The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of The 1990s
by Sadako Ogata
W.W. Norton, 402 pages, $27.95

Reviewed by Michael Barnett
June 2005

Sadako Ogata was not the obvious choice to head the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees when she took over in February 1991. She broke precedent in several ways. She was the first women, the first Japanese, and the first academic to run the world’s refugee agency. Nor had she spent a lifetime preparing for this role. Although she had participated in several diplomatic missions and helped write a U.N. report on the human rights situation in Burma, at the time of her selection she was hardly an expert on refugee or humanitarian affairs and instead was serving as the dean of the Department of Foreign Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. As she confesses in this fascinating memoir, she had to learn on the job.

Fortunately, she proved to be a quick student. She took over an organization that was experiencing adversity at the worst possible moment. She was the third high commissioner in less than three years, the agency, which runs on voluntary contributions, was near bankruptcy, and it had little support from states. Such management issues would have to wait, however, because UNHCR was in the thick of the first post-Cold War crisis—Iraq. After Saddam Hussein was evicted from Kuwait, he turned his vengeance on “disloyal” Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north. More than 1.5 million Kurds fled to the Turkish border, but Turkey, citing security concerns, denied them entry. They were now stranded in the mountains of northern Iraq in the middle of winter. The U.S., facing a public-relations disaster because it had encouraged the Iraqi minorities to rebel against Mr. Hussein and then watched as they were mowed down, launched a major relief effort. Temporary housing, though, was a stopgap solution, and the U.S. asked UNHCR to find a more permanent solution. Although the Kurds were technically outside of UNHCR’s mandate because they were internally-displaced and not bona fide refugees who had crossed an international border, Ms. Ogata’s instinct was to do what could be done and only later worry about whether she had broken any rules.

Her willingness to improvise, she recounts, reflected her calculation that UNHCR would have to learn to adapt creatively to new situations in the years ahead if it was to remain relevant to the needs of refugee populations. She says she adopted two guiding principles upon taking the office. UNHCR had to be fleet of foot and quick of mind. Her fear was that if UNHCR “remained slow, static and conservative,” then it would cease to be relevant. “It had to be quick, smart, effective, and adaptable to a fast-changing environment.” It also had to do more than tell states to protect refugees; it had to help them find solutions. Ms. Ogata used these commitments to brilliant effect over the next 10 years in a string of refugee crises, stretching from Burma to Colombia.

Rather than cover the dozens of emergencies of the period, she focuses on four: Iraq, the Balkan wars, Rwanda and the Great Lakes, and Afghanistan. She acknowledges that these four were different from most of the situations the agency confronted over the decade because of the sheer number of populations affected and the attention they received from Great Powers and the U.N. But they serve her purpose well. She writes her memoir not to deliver the ultimate insider’s account of these crises or to provide a detailed autobiography of the institution. Instead, her intention is to testify to the enduring needs of these displaced and denationalized populations, and to remind states that helping refugees is not only a matter of principle, it also is a matter of international peace and security.

These emergencies are defined by two factors that severely constrained what the organization could do. UNHCR was increasingly involved in delivering relief to populations that were trapped by “new wars.” New wars differ from old wars in various ways, but one particular difference is that they are populated by a motley assortment of militaries, paramilitaries, mercenaries, militias, bandits and rogue elements. Not only do they have little patience for the niceties of international humanitarian law and the need to differentiate the civilian from the combatant, but they generally see the victimization of populations as part of their strategy. Specifically, the combatants frequently adopted various tactics, including forcible expulsion, mass killings and deportations, that were intended to demoralize the population so that they will either submit or flee.

The victims of war are now its intended targets. Getting access to the populations in need frequently required UNHCR to negotiate with the very people who were directly responsible for the emergency. Such negotiations not only put money, food, and medicine into the hands of the very combatants who caused such misery, but these resources can help fuel wars. UNHCR, as it liked to say, could only choose “the least bad” of the alternatives. If it chooses a policy of not negotiating with extorters, then these populations might perish. If it does negotiate, then it might extend the suffering because it gives thugs the motive and reward for turning populations into objects of ransom. This was the choice that faced UNHCR in Bosnia in the so-called safe havens (a cruel invention of the Western powers, as Ms. Ogata repeatedly reminds the reader) and in the refugee camps in Zaire after the Rwandan genocide, where the perpetrators used their control over the camps to gain the resources they needed to take care of unfinished business.

The reason why UNHCR faced such tragic choices was because states refused to do what they could and they should. Certainly states were more generous over the 1990s, a generosity informed by a desire to do the right thing and by a belief that refugee flights could threaten international peace and security (an argument that Ms. Ogata continuously sounded). But there were decided limits to states’ generosity—limits set by national interests. They wanted to do something, but not too much. Humanitarian assistance became a way not only to express their concern but also to avoid the political and military commitments that would be necessary to end the emergency. In the wars of Yugoslavia, states used the UNHCR to express their concern and to limit their involvement; the results were years of ethnic cleansing and societies destroyed. Only when Western nations were embarrassed into using military force in August 1995 was there a sighting of the end of the Bosnian conflict. The only answer to the militarized camps in Zaire was a military intervention that would separate the true refugees from the genocidaires. As Ms. Ogata famously stated, there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems. Humanitarian assistance is necessary, but it is not enough.

This new environment, the emergence of the new wars and the willingness of states to fund humanitarian assistance for principled and strategic reasons, forced UNHCR to adapt and provided ample opportunity to expand. It became a lead humanitarian agency. It extended its assistance mission from refugees to internally-displaced populations. Whereas once it waited for refugees to cross a border to reach protection, it now brought protection to them, became involved in prevention, and attempting to get states to recognize basic minority human rights so that individuals would not be forced to flee. Whereas once it played a passive role in refugee repatriation, increasingly it facilitated their return by actively preparing the conditions at home. Whereas once it said goodbye to refugees at the border crossing with a handshake and a small care package, it now accompanied them on their returned and helped with their reintegration. In order to ensure their reintegration, it became involved in all kinds of nation-building projects, including building justice systems, encouraging reconciliation, establishing the rule of law, and restoring economic livelihoods. The expansion is not over. Ms. Ogata closes her book with a plea for greater international involvement in peacebuilding and human security.

As might be expected of a secretary-general who cared deeply for refugees, her organization, and her staff, she could rankle a diplomatic class that liked secretary-generals to know their place. In understated language she recounts moments when she clashed with Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, particularly so when she unilaterally decided to suspend relief operations in Bosnia because of dangers to personnel in the field. After the genocide in Rwanda she implored states to not forsake the Rwandans, once again, and to finally send the military force required to take back camps back from the thugs. If they did not, she warned, calamity would continue to spread across the region. Millions of dollars spent on damage control and millions of lives lost in central Africa are the consequences of their inaction, as she reminds the reader.

Ms. Ogata proved controversial at headquarters. She hints of moments of internal dissent, but, unfortunately, rarely provides details. As Ms. Ogata declares, she is by nature a pragmatist. This does not mean that she was absent ethical principles, but instead that her ethics derived from an attempt to make the best out of a bad situation. Sometimes doing so could lead her to flaunt tradition within the organization, to make pacts with states that sought to relieve their commitments to refugees, and to even ignore sacrosanct refugee rights. She and other pragmatists within the agency could defend their policies on the grounds that they were demanded by the situation. Another group within the UNHCR, though, frequently interpreted Ms. Ogata’s pragmatism as a Euphemism for compromising on basic rights and principles. Consider the following two issues. Humanitarian organizations such as UNHCR are supposed to be impartial, independent, neutral, and apolitical, which ultimately means not taking sides in a conflict and not associating too closely with the combatants. In the opening days of the NATO bombing of Kosovo in March 1999, UNHCR found itself overwhelmed by the refugee flight of Kosavar Albanians. In an unprecedented decision, she requested NATO’s assistance, a party to the conflict, and then subsequently watched NATO define the humanitarian agenda. For many in the organization, this move compromised UNHCR’s impartiality and injured its protection and relief missions.

