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CONTENTS
Vol. 10, No. 3: JulySeptember 1978
Gail Omvedt and Eleanor Zelliott - Introduction to Dalit Poems
Daya Pawar - Siddharthanagar / A Poem
Namdeo Dhasal - Song of the Republic and the Dog / A Poem
Arun Kamble - The Life We Live / A Poem
J. V. Powar - Its Reddening on the Horizon / A Poem
Namdeo Dhasal - So That My Mother May Be Convinced
/A Poem
David G. Goodman - Introduction to Two Languages Two Souls
Morisaki Kazue - Two Languages, Two Souls
Edward Friedman - Simon Leys Hates China; America Loves Simon
Leys
Jean Doyle - A Review of Chou En-lai and the Chinese Revolution
and Conversations With Americans by D. Davison and M. Selden
Hsieh Pei-chih - Changes and Continuity in Southwestern Yunnan:
The Xishuangbanna Tai Autonomous Region
Gene Cooper - Regionalism and Integration / A Review of Regional
Government and Political Integration in Southwest China 1949
1954 by Dorothy Solinger
M. C. van Walt - On Grunfelds Roof of the World
A. Tom Grunfeld - Rejoinder
Elizabeth J. Perry - The Politics of Chinas Peasant Revolution /
Resistance and Revolution in China by Tetsuya Kataoka and The
Broken Wave by Roy Hofheinz / A Review Essay
Nigel Disney - Perspectives on China / Reviews of Books by L.
Maitan, J. van Ginneken and Bao Ruo-wang, and R. Chelminski
Victor Nee - Behind Chinas Turmoil / Reviews of Books by J.
Gurley, S. Andors, and J. van Ginneken
Carl Riskin - East Asia and the World Economy / A Review of
F. Moulders Japan, China, and the Modern World Economy and
A. Ecksteins Chinas Economic Revolution
Chuck Cell - Review of Dwight Perkins Rural Small Scale Industry
in the Peoples Republic of China
Linda S. Pomerantz - A Review of Four Books on Women in China
by C. Broyelle, E. Croll, D. Davin, and J. Kristeva
BCAS/Critical AsianStudies
www.bcasnet.org
CCAS Statement of Purpose
Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose
formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of
the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of
our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of
Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their
research and the political posture of their profession. We are
concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak
out against the implications of an Asian policy committed to en-
suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
recognize that the present structure of the profession has often
perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a
humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies
and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront
such problems as poverty, oppression, and imperialism. We real-
ize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand
our relations to them.
CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in
scholarship on Asia, which too often spring from a parochial
cultural perspective and serve selfish interests and expansion-
ism. Our organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a
communications network for both Asian and Western scholars, a
provider of central resources for local chapters, and a commu-
nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.
Passed, 2830 March 1969
Boston, Massachusetts
,
Contents: Vol.lO, No.3 / July-September,1978
i
\
!
I
Gail Omvedt and Eleanor Zelliott 2 Introduction to Datit Poems
Daya Pawar
Namdeo Dhasal
Arun Kamble
j. V. Powar
Namdeo Dhasal
3
4
6
7
8
Siddh arth anagar /poem
Song of the Republic and the Dog/poem
The Life We Live/poem
It's Reddening on the Horizon/poem
So That My Mother May Be Convinced .. .lpoem
David G. Goodman 12 Introduction to "Two Languages, Two Souls"
Morisaki Kazue 13 "Two Languages, Two Souls"
Edward Friedman 19 Simon Leys Hates China; America Loves Simon Leys
Jean Doyle 28 Review of Chou En-Iai and the Chinese Revolution and
Conversations with Americans, by D. Davison and M. Selden
Hsieh Pei-chih 29 Changes and Continuity in Southwestern Yunnan:
The Xishuangbanna Tai Autonomous Prefecture
Gene Cooper 38 Regionalism and Integration/review of Regional Government and
Political Integration in Southwest China, 1949-1954 by Dorothy Solinger
M. C. van Walt 40 On Grunfeld's "Roof of the World"
A. Tom Grunfeld 42 Rejoinder
Elizabeth J. Perry 44 The Politics of China's Peasant Revolution/review essay of
Resistance and Revolution in China by Tetsuya Kataoka, and
The Broken Wave by Roy Hofheinz, Jr.
Nigel Disney 48 Perspectives on China/review essay of books by
L. Maitan, J. van Ginneken, and Bao Ruo-wang/R. Chelminski
Victor Nee 52 Behind China's Turmoil/review essay of books by
J. Gurley, S. Andors, and J. van Ginneken
Carl Riskin 57 East Asia and the World Economy/review essay of
Japan, China and the Modern World Economy by F. Moulder,
and China's Economic Revolution by A. Eckstein
Chuck Cell 62 Review of Rural Small Scale Industry in the People's Republic
of China by Dwight Perkins
Linda S. Pomerantz 64 Review of Four Books on Women in China by
C. Broyelle, E. Croll, D. Davin, and J. Kristeva
Editors
Bruce Cumings (Seattle); Saundra Sturdevant (Berkeley)
Associate Editor: Jayne Werner (Tucson, AZ); Managing Editor: Bryant Avery (Charlemont, MA)
Editorial Board
Len Adams, Nina Adams (Springfield, IL), Doug Allen (Orono, ME), Steve Andors (Staten Island), Frank Baldwin (Tokyo),
Ashok Bhargava (Madison, WI), Herbert Bix (Tokyo), Helen Chauncey (Palo Alto, CA), Noam Chomsky (Lexington, MA),
Gene Cooper (Hong Kong), John Dower (Madison, WI), Richard Franke (Montclair, NJ), Kathleen Gough (Vancouver), Jon
Halliday (London), Richard Kagan (St. Paul, MN), Sugwon Kang (Oneonto, NY), Ben Kerkvliet (Honolulu), Rich Le\'y (Jamaica
Plain, MA), Victor Lippit (Riverside, CA), Jon Livingston (New York), Ngo Vinh Long (Cambridge, MA), Angus McDonald
(Stanford), Joe Moore (Flagstaff, AZ), Victor Nee (Ithaca, NY), Felicia Oldfather (Trinidad, CA), Gail Om\'edt (Pune, India),
James Peck (New York), Ric Pfeffer (Baltimore, MD), Carl Riskin (New York), Moss Roberts (New York), Joel Rocamora
(Berkeley), Mark Selden (St. Louis), Hari Sharma (Burnaby, BC), Linda Shin Pomerantz (Los Angeles), Anita Weiss (Oakland,
CA), Thomas Weisskopf (Ann Arbor, MI), Christine White (Sussex, England), Martha Winnacker (Berkeley).
General Correspondence: BCAS, Post Office Box W, Charlemont, Massachusetts 01339. Typesetting: Archetype, Berkeley,
California. Printing: Valley Printing Company, West Springfield, Massachusetts.
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, July-Sept., 1978, Volume 10, No.3. Published quarterly in Spring, Summer, Fall, and
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Introduction to Dalit Poems
by Gail Omvedt and Eleanor Zelliot
The word dalit in Marathi, the language spoken by 50
million people in the state of Maharashtra in Western India,
means "downtrodden," "ground down," or "depressed."
A caste-less word which ex-Untouchables have chosen for the
new schoolof literature they have created,it includes all those
who have suffered from the religio-social system. Short stories
by ex-Untouchables began to appear in the 1950s, but the
great swelling of creativity - poetry, novels, short stories,
plays - appeared only in the late 1960s. The school is ack
nowledged by the Marathi literary establishment as a new and
important development in the long history of Marathi litera
ture. It represents a new voice,and its themes are protest,
grievance, pride - and often revolution.
Most of the writers are products of a movement toward
equality for Untouchables which began in the 1890s. Under
the leadership of a member of the Untouchable Mahar caste,
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (who received an education in India, the
United States and England through the help of reformers from
higher castes), the movement took several forms: a drive for
education; the establishment of a political party; and, in 1956,
a conversion to Buddhism as a way out of the Hindu caste
system. The new writers have been associated with this move
ment. Most of those who are educated received their higher
education in Buddhist colleges, and some of the writers have
been strongly influenced by Marxism, particularly in the case
of Namdeo Dhasal. *
Bombay dalit poet Daya Pawar and the DaHt Sahitya banner at the
entrance to the pavilion (tent) where the Literary Conference was held,
January 1976.
American scholar Gail Omvedt
and dalit artist S. Y. Waghmare
with a banner which was used in
a street procession to protect
violence against ex-Untouchables
and Buddhists in a village.
2
Siddharthanagar
by Daya Pawar
translated by Vidya Dixit,
Jayant Karve, Eleanor Zelliot
o Siddhartha!l
The town of your name
2
in this twentieth century
has been struck by the tyrannical plough of power.
Each hut
is uprooted like a worthless stone.
Over the sign board with your name on it
a police van was driven.
Clothing, mats in each hut-
the huge earnings of umpteen generations
scattered by police clubs.
A bunch of naked little children,
screaming and moaning, came onto the road.
-Hey, call tbat woman in Delbi!
- ~ b , someone pbone tbe minister!
- ~ b , isn't it nice, dear.
- Tbat bell in front of our apartment is going away-
These were the shouts heard in the air.
Before their eyes the surrounding land was cleared.
In air conditioned glass apartments
power has taken the pose of the three monkeys
If anyone asks, the sahib has left town-
that message has been left with his Personal Assistant.
o Siddhartha, did you know
a project is going on to change the hearts
of the bandits in Chambal valley;
and here in the cultured world
white collar inhumanity has reached a peak.
Your Anand and Sariputra,3
see, see-shelter under someone's awning.
-Let's go, take out five rupees each,
Let's take a march to the center of power.
Those gangsters, living under your name,
have come.
4

e.
Asmitadarsb (Mirror of Identity), a major Dalit journal, edited
by Gangadhar Pantawane and published in Aurangabad. Logo of
issue of April-May-June, 1975, Vol. 8, no. 2.
o Siddhartha,
You made a tyrant like Angulimal
S
tremble.
We are your humble followers.
How should we confront
this ferocious Angulimal?
o Siddhartha,
If we fight tooth and claw,
Try to understand us.
Try to understand us.
(Magowa, Diwali Issue, 1972)
Notes
1. Siddhartha: a name of the Buddha.
2. A slum area of Bombay named Siddhartha Nagar city, inhab
ited chiefly by Buddhists and low caste Hindus.
3. Two of the Buddha's disciples.
4. Politicians who collect money to protest slum clearance but
do nothing.
5. A robber converted by the Buddha.
3
Song of the Republic and the Dog
by Namdeo Dhasal
translated by Vidya Dixit, Gail Omvedt,
Jayant Karve, Eleanor Zelliot, Bharat Patankar
Dog, leashed dog,
He howls and barks from time to time.
This is his constitutional right.
He lives on stale crumbs.
His mind is calloused with endured injustice.
If at a rebellious moment it becomes unbearable
and he jerks at his leash, tries to break his chain,
then he is shot.
In the crowded streets
the drums of bunkus freedom are played.
Friends, I ask an uncircumcized boy
the meaning of democracy,
"do you have any inkling of it?,,1
I ask the mother with the wornout old patched sari
the worth of breast milk.
I ask the man who works like an ox
about fulfillment, prosperity, deprivation.
These riddles have turned my mind helter-skelter
"Red carriage with green handles
widowed prostitutes sit inside,,2
Do you know, do you know what it is?
He whose heart has become stone
and his skin a rhinocerous hide
and he is hanging stuffed with sawdust in a museum
now only his head can remain
cool, cool, expansive, and peaceful.
How terrible, how terrible the age is,
the thieves' age.
We can't even chat about crops and water.
The dark empire of hunger, the guts which have run dry,
the ferocious python which wanders in them.
We are not even allowed to weep.
Liberty, equality, fraternity,
the banyan tree of private property
everything is equal before the law.
"Eat, drink and be merry,
Go to hell,,3
o how strange is this age, this dark age.
Cover of collection of poems, julus, by P. M. Shinde. Aurangabad:
Asmitadarsh Press, 1972.
We live to drink tea in hotels.
We touch cup to cup, saucer to saucer.
We search the railway timetable for a two hour journey.
We try to fill up the Kumbhamela
4
of our existence
with many colors and many fashions.
After excessive tension we gather in public gardens.
We playa rhythmic flute of our breaths.
The two children of poverty,
One white, one black.
4
Sea-saws are played on in sovereign gardens.
Dry tombs are impressed on the screen of the mind.
The laudatory songs of democracy are forced down.
Hybrid, hybrid-
what bastard brought this to us?
It won't take root in flesh
It won't mix in blood
It won't flower or give fruit
It won't give shade to the weary and tired
It no more fits the body than a ready-made shirt.
The gaping wounds on the body will not vanish.
We are becoming homeless.
We are becoming orphans.
Leaving our houses to the winds we are returning
to the burial grounds.
We dig up the bones of forty-two generations.
We sell them for four annas a kilo.
We fill the belly of the skeleton.
In the nation which spewed "golden smoke"s
the marketplace of bones is flourishing.
We have become fakirs of fate.
Golden sparrow, golden sparrow,
golden birdseed, golden cage.
We are being sold.
How white are these travellers
6
How white are these beggars
How white are these hunters.
In their hands the white hunted rabbits.
On the table spread with a nice cloth they have placed their prey.
They pull out the dagger-swish, swish-
they pierce the rabbits' genitals
The geyser of blood gushes forth.
My mind is turning into blood-bathed doves.
The messengers of peace are dashing along the path of the sky.
The song emerges from the chaos, the song of the Republic:
"Give alms, the eclipse is over,
Give alms, the eclipse is over.,,7
Notes
1. The literal Marathi is "What do you eat with it?" which
implies total innocence of the thing involved. The literal Marathi might
be more effective than tile English equivalent here.
2. This is a Marathi riddle. The answer is "watermelon"-red
flesh, green skin, black seeds inside.
3. This sentence is in Hindi.
4. The Kumbhamela is the greatest religious fair in India, held
every twelve years in Allahabad.
Cover of book of poetry, Golpita (a slum area of Bombay), by Namdeo
Dhasal. Bombay: Nilkant Press, 1975.
5. The phrase "golden smoke" referes to the classic period of
India, when there was such wealth even the smoke was golden.
6. The word there translated "white" is the Marathi sbubbril,
which can mean white, clean, pure nice, etc. The use here is ironic.
7. Traditionally, the most destitute begged after an eclipsse,
shouting "Give alms, the eclipse is over" through the streets. Anything
given during an eclipse is extremely inauspicious, but some would hurry
the gifts along by shouting before the eclipse was over. Dhasal's use of
the chant here is a bitter and negative comment on the place of the
datit in the Republic.
5
The Life We Live
by Arun Kamble*
translated by Gauri Deshpande
If you were to live the life we live
(Then out of you would poems arise).
We: kicked and spat at for our piece of bread
You: fetch fulfillment and name of the Lord.
We: down-gutter degraders of our heritage
You: its sole respository, descendants of the sage.
We: never has a paisa to scratch our arse
You: the golden cup of offerings in your bank
Your bodies flame in sandalwood
Ours you shoved under half-turned sand
Wouldn't the world change, and fast
If you were forced to live at last
this life that's all we've always had?
Tbis poem first appeared in
tbe Times Weekly (Bombay),
November 25, 1973.
Cover of collection of short stories, Maran Swast Hot Abe
Is Getting Cheaper), by Baburao Bagu\. Bombay: B. L.
Press, 1969.
6
I
It's Reddening on the Horizon
by J. V. Powar*
translated by P.S. Nerurkar
These twisted fists won't loosen now
The coming revolution won't wait for you.
We've endured enough; no more endurance now
Won't do letting down your blood's call to arms
It won't do:
the seeds of revolution have been sown since long
no use awaiting the explosion now;
the fire-pit is ablaze; it's for tomorrow
even if you take to your heels now
no use; life's certainty is no more.
How will they snuff the fire within?
How will they stop minds gone ablaze?
No more reasoning now;
unreason helps a lot
Once the horizon is red
What's wrong with keeping the door open?
* Times Weekly (Bombay), November 25, 1973.
Cover of book, Kondwada, by Daya Pawar.
Poona: Magova Press, 1974.
7
So That My Mother May Be Convinced ...
by Namdeo Dhasal
translated by Jayant Karve,
Vidyut Bbagwat, Eleanor Zelliot
A body broken down for seven generations
Gentle mother, your feet haven't travelled through the ten continents,
You never, never, never could leave your village world.
Throughout life you carried, with your eyes shut, the burden of Devout Wife.
With no other way, you read again and again the stones and boulders.
Without speaking, you took the heirloom mantle of Chaste Wife.
You wore the long, long robes of the Married Woman.
All your life, you have put patches on your heart,
on your pride in living, on the clothes on your body, on your home.
In your prime, you became weak, naive,
a tethered cow.
Mother you never understood:
this land does not value the woman, the Shudra, the worker, the landless.
Today your son, in his twenties, stumble-shuffling,
of whom you made an elephant from a grain of sand,
enduring the hot winds of povery and hard times,
whom you fed grains of rice while your own stomach pinched,
whom you nurtured, making a lamp of your eyes and a cradle of your arms,
whom you protected in the stress of life as one protects a sore on the palm of the hand.
Mother, he, your favorite, has rebelled against this culture, this tradition, this custom, this thought and these justifiers of
the status quo.
Now, you are exhausted, shaken.
You cry instead of placing a helmet on my head.
Mother, all that is unnecessary.
Mother, your son is not a child.
He is the son of this age's rebellion.
He can sec clearly the injustice, himself as victim.
Governmental machinery, means of living, power of toil, mines of coal and steel, warehouses, factories
there: protection, guarantee of food and money.
My face, lying in the dust, separated from all of this.
Mother, as your ancestors have not given you anything,
so you have not given me anything.
You haven't taught me the wise ways of history.
Father has drunk the liquor of this system and is intoxicated.
Mother, you have drunk the water of ignorance and are finished.
Like an ordinary woman, you dream of a son's married life.
In your mind, you have a grandson, plump as the child on the Amul milk tin,
a one-in-a-million daughter-in-law,
a little bird's house, with you
looking after everything with your old eyes.
In your pitty-petty mind, resounding kisses and overflowing love.
In the end, a peaceful death, while you still wear kum kum in never-ending bliss.
8
I
\
I
I
I
Mother, remember your troubled life-.
The start of your life-
that day you were a new bride, anointed with tumeric,
had come ceremoniously to your father-in-Iaw's house.
How many wishes, how many hopes, were in your mind.
From then to now-dragged through life.
Mother, doesn't it gnaw you?
How can you so easily drop a curtain over the atrocities of these long years?
Can you tell me the purpose, the reasons for these atrocities?
All your life you were sucked dry and even now you bow before the system.
Your natural fearlessness, your willing drudgery, your ability to make decisions,
your wanting to learn new techniques of production,
your prominent place in individual development, public development,
your faith in freedom, your part in national defense,
your accomplishments in all of this,
All of this vanished when man came to know the use of land.
The male dominated culture kept you withering in kitchen and children,
gave you secondary status.
You were seen as machinery for the production of worms.
Your natural being, your gift of giving color to masculinity, fell into slavery.
Mother, your woman's life story lives in a house in my heart.
It makes me see you clearly.
That's why I don't kill you, don't rip out your innards.
Because-just as I have been stripped bare, so have you.
Both of us have been stripped by the same one.
I want to rip out his innards.
At this moment, mother, I need you.
Please understand me.
Mother, we are separated from our origins,
and all people like us have lost their identity.
The circumstances which brought these days to you, me, father, all of us,
Mother, I want control over those circumstances.
Long before we can effectively confront our enemy.
Dalit art at the Nagpur Dalit Literature Conference, 1976.
you must trust me.
I am going through all this for happiness and a high standard of living.
o mother of poverty, don't think my hardship is trivial.
Look, poverty's at the door.
Don't come in my way with love and affection.
Don't forecast defeat for the weapon which the 20th century has put into your son's hands.
A weapon increases respectibility!
We had no history. A weapon will create history!
Mother, I don't need your love and barren affection.
I need your faith, I need your sacrifice.
Mother, we don't have any right to even this petty, simple life.
I need the payment money to get those rights.
Mother, today, tell me the stories of that payment.
In the 18th century the whole human race was turned upside down,
but even today you haven't heard of it.
You don't know the chronology of the buying and selling of humans.
You don't know the nations and the John Hawkinses who traded in slaves.
You don't know that on 21st January 1793 the guillotine was raised and before thousands of people Louis XVI was beheaded.
You don't know the terrible massacre in history,
don't know the revolutionary year of 1848,
don't know Bebuf who brought the torch ofliberty.
Mother, the day that you cut my umbilical cord, why didn't you slash my throat with your fingernail?
9
Today you are terrified just thinking of my torment,
terrified of my imprisonment, the future noose.
Mother, I can't tolerate this cool death.
Please understand all this.
The 20th century has given eyes to your son;
he will lead you on the path of plenty.
Even if he falls on the battlefield, say with pride, "He was mine."
He will create wise economists,
he will re-shape the land,
he will produce the things that the people need.
You yourself used to say, "0 Lord, give me a strong son who will put his banner on top of the three worlds."
Mother, what has this country given to you,
Z3~ -
Mother, think of me like that.
Mother, you have been sucked dry all your life.
You didn't moo even once from the depths.
You didn't stir the sky with a shrill cry.
The earth didn't crack.
How easily you lived, wrapped in rhinoceros hide.
Mother, I cannot put on the hide of a rhinoceros.
Cover of book of poetry, Zbalai (no translation>, by Krishna
I have been aware of the exploitation and I have lost myself. Chaudhari. Nagpur: Nagpur Press, ca. 1975.
The bliss of life in blinkers!
I have become Satan.
When I see women selling their bodies or begging in the bazaar, ...........
Moth.I,hinko'you. ~ ........
_
this country which teaches begging and incest. ~
Mother, be the support for my weapon. ~
o mother of poverty, make me free for the new world.
You have become bent thinking of my execution.
If you crumble to dust at this crucial moment,
then I'll have to walk on over your inert body.
Mother, please don't make me master of that deed.
This poem u:as published in Murkh Mhataryane Dangar Halaval
(The Old Fool Who Moved Mountains) .. Poona: Magowa Praka
shan, 1975.
10
Poetry in the Bulletin
of Concerned Asian Scholars!
Poetry? Yes, over the years, the Bulletin has printed many
poems. Most are still available.
*Diane Mark
*Wing Tek Lum
*Sam Tagatae
*Lawson Fusao Inada
*Shawn Hsu Wong
*To Huu
*Ho Chi Minh
*Truong Quoe Kahn
*Nguyen Kim Ngan
*Ly Phuong Lein
"Stepping Across, Being a Sister"
"Grateful Here"
"Starfighter"
"Night Song in Asian America"
"City Letter" (all in Vol. 4, #3,
$1.50)
"Mother Suot" (1965) .
"Missing the Fields" (1939)
"Song of the Perfume River"
(1938)
"The Sound of Bamboo Brooms"
(1960)
"A Peddler's Night Cry" (1941)
"Lullaby"
"Big Stone" (1942)
"A Promise" (1970)
"The Mother of Ban Co" (1970)
"Dawn Watch" (all in Vol. 4, #4,
$1.50)
*Alexander Kuo
*John Comer
'" Bhaskar Jadhav
'" Amar Sheikh
"'Dongar Javre
"'Charles Fishman
"'Nigel Gray
'" Hari Sharma
'" Kamaruzaman Yaeub
* 01<
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(5:2, $1.50)
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Diem"
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Dienbienphu, 1954" (6:2,
$1.50)
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"The Ugly American"
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"Blossom in the Dust"
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'" '" '" '" 01<
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Cover of Asmitadarsb (Mirror of Identity), chief Dalit journal.
Diwali Issue, 1977.
11
Introduction to "Two Languages, Two Souls"
by David G. Goodman
Morisaki Kazue is a poet, essayist, and chronicler of the
lives and histories of Japan's minorities. One of her recent
books, Karayuki-san (Asahi Shimbun, 1976), an oral history of
the lives of the prostitutes who followed the Japanese armed
forces during World War II, became a widely praised bestseller.
The article that follows describes what must be understood as
the central experience in Ms. Morisaki's life: her birth and
childhood in Korea and the permanent influence this had on
the structure of her life and thought.
Already an adolescent when she arrived in Japan for the
first time after the war, Morisaki experienced an intense sense
of alienation. Her true allegiance was to her motherland Korea,
she felt, the place that had nurtured her and shaped her
sensitivity. Nonetheless she realized that henceforth Japan was
to be her home. She abandoned herself to her "inner need to
be Japanese" and to the role of the Japanese woman "cured in
the smoke of the shichirin. "
Morisaki's attempts to abandon herself to Japan and blot
out Korea ended in failure. "Two Languages, Two Souls" is
Morisaki's witness to her failure, the affadavit of her guilt for
having attempted to murder her past. But it is also more than
that: "I want to point out that my experience has a certain
generalizable validity," she writes. "I would like to keep my
careening consciousness alive. I see my life as a quest to
prevent that consciousness from languishing as a mere idio
syncrasy, as a prayer that it will create thought."
As this last statement indicates, Morisaki's thought and
writing are dialectical in character. They posit that truth is to
be found in the dynamic relationship between disparate per
sonal and historical realities. In order to evoke truth, "I" (the
subject of a long aside in this article) must have the courage to
live up to the full range of its own being. The individual must
have the integrity to eschew dogma and to seek insight while
buffeted by shift;ng historical tides; she must formulate an
integrated personality while affirming the irreconcilability of
its variegated parts. This is the meaning of the title "Two
Languages, Two Souls." Morisaki does not subjugate her fem
ininity to her feminism, Korea to Japan, language to politics;
rather she is constructing a means to affirm both feminism and
femininity, Korea and Japan, language and politics.
Despite the highly personal nature of her style, Morsaki's
work is not totally idiosyncratic. It does have generalizable
validity, for in the final analysis, Morisaki is seeking a means
for the Japanese to come to acceptable terms with their
colonial past (and present), and specifically with the sizable
Korean minority in Japan. Extending the dialectical reasoning
she uses to deal with her personal situation and history, she
urges that the Japanese transcend the limitations of their
accustomed mode of mental life so as to avoid future imper
ialism and that Koreans in Japan, by asserting their integrity
and reaffirming their history, assist in this endeavor.
"Two Languages, Two Souls" was originally published in
May 1968. It is included in Haha no Kuni to no Gensokon:
Morisaki Kazue HyoTonshu (Imaginary Marriage to My
Motherland: Collected Essays of Morisaki Kazue) Gendai
Shicho-sha, 1970.
This is a revised version of a translation which appeared in Concerned
Tbeatre Japan, Volume 2, Nos. 2 and 3 (Tokyo, Japan: 1973).
12
"Two Languages, Two Souls"
by Morisaki Kazue
translated by David G. Goodman
Korea is so hard to talk about. It presses down on me
like a heavy weight. I'm not sure I can support it for the
distance I have to go. I was born in Mikasa-cho, Taegu,
Kyongsangpukto, Korea.
The darkness of the feeling that your birth-not the way
you've lived your life but the fact that you were born-was in
itself a crime is indescribable. Ordinarily I try to redeem my
soul by telling myself that the circ;umstances of my birth were
dictated by the ineluctable movement of history. But unlike
the Japanese among whom I have been surviving since the war,
I am not allowed the luxury of dismissing Japan's colonial
policies as aberrations perpetrated by the state. You were only
a child, I try to tell myself at times, you didn't live over there
by choice, but rationalizations like these don't help either. The
fact that I absorbed all that land had to give, that I allowed it
to form me without having chosen to do so fills me with
irredeemable pain. Unable to maintain objectivity about Korea
and Koreans, I lose my composure. The hair of my omoni and
neya, my Korean mother and nanny who carried me as a child
on their backs, clings to my lips. I never would have remem
bered had we not parted so. There is more of me in each
strand of that hair than words will ever tell. Could ever tell.
Korea nurtured me, formed me. I want to see my omoni, but I
am not in a position to thank her. I want to hide these words
from Korean eyes. I cannot talk about Korea without battling
that emotion. I begin to write and the tears begin to flow. I
remember once speaking with a Korean resident in Japan and
beginning to weep. "The problem goes beyond your damned
Japanese sentimentality," he snapped. No, one really shouldn't
display tears before a Korean. I am not free to display the
truth about Korea-the truth that became my flesh. I have
done whatever I could to smother that freedom. And by
smothering it I have smothered my neya, denied her over and
over again. Here, somewhere in my flesh, is her grave. With the
will to keep its location secret, I have lived and tried to build a
life-until today. I have wanted, indiscriminately, simply to be.
I do not maintain this silence in order to ingratiate
myself with Koreans. I have simply lost the means to express
what I have to say. I'll be damned if I'll allow my identity as a
Korean-born nisei to dictate the character of my entire life, I
swear to myself.
And yet next to this self-repression the furious convic
tion that Korea will go to the dogs unless I act sends up
Roman candles of rage. Korea will accept the pseudo-universal
ideology of international humanism over my dead body! Kor
ean thought must derive from the total experience of the
Korean people! The Korean people must not allow themselves
to be reduced to pawns in political battles in a divided coun
try! The Korean people must never again allow their develop
ment to be influenced from without! Quickly I must seek out
Korean comrades, together we must find a way to free me
from the bonds of my dementia and develop a joint strategy
for action!
Perhaps my personality really is split, for there is a vein
of pure Korean running through me. I need Koreans around
me. I want to open the graves and give them voice. (I want,
that is, to disembowel myself intellectually, to plunge the
dagger deep into the fact that my confusion is itself my reason
for being.)
Circuitous reasoning, that's me, straight as an arrow until
I try to put my feelings into words. I want to be pregnant with
the Japanese language. I want to take the power of that
language and articulate Korea. I want to give birth to Korea.
Yes, that is an immodest way of putting it. If a Korean
should read this essay, I beg you to endure the discomfort it
brings. Nurture the anger that brews within you. I a111 illdebted
to you for that anger. I need it to get my bearings. Without it
my declamations on Japan and Korea lose direction, sub
stance. The debt lowe you is not the sort to be repaid by
vague semaphores of death to capitalist imperialism. It can
only be repaid by determining whether human beings call raise
their experience of domination and subjugati011 to the level of
their own unique language, by determining whether language
can communicate ideas bred of such experience.
13
For better or for worse my "I," my identity in time and
space, is delineated by two overlapping, differently shaded
cultural fields. This is no self-protective subterfuge. The basic
function of the word "I" is to define the relationship between
the unique history of the individual and the general history of
the community in which one lives. In order to fulfill this
function, tbe word internalizes two opposing dynamics-a re
ductive dynamic that distinguishes self from others, and an
extensive dynamic tbat indicates an area of shared experience
with others, necessitating the inclusion within the self of an
indefinite number of others without whom "I" would have no
meaning. Ordinarily in Japan, the latter dynamic is more
conspicuous, and "I" functions to roughly define the indivi
dual's place, one's responsibilities in society.
