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From Allies to Enemies Visions of Modernity Identity and
U S China Diplomacy 1945 1960 1st Edition Simei Qing.
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Simei Qing.
ISBN(s): 9780674023444, 0674023447
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.81 MB
Year: 2007
Language: english
From Allies to Enemies
From Allies to Enemies
v V I S I O N S O F M O D E R N I T Y, I D E N T I T Y, A N D
U . S . - C H I N A D I P L O M A C Y, 1 9 4 5 – 1 9 6 0

SIMEI QING

H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2007
Copyright
2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Qing, Simei.
From allies to enemies: visions of modernity, identity, and U.S.-China
diplomacy, 1945–1960 / Simei Qing.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02344-4 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-674-02344-7 (alk. paper)
1. United States—Foreign relations—China. 2. China—Foreign
relations—United States. 3. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989.
4. Cold War. I. Title.
E183.8.C5Q26 2006
327.7305109'045—dc22 2006043662
Dedicated to the memory
of my parents
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Cultural Visions and Foreign Policy 1

1 Perceptions and Realities: Chinese and American Visions of

Modernity and Identity 10

2 Straining the Relationship: Truman and the

Reconstruction of China after World War II 33

3 Disillusionment and Polarization: The Failure of the

Marshall Mission and Deepening Divisions in Nationalist
China 57

4 New American Strategies: Debates over the

Chinese Communist Party and Taiwan
in the Truman Administration 95

5 Two Sides of One Coin: The CCP’s Policies toward the

Soviet Union and the United States 113

6 From Adversaries to Enemies:

Military Confrontation in Korea 143

7 Inducement versus Containment:

U.S. China Policy under Eisenhower 169
viii • Contents

8 The Foundation of New China: Conflicting CCP Visions

of Industrialization in the 1950s 205

9 Mao’s Magic Weapon: From a Gradualist Political Program

to the Hundred Flowers Policy 228

10 Becoming First-Class Citizens of the World:

China’s Diplomacy of Peaceful Coexistence 253

Conclusion: Ways of War and Peace 297

Notes 309

Primary Sources 381

Index 387
 Acknowledgments

Now that this work is finally completed, after many years of research
and many revisions, I want to thank all my teachers, friends, col-
leagues, and students, as well as the institutions that have encouraged
and supported me through all these years. The research conclusions
are, of course, my responsibility.
As the thought of this work began to evolve, the U.S. Institute of
Peace provided a Peace Scholar Award, which made it possible for me
to work in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and in the
Chinese National Archives for an entire year. A predoctoral fellowship
from the Social Science Research Council/John D. MacArthur Foun-
dation on International Peace and Security enabled me to undertake a
two-year interdisciplinary training program on cultural and compara-
tive sociology at Princeton University. The Center for International Se-
curity and Cooperation at Stanford University supplied an office and
all necessary support, as well as a highly stimulating intellectual envi-
ronment.
While I cannot list all of the archivists and librarians who helped to
facilitate my research in the United States and China, I do want to
express my great appreciation to those archivists and librarians in the
United States at the National Archives, the Eisenhower Library, and
the Truman Library, as well as their counterparts at the second Na-
tional Archives of China, whose professional help was essential to the
completion of this study.
A special thanks to many of my students at James Madison College,
x • Acknowledgments

Michigan State University, who have challenged my arguments, com-

pelled me to rethink some of my theoretical interpretations, and en-
thusiastically cheered me on over the years.
I am grateful for the assistance of two able and scrupulous copy
editors, Kate O’Neill and David Rumohr, who worked on this manu-
script before I submitted it to the Press. They not only helped me im-
prove the quality of this work, but went beyond the call of duty to
offer their insights and critiques throughout the tedious process of
making revisions and meeting deadlines.
I received outstanding guidance from members of the Department of
History at Michigan State University. Bill H. Hixson taught me about
modern and contemporary American history with profound insight.
Donald Lammers guided me through the complex history of European
foreign relations and first introduced me to the fascinating field of cog-
nitive psychology in the study of world politics. Lewis H. Siegelbaum
taught me the social historian approach to Soviet studies and the study
of European history. He also offered important support, as both a
teacher and a friend.
During the course of writing and revising this work, I benefited im-
mensely from the advice and suggestions of the following scholars, who
took the time to read the manuscript or parts of it at its various stages
of evolution: Gordon H. Chang, Su-Ya Chang, Kathleen Conzen, John
W. Coogan, Bruce Cumings, Anna Graham, Norman A. Graham, Mi-
chael Guyer, David Holloway, Akira Iriye, Otto Koester, Steve I.
Levine, Sean McEnroe, Michel Oksenberg, Gilbert Rozman, Michael
Schaller, Michael Schechter, Philip West, Allen S. Whiting, and Robert
Wuthnow. In numerous conversations on American–East Asian rela-
tions, international history, and my methodology during my research,
I also benefited greatly from the advice and suggestions of these
scholars: Guy Alitto, Steve Averill, Gene Burns, Thomas Christensen,
Paul A. Cohen, He Di, Roger Dingman, Prasenjit Duara, Rosemary
Foot, Michael Gasster, Alexander George, Peter Hays Gries, Gu Ning,
Harry Harding, Charles W. Hayford, Richard Hellie, Michael H. Hunt,
Jia Qingguo, Madeline Levine, John Wilson Lewis, Li Jingjie, Li
Shenzhi, David G. LoRomer, Michael Lund, Doug Merwin, Niu Jun,
Robert Ross, Sheng Zhihua, Gordon T. Stewart, Tao Wenzhao, Nancy
Tucker, Frederick Wakeman, Wang Jisi, Kathryn Weathersby, Xiong
Zhiyong, Xue Litai, Zhang Baijia, Shu-Guang Zhang, Zhu Ruizhen,
and Zi Zhongyun.
I am especially indebted to Akira Iriye for his persistent emphasis on
 Acknowledgments • xi

the study of the cultural dimension of international relations. From the

very beginning of this work he has given me valuable advice and gen-
uine encouragement. I am grateful to Michel Oksenberg, my mentor
during my SSRC/MacArthur fellowship years, for first encouraging me
to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, particularly the approach of
cultural and comparative sociology, to the study of U.S.-China diplo-
macy. Gilbert Rozman, my mentor during the SSRC/MarArthur inter-
disciplinary training program at Princeton University, read several early
drafts of the manuscript. He taught me about the comparative soci-
ology of international relations and offered detailed suggestions and
honest critiques. Robert Wuthnow warmly invited me to join his work-
shop on comparative religion and cultural studies at Princeton Univer-
sity and taught me about cultural sociology. David Holloway, who
taught me international relations theory at Stanford University, helped
me to pin down the theoretical questions of this study and offered
valuable help whenever I needed it. Gordon H. Chang not only shared
with me his unusual insights on U.S.-China relations, but also offered
his advice and tough criticism of this work over the years. Michael
Schaller read various versions of this manuscript and offered his
thoughtful criticism throughout the revision process. John W. Coogan
shared with me his unique expertise on the history of international
relations and provided thoughtful advice on my research. I am espe-
cially grateful to Zhu Ruizhen, Russian interpreter for Mao Zedong
and Zhou Enlai from 1954 to 1966 and editor of the private papers
of Shi Zhe, Russian interpreter for Mao and Zhou from 1948 to 1953,
who guided me through the primary sources on the Korean War and
Sino-Soviet relations. My special thanks also to Shen Zhihua, who
shared with me his research findings on the Korean War in the Russian
archives and oral history on Sino-Soviet relations in China. My deep
appreciation to Norman A. Graham, who has been a wise mentor at
James Madison College and the toughest of critics of my manuscript;
he has never intervened in my research findings, even if he sometimes
disagreed with my arguments. Thanks also to Steve I. Levine for
reading all the different versions of this manuscript, for sharing with
me his incredible insights and knowledge of the history of U.S.-China
relations, for persistently encouraging me to pursue historical truth,
and for his friendship in all weather—bad as well as good—over the
years.
My heartfelt thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert at Harvard University Press
and John Donohue at Westchester Book Services, who have brought
xii • Acknowledgments

this work to its completion. John and his colleagues helped me to

clarify my methodological approach, sharpen my arguments, remove
repetitive sections, and refine the presentation of every chapter in this
work. Without their outstanding professional work, this book would
not stand as it is today.
I could not have completed this work without the advice of Warren
I. Cohen. Through all my ups and downs he has always trusted and
supported me, even when I disagreed with him in my studies and re-
search conclusions. He always pushed me to pursue historical truth
with intellectual honesty and integrity. I owe a great intellectual debt
to him for his guidance in my studies of American diplomatic history
and U.S.-China relations.
Kathleen McDermott, my editor at Harvard University Press, helped
me through the most difficult stage of this work: meeting the challenge
of rising above my years of research in the archives and developing
this work for a much broader readership. From articulating the main
thesis to reorganizing the supporting primary sources, her advice was
crucial at every step of its completion. I feel fortunate to have had the
opportunity to work with her on this project.
When I showed Warren Cohen my final manuscript, he told me that
my parents must have been very proud of me at that moment. I could
not hold back my tears. My parents taught me that historical inquiry
should never be done for the sake of pursuing personal fame and
wealth, but to pursue historical truth, regardless of its popularity at
the time. This book is dedicated to their memory with their daughter’s
love.
From Allies to Enemies
 Introduction
Cultural Visions and Foreign Policy

Could American misunderstanding of international affairs profoundly

influence the destiny of modern democracy in the United States? Yes,
it could, argued Walter Lippmann in his classic study Public Opinion
(1922). He pointed out that while citizens in earlier democratic socie-
ties lived in small communities and made decisions on domestic poli-
cies, citizens in modern democracies are asked to make judgments on
critical issues of war and peace. Yet when the public interprets inter-
national affairs, the major problem is, “We do not first see, and then
define, we define first and then see.” In observing world events, citizens
often create for themselves a pseudo reality that is more consistent with
their preexisting beliefs, misconceptions, or prejudices than with the
actual reality of the world. Lippmann, one of the leading journalists in
America in his time, asked whether a free press would help address the
problem of “hidden subjectivity” in the public’s interpretations of for-
eign affairs. It might not, he argued. In media coverage of international
affairs, “news and truth may no longer be the same thing.” It was not
that editors or reporters “deliberately tried to suppress the truth.”
Rather, “the chief censor and the chief propagandist are hope and fear
in their own minds.”1
Misunderstanding and misperception in international relations is a
critical and complex phenomenon. It is also, in many cases, not uni-
lateral.2 This book constitutes the first comprehensive endeavor to com-
pare American perceptions of China’s economic and political recon-
struction efforts and foreign-policy intentions with the reality in China
2 • From Allies to Enemies

