China - The Root of Madness 1967

The film “China: The Root of Madness” was produced in 1967, a Cold War-era documentary film divided into seven episodes. The short documentary clip we are asked to watch and comment here is from Episode Five.

The first episode started with Theodore H White narrating about the Opium War and the decline of the 250-year-old Qing dynasty, from which the rise of modern Republican China under Dr Sun Yat-sen began with his 1911 Revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty. From there, the film goes through all the major events that had a huge impact on the re-construction of modern China, with White’s own monologue description of the key figures – Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. 

Theodore H White, who died on May 16, 1968, aged 71, sold newspapers on streetcars as a boy, and he entered Harvard College on a scholarship awarded to newsboys, majored in history, and earned his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in 1938. Later that year, a Frederick Sheldon Travelling Fellowship sent him to China, which he made his base, while he honed his skills reporting for Time Magazine as its China correspondent for WWII.

His views on China in this segment of “China: the Roots of Madness”, and, also from our further knowledge of our ChinaX Study, Part 8, can be summarized as follows:

1. I find no major faults with the factual accuracy of White’s presentation in this video, as his purpose was to educate the American public about China. He attempted to analyze the anti-Western sentiment in China from the official American perspective, covering 170 years of Chinese political history – from the Boxer Rebellion of the Qing Dynasty to Mao’s Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution.

  2. However, it is in White’s monologue description of events in China that many find condescending, especially his reference to the People’s Republic of China, where he remarked at the Introduction of the whole film, that the 700 million Chinese (in 1967) had been “taught to hate, their growing power is the world’s greatest threat to peace enlightenment…….50 years of torment, bred madness ……” Taught to hate?

3.   Likewise, White’s assumption of the Chinese people as inferior is also seen in his “White Man’s Burden” complex, where he felt remorseful about America having failed “for 50 years …to help the Chinese people to find some entry to the modern world…….”

4.    So, to White, China had a total of over 100 years of suffering and conflict, and the Chinese had then fallen into the vicious cycle of “from the tyranny of Confucius of the Manchu Emperor to the tyranny of communism and Mao”. The few hundred years of the greatness of Confucianism in China's history is all but forgotten by White, who regarded his own culture as more modern, more civilized, and one that China should emulate – with American help.

5.    In our short documentary clip, White even deprecated Mao’s epic and famous “Long March” beginning October 1934 – simply because Chiang Kai-shek was hell-bent to eliminate Mao’s Communist army of peasants - they are also Chinese, remember? - than joining forces with them to fight China’s common, single enemy – the Japanese aggressors. He talked derisively of Mao and some 100,000 followers “carrying all their record with them on little yo-yo sticks” as they made their arduous, hazardous, 1,000-mile trek to avoid annihilation by Chiang’s forces! Whatever one's political views, the Long March is a monumental and epochal event in Chinese history of struggles, Communist or otherwise, and one which the world has never seen or will see!

6.   Likewise, in the December 1936 Xian Incident, White goes to excruciating details to describe on how Chiang was kidnapped by the “Young Marshal” Zhang Xueliang, how Chiang tried to escape, “hurt his back……..lost his false teeth……his feet was bleeding as he ran over the rocks…..it sounds mad”. To White, “that’s the way China was, and it even got madder” because Zhang Xueliang then invited the Communists, represented by Zhou Enlai, to come in and talk with Chiang about this Second United Front, as it was later called, against the Japanese invaders. He did admit, however, that Chiang could have easily been killed by Zhang Xueliang and/or Zhou Enlai at that moment, but our history tell us that both the latter were still of the view that Chiang was needed to head this patriotic Front to fight the Japanese, and he was released to go back to Nanking.

7.   If Theodore White really grasp Chinese history, as he claimed to know well, he must surely know that his flippant approach and comments here would not endure him to the Chinese people – and to the American people, if they are aware – for surely, what Zhang Xueliang did was the heroic act one true Chinese patriot - he willingly followed Chiang in the plane back to Nanking, as he was sick at Chiang’s obsession to wipe out his Chinese Communist enemies first, rather than forming a united front with Mao's Communist Chinese peasant army to fight and defeat the Japanese aggressors, which would surely happened if Chiang had truly and genuinely agreed. He must also have known that Chiang’s U.S. advisers – like General Stilwell and his successor General Wedemeyer, were all for this united Chinese front.

8.    We know what happened: Chiang came back to Nanking “in pain, he hobbled out” of the plane, announced this Second United Front – and then promptly imprisoned Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshall who was then the effective ruler of northeast China, and much of northern China, after the assassination of his father Zhang Zuolin by Japanese forces on June 4, 1928! This was Chiang Kai-shek, whom the Americans love, his act of treachery and deceit, who could not be trusted to keep his own word! Zhang was placed under house arrest, moved to Taiwan when Chiang fled to Taiwan in 1949, and kept under this condition for 50 years until Chiang’s death in 1975! Did Theodore White ever know that Zhang Xueliang was later regarded by the Communist People’s Republic of China then, and, today, as a true Chinese patriotic hero – who was prepared to sacrifice his principles and beliefs for a better China against the marauding, invading  Japanese forces - a national recognition which he rightly and truly deserved?

9.  This entire film, in my view, seek to portray the Chinese people as savages and of inferior intellect, as we see further in these examples:

(a)          Theodore White, in describing his conversation with Mao Zedong a bit later in our documentary clip, said Mao told him that “……George Washington didn’t have electricity. And yet, George Washington won. You suddenly realize with a start that Mao Zedong was not really sure of when and in what century electricity was introduced – that the structure of his knowledge was totally different from the structure of Chiang Kai-shek’s and ours.”

This is again White’s condescending statement, and implying Mao is uneducated and thus not very knowledgeable about world affairs. I am sure White cannot be so naïve as not to understand what Mao really meant: that George Washington, maybe short of military resources fighting against his British colonialists, could still out-manoeuvre them and win. And perhaps White never understood or appreciated that Mao Zedong - whatever his other faults - would emerge in history as one of the world's greatest guerrilla warfare strategist, notwithstanding his Hunan peasant background. The next comment by the narrator said it loud and clear: “Mao’s knowledge of Asian war, however, is unmatchable……he lifts the doctrine of partisan warfare to new levels.”

(b)         A Major General Frank Dorn, later in this documentary script, then talked about his training mission at that time. He was asked, and showed a visiting American general from Washington Chinese troops marching on the road, and “the majority of the men had dogs of one kind or description or size ….”, he said. He then explained to this general that when the Chinese troops“run out of rice and other foods, the dogs go into the cook pots.” Here you have the Chinese army with very little food and provisions for survival, but to these Americans, the Chinese army troops were savages and they eat dogs! If you go to South Korea today, you will see them killing and eating thousands of dogs as “normal” food. To me, it is disgusting and must be stopped, but this is their “culture”!

So, while our episode of China – The Roots of Madness – may initially, appear to be based on Chinese facts of history, White – on three occasions – describe China and its people as“mad.” Contemporary critics have criticized White’s "callous and condescending" portrayal of the Chinese people, and that his failings was that he was biased, his cultural understanding of China was warped, he did not really and fully understand why Chiang and Mao, for instance, took their courses of action the way they did – notwithstanding his seven years reporting in China. The fact, for instance, that he never attempted or engaged some respectable and prominent Chinese to give their views on this documentary script would surely made his film even “madder” to Chinese eyes!

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