More divisive was the matter of repatriation. A cornerstone of refugee law is voluntary repatriation, that refugees should not be returned against their will to a place that, in their view, still threatens their physical safety. This principle can force states to host refugees for extended periods of time, and many states find this an unwanted burden. Consequently, when they tire of the refugees they can insist that they go home, regardless of what either the refugees themselves of refugee law might say. In order to “encourage” their return, states sometimes will resort to force. When this happens, UNHCR is in an impossible situation. It either can make the best of a bad situation and associate itself with a forced repatriation in order to reduce the cost to refugees, or it can protest on the sidelines, far from where it might be needed. Ms. Ogata ably defends her decision to associate UNHCR with Tanzania’s forced repatriation of the Rwandan refugees in late 1996 on the grounds that it was the best option at that moment. Yet the organization’s emphasis on repatriation can mean that UNHCR also, as she describes it, “facilitates” and “encourages” repatriation. Such a policy can mean nothing more than working with the home government to prepare the ground for a return. But it also can mean encouraging return even when the situation at home has not changed. This happened in 1994, when UNHCR helped to repatriate 200,000 Rohingya refugees to Burma—a serial violator of human rights. For the fundamentalists in the organization, Ms. Ogata could be dangerously creative and pragmatic.

When states select the heads of international organizations, they often opt for the safe choice, which they define as a chief that will tell states what they want to hear, will make few waves, and make even fewer demands. Although they might have imagined that a female Japanese political scientist with no real expertise in refugee affairs or prior experience in the U.N. system would be a safe choice, thankfully they were wrong. Ms. Ogata’s commitment to refugees and humanitarian action defined her tenure as high commissioner, and this commitment is evident on every page. Her retrospective account forces the reader to not only ask what else might have been done for the displaced and uprooted, but also what else can be done in the future.

Mr. Barnett is Stassen Chair of International Affairs at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and an expert on humanitarian affairs. He is the author of Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Cornell, 2002).

Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang, Jon Halliday and Jonathan Cape, 832 pages, $35

Reviewed by Jonathan Mirsky

Two years ago at a Harvard conference devoted to Mao Zedong, retired Beijing University Professor Yue Daiyun recalled her suffering during the Maoist era. “Why would Mao relentlessly and repeatedly knock down and trample those who came to support him, had never opposed him, indeed embraced and loved him?” The constant fear during those years, she said, was that “no one is safe.”

Too infirm to come to the Harvard conference, Li Rui, once Mao’s secretary, sent a paper stating that “Mao was a person who did not fear death and he did not care how many were killed. Tens of millions of people suffered during every political movement and millions starved to death.”

Most of the contemporary biographers of Mao, from Stuart Schram, (still the leading Mao scholar), to Philip Short, author of Mao: A Life, were at Harvard. Only two guests from Beijing praised the chairman. But there was an effort among the other academics to find why many Chinese worshipped Mao.

One of those present was Harvard’s Roderick MacFarquhar, who in volume three of his great The Origins of the Cultural Revolution compared Mao to Hitler and wrote, “I have been particularly interested in the human tragedy represented by Mao’s purge of his long-time comrades of the Long March and the base areas [and] his dissolution of the Yan’an ‘Round Table.’”

Now comes Jung Chang, author of the excellent, bestseller Wild Swans. She and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, have written Mao: The Unknown Story—which is huge in every sense. They answer Professor MacFarquhar’s concern, Professor Yue’s question—how could Mao do it?—and refute Li Rui’s suggestion that while Mao was a world-class killer, he didn’t fear death. From this copiously documented book we learn that Mao killed because he liked it; that he acquired a taste for slaughter in the late 1920s; and that he was terrified of death, probably because he had killed so many that revenge may have been lurking around every corner.

In her publisher’s note, Ms. Chang explains her motives for writing this book:

I decided to write about Mao because I was fascinated by this man, who dominated my life in China, and who devastated the lives of my fellow countrymen. He was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did. Yet the world knows astonishingly little about him.

In an interview in the Sunday Telegraph she said Mao was “the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world.”

It is always disturbing when a book claims to be the “unknown story.” Ms. Chang claims that the world knows little of Mao. Actually the world, because of years of Western Mao scholarship and the experience of many Chinese whose lives the chairman indeed devastated, knows a lot about him. There are other biographies, some of them excellent, to which little or no credit is given by the authors, and—thanks to Harvard’s Stuart Schram—many volumes of Mao’s writings.

I am no Mao specialist, but before reading this latest biography I was broadly aware of the Mao story, particularly his life-long heartlessness and capacity for inflicting suffering on a national scale. Lucian Pye, for example, saw him pretty clearly decades ago (he is not cited in this book) and Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic by David Apter and Tony Saich, cited but not acknowledged, analyzes Mao’s unusual capacity for striking terror as acutely as Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday. Some of the lesser parts of the story had been published earlier, such as the enormously profitable opium-growing business at Mao’s guerrilla headquarters, Yan’an, by Chen Yung-fa in 1995 (cited in this biography) but in every case Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday add considerable detail to a story which will shock many Chinese.

And until this book there continued to be a lingering feeling in the West that Mao, despite everything, was a great man. And among many Chinese he remained a great man who went bad. That is the view of the Communist Party, which has officially judged Mao to be 70% good and “a great Marxist,” and still hangs his gigantic portrait over the main gate to the Forbidden City, from which it gazed down during the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989. It was a mark of Mao’s continuing special status that in May of that year, near the end of the demonstrations, when three men hurled paint at the portrait, they were tackled and detained not by the police but by other demonstrators. The very people who were shouting “Li Peng resign,” and “Down with Deng Xiaoping,” and calling for fundamental reform of the Party, could not countenance an attack on the Great Teacher and Helmsman who in their childhoods they had learned was “the red red sun in our hearts.”

All that is swept away by the authors. If Mao were on trial, and they presented their evidence, if the judge warned the jury they could convict only if there were no shadow of doubt, the verdict would be a unanimous guilty as charged.

Among Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday’s assertions: Mao was an early radical but he was driven by an overwhelming lust for domination. He championed women in his early writings but he exploited, betrayed, and consumed droves of them and drove into madness or despair three of his four wives. He had scorn or contempt for peasants and cared little if they died of hunger. Far from being a great guerrilla leader, he often commanded his forces into losing situations. Most of his closest colleagues feared his murderous tendencies and did what he wanted not out of loyalty but ultimately—Zhou Enlai is the outstanding example here—out of fear.

Mao opposed fighting the Japanese despite the urgings of Josef Stalin, and never forgave the commanders of the only two battles against them. During the guerrilla period Mao encouraged the production of opium whose sale greatly swelled his treasury. His policies led to the death of up to a million landlords. He encouraged Kim Il Sung to attack South Korea. His economic policies and contempt for the peasantry led to the world’s greatest famine in 1959-1961, in which at least 37 million people died. He provoked the Cultural Revolution and demanded detailed accounts of the torture and killing of its victims.

There are also details that are true scoops. One such is the debunking of perhaps the most heroic episode of the Long March, the hand-over-hand scramble through flames across the bridge over the Dadu river, which permitted the Reds to escape to safety from Chiang Kai-shek. The world learned of this from Red Star Over China, the now much-discredited story that Mao planted on Edgar Snow. “This is a complete invention,” say Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday. “There was no battle at the Dadu Bridge.” The documentation, including contemporary witnesses, is wholly convincing. Their conclusion, which will astonish most China specialists, is that Chiang Kai-shek, who they claim wanted the Communist army to survive and clear warlords from the areas they conquered, “had left the passage open for the Reds.”

Another discovery, and a poignant one, concerns Yang Kai-hui, Mao’s second wife, who was murdered by the Nationalists after Mao (as he did with all his wives in one form or another) abandoned her. Between 1928 and 1930 Yang wrote Mao eight letters, which she never sent but concealed in her house. They are passionate but also bitter letters of love and longing. “You are now the beloved sweetheart... return, return.” Found only in 1990, they had never been seen by Mao and “even Mao’s family were barred from seeing the most devastating passages.”

Ms. Chang saw—but did not copy—one of these letters, four pages long, but cites it from memory with “ellipses that cannot be recalled,” a tribute to her early education in a system which trains memorization. There are other examples of women pining for Mao, including his small daughter Li Na. He came to ignore the wives and most of the children, and those who didn’t die usually went mad. But what would Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday say about Mao’s moving poem of 1957, “I lost my proud poplar,” about Yang Kai-hui’s death?

