Edward Paine on the legacy of the UNRRA--words

This comes from a history of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) Taiwan Regional Office that Edward Paine, Reports Officer and Economic Analyst for UNRRA, China Mission, was drafting after 1947. It's an undated typescript found in the George H. Kerr collection in the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum (GK-002-0006-045). It can also be found in Su, Yao-tsung (蘇瑤崇), ed., Collected Documents of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Taiwan (Taipei: Taipei 228 Memorial Museum, 2006), pp. 342-344.*

UNRRA will not soon be forgotten by the world because it is erecting for itself an imperishable and gigantic monument in paper. This is no discredit to the Administration. In China, at least, words, paper words and vocal words, big words, little words, red words, pink words, honeyed words, bitter words, recriminatory words, damning words, words, words, words, constitute UNRRA almost wholly and completely. They are of the essence and there is no doubt but that a large number of them have been fragrant.

In assessing the value of these words one has to set up several categories. One category is for words which meant nothing to begin with. This is a large group. Then there are the words which meant something at the time but which in the long run, historically speaking, mean nothing. There are also the words which meant nothing to begin with but which have a historical, a research value and those, a very small number, which both have and will be valuable. [342||343]

Those words having to do with work accomplished by UNRRA will be, oddly enough, among the least important because an all-over view will undoubtedly show that relatively little has been accomplished. The most valuable words will be those to be gleaned from tons of documents which will indicate the reasons why UNRRA has not succeeded to a greater extent than it has. They will be those which are now being written in looking back over what has been done. They will be those words which as yet have not been written and which quite probably will not be written unless some person or organization cares to make an audit, an impersonal, unbiased audit of what has occurred and why.

Such an audit might raise an eyebrow over the fact that at least sixty percent of the correspondence between the Taiwan Region and China Office has concerned administrative details. The audit would probably discover that this Region is not unique, that at least sixty percent of the time and work of the whole China Mission has been so consumed and expended. This is understandable in the nature of UNRRA but it is probably equally true that some excellent lessons can be learned from a study of the records.

Such an audit might well take a hint from the tons of documents which have been collected in a hit or miss fashion because there was no clear-cut idea of what was desired in the way of information. Much of these data are valuable, or at least may become so to someone digging through the files for material for a MA or PhD and possibly to others. However, it would seem that it has been an awful price to pay for a few degrees; especially if, as has been irrationally true of UNRRA, other organizations ignore that material which is available and send special men into the field to re-collect the same thing.

Except for this latter fact, that UNRRA has often paid no attention to the material in its own files in HQ and has sent additional men out to duplicate the information when it was needed and, even worse, has often taken the opinions of outsiders not particularly [343||344] qualified especially if their information happened to come in the form of the printed word, in a newspaper, little criticism can justifiably be leveled at UNRRA’s methods of obtaining information.

Greater men than an organization such as UNRRA will ever attract would have had to have been given broad scope in planning in order to successfully anticipate and order collected all the many types of data which the Administration has required. Better people in general than UNRRA has found would have had to be hired to carry these orders out. Time would have had to be commanded to stand still, holding changing conditions in a state of suspended animation. This letter would have been hardly less possible than the other paramount requirement, that the basic concept under which UNRRA has been made to work in China, as an advisory rather than an operating agency, be changed.

This is not an apology for UNRRA’s word-mountain; it is not an excuse; it is an admission that more has been expended than value received and a general exposition of why this is a fact. It is an analysis in retrospect, a post-game rehash, it is, I’ll admit, a somewhat defensive question “Knowing only what was known when UNRRA was started, could you have done better?”. More important it is the posing of a vital query “Will you, in the future, profit by the example which is UNRRA, which is embodied almost entirely in words?”

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*As Talk Taiwan notes, Kerr made use of this history in his chapter on "The UNRRA-CNRRA Story" in Formosa Betrayed. (Unfortunately, Talk Taiwan repeats the unsubstantiated story that Chiang Kai-shek bought the copyright to Formosa Betrayed after it was published.)

Thoughts and questions about George H. Kerr, Edward Paine, and Formosa Betrayed (Updated, 9/27/18)

Recently I came across a post by Stephen O. Murray that has me thinking again about Edward Paine's role in the authorship of Formosa Betrayed. The post is a revision (update) of a chapter in Looking through Taiwan: American Anthropologists' Collusion with Ethnic Domination (U of Nebraska P, 2005), co-authored by Murray and Keelung Hong. For those who don't know Edward Paine, he worked in Taiwan for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) after WWII and witnessed the corruption and incompetence of the Chen Yi government that climaxed with the March Massacres in 1947.

Murray writes that after the 228 Incident, Paine and Kerr worked together on a book about what had happened. Murray continues,

Although they had received an advance from a publisher, Kerr stopped work on the book without giving Paine any satisfying explanation, and only much later (1965) published Formosa Betrayed. That book is very critical of Chiang and his subordinates. It would have had a greater impact, however, closer to the time of the events (and closer to the time when it appears to have been written). I wrote to Kerr asking about the sequence of writing and publication of Formosa Betrayed, but in two letters Kerr avoided the direct (and repeated) question of why a book about his observations did not appear much earlier. (My guess is that the virulent attack on American experts for “losing China” in part for reporting the unpopularity of Chiang Kaishek had traumatized and/or deterred him, but this is a surmise for which I have no evidence.)

