BROKEN IMAGES: CONVERSATIONS IN HONG KONG
Leys, Simon
Simon Leys is the pen name of a distinguished scholar who teaches at an Australian university and specializes in Chinese painting and literature, subjects on which he has published five books and...
...but luckily, because to that point he had demonstrated sincere Maoist fervor, attenuating circumstances were conceded and he was finally let off the hook by signing a confession in which he recognized the full horror of his crime, pledged his sincere support, and swore to sin no more...
...above all, the relatives and friends they meet again invest objective information with that essential and irreplaceable human dimension that escapes other visitors...
...How is one to blame him...
...the external exigency that requires him to adjust to the milieu replaces any subjective notion of sincerity, which becomes clouded, gradually loses all relevance, and finally disappears...
...even before leaving China, many of them have developed a surprising familiarity with the topography of Hong Kong, and can name sections and streets of the city as readily as people who have lived there for years...
...It is rather the Maoist camp that might better be worried by the sudden influx of such recruits, in case the prophecy of Lu Hsun should be borne out: "A revolution is dead when opportunists begin to join its ranks, for from that moment it is consumed from within...
...He tells me about a friend of his who was studying English at Sun Yat-sen University...
...Sometime later, during a peak famine period, he suddenly received permission to leave China...
...The aggravation of her neurosis was accompanied by short periods of lucidity, during which she was able to measure the extent of her breakdown...
...It is all too easy to speak ironically of this document, pointing out that practically none of its articles was ever complied with, not even those having to do with simple procedure—for example, articles that established the periodicity of elections, sessions of the National Assembly, etc...
...He was assigned to work beyond his strength (moving steel track) but was nonetheless required to 1OChung-kuo hsiao-shuo shih luch," in Lu Hsiin ch-i anchi, vol...
...In all large cities and all communication centers, high-ranking members of the bureaucracy had repaired in a body to railway stations and docks where, under the eye of cameras, they had solemnly shouldered the boxes of ballots waiting to be collected...
...I I Once again they try to reduce the Maoist regime to the petty dimensions of macabre buffonery in the style of General Pinochet or Colonel Amin...
...He pursued literary studies at a university in Central China, then worked in a film studio in Manchuria...
...Every day, the press and the radio praise his virtues in chorus, his picture is displayed everywhere, walls are covered with posters declaring his to be the one correct line...
...It is not confined to a certain race or a certain territory or a certain government...
...The camp inmate, on the other hand, is delivered of this lamentable freedom that dooms the ordinary mortal to grope his way through the shadows...
...The new Article 27 does guarantee the altogether academic right of citizens "to lodge a complaint in writing or orally" against illegal actions performed by any employee of the state...
...Opinion in the West has looked down on our country for too long," a Chinese colleague said to me, more or less in these words...
...Laden like beasts of, burden, they are bent by the weight of heaps of shabby goods that, on the other side of the frontier, will suddenly endow them with an aura of "uncles from America...
...Well, if they were traitors, that would be found out sooner or later...
...Ignorance makes it possible at least in good faith to confine these obligatory denunciations to a routine formality...
...In order to perceive the specific nature of Maoism, these episodes of violence and sadism must be put back into context, and then they appear as what they really are: false notes, misfirings of the engine...
...Paradoxically, it is his generation that is now 3Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung...
...i.e., the child of a proletarian, of a poor or middling-poor peasant, of a revolutionary, or of a Party member...
...One of these dour-faced men then drew from his wallet the exhibit: it was the sheet of paper on which the student had scribbled during the meeting...
...He is a pipefitter by trade and has served as education director for the UAW...
...People raised pigs and poultry, and burned off small plots of bush around them to farm in the primitive way...
...14, 1974...
...Thirty years ago, when the mandarins of the left were confronted with proofs of the existence of the Stalinist camps, they were plunged into a great dilemma: by revealing the truth, did one not risk driving the working class to despair...
...Apart from the fact of ignorance, which always makes it notably easier to reach hard and fast conclusions, for us the problem is intellectual—i.e., onedimensional...
...They were discouraged by the materialism of the people around them, by the humiliation of being subject to a colonial regime, and were fired by the victory of the revolution in their mother country...
...Peking, 1963...
...More than 25 years ago, Victor Serge pointed out in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary that...
...It is what society 374 would be were its managers able to overcome the thousand and one forces of resistance and inertia that everywhere conspire to block the immediate nationwide realization of a certain conceptual model, a vision, that so far exists without hindrance only in the mind...
...there, returned to live in Mao's China...
...During the past few years he has spent a good deal of time in England...
...When the Cultural Revolution began, Lin Pin aimed his witty barbs at the Maoist hysteria, which led the Communists to make an example of him...
...Does routine make crime less shameful...
...And if this brave phalanx is ever parted from its Mao, it will still have in reserve—Eastward, ever Eastward!—its Kim 11 Sung...
...I am not happy here...
...She believed that the television screen was a sort of window through which "they" were observing her without her being able to see "them...
...There was no aftermath, but the student swore to himself that never again would he spontaneously speak to a foreigner...
...To put it more exactly, he had pumped me on the subject, while for his own part he had maintained a prudent reserve...
...One of the latter, who has asked the colonial administration that his status as a British subject be restored (he would like to get a passport and leave Hong Kong, to go as far away as possible, for he feels unsafe so near China), reminds me ironically...
...Unfortunately for the young man, he was stubborn: not only did he show himself incapable of seeing the situation sensibly, realistically, but he also had the impudence, bordering on madness, to invoke against the Party's paternalistic authority the famous Marriage Law of April 30, 1950, which guarantees an individual the free choice of a spouse...
...Some of my new friends' accounts did deal 357 with contacts between Chinese and foreign visitors...
...A marriage was being celebrated in traditional style, and the inhabitants of the tiny, lost hamlet invited him to share their feast, which was abundant...
...How could one expect men who have been humiliated for so long, and who have only now lifted up their heads, to denounce Maoism, which has given them a new status in Western eyes...
...In all other sectors it is practically impossible for an individual branded with "bad social origins," however gifted he may be, to reach a position that matches his aptitudes...
...The regime is reduced to invoking, for purposes of contrast, situations that prevailed more than a quartercentury ago...
...Oh, if I'd only known I would have kept them for myself...
...PHILIP GREEN teaches government at Smith College and is the author of Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence...
...young man enjoyed one of the most enviable positions in the People's Republic—employment as a worker in an important enterprise in a large urban center...
...So, do you know what they're using them for...
...In the main, refugees prefer to have to deal with conscripts in the People's Liberation Army, who are fairly decent, rather than with the militia, a paramilitary peasant force whose members are frighteningly brutal...
...they had not seen each other for almost 30 years...
...The Chinese authorities were caught off guard by the request for a return visa...
...his mother, a courageous and energetic woman, strove mightily to hold her numerous family together, but M-- remembers often going hungry during that period...
...People who were saturated in that adventure as adolescents truly do seem to constitute another race of men, characterized by a mixture of almost brutal determination, cynicism, harshness, and fierce independence...
...Every day, hundreds of people from among the lower-class residents of Hong Kong return to China on a short visit to relatives in various villages in Kwangtung...
...professors in Paris and Tokyo than in all of Russia.6 In the China of the People's Republic, the situation is even more paradoxical...
...He also describes how, in Shanghai, the house of the great painter Liu Hai-su was sacked...
...one speaks of political matters only with close friends who belong to other units...
...With four companions, two intellectuals and two fishermen, he bought a boat...
...l —tells me about one of his colleagues, an engineer in a Tsinan factory, who invented an improvement for a certain machine...
...now they were reduced to four...
...Please mail to: • DISSENT, 505 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...French ed...
...I want to go back...
...So I suppose that again there will be tender consciences to protest in the name of the working class against the frivolity with which Pasqualini's revelations threaten reborn proletarian hopes...
...Peter's into a stable, confident in himself and because of personal experience that such an episode, regrettable as it may be, involves no serious consequences since That alone which really counts dwells in him and could not be harmed in the slightest by this pathetic foolishness...
...Two principles must be observed: (1) Say all you know and say it without reserve...
...China needs qualified linguists, especially in English, and is now endeavoring in every way to train as many as possible...
...Off the beaten track, nowhere to be found on any map, forgotten by the bureaucrats, the village lived in complete independence...
...The mere mention of such a thing made M-- burst into tears: no, it was impossible, monstrous, it was an aberration after waiting all these years for the one chance of getting an exit visa, after achieving the scarcely to be hoped for miracle that had 376 reunited them, how could one destroy such happiness forever...