I came to Japan for the first time after the war and
lea1'11ed that the Japanese use the word "I" around the axis of
this latter function. Raised in Korea, I had been using the
word "I" favoring the former. I observed the Japanese with
mild bewilderment. Tbis is a race unable to grasp tbe full
functional range of "I," I thought to myself
My reactions aside, "I" has this bias in tbe context of
Japanese life. Whether the example is appropriate is not en
tirely clear to me yet, but perbaps the distinction will be
understood better if I explain that in Korean wben one wants
to express what tbe Japanese mean when tbey say "Come over
to my house" or "I'd like you to meet my motber." one does
not say 1-}j;:<J (my bouse) or 1-}j <>j n1 \..-] (my
mother) but (our house) and <>j n1 \..-]
(our mother). In Japan, "I" is consistently used in this sense.
It implies tbe common nature of experience; it functions to
describe tbe overlapping, the sbared expanses of life. A similar
nuance is expressed in Korean idioms like (my
school), but whereas being called %-- (friend, com
rade) by a Korean acquaintance in Japan cames no particular
emotional impact, to be included by a korean in t!-]
(we), regardless of the reason for employing the collec
tive, leaves me shaken, at a loss bow to maintain my com
posure. My experience, the force of my existence is simply
inadequate to the historical implications of that word. It leaves
me struggling to conceal the fact tbat tbe color has left my
cheeks.
On the other hand, when I am alone and lost in thought
about Korea (or Japan), I robe myself in tbe sbadows of the
multitude of others that inhabits my HI." They are an amor
phous band of nameless Koreans, phantoms exuded by tbe
undulations of the Korean land and way of life. The day
consciousness denies tbem is the day"!" cease to be.
This sense oflanguage, this way of ordering thougbt may
well be interpreted as the distorted residue of my experience
as part of the Japanese ruling class in Korea. I have no
objections to such an interpretation. However, when I employ
the word "I" in the Japanese context, as well as with regard to
the Korean problem, my attention careens away from what
ever might be gained by drawing the distinction between
myself and others. and toward the perspective of the dialogue
between myself and the multitude that infests my being. That
does not mean that I am "identifying with the colonial
masses"; my language simply derives from a dialogue between
myself and the amorphous multitude within me. There are
times when I am socializing or struggling in Japan, in an
all-Japanese environment where people are closed off to one
14
another's inner dialogue, that I 'become lost in my conversa
tion with that multitude. I am criticized tben. I suppose I
appear unresponsive.
I would like to bave the courage to keep my careening
consciousness alive. I see my life as a quest to prevent that
consciousness from languishing as a mere idiosyncrasy, as a
prayer that it will create tbought. That is what I mean wben I
say I want to give birtb to Korea.
It was on a day not too long ago, a cold day when snow
covered the ground even in Kyushu where I live. Kim Hui Ro,
a Japanese-born Korean had shot two Japanese mobsters to
death and then, rifle in hand, had barricaded himself in a hot
springs hotel where he was resisting police attempts to appre
hend him. By embracing crime, Kim had at last obtained a
platform from which to speak. And from that platform he
excoriated anti-Korean prejudice in Japan.
It was on the fourth day of Kim's resistance that I
received a letter from a friend who wrote that she was follow
ing Kim's campaign closely and prayed for his safety. She
wrote how impressed she was by Kim's suicide tactics, taking
on the whole of Japan single-handedly. Compared to Kim, she
wrote, the resistance movement in Japan seemed like little
more than child's play. My friend is a housewife born in Japan.
For a moment I felt a little dizzy. I was suddenly unable to
follow the train of my friend's reasoning. A day or two later I
received a postcard from someone else with a similar message.
Japan was electrified at the time. A current of self
censorship flowed through the 'country-people were deter
mined not to say anything they might later regret. Self
censorship does not imply the politicization of everyday
language; it is a state several stages prior to it. Knowing that
Japan is not the sort of country to endure the demands of this
self-repression long I dreaded what lay in store. While acquies
cing to a mood of self-repression on the one hand, Japan
quickly creates a stratum of apologists to liberate the masses
from its tension on the other. The Japanese people never
suffer the pangs of perseverance all at once. The apologists
return the situation of nascent consciousness in which the
masses had seemed to be involved to its original equilibrium.
Japan rebuffs the masses to their accustomed garrulousness
and locks them in the presumed infallibility of their daily
speech. I dreaded the thought of seeing this process repeated,
of standing by while yet another attempt to establish responsi
bility for the Japanese treatment of Koreans disintegrated
before Korean eyes. I hoped against hope that the stratum of
self-appointed popular apologists would just this once fail to
appear.
And yet involved as I was in the Kim incident, a part of
me had become numb to its peculiar Japanese tragicomedy.
My friend's letter had left me momentarily disoriented because
from the depths of the well into which I had fallen I could not
perceive her position of support for Kim Hui Ro.
Then where was I? I had been taken hostage. What was I
doing? Biting my lip, glaring at Kim, vowing not to speak. Just
as I had done so often as a child. Did I have something to say?
Yes. Could I have said it? No. And now? No.
I cannot verbalize what I have to say. I have the feeling I
can say it, but then I cannot. I can see through Kim Hui Ro to
his naked ass. I can see what he is saying, and I can see with
equal clairvoyance what he is failing to say.
The Korea I have been wandering since childhood was
not one man, one Kim Hui Ro. It was a nameless multitude of
children and adults. I lived in a purely Japanese community
the hillock on which the Taegu district army residences hous
ing exclusively military and government personnel stood-and
from there I followed the road travelled by both Japanese and
Koreans to confer with the grasses and touch the water. That
my feelings should have become caught up in two or even
three circles of perception was only natural. Children who
venture out alone get their bellies ripped open! I believed that
quite literally. That's why I never crossed the Taegu River into
Kun-Eub after dark. The world was just that sort of place,
that's all. Individually Koreans were soft and warm. But as
members of the multitude they were a corset of silence,
making me tense, forcing me down into the headwaters of
language.
The Kim Hui Ro multitude envelopes me as its hostage.
They stand a little boy of four in front of them. They let the
little boy face me alone while they all turn away. Since
childhood, that has been my world, the world of a little
Japanese female born and raised in Korea. There is no laugh
ter, only an icy silence. No concessions are to be made in the
ensuing negotiations between that little boy and me.
I see rows of little boys' eyes deep within his. I can see
that they are watching me. My answer is carried into the ranks
of those eyes .... And then they disappear. I begin to play. I
touch the poplars. And again the little boy comes into
view.... He was in the air I breathed, the love I knew, the
sweet nipple that suckled me.
Now, obsessed with my vision of Kim Hui Ro's naked
ass, I confront him after the manner that has developed within
me. Can I express myself; No. Even at knife point I could not.
But should I, chance in a million, pronounce my captiv
ity, Japanese-born Kim Hui Ro would dispatch me instantly.
In that instant, would my inner voice speak Japanese, I won
der, or Korean?
I listened to Kim Hui Ro on television as he recited
poetry in the classical 31-syllable tanka form, gleefully raping
the Japanese language, and I felt as if I were being tossed
about in a sack of wild roses. Unbearable. My children sat
quite still before the television set, sneaking guilty glances at
me as I clenched a towel between my teeth and raised havoc
with the spattering grease in my frying pan.
After the war, when it became clear that I would have
no choice but to live in Japan, I concentrated on composing
tanka with the single-mindedness of a log in water. In Korea I
had casually fabricated tanka as well as other kinds of poetry.
Poetry in Japanese was truly something to be fabricated, for it
couldn't have been more irrelevant. It never occurred to me
that a world might exist where Japanese was the language of
struggle.
I have a memory that will stay with me always. The war
was intensifying, and we were told that back in Japan people
were working with the same spirit as if they were on the front
lines. Each day soldiers passed through Korea on their way to
China. As a civilian behind the lines, I was given the assign
ment of writing a composition to further the war effort. I was
told that my composition would be used to represent the
entire school and so it had better be good.
Good? I wrote my composition easily, facilely, and
handed it in. They gave me a certificate. I still have it here
with my other papers. It reads, "Certificate of merit presented
for the Kongsangpukto representative essay composed on the
occasion of the fourth anniversary of the China Incident.
Presented by the Korean League for Total Mobilization, the
seventh day of July in the sixteenth year of his Imperial
High ness' s Reign" [1941).
I had concocted something and titled it "Let's Play
War." It was about Korean boys playing war. I figured the
theme would be a sure-fire success. My teacher had said the
essays would be judged back in Japan, so I felt less inhibited
about making certain alterations to suit my theme. The song
the children sang as they played was an example. "I'll grow up
to be big and strong I I'll grow up to be big and strong I I'll
join the Korean Independence Movement and it won't be
long!" I didn't quite understand the gist of the song, so I
omitted it. It gave the children too much pleasure to make it
compatible with the somber tone of my work.
Arriving in Japan after the war, what was I to do? The
Japanese know nothing of love, not even the shapes it takes,
only what they read in novels. My heart throbbed to know
Japan. I threw myself at the feet of the portable charcoal
stove, the sbicbirin, and clung desperately to it. Gradually
postwar life returned to normal, and friends gave me advice.
"Try to be more rational," they said. And each time I parried
wittily, "You'll never understand Japan unless you've been
cured in the smoke of the sbicbirin." My friends laughed;
"What? You mean you still don't understand? How many
years do you think it's been?"
I married and took my proper place beside the sbicbirin.
How I cursed cooking! How I cursed the smoke-filled daily life
I led enslaved to my inner need to be Japanese. And my poor
Japanese-born family who had to abide my state of mind, how
they suffered! As I walked along with my baby strapped to my
back, trying to pretend I was just normal folk, I don't know
how many times I actually reached down to reassure myself
that my skirt and the special coat I wore to cover both me and
the baby had not rolled up, exposing me to public view.
Blindly I tried to fashion a plausible image of myself bundled
in that exaggerated garment, and I saved myself with the few
words within my reach: cooking smoke and woman's work,
social status and sex. How shallow is the human world of
language! And how narrow and intolerant are the national
idioms to which human beings are confined!
There isn't a household chore I dislike. But even as my
body is lost in the joy of touching things, mind and conscious
ness leap in a million directions as if they had nudged frag
ments of steel on an ice floe. I spy the Japanese bias in my
cooking utensils, and murderous intent erupts inside me. Had I
been born the daughter of the same parents here in Japan,
things would have been just the reverse-I would have grown
up as a woman who could enjoy objects in the abstract but
not, with love, in their concreteness.
I listened to Kim Hui Ro hurricane through the Japanese
language; he was someone totally incapable of self-liberation
and yet stubbornly retaining his antiauthoritarian instinct like
the contracting, stiffening stump of a tree. His performance
was for him as theatrical as it was political. Political struggle
implies, ultimately, putting your life on the line, and Kim's
antics drew a line too narrow and proscribed. Where, then, is
the line for Koreans in Japan?
1S
I
-I do not like reducing Korea (or Japan) like this to the
parameters of personal pronouncements. Japan will be unable
to transcend the provincialism of its national idiom until the
impotence of this approach is realized. Personal procurements
are necessarily fragmentary. They lack even the potency to
augment our perception of the realities to which our vocabu
lary ostensibly refers. Then why do I go on like this? I do have
a reason.
I want to point out that my experience has a certain
generalizable validity, that there is nothing in the least peculiar
about a Japanese, any Japanese, without warning or personal
reason, being taken hostage by a Korean. I want to point out
that this is in fact a common occurrence. To be a hostage
means to fall under the power of a Korean's autonomy. It also
means, however, to acquire the freedom to relate organically
to that autonomy, that is, to acquire in exchange for a sense of
mortal danger the freedom to excavate the Korea in oneself.
Japanese find it an imposition to be made subject to the
autonomy of the Koreans whether or not lawlessness is in
volved. The Japanese people come by this feeling naturally
enough. The Japanese conviction of innate superiority also
finds this experience an imposition-for a less rea
son, however. It dislikes the harried search for self-justification
into which that experience sends it.
What would happen, for instance, if a Chinese were to
take the Japanese hostage? Japan invaded China just as it
invaded Korea, but there is a considerable gap in the popular
Japanese perception of each. The reaction to the colloquial
idiom of each country, for example, is as different as night and
day. On occasion I have the opportunity to act as guide for a
foreign visitor unable to speak Japanese. We stop a passerby to
ask directions. The visitor inquires distances and fares in a
combination of Japanese, English, and his native tongue. The
young Japanese responds politely. Then he asks, "Are you
from China?" "No," the visitor answers, "Korea." "Really? I
thought you were speaking Chinese. They sound alike, don't
they?" Disappointed, the young Japanese continues on his
way.
Sometimes I have occasion to take a Korean book with
me to read on the train. The passenger sitting next to me, who
has been looking at the close horizontal printing, asks, "Is that
writing from Nepa!?" "Nepal? No, it's Korean." "Really?
Korean?" the man says as he undresses me with his eyes. "I
didn't know they had writing in Korea."
Ever since I had that experience I have made it a point
to take with me on the train a Korean language text I received
from a child attending Korean prade school in Japan. The
book has pictures. There are pictures of Korean dress that are
titled in Korean and easy to identify. Otherwise I keep a
children's textbook sent to me from Korea open on my lap.
The paper is still crude, and there are pictures accompanying
the text, so it's easy to tell where it's from. And the looks I
get! The whispering and clicking of tongues doesn't bother me
so much, but why must people communicate their displeasure
with their feet and elbows? Once someone actually spoke to
me. "Why do you study Korean; If you're going to go to the
trouble, you'd be better off studying Chinese." This reaction is
representative. I doubt that these people would find it an
equal imposition to be taken hostage by a Chinese.
Both China and Korea were invaded by Japan, but the
feelings the Japanese masses have held toward each differ, and
that difference has been reflected in the contrasting relation
ships that have developed since Japan's defeat. People regained
a sense of cultural parity with the Chinese. Toward the Kor
eans they regained a sense of categorical difference.
The Japanese masses paid for their relationship with the
Chinese in blood. In contrast, they extended the ring of
assimilation around Korea in a bloodless coup that cost them
nothing. There is in Japan that diehard feeling that we lost the
war but not to the Chinese. Yet beneath this facade the
bedrock of the masses' day-to-day existence is an unwritten
history-the world of women's thoughts. With this stratum
spread carefully beneath, the balance sheet of everyday specu
lation is drawn. The utterly disenfranchised classes have been
defending themselves by means of unique patterns of social
life centering on women's labor. The principles deriving from
these patterns have determined the attitude of their minds and
distinguished them from any community of consciousness
organized on the basis of some relationship with social power.
When Japanese meet each other for the first time they greet
each other by asking, "Where are you from?" Less than the
geographic location of their hometowns, they are inquiring
after the spatial affiliation of their lives, which is presumed to
correspond to a parallel social consciousness. This double
structure gives people a unique worldview.
Becaulie I lacked this worldview when I arrived in Japan
for the first time after the war, I could not comprehend the
presumptuousness of the people who greeted me so amicably.
They consumed me with a naked greediness that can only be
described as cannibal. Their attempts to force their mode of
thought upon me were as brazen as if they had spread their
legs and invited me to drink from the loins of their lives. That
was their ecology. They could not have cared less about me or
the principles around which I organized my life. The fact that
I was my father's eldest daughter was more than enough for
them. Perhaps they did sense something different about me,
but they would not be happy until they had eradicated that
taint from their minds with an affection they expressed by
totally ignoring the essence of my being. How much more
Father must have suffered than I! He had sustained a mortal
wound because of the principles by which he governed his life,
but the world of that wound, which was everything to him,
denied incursions from without, so the Japanese simply ig
nored it, trundling in without so much as a by-your-leave to
stuff the this and that of their lives, like vegetables fresh from
the field, down Father's throat. And when Father set aside his
own personal history to deal with them on their terms, then I
was left alone. I came to Japan and I came to understand the
real import of Japan's assimilationist colonial policies. To this
day my attempts at compliance have met with no success.
Be that as it may, groups with this sort of mentality tend
to be more intolerant of those who differ in affiliation than
those who differ in essence. Should a person or persons deter
mined by the group to be different appear on its fringes, the
group has no choice but to see that the new arrivals put down
their roots outside its boundaries. When circumstances (almost
always the whims of power) make the presence of a person or
persons determined to be different within the graup unavoid
able, the group extends the ring of assimilation and accultura
tion to envelope the new arrivals on the basis of the principle
that, just as they have ignored differences in essence in the
past, now they will ignore differences in affiliation as well.
16
Those anomalous areas of consciousness and affiliation (e.g.,
differences in bloodline, class, and geographic origin) that
stubbornly persist are ignored as idiosyncrasies within the
homogeneous community. Discrimination is the omnipresent
companion of these idiosyncrasies.
This is the mentality of the Japanese masses, not a
formal political principle. In terms of this mentality, the
assimilation of the other is a kindness performed on his/her
behalf and not a movement toward her/his extinction. People
simply do not possess the means to trace out the full implica
tions of their mentality-the implications for themselves as
much as for others. Thus it appears that one of the prime rules
governing this sort of community is that all relationships
(between all the tacit aspects of life as well as between indivi
duals) shall be conducted on the basis of an identical creed.
Should the need arise, those who extended the ring of assimila
tion can also contract it. Such contractions are intended, not
to protect oneself and others from extinction, but to ensure
that established patterns of life go unchallenged. It is against
the rules to introduce different principles into this system. It is
a distinct imposition, for example, for the community
founded on the principle of assimilation to have the principle
of legitimate opposition introduced into it-the sensibilities of
daily life simply will not accept it.
Japanese imperialism codified this popular mentality and
applied it as its colonial policy in Korea. The majority of
Japanese claim that they never discriminated against Koreans.
They simply extended the ring of assimilation to them. What is
more, they firmly believe, after defeat they made a clean break
with the former colony, returning to their original path as the
former colonials did to theirs, because power had always
respected the former subjects as categorically different. When I
was ten my father was appointed the first principal of the
middle school in the ancient Silla capital of Kyongju. Father's
passion was to make his school reflect the lofty principles of
the Shoka Academy, * and he threw himself into the work of
realizing his dream. So filled was I with my father!s respect for
the individuality of each of his students that the names and
faces of those young men he loved so dearly remain with me
to this day. At Father's dimension there was not so much as a
hint of prejudice. After defeat, the fact returned to haunt us
continually. Having lived in Japan, having struggled to beat
back the insensate waves of assimilation myself, I can see that
it was the very depth of Father's love that led to my parents'
demise.
The misfortune of the Japanese is that they have been
unable to incorporate the concept of legitimate opposition
between self and other into their mental life. Equally unfor
tunate is the fact that they have had as their leaders that
stratum able to exploit their principle of assimilation in the
pursuit of specific goals. Goal-oriented consciousness, con
ceived though it may be out of the sincerest good intentions
of the individuals employing it, nonetheless suppresses other
forms of consciousness in the same community. Scars are all
that remain of the Kyongju Shoka Academy. Since my father's
The Shbka Academy was founded by Yoshida Shoin in 1856 as a
private academy near Hagi in Yamaguchi prefecture. The principles of
the school included intense self-discipline and self-scrutiny.
death, communications from those scars come addressed to
me. Trying hard to control my emotions, I attempt to dis
tinguish in the Japanese text of the letters between {- ~ l
~ (we), 1{ (I), and "we" as conceived by the
Japanese. When the sense of . q - ~ l ~ comes through
unmistakably (and in the fullness of its nobility), I experience
an indescribable moment of peace. 1{ (I) seldom
appears in the letters, carefully as I scrutinize them. Even if
the person is someone with whom I have developed a firm
relationship, someone I have met and with whom I have had
opportunities to speak, I still have difficulty distinguishing
1{ , the equivalent of "I" in Japanese. This is
unfortunate in terms of my intellectual aspirations, but when
I, with the nerve of a criminal returning to the scene of the
crime, screw up the courage to perceive in this inability the
remnants of the history of father anc child, two generations
who lived in Korea, I find that an occasion for quiet rejoicing.
Ultimately, assimilation is the defense mechanism of
those strata of society who have been deprived of the means to
inquire into the roots of their existence. When this mechanism
is brought into play out of necessity, it performs a legitimate,
organic function, but under no circumstances can the mechan
ism be exploited for the achievement of specific goals, for it
lacks the capacity to transformationally incorporate into the
homogeneous whole individuals and groups whose patterns of
thought are authentically different. Exploited as a principle
for the domination of an entire people,this is all the more true.
Stripped of the organic role it played in the mental life of the
Japanese people as a defense mechanism intended to make it
possible for self and other to live united together, it degener
ates into a purely political device. Political oppression, while it
may destroy every concrete, every formal aspect of life, only
succeeds in reinforcing the vitality of the formless, silent space
of the oppressed. Those unable to perceive that space perish,
for out of it the people resist. .
I cannot help wondering how deeply that space of the
Koreans must have affected my childhood. I was simply play
ing, surrounded by Koreans; I didn't even know their language.
I was simply trying to emulate my father, a man given at once
to sternness and sentimentality. I was simply loving with all
my heart that ancient capital whose hills and mounds and
stone ruins, reflected in a child's mind, appeared to talk to her
of time eternal. Had things turned out differently and my
generation and the generation of my children had remained in
the colonies, I cannot imagine that we ever would have consid
ered Japan our homeland. In an atmosphere not very different
from that in which the whites rule South Africa, we \\'Quld at
best have divided ourselves into camps of the good and the bad
and spent our time arguing about whether to align ourseh'es
with China and Japan. And after several generations, the
formless, silent space of the Koreans would have completelr
permeated us colonists and produced a language capable of
expressing our thoughts. The very suggestion of it sends a ray
of hope glancing through my mind. Human beings are truly
creatures of history. And from this perspective I cannot help
but consider the conscious, the subconscious lives of Koreans
in Japan.
The Japanese masses need the impact of Koreans in
Japan to wake them to the limitations of their customary
mode of mental life. One way the Koreans can manifest this
impact is by ceasing to rely upon a hand-me-down sense of
17
Koreanness and by giving birth out of the wounds they have
sustained, wounds far deeper than those I suffered in my
divorce from my homeland, an organic original body of
thought of their own. The period when their groping will
constitute a source of direct stimulation to the Japanese mind
will continue for some time, for the Japanese masses conceive
their unconcernedness as an atonement after years of
Japanese-Korean apartheid. Moreover, precisely because they
know no other way of dealing with difference than to assimil
ate it, the Japanese need to be exposed to the disquieting
experience of directly confronting something with which they
do not know how to deal. After the war a certain number of
people consciously felt their way of conceiving the world
shaken, but their number remains too small to be significant.
The guilt of the Japanese people at large for the colonial
experience resides in their persistence in the psychological and
social structure that insists in the face of politically entrenched
and institutionally formalized discrimination within Japan
both prior to and since the war that at the level of everyday
life discrimination does not exist. Their guilt resides in the fact
that they do not struggle with it. It would seem that the
distinguishing characteristic of this mentality is that the core
of its dualism is ambiguous if not completely nonexistent, that
it is impossible to put your finger on its essential nucleus. The
function of this ambiguous dualism, that is, is to reduce the
essence of all things to insubstantiality-I am just like you, and
you are just like me; we are just like one another, and there is
no guilt anywhere. Guilt is impossible. There can be no deny
ing that from one perspective this constitutes the masses'
defense against authority. Authority cannot identify the heart
of the community and thus cannot pierce it; there is no
epicenter of opinion and activity, so the community cannot be
destroyed from without. On the other hand, the community
has nothing to fear from within, and anyone can participate in
it at the level of daily life.
Nevertheless, it is an easy matter for the proclivity to
power to exploit the circumscribed nature of this organism at
any stage for extraneous purposes. By providing specific
groups of people with the means and the motive for assimilat
ing others it is possible to achieve domination over those
others without ever making clear the source of responsibility.
The less important this mechanism is to a group as a means of
organic self-defense, the easier it will be for them to exploit it
as a means to dominate others. The success of the American
occupation of Japan testifies to this fact.
To pawn the magical messiah of class consciousness off
on people who operate on the basis of this mentality is all the
more reprehensible. Reinforced by our class consciousness you
and I line up like terraced fields and passively await orders
from the power proclivity in our group which we truly believe
to be our ally. It will not be possible to overcome this
mentality in one or two generations; it is not an easy matter to
implant the concept of legitimate opposition in an individual's
mind. The Japanese people's Korean problem will only emerge
in its true complexity when Japan itself becomes the object of
intellectual contention. Only by dissecting their own concep
tions will the Japanese come to recognize the Koreans as
possessing an existence independent of them. But in order to
undertake such a reappraisal, a situation of legitimate opposi
tion where Japan may truly become the object of intellectual
conflict must first be created, and that is difficult.
When at the cost of committing a crime or driving one's
family to destruction a Korean, not just Kim Hui Ro but any
Korean, is attempting to create a language with which to
impress upon the Japanese the legitimacy of her/his existence,
the Japanese may discharge a response that costs them
nothing, like so much excrement. Without fearing the slightest
infringement of their fragile affections, without having to
conceal their identities or suffer the pain of those who stand
alone for their principles, they are lauded by the establish
ment, which annoints them apologists, and respected by the
antiestablishment upstarts whom by some strange chemistry
they earn the prerogative to encourage and rebuke.
The Japanese Communist Party's policy toward Koreans
after the war impressed the lie of the left's solidarity with the
Korean cause upon me most deeply. The attitude of the JCP
toward Korean Party members was a stereotypical abuse of the
emotional patterns of the Japanese people. The Party ex
ploited the masses' desire to contract the ring of assimilation
so that each people might pursue its own destiny as a cynical
put-down of the Koreans' new-found sense of liberation.
Korea had not won its own liberation; Koreans had not fought
and died for their freedom. It had been the Party that had put
Koreans in a position to have their say, so now they could act
as cannon fodder without complaint. This feeling can be
perceived in the very core of Party policy. And reports of
Party members in local labor movements articulating this atti
tude and putting it into action still ring in my ears. How very
deep run the roots of "assimilation"! It would be interesting
to know the nature of the scars left by colonial policies of
other capitalist nations upon the minds of colonists and colo
nized. I understand that the relationship between Great Britain
and Ireland historically approximates the Japanese relationship
with Korea, but the policies of the two colonial powers have
been very different. I fear reducing Japan's Korean problem to
a general prejudice, thus preventing the roots of our under
standing from reaching its true depths.
I was talking to a Korean neighbor. During the course of
our conversation her expression changed. "please don't be
offended, but is it true what they say about you, that you're a
foreigner?" she asked. "The Koreans were saying so. I de
fended you. I said your Japanese was too good for you to be a
foreigner. But they wouldn't listen to me. They said they'd
heard that you had foreign blood in your veins. Is it true?"
What do you mean by a foreigner, I asked. "You know, from
America or someplace, not Korea or Japan," she replied. How
does one prove one's ethnicity, I wondered then. It shook me
to be told that I must be Japanese because I spoke the
language well. My son has asked me the same thing. "Mommy,
if you're a Korean, how come your Japanese is so good?" I
paled slightly when I heard this and tried to defend myself to
the boy. "I know that much," he protested. "Korea used to be
a Japanese colony, right?" "Yes, Korea was a Japanese colony,
and Mommy was ...." After I had explained the whole thing,.
my son looked at me and said, "I get it. That's why you're a
Korean. Then what about me?" "You? You're Japanese."
"You're a Korean and I'm Japanese?" "What's wrong with
that?" "Of course Mommy's Japanese, silly," my daughter
informed her little brother after glancing at me. "She's Japan
ese by race."
'* Those words wrung still more tears from my heart.
18
Simon Leys Hates China;
America Loves Simon Leys
by Edward Friedman
Despite the truism that hindsight provides twenty
twenty vision, it is not true. Crucial and complex issues long
remain controversial. So it is with China's Great Leap
Forward. Knowledgeable analysts still differ on the costs and
benefits of that effort swiftly to modernize China.
1
What is
special with Simon Leys is that he positions himself outside
the parameters of the on-going debate about this experiment
in modernizing China. He brushes the specialists aside with
sneer and curse and concludes that the Great Leap was
actually a "rejection ... of modemity.,,2
This is Leys' unmoving stance. He insists that only he
understands these difficult matters. The informed opinions of
the experts are dismissed.
The professionals continue to debate the worth of
China's massive resettlement of millions of educated young
city people in the countryside. As any interviewer in Hong
Kong of refugees who fled to escape rustication knows, the
policy is not quite China's most popular one. On the other
hand, it is clear that the policy helps preclude a widening of
the "gap between rapidly modernizing cities and increasingly
stagnant hinterlands," that the problem was already visible
"by the 1930s" and that nations without such a policy suffer
massive youth
unemployment (or underemployment), wasted abilities,
and the explosive discontents that come from blighted
hopes.
3
Leys will have none of this. For him the cause of the
rustication campaign does not lie in the need to grapple with
almost intractable social contradictions. Rather, the issue is
the madness of Maoism.
Chinese society as a whole has to be taken back to the
primitive-peasant stage, which is the only stage where it is
receptive to Mao's thought.
4
Leys' explanations are truly incredible. He blames
China's political victims merely on Maoism's attempt to move
toward a more egalitarian and less bureaucratic society. This is
A slightly modified version of this essay will appear in the fourth 1978
issue of Contemporary China, the editors of whom first solicited it.
Printed here .with permission.
The Chairman's New Clothes by Simon Leys. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1978. Originally published as Les
Habits Neufs du President Mao by Editions Champ
Libre, Paris, 1971.
Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys. New York: Viking
Press, 1977.
a little like Americans blaming the apparent framing of the
Wilmington Ten or the murder of civil rights workers on the
attempt to realize American ideals. What kind of people
believe such things? Why would people will themselves to
believe Leys' outrageous claims about Chinese society?
By 1976 and 1977 some leading American opinion
makers began to strike a most negative stance toward the
People's Republic of China. It has been suggested that this
hostile political position results from a normal pendulum
swing back from the euphoria which greeted the original
1971-1972 American opening to China with its television
. spectaculars and fascination with such as acupuncture.
5
The truth in this explanation is tautological. Probably
few Americans would accept it if clothed in a yill-y,lJIg-style
Chinese metaphor that things naturally reverse direction on
reaching an extreme. The Western trick is to do as the
traditional Chinese did but dress it in a pseudo-scientific guise.
