China And India And Me

...What is remarkable about this story,” Leys says, “is that the hoax was found out.’’ The China they did not see, at least as this book portrays it, is a totalitarian regime...

...He had been in and out of China during much of Mao’s reign, and he grew increasingly unhappy with what he saw...

...Like any exaggeration, this one had its measure of truth, especially in the economic improvements Mao had brought to a land where millions used to starve...

...They stay at the same ghetto-like hotels, meet the same set of experts, and end up trampling over each other’s spoor...

...but there is no politics in the noblest, most important sense, of widespread involvement in the affairs of a community of men...

...A frugal, honest, and unified nation, with its ever-smiling face set to the’ future and its sense of common purpose firm...

...His followers have remembered only the eccentricity and the self-absorption...

...for each of them, self-absorption in the one case and bureaucratic excess in the other, reflects a world in which each individual’s boundary of concern extends no farther than his own welfare...

...Much of his book, but especially the chapter on “Bureaucrats,” is a textbook on the privileges, the isolation, the means of getting ahead in any bureaucracy...

...They were established more than ten years ago, in the days of the Red Guards...

...to a narrow, incredibly constricted area...

...It was a neat China, where smiling hordes appeared as if by magic to efface all traces of either garbage or snow...

...But Leys shows in China, as Orwell showed about the Animal Farm, that even the most pious official pronouncements about the importance of communal welfare will be derailed by a bureaucracy whose motto is “I’m all right, Jack...

...On the basis of this evidence, I’m in no hurry to meet Simon Leys-but I am glad to know what he has told us about China, and about the way herd journalism presented a false China to Herd journalism really was the problem...

...but at times of crisis he “says to himself again and again, ‘Kya karun...

...Its most poignant moment, for those who believe that bureaucracy will thwart all attempts to curb it, comes when Leys visits one of the “May 7th” schools, the rural outposts Mao established to get China’s bureaucrats out of the office and into a brief, enforced contact with real life...

...Department of Agricultureor, of course, General Foods...

...But Leys did it first, and in doing so, his book helps focus on the real problem, which is not the economic organization of Chinese society, or that of any other “socialist ” state, but the rampant spread of the bureaucratic way of life It is no coincidence, of course, that when economic theory dictates that everybody should work for the state, bureaucracy will reach its fullest flower...

...An energy-efficient and non-polluting China, with bicycles instead of Plymouths and nightsoil instead of chemicals to enrich the earth...

...The book is marked, too, by an arch and snobbish tone, arising partly from Leys’ cultural ostentation (“Chinese traditional opera has been totally eliminated...

...The pitfalls of Hindu values may not be as universal a problem as the bureaucratic pitfalls Simon Leys illustrates in China...

...A civil servant can, because he depends on the public for nothing...

...Naipaul’s book India: A Wounded Civilization (Alfred A. Knopf) shares with Chinese Shadows a snobbish tone, but also an instinct for the home truth...

...he says in a footnote, “written before the People’s Republic was founded, one is aghast at its uncanny prophetic quality...

...In the Hindu tradition, Naipaul says, Gandhi was certainly an eccentric...

...If that sense is being eroded, these books suggest that the cause is two versions of the same attitude...

...Naipaul uses this freedom well...

...This is the part of Leys’ book that most nearly approaches the universal, for his description of China’s officeholders is painfully similar to a profile of the U.S...

...In sending the bureaucrats to the field, in overhauling the universities, in loosing the furies of Cultural Revolution, his prescriptions may have been imprecise, but his diagnosis was perfect...

...He saw, as we should, that to free his nation meant fighting not only ignorance, hunger, and the revisionist devils of Russia, but also the organizations that choked his people instead of leading them...

...unlike China’s, our pressure to care for our brethren came not from the state but from the spirit...

...These are the spirits that have made China and India what they are today, and can do the same for us...

...Later: “True freedom and true piety are still seen to lie in withdrawal from the difficult world...

...One is the narcissism of Assertiveness Training, singles bars, withdrawal from the troubled polity to the serene punty of Big Sur...

...he looks at the poverty of the cities, the excrement on the sidewalks, the Untouchables dwarfed and twisted by generations of suffering, and he says that it is a disgrace...

...There is “politics” in India, in the latest adventures of Indira and Desai...

...In its more modest way, India has also served as a looking glass for the United States-not for the organization of its society, like China, but for the transcendence of its spirit...

...A nation, in short, that was everything we thought pioneer America had been...

...for unlike many writers from Italy and France, whose Maoist enthusiasm made them willingly blind to the darker side of the regime, the TV men and writers who told us about the glories of China did so in the name of “objective ’ news...

...Unlike India’s, our religions required involvement with others, rather than separation...

...But in China under Mao or China under the Mandarins, in Russia or America, in private enterprise or in any government, it is a question of more or less of the same evil, which is the caution, the deception, the waste of organizational life...

...Indeed, there is a connection between the disease that, according to Naipaul, has wounded timeless India and the one that, according to Leys, afflicts China after Mao...

...That is the page from his little red book that deserves to be saved...

...When Richard Nixon opened the door to respectability in 1972, the TV crews that accompanied him sent back pictures of what was soon to become the conventional view of China...

...Foreigners troop through the same dozen cities-the only ones in which their presence is allowed...

...No elected official can long afford to snub his constituents, for he depends on them for his very life...

