Passing Through China

...I am not sure how for their authority extends...

...They and others like them may in time adapt...

...The room where negotiations with Western businessmen are held is likely to be chill...

...they may be flicked away by the thought police for going too far...

...Everyone finds ot his place a cup bottomed with o portion of tea and topped with a cute cover...

...As Julia bursts out to Winston: "When you make loveyou're using up energy, and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything...

...And as the trial ended, the prosecutor, too, was compelled to utter the name of the late god Mao...

...But to get to that point can be arduous??though always polite...

...Stalin's successors understood that the campaign against that embodiment of history was going too far for their own welfare...

...For a new dictatorship to expose the misdeeds of a former dictatorship is a chancy maneuver...

...The only new tradition of exercise in China appears to be jogging, mostly done by people several decades younger thon the shadow boxers...

...It is claimed that they reflect inner control, inner power...

...Evidently, there is no such thing in China as o brief negotiating session...

...It is as though the Communist government had been counseled by an American management consulting firm to turn itself into a conglomerate of profit centers...

...Despite the spor-sity ol cars, the air in China's cities is rarely acceptable...

...This educated middle class is essential to the modernization program of the post-Mao regime, and the trial of those who shut down the universities and ostracized educators and shipped urban youth off to primitive villages may be seen as the regime's expression of solidarity with the nation's growing technological and managerial elite...

...But jogging, too, of course, con be justified in a land where every action requires social justification...

...The streets are in fact incomparably tidier than New York's...

...As Russia's tsars understood, should something serious go wrong, blame may have to be laid on the ministers, but never on the throne...

...They voiced a determination to be more timely in their own coverage, to expand their reports even to cases of crime and violence (coverage they believe we overdo), to explore official corruption and incompetence, and above all to shake off the tight censorship under which they must now labor...

...Although Mao himself was gently treated during the trial??his widow's shouts that she was only following her husband's orders being cut from the television coverage and newspaper accounts??one would have had to be dim indeed not to make the connection...

...The joggers take to the streets before dawn, singly or in pairs, sneaking a half hour of refreshing respite from collective life??or so it occurs to the uncollectivist minded tourist...

...As George Orwell observed, "A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successor...

...As the negotiations proceed or fail to proceed, prodigious tea drinking is done in an effort to keep warm and awake...

...ADVERTISEMENTS AND BLANK SPACES Passing Through China BY WALTER GOODMAN FRIEND AND GOODMAN Breakfast conversation at the Bejing Hotel, gathering place for Western businessmen in the Chinese capital, consists these days largely of lamentations over the stiff terms being laid down by their hosts...

...The trial of the Gang of Four is another...

...Their comments lend support to a recent observation of that nononsense China watcher Simon Leys: "Whatever small leeway is now given them [Chinese activists] by the authorities in any area??political, economic, literary, artistic??they are immediately exploiting with drive, invention and gusto...

...Chinese tradition, combined with a severe shortage in the cities of places where couples can be alone, continue to dampen the sparks of love, but wall notices now emphasize the freedom of young people to find their own mates...

...stroll in the eerie light that precedes the true light brings the visitor past groups of "shadow boxers," doing their slow motion movements in the shadows...

...They want you to be bursting with energy all the time...

...in Bejing he seemed to be simply a good prophet...

...With economic planning diffused, central political control becomes more complicated...

...Most of the sweepers wear gauze masks over nose and mouth in defense against the dust they stir up...

...Party members reportedly hold up five fingers at the mention of the Gang of Four...

...Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping's move to establish a line of succession in his own image represents an effort to avoid the infighting and disruption that typically follow the passing of a dictator...

...it can be downright destabilizing...

...There is more display here, with the gleam of the twirling blades and the little leaps of the practitioners, but these routines also come out of o veryold tradition...

...As witness after witness came forward to relate the indignities visited upon himself and his kin by Mao Zedong's wife, JiangQing, and her fellow travelers, the camera panned to members of the in vited audience blinking away tears at the memory of all that the witness and perhaps their own relatives and friends had suffered during the Cultural Revolution...