One takes a dynamic topic and imposes on it a
one-dimensional bipolar configuration, contending, for ex
ample, that American foreign policy moves between idealism
and realism or that Chinese policy moves between hard and
soft periods.
The simplifying schema is most attractive, even
powerful. That is why the practice appears in so many places
to serve such different purposes. My concern here is the
purposes. We must investigate the political viewpoint which
blinds people to most obvious matters of fact. The tautological
schemas omit the essence of the matter. The logically imposed
categories-China is nice, China is awful-are not frictionless
cogs in a perpetual motion machine moving themselves
19
effortlessly along some taut trapeze wire. The simplifying
schema obscures the forces which slowly or speedily move one
category into public prominence to stay for longer or shorter
attention time spans.
These are the forces which must be investigated to
understand why The New York Times, The New Republic,
Washil1gtoll iHOllthly, Saturday Review, Dissent and Tbe New
York Review of Books have so welcomed the absurdities
advanced about China by the writer Simon Leys (a pseudonym
of a Belgian art historian of China, Pierre Ryckmanns, who
teaches in Australia). Books invariably do not succeed or fail
because of their intrinsic merits. Graham Peck's minor classic
on pre-liberation China, Two Kinds of Time, could not receive
the praise it so richly deserved when its publication coincided
with the outbreak of hostilities in Korea in June 1950.
American elites did not want to hear about the social
conditions which made the Chinese revolution popular.
On the other hand, Donald Zagoria's The Sino-Soviet
Dispute, a most important, albeit fundamentally flawed,
volume, was warmly and prominently praised in the early
1950s because it coincided with the need of ruling American
groups to legitimate limited detente with the USSR. Blaming
the Sino-Soviet split on Chinese expansionism, as Zagoria did,
and giving Washington and Moscow a supposed shared purpose
in checking alleged Chinese aggressiveness by proxy, such as
the national liberation war in Vietnam, fit wonderfully with
liberal Washington's expressed needs.
The potential costs of such powerful and popular errors
are sufficient and sufficiently obvious today to justify a closer
look now at the Simon Leys phenomenon. However
welcoming the societal context may be, it is a scholar's
responsibility not to get carried away by the tide but rather to
try to stem it. The faddish winds of fashion must not be
permitted to carry us again on to dangerous shoals.
Some people see Leys' book, Chinese Shadows,6 as
merely an extreme instance of the consequences of the
ordinary frustration of foreigners stationed in Peking.
Non-Chinese in Peking have been drastically limited in their
access to the people of China by its government. It is difficult
not to conclude that Peking gets what it deserves when such
people spew forth their pent-up anger. Ross Munro's final spite
of nasty 1977 Toronto Globe and Mail dispatches from China
is another instance of this ordinary phenomenon.
But this explanation from frustration does not address
our problem. Why did so many Americans who never
experienced these frustrations welcome Leys' perverse
descriptions of Chinese society? And why was Leys committed
to his view long before his stay in Peking?
Some people have suggested that the answer lies in
French intellectual culture. Leys was supposedly overreacting
to the 110% Maoist intellectualism of Paris.
7
And The New
York Review of Books' publisher, himself supposedly a
follower and fan of European intellectual development,
brought the French debate into the United States. But even if
true, this doesn't explain why so many other American
intellectual leaders who are less enchanted with everything
European were similarly charmed by Leys' negative magnetism
on China.
I want to offer explanations for the credibility of the
incredible both at the contextual and textual levels. The latter
approach is a necessary scholarly methodology for decoding
the meaning of word and action at the highest levels of state
power, and not just in China.
s
It is therefore worthy of our
closest attention.
First, however, I want to call a bit more attention to the
contextual level of understanding. An attempt to stipulate
precisely the social and other contexts which made Leys'
distorted message so attractive to so many most unfrotunately
but necessarily remain unsatisfactory. It is inherently a tracing
of links where even the weigh tiest of connections will remain
invisible to those who do not share the perspective. This is a
pro blem with all larger matters of social theory, a discouraging
difficulty which forces most scholarly seekers of truth to
abandon priority matters for less decisive arenas which can be
delineated more clearly. Let us remain a bit longer with these
unclear contextual factors in American society.
After Vietnam and Watergate, pressed with seemingly
insoluble and burdensome financial, tax and social dilemmas, a
tendency grew in America to stand up for older, simpler
virtues. Making Senator Sam Ervin a hero during Watergate,
opposition to the Panama Canal Treaty, taxpayers' revolts, and
a return to basics in education were all parts of this. The
notion that a poor atheistic Communist dictatorship had
something to teach an America imbued with such an ethos
would seem incredible. McCarthyite articles in Commentary
warning against fellow traveling 9 and the warm reception of
ill-informed and malevolent polemics against China, such as
Pyramids of Sacrifice, 10 heralded the new social climate which
would define truth on China long before Simon Leys'
English-language translations arrived in America. 11
At the elite level, Nixon, Ford and Carter, in response to
that perceived environment, all came to believe it was
politically dangerous to press ahead with the normalization of
relations with China. Of course, further changes such as a need
to win support by standing tough before Soviet expansionism
could permit a president once again to push ahead on
normalization with China. Meanwhile, such normalization
seemed less important in a world no longer seen merely in
Kissinger's amoral balance of power terms, seen more in
George Ball's international political economy trilateralist terms
which welcome Japan in Asia to the detriment of China.
12
The legacy of America's cold war globalism in
combination with its ethnic, regional and political diversity
meant that every international issue involved in the winding
down from cold war expansionism threatened credibility on
every other issue to each particular group. Conservatives,
worried about whites in Southern Africa, identified the fate of
those whites with the people of Taiwan vis-a-vis the mainland
of China; Jewish liberals and people of eastern European
descent identified Israel versus the Arabs or Poland versus the
USSR similarly with the fate of Taiwan. The power of many
veto groups was thus aligned against China. Finally, but not
least important, many people in all these groups identified
with the strange new social crisis atmosphere fell back on the
familiar American claim to uniqueness, America's globally
liberating mission, the Carter administration's stress on human
rights. The imperatives Qf this social context virtually
demanded the fulminations against People'S China that Simon
Leys had already produced.
Of course, China, as most all states, is quite vulnerable
on human rights grounds. China is a dictatorship. Even the
rights which its various constitutions supposedly guaranteed
20
have regularly been breeched. This is no secret to American
scholars who closely followed the misfortunes of Hu Feng,
Ding Ling, Lao She et al. Besides, raison d'etat, in China, as
elsewhere, nearly always rationalizes political immorality and
amorality as necessary for the survival of one's own group and
defines that group as the hypostatized bearer of ultimate
values. By properly ultimate humanistic' standards, China's
power-holders, as all others, can be found guilty at an abstract
bar of justice.
But the scholar's job should be more than that. It should
also include an overview of the entire record.
13
This means
grappling with cultural, historical and technological imponder
ables. Imagine how certain aspects of America look on human
rights to Chinese. This America apparently participated in an
attempted assassination of China's Premier Chou En-Iai at the
time of the Bandung conference, denied a poor and hungry
China access to food, international aid and trade, backed
groups which regularly invaded and sabotaged in China.
Imagine how this America looks with its murders of Fred
Hampton and Martin Luther King and the hundreds of
minority citizens shot down each year by police officers who
go scot free, this America with its fanatic intransigence on
abortion, with its power companies' policies which lead every
year to the heat being turned off on some poor, elderly people
who soon die while others live in waste, splendor and
corruption. Imagine how America with its dehumanizing
unemployment, organized crime, violence in the streets,
weakened families and maltreatment of the elderly looks in
human rights terms in a Chinese perspective.
Yet most Americans think theirs is a good society.
Would-be American revolutionaries who do not understand
why, do not understand anything. Leys' screed against China
displays the same kind of abysmal misunderstanding. The
mirror image of that would-be American revolutionary, Leys
has the Chinese people but a spark away from exploding and
overthrowing their government.
John King Fairbank was the leading China scholar most
regularly warning us of the dangerous consequences of
ingoring such cultural relativism. Simon Leys' text, Chinese
Shadows, opens and closes with a McCarthyite assault on
Fairbank. The success of Leys, then, the extent to which his
text is at one with the American context, the extent to which
he helps us forget what all scholars should help us remember,
can be illuminated by closely examining his text. Its form and
content should be in harmony with this sudden wrenching to
the right when anything but harmony with our own
far-fromrealized ideals will seem virtually treasonous.
Using extreme language, presenting his ideas with
absolute confidence, defaming all other observers of the
Chinese scene as naive or apologetic, insisting that he has the
unique tools to discern the truth, Leys concludes that he alone
is the true friend of China. (He in fact backs China against the
USSR on border issues and even condemns Mao for
compromising too much.) And all of this is done with vigor,
style, intelligence and knowledge. The form of the argument
demands belief.
A major issue then is Simon Leys' credibility. He wants
to persuade the reader that people who said nice things about
China cannot know whereof they speak. He pretends, as an
historian of Chinese art and a person conversant in the
language, to have special knowledge denied others of how the
People's Republic has taken their art history from the Chinese
people and left them empty. The point is not just that Leys'
claim is nonsense but that he must know it. That is, and worst
of all from a narrow scholarly perspective, one is compelled to
wonder whether Simon Leys wants to tell the truth. Leys
knows that a good half of China's greatest art was taken to
Taiwan by the Jiang regime and thereby denied to most of
China's citizens. This rankles with nationalist Chinese in China.
Leys may visit relatives on Taiwan and enjoy that heritage.
Most Chinese cannot. In addition, the People's.Republic has
collected what remained which was previously dispersed in
various private collections. The new government placed this art
in public museums and opened it to viewing. And, in contrast
to American museums, all this is displayed with a minimum of
security and barriers between viewers and viewed.
Of course, treating the art heritage as a national treasur<!
and making it accessible to the citizenry is an ordinary act of
most nations' modernization. But Leys is silent as to that fact.
This would not need mentioning except that Leys treats
Chinese modernization as a crime against its civilization.
Saturday Review titled an excerpt from Leys "China's War on
the Mind," while the New York Times, for its review of Leys,
preferred "Mao's War on Culture." Leys wants the reader left
with the misleading impression that in culture everything is for
the worse, that Maoism is out to destroy Chinese culture. Leys
writes for effect, not truth.
When one compares Ross Terrill's report of subsequent
visits to cultural treasures decribed by Leys, one is forced to
ponder Leys' veracity. Whereas Leys claims that in Hangchow
the tomb of Su Hsiao-hsiao has "disappeared completely and
no trace of it is left," 14 the respected scholar Ross Terrill
subsequently visited it and described the "quaint tomb." IS In
like manner, Leys finds that only the pavilion remains of the
Seal Carving Society, whereas Terrill subsequently visits it and
describes it as continuing "even through the buffetings of the
Cultural Revolution." 16
Leys, as usual, distorts. He concludes that "the main
effect of the Cultural Revolution has been to dry up and seal
all the springs of culture, in all fields." 17 Terrill found a
different China, the same one found by foreign archeologists,
horticulturalists and art historians.
A look at Hangchow provides 110 support for tbe /lotiOll
tbat the People's Republic of Cbilla bas lieglected the
pbysical care of its national heritage. III fact the mOlley
spent on the upkeep of monuments and bal'dens could well
seem staggering for the budget of a poor COlllltry ... Tbe
Moving?
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Let us know.
(Every time you fail to tell us, the Post Office sends us a bill.)
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21
poi11t is tbat the Cbinese Communists, despite and through
all sucb criticism (against the world of Buddha and
C01Jfucius), sbow enormolls attention to and betray a
massive regard for tbe past. 18
Members of a 1975 American Paleoanthropology
delegation to China similarly concluded that, while nothing on
archeology may have been published during the Cultural
Revolution, work did continue and
mallY significant new discoveries were made during these
years. The People's Republic of China has the most
impressive site museums I bave ever seen . .. China's site
museums sbould serve as models for other nations. These
buildings are not cheap, and the state must be willing to
spend valuable funds to preserve these features in their
original condition .
. . . the efforts for cultural relics preservation will be
successful because the state spares no expense and the
masses are organized for this purpose at the grassroots level.
All indication of the importance attached to museums . .. a
decision was made to "bring our heritage to the masses"
and give the ordinary people everywhere an opportunity to
see the real Peking man stone implements, resulting in the
scattering of the Chou-k 'ou-tien collection . .. to museums
throughout CiJina,I9
Even a reader of popular magazines knows that some of
China's heritage was harmed by Red Guards. That well-known
fact is not Leys' point. His argument is that Mao's government
intended to destroy that heritage. It is amazing that intelligent
people would believe Leys' description of a Maoist government
out to destroy China's cultural heritage when the evidence to
the contrary from numerous sources-including Cultural
Revolution documents available to Leys-is open and
impressive. That is why I stress context. The will to believe
inust be very strong.
Leys, in his effott to smear all other observers, takes on,
among others, Edgar Snow; his handling of Snow is similar to
his slanders of other knowledgeable observers. Snow reported
that it could not be true that former Minister of National
Defense Peng Dehuai had plotted against Mao, unlikely that
the CCP would revenge itself on a revered revolutionary leader
such as P eng the way outsiders were claiming. Snow knew
that the CCP had made the party over so it wouldn't operate
as had Stalin's. Leys ridiculed Snow's naivete and cited against
Snow CCP documents branding Peng the leader of an
anti-party plot. That Snow, Leys wrote, "should have
blundered so ingenuously and so thoroughly gives food for
thought on the quality of Western information on the problem
of China. ,,20
Leys' text reveals the form of his argument. He sees a
weak spot and presses hard hoping to break the reader's trust
in all other observers. But if we look at the 1970 edition of
Snow's book (Leys was still writing his book a year later), we
find Snow, as Leys, reporting a trade-off between Peng's
removal and Mao's stepping down from the state chairman
ship. But Snow, in contrast to Leys, remains skeptical. He
reports the trade-off as one which "appears" to have occurred
if the Red Guard sources are correct.
21
They weren't. In fact
Snow correctly sticks to his view despite the Red Guard
claims, doubting that the Peng plot to overthrow Mao had
transpired, pointing out that no documents "were advanced to
support such charges." 22 In short, the difference between
Snow and Leys is that Snow retains his critical independence
and doubts the claims made by politically motivated people in
China.
Was there an anti-party plot led by Peng? Why does Leys
suddenly, conveniently, have total faith in some sources? Why
not use some analytical intelligence and ask, as even a
semi-decent Kremlinologist would, what purposes and whose
purposes were served by branding Peng this way?
That is, most scholars and certainly most CCP leaders are
at one with Snow in believing that Mao had acted against the
norms of the party and had treated Peng unfairly. There were
many subsequent efforts by Chinese ruling groups to bring
Peng back. Mao was forced to concede a little bit. But
basically Mao had acted threateningly and illegitimately,
ripping a consensual way of debating and acting to shreds,
igniting anti-Mao action, forcing people to act ever more
secretively. Mao's ego-saving action against Peng's criticism was
not how the CPP was supposed to act. Snow had it right. And
Leys, out to discredit Snow and all other serious analysts,
missed a major issue on which Mao seemed illegitimate and
disruptive and many among Chinese ruling groups united
against Mao on behalf of justice for Peng Dehuai. Out to
slander Snow, seeing all Chinese leaders as subservient to Mao
on fundamentals, Leys completely misses a deeply divisive
issue marking Chinese politics for the next twenty years,
righting the wrong done to Peng by Mao. This omission is less
of a mystery when we remember the link of conetxt and text,
Leys' attempt to discredit other observers of China that no
positive image of the society remains. His goal is not to
explore the complexities of Chinese politics.
Even when Leys has an exciting insight, he cannot help
but immediately blot it out with blind hate. He comments that
Jiang Qing's much-praised innovation in Chinese opera-the
introduction of the piano-is precisely the nonsense one would
expect from petty-bourgeois philistines.
suspect that it is true that popular cultural
consciousness in China is not so distant from-assuming for the
moment the viability of that concept-such a bourgeois
mentality. Could it be otherwise? The previously ravaged
nation celebrates strong nationalist sentiments. The once
weakened family embraces the conjugal family as the heart of
society and insists on somewhat Puritanical sexual standards
which disappoint liberated westerners who want to find China
a model of gay rights, open marriage or communal living
experiments. And as is necessary where poverty and scarce
resources must be speedily and efficiently combatted in order
to produce social wealth and national strength, work is defined
by imperatives of discipline and orderliness where the laborer
is, in no small part, treated as another commodity to be
manipulated and self-manipulated. Work, family and nation
combine to mold people to values they desire (plenty, home,
prideful strength) such that a bourgeois culture seems, if not
virtually inevitable, surely not unnatural.
In like manner, Leys equates the leveling of city walls
and the building of broad and straight boulevards with
atrocities whose horror can be equated with such as Hitler or
Genghis Khan. But that is not how modern-minded Chinese
experience it. For them-even for opponents of the
regime-when "workers tore down most of the inner and outer
22
city walls ... Pekinf emerged transformed and radiant, with
renewed splendor." 2 While Leys prefers a different aesthetic,
people in China see beauty in straight lines and right-angle
corners and try to rebuild their towns accordingly. There is
much to be studied here in art and architecture which from
the realm of psychohistory reveal deep-level resemblances to
the imperatives of personality structure and modernization in
the West. Some of this is hinted at in M.I.T.'s Bruce Mazlish's
psychobiography of Mao Zedong.
What we actually find then are the limits of
revolutionary change. What Leys give us instead is one rather
ordinary misunderstanding of a Third World revolutionary
society.
Countries such as China must still achieve much of what
now limits further progress in already industrialized societies.
Hence what ethnocentric western cultural revolutionaries
actually find in such societies is much that strikes them as
philistine and un-revolutionary, even counter-revolutionary.
The sympathetic tourist to such revolutionary societies tends
to respond in one of two ways, either ignoring the dominant
cultural thrust of that society and welcoming the contribu
tions of the local ultras, or apologizing for that dominant
thrust and seeming very philistine to the cultural vanguard at
home.
Leys, as an antiquarian, condemns both kinds of
revolutionary tourists. In so doing, however, he further
obstructs understanding of the actual social dynamics of
China, and not just China, which facilitate these dominant
thrusts and make revolutionary change so difficult. After all, it
may' not be revolutionary in some ultimate cultural sense, but
it really is a magnificent achievement that the Chinese
revolution has spread ordinary cultural opportunities as
democratically as it has. Few if any industrializing societies
have made so much culture available so readily to the children
even of poor villagers, everything from swimming to learning
to play the violin.
In short, the major message of Leys' Chinese Shadows is
close to being the opposite of the truth. Rather .than simply
destroying high Chinese culture, as Leys claims, the new
government has made rich cultural opportunities accessible to
the poorest citizenry as never before in Chinese history.
Leys' strength is supposed to be culture and language. It
is as a uniquely fine translator that he makes his claim to
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understand the real China as others don't. And yet his
preference to write the nastiest words whatever the actual
situation vitiates even this asset of his. So strong is his hate
that his strength strangles him.
Imagine how out of touch with reality someone would
be who contended that because American English abounds
with forms such as ITT, GMC and IBM, this proves (I now cite
Leys' words) that capitalist "ideology" has produced a
"monstrous gibberish" of abbreviations aimed at cretinizing
the American people. Only a moment of thought to call to
mind NLF, SDS, SLA, PLO and CP-USA reminds us that what
is at stake is an artifact of language itself and perhaps of the
societal weight of organized units. The guilty one is not a
capitalist conspirator.
The Chinese language has a facility to numbered
abbreviations as American English has one for alphabetical
abbreviation. Even opponents of the regime embody their
policies in slogans such as "the three 'fors' and the three
'againsts,.',24 Leys, however, cites numbered Chinese slogans
and treats this ordinary Chinese phenomenon as a diabolical
attempt to brainwash the Chinese people with an "arbitrary
and autonomous algebra." 25 The reader ignorant of the
Chinese language might be bullied into belief by Leys. But
Leys must know about the ideological favor shown for Sun
Vat-sen's three people's principles and his five-power
constitution by the anti-Communist grouping headed by Jiang
Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek). It is impossible that Leys, as a
student of traditional Chinese culture, does not know that
"The Chinese have always liked to set forth such [ideological)
criteria in numbered categories ..." 26 Supposedly already in
the eleventh century B.C. the Prince of Chi could list the
so-called nine categories:
(1) the five agents; (2) the five matters; (3) the eight
measures of government; (4) the five regulators; ... (6) the
three virtues; . . . and (9) the five felicities and the six
extremities. 27
I
What we find then is that Leys tries to use his knowledge
of Chinese culture and language to bludgeon the reader to
accept his version of reality and ends up blinding himself to
I
what he must have once known. No serious scholar disputes
the partial destructiveness of the Red Guards, the victimiza
I
tion of some elite cultural creators, the horribly limiting
censorship or the many failures and atrocities of state-directed
I
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23
mass culture. The problem with Leys' portrayal is that he
makes that everything when there is so very much more, even
in culture. 28
Despite the deep problems of popular culture in China as
everywhere (has Leys ever seen America TV or read movie
magazines or noticed the role of violence or the commercial
seduction of very young children into murderous junk food?),
Leys writes as if only Maoism stands between the people and
cultural perfection. He will not even ask of mass culture (or
anything else) the hard questions needed to deepen
understanding.
Leys insists that his unique linguistic and cultural assets
permit him also to understand Chinese politics, as most others
do not. Others are "shielded from the truth by a blessed
ignorance of the Chinese language." 29 As we have seen, Leys'
knowledge of that language is so politically conditioned that
he is even shielded from a knowledge of the language. And
Leys' portrayal of Chinese politics in The Chairman '5 New
Clotbes is even further from the truth than his creative
descriptions of Chinese culture.
In his history of the Cultural Revolution, Leys,
depending on what he wants to argue, contends with equal
vehemence that (1) Mao took back total power or that (2) the
military took power in a coup or that (3) "a handful of party
individuals ... are the real masters of the regime." 30
Consistency and coherence are not Leys' strong point. His
purpose is to ridicule and condemn, to excel in "prejudice and
This
Publication....
polemic. ,,31 In contrast to Leys' portrayal of an alleged Chinese
totalitarianism (or is it alleged 'Chinese totalitarianisms?), Leys
is compelled to speak of "pressure groups" and "regional
strongholds" and the ability of the supposedly cretinized
villagers to understand, express and successfully defend their
interests against the "authorities' impotence." 32 These data of
the real, complex world of Chinese politics are never allowed
to question Leys' contrary, simple-minded notion of
totalitarian China.
Leys' totalitarian model with one man, Mao, controlling
all, reappears regularly to preclude even the asking of the most
worthwhile questions. While western scholars have shown how
Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi differed in principle on the role
of the Communist Party, with Liu the narrower vanguard man
and Mao more open to checks and balances against that Party
whether through liberalizing Hundred Flowers campaigns or
mass mobilizations from below, Leys insists that for Mao and
Liu on the issue of the party, "The only problem was
ultimately a personal one. To whom should ... obedience be
addressed ..." 33
While it is no doubt true that Red Guards portrayed
Liu's politics in a grossly distorted fashion,34 Leys doesn't
understand that in a stable society where the end goals are
beyond dispute, matters of principle then take the form of
struggles over tactics, methods, priorities and the like. As facts
embody theories, so means embody ends. The matters at issue
mean a world of difference in the life of the Chinese citizen as'
there is a world of difference, between liberal capitalism and
fascist capitalism.
To ferret out the huge number of corrupt cadres who
abused their positions for personal gain in the three
enormously difficult years following on The Great Leap
Forward with its attendant precipitous economic decline, Liu
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24
would use secret agents. Mao opposed methods which forced
society to mistrust the state. He preferred the Dazhai [Tachail
model, a positive way to reknit ties of trust between local
officials and villagers.
3S
Leys can't inquire into such serious
issues. He instead depicts Liu as "Mao's tame spokesman and
henchman," a mere "transmission belt for the orders of his
master." 36 In fact, the scholarly consensus has Liu opposing
and helping to undermine the Mao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaping
hundred flowers effort of 1956-1957.
In similar gross distortions which preclude any serious
analysis of Chinese political dynamics, Leys describes Chen
Boda who pressed more left Paris Commune-type policies far
longer and farther than did Mao in both the Great Leap and
the Cultural Revolution as merely being Mao's "devoted
shadow," acting only on Mao's "precise instructions." 37 Leys
is the one and only analyst of Mao's political style to accuse
Maoof giving precise instructions.
Leys applies his categories of totalitarian puppetry to
the Mao-Zhou relationship. Zhou Enlai, however, did not
welcome the Great Leap and risked much during the Cultural
Revolution's wild thrust left. Zhou exposed himself to protect
veterans such as Foreign Minister Chen Yi, thereby winning
the gratitude of people in party, military and administration.
But Leys finds Zhou "the eternal and irreplaceable servant of
power-any kind of power." 38 Too bad the Jiang Qing group
(the so-called Gang of Four) didn't read Leys. They wouldn't
have wasted so much effort trying to attack and undermine
their opponent, Zhou Enlai, had they only known Zhou had
no commitments of his own to defend.
Oddly, in a 1977 postscript, Leys portrays Zhou's
policies as the antithesis of Maoism. I say "oddly" because in
the second of his three postscripts, Leys humbly reports,
despite the glaring mistakes of and cortradictions with his
1971 volume and his sudden, silent switch, that his book is
error-free except for "an occasional typographical mistake." 39
Leys cannot admit errors because his credibility rests on the
claim of a unique, personal road to truth about China. Only a
moment with the volume undermines that ridiculous claim of
never being wrong. The original book was published just
before the 1971 so-called Lin Biao coup attempt in which
Huang Yongsheng played a reading role as Lin's ally. But Leys,
the omniscient, had just described Huang as a "counterweight
to Lin.,,40
That Lin "coup" is usually seen as an attempt to
preempt Mao who, with Zhou, was already moving against
Lin's people. But Leys concluded his book in 1971 standing
alone and in error against all knowledgeable analysts.
Foreign observers are still making great play of the rise of
Chou En-lai and bis increasing influence on Chinese politics.
I am still very skeptical ... Cbou is '" but an
administrator ... we sbould not confuse the singer [Zhoul
with the librettist [MaoI .41
Leys thus portrays Zhou as both the antithesis of Mao and the
singer of Mao's tunes.
There is one major exception to Leys' repetitious
portrayal of all as Mao's puppets. He insists that Mao's failure
in the Great Leap encouraged his opponents who "forced"
Mao to relinquish his position as Head of State in favor of Liu
Shaoqi.42 Mao is then portrayed as effectively out oJ power
such that he needs the Cultural Revolution to take him back
to the top. Although this error was' once shared by many
scholars (Leys' contribution is to see the opposition to Mao as
a unique instance), serious scholarship has now undermined
this account in every particular.
43
From the first point on" the
erroneous notion that Mao was forced out of the leading state
job by Great Leap failure, Leys' recounting of Chinese politics
is simply wrong in all important particulars.
44
In the midst of his fulminations and errors, Leys holds
before the reader one Chinese hero, the journalist Deng Tuo
[Teng T' 0 1, as "the conscience and the dignity of an
intellectual.,,4s It is true that Deng and others suffered greatly
and unjustly for their opposition to Mao's mistreatment of
Peng Dehuai. But it should be remembered that Deng Tuo and
his boss Peng Zhen, head of the Peking Party apparatus, were
knowingly playing a very dangerous game which went far
beyond rehabilitating Peng Dehuai and involved preparing a
secret dossier against Mao.
Roderick MacFarquhar, in a truly superior Kremlinolog
ical study of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, informs
us that, contrary to Leys' story, Mao's opposition to Deng Tuo
did not begin with the unfair treatment of Peng Dehuai. It was
predated by the Hundred Flowers campaign. Mao, Zhou and
Deng Xiaoping favored liberalization while Peng Zhen, Deng
Tuo and Liu Shaoqi (Leys' consummate "stalinist,,)46 opposed
it. Deng Tuo was a defender of the Stalinist policies and the
Leninist party apparatus, the opponent of Mao's desire for
broader democracy. Deng Tuo stood with the witch-hunters
against the liberals who spoke out against Deng Tuo's party
apparatus friends during the Hundred Flowers period.
47
It isn't just that Leys has strange heroes. He simply has
no time for or interest in delving into the complexities of
Chinese politics. It is possible to write reams on Leys'
fundamental malicious errors in his text. But I want to
conclude by returning to where we began, the relation of text
to context. The question is why do people such as Irving Howe
and Mary McCarthy greet Leys' gross distortions of Chinese
politics and society as at last the real truth about China?
The basis of that judgment is not comparison with the
hard-won gains of serious scholars. Indeed Leys is at pains to
distinguish himself from the professional consensus. And well
he should. His account, as we have seen, disagrees with the
findings of trained observers on virtually every count. But why
should some establishment people prefer Leys' nonsense to the
knowledge of professionals?
Leys' account has certain political advantages. Certain
virtues of China recede into oblivion. What is the relevance to
other agrarian, developing nations of the Chinese way of
handling population control,48 rural administration 49 or
intermediate techndogy? so If China is the bleak world
discovered by Leys, there is no point in seeking answers to
such questions as these in the Chinese experience.
Leys writes to ridicule others who go to see or
understand the complex meaning of the Chinese revolution.
He has no sympathy for the difficulties inherent in that task.
Supposedly so easy is the task that Leys appears unaware that
he too is one typical revolutionary tourist and that he writes in
the expected manner for someone in his role. He is, Leys tells
us, a former lover of the revolution who has become
disenchanted. What could be said about those who first
trumpeted and then hated the Bolshevik revolution can be said
about Leys.
25
Tbis report manifests tbe radical turn-about from one
extreme to tbe otber that is cbaracteristic of the
anti-Communist utterances of many former pilgrims . .. the
newly fOlmd disgust is ollly tbe reverse of tbe former blind
belief It is j1lst as belplessly emotional and politically
ignorant. 51
The black sheep returning to the fold has a vital
legitimizing role to play in most all soceities. I don't think it is
necessary to call further attention to the ulterior motives of
those who portray such malicious ignorance about China as
truth. It is an ordinary ideological device. It is, however, worth
remembering what is at stake. The lover-turned-hater is not
necessarily the best judge of the formerly loved-one. Yet Leys,
as Zagoria before him, prefers certain Soviet Russian accounts
of Chinese realities. Supposedly as ex-Communists know about
Communism, so Communists know about Communists. But is
it really so difficult to understand that the Soviets might have
had some purposes other than the quest for objective truth in
portraying Mao in the 1960s as a madman out to conquer the
world or hinting that Lin Biao was not on the plane that
crashed fleeing north from China?
