The niece of Pearl S. Buck went to my high school for a while in the 1950s and I read The Good Earth during my junior year. FYI: I am not a Sinophile, a China scholar, nor do I have Sinophobia.

Reading Bill Lascher’s Eve of a Hundred Midnights, James Bradley’s The China Mirage Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby’s Thunder out of China, and Ilona Ralf Sues’ Shark’s Fins and Millet gave me better insight to why China and our relationship with it is the way it is today. I also learned more about the political, economic, and social environments that set up The Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War.
Reviews of these books is not my reason for this post. Except for Shark’s Fins and Milletthere are multiple reviews on line, so I want to say what about each author makes them valid.

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is fiction, but she grew up in China with her missionary parents.

Ted White and Annalee Jacoby were war correspondents with access to leaders of all factions in the region. Annalee’s husband Melville (Mel) a Time-Life magazine war correspondent was killed accompanying General Harold H. George on a trip to inspect air bases.

Ilona Sues had personal contacts with leaders of all factions and commoners in China during the 1930s while on a League of Nations mission to help eradicate the flow of opium. She had intimate knowledge about meals of shark’s fins and millet and the societies who had those meals.

Bill Lasher had an advantage many writers do not —Mel and Annalee’s personal papers, films, and documents saved by their families to work with for Eve of a Hundred Midnights.

James Bradly, a historian, cited over 400 verifiable references for his work on The China Mirage.

The overlapping content of each book verifies the fidelity of the others and the experience or research by the authors added to my learning experience.

Some time ago, I mentioned re-reading Bill Lascher’s Eve of a Hundred Midnights The China Mirage by James Bradley and Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby’s Thunder out of China.

I just read another ‘China’ book:
Ilona Ralf Sues’ Shark’s Fins and Millet published by Little, Brown and Company in 1944.
The title implies two extremes of Chinese life in the late 1930s. Shark’s fins were Chinese delicacies enjoyed by the rich and powerful and millet was the food of the hungry masses.

The Polish author who was fluent in nonnative languages Russian, German, French, English, and Chinese starts her personal story by telling of trying to influence the League of Nations to make more efficient and more honest efforts to reduce the opium traffic. She tells of becoming disgusted with evasion, hypocrisy, and appeasement before deciding to travel to China to make the same efforts at the source of the problem. During the years 1936 through 1939 she asks clumsy questions, gathered information, and formed opinions.

In the process she worked as an aide to the Australian William Henry Donald who was a longtime advisor to Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. She organized publicity, delivered propaganda addresses in French and English on the radio, and served as a censor.

She finds similarities to fascism in the Kuomintang’s¹ The Kuomintang was a major political party in the Republic of China and the sole ruling party of the country during its rule from 1927 to 1949 in Mainland China. It relocated to Taiwan and ruled under martial law until 1987. corruption, reaction, militarism, and anti-education policies.

The author believed China had no chance of becoming one under the one-party, Kuomintang. She observes that the Generalissimo is cold, aloof, proud, cut off from the people, too easily influenced by advisors. Sues says, “The amazing truth dawned upon me: Donald was re-enacting Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ in China, with the world for a setting, Madame as Eliza, and himself as Professor Higgins.” Madame Chiang “knew as much of democracy as she could see by looking out of the windows of Wellesley College.” But, inspired by Donald, she fought for it, egoistically, arrogantly, temperamentally, determinedly.”

Sues develops admiration for the Chinese Communists and their achievements both in war and civil administration. Her experiences among them convinced her that “notwithstanding all statements to the contrary, the Chinese people were ripe for democracy.”

Because Shark’s Fins and Millet fills in details not given in Eve of a Hundred Midnights, The China Mirage, and Thunder out of China, it completed, at least for me, the picture of those years in China and those year’s impact on the conditions today.