...Showing up last season's cult of personality in such a regime can't be good for Party mystique...

...Yet despite all this, the changes taking place in China, visible in even a brief visit, offer glimmers of hope for extensions of freedom in one of the world's more interesting dictatorships...

...An American wandering in any of China's cities is likely to be picked up by a student who wants to practice his English...

...If you're happy inside yourselves, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot...

...newsmagazines can only raise questions about their trade in the minds of young journalists who aspire to more interesting work than reiterating the Party line...

...The meeting begins with the hosts filling all the cups with boiling water from a large thermos, the same remarkable sort of thermos that is o fix-lure in evety hotel room and keeps water hot (oralleast 12hours...

...Instead of having production quotas assigned by Bejing, these companies are supposed to do their own planning, purchasing, marketing, and hiring and firing...

...We may be certain that Deng's adversaries, Maoist and otherwise, are on the alert for an opportunity to counterattack, ready to charge him with a betrayal of the revolution??and they can make a case...

...I have no way of knowing how representative my two students were, but they spoke openly before the dean of their school and several other students of their desire for greater freedom...

...Whatever its ideological deficiencies, the capitalist mode can be an exhilarating intrusion in a tradition-laden society...

...In Sichuan Province, home of hot food and the present leadership, an experiment is under way to give increased leeway to a few major enterprises??including manufacturers of watches and textiles, and a printing plant??in running their businesses...

...Every neighborhood has its overseers, identifiable by red armbands, who serve as a sort of unofficial police force...

...Education is not readily distinguishable from indoctrination...

...By definition, there are no checks and balances in a totalitarian state...

...The Westerners sometimes come out feeling that they have been tossed between those two favorite creatures of Chinese art, the panda and the vulture...

...The bureaucrat who must justify his official operations by the Chinese equivalent of the bottom line cannot take his status for granted...

...The movements, honded down from generation to generation, are as much dance as exercise, as much ritual as dance...

...After all, the fellow was not voted in and his successor cannot be voted out...

...The increased attention now being given to consumer desires is one appeal of today's ruling group to a privileged part of the population of their bitterly poor nation...

...Wrappings are meager...

...the hosts wear longjohns and sweaters beneath their Mao jackets...

...or, as Simon Leys hopes, "they may well succeed in rescuing a regime that has failed them for nearly three decades...

...The Democracy Wall where, not so long ago, youths were demanding new freedoms, has been given over to a combination of commercial advertisements and blank spaces??not a bad symbol of public discourse in China today...

...Onceadeal is struck, the foreign firms generally find the Chinese good trading partners, offering a capable and industrious work force and other amenities beyond the call of the contract...

...Propaganda graffiti still decorate the walls...

...The masks are quite popular, even on babies??on understandable fashion given the smoke ol charcoal burners used outdoors for cooking and heating, the drainage odors, the exhalations and eructations of the omnipresent crowds...

...The busiest streets are constantly being tended by sweepers, often women, stooping over tiny straw brooms...

...propaganda banners are strung across roads...

...And reading day after day the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor and the U.S...

...When a legitimately elected government finds itself in hot water, a few individuals can be sacrificed without callINS AND OUTS A 6 a.m...

...The students, who see themselves as servants of the Party and the Faith, nonetheless expressed misgivings at the sketchy way the trial was being reported at the direction of Party higher ups...

...Single-sheet newspapers, passed from hand to hand, are worn away between thumbs and forefingers until they virtually dissolve into space...

...Watching the televised excerpts of the long trial, which was drawing to a close during my stay in Be-jing, was a mystifying entertainment...

...Prudence and experience hold one back from making too much of the signs of greater openness in a country loaded down with the trappings of Communism...

...When a passerby spit into the gutter ??a popular activity everywhere??he was awarded a tiny square of paper and directed to clean it up...

...ing the whole system into question...

