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“China is already a great power, and whether the next three decades will be a cold or a hot war, nothing can stop her now. By the year 2001 she will be a powerful industrial socialist State.”
—Han Suyin, China in the Year 2001, 1970.
“It would not be surprising if the twenty-first century were the Japanese century… It would also not be surprising if it were the American century; it would be a little surprising if it were the Soviet century; and it would be even more surprising if it were the Chinese century.”
—Herman Kahn, The Emerging Japanese Superstate, 1970.
Nineteen-Seventy was 54 years ago, and 23 years before I was born. A mere two years ago, I picked up Herman Kahn’s The Emerging Japanese Superstate: Challenge and Response in Abacus Books, a second-hand shop in the affluent south Manchester suburb of Altrincham. The post-war cover design and typography adorning Kahn’s book ticked all my boxes, and the prospect of this eminently respectable-looking hardback wrongly backing Japan as the next superpower tickled me. Then, but a few months ago, I picked up what I thought would be the perfect companion piece: Han Suyin’s China in the Year 2001. The title had the uncanny ring of Chinese science fiction, and the design was a vintage, slightly battered iteration of Penguin’s Pelican imprint. Information, education, and entertainment—all in an economical standardised package. Again, my boxes were ticked.
In any commercial bookshop, one variety of “China book” to be reliably found is the red-and-yellow-covered “China as a rising power” volume of non-fiction, usually spawned from somewhere within the mires of the American elite. Upon discovering The Emerging Japanese Superstate, I hypothesised that I had found a direct ancestor of this genre, born in an era when the most powerful forces in the world were sizing up a smaller Asian phantom. Upon discovering that copy of China in the Year 2001, I arrived at no equivalent hypothesis—I simply wished to learn what predictions Han Suyin had penned within.
Herman Kahn’s book proved as I expected: hubristic. Who is this silly fellow? I thought, and turning to Google led me to Fat Man, a 2005 New Yorker article that told me Kahn was quite a big name in his time—a self-described “one-man think tank” who inspired and ended up somewhat enmeshed in the production of Dr Strangelove. History seems to have enshrined him in this way, as an “eccentric” nuclear guru—and not an American Japanophile. Kahn famously and forcefully argued that an all-out nuclear war would be survivable… so I would assume conceit fuelled his jets.
Han Suyin’s book eluded my expectations, and the lady inside was not the one I had expected to meet. Years ago, I acquired another vintage Penguin edition of one of her works: a weathered orange-and-white Gill-Sans-bold-titled edition of Destination Chungking. I knew from osmosis that Han Suyin was what many people once called “Eurasian”, being born of a Belgian mother and a Chinese father, and that she had written well-liked semi-autobiographical fiction. I had then taken that incomplete knowledge and filed her in a mental folder of other popular, culture-crossing, liberal, and generally gentle generally Chinese cultural figures of the twentieth century—she was conversing in there alongside Eileen Chang (whom Han Suyin, in photos as a younger woman somewhat resembled), Lin Yutang, and Sanmao (and with some twenty-first century equivalents like the rising Sichuan-to-Ireland-to-England writer Yan Ge, and the multidisciplinary Fiona Sze-Lorrain, whose recent novel in stories Dear Chrysanthemums constructs intercultural, feminine bridges through time and between Shanghai’s “haipai” culture, the French-speaking world, and beyond).
Going purely by intuition I had projected a sort of impartial, optimistic timelessness and grace in Han Suyin, but I was wrong-footed, at least in the sense that I had not divined her full story. China in the Year 2001 made that abundantly clear. Impartial? No. Small portions of the book predict China’s future, but mostly Han Suyin concerns herself with a particular version of her present and the past. She lays out the development of the Chinese Communist Party and then its rapid development of the nation—and the vision is 99 per cent that of an unblinking Maoist. In Han Suyin’s account, the Chairman is an epoch-defining philosopher, and he’s never wrong. This strange woman has blindsided me, I thought, as I leafed through page after page of prose that was worthy of a Party press release. The closest equivalent writer I could think of was Ding Ling—whose early cosmopolitan foray Miss Sophie’s Diary remains vaunted in the West by liberal institutions like the BBC, but whose lifelong commitment to socialism even after enduring decades of purges, imprisonment and exile at the hands of the CCP can only be traced (in English) if one has academic access.
