Communist China's First Decade - 1. National Character
CHU, VALENTIN
Communist China's First Decade It will be ten years come October that the Chinese Communists completed their sweep of the mainland, proclaimed the "People's Republic/' and so propelled China into...
...Many of his recipes were concocted during his early days of guerrilla warfare against the Nationalists...
...The Communists, being Chinese themselves, are quite aware that a great deal of the tonguein- cheek eulogies they receive from the people make them look silly, at least in Chinese eyes...
...between tong wars, the Chinese sauntered about in gaudy mandarin robes and conversed in Confucian Analects...
...non-existent...
...This trait is frequently mistaken by straight-shooting Westerners as pure and simple submissiveness...
...Our bland looks and piquant epigrams, our disastrous famines and rich cultural heritage, our elegant cuisine and objets d'art, our strange tongues and stranger calligraphy, our sages, mandarins, warlords, peasants, rickshaw coolies and slit-gowned women—all these and many other such aspects have conjured up for the Western eye an extraordinarily complex and mystifying picture...
...No quarrel with the world" means that the individual is oblivious of such incidentals as business, wealth or government...
...Compared to Westerners, Chinese are introverts...
...Now, both these types are certainly honest...
...Relays of Communist speakers would harangue them with polite, persuasive speeches at meetings that lasted eight to ten hours at a time...
...When Ssuma rode near the city wall, he saw the unruffled Chuko calmly plucking way at a zither...
...This was fun for everyone concerned as long as it remained a parlor game...
...NATIONAL CHARACTER By Valentin Chu WE CHINESE have for centuries been a source of unintentional bafflement to the rest of the world...
...Valentin Chu, born and educated in China, was from V-J Day until 1949 a senior reporter for The China Press, an independent English-language daily in Shanghai...
...This unprecedented byplay has stumped not only the non-Chinese who do not understand the Chinese, but even some Chinese who do not understand Communism...
...A casual visitor to China today may be impressed by the sight of hasty reconstruction, Spartan discipline and ant-hill activity...
...at times a little wise, but often unaggressive, diffident, disunited and hopelessly undisciplined...
...And now some political seers have made a punditic turnabout and have discovered that, after all, the Chinese mind always had an affinity with regimentation...
...The Chinese are usually weak as a nation, but tough as a race...
...This confusion is worsened by the language barrier, which often cannot be overcome by translation...
...These statements are admittedly a series of paradoxes—but we are a paradoxical people...
...the people...
...Mao's brutally ambitious economic juggernaut is all but submerged in the quagmire of Chinese resilience, for the overwhelming majority of the people opposes the regime and has its own roundabout way of resisting it...
...One has to know the language to realize that the deadliest insults in Chinese are always couched in exquisitely polite words...
...The key to the puzzle is what I should call "the Chinese in us...
...It may be summed up in the traditional conception of ultimate contentment: "yu shih wu chen" — "no quarrel with the world...
...Its place has been taken by a growing awareness that what the inscrutable Chinese does behind his closed door may affect far more than the Westerner's laundry...
...Confusions and paradoxes like these are apt to mislead non-Chinese observers, especially the armchair pundits who think life can be understood via the reference library, or the tourist-inspector who believes that anything worthwhile has to be visible and anything he cannot see...
...They thought of war in terms of a chess game, and they much preferred to win wars by avoiding battles and using feints, traps and similar tricks...
...Have the Communists succeeded in tearing up the fabric of tradition and reweaving it into a Marxist pattern...
...Chuko might have been shaking in his clogs, but his stance was so bold that Ssuma suspected an ambush and ordered the immediate withdrawal of his army...
...But they overlook the fact that no amount of speculation and no amount of sight-seeing will shed light on China unless they understand the emotions and cast of mind of the silent millions who must live and die under Communism...
...One of the greatest techniques perfected by the Chinese is the art of bargaining...
...One day, surely, those other, realer Chinas will destroy the false image that prevails now...
...It would seem that the Chinese have, however reluctantly, accepted Communism...
...Then they part, both complaining of having received a raw deal—but both feeling victorious...
