The China Scholars

When the ketch Phoenix, manned by U.S. pacifists, was blocked by a Chinese patrol boat as it tried to sail up the Yangtze two years ago, Dartmouth History Professor Jonathan Mirsky leaped into the water. He was desperately trying to deliver to the Chinese a gift from a group of Maoist Japanese students. The patrol boat veered away. That was the closest Mirsky had got to China in 13 years of studying it. His ploy was the most bizarre in a long series of attempts by American students of China to make some sort of contact with the People's Republic. Two weeks ago, however, the first group of serious U.S. China scholars to visit the mainland since the Communist takeover in 1949 emerged from a one-month tour (see THE WORLD). Obviously, things are looking up.

President Nixon's opening to the East is about to create a booming market in Washington for China experts. Universities expect a surge of enrollment in courses that already bear such campus nicknames as "Chink Think" (Chinese philosophy, at Yale), "Rice Paddies" (introduction to China and Japan, at Harvard) and "What's My Line?" (China's evolution under Communism, at the University of Michigan).

Rapid Gain. Academicians have rarely been so well prepared for a major political event. In the past decade, the nation's supply of university China scholars has become second only to Japan's; the U.S. now has at least 500 Ph.D. holders and 1,000 graduate students. They are rapidly gaining on campus Russian-studies experts. Last year an estimated 5,400 undergraduates were taking Chinese language lessons at more than 100 U.S. colleges and universities; some 2,500 pupils studied Chinese in high school.

An academic adage has it that the difference between China and Russia scholars is that China experts love China while Russia experts hate Russia. Among the first Russia scholars in the U.S. were refugees who were understandably bitter toward the U.S.S.R. The first sizable dynasty of China scholars, by contrast, included numerous sons of missionaries eager to rediscover the country where they had lived. The next generation was made up mainly of World War II China hands. But study was subdued during the McCarthy era; the thought of enduring that kind of abuse deterred some prospective researchers from entering the field. The present renaissance began in the late 1950s, spurred in part by the first of nearly $24 million in grants from the Ford Foundation. Later, many able new students were drawn to the field by concern over the growing U.S. role in Asia, especially Viet Nam; others simply succumbed to the intellectual fascination of Chinese civilization. These scholars regularly visit libraries in Japan and Taiwan; a key overseas source is Hong Kong's Universities Service Center, a foundation-backed depot of re-search documents that also serves as a refugee-interviewing station.

China scholars share a fairly clear consensus about the leading universities and thinkers in their field:

HARVARD trained many of the scholars that the Ford grants enabled other universities to hire. The pre-eminent figure is tall, laconic Historian John King Fairbank, 64, a frequent consultant to the U.S. Government. Younger experts wryly refer to him as "King John." Starting as an expert on 19th century China, Fairbank has long argued for serious, sustained attention to the mainland. Historian Benjamin Schwartz's interests range widely, from Confucian thought to the rise of Mao; Ezra Vogel is a pioneer in the growing field of China sociology. Jerome Cohen was one of the first Westerners to become knowledgeable about Chinese law. Historian James Thomson Jr., a Kennedy and Johnson Administration adviser, is already a leader in the imminently expanding area of Chinese-American relations.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY concentrates on the social sciences at its Center for Chinese Studies. Chalmers Johnson, the center's chief, regularly reports on the Chinese and Japanese press over National Educational Television. Though the center is housed in some-what seedy off-campus offices, its 18,000-volume library is outstanding. One seasoned specialist is John Stewart Service, a State Department officer purged in 1951, who testified two weeks ago before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (TIME, Aug. 2). Political Scientist Robert A. Scalapino, who advocated U.S. diplomatic recognition of China twelve years ago, has nevertheless become anathema to many younger scholars for supporting U.S. involvement in Viet Nam during the Johnson Administration. At the opposite pole is H. Franz Schurmann, a sociologist and historian, probably the most respected of the experts who are highly sympathetic to Mao. Schurmann's Ideology and Organization in Communist China (1966) impressed scholars with its data-laden explanation of how Mao has managed to inspire and organize masses of people to work on economic and social projects without having to apply strict management procedures.

STANFORD has as its most prominent China scholar Mark Mancall, a widely traveled historian of Sino-Soviet relations and a dazzling teacher. Stanford's cadre also includes Political Scientist John Lewis and John Gurley, a well-thought-of older economist with Maoist sympathies. Anthropologist G. William Skinner, by poring over maps, gazetteers and economic records, correctly predicted that Mao would subdivide China's large communes into agricultural units of a more traditional size.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN has just hatched the China scholar who may be closest to Richard Nixon during the coming year. In September, Political Scientist Richard H. Solomon, 34, will join Henry Kissinger's staff, fresh from his eminently germane study of how the Chinese communicate with both foreign friends and American opponents. Allen S. Whiting, a Government China watcher under Kennedy and Johnson, still advises the White House during informal meetings with Kissinger. Alexander Eckstein was a leader in organizing the study of Chinese economics; like most of his colleagues, he now believes that China's economy has largely recovered from the dislocations caused by the cultural revolution.

