LEVEL 1 - 11 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
Foreign Affairs
1992, Spring
SECTION: RECENT BOOKS ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: Asia and the Pacific Pg. 212
LENGTH: 171 words
BYLINE: Donald S. Zagoria, Patricia Lee Dorff; Edited by Lucy Edwards Despard
BODY:
A CHINESE ODYSSEY: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A CHINESE DISSIDENT. By Anne
Thurston. New York: Scribner's, 1992, 465 pp. $ 24.95.
Ever since Ni Yuxian was made into an overnight sensation by Liu Binyan's
now famous essay "A Second Kind of Loyalty," he has been something of a
controversial figure within both his own country and the expatriate Chinese
community. Few people know what to make of this man, seen by some as
"courageous spokesman for . . . democratic longings," by others as abrasive,
unfaithful, opportunistic and arrogant." Thurston presents his story in a book
that ultimately combines poor biography with great history. The various
Foreign Affairs, March, 1992
interpretations of Ni's life are never fully realized and the many sides of his
complex character remain unlinked, leaving the reader confused about Ni's
motives. As a history, however, Thurston's book is a fascinating weave of Ni's
enigmatic life with the much broader picture of China's contemporary democracy
movement. For this reason alone it is worth reading.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LEVEL 1 - 12 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
The San Francisco Chronicle
FEBRUARY 9, 1992, SUNDAY, SUNDAY EDITION
SECTION: SUNDAY REVIEW; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 700 words
HEADLINE: Long-Distance Dissident
BYLINE: REVIEWED BY, ARNOLD R. ISAACS
BODY:
A CHINESE ODYSSEY
The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident
By Anne F. Thurston
Charles Scribner's Sons; 440 pages; $ 24.95
The San Francisco Chronicle, FEBRUARY 9, 1992
Opposing authority in China is not easy. The Communist Party has created a
system with a ''remarkable capacity for control,'' China scholar Anne Thurston
(a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington,
D.C.) points out in the opening pages of ''A Chinese Odyssey.'' And the heavy
penalties for dissent make the risk higher than most Chinese are willing to
face.
That much, of course, is clear to most Americans with even a casual knowledge
of China. But Thurston goes on to make another point that is less often grasped:
that Chinese attitudes and traditions, as well as their rulers, share
responsibility for the lack of freedom in their society.
Thus (as was also true before the Communist era) dissidents such as Ni
Yuxian, whose story Thurston tells, are not only opponents of an oppressive
government. They also become to a certain extent opponents of their society and
culture as well, struggling against traditions of obedience and a deeply rooted
fear of disorder (luan) that make many Chinese willing subjects of autocratic
rule.
This is the most valuable insight ''A Chinese Odyssey'' has to offer.
Thurston fails to use it to its best effect, however. Ni's biography is most
meaningful as a study of the clash between individualism and Chinese political
The San Francisco Chronicle, FEBRUARY 9, 1992
culture, traditional as well as Communist. Instead, Thurston presents it chiefly
as a piece of contemporary political history.
Framing it this way weakens the story, mainly because Ni's political role was
slight and far out on the periphery of important events. He was in no sense
prominent among dissidents; his acts of protest, which he carried out mostly on
his own or with a couple of friends, drew no significant public attention. Ni
was not even in China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, having left
more than three years earlier for exile in the United States.
Thurston's account of Ni's career, based on exhaustive interviews with Ni and
with family members and other associates still in China, provides a grim
portrait of a harsh, repressive police state.
Born in 1945 in a village near Shanghai, Ni somehow grew up with a rebellious
streak that nothing could stifle -- not even the terrifying memory of executions
carried out by Communist revolutionaries near his childhood home.
At school and later in the army, Ni frequently clashed with the authorities.
Once he got in trouble for writing a letter to Chairman Mao Zedong opposing the
party's economic policies. Later, during Mao's chaotic Cultural Revolution, he
was briefly arrested for distributing a leaflet of quotations from Lenin.
The San Francisco Chronicle, FEBRUARY 9, 1992
Ni's most serious offense, though, was putting up a poster in 1977 denouncing
the previous year's official repression of mourning for Premier Zhou Enlai. Even
though the party itself later adopted the same view Ni expressed, Ni was
imprisoned for nearly two years. Thurston's description of prison conditions is
graphic and shocking -- by far the most powerful in her book.
After his release, Ni remained under suspicion. In 1983 he was labeled a
''bourgeois liberal.'' Eventually, he managed to get a U.S. visa and in
February 1986 left for the United States.
Thurston undertook ''A Chinese Odyssey'' hoping, she says, to write about
people who ''manage to stay good'' under pressure, who preserve human values
even when trapped in an inhuman system. As a moral hero, though, Ni turns out to
be a pretty ambiguous subject. His political courage was admirable; his personal
conduct, especially toward his wife and other women, was much less so. He seems
to have been careless -- to say the least -- with funds he collected to support
the Tiananmen democracy movement.
Thurston writes honestly about Ni's flaws. But she never quite makes him
fully real for her readers, or finds some deeper understanding in her own
disappointment that he did not turn out, after all, to be the hero and saint she
hoped to write about. ''A Chinese Odyssey'' contains rich material; it is
The San Francisco Chronicle, FEBRUARY 9, 1992
frustrating that Thurston did not shape it into a more satisfying book.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO,FROM 'A CHINESE ODYSSEY'
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LEVEL 1 - 13 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
January 26, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 7; Page 26; Column 3; Book Review Desk
LENGTH: 387 words
HEADLINE: 'A Chinese Odyssey'
BODY:
To the Editor:
Judith Shapiro is wrong to suggest that Anne F. Thurston wrote "A Chinese
Odyssey: The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident" (Jan. 5) to give Ni Yuxian
another opportunity to "clear [his] name" or to make him a hero central to
China's democratic movement. Ms. Thurston tells the story, good and bad, of one
(not the) Chinese dissident. Ms. Shapiro's anger is reminiscent of the fury the
Chinese Communist Party displayed when the journalist Liu Binyan told a
different story about the same man. What is baffling about Ms. Shapiro is that
she plays the Chinese game, seeing the world in black and white, accusing
The New York Times, January 26, 1992
those ( Ni Yuxian) she does not like of being "thoroughly unpalatable."
Ms. Thurston correctly portrays Mr. Ni as more rebel than Western-style
dissident. He is rooted in the terrible Chinese system. In China, dissent, like
socialism, has Chinese characteristics. It is understandable that this may
disappoint Ms. Shapiro. Ms. Thurston's contribution is to explain why dissidents
do not grow well on Chinese soil.
Chinese dissidents are fatally weak. They find cooperation difficult and thus
"act largely alone" or band together in factions. They are mired in
recriminations, their language much like that of Ms. Shapiro: you are not a
member of the "intellectual elite" but a mere "peripheral political figure,"
while I stand at the center. What is so surprising about Ms. Shapiro is that she
uses such factionalist criteria to judge whose story should hold a higher
position in the Chinese hierarchical order. Does Ms. Shapiro not know that
Chinese revolutions always start in "peripheral" areas, led by peripheral men?
Sun Yat-sen's revolution began in peripheral Guangdong, while Mao Zedong's
started from peripheral Jingang Mountain. And how many Chinese rebels are
members of the "elite"? Unless successful, they are all labeled "chaos-making
bandits" or "counterrevolutionaries." It is curious that Ms. Shapiro herself is
co-author of "Son of the Revolution," the story of Liang Heng, who is from
peripheral Hunan. Ms. Thurston's book is the story of a man from peripheral
The New York Times, January 26, 1992
Shanghai.
No single story is central to the "history of the contemporary Chinese
democracy movement." Put all the stories together, and we begin to get the whole
picture.
YAMIN XU
Washington
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: January 26, 1992
LEVEL 1 - 14 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
January 26, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 7; Page 26; Column 3; Book Review Desk
LENGTH: 233 words
HEADLINE: 'A Chinese Odyssey'
BODY:
To the Editor:
If Judith Shapiro gets the impression that Ni Yuxian is "a thoroughly
unpalatable character -- abrasive, unfaithful, opportunistic and arrogant, a man
who even as a dissident disappoints us," she is not too far off the mark. In the
eyes of most Chinese intellectuals in America, Mr. Ni is but a self-promoting,
opportunistic individual who became someone only because Liu Binyan made him a
hero in his essay "A Second Kind of Loyalty."
The New York Times, January 26, 1992
Shortly after the Tiananmen tragedy in the summer of 1989, Mr. Ni started
his own one-man organization called the Committee for the Promotion of Democracy
in China. He placed a half-page advertisement in Chinese newspapers in New York,
appealing for contributions and affixing the names of a dozen well-known
Chinese-American professors and writers alongside his own as his "co-sponsors"
before their consent was given. Armed with this ad, he even traveled to Hong
Kong to solicit money. Later, when some contributors became suspicious and
demanded an account, he hedged. The unwitting dozen (this writer included) had
to issue a statement to Chinese newspapers to disclaim their support of Mr. Ni.
The world is full of wayward dissidents. Individuals such as Ni Yuxian need
to be exposed, but one wonders why Anne F. Thurston found it necessary to write
an entire volume about such an insignificant person.
TIMOTHY TUNG
New York
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: January 26, 1992
LEVEL 1 - 15 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
January 5, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
NAME: Ni Yuxian
SECTION: Section 7; Page 11; Column 1; Book Review Desk
LENGTH: 1082 words
HEADLINE: Making Trouble in Shanghai
BYLINE: By Judith Shapiro; Judith Shapiro is the co-author with Liang Heng of
"Son of the Revolution" and "After the Nightmare: A Survivor of the Cultural
Revolution Reports on China Today."
BODY:
A CHINESE ODYSSEY
The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident.
By Anne F. Thurston.
The New York Times, January 5, 1992
440 pp. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. $24.95.
THE Chinese dissident Ni Yuxian first had the chance to answer his
Communist Party persecutors when the great investigative reporter Liu Binyan
made him a hero of an essay, "A Second Kind of Loyalty." Now, with Anne F.
Thurston's biography, "A Chinese Odyssey," he has yet another opportunity. But
sometimes those who try to clear their names get themselves into even more hot
water by presenting their cases in public. Mr. Ni comes across in this book as a
thoroughly unpalatable character -- abrasive, unfaithful, opportunistic and
arrogant, a man who even as a dissident disappoints us.
What distinguishes Ni Yuxian from most well-known Chinese dissidents is
that he is not a member of China's intellectual elite. Born in 1945 into a
working-class family in a town near Shanghai, he got himself admitted to the
army (one of China's sole routes of upward mobility) when he was 16. Eventually,
the "dissident soldier" managed to attend the Shanghai Maritime Academy.
But he was in constant trouble from early youth. As Ms. Thurston explains, he
organized fellow soldiers, workers and students against the authorities, wrote
angry letters to Mao Zedong and put up written posters defying ultraleftist
policies. During the Cultural Revolution, he was arrested and detained for
The New York Times, January 5, 1992
printing a pamphlet of sayings from Lenin (even Lenin could be considered
counterrevolutionary at the height of the fervor). In 1977, he was thrown into a
detention center in Shanghai for putting up a poster attacking the Gang of Four.
He spent two years in fear that he would be executed, until the authorities
released him in early 1979.
Mr. Ni, Ms. Thurston tells us, was then reinstated at the Maritime Academy,
where he was given work in the propaganda department. But he felt discriminated
against when party leaders refused to facilitate his efforts to obtain a
passport. He traveled to Beijing and headed to The People's Daily to join the
lines of petitioners seeking to interest Liu Binyan in their cases. Finally, a
letter caught the journalist's attention. In 1984, Mr. Liu went to Shanghai to
meet Mr. Ni and investigate further.
At the Maritime Academy, Ms. Thurston says, officials tried to persuade Mr.
Liu that Mr. Ni was no antileftist hero during the Cultural Revolution: on the
contrary, they said, he was an extremist who attacked teachers and cadres; he
had stolen a bicycle; he was an egregious philanderer and had once been accused
of rape. But Mr. Liu persisted despite his reservations. "A Second Kind of
Loyalty" appeared in 1985. The ensuing furor was one cause of Mr. Liu's
expulsion from the Communist Party for a second time.
The New York Times, January 5, 1992
Fearful of being arrested again, Mr. Ni slipped into an elevator in the
United States Consulate in Canton, eventually finding a sympathetic official who
helped him obtain a visa. He arrived in the United States in 1986, where he
became entangled with China Spring, a politically controversial emigre Chinese
faction rumored to be funded by Taiwan. According to Ms. Thurston, he is now
accused by former supporters of having misused funds from his own one-man
organization, the Committee for the Promotion of Democracy in China.
GIVEN the questions that have been raised about Ni Yuxian's character and
motivations, the reader cannot but wish to know more about Ms. Thurston's doubts
concerning Mr. Ni's self-presentation or her own commitment to explore his life.
For she suggests in her preface that he is "a narcissist" who "often failed in
his basic obligations to those closest to him, disappointing, sometimes bitterly
so, his wife and his family, his teachers, his loves, and his friends."
With this unimaginatively titled volume, Ms. Thurston, the author of "Enemies
of the People," a book about victims of the Cultural Revolution, appears to have
wanted to write both an academic biography of Mr. Ni and an impassioned history
of the contemporary Chinese democracy movement. The fit is an awkward one, in
part because Mr. Ni is a peripheral political figure who acted largely alone. In
Shanghai, he had little connection with events in Beijing, and he was in the
United States during the 1989 democracy movement. As biography, Ms. Thurston's
The New York Times, January 5, 1992
account is oddly impersonal and distanced, though she spent hundreds of hours
talking to Mr. Ni, and though she describes the relationships she developed
during the years she spent interviewing his family as deep ones. We get only
hints of the pain of Mr. Ni's wife or the bitterness of his mistress, even when
the two meet in a minibus. Mr. Ni himself does not capture us, either as a man
of courage or as one of interesting flaws.
Still, the book has gripping moments. When Mr. Ni is dismissed from the army
in 1964 for his "mistaken, capitalist, and revisionist thought," he stumbles on
an opportunity to wipe his slate clean when a lazy official allows him to carry
his own file to his new workplace. Terrified, he eases it open: "Every
transgression he had ever committed was recorded there, many of which had long
since faded into the dark recesses of the mind." By the time Mr. Ni is done
burning the damaging evidence, the file is nearly empty.
Ms. Thurston's powerful description of Mr. Ni's experience in a Shanghai
detention center in 1977 rivals that of Nien Cheng, who recounted her solitary
confinement in the same city in "Life and Death in Shanghai." Mr. Ni is placed
in a 6-by-4-foot cell containing 19 men. Threats of execution, torture, disease
and false accusations are constant. So filthy are conditions that soon "the
prisoner's skin is marked by sores, his bottom covered with pimples, and the
pimples are filled with blood and with pus, and when the pimples burst open
The New York Times, January 5, 1992
the pus and the blood stick to his bottom like glue, so that when he has to
remove his cotton trousers to use the matong the sores pull painfully open and
frequently become infected, and every trip to the matong becomes a matter of
dread." Mr. Ni wakes one night to find himself covered with sticky liquid -- the
blood of the man next to him, who has slit his wrists.
Ms. Thurston tells us that she was drawn to this story because she wished to
write about "those rare cases where individuals manage to stay good" amid
totalitarianism. But Ni Yuxian seems to have presented far more problematic a
hero than either she, or Liu Binyan, had hoped.
GRAPHIC: Photo: Ni Yuxian as a young soldier in the Chinese Army, 1963.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: January 5, 1992
LEVEL 1 - 16 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe
January 2, 1992, Thursday, City Edition
SECTION: LIVING; Pg. 43
LENGTH: 636 words
HEADLINE: Following shadowy figures in the dark days of China;
BOOK REVIEW A CHINESE ODYSSEY The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident By Anne
F. Thurston Scribner's, 440 pp., $ 24.95
THE CLAWS OF THE DRAGON Kang Sheng, the Evil Genius Behind Mao, and his Legacy
of Terror in People's China By John Byron and Robert Pack Simon & Schuster, 608
pp., illustrated, $ 27.50
BYLINE: By Michael Kenney, Globe Staff
BODY:
The paths of Kang Sheng, the one-time director of China's political terror,
and Ni Yuxian, a dissident now living in the United States, crossed only in
darkness. And they are both shadowy figures, partially illuminating China's
The Boston Globe, January 2, 1992
recent history by deeds ill-done and undone.
The harsher light is that shed by "The Claws of the Dragon," a biography of
Kang Sheng who ran the Communist Party's purges for three decades. Compared with
Stalin's purges in the former Soviet Union - which Kang observed at first hand
while in Moscow as a Comintern delegate during the 1930s - most of the
Kang-directed purges were pretty tame affairs.
The exception is the Cultural Revolution, which Kang did not direct because
it quickly got beyond anyone's ability to direct or control. But Kang helped to
instigate it by convincing Mao Zedong that a then-current play about a
historical figure masked an intellectual conspiracy against Mao himself, and by
inciting a Peking University philosophy lecturer to attack, in a big-character
poster, the university's president and the Beijing municipal government as
opponents of Mao and the party.
On a brighter - but still conspiratorial - note, Kang, who was a patron of
the arts, brought a young Shanghai actress, Jiang Qing, to the attention of Mao
Zedong while he was holed up in the mountains of central China at the end of the
Long March of the 1930s. Their subsequent marriage, the authors say, "sealed
Kang's lifelong alliance with Mao."
The Boston Globe, January 2, 1992
Despite having to deal with some pretty obscure material - the main source
for the book is a secret biography of Kang Sheng prepared for the Chinese
leadership and slipped to John Byron (the pen name for a Western diplomat then
stationed in Beijing) in 1983 - "The Claws of the Dragon" is a lively account of
the political consequences of palace intrigue and state terror.
What light is shed by "A Chinese Odyssey" is clouded by questions about the
credibility of its Odysseus. Anne F. Thurston's subject is the state of China's
democracy movement as revealed through the life of Ni Yuxian, a young man
whose life was shattered because of his anti-government activities. As a victim
of the terror mechanism organized by Kang Sheng, his story is often gripping and
frequently chilling, but this reader sensed that the author, a respected
academic authority on Chinese dissident movements, was not quite comfortable
with her source.
Although Thurston tries hard to establish Ni as a key figure in the struggle
for democracy in China, the story does not provide much evidence for that. His
major action was to write a chaotic anti-government poem and paste it up as a
big-character poster on the walls of a Shanghai hotel in April 1977 aided by two
timorous young men and two infatuated young women. There are vague references to
"contacts" with pro-democracy activists but Ni himself was in Shanghai during
the demonstration in Beijing after the death of Zhou Enlai and by the time of
The Boston Globe, January 2, 1992
the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in the spring of 1989, he had made his way
out of C
hina and was in the United States.
The problem with "A Chinese Odyssey" may be that China's democracy movement
is as shadowy as Ni Yuxian himself. Two years after the Tiananmen Square
demonstrations, most Western observers describe them as spontaneous reactions to
various political events and economic concerns, not as evidence of an organized
opposition movement - and neither the demonstrations nor their bloody aftermath
have given birt
h to such a movement.
But neither did the crackdown set off the kind of terror that Kang Sheng
would have let loose against not just participants, but also their families and
associates. Impelled by economics rather than by politics, change is occurring
in China leaving, perhaps, both Kang Sheng and Ni Yuxian behind.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: January 3, 1992
LEVEL 1 - 17 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1991 Information Access Company, a Thomson Corporation Company
ASAP
Copyright 1991 Reed Publishing USA
Publishers Weekly
November 29, 1991
SECTION: Vol. 238 ; No. 52 ; Pg. 37; ISSN: 0000-0019
LENGTH: 154 words
HEADLINE: A Chinese Odyssey: The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident._book
reviews
BODY:
Thurston (Enemies of the People) gives an uncanny sense of daily life under
a communist dictatorship in this outstanding, very moving biography of Chinese
democracy activist Ni Yuxian. Born in 1945, Ni was barely four when Communists
took over his village, terrorizing his family and carrying out executions that
seared his memory. Thurston traces Ni's metamorphosis from schoolboy prankster
to young Marxist, rebellious army recruit and leading spokesperson for
democratic rights. Ni spent two years in prison on death row in 1977-1979 for
Publishers Weekly, November 29, 1991
pasting a huge poster on a Shangai hotel to protest the crusing of a Tiananmen
Square rally. An opponent of Deng Xiaoping's repressive measures, he emigrated
to New York in 1986 to avoid arrest. Thurston portrays an idealist willing to
die for the good of China, an imperfect, self-obsessed hero who betrayed his
wife and let down his children, lover and friends. (Jan).
IAC-NUMBER: IAC 11640359
IAC-CLASS: Magazine; Trade & Industry
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: October 11, 1995
LEVEL 1 - 18 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1991 The Kirkus Service, Inc.
Kirkus Reviews
November 1, 1991
SECTION: CHILDREN'S AND YOUNG ADULT BOOKS
LENGTH: 273 words
ISBN NUMBER: 0-684-19219-5
AUTHOR: Thurston, Anne F.
TITLE: A CHINESE ODYSSEY: The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident
PUBLISHER: Scribners (384 pp.) $ 24.95 Jan. 1992
REVIEW:
A thorough and moving biography of a comparatively obscure Chinese dissenter
by the author of Enemies of the People (1987), a study of Mao's Cultural
Revolution.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1991
Thurston cobbles together the life of Ni Yuxian mainly through interviews
she conducted with the dissident before his death in 1988. Born in 1945 in the
Shanghai countryside, Ni was the son of a man accused of ''rightist'' activity
early on during the Communist rule. Denied a chance at college prep school
because of his father's taint, Ni developed a fiercely critical intellect and a
fearless stance toward Party injustice. As a child, he rebelled against the
Party Secretary in his school; as a young soldier, he wrote a scathing 30-page
letter to Mao criticizing his Great Leap Forward policies that caused 20-30
million deaths between 1959 and 1961. Convinced that Maoism was tyranny, Ni was
emboldened by the Cultural Revolution, encouraging fellow students at the
Shanghai Maritime Academy to question Maoist doctrine. His resistance earned him
an apparently false rape charge from the authorities and six months in a
jailhouse, graphically depicted here, after arrest by a propaganda team. In
1985, Ni was lionized in a newspaper article by radical Chinese journalist Liu
Binyan. Notorious and marked by Communist officials, Ni was granted political
exile and came to N.Y.C., where he helped organize exiled Chinese dissidents, an
experience marred by accusations of financial improprieties.
A vivid account flawed only by occasional leaden diatribes against Communism
and by ''docudrama'' techniques such as invented dialogue. Still, a powerful
study.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1991
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: August 27, 1992
LEVEL 1 - 19 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1991 The Kirkus Service, Inc.
Kirkus Reviews
November 1, 1991
SECTION: CHILDREN'S AND YOUNG ADULT BOOKS
LENGTH: 273 words
ISBN NUMBER: 0-684-19219-5
AUTHOR: Thurston, Anne F.
TITLE: A CHINESE ODYSSEY: The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident
PUBLISHER: Scribners (384 pp.) $ 24.95 Jan. 1992
REVIEW:
A thorough and moving biography of a comparatively obscure Chinese dissenter
by the author of Enemies of the People (1987), a study of Mao's Cultural
Revolution.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1991
Thurston cobbles together the life of Ni Yuxian mainly through interviews
she conducted with the dissident before his death in 1988. Born in 1945 in the
Shanghai countryside, Ni was the son of a man accused of ''rightist'' activity
early on during the Communist rule. Denied a chance at college prep school
because of his father's taint, Ni developed a fiercely critical intellect and a
fearless stance toward Party injustice. As a child, he rebelled against the
Party Secretary in his school; as a young soldier, he wrote a scathing 30-page
letter to Mao criticizing his Great Leap Forward policies that caused 20-30
million deaths between 1959 and 1961. Convinced that Maoism was tyranny, Ni was
emboldened by the Cultural Revolution, encouraging fellow students at the
Shanghai Maritime Academy to question Maoist doctrine. His resistance earned him
an apparently false rape charge from the authorities and six months in a
jailhouse, graphically depicted here, after arrest by a propaganda team. In
1985, Ni was lionized in a newspaper article by radical Chinese journalist Liu
Binyan. Notorious and marked by Communist officials, Ni was granted political
exile and came to N.Y.C., where he helped organize exiled Chinese dissidents, an
experience marred by accusations of financial improprieties.
A vivid account flawed only by occasional leaden diatribes against Communism
and by ''docudrama'' techniques such as invented dialogue. Still, a powerful
study.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1991
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: August 27, 1992
LEVEL 1 - 20 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1991 The British Broadcasting Corporation
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
> October 16, 1991, Wednesday
SECTION: Part 3 The Far East; B. INTERNAL AFFAIRS; 2. CHINA; FE/1204/B2/ 1;
LENGTH: 514 words
HEADLINE: PRO-DEMOCRACY GROUP PLANS ANTI-CCP MOVEMENTS IN CHINA
SOURCE:
'Ming Pao', Hong Kong 12 Oct 91
Text of report
BODY:
Ni Yuxian [0242 5148 6343] , responsible person of one of the overseas
pro-democracy organizations the ''China Freedom Democratic Party'' [CFDP] , said
in Hong Kong yesterday [11th October] that the organization is currently
planning to shift its focus of activities from overseas to mainland China and
The British Broadcasting Corporation, October 16, 1991
recruit members from workers and peasants, with an aim to wait for opportunities
to launch anticommunist workers' movements.
As first vice-president and secretary-general of the CFDP, Ni Yuxian said
at a news conference yesterday that the party sent four persons including Yang
Zheng [2799 6927] back to the mainland last August; and last September another
five, including the party's vice-president Yue Wu [1471 2976] and Ni, also went
back to China to carry out a series of activities. According to him, their move
created a precedent in directly sending pro-democracy organizations' leaders and
''criminals at large'' wanted by the CCP into the mainland.
Ni Yuxian said they went to China via Thailand and Vietnam, and entered the
country through ''secret channels''. In Vietnam, they obtained assistance from
local Vietnamese officials for business reasons, taking advantage of
Sino-Vietnamese border trade. However, because of different passports they held,
only two of the five were granted approval to enter Hong Kong with a transit
visa. By now, Ni Yuxian has stayed in Hong Kong for 10 days, and troubles are
expected with his exit.
According to Ni Yuxian, during the period when they were on the mainland,
they went to places such as Peking, Shanghai and Canton to get into touch with
local CFDP branches; paid visits to some families of those who died in the 4th
The British Broadcasting Corporation, October 16, 1991
June incident; submitted ''letters of admonition'' to relevant CCP departments;
and inspected conditions in disaster areas in eastern China.
However, Ni was reluctant to disclose the number of members on the mainland,
but indicated that the members of his organization are also among cadres and PLA
[People's Liberation Army] troops.
The CFDP now has about 600 overseas members, and its present president is
Wang Bingzhang [3769 3521 4545] , former president of the ''Democratic Union''.
Ni Yuxian said the core members of the CFDP are ''counter-revolutionaries''
persecuted by the CCP, and the basic programme of the party is ''not to rule out
the possibility of overthrowing the despotic rule of the CCP through violence''.
Compared with the CFDP, the key members of the ''Democratic Front'' and the
''Democratic Union'' are reformist forces which were once cultivated by the CCP.
They stand for a ''structural reform'' and hold ''peace, reason and
non-violence'' as their principles.
Ni Yuxian is one of the heroes in Liu Binyan's reportage entitled ''A
Second Loyalty''. He was once in the army and later entered the Shanghai Marine
Transport Institute through examination. He was sentenced to death for opposing
the ''Gang of Four''. After the downfall of the ''Gang of Four'', Ni was
released from prison, and he went to settle down in the USA in 1986.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, October 16, 1991
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LEVEL 1 - 21 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1991 Reuters
Reuters North American Wire
October 11, 1991, Friday, AM cycle
LENGTH: 304 words
HEADLINE: PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTEST LEADERS VISIT CHINA TO CONTINUE MOVEMENT
DATELINE: HONG KONG
BODY:
A Chinese pro-democracy protest leader who sneaked into China to meet members
of the underground movement predicted Friday that communism there would soon
collapse.
"The Chinese Communist Party can't continue to hold onto power for much
longer given the historic trend," said Ni Yuxian, first deputy chairman of the
U.S.-based Democracy Freedom Party of China.
"After (paramount leader) Deng Xiaoping dies, a power struggle will
immediately follow. Once the party begins to collapse, it will collapse very
Reuters North American Wire, October 11, 1991
quickly," he told reporters after returning to Hong Kong.
Ni, who sneaked into China with four other dissidents, said the number of
underground groups had been growing since Beijing brutally cracked down on
pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989, with heavy loss of life.
The five sneaked into China in three separate groups through Hong Kong or
Vietnam, spending 20 days in major cities to meet underground organizations and
discuss the future of the democracy movement.
"The movement of course includes party cadres and military officers. We have
members in the Chinese military and we want to prepare them to lead the people
if there is a collapse," Ni said.
The five also sent letters to party and central government offices, warning
of a revolution to overthrow the Communist regime if China's leadership did not
change.
"We faced great risk going back to China, but we felt it was essential to go
back to further the movement to a new stage," said Ni, who said he was on
Beijing's most-wanted list after the June 4, 1989, crackdown.
Reuters North American Wire, October 11, 1991
The 600-member Democracy Freedom Party is one of three main overseas Chinese
dissidents groups. It openly advocates the overthrow of the Communist system and
maintains the right of the Chinese people to defend themselves against any use
of force by Beijing.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
911011
LEVEL 1 - 22 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1991 Reuters
The Reuter Library Report
October 11, 1991, Friday, BC cycle
LENGTH: 304 words
HEADLINE: PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTEST LEADERS VISIT CHINA TO CONTINUE MOVEMENT
DATELINE: HONG KONG, Oct 11
BODY:
A Chinese pro-democracy protest leader who sneaked into China to meet members
of the underground movement predicted on Friday that communism there would soon
collapse.
"The Chinese Communist Party can't continue to hold onto power for much
longer given the historic trend," said Ni Yuxian, first deputy chairman of the
U.S.-based Democracy Freedom Party of China.
"After (paramount leader) Deng Xiaoping dies, a power struggle will
immediately follow. Once the party begins to collapse, it will collapse very
The Reuter Library Report, October 11, 1991
quickly," he told reporters after returning to Hong Kong.
Ni, who sneaked into China with four other dissidents, said the number of
underground groups had been growing since Beijing brutally cracked down on
pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989, with heavy loss of life.
The five stole into China in three separate groups through Hong Kong or
Vietnam, spending 20 days in major cities to meet underground organisations and
discuss the future of the democracy movement.
"The movement of course includes party cadres and military officers. We have
members in the Chinese military and we want to prepare them to lead the people
if there is a collapse," Ni said.
The five also sent letters to party and central government offices, warning
of a revolution to overthrow the communist regime if China's leadership did not
change.
"We faced great risk going back to China, but we felt it was essential to go
back to further the movement to a new stage," said Ni, who said he was on
Beijing's most-wanted list after the June 4, 1989, crackdown.
The Reuter Library Report, October 11, 1991
The 600-member Democracy Freedom Party is one of three main overseas Chinese
dissidents groups. It openly advocates the overthrow of the communist system and
maintains the right of the Chinese people to defend themselves against any use
of force by Beijing.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: 101191
LEVEL 1 - 23 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1990 Information Access Company, a Thomson Corporation Company
ASAP
Copyright 1990 The New Republic Inc.
The New Republic
July 30, 1990
SECTION: Vol. 203 ; No. 5-6 ; Pg. 30; ISSN: 0028-6583
LENGTH: 5921 words
HEADLINE: A culture of cruelty: why does China eat it's own? political violence
and upheaval
BYLINE: Nathan, Andrew J.
BODY:
No better proof could be imagined for Nietzsche's insight that cruelty is
the great festival pleasure of mankind than the torment inflicted by the Chinese
people on one another for the last 400 years. Jonathan Spence's history of that
period is filled with burying alive, burning alive, slicing, strangulation,
stabbing, drowning, poison gas inserted into tunnels, coerced suicide,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
exposure of severed heads, vengeful exhumation and dismemberment of corpses,
arson, rapine, torture, corruption, epidemic, famine, forced migrations, wars,
riots, strikes, rebellions, and piracy. The first three pages of Liu Binyan's
memoir, A Higher Kind of Loyalty, recount an assassination by bombing, a child
killed in a car accident, a murder, an execution, the death of a young brother
from scarlet fever, and a daily parade of carts filled with beggars' corpses.
Bette Bao Lord's snapshots from the lives of Chinese friends include beatings by
Red Guards, a wife denouncing a husband, a nursing infant denied breast milk, an
ear torn off, a thumb broken, and a head whacked in half by the stroke of a
scythe.
"Why does a culture that condemns violence," asks Stevan Harrell, "that
plays down the glory of military exploits, awards its highest prestige to
literary, rather than martial figures, and seeks harmony over all other values,
in fact display such frequency and variety of violent behavior?"
It would be difficult but unnecessary to prove that China's history is
sadder than that of other countries on a per capital basis. If nothing else, the
scale of horror is unique in this largest of all nations. Nearly twenty years
ago Richard L. Walker, in a study for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee,
estimated that the "human cost of communism in China" after 1949 ranged from 32
million to 60 million deaths. Walker's estimates were rough, but also
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
incomplete. He did not include the 20 million to 30 million famine deaths in
1959-61 that scholars learned about relatively recently, nor could he touch on
the revival of female infanticide since the late 1970s, which has claimed what
Spence estimates at 200,000 lives a year.
And such costs include only deaths. They do not include the 1 million people
who Liu says were labeled "rightists" in 1957 and punished for up to twenty
years (an increase over the usual estimate of 550,000); or the 20 million young
people who, with another 20 million factory workers, were "sent down" to the
countryside in the Mao years to get them out of the cities; or the 20 million
landlords, rich peasants, and others given discriminatory class labels in the
early 1950s; or the 2.9 million cadres who Deng Xiaoping said were mistreated in
the Cultural Revolution, or the 100 million persons who Hu Yaobang estimated
were affected in one way or another by that cataclysm.
