Notes From China, Page 3

  Some, pulled by children, carry grandma sitting under an umbrella; some, pulled by grandma, carry children. Every animal-drawn cart carries, in addition to the driver, a second figure sprawled asleep on top of the load. Whole lives must be thus spent plodding along the roads, at such creeping pace when the load is heavy that once we drove past two haulers of scrap iron in the morning and on returning three hours later saw the same men only a few blocks farther on. Though some of the plodders are brawny young men, most are thin, muscular, workworn, soiled, and sweating toilers who may no longer have a landlord to oppress them but whose labor has not been much alleviated since the old days. A scrawny old woman bent against the weight of a load of wire rods bears little relation to the sturdy rosy ever-smiling maiden idyllically picking grapes who represents ideal proletarian womanhood on China’s magazine covers. Often the heaviest loads are pulled by the oldest men as if (whisper it not in Mao’s land of “struggle”) the Marxist young, like any other, may have little inclination for the hardest work.

  In the canal area, transportation is by barge, much of this too propelled by manpower. While some barges in long trains are pulled by tug on the Grand Canal, others are dragged by rope by plodders along the bank. On the smaller canals, single scows are moved by a man poling at snail’s pace or bending his back to an oar pushed back and forth on a fulcrum at the stern.

  How will all this human labor be used when and if China’s transportation gradually becomes mechanized? The goal is so far from realization that it is hardly a worry, yet there are already signs that urban labor is underemployed. China’s boasted record of full employment, which they like to tell you is the result of a planned economy as against the evils of our competitive private enterprise, is only achieved by assigning large numbers to more or less nominal jobs with no real function. Retinues of junior assistants follow every “leading cadre” like a claque, and a superabundance of personnel stands around in hotel corridors vaguely waiting for something to do. No fewer than six staff members of a “Friendship” store for foreigners clustered around the foreign exchange desk to supervise the cashing of one American Express check. At the Nanking Observatory nine staff members at one time were engaged in moving a bag of sand—which one could have handled—to mend a terrace. The cost of keeping people employed must be as great if not greater than our system of supporting the unemployed on welfare. The burden looms heavily over the future.

  V

  The Neighborhood Committee

  AFTER TRANSPORTATION, housing is the most backward aspect of China. Although given to drastic street widening and bursts of Soviet gigantism in public squares and buildings, the authorities have preferred to let new housing adjoin new industry in the new sectors of provincial capitals rather than attempt urban renewal of the old inner city. The new housing, in the form of three- and four-story apartment buildings or brick cottage-type rows, is a tremendous improvement over the old but cannot begin to meet the need. Lining the old streets and extending behind them in a maze of alleys and courtyards are the clay cabins (they can hardly be called houses) of one or two dark rooms with dirt or stone floors that are home for millions of inhabitants. A community faucet or sometimes only a pump serves for running water. Electricity has been extended to most if not all, at least sufficient for a single bulb, but it never seems to be turned on until after absolute nightfall. Hankow exhibits a specialty of two-story wooden shacks so dilapidated that they lean wearily from the upright and with gaps between the boards look as if they must collapse tomorrow. So confined is space in all the old housing that the kang (or in the south movable beds), a small table, and one or two chairs, plus some sort of cooking arrangement and possibly a sewing machine placed next to the front door for light, suffice a family for furniture. Not unnaturally, at least in summer, the inhabitants tend to sit, eat, wash, tend babies, play cards and Chinese chess, hang up the laundry, and barber each other’s hair on the sidewalk. In Hankow they bring out their beds and sleep in the street. Yet every day out of all this emerge streams of surprisingly neat, clean, and cheerful people (except in Canton where nobody is neat).

  The new is at work here at the starting level in the Neighborhood Committee, the basic organ of the masses. Five or six of these local units make up a Street Committee, which is the lowest unit of state government. (Although the designations seem reversed, they are the Chinese usage.) Size varies according to the district; the Chao Chang Neighborhood Committee we visited in the old sector of Loyang represented 440 people in 80 households and belonged to a Street Committee of 1,800 people in 443 households. The Street Committee has its assigned Party member through whom government functions but the seven members of the Neighborhood Committee are “elected by the masses,” that is, by their neighbors. Voting is by a show of hands, and the voters are the housewives and retired adults remaining at home, one or more per household. Here is the smallest cell of that share in control over their own fate so long denied to the common people of China. Here, too, of course, is where indoctrination begins.

  The “old women” (meaning over forty) are clearly the power in the neighborhood. The three who met us were the type now frequently seen of exceedingly spruce, good-looking, simple women wearing spotless jackets of the side-closing old-fashioned kind and the silver wristwatches that are clearly a sign of status. (Under the proletarian puritanism imposed by the Cultural Revolution, watches also represent the last bit of glitter allowed.) With an official of the Street Committee carefully listening, the women described their Four Tasks. (Being a people who like life in a formal framework, the Chinese are only comfortable when they can arrange things in fixed numbers: the Three Principles, the Four Olds, the Eight Points, the Three Mountainous Burdens, and so on.)

