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kwei (光影)
2019-11-06 11:29:16Trump's “China Muse” Has an Imaginary Friend
川普的“中国灵感”有个虚构朋友
原文：The Chronicle Review (高等教育纪事报)
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191015-navarro
(学术网络可直接阅读，非学术网络注册免费帐号后可阅读)
By Tom Bartlett
Ron Vara has strong opinions. He thinks you’ve “got to be nuts to eat
Chinese food.” He doles out little scraps of wisdom, like “Don’t play
checkers in a chess world.” Vara is a military veteran and Harvard-trained
economist who made seven figures in the stock market by investing in
companies that do well during international crises. His contrarian savvy
earned him an ominous-sounding nickname: Dark Prince of Disaster.
荣恩‧瓦拉（Ron Vara）有着强烈的观点。他认为你“一定是疯了才会吃中国菜。”他卖
弄一些小聪明，例如“不要在象棋世界里玩跳棋。”瓦拉是军人，哈佛出身的经济学家，
靠着在国际金融危机期间投资绩优股，获利七位数。他的逆势操作为他赢得了一个不祥的
绰号：“灾难的黑暗王子”。
Vara makes frequent cameos in the books of Peter Navarro, a White House
adviser who is often referred to as Trump’s “China muse.” Before joining
the White House, Navarro was a professor of economics and public policy at
the University of California at Irvine and the author of books like Death by
China: Confronting the Dragon — A Global Call to Action and The Coming China
Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won (FT Press). He’s
since become one of Trump’s most dogged defenders, telling CNN recently that
“I am never disappointed in my president.”
瓦拉在白宫顾问彼得‧纳瓦罗（Peter Navarro）的书中经常客串演出。纳瓦罗被称为川
普的“中国灵感”。在加入白宫之前，纳瓦罗曾是加州大学尔湾分校经济学和公共政策教
授。 他是《致命中国：中共赤龙对人类社会的危害》和《即将到来的对中战争：在何处
战斗以及如何获胜》等书的作者。他一直是川普最顽强的捍卫者之一，他最近对CNN表示
：“我从未对总统感到失望。”
Trump seems to have faith in Navarro, too. The Wall Street Journal reported
in August that when the president decided to impose tariffs on China, the
only adviser in favor of the plan was Navarro.
川普似乎也对纳瓦罗有信心。 《华尔街日报》 8月份报导说，当总统决定对中国征收关
税时，唯一支持该计划的顾问是纳瓦罗。
China scholars and fellow economists tend to be less enthused. Navarro doesn’
t have a background in Chinese studies, doesn’t speak the language, and
reportedly made his first trip to the country only last year. Justin Wolfers,
a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan,
once wrote that Navarro “stands so far outside the mainstream that he
endorses few of the key tenets of the profession.”
中国学者和经济学家对纳瓦罗则不那么热情。纳瓦罗没有中国研究的背景，不会说华语，
据报导，纳瓦罗去年才首次访问中国。密歇根大学公共政策和经济学教授贾斯汀‧沃尔弗
斯（Justin Wolfers）曾写道，纳瓦罗离主流很远，远到他并不认可该专业领域的核心
信条。
Tessa Morris-Suzuki views Navarro’s rhetoric on China with alarm. An
emeritus professor of Japanese and Korean history at the Australian National
University, she has been working on an essay examining the heated language
that Navarro employs, noting its similarity to talk of a "yellow peril" at
the turn of the 20th century.
泰莎‧莫里斯铃木（Tessa Morris-Suzuki）震惊地察看了纳瓦罗对中国的言论。她是澳
大利亚国立大学日本与韩国史的名誉教授，她撰写一篇文章，研究纳瓦罗所用的激烈言词
，并指出该言论与20世纪初时的“黄祸论”相似。
In her research, she kept running across a name she didn't recognize: Ron
Vara. Navarro has quoted Vara a dozen or so times in six books, usually as an
epigraph before a chapter. In Death by China, published in 2011, Vara offers
this sweeping assessment of the country’s roughly 1.4 billion people: “Only
the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a
lethal weapon, and a cellphone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.”
