LENGTHENING SHADOW
Whitaker, Urban G. Jr.
Lengthening Shadow China and Her Shadow, by Tibor Mende. Coward-McCann. 360 pp. $5. Hurricane from China, by Denis Warner. Macmillan. 210 pp. |3.95. Reviewed by Urban G. Whitaker, Jr. Tibor...
...The "shadow" which Mende laments is largely China's unsolicited international influence—the natural result of succeeding where others have failed in the search for solutions to desperate internal problems of economic development...
...Although it has just been published here, Mende's China and Her Shadow is nearly two years old and does not bring the eyewitness account sufficiently up to date to put recent Chinese internal developments into focus...
...In its simplest form, the perennial "China question" boils down to two specific inquiries: What is happening inside China...
...Probably the most important thing Americans can learn from these two books is that it is not only possible to oppose both the Communist regime in China and the present U.S...
...As Warner puts it, the rest of Asia, and perhaps Africa and Latin America too, thinks that "democracy is nice in theory but impracticable" and "Communism isn't nice but it works...
...Mende is primarily a student of the first and Warner of the second...
...How is the underdeveloped world outside China reacting to it...
...Both books have minor defects...
...The "hurricane" about which Warner warns is Mao Tse-tung's brilliant plan for exploiting the continuing poverty of the world's majority—simply an extension to international politics of the successful guerrilla warfare tactics he developed during the struggle for China...
...Now, with the publication of Denis Warner's intensive study, there is even more convincing evidence Mende was right when he predicted that by 1975 China will be "the decisive factor in human affairs...
...Its conclusions that China's revolution is "fast becoming the central theme of contemporary world politics" and that the American official attitude toward China is "completely sterile'' were difficult to deny when they were first published in 1960...
...It seems safe to conclude that China's lengthening shadow has many of the characteristics of a hurricane and that unless Americans begin to see what Tibor Mende has seen and to understand what Denis Warner understands, they will not successfully meet the Chinese challenge...
...He also believes that if we choose to respond effectively to the challenge it will be an "agonizing" experience for an affluent society which seems dedicated to winning the cold war by producing hot weapons and without experiencing much discomfort...
...Warner does not write from personal experience in China, but he travels regularly and extensively in most of Asia and is extremely well acquainted with the pertinent documentary evidence...
...Hqwever, both writers address themselves to the two questions and both conclude that because the Chinese Communists have achieved major internal successes they are beginning to make major gains in their external relations...
...Tibor Mende, a Frenchman, and Denis Warner, an Australian, both suggest that Communist China is competing very well with the United States in the struggle for world power...
...He reports with commendable clarity and objectivity on the nature of the Communist regime...
...He writes most effectively about the reception which the Chinese experiment is getting from its neighbors, and this is a process which he has studied at first hand...
...Warner, who also is clearly an opponent of the Peking regime, believes that the "hurricane from China" is "the greatest challenge Western civilization has ever known" but that the nature of the challenge is more political and economic than military...
...However, it provides valuable background on the development of the commune system, the effectiveness of the Communists' political leadership, and the development of Sino-Soviet differences...
...China policy, but that it is an urgent necessity for the United States to change its China policies if Mao Tse-tung is to be prevented from capturing the whole world as he has already won a quarter of its population...
...Neither of these distinguished political commentators approves of China's methods, but both believe that the Chinese economic experiment is succeeding handsomely in solving the kinds of problems which most trouble the rest of the underdeveloped world...
...Unfortunately this will be news to most Americans...
...Mende reports at length on hi* travels and observations inside Chin* but apparently does not have sufficient acquaintance with pre-Conv munist China to make effective ctW parisons...
Vol. 26 • May 1962 • No. 5