in the important period between 1945 and 1960. During that time,
U.S.-China relations deteriorated rapidly: the strategic allies became
adversaries, and then irreconcilable enemies.
This book asks one question: Did this drastic deterioration result
from an inevitable conflict between the two countries’ vital national
interests and moral principles that was therefore doomed to take place?
Or instead, was the transition from allies to enemies created by the
fallout from counterproductive foreign policies on both sides, the bitter
fruit of repeated misjudgments of each other’s intentions, or the fatal
consequences of an illusion—the perceived incompatibility of national
interests and principles?
To address the question, this book studies the United States’ China
policies from both the inside out and the outside in. The former re-
quires one to understand American visions and aspirations (i.e., U.S.
policymakers’ China policies and strategies) entirely on their own
terms. To study the United States’ China policies from the outside in
is to investigate any significant gaps between U.S. interpretations of
Chinese foreign-policy objectives and actual Chinese intentions.
The purpose of this study is not, therefore, just to ask why a specific
policy was made, but to go further: to ask how it could become so
counterproductive as to generate exactly the opposite of its desired and
expected outcome. The answer to the question of why a specific policy
was made usually involves issues of power, ideology, domestic politics,
or policymakers’ personalities. But to explore how a policy could be
counterproductive, one needs to delve more deeply, revealing those
rarely examined assumptions that might be so ingrained in mainstream
policy debates that the general public, and even most policymakers, are
not conscious of them. In the broadest terms, this is a study of the
critical role of deeply anchored visions in the origins of human military
conflicts.
Increasingly, scholars in this field have called for a comprehensive
comparison between U.S. interpretations of Chinese intentions and
China’s actual foreign-policy goals.3 As Michael Hunt and Steven
Levine point out, without such a comparison, “one cannot fully un-
derstand American actions, provide cogent evaluations of American
views, or properly judge American policy.” They emphasize that Amer-
ican scholars should be especially on guard against seeing China and
Asia through the lenses of the American value system and instead try
their best to view China and Asia through Chinese and Asian eyes.4
This is what Paul A. Cohen persistently argues in his thesis of a China-
 Introduction • 3

centered approach. The term China-centered, he emphasizes, is em-

ployed not to place China at the center of the universe but “to under-
stand what is happening in that history in terms that are as free as
possible of imported criteria of significance.” Otherwise, he says, we
may present a so-called Chinese reality, defined “too much by the his-
torian’s own innermost reality, and too little by the reality of the people
he or she is writing about.”5
Moreover, scholars in this field continue to stress the importance of
examining the different philosophical or cultural assumptions under-
lying policy debates on both sides. As Michael Schaller emphasized, we
must examine those deep-seated policy assumptions underlying U.S.-
China interactions that had led to war and confrontations in the past.6
Nations, like individuals, do have “visions, dreams, and prejudices
about themselves and the world that influence their relationships,” em-
phasizes Akira Iriye. He urges scholars of international relations to be
“aware of the ‘imagined’ nature of a given ‘reality.’ ” “All realities in
a way are imagined realities, products of forces and movements that
are mediated through human consciousness.” In his view, study of
those “most highly valued beliefs” or “latent, if not always clearly
articulated” cultural visions that “underl[ie] such interactions” is “long
overdue.”7 Or, in Gordon H. Chang’s view, the new research agenda
should focus on the elusive but important “cultural context of diplo-
macy” in U.S.-China relations. Policy analyses are conducted through
“cultural filters.” “Can one deny that there is a realm of social ideas,
images, beliefs, and sentiments, which are distinct from, but still influ-
ence, the formal expressions of power and policy?”8
In studying the making of America’s China policies from both the
inside out and the outside in, or studying why there were persistent
counterproductive policies on both sides, the major methodological
challenge is twofold. First, how can one present core American policy
assumptions on their own terms, without their being filtered through
Chinese beliefs or interpretations? Likewise, how can one present core
Chinese policy assumptions on their own terms, without filtering them
through American categories and paradigms? Second, how can one go
beyond the conscious frameworks of past participants, view them from
a distance, and analyze what the participants might not have been con-
sciously aware of when they assessed each other’s intentions?
This challenge is analogous to investigating a dispute or debate be-
tween two individuals. The investigator must first explore and come to
understand the mindset and positions of each party involved. Because
4 • From Allies to Enemies

the participants may become so immersed in the specific content of the

debate that they are hardly aware of their own predispositions, the
investigator, “taking a distanced perspective,” may be in a better po-
sition to “analyze what the participants are taking for granted.”9
This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to this methodolog-
ical challenge. It redefines how core assumptions and cultural predis-
positions are apprehended or examined, thereby building a connection
between cultural studies and international security studies.10

Official versus Informal Ideology

The concept of core policy assumptions is not identified with official
ideology. Ideology here refers to officially declared value systems, such
as democratic capitalism and Marxist socialism. For instance, if one
argues that in the 1950s, the policy assumptions of the leaders of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were grounded in Marxist socialism
or communism, then we need to understand how they defined or in-
terpreted this ideology.
During the 1950s, most Americans loathed socialism/communism,
identifying it with a grim police state that ruthlessly repressed indi-
vidual liberties. By contrast, when the great American educator John
Dewey first visited China in 1920, he exclaimed: “The best and the
brightest here all embrace, in one way or another, socialist ideas!” Chi-
nese interpretations of socialism in the early twentieth century, long
before the birth of the CCP, overwhelmingly focused on the ideals of
nonaggression among nations and economic justice in society. Sun Yat-
sen, the leader of the 1911 republican revolution and the father of
Chinese democracy, wrote in 1907 that, with the rise of the socialist
movement in Europe, humanity would no longer tolerate “the law of
the jungle”: “Humanity would hold out its hands to help the poor and
the underprivileged, to safeguard the basic human dignity for everyone
in the world, regardless of his race, sex, class, and nationality.”11
The point here is: to discover underlying core policy assumptions,
one should not take ideological rhetoric or labels, such as liberal cap-
italism and Marxist socialism, at face value. That is, one should not
simply assume that the countries being studied hold to identical defi-
nitions of these ideological concepts or that there are homogenous in-
terpretations within each nation or unvarying understandings even in
an individual’s mind. To imagine such a fixed set of definitions of so-
cialism and capitalism, and to impose them uniformly on the minds of
 Introduction • 5

Chinese and American policymakers, will not help to reveal the core
assumptions made in U.S.-China diplomacy. Steven Levine emphasizes
that in gaining an understanding of the foreign-policy objectives of the
People’s Republic of China (PRC), its informal ideology is more im-
portant than its official one. “An informal ideology,” according to
Levine, is “the complex of cultural values, preferences, prejudices, pre-
dispositions, habits, and unstated but widely shared propositions about
reality that conditions the way in which political actors behave.” An
informal ideology, then, is “implicit, unconscious, or only partly con-
scious,” and “a more powerful factor” in understanding the PRC’s
foreign policy objectives.12 To identify core policy assumptions in U.S.-
China diplomacy in the Cold War, clearly one needs to go beyond the
ideological rhetoric to uncover the cultural predispositions that shaped
or conditioned the distinctive indigenous interpretations of official ide-
ologies.13

Cultural Predisposition and Political Behavior

The concept of cultural predisposition is not equated with the inter-
nalized worldviews of individuals. The reason is that doing so would
make it impossible to study cultural assumptions at empirical levels,
since an individual may not be conscious of the assumptions he or she
makes, and even “sustained questioning of the individual” is unlikely
to reveal them.14 In the words of Alastair Iain Johnston, despite the
“centrality” of the relationship between cultural ideas and political be-
havior, “it is an exceedingly difficult causal connection to show empir-
ically.”15
In order to study cultural predispositions at empirical levels, culture
is redefined in this book. According to the disciplines of cognitive psy-
chology16 and contemporary cultural analysis,17 culture can be viewed
as a “moral classification system” in defining norms and deviances in
society, or invisible moral and political parameters in the mainstream
public debates. To discover this moral classification system, one must
trace intellectual discourses in a nation over a rather long historical
period. By determining the moral parameters of mainstream discourse
since the beginning of the modern era (the period from the mid-
eighteenth through the mid-twentieth century) and comparing them
with those of mainstream debates in the contemporary age, one may
then indirectly discover an individual’s internalized cultural assump-
tions.
6 • From Allies to Enemies

Such a definition of culture has its limitations, however. Its data are
more about patterns of thought than about individuals’ private rumi-
nations. If culture has shaped us as a single species, so, too, has it
shaped us as separate individuals. That is, in the study of culture, as
Clifford Geertz emphasizes, “we must descend into detail, . . . to grasp
firmly the essential character of not only the various cultures but the
various sorts of individuals within each culture, if we wish to encounter
humanity face to face.”18
The concept of cultural predisposition in this study thus encompasses
both the moral parameters of the mainstream discourse or the broad
patterns of thought in the mainstream society, and individual world-
views or individuals’ differing interpretations of their cultural heritage.

The Role of Cultural Visions of Modernity and Identity

in Policymaking
The role of cultural values and beliefs in policymaking is twofold: they
sometimes follow policy decision, functioning as policy justification or
rationalization. At other times, however, deep-rooted cultural values
may precede the decision, functioning as policy predispositions or
policy rationality.19
For instance, after U.S. president Richard Nixon’s historic trip to
China, “the powerfully negative images of China and the Chinese that
had dominated the center of the stage in American thinking about
China for some twenty years” were, suddenly, replaced by “the highly
positive views that had been quite out of view all this time.” Here, the
positive image of the PRC in the media and the public followed Nixon’s
policy decision. According to Harold Isaacs, a pioneer in image studies,
when the national interest is at stake, policymakers may “first set their
policy toward another state and then develop the image” of that state,
which would support, justify, or rationalize such a major foreign policy
shift in front of the media and the public.20
This study intends to inquire whether deeply embedded cultural as-
sumptions may function as policy rationality, or filter systems whereby
one selects and interprets the information about other nations’ do-
mestic developments and foreign-policy intentions. In this regard, con-
ceptions of modernity and identity may play a particularly important
role in the interactions between Western and non-Western countries.
The search for modernity and new identities began in most non-
Western, developing societies in the mid-nineteenth century, when re-
 Introduction • 7

formers tried to transform their countries from agricultural to indus-

trialized nations. Heated debates have emerged in modern times about
what kinds of new economic and political systems a non-Western
country should attempt to establish and how, in effecting such pro-
found and far-reaching transformations of the country’s economy,
polity, and foreign policy, a non-Western society should redefine its new
identity.21 In these wide-ranging debates of unprecedented intensity, cul-
tural conceptions of modernity and identity have often evoked deep
political passions, religious fervors, and different intellectual convic-
tions in non-Western societies.
To further confound a better understanding of this extraordinarily
complex process of historical quest for modernity and new identity,
there was a continual belief in the mainstream American discourse
throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century;
that is, modernization meant Westernization. As Isaacs wrote in his
pioneering study on American images of China and India in the 1950s,
“The images of Asia and of Asian-Western relationships persisting in
the minds of men educated and conditioned primarily to an Atlantic-
Western-white view of the world certainly have a major place in the
slowness and pain with which major American policy makers have
reacted to the new realities in Asia since 1945.” Based on extensive
interviews at that time, he also concluded that “Different as they are
in qualities of mind and character, this seems to apply both to Dean
Acheson and to John Foster Dulles, i.e., it appears at all extremes of
competence in the leadership of our public life.”22
It is obvious that in the turbulent encounters between Western and
non-Western societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as
Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane write, “policy outcomes can be
explained only when interests and power are combined with a rich
understanding of human beliefs” at much deeper levels.23 Thus “efforts
by social scientists to dispense with the study of national heritage have
met with failure,” according to Gilbert Rozman. “Some assumed that
national differences are of little or no consequence only to discover
that class struggle and modernization assume unexpected forms in non-
Western countries.” As he further states, “Neither socialism nor capi-
talism is as all-embracing a category for interpreting a country’s de-
velopment as many once thought. The historical slate is not wiped
clean, and particularly in East Asia, its effects are becoming widely
visible.”24
In short, with its approach to core policy assumptions and cultural
8 • From Allies to Enemies

