Book Review: Far East: China Assignment
| Published date | 01 December 1965 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070206502000438 |
| Date | 01 December 1965 |
| Author | Paul A. Varg |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
568
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL
leaders
of
the
government
and
party
and
the
ministries
concerned.
Much
of
this material
is
self-explanatory,
and
it
certainly
would
be
most inaccurate to
accuse
the
Peking
authorities
of
desiring
or
attempt-
ing
to
conceal
either their
aims or
their
methods.
In a
long
introductory
chapter,
Fraser
considers
the
problems
which
the
new
regime
faced
and
how
it
has
met
them
in
the
educa-
tional
field.
It is
important
to
remember,
as
he
has
shown,
that
not
all
of
these
problems
are
purely
ideological
or peculiar
to Communist
governments. There
was,
for
example,
the
vast task
of
conquering
illiteracy,
which
means
in
practice not
only
setting
up
primary
schools
in
every
village
and
getting
the
children
into
them,
but
also
the
huge
adult
education
programme
needed to
teach
the
very
large
number
of
illiterate
adults.
More
directly
related
to
the
nature
of
the
regime
is
the
fact
that
all
senior
academics
without
exception
were educated
in
the liberal
or conservative
traditions
of
earlier
forms
of
government,
and
a
very
high
proportion
of
them
studied
abroad
in
the
United
States,
Europe and
Japan,
all
of
which
countries
taught
an
anti-Com-
munist
ideology
in
some
form.
The
thought
of
these
indispensable
people
has
to
be
"remoulded"-if
they
are
to serve
as
reliable
instruments
for
the
regime
to
use.
One
has
only
to
imagine
the
reverse situation,
when
if
after
several
generations
of
Communist
government
a
country
were
to
undergo
an
anti-Communist
revolution, introduce
a
liberal
system
of
education,
and then
try
to
operate
it
with
an
academic
com-
munity
wholly educated
under
Communism-to
see
the
problem.
Professor
Fraser
discusses such
questions
with
temperate
objec-
tivity
which
puts
the
problem
in
perspective.
It is
not
only
instruction,
but
indoctrination,
which
must
be
the
twin purposes
of
Chinese
Com-
munist
education:
the
requirements
of
the
new
revolutionary
society
impose
this
aim,
and
it is
certain
that
it
will
not
be
laid
aside.
A
new
class,
or
rather
type
of
man
must
be
built
for
the
new
society.
Australian
National
University
C.
P.
FITZGERALD
CHINA
ASSIGNMENT.
By
Karl
Lott
Rankin.
1964.
(Seattle:
University
of
Washington
Press.
xix,
343pp.
$6.95)
Karl Lott
Rankin
served
as
minister
and
then
ambassador
of
the
United
States
to
the
Republic
of
China
from
1949
to
1958.
It
was
his
first
experience
in
the
Far
East.
Prior
to
this
time
he
had
occupied
foreign
service
posts
in
Europe
and
the
Middle
East.
His
experience
as
an
administrator
of
a
relief
programme
in
the
Soviet
Union
shortly
after
the
first
World
War
and
in
both
Czechoslovakia
and
Greece
gave
him
a
profound and
abiding
distrust
of
what
he
calls
the
international
communist
conspiracy.
This
made
it
possible
for
him
to
fit
into
the
political climate
of
Taiwan
with
ease. Indeed,
he
appears
at
times
as
the
ardent
spokesman
for
Chiang's
government.
This
is
understandable.
The
Chinese
on
Taiwan
refused to
tolerate
the
mildest
differences
of
opinion, seeing
dangers
of
betrayal
in
any
deviation
from
complete
and
obsessive
hostility
to
the
mainland
rngime.
Ambassador
Rankin
won
the
confidence
of
the
Chinese
Nationalists
by
accepting
their
view
that
a
return
to
the
mainland
was
inevitable,
that
any
talk
of
two
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