The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, by Chen Jo-hsi & The Coldest Winter in Peking, by Hsia Chih-yen
London, Miriam
BOOKS IN REVIEW - The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Chen Jo-hsi / Indiana University Press / $8.95 The Coldest Winter in Peking Hsia Chih-yen...
...She is wholly unaware that she is sailing through a story and, indeed, is not turned toward the reader (who watches in humble fictional company from a passing boat) but gazes delightedly at the scenic wonders on the river shores...
...This involves more than a dispute over ideological consistency, since our assessment of Communism's capacity to undergo fundamental change depends largely on how we interpret the relationship between Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...Hardcover $9.00, Paperback $3.50...
...During the worst years of Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union, many intellectuals were able to save their minds, if not their souls, by burying themselves more deeply in their professional work, especially in the "safer" abstract sciences...
...The Red Guard in the title story who "could not bear to take off his olive-green uniform long enough for it to be laundered, so his collar and cuffs were always shiny with oily grime," is typical in his adolescent posturing of the first arrogant Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution—whose mothers, indeed, had Miriam London is a researcher in Soviet and Chinese studies...
...Briskly written...
...At the same time, Marxist critics of the Stalinist order (most notably Trotsky and his followers) and a growing number of scholars contend that the dictator either betrayed the master's principles or, for one reason or another, pursued policies that constituted a decisive break with Leninist traditions and practices...
...Imbalance of Power is MUST reading for every concerned American...
...Norton / $19.95 Abraham Ascher For decades students of the Soviet Union have grappled with the question of the relationships between Stalinism and Leninist Bolshevism and between Stalinism and Marxism...
...She was already a published young writer in Taiwan when she left for graduate study in the United States...
...Professor David G. Boyd, Naval War College Review The most authoritative, complete assessment of the U.S./ Soviet balance that the American citizen and Congress have had available in unclassified form...
...But the real Jen Hsiu-lan has lived and died outside this story...
...As a few recent residents of that city attest, Hsia knows Peking well —and the little of historical interest in his book stems from this knowledge...
...I was filled with a desire to record everything I had seen and had witnessed, so that none of it might perish into oblivion...
...Yet Chen Jo-hsi is not a professional scholar...
...The real narrator behind the pseudonymous "I" in several of the stories that followed upon the seven-year silence is precisely this observer—a sane, decent, unobtrusive human being, who is also exquisitely alert (at times like a frightened mouse) and does not miss a trick...
...The "stinking intellectuals" of China, under the obscurantist reign of Mao Tse-tung, were not so lucky...
...The spiritually broken professor in "Residency Check," like many other politically branded people in China, became a perennial target of "struggle" or—to use a witticism of the New China—the "performing athlete" of every movement...
...The reaction itself, however, is significant in suggesting the limitations of Chen's art...
...W]hat has the Cultural Revolution done to culture...
...defense intelligence and national security, this comparison of U.S.-U.S.S.R...
...It is too late to tell him that he might do better just to write from his own experience...
...General W. C. Westmoreland A nonpartisan account . . . enhanced by on-the-scene reportage...
...To order these books, or for a copy of our catalog, write...
...Kirk's scholarship is admirable"—New York Herald Tribune...
...On the other hand, Hsiao Chang, the clever young physicist of the Academy of Sciences in "Keng Erh in Peking," easily navigated every change of course and survived to live pleasantly and well...
...Ironically, it is this bathos, often found in the amateur writing of Chinese recently from the mainland, that helps mark Hsia Chih-yen's genuineness as an insider...
...Publishers Weekly Why did we get involved...
...She did not write a line during those years—except perhaps in a diary, as a small episode in the story "Residency Check" suggests—but it is evident that she became an extraordinary observer...
...A History Book Qub selection IMBALANCE OF POWER Shifting U.S.-Soviet Military Strengths John M. Collins/Anthony H. Cordesman A superb handbook which collects masses of comparative data in one volume, presents it in a highly usable form, and provides cogent and useful analyses...
