Book Reviews : Soviet Policies in China, 1917-1924. By ALLEN S. WHITING. (New York: Columbia University Press. 1954. Pp. x, 350. $5.50.)

• Date: 01 March 1956
• DOI: 10.1177/106591295600900123
• Published date: 01 March 1956
• Subject Matter: Articles

186
UN
served a useful purpose as an instrument of reconciliation and pacific
endeavor, but it was generally agreed that the UN was not equipped to
enforce peace through other means. Because of this, older members of the
Commonwealth emphasized the need to have regional security pacts which
would offset this lacuna. They felt there is nothing incompatible between
such pacts and membership in the UN, since the two are designed for
different functions.
As far as the United States was concerned, the general feeling was for
a need to restrain American policies. It was felt that strengthening the
Commonwealth would serve this end.
STANLEY MARON.
University of California, Berkeley.
Soviet Policies in China, 1917-1924. By ALLEN S. WHITING. (New York:
Columbia University Press. 1954. Pp. x, 350. $5.50.)
Mr. Whiting has written a clear, objective, and fairly detailed account
of the first phases of the relations between the Soviet Union and China. Its
chief claim to distinctiveness lies not in its content -
for it rounds out a
picture which is already familiar in broad outline -
but in its use of Rus-
sian materials. Apparently no Chinese sources were consulted; perhaps this
accounts for the rather cursory and routine analysis of the attitudes of Sun
Yat-sen and other Chinese leaders toward the Soviet Union in these early
years.
Prior to the revolution of 1917 Lenin had not developed a compre-
hensive theory of the proper strategy and tactics to be followed in Asia.
This was hammered out, with many differences of opinion and of emphasis,
in the sessions of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, the First
Congress of Peoples of the East (to which Mr. Whiting gives surprisingly
little attention) in the same year, and the Congress of Toilers of the Far
East in 1922. Even within this rather nebulous framework differences of
approach were great; as Mr. Whiting remarks, &dquo;In examining Sino,Soviet
relations from 1917 to 1924, it is evident that there was not one...