As China grows in power and revolutionary achievement the Western world begins to take her history seriously. Chinese studies, particularly in the usa, have developed from an eccentricity to an industry. The American government, in its role of world gendarme concerned to strangle or corrupt popular revolutionary movements, has poured enormous sums into research on every aspect of modern China. The temptation to dismiss nearly all the work thus produced is one that may be indulged in without great damage to an understanding of China or excessive injustice to the career men who churn out tedious books and articles, based all too often on the work of the helots who translate and analyse the material for them in Hongkong or the usa. It is rare that an American scholar (to use the term by which they designate themselves) has any real understanding of what the Chinese revolution has been all about, though there are honourable exceptions. There is no American academic treatise I have yet seen that gives half so good an introduction to 20th century Chinese realities as Edgar Snow’s classic Red Star Over China or the passionately committed books of Agnes Smedley. The Chinese revolution has been made by the struggles of real people, not by organizational techniques and conference resolutions.
Even though Professor Fairbank was an American government pr man in China after the Second World War, Professor Reischauer has recently finished a spell as us ambassador in Tokyo, and both men have openly supported the Vietnam war they cannot be fairly regarded in quite the same terms as many of their colleagues. They do at least know their subject and know it well where the history of the ruling classes in China and Japan is concerned. In the first volume of their historyfootnote1 of East Asia they gave a useful and readable introduction to the American interpretation of the earlier periods, and in this sequel they give us a full, heavy-footed and scholarly version of us imperialism’s myth of the modern era.