MR. LATTIMORE'S LATEST
Gilbert, Rodney
WRITERS and WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION Mr. Lattimore's Latest PIVOT OF ASIA. By Owen Lattimore. Little, Brown. 287 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by ROONEY GILBERT THE "PIVOT OF ASIA." in Mr....
...In that period the two most conspicuous figures are Governors Sheng Shih-ts'ai and Chang Chihchung...
...Thorner did an adequate review of what has been published on "ancient art and modern archaeology...
...Wen Tsai was a non-partisan commercial paper...
...He has read and quotes the correct authorities...
...In an appendix Mrs...
...Contributor Sun Haicheng to the Shanghai Hsin Wen Tient Ti, cited in a note, was a favored pupil of Sa Kung-liao...
...The record of Chang Chi-chung was the inverse of this...
...The new fashion among them, to which Mr...
...by going over to the Communists and thus purifying his soul...
...In terms of the affinities ot peoples, languages and cultures, geographical accessibility, the most economic layout of modern communications, and the rapid promotion of material progress, the natural orientation of Sinkiang is toward Mongolia and the Soviet Union, rather than toward China On the other hand, however, the material and sentimental interests of China ip Sinkiang, though they have been much abused, are real...
...John De Francis is on the Page School staff...
...But let's have a look it the staff...
...Inquiry in Chinese scholastic circles yields the information that he formerly contributed to Pacific Affairs, a publication which Mr...
...once known as Chinese Turkestan, or Eastern Turkestan...
...Lattimore's Page School of International Relations (Johns Hopkins University) in 1947...
...Lattimore credits him with contributions to the chapters in which is most of the material on latter-dayRusso-Chinesc political relations...
...But here is what Asiatic Pundit Lattimore actually has to say at the end: "If statesmen were efficiency engineers, and no more than that, a very good case could be made [as this book strives to make throughout] for annexing parts of Sinkiang to the Mongolian People's Republic and to the Kazakh, Kirghiz and Tajik Republics of the Soviet Union, and for setting up most of the Tarim Basin as an Uighur Republic, also to be annexed to the Soviet Union...
...The publisher of that Kuo Hsin, to which Sa contributed, Huang Yen-Fei, is now one of Chou En-lai's four deputy commissars for foreign affairs...
...So are the Kirghiz...
...This last sentence can be construed to mean that the Chinese Communists should not let their nationalism get the best of them, and try to assert an interest in Sinkiang that might conflict with Stalinist imperialism...
...IT IS MY DISTINCT impression that what purports to be the fruit of scholarly research in this book is "cover," compiled at the Carnegie Corporation's expense, for the purposeful writing...
...Chen Han-seng (Page School Fellow, 1946-48...
...A search of Columbia University's publications has not brought Dr...
...He travelled in Soviet Central Asia in the period between the two wars and is credited with a knowledge of "Inner Asian" languages...
...Thus do I. after close reading of this book, interpret it...
...Like the scorpion's sting, the adroitly stated message is in the tail Throughout the text one will find innumerable references to the fact that the Kazakhs on both sides of the Chinese-Russian border are identical in language, ancestry and tradition...
...So are the Mongols So are the Turki (the overwhelming majority on both sides), despite the fact that, to break down their feeling of affinity with Turkey, they have been taught to call themselves Uzbegs on one side and Uighurs on the other...
...Menges' name to light...
...Chang Chih-yi, a Page School Fellow, about whom I can learn nothing in local scholarly circles...
...The first thing that made me suspicious of the good faith of this book was, in the sections which review events of the past ten or twelve years, there were frequent citations in the notes of articles in Chinese periodicals to which not one American in ten thousand would have access...
...The former was a politico-military adventurer who was saved from extinction by a Chinese Moslem wave of conquest by importing Russian arms, advisers, GPU agents, and all the machinery that goes with satellitism...
...Then in 1942, when he was getting nothing more from Russia and decided that the Germans had broken Stalin for keeps, he turned savagely anti-Communist and began jailing and shooting Reds—Mao Tse-tung's brother among others...
...Doubters will note that Sa Kung-liao is now deputy director of Mao Tse-tung's Peking news bureau...
...Thomas Wiener to take part...
...Karl H. Menges and Mr...
...Note This book was read by the reviewer well before Senator McCarthy suggested that there was a "master spy" in the State Department...
...Wiener mentioned (now at Duke University) is credited at Columbia with a thesis on the effect of the Bolshevik revolution on the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and, according to Mr...
...Chang's observations on the economic life of the province...
...HAVING DISCOVERED THAT, this reviewer was on the alert to detect the real purpose of the Seminar and the book...
...In no case is the slightest clue given to the political leanings of publications or contributors...
...The only amendments to this review since then have been made in Mr...
...and Mrs...
...This book is the fruit of an "Inner Asian Seminar," for which the Carnegie Corporation made a grant of $12,000 to Mr...
...To run rapidly over the others...
...One very conspicuous omission from the record in this book of Sheng Shihts'ai's "reformist" or pro-Soviet period is that of his abominable usage of innocent and devoted missionaries (like the late George Hunter...
...If the adjustment of such interests were left to the wisdom of th*»Politburo, Sinkiang would be in for happy days...
...Columbia University and its Russian Institute," writes Mr...
...The Chinese name, meaning "the new frontier," was bestowed on this vast territory when it became a province in 1884...
...Translating from those languages was his job, and there is no reason to think that he was incompetent...
