The Wisdom Of Pearl Buck: How Re-Reading Her Work Reveals New Insights

Buck’s description of geo-politics made no impression on a 27-year-old like me, stuck in a mundane police job in Nashik, then a backward Adivasi district in Maharashtra. However, rereading the same tattered paperback in 2024 brings out so many vignettes that makes an intelligence analyst like me wonder whether US-China relations could have been different had some of Buck’s ideas been recognized by the American leaders.

The first thing that strikes anyone reading the book is her deep love for China where she spent “most of the first forty years of her life” as her adopted son Edgar Walsh would say in 2013, while releasing her last book “The Eternal Wonder” the manuscript of which was lost for 40 years. She permanently moved to United States only in 1934 and died in 1973 when she was eighty. She published her second book “The Good Earth” in 1932 which brought her the 1938 Nobel Prize for literature, the first American woman to get it, for her “rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces of her missionary parents”.

Buck compares Americans with the Chinese: “To talk even with a farmer and his family, none of whom could read or write, was often to hear a philosophy at once sane and humorous. Compared to this, “our people” (Americans) have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy. That, perhaps, can only come to a people thousands of years”.

In this, Buck is remarkably like Jawaharlal Nehru who wrote in his “Discovery of India” (1946): “The old epics of India, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and other books, in popular translations and paraphrases, were widely known among the masses, and every incident and story and moral in them was engraved on the popular mind and gave a richness and content to it. Illiterate villagers would know hundreds of verses by heart and their conversation would be full of references to them or to some story with a moral enshrined in some old classic.”

Buck felt that America, which was obsessively trying to control China, never understood the Chinese mind and made the original mistake in not supporting Sun Yat-sen. That was when he sought American help to stabilise China which was in turmoil due to the 14 May 1919 upheaval after the US dominated 1919 Paris Peace Conference gifted Shandong, the birthplace of Confucious to Japan. The Soviets had then deputed Adolph Joffe as their envoy to China in 1920: “While the foreign ambassadors ignored him, the Chinese common people and intellectual alike welcomed him with feasts and friendship.”

In 1921, Sun Yat-sen accepted Soviet aid and promised that Nationalist Party “would allow a Chinese Communist party to be strengthened and would accept its cooperation”, although China “would not have a Communist government”. This was because Sun Yat-sen did not believe that “Communism was suited to his people”. A Communist party was already formed through the efforts of Mao-Tse-tung, then “an assistant in the library of Ch’en Tu-hshiu’s university”, Chou-En-Lai, leader of Chinese students in Paris and Chu Teh, “the son of a wealthy landlord and an officer in a war lord’s army” learning modern military science in Germany.

Although Sun Yat-sen said that the Nationalist Party would not adopt a Communist government, close cooperation with the Soviet advisers made him to reorganise the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) “with the same discipline, the same techniques of propaganda, and the same political commissars”. He also sent Chiang Kai-shek to Moscow for military training.

The second mistake America made was blindly supporting Chiang Kai-shek when it was clear to all in China that he never “commanded respect” among Chinese peasants. When the Kuomintang-Communist split came, America supported Chiang. Part of the reason might have been due to Chiang’s marriage with the American educated Chirstian celebrity Soon May-ling, a former student of Wesleyan College.

Parallelly the Fourth Army under Chu Teh, mutinied in Kiangsi and emerged as the “Red Army”, which “became the nucleus around which all discontented persons could gather”, attracting peasants. Chiang gave jobs only to the educated, neglecting the peasants. “Never in Chinese history has any government succeeded if there is a division between peasant and intellectual”.

Conversely, Buck praises Gandhiji for his foresight “that made him know very early that both peasant and intellectual must be won to work together for their country”.

(The writer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat.)

Views expressed are personal