COLUMBIA has long been known for the work done by Literary Historian William de Bary and Translator-Critic Burton Watson in assembling source material on classical Chinese literary traditions. Political Scientist Donald W. Klein is a biographer of current Chinese leaders; O. Edmund Clubb, who was U.S. consul-general in Peking until 1950, has taken a leading role in publicizing the arguments for new U.S. initiatives toward China. Michel Oksenberg, a younger scholar, has shown that bureaucratic decisions in China, far from being totalitarian, can be as complex as they are in the U.S.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, long noted for its scholarly spokesmen for Chiang Kaishek, still has faculty members known for skepticism about how well U.S. accommodations with the mainland may work out. Historian George Taylor, for example, feels that Nixon's decision to visit China in person has compromised the U.S. bargaining position: "It would be quite sufficient to send the Secretary of State." In recent years Historian Vincent Shih, a China emigre, has been leading a massive research project on the 19th century Taiping Rebellion, a 20-year peasant uprising against domestic corruption that the Communists often cite as a forerunner of their mass movement.

Other leading scholars include the University of Chicago's Political Scientist Tang Tsou, author of a provocative analysis of U.S. failures to understand China during and after World War II; Chicago Historian Ping-ti Ho, an authority on social mobility and population trends; and A. Doak Barnett, now at Washington, D.C.'s Brookings Institution, a protean expert on Chinese government and foreign policy. Barnett long urged a U.S. China policy of "containment without isolation."

Passionate Scholarship. Though spread around the country, the China scholars get together frequently at formal meetings like a session on Chinese ideology and politics that is taking place this week in Santa Fe. They share the special excitement of working on an intellectual frontier where even undergraduate research projects can excavate significant fresh information--although the significance of some such details may well escape the layman. When one Columbia professor could not respond to a student's question about the most prominent purge victim of the Cultural Revolution, the student found the answer and tacked up a card on the bulletin board: "Notice! Liu Shao-chi first attacked by name at a rally in Inner Mongolia by a tobacco factory worker on Sept. 25, 1967."

China scholarship is nothing if not passionate. One feud at Yale in the early 1960s involved husband-wife Historians Arthur and Mary Wright and Political Scientist David Rowe. The Yale Daily News had a field day describing the "Rowe-Wright row." Rowe, a staunch defender of Chiang Kaishek, attacked the Wrights, who backed a more pragmatic policy toward Peking, for being too far left.

Teach the West. The students who went to China last month are members of a more recent splinter: the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. Formed in 1968 to oppose other scholars' tacit toleration of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, the widely diverse group includes some self-proclaimed Maoists. Others in it believe that China's social experiments can teach the West something new about achieving prison reforms, operating public health programs, and developing an industrial economy that does not have wide differences in income and does not depend heavily on a technocratic elite. Another committee concern, as Wisconsin Political Scientist Edward Friedman and Washington University Historian Mark Selden explain in a recent collection of essays titled America's Asia, is the ways in which they believe American power has "channeled, distorted and suppressed much that is Asia." For example, the committee supports the contention--shared by both Mao and Chiang--that Taiwan is an integral part of China, and urges that the island's future be worked out without U.S. pressure.

Chiefly at the urging of Concerned Committee members and their allies, there is a vogue among politically hip college and high school students for books describing Mao's revolution in sympathetic terms; among them are Fanshen, Agricultural Expert William Hinton's narrative of how the revolution affected one village, and Journalist Edgar Snow's Red Star over China.

Indirect Influence. Harvard's Fairbank thinks Concerned Committee scholars have stimulated China studies by asking new questions, but he complains that they are "working hard to manufacture a split." There are ideological differences among U.S. China experts, but the scholars' overall impact has been more significant than their squabbles. They anticipated by years the Government's change of heart--and encouraged it at least indirectly. Through articles, speeches and personal contacts, they have helped alter the official view of a decade ago, which saw Chinese communism as ruthlessly totalitarian at home and implacably expansionist abroad. According to Morton Halperin at the Brookings Institution, the scholars who have consulted with the Government's China watchers have become nearly unanimous in depicting China as a relatively defensive, inward-looking, less-than-bellicose land. Says Halperin: "There was an enormous change from the time McNamara and Rusk were quoting Lin Piao as the new Mein Kampf to the time Nixon and Kissinger came in."

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