China in Retrospect
SMITH, ROBERT AURA
China in Retrospect Fifty Years in China. By John Leighton Stuart. Random House. 346 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Robert Aura Smith Editorial writer, N. Y. "Times"; author, "Our Future in Asia,"...
...After a few months, the Department had no cause for worry...
...Stuart was an integral part of that mission and a leader in its efforts...
...Here is a window on the human heart opened by a man who has the courage to admit that he was wrong...
...Stuart could, and presumably would, have put a healthy charge of dynamite under some of its pompous assumptions and have revealed then, instead of now, the glaring omissions that give it what he charitably calls its "ex parte" character...
...Stuart now corrects this misapprehension...
...No speeches...
...author, "Our Future in Asia," "Divided India" IN THE FIRST week of August 1949, Dr...
...His summation of judgment on Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, based on thirty years of personal acquaintance and knowledge, should be read by every American who has been the victim not merely of "smear" but of snap-judgment, which can be worse...
...General Marshall and Dr...
...Naturally, he was silenced...
...What he has to say now about the infamy of the "White Paper" is only a tiny part of a long, complex, personal and always fascinating human story...
...Few mistakes in strategy can be worse...
...Therefore, we cannot escape a part of the responsibility for the great catastrophe??not only for China but also for America and the free world ??the loss of the Chinese mainland...
...This is what Dr...
...This is the unprecedented document in which, as Dr...
...It is a man who had had some of the Chinese Communist leaders in his classes at Yenching...
...They learned that it was not, but continued in their naivete to ascribe their failure to the obduracy not merely of the Communists but of "both sides...
...With no disrespect to General Marshall, to whose great loyalty and great human qualities he is completely devoted, the author reveals the atmosphere of naivete in which the mission worked...
...He had been the president of Yenching University...
...He was the last United States Ambassador on the Chinese mainland...
...His affirmation of faith is the most moving thing that he has set down...
...History will be kind to him as the criticisms of his contemporaries are forgotten and he stands out in the greatness of his qualities as a devotedly patriotic, incorruptible, resourceful leader, inflexibly determined to maintain the independence of his country from any foreign domination and to lay the foundations of her constitutional democracy...
...He had been under arrest and detention by both...
...The reason for the muzzle is clear...
...He had witnessed both the Japanese invasion and the Communist conquest...
...We kept Communist meanings for such objectives as progressive, democratic, liberal, also bourgeois, reactionary, imperialist, as they intended that we should do...
...That wrongness centers in this book on the ill-fated mission of General Marshall to China in 1946 and 1947...
...Stuart makes it plain, also, that our misappraisal extended to our friends and allies as well as to our enemies...
...Here is a window on China opened by a man who knows China and the Chinese...
...He had much to say and a rare background against which to speak...
...His life story gives every reader that opportunity...
...Stuart frankly makes himself part of the "we"??understand the nature of the enemy...
...The State Department was issuing that week its now-celebrated "White Paper" on China...
...He says: "We Americans mainly saw the good things about the Chinese Communists, while not noticing carefully the intolerance, bigotry, deception, disregard for human life and other evils which seem to be inherent in any totalitarian system...
...That is not the "China Lobby" speaking...
...No statements to the press...
...He had been fifty years in China...
...He has written a sober??and a devastating??appraisal...
...Its directives, written in Washington, were to effect a "coalition" government in China and an "integration" of the Communist armies in a national force...
...No callers...
...Stuart had a severe stroke from which he is even yet only partially recovered...
...John Leighton Stuart returned to Washington...
...The muzzle was clamped on...
...We did not??and Dr...
...Stuart and their associates obviously believed that this was a possibility...
...We failed to realize fully the achievements to date and the potentialities of Chinese democracy...
...But, quite apart from all these political considerations, Dr...
...Stuart says: "Whether Chiang will again become a political force in China as a whole is problematical...
...But he is now, as he was during the war against Japan, a symbol of Free China...
...Hu Shih points out in his brilliant introduction to these memoirs, the United States attempted to take on the garb of Pontius Pilate and wash its hands of the blood of the Chinese...
...When he got off the plane, he got his orders...
...We need to share that faith...
...John Leighton Stuart, founder of a great university in China, doubtful missionary and confident educator, is worth meeting...
...He was finally allowed to make an academic and religious address whose text had been edited and censored by the State Department...
...No interviews...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 46
