User:CWH/"Thunder Out of China"
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Thunder Out of China is a 1946 best-selling book by Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby that reported on the experience of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). The book drew on the authors' wartime reporting as China correspondents for Time magazine. They resigned their positions with the magazine, however, objecting that the New York office edited their dispatches or did not publish them if they were critical of the Nationalist government or its head, Chiang Kai-shek.
Background[edit]
White was a 1938 graduate of Harvard College, where he majored in History and studied Classical Chinese. He was the first honors student of John King Fairbank, graduating with ??? honors. He decided against pursuing a scholarly career, however, because of the antisemitism in academic 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. [1] [2]
White later wrote 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” [3]
Contents and argument[edit]
Reception and influence[edit]
Owen Lattimore, writing in Atlantic Magazine wrote that the book's most important contention is "not that the Communists are a rising force in China, but that the key to Chinese polities is the fact that the Kuomintang is rotting away in corruption." As the rot spreads and the corruption flourishes, they say, there is a corresponding shrinkage in the Kuomintang's ability to rule, to build, to get rid of its own undesirable party bosses, or to recruit, younger, more honest, or more competent men.[4]
References[edit]
- Hayford, Charles W. (2009). "China by the Book: China Hands and China Stories, 1848-1948". Journal of American-East Asian Relations. 16 (4). Brill: 285–311. doi:10.1163/187656109792655508.
- Rand, Peter (1995). China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster.
- White, Theodore H.; Jacoby, Annalee (1946), Thunder Out of China, reprinted, Da Capo, 1980, New York: Sloane, ISBN 0306801280 ONLINE at Internet Archive.
- ——— (1978). In Search of History: A Personal Adventure. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0060145994..
Notes[edit]
- ^ Rand (1995), pp. ??.
- ^ Jacoby had been married to Melville Jacoby, who was killed by ??? in 1942, and later married Clifton Fadiman Annalee Whitmore Fadiman.
- ^ Theodore White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure, Warner Books, 1981 [1978]: 319.
- ^ Lattimore, Owen (December 1946). "(Review) Thunder Out of China". The Atlantic.
- ^ Donald G. Tewksbury; Review: Thunder out of China, by Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby. Far Eastern Survey 12 March 1947; 16 (5): 58–59. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3021750
External links[edit]