Chiang Kai-Shek, Pragmatism and how Communism won China

The Generalissimo

Chiang Kai-Shek and the Battle for Modern China

By Jay Taylor, Belknap Harvard University Press, 722pp.

Reviewed: 1 August 2009

History is not kind to losers, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek is usually remembered in the West as the leader who “lost” China to the Communists. Generations of Western students have been taught that this defeat was inevitable because the KMT was incurably inept and chronically corrupt, whereas the CCP was incorruptible and efficient.

This new and monumental biography shows that things were far more complex. In particular, Western fumbling, arrogance and ignorance repeatedly undermined KMT attempts to develop and protect a more modern society that would permit the development of democracy in a non-Communist, Republican China.

The West broadly accepts the CCP myth that it was a spontaneous grass-roots movement of Chinese peasants, workers and patriotic intellectuals rising up against internal and foreign oppression. While that is part of the story, this book reminds of the extent to which the Soviet Union, under Stalin, provided direction, finance and military support that were absolutely decisive in the victory of Communism in China.

Chiang Kai-Shek was a polarizing figure during his lifetime and most historical treatments have been either hostile or adulatory. Jay Taylor is well-credentialled to seek a balance, with a background as a China specialist in the US State Department, as a Harvard academic, and with access to Chiang Kai-Shek’s revealing personal diaries, family papers, and important materials from Moscow, Washington and Peking.

The tale is a true epic, both in scope and in scale. Chiang rose uncertainly to leadership of Republican China through endless manoeuvering amongst up to 40 regional autonomous warlords, plus several rival Republican factions, all in the context of growing territorial incursion by Japan in the northeast. Even Shanghai gangsters had a role in his rise.

No Western powers showed any inclination to help China defend itself against Japan, despite China’s increasingly desperate pleas.

Once the United States entered the war against Japan after Pearl Harbour, China was recognized as an ally and military assistance began to flow. The relationship, however, was managed poorly by both sides. Chiang’s control over regional commanders required deft management, quite foreign to Western assumptions about disciplined lines of command.

One might think of contemporary Iraq or Afghanistan, but on a massively greater scale.

Chiang’s diaries confirm a complex personal morality that was fundamentally neo-Confucian, overtly Christian, and morbidly self-critical – but combining iron commitment to patriotic ends with infinite flexibility as to the means. Brutality, exemplary executions, and tolerance of corruption (as the price of loyalty), could be combined with personal frugality and scrupulous fiscal propriety on the part of Chiang himself and many of his closest colleagues.

The corollary to infinite pragmatism is chronic suspicion, even of close colleagues. Many lives and careers were sacrificed to his paranoia. In this, his life paralleled that of his Communist nemesis, Mao Zedong.

Read full review

Richard Thwaites has been a student of China for 40 years, including five years living in China as an ABC correspondent 

The Imperialism behind Civilisation

The Empire of Civilization

The Evolution of an Imperial Idea

By Brett Bowden, University of Chicago Press, 304pp.

Reviewed: 6 June 2009.

How often our ears ring from the amplified calls of politicians and lobbyists rousing us to violent or oppressive action “to defend civilization”. The enemy is always barbarian.

By default, “civilization” seems to include whatever we hold dear about the society in which we live – property rights, religion, or football. Brett Bowden invites us to step back and review the slippery range of meanings attached to “civilization” over the centuries, and to follow how the term has been employed politically to justify or motivate the actions of states bent on influencing, dominating, or conquering other states and cultures.

The ancient Greeks originated “Western” self-conscious ownership of civilization (“Us”) versus barbarism (“Them”) in recording their wars with the Persians. The East-West paradigm persists today. Christian Popes later appropriated the theme as basis for launching the Crusades, decreeing that no “uncivilized” nation could possibly deserve, in God’s eyes, to occupy the Holy Land of Palestine.

The greater part of this book traces the development of justifications for Western colonialism during the centuries following the Spanish discoveries of the Americas. There were always dissidents who challenged the moral justification of empire and asserted what we would now call the “human rights” of individuals and communities to determine their own destinies, free of subjection. Mostly, these voices were overruled by louder ones claiming that it was actually a moral obligation, for the “civilized” colonial power to bring enlightenment (Christian or secular) to “savages” or “barbarians” who were capable neither of improving their own state nor of properly utilizing the resources of the land they occupied.

Bowden’s real purpose is critique of the contemporary imperialism espoused by the American neo-cons and their supporters around the world. He traces the history of overt US imperialism across three centuries, whether in the form of territorial conquest or in the guise of a “civilizing mission”.

As a Western-oriented critique, the book offers much that is challenging and hard to refute. But as a global analysis there are some large gaps. The assumption of a uni-polar, US-dominated global polity bears more testing, with regard to rising alternative powers such as China or other Asian or global communities that clearly do not accept a “Washington Consensus” for globalization. 