...Under Mao, China has finally begun to enjoy a prestige throughout the world that she has not known since the reign of Ch'ien-lung...
...How are you ever able to decide whether your leaders at a given moment are orthodox revolutionaries or whether they are usurpers, since by definition they control all the organs of propaganda and hand out the certificates of good behavior or of treachery...
...the new methods employed to dominate the mind of the masses are those of large-scale commercial advertising with, added to its irrational basis, an element of insane violence...
...Suicides are not rare among the young...
...Little by little to foist on public acceptance the myth that illiterate workers are more capable than trained specialists of making technical improvements and scientific discoveries is fraught with danger for the future...
...Thus, products manufactured in China eventually come into the possession of the Chinese population after having made this lucrative detour via Hong Kong, thanks to which they have enabled the People's Republic to reap a harvest of foreign exchange...
...L—, who had worked in a research institute in Peking, described to me the dismaying punishment she had one day felt obliged to visit on the younger of her two sons...
...It is not the hard life that maddens us," P-says, "it's the injustice...
...In the 1954 constitution, the section on civil rights included 19 articles...
...once she explained that today in China family quarrels arise always at table, when the food is being divided—hence her policy of serving herself as parsimoniously as possible in order not to invite criticism...
...M--, 35, left China ten years ago with a legal exit visa to come see his father, who was living in Hong Kong...
...The majority of those arrested make a second try "Lin Pin was a variety artist who produced a weekly satirical skit in Cantonese for Radio Hong Kong...
...But then it will be too late...
...It engenders a feeling that engineers, researchers, scholars are, after all, superfluous...
...What happiness...
...F-spent three years preparing for his escape...
...377...
...She had become rather attached to her daughterinlaw, and occasionally was quite relaxed with her, even to the point of making small confidences...
...She now longed to return to the familiar landmarks of her daily existence, to her little hovel, her neighbors in poverty— all implacable and sordid parapets of her tottering sanity...
...in an initial phase, the prisoner adopts this mode of acting and thinking the way an actor assumes a role...
...Now, the Kuomintang's capacity for understanding Maoism is roughly that of a small bankrupt trader's ability to grasp the workings of the Rockefellers' fortune...
...As always, it is the offspring of Party bureaucrats, "the new class," who are the most insufferable...
...What's more, these visitors are asked to buy their cargoes of gifts in the big Communist stores in Hong Kong which dispose of 369 foodstuffs and other consumer goods that, within China, are beyond the means of the average buyer or are actually reserved for export and simply do not appear on the domestic market...
...you say...
...T.S...
...He spent the academic year 1975-76 at Columbia University...
...But you, endowed with greater political perspicacity, you see through all that...
...A month after, M-- told me that she had finally sent him a postcard with a brief message saying that she had arrived safely...
...There, too, it was a matter of the child's future anA the clan's security...
...To find Marxist thinkers, one must turn to the capitalist countries, or to Socialist countries that revolve culturally in their orbit...
...In Hong Kong, generally they eat better than in China but often are worse housed...
...The reason: within the same unit, people always risk having mutually to accuse each other...
...In China, the difference between the camp inmate is less a difference of status than a difference of degree...
...He had quite a hard childhood and youth: his father was killed in action during the war...
...they threw light on my own experiences while in China...
...If he had won, on the other hand—technically, a perfectly conceivable hypothesis, given his position, his gifts, and the power he already held just as inevitably Chou En-lai and company would pass today for being counterrevolutionary traitors...
...The student had whiled away the time recreating from memory several characters from Charles Schulz's "Peanuts...
...Chou En-lai, "Report on the Work of the Government," Jen-min jih-pao (People's Daily), June 27, 1957 Periodically totalitarianism pays homage to democracy by adopting a constitution...
...instead, surreptitiously she would make off with bread or dry biscuits, which she would nibble on in bed, under her quilt, with all lights out...
...In Hong Kong, people who have left China stick quite close together, for they have in common an indescribable experience that their new associates do not understand or are indifferent to...
...English translation published by the Foreign Languages Press, Peking...
...Initially, the management people in the industrial establishment where he worked had simply refused to forward his application, and he was forced to set about buying their complaisance by doing odd jobs for them in their homes (plumbing repairs and such) and giving them trifling gifts sent by his brother in Hong Kong for that express purpose...
...To tear or soil his portrait, for example, is a serious crime...
...Actually, what above all else drives people to attempt escape is probably the irrepressible desire to be in charge of their own destiny, and the feeling that even if things do not work out well for them, at least the full range of the possible will be open to their children...
...Today, the Maoist regime has not liberated the individual...
...A very clear indication of the degree of despair to which hunger had reduced the population...
...This done, he goes on his way but as he leaves the store, a Public Security agent (political police) accosts him and asks him to come along "for a little talk...
...The majority are young and athletic...
...At last, the secretary of a local committee of the Party became friendly and wanted to secure for F- a decent, stable job in a factory...
...M--,who is a teacher from Kwangchow, tells me that one never discusses politics with people one does not know well, or even with close friends if those friends belong to one's political unit...
...all people ask is that they stay within bounds...
...363 During an earlier visit to China, in 1972, I raised this objection with one of my guides while on a trip in the provinces...
...But for the Chinese—and this includes those who have established themselves abroad yet for whom Maoism is 371 nonetheless an existential problem because of relatives back home—it assumes quasigeological proportions...
...Reeling under the shock, he is tempted to say that such violence must have a superior justification that passes his understanding...
...The British police in Hong Kong, however, have lost all sense of proportion, which has rightly made them objects of scorn and hatred...
...I defy anyone to finish it without feeling increased respect for the Chinese people, people so irreducibly 373 human that they are able to preserve a sort of basic decency (the "common decency" that was the leitmotif of Orwell's political thought) even in conditions that could not be more precisely calculated to shred the intimate texture of their humanity...
...Here we were—they Chinese, I a foreigner—rambling on about daily life in China, pouring out our hearts...
...One might well think so, for these incidents, which occur several times a month, have long since stopped arousing a ripple in public opinion...
...In his school, as everywhere else, there were giant bonfires of books from the library and from teachers' private libraries, as well as of books that had been confiscated in middle-class city homes...
...There can be only one answer: Chinese leaders have only contempt for the Chinese masses...
...Both P-- and F-- confirm that grave disorders did indeed upset transport and communications during the autumn of 1974 and for a moment threatened to paralyze the national economy...
...What proletarian Proust will describe for us the 365 workings of this upside-down Jockey Club...
...Discretion, reticence, even silence have made the Overseas Chinese largely fail in their mission as observers, for which their incomparable knowledge of Chinese affairs equips them...
...For similar reasons, J. Pasqualini observes that in the camps inmates are forbidden to sing "The Internationale...
...He cannot conceive that a lie on such a scale is possible [but] the brutality of it intimidates him and somehow makes the deception credible...
...But could one put together an analogous list of Russian Marxists...
...Such tactics can succeed, obviously, only in troubled times and provided that courageous and critically minded minorities are gagged or reduced to impotence...
...His book, Prisoner of Mao, coauthored with the American journalist Rudolph Chelminski [New York: Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1973...
...However, underlying this despair there is a common denominator in their various destinies: all of them came up against the same unscalable wall of suspicion on the part of the Chinese authorities...
...It would just happen...
...She related in detail what had happened to her...
...why recently Kwangchow had found itself without vegetables for some months, etc., etc...
...Slavish natures are always seeking a master...
...360 overwhelming impact...
...Be careful not to spread slander about the mother country, otherwise you risk arousing the anger of the revolutionary masses, and in that case you have only yourself to blame for all the serious consequences that would ensue...
...As they see things, it is not really relevant that different behavior might be expected of an ignominious and completely decadent colonial government than from a young republic that wants to be socialist and revolutionary...
...Leaders at all levels have the duty to listen to others...
...In certain provinces—Anhwei, for example—so many people died of starvation that the countryside seemed depopulated...
...If Lao She, Fu Lei, and so many others have committed suicide, it is, I believe, 364 because they had the brutal, unbearable revelation that perhaps China, too, could be mortal...
...one encounters this leitmotif, now in a major, now in a minor key, from Dostoievski's Grand 9"San hsien chi," in Lu Hsun ch'uan-chi, vol...
...It's a Cock-eyed world, John...
...The consequences will become obvious the day when the old specialists, the men who received a rigorous old-style training, will all have disappeared and there will no longer be anyone to produce the new inventions that can be credited to the "genius" of the uneducated masses...
...In August 1967, in Hong Kong, Lin Pin and his cousin were assassinated before my eyes in the most atrocious and cowardly way...
