CHANGES IN COMMUNIST CHINA
Leys, Simon
Earlier this year, Simon Leys, the distinguished author of Broken Images and Chinese Shadows, led an informal discussion sponsored by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas. The...
...How can China be modernized when its only implement for doing so is the completely reactionary, theocratic Chinese Communist party...
...I have sometimes been charged with being unfair to the present Chinese bureaucracy...
...The problem of legality has surfaced in mass-oriented posters and in the press...
...The family gets one more hand to work on the farm, the household a servant...
...Revisionism, in China, has reached the point not only of overturning Maoism but, to some extent, has breached Marxist dogma...
...In the time of the decadent Manchu court, in 1907,1 think there were 40,000 Chinese students in Japan alone...
...It is quite idle to speculate on the conflicts and vanities of Deng and Hua Guofeng...
...And when the leadership talks about legality, it is probably sincere...
...Yet, it has to be recognized that opening China to the technology of the advanced West may also have side effects...
...Again, we know so little of China...
...I don't think there was a single line in the overseas newspapers about the 800,000 people who died in the Hunan floods...
...Modernization in China indeed has a tradition that antedates the revolution...
...The earthquake was recorded by instruments and we knew about it, but we did not know how many victims there were...
...Whoever has any familiarity with Chinese culture and history necessarily acquires an unlimited confidence in the capacity of the Chinese to transform, adapt, to metamorphize in a creative way everything they borrow, everything imposed upon them from the outside...
...I have heard some extraordinary stories...
...The overall picture you get of China today is one of darkness, moral and political bankruptcy, with the feeling that, had the Maoist experiment been carried further, it would have led to complete catastrophe...
...If the father wants to force her into a marriage with someone she doesn't like, she takes off on her own, finds a factory job, and supports herself...
...It can seem hopeless, modernization an impossible task...
...but, in the process, he managed to impoverish greater numbers of people...
...Mao lacked the solution but saw the problem: how to bridge the gap between the countryside and the cities, and how to bring the two into harmony...
...We know about the big earthquake in Tangshen because we have seismographs...
...Cowardice, timidity, evasion of responsibility, of course, are common to bureaucracies everywhere...
...It is in this sense, I think, that Deng is trying to say that to revolutionize China is to modernize China—that modernization is the real revolution...
...Bandits created during the floods...
...In the meantime, it is safer to do as little as possible, get by with lip service...
...There is no private TV but each unit, each factory, has its set in a common room...
...Peasant households still buy a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old wife for their eight- or nine-year-old son...
...Shortly before coming to visit the United States, I went to Hong Kong to interview a number of Chinese friends and some others who were citizens of the People's Republic and had just come out, or had returned to China recently to visit relatives...
...At long last, a month later, we learn that there were 700,000 victims—and that is it, that is as much as we may know...
...EDS...
...The villagers never had it so good as during the Cultural Revolution— simply because of the breakdown of the central government...
...In these terms, when Deng builds his program around the central theme of modernization, he is getting back into the mainstream of Chinese history, the dynamics of which carried into the early years of the People's Republic, from 1949 to the mid-'50s...
...To the extent that the traditional pragmatic genius of the Chinese may find some possibility of deploying its capacities for initiative and invention, optimism is probably justified...
...Deng's policies are proceeding blindly as it were, and they may recreate a situation that Mao, at least, understood...
...The Cultural Revolution, which was a disaster for urban China, was a bonus for the countryside...
...the test of force now seems underway...
...There are as many victims as the government says there are...
...Is the "Gang of Four" getting a fair trial...
...The problems of modernization cannot be solved overnight...
...Chinese youth is responding warmly to the new directions...
...The concluding two paragraphs have been taken from an article by Simon Leys that appeared in the French periodical L'Express...
...they have been badly burned before...
...But, what few people know, is that the year before, no, for two successive years, there had been floods that caused greater devastation in 293 human lives than the earthquake...
...They were left on their own...
...They have to carry the onus of reform, and they understand quite well that reform is at loggerheads with the system itself...
...What 294 kind of modernization can it achieve...
...There is a very important statement by Deng Xiaoping saying that the ultimate criterion of truth is pragmatic...
