Perry Anderson：Sino-Americana

yangharrylg · 发表于 2013-1-30 01:18:16

Books about China, popular and scholarly, continue to pour off the presses. In this ever expanding literature, there is a subdivision that could be entitled ‘Under Western Eyes’. The larger part of it consists of works that appear to be about China, or some figure or topic from China, but whose real frame of reference, determining the optic, is the United States. Typically written by functionaries of the state, co-opted or career, they have as their underlying question: ‘China – what’s in it for us?’ Rather than Sinology proper, they are Sino-Americana. Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng Xiaoping is an instructive example. Detached for duties on the National Intelligence Council under Clinton (he assures the reader that the CIA has vetted his book for improper disclosures), Vogel is a fixture at Harvard, where the house magazine hails Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China as the ‘capstone to a brilliant academic career’.
Running to some 850 pages, the book is, formally speaking, a mismatch at two levels. Explaining that his motive in writing it was to ‘help Americans understand key developments in Asia’, Vogel clearly aimed to win a wide public audience. But its sheer bulk of detail on matters far removed from the interest of ordinary readers ensures that, whatever the number of copies sold, it will be little read. Another, more serious, misfit is between the author and his subject. By definition, if we exclude puffs or barbs about contemporaries, a biography is an exercise of historical imagination. Vogel, however, was trained as a sociologist, and in mental equipment has always remained one, with little admixture. The result is a study thick in girth and thin in texture. That would be limitation enough in itself. But it is compounded by a temperamental propensity more specific to Vogel. By nature, he is – putting it politely – a booster. The book which made his name, Japan as Number One, announced in 1979 that ‘Japan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of post-industrial society than any other country.’ The Japanese themselves, he told them, had been too modest about their achievements. It was time they realised that in the overall effectiveness of their institutions, they were ‘indisputably number one’ – and time too that Americans woke up to the fact, and put their own house in order. Post-bubble, the book is no doubt remaindered in Japan. But at the time, Vogel’s flattery electrified sales. Moving on to Korea, he explained with equal enthusiasm in The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea that Park was one of only four ‘outstanding national leaders in the 20th century’ who had successfully modernised their country. In this select pantheon, alongside Park was the next object of Vogel’s admiration, Deng Xiaoping.
Vogel ends his new account of the Paramount Leader by asking: ‘Did any other leader in the 20th century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other 20th-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?’ Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China is an exercise in unabashed adulation, sprinkled with a few pro forma qualifications for domestic effect. ‘The closest I ever came to Deng was a few feet away at a reception …’ captures the general tone. Fortunately, Deng’s family and friends were able to make good the missing encounter, with many a gracious interview illuminating the patriarch’s life. Supplemented by much official – properly respectful – documentation from the Party, and a host of conversations with bureaucrats on both sides of the Pacific, the outcome is a special kind of apologia, where the standard of merit is less Deng’s record as a politician in China than his contribution to peace of mind in America.
Thus Vogel devotes just 30 pages, out of nearly 900, to the first 65 years of Deng’s life. The foreshortening is historically grotesque, but perfectly logical from his standpoint. Of what relevance to policy-makers and pundits in Washington is Deng’s long career as a revolutionary, steeled in clandestinity, insurrection and civil war, and the founding and leading of the PRC under Mao? It is only when he is detached from this history, and can be safely treated as a victim of the Cultural Revolution whose triumphant comeback enabled a turn to the market – and the United States – that Vogel’s story gets underway. To a general lack of any of the gifts of characterisation called for by a biography is added a lack of interest in the context that formed his subject.
The result is a portrayal not much less lifeless than a dossier in the Party’s personnel department, assorted with anecdotes of irreproachable family life. Indeed, when it comes to other dramatis personae, those with whom Deng worked or disputed from the late 1970s onwards, Vogel proceeds exactly in such filing clerk fashion, tacking bureaucratic CVs (typically quite selective) onto the narrative in a clumsy appendix. The contrast with William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev – to take an obvious parallel – is painful.[1] Taubman started out much more explicitly than Vogel with the intention of studying his subject from the angle of his relations with the US, but became so imaginatively gripped by the figure of Khrushchev that he widened his vision and ended by producing a remarkably vivid and penetrating portrait, far removed from this wooden effigy.
