Hong Kong: HKU Press; New York: Columbia University Press [distributor], 2016. xi, 292 pp. (Illustrations.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-988-8208-74-6.
Recent scholarship has been carefully writing Mao-era China back into international history. For decades, study of Cold War politics, diplomacy, and culture in the West remained largely Eurocentric in focus, preoccupied with the USSR-US axis. Although many international histories of communism and the Cold War have been written in European languages, for years they tended to treat Maoism and Mao-era China as little more than a case study within a Eurocentric whole. As a result, the importance of Mao-era China in this conflict was until recently relatively neglected in much non-specialist scholarship on the Cold War. For years, moreover, the stereotype of a closed-off, isolated People’s Republic of China (PRC), shunned by the international community, dominated popular impressions of the period. Some of the strongest images for Anglophone audiences of Mao-era China’s attitude to the outside world come from memoirs describing the deranged xenophobia of the early Cultural Revolution.
But academic writing of the past fifteen years has steadily reached a more full acknowledgement of Chinese influence and experiences in the Cold War. Outside the years 1966 to 1969 (in which the foreign policy of the People’s Republic did indeed self-destruct), Mao’s China poured much hard work, money, and considerable skill into extending its influence and contacts throughout the world. Odd Arne Westad crucially expanded previously Western-centric perspectives on the Cold War, bringing the study of the role played by the “Third World” into mainstream scholarship on the conflict. As part of this greater globalization of Cold War history, manifested also in the journal Cold War History and in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, we have in recent years seen a welcome increase in the participation of mainland China-born scholars in international and Anglophone debates about Maoism and the Cold War, in for example Chen Jian’s Mao’s China and the Cold War. Since 2000, China historians and political scientists such as Zheng Yangwen, Anne-Marie Brady, Alexander Cook, Cagdas Ungor, and Matthew Johnson have pioneered a more transnational approach to China’s role in cultural diplomacy in the Cold War, offering insights into the channels along which Maoism engaged with the world beyond its borders.
Beverley Hooper’s new monograph about Western residents in Mao-era China is a welcome addition to this growing body of work on the international impact of the PRC. The book is judiciously divided into individual chapters analyzing particular segments of the Western community: Communist converts or fellow travellers to the revolution; the famous US POWs who “chose China” at the end of the Korean War rather than repatriate to the US; diplomats; foreign correspondents; “foreign experts” (teachers and editors, who assisted in Chinese universities and foreign-language publications); and students (the author was herself a member of this group in the 1970s).
The book is meticulously researched, making excellent use of oral-history testimonies, and also of materials from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which in the 2000s became the first government department to declassify its archive (a shutdown began after 2012). Greater use of the testimonies of Chinese nationals who had contact with these Westerners in China would have further enriched the book, though obtaining this sort of access is not straightforward in contemporary China, where Mao-era history remains a highly sensitive issue. Hooper uses her impressive array of materials to vividly depict the novelties, challenges, and ambivalences of Western lives in China. Her account moves fluently between the political fervour of Communists such as David and Isabel Crook, the old-school dinner parties of Western diplomats, and the excitements and frustrations of living and studying alongside young Chinese at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Throughout, the book evokes the tension between privilege and exclusion that many Western visitors and residents experienced: although many enjoyed better living and working conditions than their Chinese counterparts, they were for the most part kept at careful arm’s length from the Chinese population. A number of residents paid a heavy price for choosing China, imprisoned as “spies” during the Cultural Revolution’s most feverish phase of anti-foreignism. Conflicts of Chinese and Western identity generated trauma and sometimes tragedy: the son of the famous translating duo Gladys and Xianyi Yang had a mental breakdown, which ended in his suicide by self-immolation.
We now fortunately possess a number of well-researched accounts of the lives of Westerners (North Americans, Western Europeans, Australians, and New Zealanders) in Mao-era China, based on extensive archival and oral history work. But Mao-era China also identified strongly with revolutionary movements in the “Third World” (parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America) and engaged in substantial outreach to these regions (in the form, for example, of aid programs and invitations to study and train in China). I look forward to future publications that make use of the rich opportunities existing for archival and oral history research on this topic, to present the PRC experiences and perspectives of individuals from territories beyond North America, Western Europe, and the Antipodes.
Julia Lovell
Birkbeck, University of London, London, England