...It is now bounded on the west by Soviet Russia's domain, on the north by Soviet Mongolia, on the east by Soviet China, on the south by Tibet and by Tibetan country that is politically Indian, and on the southwest by a very narrow Afghan corridor...
...Lattimore, he has more recently been interested in Kazakh nationalism...
...Since Mr...
...For eight years he was a "reformer," imprisoning and torturing anti-Soviet elements, sending hordes of students to Soviet Russia and importing hordes of Chinese Communist advisers...
...He has travelled in Inner Mongolia and Northwest China...
...Also cited are Chinese papers in Kulja and Chuguchak, at times when they were under direct Soviet control, without a word in those scholarly notes to suggest that...
...A. A. Horvath, of Princeton, N. J. (not the university) lent material from his library and gave bibliographical advice...
...Finally, while the old folks on the Chinese side are interested in their property rights, the young folks are intrigued by the throbbing gasoline engines and whirring industrial machinery on the other side and still more by the opportunities for advancement in the enormous Stalinist bureaucracy which are open to young fellows who have learned the Marxist patter as interpreted by Stalin...
...Lattimore's favor, lest it appear that it was part of a concerted effort to discredit Professor Lattimore...
...A little clue to his political sympathies is to be found in this: ". . . . the Kazakhs on the Soviet side of the border developed a flourishing young literature . . . truly the property of the people...
...Lattimore was the butt of Senator McCarthy's denounciation of him...
...and ended, less than a year ago...
...A former editorial writer for the New York Herald Tribune, he most recently visited Asia during tie war, in the service of the OSS...
...The rest is a rehash of quite an array of material, some of it old and very familiar, some of it of recent date and sometimes from suspicious sources...
...Kuo Hsin was pro-Communist...
...The review was written well before Washington gossip indicated that Mr...
...Proper substitutes for hero lays and high romance...
...Lattimore kept the records and did the editing of contributions...
...March 1946) and in Kuo Hsin (Hongkong, November 1947...
...Lattimore "made it possible for Dr...
...The richest Turki communities on the Chinese side are the closest to the Soviet border...
...All that is paraphrase, subject to challenge of course...
...Lattimore pays deference, is to call both themselves and the language Uighur...
...Mrs...
...Rodney Gilbert, a veteran newspaperman, spent years in Alia over a period of four decades...
...Cited in the notes is Shanghai's weekly Min Chu, with no suggestion that it was pro-Communist...
...When such notes on publications which are virtually inaccessible to the reader give him the impression of academic frankness, without frankly telling him the character of the sources, they are a swindle...
...He went to Sinkiang about 1939, to run the official newspapers for Sheng Shih-ts'ai during his most flamboyant pro-Soviet period...
...Lattimore calls the book his, it is to be assumed that he did most of the writing—¦ particularly the purposeful writing...
...It does not appear that he was ever near Sinkiang, but made his studies as an agrarian economist in Manchuria and on the Tibetan and Burmese borders...
...So it happens that the only original contributions to knowledge of Sinkiang in the book are Mr...
...But Mr...
...So, though the effect on the physical type has not been great in the population of the oases, south of the Tien Shan, all but the Mongols, Kazhaks and Kirghiz described both themselves and their language as Turki, when I was there forty years ago...
...Lattimore once edited, in which nothing unkind to Soviet Russia ever appeared...
...Although it would appeal' that the original population known to history was Indo-European, speaking Iranian languages for the most part, the country has been subject to intrusion and infiltration by a succession of Mongoloid peoples, starting with the Huns, for much more than two thousand years...
...THE ONLY OTHER CHINESE member of the staff was Dr...
...In periods when they could trade freely either way, they were commercially dependent chiefly upon Czarist or Soviet Russia...
...For this the most important background material is that on Chinese-Russian relations in Sinkiang from about 1934 to the present...
...Cited several times is the official newspaper Sinkiang Daily News, with nu suggestion that, during periods of Soviet ascendancy, it was of necessity proSoviet...
...Lattimore, who went on a honeymoon jaunt through Sinkiang in 1927, the only contributor who has ever been to the country under discussion is a Mr...
...Lattimore rounded up the contributors and one is rather surprised to find that, apart from Mr...
...The new themes are concerned with modern problems such as the Civil War, the Five-Year Plans, the building of a socialist society, and the war against Nazi Germany...
...Lattimore's estimation, is the Chinese province of Sinkiang...
...For example,-credit is given to articles by one Sa Kung-liao in Wen Tsai (Shanghai...
...and so are the interests of Sinkiang in its connection with China, if this connection is wisely handled...
...He began by being a Chinese Nationalist executive, and a very naughty boy...
...and , what he has to say about either politics or "literature and oral art" (an appendix) is second hand...
...But Sa Kung-liao was a Communist throughout...
...The qualifications of those who assembled the material and appraised it are not convincing in some cases, and I know enough about the country and the literature on it to pronounce the result of their research very superficial at many points...
...He is interested in Chinese political parties...
...He supplied the material on former AngloRussian rivalry in Central Asia...
...but what he wrote about was the peoples of Sinkiang...
...Daniel Thorner, former Page Fellow and now at the University of Pennsylvania, was with the USFEA during the war...
...So far as is evident he has done no work in "Inner Asia...
...Although Sinkiang is politically Chinese, its Chinese minority has never reached ten per cent...
...The Mr...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 15
