User:CWH/Rodney Gilbert

Rodney Yonkers Gilbert (1886 Lancaster, Pennsylvania -- New Brunswick, New Jersey 1968) was an American businessman, author, and newspaper columnist who wrote on China and East Asian politics starting in 1920s Shanghai and continuing under the penname TK through the 1940s.

His best known book, What's Wrong With the Chinese (1926) explained China with racial characteristics and political incompetence. He was known for his anti-communist views and support for Chiang Kai-shek and oppostion to the Chinese Communist Revolution.

Career

After graduating from Franklin and Marshall College, Gilbert went to China. There he was first a salesman for Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People, travelling the country and learning the spoken language. He settled in Shanghai and became a correspondent for the North China Daily News He became managing editor, though the historian Robert Bickers expressed surprised that a "man with little experience and less talent" could gain such a position; allowing him to get the position showed that the diplomatic establishment had little regard for treaty port journalists.

In 1929 he returned to the United States to join the New York Herald Tribune as an editorial writer, mostly under the pseudonym "Heptisax". He continued in that capacity until he returned to China in in 1944 to be Dean of the Post-Graduate School of Journalism at the Central Political Institute in Chongqing, China's wartime capital. He returned the the United States in 1946, and became a prolific writer for such conservative-leaning magazines as American Legion and National Review.

Publications and reaction

Gilbert explains in the Preface loves china but she needs to be spanked

The University of Chicago historian Harley Farnsworth MacNair wrote that Gilbert's articles for the North China Daily News were “among the clearest, most analytical, and most critical for about a decade,” and form the content of the book. Gilbert's attitude is that of the “ecumenically minded and ‘hard boiled’ businessman,” but no other American has "delivered himself of so unsentimental and scorching a phillpic on the subject of China. Far from calling a spade a useful agricultural implement, he, without apology, describes it as a condemnable old shovel.”

Selected publications

• Gilbert, Rodney (1 July 1922), "China's New Labor Movememnt", The Living Age, 314 (4069): 7–13 Reprinted from North China Herald April 29, 1922.
• Gilbert, Rodney Yonkers (1926). What's Wrong with China. New York: F. A. Stokes. Internet Archive here.
• Gilbert, Rodney (1929). The Unequal Treaties: China and the Foreigner. London: Murray.
• The Indiscretions of Lin Mang, 1929
• Gilbert, Rodney (January 1945), "China Not Out of the War", China at War, 14 (1): 53–60
• Gilbert, Rodney (18 December 1950). "Trouble in Red China". Life.
• Gilbert, Rodney (September 1954), "Stew As Camel Drivers Make It", The American Mercury: 133–135
• Gilbert, Rodney (1956), Competitive coexistence: the new Soviet challenge, New York: Free Enterprise Hathi Trust limited search only.
• Whose Opinions on China? Scratches on Our Minds, by Harold R. Isaacs by Rodney Gilbert National Review, September 13, 1958, p. 185
• Gilbert, Rodney Yonkers (1971), Genocide in Tibet: A Study in Communist Aggression, American-Asian Educational Exchange

References

• Bickers, Robert (1999). Britain in China: Community, Culture, and Colonialism, 1900-1949. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719046971.
• Obituary (12 January 1968), "Rodney Gilbert, Columnist, Dies", New York Times: 34
• MacNair, Harley Farnsworth (1933), "Review", American Political Science Review, 27 (3): 137–139, doi:10.2307/1947368, JSTOR 1947368.
• Roosevelt, Nicholas (11 July 1928), "Bland Complacency of the Chinese" (PDF), New York Times Book Review: 10

External links

• Biographical History, Rodney Gilbert Papers, Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center