China in Our Time

...To the contrary, while acknowledging that there had been some turmoil, the Atlantic chronicle and his subsequent book were full of fabulous achievements rivaling the accounts of Marco Polo...

...Overall, he concluded, the ordinary Chinese person saw "such spectacular benefits" from Chairman Mao that he found life acceptable...

...I did not understand," he says, "that the Communist revolution was a deceptive façade behind which lay a mixture of social change, political repression, and cultural continuity...

...Understandably he is at pains to date his disillusionment with China before the slaughter on Tiananmen Square, though he is hardly alone in not having predicted it...

...Although he had begun the journey from Deng much earlier, Tiananmen represented a grave breaking point for Ten-ill, who had arrived in Peking for another one of his visits just hours before the tanks rolled in: The real tragedy of communism in China became clear when an entire generation's cry for individual self-realization through democracy was silenced by a regime part of whose mission had been to free the individual from a prior bondage to a despotic emperor system...

...Far from discrediting his message, however, these admissions had the effect of lending his interpretation more credibility...

...It is no less a saga and by far the more compelling tale...

...This was a fitting denouement to Kissinger's note in his own memoirs how the carefully manipulated images of Nixon visiting China simply "overrode the printed word...

...The `privatistic' alternative," he wrote, ". . . is not a glittering one...

...The Middle Kingdom was again ready to receive him, after an absence of seven years...

...In retrospect it remains extraordinary, but for quite the opposite reason: we now know that the author of these pieces had no knowledge of what was really going on in China, either...

...And: "After observing the Cultural Revolution from distant Harvard, I was most struck by China's partial recovery from the chaos of the 1960s, and less disturbed than I should have been by the ongoing grotesqueries of totalitarianism...

...recognition for Hanoi...

...A merger has occurred at many points—a new kind of tao (way) emerges...

...William F. Buckley, Jr., who read the articles as he prepared to cover Nixon's historic 1972 visit, was more blunt, calling him "the way station to Orwell...

...Along with other enthusiasts of the day, Terrill imbibed deeply of the myths of New Maoist Man...

...Those without prior commitments might have described the "real tragedy" as, not of, Communism in China...

...At the time, however, it was much in fashion...

...Those busy condemning Deng today as the "Butcher of Beijing" are the same folks who only a few years earlier had bestowed on him the ultimate journalistic accolade: "pragmatist...

...The future Terrill wrote about so enthusiastically twenty years ago has yielded to obituary, with the Communist era poised to take its place in the history books with the myriad other dynasties that the citizens of the Middle Kingdom have seen come and go...

...Chinese-style Communism, he found, was a kinder, gentler version of the Soviet style, rather suited to its subjects: It is no longer simply "Communists" on one hand and "Chinese society" on the other...

...But the presence of television cameras, there to record the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev, ensured that the image of a benign and ever-reforming Chinese Communism was exploded for an American audience...

...This is why Tiananmen proved such a crushing embarrassnient...

...I embraced the guilt of the Western world for having bullied China," he says, and these words should be read in the context of Harvard, Vietnam, and the student demonstrations racking the country...

...This same sense of foreboding doubtless helps to account for the autumnal air that hangs over China in Our Time...

...China in Our Time is consequently less a chronicle of Chinese history than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress for Sinologists...

...And ordinary Chinese flocked to what they built as though it were paradise...

...This makes possible a Dictatorship by Idea (rather than by force...

...Because he was Australian, moreover, he was not bound by the ban on travel to China by U.S...

...Indeed, the impetus for the invitation was a trip to Peking by the leader of the Australian Labor party, Gough Whitlam, the first of many to try to play the "China card" (and not the last to discover China had played him...

...Terrill began his career full of earnest, left-wing Christianity, searching for that elusive "third way" between American capitalism and Soviet Communism...

...Dimly I wondered if there could be something of a similarity of impulse between the idealism of the newly established Peace Corps and the apparent idealism and zeal to learn from the grass roots of Chinese Red Guards and professors who were `going to the countryside.' " History has not treated such talk kindly...

...China had endured repressions before, and the apologists are right to say (though it is a curious defense) that the bloodshed in June 1989 was relatively small compared to many of the regime's other efforts...

...All this is by way of essential background to Ross Terrill's latest treatise, China in Our Time...

...Today we are in the thick of the same debate over U.S...

...Speaking of the huge anti-American demonstrations on Tiananmen during the Vietnam war, he writes, "I did not then understand the fearsome social organization (through the blandly named 'street communications') that ensured a massive turnout for those officially triggered demonstrations...

...Terrill quotes a Peking University professor who puts his finger on what will remain the party's greatest crime against its people...

...Even the old opium traders, missionaries, and mountebanks of colonial Hong Kong and Shanghai start to look better in retrospect, because they at least left something in their wake...

...The transformation of Formosa from a Nationalist-warlord fiefdom into the world's twelfth largest trading power and the first genuine Chinese democracy was hardly inevitable, and was completely overlooked by the experts...

...T he practical consequences of this clatter were enormous...

...I pictured Mao as a modest, principled Eastern sage revolutionary," he admits, "but this image missed his vanity, his streak of pragmatism, and his deep respect for Stalin and the Bolshevik Revolution as foundation stones of socialism...

...For the most part Terrill does a good job of rummaging through old recollections and writings and setting them out against history, even where they prove embarrassing...

