This intelligent and entertaining book is a reprint of the original 1969 American edition, much missed and sought after, and now available again. In it, Jonathan D. Spence, perhaps the single finest popular scholar on China, writes about Western advisers in China from the 1620s to the 1950s. From those many who, from varying motives, "assisted," he has chosen 16 -- astronomers, soldiers, doctors, engineers.
Conflict between the two sides was impossible to avoid. Both held themselves superior. The Western advisers possessed technical skills and felt a strong sense of moral righteousness. They were convinced -- then as now -- that their goals were noble.
They did not see that the Chinese had a contractual view of the relationship. They were employers and had the right to terminate the agreement when they saw fit. The Westerners were, after all and however learned, still barbarians. This the Westerners often saw as "betrayal." There was talk of the "loss" of China, though China had never been the West's to lose.
This lesson was not, however, learned. Spence writes that "Westerners are still complacent about their civilization, convinced of their moral rightness, and eager to 'develop' those whom they consider lower than themselves on the ladder of human progress."
The first Jesuits planned to bring the Chinese to God through astronomy, German missionary Adam Schall leading the way. His measures were mild compared to later and more forceful Protestant evangelists. Peter Parker, one of their number, plowed forward with a vision of progress, commercial expansion, and -- of course -- the Good News. He substituted modern medicine for the science of the stars.
There were also those brought in to advise on military affairs, adventurers such as Fredrick Ward, who helped the Qing Dynasty create a modern army to suppress the Taiping Rebellion, and British officer Charles George ("Chinese") Gordon, who took over Ward's command when he died. Gordon was also the man who had earlier destroyed the Peking summer palace, during the Second Opium War. He wrote his mother about the event: "You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one's heart sore to burn them . . ." But, nevertheless, burn they did.
Later, there were others who came both for themselves and for the Chinese. They had now learned enough about China to see where power lay and where patronage would get them. Robert Hart was advised by a British undersecretary of state to "never venture into the sun without an umbrella and never go snipe shooting without top boots." Nonetheless, he became for a time "the most powerful Westerner in China" as inspector general of the Imperial Chinese Customs Service. He also created an organization as rare then as now, an international civil service.
To be sure, if the Westerners were using the Chinese for their own ends, they were nonetheless being used in turn. Foreign ideology on foreign terms could be tolerated only in the form of submission. This pride and wariness made similar men otherwise disparate -- for example, those bitter rivals Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.
The Chinese traditionally favored the principle of "using barbarians to control barbarians," and this reasoning is still convenient today. This is in some distinction to Japan, where Western advisers were more candidly called "human machines," and could be laid off and sent back.
This did not lead to harmonious results. The rivalry (related in particularly interesting detail by Spence) between Claire Chennault, military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, and Joseph Stilwell, commander of Chinese Nationalist forces in Burma during World War II, did not profit China. These two barbarians battling it out cleared the way for Mao to win.
Yale University's adventures in China were equally divided. "If Yale can give these boys an ideal of sportsmanship and fair play . . . China can ask no greater gift," said one spokesman. Of this the author writes, "The virtues mentioned were not those most relevant to a war-torn, impoverished, humiliated, yet still defiant country."
At the same time, Spence is careful to properly place a kind of altruism that along with both complacency and bigotry played its part in these fascinating face-to-face confrontations between civilizations East and West. He writes movingly of the sensitivity of educator Edward Hume of Yale and Mikhail Borodin (chief Comintern agent in China in the 1920s), of the shrewdness of Gordon and Stillwell, of the personal courage of Ward and Chennault, of the dedication of Dr. Norman Bethune, and adds that "each gave a significant part of his life to China."
It is this detached fairness (the author is at Yale himself) that gives this book its authenticity and its power.
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