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User:CWH/"Thunder Out of China"

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Thunder Out of China
AuthorTheodore White
Annalee Jacoby
LanguageEnglish
Publication placeUnited States

Thunder Out of China is a 1946 best-selling book by Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby that reports on the experience of 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 and has been called the "one of the most popular WW II books of all time" and has "largely withstood the test of time." [1]

Background[edit]

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. [2] 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.[3]

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.” [4]

Contents and argument[edit]

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.[5]

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 [6]

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" [7]. The Chinese government was dominated by "feudal minded men" who ran it in the interests of "feudal landlords" [8]. 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" [9]. Hayford concludes that the book presents revolution as "fearful, likely, and natural."[10]

Reception and influence[edit]

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.[11] Donald G. Tewksbury, writing in Far Eastern Survey,

[12]

Paul French called the "one of the most popular WWII books of all time," one that has "largely withstood the test of time." [5]


Orville Schell recommended it as of the five best books on China and the West. He called it a "great epic of misunderstanding." It was 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."[13]

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". [14]

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. [15] One of Chiang's biographers [16].

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, London: Victor Golancz, 1947; 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]

  1. ^ French, Paul (21 September 2023), Thunder Out of China: One of the Most Popular WW II Books of All Time
  2. ^ Rand (1995), pp. ??.
  3. ^ ??
  4. ^ White (1978), p. 391.
  5. ^ a b French (2023).
  6. ^ Yarrow (2022).
  7. ^ WhiteJacoby (1946), p. xix.
  8. ^ WhiteJacoby (1946), p. 310-313.
  9. ^ WhiteJacoby (1946), p. 20.
  10. ^ Hayford (2009), p. 306.
  11. ^ Lattimore, Owen (December 1946). "(Review) Thunder Out of China". The Atlantic.
  12. ^ Donald G. Tewksbury, "Review," Far Eastern Survey (12 March 1947) 16. 5: 58–59. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3021750
  13. ^ Alex Ash (5 January 2012). "The Best Books on China and the West recommended by Orville Schell". Five Books. Retrieved 10 June 2024.
  14. ^ T. Christopher Jespersen. American Images of China, 1931-1949. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 ISBN 0804725969): 131
  15. ^ Hans van de Ven
  16. ^ Alexander Pantsov, Victorious in Defeat: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-Shek, China, 1887-1975. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023 ISBN 0300260202):

External links[edit]


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