Pearl S. Buck appeared on the Merv Griffin Show in 1966 and made a few predictions. That’s when Buck said China will be what we make it to be. She meant that the United States will either make China its enemy or its friend. Buck said the Chinese are marvelous friends and frightful enemies. If this is true, why are so many Americans and the US media demonizing China instead of cultivating friendship?
The Chinese have a marvelous sense of humor, Buck said. The Asian people are very human.
Buck said China will moderate and modernize in time. She saw Communism arrive in China in 1921, and said it was an impractical, impossible scheme of life. She was right. China has changed and is now a hybrid, socialist-capitalist country with a market economy and an authoritarian, one-party government, a political party with more than 80-million members compared to 46.6 million registered Democrats and 33.5 million registered Republicans in the United States.
In fact, there isn’t much difference between China and the United States when it comes to politics. “If one studies the Chinese leadership long enough and carefully enough, one will come to recognize that China’s decision-makers are by no means a monolithic group of elites who share the same views, values and visions. But instead, I believe that two factions coexist in the Chinese leadership. Members of these two factions often contrast sharply in terms of their personal backgrounds, professional expertise, and political careers. These two factions compete against each other for power, influence and policy initiatives.” – One Party, Two Factions: Chinese Bipartisanship in the Making
During her career as an author, Buck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Good Earth in 1932 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938.
Only seven American authors have been awarded both the Pulitzer and the Nobel: Sinclair Lewis; Eugene O’Neill; Pearl S. Buck; William Faulkner; Ernest Hemingway; John Steinbeck; Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison—five men and two women.
Pearl S. Buck was born in America (1892 – 1973), and at the age of three months went to China. Except for attending college in the United States 1911 – 1914, she lived in China until she was forty
Meet Pearl S. Buck in the following mini-documentary that runs 2:14 minutes.
“She was a builder of bridges between China and the rest of the world,” says Edgar Walsh of his mother, Pearl S. Buck.
In this mini-documentary, Walsh describes how his mother was “ideally positioned to write about China.” Buck was the daughter of missionaries and spent much of the first half of her life in China, where many of her books are set.
Pearl S. Buck’s page on Amazon
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Lofthouse,You are right about most of the people of The US not undrstanding the importance of Mrs Buck’s statements of China’s relationship with China..Most of the Americans either visiting or working in China and especialy our government officals have no understanding of the Chinese.They seem to group al Asians together for convenonce not knowing truly any thing about them at all. One can not learn or understand a people by referances written in one country with out the refferences of study written in several countries.Then when visiting China get off the sight seeing and share a cola or hotpot someplace with any and all you meet.Mrs. Buck was not predutist of China and Chinese because she lived there she wrote because she was very observent of the chinese and wanted to help others understand them.Thank you again Mr.Lofthouse for the artical. JfwJ
Pearl grew up in China and the family cook, a Chinese woman, took care of her more than her own mother did. And as a child in China, Pearl’s friends were Chinese children. Later in her life when she was a senior, when she got angry and lost control, she’d burst out in Chiense curses. I think she also thought in Chinese and not English.