...There's no doubt that in the long run the Chinese will finally know how to swallow, digest, and, completely transform communism—perhaps preserving only the name through a purely formal, somewhat ironic process...
...It may create a feeling of rootlessness...
...295...
...I spoke of the persistence of feudal customs...
...They are worried that the proclaimed modernization will be accomplished at their expense, benefiting the cities while they pay for it...
...But what makes the Chinese bureaucracy "special" is that its area of presumed competence is so all-encompassing...
...This escort back and forth to his village puzzled him, especially as his relatives were reluctant to talk about it...
...the government tells you nothing...
...The Chinese people may well ask, What are we doing...
...A paradox remains...
...In that sense, the elimination of the "Gang of Four" is not so much a modification of the system as, ultimately, a move to salvage the system...
...Back to the countryside...
...Some now have regained positions of eminence and prestige...
...And they may perceive potential hazards...
...Well, so they hate each other...
...There were bandits about in the countryside, just as in former times...
...I think that one of the real achievements of the Maoist system was in domestic affairs...
...this has to be a long and painstaking process, and the people do not realize it...
...This fact is, simply, not news, it does not exist...
...Yet, many of them are supercautious...
...But those unreported floods drove peasants out of their villages...
...What is to prevent a coup d'etat...
...The following passages from a transcript of his remarks have been excerpted and edited slightly...
...All this, of course, is rather theoretical...
...From the start, China and its present regime found themselves on a collision course...
...Consider then: if it comes to the point where the reforms have to be canceled, well, better not to have participated in them— because on that day to have done so will be your crime, your guilt...
...Deng and his friends experienced at first hand the brutalities, imprisonment, torture of the Cultural Revolution...
...This may be shocking to faithful Maoists outside of China...
...I think that the Shah seriously intended to modernize Iran...
...In the most simplistic of Marxist terms, habit and mentality cannot succumb without economic motivation, without improving the standard of living...
...Deng's intentions in this direction are clear enough but the realities we spoke of before still present shocking contradictions...
...A German diplomat, stationed in Peking, received an inquiry from his country requesting details on the earthquake...
...Since he could not stay overnight in his family's house, he had to make the long trip back and forth every day...
...By being "omnicompetent," the bureaucracy manages to paralyze everything, and Deng's task is accordingly that much more complicated...
...that we will adopt whatever works in practice, even if it means discarding aspects of Marxist theory...
...We return to a basic contradiction: either the reforms are carried through to their logical conclusions or the whole system explodes, once the logic of reform becomes too dangerous to the basic system...
...The figures involved are staggering...
...This, then, is a two-edged sword: you can urge modernization, but you cannot suppress discouragement about the enormous gap that has to be bridged...
...There appears to be a deliberate design on the part of the Chinese leadership to be blunt in showing China's backwardness to foreigners, while compelling the Chinese themselves to see how advanced the outside world is...
...not because the policies of Chiang Kai-shek were more enlightened than those of Chairman Mao—very simply, and practically, Taiwan has reached a point where a sixteen-year-old daughter can bring home more money by going to work in a factory...
...But this capital was wasted in assorted experiments—such as the Hundred Flowers, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward...
...For one thing, foreigners now have much broader access to Chinese realities, including many that were previously camouflaged...
...It is all meshed in contradictions that have always hobbled the Chinese CP...
...On the theoretical level, they say, the changes are enormous...
...Four or five leaders were accused in a public meeting afterward...
...For example, people see what has been achieved in Taiwan, and here they are, after 30 years of Communist rule, lagging behind what the old, rotten Kuomintang has managed to accomplish...
...On the practical level, the changes have been very inadequate...
...Now, under a centralized leadership, the villagers find themselves in a more difficult position...
...inside China it is taken pretty much for granted...
...The situation is desperate, the choices are bitter...
...The opening of China has brought important changes...
...I don't know how the contradictions will be resolved...
...There might be, for example, an Iranian-type modernization...
...They know something about the absence of socialist legality...
...They say, We need the rule of law...
...But in China you must go through the bureaucracy for everything...
...Why, you may now read articles in the press saying that there is much to be learned from capitalism, that there are many models to follow...