...Several orthodox Maoist songs have been changed into "escape songs...
...Pasqualini's account is irreplaceable if one is to understand this process...
...Were they to be published, they would throw light on the way in which, in the People's Republic (to paraphrase lonesco), it is out of the sorrow of men that the happiness of mankind is paid...
...conquered, you are a mere felon...
...has no more dangerous foe than a critical intelligence, and therefore works relentlessly to exterminate it...
...The bounty paid for each corpse fished from the river was a munificent eight yuan...
...in China today, there is no more wretched, thankless profession...
...A single painting was saved...
...By chance, he came upon a hamlet of only three farms...
...Some obtained a regular exit visa as Overseas Chinese, others escaped at the risk of their lives...
...Only in the sciences and strategic industries (nuclear physics, aeronautics, etc...
...The China they left in the aftermath of the war was a despairful chaos— rotten, ravaged, and bled white—and now they find it strong, clean, orderly, and verdant...
...Taking off from Pasqualini's evidence, one could readily conceive of an Orwellian projection of the future in which all of society would have become one immense camp...
...Their expressions set and severe, they told him that a very grave incident had occurred that afternoon: an unspeakable anti-Chinese action, a counterrevolutionary provocation had been committed that required an immediate investigation...
...Prisonnier de Mao, Paris: Gallimard, 1974], is a remarkable account of Communist China's prison system and life in that concentration-camp society...
...or, another time, how boys with bayonets stabbed the corpses of rebels strung up on lampposts along a street in Kwangchow, and then, as a diversion, slit their bellies, spilling out the guts...
...To cite only one example among many: A former colleague of mine, educated in England from the age of 15 and having earned a Ph.D...
...when they meet a foreigner who shares their painful obsession, they welcome him warmly, put themselves out to introduce him to other friends who, they think, will be better able than they to make him grasp what it is really all about...
...The older boy, six, had been busy with his penmanship homework: it was a matter of copying out a hundred times "Mao chu-hsi wan sui"—"Long live Chairman Mao...
...Unlike ordinary tourists, they can assess the changes that have taken place...
...Thereupon, he wrote, as did his father, directly to Chou En-lai...
...The numerous visitors coming from Hong Kong, especially students, are openly questioned by young people in Kwangchow who seek all sorts of information useful in their own escape plans...
...They made a break with their families, their milieu, and with the dry rot, the slackness, and the compromises of the old world...
...He was born in Hong Kong, and when he was 17 he defied his parents and went to China, moved by patriotic feelings and a hatred for the colonial government...
...The meeting over, he crumpled the page and, without a thought, tossed it in the wastebasket...
...Oh, may Chairman Mao drop dead...
...in an intense, total, and permanent way, the inmate is exposed, entirely naked, to the devouring sun of orthodoxy...
...The conversation of these humble people is strikingly apolitical...
...The second option is no less committing than the first, for in this system to agree to survive means to renounce being oneself...
...Day after day, she returned to the attack, and obstinately ignored her son's distress: she had made her decision, no one could sway her...
...The great sociologist and anthropologist Fei Hsiao-t'ung recalls in an essay how in his early childhood, even after the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty, his loving parents had punished him severely for offending, all unawares, an imperial taboo...
...Acts of l8se-majeste toward Mao, even when involuntary, are punished with particular severity...
...For him, the decision to leave China seems to have been a response to an imperious moral exigency...
...This bit of lapidary wordplay perhaps sums up best the skepticism with which the masses now react to watchwords issued by the authorities...
...After several years of applying and reapplying, an exit visa was finally issued, and mother and son were reunited in Hong Kong...
...I gave him a rdsume of what was being said abroad about the affair, and told him how I personally interpreted it...
...A number of atrocity stories are reported, and for the propaganda arm of the Kuomintang the temptation to take them out of context and stitch them together has been irresistible...
...Having done my best to satisfy his curiosity, I thought it legitimate to feel him out in turn on this delicate terrain...
...I personally, perhaps not"—his frankness made me like him even more—"but other people certainly will, sooner or later...
...Those who are picked up by the English authorities are given a dry pair of pants, a bowl of soup, and are conducted to the frontier...
...Over the past few years he has spent much time studying and writing in Sweden...
...They try to trip him into contradictions, to make him confess that it was no chance meeting, that he actually knew the foreigner...
...When, furthermore, these people are teachers, university professors, and researchers whose job is, precisely, to analyze and make known the whole of China—her history, her society, her culture—their witness should possess an even greater authority, and this places a special responsibility on them...
...At table, she was careful not to eat her fill...
...For the latter, even if they are refugees, even if they are opposed to the regime, the person of Mao preserves some intangible that elicits if not affection, then at least a sort of respect...
...The unemployment problem in Chinese cities is never mentioned in the West, yet it has grown to considerable proportions...
...After several hours, his firmness prevailed over the doggedness of his questioners, and they released him...
...When he realized that she was wearing shapeless rags as underclothes, he bought her the softest and most comfortable undergarments he could find to replace them, but his mother was frightened by such luxury and instead of wearing them hid them...
...He is a scholar, archeologist, aesthete, and a collector of worldwide fame, whose entire existence is nourished and justified only by this culture...
...Periodically laid low by illness and coughirg blood, he returned to Kwangchow, where he vegetated for ten years during which time it was impossible for him to find regular work because he was not "of good family...
...For a long time, workers accepted a sort of sacrifice, confident that their situation would be eventually improved...
...However, since for her TV was a pleasant distraction, the solution she found to reconcile her pleasure with her safety was to watch it from the secure vantage of a corner or while half hiding her face behind an opened newspaper...
...T-- says he received his early literary and art education thanks to the pillaging during the Cultural Revolution...
...In every area, insofar as efficiency, productivity, discipline, and especially ideological control are concerned, the Maoist camps represent the most gigantic "leap forward" ever achieved in the world history of the concentration-camp universe, which with them is finally entering upon its golden age...
...Late in 1974, in Kwangchow, the Public Security took advantage of the movement to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius to carry out a big cleanup: a list of death sentences for various offenders was posted on walls to serve as an example and warning to the citizenry...
...A childish falsification...
...They seemed superfluous to me, given the political atmosphere of that moment...
...Son of man, You cannot say or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images...
...However, one must remember that these encroachments of the collectivity on the individual private life were always the actions of natural communities, and that insofar as possible these communities themselves lived free and independent...
...To a by no means negligible extent, it is placing on the shoulders of the laboring population of Hong Kong the task of provisioning and equipping several southern prefectures with consumer goods...
...He was equally unable to persuade the authorities of his good faith...
...A conqueror, you are made a baron...
...This marriage, therefore, in the best Chinese tradition constituted "a perfectly matched union" (men tang hu tut...
...In the notably juicy Cantonese dialect, she was roundly cursing the unhappy impulse that had led her to buy some lengths of expensive wool for cousins she had just visited in China...
...The younger boy, four, asked him to come out and play...
...Their clear conscience, combined with their prejudices, can lead them to massacre the innocent and even to place the destiny of the state in peril...
...For Westerners, pro- or anti-Mao as the case may be, it is relatively easy to reach firm opinions about Maoism...
...He never received a reply, and finally was refused any more visaapplication forms...
...T-- claims that the problem of hunger, although much less acute, still remains to some extent, even in theoretically prosperous areas like Kwangtung Province...
...But he had soon to change his tune: try as he might, he could not introduce his lugubrious censors to the charms of "Peanuts...
...Maoism—and for some people one must keep repeating this—is not simply a Kuomintang that has succeeded, a red terror, pure and lasting, that has replaced a corrupt and inept white terror...
...it is essential to be "of good family" (ch'u Shen hao)—that is, son of a worker, a poor or middling-poor peasant, a soldier, or, best of all, an influential Party official...
...9 There is no more implacable policy than one that aspires to make mankind happy...
...It seems that their advantaged skills not only have not served to illuminate Chinese realities but sometimes actively helped to obscure or distort them...
...In just the modest framework of my personal relationships, I have had access to a rather impressive number of oral confidences or of travel notes privately circulated among a few people...
...The material conditions of his life leave him indifferent, here as in China...
...the old woman retorted...
...They persisted in thinking it impossible that this could be an innocent incident: just think of it—to put words praising the Great Leader in the mouth of a DOG...
...This leads us to a second kind of misreading, the reverse of the first, and one that, for the sake of convenience, I will call "the Fairbank reading...
...STEVEN KELMAN, a teaching fellow at Harvard University, is the author of Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest, of Behind the Berlin Wall: An Encounter in East Berlin, and many magazine articles...
