China 2050

"It is wise to remember that the Chinese Communist leaders have had a story quite different from their Russian counterparts. Before they came to power, many of the Russian leaders spent their lives in underground work, jail or exile. Through the sudden collapse of the Czarist regime, they were able to seize control of their country in two or threeyears, and soon went into the isolation which goes with great power. It was easy for them to think in theories and treat the Russian people as statistics on a piece of paper.

But Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues prepared for national power gradually, over more than twenty years. From 1927 on, they lived in parts of China they controlled. And right until the day they entered Peking in 1949, they were in villages or small towns where they could not be isolated from the people around them. Since they had to extend their power village by village, county by county, and had to do so much of it by persuasion, they had to study these people and fir their theories to them, rather than vice versa.

I think it is just possible that Chinese Communism may be something new and unique, based on the same ideas which produced Western communism, but growing in such different circumstances, among a ver un-western people, that its final form is unpredictable. The Chinese revolution has taken a century to work up to the collapse of feudalism, so I suspect that if it meets no outside interference, its larger stages will spread over at least one more century; it cannot be considered complete until China is fully modernized. By that time the Chinese government may be Communist, non-Communist or of a type not known yet."

Graham Peck, Two kinds of Time. (written in 1950)

60 years ago, a wise advice on democracy

"As a nation, we seem over-eager to attribute our own character to other countries. When we see foreigners who can speak glib American English and seem familiar with our ways, we assume that their minds work like ours. When we notice that a foreign country is buying American automobiles, airplanes, and other goods we like to believe it is becoming modernized in all ways. One of the chief reasons why the Kuomintang was able to get so much American aid was because its relations with us were handled by untypical Americanized Chinese like T. V. Soong and Madame Chiang. I don't suppose I need to remind any Americans how widely it used to be assumed that because T. V. Soong could act like an American businessman in a serge suit, and the Madame had been to Wellesley, China must be full of many little replicas of them, ready and able to turn the country into an imitation America. The current notion that the Germans and the Japanese are becoming democratic because they play baseball is part of the same American failing.

It was always rather improbable that a society like the American one could be established in China, because of the vast difference in the size and the nature of the classes. All that we think best about America -democratic government, a relatively decent industrialization by private interests, a fairly strong tradition of Christian behavior- had to be developed painfully in Western Europe and America over the course of several centuries. The only thing which made this possible was the growth of a middle class with enough economic security for public interests and enough education to use the increasingly complex ideas and techniques of our civilization."


Graham Peck, Two kinds of time (1950).
(illustration by Graham Peck)