Notes From China, Page 2

  “Decorum” is the word for the masses in the capital. Even more notable, in comparison to former times, is their remarkable appearance of health and well-being, though more so in Peking than in the provinces. The running nose of children, that endemic companion of poverty, has vanished, at least in the main cities. There are no cripples, no beggars, no open sores or disease, although hawking and spitting (outside Peking) are as bad as ever. Even Mao Tse-tung Thought has found no formula to prevail over that.

  Opium-smoking, prostitution, and venereal disease have proved easier to eradicate, and according to claims have been wiped out. I cannot vouch for the claim but I can say that any overt interest in sex is simply nonexistent. When the subject came up in conversation with one female interpreter, it produced a grimace of disgust as if we had mentioned a cockroach, and the same expression contorted the face of a doctor of mental health when he was asked about perversions and homosexuality. “We don’t have this in China,” he replied succinctly.

  At a military barracks we visited outside Nanking I noticed no provision for families. The state pays for an officer’s home leave or for visits by his family to the post, I was told, but apart from that he does without a wife’s companionship. After an officer has served fifteen years and “has a good record,” he may apply to have his family live with him. To make sure I had this piece of startling information right, it was repeated for me and confirmed as true for the Army as a whole (although I suspect regional commands vary). When I ventured the comment that this must be a very monastic life, the officer replied, “We consider it a very happy life to live and work with our friends and comrades of the great proletarian People’s Liberation Army.” That is the way they really talk. (It should be added that the PLA has played a genuinely constructive role in the state which, considering the past role of soldiery in Chinese society, is a revolution in itself; but that is another matter.)

  At a May 7th Cadre School deep in the country where bureaucrats and professionals come for a six-month term to be “re-educated” through manual labor, the experience was also celibate. Although they dislike any reference to the question, the Committee was willing to say that their members were too busy with field labor, brick-making, and building (which in fact was hard real work, not leaf-raking) to worry about their sex life. Sex was sublimated in the “struggle for production” and for renewed “revolutionary consciousness.” It was the stock answer to be expected, but it is quite possible it may also be true. Whatever the truth, it is evident that in the new society the sex impulse has been pushed deep below the visible surface.

  The effect on the family life of the “cadre” class is cooling. (This ubiquitous and absurd word, pronounced “cadder” by Chinese-speaking English—gan bou in Chinese—is as basic in Communist usage as “peasant.” Originally adopted to mean a government or party bureaucrat, it now loosely covers anyone in an administrative, professional, intellectual, or white-collar job, in short, everyone who is not worker, peasant, or soldier. There is a sharp distinction between lower-echelon cadres called “staff members” and the upper-echelon “leading cadre” who is a person in a position of authority: a minister, bureau chief, manager, director, or head of any organization, except that in theory no one is head because everything is run by committee. The “leading cadre” in each case is Vice-Chairman of the relevant Revolutionary Committee. Perhaps in deference to Number One, a chairman is either nonexistent or never appears.)

  As regards family life, many of the cadre class are now confining themselves to one child or two and appear to maintain a rather detached marital relationship. Two of the various escorts who accompanied us at different places and who had working wives or husbands, sent their four-year-old children to boarding kindergarten from which the child comes home only for the one-day weekend. The first of these parents explained airily that “a child at home can be a nuisance, you know.” A third had a more surprising solution: her four-year-old son was cared for at home by what she first described as a “roommate,” and only at my evident bewilderment reluctantly confessed was a housemaid! I felt myself dangerously in the presence of Revisionism.

  This attitude has not yet spread downward, for in the life of the streets, which is the life of the masses, babies and small children are cared for and carried around by brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents (in particular the grandfather); not in the backpack arrangement with head nodding used by the Japanese but cradled in a front-carry which is certainly less efficient but more affectionate.

  Among the cadre class, however, homemaking, like child care, is de-emphasized. To eliminate the trouble of cooking, a working couple may often take their meals, including the evening meal, at the office cafeteria, the wife at her office and the husband at his.

