Take the gentry class. This is something that students like myself who began earlier than some others, never heard about until late in the 1930's. We knew of local retired officials but there's a whole school of thought about this gentry class that as grown up in the last 15, 20 years and is now being studied in detail. It's one of the great Chinese inventions, the fruit of the examination system, tied in with landlordism, tied in with the values of literacy--all of it forming the local elite who are the key to local government and order. So the local magistrate in the Chinese kingdom is a very solitary figure in the old days. He is able to govern a quarter of a million people as a single, imperial official in this very superficial fashion because these local gentry these local degree-holder landlords, educated, influential people form a class that is helping to run things on the local scene. And now in the modern day, it doesn't take us very long to find the latter-day equivalent, the new form of this kind of local elite. The Communists have got to have it. And so you have another perspective on the Communist effort.

Now when it breaks down you have a revival of the regionalism, localism--the bete-noir of the centralized Chinese state of old--with many of the same features appearing. The efforts to organize the populace locally and still keep control by Peking is a very complicated and traditional story. The study of it in pre-contemporary times is just getting started.

The Communists today are working within that inherited framework of circumstances, of ways of doing things. You can't understand them just by studying the Russians or Marxism or listening to Chairman Mao. We're just beginning to understand what he's doing.

Well, let me wind up here because I'd like to get into questions. What are the characteristic features that survive in these two cultures? Anybody can make this up for themselves. In the Chinese case, you have a moralistic society, not a legalistic society, the result being that litigation is frowned upon both traditionally and today. The lawyer is not an important figure as he is with us. Rather, there is more of morality and ethical teaching, and this needs a public opinion of consensus in the community. It rests on moral terms, and moralistic leadership. All of this takes the place of what we have in the letter of the law.

Another moral feature it seems to me is the subject of face which I think needs a great deal of analysis. You can get a better word than face, no doubt, but the generalization I suggest here is that the Chinese are more face-conscious by far because of the way they are set up in their society. The stress on personal conduct, your outward action towards others as a basis upon which you are judged, comes straight down from the classics to the present day. This leads to a great concern about how you look. How you look is an indication of how you are doing. Is your conduct proper? Are you succeeding in being the right kind of person? A noble, moral ideal, no doubt. But it develops into a face situation.

We are much less face-conscious and more inner-directed. We talk about our soul, we hold out against the majority, we stand up as indi- viduals saying, "This I believe and I defy you all" and so on. This is in our tradition. It is a very different tradition. Well, this has implications again for our policy on how to treat the people in Peking.

Another feature of the Chinese scene is the stay-at-home quality of their history. It is the center of things; China is not a place you want to go away from, it is a place to stay in. If you go out, you're going to the barbarian outside, where there's nothing. Chinese culture is Sino-centric, and today the people are still concerned with what's going on inside the country. They wish the outside would disappear and not bother them. This is very different from a seafaring country including not only the Japanese, ourselves and the British--but all these countries around the world, particularly in Europe, who, living on peninsulas, became seafaring and voyaged afar.

And finally, we have the problem in our policy of "containment" as the inherited phrase, inherited by default. I think it's way out of date. If it ever mean anything, it certainly doesn't apply in the Vietnamese situation. Containment in Europe was a sensible enough, political, economic effort behind a military shield to revive prostrate democracy in an industralized society. This worked in Japan also. And so we got into the pjhrase "containment" in the case of the Korean aggression which was so obviously aggressive. And to "contain" Taiwan with the Navy is easy enough. But in the situation we're in now, where you have a mixture of aggression and civil war, a mixture of inner and outer self-determination, and a mixture of nationalism and communism, "containment" becomes a pretty empty phrase. Yet those of us that get into sounding off in public about what is our policy don't have any other phrase to use. I think it's a pretty meaningless term.

We could suggest perhaps competition and that brings us to the question, how do you compete with the Maoist model? The Maoist model is geared to a low level of human life in some ways. It may go far because conditions may be at a low level in developing countries. We have not faced the competition with this model, except insofar as we talk about "the other war." We try to put together economic and social arrangements. In other words, I think our basic problem is that our loosely organized, pluralistic society is in competition with the more Spartan and highly integrated Chinese model. Now this theme hase been overworked. All that I've been saying, forseeing this kind of world conflict, has the unfortunate tendency to create the thing that one fears. If you buy this line of talk that I'm delving into tonight, it's by no means the whole story and it doesn't perhaps give us what we need. We've got to be optimistic and constructive. We can count on great changes coming on the Chinese side, loosening up some time. On this score, perhaps we can say Chairman Mao has already lost his mandate, that extremism is played out and not being bought by the people. This is a good sign, and perhaps there is a turn to be expected in the Chinese scene.

Questions

Journalist: I would like to ask, sir, a question on your opening statement that there was more than a 50-50 chance of Chinese intervention in Vietnam. What is the present mood?

Fairbank: I would say Chinese intervention at a point where we try to reduce the fighting is entirely conceivable. Perhaps not 50-50, but certainly not impossible as the people in the power struggle inside China would find that foreign war could help their centralization of power. This has happened in many revolutionary countries. Revolutionists find it hard to keep unified, and they find a foreign enemy at about the same time, and unity results.

Question: What can we do, on our part, given the fact that the Chinese are unpredictable? Do you think we can actually formulate a long term policy with the scanty information that we have?

Fairbank: Well, we can plan our program, but we can't plan their program because we can't have that much influence over them.

Question: But how can we plan our program if we don't know what they're going to do?