Thunder Out of China

"Another great epic of misunderstanding is Thunder Out of China by Theodore H White and Annalee Jacoby. This is about Chiang Kai-shek, the failure of his experiment, and the corruption and complete unravelling of China under the pressures of Japanese occupation and war. Chiang Kai-shek was a stand-in in a way. He was a Chinese version of his hybrid wife [Soong Mei-ling] who was very negotiable in America, a Christian and a Chinese that Americans thought they understood. And she had Chiang Kai-shek – this Confucian, imperial sort – in her wing. I think Americans felt a particular connection through Christianity (Chiang Kai-shek converted). That helped us believe that at long last China was coming around. There was a period in the thirties and forties when it looked like the metal would bend. There was a group of Chinese who were sophisticated, Western-trained, very versatile and conversant with both Western and classical Chinese culture. They centred around Shanghai and Beijing, and it looked as if this new cosmopolitan world would run China and integrate it into the larger global enterprise. That was incredibly gratifying, because it was enough like America but it was also Chinese. Then all of a sudden it went south and Mao Zedong took over. He didn’t speak any foreign languages, he wasn’t a Christian, he was a peasant – rural and inland not coastal and cosmopolitan. And he was communist to boot, the Russians got hands on him. So he was the antithesis of all the hopes and dreams that the West had for a convergence of China and the West. It was a brutal shock to have that snatched away from us after we’d put in a hundred years of missionary work, war aid, education, medical assistance, all of this stuff. I think there’s more of Chairman Mao in the Chinese bloodstream than often we, or the Chinese, like to admit. It was a protracted period where several generations of Chinese grew up on very vigorous anti-imperial, anti-foreign, anti-American sentiment – this idea of China being bullied, encircled, contained and suffocated was not to no effect. I think there’s still a good measure of that in the bloodstream, and it gets played upon from time to time by elements in society and even in government. Just as traditional Confucian culture resides in China as an almost autonomic response, rather than as a high cultural form with calligraphy and painting or whatever, I think that the Mao era continues to reside within the inner being of China in a somewhat unconscious way. It manifests itself in nationalistic and chauvinistic responses, sensitivity to slights and slurs, a constant awareness of China’s comparative standing and a lingering uncertainty about its own strengths and whether it is still a victim or not. No it’s not. The world has changed. The victim culture that defined China for so long is obsolete, and yet it still gets played upon. That’s an obstacle to China feeling comfortable in the world, with a rightful part in the world."