...Despite this cliche, the fact is that China is now the scene of an acute state of silent war: "people's government vs...
...This awareness, coupled with a misjudgment of the Chinese mind, has created such a political neurosis that every time someone in Peking sneezes, experts around the world stop short to analyze whether he has sneezed in a Chinese or a Russian accent...
...The picture, in short, was cuter than we could ever be...
...It is easy to extract a false confession from a Chinese, but it is hard to give him a genuine brain-washing...
...Regimentation, even in a good cause, is distasteful to the Chinese nature...
...This view misconstrues the Chinese attitude to freedom...
...The crux of the China puzzle is not the amount of information available, but the depth of misinterpretation...
...These traits do not wholly comprehend the Chinese character...
...It is a way of life that brooks no heresy, and it can survive only by suppressing the dissident, individualistic and free-wheeling...
...Communism in practice is an attempt to reach The Beautiful via The Ugly, peace through war, freedom through slavery, democracy through dictatorship...
...In China, even bad governments may last a long time, provided they remain inefficient...
...Nine years after Mao Tsetung and his comrades seized power, most of the world is still debating Peking's Marxist orthodoxy, its strength, popularity and even morality...
...Whether we Chinese have a knack of misleading others or whether others have a knack of misreading Chinese behavior, the result is the same...
...They tend to make us patient, serene, self-sufficient...
...Enemy retreats, we pursue...
...After his army had grown large enough for regular battles...
...By skillfully interspersing battles and phony truces, Mao averted many military crises and grew in strength...
...The common view in the West is that Mao's regime exercises an evertightening control over the Chinese people, who are powerless to do other than submit...
...Since 1956, he has served on Time's editorial staff in New York...
...Our strength resides in our weakness...
...This technique was given a nickname by the laconic citizens of Shanghai: "fatigue bombardment...
...The Chinese Communists have combined traditional Chinese tactics and Communist ideology, making Chinese Communism more palatable—and deadlier...
...We Chinese are great tongue-in-cheek talkers and between-the-line readers...
...Chuko threw open the city gates of Hsicheng...
...Chuko himself, dressed in his favorite crane-feather robe and silk scarf, sat atop the city wall, flanked by two page boys holding a sword and a ceremonial duster...
...And therein lies the long-range danger to the Communist regime...
...the businessmen were forbidden to leave until the meetings ended...
...This is a frightening prospect, but an unlikely one...
...A typical Chinese bargaining bout usually begins with the seller quoting an exorbitant price and the buyer responding with a ridiculously low offer...
...but with the stage set, he can direct the performance of many lively dramas, full of sound and color, power and grandeur...
...Soon the businessmen devised a typical Chinese counter-move...
...Where else could so critical a battle be fought with such sophistication...
...Enemy encamps, we agitate...
...approached the city...
...Forty centuries of trial and error have taught the Chinese that the shortest distance between two points is seldom a straight line...
...On the other hand, the Communist regime has inexorably driven the Chinese people to their favorite sanctuary, philosophy...
...With this article, THE NEW LEADER initiates a comprehensive series of studies on Communist China by a group of distinguished scholars and specialists...
...But since the Communist take-over in China, the pastime has been taken up in earnest by pundits and politicians in quest of solutions to international problems—and the game has got out of hand...
...Communist ideology is diametrically opposed to Chinese philosophy...
...Right now, Mao is too busy fighting his people...
...The result has been an apparent yielding by the people, under pressure...
...Communist China's First Decade It will be ten years come October that the Chinese Communists completed their sweep of the mainland, proclaimed the "People's Republic/' and so propelled China into the foreground of the international power and ideological conflict known as the cold war...
...The correct answers can only be reached if one understands how the Chinese mind works...
...We put forward the obvious, about which we do not really care, alongside the obscure, which we want to convey...
...As a classic Chinese proverb puts it, "Great wisdom resembles stupidity...
...Chuko dispatched small bands of noisy pursuers to harass the retreating enemy...
...They began attending these meetings enthusiastically—equipped with buns, thermos bottles full of tea, and even toothbrushes...
...tan tan, ta ta"—"Fight fight, talk talk...