No one has been able to estimate the population of the Chinese gulag,
although Senator Jesse Helms reportedly intends to hold hearings to try. Superb
studies by Robin Munro for Amnesty International and Asia Watch, based on
reports in the Chinese press, have detailed routine torture and mistreatment of
prisoners in Chinese detention centers, jails, and camps, but it is hopeless to
estimate the scale of abuse when the prison population itself is unknown.
Christina Gilmartin's essay in Violence in China, together with some anecdotes
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
from Liu's career as an investigative reporter, scratch the surface of the vast
subject of sexual abuse in Chinese jails, camps, offices, farms, factories, and
families, but again the data defy attempts at quantification.
Nor have the costs paid by the Chinese been limited to the period of
communism. Twenty million died during the Taiping rebellion in the
mid-nineteenth century, ten million in a famine in the 1870s, half a million in
a famine in the 1920s. Spence reports that about 14 million men were drafted
into the Chinese military during the war against Japan; a tenth of them died of
disease and malnutrition before seeing combat. One of the fine features of his
book is an endless series of small maps showing troop unsettle the paintings;
they are after-thoughts, additions, revisions, a way of refusing closure. Once
Johns has painted a picture it, too, becomes a thing "the mind already knows,"
and fair game for his exercises of doubt. His paintings are frequently
reconsidered in other ways and other media. One cannot say something about
Johns, therefore, without also saying something else.
Most of Johns's recurring imagery-flags, targets, maps, crosshatch forms,
borrowings from earlier artists, work from his seasons series-is on display in
Washington. The catalog clearly explains the import and the evolution of the
iconography and technique; that, for example, the older Johns less often selects
immediately recognizable images from mass culture and that he uses color in a
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
more varied way. But the impression left by the show is one less of evolution
than of never letting go, of an anxious continuity of interest, of an artist
coiling back even as he moves ahead.
The iconographic variations are paralleled by the constant experiments with
craft and medium. The show displays an extraordinary array of techniques-among
others, pencil, charcoal, silverpoint, crayon, oil on paper and ink on plastic.
(These last, most of them executed during the past decade, are gorgeous,
light-filled works.) The craft is enjoyed for its own sake, but it is not merely
an attempt at virtuosity. By observing old images through many different lenses,
Johns helps create a sense of a world that, despite certain landmarks, is
constantly in flux, a matter always of the shifting moment or the character of
the means at hand.
At times Johns's playfulness seems mannered and self-conscious, yet he is
not a trivial or an effete artist. The playfulness derives not from cleverness
or conceit, but from deep divisions in a passionate sensibility. Perhaps the
artist keeps playing, keeps rearranging his fragments, because that is the only
way to express things that cannot be reconciled. One could not say, for example,
that Johns is either a warm artist or a cold artist. He is both at once. On the
warm side is the expressionist moodiness that often erupts onto his surfaces,
and the sensual character of his brush stroke, which is reminiscent of
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Guston's. (John Cage once said of his friend's work that "looking closely helps,
though the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in
love. ") The opening rooms of the exhibition are rich in beautifully worked,
melancholy blacks, and Johns's later art makes admiring (and somewhat opaque)
reference to the art of Munch, Grunewald, and the wilder Picasso.
Certainly the most powerful image is a large picture called Diver, from
1963. Rosenthal describes this monumental drawing, which may make reference to
Hart Crane's manner of suicide (leaping off the stern of a ship), as "the
diagram of a diver in various stages of a swan dive." At the drawing's upper
edge are footprints, placed on a long rectangular form that evokes a diving
board. Two sets of handprints on either end of two panels suggest the diver's
arms. A circular sweep of line comes from the handprints at the bottom of the
picture, reminiscent of a diver flaring out his arms in preparation for the
dive. "Deep blacks and muted grays blend to suggest the depths of a nocturnal
sea," says Rosenthal, "while the white pastel passages in the lower center call
to mind a diver's splash."
The inky imprints of hand and foot have a ghostly immediacy, like the
signature of a dead man. The spaces seem poised on the edge of balance; the
picture as a whole suggests that moment in a dive when one has just committed,
and there is no going back to balance or solidity. The world seems about to
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
upend, to spiral into oblivion. It is an expressionist picture, in other words,
and yet not quite, not altogether. The implied circle of the arms also recalls
other, cooler considerations: a compass; a clock; or the studied analysis of
form in Leonardo's famous drawing "Human Figure in a Circle, Illustrating
Proportions Vitruvian Man)," which in itself recalls a crucifixion.
Diver is Johns at his warmest, that is, most willing to let tragedy show
itself without the interference of learning or wit. On the colder side of Johns
is the catlike detachment and the sporting intellect, most obvious in the irony
and the obscure references of the imagery. But the chill can also be sensed in
the planned, boxed-in character of many of his pictures. johns loves the
workings of chance; but like Cage, he generally provides a strict structure in
which chance is allowed to operate. He is not totally loose. In a later version
of an image, he may carefully copy a fortuitous drip or a squiggle that was
originally happen-stance. He possesses play, he co-opts chance. That spontaneous
little squiggle is reincarnated as an idea. Such oppositions enable Johns to
convey a certain kind of pathos particularly well. Because he is such a tactile
painter, the inability to finally possess, to hold, often becomes genuinely
moving. His numbers and letters are not merely abstract symbols, for example;
they convey an almost living presence, as if they were real and touchable. They
aspire to the physical in the way that some objects in early still-life
painting-say, a Zurbaran lemon-seem to aspire to the metaphysical. In a world
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
that grows increasingly abstract, Johns understands better than most the
melancholy aura of representations.
The oppositions in Johns have also enabled him to become one of those
artists able to fashion a synthesis, if not a reconciliation, among competing
traditions. In the catalog Rosenthal observes about one particular picture that
it combines references to both Picasso and Duchamp. In fact, Johns's entire
oeuvre sometimes seems like an effort to find a way to get both spirits into the
same frame, to arrive at an art that respects the ironic intelligence of a dandy
and the immediate physical apprehension of feeling that is characteristic of
abstract expressionism, to fashion an art of painting that a man like Duchamp
would not consider embarrassingly old-fashioned or bourgeois.
The way that Johns plays with the principal strains of modernism, his
passion for elaboration and contradiction, his general air of learned
knowingness and interest in making fine points, are characteristic of an artist
working late in a tradition. He is the kind of intelligent artist whose calling
is to find a way to movements across the Chinese landscape from the late Ming to
1959. "Every word is blood and grief," wrote a Chinese poet in 1944.
What has been acquired in exchange for all this misery? Today the consensus
of Chinese outside officialdom is: nothing. "What Confucian culture has given
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
us over the past several thousand years is not a national spirit of enterprise,
a system of laws, or a mechanism of cultural renewal, but a fearsome
self-killing machine that, as it degenerated, constantly devoured its best and
its brightest, its own vital elements." So wrote the authors of "River Elegy,"
the television serial, whose broadcast on Chinese television the year before
last helped to set the scene for the outpouring of anti-regime sentiment in the
spring of 1989.
The way in which Spence interprets the "search for modernity" implies that
he agrees with this tragic vision. He follows recent academic practice in
placing the beginning of the modern period 300 or more years further back than
the old conventional benchmark of the mid-nineteenth century. But instead of
stressing the secular rise over this time of agricultural productivity,
handicraft industry, commercialization, population, urbanization, literacy, and
social and geographic mobility, as other recent historians have done, Spence
points out that people's average levels of consumption were no higher in the
Qing than in the Ming, in the 1930s than in the nineteenth century, under Mao
than under Chiang Kai-shek.
He would concede (though he never says so) that China has made itself modern
in the sense that it produces computers and rockets, feeds a population of a
billion, educates most of its people, provides medical care sufficient to
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
establish a life expectancy of sixty-nine years, and participates in the
international economy and political system. He also gives full play to the
achievements of Chinese literature and art, statecraft and philosophy, and his
book is beautifully illustrated with examples of these achievements. But he
argues that China has not been modern in at least 400 years, in the sense of
being a nation "both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity
yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new
technologies, new ideas." The quest of his title is thus one in which he
believes the Chinese are still engaged, unsuccessfully.
The fact that Liu and Bette Bao Lord share Spence's despair is significant,
for particular reasons in each case. To Lord, China's tragedy is personal.
Herself of Chinese origin, with many friends and relatives there, she went to
China believing that it would be possible to reform the Party from within, and
hoping to promote "one of the most critical bilateral relationships in the
world." By the end of her hardworking tour of duty as the American ambassador's
wife, she had come to see the Chinese system as thoroughly brutal and corrupt.
Then, staying a few extra weeks in the spring of 1989 to help CBS News cover the
Gorbachev-Deng Xiaoping summit, she saw the ruins of Deng's reforms come
crashing down around her friends. A close cousin who stayed in China when Lord
emigrated with her parents in 1946 symbolizes Lord's sense of having escaped her
fair share of misery by leaving. Having enjoyed more than her share of luck,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
she feels that she has abandoned her relatives to one of the hardest fates in
this world, the fate of being Chinese.
Liu's memoir marks the nearly complete disillusionment of one of China's
last hopeful men. Liu made his name as an investigative reporter exposing power
abuse and corruption in the decade after his rehabilitation in 1979 from the
stigma of being a "rightist." As a rightist, he lost his Party membership and
his job, and spent two long periods of forced labor in the countryside. After
his rehabilitation, his first-and still most famous-article was "People or
Monsters?" (It is available in English in a book with the same title edited by
Perry Link, published by Indiana University Press in 1983.) It argued that a
major corruption case in a commune in northeastern China occurred because
cliquism and mutual back-scratching had eroded the vigilance of the local Party
committee.
Liu's trademark answer to the problem, proposed in an essay in 1985, was "A
Second Kind of Loyalty." The first kind of loyalty was what had gotten China
into trouble, he said. It was the loyalty of those who are "diligent and
conscientious, putting up with hardship and swallowing their resentment, doing
exactly what they are told, never expressing a contradictory opinion." This
loyalty, into whose moribund cults the Li Peng regime is trying to puff a spark
of life today, allowed bad people to seize power and do their will.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
The second kind of loyalty, however, would save China. Liu personified it in
two protagonists, Ni Yuxian and Chen Shizhong, who stood up for the true
ideals of socialism for twenty years, when those ideals were being trampled by
Mao and his acolytes. They wrote letters to oppose the Great Leap and the split
with the Soviet Union, hung wall posters to oppose the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution, and gave speeches to defend good cadres who were attacked by Red
Guards. But they never engaged in intrigue or violence or tried to evade their
inevitable punishments, and each of them spent years in jail. They played the
classic Chinese role of remonstrators, who sacrifice their flesh and blood in
order to awaken the ruler to his duty. Ironically, each subsequently diverged
from Liu's model, but in opposite ways. Ni obtained political asylum in New York
and helped found an exile party dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese Communist
Party. Chen went around China, at least before June 4 last year, giving speeches
on the topic, "I Offer the Love in My Heart to the Party and the People.")
Liu identified with Ni and Chen. His memoir was also going to be called "A
Second Kind of Loyalty," but the title was apparently revised to make more sense
to Americans. Liu portrays himself as telling the truth despite repression
because he believed that his appeals could awaken healthy forces in the Party.
He was never a dissident. As a reporter for the central Party paper, he was able
to conduct his investigations cloaked in the authority of the Party, publish his
works under the protection of the sympathetic General Secretary Hu Yaobang,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
and make some of his reports not in writing to the public but orally to the
relevant provincial Party secretaries. Even after his expulsion from the Party
in 1987 for bourgeois liberalism after the fall of his protector Hu, he saw
himself as a sort of political Boddhisatva who postponed his relief from
suffering to help others reach salvation.
Although he doesn't use such terms, Liu inhabits a Confucian world divided
between moral persons (junzi) and people who are only human (xiaoren). For him,
the human problem is not to figure out what is the right thing to do, but to
make up one's mind to do it. A warm, compassionate, approachable man, he has an
endless appetite and memory for the details of individual lives, and a deep
understanding of human motives. But in the end he discerns, in the complexity of
the human comedy, only two kinds of people-those whose self-justifications are
excuses for selfishness, and those who sacrifice for justice.
Liu thus embodies what the historian Thomas A. Metzger has called the
"transformative" (as opposed to the accommodative") impulse in Chinese culture.
Like Confucius, Liu sees human nature as basically good and believes in changing
the world through the force of example. To borrow the title of another of his
essays, corruption in China occurs because "good people" are "weak." The events
of last year have brought him to the point of predicting the fall of the Li
Peng-Deng Xiaoping regime, which he sees as representing a small privileged
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
stratum of conservative bureaucrats rather than the Chinese Communist Party as a
whole. Although in " Tell the World " he suggests that a non-Communist democracy
will emerge after an interregnum of rule by Party reformists, in Higher Kind of
Loyalty he appears still to hope that the Chinese Communist Party will
rediscover its soul and return to the path of its original ideals. However
ambivalently, Liu's second kind of loyalty is still loyalty.
Younger Chinese have criticized him for this all along. When he toured
American campuses in 1988, a student at Columbia confronted him with the example
of Fang Lizhi (the astrophysicist and human rights activist recently expelled
from the CCP and now in England after a year in refuge in the American Embassy
in Beijing), who had declared himself opposed to communism. Fang's stand is
based on the Western scientific viewpoint," she contended, "while yours is a
kind of peasant-based pro-Communist idealism which can never solve China's
fundamental problems." Many in the audience applauded. About a year later the
young critic Liu Xiaobo attacked Liu for believing that "someday the master the
CCP will wake up and appreciate his absolute sincerity because his criticisms
are not intended to hurt the master, but to make him more perfect." (Liu Xiaobo
is in jail now, accused of being a "sinister black hand" behind the Tiananmen
demonstrations.)
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Liu has moved toward the harshest view of Chinese reality compatible with a
shred of faith in the goodness of man. He is a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, who
returned from twenty years of feeding pigs and hauling night soil to discover a
world in which evil was pervasive and the few good people were viciously
oppressed. In one place that he investigated, "the so-called planned economy was
... nothing but the continuous how of public resources into the private pockets
of the power holders." In another, "the Party secretary could pick and choose
any girl from destitute families to sleep with him in return for food
subsidies." In a third, a petitioner for justice was repeatedly jailed and
tortured: "The children became vagrants, often beaten up, with no chance to go
to school; the family's ration of wheat and kindling wood was held back; their
house was destroyed." A fourth location as "a kingdom of evil.... a cursed land
where all values had been reversed." Throughout China, malefactors who had been
in power since the Cultural Revolution cooperated to protect one another, and
the reformists at the center, beset by forces only murkily hinted at by Liu,
were too weak to penetrate the web of evil. In all, says Liu, "China seemed like
a monstrous mill, continually rolling, crushing all individuality out of the
Chinese character."
A somewhat formulaic optimism informs the coda to A Higher Kind of Loyalty.
"The Chinese people have now changed," he asserts. "The people will pay a bloody
price, but in the end they will shake off this monstrous thing the ruling
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
clique that is draining them of their life's blood." (The language is typical of
both of Liu's books, which are more like political documents than personal
reflections, and which have been translated almost too faithfully from the
Chinese.) Lord, too, ends with an obligatory upbeat ending, a parable of a
cover-let kept immaculate through years of prison. Spence's attempt to solace
his readers leads to a last sentence that is the only really ill-considered one
in his book: "There would be no truly modern China until the people were given
back their voices." His own narrative shows that the Chinese people never had
their voices.
Like Chernobyl, China seems to get worse the more we learn about it. Of
course, we need to beware of the phenomenon-Spence traces it well-by which the
Western image of China oscillates between exaggerated hopes and exaggerated
fears. If it was wrong to see Mao's China as a people's Shangri-La, it is also
wrong to imagine that in Li Peng's China most of the people spend most of their
time doing anything other than going about their daily business. Lord states
that "all Chinese are in pain," and I believe she is right, but what does a
people in pain look like? The kind of pain she is talking about does not show on
people's faces as they bicycle to work, any more than it did when travelers
reported that all was well in Mao's day. The truth about such a large country is
hard to discern. Still, the combined testimony of observers with such cumulative
and diverse authority is impressive.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Why are things so bad? "To understand China today," observes Spence, "we
need to know about China in the past." But what does the past tell us? Spence
devotes an informative section to Hegel's theory that China is doomed by
geography to be an inward-looking peasant nation excluded from the mainstream of
history, a theory widely accepted by Chinese today. But he does not seem to
endorse such grand generalizations. The pointers he gives involve more discrete
historical echoes, parallels, and precedents. The book points out that problems
such as bureaucracy, regionalism, peasant poverty, abuse of women, familism, and
the struggle for political power persisted or recurred, but does not try to
explain why. Spence is a brilliant storyteller, endlessly curious about how
things really were at the top and the bottom of society, on the plains and in
the borderlands, at weddings and wars, in the rice fields and the scholar's
studio. While the vast tapestry contains many patterns, however, he is chary of
stating what they are. If there are "cycles" of some sort at work, as he says
several times, are they any more than historical resemblances and coincidences
that are bound to occur as human folly grinds repeatedly through a finite number
of permutations?
Spence tends to explain violence as occurring mostly when "the Chinese
people...threw themselves against the power of the state." This is a comforting
vision. Yet his narrative contains plenty of instances of the violence of the
oppressed against one another. As one of his own witnesses says, "The poor
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
squeeze each other to death." There is also a trace of romanticism in the
sections on the Communist revolution and Mao's rule. Spence portrays Mao leading
the country confidently in pursuit of his vision, however flawed. He doesn't
convey the constant bumbling, desperate insecurity, vicious infighting, and
hysterical improvisation that the Chinese Communists disguised behind the
bluster of their theory of scientific socialism.
Lord's answer to the violence of Chinese life is national character.
"Chinese go through life wearing masks," she says. The masks take over the
wearer, robbing him of his identity and inducing paranoia toward others. Able to
adapt to any circumstance, the Chinese "never bother asking themselves who they
are. They wait to be told." Under Mao, the Chinese were programmed to violence.
They took their turns as victims and perpetrators in a cycle that left no one
blameless and no one responsible. As one of her informants tells her, "It's over
now. It was not my fault. It was not his fault. Everyone suffered. It was the
times. We were all casualties of history."
Lord is a sensitive observer of human attitudes. One of the most delightful
sections of the book is a series of vignettes in which Chinese recount their
puzzling encounters in American society. But her well-meaning account of Chinese
culture boils down to an East Asian example of the "orientalism" criticized
years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our semblables and
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a national
stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people behave
savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as characteristics
that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why.
Liu Binyan's notion of a double network" of political and economic relations
created by the Cultural Revolution comes closer to illuminating the structure of
Chinese society. He sees the Cultural Revolution as a turmoil in which
opportunistic politicians scrambled to power. Once there, they stayed through
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
all the twists and turns of the line. As veterans of three dynasties," they had
an overweening interest in keeping down all those whom they had oppressed on
their way up. "To a Party leader, it is a matter of life and death always to be
right." The protective network extended from the counties at the bottom of
China's administrative hierarchy to the top. At each level politicians protected
those below so that they could in turn be protected. The CCP turned into a giant
Mafia.
One of the saddest cases of oppression that Liu describes is that of a
worker named Wang Fumian, whom Liu was finally unable to help because he was
expelled from the Party before his report on the case could be acted upon. In
the course of investigating Wang's case, Liu discovered that Wang had been
confined to a mental hospital on a diagnosis of "mania." According to the
diagnostic handbook locally in use, mania was characterized by the "orientalism"
criticized years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our
semblables and freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a
national stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people
behave savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as
characteristics that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
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cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why. overconfidence,
extreme willfulness, found mostly in people of advanced cultural background.
They are biased and tend to distort facts, although their delusions are not
wholly divorced from reality. Taken for normal at an early age, the patient
gradually asserts his (her) willpower more and more forcibly, he (she) rushes
about offering petitions, writing endless letters of accusation. A few are
deluded into thinking they are making exceptional contributions to humanity.
It was a perfect description of Liu himself The only mystery is how, under
such circumstances, a few independent individuals like Liu and the stubborn
petitioners he wrote about could continue to exist.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
On the whole, Liu's analysis is convincing, except that he is unclear about
many of the details. He seems to be protecting some people himself, as he refers
from time to time to higher-ups who were spiking his work from behind the scenes
but does not tell us who they were. (Or did he wish to spare American readers a
surfeit of names filled with Xs and Zs engaged in intricate political
struggles?) And Liu's tendency to judge persons rather than the system diverts
attention from the question of how such things could happen. Is it because evil
people are stronger than good people, as he suggests? Or does it have something
to do with the design of Chinese institutions?
As Norbert Elias has written, describing the descent into savagery of German
troops in the Baltics in the late days of World War I: The path toward barbarity
and dehumanization ... always Lakes considerable time to unfold in relatively
civilized societies. Terror and horror hardly appear in such societies without a
long process of social disintegration. All too often the act of naked violence
... is analyzed with the help of short-term, static explanations. That may be
meaningful if one is not seeking explanations but only attempting to establish
culpability. It is easy to see barbarism and de-civilizations as the expression
of a free personal decision, but that kind of voluntarist explanation is shallow
and unhelpful.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
In their approach to the problem of violence, Lipman and Harrell and their
contributors move in the direction that Elias recommends by looking at the
failure of the norms that are supposed to prohibit violence. The best chapter is
Anne F Thurston's account of urban violence during the Cultural Revolution
(drawing from her longer study, Enemies of the People, which appeared in 1987).
She directs attention to the processes that strip away inhibitions to violence
by dehumanizing the target. In Mao's China, such processes included the labeling
of class enemies, glorification of the necessity of revolutionary violence,
public struggle sessions that inured people to the sight of suffering, and peer
pressure based on the practice of victimizing all who refused to victimize
others.
The most penetrating exposition of this constellation of institutions is
Lynn T White III's, whose arguments are summarized in a paragraph by Spence.
White stresses the role of three interlocking institutions, each found in fully
developed form nowhere but in Mao's China: the work unit, the system of class
labels, and the political campaign. The work unit locked each individual in
place for life with a set of co-workers like scorpions in ajar; the class label
system created what were thought to be permanent castes (they have since
disappeared) with contrary interests, and with members of the despised castes
seen as sub-human; political campaigns trained people to be vicious. White
traces the creation of these institutions in Shanghai in the 1950s and 1960s
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and then their impact on the course of Shanghai's Cultural Revolution.
How the personalities of young Chinese were shaped by class labels, units,
and campaigns has been brilliantly described by Anita Chan in Children of Mao:
Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation,
which appeared in 1985. Chan showed that a combination of indoctrination,
competition for approval, and fear of victimization forged decent young people
into Manichaean bigots. Liu provides powerful testimony about how it felt to be
one of the victims in this system, isolated, assaulted, and humiliated until
even a person with his powerful sense of individuality felt guilty for crimes he
had not committed.
Doleful as such explanations are, at least they remove the Chinese from the
ghetto of the inscrutable and show how normal human beings can be reduced to
marauders. Authors like Thurston, White, and Chan are able to return China to
the mainstream of history from which Hegel excluded it, even though the history
that China rejoins (so far) is that of Stalinism and fascism rather than the
Hegelian progress to freedom. The institutions that created violence in the
period of the Cultural Revolution were creations of Mao's China. They cannot
explain the upheavals of the preceding hundreds of years. (In fact, no one has
yet explained how and why Mao's people invented these institutions.) But studies
like these point the way to deciphering the mystery of extreme violence
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through the analysis of social settings that rob people of human connections to
their victims.
If these are the lessons from China's modern history, they are not very
encouraging. One wonders whether even the mordant Lu Xun was too u beat when he
said, as quoted by Spence , "The history of mankind's battle forward through
bloodshed is like the formation of coal, where a great deal of wood is needed to
produce a small amount of coal." Much human wood lies under the ground of
Chinese history, but how much coal?
ANDREW J. NATHAN is the author of China's Crisis and co-author of Human
Rights in Contemporary China, both published by Columbia University Press.
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The New Republic
July 30, 1990
SECTION: Vol. 203 ; No. 5-6 ; Pg. 30; ISSN: 0028-6583
LENGTH: 5921 words
HEADLINE: A Higher Kind of Loyalty._book reviews
BYLINE: Nathan, Andrew J.
BODY:
No better proof could be imagined for Nietzsche's insight that cruelty is
the great festival pleasure of mankind than the torment inflicted by the Chinese
people on one another for the last 400 years. Jonathan Spence's history of that
period is filled with burying alive, burning alive, slicing, strangulation,
stabbing, drowning, poison gas inserted into tunnels, coerced suicide, exposure
of severed heads, vengeful exhumation and dismemberment of corpses, arson,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
rapine, torture, corruption, epidemic, famine, forced migrations, wars, riots,
strikes, rebellions, and piracy. The first three pages of Liu Binyan's memoir, A
Higher Kind of Loyalty, recount an assassination by bombing, a child killed in a
car accident, a murder, an execution, the death of a young brother from scarlet
fever, and a daily parade of carts filled with beggars' corpses. Bette Bao
Lord's snapshots from the lives of Chinese friends include beatings by Red
Guards, a wife denouncing a husband, a nursing infant denied breast milk, an ear
torn off, a thumb broken, and a head whacked in half by the stroke of a scythe.
"Why does a culture that condemns violence," asks Stevan Harrell, "that
plays down the glory of military exploits, awards its highest prestige to
literary, rather than martial figures, and seeks harmony over all other values,
in fact display such frequency and variety of violent behavior?"
It would be difficult but unnecessary to prove that China's history is
sadder than that of other countries on a per capital basis. If nothing else, the
scale of horror is unique in this largest of all nations. Nearly twenty years
ago Richard L. Walker, in a study for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee,
estimated that the "human cost of communism in China" after 1949 ranged from 32
million to 60 million deaths. Walker's estimates were rough, but also
incomplete. He did not include the 20 million to 30 million famine deaths in
1959-61 that scholars learned about relatively recently, nor could he touch on
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the revival of female infanticide since the late 1970s, which has claimed what
Spence estimates at 200,000 lives a year.
And such costs include only deaths. They do not include the 1 million people
who Liu says were labeled "rightists" in 1957 and punished for up to twenty
years (an increase over the usual estimate of 550,000); or the 20 million young
people who, with another 20 million factory workers, were "sent down" to the
countryside in the Mao years to get them out of the cities; or the 20 million
landlords, rich peasants, and others given discriminatory class labels in the
early 1950s; or the 2.9 million cadres who Deng Xiaoping said were mistreated in
the Cultural Revolution, or the 100 million persons who Hu Yaobang estimated
were affected in one way or another by that cataclysm.
No one has been able to estimate the population of the Chinese gulag,
although Senator Jesse Helms reportedly intends to hold hearings to try. Superb
studies by Robin Munro for Amnesty International and Asia Watch, based on
reports in the Chinese press, have detailed routine torture and mistreatment of
prisoners in Chinese detention centers, jails, and camps, but it is hopeless to
estimate the scale of abuse when the prison population itself is unknown.
Christina Gilmartin's essay in Violence in China, together with some anecdotes
from Liu's career as an investigative reporter, scratch the surface of the vast
subject of sexual abuse in Chinese jails, camps, offices, farms, factories,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
and families, but again the data defy attempts at quantification.
Nor have the costs paid by the Chinese been limited to the period of
communism. Twenty million died during the Taiping rebellion in the
mid-nineteenth century, ten million in a famine in the 1870s, half a million in
a famine in the 1920s. Spence reports that about 14 million men were drafted
into the Chinese military during the war against Japan; a tenth of them died of
disease and malnutrition before seeing combat. One of the fine features of his
book is an endless series of small maps showing troop unsettle the paintings;
they are after-thoughts, additions, revisions, a way of refusing closure. Once
Johns has painted a picture it, too, becomes a thing "the mind already knows,"
and fair game for his exercises of doubt. His paintings are frequently
reconsidered in other ways and other media. One cannot say something about
Johns, therefore, without also saying something else.
Most of Johns's recurring imagery-flags, targets, maps, crosshatch forms,
borrowings from earlier artists, work from his seasons series-is on display in
Washington. The catalog clearly explains the import and the evolution of the
iconography and technique; that, for example, the older Johns less often selects
immediately recognizable images from mass culture and that he uses color in a
more varied way. But the impression left by the show is one less of evolution
than of never letting go, of an anxious continuity of interest, of an artist
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
coiling back even as he moves ahead.
The iconographic variations are paralleled by the constant experiments with
craft and medium. The show displays an extraordinary array of techniques-among
others, pencil, charcoal, silverpoint, crayon, oil on paper and ink on plastic.
(These last, most of them executed during the past decade, are gorgeous,
light-filled works.) The craft is enjoyed for its own sake, but it is not merely
an attempt at virtuosity. By observing old images through many different lenses,
Johns helps create a sense of a world that, despite certain landmarks, is
constantly in flux, a matter always of the shifting moment or the character of
the means at hand.
At times Johns's playfulness seems mannered and self-conscious, yet he is
not a trivial or an effete artist. The playfulness derives not from cleverness
or conceit, but from deep divisions in a passionate sensibility. Perhaps the
artist keeps playing, keeps rearranging his fragments, because that is the only
way to express things that cannot be reconciled. One could not say, for example,
that Johns is either a warm artist or a cold artist. He is both at once. On the
warm side is the expressionist moodiness that often erupts onto his surfaces,
and the sensual character of his brush stroke, which is reminiscent of Guston's.
(John Cage once said of his friend's work that "looking closely helps, though
the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in love.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
") The opening rooms of the exhibition are rich in beautifully worked,
melancholy blacks, and Johns's later art makes admiring (and somewhat opaque)
reference to the art of Munch, Grunewald, and the wilder Picasso.
Certainly the most powerful image is a large picture called Diver, from
1963. Rosenthal describes this monumental drawing, which may make reference to
Hart Crane's manner of suicide (leaping off the stern of a ship), as "the
diagram of a diver in various stages of a swan dive." At the drawing's upper
edge are footprints, placed on a long rectangular form that evokes a diving
board. Two sets of handprints on either end of two panels suggest the diver's
arms. A circular sweep of line comes from the handprints at the bottom of the
picture, reminiscent of a diver flaring out his arms in preparation for the
dive. "Deep blacks and muted grays blend to suggest the depths of a nocturnal
sea," says Rosenthal, "while the white pastel passages in the lower center call
to mind a diver's splash."
The inky imprints of hand and foot have a ghostly immediacy, like the
signature of a dead man. The spaces seem poised on the edge of balance; the
picture as a whole suggests that moment in a dive when one has just committed,
and there is no going back to balance or solidity. The world seems about to
upend, to spiral into oblivion. It is an expressionist picture, in other words,
and yet not quite, not altogether. The implied circle of the arms also recalls
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
other, cooler considerations: a compass; a clock; or the studied analysis of
form in Leonardo's famous drawing "Human Figure in a Circle, Illustrating
Proportions Vitruvian Man)," which in itself recalls a crucifixion.
Diver is Johns at his warmest, that is, most willing to let tragedy show
itself without the interference of learning or wit. On the colder side of Johns
is the catlike detachment and the sporting intellect, most obvious in the irony
and the obscure references of the imagery. But the chill can also be sensed in
the planned, boxed-in character of many of his pictures. johns loves the
workings of chance; but like Cage, he generally provides a strict structure in
which chance is allowed to operate. He is not totally loose. In a later version
of an image, he may carefully copy a fortuitous drip or a squiggle that was
originally happen-stance. He possesses play, he co-opts chance. That spontaneous
little squiggle is reincarnated as an idea. Such oppositions enable Johns to
convey a certain kind of pathos particularly well. Because he is such a tactile
painter, the inability to finally possess, to hold, often becomes genuinely
moving. His numbers and letters are not merely abstract symbols, for example;
they convey an almost living presence, as if they were real and touchable. They
aspire to the physical in the way that some objects in early still-life
painting-say, a Zurbaran lemon-seem to aspire to the metaphysical. In a world
that grows increasingly abstract, Johns understands better than most the
melancholy aura of representations.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
The oppositions in Johns have also enabled him to become one of those
artists able to fashion a synthesis, if not a reconciliation, among competing
traditions. In the catalog Rosenthal observes about one particular picture that
it combines references to both Picasso and Duchamp. In fact, Johns's entire
oeuvre sometimes seems like an effort to find a way to get both spirits into the
same frame, to arrive at an art that respects the ironic intelligence of a dandy
and the immediate physical apprehension of feeling that is characteristic of
abstract expressionism, to fashion an art of painting that a man like Duchamp
would not consider embarrassingly old-fashioned or bourgeois.
The way that Johns plays with the principal strains of modernism, his
passion for elaboration and contradiction, his general air of learned
knowingness and interest in making fine points, are characteristic of an artist
working late in a tradition. He is the kind of intelligent artist whose calling
is to find a way to movements across the Chinese landscape from the late Ming to
1959. "Every word is blood and grief," wrote a Chinese poet in 1944.
What has been acquired in exchange for all this misery? Today the consensus
of Chinese outside officialdom is: nothing. "What Confucian culture has given us
over the past several thousand years is not a national spirit of enterprise, a
system of laws, or a mechanism of cultural renewal, but a fearsome self-killing
machine that, as it degenerated, constantly devoured its best and its
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
brightest, its own vital elements." So wrote the authors of "River Elegy," the
television serial, whose broadcast on Chinese television the year before last
helped to set the scene for the outpouring of anti-regime sentiment in the
spring of 1989.
The way in which Spence interprets the "search for modernity" implies that
he agrees with this tragic vision. He follows recent academic practice in
placing the beginning of the modern period 300 or more years further back than
the old conventional benchmark of the mid-nineteenth century. But instead of
stressing the secular rise over this time of agricultural productivity,
handicraft industry, commercialization, population, urbanization, literacy, and
social and geographic mobility, as other recent historians have done, Spence
points out that people's average levels of consumption were no higher in the
Qing than in the Ming, in the 1930s than in the nineteenth century, under Mao
than under Chiang Kai-shek.
