Ignorant Americans

...PAUL TRACHTMAN is a free lance writer who is now at work on a novel...

...University of Chicago Press...

...Reviewed by Urban Whitaker Since 1949 the annals of history have been recording one of the strangest facts of all time: the world's strongest and most developed nation seeks to have as little contact as possible with the world's most populous developing nation...

...Even repeated error, however, is perhaps insufficient basis for the conclusion drawn by Greene that The New York Times was "misleading" the people of America "by accounts of events which were untrue...

...Mikhail Klochko, a Russian chemistry professor who defected to Canada in 1961, notes in the preface to Soviet Scientist in Red China that he writes from a "somewhat different angle from that presented by those authors who had spent a few weeks, or at best a few months, in China, or those who had left the country ten years ago, or those who had never been there at all...

...Cohen's otherwise carefully documented study of Mao's written works suffers severely from his repeated insistence that the Chinese leader's deepest motivation is "personal and chauvinist conceit...

...We need now to hear from a number of them, including John King Fairbank (whom Greene criticizes for quoting another writer's reference to the Chinese as "blue ants...

...The Center of the World records Robert Elegant's warning alongside Felix Greene's about the ignorance which is characteristic of the American image of contemporary China...

...The results of the first fifteen years of this modern isolationist policy are described in Felix Greene's newest book, Curtain of Ignorance...

...PAT WATTERS is information director of the Southern Regional Council...

...Both Snow and Greene visited China during that period and subsequently wrote books about it, but neither is once mentioned in Elegant's text rior even in his bibliography...

...He is particularly excellent on the demise of the Kuomintang in the 1940's and on the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960's...

...But, no number of books by non-Americans who have been there, or by Americans who have not, will end the astounding intellectual drought which plagues students of China in America...

...Elegant's attempts to read die mind of Mao Tse-tung tend to be as far beyond the bounds of objective reality as he charges Mao with being...

...Still, one cannot read Elegant's description of life in China today without seeing some proof of Felix Greene's criticism of American reporting...

...He has had extensive first-hand experience in Washington as a special consultant to several members of Congress-including a fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson...

...As a visiting scientist for most of two years in China, he gives a brief but detailed account of the state of scientific education under the Peking regime...

...This book should make us alarmed that so many of us have fallen into the habit of mouthing cliches about a people with whom we have had almost no contact since 1949...

...One can hope that Felix Greene's complaints will stir us to reevaluate the whole American discourse about China...

...4.95...

...Anglo-American author Greene (a British subject who has resided twenty-five years in the United States) will find more sympathy for his well-documented complaints about American misconceptions of China than he will for his occasional inference that many of the misconceptions result from deliberate attempts to distort...

...The Communism of Mao Tse-tung, by Arthur A. Cohen...

...and Joseph Alsop (accused by Greene of keeping alive the idea that "there are serious prospects" for Chiang Kai-shek's returning to the mainland...

...URBAN WHITAKER teaches international relations at San Francisco State College...

...Only a renewal of direct contact between powerful America and populous China can ever remove our "curtain of ignorance...

...DANIEL M. MENDELOWITZ is a professor of art and education at Stanford University...

...He is a former city editor of The Atlanta Journal...

...The characteristic which makes his book one of the most valuable American works ever published on China is the artful challenge it makes to all of us...

...Elegant, who has not been there, gives detailed eyewitness-type descriptions of the horrors of life in Communist China today...

...Doak Barnett (charged by Greene with "misleading quoting" of Mao Tse-Tung...

...To some degree it is fair to add that the recent works of Robert Elegant and Arthur Cohen illustrate Greene's contention that the United States lives behind a self-drawn "curtain of ignorance" about China...

...Unfortunately such undocumentable judgments accompany much too much of Cohen's vicarious visit to the mind of Mao Tse-tung...

...Apparently basing his analysis exclusively on the reports of refugees (i.e., those Chinese who are the most dissatisfied with the regime) he comes to definite conclusions not only about conditions in China and the reasons for them, but about the actual inner thoughts of Mao Tse-tung...

...That hope can be realized in some significant measure if all those major contributors to the public dialogue whom Greene has criticized so severely will respond to his challenge...

...No branch of American commentary on China escapes Greene's scrutiny...

...For example, when he repeatedly quotes C. L. Sulzberger's erroneous analyses of an impending Russian takeover of China, Greene effectively demonstrates the error which comes from combining second-hand reports with second-guessing analysis...

...Although Klochko, too, is not without his prejudices, his book is a partial corrective for Americans whose view of China remains, for the most part, badly distorted by both physical and psychological distance...

...For example, he is certain that China's economic problems of 1958-1960 were caused by "maladministration and waste on a fantastic scale," and he comes to the strange conclusion that "studies of the weather in neighboring countries substantiated the evidence that nature had not taken a catastrophic toll of China's agricultural products...

...What reliable evidence can anyone—and particularly one who has never met Mao Tse-tung or been in Communist China—have for concluding that Mao Tse-tung took a certain doctrinal position "partly from conviction but largely from conceit...

...For example, the author's biases seem to be showing when he concludes about Mao, "Since each success in forcing his views on others during thirty years has heightened his conviction of infallibility he is not subject to the restraints of objective reality to the same extent as are most men...

...THE REVIEWERS RAtPH K. HUITT is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin...

...Soviet Scientist in Red China, by Mikhail Klochko...

...Historians will be particularly interested in his thesis that the departure of Soviet missions from China resulted from the Kremlin's fears of ideological contamination among its nationals residing in Mao Tse-tung's realm...

...Surely the weather reports from Japan and Burma cannot tell us as much about conditions in China as can trained observers like Edgar Snow and Felix Greene...

...210 pp...

...MELVIN L. WULF is legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...213 pp...

...Curtain of Ignorance should make us ashamed that we have so long tolerated reporting on China which is demonstrably sloppy at best and perhaps even deliberately deceiving...

...Elegant tells the story of the Chinese people in a nicely balanced narrative which is short enough and simple enough to reach a large popular audience, yet is scholarly enough to do justice to the complexities of four thousand years of recorded history...

...Praeger...

...Arthur Cohen, whose entire book is an attempt to read the mind of Mao Tse-tung, carries the same conviction to an extreme which ought to be outside the bounds of acceptable scholarship...