...collectivism and cooperation, for example, evidently came naturally to the primitive beings whose remains have been found around Xi-an...

...they are the outward manifestation of a philosophy or a way of life...

...So Chinese society, press included, is taking a venturesome turn...

...But when a dictator is exposed, be he Stalin or Mao, thoughtful citizens have their own pow-erlessness rubbed in...

...Meanwhile, the small part of the public that counts in these matters is thinking the unthinkable...

...China's increasing intercourse with the West portends political as well as economic consequences...

...There was nothing mystifying about the desired effect, however...

...Their freedom remains closely limited by circumstances, but the gestureis nevertheless significant...

...But then goods are not in such abundance as to leave much over far refuse...

...All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour...

...If the rulers of China had read 1984, they might be more cautious about giving leash to sex...

...Much the same is said of the swordplay that can also be seen in these early hours...

...In Moscow, I would have suspected that he was an agent provocateur...

...A pair of students do not a Shanghai summer make, but the very small minority that is now permitted to see the Western press in order to write reviews for the upper cadres must grow as long as the regime is determined for reasons of diplomacy and finance to expand its ties with the West...

...Museums are devoted to extolling revolutionary figures, and even the display case captions attached to ancient artifacts are in accord with the Chinese version of Marxism...

...the electorate that brought them to power has erred, and it can correct the error through set procedures...

...they may be crushed by another Cultural Revolution...

...the rules of the performance combined with the editing of the testimony managed to obscure exactly who did what to whom and under whose direction and why...

...The teo is good, and one smoll daily contest centers obout who will weaken first and make a dash for the men's room...

...If the dictatorship of the proletariat is ordained by history and the infallible dictator turns out to be an infallible villain or lunatic, what is one to do...

...That is not to suggest that the dictatorship in Bejing is tottering, but the present bosses are engaged in a delicate game...

...The promised reform of the legal system is moving slowly, and it may not matter much to the many still imprisoned political prisoners whether they have been put away by the minions of Mao or of Deng...

...A few days later, the People's Daily published a front-page commentary which, while separating Mao from the "counterrevolutionary crimes" of the Gang, nonetheless charged him with inspiring and directing the events that created national chaos from 1966-76...

...Although the students I spoke with were critical of many aspects of journalism under capitalism, the influence of their reading was apparent...

...Who can guarantee that the heir will not prove to be a tyrant too??yet who dares expose him while he lives...

...it builds one up for honest labor...

...The Westerners I spoke with during a recent two-week visit told with exasperation (and sneaking admiration) how the age-old negotiating skills of the Chinese are being employed to get what they can out of the barbarians while the getting is good...

...They can't bear you to feel like that...

...On one main street in Shanghai, several of the red bands were out, exhorting all in beholf of clean streets...

...they also criticized the requirement that reports be cleared with Party authorities before publication...

...A discussion with two graduate journalism students at Shanghai's Fudang University turned to the Gang of Four trial...

...Recently, a newspaper in Tinajin began to publish classified advertisements that in this country would be called personals, and thegovernment has set up matchmaking centers in an apparent effort to improve morale in a nation where dating does not come easy...

...a single issue of the Sunday New York Times contains more paper than a decade's worth of the People's Daily...

...W.G...

...He grumbled but complied...

...The exigencies of the marketplace, the growth of an outward looking managerial force, more occidentals making contact with natives??such forces have the potential for shaking up established power relations and straining traditional values...

...And indeed, in the spooky light, the groups might well be evocations from dynasties past...

...Anyhow, even though few of China's joggers wear designer outfits, forthe American in a strange land, they are a touch of home, where jogging con be a sort of religion...

...The values of the marketplace are neither Confucian nor Marxist, and a new, unideolog-ical class is on the way up in this most class-ridden of classless societies...

...This happened to me on almost every outing and when, on one such occasion, the subject got around to the trial, the student predicted that the moment was approaching when the memory of Mao himself would be in the dock...

...How far can Mao's successors safely go in their campaign against their progenitor and his comrades...