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Notes From China

Barbara W. Tuchman




  2017 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1972 by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Copyright © 1972 by Council on Foreign Relations, Inc., New York

  Copyright © 1972 by The Associated Press

  Notes I through VIII were originally written for and distributed by The Associated Press.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in the United States by Collier Books in 1972.

  Note IX, “Friendship with Foreign Devils,” is reprinted by permission of Harper’s Magazine and appeared in the December 1972 issue.

  “If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945: An Essay in Alternatives” is reprinted by permission from Foreign Affairs, October 1972.

  ISBN 9780812986228

  Ebook ISBN 9780812986235

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-93468

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: The Granger Collection, New York

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  A Note on How I Came to China

  Notes from China

  Chapter I: Standing Up

  Chapter II: The People

  Chapter III: The Countryside

  Chapter IV: The Changed and Unchanging

  Chapter V: The Neighborhood Committee

  Chapter VI: The Mental Diet

  Chapter VII: Preserving the Heritage

  Chapter VIII: Keeping the Revolution Green

  Chapter IX: Friendship with Foreign Devils

  If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945: An Essay in Alternatives

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  By Barbara W. Tuchman

  About the Author

  A Note on How I Came to China

  THIS IS WHAT I vowed I would never do—put ephemeral journalism between the covers of a book. But I was offered a persuasive rationale: that these reports are the outcome not only of a six-week visit but of an interest in the Far East that goes back almost forty years.

  In 1933 on graduating from college, I joined the staff of the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, an international organization representing countries with territory on the Pacific. In October 1934 I went to Tokyo for a year’s stay to work on a project of the IPR, The Economic Handbook of the Pacific Area. It was the hope of the Institute, by centering the work in Tokyo, to keep contact with and possibly encourage the liberal elements in Japan, but controlling tendencies there proved to be in another direction. In October 1935 I went home by way of China where I visited Peking and the vicinity for about a month and continued on via the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

  My first published work grew out of this year in the Far East. It included an article for the IPR quarterly on the Russo-Japanese fisheries for which I was paid $30, the first money I ever earned by writing; a review of Tsushima, a vivid history of the decisive battle of the Russo-Japanese War, a book I still remember well; and a little essay on the Japanese character which, to the astonishment of its unknown twenty-three-year-old author, made its way onto the imposing pages, alongside prime ministers, world bankers, and other pontiffs, of Foreign Affairs.

  After a seven-year interval (focused on the Spanish Civil War and the menace of Hitler) my brief experience of Asia earned me a place on the Far East desk of the Office of War Information during World War II. As I was married with a child by this time, I stayed in the New York office whose operations were beamed to the allied and occupied countries of Europe. For the Far East desk it was a chronic battle against the Europe-oriented staff to get news of the war in Asia on the air at all. (Correspondents in China and Japan in the 1930s similarly fought to get their dispatches into print against the disinterest of editors and presumably of the public. I once accompanied an enterprising correspondent when he hired a number of Japanese laborers to wash down the great Buddha of Kamakura so that he could take pictures and write a story about the Buddha’s supposed ceremonial bath.) At OWI we gained a place for the Far East news only because it was one of the aims of the operation to explain to our allies why so much American effort was engaged in the Pacific.

  Since missionaries’ sons and serious students of Asia were all snapped up by OSS and OWI for assignments in the field, or in the Washington office where policy was made, I was one of the few staff members in New York with a personal if minuscule knowledge of the Far East. I was dragged out of bed to write the backgrounder on Tokyo on the night of our first long-range bomber attack in 1944 (for which no one had prepared). I wrote the backgrounders on the East China coast for the landing that never came, and on the Soviet Far East for the Russian entry against Japan that came only five days before the end. For some weeks I even took over the Indo-China desk in the absence of its normal occupant because, on the strength of a research paper I had once done for the IPR, I was the only person in the office who could say Laos, Cambodia, Cochin-China, Tonkin, Annam (the five states of Indo-China; no one then had ever heard of Vietnam) without hesitating.

  For a while I also covered the Burma campaign in acrimonious rivalry with the military desk which considered Burma their turf while we at FE considered it ours. It was in the course of defending this territory that I followed the exploits of and became interested in General Stilwell. During the next twenty years the interest receded but remained a flickering ember that never died.

  Meanwhile the restoration of the state of Israel after a gap of nearly 2,000 years struck me as an event unique in history and started me on my first book, Bible and Sword. Ending with the Balfour Declaration of 1918, this led me to The Zimmermann Telegram of 1917 which in turn led back to 1914 and The Guns of August, and that in turn to the social origins of the Great War in The Proud Tower. By the time that book was published, it was 1966. The American relation to Asia was now an importunate reality. No one needed to wash Buddhas to get it into the press.