Seeking the equivalent of Kahn’s Fat Man I found A Chinese Janus? Han Suyin’s Tightrope Walk between East and West (1917–2012), a potted literary and political history of Han Suyin that described a bold, complicated, and eventually morally evasive woman whose early life led her writing and social commitment from documentary and romance to international anticolonialism, and from there to full-on defence—if privately conflicted—of the projects of the CCP. It was a defence that led to the sputtering-out of her once-considerable renown and readership in the West. But I think—Han Suyin novice though I may be—that through all of her written endeavours, from the noble and spirited to the naive and questionable, ran a desire to see repressed people—foremost but not exclusively the Chinese—find liberation, and be understood. Or so I have gleaned from my psychological speculations and relatively meagre readings of a twice-liberated lady in possession of a diverse and sizeable bibliography.
Clik here to view.
To compare and contrast The Emerging Japanese Superstate and China in the Year 2001, I will borrow a little from each author. Herman Kahn’s proto-PowerPoint love of figures and charts is manifest in TEJS, so I will measure it against CY2001 using a points system. And in the spirit of Han Suyin, I will carry in my own leftist perspective and—hopefully without veering into catchphrases and delusions—cast a cold eye upon the chummy liberal pretensions of US foreign policy. Given ongoing events in the middle east, this feels timely.
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First, knowledge of the subject nation. Han Suyin, pen name of Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou, spent her childhood and early years in China, her middle years across south and southeast Asia, and her later years in Switzerland. From 1956 onwards she was making regular visits to China, forging and maintaining her status as a “foreign friend” and advocate for Mao and the CCP. Herman Kahn (six years younger than Han Suyin) was also (for a time at least) a maker of regular visits to his country of study: Japan. Though free on his visits from central party handlers, Kahn was also free from any handle on the Japanese language. Early in TEJS he cites his reliance on Japanese contacts, and also on a source we might today find comically questionable: Ruth Benedict’s anthropology-from-afar, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. To his credit, Kahn freely admits when Benedict wrote her book she “knew no Japanese and had never visited Japan” but still he stands by it. All this in a chapter whose title, “Some Comments on the Japanese Mind”, speaks a great deal of the author’s Jurassic overconfidence. Ethnic generalisation with apologies is still ethnic generalisation. Han 1 – 0 Kahn.
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Second, the readability of the texts. Reading TEJS, I did feel that Kahn writes in a rather breezy style, albeit one that lets him breeze past the claims in his high-minded “futurology” that feel more like bar-room chatter. He keeps the text broken up with quotes, tables, subheadings and the like, and for me fails in prose only when the subject matter becomes dry and repetitive. In his protracted nuclear lectures it’s said Kahn sometimes exhibited a rather dark sense of humour, and while true darkness lies far on the horizon in TEJS, a certain cheekiness does grease the wheels. Occasionally I thought the author was pinching me. I cannot say the book was a great pleasure to read, though if it had been shorter I might have spent more of these words complimenting Kahn as an interesting writer.
In CY2001 Han Suyin is no breeze—she is the storm. Or in less dramatic terms, she is “forthright”—without pause. This woman wants you to believe that she has no doubt in her mind, and her sentences always serve this end. Unfortunately, thus she sinks her formidable command of tone and flow into a mire of postured contradictions. Over time the dubious statements pummelled my reason faster than it could recover from each stagger. Take for example her insistence that democratic debate is and must be alive within the CCP, because the two roads—namely “correct” and “incorrect”—must contend. She never quite allows that travellers on said correct road must hound those on the incorrect mode into exile and suicide, but being privy to the fates of Cultural Revolution victims like the novelist Lao She, I reached that conclusion without any help. On the traverse through the tunnel of copy-paste declaratives there does flicker an occasional Suyin spark, especially when she’s sniping at her opposites. Pleasingly indeed, on page 217 of my Pelican edition she pulls the trigger on Kahn himself:
The whole art of “policy” in the United States has become the imposition of might through terrorism, and Herman Kahn’s nuclear rungs in this escalation of terror illustrated the kind of “bomb think” which has taken the place of “human-think”.
