An exchange

Abstract

Since written history is what we think happened, the historian is inevitably part of the historical process he is studying, and so he must scrutinize himself as well as the flux of events that he seeks to understand. James Peck' article, “The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of America's China Watchers” (Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars II.1, October, 1969, 59-69) strikes a welcome note of criticism. During the last twenty years of non-contact with the Chinese mainland, there has been a minor American cult of the “China expert”, whose instant wisdom could provide the answer on everything west of Guam and absolve his compatriots from the need of thought; this has been an index of the American public's ducking the issues raised by our national response to the Chinese revolution. Now Vietnam has turned us psychologically inward, into a new preoccupation. East Asian area specialists in the period 1931-1945 were mainly asked about the menace of “aggressive Japanese militarism” linked with European totalitarianism; the Cold War decades saw the American public alarmed by China's new enmity as part of “monolithic international communism.” Now we are in a new climate of opinion where the greatest evil seems to come from over-extension, from “American imperialism,” or at least from within the U.S.A. and thus from within ourselves. Self-criticism is the new mood, and it seems now just as necessary and just as incomplete as those earlier concerns did in their day.