predispositions, this methodology aims to explore the long-term, im-

plicit, and underlying issues in U.S.-China diplomacy, which may well
transcend the Cold War framework and may continue to exist in the
background of U.S.-China interactions in the post–Cold War world.
In the post–Cold War era, it is especially important to go beyond the
ideological framework of the Cold War to reexamine the origins of
U.S.-China antagonism. As Robert Jervis put it, “psychologists have
shown that ‘where one and only one hypothesis is operative with no
competing alternatives, it tends to be more readily confirmable.’ ” Thus
“to expose implicit assumptions and give themselves more freedom of
choice, decision-makers should encourage the formulation and appli-
cation of alternative images.”25 To learn from U.S.-China confronta-
tions in the Cold War, our first step should be to study U.S.-China
diplomacy from alternative conceptual frameworks. As Albert Einstein
reflected, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the
same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”26
Although the United States has engaged in three major wars in Asia
since the beginning of the 1940s, two of them with the Chinese, Amer-
icans and Chinese still “do not have any understanding of one another
comparable to the understanding . . . between Americans and Euro-
peans,” laments Ernest May.27 The title of David Lampton’s most re-
cent book on U.S.-China diplomacy expresses this current relationship:
Same Bed, Different Dreams (2000).28 In his preface to the fourth
edition of America’s Response to China (2000), Warren I. Cohen writes
that he could only pray that the next edition of his book would not
tell “a sad tale of how two nations,” which have “no vital interests in
conflict,” “stumbled into war.”29
Does the current difficult relationship between China and America
have anything to do with the past? Yes, it does. An important legacy
of U.S.-China relations during “the critical decade” following 1945
was, according to Harry Harding, “to help create and reinforce a set
of mutual perceptions that still have a significant, although often un-
recognized, impact to this day.”30 Or, as Robert S. Ross put it, “Many
of the factors that prolonged and exacerbated conflict between the
United States and China in the 1950s and the 1960s may also bedevil
U.S.-China relations in the post–Cold War era.”31
Historians of U.S.-China relations bear a special duty and responsi-
bility at the dawn of the twenty-first century to study the roles of deep-
seated assumptions or cultural visions of modernity and identity in the
origins and developments of U.S.-China confrontations, because his-
 Introduction • 9

torical studies on this important subject may have a profound impact

on the future evolution of U.S.-China relations. These historical in-
quiries may either help confirm flawed policy assumptions of the past,
thus perpetuating policymakers’ mistakes, or help uncover flawed as-
sumptions that led to past conflicts and wars, thus laying down a more
solid foundation for U.S.-China relations in the years to come.
v chapter one

Perceptions and Realities

Chinese and American Visions of
Modernity and Identity

Controversy between cultural universalism and particularism in Amer-

ican discourse has existed since the beginning of the modern era. Cul-
tural universalists believe in the “enlightenment mode of history”; that
is, that “time overcomes space—a condition in which the other in geo-
graphical space, will in time, come to look like an earlier version of
us.” Cultural particularists, in contrast, argue that quests for modernity
have taken place in and varied according to different social and cultural
environments, “in response to unique circumstances.” It is thus im-
possible to engage in global “intercultural communications” con-
cerning different quests for modernity and identity.1
A deeper examination of this controversy reveals two opposing un-
derlying assumptions about people’s desires in non-Western, developing
societies. According to the universalists, the peoples in these societies,
like those in the United States, are “yearning” for individual civil and
political liberties. However, the particularists claim that the majority
of people in developing societies are “indifferent” to, or at least “unen-
thusiastic” about, the ideal of individual freedom. Clearly, this debate
reveals conflicting assumptions about the desires of people in the non-
Western, modernizing world.2
Which of these assumptions is more consistent with reality? To ad-
dress this question, this chapter compares Chinese and American vi-
sions of individual freedom, the market economy, and democracy in
the modern era, when Chinese reformers—from Taiping rebels, to con-
 Perceptions and Realities • 11

stitutionalists, to republican revolutionaries—began their earnest, com-

prehensive search for modernity and a new identity in China.
Before we address this underlying issue in the controversy, important
questions must first be answered: How shall we distinguish between
people’s desires and government’s? When analyzing people’s desires,
how shall we distinguish between the ephemeral and the constant, the
digressive and the meaningful? A historical analysis of the long-term
pattern of habits of mind may help solve the problem. For the purpose
of this inquiry, however, a historical approach alone is not sufficient.
The major focus here is not a detailed yet separate intellectual history
of Chinese and American cultural values, which could not provide any
basis for comparison. Instead, it is designed as a structured comparison
of mainstream Chinese and American discourses on modernity and new
identity. To provide a basis for analysis, it focuses particularly on how
both sides drew the boundaries between the private and the public
realms. For example, in Chinese and American discourses, how were
basic concepts such as the individual, the state, and the common good
defined? How did the symbolic borders between the public and the
private sectors negotiated? How did these symbolic boundaries change
over time? And how did these different constructions of private-public
relationships shape different economic and political blueprints in
modern times?
In short, this chapter aims to answer these questions: first, whether the
two peoples had identical definitions of freedom, democracy, socialism,
and capitalism, or whether there were interpretations outside the tradi-
tion of the mainstream discourse across the Pacific; and second, whether
there were shared basic human concerns and moral values.

Discourses on Individual Freedom, National Freedom, and

Internationalism in the Modern Era
By the turn of the century, most modern Chinese reformers agreed that
individual freedom was the key to the West’s rapid growth in the
modern age. They also agreed that the core of this ideal was freedom
of conscience. Zhang Taiyan, the intellectual spokesman of the 1911
republican revolution, wrote that individual freedom meant, above all,
freedom of conscience; that is, all “supreme” ideological authorities
must be abandoned. He thus argued that “a blind embrace of the gen-
erally acknowledged truth” from the West, like a blind embrace of
12 • From Allies to Enemies

Confucianism in the past, might severely jeopardize the individual’s free

thought and that every individual must have the sacred freedom to
pursue whatever he or she values most, without imposed constraints
from any “supreme” ideological authorities.3
If there was wide consensus among modern Chinese reformers on
the vital importance of individual liberty to China’s place in the modern
world, there was no agreement on how to construct the relationship
between individual rights and group rights. Many believed this rela-
tionship should be one of mutual dependence and complementarity. For
instance, in his first Chinese translation of John Stuart Mill’s work in
1898, Yan Fu purposely changed the original title, On Liberty, to a
new title: On the Relationship between Group Rights and Individual
Rights. As Yan wrote in his introduction, the relationship is similar to
that between a unit and the whole, or between a cell and the human
body. Neither one can exist without the other. According to Liang
Qichao, one of the leaders in the constitutionalist movement, both
one’s desire for independence and one’s desire for harmony with the
group are inherent in human nature. Thus this relationship should not be
considered to be antagonistic or contradictory.4 As he wrote, “to build a
strong and free China, every Chinese must be strong and free first.”5 On
the other hand, “Human evolution is first of all the evolution of social
groups, not isolated individuals.”6 Or as Kang Yuwei, the founder of the
constitutionalist movement, emphasized, if individual liberty is the pre-
condition for national liberty, national freedom gives meaning and pur-
pose to individual freedom. In his words, “the essence of pursuing indi-
vidual freedom lies in the harmony and unity between the individual, the
nation, and the common good of humanity.”7
For others, however, this relationship was mutually antagonistic.
Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping peasant rebellion (1850–
1865), believed that all individual self-interests must be suppressed to
serve the grand cause and urgent needs of the Taiping revolution. Some
leading liberal scholars, too, constructed this relationship in terms of
mutual antagonism, but their focus was on the individual’s rights. In
his 1918 work “On Ibsenism,” Hu Shi, one of the leading writers in
the May 4th movement, first proposed that cultivation of “a form of
self-serving principle” was much more important than serving the in-
terests of the society. He quoted Ibsen as saying: “You should feel that
your own self-interest is the most important thing in the world.” In his
view, one should be aware of the immense danger inherent in the public
realm, which “favors dictatorship or absolute conformity, often uses
 Perceptions and Realities • 13

arbitrary power to ruin individuality.” As he argued, whenever there

was a conflict between the individual and the group, the individual’s
rights must be protected first.8 If Hu was more concerned about the
societal pressures for individual conformity, he nonetheless did not
openly embrace the supremacy of the individual’s self-interests, as Ibsen
did. Like other modern Chinese reformers, Hu also defined society as
“Big Me” and individuals as “Small Me”: “The Small Me has a great
responsibility for the immortal Big Me’s timeless past and timeless fu-
ture,” he wrote. He thus implied that individual freedom might not be
an end in itself. In this sense, he vaguely agreed with, or ambiguously
conformed to, the moral parameter within which the debates on
freedom took place.9
Regardless of these different interpretations of the private-public re-
lationship, modern Chinese reformers shared common ground: they
treasured above all China’s national freedom. According to Sun Yat-
sen, the quest for modernity in the West originated from its great in-
tellectual rebellion against papal rule in medieval times; thus the
Western concept of modernity put its primary emphasis on individual
freedom. By contrast, Sun argued, China had not had a rigid religious
system similar to that of papal rule, and China’s quest for modernity
originated in its great struggle for national freedom.
Modern Chinese history since the Opium War taught Chinese people
that they could never enjoy individual freedom without first achieving
their national freedom, Sun emphasized. Due to the loss of national
freedom after the Manchu invasion and occupation, and particularly
after the Opium War, “our ancient morality and civilization have not
been able to manifest themselves and are now declining.” Since a foun-
dation was “essential to expansion,” “we must talk nationalism first if
we want to talk internationalism or cosmopolitanism.”
He persistently reminded his fellow countrymen of a common phrase
in ancient China, “Rescue the weak, lift up the fallen”: “If we want
China to rise to power, we must not only restore our national standing,
but we must also assume a great responsibility towards the world. If
China cannot assume that responsibility, she will be a great disadvan-
tage not an advantage to the world, no matter how strong she may
become.” Clearly, individual freedom, national freedom, and a new
internationalism were intertwined with one another in many modern
Chinese reformers’ conceptions of modernity and new identity. And the
cornerstones were national freedom and equality in the world.10
* * *
14 • From Allies to Enemies

Across the Pacific, in drafting Virginia’s “Act for Establishing Religious

Freedom,” Thomas Jefferson wrote one of the most brilliant pleas for
freedom of conscience. At the center of Jefferson’s definition was a
concept of human dignity based on “each person’s possession of a soul
in the likeness of God.”11
Moreover, individual freedom is also defined as the liberty to pursue
individual wealth. As Alexander Hamilton argued, “freedom to hold
and dispose property is paramount.” In his view, this concept of
freedom represented a Common Man’s rebellion against the hereditary
aristocracy of England, which had assumed for centuries that the right
to wealth flowed in the bloodstream.12
Furthermore, the ideal of individual liberty is also interpreted in
American discourse as the full expression of unique individuality. As
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “the word masses is most dreadful,”
since the poorest and the humblest equally possesses a unique individ-
uality.13
Clearly, in the American vision, the ideal of individual freedom is
not equated with selfishness or a free individual doing whatever he or
she wants without thought of the larger community. In fact, defining
the boundary between individual rights and group rights is a critical
issue in the American conversation on individual liberty. And that con-
versation is marked by two divergent constructions: one may be called
atomism, the other organicism.14
Atomism defines the whole as the sum total of its parts. To use a
metaphor, group rights can be considered as analogous to a heap of
billiard balls. A billiard ball retains its essential characteristics when
separated from the heap, the whole of which is no more than the sum
total of all the billiard balls. The common good is thus each individual’s
maximal pursuit of self-interest and freedom. Organicism, on the other
hand, views the relationship between an individual and a group as that
of a cell and a multicellular organism. The organism is not equivalent
to the sum total of the component cells. “If one may describe the be-
havior of a group of billiard balls from one’s knowledge of any one of
them, no amount of knowledge about an individual cell would enable
one to say anything about the organ of which it is a part.” In this view,
while an individual’s rights and freedom should be vigorously pro-
tected, group rights and freedom should be protected as well.15
In spite of these different interpretations of this private-public rela-
tionship, both sides believe that the pursuit of an individual’s rights
and happiness should be an end in itself. Put another way, in main-
 Perceptions and Realities • 15