Tasty stuff, but I think her target wins the point in this round. Han 1 – 1 Kahn.
(Aside: Here I will note unabashedly that Han Suyin is quite right to stick the label “terrorist” on Kahn and his employers, because the determination to bomb civilians for victory is by definition a strategic use of terror, and like it or not, the strategy of the United States has hinged on this determination ever since the Second World War. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about my cold eye.)
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Third, history. This serves as a solid prelude to the next two categories: politics and predictions. Our grasp (or fumble) of history shapes the politics in our pocket, the present beneath our feet, and (using terms Kahn might prefer) the reserves of data we may use to envision and construct possible futures. History is worth at least one point. Of course, by choosing the humanities as the battlefield rather than the business school I am ceding another home-ground advantage to Han Suyin the literati, but so be it—I know my biases.
Unlike Herman Kahn. On his personal planet, intellectual inconveniences do not exist. “Colonialism” (here meaning Western) does not even secure an entry in TEJS’s Index, while the spot for “Imperialism” (here meaning Japanese) is meagre. In Kahn’s book we meet no serious consideration of any lasting animosity toward Japan across the countries that were its former conquests, and no acknowledgement that a slew of far-right imperial statesmen and criminals have carried over into the new Japanese democracy. In his Appendix, Kahn feels comfortable sketching out an entire supermarket aisle of political and diplomatic recipes for new Japanese democracy. “PRO-AMERICAN” Japan gets nukes, “REVISIONIST” Japan expands social welfare, “CONSERVATIVE NATIONALIST” Japan becomes an economic partner of the USSR, and so on… some of his little bullet points are sensible but others are inexcusably weird, and all possible precisely because Kahn’s pre-supposedly reasonable, capital-friendly worldview assumes an essential cushiness, correctness and room for manoeuvre that is at its root incapable of surviving contact with the indignities of imperialism past (European, Japanese—boots on the ground, brutal), and present (American—denied as such). For Kahn the futurologist, history is no fun.
CY2001, by contrast, is all history—its title is pure marketing. Han Suyin is undeniably doing propaganda work so inevitably makes her own glosses, and naturally has a great deal to say about the legacy of colonial exploitation in China, its expulsion, and its threat of a return. In fact she is so attuned to America’s post-war imperial projects that she spends a considerable amount of time speculating on American plans for a massive land invasion of China. She quotes sources which do hint at such an ambitions but, quite unaware of the Nixon-Mao meet-and-greet soon to come, she proposes more than once that a coming alliance between the US and USSR could leave the PRC as the sole inheritor of the cause of post-colonial world revolution—which she insists is also coming, in the form of some kind of showdown. So from my point of view, Han Suyin is less (wilfully) blind to the Western will to power than Kahn, but could be fairly accused of overshooting from pattern-recognising perception into terrifying hallucination. Her speculations, at the very least, reflect the scale of ideological recalibration that the Sino-Soviet split triggered within the CCP. In CY2001 this schism looms far larger than the Vietnam war.
I am going to flaunt my bias again by granting Han Suyin’s version of history a second, fairly complementary paragraph. Her account of China’s struggle to break from feudalism into independent industrialisation is not by any means thrilling, but worthwhile in its insistence on the significance of this event. Han Suyin stresses that the Chinese revolution pulled the nation from an abyss of colonialism, disintegration, and decades of war without Western aid, corporations, or integration—all, for better or worse, with a state-planned economy. For Kahn (or Keynes) this might seem like a case of success in spite of several self-imposed handicaps, but when Han Suyin points to the historical vampirisation of Qing and Republican China by Western and Japanese capital-extraction operations, she underlines, quite rightly, the fact that a hands-on revolution and an organised domestic revival project was at the time an open door and a break with the past, while quiet compliance with the global order was not.
“Look at India and look at China,” she might prompt us if she were here today. “Stack the GDPs, divide by the populations, and ask yourself who accepted Western aid.”
