User:CWH/"Thunder Out of China"

Thunder Out of China is a 1946 best-selling book by Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby that reports on China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). The authors had been wartime correspondents for  Time magazine but resigned at the end of the war, objecting that the New York office edited or did not publish their dispatches if they were critical of the Nationalist government or its head, Chiang Kai-shek. It was a Book of the Month Club selection in 1946. Orville Schell called it a "great epic of misunderstanding" and recommended it as of the five best books on China and the West, about Chiang Kai-shek, "the failure of his experiment, and the corruption and complete unravelling of China under the pressures of Japanese occupation and war."

Background
White was a 1938 graduate of Harvard College, where he majored in History, learned to ride a horse in R.O.T.C., and studied Classical Chinese. He was the first honors student of John King Fairbank. He decided against pursuing an academic career, however, fearing the antisemitism in the profession. Instead, he went to China, taking a job with the Nationalist government in Chongqing, which had become the nation's wartime capital after the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1941, Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, who had been born in China as the son of a missionary and maintained a strong interest in the country, came to Chongqing to view China's resistance. White made such an impression that Luce made him Time's China correspondent. Jacoby was denied press credentials by the War Department until Luce used his influence; she was the the first woman war correspondent in the Pacific war. She marred Melville Jacoby, who was killed in an airfield accident in the Philippines in 1942. She later married Clifton Fadiman.

White wrote in his memoirs that in 1946 his “immediate task was clear: to write a book that explained what was happening in China. The book must say it not only first and best, but quickly. My information was important. It was news, not history. Over the years, I was to learn how much more dangerous news is than history. All of us in those days entertained the illusion that we could make events march in the direction we pointed, if we pointed clearly enough.”

Contents and argument
The book presents background chapters, "The Peasant,"

Central chapters the bombings of Chongqing, the relocations, the political conflicts in the government, the activities of the Americans and British. The authors also analyze how the war ended and the Chinese civil war began. There is detailed reporting on the wartime Kuomintang, the Chinese Communist Party, and the American-sponsored Hurley and Marshall missions.

The Henan famine of 1942 receives chapter length coverage. White reported in detail for Time magazine during the war, but the central government denied knowledge and did not respond to this provincial catastrophe. White

if you take such a peasant, treat him like a man, ask his opinion, let him vote for a local government, let him organize his own police and gendarmes, decide on his own taxes, and vote himself a reduction in rent and interest – if you do all that, the peasant becomes a man who has something to fight for, and he will fight to preserve it against any enemy, Japanese or Chinese.”  (p. 201-202) “masters of brutality”; peasants “putty in the hands of their Communist mentors” (p.202) Chinese Communist leaders “prided themselves on their democracy,” but when you listened to their conversation you found a “stubborn, irreducible realism” [228]

If the men of the middle group were well organized, they could guarantee peace. But they are not. They lack an army, a political machine, roots in any social class. Only the spread of education and industry can create enough men of the modern world to give them a broad social base.” (322)

If U.S. withdraws, within 10 years China will come under the control of the Communists, and then all of Asia [321- 322]

The historian Charles Hayford compared the book to earlier popular and academic works on China and found that it used a new scheme of history. Those earlier works saw China as unchanging, each dynasty providing new leadership but not a new social or political structure. White and Jacoby its was feudal. Hayford points to Chapter One, "The Peasant," which begins: "The Chinese who fought this war were peasants born in the Middle Ages to die in the Twentieth Century." "Less than a thousand years ago," White and Jacoby continue, "Europe lived this way; then Europe revolted". The Chinese government was dominated by "feudal minded men" who ran it in the interests of "feudal landlords". Since there was no strong middle class, the only other organized group was the Communists, who represent a new French Revolution: "We revere the memory of that Revolution, but we regard such uprisings in our own time with horror and loathing". Hayford concludes that the book presents revolution as "fearful, likely, and natural."

Reception and influence
Owen Lattimore, reviewing the book in Atlantic Magazine, wrote that the most important contention is "not that the Communists are a rising force in China, but that the key to Chinese politics is the fact that the Kuomintang is rotting away in corruption." Lattimore wrote that the book concluded that rot and the corruption weakened the Kuomintang's ability to rule or eliminate its own undesirable party bosses. The government had a hard time recruiting, younger, more honest, or more competent men. Donald G. Tewksbury, writing in Far Eastern Survey, Paul French writing in 2023 called the "one of the most popular WWII books of all time," one that has "largely withstood the test of time."

Henry Luce, fiercely loyal to Chiang, turned against White, his one-time protegee. When they passed on the street, he refused to tip his hat and denounced "that book by that ugly little Jewish son of a bitch." But Christopher Jespersen concludes that the public soon lost interest in China and the impact of the book was "ephemeral at best".

The book has been blamed for popularizing Joseph Stilwell's low estimation of Chiang Kai-shek and spreading the accusaton that Chiang was reluctant to fight the Japanese. One of Chiang's biographers. And another study charged that White “knowingly misrepresented the political situation in China because he believed the survival of China and the defeat of fascism depended on it.”