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The Scholar and the Policy-Maker

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Allen S. Whiting
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Ever since Plato advocated his ideal of a philosopher-king, the intellectual has sought to guide the destinies of state. Sometimes he has been openly explicit in articulating advice, as with Machiavelli. More often, however, the intellectual has abjured so crass a role. Instead, he has sought to influence through private persuasion or has rendered counsel indirectly through scholarly essays. Only in China did the dichotomy between scholar and statesman disappear some two thousand years ago with emergence of a political system that monopolized bureaucratic control in the hands of the literati, that infinitesimally small proportion of the population that could master the classical adages which comprised the examinations for entrance into government. Elsewhere the sword proved to be mightier than the pen, at least in determining affairs of state.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1972

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References

1 United States Relations With the People's Republic of China, Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 92nd Congress, June 28, 1971, p. 235.

2 Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge 1959)Google Scholar; also The Two Cultures: A Second Look (Cambridge 1964).Google Scholar

3 An extremely useful survey of the literature, completed in September 1962, may be found in A Counterinsurgency Bibliography, compiled by Condit, D. M. and others, Special Operations Research Office, The American University (Washington 1963).Google Scholar

4 See, for instance, Whitman Rostow, Walt, Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge 1960).Google Scholar In his calculus of the North Vietnamese willingness to comply with U.S. policy when accompanied by the threat of U.S. air strikes, Professor Rostow cited Hanoi's industrial investment for modernization as the most promising target for leverage on North Vietnamese decision-making. See The Pentagon Papers, Bantam Books (New York 1971), p. 241Google Scholar, as one instance of this position argued at greater length in other memoranda and in oral discussions.

5 The author was a participant in these games.

6 The Pentagon Papers (fn. 4). The author took part in all of the estimates down to mid-1966 as Director, Office of Research and Analysis for Far East, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State.

7 From 1949 to 1970, the New York Times had no correspondent in the People's Republic of China and only an occasional correspondent stationed in the Republic of China. Reporting from Hong Kong relied on a two-man bureau, supplemented by dispatches from Tokyo. This provided a limited basis for covering the interaction between the Communists and Nationalists, plus covert involvement by the C.I.A.

8 The exchange occurred between the Soviet ambassador and the American President, the latter denying he had ever authorized development of a “doomsday machine.” See Dr. Strangelove or How I Came To Love The Bomb, screenplay by Terry Southern.

9 The continuity of policy problems into which officials find themselves thrust is amply illustrated by Truman, Harry S., Memoirs (Garden City 1956)Google Scholar, Volume I; Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston 1965)Google Scholar; and Acheson, Dean, Present At The Creation (New York 1969).Google Scholar

10 Gray, Colin S., “What RAND Hath Wrought,” Foreign Policy, No. 4 (Fall 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, traces the interaction between “outside” strategic analysis and “inside” decisions.

11 Among the foremost contributors to systemic analysis in international relations are Bruce Russett, Karl Deutsch, Hayward R. Alker, Richard A. Brody, Rudolph J. Rummel, and J. David Singer.

12 Insightful reflections on problems of the Policy Planning Council are offered in Kennan, George, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston 1967)Google Scholar; also Burton Marshall, Charles, The Limits of Foreign Policy (New York 1954).Google Scholar

13 Two writers who experienced events in China first-hand offer differing assessments: Stephen Fitzgerald, “China Visited: A View of the Cultural Revolution,” and Wylie, Ray, “The Meaning of the Cultural Revolution,” in China and Ourselves: Explorations and Revisions by a New Generation, edited by Douglass, Bruce and Terrill, Ross (Boston 1969).Google Scholar A wide set of interpretations may be found in China After the Cultural Revolution (New York 1969).Google Scholar Monographic research on selected aspects appears regularly in the China Quarterly. The mass of documentation and the problem of probing the murky politics underlying the struggle have thus far precluded an overall authoritative study.

14 A brilliant probing of this problem is presented in Schurmann, Franz, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (2nd edn., Berkeley 1969).Google Scholar

15 The fullest statement of Mao's position is “On Khrushchev's Phoney Communism,” joint editorial by Jen Min Jih Pao [People's Daily] and Hung Ch'i [Red Flag], July 14, 1964, reprinted in Barnett, A. Doak, China After Mao (Princeton 1967).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 The classic study is Zagoria, Donald S., The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956–1961 (Princeton 1962).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Griffith, William E., The Sino-Soviet Rift (Cambridge, Mass. 1964).Google Scholar

17 Selected aspects of this confrontation are examined in China: Management of a Revolutionary Society, edited by Lindbeck, John M. H. (Seattle 1971)Google Scholar; and Party Leadership and Revolutionary Power in China, edited by Wilson Lewis, John (Cambridge 1970).Google Scholar

18 Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Oxford 1947)Google Scholar; August Wittfogel, Karl, Oriental Despotism (New Haven 1957).Google Scholar

19 Schurmann (fn. 14); Professor Roy Grow, Brandeis University, is completing a doctoral dissertation examining this problem in detail.

20 Charles, David A., “The Dismissal of P'eng Teh-huai,” China Quarterly, No. 8 (October-December 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Langley Hsieh, Alice, Communist China's Strategy in the Nuclear Era (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1962).Google Scholar

21 Zagoria (fn. 16).

22 Charles (fn. 20), seems partly supported by later Cultural Revolution accusations, although these are polemical and undocumented. See Peking Review, Vol. 10, No. 36, p. 14.

23 Suggestive evidence along these lines emerged in the author's research for China Crosses The Yalu (Stanford 1968)Google Scholar; further probing of the hypothesis is under way by graduate students at the University of Michigan, Stanford, and the University of California, Los Angeles. While these are separate efforts, they occur within a common framework and should prove comparable for assessment.

24 Hsieh (fn. 20), is a brilliant example of this approach.

25 “On Khrushchev's Phoney Communism” (fn. 15).

26 Gittings, John, Survey of the Sino-Soviet Dispute (Oxford 1968)Google Scholar, conveniently groups exchanges between Moscow and Peking according to issue areas which highlight the policy differences.

27 For the fullest examination of theoretical and evidential literature in his continuing development of this field, see George, Alexander L., “The Case For Multiple Advocacy In Making Foreign Policy,” prepared for delivery at the 1971Google Scholar Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.