Once Mao has died, Vogel can concentrate on the success story that it is his purpose to tell. Even here, however, there is a flagrant disproportion in his coverage. Nearly as many pages are dedicated to the three years 1977-79, when Deng was manoeuvring towards supreme power, as to the ten from 1979 to 1989, when the economic reforms with which he is usually credited were introduced. The conventional judgment is that these were his principal achievement as a ruler, and one might have expected them to loom equally large in Vogel’s laudatio. But they occupy only three out of 24 chapters. If they add little to economic histories of the period, they do make clear – a merit of the account – that Deng himself, who was aware of his limited economic competence, was rarely the initiator of the domestic changes over which he presided. What possessed him was rather an enthusiasm for science, and a belief that to acquire its fruits China had to emerge from the isolation of Mao’s last years. This, of course, is where Vogel’s own attention and admiration lie. Not agrarian reform, by any measure the most beneficial single change for the people of China in the 1980s, but the Open Door becomes Deng’s greatest achievement – its very name a welcome embrace of the slogan with which the US secretary of state John Hay bid for a slice of the Chinese market after the American conquest of the Philippines. Or, as Vogel puts it in today’s boilerplate: ‘Under Deng’s leadership, China truly joined the world community, becoming an active part of international organisations and of the global system of trade, finance and relations among citizens of all walks of life.’ Indeed, he reports with satisfaction, ‘Deng advanced China’s globalisation far more boldly and thoroughly than did leaders of other large countries like India, Russia and Brazil.’ Understandably, pride of place in this progress is given to Deng’s trip to the US, which occupies the longest chapter in the annals of 1977-79.
Anything in Deng’s career that might seriously mar the general encomium is sponged away. Of the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957-58 of which he was the executor, dispatching half a million suspects to ostracism, exile or death, we learn that he was ‘disturbed that some intellectuals had arrogantly and unfairly criticised officials who were trying to cope with their complex and difficult assignments’. Suppression of the first halting demands for political democracy in 1978? ‘As in imperial days, order was maintained by a general decree and by publicising severe punishment of a prominent case to deter others.’ Incarceration of its young spokesman for 15 years? Arrests were ‘infinitesimal’ compared with days gone by, and ‘no deaths were recorded.’ Tibet? Despite enlightened efforts to ‘reduce the risk of separatism’, Lhasa has had to witness a ‘tragic cycle’ of ‘riots’ and ‘crackdowns’; still, ‘Tibetans and Han Chinese both recognise … an improvement in the standard of living’ and Tibetans are slowly ‘absorbing many aspects of Chinese culture and becoming integrated into the outside economy’. Nothing shows Vogel’s sense of decorum, and priorities, better than his decision to omit so much as a mention of the Stalinist show trial of Lin Biao’s hapless subordinates, brigaded on trumped up charges with the Gang of Four, with whom they had nothing in common, a decade after the death of their commander, and on Deng’s orders condemned to long terms in jail in the full glare of publicity – a top political episode of 1980-81. Instead, we are regaled with five pages on Deng’s ‘historic’ – universally forgotten – speech to the UN in early 1974, while Mao was still alive, and such important episodes as the purchase for him in New York of a ‘doll that could cry, suck and pee’, which proved ‘a great hit’ when he got home, further laden with 200 croissants from Paris.
The great student rising and occupation of Tiananmen Square of 1989, with massive popular support in Beijing, naturally poses the stiffest challenge to Vogel’s exercises in edulcoration. He rises to it in inimitable style. What the students, actuated by resentment that they were ‘receiving fewer economic rewards for their ability and hard work than were uneducated entrepreneurs’, really wanted was improvements in their living conditions. But learning from earlier failures, they ‘used slogans that resonated with the citizenry – democracy, freedom’ and the like – to win wider public support. A ‘hothouse generation’ with little experience of life, their callow orators ‘had no basis for negotiating with political leaders on behalf of other students’. Wiser foreign reporters soon tumbled to the fact that most of those in the square ‘knew little about democracy and freedom and had little idea about how to achieve such goals’. No surprise that Deng felt he had to put down these ungrateful beneficiaries of ‘the reform and opening that he had helped to create and from the political stability that underpinned the economic growth’.
The result was a ‘tragedy of enormous proportions’ that stirred the West, but Chinese reactions varied greatly. After citing some that were critical, Vogel gives the last and longest word to those ‘officials who admire Deng’s handling of the Tiananmen demonstrations’, ending: ‘They acknowledge the seriousness of the tragedy of 1989, but they believe that even greater tragedies would have befallen China had Deng failed to bring an end to the two months of chaos in June 1989.’ Of course, he adds unctuously, ‘all of us who care about human welfare are repulsed by the brutal crackdown,’ but who knows if they are not right? ‘We must admit that we do not know. What we do know is that in the two decades after Tiananmen, China enjoyed relative stability and rapid – even spectacular – economic growth.’ How little Vogel cares to know about the upheaval of 1989 can be seen from his extraordinary claim that there were days during it when no newspapers appeared. The imperative is to ensure that Deng’s image remains intact.
