THE MAN WHO LOST CHINA BY BRIAN CROZIER (WITH THE COLLABORATION OF ERIC CHON)

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200030004-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 26, 2004
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: January 22, 1977
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 2005/01/13: CIA-RDP88-01350R0P02( 0Q0Q4.7
THE NEW REPUBLIC
.A.ItTrCL9APVZ b 22 January 1977
The Man Who Lost China
:)y Brian Crozier (with the.
:ollaboration of Eric Chou)
3cribner's; $12.95)
Among the smaller legacies Jimmy
carter will soon discover as he explores
he debris of the Oval Office is
something called the "GRC," also
known as the Government of the
~epubiic of China. It was bequeathed to
_zim as a. problem not only by Presidents
Nixon and Ford, but more centrally by a
man who died in April 1975, while South
'Jietnam was collapsing, Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek. .. .
Chiang was 87 when he died; and for
nearly 48 of those years he had held
,redominatit power in Nationalist
Thina--Z2 on the mainland,. 26 in
'temporary" exile on the island of
Iraiwan. Political longevity made him
*er-narkablee. So did his influence, for
dears, on American foreign policy and
Domestic politics. So, now, does his
e,acy: the thorny Taiwan issue that still
prevents normal diplomatic relations
3etween the US and the real China.
Such a man . deserves a non-
-n,giographic biography. And the effort
oy Brian Crozier; a veteran, British
journalist, looks promising . at the
autset-especially with that teasing
:itle, The Man Who Lost China. How
-navy careers hive been ruined, even.
_ives snuffed out, thanks to that nastiest
of charges, in more than one country!
? Losing China, you see, was no mean
feat-not some needle in a haystack, but
_nstead a great big country, with more
:~eoplethan anyone can evercount. So to
De accused in Russia of losing China, as
many were under Stalin in the '30s,
resulted in execution or long imprison-
-nent. The same accusation in the US,
after Mao Tse-tung's victory, produced
4ie maiming orbanishment of our finest
:hina expertise both inside and outside
;overnment. . .
So to suggest, as Croziers title does,
nat perhaps a Chinese lost.China is at
east a small step forward. But the lingo
s stilt misleading for a fundamental
-eason: to "lose" a nation, you really
rust have had it in the first place. And
neither foreign advisers whether
soviet or American--nor Mw
dationalists, nor Chiang Kai-shek, ever
kid" China sufficiently to lose it.
That, indeed, is one perhaps inadver-
tent message of this tedious and
muddled book. As the author jogs
uncertainly through the dark alleys of
Chinese political and military history in
the first half of this century, he does tell
us of the severe external limitations on
Chiang's power: untamed warlords,
Kuomintang factions, Western
privileges, Japanese invaders and Com-
munist rebels-to name only a few.
Indeed, at its high point of control in the
promising Nanking years (ca. 1936)
Chiang's government actually held
direct sway only in the lower Yangtze
River valley-about five of 22 provinces;
the rest (excluding Manchuria) were
governed through highly unstable
alliances.
The book presents other difficulties.
One has lprned--notably from Barbara
Tuchman on Stilwell-that biography
can- provide the foreground for a rich
tapestry of historical narrative. But
Crozier and his collaborator have
reversed the process. They have written
a chaotic, slipshod history of the (also
chaotic) post-1911 Chinese revolution,
and after 1927 a history of its Kuomin-
tang 'wing-with a . mysterious one-
dimensional figure named,.Chiang Kal-
shek coming on and off stage to provide
some slight continuity. In the first
sentence of his first chapter Crozier
terms Chiang "inscrutable." He might as
well have stopped there, for after 399
pages our insight. into the man is still not
much greater. - -
?I should add. that as someone who has
tried to fathom Chiang, I sympathize
with the problem. A rigid ascetic in the
midst of rampant corruption; a Confu-
cian ' convert to Methodism who ap-
parently practiced both; an admirer
simultaneously of European fascism and
the YMCA's social gospel; a man who
seemed to trust no one except, oc-
casionally, members of his family; a non-
charismatic orator and nonreflective
writer; a military mind addicted to
medieval tactics. How to penetrate or
capture such a person-particularly, as
L C3 -R-
- .--
in Crozier s case, when Chiang's
language and culture are totally alien?
The author's solution is to rely heavily
on one Eric Chou, a Chinese journalist
who lived through the Kuomintang era.
Chou flits in and out of the narrative as
the authority for far too many asser-
tions and remembered quotations ("ac-
cording to Eric Chou, "according to Eric
Chou's sources," etc.). Otherwise
Crozier simply borrows sizeable
gobbets, here and there, now and then,
from several other writers on 20th-
century China.
His borrowings seem quite random
but reflect spotty judgment. For in-
stance, he attributes to Edgar Snow, yet
again, the description of the Yenan '
Communists as simply "agrarian.
reformers." The term actually
originated with the British leftist-
turned-rightist Freda Utley. And Snow
himself never lost his original clear
perception . of them as dedicated
Marxist-Leninists (as Kenneth Shew-
maker has so carefully shown). -
Crozier's greatest lapses seem to
relate to Chiang's greatest problem:
American policy in China. On this
subject he has rehashed the. stale,
discredited charges against the US
Foreign Service officers who became the
McCarthy-McCarran victims in the
early 1950s-those Americans then
accused of "losing China." He has
apparently not read the State
Department's slowly released special
volumes on China, 1941-49, nor the
dispatches of the officers themselves--'
all of which tend to document and
exonerate their judgment at the time.
that the Communists would certainly
win unless we jarred the KMT into
reform; and that we should assist the
Communists, in our long-terns stational
interest; in order both to pressure the
KMT and to keep our hand in the game if
indeed the Communists should prevail.+
For Release 2005/01/13 CIA-RDP88-01350R000200030004-7