stream discourse in America, the ultimate moral judgment is individual

freedom. As Louis Hartz argues, America as a nonfeudal society lacks
a socialist tradition, which Europe has. It was “born equal,” as Alexis
de Tocqueville said. The American society “begins with Locke, trans-
forms him, and stays with Locke.” Or, as Seymour Martin Lipset
writes, “the emphasis in the American value system has been on the
individual. . . . America began and continues as the most anti-statist
nation.”16
While many scholars affirm the central place of individual liberty in
the American Creed, a question still remains: does it do justice to the
complexity of the mainstream discourse in modern America? In Con-
tested Truths, Daniel Rodgers raises this question. He argues that the
major issue in understanding American political culture is not just to
identify keywords, such as individual rights and private property, but
to trace how the same keywords have been used for essentially different
ends. “The crucial contest” is thus over the meaning of the same word.
It is this recurrent struggle over “a relatively small number of words”
that have shaped political talk in America, and “disguised its powerful
conflicts under a misleading veneer of sameness.” In particular, Rodgers
focuses on the key phrase “individual freedom” in postwar American
political debates. In the mind of the New Deal left, freedom should
include a new “economic bill of rights,” while in the view of political
centrists, freedom should be “everything that fascism and communism
were not” in the Cold War. According to the civil rights activists, rights
and freedom were swept up into “a common cry of protest.” None-
theless, Rodgers concluded that most of the time in the mainstream
discourse, “freedom” was employed to defend individuals’ political and
civil liberties.17 In this regard, as J. David Greenstone emphasizes, while
there are profoundly different forms of liberalism in the overarching
Lockean consensus, individual liberty defined as individualism or in-
dividual civil and political rights is at the core of the American value
system.
The American value system, with its primary emphasis on individual
civil and political rights, is not only embedded in the tradition of
Lockean liberalism, but also ingrained in the ideal of “liberal peace”
proposed by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and developed by President
Wilson. According to Kant, the key to lasting peace on earth is “liberal
peace” or the construction of a pacific federation among liberal repub-
lics organized on the principle of respecting and protecting individual
rights.
16 • From Allies to Enemies

In America’s response to World War I and Russian revolution,

Wilson further developed the Kantian ideal of “liberal peace.” The
Wilsonian goal became “the attainment of a peaceful liberal capitalist
world order under international law, safe both from traditional impe-
rialism and revolutionary socialism, within whose stable liberal con-
fines a missionary America could find moral and economic pre-
eminence.” To build enduring peace in the world, he urged America to
be the champion of “making the world safe for democracy.”18

Thus what were the similarities and differences in Chinese and Amer-
ican discourses on individual freedom and national freedom and inter-
nationalism in the modern era? Both modern Chinese and American
reformers believed that individual liberty meant freedom of conscience.
This shared interpretation across the Pacific demonstrated a common
human desire against ideological and religious monism. And both sides
believed that humanity must end wars of conquest and achieve en-
during peace on earth. However, there were important differences. In
the American vision, the sanctity of individual freedom or individual
civil and political rights centered squarely at the core of modernity,
identity, and Wilsonian liberal internationalism.
In contrast, Chinese cultural heritage, from the concept of Yin-Yang
balance in I-Ching to the Confucian Golden Mean doctrine, tends to
construct the relationship between an individual and the group as “mu-
tually complementary.”19 Moreover, as Sun Yat-sen emphasized,
China’s quest for modernity originated from its struggle for national
freedom. Thus in China’s concept of modernity, the ideal of individual
freedom became an integral part of national freedom, and the Great
Commonwealth on earth.
The Chinese and American visions of freedom and internationalism
clearly had their different strengths and weaknesses. Chinese main-
stream discourse in the modern era failed to emphasize the gravely
counterproductive consequences of an absolutist construction of the
public-private relationship. The major weakness is not that the
“common good” rather than individual liberty became the ultimate
moral judgment in China’s quest for modernity; it is that many modern
Chinese reformers were not fully aware of the far-reaching impact of
their philosophical assumptions on their economic and political blue-
prints. Thus, when the call for national salvation and an end to wide-
spread social sufferings became urgent, many of them subconsciously
as well as consciously perceived the relationship between individual
 Perceptions and Realities • 17

rights and the common good as mutually contradictory. A severe lim-

itation on individual rights could be legitimized in the name of the
nation and the people, without serious challenge from the intellectual
community. As Li Zehou, a prominent Chinese philosopher, reflected
on this major weakness in Chinese discourse in the modern era: “From
the Northern expedition, civil wars, to the War of Resistance, several
generations of Chinese intellectuals therefore started with patriotism
and liberalism, and ended up with patriotism and social revolution.”20
On the other hand, a major shortcoming in the mainstream Amer-
ican discourse in modern times is its failure to emphasize the profound
impact of moral absolutism on America’s perceptions of the world,
particularly non-Western, developing societies. According to public
polls taken in major Western democracies, 50 percent of Americans
believed in moral absolutism, as compared with 36 percent of Britons,
24 percent of the French, 26 percent of Germans, 42 percent of Italians,
19 percent of Swedes, and 30.5 percent of Canadians. This fervent faith
in absolute morality can be attributed to America’s religious exception-
alism, one that was referred to by Edmund Burke as “sectarian Prot-
estantism.” As Seymour Martin Lipset points out, “Americans are uto-
pian moralists who press hard to institutionalize virtue, to destroy evil
people, and eliminate wicked institutions and practices.” In particular,
“they tend to view social and political dramas . . . as battles between
God and the Devil.” Or, as Everett Ladd put it, “To understand the
American ideology, we need to see individualism not as a dimension of
individual character but rather as a moral standard by which social
institutions and practices are judged” in the world.21
These different ways of drawing the boundary between the private
and the public realms, different parameters within which the main-
stream discourse took place, and different strengths and weaknesses in
conceptions of freedom, modernity, and internationalism profoundly
shaped Chinese and American blueprints of the modern economy and
polity.

Discourses on the Modern Economy

Three competing visions emerged in the Chinese discourse on the
modern economy: an economy of absolute egalitarianism/radical pop-
ulism, a competitive private economy with public guidance, and a
mixed economy with private, cooperative, and public enterprises co-
existing in China’s modernity.
18 • From Allies to Enemies

While an economy of absolute egalitarianism was the rallying cry of

all poor peasant rebellions, it was most vigorously articulated by Hong
Xiuquan in the midst of social suffering unprecedented since the Opium
War. Hong imported a foreign religion—Christianity—as the official
ideology of the Taiping rebellion to justify or legitimize this economic
system. He proposed the concept of the village commune, wherein no
individual should own private property, wherein the principle of “from
each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” should
prevail, and wherein there should be no more appalling poverty.22
Clearly, Hong’s economic blueprint emphasized the government’s
role in enforcing an egalitarian society. The root of all social up-
heavals—economic ills and political corruption—lay in the great gap
between the rich and the poor, he said. In his view, if the government
could take charge of all private property and distribute it equally
among the people, the problem would be solved. There would be no
private commerce, no private trade, or, in Hong’s words, “no mer-
chants to exploit the common people.” The national and the local au-
thorities would take care of everyone and everything in society.
This radical populist approach to China’s economy was historically
appealing to poor peasants during profound social crises, as witnessed
by many Taiping rebels’ reactions to an alternative moderate economic
blueprint. Hong Rengan (Hung Jen-gan), the new prime minister in the
late stage of the Taiping rebellion, proposed that to boost the declining
urban economy in Taiping-controlled areas, industry and commerce
should be encouraged to develop through the initiatives of private en-
terprises. The economic power of private capital would be checked by
public institutions, including the government. However, to the peasant
rebels this moderate blueprint represented surrender to the rich and
powerful in the towns and cities. Consequently, his new economic blue-
print could not be implemented.23
On the other hand, according to Liang, Kang, and other constitu-
tionalists, a modern Chinese economy must be a private economy with
public guidance. That is, China’s incipient industrialization must be left
to “the genius of private enterprise.” They argued that public enter-
prises had too often been ineffective and unproductive, as proved by
the corrupt state enterprises of the 1860s and 1870s, and by the Qing
dynasty’s failed efforts to nationalize the railroad in the early twentieth
century. “What was the result of all these efforts? We actually killed
the sheep (private industry) to feed the tiger (the Qing dynasty).” These
constitutionalists emphasized that in a competitive private economy,
 Perceptions and Realities • 19

the emergence of one big corporation at least could not stop competi-
tion from others. If the government became the “sole monopoly,” then,
“no one would ever have the power to compete with a government-
owned enterprise.”24
Liang and Kang, however, endorsed not a capitalist free-enterprise
system but a private economy with public guidance. It was crucial, they
said, to utilize public guidance to address the problem of unequal dis-
tribution in China’s development. In their view, the state must take the
lead and cooperate with private enterprise to implement social-welfare
programs: “The state should provide occupation for the unemployed,
to teach a new profession to the unemployable. These social welfare
programs not only can help the economy, but can also contribute to
social order and gratify humanitarian feelings.”25
Thus according to Liang and Kang both market competition and
state intervention were necessary in the modern economy. Whether
there should be more state intervention or market competition would
depend on the specific situations in China. When state intervention
brought about too many controls in the market, market competition
would have to be strongly encouraged. When the market competition
produced a gap between rich and poor, there would have to be more
emphasis on public guidance.26
Chinese heritage put great emphasis on fair distribution of wealth,
they stated. It was thus a serious mistake to think primarily of making
China a powerful nation at the expense of people’s welfare. “When the
people are destitute, the nation can never be truly prosperous and pow-
erful. . . . The interest of the state and that of the people are insepa-
rable,” asserted Kang. And the best way to promote both was “to give
priority to the latter.”27
The revolutionary nationalists put even greater emphasis on the issue
of social justice in China’s modern economy. As Sun Yat-sen pro-
claimed in 1913, “The railroads, public utilities, canals, and forests
should be nationalized and all income from the land and mines should
be in the hands of the state. With all this money in hand, the state can
therefore finance the social welfare programs.”28
After World War I, Sun Yat-sen proposed a coexistence between pri-
vate, cooperative, and public enterprises in the modern economy. He
emphasized the mixed economy, or the principle of people’s livelihood,
was neither a capitalist free-enterprise economy nor a socialist planned
economy. In his view, while the free-enterprise system was effective for
increasing wealth, it lacked the concept of fair distribution; and if the
20 • From Allies to Enemies

socialist planned economy emphasized fair distribution of wealth, it

was not effective for rapid industrial growth. A combination of both,
he argued, would be the best economic system for China. He particu-
larly emphasized that the concept of fair distribution, unlike that of
redistribution of wealth, opposed class warfare and embraced class rec-
onciliation. But the only way to achieve class reconciliation in China’s
industrialization was to establish farsighted economic policies or to
implement the Principle of People’s Livelihood. That is, at an early
stage in China’s industrialization, Chinese economic policy should pro-
mote social/economic justice or use “peaceful means” to prevent the
“intensifying of class warfare.”29
These competing Chinese economic blueprints clearly shared one
goal: to regard individual economic rights as part of human dignity, as
well as the foundation of national freedom. Moreover, they also shared
the view that the government must assume its responsibility to achieve
the goal of both rapid growth and social justice in the modern
economy.