  First is the organization of study groups of “Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung Thought” among the older people which meet three times a week for four hours at a time. This seems like a lot of ML & M (in China one begins forcibly to abbreviate the slogans), but the women explained to us that “the masses have an urgent desire to learn.” They said the enthusiasm resulting from these discussions of how to “serve the people” leads to “good deeds” among their neighbors: for instance, marketing for a woman overburdened at home; or establishing a free tea stand for carters entering the city when it was discovered that such people were very thirsty and knew no place to get a drink; or directing a bewildered visitor from the country to the local police register for help in locating his relatives. In the past these were people whose struggle for survival was so close to the edge as to allow no leeway for mutual assistance. Now they were taking part in the social process, and the pride with which they told these incidents was vibrant and very moving.

  In the course of the study groups forty women of the neighborhood in the age group over forty had learned to read, to the extent of recognizing 100 characters.

  The second task is “organizing the masses for production.” Individuals are encouraged to seek jobs in factories and mines, small street factories are organized, for example, a forge or a one-room garment factory with a cutting table and six sewing machines, or a plant for assembling electric burners from factory-made parts (these were for export). Part-time production is also encouraged at home: for example, in the tiny courtyards of the homes we visited, the current project was assembling egg boxes by two or three women working together and paid at piece-work rates. What are called “commercial services,” that is, a cook-shop, barber shop, cobbler’s shop, or bicycle repair, come under the supervision of the Street Committee at prices fixed by the city.

  The third task is to pass down to the masses the policies and instructions of the Government, and reflect back to the leadership the opinions of the masses. The fourth, under the title Social Welfare, consists mainly in educating the people in hygiene and sanitation, and conducting the permanent and high-pitched Love-the-Army campaign in the form of “Support the families of the PLA, Defenders of the Motherland.” On August 1, which is Army Day, this was expressed by gr
oups of children carrying the Red Flag to the doors of PLA families and singing songs of praise in the shrill raucous Chinese voice at ear-shattering volume.

  Such is a microcosm of Communist society. It must be viewed in terms of a people who politically and materially are at a different stage of history than the Western democracies and whose needs are not our needs.

  VI

  The Mental Diet

  AS PRESCRIBED BY Mao thirty years ago, cultural and intellectual exercise exists only to serve the Revolution. As such it becomes propaganda. Its foundations in China are firm, its structure protective. It exhorts, reassures, and has an answer for everything.

  On the basis that Marxism is “irrefutable truth” and Mao Tse-tung Thought the one and only “correct revolutionary line,” it presumes an ongoing struggle between “the two lines.” The other line is Revisionism, meaning the effort to revert to the “Capitalist road” as represented by Liu Shao-chi, the veteran Communist and former President until his ouster in 1967, now the Antichrist of the system. This is the class struggle which is perpetual and never won because “bourgeois thinking” never gives up its effort to subvert the Revolution, and is never defeated (if it were, there would be no “struggle,” which is essential to the system). Victory will only come with the final achievement of Socialism, which like the Kingdom of Heaven or the Second Coming lies always ahead.

  Meanwhile, the main Maoist principles for keeping the struggle going are: 1) Serve the People; this is the whole purpose of the society. 2) Increase production; all former “consumer” cities and communities must become producers and self-suppliers. 3) Self-reliance; the people down to the most local level must generate their own innovations and energies for the increase of production. 4) Continuing renewal of “revolutionary consciousness” and continuing guard against divorce from the reality of manual labor and the life of the masses. 5) Nonaggression and noninterference in the affairs of other states, based on the dictum that China can never be aggressive because aggression is incompatible with Socialism. (Non-interference is a rather more elastic matter.)

  Sixth and most recent—and weakest—is the principle that all states are equal in status, Albania no less than Russia, Yemen on a par with the United States, and China is the friend of all based on a firm distinction, where necessary, between “good” peoples and “bad” governments. This convenient credo permits the new “friendship” with countries like the United States and Japan while maintaining an alert against the designs of imperialism and militarism, and at the same time reassures the Chinese people that all “peoples” are really on their side. If one suggests to them that under the Western system of representative government, the idea of a chasm between bad government and good people is a delusion and that in fact democratic governments, despite protest and opposition, tend on the whole to reflect their electorates, the Chinese remain happily unconvinced. They rest on Marxist dogma that the working-class “masses” are ipso facto always right and thus cannot support what is wrong, like the war in Vietnam. If one suggests that America has no working-class conscious of identity as such, they do not comprehend.

  The media for communicating these six principles and their basic premise make up in persistence what they lack in variety. The basic form is study groups of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung Thought in school, neighborhood, office, commune, and factory. At the Steel Smelting Plant in Taiyuan employing 50,000 workers, the study groups meet after work for one and one-half hours four times a week with one session devoted to technical subjects and three to political thought and current affairs, occasionally varied by recreation and sport.

  When it comes to reading matter, there are two national newspapers, The People’s Daily and The Workers’ Daily, distributed by mail subscription, plus various provincial papers. Content is more lectures than news and anything but fresh. On July 6, 1972, an editorial in The People’s Daily (which it was thought worthwhile to reprint in The Peking Review, edited for foreigners) stated: “The extremely important instruction, ‘Read and study seriously and have a good grasp of Marxism,’ was issued by our great leader Chairman Mao after summing up the Party’s experience in the struggles between the two lines….Leading cadres of the Party committees have warmly responded to Chairman Mao’s call and conscientiously studied the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin and Chairman Mao’s works. This is becoming common practice and has brought certain results.”

