Richard Bernstein > Quotes

“The year 1945 in this sense marked the origin of a rivalry between the United States and China’s Communists that, like a recurring illness, has always reinstated itself, and has bedeviled the relations between the two sides even after periods of near-rhapsodic warmth and declarations of common interest, during which the suspicions and animosities of the past seem to have been put permanently to rest.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“As we’ll see, there was an irony in this. The government’s claims were propagandistic exaggerations, which came to be widely disbelieved. But actually the government resisted far more than the Communists, who resisted very little and whose losses were a small fraction of those suffered by the KMT’s forces.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Rectification Campaign, that Mao engineered in Yenan and that was designed both to indoctrinate the thousands who had flocked to Yenan and to eradicate his opponents inside the party. The long-range effect of this famous meeting was to reduce the magnificent art and culture of China, historically one of the greatest contributions to global culture ever made, to standardized, officially approved propaganda.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“the goal was not simply to make the thought-control target admit his errors and flaws but to so thoroughly destroy his sense of autonomous individuality that he feels gratitude and love for the leader who restored him to the correct path—Chairman Mao.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Once Stalin had more than a million soldiers occupying Manchuria, the Chinese civil war became inevitable, because Mao understood that the central government no longer had the capability to eliminate him militarily. The irony, of course, is that the president of the United States, meeting with Stalin at Yalta, implored the Soviets to send their troops to Manchuria and that the Soviet invasion was facilitated by American Lend-Lease supplies.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“In Dorn’s account, Stilwell instructed him to “cook up a workable scheme and await orders,” and Dorn did just that, devising a contingency plan for an assassination that would have been worthy of a Hollywood thriller. The Gimo, or the Gissismo, or CKS, or Cash My Check, or Generalissimo, General of Generals, as Chiang was variously called by Americans, either respectfully or derisively, would be taken on a flight to Ramgarh, India, to inspect Chinese troops being trained there as part of the effort to improve China’s backward army. The pilot would pretend to have engine trouble and order his crew and passengers to bail out. Chiang would be ushered to the door of the plane wearing a faulty parachute and told to jump. “I believe it would work,” Stilwell told Dorn.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“It was a repetition of the familiar Communist pattern of seizing upon some incident, justifiably or otherwise, and embroidering thereon without regard to truth and accuracy to form the basis for an almost hysterical campaign of vituperation,” Marshall concluded wearily.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“The next time American pilots bailed out into the hands of Communist troops was in Korea about five years later, and the reception this time was imprisonment and torture, which makes the level of wartime cooperation all the more amazing and the decline of the relationship into enmity all the more shocking and costly.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“And so Paris is not merely the largest town in France, not merely the political and intellectual capital where all the smartest and most ambitious people from the provinces go to seek fame and fortune. If the origins of many of the Parisians lie in La France Profonde, the origins of the French identity nonetheless lie in Paris. Le tout Paris in this sense means something more than the gathering of the small number of people in town who count moss socially, though of course it does mean that as well. It also suggests that to be Parisian' is to have an identity that transcends social class, economic distinction it is to belong to a world apart, to an intellectual and moral category, nor or class, race, or gender, but of a qualitative difference from the rest, an essential worldliness, a heightened expectation--as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in a different context- of the possibilities of life.
Many people, foreigners who belonged to Paris and Parisians exiled from it, put it their own way. Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet, identified Paris as the place where the elan vital, Bergson's phrase for the life force, is stronger than elsewhere. "Elan vital," Rilke asked, "is it life? No. Life is calm, vast, simple. It is the desire to live in haste, in pursuit; it is the impatience to possess all of life right away, right there. Paris is full of this desire; that is who it is so close to death." Victor Hugo, the great novelist and poet, exiled for many years of his life, meant the same thing when he wrote: "Ever since historic times, there has always been on the earth what we call the City. . .. We have needed the city that thinks. ... We have needed the city where everybody is citizen. … Jerusalem unleashes the True. Athens the Beautiful; Rome the Great. Paris is the sum of all three of these great cities.”