In the United States, by contrast, the vision of a free-enterprise system

dominated the mainstream discourse on the modern economy. Western
Europe in the eighteenth century witnessed intense debates on the
meaning of modernity, particularly the impact of a commercial revo-
lution on modern society. At one end of the spectrum, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau denounced luxury, corruption, and modern commercial so-
ciety. He warned that modern man’s obsession with the pursuit of in-
dividual wealth would lead to empty individualism, economic in-
equality, and the disintegration of human community. At the other end
of the spectrum, Bernard de Mandeville openly embraced luxury and
corruption, believing in the notion of “private vice, public good.” In
the middle were the French philosopher Voltaire and English author
David Hume. They held a positive view of the modern commercial
economy, arguing that the structural consequences of commercial de-
velopment had come about with the decline of the rigid feudal order
of rural society. But they also saw the modern economy as “circum-
scribed,” always “bringing with it evils as well as blessings.” In partic-
ular, they feared that the new “savages” spawned by the debased con-
ditions of the laboring masses were bad candidates for citizens in a
republican polity.30
The debates in Europe had an important impact on America’s
founding fathers. Jeffersonians were particularly alarmed by the pos-
 Perceptions and Realities • 21

sible dark side of a modern economy. As Thomas Jefferson argued, a

society with large numbers of the landless poor could undermine the
foundation of the young republic. How to avoid the emergence of a
“landless poor” in America? State intervention was out of the question.
To Jefferson, an ardent believer in a “minimal state,” the solution was
“expansion across space,” or westward movement and free trade. Its
objective was to create a society of independent, prosperous yeoman
farmers, so that the new republic could remain at “the middle stage of
modernity, between the first rude, barbarous and the last refined, cor-
rupt stage of advanced modern economy.”31
The Federalists were, however, more impressed by David Hume’s
emphasis on the progressive nature of the modern economy. Alexander
Hamilton never doubted that the real disposition of human nature was
toward luxury. He agreed with Locke that the marketplace was a fair
playground, in which the more talented can excel and receive their
rewards accordingly. Thus the modern market economy, through its
mechanism of material incentives, would be the best engine for rapid
industrialization. The crux of Hamilton’s arguments was that political
liberty and economic equality could not coexist in the modern
economy. Equal political freedom could give all citizens an equal op-
portunity to become unequal in the marketplace and make “each man
zealous to achieve for himself.”32
In the early twentieth century, the rise of the progressive movement
focused on the widening gap between rich and poor in the modern
economy. “The industrial system based on an unchecked free market
took men from the bench and field and chained them to the machine,”
claimed the progressive reformers. Perhaps this was the price society
had to pay for rapid industrialization. But the time had come to make
a change, they emphasized. Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism
programs aimed to use mild government intervention to establish leg-
islation on “graduated income and inheritance taxes, workmen’s com-
pensation, regulation of the labor of women and children, and a
stronger Bureau of Corporations.” But Woodrow Wilson called New
Nationalism programs “new slavery,” saying they would only regulate,
rather than dismantle, the monopoly of big corporations, thus making
Americans more dependent on the government.
In the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal further
introduced the concepts of the “positive state” into the mainstream
discourse. The New Dealers/modern liberals and modern conservatives
sharply differed on whether the state should put more income taxes
22 • From Allies to Enemies

into the public realm. For the modern conservatives, the purpose of the
American national economy was “to maximize personal consump-
tion.” For the New Dealers/modern liberals, on the other hand, max-
imizing personal consumption “precisely is the root of our trouble.” A
major function of the state in the economic field was, in their view, to
use governmental resources (mainly from income taxes) to reconstruct
the public realm.33
The New Dealers/modern liberals emphasized, however, that their
ideas were fundamentally different from those of the Left with respect
to the role of the state in the marketplace. In their view, the Left ignored
the possibility of unlimited political power concentrated in the hands
of the government. The concept of the positive state, they believed, was
thus “the best means to check both unlimited economic power in the
hands of private monopolies and unlimited political power in the hands
of the government.”34
Therefore, modern liberals stated that they shared a common ground
with modern conservatives; that is, their faith in the major role of pri-
vate ownership and marketplace in the modern economy and their con-
fidence in the great merit of a free enterprise system in America.

What were the similarities and differences between Chinese and Amer-
ican discourses on a modern economy? Both modern Chinese and
American reformers were primarily concerned with how to construct
the relationships between political liberty and economic equality, and
between rapid growth and social/economic justice. However, in these
mainstream discourses, each side advocated very different solutions.
The Taiping rebels’ radical populist economic blueprint of employing
a centralized state to eradicate private economy and enforce an abso-
lute egalitarian society was surely alien to mainstream America. On the
other hand, the Hamiltonian concept of irreconcilability between po-
litical liberty and economic equality was clearly alien to the mainstream
Chinese discourse. The Chinese constitutionalists’ blueprint of a private
economy with public guidance, or its emphasis on the balanced role
between state intervention and market competition in the modern
economy, was more similar to the concept of the social market in con-
tinental Europe rather than that of the liberal market in the United
States.
Most important, Sun’s principle of people’s livelihood—the repub-
lican revolutionaries’ blueprint of a mixed economy—was even further
 Perceptions and Realities • 23

removed from the American belief in the fundamental virtue of private

ownership in the modern economy.
These major differences can be attributed to their vastly different
assumptions with regard to the relationship between political liberty
and economic equality. In the mainstream American discourse, the im-
portance of political liberty or individual civil and political rights holds
the highest place. In the mainstream Chinese discourse, individual civil
and political rights, individual economic rights, and national rights to
develop could not be separated from one another, but were dependent
upon one another in the modern economy. Thus if Sun’s principle of
people’s livelihood represented a middle ground between the radical
populists and the constitutionalists in the Chinese milieu, he appeared
to be a “social radical” in the American setting, as Woodrow Wilson
dubbed him.

Discourses on the Modern Polity

From the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century,
before the rise of the CCP, two major competing visions emerged in
the Chinese discourse on the modern polity: the radical populist polity
and democracy. After the rise of the CCP (1921) and before the war
of resistance (1937), three major political blueprints competed in
China: a united front between Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang (KMT) and
the CCP, a parliamentary system excluding the CCP, and Chinese so-
viets in rural China excluding the KMT.
In Hong Xiuquan’s blueprint for the Taiping peasant rebels, an eco-
nomic system of absolute egalitarianism clearly required a concentrated
political power to enforce its implementation. Thus, according to
Hong, elected officials in the village commune should be in charge of
everything from the military to agricultural production and from pol-
itics to education to make sure the most hated phenomenon in rural
China—the gap between rich and poor—would never occur in the
Heavenly Kingdom on earth.
In the late nineteenth century, the constitutionalists envisioned a con-
stitutional monarchy in China, after the model of Meiji Japan. How-
ever, Chinese intellectuals increasingly rejected this concept and turned
instead to the ideal of democracy and republicanism. As Sun declared,
Chinese republican revolutionaries must never entertain the notion of
becoming “new emperors” after the revolution, like the peasant rebels
24 • From Allies to Enemies

had over the past 2,000 years. Otherwise, “we would cause China’s
subjugation and genocide in today’s world.” Sun rejected the argument
that a democratic polity could never take root in China because the
Chinese tradition was “contradictory with the democratic ideals.” He
emphasized that the ideal of people’s sovereignty was a central theme
in the Confucian/Taoist heritage. It contributed to the creation of the
first national civil-service-exam system in world history, a system based
on meritocracy rather than on aristocracy, as well as on the concept of
universal rights to education. The ideal of people’s sovereignty in Chi-
nese heritage also engendered a new interpretation of “the mandate of
heaven,” which offered moral sanctions to poor peasants’ rights to
armed rebellion to overthrow a decadent dynasty, he argued. China’s
polity must therefore be “modernized” by combining the best from the
Chinese and the Western heritages, particularly the incorporation of
the Western concepts of institutional checks and balances and rule of
law, into the modern Chinese political system.35
If the 1911 democratic revolution led by Sun brought down the last
Manchu dynasty, it did not produce a new China. Instead, in Sun’s
words, it brought about a “sham parliamentary system” led by Yuan
Shikai, which was followed by warlordism and national disintegration.
It was in the aftermath of the failed 1911 revolution that Sun articu-
lated a theory of democratic transition in China. He proposed three
stages of evolution. In the first stage, military rule, the major task was
to eliminate the warlords and achieve national unity through military
force. In the second stage, tutelage rule, there should be a “strong po-
litical leadership,” made up of dedicated intellectual reformers, that
was “willing to assume the hardship and risks of modernization” and
to lead “an extraordinarily tough transition.” In this stage, the major
task was to employ this “political leadership” to carry out village and
county elections, to help the villagers understand the rule of law, due
process, and other major concepts of democracy and constitutionalism.
Tutelage rule was crucial for China’s democratic transition, he said,
since “a democratic façade” after the republican revolution of 1911
was brought about by “our neglect of such a ‘revolutionary process’
and a reckless advance to parliamentary government.” The third stage,
constitutional rule, should bring full democracy in China. After every
village and every county had fair, effective elections, there should be
direct provincial elections; and after every province had successful di-
rect elections, a multiparty system and the national election would nat-
urally follow. He emphasized that the voting rights in the West were
 Perceptions and Realities • 25