A third revelation is the extent to which Mao corrupted Zhou Enlai (spelled here as Chou). Far from being the voice of reason who, whenever possible saved some of Mao’s victims from death, “When Mao gave the word,” Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday maintain, “Chou would send anyone to their death.” Michael Schoenhals made this plain in 1996 (cited in this biography) but Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday show how Mao obtained Zhou’s total servility: the chairman retained an article from a Shanghai newspaper in 1931, supposedly written by Zhou (it may have been a Mao plant) in which he “condemned the Communist Party...from then on, Mao knew that he had an effective blackmail weapon. More than three decades later, Mao dangled it over Chou’s head.” This led to Zhou’s “double life.” At home he was a blackmailed slave; for the world at large he was “the most attractive man [visiting statesmen like Henry Kissinger] had ever met.”

This can be extended, I feel, to another Chang-Halliday assertion, regarding Mr. MacFarquhar’s concern: “By the end of Mao’s life, almost all his former close colleagues were dead, most of them thanks to him on his deathbed, Mao’s thirst for revenge was unslaked.” The final extension is that “Mao spared no thought for the mammoth human and material losses that his destructive quest had cost his people. Well over 70 million people had perished—in peacetime—as a result of his misrule.”

Why was Mao like this? Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday’s proposition is compelling. Although, they argue, he had little regard for peasants, and cared not a whit when they died of hunger, in 1927 Mao described how rural “ruffians strike down the landlords and stamp on them with their feet they thoroughly indulge every whim and really have created terror in the countryside.” The authors see a fatal flaw: “What really happened is that Mao discovered within himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery which verged on sadism. This propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule.” Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday assert, moreover, that, unlike Stalin and Hitler, Mao turned millions of his own people against each other.

Only one other book springs to mind which so comprehensively destroys the character and record of a tyrant: Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Mr. Montefiore’s book is more satisfying on two counts—language and the transparency of sources. His language is always graceful. He never sinks into occasional but irritating lapses by Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday, such as: “Wang [Hong-wen] was a faceless good-looking 37-year-old,” or, “she [Madame Mao] shot her mouth off.”

In both books, the sources are astounding. Mr. Sebag Montefiore’s contains almost 100 pages of sources and footnotes, Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday’s well over 100. In both books the access to great numbers of people who knew the tyrants is extraordinary and rare. Ms. Chang has lifelong Party contacts, as Wild Swans makes clear, and in China one contact leads to another. These ranged from a woman who once washed Mao’s underwear, another who lived near the Dadu Bridge when it was crossed by Mao’s forces, to the widow of Liu Shaoqi, once Mao’s Number 2, whose death the chairman caused.

In the West, the authors interviewed former U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford and other personalities who met Mao. The contribution of these interviews to the biography was not great. Mr. Kissinger, for instance, was so star-struck by Mao and Zhou Enlai that he committed many indiscretions and security breaches with both of them while serving Nixon.

Mr. Sebag Montefiore’s written sources are in Russian and he explains how he used them. Ms. Chang, too, combed and digested a mountain of Chinese sources, but it is difficult or impossible to tell how she and her co-author evaluated them. (I checked the authors’ footnotes on Mao’s admiration for peasant violence; some of the quotations seem somewhat less personal than asserted in the biography, and at least one is on a different page than cited in the English-language collected writings.) Many other sources, some of them confirming “the unknown story,” are in Russian and here too I wonder how they were chosen or weighed. This is a task which Mao specialists will enjoy.

Comparing monsters is never easy, but in the course of their biography, the product of a decade’s labor well spent—from which Mao’s reputation will never recover—Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday make this central point: “Mao not only drove a massive wedge between people working and living side by side, he greatly enlarged the number of people directly involved in repression, including making the orbit significantly wider than either Hitler or Stalin, who used mostly secret elites.”

That could be because he began early. In 1927-28, after watching peasants killing landlords, Mao “developed a penchant for slow killing.” He wrote this poem: “Watch us kill the bad landlords today. Aren’t you afraid? It’s knife slicing upon knife.” As Professor Yue said: “No one is safe.”

Mr. Mirsky is a former East Asia editor of the Times of London.

The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change
by Morris L. Bian
Harvard University Press, 346 pages, $45

Reviewed by Robert A. Kapp

All right, class: Identify the following: Weng Wenhao, Sun Fo, Qian Changzhao, H.D. Fong.

If you struggle, you are forgiven. These three men, and dozens of others who figure prominently in Morris Bian’s new book The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China, were prominent figures in the efforts of the government of the Republic of China, between 1928 and the end of the war with Japan, to conceive and build the edifices of a modern industrial economy where none had existed before.

Mr. Bian’s book will raise conflicting emotions among readers who have spent time working on the Nationalist era, as I have. One comes away from this study with a certain tragic sense of the size of the burden that Chiang Kai-shek’s economic planners and administrators bore, not only after the nearly Biblical evacuation to the remote interior after Japan’s slashing conquest of most of East China in 1937 and 1938, but from the very moment that the Nationalist regime was proclaimed in Nanjing. Mr. Bian’s evocation of the milieu from which the Kuomintang-era concepts of economic planning and industrial organization arose portrays a generation of truly transitional figures—many educated in the West—as China dissolved into postimperial chaos.

His discussion of the efforts of these economic designers to implement their schemes for China’s modern industrial economy under the brutal conditions of wartime exile in the fastnesses of Sichuan, Yunnan and other provinces of the “Great Rear Area” is extremely poignant. In the footnotes, one can remark on who stayed and who left for Taiwan at the end of the civil war, and ponder the trajectories that led different specialists, different administrators, to different fates, sharing only a gathering obscurity.

Mr. Bian’s central analytical argument is this: The industrial economy erected after 1949 by the Mao regime was not, as most observers believe, simply a wholesale borrowing from Stalin’s U.S.S.R. In fact, the origins of the “state enterprise system” that we came to recognize in the People’s Republic lie in the industrial economic system devised, under conditions of extreme emergency, by Chinese intellectuals and policy leaders working for the KMT regime—the first Chinese government with any reasonable pretension to national authority in the 20th century.

Because this book is an academic study, presumably derived from the author’s doctoral research, it begins with the customary genuflection to a body of theoretical literature, and then, a bit mechanically, returns to the core concepts of that body of theory in a “Thus we conclude” section of each ensuing chapter. To his credit, however, Mr. Bian’s evocation of theories of institutional change is not so ritualistic as to suck all life and meaning out of the work.

The most essential notion that Mr. Bian pulls from the theoretical literature is that of “modifying mental models” under conditions of extreme crisis. He also pays significant attention to the ways in which the ideas that China’s prewar and wartime economic planners came up with were a subtle blend of inherited modes (his discussion of how the Republican-era government ordnance industry derived its essential administrative structures from late Qing bureaucratic forms is marvelous) and the overwhelming pressures of a war for national survival.

Having established his conceptual moorings, Mr. Bian lays out a series of chapters that, on the one hand, portray the enormity and dignity of the Nationalist effort to build a state-dominated industrial economy, and, on the other, underscore the author’s belief that what the KMT regime managed to accomplish in the wartime emergency became the foundation for the Mao regime’s industrial reorganization after 1949.

Thus in the meaty chapters at the center of the book, Mr. Bian shows how the notion of the danwei, or unit, which we know so well from the phenomenon of “state-owned enterprises” and “work units” in the People’s Republic, emerged both linguistically and in organizational practice during the war in Nationalist west China. The “big and complete” (da er quan) complexion of the P.R.C.’s industrial behemoths—with their full complement of company-provided cradle-to-grave social services—found its antecedents (Mr. Bian would sees them as origins—a key point of interpretation) in the wartime effort to cope with the desperate instability of the work force in unoccupied China’s struggling industrial establishments. “Work emulation campaigns” became a wartime staple, anatomically linked to the KMT’s “New Life Movement” of 1934 and prefiguring a broad menu of post-1949 mobilization and emulation campaigns; Mr. Bian places more emphasis on KMT roots than on Soviet Stakhanovite examples, but to his credit recognizes the latter as well.

