In Search of the Real China: John Pomfret

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John Pomfret, In Search of the Real China; Outsiders still see what they want to see. Foreign Affairs, November/December, 2013
www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ ... h-of-the-real-china
(book review on Kin-Ming Liu (ed), My First Trip to China; Scholars, diplomats, and journalists reflect on their first encounters with China. 
East Slope Publishing, 2012)

My comment:
(1) The book review is a terrific essay in its own right. I read it late last year. Foreign Affair allowed a glimpse of the first few paragraphs until now (I checked its website periodically). Mr Pomfret did not provide citations, so I had no way of knowing what his review was based on when he talked about various things. Today I guess Mr Pomfret’s discussion of Ming as global trading power might have in part been based on the Selden Map.
(2) “Over the last decade or so, historians and journalists have chipped away -- some with sledgehammers, others with mallets -- at several long-standing myths about China’s past. China wasn’t all darkness and pain before the communist revolution of 1949, and Western efforts to change the country, long portrayed by historians as a tragic dead end, have been far more successful than anyone could have ever dreamed -- to cite just two.”

“China wasn’t all darkness and pain before the communist revolution of 1949”  By that Mr Pomfret alluded to Ching/Qing dynasty and Republican China. For the latter, see his recent book reviews in Washington Post, which I brought to your attention just weeks ago.

(3) “REVISIONISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS * * * recent historians have marshaled a powerful case that China mattered in the past, too. Starting in the late 1990s, scholars began to skewer the notions that imperial China was never an expansionist power (it conquered huge chunks of Central Asia, after all) and that it shunned trade with the outside world. New histories of China’s nineteenth-century economy and the anti–Qing dynasty Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 have placed China at the center of the world. Fluctuations in China’s consumer demand worried the British parliament as much as the spiraling price of cotton from the American South. The Taiping Rebellion inspired Karl Marx and American missionaries alike.”
(a) British parliament worried about “the spiraling price of cotton from the American South.”
(i) History of Cotton. National Cotton Council of America (NCC), undated (in The Story of Cotton).
www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/story/index.cfm
(ii) Frequently Asked Questions. NCC, undated.
www.cotton.org/edu/faq/index.cfm
("About two thirds of the harvested crop is composed of the seed, which is crushed to separate its three products–oil, meal and hulls. * * * The meal and hulls are used as livestock, poultry and fish feed and as fertilizer")
* Read Q&A for 1, 2, 14 and 15 only.
* Q&A 14 mentioned “the US upland crop.”

Gossypium hirsutum
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossypium_hirsutum
(also known as upland cotton or Mexican cotton)
(iii) cotton
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton
(section 2.1 Industrial Revolution in Britain)

(b) Daniel Little, Marx and the Taipings. Understanding Society, Feb 13, 2009
understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2009/02/marx-and-taipings0.html
(“We might imagine that this relentless advocate for underclass interests might have cheered for the poor peasants of the Taiping Heavenly Army. But this was not the case. Marx wrote about the Taiping Rebellion several times”: Revolution in China and in Europe, New York Daily Tribune, 1853; Chinese Affairs. Die Presse, 1862)

(4)
(a) Barbara Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45. Macmillan, 1970.
(b) The German (Tuchmann) and Jewish (Ashkenazic: Tuchman) surname means “a cloth merchant (see Tuch).”

(5) “Mao Zedong, the subject of several new biographies, has similarly shed the legendary veneer applied to him by Edgar Snow, whose 1937 Red Star Over China [publisher: Left Book Club] was the first work in any language to mythologize the Great Helmsman. * * * And as for the progressive chestnut that in the mid-1940s, Mao pondered positioning himself between Washington and Moscow? That idea now appears to have belonged to the ‘New Democracy’ plan, worked out between Mao and Stalin, which successfully bamboozled a slew of US diplomats into believing that Mao was, as one claimed at the time, a mere ‘agrarian reformer’ and not, as it turned out, a Stalin acolyte.”

chestnut (n): “an old joke or story”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chestnut

(6) “RED-COLORED GLASSES   A nostalgia for something that might never have existed courses through My First Trip. No one describes it better than Orville Schell * * * In the years before China opened up, he and the rest of his fellow China watchers, he writes, resembled ‘a group of forlorn Swanns in love. And like Marcel Proust’s anti-hero’s unrequited passion for Odette, our infatuation with China was only made more ardent by the hopelessness of any possibility of attention, much less consummation.’”
(a) The German surname Schell is derived from “Middle High German schel ‘noisy,’ ‘loud.’”
(b) Swann in Love (film)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swann_in_Love_(film)
(1984; Swann/Odette)
(c) The English surname Swann is “variant spelling of Swan.”

(7) “Lois Wheeler Snow, the second wife of Edgar Snow * * * Snow [referring to Lois, not Edgar] seems willing to forgive party central for the Great Leap Forward (an estimated 40 million dead) and the Cultural Revolution (a million or so dead and the ruination of millions more lives), but not the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square (in which an estimated 800 people died).”
(a) Edgar Snow (1905-1972; marriage with Helen Foster (1932-1949); with Lois Wheeler (1949-1972; Wheeler was an actress born in 1922 and is still alive))
(b) Party Central
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Central
(a 2013 animation)