...Years ago, many scoffed at a possible marriage between Communism and the Chinese mind...
...But by and large they orient our life and influence our behavior...
...A Chinese observer would discern that the peasants and intellectuals, with whose acquiescence the Communists rose to power, are most restive...
...All good military leaders in Chinese history have loved ruses de guerre...
...Unhappily, eagerness to know is not identical with ability to understand...
...The only way to survive and eventually overcome an overwhelmingly stronger force is to be soft, penetratingly soft...
...The Wei troops, fleeing from an imaginary trap, stampeded themselves into a disastrous defeat...
...This "Kung Cheng Chi," the "Stratagem of the Empty City," is familiar to every Chinese, including Mao Tse-tung, who once wrote a brief poetic version of it: "The stage of action of the military expert is provided by objective material conditions...
...For the past decade, people in China have been using every trick of survival to cope with their ruthless regime, techniques reflecting the traditional proverb, "lip obedience, but not heart obedience...
...Mao's contribution to international Communism has not been to revise it, but to flavor it with sweet-sour sauce...
...It would be a mistake to believe that the effect of monolithic totalitarianism is as deadly for the Chinese as it is for Westerners...
...On this premise is built the thesis that if the United States ever antagonizes Peking, a devastating war would ensue...
...A favorite tactic of his in dealing with a much stronger force is derived from the dictum of Sun-tse, a 5th-century military theorist: "enemy advances, we retreat...
...For compared to the way of Chinese life, the way of Chinese Communism is clumsy and inept...
...talk talk, fight fight...
...The unspoken message of the camping paraphernalia so neutralized the fatigue bombardment that the Communists settled for much smaller bond subscriptions...
...In light of this, it is tragi-comic to hear the contention that U. S. refusal to recognize Communist China and United Nations failure to admit it to its ranks is tantamount to "ignoring a nation of 600 million people...
...He would rather reach a solution by insight than by logical deduction...
...The subtle give-and-take, the intricate parries and thrusts, the fancy footwork of the opponents, are often incomprehensible and misleading to the rational West...
...At a certain point, the buyer will make as if to break off and leave, and the seller will display ostensible indifference...
...It is a past master in "Stratagems of the Empty City...
...Mao Tse-tung has done exactly this...
...The interplay of Communism and the traditional Chinese cast of mind has reshaped the behavior of both the people and the Communists, but not their intrinsic elements...
...In China, resilience has always been linked with survival and life, while rigidity has been associated with destruction and extinction...
...He dislikes to search for truth by analyzing the shapeless and classifying the indivisible...
...How often Mao has directed such "lively dramas" on the military, political and diplomatic stages...
...We are detour artists, in business, friendship, courtship or war—and it is just a question of one's point of view whether one calls this devious or worldly...
...In their own way, the typical Chinese prefer a government that leaves them alone, rather than one that does everything to or for them...
...The secret of Peking's eventual failure is held by the yielding, plastic, all-engulfing giant that is the Chinese people...
...It is no mere political system, but an inverse religion replete with gods, confessions, taboos, dogmas and inquisitions...
...So, for example, a typical Peking policy statement is a mixture of Communist dialectics and Chinese linguistic floss, often made deliberately fuzzier for special effects...
...The Chinese love of introspection produces reticence and unobtrusiveness...
...These two groups, armed with contrary philosophies and similar tactics, have been staging one of the most bizarre struggles in human history...
...It is sad to note that this decadeold cataclysmic convulsion, involving a quarter of the world's population, should remain for the outside world a puzzle rather than a stark fact...
...A typically capricious Western notion is that since the Chinese have known so little freedom historically, they will readily submit to Communism...
...more often it is the line of least resistance...
...Anyone who will not or cannot bargain is considered intellectually inferior...
...It has "no quarrel with the world...
...The Chinese have been virtually transformed into a nation of reluctant hypocrites...
...A highly developed Chinese personality is like aged wine, mellow but potent...
...Yet today we are faced with the reality of Red China...
...It may act belligerently when it is weak, and one would be foolish to become either unduly alarmed or optimistic over some ambiguously worded Communist statement...