Above all, Mr. Bian elucidates the emergence of what he calls the nationalist ideology of the developmental state, in which the principle of state domination of a modern industrial economy emerges early and reaches remarkable elaboration, long before the industrialization itself could be achieved. In this regard, it is fascinating to be reminded of the contribution of Sun Yat-sen’s own conceptual writings on the shape of the modern Chinese economy and the role of the state in this connection.

While Mr. Bian’s study serves us well by exploring seriously and thoroughly the ideas and programmatic efforts of KMT planners and administrators, the question of whether the P.R.C.’s state enterprise system derived from the emergency wartime Nationalist program seems almost beside the point.

For one thing, while I applaud him for giving these hard-working theorists and administrators a recognition that recent history has cruelly denied to them, his book simply takes no notice of what so many wartime observers could see at close hand: the regime’s endless production of elaborate, scientifically rational industrial and economic schemes, complete with legal structures and a baroque architecture of commissions and administrative agencies, even as the regime was collapsing upon itself. Thus, while inflation gets passing mention in the context of the struggle to maintain workforce stability, Mr. Bian simply leaves unmentioned the growing disjunction between the KMT regime’s diagnoses of China’s crisis and its administrative prescriptions, on the one hand, and the actualities of unraveling administrative competence and shrinking political legitimacy on the other.

Not only do the corrosive effects of wartime inflation receive short shrift (the price index in Nationalist areas, which stood at 100 in 1937, stood at about 263,000 in 1945, if I recall correctly); the companion phenomenon of what contemporary economic critics in the 1940s labeled “bureaucratic capitalism” receives no attention.

While conscientious economists and government planners labored to design a state-dominated industrial structure for a modern China, the tentacles of the KMT invaded any and all areas of profitable industrial and commercial activity, as the disaster of wartime exile, isolation and extreme resource deprivation led those in privileged position to infiltrate themselves into every economic nook and cranny where a little bit of economic advantage might be found. The alienation of much of China’s struggling entrepreneurial elite from the KMT regime crystallized in the final years of civil war before the communist triumph in 1949, but it had begun and spread during the very period on which Mr. Bian concentrates.

Finally, to Bian’s central contention that China’s state enterprise system derived not from the former Soviet Union but from the pre-1949 redrawing of the modern Chinese economic paradigm by the R.O.C.’s planners and administrators, one might observe that there is a difference between identifying correspondences and proving causalities. Bian’s discussion of the emergence of the term “unit” (danwei) in the Chinese economic lexicon during the 1940s is really interesting, simply as a linguistic excursion, and might well be suggestive of origins of communist terminology after 1949. But it is only suggestive. I can’t know for sure, but I suspect that if Mr. Bian had turned his inquiry around and focused his research on the process by which the architects of the new P.R.C. economic order settled on their organizing principles in the early 1950s, he might well have found some smoking guns that would link China’s economic trajectory quite clearly to the its decision in 1950 to “lean to one side” and look to the U.S.S.R. for essential economic support. The famous 214 Soviet-provided industrial projects, for example, which became the core of China’s industrialization strategy throughout the 1950s, were not designed by Weng Wenhao and others in the wartime KMT economic team; they were transferred part and parcel by their Soviet architects.

To sum up, this monograph reads exceptionally well. It is also poignantly evocative, reminding us of what an early generation of Chinese “policy intellectuals” and civil servants had to confront from the beginning of Japan’s aggression in 1928, as the new KMT regime was born, through the economic and social collapse of the wartime era. Reading The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China, I found myself glad that the likes of Weng Wenhao, Sun Fo, Qian Changzhao and H. D. Fong have, at last, emerged from historical obscurity.

Mr. Kapp was president of the U.S.-China Business Council (1994-2004), and author of Szechuan and the Chinese Republic: Provincial Militarism and Central Power. He is currently chairman of consulting firm Robert A. Kapp & Associates.

The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity
by Amartya Sen
Penguin/Allen Lane, 409 pages, £25

Reviewed by Salil Tripathi

One of the enduring images of Calcutta is the presence of an adda. Roughly translated as “the place,” it is a spot where people gather, often at a street corner, usually at a set time, to discuss and debate. The topic may be anything: French New Wave cinema; the differences between Stalinists and Trotskyites; or even whether “the prince of Bengal,” Sourav Ganguly, has outlived his utility as India’s cricket captain. Opinions are expressed freely, and discussions go on for hours, with neither side (assuming there are only two sides) willing to give in easily.

While addas are special to Calcutta, they are found in other parts of India as well, and form an essential part of the Indian tradition, of conversation, deliberation and debate, where the give and take of opinions is routine and loud arguments are frequent. The willingness to listen to other points of view, accepting some, modifying others, rejecting a few, is at the heart of India’s democratic experience, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. In his new book, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, which brings together his essays on Indian society published over the last decade, Mr. Sen reinforces the idea of Indians being loquacious, whose liberal traditions are derived less from their appreciation of democratic ideals learnt from the West, and more from their own tradition of svikriti, or acceptance.

This exchange is not restricted to the elite. He writes:

It would be a great mistake in this context to assume that because of the possible effectiveness of well-tutored and disciplined arguments, the argumentative tradition must, in general, favor the privileged and the well-educated, rather than the dispossessed and the deprived. Some of the most powerful arguments in Indian intellectual history have, in fact, been made about the lives of the least privileged groups, which have been drawn on the substantive force of these claims, rather than on the cultivated brilliance of well-trained dialectics.

The examples he cites are not only from ancient India, but also drawn from contemporary history, including election results like those of 1977, when Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party was routed after a spell of emergency in which democracy was briefly suspended; and of 2004, when poor Indians voted out a coalition which had presided over a period of prosperity which had in some areas widened inequality.

However, as the economist Joan Robinson, who taught Mr. Sen at Cambridge, told him once, whenever you make any generalization about India, the opposite is equally true. Put another way, the late Nirad Chaudhuri wrote once that in India even exceptions run into millions. Some may challenge Mr. Sen’s hypothesis of the argumentative nature of Indians by pointing out the submissive nature of Indians before those with power or authority, a point the Indian diplomat Pavan Varma makes in his recent book Being Indian. And many could question the notion that Indians settle their differences peacefully by pointing out the sorry history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the subcontinent.

But Mr. Sen, renowned as an economist and widely praised for bringing a moral, philosophical perspective to the dismal science, is on to something when he says that such violence is the aberration, not the rule. And he does this in a gentle tone, and spares no one in his critique. He challenges Hindu nationalists who have portrayed Hinduism as a monotheistic, intolerant religion, out to seek revenge against Muslims today because of the plunder and pillage of some Muslim invaders centuries ago, by showing other Muslim kings who were integrationist and respectful of Indian culture. But he also upbraids—again gently—the left-leaning secularists of India, who challenge the Hindu nationalists by emphasizing the contributions of other religions and cultures, and by belittling Hinduism for its hierarchical nature.

Mr. Sen is critical of such an approach. You cannot deny that a vast majority of Indians are Hindus, and their practices and thinking have influenced India, shaping it positively, making it a speCIAl place, in which the narrow nationalism of the Hindu fundamentalists is the exception. The posturing of some Indian academics and the broader left come in for special criticism: they draw on arguments developed in Western universities and criticize globalization and its influence on India, as if India is a fragile state that would get swamped by the tide. Some Indian politicians regularly fulminate against the influence of MTV, and their followers have ransacked shops selling St. Valentine’s Day cards in India. But India has always had an open mind, its feet planted firmly in the ground, and it has absorbed external influences remarkably well, Mr. Sen points out.

What Indians learn from the West is not so much outward manifestations as the underlying ideas. And so it is that a poet like Rabindranath Tagore develops dislike for nationalism which can degenerate into fascism, and a filmmaker like Satyajit Ray, sees Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, yet does not make an imitative film, but learns to use nonactors in outdoor locations, and makes Pather Panchali, (Song of the Little Road), which then goes on to win a speCIAl prize at Cannes in 1956. This ability—to learn from elsewhere, transform the idea, and make it your own, is a major part of Indian tradition. Which is why when McDonald’s sets up shop in India, it does not sound the death knell of the samosa, and Indian chefs don’t go about destroying the restaurant; rather, McDonald’s is forced to offer the McAloo Tikki Burger for its vegetarian customers. India has always absorbed external influences, making them part of its syncretic being.

