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The Long Road Back to China: The Burma Road Wartime Diaries
by Carl Crow, Paul French (ed.)
Reviewed by John D. Van Fleet
His life at risk, Carl Crow fled Shanghai in 1937, after 26 years of success in journalism and the advertising trade. Crow had written and published and spoken volumes against Japanese aggression in China, and when the invaders conquered Shanghai in August 1937, Crow became a wanted man.
Earlier in the year, Crow published 400 Million Customers. Crow's evocative, intimate and sometimes reverential insights into China and the Chinese he knew then remain more valuable than much of what's published even today.
In 1939, Crow, back in the United States and enjoying growing fame via Customers, was asked by Liberty Magazine to visit Chongqing, by then the wartime capital of Nationalist China. The river route up the Yangtze from Shanghai would have been a potentially fatal choice, so he chose instead to travel overland, on the newly completed Burma Road.
Crow's diary entries from his travels (landing in Rangoon on May 5, 1939, leaving Chongqing in mid-June, headed south for Hanoi and the equally long trip home) are now available in The Long Road Back to China, a title that refers not only to geography, but to the years he'd been away from a land he loved. Paul French, a 20-year resident of China and author of a biography of Crow, is a well-qualified editor.
Dozens of dog-ears throughout my copy of The Long Road now mark Crow's observational gems. In addition to highly-focused snapshots of everyday life, Crow offers descriptions of ordinary peoples' attempts to survive the horrific, years-long bombings of Chongqing, their calm determination in rebuilding after every attack.
Crow is overtly partisan, in part by design. In his introduction, French notes that Crow intended to use his work to solicit U.S. support for China's cause against Japan, though Crow must have been aware of the corruption and incompetence of Generalissimo Chiang and the Nationalist government (aka the Kuomintang, or KMT) he led to utter defeat. Crow felt the primary goal of unifying against the Japanese required a delay in facing the KMT's internal evil.
But one might expect that Crow's private diary entries, as opposed to his published work, written as they were by someone with such a keen grasp of China, would reflect a more realistic view. So readers of The Long Road may be surprised to see entries about Chiang such as, without comment, one journalist's assertion: "There is no nickname for the Generalissimo. The people hold him in such high regard..." Or his excerpting bits from KMT military briefings, again without comment, that must have been propaganda shows: "There are no dissentions... China is growing stronger."
Many of Crow's contemporaries, and historians since, tell us that this was all nonsense. One example: the Communists had myriad nicknames for Chiang of course, as did the millions of peasants who had their family members pressed into military service, or starved, or raped, or murdered, by KMT marauders. U.S. general "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, who commanded Chinese troops at the time, referred to Chiang as "Peanut" by 1941. Some years later, U.S. president Truman rephrased Chiang Kai-Shek as "Cash My Check" in response to the constant demands the KMT made on the U.S. for military resources and funding, much of which disappeared down the corruption drain.
Crow also massively misread the future. "It seems the communists have renounced the idea of achieving their aims by violence... the communists will just be another opposition party." Crow's personal misapprehensions of Chiang, the Communists and the future of China must spring from his laudable and well-justified respect and love for the Chinese people, and his zeal to see them freed of the Japanese occupiers. Another factor: the KMT were masters at externally-aimed propaganda. (Chiang's wife, nee Soong May Ling, was a consummate puppet master.) Crow was eager to believe, and therefore suffered believer's blindness.
Fortunately, Crow's misapprehension of the KMT and the future represents a small portion of his diary and his overall work. The footprints of his clay feet are few in comparison to those left by the giant steps he takes, in The Long Road and elsewhere, in helping us understand the China of his time, and of today as well.
An additional bonus for readers of The Long Road: French's copious and valuable footnotes to the diary entries rest at the bottom of each page, where the reader can readily refer to them, rather at the end of the chapter or the entire work--an increasingly common (and irritating) practice.
--
John D. Van Fleet leads a business based in Shanghai, and serves as adjunct faculty and advisor at the Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai JiaoTong University.
by Carl Crow, Paul French (ed.)
