DAVIES' WORLDLY VIEW

...Dragon by the Tail is not so much history as the essential material out of which historical analysis is shaped...

...It is an effort to present the histories of China, Japan, Britain, Russia, and America as they intersected—with personal observations drawn from the author's letters, diary, memos, and memory where appropriate...

...Patrick Hurley, whirling between Chungking and Washington, vicious, vain, obtuse...

...The key question for 1972 is why so urbane and enlightened a man as John Paton Davies should, in the clear light of B-52 bombs, persist in such a strange view of what genuine self-determination means...

...But how was Chinese nationalism to be expressed through the political capture of the Communists by America...

...its remarkable interest centers on his observations of the world as he experienced it...

...And the men behind the white-washed walls of Washington...

...The first hundred pages or so are a lyrical trip through Chinese society and politics, from the Ch'ing to the Nationalist Revolution of 1925, interspersed with the foreign policies of the imperialist powers towards China...

...These fixed notions about the nature of America and its adversaries are responsible, I would guess, for both the virtues and the defects of Davies' reporting on the Chinese scene as he witnessed it from the 1930s to 1945...

...It doesn't even compete in the matter of understanding China today...

...At an early date, Davies was dismayed at the way in which America tied itself to the corrupt and dying regime of Chiang Kai-shek...

...Davies' new book does not deal with his personal tribulations with the State Department...

...the adventures of the mysterious Captain Milton Miles and his cooperation with Chiang's secret police...

...The opposite of Communism is not capitalism, but democracy—and so on...

...These chapters are marred by some gross inaccuracies (such as his reference to the formation of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service and his enthusiastic repetition of the ancient myth about Theodore Roosevelt's alleged machinations in the Navy Department) and an apparent resistance to any recent research on American imperialism...

...Agnes Smedley, incandescent in Hankow...

...And John Paton Davies, a U.S...

...The most "virulent" form of nationalism is anti-imperialism...

...Revolution is seen as a "seizure in a degenerative process...

...Davies' book fails as an adequate critique of American policy in Asia...

...With no evidence, or even the hint of an argument, Davies oddly asserts that Mao has " 'lost' China to the generals and the bureaucrats...

...It is an important book, however one may disagree with its politics, and a necessary one for students of the American empire...

...He is, clearly, an erudite and witty man, a cosmopolitan, as skeptical of official American ideologies as of foreign ones...

...Nevertheless, he is blind to that which is emphatically ideological in his own beliefs...

...In his description of consular posts in China in the 1930s, in his pithy word pictures of the strange Americans who flooded China during the war (Julia Child as an OSS operative in Kunming...

...While he recognizes that America was assertively moralistic towards China, the phrase "ideological aggression" is reserved for the Bolsheviks...

...Surely a related series of blunders begins to assume a pattern beyond the accidental...

...If only America would keep its options open, Davies argued, there was a chance that a victorious Communist movement in China would not move automatically into the Soviet bloc...

...Young teaches history at the University of Michigan...

...But dependence on America magically becomes independence, and a properly stable postwar Asia...

...Despite all the evidence bloodily offered us in Indochina, Davies persists in regarding American policy as a matter of drifting into quandaries, floating into blunders...

...The early chapters are valuable, however, for what they reveal of Davies' basic perceptual framework...

...His book's considerable success lies elsewhere...

...This is an enormous undertaking, larger perhaps than absolutely necessary...

...Again and again Davies equates dependence on Russia with subservience, a distortion of Chinese independence, and a disruption of an equitable postwar balance of power...

...For the book doesn't really take off until Davies himself enters it...

...Davies adds little to John K. Fairbank in his summary of Chinese history...

...The casual killing of warlord armies is less abhorrent than the ideological warfare of revolutionaries (to whom, the peasant or the landlord...

...Ms...

...dozens of others), in his clear appreciation of General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell (Davies was his political adviser during World War II) and the narrowing range within which American policy operated—in these and many other things, Davies is superb...

...Through "control of supplies and postwar aid" the United States could "expect to exert considerable influence in the direction of Chinese nationalism and independence from Soviet control...

...Exercising his considerable literary skills, Davies describes Russia in 1945: "For the men behind the dark red walls of the Kremlin victory in Europe formalized a transition in their unending struggle against the independence of others, a transition in Eastern and Middle Europe from war to the use of means short of war...

...diplomat in China and Moscow who was dismissed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles for "bad judgment" in forecasting the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek, now has written a monumental book of history and autobiography, Dragon by the Tail...

...He had visited Yenan, and was, like everyone else, impressed with what he saw...

...Where did they stand on independence, and what had they, too, learned about means short of war...

...In a 1944 memo, Davies urged a most limited commitment to Chiang and the beginning of a "determined effort to capture politically the Chinese Communists rather than allow them to go by default wholly to the Russians...

...Thus foreign service diplomat John Stewart Service turns up reporting, once more, on China—for The New York Times, rather than the State Department...