在研究中，她不断遇到一个不认识的名字：荣恩‧瓦拉。纳瓦罗在六本书中引用瓦拉的话
十多次，通常作为章节前的引言。在2011年出版的《致命中国》中，瓦拉如此评价14亿中
国人：“只有中国人才能将真皮沙发变成酸浴，将婴儿床变成致命武器，将手机电池变成
穿心弹片。”
So who is Ron Vara? He didn’t seem to exist except in the work of Peter
Navarro. The most information Morris-Suzuki could find came from Navarro’s
2001 book, If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks (McGraw-Hill). In that
book, which lays out Navarro’s plan for how to profit by paying attention to
bad news, the reader learns that Vara was a “struggling doctoral student in
economics” at Harvard in the mid-1980s, slogging away on a thesis about
utilities regulation.
那么荣恩‧瓦拉究竟是谁？除纳瓦罗的作品外，他似乎并不存在。莫里斯铃木从纳瓦罗
2001年的书《如果巴西下雨，买进星巴克》中找到了最多的信息。在那本书中，纳瓦罗阐
述了如何通过注意坏消息来获利的计划，读者了解到瓦拉是1980年代中期在哈佛大学的“
经济学博士生” 。
Morris-Suzuki, now in full detective mode, sent emails to some colleagues at
Harvard, but no one could turn up any record of Vara.
莫里斯铃木进入了全侦探模式，向哈佛的一些同事发送了电子邮件，但没人能提供有关瓦
拉的任何记录。
While Ron Vara appears not to have attended Harvard in the 1980s, Navarro
did. He was a doctoral student in economics who published research on, as it
happens, utilities regulation. Not all of Vara’s biography lines up with
Navarro’s (Ron Vara, for example, was a military reservist during the first
Gulf War, back when Navarro was a 40-something economics professor), but
there was enough overlap to arouse suspicion.
荣恩‧瓦拉在1980年代似乎没有在哈佛就学，但纳瓦罗当时在那儿。纳瓦罗是经济学的博
士生，他发表了有关公用事业监管的研究。瓦拉的生平并非都与纳瓦罗的生平一致（例如
，瓦拉是第一次海湾战争期间的后备役军人，而当时纳瓦罗是一位40多岁的经济学教授）
，但重叠之处足以引起人们的怀疑。
And there was another tip-off: “Ron Vara” is an anagram of “Navarro.”
另外还有一个提示：将“Navarro”的字母重组就得到“Ron Vara”。
I called the co-author of Death by China, Greg Autry, to find out what he
knew about the mysterious Ron Vara. Autry was a student of Navarro’s at
Irvine and is now an assistant professor of clinical entrepreneurship at the
University of Southern California. He was playfully cagey at first but
eventually came clean. “You’re not going to find Ron Vara,” he said. He
described Vara as one of a “number of Easter eggs” in the book meant to
lighten the tone. “We do try to have a little bit of fun,” he said. “If
anybody wants to not enjoy that, they’re welcome to.”
我打电话给《致命中国》合著者格雷格‧奥特里（Greg Autry），以发掘他对神秘的荣恩
‧瓦拉的了解。奥特里是纳瓦罗在加州大学尔湾分校的学生，现在是南加州大学
clinical entrepreneurship学的助理教授。起初他说话吞吞吐吐，但最终说出真相。 “
你是找不到荣恩‧瓦拉的，”他说。他将瓦拉描述为书中刻意制造亮点的“诸多彩蛋”之
一。他说：“我们的确试着从中获得一些乐趣。”“如果有人不想享受这一点乐趣，随他
们便。”
Those who know Navarro well, Autry says, were fully aware that Ron Vara was a
phony source who often popped up in his books. He said Vara was Navarro’s “
alter ego,” an “everyman character” who dispenses cutesy business
aphorisms as well as dire warnings about Chinese food.
奥特里说，那些对纳瓦罗非常了解的人完全能意识到，荣恩‧瓦拉是一个经常出现在他书
中的冒牌消息人士。他说，瓦拉是纳瓦罗的“另一个自我”，是一个“路人角色”，他说
出俏皮的商业格言以及对中国食物的严厉警告。
Another of Navarro’s co-authors, however, was unaware of Ron Vara’s
fictional status. Vara is quoted in Seeds of Destruction: Why the Path to
Economic Ruin Runs Through Washington, and How to Reclaim American Prosperity
(FT Press, 2010), written by Navarro and Glenn Hubbard, a professor of
finance and economics at Columbia University and dean emeritus of the
business school. Asked via email whether he knew that Navarro had inserted a
fictional character, and whether doing so was OK with him, Hubbard replied “
No and no.”
