Notes From China, Page 4

  Chinese Communism itself appears as solely the work of Mao and the 8th Route Army with an assist from Stalin. No Chinese other than Mao is ever pictured in the public propaganda. He shares history only with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin whose portraits in a row of four huge pictures one sees at every turn. No matter how often one sees it, the glorification in China of these thoroughly European faces, especially the last, remains embarrassing.

  So numbing is the monotony and so simplistic the content of all this that it is a puzzle how the Chinese can bear it. The puzzle, however, has an answer: in the first place the relevant people of China today are the masses who, as Mao himself rather condescendingly put it, were “blank.” He added, “And on blank pages the most beautiful words can be written.” So can the most banal or the most anything, for people who start from blank will absorb whatever they are given; they have no criteria by which to judge and have not yet developed the capacity to be bored.

  Secondly, the Chinese have traditionally been accustomed to living within a prescribed pattern of behavior. Confucianism was just that; it too had its slogans inscribed on public walls and prescriptions that survive in the English byword, “Confucius says…” Chiang Kai-shek used the same style (with no success) in his New Life movement, “Do not spit. Correct your posture. Kill rats and flies.” In that sense Mao Tse-tung Thought follows an old form.

  Finally, if content is considered in terms of the needs of the people and the dynamics of the Communist program rather than in terms of what an educated Western mind requires for nourishment, it is apparent that Mao’s prescriptions make a good deal of sense—certainly more than “I am Gigi; fly me to Miami,” or “The toothpaste with sex appeal,” or other adages of our society. The difference is, of course, that in China the slogans are meant and taken seriously.

  One can see them in action. At a railroad crossing a PLA soldier on guard at the place actually stepped down into the road to help a peasant get his heavily loaded cart into motion again after the train had passed. He was “serving the people,” a thing that could never have happened in the old days when the soldier was both scum and the people’s bane. At a staff meeting of a small 24-hour grocery store in Shanghai the question at issue was whether to put a bicycle pump in service during the night shift when the bicycle repair shop across the street was closed. Since no charge could be made for the service, the pump would represent added cost and time for the store. But the staff had been affected the night before by a worker with a flat tire whom they had to send away unaided, knowing he would have to walk the rest of the way and be late for his job at the factory. To support “increased production,” the staff agreed it was their duty to maintain a bicycle pump.

  This is Communist China in practice. China-watchers on the outside who take its pulse-beat through its words and published statements will never record the reality because the words, taken alone, are irritating if not fatuous. It is only when one sees them acted out in the lives of the people that an understanding of today’s China is possible.

  Nevertheless, the assumption of infallibility, the twisting of the record, the suppression of fact are creating an uninformed and misinformed—although a motivated—public. One would like to believe that knowledge must break through, that truth conquers, that no people can be kept in obedient consensus for long, but I am not sure of these propositions regarding China. Nine-tenths of the mainland population may be so thoroughly and contentedly indoctrinated that it will be long before they are open to new ideas.

  VII

  Preserving the Heritage

  WESTERN visitors often arrive in China wondering whether Communism has destroyed the heritage of ancient treasures or left them to the ruin of neglect. As it turns out, a Department for the Preservation of Historic Relics has been functioning since 1949, and under its supervision palaces, pagodas, temples, and gardens are in better condition, in most cases, than at any time since their original occupants departed. The Communists are uncovering, repairing, restoring, and opening all monuments to the public with the stated purpose, of course, of exhibiting how the propertied class exploited the labor of the people for their private luxury. Simultaneously if somewhat disjointedly, the object is to show how China’s famed heritage of arts is owed to “the wisdom of the masses” because theirs was the labor that built a Ming tomb or fired the glaze on porcelain or embroidered an emperor’s silk coat. The share of the original architect, artist, or designer goes unmentioned, leaving the public to conclude that the conception sprang full-blown from the brow of the masses.

  This is the obvious rationale necessary to justify the investment of effort on relics of the leisure class. But after visiting museums and reconstructed sites of all kinds from Neolithic villages to the last home of Dr. Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai, I could not escape the feeling—which I must stress is only my own impression—that the work of preservation and archeological discovery is being done for its own sake, partly to keep a lot of people busy but also out of a kind of subdued pride in the national heritage.

  Since such pride comes perilously close to “non-proletarian thinking,” it cannot be openly expressed under the stern purity of purpose prevailing since the Cultural Revolution. Works of art are not accorded any aesthetic value per se but only the propaganda value of their subject matter. The result is an extraordinary disinterest in the aesthetic. Of the fifty or more guides, escorts, and local site guides we encountered on our way—they were always supplied in multiples—I cannot remember one expressing appreciation of any object, even the scenery, for its beauty. Beauty for its own sake, like sex, is officially out of favor.

  Archeology, which does not require ideas, is the biggest cultural activity in China. It was given sudden stimulus by the wave of engineering projects carried out by the Communists which, in digging foundations for canals, dams, and factories, turned up hundreds of tombs and old inhabited sites never investigated before. An extraordinary wealth of artifacts has been found, many in perfect condition, some unique, others of a type previously unseen and invaluable. The most excitement was caused by the Jade Emperor, actually a burial covering of square-cut pieces of jade sewn together like a medieval coat of mail. The most exquisite is the Lady with a Lamp, a gilded bronze statuette of a gently kneeling figure.