He would concede (though he never says so) that China has made itself modern
in the sense that it produces computers and rockets, feeds a population of a
billion, educates most of its people, provides medical care sufficient to
establish a life expectancy of sixty-nine years, and participates in the
international economy and political system. He also gives full play to the
achievements of Chinese literature and art, statecraft and philosophy, and his
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
book is beautifully illustrated with examples of these achievements. But he
argues that China has not been modern in at least 400 years, in the sense of
being a nation "both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity
yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new
technologies, new ideas." The quest of his title is thus one in which he
believes the Chinese are still engaged, unsuccessfully.
The fact that Liu and Bette Bao Lord share Spence's despair is significant,
for particular reasons in each case. To Lord, China's tragedy is personal.
Herself of Chinese origin, with many friends and relatives there, she went to
China believing that it would be possible to reform the Party from within, and
hoping to promote "one of the most critical bilateral relationships in the
world." By the end of her hardworking tour of duty as the American ambassador's
wife, she had come to see the Chinese system as thoroughly brutal and corrupt.
Then, staying a few extra weeks in the spring of 1989 to help CBS News cover the
Gorbachev-Deng Xiaoping summit, she saw the ruins of Deng's reforms come
crashing down around her friends. A close cousin who stayed in China when Lord
emigrated with her parents in 1946 symbolizes Lord's sense of having escaped her
fair share of misery by leaving. Having enjoyed more than her share of luck, she
feels that she has abandoned her relatives to one of the hardest fates in this
world, the fate of being Chinese.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Liu's memoir marks the nearly complete disillusionment of one of China's
last hopeful men. Liu made his name as an investigative reporter exposing power
abuse and corruption in the decade after his rehabilitation in 1979 from the
stigma of being a "rightist." As a rightist, he lost his Party membership and
his job, and spent two long periods of forced labor in the countryside. After
his rehabilitation, his first-and still most famous-article was "People or
Monsters?" (It is available in English in a book with the same title edited by
Perry Link, published by Indiana University Press in 1983.) It argued that a
major corruption case in a commune in northeastern China occurred because
cliquism and mutual back-scratching had eroded the vigilance of the local Party
committee.
Liu's trademark answer to the problem, proposed in an essay in 1985, was "A
Second Kind of Loyalty." The first kind of loyalty was what had gotten China
into trouble, he said. It was the loyalty of those who are "diligent and
conscientious, putting up with hardship and swallowing their resentment, doing
exactly what they are told, never expressing a contradictory opinion." This
loyalty, into whose moribund cults the Li Peng regime is trying to puff a spark
of life today, allowed bad people to seize power and do their will.
The second kind of loyalty, however, would save China. Liu personified it in
two protagonists, Ni Yuxian and Chen Shizhong, who stood up for the true
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
ideals of socialism for twenty years, when those ideals were being trampled by
Mao and his acolytes. They wrote letters to oppose the Great Leap and the split
with the Soviet Union, hung wall posters to oppose the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution, and gave speeches to defend good cadres who were attacked by Red
Guards. But they never engaged in intrigue or violence or tried to evade their
inevitable punishments, and each of them spent years in jail. They played the
classic Chinese role of remonstrators, who sacrifice their flesh and blood in
order to awaken the ruler to his duty. Ironically, each subsequently diverged
from Liu's model, but in opposite ways. Ni obtained political asylum in New York
and helped found an exile party dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese Communist
Party. Chen went around China, at least before June 4 last year, giving speeches
on the topic, "I Offer the Love in My Heart to the Party and the People.")
Liu identified with Ni and Chen. His memoir was also going to be called "A
Second Kind of Loyalty," but the title was apparently revised to make more sense
to Americans. Liu portrays himself as telling the truth despite repression
because he believed that his appeals could awaken healthy forces in the Party.
He was never a dissident. As a reporter for the central Party paper, he was able
to conduct his investigations cloaked in the authority of the Party, publish his
works under the protection of the sympathetic General Secretary Hu Yaobang, and
make some of his reports not in writing to the public but orally to the relevant
provincial Party secretaries. Even after his expulsion from the Party in 1987
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for bourgeois liberalism after the fall of his protector Hu, he saw himself as a
sort of political Boddhisatva who postponed his relief from suffering to help
others reach salvation.
Although he doesn't use such terms, Liu inhabits a Confucian world divided
between moral persons (junzi) and people who are only human (xiaoren). For him,
the human problem is not to figure out what is the right thing to do, but to
make up one's mind to do it. A warm, compassionate, approachable man, he has an
endless appetite and memory for the details of individual lives, and a deep
understanding of human motives. But in the end he discerns, in the complexity of
the human comedy, only two kinds of people-those whose self-justifications are
excuses for selfishness, and those who sacrifice for justice.
Liu thus embodies what the historian Thomas A. Metzger has called the
"transformative" (as opposed to the accommodative") impulse in Chinese culture.
Like Confucius, Liu sees human nature as basically good and believes in changing
the world through the force of example. To borrow the title of another of his
essays, corruption in China occurs because "good people" are "weak." The events
of last year have brought him to the point of predicting the fall of the Li
Peng-Deng Xiaoping regime, which he sees as representing a small privileged
stratum of conservative bureaucrats rather than the Chinese Communist Party as a
whole. Although in " Tell the World " he suggests that a non-Communist
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democracy will emerge after an interregnum of rule by Party reformists, in
Higher Kind of Loyalty he appears still to hope that the Chinese Communist Party
will rediscover its soul and return to the path of its original ideals. However
ambivalently, Liu's second kind of loyalty is still loyalty.
Younger Chinese have criticized him for this all along. When he toured
American campuses in 1988, a student at Columbia confronted him with the example
of Fang Lizhi (the astrophysicist and human rights activist recently expelled
from the CCP and now in England after a year in refuge in the American Embassy
in Beijing), who had declared himself opposed to communism. Fang's stand is
based on the Western scientific viewpoint," she contended, "while yours is a
kind of peasant-based pro-Communist idealism which can never solve China's
fundamental problems." Many in the audience applauded. About a year later the
young critic Liu Xiaobo attacked Liu for believing that "someday the master the
CCP will wake up and appreciate his absolute sincerity because his criticisms
are not intended to hurt the master, but to make him more perfect." (Liu Xiaobo
is in jail now, accused of being a "sinister black hand" behind the Tiananmen
demonstrations.)
Liu has moved toward the harshest view of Chinese reality compatible with a
shred of faith in the goodness of man. He is a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, who
returned from twenty years of feeding pigs and hauling night soil to discover
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a world in which evil was pervasive and the few good people were viciously
oppressed. In one place that he investigated, "the so-called planned economy was
... nothing but the continuous how of public resources into the private pockets
of the power holders." In another, "the Party secretary could pick and choose
any girl from destitute families to sleep with him in return for food
subsidies." In a third, a petitioner for justice was repeatedly jailed and
tortured: "The children became vagrants, often beaten up, with no chance to go
to school; the family's ration of wheat and kindling wood was held back; their
house was destroyed." A fourth location as "a kingdom of evil.... a cursed land
where all values had been reversed." Throughout China, malefactors who had been
in power since the Cultural Revolution cooperated to protect one another, and
the reformists at the center, beset by forces only murkily hinted at by Liu,
were too weak to penetrate the web of evil. In all, says Liu, "China seemed like
a monstrous mill, continually rolling, crushing all individuality out of the
Chinese character."
A somewhat formulaic optimism informs the coda to A Higher Kind of Loyalty.
"The Chinese people have now changed," he asserts. "The people will pay a bloody
price, but in the end they will shake off this monstrous thing the ruling clique
that is draining them of their life's blood." (The language is typical of both
of Liu's books, which are more like political documents than personal
reflections, and which have been translated almost too faithfully from the
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Chinese.) Lord, too, ends with an obligatory upbeat ending, a parable of a
cover-let kept immaculate through years of prison. Spence's attempt to solace
his readers leads to a last sentence that is the only really ill-considered one
in his book: "There would be no truly modern China until the people were given
back their voices." His own narrative shows that the Chinese people never had
their voices.
Like Chernobyl, China seems to get worse the more we learn about it. Of
course, we need to beware of the phenomenon-Spence traces it well-by which the
Western image of China oscillates between exaggerated hopes and exaggerated
fears. If it was wrong to see Mao's China as a people's Shangri-La, it is also
wrong to imagine that in Li Peng's China most of the people spend most of their
time doing anything other than going about their daily business. Lord states
that "all Chinese are in pain," and I believe she is right, but what does a
people in pain look like? The kind of pain she is talking about does not show on
people's faces as they bicycle to work, any more than it did when travelers
reported that all was well in Mao's day. The truth about such a large country is
hard to discern. Still, the combined testimony of observers with such cumulative
and diverse authority is impressive.
Why are things so bad? "To understand China today," observes Spence, "we
need to know about China in the past." But what does the past tell us? Spence
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
devotes an informative section to Hegel's theory that China is doomed by
geography to be an inward-looking peasant nation excluded from the mainstream of
history, a theory widely accepted by Chinese today. But he does not seem to
endorse such grand generalizations. The pointers he gives involve more discrete
historical echoes, parallels, and precedents. The book points out that problems
such as bureaucracy, regionalism, peasant poverty, abuse of women, familism, and
the struggle for political power persisted or recurred, but does not try to
explain why. Spence is a brilliant storyteller, endlessly curious about how
things really were at the top and the bottom of society, on the plains and in
the borderlands, at weddings and wars, in the rice fields and the scholar's
studio. While the vast tapestry contains many patterns, however, he is chary of
stating what they are. If there are "cycles" of some sort at work, as he says
several times, are they any more than historical resemblances and coincidences
that are bound to occur as human folly grinds repeatedly through a finite number
of permutations?
Spence tends to explain violence as occurring mostly when "the Chinese
people...threw themselves against the power of the state." This is a comforting
vision. Yet his narrative contains plenty of instances of the violence of the
oppressed against one another. As one of his own witnesses says, "The poor
squeeze each other to death." There is also a trace of romanticism in the
sections on the Communist revolution and Mao's rule. Spence portrays Mao
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leading the country confidently in pursuit of his vision, however flawed. He
doesn't convey the constant bumbling, desperate insecurity, vicious infighting,
and hysterical improvisation that the Chinese Communists disguised behind the
bluster of their theory of scientific socialism.
Lord's answer to the violence of Chinese life is national character.
"Chinese go through life wearing masks," she says. The masks take over the
wearer, robbing him of his identity and inducing paranoia toward others. Able to
adapt to any circumstance, the Chinese "never bother asking themselves who they
are. They wait to be told." Under Mao, the Chinese were programmed to violence.
They took their turns as victims and perpetrators in a cycle that left no one
blameless and no one responsible. As one of her informants tells her, "It's over
now. It was not my fault. It was not his fault. Everyone suffered. It was the
times. We were all casualties of history."
Lord is a sensitive observer of human attitudes. One of the most delightful
sections of the book is a series of vignettes in which Chinese recount their
puzzling encounters in American society. But her well-meaning account of Chinese
culture boils down to an East Asian example of the "orientalism" criticized
years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our semblables and
freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a national
stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people behave
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as characteristics
that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why.
Liu Binyan's notion of a double network" of political and economic relations
created by the Cultural Revolution comes closer to illuminating the structure of
Chinese society. He sees the Cultural Revolution as a turmoil in which
opportunistic politicians scrambled to power. Once there, they stayed through
all the twists and turns of the line. As veterans of three dynasties," they had
an overweening interest in keeping down all those whom they had oppressed on
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
their way up. "To a Party leader, it is a matter of life and death always to be
right." The protective network extended from the counties at the bottom of
China's administrative hierarchy to the top. At each level politicians protected
those below so that they could in turn be protected. The CCP turned into a giant
Mafia.
One of the saddest cases of oppression that Liu describes is that of a
worker named Wang Fumian, whom Liu was finally unable to help because he was
expelled from the Party before his report on the case could be acted upon. In
the course of investigating Wang's case, Liu discovered that Wang had been
confined to a mental hospital on a diagnosis of "mania." According to the
diagnostic handbook locally in use, mania was characterized by the "orientalism"
criticized years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our
semblables and freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a
national stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people
behave savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as
characteristics that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why. overconfidence,
extreme willfulness, found mostly in people of advanced cultural background.
They are biased and tend to distort facts, although their delusions are not
wholly divorced from reality. Taken for normal at an early age, the patient
gradually asserts his (her) willpower more and more forcibly, he (she) rushes
about offering petitions, writing endless letters of accusation. A few are
deluded into thinking they are making exceptional contributions to humanity.
It was a perfect description of Liu himself The only mystery is how, under
such circumstances, a few independent individuals like Liu and the stubborn
petitioners he wrote about could continue to exist.
On the whole, Liu's analysis is convincing, except that he is unclear about
many of the details. He seems to be protecting some people himself, as he refers
from time to time to higher-ups who were spiking his work from behind the
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
scenes but does not tell us who they were. (Or did he wish to spare American
readers a surfeit of names filled with Xs and Zs engaged in intricate political
struggles?) And Liu's tendency to judge persons rather than the system diverts
attention from the question of how such things could happen. Is it because evil
people are stronger than good people, as he suggests? Or does it have something
to do with the design of Chinese institutions?
As Norbert Elias has written, describing the descent into savagery of German
troops in the Baltics in the late days of World War I: The path toward barbarity
and dehumanization ... always Lakes considerable time to unfold in relatively
civilized societies. Terror and horror hardly appear in such societies without a
long process of social disintegration. All too often the act of naked violence
... is analyzed with the help of short-term, static explanations. That may be
meaningful if one is not seeking explanations but only attempting to establish
culpability. It is easy to see barbarism and de-civilizations as the expression
of a free personal decision, but that kind of voluntarist explanation is shallow
and unhelpful.
In their approach to the problem of violence, Lipman and Harrell and their
contributors move in the direction that Elias recommends by looking at the
failure of the norms that are supposed to prohibit violence. The best chapter is
Anne F Thurston's account of urban violence during the Cultural Revolution
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(drawing from her longer study, Enemies of the People, which appeared in 1987).
She directs attention to the processes that strip away inhibitions to violence
by dehumanizing the target. In Mao's China, such processes included the labeling
of class enemies, glorification of the necessity of revolutionary violence,
public struggle sessions that inured people to the sight of suffering, and peer
pressure based on the practice of victimizing all who refused to victimize
others.
The most penetrating exposition of this constellation of institutions is
Lynn T White III's, whose arguments are summarized in a paragraph by Spence.
White stresses the role of three interlocking institutions, each found in fully
developed form nowhere but in Mao's China: the work unit, the system of class
labels, and the political campaign. The work unit locked each individual in
place for life with a set of co-workers like scorpions in ajar; the class label
system created what were thought to be permanent castes (they have since
disappeared) with contrary interests, and with members of the despised castes
seen as sub-human; political campaigns trained people to be vicious. White
traces the creation of these institutions in Shanghai in the 1950s and 1960s and
then their impact on the course of Shanghai's Cultural Revolution.
How the personalities of young Chinese were shaped by class labels, units,
and campaigns has been brilliantly described by Anita Chan in Children of Mao:
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Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation,
which appeared in 1985. Chan showed that a combination of indoctrination,
competition for approval, and fear of victimization forged decent young people
into Manichaean bigots. Liu provides powerful testimony about how it felt to be
one of the victims in this system, isolated, assaulted, and humiliated until
even a person with his powerful sense of individuality felt guilty for crimes he
had not committed.
Doleful as such explanations are, at least they remove the Chinese from the
ghetto of the inscrutable and show how normal human beings can be reduced to
marauders. Authors like Thurston, White, and Chan are able to return China to
the mainstream of history from which Hegel excluded it, even though the history
that China rejoins (so far) is that of Stalinism and fascism rather than the
Hegelian progress to freedom. The institutions that created violence in the
period of the Cultural Revolution were creations of Mao's China. They cannot
explain the upheavals of the preceding hundreds of years. (In fact, no one has
yet explained how and why Mao's people invented these institutions.) But studies
like these point the way to deciphering the mystery of extreme violence through
the analysis of social settings that rob people of human connections to their
victims.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
If these are the lessons from China's modern history, they are not very
encouraging. One wonders whether even the mordant Lu Xun was too u beat when he
said, as quoted by Spence , "The history of mankind's battle forward through
bloodshed is like the formation of coal, where a great deal of wood is needed to
produce a small amount of coal." Much human wood lies under the ground of
Chinese history, but how much coal?
ANDREW J. NATHAN is the author of China's Crisis and co-author of Human
Rights in Contemporary China, both published by Columbia University Press.
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The New Republic
July 30, 1990
SECTION: Vol. 203 ; No. 5-6 ; Pg. 30; ISSN: 0028-6583
LENGTH: 5921 words
HEADLINE: "Tell the World": What Happened in China and Why._book reviews
BYLINE: Nathan, Andrew J.
BODY:
No better proof could be imagined for Nietzsche's insight that cruelty is
the great festival pleasure of mankind than the torment inflicted by the Chinese
people on one another for the last 400 years. Jonathan Spence's history of that
period is filled with burying alive, burning alive, slicing, strangulation,
stabbing, drowning, poison gas inserted into tunnels, coerced suicide, exposure
of severed heads, vengeful exhumation and dismemberment of corpses, arson,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
rapine, torture, corruption, epidemic, famine, forced migrations, wars, riots,
strikes, rebellions, and piracy. The first three pages of Liu Binyan's memoir, A
Higher Kind of Loyalty, recount an assassination by bombing, a child killed in a
car accident, a murder, an execution, the death of a young brother from scarlet
fever, and a daily parade of carts filled with beggars' corpses. Bette Bao
Lord's snapshots from the lives of Chinese friends include beatings by Red
Guards, a wife denouncing a husband, a nursing infant denied breast milk, an ear
torn off, a thumb broken, and a head whacked in half by the stroke of a scythe.
"Why does a culture that condemns violence," asks Stevan Harrell, "that
plays down the glory of military exploits, awards its highest prestige to
literary, rather than martial figures, and seeks harmony over all other values,
in fact display such frequency and variety of violent behavior?"
It would be difficult but unnecessary to prove that China's history is
sadder than that of other countries on a per capital basis. If nothing else, the
scale of horror is unique in this largest of all nations. Nearly twenty years
ago Richard L. Walker, in a study for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee,
estimated that the "human cost of communism in China" after 1949 ranged from 32
million to 60 million deaths. Walker's estimates were rough, but also
incomplete. He did not include the 20 million to 30 million famine deaths in
1959-61 that scholars learned about relatively recently, nor could he touch on
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the revival of female infanticide since the late 1970s, which has claimed what
Spence estimates at 200,000 lives a year.
And such costs include only deaths. They do not include the 1 million people
who Liu says were labeled "rightists" in 1957 and punished for up to twenty
years (an increase over the usual estimate of 550,000); or the 20 million young
people who, with another 20 million factory workers, were "sent down" to the
countryside in the Mao years to get them out of the cities; or the 20 million
landlords, rich peasants, and others given discriminatory class labels in the
early 1950s; or the 2.9 million cadres who Deng Xiaoping said were mistreated in
the Cultural Revolution, or the 100 million persons who Hu Yaobang estimated
were affected in one way or another by that cataclysm.
No one has been able to estimate the population of the Chinese gulag,
although Senator Jesse Helms reportedly intends to hold hearings to try. Superb
studies by Robin Munro for Amnesty International and Asia Watch, based on
reports in the Chinese press, have detailed routine torture and mistreatment of
prisoners in Chinese detention centers, jails, and camps, but it is hopeless to
estimate the scale of abuse when the prison population itself is unknown.
Christina Gilmartin's essay in Violence in China, together with some anecdotes
from Liu's career as an investigative reporter, scratch the surface of the vast
subject of sexual abuse in Chinese jails, camps, offices, farms, factories,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
and families, but again the data defy attempts at quantification.
Nor have the costs paid by the Chinese been limited to the period of
communism. Twenty million died during the Taiping rebellion in the
mid-nineteenth century, ten million in a famine in the 1870s, half a million in
a famine in the 1920s. Spence reports that about 14 million men were drafted
into the Chinese military during the war against Japan; a tenth of them died of
disease and malnutrition before seeing combat. One of the fine features of his
book is an endless series of small maps showing troop unsettle the paintings;
they are after-thoughts, additions, revisions, a way of refusing closure. Once
Johns has painted a picture it, too, becomes a thing "the mind already knows,"
and fair game for his exercises of doubt. His paintings are frequently
reconsidered in other ways and other media. One cannot say something about
Johns, therefore, without also saying something else.
Most of Johns's recurring imagery-flags, targets, maps, crosshatch forms,
borrowings from earlier artists, work from his seasons series-is on display in
Washington. The catalog clearly explains the import and the evolution of the
iconography and technique; that, for example, the older Johns less often selects
immediately recognizable images from mass culture and that he uses color in a
more varied way. But the impression left by the show is one less of evolution
than of never letting go, of an anxious continuity of interest, of an artist
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
coiling back even as he moves ahead.
The iconographic variations are paralleled by the constant experiments with
craft and medium. The show displays an extraordinary array of techniques-among
others, pencil, charcoal, silverpoint, crayon, oil on paper and ink on plastic.
(These last, most of them executed during the past decade, are gorgeous,
light-filled works.) The craft is enjoyed for its own sake, but it is not merely
an attempt at virtuosity. By observing old images through many different lenses,
Johns helps create a sense of a world that, despite certain landmarks, is
constantly in flux, a matter always of the shifting moment or the character of
the means at hand.
At times Johns's playfulness seems mannered and self-conscious, yet he is
not a trivial or an effete artist. The playfulness derives not from cleverness
or conceit, but from deep divisions in a passionate sensibility. Perhaps the
artist keeps playing, keeps rearranging his fragments, because that is the only
way to express things that cannot be reconciled. One could not say, for example,
that Johns is either a warm artist or a cold artist. He is both at once. On the
warm side is the expressionist moodiness that often erupts onto his surfaces,
and the sensual character of his brush stroke, which is reminiscent of Guston's.
(John Cage once said of his friend's work that "looking closely helps, though
the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in love.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
") The opening rooms of the exhibition are rich in beautifully worked,
melancholy blacks, and Johns's later art makes admiring (and somewhat opaque)
reference to the art of Munch, Grunewald, and the wilder Picasso.
Certainly the most powerful image is a large picture called Diver, from
1963. Rosenthal describes this monumental drawing, which may make reference to
Hart Crane's manner of suicide (leaping off the stern of a ship), as "the
diagram of a diver in various stages of a swan dive." At the drawing's upper
edge are footprints, placed on a long rectangular form that evokes a diving
board. Two sets of handprints on either end of two panels suggest the diver's
arms. A circular sweep of line comes from the handprints at the bottom of the
picture, reminiscent of a diver flaring out his arms in preparation for the
dive. "Deep blacks and muted grays blend to suggest the depths of a nocturnal
sea," says Rosenthal, "while the white pastel passages in the lower center call
to mind a diver's splash."
The inky imprints of hand and foot have a ghostly immediacy, like the
signature of a dead man. The spaces seem poised on the edge of balance; the
picture as a whole suggests that moment in a dive when one has just committed,
and there is no going back to balance or solidity. The world seems about to
upend, to spiral into oblivion. It is an expressionist picture, in other words,
and yet not quite, not altogether. The implied circle of the arms also recalls
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
other, cooler considerations: a compass; a clock; or the studied analysis of
form in Leonardo's famous drawing "Human Figure in a Circle, Illustrating
Proportions Vitruvian Man)," which in itself recalls a crucifixion.
Diver is Johns at his warmest, that is, most willing to let tragedy show
itself without the interference of learning or wit. On the colder side of Johns
is the catlike detachment and the sporting intellect, most obvious in the irony
and the obscure references of the imagery. But the chill can also be sensed in
the planned, boxed-in character of many of his pictures. johns loves the
workings of chance; but like Cage, he generally provides a strict structure in
which chance is allowed to operate. He is not totally loose. In a later version
of an image, he may carefully copy a fortuitous drip or a squiggle that was
originally happen-stance. He possesses play, he co-opts chance. That spontaneous
little squiggle is reincarnated as an idea. Such oppositions enable Johns to
convey a certain kind of pathos particularly well. Because he is such a tactile
painter, the inability to finally possess, to hold, often becomes genuinely
moving. His numbers and letters are not merely abstract symbols, for example;
they convey an almost living presence, as if they were real and touchable. They
aspire to the physical in the way that some objects in early still-life
painting-say, a Zurbaran lemon-seem to aspire to the metaphysical. In a world
that grows increasingly abstract, Johns understands better than most the
melancholy aura of representations.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
The oppositions in Johns have also enabled him to become one of those
artists able to fashion a synthesis, if not a reconciliation, among competing
traditions. In the catalog Rosenthal observes about one particular picture that
it combines references to both Picasso and Duchamp. In fact, Johns's entire
oeuvre sometimes seems like an effort to find a way to get both spirits into the
same frame, to arrive at an art that respects the ironic intelligence of a dandy
and the immediate physical apprehension of feeling that is characteristic of
abstract expressionism, to fashion an art of painting that a man like Duchamp
would not consider embarrassingly old-fashioned or bourgeois.
The way that Johns plays with the principal strains of modernism, his
passion for elaboration and contradiction, his general air of learned
knowingness and interest in making fine points, are characteristic of an artist
working late in a tradition. He is the kind of intelligent artist whose calling
is to find a way to movements across the Chinese landscape from the late Ming to
1959. "Every word is blood and grief," wrote a Chinese poet in 1944.
What has been acquired in exchange for all this misery? Today the consensus
of Chinese outside officialdom is: nothing. "What Confucian culture has given us
over the past several thousand years is not a national spirit of enterprise, a
system of laws, or a mechanism of cultural renewal, but a fearsome self-killing
machine that, as it degenerated, constantly devoured its best and its
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
brightest, its own vital elements." So wrote the authors of "River Elegy," the
television serial, whose broadcast on Chinese television the year before last
helped to set the scene for the outpouring of anti-regime sentiment in the
spring of 1989.
The way in which Spence interprets the "search for modernity" implies that
he agrees with this tragic vision. He follows recent academic practice in
placing the beginning of the modern period 300 or more years further back than
the old conventional benchmark of the mid-nineteenth century. But instead of
stressing the secular rise over this time of agricultural productivity,
handicraft industry, commercialization, population, urbanization, literacy, and
social and geographic mobility, as other recent historians have done, Spence
points out that people's average levels of consumption were no higher in the
Qing than in the Ming, in the 1930s than in the nineteenth century, under Mao
than under Chiang Kai-shek.
He would concede (though he never says so) that China has made itself modern
in the sense that it produces computers and rockets, feeds a population of a
billion, educates most of its people, provides medical care sufficient to
establish a life expectancy of sixty-nine years, and participates in the
international economy and political system. He also gives full play to the
achievements of Chinese literature and art, statecraft and philosophy, and his
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
book is beautifully illustrated with examples of these achievements. But he
argues that China has not been modern in at least 400 years, in the sense of
being a nation "both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity
yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new
technologies, new ideas." The quest of his title is thus one in which he
believes the Chinese are still engaged, unsuccessfully.
The fact that Liu and Bette Bao Lord share Spence's despair is significant,
for particular reasons in each case. To Lord, China's tragedy is personal.
Herself of Chinese origin, with many friends and relatives there, she went to
China believing that it would be possible to reform the Party from within, and
hoping to promote "one of the most critical bilateral relationships in the
world." By the end of her hardworking tour of duty as the American ambassador's
wife, she had come to see the Chinese system as thoroughly brutal and corrupt.
Then, staying a few extra weeks in the spring of 1989 to help CBS News cover the
Gorbachev-Deng Xiaoping summit, she saw the ruins of Deng's reforms come
crashing down around her friends. A close cousin who stayed in China when Lord
emigrated with her parents in 1946 symbolizes Lord's sense of having escaped her
fair share of misery by leaving. Having enjoyed more than her share of luck, she
feels that she has abandoned her relatives to one of the hardest fates in this
world, the fate of being Chinese.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Liu's memoir marks the nearly complete disillusionment of one of China's
last hopeful men. Liu made his name as an investigative reporter exposing power
abuse and corruption in the decade after his rehabilitation in 1979 from the
stigma of being a "rightist." As a rightist, he lost his Party membership and
his job, and spent two long periods of forced labor in the countryside. After
his rehabilitation, his first-and still most famous-article was "People or
Monsters?" (It is available in English in a book with the same title edited by
Perry Link, published by Indiana University Press in 1983.) It argued that a
major corruption case in a commune in northeastern China occurred because
cliquism and mutual back-scratching had eroded the vigilance of the local Party
committee.
Liu's trademark answer to the problem, proposed in an essay in 1985, was "A
Second Kind of Loyalty." The first kind of loyalty was what had gotten China
into trouble, he said. It was the loyalty of those who are "diligent and
conscientious, putting up with hardship and swallowing their resentment, doing
exactly what they are told, never expressing a contradictory opinion." This
loyalty, into whose moribund cults the Li Peng regime is trying to puff a spark
of life today, allowed bad people to seize power and do their will.
The second kind of loyalty, however, would save China. Liu personified it in
two protagonists, Ni Yuxian and Chen Shizhong, who stood up for the true
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
ideals of socialism for twenty years, when those ideals were being trampled by
Mao and his acolytes. They wrote letters to oppose the Great Leap and the split
with the Soviet Union, hung wall posters to oppose the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution, and gave speeches to defend good cadres who were attacked by Red
Guards. But they never engaged in intrigue or violence or tried to evade their
inevitable punishments, and each of them spent years in jail. They played the
classic Chinese role of remonstrators, who sacrifice their flesh and blood in
order to awaken the ruler to his duty. Ironically, each subsequently diverged
from Liu's model, but in opposite ways. Ni obtained political asylum in New York
and helped found an exile party dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese Communist
Party. Chen went around China, at least before June 4 last year, giving speeches
on the topic, "I Offer the Love in My Heart to the Party and the People.")
Liu identified with Ni and Chen. His memoir was also going to be called "A
Second Kind of Loyalty," but the title was apparently revised to make more sense
to Americans. Liu portrays himself as telling the truth despite repression
because he believed that his appeals could awaken healthy forces in the Party.
He was never a dissident. As a reporter for the central Party paper, he was able
to conduct his investigations cloaked in the authority of the Party, publish his
works under the protection of the sympathetic General Secretary Hu Yaobang, and
make some of his reports not in writing to the public but orally to the relevant
provincial Party secretaries. Even after his expulsion from the Party in 1987
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for bourgeois liberalism after the fall of his protector Hu, he saw himself as a
sort of political Boddhisatva who postponed his relief from suffering to help
others reach salvation.
Although he doesn't use such terms, Liu inhabits a Confucian world divided
between moral persons (junzi) and people who are only human (xiaoren). For him,
the human problem is not to figure out what is the right thing to do, but to
make up one's mind to do it. A warm, compassionate, approachable man, he has an
endless appetite and memory for the details of individual lives, and a deep
understanding of human motives. But in the end he discerns, in the complexity of
the human comedy, only two kinds of people-those whose self-justifications are
excuses for selfishness, and those who sacrifice for justice.
Liu thus embodies what the historian Thomas A. Metzger has called the
"transformative" (as opposed to the accommodative") impulse in Chinese culture.
Like Confucius, Liu sees human nature as basically good and believes in changing
the world through the force of example. To borrow the title of another of his
essays, corruption in China occurs because "good people" are "weak." The events
of last year have brought him to the point of predicting the fall of the Li
Peng-Deng Xiaoping regime, which he sees as representing a small privileged
stratum of conservative bureaucrats rather than the Chinese Communist Party as a
whole. Although in " Tell the World " he suggests that a non-Communist
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
democracy will emerge after an interregnum of rule by Party reformists, in
Higher Kind of Loyalty he appears still to hope that the Chinese Communist Party
will rediscover its soul and return to the path of its original ideals. However
ambivalently, Liu's second kind of loyalty is still loyalty.
Younger Chinese have criticized him for this all along. When he toured
American campuses in 1988, a student at Columbia confronted him with the example
of Fang Lizhi (the astrophysicist and human rights activist recently expelled
from the CCP and now in England after a year in refuge in the American Embassy
in Beijing), who had declared himself opposed to communism. Fang's stand is
based on the Western scientific viewpoint," she contended, "while yours is a
kind of peasant-based pro-Communist idealism which can never solve China's
fundamental problems." Many in the audience applauded. About a year later the
young critic Liu Xiaobo attacked Liu for believing that "someday the master the
CCP will wake up and appreciate his absolute sincerity because his criticisms
are not intended to hurt the master, but to make him more perfect." (Liu Xiaobo
is in jail now, accused of being a "sinister black hand" behind the Tiananmen
demonstrations.)
Liu has moved toward the harshest view of Chinese reality compatible with a
shred of faith in the goodness of man. He is a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, who
returned from twenty years of feeding pigs and hauling night soil to discover
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a world in which evil was pervasive and the few good people were viciously
oppressed. In one place that he investigated, "the so-called planned economy was
... nothing but the continuous how of public resources into the private pockets
of the power holders." In another, "the Party secretary could pick and choose
any girl from destitute families to sleep with him in return for food
subsidies." In a third, a petitioner for justice was repeatedly jailed and
tortured: "The children became vagrants, often beaten up, with no chance to go
to school; the family's ration of wheat and kindling wood was held back; their
house was destroyed." A fourth location as "a kingdom of evil.... a cursed land
where all values had been reversed." Throughout China, malefactors who had been
in power since the Cultural Revolution cooperated to protect one another, and
the reformists at the center, beset by forces only murkily hinted at by Liu,
were too weak to penetrate the web of evil. In all, says Liu, "China seemed like
a monstrous mill, continually rolling, crushing all individuality out of the
Chinese character."
