Two Kinds of Time (1950), American writer Graham Peck’s memoir of living and working in China between 1940 and 1945, begins with an eponymous meditation:
By one Chinese view of time, the future is behind you, above you, where you cannot see it. The past is before you, below you, where you can examine it. Man’s position in time is that of a person sitting beside a river, facing always downstream as he watches the water flow past.
While Peck was not the first or last foreign writer to romanticize Chinese temporal wisdom (consider the oft-quoted canard that Zhou Enlai said it was “too early to tell” the outcome of the French Revolution), the metaphor expresses his wish to be just an observer of China, watching the river of history flow past. But history had other plans. The book covers the era of Japanese occupation, a time when most Chinese people suffered through natural disasters, crushing poverty and fierce political divisions that would lead to civil war. By the time it was published in 1950 — one year after the founding of the People’s Republic of China — the flow of Chinese history had radically changed course.
More than a mere travelogue, Two Kinds of Time is, at different points, an autopsy of the Kuomintang (KMT) regime that fell in 1949; an indictment of American strategic myopia in its China policy of the 1940s; and a timely jeremiad about the dangers of overreach as the world entered the Cold War. The book remains remarkably prescient, offering a trenchant critique of the follies of America’s support for a failing leader who had lost the faith of his people. In the ensuing decades, U.S. policymakers would fall into the same trap in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and countless other American interventions abroad, propping up authoritarian leaders who supposedly “shared our values.”