  Stilwell revived in my mind from a combination of reasons: because it offered what I had long been looking for, an important body of unpublished papers to work from; because his career made an ideal focus for a book on the American relation to China; and because when I discussed the subject with my eldest daughter and son-in-law, two highly educated, cosmopolitan young people, I was struck by the fact that they knew nothing about America’s past connection with China, but wanted to know. When I proposed an alternative subject that I had in mind at the time, they insisted that I must do the book on China, so I did.

  I first approached the Stilwell family for access to the Papers in March 1967. Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45, was published in February 1971 two months before China opened its doors to the American Ping-Pong team, with Henry Kissinger not far behind. I can hardly claim to have foreseen this turn of events, much less its fortunate coincidence for my book, but when people ask how did I happen to choose China, I like to suggest that if a historian understands the past he will have acquired in the process a feel of the future.

  China was closed to Americans during the time I was writing the book, but though it was now too late for that purpose, I applied for a visa out of the intense interest my task had aroused in me. While waiting for a response I wrote the essay for Foreign Affairs that forms the second section of this book. In June 1972 I received word that I was invited to visit China. The journey was made in company wit
h my youngest daughter, Alma, over a period of six weeks in July and August.

  The Notes appear as originally written, under some pressure. I have made no revisions except to erase the erratic editing that afflicted them in some newspapers, notably The New York Times. Somewhere in that institution is a copy editor whose idea of meaningful prose remains an enigma.

  Notes from China

  I

  Standing Up

  IN A COUNTRY where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance. The dominant fact is that for China’s working class, which is to say over 80 percent of the world’s most populous country, the lid of exploitation has been lifted. While visible betterment varies widely between the major cities and the provinces, it is probably true to say of all areas that the working class, in whose interest China is now governed, have found a sense of purpose, self-confidence, and dignity in the knowledge that they are the object of the state’s concern, not, as in the past, society’s victims.

  The most obvious negative in the process is the mental monotone imposed upon the country. All thought, all ideas past, present, and future, not to mention the historic record, are twisted, manipulated, rolled out, and flattened into one, expressed in half a dozen slogans dinned incessantly and insistently into the heads of the public. As far as the life of the mind in China is concerned, its scope has rigid limits and its sound is a blaring, endlessly repeated single note, with effect (at least upon a Westerner) like the drip, drip, drip on the victim’s head of the ancient Chinese water torture—if it had made a loud noise. The message is that “the People” are the motive force; that Marxism-Leninism is universal truth, and that propelled by its principles and Chairman Mao’s thought, China’s working class can ultimately build Socialism, meaning well-being for everyone. The goal lies ahead and can only be reached by keeping the Revolution green, that is by continually renewed contact with the masses.

  Domestically it seems to work. I say “seems” throughout these notes cautiously and advisedly because ignorance of the language is a barrier equal to being deaf. A six-week visitor under this handicap can offer conclusions as impressions only.

  Perhaps too the transfer to collectivism has been made easier because China’s life was in some ways collective to begin with. Consider the kang, the built-in wall-to-wall bed of north China on which, in the poorer homes, the whole family sleeps. With that in their background, collective adjustment is natural, not to say imperative.

  In any event, from what we could see through eleven cities (Peking, Taiyuan, Yenan, Sian, Loyang, Chengchow, Wuhan, Nanking, Suchow, Shanghai, and Canton) and a variety of rural settlements, collective effort has made up China’s oldest lack—enough food. Our reception at an agricultural commune in central Shansi included three or four heaping platters each of sliced tomatoes, fresh peaches, and sweetened stuffed dumplings made of glutinous rice (a substance to make a Western stomach quail) in far greater abundance than was required by the company. Admittedly this was laid on to impress the visitors (as was everything else we met in China), but the availability of such abundance to agricultural workers and their un-hungry attitude toward it were simply not possible in the past when, as one member of the commune said, “The lower peasants could not even have the chaff of the rice to eat.”

  Increased production, materially speaking, is what China’s revolution is all about. It refutes all the firm statements of economists and agronomists in the past that China’s arable land could not be augmented, nor the yield per unit of land be raised sufficiently to feed the expanding population. Both have been done, not by magic but because the people have been mobilized and motivated to do it—by expropriation and redistribution of land permitting communal farming in large tracts instead of fractional plots, and by the knowledge that everything they do to make improvements will now benefit themselves not the landlord.