It’s ideology, but ideology beats blind assumption in my books, so Han Suyin has to win this point. Han 2 – 1 Kahn.
Clik here to view.
Third, politics. In all honesty we already arrived here halfway through the previous round. I’ll start, then, with a tangent. In 1972 a Canadian economist in the service of America and of Keynesian persuasion, named John Kenneth Galbraith, visited China alongside a delegation of other American economists. Afterward he wrote a slim travelogue named A China Passage, and concentrated his intellectual findings in The New York Times, which assigned a title that today we might call clickbait: Galbraith has seen China’s future—and it works. In 2024 and beyond I don’t expect we will see the NYT publishing clement approvals of Marxist-Leninist command economies, but then one can never be certain of the future. Galbraith makes his caveat pretty clear at the close:
One should not be craven. The Chinese economy isn’t the American or European future. But it is the Chinese future. And let there be no doubt: For the Chinese, it works.
So neither Ken Galbraith the sardonic liberal, Han Suyin the stalwart socialist, nor Herman Kahn the overstimulated conservative foresaw the post-Mao market reforms that eventually triggered the 21st century ascendancy of the Chinese economy. Nor indeed do Han and Kahn muse on a potential demise of the Soviet Union. Blindness to the reversals of the future is forgivable, but where we discover ignorance of or wilful blindness to basic political problems, we may lodge our critiques.
Han Suyin’s political appraisal of revolutionary China draws some parallels with Galbraith—at least when dealing with the fundamentals of the economy. Both underline the aforementioned significance of national self-reliance, and both consider this a “road” that not all nations can or will travel. Both figures were also visitors and not residents of revolutionary China—albeit she a regular and he a one-timer—and both took “the West” as their main audience. But where we can reasonably assume Galbraith’s words are his own, bar a little NYT editing, we cannot grant a free hand to Han Suyin. A Chinese Janus cites a letter from the author to her editor, in which she warns him against making alterations to the text for authenticity’s sake, and demands a final “look-over” before printing. We’re then told that after the print run of the first 5,000 copies, Han Suyin added a foreword to CY2001 (a preface in my copy) clarifying that all views within were her own. Then, according to the historian Cyril Cordoba, she bought all 5,000 of those first-run copies, to avoid a Cultural Revolution blunder (which, one presumes, would have risked cutting off her access to the motherland). Given the admissions of inner conflict and confusion Han Suyin penned in her later memoirs, it is unfortunately easy to read CY2001 feeling quite unsure that the real lady is speaking with real conviction. Sample this statement, where after telling us that “leadership of the revolutionary masses” is the “destiny” of the Communist Party, she continues…
If a party becomes complacent, believes itself above the masses and stops studying, analysing, thinking dialectically and practising what it teaches, then even after success, after the takeover of power, that party will become, like the man who stops studying, calcified, arrogant and ignorant. That way lies senescence, corruption and downfall.
Bug-eyed stuff. My more generous instincts assure me that such passages are the product of an inflexible organisation, not an inquisitive individual. Granted the power of inquisitor, I would ask this organisation where the hounding to death of Lao She slotted into their quest against calcification. And I would like to ask Han Suyin whether she really believed it was wisdom and philosophy that motivated the Cultural Revolution. I would like to ask this writer of many romantic and political novels what she really thought shutting down the universities would do for culture—but I would never feel sure of the truth in her answer.
I would have liked to hear more about culture from Herman Kahn too. “Here is a man,” you should think as you pick up your hardback copy of The Emerging Japanese Superstate, and flip to the back to find his portrait (uncompromisingly rotund), “who failed to predict anime.” Or J-horror, if you prefer. Japanese culture in an exported or modern form is never considered. All sociological questioning is superficial, because the conventional wisdom Kahn is operating under stunts his politics. In standard reactionary fashion, where he might have made a point he relies on implication and assumption. He tells us that the gusto and collective spirit of Japanese workers stands in contrast to certain drops in morale or discipline among Western workers, but he never digs into what that means. Is this a question of union militancy, or spillover from the flower power revolution? Maybe drugs are a factor. In any case, Kahn’s not telling—he’s sticking to sweeping generalisations and an unexamined faith in Protestant/capitalist values. In good conscience I can award neither of these politicos a point. Han 2 – 1 Kahn.