...Among his books are The Public Vocational University and New Politics in American Policy...
...his feet are placed on the straight and narrow path that infallibly leads to salvation...
...In return, people struck a sort of tacit bargain: they were prepared to bear patiently the burden of heavy taxes and to support a parasite class of bureaucrats, and even the emperor himself and all his court, so long as officials refrained from intervening in their private affairs and respected the autonomy of their traditional way of life...
...actually, the opposite effect is produced...
...In China today, Marxist ideas, dated as they are, still carry such revolutionary potential that the authorities cannot risk letting them be diffused except through strict Party control...
...What he fears is that the Chinese people may in the end adjust to whatever regime and whatever leaders so long as things do not go too far and their masters allow them to glimpse the possibility of simple, modest survival...
...For example, she got it into her head that some 60 people (among them the torturers who had beat her so cruelly 20 years before) had followed her all the way from the north down to Hong Kong...
...But by that time F-- had already begun to prepare his escape...
...On the basis of our constitution, the citizens of our country enjoy extensive democratic rights and freedoms...
...by playing the game you are changed by the game...
...The responses of readers and influential critics have varied but indicate that, in a way, public opinion is already quite well prepared for eventual domestic variations of this Maoist recipe...
...This country, one periodically the victim of famine and natural disasters, is now very nearly able to feed its people, to cope with droughts, and to control its fearsome rivers...
...10017...
...Unless the principle of "Don't blame the speaker" is observed genuinely and not falsely, the result will not be "Say all you know and say it without reserve...
...EDGAR LITT, who teaches political science at the University of Connecticut, often writes about educational policies...
...No less important, perhaps, than what they see in China today is the part played in more subtle fashion by their experiences over too many years in the West: the humiliating situation of the exile, the man without a country, who is the butt of thinly veiled scorn or insulting pity...
...It's not up to me to open their eyes...
...they came about through the initiative of friends...
...The joys and miseries they meet on both sides of the frontier are expressed in such personal and concrete terms that it is up to the listener to extract as best he can a more general significance...
...neither promises nor currency, when unbacked, could be continually issued without provoking a crisis...
...The attack took place in front of my door, as I was leaving the house...
...in that event, it would be the Party secretary who would be arraigned and held responsible for having helped a bourgeois infiltrate the proletariat...
...On the other hand, since the proletariat seems to have acquired the insolent habit of thinking for itself, without consulting its benevolent father confessors, the latters' objections have lost much of their pertinence...
...The blind enforcement of this rule has led to an incredible waste of talent, and has caused the People's Republic to alienate an immense cohort of specialists...
...He is detained at Public Security headquarters for the afternoon and subjected to an intense interrogation at the hands of several investigators who spell each other...
...Everyone prefers, therefore, not only to reveal as little as possible about himself to potential accusers but, above all, to know as little as possible about friends whom sooner or later he may be led to denounce...
...adjustment to the milieu requires the adoption of a certain way of acting and thinking...
...In postCultural Revolution China, the slender little book became, in the government's view, a genuine time bomb sleeping in the shadows of libraries...
...Fifteen years after the event, images of the yearslong famine that followed the Great Leap Forward remain engraved in everyone's memory...
...In the course of these conversations, my new acquaintances and I often felt amazed at our luck...
...F-- recalls how old men were forced by schoolboys to kneel on shards...
...The final success of the operation does not even require the patient to be sincere...
...However, the more her son and daughter-inlaw tried to surround her with attentions, the more she withdrew in agonized distrust...
...All right, I am supposing that the bandit and traitor Lin Piao has succeeded in seizing power and he has eliminated all his rivals...
...At night, T-and a few comrades would steal from their school's pile beat-up volumes that struck them as interesting, and then would swap their booty among themselves...
...In the course of a meeting that was dragging on, he had mechanically used the pencil and pad set before him to doodle without rhyme or reason, the way one does when one is bored...
...About two months after these emergency maneuvers had been undertaken to appease the workers, the new constitution of the People's Republic appeared, which for the first time granted them the right to strike...
...When fugitives have surmounted all such dangers and are about to set foot on the other shore, they must still elude the vigilance of the British police...
...The Source of the Peach Blossoms became the symbol par excellence of a world preserved on the verge of history, in simple, happy isolation...
...Today's pro-Chinese illusions are not much more intelligent or informed than the anti-Chinese prejudices of yesterday, but at least they are not vicious...
...Every morning she would study the "Apartments for Rent" ads in the newspaper, for she believed that "they" were trying to find lodgings all around her son's residence (she was then living with him) in order to enclose her within range of their surveillance...
...2 So, if it is correct to say that the Chinese have long known authoritarian rule, it is also necessary to specify that for them the present state authoritarianism is without precedent and can thereby be a source of frustrations no less painful for the Chinese than for a people with a stronger tradition of individual freedoms...
...The corollary to the ban on all socially impure elements, notwithstanding the good will they demonstrate, is that "wellborn" people enjoy all the promotions...
...What do you call sooner or later...
...The question of social background plays a preponderant role in the People's Republic...
...are there exceptions to the rule whereby men of suspect origins but also of genius are permitted appropriate careers...
...These reflections have never failed to impress readers...
...The Western public scarcely imagines to what point this kind of consideration has succeeded in gagging a large proportion of these travelers, and efficiently dammed a flood of revelations about human conditions in China today...
...Pajamas...
...In the Kwangchow region, clandestine emigration to Hong Kong is so widespread that it has given rise to a secret but lucrative business—for example, one People's commune specializes in the sale of boats to night travelers—and also to a sort of folklore complete with proverbs and songs...
...To paraphrase Zamyatin, the only way to deliver men from evil is to deliver them from freedom...
...It was not seemly, it was not conceivable that the son of a reactionary marry a "wellborn" young woman (ch'u Shen hao...
...That same evening, three official personages came to see the head of his delegation...
...the artist's own work and his collection were burned...
...The culprit having been identified, he was subjected to a long interrogation...
...P-- had been a worker in a big factory in Wuhan before he left China, late in 1974...
...Within the camp, redemption is inescapable...
...S-- is a student, born in Kwangchow...
...The next day, the Hong Kong Communist daily, Takungpao, published a victory bulletin about the killing by "the commando charged with punishing traitors...
...They insist that he reconstruct for each of them in turn the precise tenor of the few remarks he has exchanged with the foreigner...
...He quite realized that his philosophy degrees would be of little use there but, with a certain amount of common sense, he calculated that his knowledge of English, which he spoke as if it were a second mother tongue, would at least allow him to offer his services as translator or interpreter or teacher...
...The illustrious American scholar has remarked, a propos of the Pasqualini book, that if one compares the Maoist and the Soviet camps, "the comparison is entirely in China's favor...
...Usually, these letters went unanswered, but cases have been reported in which, after several years, the petitioner's grievance was redressed...
...How is it, then, that with far too few exceptions, they have as a group fallen short—sometimes keeping silent, sometimes mouthing what we could already read in China Reconstructs or any other propaganda sheet...
...But her psychological state spoke more eloquently than her words of the sufferings she had gone through...
...His name was removed from his invention, which was credited to a group of workers in a shop in the same factory...
...For all that the concession was to remain entirely theoretical, it does make one understand better how grave the labor unrest was to have warranted its adoption–especially when one remembers that, in other respects, this same constitution suppressed most of the individual and civil rights guaranteed by the constitution of 1954...
...After countless vicissitudes, and armed only with courage and his own talents, he was able to establish himself extremely well...
...He is now married to a charming woman, who comes from the same province as he, and he is the father of two fine children...
...However, for people under 30—and today they constitute half of the country's population—this conjures up an abstract, almost mythical notion, and these images of a tragic past become stereotypes and cliches by dint of being ritually, mechanically repeated...
...This threat seems to have made a deep impression on C...
...According to him, you are invited to open your heart, invoking the fifth quotation from the 15th chapter of The Little Red Book: Anyone should be allowed to speak out, whoever he may be, so long as he is not a hostile element and does not make malicious attacks, and it does not matter if he says something wrong...
...246-47...
...CYNTHIA PRICE COHEN is a student at New York Law School...
...It is not surprising that one finds in their ranks individuals who, in bygone days, distinguished themselves by the noisy zeal with which they served the Kuomintang, which then held the key to the cupboard...
...Accordingly, on January 17, 1975, the People's Republic was provided with a new constitution stripped of basic provisions dealing with individual rights...
...Former Article 97 provided that "people suffering loss by reason of infringement of their right as citizens by persons working in 366 organs of the state have the right to compensation...
