When the Prophet Is Punished, and the Mythmaker Rewarded

Pearl Buck vs. Henry Luce on Chiang Kai-shek — and Why Intuition Lost to Ideology

The following is member-only bonus content based on the two most recent entries to the natal database: Henry Luce and Pearl Buck. It applies lessons learned from studying the Moon’s configuration for both horoscopes to answer a thorny political divide in mid-century American politics: ‘Truth’ versus the China Lobby.

It is one of the strange ironies of 20th-century American history that Pearl Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, saw through Chiang Kai-shek's corruption and warned of his distance from the Chinese people—only to be sidelined politically and publicly. Meanwhile, Henry Luce, publishing magnate and founder of Time, Life, and Fortune, threw his support behind Chiang with missionary zeal, helping to institutionalize Chiang’s myth within U.S. Cold War policy. Luce’s bet turned out to be disastrously wrong. Buck’s intuition, by contrast, was right. And yet, it was Buck who paid the price.

Both Buck and Luce were children of American missionaries in China. Both spoke Chinese. Both viewed China as central to the moral future of the world. But one saw from below, the other from above.