In highlighting this absorptive capacity of Indian culture, Mr. Sen also challenges the notion that Asian values are somehow different from Western values, and that human rights is a Western, and hence foreign concept for the Asian mindset. He would have approved of the response the former New York Congressman Stephen Solarz gave a journalist in Singapore in the late 1990s. The reporter asked him if democracy was after all a Western value, since Singapore’s then Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia’s then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed had said so. Mr. Solarz replied that he could think of several Asians who would disagree with that view, and they included the Dalai Lama and Anwar Ibrahim.

At a time when China and India are emerging as this century’s major economic powers, one of the most interesting chapters in the book is devoted to the cultural connections between ancient India and China. Mr. Sen reveals the rich and deep exchange of views among scholars, shared manuscripts, trade, and more importantly, scientific and mathematical knowledge. The colonial experience brought this exchange to an end. Today, when Indian pharmaceutical companies set up shop in China, and Chinese software companies invest in Bangalore in India, they are only picking up the contact that had been suspended temporarily.

The resilience of Indian democracy, ultimately, emerges from its argumentative tradition, based on public reasoning, which also explains the defense of secular politics and the struggle against inequality. It does not mean the absence of horrendous inequities, but it does show that Indians have the means to deal with those problems peacefully.

Mr. Tripathi is a free-lance writer based in London. He was formerly a review correspondent based in Singapore.

Global Taiwan
Edited by Suzanne Berger & Richard K. Lester
M.E. Sharpe, 344 pages, $79.95

Reviewed by Rupert Hammond-Chambers

The recent rejection of the EU Constitution by the voters of France and the Netherlands provides a useful framework in which to view the huge challenges presented by the forces of globalization. In both of these countries, the significant margins of defeat suggest a state of dissatisfaction and unease about the direction of Europe as a whole and about the EU’s impact on the lives of its citizens. In a rash generalization, there appears to be a toxic mixture of anti-Americanism, opposition to economic liberalization, fear of China (or Polish plumbers!), and a general state of frustration over the lack of economic health and the overall future of the state. Indeed, the French in particular seem unwilling to embrace the challenges of globalization and the changes required to maintain their quality of life. This is both a failure of leadership as well as an unhealthy nostalgia for times gone by, because there is no denying that globalization is here to stay.

In the United States there has been a renaissance of the China fever of the late 1990s, when we were focused on Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China and China’s ascension to WTO. While that period heralded a remarkably cohesive and wide-ranging effort to press for those goals, we do not find such consensus in today’s debate. Instead, the discussion is wrapped in textile quotas, yuan revaluation, trade imbalances and the constant drum beat of China’s fast growing economy. China is at the heart of our own disquiet over globalization; they are coming—what should we do?

Global Taiwan, an extended study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Industrial Performance Center, offers some value-added insights into the ongoing process of globalization. There can be few better prisms than Taiwan with which to view the interwoven complexities of businesses, relationships, supply chains, and capital that thrust ever more innovation and competition into the global economy. The island has become one of the most important strategic players in the global technology sector, and as the authors point out, Taiwan’s story has brought it a great distance since the early 1950s when it broke from foreign aid and undertook a path of export-driven growth.

If we were to look at Taiwan for insight into the challenges of globalization, both globally as well as in our relationship with China, what lessons can we learn through Taiwan’s experiences and prospects for its future? Over eight independent but interconnected chapters—utilizing extensive data from a number of case studies—the authors spend some very useful time answering that question, looking at why globalization is evolving so rapidly, and at why it’s so imperative that Taiwan companies themselves continue to evolve.

Global Taiwan contains extensive discussions on Taiwan’s role in outsourcing—an issue that is, of course, hugely relevant to both the benefits of a globalized economy as well as to the angst it produces. Dedicated companies, in Taiwan’s case original equipment manufacturers and original design manufacturers (OEMs/ODMs), in essence provide a pooled platform for the production of devices for U.S., European and Japanese companies. The outsourcing process provides companies with shared risk and reduced capital outlays for production, allowing them to focus on the higher margin service and innovation side. It is a model that has proven successful not only for companies like Dell, HP, Sony and others, but for Taiwanese producers as well.

Nevertheless, the question remains if this is a sustainable model for Taiwan. The fact is that the island’s economy—while dynamic, nimble and competitive—has failed to produce companies of the pedigree of Samsung, Sony and Infosys. Real long-term value and wealth creation is held in ownership of intellectual property (IP), not in the production of other companies’ IP. The authors do a fine job of analyzing this failure to date by Taiwan to produce companies with myriad IP and globally recognized brands.

The book rightly raises a flag of caution over the percentage of overall investment capital flowing from Taiwan into China, while recognizing the allure of the market and the short-term benefits to Taiwan corporate profitability. They see the need for Taiwan to diversify its investment habits and balance its interests globally, which fits neatly with the current debate raging in Taiwan over China investment and the levels of economic integration that should be deemed healthy.

The authors state correctly that Taiwan faces an awesome challenge from China focused on initial movement of low-end manufacturing followed by an increasingly robust flow of industry up the value chain. However, I do feel that this issue is somewhat overstated. Taiwan’s low-end manufacturing businesses that have relocated to the mainland are competing with Chinese businesses under the same cost structures. The difference maker then becomes corporate intangibles such as relationships, customers and supply chain management, areas at which Taiwan companies excel. China’s Ministry of Commerce states that seven of China’s top 10 exporting companies are subsidiaries of Taiwanese companies.

The dire case for Taiwan, outlined over several chapters, seems to presume that Taiwan will stand still while China continues to grow, innovate and expand. The Taiwan economic miracle suggests that it will not stand still. Indeed, there are few business communities in the world more adept at dealing with change than Taiwan’s.

Taiwan can compete with China at the higher end of the value chain simply by focusing on research, development, design, and superior intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. This is the cornerstone of Taiwan’s future, and companies like Acer are making a genuine attempt to construct global brands, spinning off its OEM businesses to focus its core business on research, development, marketing and customer service. While Taiwan has myriad areas that need further strengthening, we have reached a point where the domestic voices within Taiwan are increasingly shouting louder than the external forces for stronger IPR protection, and this is encouraging. Taiwan needs to go much further to create a long-term critical advantage over China in this area. To do so would ensure that companies from around the world will view Taiwan favorably as an investment location for the development of the next generation of products, and allow Taiwan to remain a key player.

The book does discuss in depth a basic but hugely important area that Taiwan continues to overlook, but that could play a critical role in its drive to remain competitive with China, namely the organization of human capital. The lack of an interwoven architecture between executive and legislative branches of government, think tanks, educational institutes, leading technology companies and the investor community deprives Taiwan of better communication and coordination on its future needs. The frenzied nature of the present domestic political environment is undermining pockets of very real excellence, ensuring that Taiwan’s long-term prospects are more challenging than they should be.

Taiwan, of all global economies, is more vulnerable not just to the economic challenge of China’s increasing strength, but also to the use of that strength to produce political deliverables. At a time when the future of WTO’s Doha Round is debatable, there has been an explosion of bilateral and regional multilateral trade deals in Asia. What impact are these deals going to have on globalization and on Taiwan? This is particularly important because China is increasingly using its economic clout to press its regional partners politically and objects to other economies signing trade deals with Taiwan.

If Taiwan is economically marginalized as a consequence of these trade deals, what impact will that have on its ability to remain a strategically important partner to global companies? China would both keep Taiwan investment unhealthily focused on China (helping with China’s domestic development), while ensuring that the potential for any perceived political benefits from bilateral and regional multilateral trade deals is zero. This is an important area that the authors do not spend enough time considering.

This book does an excellent job of drawing on a number of case studies to discuss the important issues that will affect not only Taiwan’s future but that will also have an impact on the global economy. As the study is already over 18 months old, it does feel somewhat dated in areas, which undermines certain aspects of the analysis, and it also presents a picture of Taiwan’s future as somewhat grimmer than the past suggests. The authors were clearly impacted by the downturn in Taiwan over that period, which also saw much hand ringing over the island’s future. Nonetheless, the book is a useful source for those interested in a deeper understanding of the forces of globalization and one of the world’s most successful economies over the last 50 years.

Mr. Hammond-Chambers is president of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council.