Clik here to view.
Fourth, predictions. This is where it all counts—for Herman Kahn especially, since his book lives or dies on this metric. In CY2001 Han Suyin was more focused on summing up the past than sketching the future, but we can evaluate her too. In fact we will start with her. Several of her failures of clairvoyancy have already been named; in essence, her writing fails to imagine that one day—not far off—the Red Guards will be disowned, and that nearly all of Maoism (bar the friendly statues) will be overturned. But at the very least, in pointing ahead to a developed, rising, and still pointedly independent China, she was proven correct. I especially appreciated these points of accuracy given that I read CY2001 after TEJS—Kahn’s book having expended no meaningful mental effort on musing where rapid, wilful industrialisation might catapult Japan’s supermassive cultural progenitor.
Han Suyin concludes CY2001 with some prevarications on the Cultural Revolution which have aged, truly, very poorly. For those wise to even the broad strokes of what happened during Mao’s final decade, the grim irony of hindsight settles deep into sentences like the following:
The process of the humanisation of man is the one which resists brutality and animality, depersonalisation and the return to barbarism.
Again one must consider how Lao She died. One must not abstract him. Throughout the book, Han Suyin seems disinclined to use the word “kill”. She prefers “liquidate”. She ends her Conclusion and thus the book with words truer than she may realise:
The decades before us are momentous. The empires of yesterday have gone, and those of today are bringing about their own downfall. For some time yet, what is already evident will be strenuously denied; but already the future has entered our present.
We survivors of the 2020s thus far may find something timeless here. On this point of blurring trajectories, I wondered while reading these closing words whether the historians of the distant future will draw strong comparisons between the American airlifts from Saigon and Kabul. From this I’m led and left wondering whose hegemonies they will be writing under. Historians of our era tell us that the fall of the Roman Empire took entire centuries.
I would like to give Herman Kahn some credit for his predictions too—but not before I give him some more grief. Astute readers will note that today, Japan is not a superpower. Despite capitalism’s tendency to crash, Kahn did not factor in the possibility of a Japanese crash, and therefore failed to predict Japan’s “lost decade” and thus the end of its sprint to the top of the economic food chain. A closer look at Japan’s late-century plunge led me to a simple conclusion that Kahn would never have arrived at. Please bear with me…
Some commentators have argued that Japan’s crash was triggered in part by Japan’s participation in the Plaza Accord, a 1985 agreement in which the US persuaded France, Germany, the UK, and Japan to agree to a devaluing of the US dollar. The aim was purely to aid the health of the ailing US import/export economy; American hegemony revitalises, and its adherents benefit. In TEJS, Kahn envisions Japan as a country with a sovereign future—made possible by an awfully convenient view of the world where his own country is but one free and rational agent among others, and not the conductor of a titanic geopolitical order which it uses to maintain its own dominant position. He can’t imagine a Japan locked into this, willingly or not.
I promised Kahn some credit, and he can have it. I found Han Suyin’s predictive power lay in her broad claims and bombastic words regarding China’s establishment of a launching pad for a more assertive future. I found Kahn’s lay in quite opposite territory: his more modest tracking and projecting of economic growth in Japan, and in his occasional musings on a coming “post-industrial society” that suggest the neo-liberal future, which I suspect he relished during the brief overlap between its arrival and his allocated time on Earth.
At the time Kahn saw TEJS published, Japan held 6.2 per cent of the world’s GDP, and sat in “fourth place” behind the US, the USSR, and West Germany. At that time, the US held a whacking 31.4 per cent of global GDP. By 1995, Japan had climbed to second place, holding 17.7 per cent of global GDP versus America’s 24.4 per cent. In TEJS, one can find dull but fairly informed musings by Kahn, penned in 1970, on what forces might drive this ascent and where it might all lead. If we tease away the “common sense” that Han Suyin would call capitalist ideology, we can definitely learn something. Of course, the Han Suyins of our era would find wicked fun in travelling back in time and showing Kahn the 2020 statistics: #1 US (24.5 per cent), #2 China (17.3 per cent), #3 Japan (5.9 per cent). Would that floor him? I’ve honestly no idea.