for a very long period of time limited to property owners, males, and
white people. In contrast, he said, with this gradualist, bottom-up ap-
proach, voting rights would be immediately extended to the poor peas-
ants, women, and minorities in China. “How can human rights ever
be developed in China? The only way is to organize the common
people, village-by-village, and county-by-county.” In the short run, this
democratization process might appear to be slow, he said. But in the
long run, he argued, this approach would be the best way to build a
genuine democratic polity in China.36
By the late 1910s, many urban intellectuals, particularly college stu-
dents, became disillusioned with the failure of the 1911 republican rev-
olution and impatient with Sun’s gradual approach to full democracy
in China. They began to turn to anarchism as a faster way to reform
the Chinese polity. Voluntary student organizations mushroomed.
Their basic idea was to build democracy immediately by “destroying
the boundary between manual and mental labors, making every
manual laborer study, and making every intellectual do manual work.”
The most famous anarchist organization at the time was the Beijing
Labor-Study Mutual Aid League. Within the league, all things pro-
duced belonged to the community. In a few months, however, the
league was dissolved.37
The collapse of the league and other, similar anarchist organizations
in urban centers shook the Chinese intellectual community. If the con-
stitutionalist reform, the democratic revolution, and anarchist experi-
ments all failed to produce a democratic polity in China, how could
the old Chinese political structure ever be replaced? As Shi Cuntong—a
former anarchist of the Beijing Labor-Study Mutual Aid League—re-
called, the answer seemed clear to many: “We must first of all employ
radical means to make a total, thorough change of the entire nation.”38
Many anarchists were quickly attracted to the Russian Revolution
of 1917. As Sun himself observed, young students in Beijing and other
cities “rushed” to Russia to “learn everything about socialism and com-
munism.” Cai Hesen, a former anarchist who later became one of the
CCP founders, wrote at the time: “We realize that we cannot imple-
ment anarchism immediately, because there are two antagonistic classes
in the current world.” So “we must use the means of socialism or
communism” to reach “the ends of anarchism in the future.”39
According to others in the socialist movement, such as Mao Zedong
and Zhou Enlai, the major issue was not only class division but, more
important, the existence of a most powerful landed elite in the coun-
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 “In bed as he was left,” said Jason. “I went in this morning, while
you were asleep, and found him—ah, he looks horrible,” he cried,
and broke off with a shudder.
I did not shrink; I felt braced up to any ordeal.
They were all in the room when we entered it. My father, Dr.
Crackenthorpe, Zyp—even old Peggy, who was busying herself, with
the vulture relish of her kind, over the little artificial decencies of
dress and posture that seem such an outrage on the solemn
unresistance of the dead.
Directly we came in Zyp ran to Jason and clung to him sobbing. I
noticed it with a sort of dull resignation, and that was all; for Peggy,
who had drawn a sheet over the lifeless face, pulled it down that I
might look.
Then, for all my stoicism, I gave a cry.
I had left my brother the night before tired, needing rest, but, save
for the extra pallor of his complexion that never boasted a great deal
of color, much like his usual self. Now the dead face lying back on
the pillows was awful to look upon. Spots and bars of livid purple
disfigured its waxen whiteness—on the cheeks, the ears, the throat,
where a deep patch was. It was greatly swollen, too, and the mouth
so rigidly open that it had defied all effort to bind it close. A couple of
pennies, like a hideous pair of glasses, lay, one over each eye,
where they could only be kept in position by means of a filament
drawn tightly round the head. The hands, stiffly crossed, with the
fingers crooked like talons, lay over the breast, fastened into position
with a ligature.
I turned away, feeling sick and faint. I think I reeled, for presently I
found that Dr. Crackenthorpe was supporting me against his arm.
“Oh, why is he like that?” I whispered.
“’Tis a common afterclap in deaths by drowning,” said he,
speaking in a loud, insistent voice, as if not for the first time. “A
stoppage—a relapse. During the weak small hours, when the
patient’s strength is at its lowest, the overwrought lungs refuse to
work—collapse, and he dies of suffocation.”
He looked at my father as he spoke, but elicited no response. It
was palpable that the heavy potations of the night had so deadened
the latter’s faculties as to make him incapable for the moment of
realizing the full enormity of the sight before him.
“Mark me,” said the doctor; “it’s a plain case, I say, nothing out of
the way; no complications. The wretched boy to all intents and
purposes has been drowned.”
“Who drowned him?” said my father. He spoke thickly, stupidly; but
I started, with a dreadful feeling that the locked jaws must relax and
denounce me before them all.
Seeing his hopeless state, the doctor took my father’s arm and led
him from the room. Zyp still clung to my brother.
“Cover it up,” whispered Jason. “He isn’t a pretty sight!”
“He wasn’t a pretty boy,” muttered Peggy, reluctantly hiding the
dreadful face; “To a old woman’s view it speaks of more than his
deserts. Nobody’ll come to look at me, I expect.”
“You heard what the doctor said?” asked Jason, looking across at
me.
“Yes.”
“Drowned—you understand? Drowned, Renny?”
“Drowned,” I repeated, mechanically.
“Come, Zyp,” he said; “this isn’t the place for you any longer.”
They passed out of the room, she still clinging to him, so that her
face was hidden.
I did not measure his words at that time. I had no thought for nice
discriminations of tone; what did I care for anything any longer?
Presently I heard old Peg muttering again. She thought the room
was emptied of us and she softly removed the face cloth once more.
“Ay, there ye lies, Modred—safe never to spy on poor old
Rottengoose again! Ye were a bad lot, ye were; but Peg’s been
more’n enough for you, she has, my lad.”
Suddenly she saw me out of the tail of her eye, and turned upon
me, livid with fury.
“What are ye listening to, Renalt? A black curse on spies, Renalt, I
say!”
Then her manner changed and she came fawning at me
fulsomely.
“What a good lad to stay wi’ his brother! But Peg’ll do the tending,
Renalt. She be a crass old body and apt to reviling in her speech,
but she don’t mean it, bless you; it’s the tic doldrums in her head.”
I repelled the horrible old creature and fled from the room. What
she meant I neither knew nor cared, for we had always looked upon
her as a feckless body, with a big worm in her brain.
All the long morning I wandered about the house, scarcely
knowing what I did or whither I went. Once I found myself in the
room of silence, not remembering when I had come there or for what
reason. The fact, merely, was impressed upon me by a gradual
change in the nature of my sensations. Something seemed to be
asking a question of me which I was striving and striving to answer. It
didn’t distress me at first, for a nearer misery overwhelmed
everything, but by and by its insistence pierced a passage through
all dull obstacles, and the something took up its abode in me and
reigned and grew. I felt myself yielding, yielding; and strove now to
beat off the inevitable horror of the answer that was rising in me. I
did not know what it was, or the question to which it was a response
—only I saw that if I yielded to it and spoke it, I should die then and
there of the black terror of its revelation.
I sprung to my feet with a cry, and saw, or thought I saw, Modred
standing by the water wheel and beckoning to me. If I had strength
to escape, it was enough for that and no more, for everything
seemed to go from me till I found myself sitting at the foot of the
stairs, with Jason looking oddly down upon me.
“I needn’t get up,” I said. “Modred isn’t dead, after all.”
I think I heard him shout out. Anyhow, I felt myself lifted up and
carried somewhere and put down. If they had thought to restrain me,
however, they should have managed things better; for I was up in a
moment and out at the window. I had often thought one wanted only
the will to forget gravity and float through the air, and here I was
doing it. What a glorious sensation it was! I laughed to think how
long I had remained like a reptile, bound to the plodding miserable
earth, when all the time I had power to escape from myself and float
on and on far away from all those heart-breaking troubles. If I only
went very swiftly at first I should soon be too distant for them to track
me, and then I should be free. I felt a little anxious, for there was a
faint noise behind me. I strove to put on pace; if my limbs had
responded to my efforts no bird could have outstripped me. But I saw
with agony that the harder I fought the less way I made. I struggled
and sobbed and clutched myself blindly onward, and all the time the
noise behind grew deeper. If I pushed myself off with a foot to the
ground I only floated a very little way now. Then I saw a railing and
pulled myself along with it toilsomely, but some great pressure was
in front of me and my feet slipped into holes at every step. Panting,
straining, slipping, as if on blood—why! It was blood! I had to yield at
last.
My passion of hope was done with. I lay in a white set horror, not
daring to move or look. How deadly quiet the room was, but not for
long, for a little stealthy rustle of the sheet beside me prickled
through my whole being with its ghastly stirring. Then I knew it had
secretly risen on its elbow and was leaning over and looking down
upon me. If I could only perspire, I thought, my bonds would loosen
and I could escape from it. But it was cunning and knew that, too,
and it sealed all the surface of my skin with its acrid exhalations.
Suddenly it clutched me in its crooked arms and bore me down,
down to the room of silence. There was a sickening odor there and
the covering of the wheel was open. Then, with a shudder, as of
death, I thought I found the answer; for now it was plain that the
great wheel was driven by blood, not water. As I looked aghast,
straining over, it gave me a stealthy push and, with a shriek, I
splashed among the paddles and was whirled down. For ages I was
spun and beaten round and round, mashed, mangled, gasping for
breath and choked with the horrible crimson broth that fed the insane
and furious grinding of the wheel. At the end, glutted with torture, it
flung me forth into a parching desert of sand, and, spinning from me,
became far away a revolving disk of red that made the low-down sun
of that waste corner of the world.
I was alone, now—always alone. No footsteps had ever trod that
trackless level, nor would, I knew, till time was ended. I had no hope;
no green memory for oasis; no power of speech even. Then I knew I
was dead; had been dead so long that my body had crackled and
fallen to decay, leaving my soul only, like the stone of a fruit, quick
with wretched impulse to shoot upward but dreadfully imprisoned
from doing so.
 Sometimes in the world the massive columns of the cathedral had
suggested to me a like sensation; a moral impress of weight and
stoniness that had driven me to bow my head and creep, sweating
away from their inexorable stolidity. Now I was built into such a body
—more, was an integral part of it. Yet could my pinioned nerves
never assimilate its passionless obduracy, but jerked and struggled
in agony to be free. Oh, how divine is the instinct that paints heaven
all light and airiness, and innocent forevermore of the sense of
weight!
Suddenly I heard Zyp’s voice, singing outside in the world, and in
a moment tears, most blessed, blessed tears, sprung from my eyes
and I was free. The stone cracked and fell asunder, and I leaped out
madly shrieking at my release.
She was sitting under a tree in a beautiful meadow and her young
voice rose sweetly as she prinked her hat with daisies and yellow
king-cups. She called me to her and gave me tender names and
smoothed away the pain from my forehead with kisses and the
cunning of her elfish brown hand.
“Come, drink,” she said, “and you will be better.”
I woke to life and looked up. She was standing by my bed, holding
a cup toward my lips, and at the foot Jason leaned, looking on.
“Have I been ill?” I said, in a voice so odd to me that I almost
laughed.
“Yes, yes—a little; but you have come out of the black pit now into
the forest.”
 CHAPTER X.
JASON SPEAKS.