...At the same time, the Chinese have been exposed to the realities of the highly developed, industrialized West (and Japan) through television, newsreels, etc...
...In addition, the Deng leadership now has decided to send students overseas—with the goal of 10,000 by 1985...
...Modernization, on Taiwan, has disposed of a feudal remnant...
...This selfconfidence had been nourished since 1949, and it was no small achievement...
...But how do you speak of legality in a country where the supreme leader of 900 million people, Hua, is in power on the strength of six words scribbled on a piece of paper by the senile Mao: "With you in charge, I am at rest...
...It is a matter of survival...
...Mao, 292 at least, restored the confidence of the Chinese people in their own resources...
...But the main "modernization" has never been spelled out and defined: the modernization of the system...
...people roamed the countryside, some turned to begging in the cities, some became highwaymen...
...There he was, about two hours by train from where the biggest earthquake in Chinese history had occurred, and he hadn't the faintest idea of how extensive the damage was, whether there were 10 or 10,000 or 100,000 casualties...
...They could kill the pig and eat it...
...A friend of mine went back to visit a village in Hunan, and he had to spend the nights about 60-70 miles from his village home...
...Yet by courtesy of the seismographs, we did know that a big earthquake had occurred...
...The way they and their followers are being purged is an imitation of the Gang's own methods...
...With newsreels in movie theaters, the Chinese now receive striking evidence, previously denied to them, of life in such cities as New York and Tokyo...
...This comes as a shock, and Deng hopes to use the shock value of this exposure to press the urgency of his principal goal: modernization...
...Each time his car was preceded and followed by a military complement of army jeeps, fore and aft...
...The peasants are very little touched by the new policies and certainly skeptical of them...
...Thus, I know of people who went to visit relatives in remote and poor villages that are anything but showplaces...
...Compared to the immediate past, this is an impressive figure, though far from what it used to be...
...These bureaucrats are scared by Deng's policies, and rightly so, because they operate down to the grass-roots level...
...the escort was provided for his protection...
...They found an appalling state of poverty, people hovering on the edge of starvation...
...But this generates new hopes and demands that may be impossible for Deng to meet...
...Chinese friends now go back to the countryside from which they came 30 years ago, and they return with heartbreaking impressions: nothing has changed—it's the same, damned situation...
...That same kind of imbalance could occur in China too...
...Interestingly enough, this ancient custom has completely disappeared on Taiwan...
...These changes, for example, have given the intellectuals some reasons to rejoice, if only because they were so completely repressed for ten years...
...Obviously, this can be paralyzing, and the Deng leadership appears to be aware of it—at least to some extent...
...The problems, as I see them, are gigantic...
...Over the long run, it all has to end in a basic clash: either the regime clamps down and the reforms go forward—or the regime has to back down and cancel the reforms...
...They go back to a countryside that still seems to live in feudal times, its medieval beliefs and superstitions little modified, and they find a depressing material situation that, sometimes, has even deteriorated...
...Whoever has some experience with totalitarian regimes—in particular, Communist— cannot avoid a profound skepticism as to the ability of these regimes to modify their nature...
...Some effects of shaking this self-confidence can be counterproductive...
...We thank Mr...
...Aparticular problem is the mired middleand low-level bureaucracy...
...In encouraging a privileged, urban China, Deng is widening the gap, and this could have dramatic consequences...
...But after some time he broke the ice, and he learned that, no, he was not under surveillance...
...In most other countries, where you have the same stupid bureaucrat, there is still a variety of activities that escapes the bureaucracy...
...But, nevertheless, most Chinese observers— with the exception of young refugees who retain a bitter skepticism as to the capacity of the regime to tranform itself—manifest a remarkable optimism, even those among them who, previously, held the most fixed prejudices with respect to the Peking regime...
...These expectations, unrealized, could produce a severe backlash...
...Leys for permission to use this material...
...Four "modernizations" have been spelled out: they are to be carried out in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense...
...What I have to say here, essentially, is a summary of these people's reports...
...There is a desire to restore legality, but the means for doing so are the same old illegal methods...
...But, whoever wins in the end, what other policy could they possibly pursue...
Vol. 26 • July 1979 • No. 3