  The job unit governs the cadre’s life, assigns housing, and determines political reliability and periods of May 7th “re-education” if required. More often than not, one is told, the subject volunteers for this experience, perhaps because he considers it the advisable thing to do or because he sincerely wants to renew his Marxist fervor (believed to atrophy in office jobs) through realistic manual labor, as well as to obey the Chairman’s order to “combine theory with practice.” At one May 7th labor camp for “leading cadres” in the Shensi hills not far from Yenan, the mood seemed positive and the members genuinely and vigorously engaged in outdoor labor under the blazing sun. But the sad, subdued look and remote eyes of a gray-haired surgeon from the leading hospital of the provincial capital suggest that the process does not always work.

  In contrast is the provincial political boss, generally designated Vice-Chairman of the Provincial Revolutionary Committe, who may or may not combine in his person the all-powerful office of Party Secretary for the municipality or region. These are hard, beefy men, something between Mike Quill and Khrushchev, whom we came to call the Commissars. From what answers we could elicit, they came mostly from the PLA or had an Army background, and no doubt represented the Army men sent in by Mao to regain control of provincial government after the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution of 1966–69.

  We made the acquaintance of five or six of these comrades, more or less involuntarily on both sides, at dinners which the Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, our sponsoring escorts, insisted on giving in each city to welcome visiting “foreign friends” (the new official designation for all foreigners). In the presence of the local commissar as presiding host, subordinates hardly venture a word; conversational attempts are left to the guests through an interpreter. The commissar, genial but bored, confines himself to the toast-drinking routine and suavely avoids any conversation above the level of “How long have you been in China?” and “How long will you stay?” These men, at least those we met, do not convey an impression of quality above the union-boss level. They may be dedicated Maoists under the surface, or they may represent the inevitable formation of a new power group to replace the old, the very thing Mao is trying to avoid. As always the foreigner feels inadequate to penetrate the reality.

  III

  The Countryside

  THE FARMER IS THE ETERNAL CHINA. In the Sian Provincial Museum one can see a tomb carving of a Han Dynasty man driving a single-furrow iron plow pulled by a team of bullocks—and just outside town see the same arrangement functioning unchanged after two thousand years. In the fields groups of figures working together bend over the never-ending, backbreaking task of cultivation: transplanting rice seedlings, weeding the young corn, hoeing the vegetables, scything the ripe wheat or rice, and beginning over the plowing and harrowing of the field for the second crop.

  In the north, plowing is by mule or bullock and occasionally, on the lands of a fortunate commune, by tractor. In the south and in the Yangtse Valley, the gray water buffalo with flat head and crescent horns that has not taken a hurried step for twenty centuries, provides the power. Here too, occasionally, a motored plow with a man walking between the handles can be seen lurching axle-deep through the mud of a wet paddy fi
eld, looking awkward and incongruous. Whatever the place and whatever the power, the bending human figures under straw hats are never absent from the scene. Bent backs and straw hats are as integral to China as the gas station to America.

  To the eye rural China is beautiful. Terraced slopes braced by strips of stone walls rise like earth ripples on the hills. The valleys below hold orchards and tile-roofed farmhouses and fields of wheat or corn or kaoliang, which looks like corn except that its grain is borne in a feathery cluster at the top. In the wide bed of a shallow river women and children scrub clothes against the rocks. Farther south, thatched roofs appear and yellow-flowered squash vines climb over them and over everything else, hiding the debris of farmyards. Fields of vegetables and rows of string-bean vines on neatly tied tripods make patterns against the flat rich green of rice paddies where the gleam of water shows through. Haystacks, some long, some conical, some with hat-brim tops looking peculiarly Chinese, fill the right places in the landscape as if an artist had placed them. Where there are canals, old wooden scows with dark sails move between the fields. In the distance mountains are never far away.

