China, After 32 Years
I visited China for about 25 days in November of 1974. Nixon had opened the country with his visit to Mao in 1971, the US ping-pong team played in Beijing in 1972, but generally "Red China" was as closed to visitors during the reign of Mao as North Korea is today. My visit occurred during the waning years of the sociopathic spasm known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
I am presently on my first return visit to China in almost 32 years. Entries tagged "Return to China" are reflections on my earlier visit and thoughts about the extraordinary changes that I see today.
Here are links to the complete postings.
2. The New Mandarins: Lifestyles of the Rich and Communist
3. Soldiers and Soap Operas: Notes on moving around in China
4. Party On: The Evolution of Government in China
Several important caveats. First, I eat Chinese with enthusiasm but I speak no Chinese at all. Second, I have
visited mainly cities and China is still predominantly rural. Third, I am American down to my DNA, which means that I very often misinterpret what goes on here. I Americanize my observations about China just as Chinese occidentalize their views about America. Finally, China defies description and in many respects defies exaggeration. It is not a single place or a single social experiment, so it is not only me who runs the risk of drawing conclusions based on far too little data. The Chinese themselves run this risk – as the most thoughtful among them readily acknowledge. Nobody really understands this place, although at least a billion people understand it better than I do.
I will try to post a series of focused personal reflections of moderate length. I will post quickly, edit posts after they appear, and add photos as I am able.
Background
My social consciousness was forged, as the Maoists might have said, by the Three Great Struggles: the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-(Vietnam) war movement, and the women’s movement. By the mid seventies many twenty and thirty somethings were disillusioned with progress in America and intrigued by what we saw in China – a poor country that had seized its own destiny away from the US and appeared to be making impressive strides in providing health care, education, and opportunity to its citizens.
Our ideals were naive – which is pretty much what made them ideals. Much like the young people who turned a blind eye to the gulag during visits to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and returned home singing the praises of the New Soviet Man, we turned out to be naive about China, about Communism, and about the nature of economic and social progress.
In part, this was due to the badly slanted nature of contemporary writing about China. Writers like Norman Bethune (Away With All Pests), William Hinton (Fangshen and Shenfan), and Han Suyin (A Many Splendored Thing and a number of others) were, like their hero Edgar Snow, writing detailed books on the glorious achievements of Maoism that turned out to be nothing more than a rehash of CCP propaganda. You will search very hard among any of these writers to find a hint of thinking not in line with Mao’s personal views – which changed periodically, thus requiring especially adept writing. Even the lions of serious western Chinese scholarship, John Fairbank, Roderick MacFarquhar, Stuart Schram, Orville Schell and others often got it wrong despite a deep knowledge of Chinese history, language and literature. There was simply very little information coming out of the Middle Kingdom in those years.
Like North Korea today, China was an isolated garrison state — although its leaders did not sport the oddball hairdos. Visits were very restricted, closely managed, and granted only to those with a local sponsor and a reason for a visit. I was able to see Mao’s work first-hand thanks to the work of one of his fellows in patriotic homicide, Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk was the former Crown Prince of Cambodia and the descendant of two lines of Cambodian kings. He had been overthrown in a 1970 coup led by one of his lieutenants, probably with the help of the CIA. He was beloved by the Cambodian people an easily the most popular political leader in the country.
Unlike Mao, Sihanouk loved all things western. He had a taste for fine French dining, American jazz, beautiful women, and the high life of western cities. When we met with him in China, an an exceedingly poor and in many places starving nation, he received us at his home in Beijing (address: Norodom Sihanouk, Mussolini’s Son’s Mansion, Beijing, China – you can’t make this stuff up). I recall counting twelve pieces of silverware at each setting, five wine glasses, and seven courses of elegant French cuisine. — a level of sumptuousness that I have yet to exceed despite three decades of trying. The food proceeded from subtle broths to a terrine of something no doubt wasted on my young palette. The wines went from Dom Perignon to lovely French whites and rich reds. After desert and coffee, the Prince entertained us with his clarinet, signed copies of "My War with the CIA" for us, and showed us his radio room, where he bragged of his ability to communicate with the guerrilla group he had endorsed. He called them the Khmer Rouge — the first time any of us had heard the term. It turns out that Sihanouk’s endorsement was the key to their rise to power — and imprisoned in exquisite exile, the King appeared to have no idea what a monster he had unleashed.
The Khmer Rouge took their cue from Mao.They emptied Cambodia’s cities, subjected "intellectuals" (defined as anyone with more than a grade school education) to torture and death, usually with their families. Sihanouk learned of the true nature of the Khmer Rouge the hard way — they slaughtered his children while he played clarinet in Beijing. The Khmer Rouge carried out their own Cultural Revolution, killing one in five Cambodians and nearly allowing Vietnam to annex the country. Many of my professors, free to think critically thanks to a grant of lifetime tenure by the state, concluded that the whole thing terrific because it was revolutionary and anti-imperialist. Although In the years that followed our visit, 1.7 million Cambodians their lives, at the time none dared call it genocide.
It was Sihanouk who got us visas thanks to his personal physician, a Frenchman named Bernard Pate. Pate gave the visas to his son, who ended up working with my school to set up the trip. It fell to me to fly to Washington to obtain visas. I had to submit passports to the Chinese "interest office", since there was no consulate. It was Tom Clancy stuff ("stand at the phone booth across the street on Massachusetts Avenue at 1pm. The phone will ring and tell you which door to approach"). Again, think North Korea.
So we spent several months preparing to travel. We were: a mix of students – some Chinese-American, mostly white. One or two were campus Maoists, most of us were kindly disposed before the trip. Among the faculty, only one – a grumpy Russian – had the requisite skepticism. We thought him hopelessly jaded — until we returned, when he suddenly seemed much wiser. The group of visitors returned with a far more diverse view of China than when we left but all of us were deeply affected by the experience. It was one of those touchstone events that changed forever how we looked at the world.
Continue Return to China after 32 Years: Part 1. The Finger Factory
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