...And we would likely have seen continuity, not irony, between Mao's announcement of a Communist state and Deng's act of suppression on the stage of Tiananmen Square...

...The Harvard academic was Ross Terrill, and the result of his trip was an extraordinary portrait of China published later that year as a two-part series in the Atlantic Monthly and, ultimately, as a book, 800 Million...

...At variouspoints he cites the Cultural Revolution as having slashed bureaucracy, boosted industrial production, reformed the education system, and improved health care...

...Over the years the author's image of China has come into sharper focus, not only because of the knowledge he has accumulated but because of the intrusion of a wisdom that was almost entirely absent from his writings in the 1960s and 1970s...

...Ironically, both Mao's Liberation and Deng's suppression were signalled to the world from that same historic Tiananmen Square...

...And because people such as Ten-ill had been to China and wrapped these pretensions in reporting, their judgments had more apparent credibility than the opinions of those who could only drone on about the nature of Communism...

...Ponderously subtitled "the epic saga of the People's Republic, from the Communist victory to Tiananmen Square and beyond," it would have been much more accurate to substitute the words "Ross Terrill" for "the People's Republic...

...Not only did the resulting enthusiasm for the People's Republic lead observers to overlook its serious fault lines, it also blinded them to the more revolutionary and tangible achievements of the little Chinas, i.e., Taiwan and Hong Kong...

...This may be what gave me an impression in China of pervasive yet light-handed control...

...It is not like Poland or Hungary, where the Communists are a blanket spread over the body social...

...China could do no wrong—no Helsinki process for Peking—and no less a figurethan Pope Paul VI could talk about the PRC's moral claims while many of his priests and bishops were clanking their chains in its prisons...

...As with most things Chinese, however, there was more to it than that...

...Even this could have been handled had there not been another, intervening factor: television...

...It was as if Owen Lattimore," wrote Buckley, "travelling through Siberia with Henry Wallace, had reported not that the Soviet Union did not maintain concentration camps there, but that the Soviet Union did indeed maintain them, in great profusion, but that even so, Soviet life was ardently to be cherished...

...citizens...

...During the heyday of the China watchers the argument was always that China's distinctiveness meant that all the normal rules had been suspended...

...But almost two decades after Mao's death his portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square, a reminder that what unites Communists—Lenin's theory of power—is far more important than the assorted varieties of economic development...

...To be sure, the ultimate rationale for Nixon's trip to China had more to do with strategic imperatives than with any love for Maoist China (China's reasons, Terrill makes clear, were similarly cold-blooded...

...Still, Tiananmen Square remains everat the back of the author's mind, and with good reason...

...This is but a taste of things to come...

...At myriad junctures, Terrill alludes to the puppy love that began with his first visit as a student and continued through much of his academic career...

...Not only did it come in a country that was supposed to be fundamentally different from the Party despotisms of the Soviet bloc, it came from the leader most associated with reform...

...he quotes an archaeologist as crediting Red Guard destruction for helping to discover hitherto buried antiquities...

...More valuable is his willingness to explain the source of this gullibility, which happened to be dissatisfaction with his own society...

...In his classic work, Chinese Shadows, the Belgian Simon Leys, without mentioning Terrill by name, needled him as "a valiant academic journalist who visited China on one of those standard tours [and] wrote a book of a fairly impressive size, which he had the guts to subtitle The Real China," and scored him for having the vanity to believe he had in fact got to the life of "real people...

...Surely it cannot continue to escape the notice of conservatives that the Communist regimes that have proved the most resilient are precisely those we have cut off: North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam...

...Again: "I later realized that the excitement of discovering a truly different society had made me too open-minded, and the feeling of being engaged in counteracting the stupidity of the nonacknowledgment of China had made me insufficiently skeptical of the Chinese Communist party...

...But those who argued that refusing to engage China meant giving up a chance to influence China were certainly correct, and trade has not only helped create an emerging middle class—it has ensured that the regime will at least pay a price for crimes such as Tiananmen...

...By no means is China in Our Time one long mea culpa, but the frequency of Terrill's self-criticisms is nonetheless striking...

...All the old ethics were destroyed," he says, "but nothing new has come...

...4 Oddly enough, in the rush to paint the blackest possible picture of the Deng regime, Terrill may inadvertently be undermining himself in one area where history has proved him correct: the reestablishment of trade and relations with China...

...It was an unintentionally revealing choice of words...

...If there is an irony to China in Our Time, it has less to do with any transition from Mao to Deng than with the transition of the author himself...

...What nonetheless distinguished Terrill from others of the day was that he made no attempt to cover up those unfortunate aspects of the PRC that conflicted with his overall theme of socialist Shangri-La: bricked-up churches, lack of intellectual freedom, stifling social control...

...In sharp contrast to earlier efforts, this is the work of an older and (in most ways) wiser Terrill...

...Peking was also planning for a secret visit by the American national security adviser, Henry Kissinger...

...Not a single word in his series criticized the Cultural Revolution, arguably the most horrifying period in Chinese history...

...Of course, even then there were a few brave souls who dissented from the idea that Mao had liberated the Chinese from human nature and repealed original sin...

...What made it so extraordinary was the vividness of the portrait, the richness of detail of Chinese life at a time when Americans had virtually no knowledge of what was going on in China...

...He further manages to present the rough contours of China's Communist history and the personalities around Mao in exceptionally readable prose...