From: xc17@cicero.spc.uchicago.edu ()
Subject: CND Books & Journals Review, December 13, 1992
Keywords: CND Books & Journals Review
Organization: U of Chicago, SSPPCC
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 05:47:50 GMT
Summary: CND Books & Journals Review
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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/

                           December 13, 1992

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1. Politics, Murder and the Kuomintang --
   "Fires of the Dragon"  by David Kaplan  ............................. 94

2. "Chinatown: a Portrait of a Closed Society"  by Gwen Kinkead ........ 35

3. "China: Empire of Living Symbols"  by Cecilia Lindqvist ............. 46
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Editor's Note:  We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If
                you encounter any China-related books  or journals that you
                would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in
                comments, newspaper reviews, journal articles, and excerpts
                etc to  cnd-editor@Sdsc.edu   Thank you.

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1. Politics, Murder and the Kuomintang --
   "Fires of the Dragon"  by David Kaplan  ............................. 94
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Forwarded by: John Sweeney (sweeneyj@ocf.Berkeley.EDU)
Source: San Francisco Chronicle 10/25/92
Review written by: Todd Lappin

"Fires of the Dragon:  Politics, Murder and the Kuomintang"
by: David E. Kaplan.  Atheneum, $25 ISBN 0-689-112066-4

In the morning of Oct. 15, 1984, Henry Liu, an outspoken Chinese journalist
and naturalized American citizen, was gunned down in the garage of his home
in Daly City.

Liu had been a frequent critic of Taiwan's Kuomintang (KMT), the Nationalist
political party, a regime that has depicted itself as China's government-
in-exile since Communist forces overran the mainland in 1949. Liu's
persistent diatribes against what he saw as the corruption of the KMT had
been a thorn in the side of Taiwanese authorities ever since he had placed
himself beyond the reach of the KMT's oppressive internal security system by
immigrating to the United States in 1967.  "I'm protected here," Liu
repeatedly assured friends when they warned him to tone down his criticism
of the KMT.  "Nobody can touch me in America."

In "Fires of the Dragon," David Kaplan (news editor at the Center for
Investigative Reporting in San Francisco) has meticulously reconstructed the
events surrounding what he believes was the KMT's decision to assassinate
Henry Liu, painting a portrait of the man against a backdrop of more than
100 turbulent years of Chinese history and several decades of allegedly
unchecked Kuomintang intrigue in the United States.

During the 1950's and 1960's, Americans commonly referred to the KMT
presence on Taiwan as "Free China" -- a name that depicted Chiang Kai-shek's
Nationalist regime as an embattled bulwark against the menace of global
communism.  In reality, Kaplan asserts, the political tactics of the KMT
were virtually identical to those used by the Chinese Communist Party just
across the Taiwan Strait.  Unrelenting propaganda, an omnipresent internal
security system and the threat of torture and imprisonment had stifled
political dissent in both Chinas, he says.

"Fires of the Dragon" vividly suggests that the KMT skillfully exploited the
United States' fear of communism to conceal KMT efforts to stamp out
political heterodoxy on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. In the United
States, Kaplan writes, at least four separate intelligence agencies operated
out of KMT front organizations during the 1970's. Further, the KMT regularly
bribed or coerced  Taiwanese students at American colleges to spy and
organize pro-KMT demonstrations, he writes.

Similar efforts took place in America's Chinatowns, Kaplan alleges, while
Taiwan attempted to maximize KMT influence inside the U.S. government:
During Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts in the 1950's, he
says, Taiwanese security agencies supplied the CIA and FBI with fraudulent
information about such prominent Americans as Owen Lattimore and Eleanor
Roosevelt, each considered hostile to the KMT cause; two decades later, KMT
front organizations sent staff members from the offices of Senators Lloyd
Bentsen, Ted Kennedy, Barry Goldwater and Howard Baker, as well as 13
members of the House of Representatives, on all-expense paid tours of Taiwan
in an attempt to fuel opposition to America's rapprochement with the People's
Republic;  KMT agents infiltrated the Pentagon and the State Department and
sent a steady flow of classified documents back to Taipei.

When American officials stumbled across evidence exposing the KMT's
espionage, Kaplan writes, they were consistently reluctant to publicize
their findings in the interest of protecting America's "strategic relation-
ship" with their staunch anti-Communist ally in Asia.

Liu is characterized here as one of the few writers who dared look
critically at the Kuomintang despite the party's strong-arm intimidation
tactics, but as Kaplan himself argues, "Henry Liu was no saint."  Born on
the Chinese mainland to a family of prosperous landowners, Liu fled to
Taiwan during the Communist Revolution and attended the KMT's elite
Political Warfare Academy.  Later he settled in the United States, where he
wrote an unauthorized biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek's
eldest son and Taiwan's paramount leader from 1975 to 1988.  Yet Liu was
also a triple agent of sorts, Kaplan says, passing along information about
his professional contacts to intelligence agencies in Taiwan, the People's
Republic and the United States.

Kaplan's chronicle contains much of the intrigue and suspense of a good spy
thriller, but "Fires of the Dragon" does little to clarify the complexities
of the murdered man's character.  Kaplan believes that Liu's tripartite
allegiances stemmed from his "sometimes reckless work style and rather naive
ties to the world of espionage," but the author ultimately adopts a
conclusion put forth by one of Liu's oldest friends.  "To become a U.S.
citizen was useful and convenient," the friend observes, "but [Liu] was 100
percent Chinese."