A somewhat formulaic optimism informs the coda to A Higher Kind of Loyalty.
"The Chinese people have now changed," he asserts. "The people will pay a bloody
price, but in the end they will shake off this monstrous thing the ruling clique
that is draining them of their life's blood." (The language is typical of both
of Liu's books, which are more like political documents than personal
reflections, and which have been translated almost too faithfully from the
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Chinese.) Lord, too, ends with an obligatory upbeat ending, a parable of a
cover-let kept immaculate through years of prison. Spence's attempt to solace
his readers leads to a last sentence that is the only really ill-considered one
in his book: "There would be no truly modern China until the people were given
back their voices." His own narrative shows that the Chinese people never had
their voices.
Like Chernobyl, China seems to get worse the more we learn about it. Of
course, we need to beware of the phenomenon-Spence traces it well-by which the
Western image of China oscillates between exaggerated hopes and exaggerated
fears. If it was wrong to see Mao's China as a people's Shangri-La, it is also
wrong to imagine that in Li Peng's China most of the people spend most of their
time doing anything other than going about their daily business. Lord states
that "all Chinese are in pain," and I believe she is right, but what does a
people in pain look like? The kind of pain she is talking about does not show on
people's faces as they bicycle to work, any more than it did when travelers
reported that all was well in Mao's day. The truth about such a large country is
hard to discern. Still, the combined testimony of observers with such cumulative
and diverse authority is impressive.
Why are things so bad? "To understand China today," observes Spence, "we
need to know about China in the past." But what does the past tell us? Spence
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
devotes an informative section to Hegel's theory that China is doomed by
geography to be an inward-looking peasant nation excluded from the mainstream of
history, a theory widely accepted by Chinese today. But he does not seem to
endorse such grand generalizations. The pointers he gives involve more discrete
historical echoes, parallels, and precedents. The book points out that problems
such as bureaucracy, regionalism, peasant poverty, abuse of women, familism, and
the struggle for political power persisted or recurred, but does not try to
explain why. Spence is a brilliant storyteller, endlessly curious about how
things really were at the top and the bottom of society, on the plains and in
the borderlands, at weddings and wars, in the rice fields and the scholar's
studio. While the vast tapestry contains many patterns, however, he is chary of
stating what they are. If there are "cycles" of some sort at work, as he says
several times, are they any more than historical resemblances and coincidences
that are bound to occur as human folly grinds repeatedly through a finite number
of permutations?
Spence tends to explain violence as occurring mostly when "the Chinese
people...threw themselves against the power of the state." This is a comforting
vision. Yet his narrative contains plenty of instances of the violence of the
oppressed against one another. As one of his own witnesses says, "The poor
squeeze each other to death." There is also a trace of romanticism in the
sections on the Communist revolution and Mao's rule. Spence portrays Mao
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
leading the country confidently in pursuit of his vision, however flawed. He
doesn't convey the constant bumbling, desperate insecurity, vicious infighting,
and hysterical improvisation that the Chinese Communists disguised behind the
bluster of their theory of scientific socialism.
Lord's answer to the violence of Chinese life is national character.
"Chinese go through life wearing masks," she says. The masks take over the
wearer, robbing him of his identity and inducing paranoia toward others. Able to
adapt to any circumstance, the Chinese "never bother asking themselves who they
are. They wait to be told." Under Mao, the Chinese were programmed to violence.
They took their turns as victims and perpetrators in a cycle that left no one
blameless and no one responsible. As one of her informants tells her, "It's over
now. It was not my fault. It was not his fault. Everyone suffered. It was the
times. We were all casualties of history."
Lord is a sensitive observer of human attitudes. One of the most delightful
sections of the book is a series of vignettes in which Chinese recount their
puzzling encounters in American society. But her well-meaning account of Chinese
culture boils down to an East Asian example of the "orientalism" criticized
years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our semblables and
freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a national
stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people behave
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as characteristics
that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why.
Liu Binyan's notion of a double network" of political and economic relations
created by the Cultural Revolution comes closer to illuminating the structure of
Chinese society. He sees the Cultural Revolution as a turmoil in which
opportunistic politicians scrambled to power. Once there, they stayed through
all the twists and turns of the line. As veterans of three dynasties," they had
an overweening interest in keeping down all those whom they had oppressed on
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
their way up. "To a Party leader, it is a matter of life and death always to be
right." The protective network extended from the counties at the bottom of
China's administrative hierarchy to the top. At each level politicians protected
those below so that they could in turn be protected. The CCP turned into a giant
Mafia.
One of the saddest cases of oppression that Liu describes is that of a
worker named Wang Fumian, whom Liu was finally unable to help because he was
expelled from the Party before his report on the case could be acted upon. In
the course of investigating Wang's case, Liu discovered that Wang had been
confined to a mental hospital on a diagnosis of "mania." According to the
diagnostic handbook locally in use, mania was characterized by the "orientalism"
criticized years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our
semblables and freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a
national stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people
behave savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as
characteristics that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why. overconfidence,
extreme willfulness, found mostly in people of advanced cultural background.
They are biased and tend to distort facts, although their delusions are not
wholly divorced from reality. Taken for normal at an early age, the patient
gradually asserts his (her) willpower more and more forcibly, he (she) rushes
about offering petitions, writing endless letters of accusation. A few are
deluded into thinking they are making exceptional contributions to humanity.
It was a perfect description of Liu himself The only mystery is how, under
such circumstances, a few independent individuals like Liu and the stubborn
petitioners he wrote about could continue to exist.
On the whole, Liu's analysis is convincing, except that he is unclear about
many of the details. He seems to be protecting some people himself, as he refers
from time to time to higher-ups who were spiking his work from behind the
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
scenes but does not tell us who they were. (Or did he wish to spare American
readers a surfeit of names filled with Xs and Zs engaged in intricate political
struggles?) And Liu's tendency to judge persons rather than the system diverts
attention from the question of how such things could happen. Is it because evil
people are stronger than good people, as he suggests? Or does it have something
to do with the design of Chinese institutions?
As Norbert Elias has written, describing the descent into savagery of German
troops in the Baltics in the late days of World War I: The path toward barbarity
and dehumanization ... always Lakes considerable time to unfold in relatively
civilized societies. Terror and horror hardly appear in such societies without a
long process of social disintegration. All too often the act of naked violence
... is analyzed with the help of short-term, static explanations. That may be
meaningful if one is not seeking explanations but only attempting to establish
culpability. It is easy to see barbarism and de-civilizations as the expression
of a free personal decision, but that kind of voluntarist explanation is shallow
and unhelpful.
In their approach to the problem of violence, Lipman and Harrell and their
contributors move in the direction that Elias recommends by looking at the
failure of the norms that are supposed to prohibit violence. The best chapter is
Anne F Thurston's account of urban violence during the Cultural Revolution
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
(drawing from her longer study, Enemies of the People, which appeared in 1987).
She directs attention to the processes that strip away inhibitions to violence
by dehumanizing the target. In Mao's China, such processes included the labeling
of class enemies, glorification of the necessity of revolutionary violence,
public struggle sessions that inured people to the sight of suffering, and peer
pressure based on the practice of victimizing all who refused to victimize
others.
The most penetrating exposition of this constellation of institutions is
Lynn T White III's, whose arguments are summarized in a paragraph by Spence.
White stresses the role of three interlocking institutions, each found in fully
developed form nowhere but in Mao's China: the work unit, the system of class
labels, and the political campaign. The work unit locked each individual in
place for life with a set of co-workers like scorpions in ajar; the class label
system created what were thought to be permanent castes (they have since
disappeared) with contrary interests, and with members of the despised castes
seen as sub-human; political campaigns trained people to be vicious. White
traces the creation of these institutions in Shanghai in the 1950s and 1960s and
then their impact on the course of Shanghai's Cultural Revolution.
How the personalities of young Chinese were shaped by class labels, units,
and campaigns has been brilliantly described by Anita Chan in Children of Mao:
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Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation,
which appeared in 1985. Chan showed that a combination of indoctrination,
competition for approval, and fear of victimization forged decent young people
into Manichaean bigots. Liu provides powerful testimony about how it felt to be
one of the victims in this system, isolated, assaulted, and humiliated until
even a person with his powerful sense of individuality felt guilty for crimes he
had not committed.
Doleful as such explanations are, at least they remove the Chinese from the
ghetto of the inscrutable and show how normal human beings can be reduced to
marauders. Authors like Thurston, White, and Chan are able to return China to
the mainstream of history from which Hegel excluded it, even though the history
that China rejoins (so far) is that of Stalinism and fascism rather than the
Hegelian progress to freedom. The institutions that created violence in the
period of the Cultural Revolution were creations of Mao's China. They cannot
explain the upheavals of the preceding hundreds of years. (In fact, no one has
yet explained how and why Mao's people invented these institutions.) But studies
like these point the way to deciphering the mystery of extreme violence through
the analysis of social settings that rob people of human connections to their
victims.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
If these are the lessons from China's modern history, they are not very
encouraging. One wonders whether even the mordant Lu Xun was too u beat when he
said, as quoted by Spence , "The history of mankind's battle forward through
bloodshed is like the formation of coal, where a great deal of wood is needed to
produce a small amount of coal." Much human wood lies under the ground of
Chinese history, but how much coal?
ANDREW J. NATHAN is the author of China's Crisis and co-author of Human
Rights in Contemporary China, both published by Columbia University Press.
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The New Republic
July 30, 1990
SECTION: Vol. 203 ; No. 5-6 ; Pg. 30; ISSN: 0028-6583
LENGTH: 5921 words
HEADLINE: The Search for Modern China._book reviews
BYLINE: Nathan, Andrew J.
BODY:
No better proof could be imagined for Nietzsche's insight that cruelty is
the great festival pleasure of mankind than the torment inflicted by the Chinese
people on one another for the last 400 years. Jonathan Spence's history of that
period is filled with burying alive, burning alive, slicing, strangulation,
stabbing, drowning, poison gas inserted into tunnels, coerced suicide, exposure
of severed heads, vengeful exhumation and dismemberment of corpses, arson,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
rapine, torture, corruption, epidemic, famine, forced migrations, wars, riots,
strikes, rebellions, and piracy. The first three pages of Liu Binyan's memoir, A
Higher Kind of Loyalty, recount an assassination by bombing, a child killed in a
car accident, a murder, an execution, the death of a young brother from scarlet
fever, and a daily parade of carts filled with beggars' corpses. Bette Bao
Lord's snapshots from the lives of Chinese friends include beatings by Red
Guards, a wife denouncing a husband, a nursing infant denied breast milk, an ear
torn off, a thumb broken, and a head whacked in half by the stroke of a scythe.
"Why does a culture that condemns violence," asks Stevan Harrell, "that
plays down the glory of military exploits, awards its highest prestige to
literary, rather than martial figures, and seeks harmony over all other values,
in fact display such frequency and variety of violent behavior?"
It would be difficult but unnecessary to prove that China's history is
sadder than that of other countries on a per capital basis. If nothing else, the
scale of horror is unique in this largest of all nations. Nearly twenty years
ago Richard L. Walker, in a study for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee,
estimated that the "human cost of communism in China" after 1949 ranged from 32
million to 60 million deaths. Walker's estimates were rough, but also
incomplete. He did not include the 20 million to 30 million famine deaths in
1959-61 that scholars learned about relatively recently, nor could he touch on
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
the revival of female infanticide since the late 1970s, which has claimed what
Spence estimates at 200,000 lives a year.
And such costs include only deaths. They do not include the 1 million people
who Liu says were labeled "rightists" in 1957 and punished for up to twenty
years (an increase over the usual estimate of 550,000); or the 20 million young
people who, with another 20 million factory workers, were "sent down" to the
countryside in the Mao years to get them out of the cities; or the 20 million
landlords, rich peasants, and others given discriminatory class labels in the
early 1950s; or the 2.9 million cadres who Deng Xiaoping said were mistreated in
the Cultural Revolution, or the 100 million persons who Hu Yaobang estimated
were affected in one way or another by that cataclysm.
No one has been able to estimate the population of the Chinese gulag,
although Senator Jesse Helms reportedly intends to hold hearings to try. Superb
studies by Robin Munro for Amnesty International and Asia Watch, based on
reports in the Chinese press, have detailed routine torture and mistreatment of
prisoners in Chinese detention centers, jails, and camps, but it is hopeless to
estimate the scale of abuse when the prison population itself is unknown.
Christina Gilmartin's essay in Violence in China, together with some anecdotes
from Liu's career as an investigative reporter, scratch the surface of the vast
subject of sexual abuse in Chinese jails, camps, offices, farms, factories,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
and families, but again the data defy attempts at quantification.
Nor have the costs paid by the Chinese been limited to the period of
communism. Twenty million died during the Taiping rebellion in the
mid-nineteenth century, ten million in a famine in the 1870s, half a million in
a famine in the 1920s. Spence reports that about 14 million men were drafted
into the Chinese military during the war against Japan; a tenth of them died of
disease and malnutrition before seeing combat. One of the fine features of his
book is an endless series of small maps showing troop unsettle the paintings;
they are after-thoughts, additions, revisions, a way of refusing closure. Once
Johns has painted a picture it, too, becomes a thing "the mind already knows,"
and fair game for his exercises of doubt. His paintings are frequently
reconsidered in other ways and other media. One cannot say something about
Johns, therefore, without also saying something else.
Most of Johns's recurring imagery-flags, targets, maps, crosshatch forms,
borrowings from earlier artists, work from his seasons series-is on display in
Washington. The catalog clearly explains the import and the evolution of the
iconography and technique; that, for example, the older Johns less often selects
immediately recognizable images from mass culture and that he uses color in a
more varied way. But the impression left by the show is one less of evolution
than of never letting go, of an anxious continuity of interest, of an artist
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
coiling back even as he moves ahead.
The iconographic variations are paralleled by the constant experiments with
craft and medium. The show displays an extraordinary array of techniques-among
others, pencil, charcoal, silverpoint, crayon, oil on paper and ink on plastic.
(These last, most of them executed during the past decade, are gorgeous,
light-filled works.) The craft is enjoyed for its own sake, but it is not merely
an attempt at virtuosity. By observing old images through many different lenses,
Johns helps create a sense of a world that, despite certain landmarks, is
constantly in flux, a matter always of the shifting moment or the character of
the means at hand.
At times Johns's playfulness seems mannered and self-conscious, yet he is
not a trivial or an effete artist. The playfulness derives not from cleverness
or conceit, but from deep divisions in a passionate sensibility. Perhaps the
artist keeps playing, keeps rearranging his fragments, because that is the only
way to express things that cannot be reconciled. One could not say, for example,
that Johns is either a warm artist or a cold artist. He is both at once. On the
warm side is the expressionist moodiness that often erupts onto his surfaces,
and the sensual character of his brush stroke, which is reminiscent of Guston's.
(John Cage once said of his friend's work that "looking closely helps, though
the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in love.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
") The opening rooms of the exhibition are rich in beautifully worked,
melancholy blacks, and Johns's later art makes admiring (and somewhat opaque)
reference to the art of Munch, Grunewald, and the wilder Picasso.
Certainly the most powerful image is a large picture called Diver, from
1963. Rosenthal describes this monumental drawing, which may make reference to
Hart Crane's manner of suicide (leaping off the stern of a ship), as "the
diagram of a diver in various stages of a swan dive." At the drawing's upper
edge are footprints, placed on a long rectangular form that evokes a diving
board. Two sets of handprints on either end of two panels suggest the diver's
arms. A circular sweep of line comes from the handprints at the bottom of the
picture, reminiscent of a diver flaring out his arms in preparation for the
dive. "Deep blacks and muted grays blend to suggest the depths of a nocturnal
sea," says Rosenthal, "while the white pastel passages in the lower center call
to mind a diver's splash."
The inky imprints of hand and foot have a ghostly immediacy, like the
signature of a dead man. The spaces seem poised on the edge of balance; the
picture as a whole suggests that moment in a dive when one has just committed,
and there is no going back to balance or solidity. The world seems about to
upend, to spiral into oblivion. It is an expressionist picture, in other words,
and yet not quite, not altogether. The implied circle of the arms also recalls
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
other, cooler considerations: a compass; a clock; or the studied analysis of
form in Leonardo's famous drawing "Human Figure in a Circle, Illustrating
Proportions Vitruvian Man)," which in itself recalls a crucifixion.
Diver is Johns at his warmest, that is, most willing to let tragedy show
itself without the interference of learning or wit. On the colder side of Johns
is the catlike detachment and the sporting intellect, most obvious in the irony
and the obscure references of the imagery. But the chill can also be sensed in
the planned, boxed-in character of many of his pictures. johns loves the
workings of chance; but like Cage, he generally provides a strict structure in
which chance is allowed to operate. He is not totally loose. In a later version
of an image, he may carefully copy a fortuitous drip or a squiggle that was
originally happen-stance. He possesses play, he co-opts chance. That spontaneous
little squiggle is reincarnated as an idea. Such oppositions enable Johns to
convey a certain kind of pathos particularly well. Because he is such a tactile
painter, the inability to finally possess, to hold, often becomes genuinely
moving. His numbers and letters are not merely abstract symbols, for example;
they convey an almost living presence, as if they were real and touchable. They
aspire to the physical in the way that some objects in early still-life
painting-say, a Zurbaran lemon-seem to aspire to the metaphysical. In a world
that grows increasingly abstract, Johns understands better than most the
melancholy aura of representations.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
The oppositions in Johns have also enabled him to become one of those
artists able to fashion a synthesis, if not a reconciliation, among competing
traditions. In the catalog Rosenthal observes about one particular picture that
it combines references to both Picasso and Duchamp. In fact, Johns's entire
oeuvre sometimes seems like an effort to find a way to get both spirits into the
same frame, to arrive at an art that respects the ironic intelligence of a dandy
and the immediate physical apprehension of feeling that is characteristic of
abstract expressionism, to fashion an art of painting that a man like Duchamp
would not consider embarrassingly old-fashioned or bourgeois.
The way that Johns plays with the principal strains of modernism, his
passion for elaboration and contradiction, his general air of learned
knowingness and interest in making fine points, are characteristic of an artist
working late in a tradition. He is the kind of intelligent artist whose calling
is to find a way to movements across the Chinese landscape from the late Ming to
1959. "Every word is blood and grief," wrote a Chinese poet in 1944.
What has been acquired in exchange for all this misery? Today the consensus
of Chinese outside officialdom is: nothing. "What Confucian culture has given us
over the past several thousand years is not a national spirit of enterprise, a
system of laws, or a mechanism of cultural renewal, but a fearsome self-killing
machine that, as it degenerated, constantly devoured its best and its
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
brightest, its own vital elements." So wrote the authors of "River Elegy," the
television serial, whose broadcast on Chinese television the year before last
helped to set the scene for the outpouring of anti-regime sentiment in the
spring of 1989.
The way in which Spence interprets the "search for modernity" implies that
he agrees with this tragic vision. He follows recent academic practice in
placing the beginning of the modern period 300 or more years further back than
the old conventional benchmark of the mid-nineteenth century. But instead of
stressing the secular rise over this time of agricultural productivity,
handicraft industry, commercialization, population, urbanization, literacy, and
social and geographic mobility, as other recent historians have done, Spence
points out that people's average levels of consumption were no higher in the
Qing than in the Ming, in the 1930s than in the nineteenth century, under Mao
than under Chiang Kai-shek.
He would concede (though he never says so) that China has made itself modern
in the sense that it produces computers and rockets, feeds a population of a
billion, educates most of its people, provides medical care sufficient to
establish a life expectancy of sixty-nine years, and participates in the
international economy and political system. He also gives full play to the
achievements of Chinese literature and art, statecraft and philosophy, and his
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
book is beautifully illustrated with examples of these achievements. But he
argues that China has not been modern in at least 400 years, in the sense of
being a nation "both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity
yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new
technologies, new ideas." The quest of his title is thus one in which he
believes the Chinese are still engaged, unsuccessfully.
The fact that Liu and Bette Bao Lord share Spence's despair is significant,
for particular reasons in each case. To Lord, China's tragedy is personal.
Herself of Chinese origin, with many friends and relatives there, she went to
China believing that it would be possible to reform the Party from within, and
hoping to promote "one of the most critical bilateral relationships in the
world." By the end of her hardworking tour of duty as the American ambassador's
wife, she had come to see the Chinese system as thoroughly brutal and corrupt.
Then, staying a few extra weeks in the spring of 1989 to help CBS News cover the
Gorbachev-Deng Xiaoping summit, she saw the ruins of Deng's reforms come
crashing down around her friends. A close cousin who stayed in China when Lord
emigrated with her parents in 1946 symbolizes Lord's sense of having escaped her
fair share of misery by leaving. Having enjoyed more than her share of luck, she
feels that she has abandoned her relatives to one of the hardest fates in this
world, the fate of being Chinese.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Liu's memoir marks the nearly complete disillusionment of one of China's
last hopeful men. Liu made his name as an investigative reporter exposing power
abuse and corruption in the decade after his rehabilitation in 1979 from the
stigma of being a "rightist." As a rightist, he lost his Party membership and
his job, and spent two long periods of forced labor in the countryside. After
his rehabilitation, his first-and still most famous-article was "People or
Monsters?" (It is available in English in a book with the same title edited by
Perry Link, published by Indiana University Press in 1983.) It argued that a
major corruption case in a commune in northeastern China occurred because
cliquism and mutual back-scratching had eroded the vigilance of the local Party
committee.
Liu's trademark answer to the problem, proposed in an essay in 1985, was "A
Second Kind of Loyalty." The first kind of loyalty was what had gotten China
into trouble, he said. It was the loyalty of those who are "diligent and
conscientious, putting up with hardship and swallowing their resentment, doing
exactly what they are told, never expressing a contradictory opinion." This
loyalty, into whose moribund cults the Li Peng regime is trying to puff a spark
of life today, allowed bad people to seize power and do their will.
The second kind of loyalty, however, would save China. Liu personified it in
two protagonists, Ni Yuxian and Chen Shizhong, who stood up for the true
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
ideals of socialism for twenty years, when those ideals were being trampled by
Mao and his acolytes. They wrote letters to oppose the Great Leap and the split
with the Soviet Union, hung wall posters to oppose the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution, and gave speeches to defend good cadres who were attacked by Red
Guards. But they never engaged in intrigue or violence or tried to evade their
inevitable punishments, and each of them spent years in jail. They played the
classic Chinese role of remonstrators, who sacrifice their flesh and blood in
order to awaken the ruler to his duty. Ironically, each subsequently diverged
from Liu's model, but in opposite ways. Ni obtained political asylum in New York
and helped found an exile party dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese Communist
Party. Chen went around China, at least before June 4 last year, giving speeches
on the topic, "I Offer the Love in My Heart to the Party and the People.")
Liu identified with Ni and Chen. His memoir was also going to be called "A
Second Kind of Loyalty," but the title was apparently revised to make more sense
to Americans. Liu portrays himself as telling the truth despite repression
because he believed that his appeals could awaken healthy forces in the Party.
He was never a dissident. As a reporter for the central Party paper, he was able
to conduct his investigations cloaked in the authority of the Party, publish his
works under the protection of the sympathetic General Secretary Hu Yaobang, and
make some of his reports not in writing to the public but orally to the relevant
provincial Party secretaries. Even after his expulsion from the Party in 1987
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
for bourgeois liberalism after the fall of his protector Hu, he saw himself as a
sort of political Boddhisatva who postponed his relief from suffering to help
others reach salvation.
Although he doesn't use such terms, Liu inhabits a Confucian world divided
between moral persons (junzi) and people who are only human (xiaoren). For him,
the human problem is not to figure out what is the right thing to do, but to
make up one's mind to do it. A warm, compassionate, approachable man, he has an
endless appetite and memory for the details of individual lives, and a deep
understanding of human motives. But in the end he discerns, in the complexity of
the human comedy, only two kinds of people-those whose self-justifications are
excuses for selfishness, and those who sacrifice for justice.
Liu thus embodies what the historian Thomas A. Metzger has called the
"transformative" (as opposed to the accommodative") impulse in Chinese culture.
Like Confucius, Liu sees human nature as basically good and believes in changing
the world through the force of example. To borrow the title of another of his
essays, corruption in China occurs because "good people" are "weak." The events
of last year have brought him to the point of predicting the fall of the Li
Peng-Deng Xiaoping regime, which he sees as representing a small privileged
stratum of conservative bureaucrats rather than the Chinese Communist Party as a
whole. Although in " Tell the World " he suggests that a non-Communist
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
democracy will emerge after an interregnum of rule by Party reformists, in
Higher Kind of Loyalty he appears still to hope that the Chinese Communist Party
will rediscover its soul and return to the path of its original ideals. However
ambivalently, Liu's second kind of loyalty is still loyalty.
Younger Chinese have criticized him for this all along. When he toured
American campuses in 1988, a student at Columbia confronted him with the example
of Fang Lizhi (the astrophysicist and human rights activist recently expelled
from the CCP and now in England after a year in refuge in the American Embassy
in Beijing), who had declared himself opposed to communism. Fang's stand is
based on the Western scientific viewpoint," she contended, "while yours is a
kind of peasant-based pro-Communist idealism which can never solve China's
fundamental problems." Many in the audience applauded. About a year later the
young critic Liu Xiaobo attacked Liu for believing that "someday the master the
CCP will wake up and appreciate his absolute sincerity because his criticisms
are not intended to hurt the master, but to make him more perfect." (Liu Xiaobo
is in jail now, accused of being a "sinister black hand" behind the Tiananmen
demonstrations.)
Liu has moved toward the harshest view of Chinese reality compatible with a
shred of faith in the goodness of man. He is a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, who
returned from twenty years of feeding pigs and hauling night soil to discover
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a world in which evil was pervasive and the few good people were viciously
oppressed. In one place that he investigated, "the so-called planned economy was
... nothing but the continuous how of public resources into the private pockets
of the power holders." In another, "the Party secretary could pick and choose
any girl from destitute families to sleep with him in return for food
subsidies." In a third, a petitioner for justice was repeatedly jailed and
tortured: "The children became vagrants, often beaten up, with no chance to go
to school; the family's ration of wheat and kindling wood was held back; their
house was destroyed." A fourth location as "a kingdom of evil.... a cursed land
where all values had been reversed." Throughout China, malefactors who had been
in power since the Cultural Revolution cooperated to protect one another, and
the reformists at the center, beset by forces only murkily hinted at by Liu,
were too weak to penetrate the web of evil. In all, says Liu, "China seemed like
a monstrous mill, continually rolling, crushing all individuality out of the
Chinese character."
A somewhat formulaic optimism informs the coda to A Higher Kind of Loyalty.
"The Chinese people have now changed," he asserts. "The people will pay a bloody
price, but in the end they will shake off this monstrous thing the ruling clique
that is draining them of their life's blood." (The language is typical of both
of Liu's books, which are more like political documents than personal
reflections, and which have been translated almost too faithfully from the
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Chinese.) Lord, too, ends with an obligatory upbeat ending, a parable of a
cover-let kept immaculate through years of prison. Spence's attempt to solace
his readers leads to a last sentence that is the only really ill-considered one
in his book: "There would be no truly modern China until the people were given
back their voices." His own narrative shows that the Chinese people never had
their voices.
Like Chernobyl, China seems to get worse the more we learn about it. Of
course, we need to beware of the phenomenon-Spence traces it well-by which the
Western image of China oscillates between exaggerated hopes and exaggerated
fears. If it was wrong to see Mao's China as a people's Shangri-La, it is also
wrong to imagine that in Li Peng's China most of the people spend most of their
time doing anything other than going about their daily business. Lord states
that "all Chinese are in pain," and I believe she is right, but what does a
people in pain look like? The kind of pain she is talking about does not show on
people's faces as they bicycle to work, any more than it did when travelers
reported that all was well in Mao's day. The truth about such a large country is
hard to discern. Still, the combined testimony of observers with such cumulative
and diverse authority is impressive.
Why are things so bad? "To understand China today," observes Spence, "we
need to know about China in the past." But what does the past tell us? Spence
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
devotes an informative section to Hegel's theory that China is doomed by
geography to be an inward-looking peasant nation excluded from the mainstream of
history, a theory widely accepted by Chinese today. But he does not seem to
endorse such grand generalizations. The pointers he gives involve more discrete
historical echoes, parallels, and precedents. The book points out that problems
such as bureaucracy, regionalism, peasant poverty, abuse of women, familism, and
the struggle for political power persisted or recurred, but does not try to
explain why. Spence is a brilliant storyteller, endlessly curious about how
things really were at the top and the bottom of society, on the plains and in
the borderlands, at weddings and wars, in the rice fields and the scholar's
studio. While the vast tapestry contains many patterns, however, he is chary of
stating what they are. If there are "cycles" of some sort at work, as he says
several times, are they any more than historical resemblances and coincidences
that are bound to occur as human folly grinds repeatedly through a finite number
of permutations?
Spence tends to explain violence as occurring mostly when "the Chinese
people...threw themselves against the power of the state." This is a comforting
vision. Yet his narrative contains plenty of instances of the violence of the
oppressed against one another. As one of his own witnesses says, "The poor
squeeze each other to death." There is also a trace of romanticism in the
sections on the Communist revolution and Mao's rule. Spence portrays Mao
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
leading the country confidently in pursuit of his vision, however flawed. He
doesn't convey the constant bumbling, desperate insecurity, vicious infighting,
and hysterical improvisation that the Chinese Communists disguised behind the
bluster of their theory of scientific socialism.
Lord's answer to the violence of Chinese life is national character.
"Chinese go through life wearing masks," she says. The masks take over the
wearer, robbing him of his identity and inducing paranoia toward others. Able to
adapt to any circumstance, the Chinese "never bother asking themselves who they
are. They wait to be told." Under Mao, the Chinese were programmed to violence.
They took their turns as victims and perpetrators in a cycle that left no one
blameless and no one responsible. As one of her informants tells her, "It's over
now. It was not my fault. It was not his fault. Everyone suffered. It was the
times. We were all casualties of history."
Lord is a sensitive observer of human attitudes. One of the most delightful
sections of the book is a series of vignettes in which Chinese recount their
puzzling encounters in American society. But her well-meaning account of Chinese
culture boils down to an East Asian example of the "orientalism" criticized
years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our semblables and
freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a national
stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people behave
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as characteristics
that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why.
Liu Binyan's notion of a double network" of political and economic relations
created by the Cultural Revolution comes closer to illuminating the structure of
Chinese society. He sees the Cultural Revolution as a turmoil in which
opportunistic politicians scrambled to power. Once there, they stayed through
all the twists and turns of the line. As veterans of three dynasties," they had
an overweening interest in keeping down all those whom they had oppressed on
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
their way up. "To a Party leader, it is a matter of life and death always to be
right." The protective network extended from the counties at the bottom of
China's administrative hierarchy to the top. At each level politicians protected
those below so that they could in turn be protected. The CCP turned into a giant
Mafia.
One of the saddest cases of oppression that Liu describes is that of a
worker named Wang Fumian, whom Liu was finally unable to help because he was
expelled from the Party before his report on the case could be acted upon. In
the course of investigating Wang's case, Liu discovered that Wang had been
confined to a mental hospital on a diagnosis of "mania." According to the
diagnostic handbook locally in use, mania was characterized by the "orientalism"
criticized years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our
semblables and freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a
national stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people
behave savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as
characteristics that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why. overconfidence,
extreme willfulness, found mostly in people of advanced cultural background.
They are biased and tend to distort facts, although their delusions are not
wholly divorced from reality. Taken for normal at an early age, the patient
gradually asserts his (her) willpower more and more forcibly, he (she) rushes
about offering petitions, writing endless letters of accusation. A few are
deluded into thinking they are making exceptional contributions to humanity.
It was a perfect description of Liu himself The only mystery is how, under
such circumstances, a few independent individuals like Liu and the stubborn
petitioners he wrote about could continue to exist.
On the whole, Liu's analysis is convincing, except that he is unclear about
many of the details. He seems to be protecting some people himself, as he refers
from time to time to higher-ups who were spiking his work from behind the
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scenes but does not tell us who they were. (Or did he wish to spare American
readers a surfeit of names filled with Xs and Zs engaged in intricate political
struggles?) And Liu's tendency to judge persons rather than the system diverts
attention from the question of how such things could happen. Is it because evil
people are stronger than good people, as he suggests? Or does it have something
to do with the design of Chinese institutions?
As Norbert Elias has written, describing the descent into savagery of German
troops in the Baltics in the late days of World War I: The path toward barbarity
and dehumanization ... always Lakes considerable time to unfold in relatively
civilized societies. Terror and horror hardly appear in such societies without a
long process of social disintegration. All too often the act of naked violence
... is analyzed with the help of short-term, static explanations. That may be
meaningful if one is not seeking explanations but only attempting to establish
culpability. It is easy to see barbarism and de-civilizations as the expression
of a free personal decision, but that kind of voluntarist explanation is shallow
and unhelpful.
In their approach to the problem of violence, Lipman and Harrell and their
contributors move in the direction that Elias recommends by looking at the
failure of the norms that are supposed to prohibit violence. The best chapter is
Anne F Thurston's account of urban violence during the Cultural Revolution
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(drawing from her longer study, Enemies of the People, which appeared in 1987).
She directs attention to the processes that strip away inhibitions to violence
by dehumanizing the target. In Mao's China, such processes included the labeling
of class enemies, glorification of the necessity of revolutionary violence,
public struggle sessions that inured people to the sight of suffering, and peer
pressure based on the practice of victimizing all who refused to victimize
others.
The most penetrating exposition of this constellation of institutions is
Lynn T White III's, whose arguments are summarized in a paragraph by Spence.
