Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

With my G.I. Bill benefits running out, I took up Chinese studies seriously, in part because that was where the money was. Some leading intellectual institutions of the time—notably the government’s foreign policy and intelligence agencies and the Ford Foundation—were then paying handsomely to attract graduate students into the study of China and, of course, Chinese communism. I saw these fellowships not as inducements to study the enemy in the service of the state but as a wonderful opportunity. I had no hint that, as a student of Asia, I would become as much a spear-carrier for empire as I had been in the navy.

My faculty adviser, political scientist Robert Scalapino, had recently acquired from Ken’ichi Hatano microfilmed files of the Japanese wartime Asia Development Board (Koain), one of the main organs through which Japan had exploited conquered China. Hatano, a former Koain official, had in 1944 moved his office files to his home, thereby saving them from the firebombing of Tokyo. Since I was a graduate student in need of work who could read Japanese, Scalapino hired me to index these once highly classified documents. Buried in them, I discovered a remarkable tale of how after 1937, Japan’s armies, bogged down in the interior of China, had resorted to “burn all, loot all, kill all” campaigns against the Chinese peasantry, and so had helped give birth to the most monumental and catastrophic revolutionary movement of our time. To sit alone in the university library at night and see in these dry accounts Japanese army officers sent back to Tokyo, how the then-minuscule Chinese Communist Party began organizing the peasants who had survived Japanese brutality, was revelatory—and exciting. I knew that I was witnessing, years late, a story still remarkably relevant to postwar Asia, racked with similar revolts against foreign armies of occupation.

Sometime in the late 1950s, I mentioned to Professor Levenson that on-the-spot Western observers of the Chinese Communist movement from 1937 to 1945 had almost uniformly reported on the party’s remarkable popularity among ordinary Chinese. Levenson replied that they had all paid a price for such reportage, for every one of them had subsequently been tarred as a leftist and possible traitor by Senator Joseph McCarthy or other red hunters of the time. The firsthand testimony of Edgar Snow, Evans Carlson, Agnes Smedley, Nym Wales, George Taylor, and others was still considered valueless in the America of the late 1950s, coming as it did from those believed, at best, to be ideologically predisposed to accept the Chinese Communists as mere “agrarian reformers.”

Having by now read a range of Imperial Japanese Army documents on China, I responded that I could supply secret assessments of the popularity of the Chinese Communist movement in the crucial period of 1937 to 1941 from an unimpeachably anti-Communist source—namely, the Japanese high command in China. Levenson pointed out that such a topic would make a good doctoral dissertation, and so, in 1962, my dissertation was published under the title Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945.¹ The book had a significant impact on the study of modern China. The Japanese invaders, I argued, had created conditions of such savagery, particularly in North China, that the peasant masses who survived their depredations naturally gravitated toward the only group that offered them hope and resistance—the Chinese Communist Party. China illustrated what was soon to become a major political lesson of twentieth-century Asia: only in those circumstances in which the most patriotic act is to join the Communist Party does a Communist movement become a mass movement.

On a personal level, Peasant Nationalism allowed me to avoid the two worst rites of passage of academic life—getting a job and then tenure. My own university hired me. I was lucky and I worked hard, but I was also in the right place at the right time. Between research stints in Japan and Hong Kong, I made my one and only visit to Saigon, in 1962. I was appalled by our government’s policy of “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.” Knowing what I did about guerrilla war, revolutionary politics, and foreign armies, I thought it a mistake for us to involve ourselves further in what was visibly a Vietnamese civil war.² But once we did so in the mid-sixties, I was sufficiently aware of Mao Zedong’s attempts to export “people’s war” to believe that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam. In that, too, I was distinctly a man of my times.