After the Nightmare
Heng, Liang & Shapir, Judith
AFTER THE NIGHTMARE: A SURVIVOR OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION REPORTS ON CHINA TODAY Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro/Alfred A. Knopf/$16.95 Susan Ruel ike China itself, Liang Heng has led a life...
...The Yangs let it be known that she had been taken away by the same ghosts who had entered her mother and robbed her of the boy that was hers by right...
...Chinese accused of petty crimes or caught wearing Western clothes and listening to Western music were punished...
...This is not surprising when one recalls that the reforms were born less of liberalization than of failures in the Chinese economy and the need to make changes so people could eat...
...Why have they failed to express their opinions fully...
...To everyone's surprise, the unfortunate father was taken off to spend a year in prison for murder...
...closer to the pulse of national politics than landlocked Hunan, mind-numbing propaganda reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution lived on, in spite of the economic reforms...
...Considering all the traumas revealed in Son of the Revolution, the couple returned to China the way an abused wife might return to her husband...
...Having taught at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute until late in 1982, I can attest -that even in a city much Susan Ruel is a writer living in New York City...
...Became a leader...
...Those applying to join were usually hypocritical activists and class spies, hated by all...
...he gapes at the abundance of bicycles and motorcycles and notes that a new glass skyscraper has shot up...
...Mercifully, the crackdown waned in early 1984...
...Yet, in their book-length amplification of these magazine articles, the authors include few cautionary notes, indeed few editorial judgments of any kind, save for sanguine asides on how much better life in China is today...
...In the authors' stunning words: "Although an enormous number of arrests and executions were carried out as part of an autumn crackdown on crime, such important concerns as political imprisonment, violations of due process and capital punishment are beyond our scope except insofar as they affected the general climate for intellectual freedom...
...Yet how easily they condone such outrages as mass executions, female infanticide, political imprisonment, religious discrimination, and artistic repression...
...Sometimes it seemed one could never be certain of anything in China . . ." This tells me that Liang knows better than to hope for an unbroken march of progress in China...
...The baby disappeared during the night...
...All I can come up with are several paragraphs, a few phrases, and some writing between thelines that hints the authors agree with this or that viewpoint, in a monologue delivered by somebody else...
...In the closing chapter of Son of the Revolution, Liang bemoans the ignorance of Hunanese middle school students whom he taught in 1981, well into the "enlightened" era of Deng: I expected to see great differences between the education these post-Cultural Revolution-era young people were receiving and my own "Revolutionary" education, which had been so narrow and burdened with slogans...
...I have read After the Nightmare four times now, combing it for straightforward expressions of opinion and philosophical passages...
...Great changes for the better were under way in China...
...Are they genuinely confused about what is going on in China...
...Have they decided that the best way to influence policy-making in China is to flatter and cajole...
...I had departed for the United States as a dissident, believing I would never see China again," Liang writes...
...Whatever his reason, he has chosen to fall silent on the very lesson China taught him best: that the Chinese people still are not protected from tyranny by an SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB, CHANNEL 3, CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE KTVN, CHANNEL 2, RENO, NEVADA WTTS, 923 FM, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WGTC, 1370 AM, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WAJI, 951 FM, FORT WAYNE, INDIANA CORPORATE OFFICE, BOX 62 BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA 47402 TELEPHONE 812 332 7251 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 45 authentic system of law...
...It is a truism of Sinology that Chinese history has unfolded in an endless series of oscillations between strictness and laxity on the part of the authorities...
...As he himself states in Nightmare: "People shot to the heights and plummeted to the depths in the space of a moment...
...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987...
...1 It is clear what sort of tone is being set in the opening pages of After the Nightmare...
...Then a Chinese official in Washington "suggested to my surprise it was high time I go back and have a look for myself...
...The book provides a dispassionate summary of the passionate subject of the shifting climates of Chinese intellectual freedom from 1979-85...
...Yet the conclusions that may be drawn from the random testimonies of people with whom the couple happened to speak during their quick trip through seven provinces cannot be compared with the truths to be derived from the lifelong experiences of one human being...
...B ut between the Life article and the book came yet another piece, in the New York Review of Books...
...While Liang warns of the dangers of "sloughing off the Cultural Revolution like a bad dream," that seems to be precisely what he has done...
...town of Changsha immediately conveys his new attitude...
...Even the stark moral issues of the Cultural Revolution turn murky...
...No one was being taught how to think...
...My life was just that crazy...
...Endearingly nicknamed "Little Hunan" when he served as a mascot Red Guard, Liang soon found himself demoted to the dregs of society, at the mercy of his family's shifting political fortunes...
...Answers can be found in Liang's autobiography...