...An able championship of conservative philosophy"—American Historical Review...
...It may be that those most familiar with Chinese reality tend to take its clear reflection in Chen's work for granted...
...involvement from the almost innocuous decade-long advisory role into the morass of an ever-growing commitment...
...this view in order to legitimate Stalin's policies...
...She will never turn and see the China of Chen Jo-hsi...
...One of the most thought-provoking books of our generation...
...The connection between this preface—especially its stated purpose—and the potboiler that follows is hard to fathom...
...she is really writing for the West...
...As the fate of the good Mayor Yin demonstrates, honest loyalty to the fickle party line could be the most dangerous course of all...
...Chen Jo-hsi's stories are, perhaps, too bound by the author's expository purpose to allow creativity its own free and mysterious way...
...Colonel Palmer traces U.S...
...Thus, in "Night Duty," a recently returned overseas Chinese, doing labor in a "May Seventh" collective farm in northern Kiangsu, is greatly shocked to find that the farm must be guarded nightly against the very peasants from whom he and other intellectuals have presumably come to "learn...
...The sorriest of all Chen Jo-hsi's characters is the poor wreck of a formerly' spirited, brilliant young scholar, glimpsed once on a summer evening leaning against his front door, open-mouthed and "motionless, like some kind of fossil," staring into the vacuity of his own life...
...Spring is bound to come...
...A combination of the work of two of the best-qualified analysts of U.S...
...The pseudonymous author of The Coldest Winter in Peking, Hsia Chih-yena middle-aged emigrant living in Japan—writes as an insider, but, unfortunately, his book cannot be taken seriously...
...Will move its reader pleasantly through a chapter of American history that too commonly is told only from the dominant, the Jeffersonian, side of the record"—St...
...The former take Abraham Ascher is professor of history at Brooklyn College, City University of New York...
...32 The American Spectator November 1978 The general reader may mistakenly discount as imaginary the single most important fact in the book: the existence in China of underground organizations of conspiratorial youth—although not, according to certain young Chinese emigrants, in the numerical force described by Hsia...
...In addition—as natives of the New China sense—her viewpoint is still that of the onlooker at a perceptible remove from the insider's China...
...In "Jen Hsiu-lan," one discovers among various persons forced to make public confession at a Nanking University mass meeting "a Red Guard who had taken a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf while ransacking the library, and after studying the book thoroughly...had made it his personal bible...
...The answer is embodied in the once-promising student and lover of books whom he now observes daily hammering old tin cans into kerosene stoves, with the placid concentration of a madhouse inmate cutting out paper dolls...
...the returned overseas Chinese asks himself in "Night Duty...
...It is painful to learn that Hsia, evidently encouraged by the success of the original version of his book in Japan—a baffling phenomenon in itself—is at work on a second novel of this genre...
...Come on...this is what really counts: 'Here is wine, let us sing /For man's life is short.' ") One should not imagine that Chen Jo-hsi has produced a kind of political coloring book...
...Senator Howard Baker, Jr...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...Satisfaction guaranteed At your bookstore, or order from Presidio Press Distribution Center, Box 978 SP, Edison, NJ 08817 r ^ SUMMONS OF THE TRUMPET ^ IMBALANCE OF POWER $12.95 ISBN: 0-89141-0414 56.95, paper ISBN: 0-89141-059-7 ^ Latest catalog of books on military history and current affairs...
...In his modest and touching preface he tells of a moment in Peking, "around 1960," when he suddenly "deeply regretted that I had not studied literature...
...Charge my ^MC ^Visa 0 American Express Card Number Expires The American Spectator November 1978 33...
...The import of such disparate detail may not be obvious to the general reader, but the overriding theme of Chen's stories is plain: It is the real effect on people living in China of Mao Tse-tung's extreme and treacherously shifting policies, which have been the subject of so much airily abstract analysis abroad...
...For the latter, the demonstration of such links reinforces their conviction that the attempt to implement utopian goals inevitably leads to disastrous consequences...