...The bureaucracy itself strove to keep its intervention in clan and local affairs to a minimum...
...The former Article 95 guaranteed "the freedom of the citizens to engage in scientific research, literary and artistic creation, and other cultural activities...
...DISSENT is looking for copies of the following issues that are now out of print: Spring 1975 Summer 1965 Winter 1975 Winter 1964 Winter 1974 Summer 1962 May-June 1970 Summer 1961 • We will be pleased to pay the regular price, plus mailing costs, for any copies we receive...
...Accused of complicity with the Kuomintang (her husband had served in the Nationalist Army) and of collusion with American imperialists (her son has made his fortune in the United States), she had been subjected to censure, harassment of various kinds, and once to such brutal maltreatment that she was half-paralyzed for almost a year...
...T--, on the other hand, is the incarnation of a new human type, disabused and toughened by grueling experience...
...On the eve of the Communists' seizing power, his mother contrived to get him out of the country and, at the age of 15, M--found himself facing the 375 big world alone...
...His mother collared him then and there, and beat him in a way he would never forget...
...The head of the delegation, himself a dedicated Maoist, could not help smiling...
...Lastly, the chief cause of prudence and reticence on the part of these privileged witnesses is the subtle antennas they preserve in China—relatives and friends whose fate can be dramatically affected by all they will say or publish on their return...
...0 ne might think few people better placed to give us a nuanced evaluation of the Maoist regime than the numerous Chinese intellectuals who, after establishing themselves abroad on the heels of the Liberation, have recently returned to visit their native country...
...Others do not even reach the coast: they are shot down in the mountains by frontier guards or torn to pieces by police dogs...
...Just before leaving China, C-- was put through two days of indoctrination in Kwangchow in which he was taught the correct answers to various types of questions that might be put to him in the outside world: what the campaign of criticism of Lin Piao and Confucius signified...
...in normal times, they must be satisfied with sweet potatoes and other substitutes...
...The show was immensely popular both in Hong Kong and on the other side of the frontier...
...Their very idleness testified to the good governance of the area under their administration, just as a doctor's leisure testifies to the good health of his patients...
...How is one to explain the incredibly blatant lies in the official propaganda about it...
...4, p. 85...
...In fact, it is on this score that young people are most clearly set apart from their elders...
...361 turning against its Creator Mao...
...This was very generous of him, for come the next "mass movement," there would always be the risk of some activist's exhuming F--'s undesirable social origins...
...As I listen to them assess the future and the probability of eventual de-Maoization, I keep asking myself whether M-- and T--, as well as many other young Chinese in the same circumstances, are not tempted to extrapolate on the basis of too limited and personal experiences...
...Our after-dinner debates, riddled as they are with irrelevance, bring to mind the question of the newsman who approaches the earthquake victim lying crushed under the debris of his ruined home, and inquires whether the man is for or against seisms...
...Stacks of books destined for the flames used to wait in school courtyards...
...And who, if not Mao, had laid explicit claim to the heritage of Stalin...
...Not merely that...
...otherwise, the chances of their surviving the attempt would be slight...
...Prisoner of Mao, p. 212 Pasqualini's first-hand reportage should be read not only out of elementary solidarity with one quarter of the human race and concern for their political destiny but also because the experiment being attempted in the People's Republic and so well described in this book might well prove to be a sort of prophecy on a planetary scale...
...He is writing a book on the Texas power structure...
...or, had one of the standard visits to a factory or commune given me the opportunity to question them, they could have done no more than reel off the panegyric that one advisedly delivers for the benefit of foreigners...
...Only yesterday, our paths might well have crossed in China, but then we would have had to keep silent...
...from Macao, he smuggled his way to Hong Kong, availing himself of the China Travel Service, which at that time (I don't know what it is doing today) had turned the clandestine immigration to Hong Kong into one of its most lucrative second-string enterprises...
...One way I will call "the Kuomintang reading...
...We spend the whole day chatting—or, rather, I spend the day listening to the painters' stories...
...They had only a very dim notion of a People's Republic that impinged on life in the outside world...
...6"La Russie non officielle: les dissidents et 1'Occident," Contrepoint, no...
...In his admirable novel, The Itinerary of the Rejected Old Man (Lao-ts'an yu-chi), Liu E developed the paradox that claims principled leaders are more to be feared than corrupt leaders: Everyone knows that corrupt mandarins are evil, but few people know that irreproachable mandarins are worse...
...The other, Party member though he was, showed that he was a true friend and simply responded, "Given my position, I can't help you in such an undertaking, but I understand you...
...Neither the sacrifices they had made in breaking away from family and home nor their unquestionable zeal—nothing ever was able to disarm the invincible distrust caused by their colonial bourgeois origins...
...Those who, like P--, choose to escape to Hong Kong are bartering the very real security the Maoist regime assures them for a totally uncertain future...
...In China itself, on the contrary, the Cultural Revolution finally forced some eminent intellectuals to face up to the unthinkable...
...In Hong Kong, this university graduate is now employed as a clerk in a shabby little electrical-supply shop, a position he owes to the kindness of a friend...
...But I do clearly recall one vigorous, plump matron in wide black lustrine trousers, seated tailorfashion on the wooden bench, one hand busy fanning herself with her straw hat, the other hand scratching her toes...
...What is pathetic about the effort is that the ghost of a vanished bourgeoisie appears to the regime to be a still more redoubtable adversary...
...This provision is suppressed in the new constitution, which thereby consecrates the irresponsibility of bureaucrats...
...Many become exhausted and either drown or are swept away by the current in full view of their companions, who are too weakened to come to their aid...
...all these freedoms and guarantees disappeared in the constitution of 1975...
...To really appreciate what such dogged perseverance means, one must realize the dangers and suffering the fugitives are exposed to...
...the rare dissident or incorrigible who might still exist would be subjected to the worst conceivable punishment: he would be expelled from the camp and condemned to freedom...
...He went first to Macao...
...Oh, you know, that kind of thing takes time—fifty, a hundred years...
...T-- expects Mao to lose his standing with the masses more quickly than Stalin did in the U.S.S.R., yet at the same time he does not hide a fundamental pessimism...
...in fact, whereas the first, knowing their own vices, do not dare play the tyrant too blatantly, the second delude themselves that because they decline bribes they have the right to impose any decision they wish...
...Choosing her words carefully, his mother let him understand that she had passed through some harsh experiences and that she wanted to leave China...
...By way of contrast, in second class on the small local train that connects Kowloon with the Chinese frontier (I used to take that train often when I was living in the New Territories), after five minutes total strangers are talking to one another...
...In a way, the camp represents a model, a projection of the future, an ideal society...
...A fire bomb was thrown into his car and he burned alive together with a cousin...
...Her interest in juvenile problems dates back to precollege days, when she was an actress doing volunteer work with New York street gangs...
...This new guardianship is no less invasive and tyrannical than the old family system...
...bid., p. 11...
...Did it not clearly evidence a hatefilled wish to insult the dignity of the Supreme Guide and, through him, to offend the entire Chinese nation...
...So, if now the idiots want to bow down before China, far be it from me to discourage them...
...A modern version of The Tale of the Source of Peach Blossoms5: T-- describes how he 5 Tao hua Yuan chi, the celebrated work of Tao Yuanming, in which a fisherman accidentally discovers a tiny village so totally cut off from the rest of the world that it 362 was wandering alone in a wild, mountainous area of Kwangtung Province, sketching from nature...
...Are you, on your own initiative, going to rise to your feet and, confronting the conformism of your familiars, the pressures of your superiors, and the authority of the Party—are you going to denounce the supreme leader of the moment as a traitor...
...What I chiefly remember now is certain modulations of speech and voice...
...and, if one accepts the sure indications already evident in arts and letters, in culture, and in taste, that ghost threatens to survive, sardonic master of the field of battle...
...I'm sorry that I did not immediately jot down all those snatches of conversation...
...The following article has been condensed from a longer version that appeared in the French journal Contrepoint.—Ens...
...She spoke of returning to China...
...The cruellest of all was that the mania of the lonely old woman was visited first and foremost on the person most devoted to her— her son...
...As for C--, his experiences had been quite ordinary and he had no sensational revelations to make...
...The vast enforced movement of youth from the cities to the countryside is the cause of many tragedies...
...Under the pressure of circumstances, he has felt compelled to bear witness to what he directly experienced of Chinese contemporary society in two books published in France...
...As a policy, this reached a paroxysmic pitch during the Cultural Revolution, which for the young generation was a methodical, large-scale initiation into brutality...
