Transcript | The Raider: China and the Life of Evans Carlson, with Historian Stephen Platt

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Oana Grigor and Natalia Polom for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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Today on Sinica, we are joined by one of my very favorite historians writing in English. Not just writing on modern China, but one of my favorite historians writing in English. Full stop. Stephen Platt is the author of, well, three books, two that I’ve read, magnificent works of narrative history, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, about the cataclysmic Taiping Civil War, and the excellent book on the Qing dynasty’s old order in the run up to the Opium War — Imperial Twilight. It focuses on the Canton settlement. It’s a book that, well, both books I’ve recommended more times than I can count.

Both combined panoramic storytelling, just exquisite prose, deep archival work, and a remarkably sure grasp of both Chinese and Western perspectives. Which is why they rank, for me, just among the best out there. Stephen is Professor of History at UMass Amherst and was trained at Yale with Jonathan Spence, among others. His new book, which came out just last month, is called The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II.

And it’s every bit as good as his well-known earlier works. The Raider is the gripping and improbably true story of Evans Fordyce Carlson, who ran away from home at like 16 or something, falsified his age so he could enlist in the Marines early, fought in the First World War, served in Nicaragua. And then in China, a place he developed an early, intense fixation with, on a second stint in China, he became an admirer, and, I dare say, a friend of General Zhu De. He also befriended people who are household names for those of us in China studies, like Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley. And he introduced the phrase ‘gung ho’ into American English. Carlson would go on to lead a band of commandos known as Carlson’s Raiders in the Pacific War, fighting on Makin Island and at Guadalcanal.

He landed with the Marines on Tarawa and Saipan as an observer to those horrific battles, and in the latter, he took some severe wounds. And there’s just much more, so much more. The book is many things. It’s a biography. It’s a war story. It’s a study in cross-cultural admiration and ideological transformation. And it is a poignant meditation on what it means to be both a patriot and a radical.

Stephen Platt’s own life may not be quite a story as Carlson’s, though I’ve just discovered that he’s quite a good drummer, so that all adds a lot. But he is living proof that you can start your career as a humble English teacher in China and with no particular notion of becoming a professional historian and still end up writing some of the most compelling and humane works of history out there. It is such a treat to have you on the show today, Stephen. So, congratulations on the new book, which I devoured with great gusto. Welcome to Sinica.

Stephen Platt: Thank you, Kaiser. It’s really nice to be here. I’m glad to be on the show finally.

Kaiser: Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this for so long. So, let’s dive right in. Let’s talk about our forgotten hero, Evans Carlson. In The Raider, you paint a vivid portrait of this man. He was famous enough to be played by Randolph Scott in a Hollywood film. And yet his name and his legacy seem almost deliberately excised from the collective memory of the Marine Corps and the war and China. Why do you think Carlson has just so thoroughly vanished from the institutional memory of the court and, more broadly, from American public consciousness? Was it just Cold War politics? Was it that he died before the worst excesses of McCarthyism in the whole who lost China debate really took hold? Or is there something maybe about the American military psyche that resists romanticizing its heretics?

Stephen: And heretic is a good description for him. I mean, he was a lifelong Marine who was, in some ways, absolutely devoted to the Marine Corps. But he was also, throughout, a complete antagonist to its traditional culture. I mean, he was a believer in innovation and change. He thought the traditional officer class was just hidebound and conservative, and unimaginative. I mean, during World War II, he established himself as an officer who is absolutely beloved to the enlisted men. In fact, there’s a war correspondent in 1944 who said he is “the most beloved officer in the Marine Corps” to the enlisted men, but the brass hate him. He alienates himself from the other officers because he has completely different ideas about leadership, etc. The reason he gets lost, I mean, and again, yeah, he’s a household name during World War II.