The error of the 1960s, strengthened by the supposed
superior credibility of former friends of China, facilitated the
horrible, wasteful American war in Vietnam against a
supposedly monstrously and uniquely aggressive Chinese
invasion by proxy. The error of the 1970s, this picture of a
uniquely inhuman China, legitimates no move on normaliza
tion of relations with China. After all, how can America betray
its humanitarian ideals?
Should such rigidity against normalization unnecessarily
turn America into the enemy of Chinese nationalism the
results may again prove very explosive. There is a crisis of not
wanting to confront difficult realities in the American love of
Simon Leys' distortions. The scariest issue is not that the
1970s are repeating the 1950s, though the same tendencies of
intellectuals toward political safety at home are growing. The
frightening issue is that the 1980s may repeat the 1960s. That
is, the renewed truculence and toughness will prove its worth
in renewed wars. The analysis of text and context is not a
mere academic exercise. What we have found are tendencies
towards a love-hate syndrome which are not the most rational
basis for the nuanced and balanced understanding needed for
responsible action in American-Chinese relations. *

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Notes
1. Cf. Victor Lippit, "The Great Leap Forward Reconsidered,"
Modern China 1.1 (Jan. 1975), 92-114, for a reassessment on the
positive side.
2. Simon Leys, The Chairman's New Clothes (London: Allison
and Busby, 1977), 16.
I
3. The American Rural Small-Scale Industry Delegation, Rural
Small-Scale Industry in the People's Republic of China (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977),242, 241. For a solid and subtle
account of the transfer of youth to the countryside, see Thomas
Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages (New Haven:
!
Yale University Press, 1977). For an unfriendly assessment, see Yuan
I
I
Po-p'ing, "The 'Sending Down' Movement Since the Cultural
Revolution (1966-73)," Issues and Studies, 14.1 (January 1978),40-57.
The liberal anthropologist Fei Hsiao-t'ung even before liberation
stressed the need to deal with the lack of educated technical people in
the rural area. (China's Gentry, University of Chicago Press, 1953,
Chapter 7)
I
4. Leys, op. cit., p. 155.
5. Richard Solomon, "Thinking Through the China Problem,"
Foreign Affairs 56.2 (Jan. 1978), 324-56.
I
6. New York: Viking Press, 1977.
I
7. Benjamin Schwartz (Review of Simon Leys' Chinese
Shadows) in The New Republic, August 6 and 13, 1977, p. 40.
8. Franz Schurmann's The Logic of World Power is one of the
few serious works to attempt to decode the texts produced by
1
American politics.
9. Especially Sheila Johnson, "To China with Love,"
I
!
Commentary 55 (June 1973), 37-45. But also Edward Luttwak,
"Seeing China Plain," Commentary 62 (December 1976), 27-33.
10. Peter Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice (New York: Basic Books,
1975).
I
11. I believe the changed political atmosphere and the way Leys
presents himself as the sole receptacle of truth explain why Berger was
ignored and Leys championed.
12. George Ball, "We are Playing a Dangerous Game with
Japan," The New York Times Magazine, June 25, 1972, W. 10-11ff.
13. Susan Shirk's "Human Rights: What About China?" Foreign
Policy, Number 29 (Winter 1977-78), 109-27, is an effort in that
direction, especially in contrast to the usual human rights anti-China
view such as Victor Zorza, "Setting China to Rights," Manchester
Guardian Weekly, Feb. 5, 1978, p. 9.
14. Leys, Chinese Shadows, pp. 99-100.
15. Ross Terrill, Flowers on an [ron Tree (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1975), 165.
16. Ibid., p. 166.
17. Chinese Shadows, p. 103, my emphasis.
18. Terrill, op. cit., pp. 224, 225.
19. W. W. Howells and Patricia Jones Tsuchitani, eds.,
Paleoanthropology in the People's Republic of China (Washington:
National Academy of Sciences, 1977), 104, 108, 133, 134, 135, 136.
20. Leys, The Chairman's New Clothes, pp. 22-23.
21. Edgar Snow, Red China Today (New York: Vintage Books,
1971),422.
22. Ibid., p. 606.
23. Hsia Chih-yen, The Coldest Winter in Peking (Garden City,
N.J.: Doubleday, 1978) 32.
24. Ibid., pp. 345, 365.
25. Leys, Chinese Shadows, p. 169.
26. J a m e ~ D. Seymour, China: The Politics of Revolutionary
Reintegration (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976) SO.
27. Ibid., pp. SO-51, emphasis added.
28. Cf. John Berninghausen and Ted Huters, eds., Revolu
tionary Literature in China (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1976); Michael
Sullivan, The Arts of China (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1977); and some recent work by Hsu Kai-yu for an introduction to this
broader panorama.
29. Leys, The Chairman's New Clothes, p. 8.
'30. Ibid., pp. 84, 49,61,177.
31. Roxanne Witke, Reply to Leys, The New Republic, Sept. 3,
1977, p. 38.
32. Leys, The Chairman's New Clothes, pp. 182, 186, 195.
Compare my "The Politics of Local Models, Social Transformation and
State Power Struggles in People's China," China Quarterly, Dec. 1978.
33. Ibid., pp. 98,103.
34. Cf. Lowell Dittmer, Liu Shao-ch'i and the Chinese Cultural
Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
35. Cf. Mitch Meisner, "In Agriculture Learn from Tachai,"
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, Department of Political
Science, 1976.
36. Leys, The Chairman's New Clothes, pp. 26, 28.
37. Ibid., p. 203.
38. Ibid., p. 185.
39. Ibid., p. 205.
40. Ibid., p. 121.
41. Ibid., pp. 200-201.
42. Ibid., p. 22.
43. Cf. Lowell Dittmer,
Practice," China Quarterly, No.
"'Line Struggle' in Theory and
72, December 1977, pp. 675-712.
Dittmer follows M. Oksenberg on this mllter.
44. Cf. Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural
Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 152-56.
45. The Chairman's New Clothes, pp. 251-53.
46. Ibid., pp. 26, 27.
47. MacFarquhar, op. cit., pp. 194, 232-33, 282, 397.
48. Pi-chao Chen, "China's Planned Birth Program and Its
Transferability," Studies in Family Planning 6 (Oct. 1975), 354-66.
49. Ben Stavis, "China's Rural Local Institutions in Comparative
Perspective," Asian Survey 16 (April 1976), 381-96.
50. Rural Small-scale Industry in the People's Republic of
China, op. cit.; S. Rifkin, "The Chinese Model for Science and
Technology: Its Relevance for Other Countries," Technical Forecasting
and Social Change 7.3 (1975),251-71.
51. Hans Enzensberger, Raids and Reconstructions (London:
Pluto Press, 1976), 238. John Updike concludes his review of Leys,
"Mr. Leys sounds a thin note of personal rejection in these jottings of a
frustrated lover of a vanished civilization." (The New Yorker, Oct. 24,
1977, p. 182.)
27
A Short Review
by Jean Doyle
As the title indicates, Zhou En-lai is the link which
joins together the two distinct parts of this brief work. The
first section by Davison and Selden is a short interpretive
history of the Chinese revolution from the Opium War to
1975, highlighting Zhou's participation in and contributions
to it. The second section contains reprints from New China
Maga::ille of Zhou's 1971 talks with Americans on selected
topics including class struggle in the socialist period, slogans,
the Cultural Revolution, and U.S.-China relations.
Davison and Selden have provided a highly readable
overview of Chinas continuing revolutionary struggle. They
basically accept the Chinese conceptualization of that struggle:
in the century preceding Liberation, the revolution was anti
imperialist and anti-feudal; following Liberation it has centered
on the struggle to build socialism. Zhou En-lai's life, which
spanned nearly eight crucial decades of this process, is used
quite effectively as a vehicle for discussing both the dynamics
of the revolution itself and Zhou's unique role within it. As
Edgar Snow pointed out, events and individual personalities
became inseparable in times of great socio-political upheaval.
The attempt to deal with such a huge topic in a mere 36
pages has its inevitable pitfalls; subtlety, detail, and com
plexity are sacrificed to brevity. Within these limitations, how
ever, it is with regard toemphasis that the most serious prob
lems arise. Certain events and Zhou's relationship to them
for example the Sian incident and the propagation of the
Dazhai agricultural model - are described in extraordinary
detail,while other more crucial aspects of the Chinese revolu
tion such as the Great Leap Forward, receive only cursory
attention. In foreign affairs, the exclusive focus of discussion
is on state-to-state relations; China's position on national
liberation struggles is omitted altogether, and party-to-party
relations as an aspect of proletarian internationalism are men
tioned only in passing. These types of unevenness are especial
ly puzzling if the book is intended as an interpretive intro
duction to China for non-experts. (This assumption is mine
given the absence of a preface or its equivalent to explain the
book's purposes or structure.)
Zhou's conversations with Americans in the second sec
tion cover interesting, if not terribly controversial themes.
As introductions to both the man and the topics selected, the
chapters on class struggle,slogans, and Sino-American relations
are the most successful. In the first of the chapters, Zhou dia
lectically constructs the argument for the continued existence
of classes and class struggle in the socialist period of develop
ment and does not hesitate to discuss how, even after the
creation of a socialist economic base "newly generated bour
geois class forces," i.e. a managerial elite, can arise. In the
second chapter he establishes the absurdity of slogans such as
"all public, no self'and "absolute self-reliance," arguing
instead the need for balance and context in the application of
Chou En-Iai and the Chinese Revolution and Conversa
tions with Americans, by Debbie Davison and Mark
Selden. Interviews with William Hinton. U.S.-China
Peoples Friendship Association, 1977,86 pages, $1.95.
the principles involved. The logic and simplicity of his argu
ment for moderation make one wonder how these slogans
ever could have become the focus of such intense political
struggle in China from the mid-1950s on. Concerning U.S.
China relations, his characterization of negotiation as a neces
sary form of struggle with precedents in China's own revolu
tionary history explains the strategy behind the Nixon visit
but not its timing, and his American guests do not press on
this point. (This is one of a number of places where the
analysis in the first section of the book fails to provide ade
quate background for understanding Zhou's own statements
in the second part.)
The excerpts on the Cultural Revolution are a mixed
bag. The concrete examples of problems which arose during
the movement are vivid and cogent, but the more general
explanation of the issues and outlines of the campaign gets
bogged down in too much detail. Names, places, events, and
directives fly by in a dizzying array; and they may have
significance for Zhou's immediate American audience and
for students of the Cultural Revolution, but for the non
expert they can only be confusing and inhibit understanding
of the importance of the movement in China's overall revolu
tionary process. At best, Hinton's copious explanatory notes
only partially alleviate these problems; generally they com
pound the confusion.
In this section, no reasons are offered for the inclusion
of any of the topics but the first; consequently, even though
each of the selections is interesting in itself, the entire second
section of the book lacks structure or coherence. The author's
decision to tack material concerning the Lin Biao affair on to
the end of the discussion of Sino-American relations con
tributes to this sense of disorganization. So also does the
inconsistency of romanization, with modified Wade-Giles
(Chen Yung-Kuei) and pinyin (Wang Guang-mei) haphazardly
interspersed.
Overall, despite its obvious strengths, this is a book that
will leave almost everyone at least partially dissatisfied. It
may have limited uses in an introductory course on China,
but it is not a scholarly work which breaks new ground in
either substance or interpretation. '*
28
Changes and Continuity in Southwestern Yunnan:
The Xishuangbanna Tai Autonomous Prefecture
by Hsieh Pei-chih
About thirty years ago, in the 1940s, the chief of a local
Tai (Thai) community brought in a bicycle from Thailand. He
did not use it for riding because the roads there were too
rough and narrow. But he made good use of this strange piece
by collecting five babt! from curious viewers.
People in Xishuangbanna today often cite this story to
illustrate the primitiveness of their immediate past. When I
visited there in August 1977 I heard about it several times.
Located in the southwestern corner of Yunnan province, along
the border of Laos and Burma, this area is now officially
known as the Xishuangbanna Tai Autonomous Prefecture
(zbou). It encompasses the three counties of Jing-hong or
Yun-jing-hong, Meng-hai, and Meng-Ia, with an area of 25,000
square kilometres and a population of 610,000. Two thirds of
this population are minority peoples, half of whom are Tai;
hence the name of the prefecture. Other nationalities include
Lahu, Aini, Bulang, Yao, Hui, Wa, Miao, Jingpo and a number
of smaller ~ r o u p s such as Ji-nuo that anthropologists have yet
to classify.
This is one of the most mountainous areas I have ever
seen. There are highlands interspersed with mountains ranging
from 1,500 to 2,500 meters above sea level. Valleys which are
flat and sizable enough for farming are called ba; their
elevations range from 500 to 1,500 meters above sea level. For
centuries, Tai and other nationalities lived here and, in 1570,
the Ming dynasty government established the Cbeli-xuan
wei-si, the Che-li Bureau of Pacification, to rule over 12 basins
in this area.
3
From then on, the Tai people called it Xishuang
banna, meaning twelve administrative units.
The area has a subtropical climate, with a rainy season
from June to October and a dry season from November to the
following May. There is heavy rainfall. in August and
September and the annual accumulation is about 1,400 mm.
Rice, soybean, rubber, tea, and a variety of vegetables and
fruits are produced. There are known deposits of iron, copper,
lead, and salt. Nearby along the borders, there are deep forests
in which numerous rare birds and animals have been found,
such as elephants, wild oxen, peacocks, etc. It is China's
natural zoo and the government has taken measures for
conservation and protection. Lan Cang [Lantsang) River, the
upper stream of the Mekong, flows southward through here to
become, first, the boundary with Burma and then that
between Burma and Laos.
My family and I were quite surprised to find the place a
fairly developed and modernized area. The rice fields in the ba
were as promising as anywhere in China and the people were
healthy-looking. As these minority women always dress in
their national costumes, street scenes were more colorful than
in many other parts of China. As usual, one also sees countless
bicycles.
In the past, Xishuangbanna has been a place that few
Westerners have desired to visit. During the heyday of the
im perialist age, British and French explorers had frequented
areas to the north or to the east: there was a French
missionary clinic at Jinghong and, in 1890, a British force of
500 soldiers also briefly invaded that capital city.4 But both
the British in Burma and the French in Laos preferred to
regard Xishuangbanna as a buffer zone like Thailand.
Moreover, this was an area that outsiders, including the Han
Chinese, considered inhospitable. In Yunnan, people used to
say: "Marry off your wife if you are to cross Pu Wen Basin" or
"Get a coffin ready if you are to go to Pu Wen basin." Han
Chinese traditionally had believed that this area "was filled
with a lethal vafor which would attack strangers in a
mysterious way." Ever since the seven campaigns led by
Zhu-ge Liang [Chu-ke Liang) in the 3rd Century A.D., it was
said that Han Chinese could not survive in this mosquito
plagued malarial incubator. Here, the incidence of malaria was
said to be as high as 50-90 percent, one of the worst in the
world.
6
Smallpox, bubonic plague, and cholera also were
common. Infant mortality rate was among the highest in the
world, and could be illustrated by the local saying: "One sees
pregnant women, but no children can be sighted in the
market." Finally, until 1954 when the highway was
completed, people had to trek for at least 28 days from
Kunming to reach Jinghong. The isolation of the area may be
imagined from an account by Fei Hsiao-tung and Chang
Chih-i.7
Walking is the most common way for human movement,
horses being used for transportation of goods. Wbel1 we
took our journey from tbe nearest statioll all tbe Burma
Road to Yit'sun, a distance of about 27 miles, we spent tell
days getting there ... It is not surprising to ji7ld people il1
the interior villages wbo bave never been alit of their own
valley.
Yit'sun is only about 150 kilometers from Kunming. It is
about 763 kilometers from Kunming to Xishuangbanna over
sim ilar terrain.
When the Chinese People's Liberation Army marched
into this area in December 1949, it was doubtful that they
29
could stay for long. Even though they were well protected
from malaria and other diseases by the medical workers and
medicine available to them, the local people were uncoopera
tive, even hostile, because of the centuries of Han
mistreatment. Han cadres and soldiers encountered all kinds of
difficulties.
8
Local headmen occasionally exploited the
traditional fears and hatred and succeeded in blocking direct
contact between the local minority people and the Han cadres
and soldiers.
The new government was patient. For several years, they
persisted with the policy of "doing good work and making
friends" with the local people of all social strata. Because of
this patient and cautious policy, procedures developed for the
social transformation were quite different from those in the
eastern provinces. In carrying out land reform, for instance,
struggle sessions were avoided. At the beginning the cadres
were instructed to maintain contact with the people only
through the feudal lords and headmen. Because of the
deep-rooted anti-Han sentiment, fear, and superstition, the
local people ran away or closed their doors to avoid any direct
contact with the cadres. Therefore it became essential for the
cadres to obtain cooperation from the leaders by explaining to
them that the revolutionary process would include all
law-abiders and that their living standard would not be
lowered. The cadres also rigidly maintained their discipline
based on the "Three main rules of discipline and eight points
for attention." 9
While the cadres did not immediately undermine the
privileges enjoyed by the feudal leaders, they did everything
possible to help the poor in order to win their sympathy and
cooperation, For example, local leaders often played up
superstitions to protect their own privileges. "Abnormal"
offspring such as six-fingered babies, hare-lipped ones-even
twins-were believed to be possessed by devils. They were
burned to death immediately, and their parents, now
considered untouchable, were expelled to isolated areas. If a
mother had difficulty in childbirth, the family might have to
dismantle its house and fences and turn all belongings upside
down; such measures were expected to save the situation. If a
person became hysterical with a high fever or some other
cause, he/she could also be considered dangerous by the feudal
leaders and be expelled.
After a period of investigation, the cadres located these
villages of "untouchables." 10 There they could make friends
easier than in other villages. The poor and the desperate more
readily accepted the assistance of the cadres and medical
workers. Better yet was the occasion when one dose of quinine
prevented an entire family from getting into trouble. 11
For several years the cadres investigated how to carry
out socialist transformation in Xishuangbanna. The autono
mous prefecture was formally established in January 1953, but
land reforms were not carried out here until 1956, and then
only in a mild form. By way of contrast, in other parts of
China, land reforms were completed in 1952 during which
many landlords were roughly treated in struggle meetings.
Here in Xishuangbanna, land reform was achieved by
negotiations and without direct confrontations with the
peasantry.
The primitiveness of the farming methods in the area
made it possible to introduce socialist reforms without
undermining the privileges of the leaders. In other words, the
society was transformed while the local leaders temporarily
were left undisturbed. 12 This was possible, first, because the
population was not a large one.
13
Land was practically
available for everyone. In the past, yield had been poor
because the method of farming. had been primitive:
superstitions had blocked both fertilizing with manure and
weeding practices. In this context the cadres were able to
demonstrate by deeds that they could raise the yield
considerably by manuring and weeding-and without suffering
repercussions.
The medical workers were also able to convince the local
poor that twin babies and babies with minor abnormalities
were not devilish. If the mother had difficulty in childbirth,
she could be helped with a caeSltrean operation. Slowly the old
superstitions that the landlords had utilized were overcome,
and a major bastion of the local lords' authority was effec
tively demolished. For example, in 1952, when triplets were
born in the vicinity, the government immediately rushed a
delegation to the home to offer aid and congratulations. The
cadres explained to the local leaders that China's constitution
guaranteed'the safety of all newborns; the lives of the triplets
must be protected. 14 The medical efforts succeeded and word
about it spread rapidly. The prestige of the cadres improved
and, although the local leaders might still argue that the Han
would leave, more and more people began to seek contact with
the cadres. It was time to start the land reform.
News of the land reforms in the east had by now reached
this frontier area and poor people were getting excited.
Moreover, by then, many poor people in Xishuangbanna had
been recruited for training to become cadres. * In 1954 a
highway was completed to link this area with the provincial
capital. Massive amounts of materials could be moved in more
easily, including machinery for factories. More cadres and
30
medical workers arrived to strengthen the government
programs and to build hospitals. A network to combat malaria
and other serious local diseases was set up. The Guomindang
remnants no longer were a serious threat. Meanwhile, people
from all walks of life were invited to tour other parts of China.
The son-in-law of the brother of a local chief was chosen as
one of the delegates to represent China at the World Youth
Festival held in Poland in 1956. (He is now in his 50s, a
member of the People's National Assembly, and the
vice-chairman of the prefecture's Revolutionary Committee.)
All these factors helped to convince the local leaders
that it was in their best interests to compromise with the
government for a peaceful transition to socialism; resistance
would be futile. On the other hand, the government was
prepared to make certain concessions: The leaders received
good compensation, including the local "king" and his family
who were awarded a huge monthly stipend of well over one
thousand yuan (which they are still getting today).IS Only one
such leader refused to cooperate, but, when he organized an
armed resistance, he was killed in action.
In short, this was a movement from above to below. No
force was used and there were no arrests or executions for
crimes committed in the past. Members of the upper class
retained their rights as citizens and they were not deprived of
political rights. One informant summarized the policy in the
following way:
Keep contact with the people through the village and clan
leaders and rely on the mass movement of the people to
educate the leaders. 16
People's Communes were not established in Xishuang
banna until 1969, a decade after the system had become
general throughout the central provinces of China. Beginning
in 1968, educated youths had begun to arrive. They came
from many provinces but especially from the cities of
Shanghai and Kunming-about fifty thousand of them. The
vast majority have found their permanent homes there
17
and
have been a crucial factor as the prefecture has gradually
modernized.
Xishuangbanna now is an entirely different place from
what it was in 1950. Instead of the one month trek from
Kunming to Jing-hong, one can first fly from Kunming to
Si-mao-a journey of one hour in a twin-engine propeller-and
then travel along a paved highway for five more hours.
Although there are only three flights a week from Kunming to
Si-mao and the fare is still too high for ordinary people, there
are frequent daily bus services to link up with Kunming. (It is
a two-day journey.) From Kunming, there are daily trains to
Shanghai and Peking. The whole length of Kunming
Xishuangbanna highway is paved and very well maintained.
Within the prefecture, over 1,500 kilometers of highway have
been built (although most of the 23 roads are not paved). Of
the thirty communes in the three counties, only one, located
deep in the mountains, is not reachable by car.
Jing-hong is now a modern city with wide, paved streets,
lined with two- or three-story buildings, many of which are still
While poor minority people were trained for cadre work, it was also
the policy after Liberation to invite minority leaders of the old society
to participate in the united front work.
under construction. Population in Xi1>huangbanna has
increased from 210,000 in 1950 to 610,000 this year. Racial
relations seem to be cordial and friendly. Inter-racial marriages
are no longer rare. Han cadres share positions with minority
cadres; if Han Chinese held leading positions in the past, that is
no longer the case. All the first secretaries of the Chinese
Communist Party in the three counties in the prefecture are
now minority cadres. 18 There are over two thousand minority
government workers, including more than three hundred
females. Nearly half of the cadres at the prefecture and county
levels, and 80 percent at the commune and production brigade
levels are minority people.
Mellg-hai
There are now in the prefecture over one hundred and
ten factories of various sizes. The largest one we visited is a
tea-processing plant in Meng-hai county employing over eight
hundred workers. The famous Pu-er tea is produced here
(although Pu-er is two hundred kilometers away). Our visit was
in the off-season and many of the workers were busy making
new designs for the further automation of the plant. Most of
the tea is for export, but they still make tea bricks for the
people of Tibet.
We also spent several hours touring a factory that
manufactures farm machinery. Established in 1954, this
factory has a staff of over two hundred, producing threshing
31
Mountainous scenery (with ba) along highway
Scenes ofJing-man-lan brigade
Jing-man-lan warehouse
Local medical clinic
Tea Research Institute
machines, water pumps, rice-hulling machines, tractor parts,
etc. Production costs are still high-often higher than the
prices for which the machinery sells-but the government
provides enough capital to keep the factory operating and
developing.19 Apart from these factories-some of which are
owned by the state and others by the prefecture or
county-there are also over 170 machine workshops at the
commune or lower levels.
In the basins, there are now two annual crops where in
the past there was but one. This was made possible with the
construction of hydroelectric stations to run water pumps for
irrigating during dry seasons. Traditionally, Tai women often
had had to get up at 4 a.m. or earlier to hull rice for the day.
Now, this is being done by electric machines. Since power is
more plentiful in Xishuangbanna than in some other parts of
China,2o many of the homes in the village that we visited use
electricity for light cooking, boiling water, or to run small
fans.
Health care is often cited by local people as an area of
great improvement. Bubonic plague, the worst epidemic of
which hit Xishuangbanna in 1929, has been eliminated. The
incidence of malaria has dropped off to about 0.6 percent, and
many of the individual cases of malaria come in with visitors.
A general hospital for the prefecture was built in 1953. It now
has 150 beds and a staff of 158, of which 98 are medical
workers-with 22 of them trained in medical colleges. Since
the hospital has made efforts to train minority people as
doctors, there are now 28 of them (including one surgeon and
one dentist) from eleven nationalities. At the beginning the
Han Chinese doctors were permitted by local officials to see
only the patients who were near death. If they died, the
doctors would have had to bear the blame. However, the local
leaders misjudged some of the cases and the lives of many
patients were saved.
There are now over 800 medical workers on the payrolls
of the counties or higher levels in Xishuangbanna. In addition,
there are over three thousand medical workers such as the
barefoot workers who are supported by the communes and
production brigades. Beside the general hospital and two other
county hospitals, there are now four quarantine stations and
four health care stations for children and women. There is a
medical school at a pre-collegiate level which was established
to train local medical workers and to offer reft:esher courses
for those working in the countryside. Medical colleges in
Kunming, Peking, and elsewhere select students from here and
since 1970, teams of doctors have come from Peking and
Shanghai each year to help improve local health work and to
do research into the special problems of the locality. The
present Shanghai team is the fourth one and has over seventy
doctors.
21
Within every group of ten families, there is one
person who is specially trained to detect malarial symptoms.
In short, in health work and public hygiene, Xishuangbanna
has progressed well and is catching up rapidly with the more
advanced areas in China.
Minority family members from distant parts of the
prefecture-very attached as they are to each other-are
permitted to enter the hospital with the patient. Some even
bring their domestic animals with them because there is no
other means for tending them.
22
I saw pigs running around in
the hospital compound and was informed that this was
common.
As in other minority areas, the Chinese government has
not introduced a family planning program here.
23
However,
the government has influenced the local people not to marry
until they reach the legal age stipulated in the constitution,
i.e., 18 for females and 20 for males. The people of
Xishuangbanna used to marry at age 14 or 15 in the past, but
now more and more minority people have begun to realize the
importance of family planning. Mr. Van Nuo, host of the
home that we visited, had had a vasectomy operation. He has
only two daughters and no son. Mr. Van, a Tai, is probably
more progressive than most of his fellow villagers, but, the fact
that he lives in the village and seems to be quite popular will
eventually affect the thinking of all the villagers there. I
learned that he had enlisted in the People's Liberation Army
and, during his years of service, he had become a well-educated
person.24 With people like him living in the villages, I shall not
be surprised if some of the members of the community decide
to start a family planning program. Last year, in
Xishuangbanna, the rate of population increase was about
1.8-2.0 percent a year. Moreover, infant mortality has been
sharply reduced, and the average life span there is about sixty
years.
25
We spent an entire afternoon touring one Tai village,
Jing-man-Ian Production Brigade of Jing-hong commune. The
Tai people there all have large houses of wood and bamboo,
standing on timber piles. There are 138 families in the village
as compared to 64 in 1949. In the past, the people had
guarded the cemetery of their lord's family. Every year, the
villagers had to prepare three sacrifice ceremonies, all at their
own expense, to worship the ancestors of their lord. The lord
assigned 850 mu of patty-land to them. Total annual grain
yield was about 230,000 catties; but, after all taxes and rents
were paid, only 90,000 were left for them. There were also
other taxes to be paid in cash, and they had to pay a high price
34
to rent cattle for ploughing. It is estimated that 70 percent of
their labor was used to serve their masters. The villagers
remember that, for various reasons, twelve families were
thrown out of the village before Liberation by the lords who
charged that there were pi-ba devils in their families.
26
Now, it is quite a different picture. In 1976, total grain
yield was 1,130,000 catties. In addition, they have 250 mu of
rubber trees, 250 mu for banana, a vegetable garden of 100
mu, and a lot of 120 mu for peanuts, corn, and rapeseed. The
five-fold increase of grain was mainly due to the additional
crop, advanced techniques, and mechanization. Actually, they
have only 1,060 mu for rice today as compared to 850 in
1949. This village now has a collective saving of 180,000 yuan
and a grain reserve of 200,000 catties. Annual share of grain
per person was 750 catties in 1976.
27
Since 180,000 yuan were
distributed to the villagers last year, the per capita income was
266 yuan, of which 182 was paid in cash and the rest was paid
with vegetables, peanuts, and other things. Private savings in
the bank average 400 yuan per family. Collectively, they own
a large number of water buffaloes, yellow oxen, horses, hogs,
different machines, carts, and tractors. All except the 19 new
families live in houses with tiled-roofs which, in the past, only
the chief could have afforded. The old village temple, a much
larger structure, is now the grain store. Since the land reform
in 1956 the monks have worked and, since 1965-6, have
become full-fledged members of the commune. There are now
in this village over 140 bicycles, 200 watches, and 80 sewing
machines while there were none before. Their present plan is
to double their output of grain and other products by 1980.
Whether they will be able to achieve it or not I could not
predict; but they seemed to be quite confident as they
discussed the steps for attammg their goals of full
mechanization, better strains of seed, etc.
In education, the prefecture has one normal school for
nationalities, 29 middle schools and over 1,300 primary
schools, a 200-fold increase from the 1940s when there were
only six primary schools with less than 500 students. At that
time, of all the minorities, only Tai people had a ianguage
developed by the Buddhist monks. All male youngsters then
were required to become student monks for a few years to
learn chanting in the Tai language. Otherwise, the language had
very little usage. For the other minorities, some even believed
that they would become blind if they tried to learn the Han
language.
28
As a result, the local people were so ignorant that
they were often cheated by the Han merchants who came here
to barter. One box of matches could be exchanged for four
catties of tea and a small pack of needles was worth a large
chicken. The cadres in the early years after Liberation spared
no effort to convince the minority people to attend the
schools, but, because of the traditional mistrust of the Han,
response from the local people initially was rather
disappointing. Today, about 96 percent of the school age
children are attending schools and many universities in China
now have students from Xishuangbanna.
29
Many local people also received a good education while
serving in the military service. At first, it was not easy for the
cadres to recruit the local people into the army because the
minority members believed either that they would not return
home alive, or that one would become a Han, thereby
betraying his or her own race. But, at long last, in 1965, a Tai
minority young man decided to join the army. He is Ai
Jiao-hu, now vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Committee
of the town of Jing-hong, capital of the prefecture. He told me
in an interview that his family was then considered progressive,
but his parents tried to stop him when they heard about his
decision. They even tried to pull him out of the car that was to
carry him to the recruit center. In 1969, Ai took a home leave
from the army. Many young people asked him questions and
were gradually convinced that it would be a good thing to join
the army. By 1972, many persons had volunteered to enter
military service and the barrier had been broken.
