Some scholars have seen The Good Earth as creating sympathy for China in the oncoming war with Japan. "If China had not captured the American imagination," said one, "it might just have been possible to work out a more satisfactory Far Eastern policy," but such works as The Good Earth, "infused with an understandable compassion for the suffering Chinese, did little to inform Americans about their limited options in Asia."[5] The diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber, however, although he agrees that Americans grew enamored of heroic Chinese portrayed by writers such as Buck, concluded that "these views of China did not shape U.S. policy after 1937. If they had, Americans would have been fighting in Asia long before 1941."[6]
The Columbia University political scientist Andrew J. Nathan praised Hilary Spurling's book Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth, saying that it should move readers to rediscover Buck's work as a source of insight into both revolutionary China and the United States' interactions with it. Spurling observes that Buck was the daughter of American missionaries and defends the book against charges that it is simply a collection of racist stereotypes. In her view, Buck delves deeply into the lives of the Chinese poor and opposed "religious fundamentalism, racial prejudice, gender oppression, sexual repression, and discrimination against the disabled."[7]
