John Israel

The Red Guard Phenomenon: Precedents and Prospects

ONE SIDE EFFECT of the Cultural Revolution has been an epidemic of instant punditry, an affliction to which China-watchers are unusually susceptible. In its acute form, this disease affects the minds of learned academicians and experienced journalists, causing them to conjure up proofs .that the current situation in China could not possibly be other than the way it is. The advent of the unexpected generates feverish attempts to prove the inevitability of the new status quo-and the infallibility of the analyst. In the early stages of the Red Guard movement, pundits painstakingly demonstrated that students-and only students-were fit instru-

《共同走过的日子—美中交往两百年》 A JOURNEY SHARED: THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA—TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF HISTORY

On August 8, 2008 in the northeastern corner of Beijing’s Sanlitun Embassy Quarter, an opening ceremony was held for the new American Embassy. The shining glass and steel structure, built to accommodate more than 900 diplomats and staff, symbolized a new era in the relationship between two great nations, the United States and China. To mark the occasion, the Department of State came out with a richly illustrated sixty-four-page book. This handsome volume was published simultaneously in Chinese. The front cover shows two solitary figures on a raft, poling their way along a river through a mountainous Chinese landscape, their silhouettes etched against the golden sunlight reflected in the river. Each page of this artfully designed volume is edged with a line of burgundy, setting off a golden stripe on the outer margin. A full page delineated by a dignified brocade strip proclaims each of three major sections: The Beginnings of Relations to the End of the Nineteenth Century, From Open Door to Chinese Civil War, and American-Chinese Relations in the Twentieth Century (1949–2000). There is an introduction by US Department of State Historian Marc J. Susser and a Preface by Ambassador Clark T. Randt, Jr. In the United States, volumes of this sort, in which visual elegance overshadows a somewhat anemic text, are known as ‘‘coffee table books’’, intended to be prominently displayed in the living room to enhance the décor and impress guests. Why, then, would a scholarly journal ask an American specialist in modern and contemporary Chinese history to review this work? The answer lies in its subject, the timing of its appearance, and, above all, in its authorship. China and the United States now have reached a turning-point in their two centuries of interaction. For a major part of this period—from the Opium War (1839–42) to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1949), a radical imbalance existed between a rising American power and a China aptly described as ‘‘the sick man of Asia’’, what would now be called a ‘‘failed state’’. Following half a century’s transition, China now emerges, in the twenty-first century, as a rising power with unlimited potential to play a major, even dominant,

An Introduction to Liu Cho-ch'ang's "The Democratic Thought of Thomas Jefferson"

Liu Cho-chang is, by his own account, Chinas only published Jefferson scholar. The appearance of his article is one manifestation of the resurgence of academic liberals educated in Western-model universities before 1949.