To understand why this is so important, it is helpful to turn to Henry Kissinger’s meditation On China, presented as ‘an effort … to explain the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and international order’, from one whose career as a statesman and scholar has been devoted to the first of these: ‘All my life I have reflected on the building of peace, largely from an American perspective.’ Comparing the Chinese approach to inter-state relations with go, the Western to chess, Kissinger offers a potted history of what he takes to be conflicts between the two from the late 18th to the late 19th century, before jumping to Mao in the Cold War, and the story, often retold, of the ‘quasi-alliance’ between the PRC and the US that he negotiated in Beijing in the early 1970s. In the years since his exit from the State Department, he explains, he has been to China more than fifty times, hobnobbing with its leaders, but his conversations with these epigones dwindle to banalities after the heights of his dialogues with Mao. The Chairman had treated him as a ‘fellow philosopher’. Deng could not live up to the same standard, still less his successor.
Notwithstanding this drop in level, Kissinger gives Deng full credit for what he terms ‘a turning point of the Cold War’ and the ‘high point of Sino-American strategic co-operation’. What was this? China’s war on Vietnam in 1979. Here Vogel and Kissinger converge, applauding Deng’s resolute action to thwart Vietnamese plans to encircle China in alliance with the USSR, invade Thailand, and establish Hanoi’s domination over South-East Asia. Conscious that not even all Deng’s colleagues approved the assault, which was far from a military success, Vogel separates by eight chapters and 150 pages Deng’s tour of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore to ensure diplomatic cover for the attack he was planning, from the war itself. The first, presented – along with Deng’s far more important tour of the United States two months later – as a triumph of far-sighted statesmanship, receives lavish coverage; the second, less than half the space. In part, this distribution is designed to protect America’s image in the affair: Deng launched the war just five days after getting back from Washington with the US placetin his pocket. But it is also to gloss over Deng’s misadventure on the battlefield as expeditiously as possible. The last word, as usual, goes to an apologist, through whom Vogel can convey his standpoint without being directly identified with it. Lee Kuan Yew, an ardent supporter of the war, has told the world: ‘I believe it changed the history of East Asia.’
Vogel’s account of China’s war on Vietnam is that of a former servant of a Democratic administration. Showering Carter’s point men in the tractations over Deng’s visit with effusive epithets, he is careful to shield the president himself from any too explicit responsibility for giving the war the go-ahead. Kissinger, a Republican and once head of the National Security establishment where Vogel was an underling, can afford to be more forthright. Deng’s masterstroke required US ‘moral support’. ‘We could not collude formally with the Chinese in sponsoring what was tantamount to overt military aggression,’ Brzezinski explained. Kissinger’s comment is crisp: ‘Informal collusion was another matter.’
How is this zenith of Sino-American collaboration, as Kissinger repeatedly calls it, to be judged? Militarily, it was a fiasco. Deng threw 11 Chinese armies or 450,000 troops, the size of the force that routed the US on the Yalu in 1950, against Vietnam, a country with a population a twentieth that of China. As the chief military historian of the campaign, Edward O’Dowd, has noted, ‘in the Korean War a similar-sized PLA force had moved further in 24 hours against a larger defending force than it moved in two weeks against fewer Vietnamese.’ So disastrous was the Chinese performance that all Deng’s wartime pep talks were expunged from his collected works, the commander of the air force excised any reference to the campaign from his memoirs, and it became effectively a taboo topic thereafter. Politically, as an attempt to force Vietnam out of Cambodia and restore Pol Pot to power, it was a complete failure. Deng, who regretted not having persisted with his onslaught on Vietnam, despite the thrashing his troops had endured, tried to save face by funnelling arms to Pol Pot through successive Thai military dictators.
Joining him in helping the remnants of the world’s most genocidal regime continue to maul border regions of Cambodia adjoining Thailand, and to keep its seat in the UN, was the United States. Vogel, who mentions Pol Pot only to explain that despite his negative ‘reputation’, Deng saw him as the only man to resist the Vietnamese, banishes this delicate subject from his pages altogether. Kissinger has little trouble with it. No ‘sop to conscience’ could ‘change the reality that Washington provided material and diplomatic support to the “Cambodian resistance” in a manner that the administration must have known would benefit the Khmer Rouge’. Rightly so, for ‘American ideals had encountered the imperatives of geopolitical reality. It was not cynicism, even less hypocrisy, that forged this attitude: the Carter administration had to choose between strategic necessities and moral conviction. They decided that for their moral convictions to be implemented ultimately they needed first to prevail in the geopolitical struggle.’