...Liang's old friend Peng Ming, who with Liang took part personally in the detention and torture of a noted concert pianist and later was associated with the Gang of Four, is portrayed as a great guy...
...As, an old woman quoted in the book remarks, "Only a fool forgets the pain of a wound once it has healed...
...Why then, in the September 1985 issue of Life magazine, did Liang and Shapiro write about Liang's trip back to China as if it were the return of the prodigal son...
...Until that problem is addressed, the profits and losses of the individual Chinese lemonade-stand entrepreneur are of far less significance than Liang and Shapiro would have Westerners believe...
...After the Nightmare is written in narrative form, much like Son of the Revolution was...
...Far more disturbing than the book's formal flaws is a non-judgmental quality that verges on amorality...
...In a mere four years, Liang seems to have forgotten everything he has ever known about the never-ending cyclical upheavals of Chinese life...
...While noting that "what the Party seemed so freely to have given, tomorrow it could as easily take away," Liang ends the article with a roseate assessment of how China has changed since he left...
...The blind obedience that had made the Cultural Revolution possible was being fostered still...
...In 1983, a full four years after Deng had instituted the economic reforms in agriculture, he launched an anti-spiritual pollution campaign...
...In the past, we had stayed as far away from the Party and its activities as possible...
...As the recent wave of student demonstrations and subsequent suppression of dissent have shown, anyone familiar with the vagaries of Chinese public policy canbe sure of but one thing: no condition is permanent...
...He makes the following analysis of his friend's transformation: 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 Joined the Party...
...In his autobiographical first book, Son of the Revolution, written with his American wife Judith Shapiro, he describes how the tumultuous experience of growing up during Mao Tsetung's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) converted him to belief in fortune-telling...
...The authors interview Liang's relatives, several former Red Guards, three unfortunate women who were victims of the Cultural Revolution, a leading architect of the economic reforms, and a number of farmers...
...That magazine article was expanded to book-length and became After the Nightmare: A Survivor of the Cultural Revolution Reports on China Today...
...I could hardly believe it...
...Upon learning that one of his old friends had joined the Chinese Communist Party, Liang writes that he was at first nonplussed, then elated...
...Liang himself writes that he was "convinced" the campaign would "lead to another Cultural Revolution...
...Then the county officials came and made an investigation...
...What else could a man in his position have been expected to do...
...The opening description of Liang's home'Nor does the book Cold Winds, Warm Winds: Intellectual Life in China Today, written just before Nightmare and recently reprinted by Wesleyan University Press, shed much light on what its authors think...
...Still more upsetting is the way the authors present, in a playful, almost bantering tone devoid of any comment save irony, an anecdote on how the responsibility system has led to a resurgence of female baby killing in the countryside: Then quietly, the problem was resolved...
...To relax them much further would put its position as ruling party in jeopardy...
...It is no wonder I believed in fate," he writes...
...But to my surprise, little had changed...
...In that story, Liang and Shapiro voice reasons why they cannot be unabashedly bullish on China: "In our view, the Party has gone as far as it will go in loosening control on speech and belief...
...It was so unfair, the Guos complained...
...Do they simply want continued access to China in order to make a career out of writing books on the subject...
...It was in 1979, the same year that Deng permitted the agricultural sector to adopt the "responsibility system," that he also waged a crackdown on the Democracy Wall movement, rounding up dissidents and throwing them in jails and labor camps, where many remain today...
...The fact that the book lacks an index makes it even harder to analyze...
...I t is difficult to understand what mo- 1 tivates Liang and Shapiro to editorialize so little...
...Having survived a dark night of the soul in which, falsely accused of being a "counterrevolutionary" and threatened with jail, he is tempted to commit suicide, Liang is inexplicably released the next day...
...Many were put to death...
...Under Deng Xiaoping, life in China unquestionably became safer and more comfortable, but no country can change overnight, especially a tradition-bound one like China...
...The official suggests that the "general mood of the country was good...
...AFTER THE NIGHTMARE: A SURVIVOR OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION REPORTS ON CHINA TODAY Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro/Alfred A. Knopf/$16.95 Susan Ruel ike China itself, Liang Heng has led a life filled with vicissitudes...
...No one knows this better than Liang Heng, whose autobiography illustrates what a sharp memory he possesses...
...Half a page later, explaining that supporters of the economic reforms were joining the Party to dilute the ranks of old-guard leftists, Liang concludes, "I could not help admiring my honest old friend for his courage in taking on these knotty problems and wondered how he would acquire the political skills needed to survive...
...The implication is made occasionally that the authors agree with the people they are interviewing, but Liang and Shapiro never fully explain what they think...
Vol. 20 • April 1987 • No. 4