White stresses the role of three interlocking institutions, each found in fully
developed form nowhere but in Mao's China: the work unit, the system of class
labels, and the political campaign. The work unit locked each individual in
place for life with a set of co-workers like scorpions in ajar; the class label
system created what were thought to be permanent castes (they have since
disappeared) with contrary interests, and with members of the despised castes
seen as sub-human; political campaigns trained people to be vicious. White
traces the creation of these institutions in Shanghai in the 1950s and 1960s and
then their impact on the course of Shanghai's Cultural Revolution.
How the personalities of young Chinese were shaped by class labels, units,
and campaigns has been brilliantly described by Anita Chan in Children of Mao:
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Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation,
which appeared in 1985. Chan showed that a combination of indoctrination,
competition for approval, and fear of victimization forged decent young people
into Manichaean bigots. Liu provides powerful testimony about how it felt to be
one of the victims in this system, isolated, assaulted, and humiliated until
even a person with his powerful sense of individuality felt guilty for crimes he
had not committed.
Doleful as such explanations are, at least they remove the Chinese from the
ghetto of the inscrutable and show how normal human beings can be reduced to
marauders. Authors like Thurston, White, and Chan are able to return China to
the mainstream of history from which Hegel excluded it, even though the history
that China rejoins (so far) is that of Stalinism and fascism rather than the
Hegelian progress to freedom. The institutions that created violence in the
period of the Cultural Revolution were creations of Mao's China. They cannot
explain the upheavals of the preceding hundreds of years. (In fact, no one has
yet explained how and why Mao's people invented these institutions.) But studies
like these point the way to deciphering the mystery of extreme violence through
the analysis of social settings that rob people of human connections to their
victims.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
If these are the lessons from China's modern history, they are not very
encouraging. One wonders whether even the mordant Lu Xun was too u beat when he
said, as quoted by Spence , "The history of mankind's battle forward through
bloodshed is like the formation of coal, where a great deal of wood is needed to
produce a small amount of coal." Much human wood lies under the ground of
Chinese history, but how much coal?
ANDREW J. NATHAN is the author of China's Crisis and co-author of Human
Rights in Contemporary China, both published by Columbia University Press.
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The New Republic
July 30, 1990
SECTION: Vol. 203 ; No. 5-6 ; Pg. 30; ISSN: 0028-6583
LENGTH: 5921 words
HEADLINE: Legacies: a Chinese Mosaic._book reviews
BYLINE: Nathan, Andrew J.
BODY:
No better proof could be imagined for Nietzsche's insight that cruelty is
the great festival pleasure of mankind than the torment inflicted by the Chinese
people on one another for the last 400 years. Jonathan Spence's history of that
period is filled with burying alive, burning alive, slicing, strangulation,
stabbing, drowning, poison gas inserted into tunnels, coerced suicide, exposure
of severed heads, vengeful exhumation and dismemberment of corpses, arson,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
rapine, torture, corruption, epidemic, famine, forced migrations, wars, riots,
strikes, rebellions, and piracy. The first three pages of Liu Binyan's memoir, A
Higher Kind of Loyalty, recount an assassination by bombing, a child killed in a
car accident, a murder, an execution, the death of a young brother from scarlet
fever, and a daily parade of carts filled with beggars' corpses. Bette Bao
Lord's snapshots from the lives of Chinese friends include beatings by Red
Guards, a wife denouncing a husband, a nursing infant denied breast milk, an ear
torn off, a thumb broken, and a head whacked in half by the stroke of a scythe.
"Why does a culture that condemns violence," asks Stevan Harrell, "that
plays down the glory of military exploits, awards its highest prestige to
literary, rather than martial figures, and seeks harmony over all other values,
in fact display such frequency and variety of violent behavior?"
It would be difficult but unnecessary to prove that China's history is
sadder than that of other countries on a per capital basis. If nothing else, the
scale of horror is unique in this largest of all nations. Nearly twenty years
ago Richard L. Walker, in a study for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee,
estimated that the "human cost of communism in China" after 1949 ranged from 32
million to 60 million deaths. Walker's estimates were rough, but also
incomplete. He did not include the 20 million to 30 million famine deaths in
1959-61 that scholars learned about relatively recently, nor could he touch on
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
the revival of female infanticide since the late 1970s, which has claimed what
Spence estimates at 200,000 lives a year.
And such costs include only deaths. They do not include the 1 million people
who Liu says were labeled "rightists" in 1957 and punished for up to twenty
years (an increase over the usual estimate of 550,000); or the 20 million young
people who, with another 20 million factory workers, were "sent down" to the
countryside in the Mao years to get them out of the cities; or the 20 million
landlords, rich peasants, and others given discriminatory class labels in the
early 1950s; or the 2.9 million cadres who Deng Xiaoping said were mistreated in
the Cultural Revolution, or the 100 million persons who Hu Yaobang estimated
were affected in one way or another by that cataclysm.
No one has been able to estimate the population of the Chinese gulag,
although Senator Jesse Helms reportedly intends to hold hearings to try. Superb
studies by Robin Munro for Amnesty International and Asia Watch, based on
reports in the Chinese press, have detailed routine torture and mistreatment of
prisoners in Chinese detention centers, jails, and camps, but it is hopeless to
estimate the scale of abuse when the prison population itself is unknown.
Christina Gilmartin's essay in Violence in China, together with some anecdotes
from Liu's career as an investigative reporter, scratch the surface of the vast
subject of sexual abuse in Chinese jails, camps, offices, farms, factories,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
and families, but again the data defy attempts at quantification.
Nor have the costs paid by the Chinese been limited to the period of
communism. Twenty million died during the Taiping rebellion in the
mid-nineteenth century, ten million in a famine in the 1870s, half a million in
a famine in the 1920s. Spence reports that about 14 million men were drafted
into the Chinese military during the war against Japan; a tenth of them died of
disease and malnutrition before seeing combat. One of the fine features of his
book is an endless series of small maps showing troop unsettle the paintings;
they are after-thoughts, additions, revisions, a way of refusing closure. Once
Johns has painted a picture it, too, becomes a thing "the mind already knows,"
and fair game for his exercises of doubt. His paintings are frequently
reconsidered in other ways and other media. One cannot say something about
Johns, therefore, without also saying something else.
Most of Johns's recurring imagery-flags, targets, maps, crosshatch forms,
borrowings from earlier artists, work from his seasons series-is on display in
Washington. The catalog clearly explains the import and the evolution of the
iconography and technique; that, for example, the older Johns less often selects
immediately recognizable images from mass culture and that he uses color in a
more varied way. But the impression left by the show is one less of evolution
than of never letting go, of an anxious continuity of interest, of an artist
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
coiling back even as he moves ahead.
The iconographic variations are paralleled by the constant experiments with
craft and medium. The show displays an extraordinary array of techniques-among
others, pencil, charcoal, silverpoint, crayon, oil on paper and ink on plastic.
(These last, most of them executed during the past decade, are gorgeous,
light-filled works.) The craft is enjoyed for its own sake, but it is not merely
an attempt at virtuosity. By observing old images through many different lenses,
Johns helps create a sense of a world that, despite certain landmarks, is
constantly in flux, a matter always of the shifting moment or the character of
the means at hand.
At times Johns's playfulness seems mannered and self-conscious, yet he is
not a trivial or an effete artist. The playfulness derives not from cleverness
or conceit, but from deep divisions in a passionate sensibility. Perhaps the
artist keeps playing, keeps rearranging his fragments, because that is the only
way to express things that cannot be reconciled. One could not say, for example,
that Johns is either a warm artist or a cold artist. He is both at once. On the
warm side is the expressionist moodiness that often erupts onto his surfaces,
and the sensual character of his brush stroke, which is reminiscent of Guston's.
(John Cage once said of his friend's work that "looking closely helps, though
the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in love.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
") The opening rooms of the exhibition are rich in beautifully worked,
melancholy blacks, and Johns's later art makes admiring (and somewhat opaque)
reference to the art of Munch, Grunewald, and the wilder Picasso.
Certainly the most powerful image is a large picture called Diver, from
1963. Rosenthal describes this monumental drawing, which may make reference to
Hart Crane's manner of suicide (leaping off the stern of a ship), as "the
diagram of a diver in various stages of a swan dive." At the drawing's upper
edge are footprints, placed on a long rectangular form that evokes a diving
board. Two sets of handprints on either end of two panels suggest the diver's
arms. A circular sweep of line comes from the handprints at the bottom of the
picture, reminiscent of a diver flaring out his arms in preparation for the
dive. "Deep blacks and muted grays blend to suggest the depths of a nocturnal
sea," says Rosenthal, "while the white pastel passages in the lower center call
to mind a diver's splash."
The inky imprints of hand and foot have a ghostly immediacy, like the
signature of a dead man. The spaces seem poised on the edge of balance; the
picture as a whole suggests that moment in a dive when one has just committed,
and there is no going back to balance or solidity. The world seems about to
upend, to spiral into oblivion. It is an expressionist picture, in other words,
and yet not quite, not altogether. The implied circle of the arms also recalls
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
other, cooler considerations: a compass; a clock; or the studied analysis of
form in Leonardo's famous drawing "Human Figure in a Circle, Illustrating
Proportions Vitruvian Man)," which in itself recalls a crucifixion.
Diver is Johns at his warmest, that is, most willing to let tragedy show
itself without the interference of learning or wit. On the colder side of Johns
is the catlike detachment and the sporting intellect, most obvious in the irony
and the obscure references of the imagery. But the chill can also be sensed in
the planned, boxed-in character of many of his pictures. johns loves the
workings of chance; but like Cage, he generally provides a strict structure in
which chance is allowed to operate. He is not totally loose. In a later version
of an image, he may carefully copy a fortuitous drip or a squiggle that was
originally happen-stance. He possesses play, he co-opts chance. That spontaneous
little squiggle is reincarnated as an idea. Such oppositions enable Johns to
convey a certain kind of pathos particularly well. Because he is such a tactile
painter, the inability to finally possess, to hold, often becomes genuinely
moving. His numbers and letters are not merely abstract symbols, for example;
they convey an almost living presence, as if they were real and touchable. They
aspire to the physical in the way that some objects in early still-life
painting-say, a Zurbaran lemon-seem to aspire to the metaphysical. In a world
that grows increasingly abstract, Johns understands better than most the
melancholy aura of representations.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
The oppositions in Johns have also enabled him to become one of those
artists able to fashion a synthesis, if not a reconciliation, among competing
traditions. In the catalog Rosenthal observes about one particular picture that
it combines references to both Picasso and Duchamp. In fact, Johns's entire
oeuvre sometimes seems like an effort to find a way to get both spirits into the
same frame, to arrive at an art that respects the ironic intelligence of a dandy
and the immediate physical apprehension of feeling that is characteristic of
abstract expressionism, to fashion an art of painting that a man like Duchamp
would not consider embarrassingly old-fashioned or bourgeois.
The way that Johns plays with the principal strains of modernism, his
passion for elaboration and contradiction, his general air of learned
knowingness and interest in making fine points, are characteristic of an artist
working late in a tradition. He is the kind of intelligent artist whose calling
is to find a way to movements across the Chinese landscape from the late Ming to
1959. "Every word is blood and grief," wrote a Chinese poet in 1944.
What has been acquired in exchange for all this misery? Today the consensus
of Chinese outside officialdom is: nothing. "What Confucian culture has given us
over the past several thousand years is not a national spirit of enterprise, a
system of laws, or a mechanism of cultural renewal, but a fearsome self-killing
machine that, as it degenerated, constantly devoured its best and its
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
brightest, its own vital elements." So wrote the authors of "River Elegy," the
television serial, whose broadcast on Chinese television the year before last
helped to set the scene for the outpouring of anti-regime sentiment in the
spring of 1989.
The way in which Spence interprets the "search for modernity" implies that
he agrees with this tragic vision. He follows recent academic practice in
placing the beginning of the modern period 300 or more years further back than
the old conventional benchmark of the mid-nineteenth century. But instead of
stressing the secular rise over this time of agricultural productivity,
handicraft industry, commercialization, population, urbanization, literacy, and
social and geographic mobility, as other recent historians have done, Spence
points out that people's average levels of consumption were no higher in the
Qing than in the Ming, in the 1930s than in the nineteenth century, under Mao
than under Chiang Kai-shek.
He would concede (though he never says so) that China has made itself modern
in the sense that it produces computers and rockets, feeds a population of a
billion, educates most of its people, provides medical care sufficient to
establish a life expectancy of sixty-nine years, and participates in the
international economy and political system. He also gives full play to the
achievements of Chinese literature and art, statecraft and philosophy, and his
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
book is beautifully illustrated with examples of these achievements. But he
argues that China has not been modern in at least 400 years, in the sense of
being a nation "both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity
yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new
technologies, new ideas." The quest of his title is thus one in which he
believes the Chinese are still engaged, unsuccessfully.
The fact that Liu and Bette Bao Lord share Spence's despair is significant,
for particular reasons in each case. To Lord, China's tragedy is personal.
Herself of Chinese origin, with many friends and relatives there, she went to
China believing that it would be possible to reform the Party from within, and
hoping to promote "one of the most critical bilateral relationships in the
world." By the end of her hardworking tour of duty as the American ambassador's
wife, she had come to see the Chinese system as thoroughly brutal and corrupt.
Then, staying a few extra weeks in the spring of 1989 to help CBS News cover the
Gorbachev-Deng Xiaoping summit, she saw the ruins of Deng's reforms come
crashing down around her friends. A close cousin who stayed in China when Lord
emigrated with her parents in 1946 symbolizes Lord's sense of having escaped her
fair share of misery by leaving. Having enjoyed more than her share of luck, she
feels that she has abandoned her relatives to one of the hardest fates in this
world, the fate of being Chinese.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Liu's memoir marks the nearly complete disillusionment of one of China's
last hopeful men. Liu made his name as an investigative reporter exposing power
abuse and corruption in the decade after his rehabilitation in 1979 from the
stigma of being a "rightist." As a rightist, he lost his Party membership and
his job, and spent two long periods of forced labor in the countryside. After
his rehabilitation, his first-and still most famous-article was "People or
Monsters?" (It is available in English in a book with the same title edited by
Perry Link, published by Indiana University Press in 1983.) It argued that a
major corruption case in a commune in northeastern China occurred because
cliquism and mutual back-scratching had eroded the vigilance of the local Party
committee.
Liu's trademark answer to the problem, proposed in an essay in 1985, was "A
Second Kind of Loyalty." The first kind of loyalty was what had gotten China
into trouble, he said. It was the loyalty of those who are "diligent and
conscientious, putting up with hardship and swallowing their resentment, doing
exactly what they are told, never expressing a contradictory opinion." This
loyalty, into whose moribund cults the Li Peng regime is trying to puff a spark
of life today, allowed bad people to seize power and do their will.
The second kind of loyalty, however, would save China. Liu personified it in
two protagonists, Ni Yuxian and Chen Shizhong, who stood up for the true
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
ideals of socialism for twenty years, when those ideals were being trampled by
Mao and his acolytes. They wrote letters to oppose the Great Leap and the split
with the Soviet Union, hung wall posters to oppose the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution, and gave speeches to defend good cadres who were attacked by Red
Guards. But they never engaged in intrigue or violence or tried to evade their
inevitable punishments, and each of them spent years in jail. They played the
classic Chinese role of remonstrators, who sacrifice their flesh and blood in
order to awaken the ruler to his duty. Ironically, each subsequently diverged
from Liu's model, but in opposite ways. Ni obtained political asylum in New York
and helped found an exile party dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese Communist
Party. Chen went around China, at least before June 4 last year, giving speeches
on the topic, "I Offer the Love in My Heart to the Party and the People.")
Liu identified with Ni and Chen. His memoir was also going to be called "A
Second Kind of Loyalty," but the title was apparently revised to make more sense
to Americans. Liu portrays himself as telling the truth despite repression
because he believed that his appeals could awaken healthy forces in the Party.
He was never a dissident. As a reporter for the central Party paper, he was able
to conduct his investigations cloaked in the authority of the Party, publish his
works under the protection of the sympathetic General Secretary Hu Yaobang, and
make some of his reports not in writing to the public but orally to the relevant
provincial Party secretaries. Even after his expulsion from the Party in 1987
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
for bourgeois liberalism after the fall of his protector Hu, he saw himself as a
sort of political Boddhisatva who postponed his relief from suffering to help
others reach salvation.
Although he doesn't use such terms, Liu inhabits a Confucian world divided
between moral persons (junzi) and people who are only human (xiaoren). For him,
the human problem is not to figure out what is the right thing to do, but to
make up one's mind to do it. A warm, compassionate, approachable man, he has an
endless appetite and memory for the details of individual lives, and a deep
understanding of human motives. But in the end he discerns, in the complexity of
the human comedy, only two kinds of people-those whose self-justifications are
excuses for selfishness, and those who sacrifice for justice.
Liu thus embodies what the historian Thomas A. Metzger has called the
"transformative" (as opposed to the accommodative") impulse in Chinese culture.
Like Confucius, Liu sees human nature as basically good and believes in changing
the world through the force of example. To borrow the title of another of his
essays, corruption in China occurs because "good people" are "weak." The events
of last year have brought him to the point of predicting the fall of the Li
Peng-Deng Xiaoping regime, which he sees as representing a small privileged
stratum of conservative bureaucrats rather than the Chinese Communist Party as a
whole. Although in " Tell the World " he suggests that a non-Communist
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
democracy will emerge after an interregnum of rule by Party reformists, in
Higher Kind of Loyalty he appears still to hope that the Chinese Communist Party
will rediscover its soul and return to the path of its original ideals. However
ambivalently, Liu's second kind of loyalty is still loyalty.
Younger Chinese have criticized him for this all along. When he toured
American campuses in 1988, a student at Columbia confronted him with the example
of Fang Lizhi (the astrophysicist and human rights activist recently expelled
from the CCP and now in England after a year in refuge in the American Embassy
in Beijing), who had declared himself opposed to communism. Fang's stand is
based on the Western scientific viewpoint," she contended, "while yours is a
kind of peasant-based pro-Communist idealism which can never solve China's
fundamental problems." Many in the audience applauded. About a year later the
young critic Liu Xiaobo attacked Liu for believing that "someday the master the
CCP will wake up and appreciate his absolute sincerity because his criticisms
are not intended to hurt the master, but to make him more perfect." (Liu Xiaobo
is in jail now, accused of being a "sinister black hand" behind the Tiananmen
demonstrations.)
Liu has moved toward the harshest view of Chinese reality compatible with a
shred of faith in the goodness of man. He is a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, who
returned from twenty years of feeding pigs and hauling night soil to discover
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a world in which evil was pervasive and the few good people were viciously
oppressed. In one place that he investigated, "the so-called planned economy was
... nothing but the continuous how of public resources into the private pockets
of the power holders." In another, "the Party secretary could pick and choose
any girl from destitute families to sleep with him in return for food
subsidies." In a third, a petitioner for justice was repeatedly jailed and
tortured: "The children became vagrants, often beaten up, with no chance to go
to school; the family's ration of wheat and kindling wood was held back; their
house was destroyed." A fourth location as "a kingdom of evil.... a cursed land
where all values had been reversed." Throughout China, malefactors who had been
in power since the Cultural Revolution cooperated to protect one another, and
the reformists at the center, beset by forces only murkily hinted at by Liu,
were too weak to penetrate the web of evil. In all, says Liu, "China seemed like
a monstrous mill, continually rolling, crushing all individuality out of the
Chinese character."
A somewhat formulaic optimism informs the coda to A Higher Kind of Loyalty.
"The Chinese people have now changed," he asserts. "The people will pay a bloody
price, but in the end they will shake off this monstrous thing the ruling clique
that is draining them of their life's blood." (The language is typical of both
of Liu's books, which are more like political documents than personal
reflections, and which have been translated almost too faithfully from the
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Chinese.) Lord, too, ends with an obligatory upbeat ending, a parable of a
cover-let kept immaculate through years of prison. Spence's attempt to solace
his readers leads to a last sentence that is the only really ill-considered one
in his book: "There would be no truly modern China until the people were given
back their voices." His own narrative shows that the Chinese people never had
their voices.
Like Chernobyl, China seems to get worse the more we learn about it. Of
course, we need to beware of the phenomenon-Spence traces it well-by which the
Western image of China oscillates between exaggerated hopes and exaggerated
fears. If it was wrong to see Mao's China as a people's Shangri-La, it is also
wrong to imagine that in Li Peng's China most of the people spend most of their
time doing anything other than going about their daily business. Lord states
that "all Chinese are in pain," and I believe she is right, but what does a
people in pain look like? The kind of pain she is talking about does not show on
people's faces as they bicycle to work, any more than it did when travelers
reported that all was well in Mao's day. The truth about such a large country is
hard to discern. Still, the combined testimony of observers with such cumulative
and diverse authority is impressive.
Why are things so bad? "To understand China today," observes Spence, "we
need to know about China in the past." But what does the past tell us? Spence
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
devotes an informative section to Hegel's theory that China is doomed by
geography to be an inward-looking peasant nation excluded from the mainstream of
history, a theory widely accepted by Chinese today. But he does not seem to
endorse such grand generalizations. The pointers he gives involve more discrete
historical echoes, parallels, and precedents. The book points out that problems
such as bureaucracy, regionalism, peasant poverty, abuse of women, familism, and
the struggle for political power persisted or recurred, but does not try to
explain why. Spence is a brilliant storyteller, endlessly curious about how
things really were at the top and the bottom of society, on the plains and in
the borderlands, at weddings and wars, in the rice fields and the scholar's
studio. While the vast tapestry contains many patterns, however, he is chary of
stating what they are. If there are "cycles" of some sort at work, as he says
several times, are they any more than historical resemblances and coincidences
that are bound to occur as human folly grinds repeatedly through a finite number
of permutations?
Spence tends to explain violence as occurring mostly when "the Chinese
people...threw themselves against the power of the state." This is a comforting
vision. Yet his narrative contains plenty of instances of the violence of the
oppressed against one another. As one of his own witnesses says, "The poor
squeeze each other to death." There is also a trace of romanticism in the
sections on the Communist revolution and Mao's rule. Spence portrays Mao
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
leading the country confidently in pursuit of his vision, however flawed. He
doesn't convey the constant bumbling, desperate insecurity, vicious infighting,
and hysterical improvisation that the Chinese Communists disguised behind the
bluster of their theory of scientific socialism.
Lord's answer to the violence of Chinese life is national character.
"Chinese go through life wearing masks," she says. The masks take over the
wearer, robbing him of his identity and inducing paranoia toward others. Able to
adapt to any circumstance, the Chinese "never bother asking themselves who they
are. They wait to be told." Under Mao, the Chinese were programmed to violence.
They took their turns as victims and perpetrators in a cycle that left no one
blameless and no one responsible. As one of her informants tells her, "It's over
now. It was not my fault. It was not his fault. Everyone suffered. It was the
times. We were all casualties of history."
Lord is a sensitive observer of human attitudes. One of the most delightful
sections of the book is a series of vignettes in which Chinese recount their
puzzling encounters in American society. But her well-meaning account of Chinese
culture boils down to an East Asian example of the "orientalism" criticized
years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our semblables and
freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a national
stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people behave
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as characteristics
that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why.
Liu Binyan's notion of a double network" of political and economic relations
created by the Cultural Revolution comes closer to illuminating the structure of
Chinese society. He sees the Cultural Revolution as a turmoil in which
opportunistic politicians scrambled to power. Once there, they stayed through
all the twists and turns of the line. As veterans of three dynasties," they had
an overweening interest in keeping down all those whom they had oppressed on
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
their way up. "To a Party leader, it is a matter of life and death always to be
right." The protective network extended from the counties at the bottom of
China's administrative hierarchy to the top. At each level politicians protected
those below so that they could in turn be protected. The CCP turned into a giant
Mafia.
One of the saddest cases of oppression that Liu describes is that of a
worker named Wang Fumian, whom Liu was finally unable to help because he was
expelled from the Party before his report on the case could be acted upon. In
the course of investigating Wang's case, Liu discovered that Wang had been
confined to a mental hospital on a diagnosis of "mania." According to the
diagnostic handbook locally in use, mania was characterized by the "orientalism"
criticized years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our
semblables and freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a
national stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people
behave savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as
characteristics that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why. overconfidence,
extreme willfulness, found mostly in people of advanced cultural background.
They are biased and tend to distort facts, although their delusions are not
wholly divorced from reality. Taken for normal at an early age, the patient
gradually asserts his (her) willpower more and more forcibly, he (she) rushes
about offering petitions, writing endless letters of accusation. A few are
deluded into thinking they are making exceptional contributions to humanity.
It was a perfect description of Liu himself The only mystery is how, under
such circumstances, a few independent individuals like Liu and the stubborn
petitioners he wrote about could continue to exist.
On the whole, Liu's analysis is convincing, except that he is unclear about
many of the details. He seems to be protecting some people himself, as he refers
from time to time to higher-ups who were spiking his work from behind the
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
scenes but does not tell us who they were. (Or did he wish to spare American
readers a surfeit of names filled with Xs and Zs engaged in intricate political
struggles?) And Liu's tendency to judge persons rather than the system diverts
attention from the question of how such things could happen. Is it because evil
people are stronger than good people, as he suggests? Or does it have something
to do with the design of Chinese institutions?
As Norbert Elias has written, describing the descent into savagery of German
troops in the Baltics in the late days of World War I: The path toward barbarity
and dehumanization ... always Lakes considerable time to unfold in relatively
civilized societies. Terror and horror hardly appear in such societies without a
long process of social disintegration. All too often the act of naked violence
... is analyzed with the help of short-term, static explanations. That may be
meaningful if one is not seeking explanations but only attempting to establish
culpability. It is easy to see barbarism and de-civilizations as the expression
of a free personal decision, but that kind of voluntarist explanation is shallow
and unhelpful.
In their approach to the problem of violence, Lipman and Harrell and their
contributors move in the direction that Elias recommends by looking at the
failure of the norms that are supposed to prohibit violence. The best chapter is
Anne F Thurston's account of urban violence during the Cultural Revolution
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(drawing from her longer study, Enemies of the People, which appeared in 1987).
She directs attention to the processes that strip away inhibitions to violence
by dehumanizing the target. In Mao's China, such processes included the labeling
of class enemies, glorification of the necessity of revolutionary violence,
public struggle sessions that inured people to the sight of suffering, and peer
pressure based on the practice of victimizing all who refused to victimize
others.
The most penetrating exposition of this constellation of institutions is
Lynn T White III's, whose arguments are summarized in a paragraph by Spence.
White stresses the role of three interlocking institutions, each found in fully
developed form nowhere but in Mao's China: the work unit, the system of class
labels, and the political campaign. The work unit locked each individual in
place for life with a set of co-workers like scorpions in ajar; the class label
system created what were thought to be permanent castes (they have since
disappeared) with contrary interests, and with members of the despised castes
seen as sub-human; political campaigns trained people to be vicious. White
traces the creation of these institutions in Shanghai in the 1950s and 1960s and
then their impact on the course of Shanghai's Cultural Revolution.
How the personalities of young Chinese were shaped by class labels, units,
and campaigns has been brilliantly described by Anita Chan in Children of Mao:
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation,
which appeared in 1985. Chan showed that a combination of indoctrination,
competition for approval, and fear of victimization forged decent young people
into Manichaean bigots. Liu provides powerful testimony about how it felt to be
one of the victims in this system, isolated, assaulted, and humiliated until
even a person with his powerful sense of individuality felt guilty for crimes he
had not committed.
Doleful as such explanations are, at least they remove the Chinese from the
ghetto of the inscrutable and show how normal human beings can be reduced to
marauders. Authors like Thurston, White, and Chan are able to return China to
the mainstream of history from which Hegel excluded it, even though the history
that China rejoins (so far) is that of Stalinism and fascism rather than the
Hegelian progress to freedom. The institutions that created violence in the
period of the Cultural Revolution were creations of Mao's China. They cannot
explain the upheavals of the preceding hundreds of years. (In fact, no one has
yet explained how and why Mao's people invented these institutions.) But studies
like these point the way to deciphering the mystery of extreme violence through
the analysis of social settings that rob people of human connections to their
victims.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
If these are the lessons from China's modern history, they are not very
encouraging. One wonders whether even the mordant Lu Xun was too u beat when he
said, as quoted by Spence , "The history of mankind's battle forward through
bloodshed is like the formation of coal, where a great deal of wood is needed to
produce a small amount of coal." Much human wood lies under the ground of
Chinese history, but how much coal?
ANDREW J. NATHAN is the author of China's Crisis and co-author of Human
Rights in Contemporary China, both published by Columbia University Press.
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The New Republic
July 30, 1990
SECTION: Vol. 203 ; No. 5-6 ; Pg. 30; ISSN: 0028-6583
LENGTH: 5921 words
HEADLINE: Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture._book reviews
BYLINE: Nathan, Andrew J.
BODY:
No better proof could be imagined for Nietzsche's insight that cruelty is
the great festival pleasure of mankind than the torment inflicted by the Chinese
people on one another for the last 400 years. Jonathan Spence's history of that
period is filled with burying alive, burning alive, slicing, strangulation,
stabbing, drowning, poison gas inserted into tunnels, coerced suicide, exposure
of severed heads, vengeful exhumation and dismemberment of corpses, arson,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
rapine, torture, corruption, epidemic, famine, forced migrations, wars, riots,
strikes, rebellions, and piracy. The first three pages of Liu Binyan's memoir, A
Higher Kind of Loyalty, recount an assassination by bombing, a child killed in a
car accident, a murder, an execution, the death of a young brother from scarlet
fever, and a daily parade of carts filled with beggars' corpses. Bette Bao
Lord's snapshots from the lives of Chinese friends include beatings by Red
Guards, a wife denouncing a husband, a nursing infant denied breast milk, an ear
torn off, a thumb broken, and a head whacked in half by the stroke of a scythe.
"Why does a culture that condemns violence," asks Stevan Harrell, "that
plays down the glory of military exploits, awards its highest prestige to
literary, rather than martial figures, and seeks harmony over all other values,
in fact display such frequency and variety of violent behavior?"
It would be difficult but unnecessary to prove that China's history is
sadder than that of other countries on a per capital basis. If nothing else, the
scale of horror is unique in this largest of all nations. Nearly twenty years
ago Richard L. Walker, in a study for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee,
estimated that the "human cost of communism in China" after 1949 ranged from 32
million to 60 million deaths. Walker's estimates were rough, but also
incomplete. He did not include the 20 million to 30 million famine deaths in
1959-61 that scholars learned about relatively recently, nor could he touch on
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
the revival of female infanticide since the late 1970s, which has claimed what
Spence estimates at 200,000 lives a year.
And such costs include only deaths. They do not include the 1 million people
who Liu says were labeled "rightists" in 1957 and punished for up to twenty
years (an increase over the usual estimate of 550,000); or the 20 million young
people who, with another 20 million factory workers, were "sent down" to the
countryside in the Mao years to get them out of the cities; or the 20 million
landlords, rich peasants, and others given discriminatory class labels in the
early 1950s; or the 2.9 million cadres who Deng Xiaoping said were mistreated in
the Cultural Revolution, or the 100 million persons who Hu Yaobang estimated
were affected in one way or another by that cataclysm.
No one has been able to estimate the population of the Chinese gulag,
although Senator Jesse Helms reportedly intends to hold hearings to try. Superb
studies by Robin Munro for Amnesty International and Asia Watch, based on
reports in the Chinese press, have detailed routine torture and mistreatment of
prisoners in Chinese detention centers, jails, and camps, but it is hopeless to
estimate the scale of abuse when the prison population itself is unknown.
Christina Gilmartin's essay in Violence in China, together with some anecdotes
from Liu's career as an investigative reporter, scratch the surface of the vast
subject of sexual abuse in Chinese jails, camps, offices, farms, factories,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
and families, but again the data defy attempts at quantification.
Nor have the costs paid by the Chinese been limited to the period of
communism. Twenty million died during the Taiping rebellion in the
mid-nineteenth century, ten million in a famine in the 1870s, half a million in
a famine in the 1920s. Spence reports that about 14 million men were drafted
into the Chinese military during the war against Japan; a tenth of them died of
disease and malnutrition before seeing combat. One of the fine features of his
book is an endless series of small maps showing troop unsettle the paintings;
they are after-thoughts, additions, revisions, a way of refusing closure. Once
Johns has painted a picture it, too, becomes a thing "the mind already knows,"
and fair game for his exercises of doubt. His paintings are frequently
reconsidered in other ways and other media. One cannot say something about
Johns, therefore, without also saying something else.
Most of Johns's recurring imagery-flags, targets, maps, crosshatch forms,
borrowings from earlier artists, work from his seasons series-is on display in
Washington. The catalog clearly explains the import and the evolution of the
iconography and technique; that, for example, the older Johns less often selects
immediately recognizable images from mass culture and that he uses color in a
more varied way. But the impression left by the show is one less of evolution
than of never letting go, of an anxious continuity of interest, of an artist
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
coiling back even as he moves ahead.
The iconographic variations are paralleled by the constant experiments with
craft and medium. The show displays an extraordinary array of techniques-among
others, pencil, charcoal, silverpoint, crayon, oil on paper and ink on plastic.
(These last, most of them executed during the past decade, are gorgeous,
light-filled works.) The craft is enjoyed for its own sake, but it is not merely
an attempt at virtuosity. By observing old images through many different lenses,
Johns helps create a sense of a world that, despite certain landmarks, is
constantly in flux, a matter always of the shifting moment or the character of
the means at hand.
At times Johns's playfulness seems mannered and self-conscious, yet he is
not a trivial or an effete artist. The playfulness derives not from cleverness
or conceit, but from deep divisions in a passionate sensibility. Perhaps the
artist keeps playing, keeps rearranging his fragments, because that is the only
way to express things that cannot be reconciled. One could not say, for example,
that Johns is either a warm artist or a cold artist. He is both at once. On the
warm side is the expressionist moodiness that often erupts onto his surfaces,
and the sensual character of his brush stroke, which is reminiscent of Guston's.