Read full review

The Great Scientific Heritage of Islamic Cultures

Science and Islam

a History

By Ehsan Masood, Icon Books, 240pp

Reviewed:2 May 2009

When most Westerners associate Islam with faith-based politics and socio-religious dogmatism, it is valuable to be reminded that the Quran, and the words of the Prophet Mohammed, have also provided inspiration for regimes of strenuously rational and empirical scientific enquiry.

In 833AD, Caliph al-Mamun of Baghdad conducted a stern inquisition throughout his Islamic realm. Scholars and officials were required, on pain of punishment or even death, to attest that the Quran was not the dictated word of God, but rather the work of men inspired by their understanding of God.

Perhaps lacking in subtle people skills, the Caliph was a passionate believer in scientific enquiry, and a student of the Greek, Persian and Indian philosophers. He represented a consistent strand of Islamic thinking: that curiosity about the world is the greatest sign of respect to the Creator.

Among many scientific projects, he had his researchers confirm from astronomical observations that the circumference of the Earth was 24,000 miles – six centuries before our European savants could accept that the world was round.

The great surge of Islamic knowledge-seeking began in the Persian Abbassid Caliphate period from 750AD, with a sustained and systematic program to collect and translate all the wisdom of the world. In four centuries of Islamic enlightenment, scholarship proceeded in conditions of religious tolerance. Many of the scholars were Christians, Jews or other non-Muslims, but were supported by powerful patrons. Islamic religious purists were not allowed to stand in the way of the quest for understanding of the world.

There is much here to challenge Eurocentric assumptions. In 2009, as we celebrate Charles Darwin’s 19th Century studies, it is salutary to read the 9th Century Baghdad naturalist al-Jahiz describing the evolution of species by natural selection – a full millennium earlier than Darwin. 

The “algorithm” (the foundation of computer programming) is named for al-Khwarizmi, another 9th Century scholar, of Central Asian origins, who not only introduced the Indian base-10 number system to the West (what we now call Arabic numerals), but also established the foundations of “algebra” (another Arabic word) to radically extended the possibilities of calculation in every field of science. 

Ibn-Firnas, of Moorish Cordoba, is reported making a successful hang-glider flight that lasted several minutes and also built a functioning projection planetarium using glass lenses in the floor, centuries before Leonardo or Galileo.

Masood notes that science can flourish under authoritarian rule, ancient or modern, but suggests a fundamental link between cultural self-confidence and the liberation of rational enquiry.  Modern Islamic societies, Masood suggests, are still defined by their state of reaction to Western colonialism. Conservatism is a political artifact, and no more intrinsic to Islam than it is to Christianity.

Read full review

An Informed Re-think about Iran and the Region's Future

The Devil We Know

Dealing with the new Iranian superpower

By Robert Baer, Scribe Publications, 277pp

Reviewed: 4 April 2009

The Devil We Know seems written to shock the American public: “Nearly everything the average American has been told about Iran is wrong”, says Baer. The view of Iran as a terrorist state ruled by mad mullahs has been out of date for many years. Behind the posturing of President Ahmedinajad, the Iranian regime is a rational actor with clear aims based on a substantial culture and history, and pragmatic tactical flexibility.

Comparing Shia Islam to Sunni Islam, Baer draws parallels between the Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity. Shiism is hierarchical, scholarly and disciplined, whereas Sunnism is individualistic and infinitely schismatic. Hence Shiite tactics, including terrorist actions, are purposeful and disciplined toward a political objective, whereas Sunni extremists such as Al Qaeda are more often motivated by irrational desire for revenge or “cleansing” destruction. Talking to the Shia is useful.

Sunni regimes such as Pakistan or most Arab states are endemically corrupt and incompetent, he asserts. The Shia regime in Iran, and its proxies including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraq, are far less corrupt and demonstrably more capable of maintaining effective and popular administration.  Baer calculates that Western support for Sunni regimes is money down the drain. He presents a compelling analysis of the extension of Iranian influence over most of the Middle East, including non-Shia territories such as Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria.

Baer is no moralist. His assessment is based on what he has observed to work and not to work in the contemporary Middle East. He spent years in the CIA cultivating proxy actors in the Middle East who would serve the interests of the USA. Now he proposes that the only way to halt the profligate waste of American resources in a losing battle with Iran is to come to reasonable terms with Iran. 

His prescription would USA mean abandoning several shibboleths: Israel would lose its apparently divine immunity and be required to return to its pre 1967-borders. Patronage and protection of the Arab oil states would have to be shared with Iran. Terrorism punishment objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan would have to be abandoned and those states allowed to fail on their own terms.

Read full review 

Rise and Fall of Gordon Barton, Anti-Establishment Buccaneer

Gordon Barton

Australia’s Maverick Entrepreneur

By Sam Everingham, Allen & Unwin, 432pp

Reviewed: 7 March 2009

Australia today owes more to the structural reforms of the 1970s and 1980s than to the superficial rebel-hip that younger people like to imagine characterized the 1960s. The entrepreneur Gordon Barton, while never holding any public office, played an extraordinary role in catalyzing social and economic change in Australia.