The struggle in question was against the USSR. In these years, Deng continually berated his American interlocutors for insufficient hostility to Moscow, warning them that Vietnam wasn’t just ‘another Cuba’: it was planning to conquer Thailand, and open the gates of South-East Asia to the Red Army. The stridency of his fulminations against the Soviet menace rang like an Oriental version of the paranoia of the John Birch Society. Whether he actually believed what he was saying is less clear than its intended effect. He wanted to convince Washington that there could be no stauncher ally in the Cold War than the PRC under his command. Mao had seen his entente with Nixon as another Stalin-Hitler Pact – in the formulation of one of his generals – with Kissinger featuring as Ribbentrop: a tactical deal with one enemy to ward off dangers from another. Deng, however, sought more than this. His aim was strategic acceptance within the American imperial system, to gain access to the technology and capital needed for his drive to modernise the Chinese economy. This was the true, unspoken rationale for his assault on Vietnam. The US was still smarting from its defeat in Indochina. What better way of gaining its trust than offering it vengeance by proxy? The war misfired, but it bought something more valuable to Deng than the 60,000 lives it cost – China’s entry ticket to the world capitalist order, in which it would go on to flourish.
Hysteria, calculation or a mixture of the two, Deng’s motives at the time are one thing. Endorsement of the claims he pressed on his interlocutors – South-East Asian and American – to justify his aggression, in works supposedly of scholarship thirty years after the event, are another. Kissinger, for whom the history of the period is little more than a grab-bag for his own self-glorification as an actor in it, can be forgiven for maintaining that China’s war on Vietnam was a vital blow against the Soviet Union and a stepping-stone to victory in the Cold War. That the Sino-American alliance he negotiated, and Deng escalated, had scant bearing on the dissolution of the USSR hardly matters. Whatever his other gifts, truth is not one that can reasonably be expected of him. Vogel, with more pretensions to scholarship, is a different case. His fawning account of the Paramount Leader’s preparations for war – ‘Deng had had enough’ etc – not only repeats the fantasy of Vietnamese designs on Bangkok, imminent Soviet takeover of South-East Asia and the rest, but blacks out all mention of American aid and comfort to Pol Pot, in the common cause of resisting these phantasms. Kissinger’s description of Carter’s actions in assisting the perpetrators of one of the few true genocides of the last half-century – not killings on a far smaller scale, blown up as genocide to decorate ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya or elsewhere – can stand for Vogel’s treatment: informal collusion, in academic dress.
Deng, a far more uneven, explosive and complex figure, at once more radical and more traditional than the now standard images of him, awaits his biographer. That book will not be written as another page in US self-satisfaction. Works of Sino-Americana are not, it should be said, automatically characterised by servility or opportunism. Books of more spirit have been, and continue to be, written within its limiting framework. A case in point is a study that can be read as a pendant to Vogel’s, Jay Taylor’s biography of Chiang Kai-shek, The Generalissimo. In many ways, the starting points are close. Taylor too is a former official, a career diplomat in the intelligence apparatus of the State Department, with postings in Taipei, Beijing and Havana. His enterprise is likewise a eulogy. It relies on similarly brittle sources supplied by self-interested parties, redacted diaries or memoirs, conversations with family members and placemen. Its concerns are also thoroughly Americo-centric. Yet with all these failings, and more, the result is still refreshingly different.
In large part, this is because Taylor makes a real attempt to capture Chiang’s tortuous personality. Seething with an inner violence that exploded in volcanic rages as a young man, once in power he succeeded in outwardly controlling it beneath a mask so rigid and cold that it isolated him even from his followers. Sexual rapacity was combined with puritan self-discipline, skills in political manoeuvre with bungling in military command, nationalist pride with retreatist instinct, threadbare education with mandarin pretension. In a narrative that is far more readable than Vogel’s plodding compendium, Taylor gives us a vivid sense of many of these contradictions, even if he looks away from others. Writing to rehabilitate the Generalissimo, whose reputation is not high in the West, he is driven, not to deny outright, but to minimise the murders and mismanagements of his reign. He does so principally by giving him – repeatedly, although not invariably – the benefit of the doubt. A better sense of Chiang’s vindictiveness, and of the low-grade thuggishness of his regime, in which torture and assassination were routine, can be gained from Jonathan Fenby’s less inhibited account, Chiang Kai-shek: The Generalissimo and the China He Lost.[2]
A larger drawback of Taylor’s approach is his single-minded focus on Chiang alone, detached from his peers. No other figure in the tangled constellation of the interwar Kuomintang acquires any relief in his story. The reasons why Chiang could rise to power require a contextual explanation, however. They do not lie in his individual abilities. For these were, on any reckoning, very limited. The extremes of his psychological make-up cohabited with his mediocrity as a ruler. He was a poor administrator, incapable of properly co-ordinating and controlling his subordinates, and so of running an efficient government. He had no original ideas, filling his mind with dog-eared snippets from the Bible. Most strikingly, he was a military incompetent, a general who never won a really major battle – decisive victories in the Northern Expedition that brought him to power going to other, superior commanders. What distinguished him from these were political cunning and ruthlessness, but not by a great margin. They were not enough on their own to take him to the top.