3o
Now, in
Jing-man-Ian alone, there are twenty-three people who either
have become veterans or are still in active service.
During our stay in Xishuangbanna, we had the
opportunity to interview for three hours five minority leaders,
representing four different nationalities (Tai, Aini, Bulang, and
Yao). One of them was the first soldier mentioned above. One
of the other four was the chairperson of .he Jing-hong
county's Federation of Women, Yu Ye, who is in her 30s. A
Tai, she was illiterate in 1964 when she volunteered to join a
Working Team for Nationalities. She was then sent to a cadre
school for training where she learned to read and write. She
was a salesgirl in a store for three years before going to
Kunming in 1972 to study for two years at the Yunnan
Institute for Nationalities. In the Women's Federation, she is
assisted by three other female cadres, one Tai and two Han.
Before Liberation, her parents were chased away as pi-ba devils
by the lord and, therefore, she was brought up in an isolated
village. But although she belonged to a persecuted group, her
family was still afraid of the Han Chinese. It took great efforts
by the Han cadres to convince Yu Ye and her parents that
there would be no danger living away from home. According
to her, before the Cultural Revolution, people were still afraid
of these "devil" villages, but they are now a thing of the past
and many ordinary families have actually moved in to settle
down.
3
!
Another graduate of the Yunnan Institute for
Nationalities is Mr. Chen Hung-yun, vice-chairman of the
revolutionary committee of the Yao Nationality People's
Commune in Meng-Ia county. He told us how the Yao
minorities used to rove from one place to another as in the
saying:
Wbel1 peacb trees blossom,
Tbe Yao aborigines move.
In the 1950s the Yao people were given lands in the ba areas
and were finally able to settle down. For generations, his
landless family had worked as farm laborers. He had no
education until the 1960s but he became the leader of the
militia in his village before his college education in Kunming.
Ai Jiao-shao, a Bulang, is now the party secretary of a
production brigade in Bulang Mountain area. He told us a
similar story. In his area, land reform was carried out in 1958,
two years after the ba areas. Zhang Yung-zhang, an Aini, is 37
years old. He entered Grade I at age 14, married at 15, and
eventually graduated from the local junior middle school. He is
chairman of the revolutionary committee of the Ma-mu-shu
People's Commune in Meng-la county. His second daughter has
recently joined the People's Liberation Army, the first woman
Banana Plantation, Xisbuangbanna
soldier in the whole county. His commune, which consists of
forty-four villages, has a population of 8,700. According to a
common legend, the Aini originally had had a language which
they recorded on an ox-hide. However, ignorant and hungry,
some people cooked it for food and, therefore, the Aini lost
their language forever. Whatever the causes of the illiteracy,
there were no schools before the 50s. Now in Chang'S
commune there are two middle schools and 32 primary
schools. About 80 to 90 percent of the Aini school age
children are attending schools where they are to receive five
years' education. Chang's commune is probably behind most
of the other communes in this respect, but he is optimistic
that they will catch up.32
Xishuangbanna has begun to play an increasingly im
portant role in China's national economy. There are now,
for example, two well-established provincial research institutes
for tropical plants. We spent a pleasant morning in the one
located near J ing-hong, the Yunnan Provincial Research
Institute of Industrial Tropical Plants. It was founded in 1953
when they didn't even have a weather chart. Now the Institute
has a research staff of over 200, over one third of whom are
college-trained. Some of their efforts have been significant.
For example, in the past, foreign scientists concluded that
tropical plants were not plantable north of the 17th parallel or
300 meters above sea level. But the foreign scientists had
neglected certain other factors. In Xishuangbanna, located at
21.5th parallel and 545 meters above sea level, they have
successfully transplanted several hundred industrial tropical
plants, such as the rubber trees planted by many communes in
this area. Although these rubber trees may produce less than
ones in Malay, the Chinese have saved much and are less
dependent on imported rubber. Other industrial tropical plants
include coco, coffee, spice plants, al1d oil-bearing plants.
33
Meng-hai, where the tea-processing plant already
mentioned is located, also has a provincial research institute on
tea plants. Run by a staff of 202, it has an experimental
plantation of 254 mu. Over one hundred species of tea plants
from all over China are cultivated here for scientific
experimentation. The Institute has five research groups to
study tea planting and processing, and an electric tea-picking
machine is being tested there.
34
Our visit to Xishuangbanna was a brief one. We had only
six days, and one third of that was spent journeying to and
from the prefecture. In 1975, Joan Robinson, a leading British
economist, published an article on her visit to Xishuangbanna:
China's national minorities are treated with respect and
dignity by the Han majority. In new China, this seems
perfectly natural, but perhaps some readers will think
have just made it all up.3S
Like Robinson, I am no specialist on China's minorities and I
have never been in the areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet to
make a comparison with what I saw in Xishuangbanna. On the
other hand, we know that Chairman Mao paid much attention
to minority affairs. His intra-party directives on Tibet (April
1952), on Han chauvinism (March 1953), and his speech
delivered in 1956 on the ten major relationships all tend to
show that the government of new China has been consistently
cautious on the problems of minority nationalities. Certainly,
as far as I can judge, his directives and policy have been
vindicated in Xishuangbanna. *: 36
l
Notes
1. The basic monetary unit circulated in the area before
Liberation. One baht equals US $0.05 in Thailand today.
2. In addition to Ji-nuo, this group includes Ben, Kong-ge,
Shan-da, Bu-xia, Xiang-tang, A-ke. Some of those nationalities were not
known to those outside of the area before Liberation. For example, in
the 1950s, Chinese soldiers found one such group while carrying out
maneuvers in the deep mountains. They saw smoke rising in the forest
and fomd a primitive community. The people had no clothes, only
animal skins to wear at that time.
3. Chang Ting-yu et aI., Ming Shih (History of Ming), Peking,
1739. chuan 46, chih 15.
4. According to Mr. Wang Ping-fu, director of the reception
centre of Xishuangbanna, the British force was commanded by a certain
Si-ge-de-Ia; I have yet to find the English name.
5. Fei Hsiao-tung and Chang Chih-i, Earthbound China, A
Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan. (Chicago: University of Chicago
PreSs, 1945), p. 7.
6. Interview with Drs. Wang La-chang and Li Kuei-fang, head
and deputy head of the General Hospital of Xishuangbanna, August 12,
1977.
7. Fei & Chang, op. cit., p. 8.
8. One of the best sources in English concerning the relations
between the minorities and the Han cadres is Alan Winnington, The
Slaves of the Cool Mountains (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1959), 274
pages. The Cool Mountains area is several hundred kilometers to the
north of Xishuangbanna; but many of the problems described in this
book were quite identical to what I learned in Xishuangbanna.
9. For details, see Selected Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking,
1961), Vol. IV, pp. 155-56. He issued this directive on October 10,
1947.
10. Interview with Mr. Li Jia-shou, an educated youth from
Kunming area who volunteered to settle down here in 1968. He is now
a staff member of the rcception center. He was with us as our guide
from August 10 to 15, 1977.
11. Interview with two doctors, see Note 7. According to Dr. Li
Kuei-fang, a graduate of Sichuan Medical College, who came here in the
early 1950s, quinine was too expensive here before their arrival. One
dose of it was worth ten silver dollars. Today, the price of it is 5 fen
(about US $0.029).
12. My own observation. In the eastern provinces, in the early
years of the Revolution, it would be impossible to improve the living
standard of the poor without taking away some privileges from the
exploiters.
13. I do not know the population figure for 1956. It was
210,000 in 1951 and 610,000 recently. The rate of increase was high in
the '60s as about 50,000 young people moved in to settle down.
14. I do not know the fates of these three today. According to
my informants, the Aini people, who were more primitive than the Tai,
completely ceased to kill off the twin babies in 1958 and there 3'e eight
pairs of such Aini young people and children today.
15. The "king" himself was allotted over three hundred yuan,
but members of his family were given positions to ensure the family's
livelihood.
16. This policy had been discussed in many interviews
conducted during my Yunnan visit. In Kunming, I had an extensive one
with Mr. Pan Jing-si, head of the Kunming Branch of China
International Travel Service, and Ms. Jing Man-xia, a senior staff
member of the branch. I also interviewed a number of leading officials
in the Si-mao and Xishuangbanna districts. In Winnington's book, it is
also mentioned (p. 182).
17. Interview with Li Jia-shou and others, see notes 10 and 16.
18. Interview with the fivyminority leaders discussed in this
paper on August 14, 1977. The first secretary of Jing-hong county is
Mr. Ho Kuei, a Ji-nuo. His counterpart in Meng-la county is Mr. Dao
Yu-cai, a Tai, and the one in Meng-hai county is Mr. Yen Xiang-kan, a
Bulang.
19. Interview with Mr. Zhang De-ran and Ms. Jiao Yu, deputy
directors, Xishangbanna Farm Machinery Factory, August 12, 1977.
Ms. Jiao Yu, a Tai, was an iron-casting worker and was promoted to her
present position recently. According to her, 75 percent of the team
leaders in the workshops of the factory are now minority workers. One
of the major assignments of this factory was to train minority workers
for factories at county and lower levels.
20. In eastern China, many places have only thermo-electric
plants to produce power. OccJlSionaily during the last two or three
years, transportation of coal became a problem and people could not
use power as freely as in Xishuangbanna: The situation, hwoever, has
been improving since the fall of the "gang of fpur."
21. Interview with Drs. Wang and Li, see note 6. The
Shanghai doctors and other medical workers have maintained a base
hospital here. The Peking doctors often split into smaIler groups to stay
at different clinics and health stations and to help train local medical
workers.
22. Ibid. When we were in the hospital, VIe saw many minority
families there.
23. Minority areas are much less populated and therefore family
planning is not as urgent as in the Han majority areas.
24. In the army one could travel or learn how to drive a truck or
jeep, an opportunity not easily obtained. Also, the person would learn
how to speak the Han dialect which, by that time, had already been
very much valued. In addition, the Chinese People's Liberation Army
had had long experience turning illiterate persons into well-eductaed
soldiers. Traditionally, the Tai women have always enjoyed more
equality with men than their Han counterparts. The fact that Mr. Yen
had an operation before having a male child is a reflection of this
attitude.
25. Interview with Dr. Li Kuei-fang, see note 6.
26. In Tai language, piba means devil, but a pi ba is also a
familiar musical instrument. Parents of "abnormal" babies were to be
expeIled for about a month. Upon return, they had to burn off their
clothing, etc., and change names. If a person was killed by a wild animal
or was drowned, family members of the victims would be expelled
temporarily. In that case, they would not have had to burn off their
clothing, but they would have had to kill a pig for a sacrificial feast.
27. Seven hundred and fifty catties is a higher figure than
reported in other areas. For the people in the highlands, annual share
was about 500 catties last year, about the same as in other parts of
China.
28. Interview with Mr. Chang Yung-chang, August 14, 1977.
29. I don't have complete information on this, but the viIlagers
mentioned that they had sent students to Jinghua University, Peking
University, Chengdan College of Engineering, Kumming Colleges of
Engineering and of Agriculture, Yunnan Institute of Nationalities,
Central Institute of Nationalities, Yunnan University, Kumming
Medical College and Sichuan Medical College.
30. Interview with Mr. Ai Chiao-hu, August 14, 1977.
31. Interview with Ms. Yu Yeo She also has a Han name (Bai
Yong-zhen).
32. See note 28.
B. Interview with Mr. Shih Ming-hui, director of the Yunnan
Provincial Research Institute of Industrial Tropical Plants, and Ms. Shen
Wei-ming, a senior staff member of the Institute, August II, 1977.
34. Interview with Mr. Deng Jing-xuan, acting director, and Mr.
Huang Biao-lan, representative of the minority workers, Yunnan
Provincial Research Institute of Tea Plants, August 13, 1977. We also
hali an interview with the head of the tea processing plant that morning
and then had another interview with Mr. Liu Hung-tu, head of the
foreign affairs branch, Meng-hai county, during the lunch hour before
visiting this research institute.
35. Joan Robinson, "In the Deep Southwest: The Thai People
of Yunnan before and after Liberation," in New China, Vol. I, No.3,
Fall 1975, pp. 21-23.
TEACHING A COURSE ON ASIA?
Assign your favorite articles
from the
Bulletin
A Short Review
Regionalism and Integration
by Gene Cooper
This book is a straightforward, well researched,
meticulous study of regionalism and its associated problems
during the early post-liberation period of Chinese political
development. It is loaded with data and hypotheses that the
expert will doubtless find stimulating, but which the layperson
could easily afford to pass up.
The book focuses on two related problems facing the
post-liberation government of the People's Republic with
respect to southwest China. The first was how to achieve
integration of the southwest region, an area economically,
culturally and politically marginal- to past Chinese empires,
into the newly founded People's Republic. The second was
how, within the southwest region itself, to integrate the
heterogeneous populations of which the region is composed.
Solinger traces the handling of these problems through a
policy of "decentralization for centralization" (p. 253). Great
Administrative Regions and their Military Administrative
committees were established as intermediate-sized admini
strative "packages" to guide local developments along lines
consistent with central policy, while at the same time taking
account of distinctive local characteristics. These administra
tive organs were able to supersede provincial power bases, and
were more closely in touch with distinctive regional problems
than the central government.
As the southwest region grew more closely integrated
into the national scene after 1952, the Military Administrative
committees were replaced by Administrative committees
which were more directly controlled by the central
government and which were organized on a more functionally
specific basis. By 1953, Solinger argues, the southwest region
was prepared to participate in national, large-scale economic
construction, guided by the first five-year plan.
Concerning integration of the southwest region itself,
Solinger addresses three problem areas-counter
revolutionaries, national minorities, traders and merchants
and develops a typology of strategies by means of which they
were handled.
Counterrevolutionary activity was particularly wide
spread in the southwest. In addition to the secret societies and
bandit groups which were powerful and numerous in the
region, large numbers of Guomindang forces had gathered in
the area in the course of the communist victory and
constituted a special problem. Together with secret society
members and landlord groups, many of these remnant KMT
forces took refuge in the remote hill areas where they
organized armed resistance and sabotage and incited rebellion
Regional Government and Political Integration in
Southwest China, 1949-1954: a case study, by Dorothy
J. Solinger. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1977.
and general chaos. The overall strategy for dealing with
counterrevolutionary activity was "direct." Cadres from
outside the southwest region were installed in leadership
positions in the localities and were charged with uniform
implementation of national policy. New administrative units,
organs and hierarchies designed deliberately to cut across and
undermine traditional "natural" administrative boundaries
(and to avoid favoritism) were set up to deal with the activities
of counterrevolutionaries.
By comparison, the strategy the government adopted to
deal with national minorities was "indirect" and characterized
by "appeasement." Former leaders and traditional admini
strative boundaries were retained, and the adaptation of
national policy to local circumstances was entrusted to local
officials. Such indirect strategies encouraged local mltJatlve,
enthusiasm and allegiance by raising the level of local
participation in government.
The problem associated with traders and merchants
called for a "mixed strategy"-"those local people willing to
cooperate with regime policies were retained ... but the new
state and Party controls over these individuals gradually
changed the nature of their activities considerably" (194).
Solinger goes on to analyze tensions created in the
implementation of policies at the local level by cadres'
deviations and misinterpretations on the one hand, and by the
inappropriateness of some of the policies on the other. These
fall into four categories:
1. Tension between insiders and outsiders. While
outsiders were required to implement certain policies aimed at
achieving national integration, they were often ignorant of
local customs. Reliance on local people to implement policies
often sacrificed national integration.
2. Tension between upper and lower levels of
administration. Working relations between organs at the
national or regional level and local cadres charged with
implementing national and regional policies were often
strained.
38
______________________________ _
3. Tension between old and new. Scarcity of
competent cadres led to the use of former Guomindang
officials whose old habits and attitudes continued to influence
policy implementation.
4. Tension between theory and practice. Shortage of
party cadres led to deviations in work style, especially
insufficient attention to ideological aspects of policy.
Borrowing from anthropology, Solinger makes use of the
concept of the "political middle man" to describe the
activities of cadres charged with bridging the gap between the
larger political system and the smaller structures contained
with:n it. However, portions of Solinger's analysis could do
with a bit more anthropological slrhistication, particularly the
discussions of national minority peoples of the southwest. In
the space of a single page. (188-189) the I nationality is
described, first, as living under a slave system, second, as
tenant-peasants subject to exactions of rent in the form of
labor services, and then as living in a tribal regime which
constituted a serious obstacle to the institution of communist
reforms. While much has recently been written in neo-Marxist
literature about the coexistence of diverse modes of
production, and while it is known that the I nationality
experienced wide geographical dispersion during the twentieth
century, the reader of Solinger's book is left with the
impression that the terms tribal, slave and feudal are devoid of
precise empirical referents.
Some confusion probably arises out of the juxtaposition
of the official Chinese Communist characterization of the I as
living under a slave regime at the time of liberation (itself a
rather mechanical adoption of Marx's periodization of western
world history into communal, slave, feudal, capitalist stages)
with the more precise ethnographic reporting of Lin
Yileh-hwa's The Lolo of Liang Shan. Moreover, in view of
Solinger's general point that the Chinese Communist Party
attempted to adapt its policies toward particular minority
groups to correspond to their pre-liberation social structures,
one wonders whether confusion over the nature of those social
structures might have already influenced the implementation
of policy in minority areas. Solinger's sources are notably
silent on this point.
For the most part I found Solinger's analysis
generally well reasoned. There is little in it with which I would
take serious issue. I was a little disturbed, however, with
Solinger's adoption (140ff.) of the terminology of H. B.
Chamberlain ("Transition and Consolidation in Urban China,"
in R. Scalapino, ed., Elites in the People's Republic of China,
1972) to describe three types of regional leaders. Ex-KMT
generals/democratic personages, leading native southwest
communist officials, and communist officials from outside the
southwest region are described as "local whites," "local reds"
and "outside reds," respectively. The adoption of such jargon
in no way enhances the quality of the presentation and has no
place in a volume like Solinger's. I find its use reminiscent of
the condescending and hostile tone of American China
scholarship of the cold war era, and believe it compromises the
otherwise serious character of the study.
As a form of shorthand, it is not particularly effective.
Indeed, in the text, Solinger often re-explains the terms each
time she uses them (e.g., "In general, the whites-local
non<:ommunists of prestige-..." and "Communist military
leaders with previous ties to the Southwest (local reds) ...").
This makes her use of Chamberlain's terms all the more
inexplicable, all the more superfluous, and to my mind all the
more regrettable.
This one terminological lapse aside, Solinger'S Regional
Government and Political Integration offers the student of
Chinese politics an in-depth and careful analysis of the
dynamics involved in successfully building a modern unified
political state out of the remnants of a divided, war-torn,
ethnically diverse subcontinent. The general hypotheses and
propositions which Solinger derives from her study will
undoubtedly prove useful to the student of comparative
politics concerned with the problems of national integration in
the evolving political systems of the Third World. The book is
required reading for those with research interests in this field. *
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39
On Grunfeld's "Roof of the World"*
by M. C. van Walt
In his article Mr. Grunfeld claims to be a scholar and to
treat the material scholarly. A critical reader cannot help but
suspect the author of supporting the Chinese Communist
claims and propaganda regarding Tibet, and of using the
scholar's disguise to do so. A few examples should clarify this
statement.
In his opening remarks, Mr. Grunfeld finds it "hardly
surprising that the history and politics of Tibet are not of
major concern in the Western academic world." I do not
question the validity of the statement, but the author bases it
on invalid arguments. The country is not largely barren or
cursed by the world's harshest climates (or one of the world's
harshest climates), as he states. Certainly the climate is not
hospitable to aliens, including the Chinese, but to Tibetans it is
perfectly suitable. There are barren areas in this vast country,
as for example the North Western Plateau Jang Tang, but there
are also regions such as Kham in S.E. Tibet that look rather
like Switzerland. According to Chinese sources, China has
carried out research throughout the country revealing the
existence of an extremely great variety of flora and fauna and
a great animal and bird population. Nor is it a secret that the
mineral deposits (including gold, bauxite, titanium, silver, iron,
arsenic, borax, mica, manganese, copper, lead, zinc, salt,
sulphur, graphite, jade, uranium, coal and oil) are very large
and valuable. "Tibet can become a stupendous granary and
one of the wealthiest industrial regions in all Asia." (Han
Suyin in Lhasr, the Open City)
The strategic importance of Tibet (see the accompanying
map) is obvious when looking at a relief map of Asia. Yet
despite all of this Grunfeld finds that the only importance to
the Western academic world is that the situation in Tibet can
teach us how to eliminate a "mystical religion" and that it
"gives clues as to how Peking will integrate a capitalistic
Taiwan into a Communist China in the future." The map,
surface area and population used by the author are misleading
and grossly incorrect. When writing of Tibet as a scholar, Mr.
Grunfeld should at least define which area he is discussing. He
"Roof of the World" I a review essay by Tom Grunfeld of books on
Tibet appeared in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 9, No.
1 (Jan.-March, 1977), pp. 58-67. That issue is available for $2.50.
40,
does not talk of Tibet (surface area about twice that
mentioned in his article, and population of six million instead
of the 1.7 million quoted!), but of the region named "Tibet
Autonomous Region of China." The information he uses
appears to be taken directly from the Chinese publication
China Reconstructs, March 1976.
Mr. Grunfeld's article is further filled with contradic
tions, illogical conclusions and errors. On the one hand the
author concludes that difficulties in communication allowed
Tibetans to enjoy a large degree of autonomy; almost in the
same sentence the same communication problems lead to a
highly centralized, extremely powerful Tibetan government.
When speaking of the Tibetan political structures before the
Chinese takeover, he uses a broad range of terms including
"warlords," "highly centralized dyarchic Tibetan govern
ment," "local autonomy," "absolute rulers," and "monolithic,
despotic political structure." Mr. Grunfeld does not examine
the status of Tibet before the Chinese invasion in 1950, but
simply takes it for granted that Tibet was a part of China. A
study of the history of Sino-Tibetan relations and of Tibet's
relations with other countries will show that the question was
not as simple as that. The author uses the term suzerainty (a
British term, of no clear legal meaning and without an
equivalent in either Chinese or Tibetan) to describe both the
Sino-Tibetan and the British-Tibetan relations. He ignores that
the British used the term to describe the Sino-Tibetan
relationship in order to contain the feared Russian
expansionism, and even made suzerainty conditional upon
Tibetan autonomy. As a student of international law I can say
with confidence that there can be little doubt as to the
independent status of Tibet before the Chinese invasion of
1950.
With a deeper study of Tibet's history, the author also
would have soon discovered that the Tibetan ruling clan did
not "only raise the issue of Tibetan independence until the
late 1940s." For example, the 13th Dalai Lama had officially
declared Tibet's independence in 1913. This was further
stated in 1914 at the Simla Convention at which Tibet took
part as an independent nation, in all respects.
One inevitably wonders why this "concerned Asian
scholar" uses so many halftruths, untruths, distortions,
flagrant omissions and misrepresentations. Perhaps the answer
was contained in a letter sent by Mr. Grunfeld to the
Information & Publicity Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama in
India: "The differences between us .are religious-as an atheist
I'm not really disturbed by the eradication of Buddhism-and
political-I read the books [reviewed by him) using a Marxist
analysis and the contradictions abound." The reader, too,
notices contradictions. The author admits that the Tibetans
and the Chinese regarded each other as different peoples
("racist attitudes on both sides have had to be overcome") yet
he contends that the Tibetans are Chinese. A scholar in any
discipline will claim the contrary. Mr. Grunfeld calls the
Khambas "Tibetan nomads." In fact, the Khambas are people
who live in the Tibetan region called Kham, and they are not
necessarily nomads.
The examples given above are only a few out of the
many which could easily be shown and proven in detail. The
books reviewed by Mr. Grunfeld are condemned on the
grounds that they have:
- (1) very scanty bibliographies-yet Dr. Han Suyin, to
whom he repeatedly refers, has even less;
- (2) no footnotes, although to take Han Suyin's book
once again, it is interesting to note that she refers to her earlier
books for corroboration;
- (3) "The reader is left to accept or reject statements
without an opportunity to research them further." Anybody
can investigate the Tibetan communities in exile, and the
Tibetans have persistently called for an internationally
supervised investigation of conditions in Tibet. The Chinese
refuse;
- (4) "They portray Han-Tibetan relations in simplistic
political extremes," a charge that is not documented, and
could well be applied to his portrayal of Han-Tibetan relations
as well;
- (5) "The books are all anti-Chinese."
Has the author ever considered the possibility that there
is a valid reason for Tibetans and others to be anti-Chinese? To
be objective one must look and perhaps criticize arguments,
not conclusions. Particularly in Mr. Grunfeld's criticism of
Dawa Norbu's book, he betrays his lack of knowledge of the
subject. Mr. Grunfeld places himself in a curious position.
Never having been to Tibet himself, he makes harsh, authorita
tive-sounding judgments on that country, based on interviews
with Tibetan refugees (sometimes he refers to scores of refu
gees, sometimes to hundreds), all of whom he calls unreliable,
and on Chinese media, which even he says "portray events in
black and white."
Before venturing to write a scholarly article on Tibetan
matters again, I would suggest that !\ir. Grunfeld study the
basic facts more carefully. Perhaps he does not know that the
United Nations General Assembly adopted three resolutions
condemning the Chinese denial of even the basic human rights
to the Tibetan people. *
.....t'.
\).....
c
H
I
D
....... t ,
I
-
.
.._.
A
Tbis map was supplied by Mr. van Walt.
41
Rejoinder
by A. Tom Grunfeld
Many of Mr. van Walt's criticisms are based solely on
fabrications of his own making. For example, I am accused,
twice, .of referring to myself as a "scholar" and to my article as
"scholarly." I could find no trace of either. I am further
accused of considering all Tibetan refugee acc.ounts as
"unreliable." T.o be sure, I believe that one cannot base the
study of historical events solely .on refugee accounts, but that
does not make all .of these st.ories "unreliable." After all, Dawa
Norbu, a refugee himself, wr.ote in Red Star Over Tibet, "I
never saw Dr heard .of any case of misconduct by a Red
soldier."l I w.ould never argue that this statement was
unreliable. We are further told that I refer to Tibetans as
Chinese when in the second paragraph .of my review I wr.ote,
"... Tibetans [are] only one of 56 minorit:, nationalities.,,2
Chinese citizens yes, ethnic Hans no. A final example,
although there are many more, is Mr. van Walt's attempt to
attribute to me the opinion that
... the .only importance to the Western academic world is
that the situation in Tibet can teach us how to eliminate a
"mystical religion" and that "it gives clues as to how Peking
will integrate a capitalist Taiwan into a Communist China in
the future. (emphasis added)
My discussion .of Tibet's strategic importance (pg. 59 .of my
.original review) is c.ompletely ign.ored. Moreover, the relevant,
misrepresented qu.ote reads as f.oll.ows:
Serious studies of Tibet could p.ossibly give us insights into
how ethnic relations are handled in China, and materials on
the integration of Tibet in the decade of the 1950s could
give us clues as to how Peking will integrate a capitalist
Taiwan into a communist China in the future. 3 (emphasis
added)
The need t.o misrepresent what I have written in .order to
summ.on up an attack on ]lle at times reaches a bizarre level.
Mr. van Walt argues that Tibet is not barren and inh.ospitable
because it suits the Tibetans. The Arctic suits the Eskimos but
that doesn't make it any less barren or inh.ospitable.
4
Han
Suyin is then quoted .on the potential wealth .of Tibet as
though what the future p.ossibly holds discredits my view .of
what it is like in the present. Finally with this kind .of charge,
van Walt accuses me .of a
... lack of knowledge of the subject . .. Never having been
to Tibet himself, he makes harsh, authoritative-sounding
judgments on that country (sic).
Mr. van Walt fails to inform us if he has ever been t.o Tibet.
M.ore to the p.oint, he d.oes n.ot-cann.ot-d.ocument his charges,
and he fails to menti.on that many Western and Asian authors
who share his views have also never been t.o Tibet. At least my
judgments are backed up with ample documentati.on.
An.other curious aspect .of the criticism leveled at me is
the propensity for making my views and those .of Han Suyin
synonymous. Since I have only had the good f.ortune of
meeting Dr. Han once and since my article was written months
before her b.ook was published, Mr. van Walt's assumptions are
gr.oundless. Indeed, he appears t.o criticize me f.or the lack of
f.o.otn.otes in her b.o.ok and then g.oes .on t.o attack the b.o.ok. He
evl:" g.oes s.o far as t.o imply that the lack of d.ocumentati.on in
t h ~ books I reviewed (.one .of my criticisms) is s.omehow
justified because Han Suyin's b.o.ok als.o lacks d.ocumentation.
He g.oes .on to p.oint .out that I "repeatedly refer" t.o her in my
article. In fact I menti.oned Han Suyin four times: once when I
list her among recent visit.ors to Tibet; once when I speculate
on what her then-unpublished bo.ok will contain; and twice
qu.oted fr.om the interview we had. In c.omparis.on, I refer t.o
Dr. Melvyn C. G.oldstein seven times but I am not accused .of
"repeatedly referring" t.o him.
Mr. van Walt even appears to be c.onfused about what it
was I was criticizing. I was c.oncerned ab.out the lack .of
d.ocumentati.on in the b.ooks I was reviewing-in particular
Michel Peissel's b.ook and his alleged acc.ounts of mass
defecti.ons by Chinese army .officers, his "kn.owledge" .of
Peking's military budget, and s.o .on. F.or the reader who w.ould
seek d.ocumentati.on, van Walt's suggesti.on is t.o assert that
"Anyb.ody can investigate the Tibetan c.ommunities in
exile ..."
In all fairness I have t.o admit that not all .of Mr. van
Walt's criticisms are based on fantasy and misrepresentati.on.
There are indeed some aspects which are based on hist.orical
interpretati.on. F.or example, there is the questi.on .of my
choice of a map. As is c.omm.on in many parts of the w.orld,
the ethnic boundaries of a people do not necessarily
c.orrespond t.o the political boundaries. This is true in Tibet as
well. The map accompanying Mr. van Walt's article is a fair,
alth.ough n.ot entirely accurate, ethnic map.of Tibet.
