The Twisted Academy
By Arthur Waldron, Hillel Fradkin

China's relative opening to the world in the late 1970s has provided scholars with something that many never imagined possible: the opportunity to compare facts that are known today to the assessments the scholars had made of that country when it was still tightly closed. Not surprisingly, some scholars got a great deal right. Others, were very, very wrong.

One of the best examples of this is the handling of the grim and stomach-turning story of how 40 million Chinese perished in the famines that resulted from Mao Zedong's disastrous attempt to make the Chinese economy perform "greater-faster-better-cheaper" during the Great Leap Forward. From a scholarly viewpoint, however, this is the story of a most remarkable sin of omission perpetrated by the Western China-watching community: The famine was not reported in the respectable Western media at the time.

Compare two scholars who got things right--Jürgen Domes and Edward Rice--with two who got them wrong--William Hinton and John Fairbank.

Ironically, those who missed the great, mind-boggling tragedy were those who purported to take a "Chinese" point of view of the whole thing: those who sought to be culturally sensitive and aware. What they learned was that the Cultural Revolution flowed from Mao's important extension of Marx's theories, that class conflict did not end with the victory of communism but in fact continued. Regular struggles were therefore necessary to keep the revolution young and avoid bureaucratization and sclerosis.

William Hinton is an appealing character who has genuinely given his life to China, albeit in a rather naive and confused way. For Hinton, all that happened in China until Deng's time is for the best, part of the unfolding of one of the most dramatic stories of national revival in human history, with immense relevance for South and Southeast Asia, which share many of the structures and problems of the Chinese agrarian economy.

For Hinton, above all, these lessons have to do with feeding the hungry--a worthy goal to be sure, though not achieved by China as successfully as he maintained. But there is a worse defect. To read Hinton's first book, the misleading but readable Fanshen, one would think that China's fundamental need was for land redistribution. But throughout most of China, land had been privately owned; "Landlords" were people who owned a few acres. And the productivity of "unreformed" Chinese agriculture, landlords and all, was consistently as high as can be achieved without modern machinery, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. So the premise of Hinton's most famous book was incorrect to begin with.

But even in Hinton's far more honest follow-up, Shenfan, in 1983, in which he revisits the towns he described in his first book, he spends more than two dozen pages on the Great Leap and includes only one indirect mention of the great starvation.

John Fairbank was an altogether different sort of man. He was, for one thing, seemingly free of human passions. His own account of his career, Chinabound: A Fifty Year Memoir, must rank among the most unrevealing autobiographies ever written. He was also, as far as one can tell, politically ambitious. But his dreamed-of public career evaporated when the victorious communists turned out to have little interest in trade and even less in diplomacy with the United States. But he thought the communists deserved a fair hearing, and he did his best to provide it.

Thus, successive editions of Fairbank's widely-read introduction to twentieth-century China, The United States and China, tread very lightly on the subject of the famine. In the final edition, Fairbank devotes eight pages to the Great Leap Forward and the collective farms Mao created. His only reference to the devastating mass starvation is this single, solitary sentence: "Malnutrition was widespread and some starvation occurred." Only in his widely praised final work, China: A New History, written after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, does he finally acknowledge the full extent of the famine.

But even as Hinton and Fairbank dominated university syllabi, other scholars wrote books that were widely available and contained accounts that were remarkably close to what we now know to have been true. During the 1960s and early '70s, Jürgen Domes, a man of East European ancestry who was a university professor in Germany, published a remarkable short book called The Internal Politics of China in 1973. He has the following to say about the famine: "At least ten million died...but an estimate of even several times this number cannot be entirely dismissed." How does Domes know? Look at his footnotes and you will find references to, of all things, the official communist Chinese press--Chinese writers slipped much important information into print. Domes, an assiduous reader of Chinese primary materials, worked outside "the field"--which is to say he read mostly Chinese writings, rather than the latest crop of essays and opinions of Westerners commenting on other Westerners.

Another observer who got things astonishingly right was Edward Rice, an old-time U.S. government China watcher who served for many years as consul general in Hong Kong. Like Domes, he immersed himself in Chinese raw materials. His book, Mao's Way, has stood up remarkably well. In his chapters on the Great Leap, he describes both the famine itself and the widespread dissent it caused. Above all, Rice understood that the death of innocent Chinese farmers in a famine caused by party policy was not so much an ideological as a political issue.

Writing at roughly the same time, with access to exactly the same materials, Rice and Domes saw most of the truth clearly, while Hinton and Fairbank missed it completely--until, of course, the famine was officially acknowledged by the Chinese government. This admission came in a typically indirect way. The Chinese Academy of Sciences sent computer tapes--knowing perfectly well what they contained--to Professor Ansley Coale at Princeton University, a respected demographer. His findings were more or less buried in a pamphlet with the anodyne title Rapid Population Change in China, 1952-1982. Thus did the famine become a fact. Chinese scholars today will quote figures of the order of 40 million dead.

The current generation of China-watchers, of course, is growing up without any sense of how strong the denial once was, and above all without learning the general lessons about studying foreign cultures that are so clearly taught by the incident I have just described. What are these lessons?

