The Maoist Tiger's Stripes

The terrible debacle in Tiananmen Square reminded me vividly of my conclusion about China after two trips there six years ago--that the Maoist Tiger wasn't going to lose its stripes easily or soon.

My first post-retirement adventure was to go to Shanghai to study Mandarin at their Foreign Language Institute. Our hosts were friendly, the exotica were enchanting. But the traces of the disaster of the Cultural Revolution were everywhere.

To prove to us that they really were changing, the Institute staged an "open forum" before our final going-away party. My suspicions about how open it was to be began with their request that we submit questions in writing in advance of the "forum." The panel of "distinguished" senior faculty who were to answer our "no-holds-barred" questions included one customer whose specialty was "Ethics and the History of the Chinese Communist Party." Right.

I have never been so insulted by such a farcical parody of an open forum. A few of the least contentious questions were translated into Chinese, answered in Chinese, then rendered into English--even though at the after-party the professors who hid in that fog of Mandarin seemed articulate enough in English. The longueurs of the procedure made the worst academic committee meeting seem lively in comparison.

The reason for the charade: These senior faculty were the intellectual thugs who had risen to their eminence by subverting their betters during the Cultural Revolution. China's bureaucracies are rotten with this intellectually and morally dead wood. To prune them could trigger another Cultural Revolution.

Another episode stemmed from a Sunday morning visit in Shanghai's Hyde Park, a downtown gathering place so-called because people go there to fine-tune their English (and, when the wind is blowing right, their ideas). A young man adopted us as a guide to wherever we wanted to go with the taxi we hired. At the Catholic Cathedral a French-speaking Jesuit recapped for us the misery of the last decades for him and his fellows. At a Protestant Church we could barely squeeze into the back door, it was so packed.

While we topped off our day with a visit to Shanghai's excellent zoo and its first new hotel since Liberation, our guide dropped out but made Anne and me promise to come to dinner two days hence so we could meet his fiancee. Since his father was a college accounting teacher, the family had been rusticated to Nanking during the Cultural Revolution. The young man had spent six years switching railroad cars for "re-education." But his father surreptitiously taught him English, so that he had qualified to teach middle-school English after he was rehabilitated.

His fiancee was an elementary school teacher. Both their parents were professional who had already split--one to Hong Kong, one to L.A. They were not going to return from their honeymoon, they told us in confidence. Such is the foolish way ideologues drain brains. It was inevitable that we would contrast the thugs on the fake "open forum" with these victims who couldn't get out of Red China fast enough.

When the class was given the bonus of a trip to Beijing after the Mandarin class closed, I diverted from the group tour of the Great Wall to interview one of the editors at the English-language China Daily. Strictly speaking, it wasn't a newspaper at all, because every feature story and reported item carried a covert political agenda. I called it a "views" paper.

Still, they were about to open a New York edition, and ultimately they were more interested in doing market research through me than to explain the relations between ideology and news budget. ("Should we run more sports in New York?") Beneath every Maoist jacket beats the heart of a Chinese businessman. But I saw then and there that expanding business had no connection with expanding freedom.

It was the same thing at Panda Books (paperbacks--the Chinese equivalent of Penguin!) and New World Press. What will go in the American market? Would I like samples to show to American publishers?

Only at the editorial offices of the quarterly Chinese Literature did I find more interest in ideas than in bottom lines. The venerable editor wanted to talk about Walt Whitman, the American writer whom Lu Xun, the so-called Thomas Jefferson of the Long March, had popularized.

Lu had also been the proponent of the woodcut as the genre of the Long March, a medium you could engage in with a minimum of support. The Fine Arts Publishing House of Shanghai was just publishing a splendid golden jubilee gathering of the art in honor of the anniversary of Lu Xun's death. The editors there were also interested in how an American edition would go.

I had gone to Shanghai more interested in their art museum's treasures than in learning Mandarin (they were about the travel to San Francisco). The museum was located in a recycled Art Deco bank! There had been no public museums before the Revolution, so it was just getting up to speed. But they took me to the reproduction workshop and explained their elaborate plans to finance expansion by selling a lot of high-quality reproductions.

Every time I glance at a the wall hanging I had mailed from the museum. I ruminate about how much easier it is to package traditional art than to create the infrastructure for a libertarian society. I don't doubt that down the road China will purge itself of Maoist shackles. But it won't be in our generation. Once lost, freedom is very hard to retrieve.

from Welcomat: After Dark, 1989