Nostalgia for Pearl Buck's ‘the good earth’∗

This essay first appeared as the Prologue to the author's Chūgoku kindaishi kenkyū josetsu (Introduction to research on modern Chinese history; Tokyo: Keiso Book Store, 1968, 3rd printing 1972, 208 pp.), pp. 1–4. My colleague David Evans assisted me in making the translation.

The author, currently professor of history and dean of the college of liberal arts at Hiroshima University, is one of Japan's most senior Marxist scholars of China. Born in 1914, he first went to China in 1939 as a Foreign Office scholar. It was there that he began his important researches on Chinese society, which have included work on such subjects as feudalism, guilds, self‐government movements, economic history, the Chinese revolution. After the war he was active in the peace and anti‐nuclear bomb movements.

Abstract

Until the Chinese peasants made their revolution in 1949 they were known to the Western world almost exclusively as the product of Pearl Buck's (1892–1973) prose. The influence of The Good Earth was even more widespread than that of Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China. We are only now beginning to understand the peculiarities of that influence and the fictitious half‐world in which China's peasants were placed. Rural reality is only recently beginning to cut away at the historical fiction that has governed much of our thinking about China. In this little reminiscence, Imabori Seiji, himself once seduced by the humanitarian fantasies of The Good Earth, recalls how he first began the search for real peasants out there in the villages of north China. [H. L. Kahn]

Notes

This essay first appeared as the Prologue to the author's Chūgoku kindaishi kenkyū josetsu (Introduction to research on modern Chinese history; Tokyo: Keiso Book Store, 1968, 3rd printing 1972, 208 pp.), pp. 1–4. My colleague David Evans assisted me in making the translation.

The author, currently professor of history and dean of the college of liberal arts at Hiroshima University, is one of Japan's most senior Marxist scholars of China. Born in 1914, he first went to China in 1939 as a Foreign Office scholar. It was there that he began his important researches on Chinese society, which have included work on such subjects as feudalism, guilds, self‐government movements, economic history, the Chinese revolution. After the war he was active in the peace and anti‐nuclear bomb movements.