Government Capacity and the Hong Kong Civil Service
by John P. Burns
Oxford University Press, 468 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Fred Armentrout

If this book were written in the days of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it might have been titled The Case of the Honestly Inefficient Government. Professor John P. Burns, chair professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong, picks through the enormous, costly and politically important entity that is the Hong Kong Civil Service using the academic research notion of “state or government capacity” as his magnifying glass. High capacity is associated with bureaucracies that are competent, committed, and coherent, and where bureaucrats have high integrity and social prestige, according to Mr. Burns.

After two decades of uninterrupted double digit growth, similar to the pace of the territory’s economic expansion, Hong Kong’s civil service peaked in size in 1991-92 at almost 200,000 positions, divided into over 400 different grades. By the next decade, personnel expenses consumed 31% of government expenditure, which Mr. Burns says was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg:

To this must be added the personnel-related expenses of the vast subvented sector that includes the universities, schools, social welfare agencies, NGOs, and so forth, which in 2001-2 took an additional HK$67.4 billion [$8.6 billion], or 34%. Thus by 2001-2, personnel-related expenses of the civil service and the subvented sector combined consumed nearly 70% of total government recurrent expenditure.

By comparison, the entire United Kingdom’s civil service totaled 490,240 people in 2002. It is the general absence of such comparative statistics and other reference points across cities or countries that keeps Mr. Burns’s focus hermetically sealed within the complex matrix of Hong Kong’s personnel policies and local politics. How does it fare in size, cost and in its “ability to perform appropriate tasks effectively, efficiently, and sustainably,” (his definition of how to measure government capacity) against cities of comparable size (seven million to eight million people) such as London or New York for instance?

Many of the failures or contradictory dynamics of Hong Kong’s civil service are actually endemic to all large, urban civil services, and not entirely local idiosyncrasies.

A case in point is his noting that government has identified five key results areas for the civil service, in place since 1998: modernized management, appropriate staff capacity, results-oriented organization culture, high integrity, and good staff relations. Each year, initiatives toward defined targets have been introduced and led by different agencies. But the policy objective of these exercises—that the civil service be “trustworthy, efficient and serves the needs of the community”—cannot be achieved by a single government department. This requires a combined effort of the entire service. Mr. Burns concludes that:

Therefore, no one department or agency can be held responsible for failing to achieve the objective. To be sure, this is in keeping with the practice of identifying program areas that cut across institutional boundaries. But it makes it impossible to hold any individual or department accountable for not achieving the objective.

This complaint echoes those that arise as an annual chorus, at budget-setting times of urban civil services around the world or when preventable catastrophes occur.

Mr. Burns does however allude to international comparisons based on ratings done by Transparency International and the World Economic Forum, that consistently rank Hong Kong’s competitiveness highly due in part to the comparative integrity of its civil service, on both Asian and world scales.

Mr. Burns gives full points for that, but parses out a peculiar disjunction between steering clear of criminal corruption internally and delivering responsive services to the community: “I argue that although the Hong Kong civil service has come to value integrity (especially in terms of corruption-free), the civil service in practice has not particularly valued performance,” he contends. This explains why The Case of the Honestly Inefficient Government might have been an alternative title.

“I am interested in how the Hong Kong civil service actually behaves,” notes Mr. Burns, and his book looks closely at its behavior through two lenses, one political and one managerial. He looks at political issues that create the context of operations and compares the inherited colonial conditions of the pre-July 2002 era, with those changed under the “accountability system,” introduced by then Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa at that time. For most of Hong Kong’s history, career civil servants held top government jobs and fiercely resisted attempts to hold them accountable for policy blunders. In July 2002, that paradigm was meant to change.

He tests “accountability” by looking at six highly contested cases wherein the Legislative Council attempted to impose sanctions on government civil servants and/or ministers—three before Mr. Tung’s accountability system came into force and three afterward. Those before 2002 were: glitches at the opening of the new airport; a decision not to prosecute a prominent newspaper magnate for fraudulent circulation claims; and the “short piling” public housing projects scandal. Afterward came: the “penny stocks” case; the “Lexus-gate” car purchase scandal involving Former Financial Secretary Antony Leung; and the famously failed attempt to introduce the “Article 23” National Security (Legislative Provisions) Bill.

Mr. Burns notes that in only one of the six cases was there even an attempt made to sanction government officers, and that was a formal written rebuke of the financial secretary by the chief executive, calling what he’d done “gross negligence” and a breach of his code of service and “highly inappropriate” as a principal official.

In Mr. Burns’ view, neither Mr. Tung’s letter nor Mr. Leung’s subsequent public statement of contrition constitute imposition of a sanction, and says the financial secretary emerged “virtually unscathed” from the incident. He explains:

…Hong Kong’s undemocratic political system means that the consequences of such public acts of contrition are relatively insignificant. Because political appointees are not elected to office by universal suffrage and do not require the support of any others who are, making public apologies and accepting formal criticism may have relatively little impact.

Until July 2002, the inherited state apparatus of Hong Kong was relatively autonomous from society and government operated without the constraints of a ruling class, politicians or the business community, asserts Mr. Burns. Without the incubus of a colonial administration and somewhat weakened by the shift of policy-making “accountability” to political appointees, senior civil servants have spent much of the posthandover period feeling flayed and flummoxed by a public and legislature whose motives they cannot comprehend.

On the other hand, the public comprehends all too well that Former Chief Executive Tung’s “executive accountability” system was just that: a system designed to assist him and not at all intended to account for his actions or those of the civil service to the public. The culmination of this search for postcolonial accountability finally came in the form of half a million people taking to the streets over government’s gruff efforts to drive through national security legislation, which resulted in the public’s only clear success in causing its government to take note, forcing indefinite withdrawal of the offending legislation. Not a desirable way to run a “high capacity” government. “In this case, colonial-era-type consultation was no substitute for democracy,” notes Mr. Burns wryly.

Part two of the book looks at the internal drivers of the service, such as staffing, efforts to introduce modern “performance management” techniques, compensation, and participation of staff associations or public sector trade unions in civil service management.

Mr. Burns’ measures of success or failure are broken down within chapters into carefully researched and quoted enunciations of official policies of government and civil service codes that are then dissected and compared to records of actual practice. Results affirm a civil service locked politically and functionally in a self-interested protection of the colonial status quo, wherein promotion and responsiveness to peer pressure are the operative management values in the culture, not efficient performance of duties or public approval. As Mr. Burns puts it:

The organization cultures of the Hong Kong government fit comfortably with utility maximizing behavior. Although many civil servants may believe that they should be rewarded for their performance, they also believe in apparently large numbers that the existing compensation system (which is position and not performance based, and which has rewarded them generously) should be maintained. In pursuit of their own utility, not surprisingly civil servants have strongly resisted compensation reform.

Donald Tsang, former chief secretary, is now the man “with the handshake” of mainland authorities and so already anointed by most of the 800 members of the Election Committee as the one they will elect from their “small circle” to be the next chief executive. Among his first public policy platform statements to the press in Hong Kong was to declare that there would be no reduction in the size or pay of the civil service during his two-year term. Small wonder, Mr. Tsang is a lifetime civil servant, as was his brother, the former police chief, and the most often cited rationale for his being chosen by Beijing for the new job is how well he understands the workings of the civil service.

Mr. Armentrout has been a commentator on Hong Kong and Asian affairs since 1978. He is the communications manager for the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong and recently completed a master’s degree in international and public affairs at the University of Hong Kong.

Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam
by Gareth Porter
University of California Press, 368 pages, $27.50

Reviewed by Stephen J. Morris

Two kinds of history books make a knowledgeable reader sit up and pay attention. The first tells us something factually new about a subject. The second offers a radically new interpretation of old facts. Gareth Porter claims to do both.

The author, it must be noted, has a radical left-wing pedigree, and the book’s dust jacket is adorned with promotional blurbs from historians of the far left, such as Walter LaFeber and Marilyn Young, as well as the tireless Narcissus, Daniel Ellsberg. Yet Mr. Porter’s book is not written from a Marxist perspective, and has attracted effusive praise from noted Columbia University political science professor, Robert Jervis, who is not from the political left. Mr. Jervis describes Mr. Porter’s book thus:

The most important contribution to our understanding of the war in Vietnam since the Pentagon Papers. I am not exaggerating or speaking for effect. Porter challenges—by and large successfully—most of the accepted views.