(John Cage once said of his friend's work that "looking closely helps, though
the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in love.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
") The opening rooms of the exhibition are rich in beautifully worked,
melancholy blacks, and Johns's later art makes admiring (and somewhat opaque)
reference to the art of Munch, Grunewald, and the wilder Picasso.
Certainly the most powerful image is a large picture called Diver, from
1963. Rosenthal describes this monumental drawing, which may make reference to
Hart Crane's manner of suicide (leaping off the stern of a ship), as "the
diagram of a diver in various stages of a swan dive." At the drawing's upper
edge are footprints, placed on a long rectangular form that evokes a diving
board. Two sets of handprints on either end of two panels suggest the diver's
arms. A circular sweep of line comes from the handprints at the bottom of the
picture, reminiscent of a diver flaring out his arms in preparation for the
dive. "Deep blacks and muted grays blend to suggest the depths of a nocturnal
sea," says Rosenthal, "while the white pastel passages in the lower center call
to mind a diver's splash."
The inky imprints of hand and foot have a ghostly immediacy, like the
signature of a dead man. The spaces seem poised on the edge of balance; the
picture as a whole suggests that moment in a dive when one has just committed,
and there is no going back to balance or solidity. The world seems about to
upend, to spiral into oblivion. It is an expressionist picture, in other words,
and yet not quite, not altogether. The implied circle of the arms also recalls
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
other, cooler considerations: a compass; a clock; or the studied analysis of
form in Leonardo's famous drawing "Human Figure in a Circle, Illustrating
Proportions Vitruvian Man)," which in itself recalls a crucifixion.
Diver is Johns at his warmest, that is, most willing to let tragedy show
itself without the interference of learning or wit. On the colder side of Johns
is the catlike detachment and the sporting intellect, most obvious in the irony
and the obscure references of the imagery. But the chill can also be sensed in
the planned, boxed-in character of many of his pictures. johns loves the
workings of chance; but like Cage, he generally provides a strict structure in
which chance is allowed to operate. He is not totally loose. In a later version
of an image, he may carefully copy a fortuitous drip or a squiggle that was
originally happen-stance. He possesses play, he co-opts chance. That spontaneous
little squiggle is reincarnated as an idea. Such oppositions enable Johns to
convey a certain kind of pathos particularly well. Because he is such a tactile
painter, the inability to finally possess, to hold, often becomes genuinely
moving. His numbers and letters are not merely abstract symbols, for example;
they convey an almost living presence, as if they were real and touchable. They
aspire to the physical in the way that some objects in early still-life
painting-say, a Zurbaran lemon-seem to aspire to the metaphysical. In a world
that grows increasingly abstract, Johns understands better than most the
melancholy aura of representations.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
The oppositions in Johns have also enabled him to become one of those
artists able to fashion a synthesis, if not a reconciliation, among competing
traditions. In the catalog Rosenthal observes about one particular picture that
it combines references to both Picasso and Duchamp. In fact, Johns's entire
oeuvre sometimes seems like an effort to find a way to get both spirits into the
same frame, to arrive at an art that respects the ironic intelligence of a dandy
and the immediate physical apprehension of feeling that is characteristic of
abstract expressionism, to fashion an art of painting that a man like Duchamp
would not consider embarrassingly old-fashioned or bourgeois.
The way that Johns plays with the principal strains of modernism, his
passion for elaboration and contradiction, his general air of learned
knowingness and interest in making fine points, are characteristic of an artist
working late in a tradition. He is the kind of intelligent artist whose calling
is to find a way to movements across the Chinese landscape from the late Ming to
1959. "Every word is blood and grief," wrote a Chinese poet in 1944.
What has been acquired in exchange for all this misery? Today the consensus
of Chinese outside officialdom is: nothing. "What Confucian culture has given us
over the past several thousand years is not a national spirit of enterprise, a
system of laws, or a mechanism of cultural renewal, but a fearsome self-killing
machine that, as it degenerated, constantly devoured its best and its
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
brightest, its own vital elements." So wrote the authors of "River Elegy," the
television serial, whose broadcast on Chinese television the year before last
helped to set the scene for the outpouring of anti-regime sentiment in the
spring of 1989.
The way in which Spence interprets the "search for modernity" implies that
he agrees with this tragic vision. He follows recent academic practice in
placing the beginning of the modern period 300 or more years further back than
the old conventional benchmark of the mid-nineteenth century. But instead of
stressing the secular rise over this time of agricultural productivity,
handicraft industry, commercialization, population, urbanization, literacy, and
social and geographic mobility, as other recent historians have done, Spence
points out that people's average levels of consumption were no higher in the
Qing than in the Ming, in the 1930s than in the nineteenth century, under Mao
than under Chiang Kai-shek.
He would concede (though he never says so) that China has made itself modern
in the sense that it produces computers and rockets, feeds a population of a
billion, educates most of its people, provides medical care sufficient to
establish a life expectancy of sixty-nine years, and participates in the
international economy and political system. He also gives full play to the
achievements of Chinese literature and art, statecraft and philosophy, and his
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
book is beautifully illustrated with examples of these achievements. But he
argues that China has not been modern in at least 400 years, in the sense of
being a nation "both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity
yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new
technologies, new ideas." The quest of his title is thus one in which he
believes the Chinese are still engaged, unsuccessfully.
The fact that Liu and Bette Bao Lord share Spence's despair is significant,
for particular reasons in each case. To Lord, China's tragedy is personal.
Herself of Chinese origin, with many friends and relatives there, she went to
China believing that it would be possible to reform the Party from within, and
hoping to promote "one of the most critical bilateral relationships in the
world." By the end of her hardworking tour of duty as the American ambassador's
wife, she had come to see the Chinese system as thoroughly brutal and corrupt.
Then, staying a few extra weeks in the spring of 1989 to help CBS News cover the
Gorbachev-Deng Xiaoping summit, she saw the ruins of Deng's reforms come
crashing down around her friends. A close cousin who stayed in China when Lord
emigrated with her parents in 1946 symbolizes Lord's sense of having escaped her
fair share of misery by leaving. Having enjoyed more than her share of luck, she
feels that she has abandoned her relatives to one of the hardest fates in this
world, the fate of being Chinese.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Liu's memoir marks the nearly complete disillusionment of one of China's
last hopeful men. Liu made his name as an investigative reporter exposing power
abuse and corruption in the decade after his rehabilitation in 1979 from the
stigma of being a "rightist." As a rightist, he lost his Party membership and
his job, and spent two long periods of forced labor in the countryside. After
his rehabilitation, his first-and still most famous-article was "People or
Monsters?" (It is available in English in a book with the same title edited by
Perry Link, published by Indiana University Press in 1983.) It argued that a
major corruption case in a commune in northeastern China occurred because
cliquism and mutual back-scratching had eroded the vigilance of the local Party
committee.
Liu's trademark answer to the problem, proposed in an essay in 1985, was "A
Second Kind of Loyalty." The first kind of loyalty was what had gotten China
into trouble, he said. It was the loyalty of those who are "diligent and
conscientious, putting up with hardship and swallowing their resentment, doing
exactly what they are told, never expressing a contradictory opinion." This
loyalty, into whose moribund cults the Li Peng regime is trying to puff a spark
of life today, allowed bad people to seize power and do their will.
The second kind of loyalty, however, would save China. Liu personified it in
two protagonists, Ni Yuxian and Chen Shizhong, who stood up for the true
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ideals of socialism for twenty years, when those ideals were being trampled by
Mao and his acolytes. They wrote letters to oppose the Great Leap and the split
with the Soviet Union, hung wall posters to oppose the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution, and gave speeches to defend good cadres who were attacked by Red
Guards. But they never engaged in intrigue or violence or tried to evade their
inevitable punishments, and each of them spent years in jail. They played the
classic Chinese role of remonstrators, who sacrifice their flesh and blood in
order to awaken the ruler to his duty. Ironically, each subsequently diverged
from Liu's model, but in opposite ways. Ni obtained political asylum in New York
and helped found an exile party dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese Communist
Party. Chen went around China, at least before June 4 last year, giving speeches
on the topic, "I Offer the Love in My Heart to the Party and the People.")
Liu identified with Ni and Chen. His memoir was also going to be called "A
Second Kind of Loyalty," but the title was apparently revised to make more sense
to Americans. Liu portrays himself as telling the truth despite repression
because he believed that his appeals could awaken healthy forces in the Party.
He was never a dissident. As a reporter for the central Party paper, he was able
to conduct his investigations cloaked in the authority of the Party, publish his
works under the protection of the sympathetic General Secretary Hu Yaobang, and
make some of his reports not in writing to the public but orally to the relevant
provincial Party secretaries. Even after his expulsion from the Party in 1987
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for bourgeois liberalism after the fall of his protector Hu, he saw himself as a
sort of political Boddhisatva who postponed his relief from suffering to help
others reach salvation.
Although he doesn't use such terms, Liu inhabits a Confucian world divided
between moral persons (junzi) and people who are only human (xiaoren). For him,
the human problem is not to figure out what is the right thing to do, but to
make up one's mind to do it. A warm, compassionate, approachable man, he has an
endless appetite and memory for the details of individual lives, and a deep
understanding of human motives. But in the end he discerns, in the complexity of
the human comedy, only two kinds of people-those whose self-justifications are
excuses for selfishness, and those who sacrifice for justice.
Liu thus embodies what the historian Thomas A. Metzger has called the
"transformative" (as opposed to the accommodative") impulse in Chinese culture.
Like Confucius, Liu sees human nature as basically good and believes in changing
the world through the force of example. To borrow the title of another of his
essays, corruption in China occurs because "good people" are "weak." The events
of last year have brought him to the point of predicting the fall of the Li
Peng-Deng Xiaoping regime, which he sees as representing a small privileged
stratum of conservative bureaucrats rather than the Chinese Communist Party as a
whole. Although in " Tell the World " he suggests that a non-Communist
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democracy will emerge after an interregnum of rule by Party reformists, in
Higher Kind of Loyalty he appears still to hope that the Chinese Communist Party
will rediscover its soul and return to the path of its original ideals. However
ambivalently, Liu's second kind of loyalty is still loyalty.
Younger Chinese have criticized him for this all along. When he toured
American campuses in 1988, a student at Columbia confronted him with the example
of Fang Lizhi (the astrophysicist and human rights activist recently expelled
from the CCP and now in England after a year in refuge in the American Embassy
in Beijing), who had declared himself opposed to communism. Fang's stand is
based on the Western scientific viewpoint," she contended, "while yours is a
kind of peasant-based pro-Communist idealism which can never solve China's
fundamental problems." Many in the audience applauded. About a year later the
young critic Liu Xiaobo attacked Liu for believing that "someday the master the
CCP will wake up and appreciate his absolute sincerity because his criticisms
are not intended to hurt the master, but to make him more perfect." (Liu Xiaobo
is in jail now, accused of being a "sinister black hand" behind the Tiananmen
demonstrations.)
Liu has moved toward the harshest view of Chinese reality compatible with a
shred of faith in the goodness of man. He is a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, who
returned from twenty years of feeding pigs and hauling night soil to discover
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a world in which evil was pervasive and the few good people were viciously
oppressed. In one place that he investigated, "the so-called planned economy was
... nothing but the continuous how of public resources into the private pockets
of the power holders." In another, "the Party secretary could pick and choose
any girl from destitute families to sleep with him in return for food
subsidies." In a third, a petitioner for justice was repeatedly jailed and
tortured: "The children became vagrants, often beaten up, with no chance to go
to school; the family's ration of wheat and kindling wood was held back; their
house was destroyed." A fourth location as "a kingdom of evil.... a cursed land
where all values had been reversed." Throughout China, malefactors who had been
in power since the Cultural Revolution cooperated to protect one another, and
the reformists at the center, beset by forces only murkily hinted at by Liu,
were too weak to penetrate the web of evil. In all, says Liu, "China seemed like
a monstrous mill, continually rolling, crushing all individuality out of the
Chinese character."
A somewhat formulaic optimism informs the coda to A Higher Kind of Loyalty.
"The Chinese people have now changed," he asserts. "The people will pay a bloody
price, but in the end they will shake off this monstrous thing the ruling clique
that is draining them of their life's blood." (The language is typical of both
of Liu's books, which are more like political documents than personal
reflections, and which have been translated almost too faithfully from the
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Chinese.) Lord, too, ends with an obligatory upbeat ending, a parable of a
cover-let kept immaculate through years of prison. Spence's attempt to solace
his readers leads to a last sentence that is the only really ill-considered one
in his book: "There would be no truly modern China until the people were given
back their voices." His own narrative shows that the Chinese people never had
their voices.
Like Chernobyl, China seems to get worse the more we learn about it. Of
course, we need to beware of the phenomenon-Spence traces it well-by which the
Western image of China oscillates between exaggerated hopes and exaggerated
fears. If it was wrong to see Mao's China as a people's Shangri-La, it is also
wrong to imagine that in Li Peng's China most of the people spend most of their
time doing anything other than going about their daily business. Lord states
that "all Chinese are in pain," and I believe she is right, but what does a
people in pain look like? The kind of pain she is talking about does not show on
people's faces as they bicycle to work, any more than it did when travelers
reported that all was well in Mao's day. The truth about such a large country is
hard to discern. Still, the combined testimony of observers with such cumulative
and diverse authority is impressive.
Why are things so bad? "To understand China today," observes Spence, "we
need to know about China in the past." But what does the past tell us? Spence
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devotes an informative section to Hegel's theory that China is doomed by
geography to be an inward-looking peasant nation excluded from the mainstream of
history, a theory widely accepted by Chinese today. But he does not seem to
endorse such grand generalizations. The pointers he gives involve more discrete
historical echoes, parallels, and precedents. The book points out that problems
such as bureaucracy, regionalism, peasant poverty, abuse of women, familism, and
the struggle for political power persisted or recurred, but does not try to
explain why. Spence is a brilliant storyteller, endlessly curious about how
things really were at the top and the bottom of society, on the plains and in
the borderlands, at weddings and wars, in the rice fields and the scholar's
studio. While the vast tapestry contains many patterns, however, he is chary of
stating what they are. If there are "cycles" of some sort at work, as he says
several times, are they any more than historical resemblances and coincidences
that are bound to occur as human folly grinds repeatedly through a finite number
of permutations?
Spence tends to explain violence as occurring mostly when "the Chinese
people...threw themselves against the power of the state." This is a comforting
vision. Yet his narrative contains plenty of instances of the violence of the
oppressed against one another. As one of his own witnesses says, "The poor
squeeze each other to death." There is also a trace of romanticism in the
sections on the Communist revolution and Mao's rule. Spence portrays Mao
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
leading the country confidently in pursuit of his vision, however flawed. He
doesn't convey the constant bumbling, desperate insecurity, vicious infighting,
and hysterical improvisation that the Chinese Communists disguised behind the
bluster of their theory of scientific socialism.
Lord's answer to the violence of Chinese life is national character.
"Chinese go through life wearing masks," she says. The masks take over the
wearer, robbing him of his identity and inducing paranoia toward others. Able to
adapt to any circumstance, the Chinese "never bother asking themselves who they
are. They wait to be told." Under Mao, the Chinese were programmed to violence.
They took their turns as victims and perpetrators in a cycle that left no one
blameless and no one responsible. As one of her informants tells her, "It's over
now. It was not my fault. It was not his fault. Everyone suffered. It was the
times. We were all casualties of history."
Lord is a sensitive observer of human attitudes. One of the most delightful
sections of the book is a series of vignettes in which Chinese recount their
puzzling encounters in American society. But her well-meaning account of Chinese
culture boils down to an East Asian example of the "orientalism" criticized
years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our semblables and
freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a national
stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people behave
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as characteristics
that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why.
Liu Binyan's notion of a double network" of political and economic relations
created by the Cultural Revolution comes closer to illuminating the structure of
Chinese society. He sees the Cultural Revolution as a turmoil in which
opportunistic politicians scrambled to power. Once there, they stayed through
all the twists and turns of the line. As veterans of three dynasties," they had
an overweening interest in keeping down all those whom they had oppressed on
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their way up. "To a Party leader, it is a matter of life and death always to be
right." The protective network extended from the counties at the bottom of
China's administrative hierarchy to the top. At each level politicians protected
those below so that they could in turn be protected. The CCP turned into a giant
Mafia.
One of the saddest cases of oppression that Liu describes is that of a
worker named Wang Fumian, whom Liu was finally unable to help because he was
expelled from the Party before his report on the case could be acted upon. In
the course of investigating Wang's case, Liu discovered that Wang had been
confined to a mental hospital on a diagnosis of "mania." According to the
diagnostic handbook locally in use, mania was characterized by the "orientalism"
criticized years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our
semblables and freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a
national stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people
behave savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as
characteristics that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why. overconfidence,
extreme willfulness, found mostly in people of advanced cultural background.
They are biased and tend to distort facts, although their delusions are not
wholly divorced from reality. Taken for normal at an early age, the patient
gradually asserts his (her) willpower more and more forcibly, he (she) rushes
about offering petitions, writing endless letters of accusation. A few are
deluded into thinking they are making exceptional contributions to humanity.
It was a perfect description of Liu himself The only mystery is how, under
such circumstances, a few independent individuals like Liu and the stubborn
petitioners he wrote about could continue to exist.
On the whole, Liu's analysis is convincing, except that he is unclear about
many of the details. He seems to be protecting some people himself, as he refers
from time to time to higher-ups who were spiking his work from behind the
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scenes but does not tell us who they were. (Or did he wish to spare American
readers a surfeit of names filled with Xs and Zs engaged in intricate political
struggles?) And Liu's tendency to judge persons rather than the system diverts
attention from the question of how such things could happen. Is it because evil
people are stronger than good people, as he suggests? Or does it have something
to do with the design of Chinese institutions?
As Norbert Elias has written, describing the descent into savagery of German
troops in the Baltics in the late days of World War I: The path toward barbarity
and dehumanization ... always Lakes considerable time to unfold in relatively
civilized societies. Terror and horror hardly appear in such societies without a
long process of social disintegration. All too often the act of naked violence
... is analyzed with the help of short-term, static explanations. That may be
meaningful if one is not seeking explanations but only attempting to establish
culpability. It is easy to see barbarism and de-civilizations as the expression
of a free personal decision, but that kind of voluntarist explanation is shallow
and unhelpful.
In their approach to the problem of violence, Lipman and Harrell and their
contributors move in the direction that Elias recommends by looking at the
failure of the norms that are supposed to prohibit violence. The best chapter is
Anne F Thurston's account of urban violence during the Cultural Revolution
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(drawing from her longer study, Enemies of the People, which appeared in 1987).
She directs attention to the processes that strip away inhibitions to violence
by dehumanizing the target. In Mao's China, such processes included the labeling
of class enemies, glorification of the necessity of revolutionary violence,
public struggle sessions that inured people to the sight of suffering, and peer
pressure based on the practice of victimizing all who refused to victimize
others.
The most penetrating exposition of this constellation of institutions is
Lynn T White III's, whose arguments are summarized in a paragraph by Spence.
White stresses the role of three interlocking institutions, each found in fully
developed form nowhere but in Mao's China: the work unit, the system of class
labels, and the political campaign. The work unit locked each individual in
place for life with a set of co-workers like scorpions in ajar; the class label
system created what were thought to be permanent castes (they have since
disappeared) with contrary interests, and with members of the despised castes
seen as sub-human; political campaigns trained people to be vicious. White
traces the creation of these institutions in Shanghai in the 1950s and 1960s and
then their impact on the course of Shanghai's Cultural Revolution.
How the personalities of young Chinese were shaped by class labels, units,
and campaigns has been brilliantly described by Anita Chan in Children of Mao:
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Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation,
which appeared in 1985. Chan showed that a combination of indoctrination,
competition for approval, and fear of victimization forged decent young people
into Manichaean bigots. Liu provides powerful testimony about how it felt to be
one of the victims in this system, isolated, assaulted, and humiliated until
even a person with his powerful sense of individuality felt guilty for crimes he
had not committed.
Doleful as such explanations are, at least they remove the Chinese from the
ghetto of the inscrutable and show how normal human beings can be reduced to
marauders. Authors like Thurston, White, and Chan are able to return China to
the mainstream of history from which Hegel excluded it, even though the history
that China rejoins (so far) is that of Stalinism and fascism rather than the
Hegelian progress to freedom. The institutions that created violence in the
period of the Cultural Revolution were creations of Mao's China. They cannot
explain the upheavals of the preceding hundreds of years. (In fact, no one has
yet explained how and why Mao's people invented these institutions.) But studies
like these point the way to deciphering the mystery of extreme violence through
the analysis of social settings that rob people of human connections to their
victims.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
If these are the lessons from China's modern history, they are not very
encouraging. One wonders whether even the mordant Lu Xun was too u beat when he
said, as quoted by Spence , "The history of mankind's battle forward through
bloodshed is like the formation of coal, where a great deal of wood is needed to
produce a small amount of coal." Much human wood lies under the ground of
Chinese history, but how much coal?
ANDREW J. NATHAN is the author of China's Crisis and co-author of Human
Rights in Contemporary China, both published by Columbia University Press.
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The New Republic
July 30, 1990
SECTION: Vol. 203 ; No. 5-6 ; Pg. 30; ISSN: 0028-6583
LENGTH: 5921 words
HEADLINE: Policies of Chaos: the Organizational Causes of Violence in China's
Cultural Revolution._book
reviews
BYLINE: Nathan, Andrew J.
BODY:
No better proof could be imagined for Nietzsche's insight that cruelty is
the great festival pleasure of mankind than the torment inflicted by the Chinese
people on one another for the last 400 years. Jonathan Spence's history of that
period is filled with burying alive, burning alive, slicing, strangulation,
stabbing, drowning, poison gas inserted into tunnels, coerced suicide,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
exposure of severed heads, vengeful exhumation and dismemberment of corpses,
arson, rapine, torture, corruption, epidemic, famine, forced migrations, wars,
riots, strikes, rebellions, and piracy. The first three pages of Liu Binyan's
memoir, A Higher Kind of Loyalty, recount an assassination by bombing, a child
killed in a car accident, a murder, an execution, the death of a young brother
from scarlet fever, and a daily parade of carts filled with beggars' corpses.
Bette Bao Lord's snapshots from the lives of Chinese friends include beatings by
Red Guards, a wife denouncing a husband, a nursing infant denied breast milk, an
ear torn off, a thumb broken, and a head whacked in half by the stroke of a
scythe.
"Why does a culture that condemns violence," asks Stevan Harrell, "that
plays down the glory of military exploits, awards its highest prestige to
literary, rather than martial figures, and seeks harmony over all other values,
in fact display such frequency and variety of violent behavior?"
It would be difficult but unnecessary to prove that China's history is
sadder than that of other countries on a per capital basis. If nothing else, the
scale of horror is unique in this largest of all nations. Nearly twenty years
ago Richard L. Walker, in a study for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee,
estimated that the "human cost of communism in China" after 1949 ranged from 32
million to 60 million deaths. Walker's estimates were rough, but also
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
incomplete. He did not include the 20 million to 30 million famine deaths in
1959-61 that scholars learned about relatively recently, nor could he touch on
the revival of female infanticide since the late 1970s, which has claimed what
Spence estimates at 200,000 lives a year.
And such costs include only deaths. They do not include the 1 million people
who Liu says were labeled "rightists" in 1957 and punished for up to twenty
years (an increase over the usual estimate of 550,000); or the 20 million young
people who, with another 20 million factory workers, were "sent down" to the
countryside in the Mao years to get them out of the cities; or the 20 million
landlords, rich peasants, and others given discriminatory class labels in the
early 1950s; or the 2.9 million cadres who Deng Xiaoping said were mistreated in
the Cultural Revolution, or the 100 million persons who Hu Yaobang estimated
were affected in one way or another by that cataclysm.
No one has been able to estimate the population of the Chinese gulag,
although Senator Jesse Helms reportedly intends to hold hearings to try. Superb
studies by Robin Munro for Amnesty International and Asia Watch, based on
reports in the Chinese press, have detailed routine torture and mistreatment of
prisoners in Chinese detention centers, jails, and camps, but it is hopeless to
estimate the scale of abuse when the prison population itself is unknown.
Christina Gilmartin's essay in Violence in China, together with some anecdotes
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
from Liu's career as an investigative reporter, scratch the surface of the vast
subject of sexual abuse in Chinese jails, camps, offices, farms, factories, and
families, but again the data defy attempts at quantification.
Nor have the costs paid by the Chinese been limited to the period of
communism. Twenty million died during the Taiping rebellion in the
mid-nineteenth century, ten million in a famine in the 1870s, half a million in
a famine in the 1920s. Spence reports that about 14 million men were drafted
into the Chinese military during the war against Japan; a tenth of them died of
disease and malnutrition before seeing combat. One of the fine features of his
book is an endless series of small maps showing troop unsettle the paintings;
they are after-thoughts, additions, revisions, a way of refusing closure. Once
Johns has painted a picture it, too, becomes a thing "the mind already knows,"
and fair game for his exercises of doubt. His paintings are frequently
reconsidered in other ways and other media. One cannot say something about
Johns, therefore, without also saying something else.
Most of Johns's recurring imagery-flags, targets, maps, crosshatch forms,
borrowings from earlier artists, work from his seasons series-is on display in
Washington. The catalog clearly explains the import and the evolution of the
iconography and technique; that, for example, the older Johns less often selects
immediately recognizable images from mass culture and that he uses color in a
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
more varied way. But the impression left by the show is one less of evolution
than of never letting go, of an anxious continuity of interest, of an artist
coiling back even as he moves ahead.
The iconographic variations are paralleled by the constant experiments with
craft and medium. The show displays an extraordinary array of techniques-among
others, pencil, charcoal, silverpoint, crayon, oil on paper and ink on plastic.
(These last, most of them executed during the past decade, are gorgeous,
light-filled works.) The craft is enjoyed for its own sake, but it is not merely
an attempt at virtuosity. By observing old images through many different lenses,
Johns helps create a sense of a world that, despite certain landmarks, is
constantly in flux, a matter always of the shifting moment or the character of
the means at hand.
At times Johns's playfulness seems mannered and self-conscious, yet he is
not a trivial or an effete artist. The playfulness derives not from cleverness
or conceit, but from deep divisions in a passionate sensibility. Perhaps the
artist keeps playing, keeps rearranging his fragments, because that is the only
way to express things that cannot be reconciled. One could not say, for example,
that Johns is either a warm artist or a cold artist. He is both at once. On the
warm side is the expressionist moodiness that often erupts onto his surfaces,
and the sensual character of his brush stroke, which is reminiscent of
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Guston's. (John Cage once said of his friend's work that "looking closely helps,
though the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in
love. ") The opening rooms of the exhibition are rich in beautifully worked,
melancholy blacks, and Johns's later art makes admiring (and somewhat opaque)
reference to the art of Munch, Grunewald, and the wilder Picasso.
Certainly the most powerful image is a large picture called Diver, from
1963. Rosenthal describes this monumental drawing, which may make reference to
Hart Crane's manner of suicide (leaping off the stern of a ship), as "the
diagram of a diver in various stages of a swan dive." At the drawing's upper
edge are footprints, placed on a long rectangular form that evokes a diving
board. Two sets of handprints on either end of two panels suggest the diver's
arms. A circular sweep of line comes from the handprints at the bottom of the
picture, reminiscent of a diver flaring out his arms in preparation for the
dive. "Deep blacks and muted grays blend to suggest the depths of a nocturnal
sea," says Rosenthal, "while the white pastel passages in the lower center call
to mind a diver's splash."
The inky imprints of hand and foot have a ghostly immediacy, like the
signature of a dead man. The spaces seem poised on the edge of balance; the
picture as a whole suggests that moment in a dive when one has just committed,
and there is no going back to balance or solidity. The world seems about to
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
upend, to spiral into oblivion. It is an expressionist picture, in other words,
and yet not quite, not altogether. The implied circle of the arms also recalls
other, cooler considerations: a compass; a clock; or the studied analysis of
form in Leonardo's famous drawing "Human Figure in a Circle, Illustrating
Proportions Vitruvian Man)," which in itself recalls a crucifixion.
Diver is Johns at his warmest, that is, most willing to let tragedy show
itself without the interference of learning or wit. On the colder side of Johns
is the catlike detachment and the sporting intellect, most obvious in the irony
and the obscure references of the imagery. But the chill can also be sensed in
the planned, boxed-in character of many of his pictures. johns loves the
workings of chance; but like Cage, he generally provides a strict structure in
which chance is allowed to operate. He is not totally loose. In a later version
of an image, he may carefully copy a fortuitous drip or a squiggle that was
originally happen-stance. He possesses play, he co-opts chance. That spontaneous
little squiggle is reincarnated as an idea. Such oppositions enable Johns to
convey a certain kind of pathos particularly well. Because he is such a tactile
painter, the inability to finally possess, to hold, often becomes genuinely
moving. His numbers and letters are not merely abstract symbols, for example;
they convey an almost living presence, as if they were real and touchable. They
aspire to the physical in the way that some objects in early still-life
painting-say, a Zurbaran lemon-seem to aspire to the metaphysical. In a world
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
that grows increasingly abstract, Johns understands better than most the
melancholy aura of representations.
The oppositions in Johns have also enabled him to become one of those
artists able to fashion a synthesis, if not a reconciliation, among competing
traditions. In the catalog Rosenthal observes about one particular picture that
it combines references to both Picasso and Duchamp. In fact, Johns's entire
oeuvre sometimes seems like an effort to find a way to get both spirits into the
same frame, to arrive at an art that respects the ironic intelligence of a dandy
and the immediate physical apprehension of feeling that is characteristic of
abstract expressionism, to fashion an art of painting that a man like Duchamp
would not consider embarrassingly old-fashioned or bourgeois.
The way that Johns plays with the principal strains of modernism, his
passion for elaboration and contradiction, his general air of learned
knowingness and interest in making fine points, are characteristic of an artist
working late in a tradition. He is the kind of intelligent artist whose calling
is to find a way to movements across the Chinese landscape from the late Ming to
1959. "Every word is blood and grief," wrote a Chinese poet in 1944.
What has been acquired in exchange for all this misery? Today the consensus
of Chinese outside officialdom is: nothing. "What Confucian culture has given
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
us over the past several thousand years is not a national spirit of enterprise,
a system of laws, or a mechanism of cultural renewal, but a fearsome
self-killing machine that, as it degenerated, constantly devoured its best and
its brightest, its own vital elements." So wrote the authors of "River Elegy,"
the television serial, whose broadcast on Chinese television the year before
last helped to set the scene for the outpouring of anti-regime sentiment in the
spring of 1989.
The way in which Spence interprets the "search for modernity" implies that
he agrees with this tragic vision. He follows recent academic practice in
placing the beginning of the modern period 300 or more years further back than
the old conventional benchmark of the mid-nineteenth century. But instead of
stressing the secular rise over this time of agricultural productivity,
handicraft industry, commercialization, population, urbanization, literacy, and
social and geographic mobility, as other recent historians have done, Spence
points out that people's average levels of consumption were no higher in the
Qing than in the Ming, in the 1930s than in the nineteenth century, under Mao
than under Chiang Kai-shek.
He would concede (though he never says so) that China has made itself modern
in the sense that it produces computers and rockets, feeds a population of a
billion, educates most of its people, provides medical care sufficient to
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
establish a life expectancy of sixty-nine years, and participates in the
international economy and political system. He also gives full play to the
achievements of Chinese literature and art, statecraft and philosophy, and his
book is beautifully illustrated with examples of these achievements. But he
argues that China has not been modern in at least 400 years, in the sense of
being a nation "both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity
yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new
technologies, new ideas." The quest of his title is thus one in which he
believes the Chinese are still engaged, unsuccessfully.
The fact that Liu and Bette Bao Lord share Spence's despair is significant,
for particular reasons in each case. To Lord, China's tragedy is personal.
Herself of Chinese origin, with many friends and relatives there, she went to
China believing that it would be possible to reform the Party from within, and
hoping to promote "one of the most critical bilateral relationships in the
world." By the end of her hardworking tour of duty as the American ambassador's
wife, she had come to see the Chinese system as thoroughly brutal and corrupt.
Then, staying a few extra weeks in the spring of 1989 to help CBS News cover the
Gorbachev-Deng Xiaoping summit, she saw the ruins of Deng's reforms come
crashing down around her friends. A close cousin who stayed in China when Lord
emigrated with her parents in 1946 symbolizes Lord's sense of having escaped her
fair share of misery by leaving. Having enjoyed more than her share of luck,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
she feels that she has abandoned her relatives to one of the hardest fates in
this world, the fate of being Chinese.
Liu's memoir marks the nearly complete disillusionment of one of China's
last hopeful men. Liu made his name as an investigative reporter exposing power
abuse and corruption in the decade after his rehabilitation in 1979 from the
stigma of being a "rightist." As a rightist, he lost his Party membership and
his job, and spent two long periods of forced labor in the countryside. After
his rehabilitation, his first-and still most famous-article was "People or
Monsters?" (It is available in English in a book with the same title edited by
Perry Link, published by Indiana University Press in 1983.) It argued that a
major corruption case in a commune in northeastern China occurred because
cliquism and mutual back-scratching had eroded the vigilance of the local Party
committee.