...Eliot, The Waste Land In 1975, during a six-month stay in Hong Kong (a city I know somewhat since I have lived there for five years) I had the opportunity to talk informally and at length with various Chinese who recently left the People's Republic—some with valid exit visas, but a larger number having risked their lives to escape...
...She realized that if she were to continue like that she would go under entirely...
...Then, as a punitive measure, he had been dispatched to the fields: he was being censured for writing regularly to his father in Hong Kong...
...However, the consequences of his father's military service had not been immediately apparent, for initially the 'Chinese name of Canton...
...Taipei, 1974...
...in a proud affirmation of youthful freedom, they left for China...
...The bitterest part of this is that, even if the policy does hit everyone without distinction, for the majority it means permanent exile, whereas young people "of good family" (ch'u-shen hao, which in this instance means exclusively the children of bureaucrats and influential Party members) manage after one or two years to return to the city "by the back door" (tsou hou men) and get themselves hired in lines of work that 359 protect them against fresh deportation...
...Twenty years later, here they are again...
...Yet at least their failure is not attributable to base motives...
...Ergo, once and for all it must be defused (the precedent of dissenters' activities in the U.S.S.R., based on legalistic constitutional grounds, loomed as a stern warning...
...The observation provides a clue to why certain clerics are fascinated with totalitarianism...
...Yet even here there can be exceptions to the rule: three youthful fugitives were crossing a wild valley and fell into the hands of a militia patrol that did not arrest them but instead pointed out the route they should follow to reach the coast...
...At that time, most were adolescents...
...People recopy and pass it from hand to hand, hoping to decipher in its cabalistic cryptograms what the future reserves for them...
...I wish good luck to the bureaucrats whose job it will be to keep people of this caliber toeing the line...
...However, I have no doubt that good Maoists will be able to salvage the story for their own purposes and find that it movingly confirms the soundness of their religion...
...Thus it is that today in China the Revolution is perpetually victorious, just as it is mandatory that the Counterrevolution be regularly routed...
...Nevertheless, it was widely discussed in scholarly publications by serious observers whose attention had been attracted at the time by a campaign orchestrated on a national scale "to galvanize and support the revolutionary enthusiasm of the workers in the transport sector...
...Contrary to what the hirelings of the Department of Propaganda have been quick to claim, Pasqualini's book is not antiChinese...
...There is something touching in the spectacle of these poor people en route to help out others more impoverished than they...
...P--, who used to live near a railroad track, speaks to me of how frequently despairing young people would come to throw themselves in front of trains...
...what was unusual about him was his obsessive, devouring hatred for the regime, although he himself was a pure proletarian and his father the same...
...It was for the safety of the whole family—"Imagine if a neighbor had overheard the kid...
...F --, 38 years old, is physically frail and sickly, but he gives one the impression of having moral strength, and he expresses himself with firmness and precision...
...Many are intercepted on the way...
...All questions are theoretical, and we can argue about them and take positions...
...Invariably, it gave him diarrhea, for his stomach was no longer used to digesting such rich food...
...In the final stages of this evolution— which for Pasqualini stopped at midpoint because he was prematurely set free— adaptation to the upside-down world can become so complete that if the individual is abruptly reintroduced into an upright world he is assailed by unbearable vertigo, which sometimes defeats his every effort to fit once more into a normal environment...
...Whereupon the Party, whose solicitude embraces all, even the black sheep, did a touching thing: knowing in its wisdom that "it is not good that a man should be alone," on its own initiative undertook to present the repentant sinner with a mate...
...In order to induce her to use her new clothes, he had her old rags thrown out, but she took this to mean that her own son was trying to rob her...
...M-- recalls that in the days when he was working in the fields (before the great famine), he received meat only once a month...
...It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that there are more Marxists among university has preserved the customs and clothing of another age...
...I am neither a China watcher nor a professional interviewer, and I did not solicit these meetings...
...in principle, however, I would be the last to make fun of them, for I know too well that in different circumstances such threats could perfectly well be put into effect...
...After all, don't they know from experience that the British custom men and police in Hong Kong are a hundred times more corrupt...
...Quite the reverse...
...T-- is rough, truculent, and enormous—a force of Nature...
...The same could not be said of that small minority of itinerant polygraphs who have made a profession out of peddling the Maoist message to the four corners of the earth...
...Consternation and fear on all sides...
...Albania, given its modest dimensions, could not have supplied stages sturdy enough to support their not inconsiderable egos...
...Statements are made that carry an 2The sole recourse when the blind colossus of the Maoist bureaucracy inflicted some unendurable injustice used to be to write a letter to Chou En-lai...
...to leave Kwangchow would have compromised everything, so he declined his friend's offer...
...her father had the following deal put to him by the custom officer on duty: "Either you agree to sell me the watch or I will have it returned to the sender...
...T-- still remembers how amazed he was not to find any portrait of Chairman Mao on their walls...
...It is from people such as these that I have heard, for example, a whole series of anecdotes bearing on corruption—still tentative and smallscale— among public officials in the People's Republic...
...A British student of my acquaintance, who was visiting the People's Republic with a group of activist pilgrims, discovered to his cost how delicate Maoist sensibilities are in this respect...
...the little fellow replied, with utter insouciance...
...Indeed, in this one area of activity, the People's Democracy is carrying out a useful economic operation...
...Rather than resenting and taking up arms against this "intellectuals' betrayal," it would surely be more useful 370 to try to understand their problems and the complex reasons for their attitude...
...reprinted by Bantam Books, New York, 1967, p. 90...
...It is only logical that when their capital of enthusiasm was temporarily made idle by the Soviet failure they should end up investing it in Peking...
...The gravest crime, ranking above the murders, armed robberies, and rapes that figured on this list, was that of three high-school students found guilty of having secretly organized "a study group of Marxist thought...
...She tells me she saw on it a daring graffitto that changed the slogan "p'i Lin p'i K'ung"—"Critique of Lin [Piao], critique of Confucius"— into "p'i ling p'i k'ung—"Critiquezero, critique-nil...
...they protected their members by fiercely fending off government and bureaucratic interference...
...in actual fact, it has not changed for 20 years...
...Never having benefited from first-hand experience with the Maoist regime, he has never understood what happened...
...They find nothing surprising or even shocking in officials' taking advantage of their position...
...And heaven knows their abilities could have been put to profitable use...
...The pessimists look ahead and the optimists look back...
...During the '50s and early '60s, M-- had requested permission 11 times to rejoin his father in Hong Kong...
...Peking, 1963...
...In the last weeks of my stay in Hong Kong, I witnessed a bizarre family drama that might suitably be reported here in brief...
...I was talking about this one day with one of them...
...But when the Pearl River began to float down so many cadavers that some were washed up on Hong Kong beaches (I remember this period), the authorities, concerned for their good reputation abroad, took energetic measures to intercept bodies as they drifted with the current...
...she was dry-eyed, and she walked across the Lowu Bridge with what for her age was a quick step...
...As Karel Van het Reve observed, It would be easy, I believe, to draw up an impressive list of well-known Marxists in the United States, France, Japan, Poland, England, Germany, and Yugoslavia...
...Chinese culture is indestructible...
...Before the big departure, the crew practiced rowing every evening for months...
...China is the religion of the Chinese...
...Such people, educated abroad in the most diverse disciplines, asked only to return to China to put their competencies at the service of their country...
...Had I not been a close friend of his family, I doubt that he would ever have agreed to meet me...
...he offered his services and in a matter of seconds solved the little communications problem...
...He lived in fear, and insisted that each of our meetings be accompanied by extravagant precautions...
...It applies equally to the use of propaganda in politics and to the use of banknote plates in public finance...
...The record for attempted escapes is probably held by a man I was told about, who finally made it on his eleventh attempt...
...Finally, there was nothing to do but give in...
...China is a cultural concept...
...2) Don't blame the speaker but take his words as a warning...
...Simon Leys is the pen name of a distinguished scholar who teaches at an Australian university and specializes in Chinese painting and literature, subjects on which he has published five books and many articles...
...We had discussed the Lin Piao affair, the shock of which had not yet worn off, one year after the event...
...No one, he adds, dared say anything, do anything—intervene in any way—for fear of being accused on the spot of "bourgeois humanism" or of culpable compassion for class enemies...
...367 Along the same lines, Mme...
...They manifest a sort of fundamental good will toward my country that flatters me and touches me, and I can only welcome it...
...The woman doctor from Shanghai whom I quoted earlier mentioned the astonishing popularity enjoyed once more by the Shao-ping ke—a sort of Nostradamus that dates back to the Ming period...