Reviewed by John D. Van Fleet
His life at risk, Carl Crow fled Shanghai in 1937, after 26 years of success in journalism and the advertising trade. Crow had written and published and spoken volumes against Japanese aggression in China, and when the invaders conquered Shanghai in August 1937, Crow became a wanted man.
Earlier in the year, Crow published 400 Million Customers. Crow's evocative, intimate and sometimes reverential insights into China and the Chinese he knew then remain more valuable than much of what's published even today.
In 1939, Crow, back in the United States and enjoying growing fame via Customers, was asked by Liberty Magazine to visit Chongqing, by then the wartime capital of Nationalist China. The river route up the Yangtze from Shanghai would have been a potentially fatal choice, so he chose instead to travel overland, on the newly completed Burma Road.
Crow's diary entries from his travels (landing in Rangoon on May 5, 1939, leaving Chongqing in mid-June, headed south for Hanoi and the equally long trip home) are now available in The Long Road Back to China, a title that refers not only to geography, but to the years he'd been away from a land he loved. Paul French, a 20-year resident of China and author of a biography of Crow, is a well-qualified editor.
Dozens of dog-ears throughout my copy of The Long Road now mark Crow's observational gems. In addition to highly-focused snapshots of everyday life, Crow offers descriptions of ordinary peoples' attempts to survive the horrific, years-long bombings of Chongqing, their calm determination in rebuilding after every attack.
Crow is overtly partisan, in part by design. In his introduction, French notes that Crow intended to use his work to solicit U.S. support for China's cause against Japan, though Crow must have been aware of the corruption and incompetence of Generalissimo Chiang and the Nationalist government (aka the Kuomintang, or KMT) he led to utter defeat. Crow felt the primary goal of unifying against the Japanese required a delay in facing the KMT's internal evil.
But one might expect that Crow's private diary entries, as opposed to his published work, written as they were by someone with such a keen grasp of China, would reflect a more realistic view. So readers of The Long Road may be surprised to see entries about Chiang such as, without comment, one journalist's assertion: "There is no nickname for the Generalissimo. The people hold him in such high regard..." Or his excerpting bits from KMT military briefings, again without comment, that must have been propaganda shows: "There are no dissentions... China is growing stronger."
Many of Crow's contemporaries, and historians since, tell us that this was all nonsense. One example: the Communists had myriad nicknames for Chiang of course, as did the millions of peasants who had their family members pressed into military service, or starved, or raped, or murdered, by KMT marauders. U.S. general "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, who commanded Chinese troops at the time, referred to Chiang as "Peanut" by 1941. Some years later, U.S. president Truman rephrased Chiang Kai-Shek as "Cash My Check" in response to the constant demands the KMT made on the U.S. for military resources and funding, much of which disappeared down the corruption drain.
Crow also massively misread the future. "It seems the communists have renounced the idea of achieving their aims by violence... the communists will just be another opposition party." Crow's personal misapprehensions of Chiang, the Communists and the future of China must spring from his laudable and well-justified respect and love for the Chinese people, and his zeal to see them freed of the Japanese occupiers. Another factor: the KMT were masters at externally-aimed propaganda. (Chiang's wife, nee Soong May Ling, was a consummate puppet master.) Crow was eager to believe, and therefore suffered believer's blindness.
Fortunately, Crow's misapprehension of the KMT and the future represents a small portion of his diary and his overall work. The footprints of his clay feet are few in comparison to those left by the giant steps he takes, in The Long Road and elsewhere, in helping us understand the China of his time, and of today as well.
An additional bonus for readers of The Long Road: French's copious and valuable footnotes to the diary entries rest at the bottom of each page, where the reader can readily refer to them, rather at the end of the chapter or the entire work--an increasingly common (and irritating) practice.
--
John D. Van Fleet leads a business based in Shanghai, and serves as adjunct faculty and advisor at the Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai JiaoTong University.
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