For some three weeks I had lain racked and shriveled in a

nervous, delirious fever. It left me at last, the ghost of my old self, to
face once more the problems of a ruined life. For many days these
gave me no concern, or only in a fitful, indifferent manner. I was
content to sip the dew of convalescence, to slumber and to cherish
my exhaustion, and the others disturbed me but little. My recovery
once assured, they left me generally to myself, scarce visiting me
more often than was necessary for the administering of food or
medicine. Sometimes one or other of them would come and sit by
my bedside awhile and exchange with me a few desultory remarks;
but this was seldom, and grew, with my strength more so, for the
earth was brilliant with summer outside and naturally fuller of
attractions than a sick-room.
Their neglect troubled me little at first; but by and by, when the first
idle ecstasy of convalescence was beginning to deepen into a sense
of responsibilities that I should soon have to gather up and adjust, it
woke day by day an increasing uneasiness in my soul. As yet, it is
true, the immediate past I could only call up before my mental vision
as a blurred picture of certain events the significance of which was
suggestive only. Gradually, however, detail by detail, the whole
composition of it concentrated, on the blank sheet of my mind, and
stood straight before me terribly uncompromising in its sternness of
outline. Had I any reason to suppose, in short, that my share in
Modred’s death was known to or guessed at by my father, Jason or
Zyp? On that pivot turned the whole prospect of my future; for as to
myself, were the secret to remain mine alone, I yet felt that I could
make out life with a tolerable degree of resignation in the certain
knowledge that Modred had forgiven me before he died, for a
momentary mad impulse, the provocation to which had been so
bitter—the reaction from which had been so immediate and so
equally impulsive.
 Of my father, I may say at once, I had little fear. His manner
toward me when, as he did occasionally, he came and sat by me for
a half-hour or so, was marked by a gentleness and affection I had
never known him to exhibit before. Pathetic as it was, I could
sometimes almost have wished it replaced by a sterner mood, a
more dubious attitude; for my remorse at having so bereaved him
became a barbed sting in presence of his new condescension to me
that dated from the afternoon of my appeal to him, and was
intensified by our common loss.
Of Zyp I hardly dared to think, or dared to do more than
tremulously hover round the thought that Modred’s death had
absolved me from my promise to him to avoid her. Still the thought
was there and perhaps I only played with self-deception when I
affected to fly from it out of a morbid loyalty to him that was gone. I
could not live with and not long for her with all the passion I was
capable of.
Therefore it was that I dreaded any possible disclosure of a
suspicion on her part—dreaded it with a fever of the mind so fierce
that it must truly have retarded my recovery indefinitely had not a
counter-irritant occurred to me, in certain moods, in the form of a
thought that perhaps, after all, my deed might not so affright one
who, on her own showing, found a charm in the contemplation of
evil.
But it was Jason I feared most. Something—I can hardly give it a
name—had come to me within the last few weeks that seemed to be
the preface to an awakening of the moral right on my part. In the
unfolding of this new faculty I was startled and distressed to observe
deformities in my brother where I had before seen nothing but manly
beauty and a breezy recklessness that I delighted in. Beautiful
bodily, I and all must still think him, though it had worried me lately to
often observe an expression in his blue eyes that was only new to
my new sense. This I can but describe, with despair of the
melodramatic sound of it, as poisonous. The pupils were as full and
purple as berries of the deadly nightshade.
It was not, however, his eyes only that baffled me. I saw that he
coveted any novelty of sensation greedily, and that sooner than
forego enjoyment of it he would ruthlessly stamp down whatever
obstacle to its attainment crossed his path.
Now I knew in my heart that his hitherto indifference to Zyp was an
affectation born only of wounded vanity, and that such as he could
never voluntarily yield so piquant a prize to homelier rivals. I recalled,
with a brooding apprehension, certain words of his on that fatal
morning, that seemed intended to convey, at least, a dark suspicion
as to the manner of Modred’s death. Probably they were bolts shot
at random with a sinister object—for I could conceive no shadow of
direct evidence against me. In that connection they might mean
much or little; in one other I had small doubt that they meant a good
deal—this in fact, that, if I got in his way with Zyp, down I should go.
Daily probing and analyzing such darkly dismal problems as these,
I slowly crawled through convalescence to recovery.
It was a sweltering morning in early July that I first crept out of
doors, with Zyp for my companion. It was happiness to me to have
her by my side, though as yet my weak and watery veins could
prickle to no ghost of passion. I had thought that life could hold
nothing for me ever again but present pain and agonized
retrospects. It was not so. The very smell of the freshly watered
roads woke a shadowy delight in me as we stepped over the
threshold. The buoyant thunder of the river, as it leaped under the
old street bridge seemed to gush over my heart with a cleansing
joyousness that left it white and innocent again.
We crossed the road and wandered by a zig-zag path to the
ancient close, where soft stretches and paddocks of green lawn,
“immemorial elms” and scattered buildings antique and embowered
wrought such an harmonious picture as filled my tired soul with
peace.
Here we sat down on an empty bench. I had much to question Zyp
about—much to reflect on and put into words—but my neglected
speech moved as yet on rusty hinges.
“Zyp,” I said presently, in a low voice; “tell me—where is he
buried?”
“In the churchyard—St. John’s, under the hill, Renny.”
Not once until now had I touched upon this subject or mentioned
Modred’s name to any one of them, and a great longing was upon
me to get it over and done with.
“Who went?”
“Dad and Jason and Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
“Zyp, nobody has asked me anything about it. Don’t you all want to
know how—how it happened?”
“He was caught in the weeds—you said so yourself, Renny.”
Vainly I strove to get under her words; intuition was, for the time
being, a sluggish quantity in me.
“Yes; but——” I began, when she took me up softly.
“Dad said it was all clear and that we were never to bother you
about it at all.”
A sigh of gratitude to heaven escaped me.
“And I for one,” said Zyp, “don’t intend to.”
Something in her words jarred unaccountably on my sick nerves.
“At first,” she said, just glancing at me, “dad thought there ought to
be an inquest, but Dr. Crackenthorpe was so set against it that he
gave in.”
“Dr. Crackenthorpe? Why was——”
“He said that juries took such an idiotic view of a father’s
responsibilities; that dad might be censured for letting the boy run
wild; that in any case the family’s habits of life would be raked over
and cause a scandal that might make things very uncomfortable; that
it was a perfectly plain case of drowning, and that he was quite
willing to give a certificate that death was due to a rupture of some
blood vessel in the brain following exhaustion from exposure—or
something of that sort.”
“And he did?”
“Yes, at last, after a deal of talk, and he was buried quietly and
there was an end of it.”
Not quite an end, Zyp—not quite an end!
She was very gentle and patient with me all the morning, and my
poor soul brimmed over with gratitude. My pulses began even to
flicker a little with hope that things might be as they were before the
catastrophe. After all she was a very independent changeling and, if
there existed in her heart any bias in my favor, Jason might find
himself quite baffled in his efforts to control her inclinations.
Presently I turned to the same overclouding subject.
 “What happened the day I was taken bad, Zyp?”
“Jason found you on the stairs, talking rubbish. They carried you to
bed and you hardly left off talking rubbish for weeks. Don’t you
remember anything of it?”
“Nothing, after—after I saw him lying there so dreadful.”
“Ah, it was ugly, wasn’t it? Well, you must have wandered off
somewhere—anywhere; and the rest of us to the parlor. There dad
and the doctor fell to words. They had spent all the night over that
stupid drink, sleeping and quarreling by fits and couldn’t remember
much about it. They had not heard any noise upstairs, either of them;
but suddenly the doctor pointed to something hanging out of dad’s
pocket. ‘Why, you must have gone to the boy’s room some time,’ he
said. ‘Look there!’ Dad took it out and it was Modred’s braces, all
twisted up and stuffed into his pocket.”
“Modred’s braces?”
“Yes; they all knew them, for they were blue, you know—the color
he liked. Dad afterward thought he must have put them there to be
out of the way while he was carrying Modred upstairs, but at the time
he was furious. ‘D’ye dare to imply I had a hand in my son’s death?’
he shrieked. ‘I imply nothing; I mean no offense; they are plain for
every one to see,’ said the doctor, going back a little. I thought he
was frightened and that dad would jump at his throat like a weasel,
and I clapped my hands, waiting for the battle. But it never came, for
dad turned pale and called for brandy, and there was an end of it.”
This story of the doctor’s horrible suggestion wrought only one
comfort in me—it warmed my heart with a great heat of loyalty to one
who, I knew, for all his faults, could never be guilty of so inhuman a
wickedness.
“I should like to kill that doctor,” I said, fiercely and proudly.
“So should I,” said Zyp. “I believe he would bleed soot like a
chimney.”
Zyp was my companion during the greater part of that day and the
next. Her manner toward me was uniformly gentle and attentive.
Sometimes during meals I would become conscious of Jason’s eyes
fixed upon one or other of us in a curious stare that was watchful and
introspective at once, as if he were summing up the voiceless
arguments of counsels invisible, while never losing sight of the fact
that we he sat in judgment on were already convicted in his mind.
This, for the time being, did not much disturb me. I was lulled to a
sense of false security by the gracious championship I thought I now
could rely upon.
It was the evening of the second day and we three were in the
living-room together; Jason reading at the window. Zyp had been so
kind to me that my heart was very full indeed, and now she sat by
me, one hand slipped into mine, the other supporting her little
pointed chin, while her sweet, flower-stained eyes communed with
other, it seemed, than affairs of earth. A strange wistful tenderness
had marked her late treatment of me; a pathetic solicitude that was
inexpressibly touching to one so forlorn. Suddenly she rose and I
heard Jason’s book rustle in his hand.
“Now, little boy,” she said, “’tis time you were in bed.”
Then she leaned toward me and whispered:
“Is he so unhappy? What has he done for Zyp’s sake?”
In a moment she bent and kissed me, with a soft kiss, on the
forehead, and shooting a Parthian glance of defiance at Jason, who
never spoke or moved, ran from the room.
All my soul thrilled with a delicious joy. Zyp, who had refused to
kiss him, had kissed me. The ecstasy of her lips’ touch blotted out all
significance her words might carry.
Half-stunned with triumphant happiness, I climbed the stairs and,
getting into bed, fell into a luminous dream of thought in which for the
moment was no place for apprehension.
I did not even hear Jason enter or shut the door, and it was only
when he shook me roughly by the shoulder that I became conscious
of his presence in the room.
He was standing over me, and the windows of his soul were down,
and through them wickedness grinned like a skull.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he said in a terrible low voice. “D’you
want to drive me to telling that I know it was you who killed Modred?”
 CHAPTER XI.
CONVICT, BUT NOT SENTENCED.

So the blow had fallen!