  China has no landscape without figures. Through a lake of broad-leaved pink-flowering lotus, black-clad women with streaming hair wade waist-deep in water to pick the edible roots, making a picture so strange and poetic that they seem to belong to some ancient legend. On a village threshing floor chaff is shaken from the grain in shallow baskets; nearby a mule attached to a pole turns the millstone on his ceaseless round. A fisherman by a stream, looking exactly as he might in a Tang painting, tends a round-bottomed net hung from a bamboo frame. Where the stream flows by a village, three wizened old men retired from field work sit on a board turning a water wheel with their feet.

  In the rice regions the early crop, already harvested, is spread out in neat golden bundles to dry. Alongside, after the soil has been turned and meticulously hoed and harrowed and the water pumped back, the thin, pale seedlings of the late crop, transplanted by hand, begin the cycle over again. Weeding, spraying, and fertilizing are still to come. No crop takes so much labor as the rice of Asia, but the yield per unit of land feeds the most mouths. The Chinese call wheat “the lazy man’s crop.”

  The policy of dispersing industry to the countryside has already invaded the beauty. From the train window crossing the area between the Yellow River and the Yangtse, power line grids and the tall smokestacks and sharp outlines of factories suddenly appear here and there.

  Old and new exist together. High on a hill in Shensi the fans of a radar station are visible. On the roadside below, a large grass-covered mound with a smoking chimney on top signifies a village brick-making kiln. Boys and women with buckets dangling from shoulder poles carry night soil from a pit to spill on the fields, and elsewhere a group moves among the corn in a cloud of chemical spray. Insecticide is so important in today’s China that in one ballet we saw in Peking the girl dancers appeared with handsprayers as part of their costume. Except for locusts, insects seem extraordinarily absent, and birds too in consequence. For the sake of agricultural yield, China has taken a long step toward silent spring. Chemical fertilizer is spread by hand from baskets, and in one bean-field we passed, by women doling it from wash basins with measuring spoons.

  The rural reality is of course less idyllic than the view. The soft clay soil is dust in dry weather and clinging mud impossible to escape after a rain. In one small farm village near the Yellow River of perhaps twenty or thirty houses encircled by a crumbling clay wall, pigs, ducks, chickens, mules, donkeys, and people merged in the mud, and bullocks lay in it comfortably sleeping. What farm life must be like in the sodden snow of winter with temperatures below freezing is imaginable. Communes are slowly improving the housing but the backlog is vast: the rural population living in communities under 2,000 is estimated at 500,000,000 or approximately 100,000,000 households. Not all have been communalized. Some still cultivate tiny front-yard plots of corn or vegetables no more than ten or twelve feet square, although their land, we were told, is state-owned. A privy here was simply a hole in the ground with two flat stones placed on top in the form of a V.

  Though painful in the making, communalized farming is by now the rule and the law. At a meeting of a Production Brigade (one unit of a commune) in Shensi, the team leaders, each representing some twenty to twenty-five households, were brown and wrinkled traditional peasants in work-soiled clothes, many of them older men, each with a towel turban wrapped around his head. Three of the team leaders were women. The Vice-Chairman of the Brigade’s Revolutionary Committee was the type of village elder one would not have expected could read, but he spoke from notes written down in a pocket notebook. Each member in turn reported his team’s progress in the second round of weeding, the second application of fertilizer, and the threshing of already harvested wheat. No. 5 Team was short of manpower and had to call on the old women and children for this task. Throughout the talk the importance given to chemical fertilizer was notable. More than Maoist Thought, this is what has raised yield in China. The best time for the third application of insecticide, new to this village, was debated. Following the team leaders, an “educated youth” of about sixteen or seventeen, sent to the Brigade after graduation from Middle School for his three-year term of manual labor, spoke up to urge greater use of the “scientific” knowledge of the young. He was earnestly supported by the local schoolteacher.