The historical reality was that no outstanding leaders emerged from the confused morass of the KMT in the Republican period. The contrast between Nationalists and Communists was not just ideological. It was one of sheer talent. The CCP produced not simply one leader of remarkable gifts, but an entire, formidable cohort, of which Deng was one among several. By comparison, the KMT was a kingdom of the blind. Chiang’s one eye was a function of two accidental advantages. The first was his regimental training in Japan, which made him the only younger associate of Sun Yat-sen with a military background, and so at the Whampoa Academy commanding at the start of his career means of violence that his rivals in Guangzhou lacked. The second, and more important, was his regional background. Coming from the hinterland of Ningbo, with whose accent he always spoke, his political roots were in the ganglands of nearby Shanghai, with its large community of Ningbo merchants. It was this base in Shanghai and Zhejiang, and the surrounding Yangtze delta region, where he cultivated connections in both criminal and business worlds, in what was by far the richest and most industrialised zone in China, that gave him his edge over his peers. The military clique that ruled Guangxi, on the border with Indochina, were better generals and ran a more progressive and efficient government, but their province was too poor and remote for them to be able to compete successfully against Chiang.
Taylor’s attention is fixed elsewhere, however. Central to The Generalissimo is the aim of reversing the verdict of Barbara Tuchman’s book on the American role, personified by General Stilwell, in the Chinese theatre of the Pacific War.[3] For Taylor, it wasn’t the long-suffering Chiang, but the arrant bully and incompetent meddler Stilwell who was to blame for disputes between the two, and failures in the Burma campaign. Stilwell was no great commander. Taylor documents his abundant failings and eccentricities well enough. But they scarcely exonerate Chiang from his disastrous sequence of decisions in the war against Japan, many of them – even at the height of the fateful Ichigo offensive of 1944 – motivated by his conviction that Communism was the greater danger. From the futile sacrifice of his best troops in Shanghai and Nanjing in 1937 to the gratuitous burning of Changsha in 1938, it was a story without good sense or glory. Despite strenuous scrubbings by recent historians to blanco his military record, it is no surprise that, from a position of apparent overwhelming strength after the surrender of Japan, he crumpled so quickly against the PLA in the Civil War.
There too Taylor tends to attribute to the US substantial blame for the debacle – Marshall, who had picked Stilwell, cutting a not much better figure in this part of his narrative – which he hints could have been avoided had Washington been willing to provide the massive support needed to help Chiang hold North China or, failing that, a line south of the Yangtze. These are not the sentiments of the Republican lobby that denounced the ‘loss of China’ in the 1950s. Taylor has an independent mind. Describing himself as a moderate liberal and foreign policy pragmatist, he is quite capable of scathing criticism of US policies in full support of Chiang – attacking the ‘breathtaking’ irresponsibility of Eisenhower in threatening war with the PRC during the Quemoy crisis of 1955, and composing with Dulles a secret policy document on the same island three years later, ‘extraordinary for its ignorant and far-fetched analysis’. What remains constant, however, is the American visor through which Chinese developments are perceived.
In the last third of Taylor’s book, devoted to Chiang’s years after his flight from the mainland, when Taiwan became a US protectorate, this is obviously less of a handicap. Taylor’s grasp of the reconstruction of the KMT regime on the island, of which he was a witness, is much firmer than of its time in Nanjing. It is also, though admiring, less apologetic, not minimising the White Terror that Chiang unleashed in Taiwan, nor glossing over his use of General Okamura, commander of the Japanese occupation of China and author of the ‘Kill All, Burn All, Loot All’ order responsible for the deaths of more than two million civilians, to help him out on the island. For Chiang, patriotism came second to personal power. But now able to rule as an extraneous force, with full-bore American assistance and without ties to local landlords, he could preside over an agrarian reform designed by US advisers, and industrialisation funded by US capital, in a society that fifty years of modernisation under colonial rule had left substantially more advanced in popular literacy and rural productivity than the mainland. Economic success stabilised but scarcely liberalised his regime, which ended as it had begun under martial law.
