SHORT TAKES : China Rehabilitates Pearl Buck

Pearl Buck, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist once reviled by the Beijing authorities for her anti-Communist views, is being rehabilitated in China nearly 20 years after her death.

Chinese literary scholars recently held a symposium to reassess the works of the “old China hand,” the official New China News Agency said today.

Her numerous novels, many of them set in China and criticized as imperialist by the Communists, received a more objective appraisal at a meeting late last month, it said.

The conference was in her old home town of Zhenjiang, in southeastern China, where she was taken as an infant by her missionary parents.

Buck spent 36 years in China and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for her novel “The Good Earth.” She died in 1973.

Experts at last month’s meeting agreed that her work could not be judged as merely good or bad, the news agency report said.

“It is necessary to understand and appraise Pearl Buck with a dialectical and historical materialist view so as to fully affirm the contributions she made for Sino-American cultural exchanges,” scholar Wang Fengzhen was quoted as saying.