The True Believers
MORAVIA, ALBERTO
TRAVELING IN CHINA The True Believers There were four of them facing us in the university lounge, two boys and two girls. They wore the scarlet armband of the Red Guards on their sleeves. All four...
...Mao the educator, Mao the dialectician wants ideological power based on persuasion and education...
...I looked at them while I questioned them, and thought to myself, they are children, they are babies...
...Their clothes were washed in soap and water, but from thousands of tiny wrinkles it was clear they had never been ironed...
...I was afraid for my daughter...
...He assured them that once they reached the sea it would open before them, as the Red Sea had for the Jews, and they would walk on dry ground to Jerusalem and free it...
...We're for Mao against everyone...
...Furious, Liu Shao-chi turned his back and left...
...Imagine for a moment an Italy ruled by a pope who disagrees with his Curia on some religious question...
...That's why I rushed here...
...We read Mao...
...It is a struggle for orthodoxy of an ideological and religious order...
...I asked another question, "Is it true that you have opposed the professors and some very important state figures...
...It all seems extremely medieval...
...The Russians and the Anglo-Saxons talk about the Red Guards as if they were juvenile delinquents or worse...
...I asked them, "How do you feel about the Cultural Revolution...
...The immediate one is that, as I have already said, the Red Guards are children on a crusade...
...They laughed politely, sweetly, sympathetically...
...In other words, imagine Italy split in two between two movements, each claiming orthodoxy and accusing the other of heresy...
...I knew that in China, in order not to increase the over-abundant population, people were advised (that is, basically, ordered) not to marry before the age of 30...
...Are you for Mao against the Party...
...They were very young, probably under 20, and had a cordial, timid, yet very self-assured air about them...
...All four were holding Mao's book in their hands...
...When do you marry in China...
...One of the Red Guards asked her if she was frightened, and she replied, "Not at all...
...It also demonstrates the extraordinary vitality of the political struggle in China—its fertility, its inventiveness, and its complexity...
...And since examples are always more pertinent than explanations, here is one that illustrates the curious mixture of infantilism and fanaticism of the Red Guards...
...In 1207, a fanatical 12-year-old shepherd boy named Stephen, equipped with a letter he claimed had been sent from Christ, managed to collect thousands of boys and girls from all over Europe...
...P'ing-p'ing has a broken leg...
...But the chivalrous Red Guards, "protecting her from the indignant crowd," helped her into an automobile...
...In the sense of making the courses political...
...Distraught, their eyes red with tears, President Liu Shao-chi and his wife, Wang Kuang-mei, rushed to the hospital—only to learn from the Red Guards that their daughter was alright, that it was all a plot, and that Wang Kuang-mei would have to come with them for a solemn public act of self-criticism...
...But with the same argument (Are you for or against Mao...
...But they seemed to me to be political Boy Scouts, children on a crusade...
...Yes, but for their own good...
...It is a story reported in one of their newspapers under the significant headline, "Don't Be Afraid to Wash Your Dirty Linen in Public...
...As late as possible...
...Imagine that the debate is extended to the entire country and that the country participates passionately, with poster newspapers, assemblies, demonstrations, parades, etc...
...So that we can travel, come together, and see Mao...
...I hoped for an invigorating cup of good tea, but I was disappointed...
...The result was that at 10 o'clock in the morning, in front of 20,000 Red Guards, Wang Kuang-mei was forced to an act of self-criticism...
...The conflict concerns a very simple but extremely important point: Is the Russian system of party control from above, or the Maoist system of leadership by the masses from below the more orthodox system...
...Many of them had patches on their elbows and knees—clean well-sewn patches, but patches nevertheless...
...Abroad they have been called hooligans and Hitlerjugend(in Russia),delinquents (Anglo-American Rightist version), Chinese beatniks (Anglo-American Leftist version), Praetorians (Formosan Chinese version), and so on...
...And before marriage there is not that frequently total relationship which is euphemistically called an engagement in the West...
...So between a wise old man, a learned man, say, and one of you, a 20-year-old or even a 15-year-old, which would you choose...
