Cover
We stared—frozen—at the great face above us.
THE IMAGE
and
THE LIKENESS
By John Scott Campbell
The initial bitterness which followedthe debacle of 1955 hadpassed, we were glad to see. Portersno longer spat in the faces of whitemen. They were polite, but we hadnot been in the city a half hour beforewe sensed something else.There was an edge to that politeness.It was as Major Reid hadwritten before we left San Francisco—a[6]subtle change had comeover Asia in the previous few years.They smiled—they waited on us—theybent over backwards to atonefor the excesses of the first years offreedom from foreign rule; butthrough it all was an air of aloofness,of superior knowledge.
Baker put it in his typically bluntBritish way.
"The blighters have somethingup their sleeves, all right. Thewhole crew of them. Did you noticethat rickshaw boy? When I saidto take us to the hotel, he answered'Yes, today I take you'. The Majorwas right—there's something in thewind, and it's damned serious."
We were sitting, surrounded byour luggage, in our suite at the NewChina Hotel. There were four ofus: Llewelyn Baker, WalterChamberlin, Robert Martin, andmyself, William Cady. Bakerand Martin were anthropologists,and old China hands as well.Chamberlin was a geologist, and Iclaimed knowledge of zoology. Wewere here ostensibly as a scientificexpedition, and had permissionfrom the Republic of East Asia todo some work on Celebese man,following up the discoveries byRance of bones and artifacts onthat East Indian island in 1961.
We had another reason for comingat this particular time, althoughthis was not mentioned to the authorities.Our real objective was tofind out certain things about NewBuddhism, the violently nationalisticreligion which was sweepingPan-Asia.
New Buddhism was more thana religion. It was a motivating forceof such power that men like MajorReid at the American Embassywere frankly worried, and had communicatedtheir fears to their homegovernments. The Pan-Asia movementhad, at first, been understandable.At first it had been nationalism,pure and simple. The Asiaticswere tired of exploitation andwestern bungling, and wanted torule themselves. During the communisthoneymoon in the earlyfifties, it was partly undergroundand partly taken over by the Redsfor their own purposes. But througheverything it retained