Liu's trademark answer to the problem, proposed in an essay in 1985, was "A
Second Kind of Loyalty." The first kind of loyalty was what had gotten China
into trouble, he said. It was the loyalty of those who are "diligent and
conscientious, putting up with hardship and swallowing their resentment, doing
exactly what they are told, never expressing a contradictory opinion." This
loyalty, into whose moribund cults the Li Peng regime is trying to puff a spark
of life today, allowed bad people to seize power and do their will.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
The second kind of loyalty, however, would save China. Liu personified it in
two protagonists, Ni Yuxian and Chen Shizhong, who stood up for the true
ideals of socialism for twenty years, when those ideals were being trampled by
Mao and his acolytes. They wrote letters to oppose the Great Leap and the split
with the Soviet Union, hung wall posters to oppose the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution, and gave speeches to defend good cadres who were attacked by Red
Guards. But they never engaged in intrigue or violence or tried to evade their
inevitable punishments, and each of them spent years in jail. They played the
classic Chinese role of remonstrators, who sacrifice their flesh and blood in
order to awaken the ruler to his duty. Ironically, each subsequently diverged
from Liu's model, but in opposite ways. Ni obtained political asylum in New York
and helped found an exile party dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese Communist
Party. Chen went around China, at least before June 4 last year, giving speeches
on the topic, "I Offer the Love in My Heart to the Party and the People.")
Liu identified with Ni and Chen. His memoir was also going to be called "A
Second Kind of Loyalty," but the title was apparently revised to make more sense
to Americans. Liu portrays himself as telling the truth despite repression
because he believed that his appeals could awaken healthy forces in the Party.
He was never a dissident. As a reporter for the central Party paper, he was able
to conduct his investigations cloaked in the authority of the Party, publish his
works under the protection of the sympathetic General Secretary Hu Yaobang,
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
and make some of his reports not in writing to the public but orally to the
relevant provincial Party secretaries. Even after his expulsion from the Party
in 1987 for bourgeois liberalism after the fall of his protector Hu, he saw
himself as a sort of political Boddhisatva who postponed his relief from
suffering to help others reach salvation.
Although he doesn't use such terms, Liu inhabits a Confucian world divided
between moral persons (junzi) and people who are only human (xiaoren). For him,
the human problem is not to figure out what is the right thing to do, but to
make up one's mind to do it. A warm, compassionate, approachable man, he has an
endless appetite and memory for the details of individual lives, and a deep
understanding of human motives. But in the end he discerns, in the complexity of
the human comedy, only two kinds of people-those whose self-justifications are
excuses for selfishness, and those who sacrifice for justice.
Liu thus embodies what the historian Thomas A. Metzger has called the
"transformative" (as opposed to the accommodative") impulse in Chinese culture.
Like Confucius, Liu sees human nature as basically good and believes in changing
the world through the force of example. To borrow the title of another of his
essays, corruption in China occurs because "good people" are "weak." The events
of last year have brought him to the point of predicting the fall of the Li
Peng-Deng Xiaoping regime, which he sees as representing a small privileged
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
stratum of conservative bureaucrats rather than the Chinese Communist Party as a
whole. Although in " Tell the World " he suggests that a non-Communist democracy
will emerge after an interregnum of rule by Party reformists, in Higher Kind of
Loyalty he appears still to hope that the Chinese Communist Party will
rediscover its soul and return to the path of its original ideals. However
ambivalently, Liu's second kind of loyalty is still loyalty.
Younger Chinese have criticized him for this all along. When he toured
American campuses in 1988, a student at Columbia confronted him with the example
of Fang Lizhi (the astrophysicist and human rights activist recently expelled
from the CCP and now in England after a year in refuge in the American Embassy
in Beijing), who had declared himself opposed to communism. Fang's stand is
based on the Western scientific viewpoint," she contended, "while yours is a
kind of peasant-based pro-Communist idealism which can never solve China's
fundamental problems." Many in the audience applauded. About a year later the
young critic Liu Xiaobo attacked Liu for believing that "someday the master the
CCP will wake up and appreciate his absolute sincerity because his criticisms
are not intended to hurt the master, but to make him more perfect." (Liu Xiaobo
is in jail now, accused of being a "sinister black hand" behind the Tiananmen
demonstrations.)
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Liu has moved toward the harshest view of Chinese reality compatible with a
shred of faith in the goodness of man. He is a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, who
returned from twenty years of feeding pigs and hauling night soil to discover a
world in which evil was pervasive and the few good people were viciously
oppressed. In one place that he investigated, "the so-called planned economy was
... nothing but the continuous how of public resources into the private pockets
of the power holders." In another, "the Party secretary could pick and choose
any girl from destitute families to sleep with him in return for food
subsidies." In a third, a petitioner for justice was repeatedly jailed and
tortured: "The children became vagrants, often beaten up, with no chance to go
to school; the family's ration of wheat and kindling wood was held back; their
house was destroyed." A fourth location as "a kingdom of evil.... a cursed land
where all values had been reversed." Throughout China, malefactors who had been
in power since the Cultural Revolution cooperated to protect one another, and
the reformists at the center, beset by forces only murkily hinted at by Liu,
were too weak to penetrate the web of evil. In all, says Liu, "China seemed like
a monstrous mill, continually rolling, crushing all individuality out of the
Chinese character."
A somewhat formulaic optimism informs the coda to A Higher Kind of Loyalty.
"The Chinese people have now changed," he asserts. "The people will pay a bloody
price, but in the end they will shake off this monstrous thing the ruling
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
clique that is draining them of their life's blood." (The language is typical of
both of Liu's books, which are more like political documents than personal
reflections, and which have been translated almost too faithfully from the
Chinese.) Lord, too, ends with an obligatory upbeat ending, a parable of a
cover-let kept immaculate through years of prison. Spence's attempt to solace
his readers leads to a last sentence that is the only really ill-considered one
in his book: "There would be no truly modern China until the people were given
back their voices." His own narrative shows that the Chinese people never had
their voices.
Like Chernobyl, China seems to get worse the more we learn about it. Of
course, we need to beware of the phenomenon-Spence traces it well-by which the
Western image of China oscillates between exaggerated hopes and exaggerated
fears. If it was wrong to see Mao's China as a people's Shangri-La, it is also
wrong to imagine that in Li Peng's China most of the people spend most of their
time doing anything other than going about their daily business. Lord states
that "all Chinese are in pain," and I believe she is right, but what does a
people in pain look like? The kind of pain she is talking about does not show on
people's faces as they bicycle to work, any more than it did when travelers
reported that all was well in Mao's day. The truth about such a large country is
hard to discern. Still, the combined testimony of observers with such cumulative
and diverse authority is impressive.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
Why are things so bad? "To understand China today," observes Spence, "we
need to know about China in the past." But what does the past tell us? Spence
devotes an informative section to Hegel's theory that China is doomed by
geography to be an inward-looking peasant nation excluded from the mainstream of
history, a theory widely accepted by Chinese today. But he does not seem to
endorse such grand generalizations. The pointers he gives involve more discrete
historical echoes, parallels, and precedents. The book points out that problems
such as bureaucracy, regionalism, peasant poverty, abuse of women, familism, and
the struggle for political power persisted or recurred, but does not try to
explain why. Spence is a brilliant storyteller, endlessly curious about how
things really were at the top and the bottom of society, on the plains and in
the borderlands, at weddings and wars, in the rice fields and the scholar's
studio. While the vast tapestry contains many patterns, however, he is chary of
stating what they are. If there are "cycles" of some sort at work, as he says
several times, are they any more than historical resemblances and coincidences
that are bound to occur as human folly grinds repeatedly through a finite number
of permutations?
Spence tends to explain violence as occurring mostly when "the Chinese
people...threw themselves against the power of the state." This is a comforting
vision. Yet his narrative contains plenty of instances of the violence of the
oppressed against one another. As one of his own witnesses says, "The poor
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
squeeze each other to death." There is also a trace of romanticism in the
sections on the Communist revolution and Mao's rule. Spence portrays Mao leading
the country confidently in pursuit of his vision, however flawed. He doesn't
convey the constant bumbling, desperate insecurity, vicious infighting, and
hysterical improvisation that the Chinese Communists disguised behind the
bluster of their theory of scientific socialism.
Lord's answer to the violence of Chinese life is national character.
"Chinese go through life wearing masks," she says. The masks take over the
wearer, robbing him of his identity and inducing paranoia toward others. Able to
adapt to any circumstance, the Chinese "never bother asking themselves who they
are. They wait to be told." Under Mao, the Chinese were programmed to violence.
They took their turns as victims and perpetrators in a cycle that left no one
blameless and no one responsible. As one of her informants tells her, "It's over
now. It was not my fault. It was not his fault. Everyone suffered. It was the
times. We were all casualties of history."
Lord is a sensitive observer of human attitudes. One of the most delightful
sections of the book is a series of vignettes in which Chinese recount their
puzzling encounters in American society. But her well-meaning account of Chinese
culture boils down to an East Asian example of the "orientalism" criticized
years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our semblables and
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a national
stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people behave
savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as characteristics
that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why.
Liu Binyan's notion of a double network" of political and economic relations
created by the Cultural Revolution comes closer to illuminating the structure of
Chinese society. He sees the Cultural Revolution as a turmoil in which
opportunistic politicians scrambled to power. Once there, they stayed through
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
all the twists and turns of the line. As veterans of three dynasties," they had
an overweening interest in keeping down all those whom they had oppressed on
their way up. "To a Party leader, it is a matter of life and death always to be
right." The protective network extended from the counties at the bottom of
China's administrative hierarchy to the top. At each level politicians protected
those below so that they could in turn be protected. The CCP turned into a giant
Mafia.
One of the saddest cases of oppression that Liu describes is that of a
worker named Wang Fumian, whom Liu was finally unable to help because he was
expelled from the Party before his report on the case could be acted upon. In
the course of investigating Wang's case, Liu discovered that Wang had been
confined to a mental hospital on a diagnosis of "mania." According to the
diagnostic handbook locally in use, mania was characterized by the "orientalism"
criticized years ago by Edward W Said. It makes the Chinese seem less our
semblables and freres than mysterious others, sinister and cruel. It offers a
national stereotype instead of analyzing the situations that can make people
behave savagely. It labels the symptoms of living in Chinese society as
characteristics that explain Chinese behavior.
It is ironic that Lord's approach replaces understanding with exoticism,
because she writes out of affection, positioning herself as a member of both
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
cultures, interpreter of each to the other. Yet the Chinese side of her
credentials is open to question. She came to the United States at the age of
eight and did not visit again until 1973. Returning as the wife of the American
ambassador, she let her interest in learning about Chinese lives be known. Many
Chinese obliged, in person or on tape. She herself suspects that their motives
were not always disinterested, although in fact she was unable to do them favors
with the American government. In any case, she received scores of anecdotes,
some rather stylized, all filtered to us through a pathos-filled language that
replaces her interviewees' voices with her own. The result is a book that tells
the reader some of what went on in Mao's China about why. overconfidence,
extreme willfulness, found mostly in people of advanced cultural background.
They are biased and tend to distort facts, although their delusions are not
wholly divorced from reality. Taken for normal at an early age, the patient
gradually asserts his (her) willpower more and more forcibly, he (she) rushes
about offering petitions, writing endless letters of accusation. A few are
deluded into thinking they are making exceptional contributions to humanity.
It was a perfect description of Liu himself The only mystery is how, under
such circumstances, a few independent individuals like Liu and the stubborn
petitioners he wrote about could continue to exist.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
On the whole, Liu's analysis is convincing, except that he is unclear about
many of the details. He seems to be protecting some people himself, as he refers
from time to time to higher-ups who were spiking his work from behind the scenes
but does not tell us who they were. (Or did he wish to spare American readers a
surfeit of names filled with Xs and Zs engaged in intricate political
struggles?) And Liu's tendency to judge persons rather than the system diverts
attention from the question of how such things could happen. Is it because evil
people are stronger than good people, as he suggests? Or does it have something
to do with the design of Chinese institutions?
As Norbert Elias has written, describing the descent into savagery of German
troops in the Baltics in the late days of World War I: The path toward barbarity
and dehumanization ... always Lakes considerable time to unfold in relatively
civilized societies. Terror and horror hardly appear in such societies without a
long process of social disintegration. All too often the act of naked violence
... is analyzed with the help of short-term, static explanations. That may be
meaningful if one is not seeking explanations but only attempting to establish
culpability. It is easy to see barbarism and de-civilizations as the expression
of a free personal decision, but that kind of voluntarist explanation is shallow
and unhelpful.
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
In their approach to the problem of violence, Lipman and Harrell and their
contributors move in the direction that Elias recommends by looking at the
failure of the norms that are supposed to prohibit violence. The best chapter is
Anne F Thurston's account of urban violence during the Cultural Revolution
(drawing from her longer study, Enemies of the People, which appeared in 1987).
She directs attention to the processes that strip away inhibitions to violence
by dehumanizing the target. In Mao's China, such processes included the labeling
of class enemies, glorification of the necessity of revolutionary violence,
public struggle sessions that inured people to the sight of suffering, and peer
pressure based on the practice of victimizing all who refused to victimize
others.
The most penetrating exposition of this constellation of institutions is
Lynn T White III's, whose arguments are summarized in a paragraph by Spence.
White stresses the role of three interlocking institutions, each found in fully
developed form nowhere but in Mao's China: the work unit, the system of class
labels, and the political campaign. The work unit locked each individual in
place for life with a set of co-workers like scorpions in ajar; the class label
system created what were thought to be permanent castes (they have since
disappeared) with contrary interests, and with members of the despised castes
seen as sub-human; political campaigns trained people to be vicious. White
traces the creation of these institutions in Shanghai in the 1950s and 1960s
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
and then their impact on the course of Shanghai's Cultural Revolution.
How the personalities of young Chinese were shaped by class labels, units,
and campaigns has been brilliantly described by Anita Chan in Children of Mao:
Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation,
which appeared in 1985. Chan showed that a combination of indoctrination,
competition for approval, and fear of victimization forged decent young people
into Manichaean bigots. Liu provides powerful testimony about how it felt to be
one of the victims in this system, isolated, assaulted, and humiliated until
even a person with his powerful sense of individuality felt guilty for crimes he
had not committed.
Doleful as such explanations are, at least they remove the Chinese from the
ghetto of the inscrutable and show how normal human beings can be reduced to
marauders. Authors like Thurston, White, and Chan are able to return China to
the mainstream of history from which Hegel excluded it, even though the history
that China rejoins (so far) is that of Stalinism and fascism rather than the
Hegelian progress to freedom. The institutions that created violence in the
period of the Cultural Revolution were creations of Mao's China. They cannot
explain the upheavals of the preceding hundreds of years. (In fact, no one has
yet explained how and why Mao's people invented these institutions.) But studies
like these point the way to deciphering the mystery of extreme violence
The New Republic, July 30, 1990
through the analysis of social settings that rob people of human connections to
their victims.
If these are the lessons from China's modern history, they are not very
encouraging. One wonders whether even the mordant Lu Xun was too u beat when he
said, as quoted by Spence , "The history of mankind's battle forward through
bloodshed is like the formation of coal, where a great deal of wood is needed to
produce a small amount of coal." Much human wood lies under the ground of
Chinese history, but how much coal?
ANDREW J. NATHAN is the author of China's Crisis and co-author of Human
Rights in Contemporary China, both published by Columbia University Press.
IAC-NUMBER: IAC 08731888
IAC-CLASS: Magazine
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: August 15, 1995
LEVEL 1 - 30 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1989 The British Broadcasting Corporation
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
November 4, 1989, Saturday
SECTION: Part 3 The Far East; B. INTERNAL AFFAIRS; 2. CHINA; FE/0605/B2/ 1;
LENGTH: 4452 words
HEADLINE: 'PEOPLE'S DAILY' DISSIDENT WRITER LIU BINYAN ''SCUM OF THE CHINESE
NATION''
SOURCE: Peking 'Renmin Ribao' overseas edition in Chinese 3 Nov 89
Text of front page article by Guo Fan (6753 1581) ''Full exposure of Liu
Binyan's reactionary features''
BODY:
In early 1987, Liu Binyan was expelled from the party for seriously violating
the party constitution, party discipline, and party resolutions, attacking the
four cardinal principles, vilifying the CCP, and becoming a representative
figure of bourgeois liberalisation. In March 1988, he received the Nieman
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
Scholarship from the USA and went to the other side of the Pacific with his
wife. He studied and gave lectures in Harvard University for one year. At the
turn of spring and summer of this year, before and after the student unrest in
Peking developed into a round of turmoil and a counter-revolutionary rebellion,
Liu Binyan played an extremely inglorious role. After the counter-revolutionary
rebellion in Peking was quelled, he went to many places and did his utmost to
oppose the CCP and the socialist system. He also colluded with Yan Jiaqi, Wan
Runnan, Wuer Kaixi and other people who fled the country in establishing the
reactionary organisation the ''Federation for a Democratic China'', thus putting
himself on the pillar of stigma in history.
Before the Turmoil Summoning Wind and Rain
Over a period of more than one year, Liu Binyan travelled to the eastern and
western parts of the USA, Hon gkong, Bonn, Paris and London in the capacity of a
Chinese writer, an old reporter and a ''scholar'' doing research work in the
USA. He came into extensive contacts with various forces, especially people in
the journalist and opinion-forming circles and overseas intellectuals of Chinese
origin. He frequently gave lectures, published articles and gave interviews to
reporters, thus becoming an important ''newsmaker'' and ''source'' about Chinese
affairs for some Western and overseas mass media.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
Liu Binyan stubbornly stuck to the position of bourgeois liberalisation for
many years and became more unscrupulous in advocating bourgeois liberalisation
after going abroad. In April 1988, he published an article in the 'Los Angeles
Times' that advocated bourgeois ''freedom of the press'' and called for the
establishment of ''non-governmental newspapers'' in China. He opposed the CCP's
leadership of journalism, opposed the socialist journalist system and
guidelines, and tried to seize an opinion position for bourgeois liberalisation.
In June 1988, he made a speech ''on the issue of intellectuals in China'' at a
symposium, and the full text of this speech was published by the Hongkong
magazine 'Pai Hsing' ['The People']. He uttered some noticeable points, he
asserted that our country's socialist ''democratic model and system have
failed'' and should be replaced with the capitalist political system ''with
three separate powers''. He also said that ''a major strategic mistake we have
committed since 1949 is the absolute severance from capitalism''.
Beginning last autumn, Liu Binyan obviously changed the tune of his comments
on domestic political issues and there was a stronger smell of gunpowder. This
was because he had perceived the new changes in the micro-climate inside China
and the macro-climate in the world with his special political sensibility.
In late September 1988, Liu Binyan asserted that China's economic reform
''will not be successful'' when giving a lecture in Harvard University, and he
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
ridiculously alleged that the ''CCP bureaucratic group'' was the fundamental
reason for China's inability to make progress. On 30th October, he gave a speech
at Queen's College, New York University and making the open incitement that ''a
round of larger-scale and more intense turmoil than the Cultural Revolution will
occur in China''. Taiwan's radio ''Voice of Free China'' later broadcast a
commentary on the topic of Liu Binyan's speech and launched a psychological
offensive against the mainland. The commentary said that Liu Binyan's opinion
was supported by many experts in Chinese affairs. They held that the forthcoming
new ''social revolution'' would be directed at the CCP. This radio for fighting
an anti-communist psychological battle also called for ''grasping this
opportunity'' to greet the coming of a ''new era''.
In November 1988, Liu Binyan was interviewed by the reporter for West
Germany's 'Die Welt', in Bonn. In response to a question about creative freedom,
he made use of the subject under discussion to slander China by saying that
''there is no freedom of speech so far''. He said that the current system in
China needs a ''change'' and he hoped for the appearance of a ''second political
party''. In early December, he gave speech to some Chinese students from both
the mainland and Taiwan at Maryland University in the USA on the topic of the
so-called ''rise and death of the CCP and China's future''. In the speech, he
disregarded the great achievements of the 10-year reform in our country and said
that the reform ''was doomed to failure from the very beginning'', because
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
China's''political system is unreasonable''. He called for abolishing the four
cardinal principles which are taken as the foundation for establishing our
state. He said that ''the four cardinal principles are included in the preamble
to the PRC Constitution and lack legal validity. Everything written on paper can
be changed.'' He ridiculously attacked communism envisaged by Marx by describing
it as ''something with a strong colour of Utopia''. He accused Mao Zedong
Thought of being ''intensively harmful''. He even openly claimed that he did not
oppose using ''means of violence'' to achieve the goal of ''democratic
politics'' in China. After concluding the speech, Liu Binyan told a Hongkong
'Shih Pao' ('Hongkong Times') reporter on his own initiative that he was so
greatly influenced by Taiwan's ''democratisation'' that he had the courage to
openly criticise the CCP. He said that Taiwan was a mirror to the mainland and
he intended to visit Taiwan but was in no hurry and it was better to let Mr Fang
Lizhi go there before him.
In making the above two clamorous statements, Liu Binyan attacked our
country's socialist political system and Marxist guiding ideology by using the
political models and values of Western capitalist countries. The ''democratic
politics'' he called for is synonymous with Western political models, such as
parliamentary democracy and the multi-party system, and the ''democratisation''
he trumpeted means in essence turning China into a bourgeois republic and
reducing it once more to the status of a vassal to big Western capitalist
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
countries.
At the beginning of this year, in collusion with people such as Fang Lizhi,
Liu Binyan staged a farce to demand a general pardon and the release of the
so-called ''political prisoners'', such as Wei Jingsheng and others who had
seriously contravened the criminal law. Supported by some overseas political
forces, by capitalising on the opportunity of the US President's visit to China
and the ''human rights'' issue, they created incidents and tried to coerce our
government. On 6th January, Fang Lizhi sent an open letter to Deng Xiaoping,
demanding the release of ''political prisoners'' and Wei Jingsheng. At a rally
of the ''new enlightenment salon'' on 28th January, Fang Lizhi provocatively
said ''The main problem currently facing China is the human rights issue. What
we need is action.'' ''We must adopt a complete and thorough critical attitude
toward the authorities.'' At a press conference in Peking on 26th February, Chen
Jun, member of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy, distributed in large numbers
Fang Lizhi's letter to Deng Xiaoping and the letter of 33 people including Chen
Jun to the NPC Standing Committee and the CCP Central Committee. On 17th
February, Fang Lizhi and 53 overseas Chinese intellectuals issued a
''Declaration demanding democratic reforms on the Chinese mainland'' in the USA,
which included the release of ''political prisoners'' and the deletion of the
clause concerning ''counter-revolutionary offences'' from the criminal law. On
20th February, Liu Binyan published his predrafted ''Answering questions of a
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
'Hua Chiao Jih Pao' 'Overseas Chinese Daily' reporter'' in the USA and expressed
his support for the actions of people, such as Fang Lizhi and Chen Jun.
Afterwards, Liu Binyan and Fang Lizhi put on another show. On 19th February,
when the US President visited China, Liu Binyan, in a special interview with the
'New York Times' published on the same day, blamed the US government for ''not
lodging a protest as it did against the USSR'' on the issue of ''political
prisoners'' on mainland China and said that ''it is indeed an insult if human
rights in China are regarded as of no importance''. Several days later, in an
article dispatched from Peking and published in the 'Washington Post' Fang Lizhi
also blamed US political activists for ''only saying a few words without taking
any action'' on the issue of human rights in China, while openly showing their
concern for the issue of human rights in the USSR and other east European
countries. These two fellows successively fell back on the assistance of the US
press to blame, in the same tone, the US government for not interfering enough
in China's internal affairs on the issue of ''human rights'', thus boosting the
arrogance of USA in interfering in China's internal affairs by means of ''human
rights diplomacy''.
The ''human rights farce'' participated in by Liu Binyan and his ilk was
merely the first ''card'' played by Fang Lizhi and his followers who had tried
their best to foment turmoil in China. Taiwan's 'Lien Ho Pao' ['United Daily
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
News'] published an article on 23rd February, which said ''A declaration on
human rights has been published in New York and an open letter has been
published in Peking. The Divine Land is experiencing fundamental changes and an
unprecedented tide of democracy!'' This clearly indicated that between spring
and summer, this year, political turmoil was brewing in China and that foreign
and domestic antagonistic forces were preparing to join hands with each other in
an attempt to stir up political turmoil in China.
In March, this year, Liu Binyan went to Harvard University and gave a series
of lectures there. On the platform of Harvard University, Liu Binyan frequently
slandered and attacked the CCP and China's socialist system. Liu Binyan said
that the CCP has practised ''dictatorship'' and made unremitting efforts to step
up its ''autocratic rule'' over the past 40 years. China's economic construction
is''a complete failure''. The decade-long reform has ''drained China of her
resources''. Later on, these slanderous remarks made by Liu Binyan were
transmitted to China by the Voice of America and echoed the anti-communist and
anti-socialist tune sung by some people who were putting up a large number of
big-character-posters and small-character-posters and held a lot of gatherings
on the campuses of some institutions of higher learning in Peking.
Banging the Drum for the Turmoil
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
On 15th April, Comrade Hu Yaobang passed away all of a sudden. Soon
afterwards, the student unrest and turmoil, which had been brewing for a long
time, broke out in China ahead of schedule. On the pretext of ''rehabilitating
bourgeois liberalisation'', the organisers and plotters of the turmoil put
forward a reactionary political programme which consisted of a ''parliamentary
system'', a ''multiparty system'', a ''private ownership system'' and some
specific demands, including ''rehabilitating Fang Lizhi and Liu Binyan'',
''implementing freedom of the press'', ''lifting the ban on privately-run
newspapers'' and so on. Liu Binyan, who was still in the USA at that time,
immediately made his response to the student unrest and turmoil in China and
said ''I am greatly encouraged by the student demonstrators on the Chinese
mainland'' and ''feel happy and excited!''
On 16th April, during an ABC television interview, blinded by his impatience
to see an immediate overthrow of China's legitimate government, Liu Binyan said
''The Li Peng regime will collapse in three days.'' Three days later, he found
that he had ''miscalculated the situation'' and went to attend a rally organised
by ''Liaison group for the promotion of democracy in China''. At the rally, he
shouted with anger ''China has never been worse than she is now. The Chinese
nation is now in a grave crisis. A hopeless environment will inevitably make the
ordinary Chinese people revolt.'' Liu Binyan said that he had three times
decided to go back to China in order to personally take part in the turmoil.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
The first time when the climate of turmoil came about in April, his ''friends''
in China called him and urged him to go back to China; the second time when the
students began their hunger strike in May, he wanted to go back to China to
personally give them support; the third time when the student hunger strike
continued for some time, he again wanted to go back to China to personally give
them support. ''However, I changed my mind three times.'' The experienced and
astute Liu Binyan did not return to China, but acted as a mouthpiece for the
foreign reactionary force and banged the drum for the turmoil in China.
In the last 10 days of April, Liu Binyan attended several forums in New York.
All the speeches made by Liu Binyan at these forums were later published by the
reactionary publication 'China Spring'. In his speeches, Liu Binyan denounced
the CCP as ''unprecedentedly fatuous'' and ''corrupt''. Liu Binyan said that
should China fail to solve her problems, China would become a burden on mankind.
On 4th May, Liu Binyan published his article entitled ''Commemorating the 70th
anniversary of the 4th May movement'' in the 'New York Times', saying that ''the
turbulent situation on mainland China will probably threaten the position and
very existence of the CCP.'' This clearly showed his anti-CCP and anti-socialist
psychology.
After martial law was enforced in some parts of Peking, the organisers and
plotters of the turmoil felt panic-stricken, but would not resign themselves
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
to defeat. Instead, they stepped up their efforts to organise the
counter-revolutionary rebellion and formed a reactionary force aimed at
overthrowing China's central government. At this time, through Voice of America
and Hongkong and Taiwan newspapers, Liu Binyan spread a large number of rumours.
For instance, on 22nd May and 23rd May, Voice of America broadcast a comment
made by Liu Binyan in the USA ''Over 100 senior PLA generals have signed a
petition to oppose the erroneous decision (enforcing martial law). . . [ellipsis
as published] and they do not recognise the Li Peng regime and even call it a
puppet regime.'' On 30th May, Hongkong's 'Ming Pao' reported ''When attending a
forum on human rights held in an American university yesterday, Liu Binyan told
a group of Chinese students that he believed that Deng Xiaoping would sooner or
later force Li Peng to step down. Liu Binyan said that according to information
released by some high-level officials, eight ministries of the Chinese
government, including the Foreign Ministry, and several provincial governments
have refused to be loyal to the Li Peng regime. Liu Binyan also told the
students that Zhao Ziyang, former CCP General Secretary, who had resigned two
days previously, would soon be rehabilitated.'' These rumours spread by Liu
Binyan clearly show that he is a man with ulterior motives.
On 28th May, Liu Binyan dished up in Taiwan's 'China Times' a reactionary
article ''The last stake of the public enemy'', openly waving flags and shouting
battle cries for the disturbance in Peking and inciting the ''democrats and
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
reactionaries within the CCP to categorically stand up and to form an
independent political force with the non-governmental and non-party statesmen''.
The reactionary intrinsic quality of Liu Binyan who vowed to be an enemy of the
CCP and the Chinese people here was thoroughly exposed. An Anti-communist and
Anti-China Bugler
After Peking put down the counter-revolutionary rebellion, being flustered
and exasperated, Liu Binyan has desperately wagged his tongue to add fuel to the
flames of the anti-China tide fanned by the Western world and has become an
earpiercing tweeter in the international anti-communist and anti-China chorus.
Liu Binyan has been interviewed by the American propaganda media on many
occasions and in co-ordination with the propaganda machines, including ''Voice
of America'' has launched rumour and public opinion attacks on our country, done
his utmost to exaggerate such rumours as ''plunging Tiananmen into a
bloodbath'', and incited some people of the West and Chinese abroad to condemn
and oppose the government of our country. What especially attracted people's
attention was that during his visit to Hongkong from 18th to 26th June, he
played the part of an anti-communist and anti-China henchman of the
international reactionary forces.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
On 18th June, no sooner had he arrived in Hongkong than he openly announced
''self-exile'' and asserted that he would remain in the USA in exile. At the
press conferences of Chinese and foreign reporters and on the other occasions in
Hongkong, he used extremely venomous language to madly curse our party,
government and state leaders, cursing ''If this clique is not wiped out,
mainland China cannot stand up'', and did his best to incite people to overthrow
the leadership of the CCP and to subvert the legitimate government of our
country. He has time and again encouraged the ''democrats'' within the communist
party ''to be independent'' publicly, to ''contend with'' and replace it. What
are ''democrats?'' He said ''China has not and also does not allow a political
party really outside the communist party'' but ''there is a relatively realistic
force in China that can contend with the communist party and it is the
democrats, what can perhaps be called a healthy force, within the communist
party. It can be seen at all levels, ranging from the central authorities to the
localities. Before I was expelled, I was such an element.'' This really lays
bare the truth with one penetrating remark. The ''opposition faction'' and
''opposition party'' on which he originally pinned his hopes are those ''Liu
Binyans'' that go in for bourgeois liberalisation.
Liu Binyan brazenly instigated activities aimed at splitting the motherland
and wantonly clamoured that ''people abroad should support the emergence of a
division of power and independence on the mainland, so as to weaken the
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
strength of the ruling group of the CCP'' and that ''if three provinces can be
independent, there will be room for the Chinese democratic fighters to stay or
take refuge''.
With ulterior motives, he sowed dissension between Hongkong and the
motherland. In his televised speech delivered on behalf of the Chinese
government on 22nd June, Ji Pengfei, director of the Hongkong and Macao Affairs
of the State Council, reiterated that the Chinese government's principles and
policies towards Hongkong and Macao remained unchanged. On 25th June, Liu Binyan
said openly in Hongkong that ''a Peking official said a few days ago that no-one
is permitted to use Hongkong and Macao as a base to subvert the central people's
government'' and that this shows that the Hongkong people have done a very good
job of this, which constitutes a danger to the central people's government''.
The next day, with the malicious intention of sabotaging the great cause of the
reunification of the motherland, he tried again to incite Hongkong compatriots
during a televised interview, saying ''Hongkong was not a so-called
counter-revolutionary base a few months ago. Was the chinese government friendly
to Hongkong? Will Hongkong be safe after 1997?'' He also dissuaded the Hongkong
merchants from doing business with the mainland, saying that they ''should not
be shortsighted and confine their scope to just a few small fry''.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
Furthermore, on 20th June, Liu Binyan called on foreign reporters to urge the
Western countries to impose the strictest economic sanctions on China and stop
giving loans to and doing business with China and also to urge the UN to take
political restrictive measures against China. On 22nd June, he also openly
denounced the Japanese government for acting differently from some large Western
countries, saying that Japan was ''detestable''. He even warned the Japanese
government ''Continuing to do business with China now means continuing to commit
a crime, and those involved will be called to account.'' This proved that Liu
Binyan is not only a reactionary against communism and socialism, but also scum
who has betrayed his motherland.
For his 10-day performance in Hongkong, Liu Binyan won unanimous acclaim from
the Taiwan KMT authorities and some reactionary forces abroad. On 26th June, the
Taiwan ''Internal Affairs Ministry'' announced that ''pro-democracy personages
on the mainland'' were permitted to visit Taiwan and that the department
concerned had made a name-list of ''mainland pro-democracypersonages'' abroad
who were to be invited to Taiwan. Liu Binyan's name was on the list, of course.
Hongkong's 'Ming Pao' carried this news the next day, under the healdine
''Taiwan accepts pro-democracy personages, Liu Binyan and Yan Jiaqi are
preferred''.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
During his stay in Hongkong, Liu Binyan joined the gang of Yan Jiaqi, Wuer
Kaixi and other criminals who were wanted by the Chinese public security organ.
On 13th July, Liu Binyan flew from the USA to Paris specially to join Yan Jiaqi,
Wuer Kaixi and Wan Runnan. After careful planning, they jointly released a
written proposal in Paris on 20th July, initiating the establishment of a
reactionary organisation, the ''Federation for Democratic China'', which called
for the overthrow of the Chinese government and the socialist People's Republic
of China. During an interview with reporters on the same day, Liu Binyan openly
clamoured ''Our failure this time does not mean that we will not adopt this
method in the future. We may also act in other ways.''
