The People's Doctor: George Hatem and China's Revolution (review)

512 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 Perry and Li add to the renewed confidence in the social psychology ofpopular protest. Guobin Yang New York University Guobin Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department ofSociology at New York University . His current research interests are sociological theory and social movements. N OT ES1. For different views on the periodization of the Cultural Revolution, see Anita Chan, "Dispelling Misconceptions about the Red Guard Movement: The Necessity to Re-examine Cultural Revolution Factionalism and Periodization," Journal ofContemporary China 1 (1992): 6185 , and Peter R. Moody, Jr., "The Reappraisal ofthe Cultural Revolution," Journal ofContemporary China 4 (1993): 58-71. See also Hao Ping, "Reassessing the Starting Point of the Cultural Revolution," China Review International 3 (1996): 66-86. 2.For a classical statement ofthe political process theory, see Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development ofBlack Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Sidney Tarrow is another major proponent of this theory. 3.Lucían W. Pye, The Spirit ofChinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study ofthe Authority Crisis in Political Development (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), and Richard H. Solomon, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 4.See Craig Calhoun, "The Problem of Identity in Collective Action," in Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology, ed. J. Huber (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1991). See also Jeff Goodwin, "The Libidinal Constitution of a High-Risk Social Movement: Affectual Ties and Solidarity in the Huk Rebellion, 1946 to 1954," American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 53-69. Edgar A. Porter. The People's Doctor: George Hatem and China's Revolution . Honolulu: University ofHawai'i Press, 1997. xii, 342 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-8248-1840-7. Paperback $29.95, isbn 0-8248-1905-5. This biography of the American physician George Hatem, who did medical work in China from 1933 to the time of his death in 1988, adds one more story to the growing and shifting collection of accounts by and about foreigners in Maoist China. Though many of Hatem's friends and associates—Norman Bethune,© 1998 by University ^gnes Smedley, Edgar Snow, and RewiAlley, for example—are more promiofHawai 'i Pressnentiy remembered, or appear more glamorous or controversial, few ofthem had as sustained and faithful an engagement wim the people and the Communist Party of China as Hatem did. Reviews 513 Edgar Porter has utilized a wide variety ofresources to reconstruct Hatem's life. Drawing on interviews and correspondence, he parallels an unremarkable childhood in Buffalo and North Carolina as the son of Lebanese Christian immigrants , and medical training in Geneva and Beirut, with simultaneous developments in China. This is an effective device diat provides readers with some ofdie historical background they need in order to understand die Chinese situation into which Hatem naively entered in 1933. The China years are filled in mainly on the basis ofHatem's personal papers and numerous interviews with many who knew him, though the published works ofhis friends who were writers in and about China have also been used to good effect. Hatem's Chinese name, Ma Haide, is used for the Yan'an years and after, reflecting the depth ofdie transformation that China appears to have worked upon him. The picture that emerges from Porter's research and his sometimes labored narrative is of a loyal Party member, a dedicated but undertrained doctor, and a pleasant companion who, in the words of a Yan'an roommate, "got along well with everyone, was never in anyone's way, and made himself useful where he could" (p. 98). Armed widi these skills (as well as a talent for ballroom dancing), and apparently handicapped by no independent political enthusiasms, Ma Haide made it through the purges and political campaigns of the fifties, sixties, and seventies relatively painlessly. Vaguely suspected ofbeing a spy during those years (what foreigner wasn't?), he was often insulated from positions of the greatest influence , but never seriously attacked. His last years were spent leading public health education about leprosy eradication, in which work he appears to have been very happy and effective. Ma Haide's relative obscurity in modern Chinese history is a problem for...