...Bargaining is loved by the Chinese as much for the game as for the money saved, and everything is expected to be bargained for...
...His desires are in abeyance and his grievances few...
...This is a succinct expression of Taoist philosophy, attributed to the ancient Chinese mystic, Lao-tse, whose influence on Chinese life surpasses that of the better-known Confucius...
...And that day may be nearer than many suspect...
...The florid Chinese language, so delicate in nuances and rich in literary allusions, is unusually complex and extremely difficult to render adequately, let alone literally, in translation...
...When they have sufficiently indulged in histrionics and have probed each other's relative strengths, a bargain is struck...
...For the next seven years he was Time-Life correspondent in Hong Kong, where he specialized in analysis of Chinese Communist documents and publications and interviewed more than 500 refugees from the mainland...
...Enemy tires out, we attack...
...Mao developed his most famous stratagem: "Ta ta, tan tan...
...the China of somnolent temple bells and misty lakes...
...By yielding elastically to brute force, one diverts the blow, conceals one's real strength and preserves the chance for a comeback...
...If one looks at the Communist regime with .a Chinese eye, one realizes that Peking is expert in the psychology of bargaining...
...If one abstracts Chinese tactics from Chinese philosophy and combines them with such an undeviating ideology, the product will be insidiously un-Chinese...
...In the Chinese, reticence may serve to conceal mediocrity, but it also may camouflage wisdom...
...Without this understanding, all the analysis only amounts to "scratching an itch from outside the shoe...
...It is easier to conquer China than to govern it...
...Until a decade ago, a common Western image of China was that of a nation of laundrymen thriving on chop suey, lotus seeds, opium and concubines...
...How is this struggle carried on...
...Since then, China's internal development and foreign policy have been the objects of the world's fascinated scrutiny...
...The most famous stratagem in Chinese history was devised by Chuko Liang, a military genius of the Three Kingdoms era (3rd century A. D.) Chuko, commanding general of the army of the Kingdom of Shu, was trapped one day with only 2.500 of his troops at his advance base, Hsicheng, as an army of 150,000, under the command of General Ssuma Yi of the Kingdom of Wei...
...He merges with Nature...
...furled all military banners and set some soldiers in civilian clothes to sweeping the street near the gates...
...A few years ago, for instance, the Communists tried to force Shanghai businessmen to subscribe to an onerous government bond drive...
...Herein lies the confusion for the outside world...
...It will be a long time before Mao can marshall his 600 million rugged individualists into a solid phalanx which the U. S. and the UN cannot afford to ignore...
...So much so that it has long been a popular sport in the West to try to describe...
...A whole system of self-defense, tai chi, has evolved from this thesis A simplified version of it flourishes in Japan as judo...
...The real Chinese way of life is less theatrical and more profound...
...In a desperate flash of brilliance...
...We do this as a matter of courtesy, or in order to by-pass resistance or for the sheer love of double entendre...
...This kind of freedom is individualistic and personal, rather than political...
...This is how he has described his method of vanquishing "imperialistic nations": "Our tactical principle is to exploit the contradictions among them in order to win over the majority, to oppose the minority and then to crush the enemies separately...
...These effects have been achieved at the expense of many other Chinas: the China of kaleidoscopic colors, sounds and smells: the China of ubiquitous smiles, mellow humor and ready hospitality : the China of carefree anglers beneath willow trees...
...An outgrowth of this philosophy is that most prominent of Chinese traits, resilience...
...The old smugness about China has disappeared from the Western consciousness...
...analyze or just speculate about China and its enigmatic people...
...It harmonizes with Lao-tse's idea of a perfect government: one that does nothing...
...The two may chat lackadaisically or argue belligerently about a host of seemingly irrelevant topics, from yesterday's weather to next year's rice harvest...
...The Chinese prefers intuition to logic...
...Or will the yielding softness of the Chinese eventually prove to be the undoing of Mao's paradise...
...IT is just such dramatic ruses that are likely to confuse Westerners who are trying to understand and cope with Communist China...
...The traditional Chinese conception of freedom is not participation in government, but avoiding government...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 13