Yet a single despairing effort I made to beat off or at least
postpone the inevitable.
I sat up in bed and answered my brother back with, I could feel,
ashen and quivering lips.
“What do you mean?” I said. “How dare you say such a thing?”
“I dare anything,” he said, “where I have a particular object in
view.” He never took his eyes off me, and the cold devil in them froze
my blood that had only now run so hotly.
“For yourself,” he went on, “I don’t care much whether you hang or
live. You can come to terms with your own conscience I dare say,
and a fat brother more or less may be a pure question of fit survival.
That’s as it may be—but the girl here is another matter.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I could only say, dully.
Still keeping his eyes on me he sought for and drew from his
jacket pocket a twist of dry and shrunken water weed. A horrible
shudder seized me as I looked upon it.
“You didn’t think to see that again?” he said. “Do you recognize it?
Of course you do. It was the rope you twisted round his foot, and that
I found round his foot still, after dad had carried him upstairs,
bundled round with those sacks, and I was left alone in the room with
him a minute.”
My heart died within me. I dropped my sick, strained eyes and
could only listen in agonized silence. And he went on quite pitilessly.
“You shouldn’t have left such evidence, you know—least of all for
me to see. I had not forgotten the murder in your eyes when I spoke
to you that morning and the evening before.”
He struck the weed lightly with his right hand.
“This stuff,” he said, “I know it, of course—grows up straight
enough of itself. It wanted something human—or inhuman—to twist it
round a leg in that fashion.”
 I broke out with a choking cry.
“I did it,” I said; “but it wasn’t murder—oh, Jason, it wasn’t murder,
as you mean it.”
He gave a little cold laugh.
“No doubt we have different standards of morality,” he said. “We
won’t split hairs. Say it was murder as a judge and jury would view
it.”
“It wasn’t! Will you believe me if I tell you the truth?”
“That depends upon the form it takes.”
“I’ll tell you. It is the truth—before God, it is the truth! I won’t favor
myself. I had been mad with him, I own, but had nearly got over it. I
was out all day on the hills and thought I should like a bathe on my
way home. I went through the ‘run’ and saw he was there. At first I
thought I would leave him to himself, but just as I was going he saw
me and a grin came over his face and—Jason, you know that if I had
gone away then, he would have thought me afraid to meet him.”
“You can leave me, Renalt, out of the question, if you please.”
“I meant no harm—indeed I didn’t—but when I got there he
taunted and mocked at me. I didn’t know what I was doing; and
when he jumped for the water I followed him and twisted that round.
Then in a single moment I saw what I had done—and was mad to
unfasten it. It would not come away at first, and when at last I got
him free and to the shore he was insensible. If you could only know
what I suffered then, you would pity me, Jason—you would; you
could not help it.”
I stole a despairing look at his face and there was no atom of
softness in it.
“He came to on the way home and I was wild with joy, and at night,
Jason, when you were in bed and asleep, I crept into his room and
begged for his forgiveness and he forgave me.”
“Without any condition? That wasn’t like Modred. What did he ask
for in return?”
I was silent.
“Come,” he persisted, “what did he want? You may as well tell me
all. You don’t fancy that I believe he forgave you without getting
something substantial in exchange?”
“I was to give up all claim to Zyp,” I said in a low, suffering voice.
 Jason laughed aloud.
“Oh, Modred,” he cried, “you were a pretty bantling, upon my word!
Who would have thought the dear fatty had such cunning in him?”
His callous merriment struck me with a dumb horror as of
sacrilege. But he subdued it directly and returned to me and my
misery in the same repressed tone as before.
“Well,” he said, “I have heard it all, I suppose. It makes little
difference. You know, of course, you are morally responsible for his
death, just the same as if you had stuck a knife into his heart.”
I could only hide my face in the bedclothes, writhed all through
with agony. There was a little spell of silence; then my brother
bespoke my attention with a gentle push.
“Renny, do you want all this known to the others?”
I raised my head in a sudden gust of passion.
“Do what you like!” I cried. “I know you now, and you can’t make it
much worse!”
“Oh, yes,” he said, coolly; “I can make it a good deal worse.
Nobody but I knows at present, don’t you see?”
I looked at him with a sudden gleam of hope.
“Don’t you intend to tell, Jason?”
He laughed again, lightly.
“That depends. I must borrow my cue from Modred and make
conditions.”
I had no need to ask what they were. In whatever direction I
looked now, I saw nothing but a blank and deadly waste.
“I want the girl—you understand? I need not go into particulars.
She interests me and that’s enough.”
“Yes,” I said, quietly.
“There must be no more of that sentimental foolery between you
and her. I bore it as long as you were ill; but, now you’re strong
again, it must stop. If it doesn’t, you know what’ll happen.”
With that he turned abruptly on his heel and began to undress. I
listened for the deep breathing that announced him to be asleep with
a strained fever of impatience. I felt that I could not think cleanly or
collectedly with that monstrous consciousness of his awake in the
room.
 Perhaps, in all my wretchedness, the full discovery of his
baseness of soul was as bitter a wound as any I had received. I had
so looked up to him as a superior being, so sunned myself in the
pride of relationship to him; so lovingly submitted to his boyish
patronage and condescension. The grief of my discovery was very
real and terrible and would in itself, I think, have gone far to blight my
existence had no fearfuller blast descended to wither it.
Well, it was all one now. Whatever immunity from disaster I was to
enjoy henceforth must be on sufferance only.
Had I been older and sinfuller I might have grasped in my despair
at the coward’s resource of self-destruction; as it was, I thought of
flight. By and by, perhaps, when vigor should return to me, and with
it resolution, I should be able to face firmly the problem of my future
and take my own destinies in hand.
Little sleep came to me that night, and that only of a haunted kind.
I felt haggard and old as I struggled into my clothes the next
morning, and all unfit to cope with the gigantic possibilities of the
day. Jason had gone early to the fatal pool for a bathe.
At breakfast, in the beginning, Zyp’s manner to me was prettily
sympathetic and a little shy. It was the first of my great misery that I
must repel her on the threshold of our better understanding, and see
her fall away from me for lack of the least expression of that
passionate devotion and gratitude that filled my heart to bursting. I
could see at once that she was startled—hurt, perhaps, and that she
shrunk from me immediately. Jason talked airily to my father all
through the meal, but I knew his senses to be as keenly on the alert
as if he had sat in silence, with his eyes fixed upon my face.
I choked over my bread and bacon; I could not swallow more than
a mouthful of the coffee in my cup, and Zyp sat back in her chair,
never addressing me after that first rebuff, but pondering on me
angrily with her eyes full of a sort of wonder.
She stopped me peremptorily as, breakfast over, I was hastening
out with all the speed I could muster, and asked me if I didn’t want
her company that morning.
“No,” I answered; “I am well enough to get about by myself now.”
“Very well,” she said. “Then you must do without me altogether for
the future.”
 She turned on her heel and I could only look after her in dumb
agony. Then I crept down into the yard and confided my grief to the
old cart wheels.
Presently, raising my head, I saw her standing before me, her
hands under her apron, her face grave with an expression, half of
concern, half of defiance.
“Now, if you please,” she said, “I want to know the meaning of
this?”
“Of what?” I asked, with wretched evasiveness.
“You know—your manner toward me this morning.”
“I have done nothing,” I muttered.
“You have insulted me, sir. Is it because I kissed you last night?”
“Oh, Zyp!” I cried aloud in great pain. “You know it isn’t—you know
it isn’t!”
I couldn’t help this one cry. It was forced from me.
“Then what’s the reason?”
“I can’t give it—I have none. I want to be alone, that’s all.”
She stood looking at me a moment in silence, and the line of her
mouth hardened.
“Very well,” she said, at last. “Then, understand, I’ve done with
you. I thought at first it was a mistake or that you were ill again. I’ve
been kind to you; you can’t say I haven’t given you a chance. And I
pitied you because you were alone and unhappy. Jason, I will tell
you, hinted an evil thing of you to me, but even if it was true, which I
didn’t believe, I forgave you, thinking, perhaps, it was done for my
sake. Well, if it was, I tell you now it was useless, for you will be
nothing to me ever again.”
And, with these cruel words, she left me. The proud child of the
woods could brook no insult to her condescension, and from my
comrade she had become my enemy.
I suppose I should have been relieved that the inevitable rupture
had occurred so swiftly and effectually. Judge you, you poor outcasts
who, sanctifying a love in your tumultuous breasts, have had to step
aside and yield to another the fruit you so coveted.
Once pledged to antagonism, Zyp, it will be no matter for wonder,
adopted anything but half-measures. Had it only been her vanity that
was hurt she would have made me pay dearly for the blow. As it
was, her ingenuity in devising plans for my torture and discomfiture
verged upon the very bounds of reason.
At first she contented herself with mere verbal pleasantries and
disdainful snubbings. As, however, the days went on and my old
strength and health obstinately returned to me, despite the irony of
the shattered soul within, her animosity grew to be an active agent
so persistent in its methods that I verily thought my brain would give
way under the load.
I cannot, indeed, recall a tithe of the Pucklike devices she resorted
to for my moral undoing, and which, after all, I might have endured to
the end had it not been for one threading torment that accompanied
all her whimsies like a strain of diabolical music. This was an
ostentatious show of affection for Jason, which, I truly believe, from
being more or less put on in exaggerated style for my edification,
became at length such a habit with her as may be considered, in
certain dispositions, one form of love.
The two now were seldom apart. Once, conscious of my presence,
she kissed Jason on the lips, because he had brought her a little
flowering root of some plant she desired. I saw his face fire up darkly
and he looked across at me with a triumph that made me almost
hate him.
And the worst of it was that I knew that my punishment was not
more than commensurate with the offense; that my sin had been
grievous and its retribution not out of proportion. How could full
atonement and Zyp have been mine together?
Still, capable of acknowledging the fitness of things in my sadder
hours of loneliness, my nature, once restored to strength, could not
but strive occasionally to throw off the incubus that it felt it could not
bear much longer without breaking down for good and all. I had done
wrong on the spur of a single wicked impulse, but I was no fiend to
have earned such bitter reprisal. By slow degrees rebellion woke in
my heart against the persistent cruelty of my two torturers. Had I fled
at this juncture, the wild scene that took place might have been
averted, and the exile, which became mine nevertheless, have
borne, perhaps, less evil fruit than in the result it did.
 CHAPTER XII.
THE DENUNCIATION.

One November morning—my suffering had endured all these

months—my father and Dr. Crackenthorpe stood before the sitting-
room fire, talking, while I sat with a book at the table, vainly trying to
concentrate my attention on the printed lines.
Since my recovery I had seen the doctor frequently, but he had
taken little apparent notice of me. Now, I had racked my puzzled
mind many a time for recollection of the conversation I had been
witness of on the night preceding my seizure, but still the details of it
had eluded me, though its gist remained in a certain impression of
uneasiness that troubled me when I thought of it. Suddenly, on this
morning, a few words of the doctor’s brought the whole matter vividly
before me again.
“By the bye, Trender,” he said, drawlingly, and sat down and
began to poke the fire—“by the bye, have you ever found that thing
you accused me of losing for you on a certain night—you know
when?”
“No,” said my father, curtly.
“Was it of any value, now?”
“Maybe—maybe not,” said my father.
“That don’t seem much of answer. Perhaps, now, it came from the
same place those others did.”
“That’s nothing to you, Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
“Well, you say it’s lost, anyhow. Supposing I found it, would you
agree to my keeping it? Treasure-trove, you know”—and he looked
up with a grin, balancing the poker perpendicularly in his hand.
“Treasure-trove, my friend,” he repeated, with emphasis, and gave
the other a keen look.
Something in the tone of his speech woke light in my brain, and I
remembered at a flash. I stole an anxious glance at my father. His
face was pale and set with anger, but there was an expression in his
eyes that looked like fear.
 “You don’t mean to tell me you have found it?” he said in a forced
voice.
“Oh, by no means,” answered the doctor. “We haven’t all your
good luck. Only you are so full of the unexpected in producing
valuables from secret places, like a conjurer, that I thought perhaps
you wouldn’t mind my keeping this particular one if I should chance
to pick it up.”
“Keep it, certainly, if you can find it,” said my father, I could have
thought almost with a faint groan.
“Thanks for the permission, my friend; I’ll make a point of keeping
my eyes open.”
When did he not? They were pretty observant now on Zyp and
Jason, who, as he spoke, walked into the room.
“Hullo!” said my brother. “Good-morning to you, doctor, and a
sixpence to toss for your next threppenny fee.”
“Hold your tongue,” cried my father, angrily.
“I would give a guinea to get half for attending on your inquest,”
said the doctor, sourly. “Keep your wit for your wench, my good lad,
and see then that she don’t go begging.”
“I could give you better,” muttered Jason, cowed by my father’s
presence, “but it shall keep and mature.” Then he turned
boisterously on me.
“Why don’t you go out, Renny, instead of moping at home all day?”
His manner was aggressive, his tone calculated to exasperate.
Moved by discretion I rose from my chair and made for the door;
but he barred my way.
“Can’t you answer me?” he said, with an ugly scowl.
“No—I don’t want to. Let me pass.”
My father had turned his back upon us and was staring gloomily
down at the fire.
I heard Zyp give a little scornful laugh and she breathed the word
“coward” at me.
I stopped as if I had struck against a wall. All my blood surged
back on my heart and seemed to leave my veins filled with a tingling
ichor in its place.
“Perhaps I have been,” I said, in a low voice, “but here’s an end of
it.”
 Jason tittered.
“We’re mighty stiltish this morning,” he said, with a sneer. “What a
pity it’s November, so that we can’t have a plunge for the sake of
coolness—except that they say the pool’s haunted now.”
I looked at him with blazing eyes, then made another effort to get
past him, but he repelled me violently.
“You don’t know your place,” he said, and gave an insolent laugh.
“Stand back till I choose to let you go.”
I heard the doctor snigger and Zyp gave a second little cluck. My
father was still absorbed—lost in his own dark reflections.
The loaded reel of endurance was spinning to its end.
“You might have given all your morning to one of your Susans
yonder,” said my brother, mockingly. “Now she’s gone, I expect, with
her apron to her eyes. She’ll enjoy her pease pudding none the less,
I dare say, and perhaps look out for a more accommodating clown. It
won’t be the first time you’ve had to take second place.”
I struck him full between the eyes and he went down like a polled
ox. All the pent-up agony of months was in my blow. As I stepped
back in the recoil, madly straining even then to beat under the more
furious devil that yelled in me for release, I was conscious of a
hurried breath at my ear—a swift whisper: “Kill him! Stamp on his
mouth! Don’t let him get up again!” and knew that it was Zyp who
spoke.
I put her back fiercely. Jason had sprung to his feet—half-blinded,
half-stunned. His face was inhuman with passion and was working
like a madman’s. But before he could gather himself for a rush, my
father had him in his powerful arms. It all happened in a moment.
“What’s all this?” roared my father. “Knock under, you whelp, or I’ll
strangle you in your collar!”
“Let me go!” cried my brother. “Look at him—look what he did!”
He was choking and struggling to that degree that he could hardly
articulate. I think foam was on his lips, and in his eyes the ravenous
thirst for blood.
“He struck me!” he panted—“do you hear? Let me go—let me kill
him as he killed Modred!”
There was a moment’s silence. Dr. Crackenthorpe, who had sat
passively back in his chair during the fray, with his lips set in an acrid
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