All this took its effect by 1948 Guy Swope, who had worked in SCAP's Government Section, returned to the U.S in the spring of that year expecting to find work quickly with the new

Economic Cooperation Administration, the foreign aid body which, over the ensuing thirteen years, was to be renamed successively, the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), the Foreign Operations Administration (FOA), the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), and finally the Agency for International Development (AID), the name it has held since 1961. What he encountered, as he wrote to his SCAP colleague Justin Williams, was actual hostility at ECA, Department of State, and elsewhere, because of his SCAP background and his perceived membership of the "small group of long-haired boys . . . who have helped General Mac Arthur put over his socialistic schemes." He found himself "blackballed for that reason" and informed Williams that the anti-SCAP sentiment extended through "the powerful American interests" across both political parties and included both President Truman and Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate in 1948.[29] In the summer of 1948, MacArthur himself swung to the Right and began to cut back social reform in Japan and purge SCAP of its "radicals."

6 . It is against this background that one must read the pronouncements of President Truman, Dean Acheson, Agriculture Secretary Charles F. Brannan and Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Willard L. Thorp, in 1950-51, publicly avowing U.S. support for land reform in the countries of Asia and the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.[30] In a major address on international relations in San Francisco in October 1950, Truman declared:

"We know that the peoples of Asia have problems of social injustice to soive. They want their farmers to own their own land and to enjoy the fruits of their toil. That is one of our great principles also. We believe in the family-size farm farm. This is the basis of our agriculture and has strongly influenced our form o f government."[31\

When Truman said of "the peoples of Asia" that "they" want farmers to own their own land, he might have been more precise. Did he exclude landlords and other conservative elites from "the peoples of Asia?" Or did he believe that they ”want[ed] their farmers to own their own land?" The ambiguous status of "private property" in all this lent itself to defence of landlords as much as promotion of tenure reform. Nor did the statement entail the least critical reflection on the history of the "family-size farm" in U.S. agriculture and government. There was, in short, nothing "more liberal than ever" in Truman's address, much less anything radical. In the terms of President Woodrow Wilson's challenge to American

liberalism, a generation earlier, to become "more liberal than ever" and even "radical", in order to save "civilization" from the typhoons of "irrational revolution”; there was nothing "more liberal than ever" in Truman's address, much less anything "radical". Yet the typhoon was blowing up ominously. China had been conquered by the Communists, who pressed through a massive clearance of landlords, bandits and other "counterrevolutionaries" during 1950-51 and completed a sweeping land to the tiller agrarian reform. War had broken out in Korea and in Indochina, as Communist insurgents pressed their claims to leadership of the national liberation and modernization of those ancient and long colonized cultures. Communists and peasant rebels were in arms in the Philippines and in Malaya. Land reform was by no means the only issue at stake in these struggles, but it was a critical one, which may be said to provide a sort of litmus test of the amount of liberalism, never mind radicalism, in American Cold War containment policies. A demonstrated capacity to render effective support to land reformers in changing societies struggling with turbulent processes of internal re-ordering, grappling with the strains of adjustment to the modem world-system, would show that post-classical counter-revolution had transcended the ossified conservatism that had doomed the classical counter-revolution of the age of Metternich and the last Russian Tsars. A demonstrated incapacity to do so would suggest otherwise.

3:3. What is True of China.

1* Even in the late 1950's, historians of the land reform in Japan, Laurence Hewes and Ronald Dore, were able to observe the quite dramatic improvements it had brought to the Japanese rural sector by the elimination of much of the landlordism and tenant poverty that had characterized it before the Second World War. An agro­ industrial transformation which had already taken impressive steps in Japan between the Meiji Restoration and the 1930's, was quickened by the land reform of the late 1940’s, helping to open the way to the extraordinary economic achievements of Japan as a nation in the ensuing decades. By the 1970's and 1980’s, Japanese agriculture, even more than West European or American agriculture, had assumed a somewhat bizarre, overprotected character, but it was not characterised by the peasant backwardness and grinding rural poverty of the pre-Second World War era. As Mikiso Hane wrote in 1982, in a critical history of Japanese rural poverty:

” . . . rapid industrial and technological growth, together with the land reform program initiated by the occupation authorities, resulted in momentous changes in farm communities. The economic conditions and cultural life of rural Japan began steadily to approximate those of the urban population. By 1980, in most areas, the differences that had sharply divided the farming and urban communities in the pre-war years had become blurred."[31]

Howard Schonberger observed, in 1971, that the curtailment of the SCAP reforms after 1948, the so- called reverse course in occupation policies, meant that Japan developed in ways very different from those envisaged by the more liberal planners and reformers in the first flush of the occupation in 1945-46 [32]. Develop, however, it did, with astonishing dynamism and, from the standpoint of a critique of American Cold War foreign policies, both the success of the land reform in Japan, under special circumstances, and the attack on its architects and principles by American conservatives are what call for examination. If, in addition, the vision entertained by men like Lattimore and Pauley in 1946, of the scattering of Japan's concentration of industrial and commercial power around East and Southeast Asia and a vigorous effort to encourage the agro-industrial transformation of these regions, in a fashion autonomous of the Japanese core zone, be considered the chief casualty of the reverse course and the geo-political vision of George Frost Kennan, then the debate over the land reform in Japan assumes considerable significance for an understanding of subsequent debates concerning land reform and revolution in Southeast Asia.

2. The debate in the L.S. over the significance of land reform in Japan grew out