First, it is essential to know the language of the country you are studying. This should be obvious, but it is not. Over the course of 20 years I heard Fairbank speak only three words of Chinese. Yet, as the examples of both Rice and Domes make clear, language is the key.

One problem with China studies during the Great Leap was that too many people thought they already knew what was happening--not from empirical study, but from theory--and therefore neglected the former. The lesson: Never trust theories over facts. This brings us to a basic logical point that is often forgotten: Scholars need to look for evidence that undercuts their arguments. Scholars like Hinton and Fairbank never did this. Even as refugees trampled down the border fences and streamed into Hong Kong, the Western academic consensus was not that there was famine in China, but that there was not. Lurking beneath all this scholarly and logical argument, was a desire not to know, a willingness to collude in deception.

Those who didn't understand Chinese communism never took Chinese culture seriously enough. They imagined China's deeply rooted culture could be swept away by twentieth-century innovations and government fiat. My advice to would-be China watchers: Know China first, and don't confuse it with the People's Republic.

Sympathy, Not Grievances
By Hillel Fradkin

One of the most important aspects of contemporary Muslim society is a sense of humiliation and oppression. This is epitomized by the view, still held by a majority of Muslims around the world, that the attacks of September 11 were not and could not have been the work of Osama bin Laden, but were instead perpetrated by the Mossad or the CIA or both.

It was impossible that Muslims were to blame for 9/11, according to the Muslim view, because on the one hand the attacks required careful planning and above all exact timing, while on the other hand Muslims are never on time and are generally disorganized. Hence the attacks must have been the work of the West itself. But why would the West attack itself? The Muslim answer: to provide a pretext for attacks on the Islamic world, like the campaign in Afghanistan.

How should Westerners understand this important cultural datum? Conventional academic study will point to 150 years of colonial or semi-colonial rule. But Muslims themselves say that their sense of humiliation derives not only from the current ignominy of their condition but from the recollection of a more glorious time when it was they rather than the Western world who were powerful. A time when it was they, to put it in the terms of current cultural study, who were the oppressors rather than the oppressed. If we follow the truly crude logic of contemporary cultural study, we might say that Islamic oppression of the West led Westerners to seek a means of overcoming their weakness, which, when successful, led to the oppression of the Muslim world.

Would it not make more sense, in the interests of understanding Islamic culture, to ask what accounts for the decline of the great Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century? Does it not make sense to ask why the Arab world, liberated from colonial rule at the end of WWII, has failed so miserably politically, economically, and militarily ever since? Above all, would it not make sense to ask what aspects of Muslim or Arab culture, independent of the depredations of outsiders, have contributed to these sad consequences?

These questions have been thoughtfully pursued by Bernard Lewis and Fuad Ajami--with great learning, respect, affection, even love. For those efforts, their intellectual colleagues have rewarded them with vilification. They have, however, achieved a level of real understanding of the Islamic world.

The failures of our present orientation should lead us to resurrect an older academic approach: the notion that one should strive for a sympathetic understanding of the object of one's study. "Sympathetic understanding" meant that one would try to understand a culture first exactly as it understood itself. This kind of understanding doesn't always lead to sympathy in the conventional sense of the word. A full and sympathetic understanding of Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran might lead to repulsion. But whatever the outcome, one's conclusion would be based on a clear and accurate understanding. One would also have the satisfaction of knowing that one had tried to be fair and just.

Of course at this point one will hear loud objections. There are many who claim that it is never possible to be fair and just; that one's ultimate interest is always power over the other; that cultural study is necessarily unjust, since it seeks to oppress. From this perspective, it is hard to understand why someone would engage in the study of another culture except to advance his own interests. And hard to understand, by the way, what is wrong with that.

Since this idea seems to be written in our hearts by the nature of things it must be impossible for anyone to behave otherwise. But such a conclusion--the abandonment of justice--is too hard for us to bear. Hence such thinking has led to the view that the injustice of studying other cultures must be rectified by empowering the powerless. As a result, the chief object of scholarship today is to convey the grievances of another culture, as if culture was essentially constituted by grievance. All other sentiments, longings, and aspirations enjoy a much-diminished status, if they are not ignored altogether. This, it should be obvious, is greatly impoverished understanding. But this need not be the case.

Islamic discourse was once alien to me. But that did not prevent me from trying and, in my opinion, succeeding in understanding how the Koran viewed the world and especially its sister religions Judaism and Christianity. Unlike our current students of culture, Islam does not claim to be unintelligible to the outsider. It presents an argument and in doing so means not only to command but to persuade. It escapes me, therefore, how one could do justice to Islam by operating on the conventional premises of contemporary academic study.

Having taken so much refuge and comfort in the repetition of simple-minded dogmas, moving away from the flawed modern understanding of Islam will be difficult for most scholars, as well as for those in the mainstream. But there simply is no alternative if we are serious about understanding other cultures.

—These two articles are adapted from talks given at the National Association of Scholars conference in Washington, D.C. this past spring. Arthur Waldron is director of Asian Studies at AEI. Hillel Fradkin is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.