He was a buccaneering self-made capitalist who repeatedly challenged comfortable industry cartels that loafed along under government protection. His epic legal challenges to government regulation set precedents that ultimately led to major micro-economic reforms, particularly of Australia’s transport industries.

Barton founded, funded, and for many years led the Australia Party, whose socially-progressive but non-socialist agenda created the first effective third force in Australian federal politics. It was Australia’s first political party with no Class War history. 

Barton also bankrolled and protected first the Sunday Oberver, then the Sunday Review, then Nation Review, which in the pre-Internet world provided Australia’s most important non-establishment journalism in a period of concentrated, conservative control of the mass media. Along the way, he gave the Australian publishing industry a timely kick in the tail during a turbulent period of ownership of Angus and Robertson.

Barton had to mount challenges all the way to the Privy Council in London to strike down state-based laws that prevented his interstate road haulage business competing with the state-owned railways.

Many more years and colossal legal costs were expended in challenging Federal aviation regulations that prevented introduction of airfreight services – again, to protect the incumbents. Later there would be challenges to Post Office monopoly privileges on courier services, and to the coastal shipping cartel that gave power to the seamen’s and waterfront unions as well as the uncompetitive shipping lines.

In many cases the reforms Barton forced through, against vested interests with entrenched political support, opened up opportunities for other market entrants and precipitated structural reform we now take for granted.

Over time, Barton’s addiction to risk and to personal drama undid much of his personal life and his fortune. Repudiated by the corporations he had built, he spent his declining years pottering about a small villa in Italy looked after by a son and daughter, dying in 2005.

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites worked in publishing and in journalism through the 1970s 

Of Smugglers, Grave-Robbers and Shameless Curators

Loot

The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World

By Sharon Waxman, Times Books, 414pp

Reviewed:14 February 2009

Sharon Waxman, an American, studied the Middle East at Oxford then worked as a “culture correspondent” and foreign correspondent for the New York Times. This book applies journalistic reporting on places and personalities in a struggle within the world of museums and professional collectors: when should foreign objects held in museums be returned to their place of origin?

The Enlightenment idea that people become more civilised by appreciation of the classical past – essentially Greece, Rome and antecedents in the Near East - inspired development of the public museum.  From the time of Napoleon, this evolved from blatant displays of looted treasure and colonial curios into the sophisticated systems of archaeology, conservation and historical research now epitomised by the Louvre or the British Museum.

The Louvre and the British Museum were founded on overt imperial acquisitions, while the New York Metropolitan Museum continues to receive items of dubious provenance donated by those social-climbing hedge-fund operators not yet in gaol. For at least a century, the prevailing motto has been “Don’t ask, don’t tell” on the provenance of prized items.

Legal and illegal acquisitions seem always to have run in parallel, but formal legality has not discouraged new generations of cultural nationalists from demanding return of precious artifacts to their land of origin.

Waxman gives a fair account of the claims of those restitutionists of Egypt, modern Greece, Turkey and Italy. The happiest case histories undo blatantly unlawful acquisitions involving networks of grave-robbers, smugglers, shady dealers and shameless curators. 

Sadly, some of the cultural treasures recovered with heroic effort have since been lost again through corruption, incompetence, or lack of curatorial resources in the place of origin. Such cases strengthen the arguments of the big museums that they hold items not only for themselves but in safe trust for humanity.

Read full review

Richard Thwaites has worked, among other things, as a publisher's editor 

Betrayed Americans Forsaken in Soviet Russia

The Forsaken

by Tim Tzouliadis, Little Brown, 472pp

Reviewed: 10 January 2009

Tim Tzouliadis  traces the horrifying fate of several thousand American citizens caught in Stalin’s Russia during the years of the Great Terror.

Most of the Americans had gone to the USSR voluntarily in the 1930s, either as Communist idealists hoping to build a socialist new world order, or as contract “experts” fleeing the unemployment of the Great Depression in capitalist America. They ranged from artists and assembly-line workers to architects and engineers. Most sold up their belongings and took their families with them.

The largest group comprised several hundred Ford Motor Company employees hired to run the Soviet Ford car plant at Nizhni Novgorod. At the time the USA did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and consequently no Embassy or Consulates to represent them.

Most were tricked or bullied into giving up their American passports and acquiring Soviet ones. As Stalin’s internal terror campaigns escalated from 1936, the lost Americans became targets. Attempting to leave, or even expressing a desire to go home, became acts of treason earning death or deportation to the burgeoning Gulags, from where less than ten percent would ever return.

There are many appalling accounts of culled from correspondence, from Soviet archives, from survivor accounts, and most sadly from the records of the US State Department and other official sources. Most chilling are the accounts of how these Americans were treated by other Americans. 

President Roosevelt is portrayed as almost willfully blind to the character of Stalin and his regime.

Not for those who prefer a rose-tinted world view, this book will confirm any conviction that civilization lies not in the mobilization of power over the people, but in the restraint of power by the people.

Read full review