  I will cite no statistics on increased yield because I cannot judge their reliability, but in this summer’s drought in north China with day after relentless day of no rain and of temperatures over 100, when one sees fresh water being pumped in life-giving gushes from irrigation channels, and sees surrounding fields green, vegetables ripening, and seedling crops sprouting instead of withering, one needs no statistics. In the old days this year’s drought would have been lethal. The great Miyun Dam and Reservoir northeast of Peking, the pumping stations and sedimentation plants along the Yellow River that have at last harnessed “China’s Sorrow,” and similar projects constructed elsewhere under the new regime, besides providing hydroelectric power, have brought drought, flood, and famine under control. The result provides the agricultural surplus which, paid in kind to the state as a form of tax, supplies the capital for expansion of industry—the other of the two legs on which the new China walks.

  In human terms the process has produced a new person—the worker from the ranks who can become manager of the enterprise. It is true that such people do not bear sole responsibility. They function in committee in a three-in-one arrangement of workers, technicians, and “cadres” or representatives of the Government. Even so, in their straightforward look-you-in-the-eye greeting, their poise and self-respect, they are impressive, none more so than the woman Vice-Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Szu Tzi Ching (Evergreen) Commune outside Peking.

  Quiet, composed, and supremely assured, with bobbed hair, neat overblouse, loose trousers, and a big silver wristwatch, she knew every aspect of the operation: the crop rotation, marketing, fertilizing, spraying, trucking, livestock, the schools, clinics, and family lives of a commune of 6,000 acres and 41,000 people, formerly scattered in hopeless division in 138 villages. Born in a family in the “poor peasant” category, that is, hired or tenant farmers without land of their own, she was now playing a competent role where formerly she had no stake. Her colleague in charge of the orchards, a rough peasant with stubble of beard and sweat towel around his neck, had the same assured air, as did the girl supervisor of the pigsties. Both shook hands with confident equality and exhibited their domains with pride (each ripening peach on the trees was individually bagged and each pig had its own pen).

  Their counterparts in industry—like the shop foreman whose intense pride is almost tangible as he watches a finished tractor leave the assembly plant—are equally forthright and precise, in notable contrast to civil servants who, being more vulnerable to the swings and switchbacks of official policy, try to be utterly orthodox and noncommittal to the point of speechlessness.

  Obviously the commune and tractor plant were selected showplaces, but the fact that they exist at all and are managed in part by their workers is a piece of one of the greatest bootstrap operations in history. There have been harsh costs and there are negative aspects, but in these worker-managers China has visibly, to quote who else but the Chairman, “stood up.”

  II

  The People

  WHO ARE “THE PEOPLE,” the subject and object of every political slogan in China? According to Chairman Mao’s definition, “the People” are all who support the Revolution (dutifully said to be 90 to 95 percent). The remainder, consisting of “class enemies,” “bad elements,” and counterrevolutionaries, are merely Citizens. This strikes me as a murky Thought, not one of the Chairman’s best, or else a poor translation, but since it is the official translation, it will have to stand. Theoretically and ideally, then, the People are a mystic whole (leaving aside the bad elements), but in practice class origin is determining.

  Workers, peasants, and soldiers are automatically People (although sometimes they are exhorted to “learn from the People,” which is confusing) as is anyone of “poor and lower middle peasant” or other working-class family. Those who come from landlord, rich peasant, merchant-capitalist, or bourgeois origin a
re automatically out, or at least not full members of society until they have proved by deed and attitude that they have repudiated their class values and wholeheartedly adopted Chairman Mao’s “correct revolutionary line” of service to the People. What this requires in outward conformity for those with inner reservations can only be conjectured.

  The masses (and for China the word is appropriate in a descriptive, not necessarily Marxist, sense), pedaling unhurriedly to work on their millions of bicycles through the city streets, filling the now public parks of the Imperial City and Summer Palace, crowding a department store or a museum exhibit of People’s Art, queueing at cooked food shops for a meal in a bowl, appear quite at ease. The economic security of food, paid work, and old-age pension is a great relaxer of tension, and this appears in faces and manner. China has never been in a hurry, and the pace, even in factory work, is still easygoing. There is no sense of pressure or tension in the air.

  A foreigner feels safe (though not comfortable) walking alone anywhere at any time—if he can put up with attracting crowds of intense starers. In the countryside and provincial cities he also attracts smiles and spontaneous hand-clapping and almost never a scowl, for the Chinese are an agreeable and normally friendly people. Mrs. Chang Si-lan, a tiny spry lady in black whose two-room home (for a family of eight) we visited in a factory compound, welcomed us with such genuine delight that we fell into instant communication. It appeared that she and I were the same age: I pointed to my gray hair while hers was still black; she pointed to her absent teeth while I still had mine. She pressed us to sit beside her on the kang, passed cigarettes, and compared grandchildren. On Mrs. Chang’s level the Chinese do not insist on talking in ritual fatuities.