...but the children of the Cultural Revolution are savage orphans who at the end of their adventure burned the tribal totem...
...One of these, Ombres Chinoises, published in Paris in 1974, is scheduled to appear in an English translation under the auspices of the Viking Press...
...Stories like this arouse curiosity and amusement in the listeners but no outrage...
...In Hong Kong, among recent exiles the most vehemently bitter group is composed of people who were born in Hong Kong but returned to China in the 'SOs, in a burst of patriotic fervor...
...q — Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE AMONG OUR CONTRIBUTORS MARVIN CAPLAN is a legislative representative for the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO and director of the Washington office of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights...
...Needless to say, P 's seditious attitude entailed appropriate punishment: he lost his excellent job, and found himself transferred to menial work and his wages cut by two-thirds...
...an unbelievably backward stage: it is only a monstrous chaos, a mess, a pottering about of primitives...
...Because he was the son of a former Kuomintang soldier, he would, as he came to discover, be branded for life...
...CHANDLER DAVIDSON, who teaches sociology at Rice University, is on leave this academic year as a National Endowment for the Humanities research fellow...
...One must not forget that this constitution had at least one virtue—so shining a virtue as in the end to seal its fate—and that was the merit of existing...
...It is wrong not to understand this and to give up ideological struggle...
...Because when they are conquerors one dares no longer call them traitors...
...He is spending this academic year on sabbatical in London, on a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, writing a book on political equality...
...Their lack of information at the time they decided to go to China, and their romantic illusions, account for part of the disappointment, the disenchantment, and finally the despair that seized them later...
...How so...
...Very different sources also vouched for this...
...There is a wall in Shanghai reserved for posting documents having to do with the "Critique of Lin Piao and Confucius" movement...
...The former still lives in today's world, he is bombarded by manifold temptations, wooed by manifold "diversions" (in the Pascalian sense of the word)—the Sunday football game, his girlfriend's smile, a novel, his baby's whooping cough...
...7 After waiting five years, C-- finally got his exit visa, probably because he came originally from Hong Kong...
...0 But as pointed out above, the Maoist bureaucracy is becoming just a little more human: the mild corruption that is now evident at times helps to moderate some controls and could be the harbinger of a thaw, while the battalion of the incorruptible cadres, those lay saints given to total selfabnegation who constituted the special and fearsome strength of Maoism, has finally been decimated by age or by successive purges...
...It is not so much their poverty that weighs on workers—their elders have known much worse!—but rather their sense of stagnation, of an absence of hope...
...Furthermore, honesty compels me to add immediately that if these Chinese emigre witnesses did feel free to speak out, atrocious as some of their depositions might be, they would not necessarily draw from them the same conclusions as we...
...Former Article 89, providing that no citizen may be arrested except by the decision of a People's Court or with the sanction of a People's Procuratorate," was changed to "no citizen shall be arrested except by the decision of a People's Court or with the sanction of a Public Security organ"—in effect, arbitrary police power was made constitutional...
...During the Great Leap Forward, he was sent with his fellow-workers to build a railway line...
...Then the Soviet experiment went bankrupt, and the flock of ideologists turned Eastward, ever Eastward...
...they catch the average person by surprise...
...indeed, it appears more arbitrary, more intolerable because it is no longer imposed by one's own flesh and blood but by the most gigantic and monstrous of cold-blooded monsters...
...Greatly relieved, he was sure now that he could instantly clear up an absurd misunderstanding...
...In order to explain certain aspects of the present regime, people have often emphasized the traditionally collective nature of Chinese life, in which the individual was never left on his own but, on the contrary, was constantly supported, influenced, ragged, guided—bound, in a word, by a close and complex network of family, clan, local, and other relationships...
...Superb wools, you should have seen them...
...Few present-day experiences compete with the long-distance jet flight in forcing on the traveler both physical promiscuity and social isolation...
...Chinese proverb Wby are the traitors always the vanquished...
...It was with Snoopy that things had gone awry...
...It is feckless to believe that by systematically placing only proletarians in all important positions one will be able to exorcise the influence of the bourgeoisie...
...The concentration camp occupies a central place in the Maoist world and provides a key to all its mechanisms...
...on the other hand, the moderation of Communist officials in this regard is appreciated...
...I began by saying, "Since Lin Piao was defeated in the power struggle, today he must be tagged as a counterrevolutionary traitor...
...I think a Christian mystic would display the same equanimity while watching barbarian hordes transform St...
...She had a persecution mania, which manifested itself in ways all the more painful for her being otherwise remarkably alert, given her age...
...The son of a poor peasant, he—like one of his brothers and his sister—had been able to attend university and now was enjoying a privileged position in a large city...
...In some regions, rationing permits the peasants to eat rice only on great occasions...
...Inquisitor to the Dominican reverend fathers who celebrate Maoism in le Monde, skirting en route prelates who were generous in their blessings of Mussolinian canons and the chaplains of Vichyite Boy Scouts...
...In a way, the contrast between their two temperaments could symbolize and summarize the contrast between two generations separated by the experience of the Cultural Revolution...
...In the West, this crisis was not mentioned in those prestigious liberal newspapers (prominent among them le Monde) that feed their readers little else about China but orthodox Maoist propaganda...
...Unhappily, his social origins were "bad," and he has been employed for seven years as a truckdriver in Sinkiang...
...To all this is added an old and constant pressure that I have discussed elsewhere—the aspiration of educated men to rally, from dynasty to dynasty, around the new reigning orthodoxy...
...M-- relates how, around 1961-62, in the Shanghai region, a persistent rumor circulated among the people that any day Chiang Kai-shek was to arrive on the mainland...
...Since his head appears in all newspapers and magazines, people must be careful when getting rid of old papers that no image of the Great Pilot ends up all tattered in the dustbin...
...In China, all avenues had been closed to M...
...one of the most popular is called "Goodbye, Kwangchow"—a very sentimental song, in which a young man, poised for the great departure, enumerates in his heart one last time all the beloved aspects of his home town, which he has decided to leave forever...
...Jean Pasqualini, also known as Bao RuoWang, a French national whose father was Corsican and mother Chinese, spent his first thirty-odd years in China, the last seven in prison camps...
...Take the Lin Piao affair...
...M--, his wife, and the two boys, all in tears, took the old woman as far as the frontier...
...no loophole, no change of course, is available...
...Bourgeois values, with all the attendant fetishes and especially the fripperies, attract their most ardent and pathetic followers from among people who have been deprived of them all their lives, whereas the bourgeoisieborn are more inclined to whisk a critical broom through the attics of their class...
...First, one must take into account that many of these men have not seen their homeland for a quarter of a century, and their return is a stunning shock...
...RICHARD LOWENTHAL, a long-time contributor to Dissent, is a German Social Democrat and a professor emeritus of international relations at the Free University of West Berlin...
...Systematic mendacity has rotted everything...
...At the root of the present troubles lies a profound discouragement, a moral depression...
...In point of fact, if the Soviet system is compared with the Chinese as described by Pasqualini, it is obvious that the Gulag Archipelago is still at "Mao Tse-tung ti ch'iu-t'u: extracts translated as an appendix to a digest of The Gulag Archipelago (Ku-la-ke ch' In tao...
...For example, the 1954 constitution protected the inviolability of private correspondence between citizens, the free choice of domicile, freedom to change residence (Art...
...Everything combines unremittingly to weaken and conflict with what should be the one object of his attention, the exclusive motivation of his actions, the pole of all his desires, the spring of all his feelings...
...BILL GOODE is the dean of the Center for Labor Studies at Empire State College in New York City...
...As a first step, the young woman was removed from the picture by being assigned a new job in a distant town...
...Their despairing message seems not to have reached its destination...
...All those beautiful woolens...
...Here, according to the terms of a recent agreement between the governments of Her Gracious Majesty and the People's Republic of China, they are promptlydelivered over to the Chinese police...
...Because I know what Chinese culture means to them, I have often been amazed by the impassive serenity with which the majority of the elderly Chinese scholars whom I know witness from abroad the destruction of that culture...
...it is not easy for them to find employment, and they are always at the mercy of whatever illness or accident may, from one day to the next, deprive them of every means of subsistence...
...The hapless young man steadfastly insisted that he had never laid eyes on the foreigner before, that their conversation concerned nothing more than the purchase of six pairs of socks and a dozen handkerchiefs...
...What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish...
...But if one has, therefore, the right to speak of "progress," it must be made clear that this progress is apparent above all to those who adopt Big Brother's point of view...
...All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism...