但是，纳瓦罗的另一位合著者却没有意识到荣恩‧瓦拉的虚构身份。瓦拉在《毁灭的种子
》书中被引用，该书由纳瓦罗和哥伦比亚大学商学院名誉院长，金融与经济学教授格伦‧
哈伯德 (Glenn Hubbard) 合写。通过电子邮件询问他是否知道纳瓦罗插入了虚构人物，
并且对纳瓦罗这样做是否认可，哈伯德回答：“不，不。”
What does Peter Navarro have to say about his imaginary friend? I emailed the
White House press office and received a phone call from Navarro. While he
declined to speak on the record, he did send a statement in which he called
Ron Vara a “whimsical device and pen name I’ve used throughout the years
for opinions and purely entertainment value, not as a source of fact.”
纳瓦罗对他的虚构朋友有什么要说的？我给白宫新闻办公室发了电子邮件，并接到了纳瓦
罗打来的电话。尽管他拒绝正式访谈 (speak on the record)，但他确实发表了一份声明
，称荣恩‧瓦拉是“我多年来使用的异想天开的一种手法和笔名，用于表达观点，以及用
于纯粹娱乐，而不是事实的出处。”
He compared the Ron Vara character to “Alfred Hitchcock appearing briefly in
cameo in his movies" and wrote that it's "refreshing that somebody finally
figured out an inside joke that has been hiding in plain sight for years."
他将荣恩‧瓦拉的角色相比于“希区考克在他自己电影中的短暂客串”，并写道这是
“有人终于理解了一个隐藏好几年的圈内人笑话”。
The inside joke doesn't strike Morris-Suzuki as particularly funny. Maybe,
she said, Vara began as a whimsical device — though even that’s
questionable in books that purport to be nonfiction. But “once he started to
be used as a source of fear and loathing about China, and of messages which
readers are likely to believe about the dangers of various Chinese products,
the joke wore very thin,” she said. She was left “wondering whether there
might be other invented sources in Navarro's work.”
这个圈内人笑话对莫里斯铃木来说并不好笑。她说，瓦拉最初也许只是一个异想天开的手
法，尽管这个手法用在非小说类的书中都是很成问题的。然而，“一旦他开始被当作恐惧
和厌恶中国的消息来源，使读者相信各种中国产品的危害，这种笑话就变得令人不舒服”
。她还“想知道纳瓦罗的作品中是否还有其它无中生有的消息人士。”
Morris-Suzuki hasn’t stumbled on any more such sources, though she did
notice that another quote — “Import from China. Save money. Lose your life”
— is credited to Leslie LeBon, about whom the book tells us nothing except
her name. A Google search reveals that LeBon is an architect who also is
Navarro’s wife.
莫里斯铃木并没有发现更多虚构的消息人士，尽管她确实注意到引用自一个名叫Leslie
LeBon的人的一句话 ：“从中国进口，钱省了，命没了”。书中没有告诉我们任何有关
这个人的事。谷歌搜索显示LeBon是一位建筑师，同时也是纳瓦罗的妻子。
While it seems that no one picked up on Ron Vara before Morris-Suzuki did,
this isn’t the first time Navarro's books have come in for criticism.
Writing in The National Review in 2017, Kevin D. Williamson pointed to
uncredited anecdotes that veer close to plagiarism. He also noted a general “
sloppiness with sources,” such as citing a 25-year-old report from the RAND
Corporation on China’s involvement with Iran as if it were up-to-date.
尽管莫里斯铃木最早指出荣恩‧瓦拉这个冒牌货，但这并不是纳瓦罗的书第一次受到批
评。凯文‧威廉姆生在2017年The National Review上的文章就指出纳瓦罗近乎抄袭的事
迹[注1]。凯文还指出纳瓦罗一般对引用消息的态度草率，例如引用兰德公司25年前的报
告来当作中国与伊朗关系的最新报告。
[注1] The National Review 文章： https://tinyurl.com/yy34fght
Still, whatever their faults and fictions, the ideas in Navarro’s books
appear to be driving economic policy with the United States’s largest
trading partner. And the professor continues to have one very important fan.
When Navarro was brought into the administration, in 2016, Trump praised him
in a statement, saying that he had read one of the professor’s books on
China and was “impressed by the clarity of his arguments and thoroughness of
his research.”
无论有多少错误和虚假，纳瓦罗书中的思想正推动美国制订经济政策对付其最大贸易伙伴
。纳瓦罗教授仍然有一位非常重要的粉丝。纳瓦罗于2016年上任时，川普在一份声明中称
赞纳瓦罗，称他读过纳瓦罗教授关于中国的一本书，“对他论据的清晰和研究的彻底印象
深刻”。