What could command such a recommendation? Mr. Porter’s book is about the origins of U.S involvement in Vietnam. It is written in an academic style that will not appeal to the general reader, and makes frequent reference to “realist” international relations theory that will interest only a small minority of the academic world. But it lays claim to an originality of interpretation.

Most historians of the Vietnam War explain the decision by the U.S. to intervene in Vietnam in terms of the Cold War doctrine of containment of communism—whether they consider that decision wise or unwise. The conventional thinking is that the U.S. feared a communist victory in South Vietnam because of a perceived likely domino effect, by which the fall of South Vietnam would likely lead other Southeast Asian nations to succumb to communism, either through external attack or internal subversion. Many historians also focus on the difficulties of presidential decision-making on Vietnam and Laos in the context of conflicting counsel from disparate advisers over whether to use military force and what kinds of force to use.

Mr. Porter rejects all of these established views—for him, the American intervention took place not because of fear of communism. According to Mr. Porter, the balance of global power was not equal between the U.S. and the communists, but massively in favor of the U.S. Contrary to popular belief, its main adversaries, the Soviet Union and China, were more interested in appeasing the U.S. than challenging it, and American presidential advisers knew all this.

Moreover, Mr. Porter argues, the North Vietnamese were innocent victims of U.S. aggression. From the beginning, they were reacting to American-sponsored oppression of southern communists. They were interested in a compromise political settlement of the conflict, involving a noncommunist neutralist government, and they wanted to achieve this politically, not through a military victory. Hanoi, Mr. Porter asserts, made overtures for such ends which the U.S. rebuffed. In other words, the U.S. was the aggressor and initiator of war in Vietnam. Furthermore the U.S. went to war in Vietnam because it could.

Mr. Porter proposes a novel theory of presidential power: Each president was not the final independent arbiter of these momentous foreign policy decisions, but instead the prisoner of an independent “national security bureaucracy” which pressured him to use force against his better inclinations:

Neither Kennedy nor Johnson had full control over Vietnam policy because the national security bureaucracy acted as an independent power within the U.S. government with the right to pressure the president on matters of war and peace.

This notion of an unelected bureaucratic power center running foreign policy is meant to be analogous to the current situation of U.S. policy towards Iraq, in reference to which many critics today speak of a “neoconservative cabal.” According to Mr. Porter the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq was also driven by an imbalance of power favoring it.

This interpretation of the Vietnam War is certainly novel. But novelty is not valuable in itself if not based on strong empirical evidence, or if it rests on faulty arguments. So does Mr. Porter’s interpretation have a strong empirical and logical foundation?

Let us start in reverse order with his theory of U.S. foreign policy decision-making. Who exactly constitutes this nefarious “national security bureaucracy?” Mr. Porter never defines it. Most analysts would include the National Security Council, the entire Defense Department, at least the analytical division of the CIA, and at least the intelligence bureau of the State Department, and perhaps the regional secretaries of that department as well.

But Mr. Porter seems confused about this. It seems at times that this “bureaucracy” in his mind is nothing more than some of the elite inner circle of presidential advisers—for instance in the period of President Johnson, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk. For Mr. Porter tells us that the CIA analysis of the threat posed by North Vietnam was always at variance with the counsel of the above-mentioned gentlemen. So too was the analysis of William Bundy and his State Department underlings upon his assumption of the post of assistant secretary of state for East Asia. Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk? Some “bureaucracy”!

Equally important, one is compelled to ask on what basis can the elected U.S. president be considered a tool of a “pressure group” made up of the very advisers he has appointed, all of whom serve at his pleasure? Neither evidence nor logic support this utterly fanciful hypothesis.

What then do we make of Mr. Porter’s theory of why the U.S. became involved in Vietnam? Let us assume, for argument’s sake, that his hypothesis of a preponderance of U.S. military power in the world during the 1950s and 1960s is true. Does it make sense that this preponderance was the primary reason for military intervention? If so, the question of “why Vietnam?” is left unanswered. Why not Canada or Saudi Arabia? Why not Gaullist France or Nasserite Egypt? They were far more economically and politically important places for the U.S. to establish its political domination than Vietnam. And they would have been more susceptible to America’s conventional military might.

The correct answer is of course that the balance of power provides merely a condition, not a reason, for action or inaction. But so eager is Mr. Porter to dress up his work with the trappings of a political scientist’s theory, that he abandons the logic of comprehensive historical analysis.

The reasons for, rather than the conditions facilitating, U.S. foreign policy decisions, have to do with the behavior of other nations. And here we see the fundamental failure of Gareth Porter as a historian. He neglects to note that the U.S. became deeply involved in support of the French in Indochina in the summer of 1950, after the communist instigation of uprisings in Malaya, Burma and the Philippines in 1948, after Mao’s conquest of China in 1949, after the Soviet Union and China began their massive support for the Vietnamese communists in January 1950, and after North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950. Revealing that sequence of events would undermine his thesis that it was the U.S. which began an aggressive war against the Vietnamese communists, and that the major U.S. decisions on Vietnam had no connection to the Cold War. Obviously, the Cold War had everything to do with America’s decision to intervene.

Similarly with his account of the origins of the second Indochina war. His entire account of North Vietnam’s motives and actions are nothing more than a stale rehash of old arguments that Hanoi itself has publicly presented. And they are demonstrably wrong.

Take for example the issue of who actually started the war in South Vietnam. Hanoi always controlled the communist movement in the South. Violent insurrection in the south did not begin with the formation of the National Liberation Front in 1960, as Hanoi and Mr. Porter would have us believe. It began in the mid 1950s with the campaign of political assassinations undertaken by the communist cadres, euphemistically described by Mr. Porter, following Hanoi, as a “political struggle.” These acts of political terrorism constituted violence on a smaller scale than that of organized military formations. But they were acts of insurrection nonetheless. Hiding acts of terror behind Orwellian terminology like “political struggle” is what totalitarian parties do to confuse their victims. It is not an act of deception that any honest scholar should be complicit in.

One consistent underlying defect in Mr. Porter’s scholarship is his reliance upon published Vietnamese Communist Party histories as credible evidence of Vietnamese leaders’ actual intentions, motives or actions. He does not seem to grasp that such sources are meant as retroactive justifications for past actions, not honest analysis. This element of his writing goes back more than three decades, and is connected to his political sympathies.

Thirty-three years ago in a monograph published by Cornell, Mr. Porter indicated his sympathy for Vietnamese communism:

Two generations of Americans have been led to believe that revolutionaries guided by Marxist-Leninist concepts must be fanatical and cruel. Many Americans tend to accept that stereotype in total ignorance of the real nature of the Vietnamese revolution…That same stereotype which belittled the intelligence, the patriotism and the humanity of the Vietnamese communist movement also made it easier for Americans to assume that it was no match for American economic and military power. It should now be clear that the U.S. can delay but cannot ultimately avoid coming to terms with the Vietnamese revolution. The abandonment of the crudely distorted portrayal of the Vietnamese communists still prevalent in the U.S. should be the first step in that process.

In pursuit of his assumptions stated above, Mr. Porter began his political-academic career with another novel mission: attempting to refute the evidence of mass murder by the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists in both war and peace.

During the 1950s the Vietnamese communists, under the supervision of Chinese communist cadres, had carried out a Maoist reign of terror, under the guise of “land reform,” in zones of North Vietnam under their control. Tens of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians died in what ranks as the greatest single atrocity and state crime in Vietnamese history. The U.S. government cited this event as a reason why it should not abandon South Vietnam. In the 1972 Cornell monograph, entitled The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam’s Land Reform Reconsidered, he argued that there had been no communist policy of mass murder during the so-called “land reform” campaign, and that hundreds, not tens of thousands, had died, mostly by mistake. Mr. Porter’s sources were Communist Party histories published in Hanoi.

In subsequent years the original story of the massacre—which had been reported by reputable Vietnamese writers and refugees from North Vietnam—was confirmed by Chinese historians, by Vietnamese communist defectors and by the memoirs of other Vietnamese. These accounts thoroughly repudiate Mr. Porter’s 1972 publication. But despite the fact that he has read many of these more recent accounts and quotes their authors as reliable sources in his writings on other topics, he has ignored their refutation of his published account of the “land reform” terror.