  There are two glossy magazines published in many languages and intended mainly for foreigners though eagerly read by the Chinese, and at least one popular magazine presumably obtained, like the newspapers, by mail, for there are no newsstands except for occasional small street tables displaying a newspaper and a few pamphlets and Mao Thought booklets. To imagine an American or European city without its newsstands in streets, stores, and subways is to visualize how striking is their lack in China. Wall newspapers mounted behind glass exist, some with newsprint, most given over mainly to photographs exhibiting various proletarian triumphs in harvesting, athletics, shipbuilding, barefoot-doctoring, and other examples of “overfulfilling the quota.”

  Although television exists to the extent of one or two hours of programming a day, I never saw a set outside the hotels for foreigners nor was ever shown one in factory, commune, school, Street Committee, or other institution, much less a home. Radios, however, are prized: of the eighty households in the Chao Chang neighborhood in Loyang, twenty-two possessed radios, and young men walk in the parks carrying transistors.

  Bookstores, including foreign language bookstores, are almost as much a shock as the missing newsstands, for instead of color and variety they display pile upon pile of little monotone booklets either of Marxist classics (judging by the remainder piles even loyal Chinese are not avidly interested in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, which is understandable) or Maoist Thought or illustrated storybooks based on the film of the opera of the ballet of The White-Haired Girl (which has been playing for twenty years) or The Red Detachment of Women or Dragon River or another of the familiar dramas whose theme is invariably the heroic collective triumph over landlords, Japanese, counter-revolutionaries, and other evils.

  That this fare needs some enrichment has evidently been recognized by the authorities, for new editions (with suitable introductions) of the classic Chinese novels—Water Margins, Three Kingdoms, and others—have appeared, as well as the works of some “bourgeois” Western economists. When these went on sale, the crush at the bookstores, according to foreign residents of Peking, was epic, and copies are now hard to come by as they are always sold out.

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  To instill self-confidence, triumph is the dominant note in all forms of communication, especially in the permanent outdoor posters set up in public squares and in front of public buildings. The raised proletarian fist, the outthrust chest, the heroic gaze into the far horizon combine to express invincible determination by figures resembling overfed Paul Bunyans, usually wearing fur caps with ear flaps left carelessly open to the winter wind. The same heroic note dominates music broadcast over the loudspeakers. Generally in the Western mode, since Chinese music despite its decibel count is too uninflected to express triumph, this form of exhortation reaches a climax every few bars like a parade forever passing by but never ending. The same themes and songs are learned from kindergarten up in song-and-dance programs. Excerpts from the famous ballets and self-composed dance-dramas are performed by the schoolchildren with poise, gusto, frightening proficiency, and such fixed smiles of happiness as would make an American chorus line by comparison look melancholy. Amateur groups and propaganda teams carry these song-and-dance programs around the country; like early America, China still relies heavily on self-entertainment.

  Art too serves the class struggle. “Following Chairman Mao’s teaching,” reports the official news agency Hsinhua on a recent exhibition of People’s Art, “the painters take as their main theme the emancipation of the poor and lower middle peasants from heavy exploitation by the land
lord class. Every stroke bears out ardent love for socialism and implacable hatred for feudalism and capitalism.” A stone carving, “Ode to the Plum Blossom,” reports The Peking Review, “describes the dauntless integrity of proletarian revolutionaries.”

  On this diet China’s people under thirty-five are left strikingly uninformed. They know nothing about anything outside their immediate job or beyond their own neighborhood. They ask no questions, have no curiosity and do not speculate. When we were informed that famed Hangchow, normally on every visitor’s schedule, was suddenly “closed to foreigners,” and our guide could give us no reason, my daughter, after futile questioning, at last expostulated, “Well, what do you imagine is the reason?” “It is not practical to imagine,” he replied.

  They know nothing whatever about the past prior to “Liberation” in 1949. The past is one great big black landlord planted upon a foundation of feudalism which was gradually transformed into foreign-aggressive-imperial-colonialism still upholding the landlord. All history, prehistory, and yesterday are covered under this one rubric. It is all the Chinese know about their own history, much less any other. All historic time prior to 1949 is a blur. Apropos of some distinctly eighteenth-century frescoes on a temple wall, the local guide informed us these were “pre-Liberation.” The Opium Wars of 1840–60, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, and the Japanese War of the 1930s and ’40s are barely seen as distinct in date, and the Chinese are virtually unaware that anyone fought the Japanese but themselves—themselves being confined to the Communist 8th Route Army. When I asked a high school history class if they knew how the Japanese were eventually defeated, one girl replied, “By the 8th Route Army and the Soviet Red Army.” When I asked if they knew anything about the American role in the war, the same girl said, after a prolonged and general silence, that she had heard of what came through in translation as “Pearl Port,” suggesting that our interpreter too was unfamiliar with the name and with America’s four-year effort that followed.