Taylor concludes his story with the claim that Chiang has triumphed posthumously, since the China of today embodies his vision for the country, not that of the Communists he fought. This trope is increasingly common. Fenby retails a lachrymose variant of it, quite out of character with the rest of his book, a tourist guide in the PRC – as good as a taxi-driver for any passing reporter – telling him what an unnecessary tragedy KMT defeat in the Civil War was. In such compensation fantasies, Deng becomes Chiang’s executor, and Western visions of what China should be, and will become, are reassured.

[1] Khrushchev: The Man and His Era was reviewed by Neal Ascherson in the LRBof 21 August 2003.
[2] Reviewed by John Gittings in the LRB of 18 March 2004.
[3] Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971)
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原文地址：http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana

yangharrylg · 发表于 2013-1-30 01:21:22

关于中国的著作，无论通俗或学术，都还在轰炸书市。在这块欣欣向荣的出版领域，有一类书可命名为“在西方的注视下”（来自康拉德的一部小说名字——观察者网注）。其中大部分内容看上去是关于中国的——中国人或中国话题——但决定其眼光的坐标系却是美国。这些书的作者通常是公职人员，他们内心总是埋藏着一个问题：“中国内部有哪些东西对我们有好处？”与其说这些人是在研究“中国学”，不如说是在搞“中美学”（Sino-Americana）。傅高义写的邓小平传记便是一例。傅高义离开克林顿政府时期的国家情报委员会以后（他已向读者保证，该书接受了美国中央情报局的审查），便安心呆在哈佛。哈佛校内刊物称赞《邓小平时代》是“杰出学术生涯的巅峰之作”。
该书洋洋洒洒850页，从形式上说，有两点错位。傅高义解释该书的写作动机是“帮助美国人了解亚洲的关键性发展动向”，显然，他想面对普通大众说话。但过于繁杂的细节堆砌会让普通读者望而生畏，无论卖出多少册，恐怕很少有读者会把整本书读完。另一个更严重的错位是作者与其写作主题。抛开臧否人物，传记从性质上来说应该是一种历史想象力的磨练。然而，傅高义接受的学术训练是社会学，从思维方法来看，他的确也就是个社会学家。呈现出来的结果便是广度有余、深度不足。不仅如此，这本书还夹杂着傅高义的个人倾向。往好里说，他本质上是一个“歌颂者”。他在1979年出版的《日本名列第一》一书中赞扬“日本处理基本问题的能力比其他任何后工业国家都要更优秀”，这本书令他名声雀起。他对日本人说，你们对自己的成就过于谦虚了。日本人理应意识到他们的体制优越性，他们“毋庸置疑名列第一”，同时美国人应该清醒地意识到这一点，好好清理本国的家务事。泡沫经济破碎后，该书自然归入了清仓处理的廉价书。但在当时，傅高义的吹捧让该书销量激增。后来，他又转战韩国，以同样的热情撰写了《朴正熙时代》，他说朴正熙是“20世纪最优秀的4位国家领袖之一”，成功地实现了韩国的现代化。在傅高义的万神殿里，朴正熙身旁坐着邓小平。
傅高义关于这位元首的描述以如下问句结尾：“20世纪还有其他领导人改善了这么多人的生活吗？”《邓小平时代》是不知羞耻的谄媚，其中穿插着为了吸引国内读者眼球的姿态性评语。“我最接近邓小平的一次是在某个招待会上，当时我离他只有几英尺……”，类似笔调不胜枚举。所幸的是，针对邓小平的家人、朋友的采访弥补了没见过传主的遗憾。许多别致的采访反映了这位大家长的一生。该书还包括许多中共的官方材料，以及太平洋两岸的众多官员访谈。结果便成了某种辩护词，个人美德的标准似乎不像是在中国的执政履历，而是他如何安抚美国人的心灵。