...One might well ask, why doesn't Mao, who has the power to do so, arrest his opponents (beginning with Liu Shao-chi), try them and execute them as Stalin would have...
...One of us, a 15-year-old...
...To begin with, a group of Red Guards went to the high school where Liu P'ing-p'ing, Wang Kuang-mei's daughter, was herself performing an act of self-criticism, and took her to a hospital...
...Instead there was the demure tinkling of cups full of simple hot water...
...And to reorganize the courses...
...Why...
...At that moment a young girl came in with an enormous thermos...
...Have you read Marx...
...They are babies in their freshness, their ignorance, their innocence and their aggressiveness...
...Children, I repeat, children with a luminous poverty and an unsuspecting chastity...
...Alberto Moravia, a previous contributor, recently completed a tour of Red China...
...but mainly they are babies in the candidly religious quality of their faith...
...There by a simple argument (Are you for or against Mao...
...The Red Guards are totally ignorant and they have complete faith in Mao, a total religious conviction that tomorrow might take them, innocent and fantatical, to war in a North Vietnam or a North Korea...
...But the third is more far-reaching still...
...As soon as they reached the hospital, the two discovered that Liu P'ing-p'ing was perfectly alright...
...To educate them, to teach them, to bring them back to the road of the revolution after they had started on the road to capitalism...
...The story tells how the Red Guards succeeded in getting the wife of President Liu Shao-chi to come perform a public act of self-criticism...
...they too were drawn into the plot...
...she was persuaded to take part in the conspiracy...
...Yet nothing is more characteristic of the Red Guards than the complicated, infantile and, as it were, Boy Scout method that was employed...
...But for me they brought to mind a historical comparison: the Fifth Crusade, the so-called Children's Crusade...
...The revolution of youth...
...I did not persist...
...Then the 15-year-old telephoned her mother: "Mother, come at once...
...The mother, a clever woman, sent a trusted friend, Comrade Li, together with her younger daughter, 15-year-old Liu T'ing-t'ing...
...What opened instead were the holds of sinister trading ships, which carried the children not to the Holy Land but to Algiers, where they were sold as slaves...
...The operation, in the innocent and ardent prose of the newspaper, consisted of literally forcing "the notorious number one thief of Tsinghua University," Wang Kuang-mei (Liu Shao-chi's wife's name), to criticize herself before 20,000 students, professors and workers...
...This is the norm in China: No clothes look pressed, and I have even seen patches on the knees and elbows of soldiers...
...Imagine that some cardinals take the pope's side and that others stand up against him...
...It's our revolution...
...What is involved, then, is not a struggle for personal power on the order of Stalin...
...If there had been a secret police in China like that of Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, one knows what would have happened...
...Man must dedicate himself first to the revolution and then to his family...
...By Alberto Moravia "Reorganize the courses, how...
...This time "the serpent came out of her hole...
...Meanwhile, another group telephoned Wang Kuang-mei at home and told her that her daughter had broken her leg in an accident...
...Mao does not want personal power based on violence, as Stalin did...
...The poverty of the Red Guards is such that they cannot even afford a tea bag costing less than a penny...
...His impressions will appear in a book to be published this fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, The Red Book and the Great Wall, from which this article is adapted...
...He does not want President Liu Shao-chi killed...
...I wondered...
...Imagine that at the same time, though, despite such violent disagreement, all Italians agree on the inviolability of the institution of the Church...
...That's all there is to it...
...But when they reached Marseilles, the waters did not part...
...Inside the automobile, however, Wang Kuang-mei pulled herself together...
...He wants him to change his mind—that is, to realize that he is a heretic and to abjure his heresy...
...What is the moral of the story...
...The second is that all authorities (professors, superiors, party and political leaders) are trampled in the dust, except Mao...
...China is not anti-sexual, it is asexual...
...The poor mother, suffering a kind of momentary collapse at this point, deflated "like a punctured balloon...
...No...
...Thus there is a political struggle of a religious kind in China, yet on the foundation of a basic political and institutional unity...
...But Mao is not Stalin...
...Why have the universities been closed...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 13