(Interestingly, wh.oever drew up the' map seemed to be
influenced by Indian politics because Sikkim [n.ow annexed
int.o India], Bhutan and the area east.of Bhutan kn.own as the
Tawang Tract are all excluded alth.ough their p.opulati.ons are
ethnically Tibetan.) The reality, h.owever, is that there is a
p.olitical entity kn.own as the Tibet Aut.on.om.ous Region .of the
Pe.ople's Republic .of China and that is what is alm.ost always
referred t.o when Tibet is discussed. That is what my map
p.ortrayed. The definiti.on .of the borders between the PRC and
India is an issue of enorm.ous complexity that cann.ot p.ossibly
be discussed in this space. For m.ore inf.ormation on that
subject I refer readers t.o the second footn.ote .of my .original
reVlew.
Mr. van Walt raises the issue of Tibetan "independence"
which I had discussed on page 64 of my review. The 13th
Dalai Lama did declare Tibet "independent" in 1913 but a
unilateral declarati.on of independence does n.ot automatically
c.onstitute independence unless .other nati.ons are willing to
c.oncur. In Tibet's case, not one single country paid any
attention. Whatever Mr. van Walt's feelings may be about the
term "suzerainty," the fact remains that the British
government recognized local autonomy for the Tibetan ruling
class while accepting Tibet as a part of a greater China. The
Simla conference was an attempt by the British government
to legitimize their imperialist advances into Tibet. The Chinese
government, which never signed the agreement, was forced to
attend and accept Tibetan representation. The Tibetan
delegation, having no experts on geography and b.order
demarcation, was well .out of its league and signed the
agreement at British pr.odding. Serious questions have been
raised about the legality of the entire Simla affair even by
scholars who are ideologically opposed to the PRC. Even when
we examine the United Nations resolutions on Tibet, all passed
42
at a time when the PRC was not allowed to become a member,
at no time did the UN recognize Tibet as an independent
entity. Neither is the Dalai Lama's so-called "government-in
exile" recognized as such although the UN has a precedent for
doing so. (The Palestinian Liberation Organization is an
official observer.) Even India, which for the last 19 years has
allowed the Dalai Lama to maintain his headquarters there,
refuses to recognize him as anything more than a leader of a
group of refugees and Tibet as anything more than a part of
the PRC.
The one part of the response to my review that surprised
me most was the quote .from a letter I had written to the
Information and Publicity Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama in
India. I had written that
The differences between us are religious-as an atheist I'm
not really disturbed by the eradication of Buddhism [which
was used as a tool of oppression by the ruling elite] -and
political-l read the books using a Marxist analysis and the
contradictions abound.
A search through my files revealed that the quote, while out of
context, was quite accurate. What shocks me is the fact that
this quote was taken from a piece of personal correspondence
addressed not to Mr. van Walt in Holland, but to the deputy
secretary of the Information and Publicity Office in India. It is
appalling that apologists for the Dalai Lama would be so
dishonest and desperate as to conduct a world-wide search for
materials with which to attempt to defame me; and would not
hesitate to publish unauthorized personal correspondence.
These are clearly the measures of a group whose cause is in
rapid demise and whose character is near bankruptcy.
In the final analysis Mr. van Walt's response must" be
judged by such criteria as the amount of space devoted and
length gone to, in order to attack, not my article and
arguments, but me personally. He hardly even bothers to
defend the books I criticized. Mr. van Walt has allowed himself
to hide behind meaningless, totally undocumented generaliza
tions, and his article stands as an excellent example of the
polemic nature of the literature on Tibet which I lamented in
my original review. *
Notes
1. Dawa Norbu, Red Star Over Tibet (London: Collins, 1974),
p.l09.
2. A Tom Grunfeld, "A Review Essay: Tibet. The Roof of the
World," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, January-March 1977,
Vol. 9:1, p. 58.
3. Ibid., 64.
4. For verification of Tibet's climate and harsh conditions I
invite readers to consult any of the numerous travellers' accounts. A
comprehensive, though incomplete, list of these texts can be found in
The Museum (Newark, N.J.: The Newark Museum Association,
Spring-Summer 1972), 24:2 and 3.
Here is one short example. In an attempt to relate the harshness
of Tibet's climate, one traveller felt that an anecdote summed up the
conditions succinctly. He told how his party cooked and ate "tsampa"
(barley) each morning but always made extra to be eaten later.
The hot paste was wrapped in a piece of hot linen and then
deposited in our breasts. Over it were all OUT clothes; to wit, a thick
robe of sheepskin, then a lambskin jacket, then a short foxskin
cloak, and then a great wool overall. Now, upon every one of the
fifteen days in question, our "tsampa" cakes u!ere always frozen . ..
merely so many balls of ice.
Julie Bedier (ed.), High Road in Tartary. An Abridged Revision
of Abbe Huc's Travels in Tartary, Tibet and China During the Years
1844-5-6 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), p. 132.
Tibet Autonomous Region
43
Review Essay
The Politics of China's Peasant Revolution
by Elizabeth J. Perry
Efforts to explain the success of the Chinese Communist
revolution have preoccupied more than a few American
historians and political scientists in recent years. Most of these
scholars, following the trail blazed by George Taylor's The
Struggle for North China,l have focused attention on the War
of Resistance period (1937-1945) in search of the factors
responsible for the phenomenal growth in Communist power.
2
Chalmers Johnson, with his famous thesis of "peasant
nationalism," emphasizes the importance of the Japanese
invasion for rural mobilization in China.
3
Mark Selden, by
contrast, identifies the Communist Party's positive wartime
policies-the "Yenan Way"-as the key to revolutionary
victory.4 Carl Dorris, while agreeing with much of Selden's
explanation, locates the source of these successful wartime
policies not in the capital of Yenan, but in the guerrilla bases
of North China, especially Jin-Cha-Ji.
5
Despite their divergent interpretations, these scholars
share a common research strategy of looking to the War of
Resistance period to uncover the critical ingredients of
Communist success. Specifically, they seek to isolate those
factors present during the war which were absent in the
preceding Jiangxi Soviet period that ended in disastrous defeat
at the hands of overwhelming Guomindang (KMT) military
might.
6
Tetsuya Kataoka's Resistance and Revolution in
China, while adopting a l:road interpretation of the resistance
period that attempts to synthesize much of the earlier
research, follows this favored approach. Not content to assign
primary explanatory value to either the Japanese invasion or
the Communists' programmatic response, the author argues
that both the war and the agrarian revolution must be included
as causal factors. For Kataoka, it was their united front with
the KMT that permitted the Communists to forge an
ultimately successful, two-pronged strategy of military
resistance and land redistribution.
Kataoka undertakes a novel interpretation of this united
front as an uneasy, yet highly effective, amalgam of two quite
distinct policy positions within the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP): that of Mao Ze-dong and of his rival Wang Ming.
Although Kataoka may perhaps be charged with exaggerating
the differences between these "two lines" on the basis of
rather slim documentation, he is to be credited with a fresh
and challenging thesis. According to his view, while Mao's was
the way of rural revolution, Wang Ming was responsible for
Resistance and Revolution in China: The Communists
and the Second United Front, by Tetsuya Kataoka.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
The Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist Peasant
Movement, 1922-1928 by Roy Hofheinz, Jr. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977.
advocating reliance on urban areas, anti-imperialist struggle,
and cooperation with the Guomindang. As Kataoka explains
it, Wang Ming's contribution was critical to the Communists'
development,
... for the rural revolution to grow, the forces generated in
the cities had to be politically neutralized. Any
arrangement to attain this end had to draw on the
nationalistic impulse that animated the cities. The CCP had
[after the Jiangxi debacle] learned the critical weakness of
its exclusively rural orientation and again it turned toward
the cities. This is the meaning of the second united front. 7
The united front, according to this view, provided an urban
shield that permitted the Chinese Communists to build up
their power in the countryside. Kataoka emphasizes, in
contrast to Johnson, that one key to peasant support was an
effective land revolution, which was carried out in such a way
as to restrain class tensions just short of the breaking point.
8
Despite this stress on agrarian reform, however, Kataoka
prefers a "political" to an "economic" explanation of peasant
mobilization. Paraphrasing Mao, he concludes ironically that,
"To exaggerate a bit, one might say that 'political power grows
out of the barrel of a gun' rather than in reaction to
'deprivation.' ,,9 In Kataoka's opinion, the secret to the
mobilization of the Chinese peasantry lay less in their
destitution than in their receptivity to political organization:
[The] propensity of Chinese peasants to take local power
into their hands in modern times, rather than their poverty,
should be regarded as an element of necessity in the
revolution. But this was not sufficient for the victory of the
revolution. The peasants had to be acted upon under
44
particular international and domestic circumstances. These
circumstances were political in nature. 10
The Chinese Communists, according to Kataoka,
succeeded in large measure as a result of their political finesse
in integrating traditional forms of peasant militarization into a
new, revolutionary infrastructure. This rural tradition itself
was, it is claimed, "politically neutral." 11 As Kataoka portrays
them, bandits, secret societies, and local militia were
essentially apolitical elements which the CCP skillfully
managed to discipline and anchor to a "frame of steel." 12 Here
the analysis may be faulted for lumping together a wide
spectrum of rural groups that did in reality represent quite
distinct economic and political interests. In many locales,
bandit gangs were vehicles by which the desperately
impoverished sought a means of survival. Secret societies and
local militia, on the other hand,. constituted defensive
institutions organized by the rural elite to protect their assets
against the threat of bandit assault. Thus, although the lines of
conflict were parochial, they were not politically neutral. It
was precisely because many secret societies, such as the Red
Spears, represented propertied interests, that the groups posed
a formidable obstacle to .CCP mobilization efforts in many
parts of North China.
Kataoka's failure to do full justice to the matter of
regional idiosyncracies stems in great measure from his
attempt to cover an extremely large geographical expanse.
Unlike his predecessors in the study of the resistance period,
who limited themselves to more manageable local areas, 13
Kataoka considers the entire array of Communist bases in
North China. While his effort to cast his net widely is
commendable, the result lacks detail and depth, and leaves the
reader feeling a bit as though the fish have managed to slip
through uncaught.
If one desires a more microscopic approach to the study
of the Chinese revolution, he/she should turn to Roy
Hofheinz's The Broken Wave. Hofheinz departs from most
previous scholarship in identifying as the critical period for
understanding Communist success not the War of Resistance,
but the peasant movement era some twenty years prior. It is
his contention that the period of the first united front
(1923-1927), rather than the second, holds the key to an
explanation of people's war in China. Despite the fact that this
era ended in defeat, Hofheinz argues that "from 1928 to 1949
the Chinese Communist movement shaped every decision in
order to avoid the pitfalls while preserving the vision of the
peasant movement period." 14
Hofheinz explains that the title of his book carries a
double meaning. First, it refers to the "wave of peasant
revolution in South China that crested and crashed between
1922 and 1928." IS Less obviously, it also refers to peasant
movement leader Peng Pai, whose name was an onomatopoetic
imitation of the sound of breaking waves. Hofheinz holds that
Peng Pai, rather than Mao Ze-dong, deserves credit as the first
practitioner of people's war.16 According to Hofheinz's
analysis, Haifeng county, site of Peng Pai's vigorous efforts,
evidenced by 1927 what Hofheinz advances as the "four
conditions" for people's war: (1) a rural-urban split, (2) a rural
underground, (3) a strategy of protracted warfare, and (4) a
vacuum of urban authority. 17 One problem with these criteria
is that they leave one wondering whether the early
Communists differed at all from generations of previous
peasant rebels. Surely the late Ming rebels of 1627-1646, the
White Lotus uprising of 1796-1804, and the Nien of
1851-1868 all took advantage of an urban vacuum to establish
a rural underground capable of waging protracted struggle. IS
Fortunately, Hofheinz's meticulous description of the actual
experiences of the early Communists in selected counties of
Guangdong and Hunan shows us that these were indeed a new
breed of insurgents, deserving of the title "revolutionaries."
One might have expected, however, that the author would
have spelled out more convincingly the defining characteristics
of this new mode of peasant mobilization. Furthermore, in
light of the work of Kataoka and others suggesting the critical
importance of an urban-rural coalition, one would have hoped
for more theoretical attention to the positive role of the cities
in the development of effective people's war.19
Despite their different time periods and different
appraisals of the urban link, Hofheinz and Kataoka do share a
belief that the Chinese revolution requires a "political"
explanation. Hofheinz presents his work as an explicit
challenge to "those who would define revolutionary potential
in other than political terms." 20 Arguing in the political
science tradition of Samuel Huntington,21 he tells us that "the
conditions for revolution, as well as for successful
counterrevolution, are essentially artifacts of human effort
rather than immutable givens of social structure, economics, or
demography." 22 Phrased in such stark terms, few would
disagree. Indeed, most social scientists who argue for the
primacy of socioeconomic structures would be the first to
concur that these be seen not as "immutable givens," but as
products of human activity subject to human transformation.
Unfortunately, however, much of Hofheinz's subsequent
analysis tends to undermine his "humanistic" promise,
reducing his "political" explanation to yet a new form of
determinism. For example, while offering an original and
persuasive portrait of CCP leader Chen Du-xiu as neither a
45
Soviet stooge nor as pro-Guomindang, Hofheinz then reduces
his characterization of Chen to that of a "politician whipsaw-ed
by conflicting forces.,,23 In analyzing the CCP's efforts to
build independent rural bases, he states, "But these activities,
far from the product of one man's [Mao] imagination, were
inexorable results of the failure of the peasant movement
strategy.,,24 With regard to the demise of the Autumn Harvest
uprising, Hofheinz writes, "nothing could have produced a
successful insurrection given the conditions of the day." 25 His
autopsy on the peasant movement period as a whole
pronounces that "the movement died of natural causes ...
none of the actors, least of all the peasant movement leaders,
could have averted the defeat, given the critical facts of
Chinese politics of the day.,,2s In short, one gets the sense that
politics is hardly a less "immutable given" than the economic,
social, or demographic factors that Hofheinz eschews.
Inasmuch as the wealth of fascinating detail that he carefully
unfolds is not supplemented by a convincing analytic
framework, we are left to believe that politics-causes-politics
causes-politics with little deeper insight into the why and
wherefore.
Hofheinz goes to some length to demonstrate that
Chinese Communist success, measured in numbers of peasant
associations, cannot be adequately explained by "environ
mental" variables. While he is undoubtedly correct in arguing
for the need to look beyond aggregate statistical data in any
search for a full explanation, the "economic" variables with
which he chooses to test the rival economic hypothesis are less
than adequate for the purpose. Drawing on Harvard's data
bank on Republican China county development, Hofheinz
selects four "economic" variables: extent of rice cultivation,
percentage of the population engaged in agriculture,
population growth, and rate of land tenancy. Although he
finds no significant correlation between these particular
variables and the growth of peasant association membership,
he has hardly accomplished a convincing refutation of the
argument for economic roots of peasant support. None of the
LOOKING FORWARD?
The next issue of the
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
is our
Tenth Anniversary Issue.
There will be research articles, reviews,
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SOUTHEAST ASIA
Look forward to it: Volume 10 #4.
measures used is an accurate indicator of rural poverty. While
tenancy rates might seem to come closest, Hofheinz himself
correctly points out that in South China there was no
one-to-one correspondence between tenant status and
poverty.27 Only some measure of household income could
serve as a valid basis for testing the relationship between
poverty and support for the Communists. Another important
"economic" variable omitted from Hofheinz's analysis is the
tax rate, a serious omission in view of the fact that several
scholars have identified tax riots as the most common form of
traditional peasant uprising in China.
28
Indeed, Hofheinz's
finding that his strongest explanatory variables were date of
railroad penetration and proximity to the provincial capital
may have beel.1 less an indicator of greater peasant movement
communication (as he suggests) than of more effective tax
collection.
29
In any case, the evidence presented is far from
sufficient to dispel the suspicion that economics was an
important factor in the peasant calculus of support.
Despite his failure to refute the "deprivation hypothe
sis," Hofheinz is instructive in his unwillingness to interpret
the CCP's move to more poverty-stricken, backward areas as a
simple "poverty is hospitable to revolution" phenomenon. His
emphasis that later Communist successes must be seen as an
culmination of earlier revolutionary experiences-the outcome
of a cumulative learning process, rather than an automatic
reflection of changed environmental conditions-is persuasive,
if not proven.
The book is very useful for its informative discussion of
strategic debates within the CCP during the peasant movement
period, its detailed description of the organizations responsible
for developing that strategy (the peasant movement institute
and peasant associations), and its lively case studies of the
course of the revolution in several key counties: Haifeng,
1922-1924; Guangning, 1924-1925; and Hua, 1926. Despite
his disavowal of economics, Hofheinz is to be credited with a
balanced and sophisticated treatment of his case studies that
blends socioeconomic setting with human action to produce
an absorbing drama.
His strength is in the telling of the story-an account
based upon meticulous research-rather than in any broader
analysis of the events. Little attempt is made to substantiate
his central contention that the peasant movement period, as
much as or more than the Yenan era, has exerted a decisive
impact on the mentality of the contemporary Chinese
leadership. Many readers will choose to dissent from
Hofheinz's claim that one lasting legacy of the peasant
movement experience has been that the Communist Party
"would continue after 1949 to direct the fate of a half-billion
Chinese villagers without pausing long to ask their views.,,3o
And many will prefer a more serious analysis of the Chinese
revolution than Hofheinz's conclusion that "the game that the
Chinese Communists lost in 1927 and then won in 1949 can
be played anywhere, for it is the game of politics." 31 A
satisfactory explanation of the Chinese revolution will require
a dialectical approach that takes seriously both the "political"
insights of Hofheinz and Kataoka and the complex structural
history of Chinese peasant society. "*
46
Notes
1. George E. Taylor, The Struggle for North China (New York:
Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940).
2. In 1937 the Communists ruled an area of only a few
thousand square miles with a population of a million people and an
army estimated at 80,000 soldiers. At the conclusion of the War of
Resistance, they controlled a quarter of the nation with some 100
million people and an army of almost one million.
3. Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist
Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962).
4. Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
5. Carl E. Dorris, "Peasant Mobilization in North China and
the Origins of Yenan Communism," China Quarterly, No. 68,
December 1976.
6. An exception to this research strategy is the work of
IIIpyong J. Kim, whose book The Politics of Chinese Communism:
Kia!,gsi Under the Soviets (l3erkeley: University of California Press,
1973) suggests that Communist mobilization techniques were
developed in the Jiangxi period.
7. Tetsuya Kataoka, Resistance and Revolution in China: The
Communists and the Second United Front (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1974), p. 9.
8. Ibid., p. 135.
9. Ibid., p. 295, footnote 124.
10. Ibid., p. 311.
11. Ibid., p. 104. In his discussion of rural mobilization,
Kataoka acknowledges a heavy debt to Philip A. Kuhn's Rebellion and
Its Enemies in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1970).
12. Ibid., p. 30l.
13. Chalmers Johnson focuses on north Jiangsu, Mark Selden on
Yenan, and Carl Dorris on the Shanxi-Chahar-Hobei base area.
14. Roy Hofheinz, Jr., The Broken Wave: The Chinese
Communist Peasant Movement, 1922-1928 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
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University Press, 1977).
15. Ibid., preface.
16. Ibid., p. 234.
17. Ibid., pp. 281-82.
18. Details on the "people's war" tactics of these three uprisings
can be found in James Bunyan Parsons, Peasant Rebellions of the Late
Ming Dynasty (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970); Suzuki
Chusei, Sincho chukishi kenkyu (Research on the history of the middle
Qing), (Tokyo: Aichi University Press, 1951); and Luo Er-gang. Nianjun
ti yundongzhan (The mobile warfare of the Nian Army) (Changsha:
Shangwu yinshuguan, 1939).
19. See especially Charles Tilly, "Town and Country in
Revolution," in Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia,
John Wilson Lewis (ed.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974),
pp.271-302.
20. Hofheinz, op. cit., preface.
21. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968).
22. Hofheinz, op. cit., preface.
23. Ibid., p. 27.
24. Ibid., 53. Emphasis added.
25. Ibid., p. 58.
26. Ibid., p. 289.
27. Ibid., p. 121. For a further discussionof this point, see Philip
C. C. Huang, "Analyzing the 20th Century Chinese Countryside,"
Modern China vol. I, no. 2 (April 1975).
28. Hsiao Kung-ch'uan, Rural China: Imperial Control in the
Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington, Press, 1960), p.
441; Lucien Bianco, "Peasants and Revolution: The Case of China,"
Journal of Peasant Studies vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 313-35.
29. Hofheinz, op. cit., p. 114.
30. Ibid., p. 303.
31. Ibid., p. 304.
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47
I
Review Essay
Perspectives on China
by Nigel Disney
Events since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 have
raised doubts in many people's minds about what kind of
democratic processes operate in China and within the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP). These questions have been
highlighted by the manner of the purging of the "Gang of
Four" and the reappearance of Deng Xiaoping after his
purging on the personal orders of Chairman Mao. The charges
against the "Gang of Four" are incoherent, and have been
framed as much in terms of personal abuse (and in the case of
Jiang Qing, sexist abuse) as in terms of principled political
disagreements. And the reversal of many of the policies of the
Cultural Revolution-a reversal consolidated at the recent
National People'S Congress-leaves a question mark hanging
over the future of the Chinese revolution.
Many Marxist-Leninists who have been disoriented by
recent events in China might be thought likely to turn eagerly
ro a book that promises a "Marxist interpretation of the
cultural revolution and its aftermath." They will be
disappointed (that is, assuming any of them get beyond
discovering from the dust jacket that the author has been a
member of the Fourth International since 1948). The book
does not provide a definitive Marxist analysis of either China
or the Cultural Revolution. That is still to be written. What the
book does is raise a number of important questions and
criticisms. Ultimately the book is unable to resolve the
questions it poses because it tries to squeeze China into the
framework uf orthodox Trotskyism. And China will not fit.
The book is divided into three sections. The first deals
with China from 1949 to 1965, discussing sQciai and political
changes since Liberation. The second part, which comprises
the bulk of the book, concerns itself with the Cultural
Revolution. The final part discusses the aftermath of the
Cultural Revolution. An interview with a Cantonese ex-Red
Guard is appended to the book.
A central concern of Maitan is democracy, or the lack of
it, in China. He considers the "most negative aspect of the
system established by liberation was the absence of real
Soviets ... " (20) He believes that Soviets "would have
provided the best guarantee for the future course of the
revolution." (21) Maitan argues that certain aspects of the
Cultural Revolution cannot be regarded as examples of
socialist democracy. In his discussim of "seizing power" and
the formation of revolutionary committees, he shows that
while in certain cases at the local level there may have been
Party, Army and Masses in China: A Marxist
Interpretation of the Cultural Revolution and Its
Aftermath, by Livio Maitan. London and New York:
NLB and Schocken Books, 1976, $17.50.
The Rise and Fall of Lin Piao by Jaap van Ginneken.
New York: Avon Books, 1977, 363 pp., $2.50.
Prisoner ofMao, by Bao Ruo-wang (Jean Pasqualini) and
Rudolph Chelminski. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976,
325 pp., $2.50.
genuine elements of control from below, in the final analysis it
was not a genuine democratic seizure of power because it was
neither democratic nor a seizure of power. Every seizure of
power nad to be sanctioned from the upper echelons. "Seizure
of power" at best can only have a metaphoric meaning; seizure
of power in the Marxist-Leninist sense means the smashing of
the state machine and the installation of a different class state.
And clearly this did not happen during the Cultural
Revolution. Whatever may have happened to the party or the
bureaucracy, the army-a central component of state
power-became a target of the Cultural Revolution only during
the summer of 1967.
But Maitan fails to recognize that the Cultural
Revolution was a genuine attempt to grapple with a problem
that has yet to be solved either theoretically or in practice
within Marxism: the relationship between the vanguard
(Leninist) party and the organs of popular control and
democracy (Soviets) in a post-revolutionary society. Despite
Maitan's references to State and Revolution the problem is not
solved there. State and Revolution does not discuss what the
relations between the Bolshevik Party and the Soviets should
be after the revolution. Neither was the problem solved by the
practice of the Russian revolution. Soviets soon disappeared
under the pressures of foreign intervention and civil war; the
disappearance of democracy within the' party followed suun
afterwards.
48
The problem is how to reconcile democratic control
(whatever institutional form this may take) by workers and
peasants over all areas of political, social and economic life
with the existence of a vanguard party. The mere seizing of
state power does not immediately abolish the necessity for
either a state or a vanguard party. The difficulties arise when
the vanguard party and the democratic institutions of control
come into conflict. The vanguard party (which by definition)
should be taking the leading role) has either to defer to the
wishes of the (backward?) masses or override their
democratically expressed will. Democratic institutions and the
vanguard party cannot last long in disagreement with each
other. One of the two has to go. And so far, historically, it has
always been the democratic institutions.
A related problem is that of the distinction between
party and state. Theoretically, the two should be distinct
entities. In all countries where there have been socialist
revolutions, there have not been enough technically competent
cadres within the ranks of the revolutionary forces to fill the
posts ofthe state bureaucracy; both Lenin and Mao recognized
the need to use people from the old state machine even after
the seizure of power. So it has been even more impossible to
fill the ranks of the state bureaucracy with revolutionaries who
are not members of the vanguard party. The result has been
that for all important posts party and state have become
congruent within socialist societies.
Maitan is aware of the problem of the triangular
relationship between party, state and masses, but has nothing
original to add. He merely rehashes the usual references to
Lenin, democracy and the need for a party. "Marxism has
never subscribed to anarchist ideas on the state or denied that
the state would have to perform a number of functions during
the period of transition. But it has always recognized that this
implies profound contradictions." (243) "This does not mean
to say that we support a spontaneist theory or are
underestimating the importance of politically educating the
working class and its vanguard." (245) "In other words, the
Party's function as guide does not dispense with or replace the
functions of the trade unions, the workers' councils and the
soviet bodies through which power is democratically exercised.
We can see the difference between Maoism and Leninism
particularly clearly when we compare the Chinese views on the
unions and those expressed by Lenin in the famous 1921
controversy. " (246) Rather than seeing the actuality of the
problem raised by the Cultural Revolution and attempting to
discover whether any of the methods promoted during the
Cultural Revolution to combat bureaucratism and increase
democracy had any potential for reducing the bureaucratism
which both Maitan and the Chinese agree existed in
pre-Cultural Revolution China, Maitan just shoves these
innovations to one side with the obligatory references to
Marxist orthodoxy, but with no indication as to how this
orthodoxy could be applied concretely to Chinese conditions.
One of the most interesting chapters is Chapter 11
(198-239) where Maitan examines the charges against many of
the leading members of the CCP who lost their positions (and
in the case of Lin Biao, his life) during the Cultural
Revolution. His conclusion is that many if not most of the
charges made against the fallen leaders were tendentious and
frequently lacked any political basis, consisting of phrases or
sentences ripped out of context, or charges which it is
impossible to substantiate. But Maitan again shows his
Obituary
Nigel Disney died in hospital on June 24, 1978, at
the age of 26. Nigel was a founding member of AREAS
(Association for Radical East Asian Studies), the Hong
Kong Research Project and the Korea Committee. He
was also an active member of the Gulf Committee, and
a member of the editorial board of MERIP.
Nigel was an indefatigable worker in all these
organizations. All those who worked with him knew his
tremendous-and unusual-qualities. He was a voice for
reason in every collective, and for internationalism in
every national situation. He was unflinchingly honest,
both personally and politically. He commanded the deep
respect, and affection, of all of us who knew I-,im.
He had just begun to fulfill the promise which his
writings showed. It is a great tragedy that he died just
when his writing was beginning to take oft He was one
of the rare people with an excellent knowledge of both
the Middle East and the Far East and a truly internation
alist perspective. But even though his life was so tragi
cally cut short, Nigel had already made an exceptionally
powerful and valuable contribution to all the organiza
tions and causes with which he worked. Nigel will be re
membered for his selfless dedication to the oppressed
peoples of the world, and his ability to work in a group,
to inspire and help other people.
Nigel was one of the most decent people 1 have
ever known. He could think and see straight on personal
as well as political issues. This made him an invaluable
colleague who will be missed sorely. Nigel was truly a
good friend. A good personal friend, and a good friend
ofall oppressed peoples.
J on Halliday
limitations by concentratmg on the purely individual level. It
is true, for example, that it is patently ridiculous to accuse Liu
Shaoqi of plotting the restoration of capitalism, or Lin Biao
the restoration of Confucianism as the official ideology in the
sense that either of them was organizing systematically with
the avowed (if secret) aim of carrying out a restoration.
But this ignores the other aspect of the accusations
against Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao: they did raise substantive
theoretical issues. In Liu Shaoqi's case the conditions for the
emergence of capitalist tendencies under socialism are
implicitly under discussion; in the case of Lin Biao the way in
which the ideology(ies) of the old society can continue to
exist under socialism unless specifically combated. These key
theoretical questions were obscured by turning them into a
personalized attack on specific individuals. A careful reading
of some of the texts produced during the Cultural Revolution
reveals some of these theoretical issues. It is a pity Maitan did
not perform such a readin$.
A review of Maitan would not be complete without a
discussion of his source material. Generally, it is well balanced,
mixing official documents (in translation), writings by authors
sympathetic to China, and academic studies. It is, however,
49
intensely irritating to find Maitan noting all the authors
sympathetic to China, while failing to inform his readers of
those who by any standard are hostile to China. A text by
Enrica Pischel is referred to as being "written in the author's
usual apologist vein" (48, fn. 23); in case we do not
understand the first time we are twice warned about Jean
Daubier "who as usual reproduces every snippet of propaganda
as if it were hard fact" (117); even worse, he is "a fervent
supporter of the Maoists" (146); when it comes to
Wheelwright and McFarlane they are "two dogged admirers of
Maoist economics" (273). Maitan does not feel it necessary to
warn his readers about CIA authors, or Taiwan publications:
when it comes to a well-known CIA analyst he is introduced
by just his surname, Field (46), although later in the book
when he makes his final appearance he is granted his initials,
R. M. (65, fn. 71). Similarly, when Issues and Studies-
produced in Taiwan-is mentioned as a source for one of Mao's
speeches (190, fn. 15), Maitan omits to inform us of its place
of publication.
Van Ginneken, in contrast to Maitan, is more judicious
in his use of sources. He has a section devoted to sources,
separate from the footnotes. Van Ginneken allows the reader
to make up his or her own mind: "I have only used the reports
from Hong Kong and text from Taipei when I have considered
that they had reasonable claims to authenticity. In instances of
persistent uncertainty, I must leave it to the reader to make
the final judgment." (314)
By combining these different sources van Ginneken is
able to make some sense of the Lin Biao affair. In doing so, he
covers much of the same ground as Maitan in his discussion of
the Cultural Revolution. But van Ginneken concentrates on
events that are relevant to the rise and fall of Lin Biao. Thus
he details, along with the rise of Lin Biao after the purge of
Peng Dehuai, the rise of such figures as Chen Boda, Jiang Qing
and other members of the Shanghai radicals.