In the spirit of generosity, growth, and development, I will award both futurologists one point. Han 3 – 2 Kahn.
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So ends the contest. Comrade Han Suyin takes the win. If I were a despicable centrist with an abundance of free time I would have concocted additional categories in which Kahn would duel her to a brutal stalemate. “Singularity” would have numbered among the fabrications—and in it there’s reason to obfuscate the contest entirely, because assigning victory is not my main objective. I am propagandising the weird; I want to highlight first these two strange and singular books, and secondly the strange and singular people who penned them—all products of their time. Herman Kahn was clearly one of the great maniacs of the twentieth century. I love maniacs. I also feel a little enamoured with the wending life story of Han Suyin, but will need to read her works in plural to arrive at a final evaluation of the woman as writer (I will definitely be reading Destination Chungking, though my copy is so old that out of fear of damaging the spine or the glue that I might procure the title again, this time as an e-book).
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A penultimate point. I’ll freely confess this as unoriginal: both of these books are artefacts of their era. In each, Han Suyin and Herman Kahn’s complex map of views and blind spots could not have been arrived at by their past or future selves. Han Suyin recanted and retracted in her later works, and Kahn conceded certain over-enthusiasms in a 1979 sequel to TEJS titled The Japanese Challenge. Time is cruel to us all. We can only age gracefully.
Conversely, one could easily argue that each book captures something a little more eternal. Herman Kahn’s dubious articulation of a more effective, less humanistic East Asian power arising in the near future to supplant the US has its aforementioned 21st-century successors, and it is likely the form will not go out of style until the revolutionary republic of North America is finally knocked from its perch for good. Han Suyin’s extreme reluctance to acknowledge a single crack in the edifice of her preferred iteration of communism and her contempt for any who might point out said cracks are hardly novel for any internet user who has encountered your common-or-garden Twitter tankie. The mental gymnastics are not dissimilar—but at least in Han Suyin’s case, the reader familiar with her biography will understand the emotions driving her manoeuvres.
A more original point I can make about each book’s place in history concerns invisibility. As far as I am aware, neither of these books have entered a canon. Herman Kahn is known for his books on nukes. Han Suyin is beloved for her lovable works, and there are far sounder books on the pre-market foundations of communist China (excoriating Western publications abound, so for a hard left spin capable of scathing critique see volume 1 of Chuǎng, titled Dead Generations). It is precisely the sidelined position of The Emerging Japanese Superstate and China in the Year 2001 which, I think, gives cause to seek them out. History is written not only by the victors, but by the best predictors. But on the obscure second-hand shelf where the losers sit, long since out of print, there is space to play.
Clik here to view.
A final note. All biases acknowledged, this is another little indulgence leaning toward Han Suyin. Today, while keeping a wary eye on my rebellious dog, I began reading the opening chapters of John Kenneth Galbraith’s A China Passage, mentioned above and which I got from my employer’s library, partly on a whim and partly to benefit this essay. In those opening chapters Galbraith discloses that he met Han Suyin for lunch in Zurich’s Hotel zum Storchen, not long before he was appointed ambassador to India in 1961. He refers to the lady as a novelist, and relates that she is on her way to China, where ‘rightly, she is well regarded’. During that five-star lunch Han Suyin (acting a proxy for an unnamed contact) tells Galbraith that he is presently “persona non grata” in the PRC, having once taken the wrong position on Taiwan. Therefore Han Suyin’s visits to her homeland will continue, while Galbraith will not gain access to the middle kingdom until after the Nixon visit. John Kenneth Galbraith died in 2006, and Han Suyin six years later. I wish I could know whether they ever met again.
How to cite: Stewart, Angus. “Han versus Kahn: 1970.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 30 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/30/han-vs-kahn.
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Angus Stewart is a Dundonian living in Greater Manchester who writes occasional strange stories and essays. His works have appeared in various small publications including Ab Terra and NOUS, and he has forthcoming pieces in STAT and Dark Horses. His show, the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, is soon to be placed on hiatus.