A.
Doak Barnett. Communist China: The Early Years, 1949-55. New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1964.
A. Doak Barnett’s book, Communist China, told
readers much about the hectic social policies and changes that were implemented
in the early years of Communist rule in China.
This collection of disparate essays is composed of reports written by
Barnett after he witnessed the Communist victory in Beijing and during his
subsequent stay in Hong Kong. There, he
served as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, an associate for the
American Universities Field Staff (AUFS), a staff member of the American
consulate general, and a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs
(ICWA). In these various capacities the
author recorded his observations on Communist China. The resulting volume was one of the first attempts of a Western
scholar in the 1950s to understand the main tasks undertaken by the CCP: consolidation
of political power, social reorganization and economic rehabilitation.
Written
between 1949 and 1955, ten years before the book’s publication, the twenty
essays are presented with little revision.
Barnett based his observations on official CCP government publications,
official newspapers, reports, and refugee interviews. At the time, these were the only sources available and as a
result, his essays generally replicate the official party discourse. Organized topically, the book’s chapters are
comprised of assorted reports on social control and political organization,
propaganda and indoctrination, mass mobilization, and economic
development. This work’s disjointedness
is perhaps a result of the fact that the author did not intend for it to be a
comprehensive survey or an over-all analysis of events.
Contemporary
reviewers did not overlook the author’s experience, repute and knowledgeable
insight (John W. Lewis, JAS, 24.4: 685-6; Richard Walker, China
Quarterly, 25, 231-3). However, one
reviewer rightly noted the work’s lack of conceptual framework and failure to
support the claim that “subsequent developments in Communist China cannot be
fully understood without some knowledge of this 1949-55 period,” as Barnett
asserts in his preface (ix). As early
as 1965, a contemporary reviewer in Barnett’s own discipline bemoans the book
as missed opportunity for a leading political scientist to reconsider the crude
methods of scholarship in vogue in the wake of the Cold War (John Lewis, Journal
of Modern History, 27.3: 420).
Indeed,
Barnett’s study for the most part reflects rather than rethinks the
conventional methods of China scholarship and the American political climate
during Cold War heyday. The perspective
of the victory of communism-socialism in a modernizing nation as a divergent
path permeates all of Barnett’s judgments of the new ruling regime. As a political scientist, the author’s focal
point is the state and does not take into consideration the social conditions,
processes of culture and imperialism that may have played a role in China’s
modern transformation. In this sense,
this work is largely an elite-oriented, top-down view of recent change in
China. Indeed, in Barnett’s view,
revolutionary China was “still in motion, developing, and dying away”
(327). A rather monolithic view of
Communist China during this time period emerges from such statements as
“nothing was non-political” (71), when referring to art life, and “the Party
remains an effective totalitarian instrument” (59).
Without
a glossary, Chinese romanization translations or footnotes, Barnett’s study
qualifies only as a good summary of early fifties China and a reflection of
Cold War scholarship produced in America.
More sensitive and analytical overviews of this time period can be found
in such recent textbooks as Maurice Meisner’s Mao’s China and After
(1999) or Jonathan Spence’s Search For Modern China (2000). Still, the wealth of facts relayed in Communist
China attests to the continuing need and room in the China field for
in-depth examinations of the transitional years immediately following the CCP
revolution.
Ellen
Huang
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Copyright 2003. All rights reserved.