Lin's rise (and subsequent fall) was linked to the various
leftist currents that appeared during the Cultural Revolution,
in particular the "May 16" group which was responsible for
such acts as the burning down of the British Embassy in
August 1967, and spearheading the Red Guard attack against
the "capitalist roaders" in the army during the same summer.
Lin Biao also appears to have been one of the main promoters
of the excessive cult of the personality around the figure of
Mao Zedong. Van Ginneken quotes him as saying:
China's rich revolutionary experience cannot be excelled.
Chairman Mao commands the highest prestige in the nation
and the whole world and he is the most outstanding and the
greatest figure. Chairman Mao'S sayings, works and
revolutionary practice have shown that he is a great
proletarian genius. Some people don't admit genius but this
is not Marxist . .. Every sentence of Chairman Mao's works
is a truth. one single sentence of his surpasses ten thousand
of ours. I have not read Chairman Mao's works enough and
would study harder from now on . .. (61-62, quoting from
a speech made in 1966).
Mao's response in a letter circulated within the Party was
ambiguous:
The Central Committee is in a hurry to circulate the speech
made by my friend. [Mao is referring to the speech by Lin
Biao quoted above.1 I am prepared to give my approval . ..
I would never have thought that the few books I have
written could have had such magic powers. Now he has
sung the praises of my works, the whole country will follow
his example. This reminds me of the old woman who was
selling melons and who exaggerated the quality of her
wares. My friend and his colleagues have presented me with
a fait accompli. It looks as if there is no other course left
open to me than to give my approval.
This is the first time in my life that I have had to
agree with other people about an essential problem against
my wish . .. (63, quoting from a letter written by Mao in
1966).
Although not totally approving of the personality cult, Mao is
also not as resolutely opposed to it as is sometimes made out.
Lin Biao was certainly not fully responsible for all the excesses
of the Mao cult.
Lin Biao's role in the promoting of the personality cult
played only a minor role in his downfall. Much more
important was the policy to be adopted towards the Soviet
military threat, and the question of an opening to the West;
there were also disagreements between Lin and other members
of the Party leadership over internal policy.
When border clashes with the Soviet Union turned into
full-scale battles in 1969 and 1970, the question of how to
deal with a potential Soviet invasion became crucial.
According to van Ginneken, Lin Biao and his supporters were
in favor of a beefing up of the army, both in terms of
equipment and in terms of its political role within the country.
Others, such as Mao, Zhou Enlai and Chen Vi, favored the
opening to the West. The view that U.S. imperialism was less
dangerous than "soviet social imperialism" carried the day
within the leadership. Van Ginneken summarized the
difference as follows:
Everyone wanted to continue the ideological fight with the
Soviet Union . .. But if priority had to be given to one of
the confrontations, then it must be the struggle against
imperialism: better a bad socialist than a good capitalist, so
reasoned Lin and his colleagues. Chou En-lai and other
officials, on the other hand, believed that Soviet revisionism
was dangerous, in a much more real way, and that it was, in
any case, much easier to take advantage of the
condradictions in Western imperialism. (252)
Van Ginneken's interpretation of the attempted coup
is plausible and convincing. He argues that the groundwork
was laid for the coup by Ye Chun (Lin Biao's wife) and her
son, Lin Liguo, and that Lin was dragged into it, faute de
mieux. The planning for the coup was carried out by Lin
Liguo, and Ye Chun became involved at a later stage. Lin Biao
only became aware of it when it was too late for him to do
anything about it. It is difficult to salvage much from the
accounts put out by Peking, some of which have appeared on
Taiwan, and clearly many of the accusations against Lin are ex
post facto justifications for changes in policy. But there is now
no doubt, incredible as it seemed when these reports first
appeared, that Lin Biao was killed in a plane crash trying to
flee to the Soviet Union.
Bao Ruo-wang's book is in complete contrast to the two
discussed above. It is an account by a half-Chinese, half-French
man who spent seven years in prison camps undergoing
50
Reform Through Labor. The first question to be asked about
the book is whether it is genuine. Naturally, it is not possible
to give a categorical answer to this question. All one can say is
that the balance of probability is that it is genuine-the
authors are not out to crudely slander China, even though
there are many points in the book where they could have done
so. For example, Bao states that he was not tortured during
interrogation; he was only shown the old MKT torture
chambers as an instance of how things had improved since
Liberation. Again, he recounts an incident where the prisoners
were taken to see the kind of food the prison warders ate; it
was almost identical to that of the prisoners. In both of these
cases Bao could have written a very different story. He could
have provided a lurid description of how he was tortured, or
an account of the luxurious feasts the prison warders had.
According to Bao, the labor camps have not only a
political but also an economic rationale, which also explains
why so little is known about them outside of China.
... what the Chinese Communists knew all along, is that
convict labour can never be productive or profitable if it is
extracted only by coercion or torture . .. There is a simple,
basic truth about the labour camps that seems to be
unknown in the West: For all but a handful of exceptional
cases (such as myself) the prison experience is total and
permanent ... Labour camps in China are a lifetime
contract. They are far too important to the national
economy to be run with transient personnel . .. (10-11)
Bao probably exaggerates the importance of the camps
to the national economy. Some of the forms of labor he
describes could easily be performed by non-prisoners-apart
from the need to keep the prisoners occupied.
What emerges clearly from Bao's account is the ritual
and apolitical nature of supposedly politicized people in
China; and how it is possible for a prisoner to manipulate these
rituals so that the prison officer, or whoever, has to concede
the point to the prisoner. As Bao puts it: "In China one is
expected to react in a certain correct manner to ev(!ry given
situation. Prison is not a prison, but a school for learning
about one's mistakes. What counts is not what a thing is, but
what you call it." (28) Or as Bao aptly puts it later inthe book
when referring to compulsory cell political discussions, "We
chatted away our platitudes like Stakhanovite parrots." (69)
Once a person has entered into the processes of the
judicial system and prison life he/she is governed by a
topsy-turvy logic. "In China an appeal against a sentence
means the prisoner is not repentant for his crimes and has not
accepted the government's leniency. Ipso facto, it is proof that
he has not learned his lesson. An appeal, therefore, is a
demand for further punishment." (80) When Bao is caught
stealing food, the theft is not the most serious aspect, as the
warder points out to Bao:
. .. "What you have done here"-he enumerated the items
one by one on his fingers- "is, first, proof that you are
discontented with what the government is giving you;
second, stealing government property; third, inducing
others to criminal activities; and fourth, unhygienic. You
can ruin your health with dirty food ... " (227-28,
emphasis added)
The book is not without its lighter moments, Bao
describes his problems in giving political education classes to
backward illiterates. He had to teach them the new line (this
was in the early sixties) on the Soviet Union. He created
uproar in the class by insulting "Elder Brother" Khrushchev,
provoking the prisoners to summon the warder, who
confirmed to the dumbfounded prisoners that Bao was right.
After that everything went fine for Bao except that "I never
succeeding in persuading them to take Albania seriously. When
I told them that the population of our doughty little ally was
only around a million, they sniffed with exquisite Chinese
scorn. Only one million! Not worth considering. One of my
students even permitted himself the speculation that if we 600
million Chinese got together we could sink Albania by merely
pissing on it."
The book is replete with insights such as this on how at
least some Chinese reacted to the official line in a less than
coherent way. Many people will dismiss this book as a forgery
as it does not agree with some of their preconceived and more
rosy views of China. This would be a pity, as Bao Ruo-wang
takes us behind some of the propaganda and reports from
easily impressed travellers. "*
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51
Review Essay
Behind China's Turmoil
by Victor Nee-
Not long ago it was difficult to imagine China without
Mao Ze-dong. No figure in history had so great a hand in
charting the course of an entire civilization as Mao did through
his leadership of the Chinese revolution. Although we think of
him mainly as a great political and military strategiest, Mao
also developed a far-reaching and comprehensive strategy for
China's economic development. That is the subject of John G.
Gurley's China's Economy and the Maoist Strategy. China's
economic achievements under Mao gain particular significance
in light of the worsening economies in the third world. China
is one of the few countries that has successfully broken free of
the capitalist international system and launched a sustained
program of economic development on the basis of internally
generated resources. It is the most important country to do so
since World War II.
In the last quarter century the Chinese government has
fed, clothed, housed, and educated a quarter of the world's
people in a country where the norm had been periodic famine
and a short life expectancy. China's industrial production has
risen an average of 11 percent a year, its agricultural output
has grown in the range of 2.5 to 4 percent a year, and its Gross
National Product has risen an average of 6 percent. China's
respectable, though not spectacular, economic growth rate
under Mao was higher than comparable periods of industrial
revolution in the Soviet Union (1928-1940), England
(1750-1850), and Japan (1876-1936).
Gurley credits Chinese achievements to the Maoist
economic model. Mao believed that thoroughgoing mobiliza
tion of the latent energies and creativity of all its people was
essential to China's rapid economic growth, and that this could
be achieved only through political struggle. He considered
human labor power as the major factor in economic
development, a belief consistent with China's Confucian past
and the fact that its natural wealth lay primarily in its huge
population. In other respects China was, as Mao termed it,
"poor and blank." Its soil was grossly depleted from thousands
of years of intensive farming, science and technology were
very backward, and capital resources were thin.
This review essay also appears in the January-February 1978 issue of
the Working Papers (Volume VI, No.1), published by the Center for
the Study of Public Policy, Cambridge, Mass.
China's Economy and the Maoist Strategy, by John G.
Gurley. New York: Monthly Review Books, 1976. 325
pp., $15.00.
China's Industrial Revolution, by Stephen Andors. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1977.448 pp., $6.95 (paper).
The Rise and Fall of Lin Piao, by Jaap van Ginneken.
New York: Avon Books, 1977. 363 pp., $2.50 (paper).
Enthusiasm for socialism could be awakened, Mao
argued, by enlisting the active participation of China's people
in every phase of economic development, from planning to
implementation of new programs or projects (within the
context of central planning by the state). And enthusiasm
could be sustained only if the benefits of development were
equitably distributed, with the entire population experiencing
concrete improvements in well-being. Simultaneously, China
would have to maintain a high rate of savings and, most
important, prevent the emergence of a high-consuming middle
class that would monopolize the benefits of development.
Gurley errs when he portrays Maoists as opposed to
experts and specialists in the development process <e.g., page
18). The issue was not Communists versus experts or
generalists versus specialists; instead, the Maoist ideal was to be
"red and expert," generalist and specialist. (Mao, however, did
have an impatience bordering on contempt for academic
experts. So long as their knowledge served the cause of
socialism, he considered them useful and constructive. But
academic experts who lacked experience in production
frequently lacked real knowledge, according to Mao, which
made their claim to expertise false.)
Nowhere have Mao's economic policies been more
successful than in agriculture, and Gurley appreciates the
enormity of China's achievements in rural development. It is
true, as he points out, that the agricultural growth rate has
been slow relative to that of the industrial sector, and has just
kept ahead of natural population increases. However, China's
industrial base before 1949 was minuscule, constituting only 3
to 4 percent of the national output. The high growth rate in
the industrial sector must be seen in light of the small initial
52
base, whereas China was and is predominantly an agricultural
economy.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, Mao fought to ensure
that the countryside would not be left behind or exploited for
the sake of China's new industrial priorities. At the height of
the short-lived Soviet era in Chinese socialism, when state
investments went almost exclusively to the cities and to new
heavy industrial projects, Mao pushed ahead the rapid
collectivization of agriculture. This was in opposition to those
within the Chinese Communist party who adopted the Soviet
"theory of productive forces." According to this theory, only
the steady development of heavy industries could lead to any
economic breakthroughs. These party leaders argued that
mechanization had to come before any attempt to collectivize
agriculture. Mao, on the other hand, maintained that
collectivization not only could precede mechanization, but
had to in order to provide the organizational framework for
subsequent rapid mechanization.
Mao came to bdit"vC' that Soviet-style economic
development meant, as it had in Russia, bleeding the
countryside to build up heavy industries and urban centers.
The social and political costs of this strategy, he felt, were
intolerable and would lead ultimately to peasant rebellion.
The Great Leap Forward was Mao's bold attempt to
evolve a distinct Chinese road to socialism: to develop industry
and agriculture simultaneously. It was not madness, as it has
been portrayed in the West. Despite the many failures of the
Great Leap years (1958 and 1959)-the social and economic
disruption and subsequent economic depression-the essential
features of its strategy and programs have become fixtures of
Chinese rural development.
The years following the Great Leap saw the consolida
tion of people's communes, the expansion of rural industries
as an increasingly' important sector of China's industrial
system, and the transformation of the Chinese countryside
with new dams, roads, irrigation systems, and crop lands.
Thanks to the massive forestation program begun in the Great
Leap years, Chinese hills and mountainsides are green for the
first time in many centuries. Other Great Leap programs
established the basis for China's "green revolution." Gurley
writes that living standards in the countryside improved largely
because of changes in the terms of trade between agriculture
and industry. The government has provided a generous subsidy
to agriculture by steadily raising the price it pays for grain-a
price that is higher than what grain sells for in the cities. Prices
for industrial products, meanwhile, have remained stable since
1951 and in recent years many have been reduced. "By the
end of the 1950s, a given amount of agricultural produce was
purchasing about 35 percent more industrial goods than at the
beginning of the decade," Gurley writes. "By the end of the
1960s, the increase was 67 percent."
In the long run, Mao argued, state investment in
agriculture provided thr: basis for a sounder industrial
development. The prioricy the Chinese have given to rural
development is the crux of Mao's victory over those in the
Chinese Communist party who advocated the Soviet
development strategy.
Although China is still overwhelmingly a peasant nation,
the Chinese are nonetheless in the midst of an attempt to
create a modern industrial state. Stephen Andors' China's
Industrial Revolution is an important and provocative study of
industrial management and workers control in China. He
argues optimistically that the Chinese have developed a new
approach to industrial society, having rejected both capitalist
and Soviet models of industrial organization. Andors believes
capitalist and Soviet models are fundamentally incompatible
with industrial democracy since both are based on elitist
bureaucracies that dominate the working class. In a sense this
convergence of the two systems was anticipated by Weber,
who argued that bureaucracy would triumph over all
competing forms of organization because of its greater
efficiency and rationality for modern society. Weber
maintained that bureaucratic control in socialist societies,
where the state owns the means of production, would be even
more complete and total than under capitalism. Andors
acknowledges that history has proven kinder to Weber's
prediction of bureaucratization than to the Marxian hope of
industrial democracy. He feels, nonetheless, tl'at the Chinese
have made significant inroads in building a new model of
industrial organization.
Ironically, the Chinese approach evolved less from
Marxian notions of proletarian democracy than from the
success of the experience in Yenan. In the wartime capital of
Yenan, the Chinese Communists mobilized peasants in a war
I
of resistance against the Japanese invasion by combining
central leadership with a high degree of local initiative,
flexibility, and participation. This new method of leadership
was embodied in the policy "from the masses, to the masses," I
which came to symbolize the Maoist revolutionary approach.
Later, when applied to the industrial sector, it was translated
into the call for managers to participate in labor, workers to
participate in management, and a three-in-one combination of
party cadres, workers, and technicians to take over
I
management responsibilities.
Although the official Chinese attempt to follow Soviet
industrial ways was short-lived, Soviet influence has proven
extremely difficult to shake. The Chinese imported Soviet
ideas and methods on a massive scale during the First Five
Year Plan in the early 1950s, including importing entire plants.
Along with the plants came droves of Soviet advisers eager to
instruct their Chinese comrades. In both new and old
industrial plants the Chinese adopted and implemented Soviet
methods of industrial organization. According to the Soviet
management model, the principle of individual responsibility
was necessary to maintain a system of strict discipline and
obedience. Administrative and technical experts were to be
given a free hand in controlling production. Top-down control
was essential for effective state planning, and hierarchical
distinctions and material rewards were expected to provide
work incentives.
Although Soviet "one-man management" may have been
at odds with Maoist political values, it meshed with the
interests and world view of Chinese bureaucrats. In my
opinion, this fact more than any other explains the persistent
influence and attractiveness of Soviet methods long after
China's rupture with the "big brothers," as the Chinese called
the Soviets during the height of their friendship.
In 1958, as the Great Leap Forward gathered
momentum in Chinese factories, the party moved quickly (too
quickly, in retrospect) to dismantle the Soviet management
system and to implement Maoist participatory management.
Control and decision making were decentralized to the level of
the workshop and production team. Party cadres replaced
53
technical personnel in management, and a system of
committee rule replaced one-man management. Moral
incentives took precedence over material. Workers were
encouraged to participate in management, and party cadres to
do manual labor.
The frenzied national effort to surpass Great Britain's
productive output in the Great Leap years ground to a
crashing halt in 1960. We do not know from Andors whether
the drop in industrial efficiency was the result of mistakes
made in implementing a basically sound management plan or
whether it revealed some flaws in Mao's conception of
industrial organization. Certainly the dismantling of central
planning and statistical bodies was a great mistake, which was
corrected during the post-Leap years of economic recovery.
Liu Shao-qi and the "pro-Soviet" wing of the party
apparently concluded from the disruptions and failures of the
Great Leap Forward that its very conception was hopelessly
flawed. Mao remained convinced that the policies and
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programs were sound. In his view they were the only way
China could develop into a modern socialist society and make
the transition to communism while avoiding the pitfalls of
revisionism and capitalism. The Cultural Revolution, which
began in 1966, was, among other things, a battle between
these two development strategies.
While Andors' treatment of the Cultural Revolution
focuses on the renewed Maoist attempt to establish
participatory management in Chinese factories, neither he nor
Gurley provides an analysis of the complex struggles for power
that propelled the Cultural Revolution. The best analysis of
those struggles so far is Jaap van Ginneken's The Rise and Fall
of Lin Piao.
It will take us decades to unravel the strands of the
Cultural Revolution, if we ever do. It was undoubtedly the
largest political movement in history. When I told a Chinese
diplomat in 1971 that I was planning to write on the Cultural
Revolution he shook his head slowly and said, "Even we
Chinese do not understand the Cultural Revolution. How can
you?"
The tale is one of changing alliances and counteralliances
among competing factions, frequently based more on
realpolitik considerations than on ideological solidarity. In its
very simplest terms the Cultural Revolution was a struggle
between Maoists and Liuists, the Soviet-oriented conservative
wing of the party. Between these two positions was a
continuum of factional groupings courted by both sides. Mao
was never exclusive in the company he chose to make up the
forces of revolution, and the coalition that supported the
Cultural Revolution included disparate institutional interests
and personal ambitions. At the highest level there were three
principal bases of support: the central army, led by Lin Biao;
the mass media, controlled by the Cultural Revolution Group
and led by Chen Bo-da and Jiang Qing (Mao's wife); and the
State Council headed by Premier Zhou En-Iai. Mao stood
above these bases of power and was, as the Chinese described
him, the "great helmsman" of the Cultural Revolution.
Lin Biao and the central army played a key support role
in launching the Cultural Revolution by intervening at critical
points when the Cultural Revolution Group seemed
outmatched by the Peking party machine controlled by Peng
Zhen, a close ally of the Liuist camp. But Lin Biao, the
brilliant general of the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War,
proved to be an alarming dogmatist of revolution whose praise
for Mao's genius was exceede,i only by his own personal
ambition for power.
Chen Bo-da and Jiang Qing presided over an intense but
inexperienced following (".: young radicals, mainly from the
party's ideological journal Red Flag. The ultimate goal of the
Cultural Revolution Group was to establish local governments
modeled after the Paris Commune of 1871. When the hope for
these communal governments was quashed by Zhou and
took a more realistic view of the political limits of
the Cultural young radicals moved to an
ultraleft position. Here the politics of the Cultural Revolution
gets especially murky, but available evidence points to the
complicity of Chen Bo-da's young radicals in the "May 16
Group" conspiracy to topple Zhou and the vice-premiers of
the State Council. The degree to which Jiang Qing was
implicated is not clear. She certainly was responsible for
inspiring ultraleftist excesses with her call to the Red Guards
54
to "defend by force." Lin Biao also found the ultraleft useful
for its call to "drag out capitalist roaders" in the army. This
call was directed primarily at the regional military
commanders, all veterans of the revolutionary campaigns, who
opposed Lin's move to extend and consolidate his power in
the army.
An alliance based around Zhou and the regional military
commanders successfully the ultraleftists. Zhou had
strong ties with these military leaders, dating back to the
1920s and, more important, he had Mao's unflinching support
throughout the Cultural Revolution.
The failure of the May 16 Group conspiracy was
followed by successive purges of ultraleftists from among Lin's
followers in the central army command and from the Cultural
Revolution Group. Whatever their individual involvement, the
Cultural Revolution Group as a whole was discredited by the
May 16 group. That, plus the collapse of the party
organization, opened the way for Lin Biao to expand his
power, which he did with great zest. As the factional
bloodletting of the Cultural Revolution continued to escalate
out of control, the army came to play an increasingly
important role, and Lin lost no opportunity in filling the many
holes in China's power structure with his people. Lin's high
point was the Ninth Party Congress, convened in 1969, where
he delivered the keynote speech, and where the new party
constitution was unveiled, listing him as Mao's chosen
successor.
Lin's power was dominant over Zhou from 1968 to
1971, and Chinese military expenditures increased rapidly in
those years. Lin apparently rationalized the increased military
budget by citing the pressing need for preparedness in the
struggle against the two imperialist powers, the United States
and the Soviet Union. Mao, however, argued that the world
balance of power had shifted following the American setback
in Indochina and that America waS a declining imperialist
power. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was rapidly
expanding its power and influence on a global and had
become China's principal "external contradiction" and
primary enemy. The outbreak of a bitter border conflict along
the Ussuri River in 1969 underscored this conclusion.
Zhou, who argued for cutting back on military
expenditures in order to allocate a larger portion of the state
budget to domestic economic development, sided with Mao in
the debate with Lin Biao over foreign policy. The Chinese
overtures to the United States and the invitation to Nixon to
negotiate a Sino-American rapprochement were consequences
of Mao's new foreign policy.
As both Lin Biao and Chen Bo-da came to realize that
they could not beat the Mao-Zhou alliance and that their
fortunes were rapidly on the wane, they forged a desperate
alliance against Mao and Zhou. Van Ginneken documents the
Lin Biao affair, the abortive coup d'etat, and the bizarre
circumstances of Lin's death. Like the first stage of the
Chinese revolution in the 1920s, the Cultural Revolution was
an urban-based movement that ended in a severe crisis for
Chinese Communism itself. Although the right wing of the
party suffered a serious defeat in the Cultural Revolution, it
was still a force to be reckoned with in Chinese politics, and
many of the purged capitalist roaders were needed to help
rebuild party and state organizations in the post-Cultural
Revolution period.
Premier Zhou En-Iai led a coterie of professionals who
were both red and expert and who called for positive action in
building China into a modern socialist state. The radical left
leaders, in contrast, were relatively inexperienced in national
administration and economic development. They called for
continuing struggle against hidden capitalist roaders in the
party, prolonging the witch-hunt atmosphere of the Cultural
Revolution. Mao appears to have remained sympathetic with
the radical left of the Cultural Revolution leadership, but he
sided, in the final analysis, with the more moderate Zhou
group. The Zhou faction ultimately won out over the radical
left as it had won previously over the ultraleft and Lin Biao.
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Mark Tushnel A Marxist Interpretation of American La"
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55
From van Ginneken's account, it appears that Jiang Qing
and the Shanghai radicals-the now discredited "gang of
four" -were not directly involved in the struggle against Lin
Biao and Chen Bo-da. The extent to which the Shanghai
radicals-Zhang Chun-qiao and Wang Hung-wen-acted inde
pendently of Jiang Qing, using her to gain access to Mao, is
another murky area. What is clear, however, is that when Zhou
resurrected Deng Xiao-ping like Lazarus from the dead in
1973, the prospect of having the "No. 2 capitalist roader" of
the Cultural Revolution succeed Zhou greatly alarmed the
remaining leaders of the Cultural Revolution Group. It mayor
may not be at this point that the gang of four became
anti-Zhou. But their opposition to Zhou and what he stood for
eventually spelled their downfall. Within the reconstructed
party and among the regional military commanders, Zhou was
the real hero of the Cultural Revolution. His opposition to Lin
and the ultraleft current, which had been responsible for the
humiliation and premature death of many revered leaders of
the old guard, was widely respected.
The Chinese under Mao creatively responded to the
challenge of transforming China from what they called the
"sick man of Asia" into a modern socialist society. Yet those
who look to China for the realization of their political ideals
are bound to be disillusioned at some point. Chinese socialism
is no paradise on earth. China is still a poor country that faces
severe constraints in the present and foreseeable future. And
although the Chinese have never turned to the wide-scale use
of state violence and secret police terror of a Stalinist regime,
the Chinese still defend Stalin as 70 percent good and 30
percent bad, and they believe strongly in the authoritarian role
of the state.
In many ways the present stage of the Chinese
revolutionary process resembles the period following the Great
Leap Forward. It is a period of intense political struggle and
conflicting trends. Though the participatory and egalitarian
ideal of the revolution still remains basic party policy,
retrenchment is in the air. There is more emphasis on central
authority and discipline and on the role of experts, more stress
on economic growth, greater attention to the role of science
and technology in development, more mention of material
incentives, even favorable comments on the virtues of
capitalist scientific management. The present Chinese leader
ship repeatedly points to the need to learn from the West and
from Japan. As Deng Xiao-ping recently commented to a
visiting American physicist, "To surpass the advanced, you
must first learn from the advanced."
An important bellwether of the political and ideological
climate in China has been its educational system. There is talk
about the need to raise academic standards in the nation's
schools and the need to make up for the time wasted during
the ten years of educational revolution, implying that the
Maoist attempt to reform education was a failure. As a sign of
the times, Chinese institutions of higher learning have
reinstituted competitive entrance examinations and have
begun to recruit students directly from urban high schools, a
practice that in the past was condemned for discriminating
against peasant youths.
It would be short-sighted, however, to read such signs as
evidence that the Chinese have already abandoned their
dedication to the revolutionary process. If Mao has left a
permanent legacy, it is that only through protracted struggle
can the Chinese people experience progress and basic
improvements in their condition. If we have learned a lesson
from the Chinese Communists, it is that they have been
unsurpassed in combining firmness of revolutionary resolve
with hard-nosed practicality.
The Zhou faction has been characterized as moderate by
the American China-watching community. This label, however,
is misleading, implying that Zhou represented a different
political line from that of Mao. There is every reason to believe
that Zhou agreed with the basic principles of the Maoist path
for China; indeed, he built his reputation as a brilliant and
capable administrator who faithfully carried out Mao's line.
The Chinese, who are now preparing for a new leap forward in
economic development, are not likely to jettison the basic
principles of the Maoist economic strategy. It not only has
made them the most successful of the deVeloping nations, but
has propelled them from desperate poverty and backwardness
to the front ranks of the contemporary world. *
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I
1
i
Review Essay
~
East Asia and the World Economy
by Carl Riskin
The contrast between Japan's emergence from the late
nineteenth century as an industrializing nation and China's
continued relative stagnation during the same period
constitutes a puzzle that has provoked many attempts at
solution. To heighten the sense of paradox, a number of
observers have echoed the view of the late Alexander Eckstein
that
an informed observer appraising the prospects of economic
development and modernization in Asia from the vantage
point of 1840 might well have picked China-rather than
Japan-as the most likely candidate. China was a vast
empire more populous than Japan, much better endowed
with mineral resources and large internal markets. Even in
terms of social and political institutions, China might have
appeared to be in the better position [etc.]
In his last book before his untimely death in 1976,
Professor Eckstein went on to cite the various advantages that,
in sum, enabled Japan rather than China to forge ahead into
industrialization. But, significant though these factors might
have been, they provide only a partial explanation, for, with
the exception of a single Sentence referring to japan's being
"less constrained by incursions into its sovereignty" (8),
Eckstein does not consider the important question of the
differential impact of imperialism upon the two countries.
This is an issue with which Bulletin readers will be familiar
from Jim Peck's "Roots of Rhetoric"* and the subsequent
articles by Andrew Nathan and Joseph Esherick.
An examination of this question is the central task of
Frances Moulder's Japan, China and the Modern World
Economy. As its title makes immediately apparent, this work
is a product of the Emmanuel Wallerstein "world economy"
school, and indeed, Wallerstein was one of the author's
supervisors when the book was in the dissertation stage.
Moulder's principal thesis is that China's failure to
develop industrial capitalism during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, as Japan did, was due chiefly to the
greater degree of its "incorporation" into the world economy
dominated by the Western powers. Assigning such weight to
the impact of "incorporation" logically requires demoting the
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Volume II, No.1 (October,
1969), which is now out of print; and BCAS, Volume IV, No.4
(December, 1972), still available.
Japan, China and the Modern World Economy, by
Frances V. Moulder. New York and London: Cambridge
University Press, 1977, x + 255 pp.
China's Economic Revolution by Alexander Eckstein.
New York and London: Cambridge University Press,
1977, xii + 340 pp.
relative importance-stressed by previous writers-of dif
ferences in initial conditions of the two countries prior to
"incorporation." In a very interesting comparison of the
traditional social and political structures of China and Japan,
Moulder, while not ignoring distinctive differences, argues that
"the overall character of the two economies and societies was
more similar than divergent on the eve of the Western
capitalist intrusion into East Asia," and that "traditional
society theorists have exaggerated the differences between
Tokugawa Japan and Ch'ing China" (199).
During the phase of trade-oriented imperialism, lasting
until the 1880s, "Japan was shielded from strong incor
poration by other Asian areas of the satellite world that were
geographically closer to the Western European nations and had
been reached first, especially India, Indonesia and China," as
well as by its smaller population and lack of resources (92).
Thus, given a "breathing space" of several decades following
the initial encroachments upon its political sovereignty, Japan
used its preserved autonomy to industrialize and militarize
sufficiently to deter strong incorporation during the "new
imperialism" that began in the 1880s, and made itself instead
into a "likely candidate as an ally or 'junior partner' of some
European power in the competitive race to carve up China and
the rest of the world" (93).
Moulder avoids the error of giving more weight than
they can bear to the direct economic effects of the Western
incursion, e.g., in orienting the economy toward production of
primary products for export or destroying native handicrafts.
Pointing out that Japan's industrialization occurred despite the
presence of such effects (150), she argues instead that
the major way ill wbicb incorporation contributed to
underdevelopment ill Cbina was tbe impact 011 tbe state.