As I wrote in a comment to Murray's post, I posted some notes a few years ago about the publication history of Formosa Betrayed based on research I conducted in the Okinawa Prefectural Archives. In those notes, I quoted from some 1965 correspondence between Kerr and editors at Houghton Mifflin in which Kerr blames the failure to publish earlier on the McCarthy era. In fact, he implies that it would not have been possible to publish at that time. He does not mention Paine in those letters, however.

In an article introducing the George H. Kerr collection at the Okinawa Prefectural Archives (Chinese; pdf), historian Su Yao-tsung (蘇瑤崇) also cites the WUFI story that has circulated about Paine's role in the composition of what became, almost 20 years later, Formosa Betrayed (see my 2010 notes for details of that story). Su argues that although Kerr used materials that Paine had provided him for book (and thanked him in the acknowledgements), most of the book was based on Kerr's own experience, so Kerr "was without a doubt the first author" (p. 247, my translation).

There are some interesting (and frustratingly confusing) twists to this whole tale, though. In no particular order:

• Articles in two issues of Pacific Affairs, published in Dec. 1949 and Dec. 1951, include references to a book project by Kerr entitled The Development of Modern Formosa as a project sponsored by the Institute of Pacific Relations (the publisher  of Pacific Affairs). The article in the Dec. 1949 issue describes The Development of Modern Formosa as an "extensive report, with particular emphasis on wartime and postwar developments, [that] has now been completed and is scheduled for publication under the auspices of the IPR International Secretariat early in 1950" (p. 410). The 1951 article mentions that the book was supposed to come out in 1952 (p. 421). Neither of the notes about the project mentions Paine as a co-author; this suggests that whatever Paine thought (in 1986) about the book as a co-authored project, Kerr had gone ahead with a book about "modern Formosa" by himself.
• Su Yao-tsung notes in his article that according to archival documents, Kerr wrote in 1948 that he had a manuscript "in preparation" entitled "Seeds of Rebellion: Formosa under Kuomintang Rule, 1945-1947." What is the relationship between "Seeds of Rebellion" and The Development of Modern Formosa? (Thanks to Prof. Hidekazu Sensui for first raising this question in an email.)
• In Volume Two of Correspondence by and about George Kerr (Taipei: 228 Museum, 2000), there are several letters to Paine that imply that Kerr and Paine were working on a book together. Evidently Paine had written to several people who had been in Taiwan before and during 228, asking them for information about their experiences and observations. For instance, there's one letter to Paine from Allan Shackleton (author of Formosa Calling) that mentions "your book" (Vol. 2, p. 848), and there's a letter from Muriel Graham (pp. 855ff) in which she writes, "I do wish I could help you and Mr. Kerr more..."
• Kerr and Paine did evidently work together on a memorandum about Taiwan's situation that they sent to several media outlets. It was entitled "Can Formosa Be Used in Solving Our Dilemma in China?" and a draft of it (not the final version) can be found on pp. 166ff. in the Collected Papers (Taipei: 228 Museum, 2000). Interestingly, although it appears to have been a collaborative effort (see Correspondence vol. 1, p. 435), Kerr writes on the draft found in Collected Papers, "I prepared this to distribute..." Several questions related to this: Who's the audience for this note? Why does Kerr leave out Paine? (He could have written "Ed Paine and I prepared this...") (Update, 9/27/18, updated 6/12/19: After further digging in the 228 Museum Kerr archives and Kerr's inventory of the materials that he sold to Cheng-mei Shaw, I found that this was labeled "the Kerr-Paine Memo" and was one of the memos that Kerr and Paine distributed to media outlets and others. The other document that Kerr and Paine wrote together is a five-page brief entitled, “Will America Face a ‘Formosa Problem’?” It's dated December 15, 1948. Headed with a hand-drawn map of Asia and the Western Pacific, the brief gives an overview of the US situation regarding Taiwan—that at Cairo, Roosevelt had “promised” Chiang Kai-shek to return Taiwan to China, but that not only was the KMT rule of Taiwan corrupt, but the Nationalists were likely to lose the mainland. Kerr and Paine go on to outline some basic facts about Taiwan: its strategic potential to the US, area and population, development, economic potential, post-surrender events, “What do the Formosans want?”, “What would be the significance of a plebiscite?”, and “What if the Communists are successful on the mainland?”)
• Finally (?), there's the question of the phrasing of Kerr's reason (given in 1965) for not publishing: "it was not possible to get a hearing" by the time he got the manuscript back. What exactly did Kerr mean by that? Was it impossible to publish it, or was Kerr "deterred" (as Murray puts it) from publishing it? (This isn't directly related to the authorship issue, but it's related to Kerr's reasons for postponing the publication of the book for close to 20 years.)

Well, I'm left with a bunch of questions. Su Yao-tsung has told me that there are two boxes of Kerr-Paine correspondence in the Kerr collection at the Taipei 228 Museum. Anyone want to do some fishing for me? ;) (Update, 9/27/18: the people at the archives say that actually there aren't any such boxes. Hmmm...)