . At least, most Chinese seem now to believe so, and it will be hard to prove otherwise...

...However ruthlessly the news and propaganda monopoly of the Communist Party may try to control thought in its own areas, it is plain that it seeks to align itself with the Chinese liberal tradition, which is mainly the tradition of individual self-expression on the part of the scholar class...

...In 1977, t h e impeccable German scholar, Ji~rgen Domes, had already estimated that not less than 10 million people and possibly " a multiple of this figure"--from 25 to 40 million p e o p l e - - " f e l l victim to the consequences of the lack of food...

...He was a world t r a v e l e r , l e c t u r e r , pundit, academic entrepreneur, and the "father" of many Ph.D.'s...

...The irony of Fairbank's _9 Cbinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir, Harper & Row, $20.00...

...Transposed to Nazi Germany, F a i r b a n k ' s view of Mao's record would go something like this: Although H i t l e r p e r s e c u t e d a small non-Aryan minority, with some grievous consequences, he was a great leader who unified Germany, restored its national pride and dignity, lifted popular morale from the depths of humiliation and defeat, and built the excellent Autobahn...

...Spearheading the battle is the U.S...

...Perhaps these rebels should learn from his "classic" work that the "American way is not the only way" for the f u t u r e , that " o u r recourse to legislation, contracts, legal rights and litigation is meeting l i m i t a t i o n s " and that " t i m e may favor" China's "alternatives...

...He is referring to Christianity, from whose dogmas he considers himself happily freed by an ' 'irreligious upbringing...

...The latest inkling of this crisis is an attack by the Communist Party Central Committee's organ Red Flag (March 1, 1982) on " a few people who hold that our Party has degenerated, is hopeless, and must be toppled and that it is necessary to change the regime...

...Upon the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976, Fairbank protested the unseemly use in the Western press of the term "power struggle" to describe what he preferred to call " p o l i c y problems on which honest revolutionaries disagree" (New York Review of Books, October 14, 1976...

...PLEASE PRINT Name Address City ~i z State Zip e~ X l'he American Spectator, Bound Editions P.O...

...Fairbank is sketchy about such events, leaving, however, the general impression that it was all raucous good fun...

...frequent reports of rape, the kidnapping and sale of women, and organized prostitution...

...UNITED TECHNOLOGIES THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 25...

...In the Foreign Affairs article, he implied the irrelevance of such notions for " C h i n a ' s government by exemplary moral men, not l a w s " ; and in China Perceived he suggested that this "new China full of morale" might even offer f r e s h models to regenerate a rather wornout United States: "The p e r s o n a l quality of China's government is evident i f one compares the very human aura of Chairman Mao's thought as a final a r b i t e r with the rather impersonal legal concepts of the American Constitution...

...The paper pile is being pruned...

...It amounts to over one hour saved for every man and woman in the U.S., OMB notes...

...9 adoption of a common medical claim form for use by Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance companies...

...Please provide street address for UPS delivery...

...Less understandable, however, is that a historian who made a s e l f - p r o f e s s e d career of bringing" learning" to bear upon American foreign policy should have remained transfixed for life by the red star over China, which, like his vision of Yenan in 1943, "glowed in the d i s t a n c e . " No mystery confronts us, however...

...The law was enacted during the Carter Administration and is now being implemented and enforced by the Reagan Administration...

...These volumes are library bound, with gold lettering on a handsome dark green cloth cover...

...A comparison of descriptive data with the famine in the Soviet Ukraine during the early thirties suggests that this last figure is still too conservative...

...Strangely, the phrase "irrational faith" would most likely make an intellectual in China today think, not of religion, which is ironically enjoying a rebirth, but of something currently called "modern superstition"--a euphemism for the cult of Mao...

...r ][" faith appalls me," Fairbank writes at the outset of Chinahound...

...And in his fervor he has also become a missionary--not as in times past to save the souls of China's people, but to salvage the image of the Chinese Communist regime...

...Soon magazines and newspapers in the United States were printing articles referring to the Chinese Communists as stout fellows of uncommon virtue, who could save China if only they could get out from under the wraps kept on them by a corrupt, swollen bureaucracy...

...During World War II and immediately afterward he served his government as a civilian in China, then r e t u r n e d to his Harvard professorship and eventually became the first head of the East Asian Research Center, which now bears his name...

...As Cbinabound informs us, the Ford Foundation over the 15-year period 1955-1970 invested about $5.5 million in China studies at Harvard alone, of which more than $4 million went toward research...

...Let's hope they'll carry on the fight against governmental paper flow with redoubled zeal...

...In fact, has not the intelligent and accomplished John King Fairbank himself long succumbed to a stubborn form of modern superstitionmthe cult of a new earthly order with the magical power to transform men...

...The battle against federal paperwork is being waged under terms of the Paperwork Reduction Act...

...He may have invoked history, but it is ideology that he has served...

...In Chinahound Fairbank blithely explains: "I was committed to viewing 'communism' as bad in America but good in China, which I was convinced was t r u e . " Fairbank, the advocate, has remained true to his commitment, but what of Fairbank the scholar and his commitment to history...

...Forms, forms everywhere...

...I n ChinaboundFairbank tells us that his experience during the heyday of McCarthyist demagoguery, when he was publicly accused of abetting the "loss of China" to Communism, gave him "an abiding commitment to educate the American p u b l i c , " to help base national policy on "knowledge and reason instead of violence and fear...

...One can only imagine then the fate of Carter or Ford...

...these centers can also function to bury or discredit the alternative viewpoints so necessary to the pursuit of knowledge...

...Evidently not, for this time he has plunked on the side not of the " r e b e l s " but of the " e s t a b l i s h e d order...

...Carter is a more naked power struggle than anything going on in Peking . . . . By calling the conflict between the Peking policy factions a "power struggle," we . . . cut down dedicated revolutionaries, whose thinking condemns selfishness and personal aggrandizement, to the size of ambitious individualists of a type we know well-Chang Chun-chiao [Zhang Chunqiao], for instance, is implied to be no more than John Connally with chopsticks...

...The commercial is intended to dramatize the problem of coping with the pileup of paper in a modern business office...

...Office of Management and Budget...

...This tradition is one hope of liberalism in China . . . . Whether Communist China can eventually reconcile a socialist economy with individual liberty we do not know . . . . Presumably, eighteen years of China-study later, Fairbank did know, but, if so, he did not say...