Beldin

Hugh Deane spent a year in China as a Harvard exchange student in 1936-37, then an eccentric course. With time out while he served as an officer in the naval intelligence service during the Second World War, he has been deeply involved with China ever since - as journalist, co-founder of INDUSCO (Industrial Cooperatives), leader of the US-China People's Friendship Association, and editor of the US-China Review. Today he is one of the most knowledgeable "Old China Hands" in the United States and an active though sharply critical supporter of the People's Republic.

His current book, Good Deeds & Gunboats, illustrates the converse of a by now well worn truism, "the personal is political," reminding us how much of the political is personal.

Although there is a remarkable absence of the capital "I" throughout his volume, even the first chapter, which offers a succinct history of US-China relations from 1784 to 1970, creates a sense of immediacy as in a concerned reporter's account. This is in part achieved by a judicious use of quotation. For example, a two-paragraph reference to the treatment of a "trickle of arriving [Chinese] students, returning residents, visitors with proper visas and even diplomats" in the receiving center on Angel island at the beginning of this century, is made vivid by a few lines of Li Xin's, line written after a visit ten years later.

Drifting thousands of miles,

a thousand grievances, Breath filled with anger,

walls filled with poems. A different era,

the present is better than the past, However treat not history

as fictional tales.

The much longer second chapter, "Elaborations," again rapidly summarizes, in an unusually personal way, a more detailed series of American-Chinese encounters from the mid-nineteenth century on. It includes thumbnail biographies of important figures and offers rare sense of intercultural parallels. For instance, the thrust of the Taiping Revolution (1850-1862) is compared to that of the Levellers in Cromwell's seventeenth-century army. Here Deane contrasts Chiang Kaishek's retrospective attitude the "rabble horde" with a popular peasant song of the twelve-year struggle.

Bamboo shoots' two ends are yellow

Li Xiucheng is the peasants' leader.

The landlords dread him like the King of Hell,

The peasants love him like a mother.

It is, as Deane points out, Chiang's viewpoint which is assumed in most American texts.

The ten-page account of this momentous uprising opens somewhat disconcertingly: "Frederick Townsend Ward, an adventurer from Sale, Massachusetts, took the timely initiative which began the decisive Western intervention against the Taiping Revolution." For those of us who were originally taught, then painfully unlearned, and perhaps too completely rejected, any concern with the role of the individual in history, this focus on specific men and (a very few) women, repeated throughout the books, is rather startling. However, Deane does not ever underestimate the broader forces culminating in individual crises even as he indicates his feeling that, after all, it is men and women who make history - that it would happen a little differently if certain individuals were different.

Oddly the tone of his account is much the same whether the event reported is one in which Deane was personally involved, one which he observed from a reasonable distance, or one completed before his birth. While this may blur the chronological development somewhat a moderately well informed reader will find no difficulty in fitting events together, and even advanced students may see much of new interest in this intimate peopling of the stage with real villains and heroes. Some of these figures are well known to us in other contexts although not many will have read them as quoted here. Mark Twain, Herbert Hoover, and Paul Robeson are a few of those already famous or infamous for other than their Chinese connections.

There are a number of vignettes memorializing such relatively unknown friends of China as botanist Frank Meyer, drowned in the Yangtze in 1918 after thirteen years of difficult, devoted, productive work there. There are also sketches of such newsworthy figures as Major Stilwell, Agnes Smedley, and Edgar Snow whom the author knew personally.

Perhaps the best way to give an idea of his episodic survey of the second and third quarters of our century is to list a few of the section subheads. These include: "Herbert Hoover and the Kaiping Mines Swindle," "Gunboats on the Yangtze," "Agnes Smedley and Lu Xun - Friends in a Dark Time," "China Crisis - American Journals," "Serving Counterrevolution - Mary Miles and SACCO," "Guerillas Rescue a B-29 Bomber Crew," "China and the Ruination of MacArthur," "The CIA'S |Contra' Campaign in Tibet," and "China in American Poetry." (This literary excursion includes poems by Walt Whitman, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Archibald MacLeish, Paul Engle, Witter Bynner, and, of course, Ezra Pound.)

There is no continued chronological account of the long civil war between the Kuomintang and the revolutionary forces, which had to fight both Chiang Kaishek and the invading Japanese. (Chiang used much of the enormous American war supplies, nominally furnished him for war against Japan, to destroy the Red Army.) Yet a strong feeling of the whole is given through the many lively episodes rapidly narrated.

The short concluding chapter, "Recollections," tells of the author's own work in China, of the difficulties in attempting to get an honest account published anywhere in the United States, and of his friendship with writers like Jack Beldin, Israel Esptein, John Hersey, Edgar Snow, and Anna Louise Strong, who have played a significant part in China's development. Many of these, as well as some others, are included in the twelve-page picture section, largely composed of informal snapshots.

There is a very useful five-page general chronology appended, and a similar one for Taiwan. There is also an extensive four-and-a-half-page bibliography as well as an index.

John S. Service, who contributes a substantial introduction to the book outlining the historical perception of American-Chinese relations in the United States, speaks of Deane's "board experience and intimate knowledge" of China and stresses the work's importance in helping to build closer relations between the two great nations in the future. He concludes: "Deane's affectionate reminiscences... combined with clear-eyed analysis, eloquently illustrate. ..that there is a chemistry between Americans and Chinese that favors friendship."

COPYRIGHT 1992 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group