America's Asia. Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations

480 Pages·1971·13.926 MB·English

by  Edward Friedman and Mark Selden

AMERICA’S ASIA
Dissenting Essays
on Asian-American
Relations
Other' Pantheon Antitextbooks
THE DISSENTING ACADEMY edited by Theodore Roszak
TOWARDS A NEW PAST edited by Barton Jf Bernstein
POWER AND COMMUNITY edited by Philip Green and
Sanford Levinson
PINTAGE BOOKS
A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK
AMERICA’S ASIA
Dissenting Essays
on Asian-American
Relations
EDITED BY
Edward Friedman & Mark Selden
VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION FEBRUARY 1971
Copyright © 1969, 1970, 1971 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canadaby Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Pantheon Books, a division
of Random House, Inc., in February, 1971.
Acknowledgment is gratefully extended to the following for permission
to reprint from their works:
Ginn and Company: From China, Today’s World in Focus by Earl
Swisher and Lindley J. Stiles, Consulting Editor. Copyright © 1964,
1968 by Ginn and. Company.
Little, Brown and Company: From Memoirs 1925-1950 by George F.
Kennan. Copyright © 1967 by George F. Kennan.
The New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1964: From "A Fresh
Look at Our China Policy,” by George F. Kennan. Copyright © 1964
by the New York Times Company.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 79-118018
isbn: 394-71662-0
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DEDICATION
To the furthering of the critical spirit and
humanitarian purposes which informed the
founding of the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars
1
I
Introduction
g AsiA is America’s in three important ways. First, it is
America's in the sense that we impose American categories
to describe, evaluate, and direct Asian experience. Our cul-
tural chauvinism might mainly provide material for hu-
morous self-analysis were it not for the overwhelming
explosion of American economic and military might through-
out Asia. For Asia is America’s in this second tragic sense
that American power has channeled, distorted, and sup-
pressed much that is Asia.
This book explores the dynamic and destructive inter-
action between American perceptions and American power
in the making and unmaking of contemporary Asia. Our
focus is at once Asia and America. For the investment of
immense intellectual and material resources in American
military adventures in Asia does more than deprive.us of re-
sources vitally needed at home, It simultaneously strengthens
the very repressive tendencies in our society most prone to
crush aspirations for freedom, autonomy, and equality in
America.
The essays in this book suggest, moreover, that an Asia
conceived in antagonistic or contemptible categories is an
Asia where much that is humane, valuable, and worthy of
emulation is ignored. This adds a final meaning to' Amer-
ica’s Asia. If we could change our relation to Asia we would
be open to learning much from Asian peoples that could
help us create a more decent and just society irTthe United
States.
I
consider some of the categories invented to judge and
manipulate Asia, Of repressive oligarchies in Thailand and
Indonesia, we ask: Are they good military modernizers?
Of a Japan seething with burning social tension and skewed
and unequal distribution, we wonder: At what rate has
Introduction (cid:127) viii
the annual gross national product increased? Of rural so-
cieties such as India where millions upon millions of poor
tillers, tenants, and landless peasants live in hopelessness,
squalor, and degradation, we ask: Have they abandoned the
neutralist na'ivetd of a new nation to assume mature re-
sponsibilities? Definitional preoccupations reflect and pro-
ject American actions in Asia. We establish the ground rules
and then judge the performance. Any Asian who fails the
test posed by American interests and ideology obviously
needs Yankee know-how and military protection. Far from
contributing to a free and independent development of
new nations, our aid harnesses the economy, "security,”
and culture of Asian states to American power: Elites in
the new Asian nations become beholden to Washington
for their power and fail to respond to the urgent needs of
their own poor and oppressed rural populations.
The very categories employed by American scholars,
journalists, and diplomats mask the harsh, realities of con-
temporary Asia. The essays by Dick Kagan and Leigh Kagan
and Jim Peck provide the first systematic analysis of the
dominant intellectual constructs which have guided Amer-
ica in the era of the Americanization of Asia. By examining
high school textbooks on China, Leigh Kagan and Dick
Kagan reveal many. basic notions of the field translated into
a smooth sea of English to be washed through the brains
of Mr. American Citizen. China’s multifaceted past and
present are distorted into a simple Manichean world. A
present ruthless Red menace is contrasted with a prior
harmonious and beneficent Confucian tradition and the
potential benefits of American-sponsored development, the
supposed reality of “Free China.” Such fundamental notions
may bear little relation to truth, but they help to promote
good consciences among men perpetrating the worst bar-
barisms in the name of cultural freedom and progress.
Nor is this simply a matter of talking down to high school
students. The Peck essay shows that similar ideas control
the discussion in the most sophisticated scholarly, circles.
Introduction (cid:127) ix
An ideology of modernization has carefully been con-
structed to play down to a null point American aggression
and exploitation and play up as a dominant motif Amer-
ican benevolence in assisting Asians to traverse the treach-
erous evolutionary course to the modem world. In this
worldview, revolution emerges as a menace to be crushed,
not a solution and a natural response to overwhelming
evolutionary horrors.
Our profession is limited by more than its intellectual
milieu.- Its institutional development, traced by Judy Co-
bum, has-been shaped by the Cold War and the growth
of American hegemony in Asia. How did the field grow?
Why did it grow when it did? Who provided the money and
the expertise to shape this growth? Were the products of
the scholarship and we, the people who produced them,
in the service of political and financial sources which sought
from us a very special product? Coburn shows how Asian
studies was nurtured by foundations and government to
service the growing needs of an American-dominated Asia.
The Cold War environment in which Asian studies de-
veloped is most vividly illustrated by the events of the Mc-
Carthy era. If the entire American intellectual world was
shattered at that time, few branches were more profoundly
disrupted than Asian studies whose members provided con-
venient scapegoats for the "loss of China.” Two decades
later we are still living with the legacy of McCarthyism. A
few years ago, as America massively expanded its interven-
tion in Vietnam, some of us suggested that the Association
for Asian Studies consider the political implications of its
activities and non-activities. We were swiftly and firmly
put down by our elders and betters whose Institute of
Pacific Relations, and in some cases professional careers,
had been destroyed or damaged by McCarthyite politics.
Many of these men had fought courageously against the
repression of the early fifties. But their defeat was over-
whelming. They organized the AAS to avoid the political
vulnerability of the IPR. In the process they accepted and