...In the high Hindu ideal of self-realization,” Naipaul says, “there was no idea of a contract between man and man...

...Unhappy enough, by the end of 1974, to write what he admits is a pamphleteering broadside against the regime and its excesses...

...for when he regards the May 7th schools as a kind of farce, he misses the insight that led Mao to create them...

...This is more naked in India, of course, for that culture has no official dogma of the importance of the common good to offset the narcissistic fascination of the Hindu faith...

...The horrors of a totalitarian state are many, and pointing them out may not seem like much of an insight (except, in France, where perception of this sort wins you recognition as a nouveau philosophe...

...Without ever dreaming of Mao’s China, Orwell succeeded in describing it, down to concrete details of daily life...

...The Chinese authorities ‘ managed to limit Chinathat immense and varied universe...

...This one sentence, from the end of the book, illustrates both the put-down tone and the strangely zippy style: “The totalitarian cancer, the organized cretinization, the dictatorship of illiterates, the crass ignorance of the external world together with a pathetic inferiority complex toward it-those traits are not the natural features of the most civilized people on earth...

...but in the United States of 1978 they could not be more directly to the point...

...Not a disgrace to be blamed on Western rapacity or on the evils of the Raj, but on a wrong, immoral, wounded view of life...

...The glory of the United States has always been that, while proclaiming its political ethic of individual liberty, it has suggested a balancing moral pressure to be our brothers’ ,keepers...

...Leys is the pseudonym of Pierre Ryckmans, a Belgian art historian who specializes in the works of ancient China...

...one must perhaps know its once-central place in Chinese life to appreciate the void created by its disappearance.’) and partly from his pose as a man who loves Mother China but feels contempt for those who now happen to tenant her soil...

...Rereading that book...

...The other, as in China, is the replacement of politics by bureaucracy, in which the survival of one’s own post takes precedence over all other claims...

...Specifically, he blames it on the Hindu sense of self, which, folding all attention in upon the Me, leaves the nation without a sense of political life...

...Hindu self-absorption differs from its American analogue in its indifference to material goods, but in focusing on the Me and disregarding the You and They, both spirits are the same...

...And if we are now seeing, with greater and greater frequency, reports of chaos in Italy, coronations in Africa, and beheadings among the princes of Araby, it is because, under the Return to Normalcy policy of our government, we are ready to be reassured about the basic soundness of all things American...

...If we are reminded from time to time that the Roman Empire came crashing down, it is not because we need that information, but to warn us of the consequences of our own dissolute ways...

...A disciplined and inventive China, where other smiling hordes made steel in backyard smelters and raised champion hogs...

...But it is also the part in which he misses an important point...

...Like most broadsides, Chinese Shadows has excesses of its own, which are not improved by what comes across in translation as a curiously pugnacious style...

...Leys tells about the American reporter who wrote a moving account of his visit to China, illustrated with all the standard scenes and documented by the standard sources-although he had never gone to the country at all...

...If Maoist China has created the most ponderous bureaucracy this side of the Kremlin, at least Mao recognized, as his counterparts in the Kremlin have not, that he had something of a monster on his hands...

...This claim to Indian roots, tenuous as it may be, gives him the freedom to criticize Indian culture and Hindu values in a way that would earn other writers the label “racist...

...In old China, the mandarins were called, in a very telling phrase, ‘Those-who-eat-meat ,’ ” Leys says...

...the value of Simon Leys’ book, Chinese Shadows (Viking), is that it says what needed to be said about that other side...

...During the stage of foreign reportThomas Massey is a Washington writer age that is now drawing to a close-the one in which we praised other nations in order to demonstrate, as Susan Sontag put it in a particularly fevered moment, that “the white race is the cancer of human history”-no country had a more successful propaganda run than the China of Chairman Mao...

...Their inmates plant cabbages and feed pigs, but they do it with other bureaucrats, on the school grounds...

...V.S...

...Whenever the acquisitive nature of the American ethic seems too gross, there is always the placid contemplation of Eastern religion to inspire us by its example...

...Kya karun?’ What shall I do...

...their question is, “What shall I be...

...But to say that there was another side to the story is to put things as gently as possible...

...The result, Leys says, was a “strange tour de force...

...but since then, Leys says, “the May 7th schools have become institutionalized, they have become bureaucratic islands in the rural environments...

...If we heard, during the dark days of the 1960s, about the glories of nearly every civilization but our own, that was less to demonstrate their virtues than to denounce our failures...

...In his illustrations of individualism suppressed, thought controlled, diversity rooted out, Leys continually quotes George Orwelland with good reason, for he is really rewriting 1984...

...If they were blinded, as Leys demonstrates they were, it was partly by the wiles of the Chinese authorities, and partly by their own willingness to be satisfied with what was put before them...

...Naipaul is a novelist from Trinidad, raised as a Hindu and descended from Indians who left the homeland a hundred years ago...

...When we take the trouble to learn of developments in Country X or Y, it is less because we care about those countries than because we hope to catch an oblique reading of our own state of health...

...But if a new phrase must be found to qualify modern mandarins, ‘Thosewhoride-in-cars’ would probably be the most appropriate...

...This balance has led to a sense of politics that, in its best moments, means that everyone bears a responsibility to participate-voluntarily-in determining the fate of the community...