. 57
China's incorporation led to the dismantling of the already
weak imperial state. Japan's greater autonomy, however,
permitted transformation of the weak feudal state into a
bureaucratic or national state [which] was able to promote
national industrialization through policies tbat promoted
private investment in industry . .. , tbrough protectionist
measures, and through colonial expansion. (200)
Finally, Moulder suggests that Japan was able to take
advantage of a unique historical "time corridor" (to use a
science fiction metaphor) unlikely to be available to the less
developed countries of today, far more dependent as they are
upon foreign capital. Even the dynamic growth performance
of Brazilian "subimperialism," which she sees as demonstrating
"intriguing parallels" to the Japanese approach, is unlikely to
follow the latter in establishing ultimately an independent
national industry (201-2), since it is overwhelmingly
dominated by foreign capital.
Moulder does not argue that either Japan or China was
undergoing an indigenous process of transformation to
capitalist industrialization which imperialism, in the one case,
permitted to continue to fruition, and, in the other, blocked.
On the contrary, she speculates that it was "highly unlikely
that the various trends summarized ... as the 'decline of
feudalism' in Japan would soon have culminated in the 'rise of
industrial capitalism' " in the absence of the Western impact,
and that "the Ch'ing dynasty might have held on for another
200 years [and] the Tokugawa feuda!.. system might have
remained intact for another 200 yeats" (90). The argument is
rather that, having intervened and provided the initial impetus
for change, the Western powers then failed to incorporate
Japan to the same extent as China and thus permitted the
former the autonomy necessary to forge a successful response.
All of this clearly constitutes a rich menu of arguments
which can be expected to have considerable appeal for a wide
range of customers. Moreover, since Moulder makes many
interesting points in support of the various components of her
case and in exposing flaws in previous approaches, the book
certainly deserves to be read on this score alone. Nevertheless,
its case ultimately fails to convince, it seems to me, for two
interconnected reasons. First, it depends heavily upon an
implicit counterfactual argument about what would have
happened to China if initial exposure to the West had been
followed by a lesser degree of "incorporation"; certainly the
full range of evidence on this issue is not considered. Second,
the argument is excessively colored by the struggle between
competing paradigms ("traditional society" vs. "world
economy") to an extent that excludes adequate consideration
of dynamic interactions between domestic and international
factors.
Regarding the first point, in so far as the role of the state
is at issue, the basic claim is that China's incorporation and the
consequent "dismantling of the imperial state" was decisive in
preventing China from paralleling Japan's industrialization;
this rests on the assumption that the constellation of class
forces in late imperial China were such that, given initial
stimulus from the West, a degree of social and institutional
change comparable with that brought about by the Meiji
Restoration was a real possibility. As Moulder points out, the
latter involved "a concerted attack on the economic privileges
of various strata of society ..." (169-70). Lockwood has
58
likened Japan's subsequent modernization to "the bursting of
a dam. It was the more violent because it brought the release
of long pent-up forces."* In other words, while the threat
occasioned by the Western intervention provided the breach,
the ensuing flood was conditioned by powerful forces long
endemic in Japanese society. There is virtually no generally
recognized evidence that a similar build-up of forces had
occurred in late imperial China that was likely to have
engineered equivalent fundamental changes had imperialism
provided a brief respite. On the contrary, historians have
stressed the continued dominance of conservative, gentry
based resistance to any fundamental change at least until the
end of the nineteenth century. It was only toward the very
end of the imperial era that the juxtaposition of increasing
national consciousness of China's plight and the growing
strength and self-awareness of a local bourgeoisie created the
possibility of such change, had international conditions been
more favorable. Moulder's argument thus' requires a far-reach
ing revisionist analysis of China's late-imperial history if it is to
establish against this consensus. But such is not provided. At
most we are given a few instances of futile government
attempts to circumvent Western opposition to protection of
Chinese enterprises, plus the argument that the constraint on
government revenues caused by indemnities and loss of tariff
autonomy prevented a strong government program designed to
support industrialization. The latter point, by confining
analysis to the revenues actually raised, ignores the crucial
issue of what became of the surpluses produced throughout
the vast bulk of China that was relatively unaffected by
foreigners in treaty ports. The former point is certainly not
sufficient to establish a commitment by the Chinese
government comparable with that of the Meiji to industrial
ization and to the requisite social transformation.
The neglect of the role of China's class structure in
resisting change is itself traceable to Moulder's preoccupation
with paradigm conflict. In correctly refuting the excessive
emphasis on certain particular domestic factors in conven
tional explanations of the course of nineteenth century
Chinese and Japanese history, and in pointing (again correctly)
to the importance of certain international ones, she tends to
denigrate the role of internal considerations per Se. But if the
issue is posed not as a contest between different approaches
but as an inquiry into the actual course of events in the
countries concerned, it is very likely that a theory based on
the dynamic interactions between domestic and international
factors will turn out to have the greatest explanatory power.
As soon as Moulder's study is interpreted in this weaker
sense-as demonstrating the limitations of certain "traditional
society" theories and providing abundant evidence for the
importance of international factors that interacted with the
domestic economy, society and polity so as to impede
self-sustained development in China while permitting it to
evolve in Japan-then credit call be given to its many insights.
W. W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 5.
China's Economic Revolution takes up where-for
China-Moulder leaves off. Its first chapter, "The Economic
Heritage," is a revised and shortened version of the author's
useful essay in Ecksub, Galenson and Liu (1966). While
presenting a bare-bones decription of economic-demographic
trends over several hundred years and of the economic
structure of the Republican period, this section omits
consideration not only of the question of imperialism but also
of the debate over the relative weights to be assigned to
sociopolitical vs. technological impediments to China's
economic development after the mid-nineteenth century. It
also contains some misleading formulations, which the author
might have caught had he had the opportunity to see the book
through to print. Thus, population growth is said to have
"fluctuated between 1.5 and 2.5 percent rate" during the
Communist period (17), where "varied" would have been the
appropriate term, given the distinct downward trend that
has occurred over the period from the higher figure to the
lower. Similarly, the initial discussion of the Nationalist
hyper-inflation of the late 1940s (26-27) is placed in a context
which might lead the unwary beginner (for whom the book is
intended) to think that it was generated under the People's
Republic.
Chapter 2 surveys the sequence of development
strategies and policies adopted from 1949 to the mid-'70s.
This discussion is marked by some distinct conceptual
advances over the framework conventionally adopted in earlier
studies, including those by Eckstein himself. Thus, there is a
serious and informative account of the relevance of Mao's
thought to development, one which avoids dichotomizing
between "red" and "expert," "people" and "machines," etc.,
and which gets right to the interrelations between ideology, on
the one hand, and technology, innovation, creativity, and skill
acquisition, on the other. There is also a proper appreciation
of the degree to which successful policies from one period
have been kept on in subsequent and very different ones. The
older "pendulum" and "cycle" images thus give way to one of
a spiral in which history does not merely repeat itself but
moves secularly as well.
One of the principal themes of this section, however, has
been called into question by the events of recent months.
McGill University
Centre for East Asian Studies
The Centre for East Asian Studies at McGill University is
pleased to announce the first publication in its series of
OCCASIONAL PAPERS
"History & Human Values: A Chinese Perspective
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(Canadian) each.
Eckstein sees the "more political and radical elements
identified with Mao" (48) among the leadership favoring
higher rates of investment and more headlong rushes at
economic growth than did the more pragmatic and less
ideological "counselors of caution." It now appears that
ideology and growth-orientation are by no means coterminous,
and that the current "pragmatic" leadership favors a pace of
advance that leaves even some of its most ardent admirers in
the West somewhat skeptical, whereas the "radical" group
displaced in 1966 is said to have been content with a lower
growth rate.
Moreover, Eckstein treats the "Agriculture First"
strategy as having been characterized by a decrease in the rate
of investment, whereas the latter was clearly a response to the
economic crisis conditions of the early 1960s and was not a
new strategic decision. Similarly, he expresses confusion about
the meaning of the slogan, "agriculture is the foundation,
industry is the leading factor," and suggests a deliberate
ambiguity in its interpretation (60). In fact, the Chinese have
been quite meticulous in explaining this phrase: industrial
ization must be treated as contingent upon the surpluses
produced by agriculture, and must in turn be geared to
equipping agriculture to produce growing surpluses.
Furthermore, the treatment of organizational changes in
agriculture, principally the collectivization, has them giving
rise merely to "once-for-all advances" in production (52),
without pointing out the degree to which all subsequent
investment and technological progress was conditioned upon
the organizational framework adopted from the mid-1950s to
the early '60s. This survey of development strategies is thus
something of a halfway house, which does more than merely
pay lip service to the need for a broader political-economic
framework for analyzing Chinese development but which then
fails fully to live up to that recognition in the ensuing analysis.
Economic organization and resource allocation are taken
up next. Here the history of land reform, collectivization and
communization is sketched, together with descriptions of the
structure and functions of the resulting units of organization
in the countryside. The various kinds of property relations are
set out, and there is a detailed discussion of the functions of
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"Recent Economic Problems & Trends
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"Bureaucracy and Revolutionary Continuity
in China" by: S.J. Noumoff
59
the industrial enterprise. The macro-planning system, material
balance planning, the structure and use of prices, labor
allocation and investment planning are all given lucid
expositions, together with some helpful comparative points on
Soviet and East European planning practices. But here too, the
"comparative systems" orthodoxy occasionally reaches out to
blight points in an otherwise sensible discussion. Eckstein finds
it impossible to conceive of the massive and socially traumatic
land reform as being anything other than a "detour ...
necessary for tactical political reasons" on the road to
collectivization (68). The political-economic process by which
a nation was mobilized for both social transformation and
economic development is thus reduced to one of manipulation
of the peasantry by the regime. Similarly with the issue of
market vs. planning, Eckstein argues that because administered
prices are subject to more of a market test in capitalist than in
socialist economies, "therefore, the extent of arbitrariness in
pricing is likely to be significantly less in market than in
command systems" and "for this very reason profits tend to
be more reliable guides of enterprise performance in capitalist
than in command economies" (99). Even abstracting from the
dependence of profits upon degree of monopoly power and
other kinds of "market failure" in capitalist economies, the
impact of the unequal distribution of income and wealth upon
relative prices in such economies is in principle just as
"arbitrary" as that of planners' preferences in a socialist
economy-and without the social rationale of the latter.
Moreover, "enterprise performance" cannot properly be
evaluated except on the basis of social criteria: it is quite
possible for a profitable enterprise to poison more people and
environment than an unprofitable one. Such strictures have
long been well known, yet they too often lie idle in the
tool-kit when it comes to considering resource allocation in
socialist economies.
Fiscal and monetary matters and the role of the state
budget are set out clearly in Chapter 5, "The Quest for
Economic Stability." Eckstein here carries the story back to
the Nationalist hyper-inflation, which illustrates one of the
principal problems with the book's organization, viz., that the
technique of re-examining the same historical material under a
variety of analytical perspectives (strategy, organization,
resource allocation, quest for stability, etc.) involves a great
deal of repetition. Nevertheless, in addition to presenting a
clear account (except for a confusing and incorrect discussion
of "repressed inflation") of financial aspects of Chinese
planning, this section also makes some useful analytical points.
Eckstein does not make the common error of considering only
state investment in agriculture during the First Plan, but calls
attention to the larger volume of investment provided by
individual farm households and cooperatives themselves; at the
same time, he points out that the kinds of goods purchased by
these two types of investment expenditures were quite
different, and had different implications for economic growth.
On the other hand, self-financed investment by the people's
communes in the 1960s and '70s has come to resemble state
investment more closely in that now it goes to purchase
modern or semi-modern equipment manufactured by rural
industries.
It is a weakness of the peculiar organization of China's
Economic Revolution that a schematic periodization of
post-1949 economic history (Rehabilitation, First Five-Year
Plan, Great Leap Forward, etc.) appears only in Ch. 6, some
two-thirds of the way through the book, and, even then, it
turns out to be both sketchy and superficial (e.g., no mention
is made of the impact of the Vietnam War and its end upon
China's development approach in the late '60s and early '70s).
The main purpose ofthis chapter, however, is to present the
available evidence regarding China's macroeconomic perform
ance and analyze its implications for the structure of
production and of the labor force. The former task is
performed competently, although space precludes a full
discussion of the many methodological issues involved in
making such quantitative estimates, and of the range of
alternatives that could be generated on the basis of different
assumptions. The more interesting discussion revolves around
the latter task. Here Eckstein, relying on a previously written
Asian American Perspectives
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COUNTERPOINT:
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General Editor: Emma Gee. Features 54
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31 works ot literature, and Is generously
Illustrated. The selections ... iew Asian Amer
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their history. Topics covered include im
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610 pp., S"x11", lIIus., Hardbound,limited
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90024
essay, brings out the contradiction between an output whose
s.ructure resembles increasingly that of an advanced,
industrialized country, and a labor force whose occupational
structure continues largely to reflect the economy's agrarian
origin. This contradiction is apparent in the tendency for labor
productivity differentials between industry and agriculture to
grow larger, which suggests the dual imperative of attempting
to divorce personal income from labor productivity (in order
to prevent a growing gap in living standards between workers
and peasants), while, at the same time, moving forcefully to
upgrade farm technology and lay the basis for productivity
increases in agriculture.
The penultimate chapter, on foreign trade, concerns an
issue about which Eckstein wrote a great deal previously, and
his treatment reflects this expertise. Eckstein tends to be
cautious with respect to the prospects for increased Sino-U.S.
trade, but he was writing before the dramatic shift toward a
more outward-oriented development strategy had occurred in
China. A conspicuous omission from this chapter is any
discussion of China's own foreign aid program.
The various major themes of the book are brought
together in the final chapter, "The Chinese Development
Model," whose title is immediately undermined by the
author's disclaimer that "it would be misleading to think of
the Chinese development model as a static, frozen, unchanging
system" (277), and is obviously called into question by the
many changes in development approach that have occurred
subsequent to the book's appearance. Nevertheless, certain
broad principles distinctive to China in comparison with other
countries, including socialist ones, can be perceived in
the Chinese experience, and it is these with which Eckstein is
concerned. In the end, he identifies them as the "periodic
attacks on status barriers," "rustication movement(s),"
"institutionalized measures designed to systematically break
down the role differences between mental and manual labor,"
and, "in a most fundamental sense ... a mass-based
approach evidenced also in the distribution of
communal services, most notably in the field of health delivery
and technology" and "reflected in mass involvement and mass
participation ..." (313). Eckstein takes what is in my opinion
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AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF ASIA
AND THE PACIFIC
Now in its 51st year, this authoritative journal covers the
political, economic, social and diplomatic problems of Eastern
and Southern Asia, with articles contributed by writers from
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a properly dim view of the fashionable subject of
"transferability," pointing out that these characteristic aspects
of China's past development strategy are "quite interde
pendent and deeply imbedded in the economic, political, and
social system as a whole," and that it is thus unclear how
particular elements could be lifted out to be included in the
development programs of other countries. It might be added
that the attempt to do so would be likely to generate
elsewhere, under different socioeconomic conditions, very
differen t results as well.
Even here, despite an often quite sensitive and sensible
discussion of the political economy of Chinese development,
the chapter is haunted occasionally by the ghost of the old
comparative system habits. Thus, a detailed discussion of the
comparative purchasing power of Chinese and U.S. wages
never refers to such socially provided or subsidized services as
health, education, rent and transport, which together use up
such a large fraction of the average budget of American
workers in comparison with their Chinese counterparts, and
whose inclusion would thus make the comparison much less
unfavorable to the Chinese than one based only on the list of
store-bought goods used by Eckstein.
China's Economic Revolution reflects its author's genius
and enthusiasm for conveying complex ideas with a clarity,
vigor and absence of jargon that make them comprehensible to
a wide audience. It also reflects the strengths, as well as the
weaknesses, of the field of Chinese economic studies which the
author himself did so much to build up. Informed by a
detailed familiarity with Soviet economic studies, available
sources of data, and national income accounting methods, and
moving with the times toward a more sympathetic and flexible
posture toward Chinese socialism, the book still is hampered
by preconceptions that prevent it from being as truly
satisfactory an analysis of China's development experience as
it might have been. These are perhaps best symbolized by the
book's neglect of the contributions and insights of such
scholars as Charles Bettelheim, Jack Gray, John Gurley, and
Joan Robinson, scholars outside "the fold" who nevertheless
often said first what later became fashionable. *
Vol. 51, No.2
The Fate of the "New Born Things" of
China's Cultural Revolution
The Soviet Far East: New Centre of
Attention in the U.S.S.R.
The Impact of the Law of the Sea
Conference Upon the Pacific
Region: Part II
China's Energy Prospects: A Tentative
Appraisal
South Asian Studies in Canada, and
the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute
China from Thirteen Angles
A Review Article
Summer 1978
David BOllavia
Robert N. Nortb
Barbara jo/msoll
Frank Lallgdoll
Vaclav Smil
Edward C. Moulton
Artbur Huck
A list of books in the Asian field available from the University
of British Columbia Press will be sent free on request.
61
A Short Review
by Chuck Cell
For many years most capitalist-oriented observers of
China's economic process emphasized its "irrationality." We
were told that over-emphasis on mass mobilization, and
political and ideological goals created serious for. the
economic sector which should have an effect on specIahzatlOn,
technical expertise, gradualness for the sake of societal
stability, etc. If any proof was needed of this position were
directed to the "dislocations" of the Cultural RevolutIOn and
especially the Great Leap Forward.
Fortunately in the past few years there have been a few
voices emerging to question the above assumptions, including
economists such as Jack Gray and Carl Riskin. Given this
context, we should greet with a certain sense of progress, if
not enthusiasm, this report by the American Rural Small-Scale
Industry Delegation which visited factories in towns
and countryside in June and July 1975. The delegation was
organized by the Committee on Scholarly Communication
with the People's Republic of China of the National Academy
of Sciences. In spite of some continuing misgivings, the clear
message of the book is that at least in the of rural
industrialization, the Chinese have made a very Important
series of innovations, with positive political, economic and
social consequences for the total society. Indeed at one point
the report even points to the long-term benefits the Great
Leap Forward made to rural industrialization"
Although nominally a book authored by Dwight Perkins,
the report is in fact a compendium of chapters authored by
various members of the delegation. Chapter 1, by Perkins, lays
some useful groundwork for those without a China
background. It discusses the rationale for China's emphasi.s o?
small-scale industry with references to the context of China s
social and political development. It also notes the limited
nature of the data and explains that most observations of the
delegation were made in model or advanced units and areas of
China.
Chapters 2 and 3 on administration of individual
incentives were authored by the delegation'S sociologists, Art
Stinchcombe and Bill Parish. They contain a useful description
of the organization of the work process in the places visited.
The fourth chapter, by Dernberger, T. Rawski and Timmer, is
an effort to construct a formal model of economic efficiency
from which to judge the Chinese process. These three
It is interesting to note that Riskin is the most
scholarly justification for their arguments. He participated In the
briefing before and the workshops after the trip, since.
already visited China with an URPE delegation, he did not
group. The decision of the Committee on
was to invite persons who had not had a previous opportumty for an
extended visit.
Rural Small Scale Industry in the People's Republic of
China by Dwight Perkins. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1977,310 pp. $15.00
economists conclude that, given the current Chinese context,
technology is appropriate, but the plants are somewhat too
labor intensive. Resources, while basically sufficient, could be
of somewhat higher quality. Finally they state that, although
there are occasional management problems at the outset,
experience generally lessens them.
The next three chapters on farm machinery, chemical
fertilizer and cement are authored respectively by each of the
delegation'S three engineers, Amir Khan, Owen and
Kenneth Simmons. Fairly technical in nature and analYSIS, the
comments are presumably based on the authors' western
American engineering experience. The general conclusions
suggest that given China's resource and base,
its emphasis on agricultural development, the rural mdustnall
z;rion approach is quite appropriate.
The following chapter, again a collective effort by Scott
Hallford, Perkins and Timmer, evaluates the overall contribu
tion of industry to agriculture. The conclusion is a clear
statement that rural industrialization has led to a rise in
agricultural output. Although this should not be
information for many, it is well to have it restated by thiS
delegation. The ninth chapter, by Parish, assesses the social
impact of small-scale industry, concluding that thre have been
positive results in four areas: absorbing rural labor,
ing the network for economic innovations, strengthemng
the commune initiative and authority, and strengthening the
role of women. Lyman Van Slyke's final chapter attempts to
show how industrialization has dramatically effected changes
in traditional Chinese values. Finally, a brief conclusion by
Perkins suggests that rural small-scale industries may be just a
transition phase in the overall industrialization process towards
an ever-growing number of medium-sized industrial urban
centers.
In spite of the effort to weave together a disparate s:ries
of interests and expertise in an integrated report, there IS an
uneasy interplay between the overall message and the series of
edited chapters. At times one is left with what appear to be
contradictory opinions. For example, in Chapter 4 on the
evaluation of economic efficiency, many factories are said to be
too labor intensive. Yet the chapter on social consequences
notes that in most places "factories absorb rather little labor."
62
(212) Chapter 4 includes references to the problems of
management, yet the technical chapters are generally
impressed with management techniques; for example,
Livingston notes that small plants in China "were well
designed and appeared to be well managed." The chapter on
economic efficiency seems somewhat out of place. Its effort at
quantitative economic modeling is intended to impress, but it
is not particularly convincing, especially when the basis for its
assumptions are occasionally obscure. For example on page
62 it is assumed that over a ten-year period the per-unit cost
will be lowered from 10 to 25% (depending on the type of
unit)-raising the efficiency level from "primitive" to
modern." While this assumption is a key element for the
model, no explanation is given. Even more serious is the
admitted decision by the authors to exclude any desired
political or social effects as a basis for judging rationality.
Hence many of the reasons they give for the problems of
management, such as frequent job-transfers and spreading out
management decisions among inexperienced workers, are
precisely those things which indicate the fulfillment of higher
political goals-an approach which the Chinese leaders believed
would lead in the long run to even greater economic
productivity.
One might have hoped for many more efforts to place
the observations in a political and social context. There are
points where one surmises that there were two basically
separate groups and mind-sets within the delegation, one
emphasizing technical competence and the other discussing
social and political context and consequences. The fusion of
the two is often unsuccessful.
I
There are also several dysfunctional and even misleading
efforts to understand China by comparing it to the United
States. This is most notable in the early chapters on incentives
!
and organization. For example, there is an effort to explain
I
the Chinese emphasis on model factories and the use of moral
I
suasion with ideological appeals by comparing it to Western
I
scientific research processes with its emphasis on "model"
Nobel Laureates. Not only does this analogy fail to provide
I

understanding, it is wrong. It misses the whole point of
collective work versus individual achievement and recognition.
In the same chapter there is a gratuitous analogy: the
I
crucifixion of Christ-an inappropriate standard-setter for the
average parish priest-is proposed as a way to understand why
I
no one really expects the average agricultural brigade to live up
!
I
to the heroic example of Dazhai. Such examples tell us more
about the author than about China.
"Given the conflicting interpretations and the lack of
I
consistent integration of the social and political context, this
report has enough probl<ms to give one pause before
I
I
recommending it to those who know little about China.
However, for those who do have an awareness of the Chinese
social and political setting, it does represent a useful addition,
however limited the data base may be, to our understanding of
the process and operation of rural industry. Above all, it is
very encouraging to see the beginnings of more positive
evaluations of China's economic efforts from groups like this
one, groups which historically have been all too eager to
criticize. It is impossible to know to what extent this is due to
a general change in prevailing views on China, and to what
extent it is due to the opportunity, however brief, to observe
first-hand what is actually occurring in China. For whatever
reason, the change of direction is welcome. *
1
I
I
I
Three Kingdoms
By Lo Kuan-chung
Translated and Edited
by Moss Roberts
NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK!
THREE KINGDOMS is a vivid
revival of China's most cele
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erts' exquisitely illustrated
translation tells of the decline of
the mightiest of China's dynas
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breakup in the third century
A.D. into three warring king
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63
Four Books on Women in China
by Linda Shin Pomerantz
Few topics have aroused greater interest among western
feminists than that of the situation of Chinese women before
and after the revolution of 1949. * We are all preoccupied with
questions of great importance: what is the relationship
between feminism and the other major political movements of
our day? Do we need a revolution to achieve our liberation?
What constitutes liberation? Do women fare better under
socialism than under capitalism? These are among the
questions western women have brought to their investigations
of Chinese women, with the books under review partial
attempts to address themselves to these issues.
Delia Davin's Women-Work is certainly the most useful
of these works for Asian studies specialists as well as for those
interested in women's studies. Women-Work examines the
evolution of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) policies
toward women from the 1920s through the mid-19S0s. The
author's close work with primary materials brings us a lucid
and informative account of the history of women in the
communist movement from the 1920s through the Civil War
of the late 1940s, ending in the mid-1950s, a period of
transition for the vast majority of Chinese women. Although
the framework for legal equality had been established in the
Marriage Law of 1950, as of 1955-56, women in cities were
only beginning to be drawn into society outside their
households, while those in the countryside still faced
formidable hurdles. Davin's sensitivity to the issues involved in
the drive to bring women into production brought forth in me
a greater appreciation of the struggles to achieve genuine
equality in a context of great social and economic
backwardness. This pioneer work is truly must reading for all
those interested in China and women's issues.
Since Davin's work ends in the mid-1950s, just at the
point of transition, the reader will certainly want to see an
up-date: how has the situation for Chinese women developed
in the past twenty years? Unfortunately, the three remaining
books under review do not provide adequate answers.
Elisabeth Croll's collection of documents is useful in providing
an introduction to the CCP's views on the issues surrounding
women's emancipation, but it does not provide data to help
the reader to determine the actual situation of Chinese
Also see Phyllis Andors' "Studying Chinese Women," a review of
Women in Chinese Society, a compilation of nine essays edited by
Margery Wolf and Roxanne Witke: Bulletin of Concerned Asian
Scbolars, Volume 7, number 4 (October-December, 1975), pp. 41-43.
Women's Liberation in China by Claudie Broyelle.
(Translated from the French by Michele Cohen and Gary
Herman), Humanities Press, 1977
The Women's Movement in China: A Selection of
Readings, 1949-1973 by Elisabeth Croll. London,
Anglo-Chinese Educational Institute, 1974
Woman-Work; Women and the Party in Revolutionary
China by Delia Davin. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976
About Chinese Women by Julia Kristeva. (Translated
from the French by Anita Barrows), New York, Urizen
Books, 1977
women. Moreover, because the documents are arranged
topically rather than chronologically, it becomes difficult to
assess the ways that women's issues did or did not emerge in
the Cultural Revolution, 1965-1969, or in any of the other
major ideological and political struggles of contemporary
China. This is especially germane in view of the dramatic
emergence of women's issues during the anti-Confucian
campaign of 1974 and their subsequent retreat from the
forefront of political struggle. We await Ms. Croll's
forthcoming work on feminism and socialism in China in
anticipation that it will deal with these issues.
Julia Kristeva's About Chinese Women and Claudie
Broyelle's Women's Liberation in China are works written by
Frenchwomen of very different political and intellectual
interests. Both books are based essentially on tours made to
China in 1974 as members of foreign delegations. Of the two
works, Broyelle's is to me definitely the more interesting and
provocative. Books that have the three-week whirlwind tour of
the PRC as their core (whether dealing with women or any
other subject) have obvious limitations due to the narrowness
of their data base, and what value they have must derive from
the observers' ability to bring fresh insight to the subject. In
this regard I must flatly say that I found Kristeva's book
uninteresting, in fact one of the worst pieces of writing about
China I have ever seen. In the midst of the author's wordy
ramblings on the nature of sexuality and the psycho-cultural
origins of sexism, the Chinese as a people and nation were
somehow obscured and diminished. It is impossible to tell
what was Kristeva and what was China. In sum, for this reader
64
at least, this book was a pretentious bore and representative of
the worst sort of western narcisism in examining China.
Broyelle's work is quite different, however. As a member
of a group of French feminists and (presumably) Marxists
visiting China, Broyelle was able to concentrate exclusively on
women's issues during her visit. As a Marxist, she has a sense of
the vision of socialism as it applies to womt:n. Hence, her book
is as much a summary of socialist feminist critiques of
capitalism as it is an exploration of the possibilities of
socialism. Because of its polemical nature, Broyelle's work
sometimes tends to confuse the vision with the reality, a point
the author herself is aware of and which her postscript makes
special point of. While China scholars will certainly find this
book frustrating, it is valuable nonetheless, especially for
courses which place women and the family in global
perspective. For this reader, the frustrations of the China
scholar were outweighed by the provocativeness of the
presentation and the insight into the radical vision of Chinese
socialism.
It is exciting that Chinese women have been the subject
of so much intense speculation among western feminists and
that scholars have been devoting themselves to serious
investigation of women's studies. Perhaps the next spate of
works on women in China will reflect even higher levels of
understanding, enabling us to place the experience of Chinese
women in true perspective of the Chinese revolution and other
contemporary movements throughout the world. *
We have a Viewpoint
-on everything that concerns Pakistan and is of relevance to
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Correspondence
To the Editors:
The California Council for the Humanities in Public
Policy and the University of California-Santa Barbara have
funded the project "To Facilitate Inclusion and Mobility:
The Chinese and African Immigrant Connection." The project
will assess the impact bilinguallbicuitural education, ESL, and
affirmative action have had in helping these immigrants'
chances for educational and professional advancement in Cali
fornia. The assessment of these s t a t ~ programs will be juxta
posed against the importance of the historical experiences of
these immigrants, their social, economic, and educational
backgrounds, and the general environment from which they
came. Five videotapes for television, a conference to be held
in February, and a final printed report will be the media of
communication. For further details, please contact: Edwin
Clausen, History Department, University of California, Santa
Barbara, CA 93106.
Sincerely,
Ed Clausen
Graphics
Take a look at the sketches, pictures, maps, photos. and car
toons that have appeared in the Bulletin during the past year.
Subscribers have sent them to us. Haven't YOU aot a few fHor
e
ites that you would like to share with the rest of us? Send them
to BCAS, P.O. Box W, Charlemont, MA 01339. Well return
them...and everyone will enjoy them.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Buddhist Prayer
by Lu Yuan
Hands clean, the morning fresh,
The sacred leaves lie open:
No favor to seek,
No harm to avert.
But to leave the word bond broken
Where it breaks,
Having in the glare of raging eons
Had one turn to dance
Away ...
Lu YUan was an official of the southern Sung court (12th cen
tury)_ The translation from the Chinese was made by C. N. Tay
and Moss Roberts of New York University.
BULLETIN
OF CONCERNED ASIAN SCHOLARS
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A
Weizho
Oao Bach Lonl Vi
iJ (i II
Oongfang r