...CHARLES KILLINGS WORTH teaches labor and industrial relations and economics at Michigan State University and is the chairman of the National Council on Employment Policy...
...Things began to sour for him only when he fell in love with the daughter of the secretary of a local Party committee...
...This regime of starvation wages and ostracism lasted six years, at the end of which he confessed himself finally defeated, recognized the error of his ways, and renounced his pretentions...
...Some 20 years ago, M-- had managed to trace his mother, who had remained in China, and he corresponded with her quite regularly...
...Charlie Brown was there, and Linus and Lucy—and of course, the inevitable Snoopy...
...The training bore fruit: when they finally set out, they were pursued by a boatful of militiamen for a whole hour, after which the exhausted pursuers gave up the chase...
...3 When, thus encouraged, some simple soul has the audacity to speak his mind about his superiors or the policy of the moment, he is instantly pinned down on the authority of the 20th quotation from the second chapter: We still have to wage a protracted struggle against bourgeois ideology...
...A woman tells the story of her father, who lives in China and to whom she had sent an expensive watch through the mails...
...there is nothing astonishing in that, and nothing that need alarm us about such people...
...Like all profound works, Pasqualini's book presents a measure of ambiguity that could lead to its being misconstrued several ways...
...citizens no longer have the right to claim reparations, but at least they are promised that the use of the complaint option will not entail "reprisals" on the part of the accused bureaucrat...
...He smiled at my naif ardor, and he said to me, "Look, my friend, don't get so overwrought...
...T--, 22, arrived here last year by swimming, after an earlier attempt had failed and had won him a stint in prison...
...He tells me about his matrimonial tribulations...
...S-- is back from Shanghai, where she had gone to visit her mother...
...Arise, ye wretched of the earth" could be too inflammatory...
...It was hanging, under glass, in the living room, and the elderly artist had the presence of mind to cover it with a large photograph of Mao...
...In the circumstances, first and foremost it behooved the young woman's father to prevent a marriage that, by allying his family with a politically tarnished individual, could have compromised his own advancement...
...Like that—a quiet, matter-of-fact statement, to remind me of a commonsensical, self-evident truth...
...As the abyss dividing constitutional fiction from political reality deepened, this document, which originally partook of innocent utopianism, little by little acquired a sort of subversive quality...
...the sentence meted out varies in severity depending on the political situation of the moment...
...So beautiful that no one dares put them on his back in public...
...He has written extensively and testified frequently before congressional committees on employment policy...
...372 meet the insane norms then enforced, and as a result he ruined his health permanently...
...The tragedy of this "original sin" is that it cannot be effaced...
...The amateur artist had drawn a balloon which has the canine hero say, "Long live Chairman Mao...
...M--, with his subtlety and courtesy, is in every respect a product of the traditional family upbringing that continued to mold new generations virtually up until the Cultural Revolution...
...in the new constitution, this provision vanished without a trace...
...The recurrent theme of all his stories is the violence official logic wreaks on people's innate humane and decent impulses...
...In other words, to survive you must play the game...
...As Ssu-ma Ch'ien pointed out more than 2,000 years ago in his famous "Reply to Jen An," the man who is caught up in the punitive wheels of a totalitarian system has only two alternatives between which he must choose instantly and irrevocably: immediate suicide or survival...
...The young woman reciprocated his feelings, and they decided to marry, at which point the Party put an end to that plan...
...One day the young man was strolling through a large department store, and by chance came upon a foreigner who wanted to buy something and was struggling to make the clerk understand him...
...Their impudence and arrogance know no bounds, and all on their own they have managed to make a teacher's life a purgatory...
...Since he still would not give up his foolish fancy, he was progressively reduced to the state of a pariah...
...At the same time, he was put on his guard: "When you are outside of China, watch what 'Actually, this continues a millenary Chinese tradition...
...There is a general disintegration in the labor force that is expressed in masked strikes and sabotage...
...The man could not understand how he could refuse such an opportunity, and urged him so insistently to accept it that at last F--took the enormous risk of confiding his plan...
...Survival implies adjustment to the milieu...
...Who was the British author who spoke of "the hunted air of people for whom one has done some good...
...M-- did everything in his power to make life pleasant for her, but everything he did only aroused fresh suspicions...
...He is the author of World Communism: The Disintegration of a Secular Faith and other works on the theory of capitalism and socialism...
...in spite of his brilliant performance at high-school level, admission to the university as well as to the School of Fine Arts had been denied him because of his middle-class background...
...The student was glad to be helpful and also to test his command of English...
...that when, with pride and heart high, he was about to cross the Lowu Bridge twenty years ago, in a gesture of juvenile theatricality he had torn his colonial identity card to shreds and thrown them in the face of the British policeman on duty at the entrance to the bridge...
...it has merely substituted the all-encompassing authority of party and state for that of the earlier family and village collectivity—which was limited, after all, if only territorially...
...To him, the question seemed quite abstract and academic...
...in a second phase, however, it is the character who, little by little, is substituted for the person, the mask for the face, and the untruth of the jailers for the truth of the prisoner...
...in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked . 4 A visit from two young artists...
...China is one great school of the Thought of Mao Tsetung in which the ordinary citizen appears as the truant dunce while the camp inmate seems the model student...
...I iaven't finished writing my hundred `Long live Chairman Mao's," his brother said...
...Regarding the polyvalent use of Mao Tsetung's Thought: L--, a minor cadre from Hunan, has had a searing experience in this connection...
...Lu Hsun, for example, quotes them in full in his "Short History of the Chinese Novel...
...Zealous mandarins—the kind that produce a plethora of reports and dossiers—generally got bad marks in their administrative careers, whereas those who year after year never had any problem to bring to their superiors' attention were promised rapid advancement...
...M-- is 42 years old, comes from North China, and is one of my very good friends...
...8 It was the first real political lesson of my life, and I am not Iikely to forget it...
...The vices, crimes and venalities of the former society, the corruption, social injustice, prostitution, banditry, drug addiction, and begging have if not entirely disappeared then at least been reduced to near invisibility for the transient visitor, and this represents such an incredible metamorphosis that it would seem to warrant many sacrifices...
...For the escapees, however, China remains a central concern...
...of course, there does exist a China in the narrow nationalist sense of the term, but this notion, which developed only recently and chiefly under the influence of the West, does not concern us here...
...so long as public order was maintained and taxes were paid, it willingly left to the traditional communities the responsibility for policing themselves...
...Today, there is also the fear that if their criticisms were to be expressed publicly, they might be diverted from their original purpose and exploited by China's enemies to batter down some of the regime's basic achievements that one must hope are permanent...
...in the end, having assured themselves that the unfortunate woman was utterly inoffensive, they granted her her visa...
...they saw themselves condemned indefinitely to vegetate as semipariahs...
...The woman in question was the exwife of a political prisoner (generally, when one spouse 358 is arrested for a political crime, the other is firmly encouraged to request a divorce so as to "clearly indicate that he has put himself at safe remove" from the class enemy, hua ch'ing chieh-hsien...
...After all, the government is not being run by idiots...
...He was a lively, jovial young fellow, deeply committed to the regime, I believe, and for very apparent reasons...
...People generally make their escape by swimming...
...Their admiration is based on a misconception...
...they spent some time conjecturing what plot could be concealed behind such a paradoxical move...
...Former Article 88, protecting "freedom of religious beliefs," was amplified by "the freedom to hold no religious beliefs and to propagate atheism...
...The systematic, total elimination of the middle class is justified in the eyes of the leaders of China by the need to consolidate the authority of "the new class" and prevent any danger of restoration of the earlier society...
...None of this would have been possible without Maoism, he pointed out to me, not irrelevantly...
...They're afraid of attracting their neighbors' attention and of being called in for questioning...
...These travelers are identified by the mountains of packages and bundles—food, clothing, utensils, and what not—they are carrying with them to relieve their relatives' poverty...
...M--is discriminating, reserved, delicate, and somewhat sickly...
...that is, the reform of himself, the building of "Socialism," the study and application of the Thought of Mao Tse-tung...
...this does not arise from simple opportunism but rather from a lack of historical alternatives...
...T-- speaks, too, of the peculiar and very recent recrudescence of traditional superstitions, even in their most primitive and bizarre forms...
...when the machine has been put into perfect running condition, you can be sure that these deplorable accidents will not be repeated...
...In 1954, the People's Republic was dowered with a constitution that should remain a masterpiece of the genre, second only to Stalin's, on which it draws for inspiration...
...8 pp...
...368 as soon as they have served their sentence...
Vol. 23 • September 1976 • No. 4