...Hardcover $9.00, Softcover $3.00...
...It is possible without risk of error to generalize from the particular almost anywhere in Chen's stories—even from seemingly incidental detail...
...Was it really the state alone that thwarted the marriage plans of the lonely bachelor Keng Erh, or his own submissive slowness...
...The issue bears not only on our understanding of historical events but also on our analysis of current Soviet affairs, and thus on our estimates of the probable directions of Soviet policies...
...Never has an historian of politics done a better job of this kind"—Samuel Flagg Bemis in The Yale Review...
...Please send titles checked to: Name Address City State Zip ^ Payment enclosed...
...by Robert C. Tucker / W.W...
...In 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution began, she and her husband acted daringly on their faith in the Maoist dream and went off to live in the People's Republic...
...Kirk is author of The Conservative Mind and other books...
...Ironically, some of the most ardent defenders and many of the sharpest critics of the Stalinist system have agreed that there was a direct and continuous line of development from Marx through Lenin to Stalin...
...People who live in severely regimented societies, her characters seem to suggest, are neither crueler nor kinder than elsewhere, only weaker—swaying compliantly with the political winds (like "grass-onthe-wall," as the Chinese say) in the wistful hope of sustaining their scrap of normal life with its ordinary pleasures and troubles...
...Why did we stay...
...The Westerner in search of Chinese reality will find it reflected not in the romantic effusions of a Han Suyin but in Chen Jo-hsi's low-keyed stories, at last accessible in excellent English translation...
...According to the translator of The Coldest Winter in Peking, its style "derives unmistakably from traditional Chinese narrative," but to this occidental eye, the book looks distinctly more derivative of a Western political thriller, with every ingredient from top-level panic and hot lines to Natasha, the creamy Russian spy (stepping, undressed for action, out of her last fictional assignment...
...bbertyPress LibertyClassics We pay postage on prepaid orders...
...He writes of mistakes, aggression, and brutality on both sides, and of lessons that must not be lost...
...Chen Jo-hsi makes us watch and listen, as in "Jen Hsiu-lan," when she takes us in search of the fugitive Jen, the once-fierce heroine of the Cultural Revolution, and even on a visit to the dark cell from which she fled...
...Had she withstood a little longer her confinement in a "study class"—that innocuous-sounding psychological compression chamber—a new reversal of political line might have averted the sickening last act in her life...
...Everything she writes is true," said a young woman who fled Canton in 1975, and then added, startlingly, "But the book that really impressed me, when I read it in China, was The Diary of Anne Frank...
...LibertyPress/LibertyC/assics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...Al2 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250 The American Spectator November 1978 31 situation true not only of his poor mountainous area in Shensi, but of similar regions elsewhere in China...
...it is not easy to write accurately and well...
...You'll be all right if you just get on the bandwagon quickly," he tells his colleague, Keng Erh, as he refills the latter's glass...
...Their stay lasted seven years...
...military forces shakes the foundations of long-held concepts about national strategy...
...Even for an initiate, however, it is sometimes hard to ascertain where the author's fantasy ends and truth begins...
...will...pass...
...By the time he has got this far in the book, the reader understands: It is not an accident that Han Suyin's eyes are averted...
...The fact that constant patrols are needed there to prevent theft of food supplies by hungry peasants comes as no surprise to anyone who has analyzed Chinese internal broadcasts or talked to emigrants in Hong Kong...
...The strongest of Chen Jo-hsi's characters is undoubtedly the sexy P'eng Yil-lien of the "large and curvaceous" breasts, who manages to be an enchanting butterfly among worms bundled in cocoons and is faithful to her husband after her fashion...
...BOOK REVIEW Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation Ed...
...The villains and heroes of the propaganda hack are nowhere in her stories...
...A number of recent emigrants from the China mainland who read Chen Jo-hsi's stories when they first appeared in 19741976 in the Hong Kong press, while unanimous in confirming the truth of her work, often add: But all this we already know...