― Richard Bernstein, Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French

“Anyway, if he went anyplace, Mao said, he’d rather that it be to the United States where he was sure he’d have a great deal to learn.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“that the concept of a loyal opposition did not exist in China and that Chiang’s system of balancing off a variety of competing opportunists would not survive the introduction of western democracy with its free-for-all popular participation, particularly when one of the competing forces would be a dynamic, proliferating, disciplined organization determined to destroy that system and seize power.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“In 1938, in a desperate effort to stop the Japanese advance in North China, Chiang ordered that the dikes of the Yellow River, not for nothing known as China’s Sorrow, be broken. This only delayed the Japanese advance while it created an inundation of the vast North China plain, with two or three feet of water sweeping over whole counties in several provinces. The flooding caused widespread crop failure such that at the worst of it ten thousand starving people each day were gathering in major cities seeking relief. In the end, 800,000 people died either directly of flooding or of starvation. In 1945, five million refugees were still in the places they had fled to.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“The most pathetic element in the Chinese military picture was the Chinese soldiers themselves, for whom being wounded or being killed in action ended the same way, the difference being either a quick death or a slow one. Foreign visitors reported their shock at seeing wounded soldiers by the roadsides, their eyes blank with hopelessness as their wounds went unattended, as if they were street beggars ignored by the passing throng. The dead and wounded were replaced by conscripts dragged unwillingly from their homes, underfed men sometimes literally roped together.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“the American journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote after trekking across much of China in 1940. No worse luck could befall a human being than to be born and live there, unless by some golden chance you happened to be born one of the .00000099 percent who had power, money, privilege (and even then, even then). I pitied them all, I saw no tolerable future for them, and I longed to escape away from what I had escaped into: the age-old misery, filth, hopelessness and my own claustrophobia inside that enormous country. Skinny, sweaty rickshaw pullers strained at their large-wheeled contraptions to provide transportation to the rich. The scenes of nearly naked coolies towing barges up canals and rivers, leaning so far against their harnesses as to be almost horizontal to the ground, were an emblem, picturesque and horrible at the same time, of the unrelenting strain of everyday life in China, as were such other standard images as the women with leathery skin barefoot in the muck planting and weeding, the farmers covered in sweat at the foot pumps along fetid canals or carrying their loads of brick or straw on balancing poles slung over their shoulders or moving slowly and patiently behind water buffalo pulling primitive plows. The fly-specked hospitals, the skinny, crippled beggars, the thousands and thousands of villages made of baked mud whose houses, as one visitor described them, were “smoky, with gray walls and black tiled roofs; the inhabitants, wearing the invariable indigo-dyed cloth … moving about their business in an inextricable confusion of scraggy chickens, pigs, dogs, and babies.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“In retaliation, Zhou ordered the Red Squad to assassinate Gu’s entire family, some fifteen people, and this order was scrupulously carried out.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Mao used to boast that a nuclear attack on China would cost it much less than a similar attack on other countries because China could afford to lose tens of millions of its people and still be the most populous country on the planet. Mao accepted without any apparent remorse the death of more than forty million people in the famine of 1959–1962, which was a direct result of his economic policies. He was willing to endure the loss of thousands of China’s intellectuals, scientists, writers, artists, and technicians in the campaigns for political purity that he waged throughout his time in power. There were always enough people in China for a fresh start. The population was fungible.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Mao further assured Forman that “we believe in and practice democracy,” in contrast with what Mao called the “one-party dictatorship as practiced by the Kuomintang today.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Contrary to the impression garnered by foreign visitors, an elaborate system of perquisites and privileges had developed in Yenan that seems remarkable given the Communists’ theoretical emphasis on material equality and the informality,”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Meanwhile, in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Soviet secret police, in an operation approved by Stalin, murdered more than twenty thousand Polish citizens, including eight thousand army officers taken prisoner in the 1939 invasion. It was a preemptive attack, organized by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and its utterly ruthless leader, Lavrenty Beria, aimed at eliminating any independent Polish leadership for the foreseeable future. The Soviets pinned blame for this signal and unforgivable atrocity on the Germans, an audacious lie that was believed around the world for decades.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Mao assured Forman of the CCP’s democratic aspirations and its admiration of western values. “We are not striving for the social and political Communism of Soviet Russia,” he told him. “Rather, we prefer to think of what we are doing as something that Lincoln fought for in your Civil War: the liberation of slaves.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“The main and climactic battles of this war took place between 1937 and 1945, but it could be said to have started in 1895 when Japan, resurgent, implacable, and unrestrained in its pursuit of international prestige—which meant emulating the major European powers in their scramble for colonial possessions—made a colony of the entire island of Taiwan, which had belonged to China for centuries. But Japan’s major goal was the possession of Korea and Manchuria, the vast landmasses just across the Sea of Japan that were stepping-stones toward the even larger prize, which was China.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Was it wrong of him to believe that saving China meant not fighting Japan, which was nearly defeated anyway, but making sure that a Communist dictatorship didn’t position itself to take power once Japan had been disposed of by the valiant Americans?”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“The Communists had mounted an attack and then used it in a propaganda campaign, utterly unhinged from the truth, whose purpose was to portray the United States as an imperialist enemy. This was to be the pattern for the next twenty-six years, during which tens of thousands of Chinese and American young men were killed in wars that needn’t have taken place.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Shi Zhe wrote in his memoir, “and if you didn’t confess you were tortured and stayed in prison. The more stories you made up the better you were treated.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“When the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov visited Washington in 1942, he’d been invited to sleep at the White House. “I think,” Roosevelt told Churchill in 1942 referring to Stalin, “that if I give him everything I can and ask him for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” The American president clung to that illusion until his death in April 1945.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“How was power to be shared in a country that in its three-thousand-year history had never once witnessed a peaceful struggle for power?”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“It was a rare and therefore heartening event in a China that had become perhaps not inured to defeat but well acquainted with it, and with the human devastation that it brought with it.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Warned by some of his advisers that Stalin would devour whole countries after the war, Roosevelt’s feeling was that “Stalin is not that kind of man.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“But his expressed willingness to put his troops under American command was pure public relations. “We shall never agree to that,” Mao cabled Zhou in Chungking on January 25, 1945, and his reason harked back to Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It would put the party’s troops “under foreign command, turning them into a colonial army,” Mao said. America was the imperialist power, the Soviet Union the revolutionary one. And that is what mattered when it came to distinguishing between permanent friends and permanent enemies.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Later he understood Zhou to be “a man as brilliant and ruthless as any the Communist movement has thrown up in this century,” but he “had a way of entrancing people, of offering affection, of inviting and seeming to share confidences. And I cannot deny that he won my affection completely.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice