Westerners In China

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32210, 31 January 1970, Page 4

Westerners In China

the China Helpers. Western advisers in China 1620*1960. By Jonathan Spence. Bodley Head. 335 pp. ■■ ■ , More a cautionary tale - than an inspirational tract is how toe author describes his study of 16 Westerners who between 1620 and 1960 went to China with their technical skills and advice determined to place them at the disposal of the Chinese people. The first man iit Mr Spence’s selection is Father Adam Schall, the determined Jesuit who in 1644 was appointed director of the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy. The appointment was a portent of things to come, for until that moment China, secure in her superiority, had never dreamed that anything of value might be found in toe West. For Schall the appointment was relished as a means to a greater end—the planned conversion of toe Chinese people to tße Roman Catholic faith. Other Christians followed toe Jesuit strategy, substituting modern medicine or education and other skills for astronomy but they all learned the bard way that in China even the most precisely calculated means do not necessarily lead to toe desired ends. The Chinese used the Westerners skills when it suited them and paid a fair price but did not offer their souls in return. Not all of the advisers had a religious spur. Some were simply born adventurers with a love of travel and excitement Frederick Townsend Ward wandered the world for ten years before taking command of Shanghai’s “Ever-Victorious Army,” later becoming a general, an admiral and an official in the Chinese hierarchy. And Charles “Chinese” Gordon satisfied his love of danger and excitement with his role in helping to put down toe Taiping Rebellion. Sir Robert Hart, Irish-born Inspector General of toe Imperial Chinese Customs Service, was toe most powerful Westerner in China in the mid-nine-teenth century, yet the Service which he controlled and built up barely affected toe basic structure of the

Chinese economy. Westerners continued to dream of making China over into their own image but to toe -Chinese their proffered expertise was eagerly accepted under the old Chinese principle of “using barbarians to control barbarians. For those with no goad except personal ambition, life in China fell into a wearisome pattern of drudgery -and disappointment. . John Freer, son of a poor English clergyman, sought wealth and honour: m China as an edueationalyMW flnd out that the Chinese were using him, not he toeni. They had taken his best years and used them as they saw fit - By the early 1920 s toe virtues which the missionaries were striving to give the Chinese were not those most releK ant i. j a war ' t °rn, impoverished, humiliated yet still defiant country. Hume ’ 4octor.president of Yale-ln-China could perceive that foreigners still only vaguely understood the Chinese attitude and dilnese S He acknowledged toe force of Chinese nationalism and emphasised the need . ?.. more subservient role on the part of Westerners yet his colleagues in America refused to be denied China'a helplessness and need for moral uplift. Even toe Russian professions revoluB° l ' KUn . Selin’s representative with the Kuomintang nationalist revolution, was mastered by toe Chinese and made aware that there were tilings in this world that neither he nor Stalin could control. O. J. Todd’s civil engineering feats were staggering achievements and yet at the same time he failed to win wide support from the Chinese he was so anxious to help. The Chinese did not wish to be transformed into a ready market for American machinery and cars and to the varied warring factions his work was seen as a direct threat: better communications would mean stronger central control, roads and rails could carry food but they could also carry invading armies. A brilliant surgeon, Dr Norman Bethune, no less than other Western advisers, used the Chinese for his own ends and was in turn used by them. He differed from all toe others however in that he used the Chinese to attain a meaningful death. He went to China to expiate toe sins of his generation, to purge himself of the apathy and callousness an< pursuit of profit which he believed had rotted his civilisation. He systematically worked himself to death treating Communist guerillas in the villages and mountains of north-east China.

Mr Spence’s final three advisers are three American Generals—C. L. Chennault, Joseph Stilwell and Albert Wedemeyer, President Roosevelt’s representatives with Chiang Kai-shek during World War Two. They, too, experienced frustrations, for the Generalissimo decreed that China was not America and the battle for China would be fought according to Chinese rules. The Communist takeover in 1949 saw toe influx, of Russian advisers but toe Chinese soon found that they too brought ideological demands along with their mastery. Ten years of Soviet advice were of great benefit to China but Mao Tse-tung was not willing to see his country slide slowly under Russian influence. When the Russian advisers withdrew in 1960 there was one major task still unfinished: the development of an atomic bomb. With the successful thermonuclear detonation of 1967 the Chinese showed, to their satisfaction at least, that the Western adviser was no longer needed. And the wheel has turned full cycle; Chinese advisers have begun to compete in many areas with advisers from the West

Thij scholarly and illuminating study by one of the most promising Chinese scholars of his generation, contains photographs, notes and an index.