  The cream of the finds, including these two, was on exhibit this summer in Peking. Others have been spread through the provinces, with special effect in the museums of Sian, Loyang, and Nanking and in the reconstructed Neolithic village at Sian. Artifacts and figures are labeled by dynasty and also by sociological system, that is, “Slave society” for the Chou Dynasty, 1122–249 B.C., “Feudal society” beginning with the Han, 206 B.C to A.D. 220, and so on. The delicate question of class origins has been settled by the finding from late Neolithic times of skeletons buried nakedly without pots or jars, indicating the first slaves as distinct from slave owners. Besides being ideologically malleable, archeology is collective in effort and marvelously suited to the Marxist state.

  Preservation of palaces and temples finds its natural justification in public use. All the famed sites are now public parks, well cared for and heavily used, often with outdoor cafes or refreshment stands under ancient pines. The Imperial City in Peking, with its halls of audience and residence and courtyards and marble ramps, is now as crowded as New York’s Metropolitan Museum, unlike my last visit in 1935 when the buildings were closed and the grounds eerily empty with weeds growing in the courtyards. The Summer Palace outside the city with its terraced pavilions and gardens and lake for boating is no less crowded and infinitely cleaner and safer than Central Park. Here and in many other parks, gardening is first-class, with lotus ponds, peony beds, rosebushes, potted oleander and other flowering shrubs, and all the familiar annuals. In every city—at least judging by the eleven we visited—new parks have been added, like the Working People’s Park in Loyang, also called, somewhat inconsistently, Wang Tsen or Imperial Park because it was the site of the Chou Dynasty capital. The peony beds here
are of such remarkable size and magnificence that to see them in bloom in April would probably be worth the 10,000-mile voyage.

  In Peking most of the buildings of the Imperial City, including the last Empress’s bedroom, are open, with furniture and decor restored as they were when last occupied. There are no guards, at least none recognizable in uniform. In the treasure room, the fantastic objects of jade, gold, ivory, and jewels are housed in glass cases but otherwise unprotected. What is left of the national collection of porcelains and paintings, after the major share was taken off to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek, is for some reason not on public view and only to be seen by special request. The supreme painting of old China is one form of art which cannot by any stretch of the dialectic be represented as a product of the masses and is therefore very little exhibited, if at all.

  Since religion has suffered the shutdown common under Communist regimes, many Buddhist and Taoist temples listed in guidebooks are not to be seen, perhaps because of vandalism suffered during the ravages of the Cultural Revolution or perhaps because they are simply closed. Others of special renown, like the Temple of the Five Hundred Disciples at Suchow with its 500 glowing golden statues, or the rich buildings and grounds of the former Jen Ci monastery in Shansi, or the Lung Men caves of Buddhist sculptures, have been preserved for public visiting without, as far as we could see, any antireligious propaganda attached.

  The propaganda varies erratically in stress. It is all but invisible at the classical gardens of Suchow, although they represent the acme of leisured existence where rich mandarins retired to live in highly contrived Marie Antoinette-type rusticity. One by one, with great expenditure of labor which China can easily spare, these are being minutely replanted, polished, and restored, perhaps for their tourist value, although how they escaped the Red Guards at the height of their frenzy is a mystery. On the other hand, propaganda is heavy at the Ming Tombs, now excavated and publicly exhibited for the first time. Graphic charts claim to show that 30,000 men a day worked for six years, or 65,000,000 man-days, to build a useless tomb while every peasant household in the area was forced to contribute an average of 6.5 workers to the task.

  Here, as in most museums, painted and modeled reconstructions portray peasant uprisings over the centuries with fierce spears and raised fists but little progress against feudalism. The accompanying texts, which I could not read, no doubt supplied convincing Marxist reasons why feudalism remained so long embedded in China. The object everywhere was to remind the viewer of the cruelty and oppression of the past as compared to the “liberation” of 1949.

  One curious exception was in the realm of science. Alongside models in the Sian Museum of the first seismograph, astrolabe, and compass, and of the first man to use the pulse for medical diagnosis, the curators have displayed finely executed but imaginary portraits of the developers of these instruments and methods. The portraits clearly show men of the upper class with scholars’ gowns and intellectual faces. Apparently the wisdom, in their case, is allowed to be their own without inspiration from the masses. What this aberration signifies, if anything, I do not know; perhaps only the comforting thought that Communism has its inconsistencies no less than Democracy.

  VIII

  Keeping the Revolution Green

  IF MAO’S PLACE in history depended solely on his leadership of China’s belated Revolution—in which he had many associates now lost in the shadows of Mao-worship—that place would be great but not unique. His truly original contribution has been his concept of ongoing revolution, his recognition that achievement of power is not the end, but on the contrary the peril, because success solidifies. Thus every revolution ends in a new ruling class and every ruling class, by gripping the status quo, ends in Revisionism, the final sin. It is not the state that withers away but Revolution, and with it the goal of Socialism.