...This edition includes sixty-four essays, practical and political, on farming and the social order of an agricultural republic...
...There is actually more strict accuracy of report in Chen Jo-hsi's fiction than in many a " documented"— and unreadable—product of Sinological scholarship...
...BOOK REVIEW The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Chen Jo-hsi / Indiana University Press / $8.95 The Coldest Winter in Peking Hsia Chih-yen / Doubleday / $10.00 In the next to last story of The Execution of Mayor Yin, the reader catches a surprise glimpse of the "glamorous" writer and Mao-idolater, Han Suyin, in the prow, of a tour boat on the Li River near Kweilin in southern China...
...Northern Kiangsu is one of the more impoverished areas in China...
...Arator By John Taylor The most popular and influential work by John Taylor of Caroline, foremost philosopher of the conservative Jeffersonians...
...The most persistent after-impression of Chen Jo-hsi's stories, however, is that of crepuscular sadness and waste—a perverse, dumbfounding waste of human intelligence, talent, and industry...
...The fanatic leftist, Jen Hsiu-lan, in the story by that name, was a creature of the Cultural Revolution, which then reversed itself to destroy her...
...Unsurprisingly, it was not a party secretary, who sought to crush her in the name of Communist morality—quite the contrary, in fact—but a pack of good, proper, envious women...
...and after the first chapters, the distinction ceases to be troubling—everything seems equally unreal...
...But, somehow, one feels that P'eng Yil-lien will win out handily...
...Chen Jo-hsi's stories may resemble Chekhov's," said a young man who had read many privately-circulated copies of Russian classics in China during the late sixties and early seventies, "but after a Chekhov story something deeper remains—something to think about...
...Miriam London trouble getting them to remove their dirty military jackets...
...The literary technique attempted by Hsia is a familiar one: the convergence of disjointed episodes and separate human destinies toward a climactic event—in this case, a coup in Peking...
...The old kinsman of Mayor Yin, in the title story, who notes that "even though the People's Government tries its best, we suffer from famine if there's a spell of bad weather," and that "there are still times when people must chew leaves and grass and the bark of trees," is describing a Available: allable: John Randolph of Roanoke By Russell Kirk A masterful study of one of America's best, but least-known, political thinkers...
...The case of this Red Guard is not a mere oddity served up by Chen Jo-hsi for special effect...
...The clear, easy flow of the stories is due to the writer's skill rather than to reduction of a complex truth...
...Edited and with an introduction by M. E. Bradford...
...I wanted to preserve the historical evidence...
...Research among young Chinese emigrants has turned up a number of instances of Hitlerian influence on Red Guards and in places other than Nanking...
...In the opening chapter of this collection of essays, Stephen Cohen points out that the notion of a "fundamental continuity" between Leninist Bolshevism and Stalinism has been a premise of most Western IF YOU WANT THE FACTS SUMMONS OF THE TRUMPET U.S.-Vietnam in Perspective Dave Richard Palmer A comprehensive, objective, and highly creditable synthesis of America's involvement in Vietnam...
...I felt very much like Anne Frank then...
...So much fantasy has been written about China in the last decade, it seems a folly that Hsia Chih-yen, in the name of honest realism, should concoct more...
...In any case, he does not live without small consummate pleasures—likeeating mutton fire pot in Peking to the accompaniment of a wine called Bamboo Green...
...Included in this third edition are appendices containing several of Randolph's most important speeches and a representative selection of his letters...
...Noticeable also are cliches borrowed from the files of socialist realism (model heroes, guaranteed to "self-destruct"—this time by throwing themselves against Soviet tanks in Inner Mongolia) and a moist application of modern Chinese bathos (e.g., the dying words of Hsia Yu-min, young intellectual-of the anti-Mao underground: "Winter...
...The kindest thing that can be said is that the author, lacking both talent and literary skill, labored so hard at constructing "fiction" that he did the job: Not a living person or unmangled truth survives his effort...
Vol. 11 • November 1978 • No. 11