因此，傅高义在将近900页的书中花了仅仅30页篇幅描述了邓小平前65年的经历。这种缩略方法从历史角度看很奇怪，但却完全符合作者的逻辑。邓小平漫长的革命者生涯——隐忍刚毅、历经起义与内战的磨难、在毛泽东领导下创立新中国——对于华府的决策层和智囊团有何干系呢？只有把邓小平抽离历史，将他置于“文革受害者重返市场经济”的位置，傅高义的故事才能讲得下去。傅高义缺乏传记作者所必需的刻画人物的才能，他自然就没有兴趣去描述传主的历史背景。
结果呈现出来的人物肖像还不如共产党的档案资料来得生动。我们可以把这本书归入无可指摘的家庭生活掌故一类。每当傅高义要处理传记中其他人物（自1970年代末邓小平的共事者）的时候，他采用的就是档案管理员的手法，把官方履历（选择性地）粘贴到杂乱无章的文末附录。我们用威廉·陶布曼关于赫鲁晓夫的传记（2004年获得普利策奖——观察者网注）作比较便可发现，傅高义的这本书相形见绌。威廉·陶布曼在写作之初，比傅高义更加清楚地表露了对于传主与美国关系的关注，但是，陶布曼对赫鲁晓夫这个人物更加投入，他开拓了自己的视野，最终拿出了一部非常生动、有洞见的传记——比傅高义呆板的石碑像高出不知多少倍。
毛泽东逝世后，傅高义便可放心大胆地讲他那一套故事。不过，即便这样，还是存在可耻的写作错位。该书描述1977-79年（邓小平逐步掌握最高权力阶段）的篇幅与1979-89年的篇幅（经济改革时期）一样多。一般来说，1979－89年是他执政的主要成就，读者可能会期望在傅高义的颂词中予以重视。但这只占全书24章的3章。如果说，这段时期在经济史中的地位仍有待讨论，那么这至少可以说明，邓小平不是这段时期国内大变局的发起者。邓小平本人清楚地知道自己处理经济问题的能力有限。他最关心的是科学事业。邓小平认为，中国如果想要利用科学成果，那就必须摆脱毛泽东时代末期中国的孤立地位。这当然正是傅高义的兴趣所在。在他眼中，邓小平最大的成就不是农业改革（1980年代对中国人好处最大的变革），而是对外开放政策。“开放”这个词，恰恰是国务卿海约翰（John Hay）在美国政府征服菲律宾后对中国提出的“门户开放”要求。或者用傅高义的陈词滥调来说，“在邓小平的领导下，中国真正加入了国际社会，成为国际组织、全球贸易、金融、各国人民交往的积极参与者。”他心满意足地地写道，“邓小平推动中国全球化进程的积极、彻底程度远远超过印度、俄罗斯或巴西等国领导人。“可想而知，这一过程中最为荣耀的是邓小平访美之旅，这一章的篇幅是1977-79年的几章中最长的。
最能体现傅高义彬彬有礼的笔法的地方是，他删去了审判“四人帮”的情节。那可是1980-81年最重要的政治事件之一。取而代之的文字则是5页关于1974年初（当时毛泽东还健在）邓小平在联合国发表的“历史性”演讲——虽然没有多少人记得。其中描写的重要情节包括，邓小平在纽约买了一个可以“哭闹、吮吸和撒尿的玩偶”，他带着这个玩具和200个羊角面包回家后引发了“一场轰动”。
1989年的政治风波对傅高义的礼节提出了最尖锐的挑战。傅以无可比拟的方式应对。那些学生认为，“相较未受过教育的企业家，学生们的经济收入与其能力、贡献不成正比”，他们内心希望的是改善自己的生活条件。年轻的演讲家们属于“温室里的花朵”，没多少阅历，“与代表其他学生的政治领袖谈判时，没有什么根底”。更为明智的外国记者逐渐意识到，广场上的大多数人“不懂得何谓民主、自由，也不知道究竟该如何实现。”因此，邓小平感到必须要把这些不知感恩的“改革开放与和平稳定”的受益者们压下去。
对傅高义而言，最重要的是保持邓小平的形象完好无损。理解邓小平形象的重要性，我们可以转到基辛格的《论中国》，该书“力图阐释中国人思考战争与和平、国际秩序邓问题的思维方式。”基辛格把中国人处理国家间关系的方法比作围棋，西方人的方法比作国际象棋，他从18世纪末、19世纪初开始讲起，然后跳到冷战时期的毛泽东，然后便是耳熟能详的1970年代初他本人在北京参与的中美“准联盟“。他解释道，自离开美国国务院后，他去过中国50多次，与中国领导人关系亲睦，但自他与毛泽东对话以后，他与这些后继者的对话逐渐变得乏善可陈。毛主席待他如“哲学家朋友”。邓小平接待他的级别没那么高，下一代领导人则更低。