  The only obvious Government or Party man present, a gray-haired individual in glasses with a sophisticated face, was the commune representative. Remaining silent throughout the discussion, he spoke only at the end to remind members to repair storehouse roofs against heavy rainfall, and to report a new method of shooting rockets in the air to disperse hail. Except for a glancing reference by the schoolteacher, not a single Maoist slogan or exhortation about the “struggle for production” or “in agriculture learn from Dachai,” or “repudiate the Revisionists and capitalist-roaders” was mentioned, although doubtless this would not have been true of a younger group. It was the first, and except for a brilliant performance of traditional acrobats, magicians, and jugglers in Sian, the only such relief during the whole of our visit to China.

  Mechanization of agriculture to replace the water buffaloes, the shoulder-pole baskets, and the bent human backs is the great goal. One could almost indulge in the dream that the Chinese might close themselves off from advancing history, as the last emperors tried vainly to do, and having got rid of the oppression of landlords and taxes and the cruelty of real want, might remain, despite the hard life, an agricultural people, both for the world’s sake and their own. It somehow suits them.

  IV

  The Changed and Unchanging

  THE TWO MOST STRIKING PHYSICAL FEATURES of China today are the new tree-planting and the old transportation by animal- and man-drawn cart.

  Willows, sycamores, and countless varieties of poplars and cypress in multiple and flourishing rows, often under-planted with shrubs and hedges, supply shade and greenness in the city streets and extend for miles along the roads outside. Trees have been richly planted in parks, on campuses, factory grounds, new housing lots, airports, military barracks, dam sites, riverbanks. In the new part of Chengchow the avenues lined with double rows of sycamores already thirty feet high are spectacular. Nanking and Suchow have no street without shade. Nurseries of thin saplings can be seen everywhere. The “greening” campaign, as it is called, is said to have lowered the implacable summer heat in the baked cities of the north and the muggy cities of the Yangtse Valley by two degrees. In the hills it has begun to get a grip on the soil that had been allowed to erode and slide away in the rivers unchecked for centuries.

  Afforestation is one of those civic works that was simply not undertaken in China before what is officially called “Liberation,” that is, the Communist takeover in 1949. In Manchu times, local officials lived by the cut they could take out of tax-collecting and were disinclined to spend any of it on projects for the public welfare.
After the Revolution of 1911, the “People’s Welfare” was one of the Three Principles of the Kuomintang Party founded by Sun Yat-sen and inherited by Chiang Kai-shek, but it got lost in the difficulties of consolidating political power and of invasion by the Japanese. Until now the Yangtse was never bridged—not at Nanking although it was the national capital during 1929–49; nor upstream at the triple city of Wuhan where railroad cars on the main north-south line had to be carried over by ferry; nor farther up at Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital for eight years. Now bridges carry traffic across the river at all three places.

  In Honan, province of the ghastly famine of 1942–43, a canal that took ten years to build has been cut through rock and mountain to carry water and electric power to stony Linhsien County whose people used to walk six miles to fetch water by bucket. Less spectacular but in the same spirit, a 400-man factory in Loyang has developed from twelve original workers and one sewing machine to make rubber-soled shoes for soldiers and peasants who once walked on straw.

  How far China remains from its goal of modernization, however, lies under one’s eyes every day in the endless procession of two-wheeled carts moving in and out of the provincial cities. This, not the trucks that serve Canton, Shanghai, and Peking, is the wider reality of China. Drawn by mixed teams or tandems of donkey, mule, and horse or by the straining muscles of a man between the shafts, with added pulling rope around a shoulder pad, the carts carry gravel, manure, bricks, building stone, sand, iron pipes, bottled drinks, earthenware jars, mountainous piles of scallions, red onions, melons, and other produce, roped loads of tires, boxes, chairs, wastepaper and rags, bags of grain, bags of fertilizer, blocks of ice, baskets of coal, heavy tree trunks twenty feet long, and everything else the country sends to the city and vice versa.