  To recognize this principle is open to anyone with a sense of history, but Mao is probably the first chief of state to act upon it to uproot and dismember his own power structure in order to restart the Revolution and keep it moving toward its goals.

  This was the purpose and meaning of that mysterious frenzy—as it came through to the West in bewildering flashes—which swept China in 1966–69 and is now sanctified as the great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Deliberately set in motion by Mao and at least some like-thinking colleagues, it was an act of extraordinary risk that could have wrecked the system. It activated the fanaticism of youth, which can be activated to anything, and set it rampaging through society, beating, persecuting, shaming, and leaving a wake of violence, ruin, and suicides. In the course of purging Liu Shao-chi and breaking up the settled bureaucracy which he supposedly headed, the movement also ignited a dangerous opposition of the Ultra Left whose object, more or less, was to shatter the whole establishment and achieve Socialism through anarchy. Factions arose and fought with spears and stones when they could not get arms. Only because the Army remained loyal as the arm of the Party was Mao able to apply the brakes, regain control, and begin to reconstruct his Government.

  At present the domestic surface is calm; the vicious turmoil of only a few years ago seems to have left the public curiously unaffected. Their equanimity reminds one of a tantalizing remark by an English missionary named George Tradescant Lay who wrote in 1841, “The Government of China is purposely absurd but the people are reasonable in their views and conceptions.”

  To judge either the degree of damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution or the degree of renewed revolutionary impetus is not possible for a superficial visitor, but some of the cost is obvious. Although most of the purged bureaucracy below the top are said to have returned to their jobs after “re-education,” the government has undoubtedly been weakened, both within the central Politburo and in its authority over the provinces. The Ultra Left, angered by the return of the bureaucrats, is far from dead, and power struggles within the Party and Politburo apparently continue.

  At the same time it is plain that the ideas of the Cultural Revolution have officially prevailed, at least in general lip service. “Reliance on the masses” is the password, and the painful process of “Struggle, Criticism, and Transformation,” which refits a Revisionist or other erroneous thinker for service to the people, must still be endured. Struggle, Criticism, and Transformation—which emerges as SCAT in my abbreviation—is a great invention. For purposes of rehabilitation, it means repudiation of “Liu Shao-chiist crimes” followed by a change of heart through self-criticism, but it can also be used to cover up any situation in which Maoist control is not fully reestablished or intramural struggle continues.

  When I asked to meet members of a Writers’ Union, if any, I was told there were “no writers in Peking,” and the same was said of Shanghai, because they were all away in May 7th camps undergoing Struggle, Criticism, and Transformation. When I asked why Szechwan was “closed to foreigners,” I was told the province was undergoing SCAT. The same explanation was offered for not taking me to visit the great Peking Public Library. In fact the whole library system must have been suffering a severe case of SCAT, for though I kept up the pressure, municipal libraries elsewhere remained off-limits.

  The campaign against Revisionism remains fierce. While Stalin’s purges killed men, in China it is the idea which must be destroyed, must be dragged out, exposed, trampled, and stamped out. This requires unrelenting denunciation which the people repeat as dutifully as a congregation chanting responses to the minister. Every negative result in the past is explained as caused by the influence of Liu Shao-chi, and equally any current negative development—a poor harvest, an outbreak of disease, a foreign threat, or the persistence of dissenters escaping to Hong Kong—is the undercover work of “Liu Shao-chiist swindlers and criminals” who are somehow able to sway the true-thinking masses toward wrongdoing. Even the excesses of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution are laid to Revisionist infiltrators who instigated them to violence. The people are being educated in a conspiracy theory of evil, the easiest t
hing of all to believe in. It leaves Party and leaders unresponsible for error or failure.

  The effect of the Cultural Revolution is crystallized in the universities. Because the sons and daughters of the ruling group were filling the classes, it was here that elitism was believed most dangerously developing, and as everyone knows the universities were actually closed down for two or more years.

  Under tall trees on the old campus of Peking—or Peita—University, founded in 1898, we were told that only three or four of the faculty had been permanently eliminated as counterrevolutionaries because these individuals had refused to admit to “crimes” and therefore could not make a new start. One member of the English department, it was said, had even admitted to being a Kuomintang agent but after Struggle, Criticism, and Transformation, had been allowed to resume teaching. The distinguished professor of history and a younger associate with whom we talked told us that they themselves had been “repudiated by the students and masses.” It had taken them a long time to admit the justice of the accusations but they finally came to recognize their errors and were now fully functioning again.

  Listening to such talk from mature men, I was too embarrassed to look them in the eye. Outside, during the lunch hour, a loudspeaker screamed the usual heroic music at a pitch that penetrated the entire area of what was supposed to be a place of learning.

  Since 1970 the reopened universities have been recruiting and enrolling only students from the masses, that is, from the ranks of workers, peasants, and soldiers. The new policy presumes that working-class experience of actual jobs in various fields fits these young men and women to make better use of an education for purposes of serving the Revolution. If they have graduated from Junior Middle School, which finishes at about age sixteen, and have held a job for a few years, they are admitted on the recommendation of their work unit without any qualifying examination.