基辛格受到邓小平接待的级别虽然降低了，但他充分肯定了邓小平对于“冷战转折点”和“中美战略合作制高点”的贡献。这指的是什么呢？1979年中越战争（即我“对越自卫反击战”——观察者网注）。傅高义与基辛格在这一点上走到了一起，赞扬邓小平坚决阻止越南与苏联合作制衡中国、侵略泰国、建立河内主导权的企图。傅高义意识到，并非邓小平所有的同事都支持这次行动，毕竟这不是一次完美的军事胜利。他花了8个章节、共150页把邓小平访问泰国、马来西亚、新加坡的掩护过程与对越战争分隔开来。东南亚之旅两个月过后是更为重要的访美之行，这两次外交被视为深谋远虑的执政者的胜利，获得外界广泛关注。而那次军事行动的篇幅不及外交斡旋的一半。这种写法有一个原因是为了维护美国在此事中的形象：邓小平在华盛顿特区获得美国支持，回国5天之后便开战了。不过，还有另一个原因，即尽可能方便地掩盖邓小平造成的人员损伤。这一节的结语，傅高义同样是引用了他人来作为辩护。此次战争的热烈支持者李光耀向世界宣布：“我相信这（场战争）改变了东亚历史。”傅高义关于中越战争的描述就像是一位民主党前官员。他小心谨慎地免去卡特总统默许开战的责任。基辛格作为共和党人，曾经的国家安全委员会主席（傅高义当过他的下属），可以表现得更为直率。邓小平的高超手段需要美国的“道义支持”。“我们不能在明显的军事侵略问题上与中国正式合谋。”布热津斯基解释道。基辛格的评价更为干脆：“非正式合谋则是另一回事。”
基辛格反复提及的“中美合作最高点”应该做何评价？军事上，这是一次大溃败。邓小平派出11支军队，约45万人，相当于1950年鸭绿江上对抗美国人的规模，来打击中国人口二十分之一的国家。用军事史学者欧道得（Edward O’Dowd）的话来说，“在朝鲜战争当中，一支类似规模的解放军可在24小时内突破更强大的防御，而面对人数更少的越南人则两周的进展尚不及此。”政治上，强迫越南撤出柬埔寨、让布尔波特重新执政的计划则彻底失败。邓小平对自己未能坚持打完对越战争而感到遗憾，虽然他的军队遭受了重创。
与他一道支持世界上最残忍的政权余孽侵扰泰缅边境、并保住其联合国席位的，是美国人。傅高义在他的书中几乎没有讲到布尔波特。基辛格毫不介意。“满腔热血”不能“改变以下事实：华府为红色高棉提供了物质和外交支持。没错，“美国价值观遭遇了地缘政治现实的紧迫使命。”这不是愤世嫉俗，也不是虚伪：卡特政府不得不在战略需要和道德准则之间做出选择。他们做出的判断是，为了最终实现道德理念，他们必须首先在地缘政治斗争中取得胜利。”这里所说的“斗争”对象是指苏联。当时，邓小平在对话中屡次批评美国人没有严肃对待莫斯科的威胁，他警告美国人，越南不是“另一个古巴”：越南计划征服泰国，为苏联红军开启东南亚的大门。他对苏联的敌意简直是约翰·柏奇会（美国一个保守的反共团体——观察者网注）的翻版。不论其态度真实与否，客观上他达到了目的。他希望说服美国，在他领导下的中国将是美国冷战时代最可靠的盟友。毛泽东曾把他与尼克松的和睦关系比作另一个斯大林－希特勒协议——以其手下大将的形式——基辛格则是里宾特洛甫（纳粹德国时期的驻英大使，曾赴莫斯科签订苏德互不侵犯条约——观察者网注）：拉拢第三方，以牵扯敌人的力量。邓小平的想法不止于此。他的目的是在战略上接受美国的霸权体系，以换取中国经济现代化所需的技术和资本的空间。这是他打击越南真正不可言说的背后逻辑。美国还没从印度支那的失败阴影中走出来。还有什么能比替她教训教训更好的获取信任的方式？
感情用事，精明算计，抑或是两者皆有，总之，邓小平当时的动机是连贯的。而三十年后对他当时在东南亚和美国发表的言论的学术研究，则是另一回事。对基辛格而言，那段历史不过是他自己大放光彩的舞台背景，可想而知，他自然会认为中国对越战争是对苏联的严重打击，并且是冷战胜利的重要一步。他负责斡旋、邓小平进一步巩固的中美关系与苏联解体无甚关系——但这不重要。无论基辛格有何种才华，其中肯定没有说实话这一项。傅高义自称学者，我们对他自然会有另一种期待。他对伟大领袖备战的奉承之辞不单是越南人对曼谷的想象、苏联人对东南亚等地的征服，还略去了美国人对布尔波特的援助和精神支持。这都是想要回避重点。基辛格关于卡特协助二十世纪下半叶最血腥的屠杀者之一（虽然不是科索沃、伊拉克、利比亚等地的规模相对较小的“人道主义干预”）的描述与傅高义有些相像：以学术的面貌实施非正式合谋。
邓小平的人物形象更加不稳定、暴躁和复杂。相比人们对他的刻板印象，他更为激进，同时也更为传统。他还没遇到真正适合他的传记作家。

原文地址： http://www.guancha.cn/PeiLi%C2%B7AnDeSen/2013_01_26_123269.shtml

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Perry Anderson：Sino-Americana

佩里·安德森评傅高义《邓小平时代》