From denying mass murder by the Vietnamese communists it was only a short step to denying the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. In 1976, Mr. Porter was co-author of a book on Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge entitled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, published by the Marxist Monthly Review Press. In it he wrote:

…U.S. and government and news media commentary … have gone to great lengths to paint a picture of a country ruled by irrational revolutionaries, without human feelings, determined to reduce their country to barbarism…This study is aimed at setting the record straight on these crucial events.

Mr. Porter argued that there was no deliberate policy of mass killing by Pol Pot’s regime and that the Khmer Rouge had only depopulated the cities of Cambodia in order to facilitate the people’s access to food. In May 1977, when a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee held hearings on human rights in Cambodia, Mr. Porter was one of those called to testify. He told the subcommittee:

But the notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people, of purging anyone who was connected with the Lon Nol government, or punishing the entire population by putting them to work in the countryside after the “death march” from the cities, is a myth fostered primarily by the authors of a Readers’ Digest book…

Mr. Porter’s views on the Khmer Rouge are not only contradicted by abundant evidence available today. They were at variance with the testimony of refugees available at the time he wrote. Yet in three decades there has been no apology from Mr. Porter for denying the Khmer Rouge holocaust.

The Vietnamese “land reform” terror and the Cambodian holocaust are merely the two most famous examples of Mr. Porter’s disgraceful scholarship. He has also denied that the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Vietnamese civilians in Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968 was the calculated plan of the Vietnamese communists.

Also, in 1980 he wrote an article denying that the pogrom of Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese minority, undertaken by the Vietnamese Public Security Bureau, resulting in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of “boat people,” was ever instigated by Hanoi’s leaders. Mr. Porter ignored voluminous refugee accounts and blamed the refugees’ displeasure with “socialist transformation,” as well as the Chinese government.

Gareth Porter’s Perils of Dominance is so deeply flawed that no scholarly reader should take him seriously, let alone gush over his amazing misconceptions. All the more so since Mr. Porter’s extensive resume of being wrong about great historical events in Southeast Asia is a matter of public record. Too bad some of America’s more prominent academics and publishers didn’t check that record before buying such damaged goods.

Mr. Morris is a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and author of Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia (Stanford, 1999).

The Lost Executioner
by Nic Dunlop
Bloomsbury, 326 pages, $31.50

Reviewed by Ron Gluckman

From the depressing gloom that perpetually hovers over Cambodia comes yet another book about the unfathomable cruelty of the Khmer Rouge, but one that, at least, does not try to explain the savage orgy of killing that prompted the world to consider a terrifying new concept—autogenocide, the extermination of one’s own people.

Nic Dunlop, an Irish photographer who spent much of his career in Cambodia, has many questions, and considerable insights to the madness. Yet, he takes a novel approach, focusing on one principal in the nightmare that came to be known as the Khmer Rouge. His subject is Comrade Duch (pronounced Doik), the mysterious commander of S-21, a secret prison camp the likes of which the world has—thankfully—rarely seen. Some 20,000 men, women and children were dispatched to a former school in Phnom Penh also known as Tuol Sleng (and still today, as a museum to the Cambodian holocaust); only seven walked out alive.

The rest were brutally tortured, then dispatched to the infamous Killing Fields, where they were clubbed to death by direct order of the mysterious Duch, of whom the world knew nothing, not even his true name. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Duch disappeared, seemingly burying the secrets of S-21 as effectively as its tens of thousands of victims. Until Mr. Dunlop caught his scent.

Mr. Dunlop would seem an unlikely angel of accountability. He was not yet 10 years old when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, ending the brief but incomparably cruel Khmer Rouge reign. Some two million Cambodians were put to death, a full third of the population. Included were virtually all doctors, lawyers, teachers, even students. In percentage terms, he writes, the genocide was worse than that wrought by the Nazis and the Rwanda regime combined.

Others have recounted the madness, much earlier and in greater detail. David Chandler has practically made a career out of documenting Cambodia’s tragedy, while journalists from John Pilger to Elizabeth Becker have produced insightful books. Mr. Dunlop’s approach is different from these writers, partly because he’s a photographer. At times, his style lacks sophistication. Yet, there is a freshness to the rough approach of someone whose career has been spent capturing images. He can be raw, crude, but brutally evocative. Talking to former Khmer Rouge who joined as student idealists only to suffer greatly in the intellectual purges later, a woman recalls a younger brother, killed by the Khmer. “He once told me, you can talk about the Khmer Rouge, but you cannot cry.” Why not, I asked. She paused, “because there would be no stopping.”

Ultimately, what makes this book unique isn’t the story of how Mr. Dunlop tracked down, unveiled and reported the confession of Cambodia’s Lost Executioner. All thrilling details, to be sure. But at its essence, this isn’t so much a book about Cambodia, or the evils that occurred under the Khmer Rouge, or why (although all of this eats Mr. Dunlop, filling the pages). Rather, it’s a tale of a tiny country that grabs the attention of a man from the other side of the globe, becoming his obsession. Rather than detective story, it’s one of self-discovery. In an interview, Mr. Dunlop explains: “The Khmer Rouge represented the first time, as a child, I realized how horrible the world really was.” Duch represents his own heart of darkness.

Mr. Dunlop was initially keyed to the chase by a series of photographs, stark, grim portraits of every person who passed through S-21. These were taken by Neim Ein (among many subjects that Mr. Dunlop tracks down, and interviews), sent to China to train to capture the images of all who were, Mr. Dunlop writes, “processed before being smashed to bits.” The photos were eventually collected in a book, exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and remain haunting reminders hanging at S-21, now the genocide museum in Phnom Penh.

The pictures provide one thread of the book, yet it contains only three photos. One was carried by Mr. Dunlop in his wallet for over a decade, allowing the author to unmask Duch by coincidence in a refugee camp in 1999. Amazingly, one of the world’s worst killers was working under a new identity as an aid worker.

Remarkably, this astonishing scoop isn’t the end of the story. Mr. Dunlop does a credible job of not only of tracking down Duch, but also detailing his early life, from privileged youth to dedicated school teacher, like many senior Khmer Rouge. What he cannot explain is what turned the former teacher into torturer.

Mr. Dunlop concedes a certain despair in the lack of resolution, not just in the case of Duch (currently in jail, among the only pair of prominent Khmer Rouge likely to face trial if the endlessly-discussed Cambodian tribunal ever takes place), but also in reconciliation for Cambodia. Mr. Dunlop thinks that must take place for the sake of all the victims and human-rights workers who populate these pages.

But there is also a lack of resolution for Mr. Dunlop himself, and humanity itself. The author is blisteringly unsympathetic in his views on the entire aid effort that spent then-record sums to solve Cambodia’s misery, to little avail. He also writes venomously about the various political forces that funded and armed the Khmer Rouge, and kept them in power to kill longer. Nor is he easier on himself, or his profession. “As I took pictures of the pictures,” he writes, “I realized I was participating in another person’s sufferings and vulnerability and exploiting their memory still further and for much more nebulous reasons.”

“There is a need among photojournalists (myself included) to justify what we do,” he writes. In the end, he cannot.

“It was at times like these, several years after Duch’s imprisonment, that I began to question my own role in his incarceration and what purpose it has served other than to shut him up. By seeking out Duch, confronting him and then publishing the contents of his confession with his picture, I had naively believed that the truth about the killings would be made known, that a real justice would be forthcoming and other former Khmer Rouge brought to account.”

None of that has happened, of course, and that remains a tragedy both for Cambodia and the concept of international accountability. All that we have to show for the chase then, is this book. Mr. Dunlop, who immersed himself in so much of Cambodia’s sorrow, may not think this much, but it’s a remarkable contribution.

Mr. Gluckman is a free-lance journalist based in Bangkok.

The REVIEW’s definitive list of Asian travel books: Summer 2005

What to read on your summer holidays? The July issue of the REVIEW will answer that question with a reading list of the best travel books on Asia. But first we’d like your input on the books you think should be included and why. So if there’s a travel book that aroused your wanderlust or you feel offers exceptional insights, email us at letters@feer.com. We will publish a selection of readers’ comments.

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