But such an interpretation is by no means self-explanatory. Westerners have
been struggling for centuries to understand exactly what it means to be
Chinese, and retreating behind the mystery of Liu's ethnicity leaves many
questions unresolved.

Why, for example, despite his English skills, did Liu continue to write in
Chinese?  A higher profile within the American media might have given him
some protection from political enemies in Taiwan, but instead Liu almost
completely ignored the Western reading audience.  Why did he speak out at
all, when so many Chinese writers toed the official line dictated by
propagandists in either Taipei or Beijing?

"Fires of the Dragon" is an extremely ambitious book, and Kaplan has done an
excellent job of investigating what appears to be the KMT's long history of
illegal intervention in American affairs.  Kaplan argues that the gunshot
that killed Liu was "the last bullet of the Chinese civil war," and he may
well be correct in saying so.  Since the mid-1980's, Taiwan 's leaders have
focused most of their energies on economic development rather than mainland
conquest, and a recent spate of political reforms has helped moderate the
behavior of the KMT both at home and abroad.

"Fires of the Dragon" is thus a gripping reminder of the way things were
done in the days before economic rivalry replaced ideological confront-
ation in the battle to win the allegiance of Chinese around the world.

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2. "Chinatown: a Portrait of a Closed Society"  by Gwen Kinkead ........ 35
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Forwarded by: Jian
Source: Magill Book Reviews 11/20/92
Reviewed by: John Wilson

"Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society" by Gwen Kinkead
Publisher: HarperCollins, 1992, 211 pages, $23.00

A journalist's revealing report from New York City's Chinatown.

Mention "Chinatown" and many Americans will think of San Francisco, the
center of the early Chinese American community. With the wave of immigration
that began in the 1960's, however, New York became the first choice for
Chinese immigrants to the United States. In the 1970 census, for the first
time, the Chinese population of New York City surpassed that of San
Francisco. Today the population of New York City's Chinatown is about
150,000, with an equal number in the outer boroughs.

While other accounts -- most notably Peter Kwong's THE NEW CHINATOWN, 1987
-- have opened the doors of this closed community, there has been no
in-depth study. Gwen Kinkead's CHINATOWN, valuable as it is, falls short of
that goal. Kinkead's book, much of which first appeared in THE NEW YORKER,
combines personal profiles and descriptions of everyday life in Chinatown
with topical reportage. A good deal of the book concerns the pervasive
presence of organized crime. While Kinkead thus provides a valuable
corrective to feel-good stories on the New Immigration, her discussion of
crime in Chinatown could have been greatly condensed. As it is, the book
falls between stools; it is neither a fully satisfying multifaceted portrait
of Chinatown (as it sometimes aspires to be) nor a book-length study of
crime in Chinatown.

Still, there is much of interest here, particularly in the attention Kinkead
gives to immigrants from the People's Republic of China -- in her telling, a
much more significant part of New York's Chinese community than one would
guess from other sources. See her chapter on "The Snake," the intricate and
lucrative pipeline by means of which illegal Chinese immigrants are smuggled
into the United States; the going rate is $30,000. The text is supplemented
by photos (the paucity of which attests Kinkead's lament on the difficulty
of reporting on Chinatown and its populace) and an index -- no notes or
bibliography.

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3. "China: Empire of Living Symbols"  by Cecilia Lindqvist ............. 46
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Jian
Source: Magill Book Reviews 11/20/92
Review written by: John Wilson

"China: Empire of Living Symbols"
by Cecilia Lindqvist
Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 1991, 423 pages, $39.95

A magnificently illustrated study of Chinese written characters that places
their development in the context of Chinese history and culture.

Ever since the beginnings of sustained contact between China and the West,
the Chinese writing system has exerted a particular fascination on Western
observers. At the heart of that fascination lies the notion of a language in
which the written symbols are actually pictures of the things they name. In
fact, as linguists have frequently pointed out, the Chinese writing system
is considerably more complex -- and less directly pictographic -- than
popular accounts would lead us to believe.

Nevertheless, as Cecilia Lindqvist explains, the core pictographic
characters, which have their roots in ancient inscriptions on bones and
bronze, "are the main elements of the written language, and like the
elements of the periodic table in chemistry, they recur constantly in all
the other characters in new and fascinating combinations." A Swedish scholar
who studied Chinese under the great Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren, Lindqvist
has also lived and studied in China. Her approach to Chinese characters is
unique. Discussing the character for "pig," for example, Lindqvist devotes
several paragraphs to the role of the pig -- and pig manure -- in Chinese
agriculture and the uses of pork in Chinese cuisine. A photo shows how
different the shaggy, black Chinese pigs are from the variety that is common
in the United States. As usual, the character under discussion is shown as
it evolved from early inscriptions to the modern form. Throughout the book,
Lindqvist relates the characters to distinctive practices, customs, and
beliefs of the Chinese people.

Lindqvist began her scholarly career as an art historian. When she focuses
on the characters themselves, she combines a painterly eye with a poet's
imagination. There is no better introduction to the Chinese writing system
than CHINA: EMPIRE OF LIVING SYMBOLS -- a book which will also engage and
inform readers with a longtime interest in its subject.

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