With the support of hostile forces abroad, the group who staged the farce of
the ''Federation for Democratic China'' embarked upon a political venture in
Paris on 23rd September. The ''inaugural meeting'' attacked the leadership of
the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system time and again, wildly
clamoured for the overthrow of the Chinese government, and openly asked the
Taiwan KMT to give them financial aid and even lead them in carrying out
anti-government activities. At that time, Liu Binyan was carrying out activities
in Britain. He specially sent a recorded tape from London to the meeting, saying
that ''although he could not participate in the leadership work of the
'Federation for Democratic China', he would continue to assist in accomplishing
its task in his own way''. The little tricks played by Liu Binyan, Yan Jiaqi,
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
Wuer Kaixi and others cannot hinder even slightly the victorious advance of the
Chinese people along the socialist road under the leadership of the Chinese
Communist Party. Any attempt by hostile forces abroad to turn China into a
dependency, and any plot of the hostile forces at home to reverse the verdict on
the riots and counter-revolutionary rebellion or to stage a ''comeback'' will
inevitably go completely bankrupt.
A Pawn Loyal to the ''Peaceful Evolution'' Strategy
Liu Binyan is quite a ''famous'' person and is called by some foreign
newspapers and magazines a ''star'' and the ''conscience of Chinese society''.
In China, some people have also extolled him as a famous reporter, noted writer,
thinker and so on. In 1985, he published an article entitled ''Loyalty of the
second kind''. In this article, he advocated a so-called ''highly critical
spirit'' and the ''highest degree of loyalty'', that is, ''loyalty of the second
kind'' with which a person dares to ''criticise'' party organisations and even
the Party Central Committee and Mao Zedong and will ''not regret it even if he
has to die nine times''. At one time, a ''Liu Binyan whirlwind'' was stirred up
abroad.
A reactionary magazine called 'Chiu Shih Nien Tai' ['The Nineties'] in
Hongkong carried in its March 1986 issue an article entitled ''Liu Binyan an
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
extraordinary phenomenon in China.'' This article commented ''He has been
'airing his views' for several years, beginning with 'Of Men and Monsters' and
most recently with 'Loyalty of the second kind' and 'The past and present of an
old castle. Now he is 'airing his views' more deeply, bitterly and thoroughly. .
. [ellipsis as published] He has become a conscious and mature fighter. He is
good at making use of the climate and terrain and dealing out the most powerful
blows at the most favourable moment.'' This passage is like a mirror which
clearly reflects the features of Liu Binyan! Let us put aside all this for the
time being and just talk about the fabricated materials used by Liu Binyan in
''Loyalty of the second kind''. He described and extolled a person of the
Shanghai Sea Transport College, a ''rebel'' during the ''Cultural Revolution''
and a residual evil element of the ''gang of four'' as displaying the typical
characteristics of a person who has the ''highest loyalty'', who ''most firmly
supports the party's line laid down at the 3rd plenary session of the 11th CCP
Central Committee, and who has dedicated himself to the four modernisations and
reforms''. This person is Ni Yuxian, who went to the USA at the beginning of
1986. As soon as he arrived there, he expressed views attacking the CCP and
socialism in China. Later he became a member of the ''Chinese Alliance for
Democracy''. This year, he followed Wang Bingzhang and his like and set up
another reactionary organisation called the ''China Democratic Party''. He is
one of the initiators and signature collectors of the notorious ''Declaration
demanding democratic reforms on the Chinese Mainland''. On 8th February 1989,
The British Broadcasting Corporation, November 4, 1989
he again set up in the USA a ''Liaison group for the promotion of democracy in
China''. With his reactionary words and deeds, Ni Yuxian has irrefutably
proved what kind of trash the ''loyalty of the second kind'' advocated by Liu
Binyan is.
Now we come to Liu Binyan himself. His disgusting conduct in betraying the
motherland, throwing in his lot with reactionary forces abroad, and opposing the
communist party and socialism has constituted a most realistic and explicit
footnote to the ''loyalty of the second kind'' that headvocates. People can only
regard Liu Binyan as a pawn loyal to the strategy of ''peaceful evolution'' of
international monopoly capital, an advocate loyal to anti-communist and anti-
socialist forces at home and abroad, and the scum of the Chinese nation.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LEVEL 1 - 31 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1987 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
February 20, 1987, Friday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section A; Page 30, Column 1; Editorial Desk
LENGTH: 490 words
HEADLINE: The Editorial Notebook;
Silencing Liu the Just Judge
BYLINE: By Geneva Overholser
BODY:
Andrei Sakharov, Yelena Bonner, Natan Sharansky. Americans know these names:
they are heroes fighting the evil Soviet system. Their Chinese counterparts,
also courageously fighting repression, are nameless and unknown. That's partly
because Americans pay so much attention to the Soviet Union. It's also because
Americans think of the Chinese as the good-guy Communists. Yes, their system has
been repressive, but it's opening up. Things are improving, life is becoming
freer, more just.
The New York Times, February 20, 1987
Until last month, Liu Binyan was helping to move China in just that
direction. He was a journalist for The People's Daily and a muckraker in the
best tradition. He uncovered party corruption. Though a dedicated party member,
he said loyalty to the country must come first. People began to call him Liu the
Just Judge. Hundreds wrote daily to call his attention to their problems.
Then, after December's student protests, Deng Xiaoping denounced him as one
of the instigators. In January he was expelled from the party.
In cycles over the last three decades, Chinese leaders have loosened and
tightened on free expression. At each loosening, a courageous few push forward.
Mr. Liu first pushed in 1956, and then spent 20 years in prison and labor camps.
Now, at 62 perhaps the most influential intellectual figure in China since the
Cultural Revolution, he has again been silenced.
What will happen now to the other voices? That is what Ni Yuxian, about
whom Mr. Liu wrote a book, wonders from his exile in New York.
Mr. Ni, a military man, first got into trouble in the 1960's. There was a
terrible famine, but officially everything was fine. Mr. Ni saw a great many
peasants starving. He wrote Mao Zedong to tell him so - and was expelled from
the military.
The New York Times, February 20, 1987
Several years and another jail stay later, Mr. Ni made a huge poster
supporting protests in Beijing's Tian An Men Square. He was arrested and spent a
hair-raising two years in prison. When he was released he contacted Liu Binyan.
In 1985 Mr. Liu's ''A Second Kind of Loyalty'' used Mr. Ni's story and others to
make this point: Loyalty to nation and people must come before party loyalty.
Now Mr. Liu is out of the party and Mr. Ni is worried about the author and
about the reforms he did so much to further. How can a society reorganize itself
when there is no channel through which the voices for change can be heard?
Having attempted to make the party more honest and responsive to people's
needs, Mr. Liu is now denounced in papers throughout the nation for attacking
party principles and primacy. Once again, China's leaders have decided that
letting a hundred flowers bloom isn't quite the thing. Some of the flowers they
don't like. Speak out, yes, but don't say anything too worrisome. Don't shake up
the system too much.
Mr. Liu and Mr. Ni and others believe that unless the system is shaken it
cannot change. For now at least they've lost their opportunity to say so.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LEVEL 1 - 32 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1987 The British Broadcasting Corporation
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
February 3, 1987, Tuesday
SECTION: Part 3 The Far East; B. INTERNAL AFFAIRS; CHINA II; FE/8482/BII/1;
LENGTH: 3401 words
HEADLINE: Criticism of Liu Binyan's Articles on Shanghai
Marine Transport
Institute
SOURCE: Xinhua in Chinese 1336 gmt 29 Jan 87
Text of report
BODY:
According to a 'Guangming Ribao' report, Chen Hao, party committee Secretary
of the Shanghai Marine Transport Institute, answered questions raised by a
reporter of the institute's paper on Liu Binyan's three reports.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
Question: ''Second type of loyalty'', ''My diary'' and ''Incomplete burial'',
written by Liu Binyan, have created sharp repercussions in society and in our
institute after their successive publication. The broad masses of readers are
extremely concerned about this course of events. They would like very much to
know what actually happened. Can you tell us what happened?
Answer: Well, that is a long story. Our differences with Liu Binyan began
with his total ignorance of facts in reporting on Ni Yuxian in his report
''Second type of loyalty''. From 4th January to February [1985] we learnt from
the highlights of the first issue of the magazine 'Kai Tuo' [2030 2148 'Open
Up'], from excerpts from the report ''Second type of loyalty'', briefings for
limited circulation and an article on an interview with Liu Binyan carried in
the press, that Ni Yuxian, a staff worker at the institute's library, had
become one of the heroes in Liu Binyan's report ''Second type of loyalty'' and
that this report was ignoring facts in describing Ni Yuxian. Before this, we
knew nothing about this report. No one had called on us or conducted any
investigation. Since that time, the leading department and the leading comrades
concerned at the higher level, some school teachers and students, and some
comrades in society have asked us about some of the contents of ''Second type of
loyalty''.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
What should we do when we are faced with the work of a famous reporter and a
Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Writers' Association, which shows a complete
disrespect for facts? At that time, we were faced with only two choices: one was
to truthfully inform the writer and the department concerned; the other was to
take a laissez-faire attitude and keep silent. But, as a matter of fact, we
could not keep silent even if we wanted to. As far as the principle of party
spirit was concerned, we neither could keep silent. There-fore, in order to
safeguard the sanctity and prestige of the party's journalistic cause and
protect the reputation of the writer, we invited Liu Binyan, through a reporter,
to come to the institute to give some explanations.
On the morning of 18th February 1985, six people, including Liu Binyan came
to our institute. Six middle-level leading cadres of our institute met them. We
thought that it would not be difficult to solve the issue, because Liu Binyan
would basically understand the issue when he personally reviewed the findings
concerning Ni Yuxian and heard our briefings. What surprised us was that,
after Liu Binyan came to our institute, he did not permit us to brief him on
Ni Yuxian. Nor did he read the relevant findings. Instead, usurping the host's
role, he took the initiative to preside over the meeting and raise questions,
and to ask the comrades of our institute to answer them. He also acted
presumptuously by notifying Ni Yuxian to attend the meeting to ''defend''
himself. At once our comrades told him that it was inappropriate to have the
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
meeting conducted in such a way. However, Liu Binyan said: ''I am a veteran
reporter of 'Renmin Ribao'. I use this kind of method all the time.'' He also
said, in the presence of Ni Yuxian, ''Based on my political experience of
several decades, I know Ni Yuxian's political stand quite well.'' He even
tried to defend Ni Yuxian for his mistake in stealing a bicycle in March 1983.
Thus, Liu Binyan made into a complicated and difficult one an issue that
originally could have been solved quite easily.
Because Liu Binyan refused to listen to our opinions, we submitted a ''Report
on the actual situation concerning the question of Ni Yuxian' ' and another
report requesting the temporary withholding of publication of Comrade Liu
Binyan's reportage ''The second type of loyalty'' to the higher leading
department and concerned units in March 1985. However, shortly afterwards, ''the
second type of loyalty'' was formally published. Some newspapers and
publications reprinted the article. At that time, Ni Yuxian was as proud as a
peacock| He went out to make reports, answered questions at the school and even
wanted to write a play to show his ''heroic image''. He also constantly made
unreasonable demands on the school. For a while, the school was indeed in
disorder.
In order to clarify facts and distinguish between right and wrong, we wrote a
report to the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee in May 1985,
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
pointing out that Liu Binyan's reportage was far from the truth. At the same
time, we reported it to leading departments concerned. We did this in order to
settle our differences with Liu Binyan through normal channels, in the spirit of
seeking truth from facts, by relying on the party organisation. However, we met
with a series of unexpected difficulties. It has been nearly two years now. It
was indeed a stormy and unstable period|
In June 1985, Liu Binyan wrote his second article on our institute ''My
diary'', which was published in the sixth [monthly] issue of 'Wen Hui Yuekan'.
The article accused five cadres in our institute by name.
In October 1986, Liu Binyan wrote ''another fine article'' entitled
''incomplete burial'', attacking more than 30 comrades in our institute by name
or insinuation, including the leading members, middle-level cadres, teachers,
staff and workers.
Question: Liu Binyan described Ni Yuxian as a typical person, truly loyal
to the party. Can you talk about the character of Ni Yuxian?
Answer: The part concerning Ni Yuxian in ''The second type of loyalty'' was
written by Liu Binyan according to Ni Yuxian's so-called ''letter of appeal''.
Many paragraphs were quoted from the letter, of which much was fabricated by
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
Ni Yuxian.
What Liu Binyan was writing was far from the truth and I listed nine examples
in the report to the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee. Here, I
will not specifically repeat them, but will cite a few:
''The second type of loyalty'' said that ''from 1966 to 1976, Ni Yuxian
persistently opposed Lin Biao, the 'gang of four' and the 'great cultural
revolution'.'' This was contrary to the facts. When the ''cultural revolution''
started in 1966, Ni Yuxian immediately took part in rebe llion. He organised a
''fighting team,'' and wrote many big-character posters accusing cadres and
teachers of the institute of implementing the so-called ''revisionist line'' and
the ''reactionary line of the bourgeoisie'' and ''opposing Mao Zedong thought'.
_O_. He actively criticised and struggled against cadres and took part in
factional disputes at the school. From the end of 1966, Ni Yuxian was
definitely not ''staying away from the 'cultural revolution' '', but took part
in disrupting society. He had been a standing committee member and de puty head
of a ''rebellious commune'' which was a lawless organisation at city level. He
himself had made repeated confessions regarding his role during the period of
the ''cultural revolution''.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
Here I can cite several paragraphs: In his letter to Xu Jingxian on 25th
April 1971, he wrote: ''In the great proletarian cultural revolution, I,
together with revolutionary teachers and students, was among the first group of
forces to rebel against Liu Shaoqi's bourgeois reactionary line. I put up the
first revolutionary big-character poster at the school's auditorium in order to
bombard the old party committee, and was elected one of the leaders of the mass
organisation by revolutionary teachers and students.''
In his letter to Wang Xiuzhen on 10th March 1976, he again said: ''At the
beginning of the great cultural revolution'' I was among ''the first group to
step out and rebel against the Liu-Deng line'' and ''later, as the movement was
developing in depth, I became one of the responsible members of the rebel
faction at the school, taking part in social activities, and going all out to
rebel against the old municipal party committee, together with the rebellious
workers of the workers' general headquarters. In the January revolutionary
storm, we fought alongside port workers, repelled the evil wind of economism and
seized power from the handful of capitalist roaders within the party.'' After
the toppling of the ''gang of four'', he wrote a letter to the then Secretary of
the Shanghai Municipal CCP Committee on 12th December 1976, in which he
continued to claim that he was ''a red guard fighter among the first group to
rebel against Liu Shaoqi'' and asserted his many ''merits'' in the rebellion.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
The report, ''The second type of loyalty'', claims that Ni Yuxian
''Bombarded Zhang Chunqiao on two occasions''. What actually happened?
When the Shanghai ''Red revolutionary committee'' ''bombarded'' Zhang
Chunqiao for the first time in late January 1967, Ni attempted to instigate the
''rebellious commune'' to issue a statement in support of the ''bombardment''.
However, when the commune was informed of the attitude of the ''central cultural
revolutionary group'', it immediately changed its attitude and, in the name of
the ''rebellious group'' issued a statement firmly opposing the ''bombardment''.
The statement was drafted by Ni Yuxian.
In April 1968, when Shanghai ''bombarded'' Zhang Chunqiao for the second
time, Ni did not take part. Later, Ni stated clearly that he did not want to do
so. In a letter to Xu Jingxian, he added: ''The class enemy's purpose in
instigating the bombardment of Comrades Zhang Chunqiao and Tao Wenyuan of the
proletarian headquarters was not the elimination of the individual named Zhang.
Their ultimate purpose was to destroy the headquarters.'' In that letter, Ni
also reported that several of his classmates had taken part in the second
''bombardment''. ''The second type of loyalty'' also claims that Ni Yuxian
cherished profound feelings for Comrade Deng Xiaoping. What is the fact? People
will have a crystal-clear idea if they read the two letters Ni Yuxian sent to
Wang Xiuzhen and the culture and education group under the Shanghai Municipal
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
Revolutionary Committee in March 1976. The vicious language he used in cursing
Comrade Deng Xiaoping in those two letters makes one boil with anger|
After he went to the USA in January 1986, Ni Yuxian made many speeches
attacking our party and our country. His words and deeds have shown just to what
kind of people he is loyal, and we thought Liu Binyan had learnt his lesson and
the issue had been settled.
Question: What is your view of Liu Binyan's new work, ''Incomplete burial''?
Answer: I read ''Incomplete burial'', which has three parts. Part one deals
primarily with our institute's ''persecution'' of certain intellectuals. Just
what did actually happen? Since this issue involves many specific problems, I am
sorry that I cannot give you precise details. In fact, if people read Liu
Binyan's article between the lines, they could see what did actually happen and
know whether it was indeed persecution. The vast number of comrades in the
institute are very clear on this point. After reading Liu's article, many
comrades at our institute said that Liu had again found the wrong target, as he
did in writing ''The second type of loyalty''. It is really incomprehensible why
this great writer kept finding this type of person!
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
Part two of the article tries mainly to recall our institute's conduct during
the ''cultural revolution''. Sensible people can discern Liu's intention
promptly: he wanted to rekindle factionalism by means of contradictions.
Everyone knows that, after the crushing of the ''gang of four'' and especially
following the third plenary session of the 11th CCP Central Committee, our
institute spent several years settling the problems created during the
''cultural revolution'' and conclusions have been reached on many issues. During
party rectification in 1985, we followed the plans of the Central Committee and
the municipal party committee, and regarded as one of the main projects of party
rectification the thorough discrediting of the ''great cultural revolution'' and
the two factions formed at that time. Now, according to information provided by
certain people, Liu Binyan has again tried to bring up the old issues, and
coined such new terms as ''conservative rebellious faction'' and ''radical
rebellious faction''. Is he trying to create a new split in our institution? We
have all gone through the ''cultural revolution'' and our hearts ache whenever
we think of the catastrophes and the serious consequences that the ''great
cultural revolution'' created. I just do not know why Liu Binyan is so
interested in these things. Is it possible that what he did is in line with the
guidelines of the party Central Committee?
The third part of the article, in the main, criticises our institute for
letting the leading department at the higher level know that his works are not
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
telling the truth. He wrote in the article: ''Most of the part in the article
that deals with Ni Yuxian has nothing to do with the present leadership of the
party committee of the Shanghai Marine Transport Institute. The only thing
concerning it is the question of implementation of the policy. However, the
sharpness and persistence of reactions received are far more than the disputes
caused by the much stronger criticisms and exposures I have written in the last
seven years. This is abnormal and unthinkable.''
In my opinion, Liu Binyan himself is abnormal and unthinkable. Why should Liu
Binyan, as a 'Renmin Ribao' reporter and Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Writers'
Associa-tion, ''criticise'', ''expose'' and ''bury'' others by name in
newspapers and publications as he pleased, disregarding the true facts, while
those who knew the facts could not tell the truth, and the victims could not say
that they had been accused wrongly? Why should Liu Binyan go all out to
publicise the lies Ni Yuxian fabricated, while we could not report the truth
through normal channels?
News reports must be true. This is a basic principle that journalistic
workers must follow. Any questions concerning people's achievements and
mistakes, or right and wrong, must be dealt with very carefully, and must be
authenticated by repeated checks. Particularly in criticising a person by name,
it is imperative to comply with the relevant stipulations set by the central
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
authorities, and to exercise exceptional caution. In no way should criticism be
swayed by emotion. In ''Second type of loyalty'' and ''My diary'', Liu Binyan
cited the names of seven cadres of our institute, framing them as ''key targets
for investigation of the three types of persons'', ''persons of the An Shizhi
type'', ''political swindlers'' and so on. While these old debts had not been
paid, he went further in accusing, either by name or implication, more than 30
comrades of our institute in his ''Incomplete burial''. Many facts were
distorted, right and wrong were confounded, and minor mistakes were exaggerated
to the maximum. Just as many comrades in our institute have said, these are not
literary works, but resemble exactly the big-character posters of the ''cultural
revolution'' period|
Here, I also have to say that Liu Binyan appears to hate bitterly the act of
''striking at and persecuting'' intellectuals, and has always said that he wants
to speak for intellectuals. Yet, basically, all the dozens of comrades in our
institute he has accused are intellectuals| He has attacked these comrades
frenziedly. What sort of behaviour is this? Liu Binyan said in his article that
''The writer has an obligation to be 'responsible' for his 'speech' because he
enjoys the right of 'freedom of speech' guaranteed by the Constitution.'' Here,
Liu Binyan was talking about the Constitution; but let us see what is stated in
article 38 of the Constitution: ''The personal dignity of citizens of the PRC is
inviolable. Insults, libel, false charges or concocted cases directed against
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
citizens by any means are prohibited.''
In all probability, Liu Binyan has learned something in the education
campaign to popularise general knowledge about the law. What I cannot understand
is why he ignores party discipline and state law. It should be noted that all
men are equal before truth and the law.
As for the writer's cursoriness in producing the articles, in some cases he
picked up the pen before he had a clear understanding of the basic situation. In
''Incomplete burial'', he described a male associate professor as female. This
associate professor is still alive and well, contributing significantly to the
development of the foreign language department. Yet Liu said that he ''finally
died, uncleared of his false charge''. This kind of irresponsible writing is,
indeed, astonishing. There is no lack of such objects of ridicule in the
''excellent work'' he wrote|
Question: Liu Binyan said that our school is a ''dead space'' where the
policies concerning intellectuals are not implemented. Will you comment on his
remarks?
Answer: Yes. For a long time, particularly during the ''cultural
revolution'', the ''leftist'' line created many serious problems regarding
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
intellectuals. Under the guidance of the correct line laid down by the party
Central Committee since the third plenary session of the 11th Central Committee,
the party committee and the party organisations at lower levels in our school
have regarded the implementation of the policies concerning intellectuals as an
important task, and have made great efforts to ensure their implementation. In
the last few years, we have seriously re-examined cases of injustice created
before and during the ''cultural revolution'' and have redressed 132 of them.
Because we have carried out a thorough re-examination and rehabilitation work,
most com rades concerned are satisfied. After reading our conclusions, some
comrades had their eyes brimming with grateful tears, and others wrote poems in
praise of the line laid down by the third plenary session of the 11th CCP
Central Committee. In accordance with relevant policies, we have seriously
checked and returned to owners the property and houses confiscated during the
''cultural revolution''. We have also generally corrected personnel records to
remove politically the heavy mental yoke from the back of many intellectuals.
Since the third plenary session of the 11th CCP Central Committee and
particularly since the beginning of the overall party rectification, we have
attached importance to recruiting party members from among intellectuals, made
more efforts to educate, train and observe the intellectuals, paid attention to
overcoming ''leftist'' influence in the course of party building, and basically
made it easier for intellectuals to join the party. Since 1979, we have
recruited 256 new party members. Now 40% of our professors and associate
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
professors are party members: while none was a party member before 1978.
We pay more attention to intellectuals' actual problems in everyday life. In
order to free intellectuals from worries about their families, we have, in the
last few years, done a great deal to improve housing conditions, medical care,
dependent children's education and the propane gas supply for the Changtian,
Laoshan and Haiyuan housing areas, in helping faculty members get their spouses
transferred to Shanghai so that they can work in the same place, and in changing
the residence status of faculty members' dependants from rural to urban
residence.
Our implementation of the policies concerning intellectuals is a fact people
can discern. In a normal situation, it is not necessary to talk about it,
because it is our duty to implement those policies. Now, we must say something
about it, because Liu Binyan has alleged that our school is a ''dead space,
where the policies concerning intellectuals are not implemented''. For internal
and external reasons, there are, of course, still short-comings and many
problems in the implementation of the policies concerning intellectuals. There
will still be a great deal of work for us to do, even if we have resolved all
the problems left over from the past. Therefore, we must show even greater
determination and make efforts to do a serious and good job in this respect.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, February 3, 1987
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LEVEL 1 - 33 OF 35 STORIES
The Xinhua General Overseas News Service
The materials in the Xinhua file were compiled by The Xinhua News Agency. These
materials may not be republished without the express written consent of The
Xinhua News Agency.
JANUARY 29, 1987, THURSDAY
LENGTH: 598 words
HEADLINE: journalist accused of distorting facts
DATELINE: beijing, january 29; ITEM NO: 0129100
BODY:
a party leader of the shanghai marine transport institute accused "people's
daily" staff reporter liu binyan of distorting facts in writing about institute
personnel. liu binyan, also vice-chairman of the chinese writers association,
was recently expelled from the communist party for making speeches and writing
articles in violation of the party constitution, discipline and resolutions. in
an interview with a reporter from the institute's paper, chen hao, secretary of
the party committee of the shanghai institute, said, "liu's report is a
The Xinhua General Overseas News Service, JANUARY 29, 1987
'second kind of loyalty' and shows no respect for the facts. liu's report,
first printed in the spring of 1985, has ni yuxian, a staff worker at the
institute's library, as one of its heros, and lists obedience to the communist
party as the "first kind of loyalty" and criticism of the party as the "second
kind of loyalty." liu said in the report, ni was consistently against the "gang
of four" and the "cultural revolution," but according to the party secretary,
ni yuxian a rebel when the "cultural revolution" started in 1966, and later
became a "standing committee member" of a city rebel organization. " ni yuxian
took an active part in repudiating the institute's cadres and teachers, and
joined others in rebelling against city leadership," chen said, adding that ni
was against deng xiaoping as shown in two of his letters to followers of the
"gang of four," who were the culprits responsible for the chaos of the "cultural
revolution." chen continued, "ni fled to the united states in january 1986 where
he spoke against the chinese communist party, showing his true loyalty." "before
the report, 'second type of loyalty' was published," chen said, "the institute
asked liu binyan to come to verify the facts, but when liu went to the institute
in february 1985, he refused to listen to any explanation." "after the report
was published," he continued, "the leadership of the institute wrote a report to
the central authorities, pointing out that what liu was writing was far from the
truth." liu followed the first report with another article entitled, "my diary,"
in june of the same year, which accused five leading cadres of the institute.
in october, another article, "incomplete burial," which attacked over 30
The Xinhua General Overseas News Service, JANUARY 29, 1987
leaders, cadres, teachers and workers at the institute, was published. liu said
in the october article, "the institute's reaction towards the question of ni
yuxian was abnormal and incredible". the party secretary called liu binyan
"abnormal and incredible", and asked, "as a reporter and writer, why should he
be allowed to criticise others at will in newspapers and magazines while the
wronged party is not allowed to air the truth through normal channels?" "news
reports should be based on facts, and this is a principle all journalists should
follow," the party secretary pointed out, "but liu distorted facts and confused
right and wrong." "liu declares he speaks for intellectuals, but all the wronged
people of the institute are intellectuals, and why should he attack them so
vehemently?", he also asked. liu said in his article that he has freedom of
speech as protected by the constitution, but the party secretary quoted this
passage from the constitution, "the personal dignity of citizens of the people's
republic of china is inviolable. insult, libel, false charge or frame-up
against citizens by any means is prohibited." the party secretary stated, "i
don't understand why liu pays no heed to the constitution and party discipline,
and he should know that everyone is equal before the law."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LEVEL 1 - 34 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1987 McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Business Week
January 19, 1987
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; International Business; China; Pg. 48
LENGTH: 1088 words
HEADLINE: CHINA'S STUDENT REBELS ARE PLAYING INTO DENG'S HANDS
BYLINE: By Maria Shao in Beijing, with Steven J. Dryden in Washington and
William J. Holstein in New York
HIGHLIGHT:
HE CAN USE THE UNREST TO FORCE CONSERVATIVES TO ACCEPT REFORMS
BODY:
Wang, a 22-year-old political science student at Beijing University, stands
in the biting cold reading posters describing the burst of student
demonstrations across China. Despite the presence nearby of plain-clothes
security police, he takes a foreigner into his confidence, telling a life
1987 McGraw-Hill, Inc., Business Week, January 19, 1987
story that is more revealing of China's political evolution than any government
proclamation.
In the early 1970s, at the height of China's Cultural Revolution, Wang's
elementary school classes began with students proclaiming, "Long live Chairman
Mao." But by the time he reached college age, ideology was less important.
College admission was based on exams, not politics. Rather than reading Mao
Zedong's "Little Red Book," Wang listens to disco tapes and watches American
movies such as Rambo. Books by Western political philosophers, once banned, are
now available. Wang's favorite: Considerations on Representative Government by
John Stuart Mill.
The students who took to the streets in a dozen Chinese cities beginning in
early December are not radicals trying to overthrow the Communist Party. As
beneficiaries of a freer economy that has made life better for millions of
Chinese, the students now want to free China's rigid political system, too.
Emboldened by ideas from Western philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Mill,
the students want more local elections, a freer press, and greater career
freedom.
HIGH STAKES. The betting among China watchers is that the student
demonstrations will play into the hands of China's leader, Deng Xiaoping. His
1987 McGraw-Hill, Inc., Business Week, January 19, 1987
conservative foes, led by such officials as Hu Qiaomu and Bo Yibo, are trying to
obtain polical mileage by accusing the students of fomenting anarchy. But the
protests appear to have tapered off as the students take final exams. As long
as the unrest doesn't spin out of control, Deng will be able to manipulate it to
his own advantage. By the time the party holds its key 13th congress in
October, Deng probably will be able to use the protests as evidence that the
country's political structure needs more basic change.
This high-stakes test of strength within the party is what gives the student
demonstrations such importance. Many of the students are naive, with little
memory of the bloody upheaval caused by the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. Some
of their demands, such as for better food in dining halls, are petty. But
partly because of their exposure to Western ideals, they believe the party can
move more quickly in opening up the political valves. "The children of a system
often are the first to oppose it," says exiled Chinese dissident Ni Yuxian
(page 49). "They have had the opportunity to absorb more Western political
ideals and observe the bad practices within the Communist system."
The Western flavor of the student protests, however, gives the conservatives
an issue. They are using the official press to launch public attacks against
"bourgeois liberalism" and "complete Westernization." Behind closed doors, the
conservatives are certainly arguing the Deng's open-door policies of the past
1987 McGraw-Hill, Inc., Business Week, January 19, 1987
eight years have created expectations that will threaten the party's leadership.
Deng, 82, a master of political manipulation, may find it useful to let the
conservatives vent steam over the next few months. "Deng's style has been, when
the conservatives have an issue to run with, he steps back a bit and lets them
overstep their bounds," says Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China specialist at the
University of Michigan.
Ultimately, though, Deng's reforms have built up so much momentum that they
can only go forward. The demonstrations, China experts believe, will help him.
The students, says Lieberthal, have "reaffirmed that the system must evolve on a
political level, and there is pressure from below to do that." Adds Joseph
Cheng, of the Chinese University in Hong Kong: "Deng will be able to say that
further reforms are necessary."
'FIFTH MODERNIZATION." One reason Deng is pressing for political reform is
that China's ability to achieve a more efficient, market-oriented economy
depends on easing party control over factories and other enterprises. A manager
of a Chinese factory is now unable to make decisions on the basis of what the
market wants, because inevitably this would undermine the power of the factory's
party boss. Deng's hope to launch new financial markets and introduce labor
reforms also may be stymied if he is not able to reduce the party's grip.
1987 McGraw-Hill, Inc., Business Week, January 19, 1987
That's why Deng since mid-1986 has been calling for political reform in what
has been tagged the "Fifth Modernization," following Deng's Four Modernizations,
which are economic. Among his suggestions are evaluating the performance of
party members, further decentralizing power, and reducing the bureaucracy. "The
economic reforms have reached a stage where they're very much intertwined with
political reforms," says Cheng.
Deng's attempts to launch his Fifth Modernization will be put to the test at
the October congress, an event that brings together about 3,000 party members.
This congress elects a new Central Committee, a smaller, more elite body. That
Central Committee in turn selects the all-powerful Politburo. Deng's forces are
working on a package of political reforms to be submitted for approval at the
party congress. That means the events of autumn will be critical in
establishing China's direction for years.
NEW LEADERS. However many reforms he brings about, China's paramount leader
is no democrat. The authorities have been surprisingly lenient with the
students, but Deng draws a line at violations of basic principles, such as
Communist Party leadership. His political reforms, though dramatic by Chinese
standards, appear to fall short of the broad freedoms many students have
demanded. Any sort of Western-style freedom of the press or speech remains
inconceivable. "The party is still central," says Cheng. "It will take China
1987 McGraw-Hill, Inc., Business Week, January 19, 1987
decades to reach the stage of East European countries."
But tensions will build as tens of thousands of Chinese students begin moving
into positions of leadership and many others return from studying abroad. "The
real conflict is down the road," says David M. Lampton, director of the China
Policy Project at the American Enterprise Institute. "The demands for political
liberalization will only become bigger and bigger." The question for now is
whether the pace of Deng's political reform will be fast enough to keep the
students out of the streets.
GRAPHIC: Picture 1, "WE STRIVE FOR DEMOCRACY AND DEMAND FREEDOM," SAYS A POSTER.
THE DEMONSTRATIONS HAVE WANED AS STUDENTS TAKE EXAMS, ANDERSON/GAMMA-LIAISON;
Picture 2, DENG: THE 82-YEAR-OLD LEADER IS A MASTER OF POLITICAL MANIPULATION,
ANDANSON/SYGMA ANDANSON/SYGMA
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LEVEL 1 - 35 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1987 McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Business Week
January 19, 1987
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; International Business; China; Pg. 49
LENGTH: 441 words
HEADLINE: ACTIVIST ABROAD: AN AGENDA FOR REFORM IN CHINA
BYLINE: By William J. Holstein in New York
BODY:
Ni Yuxian's career as a dissident began in 1961 when, as a soldier in the
People's Liberation Army, he witnessed mass starvation among the peasants in
rural Anhui province where he was stationed. Ni wrote a long letter to Chairman
Mao Zedong condemning the government's treatment of the peasants. As a result,
Ni was kicked out of the army and sent to work at a remote factory. For the
next 25 years, Ni's activism repeatedly landed him in jail or labor camps.
1987 McGraw-Hill, Inc., Business Week, January 19, 1987
Today, Ni, 41, a native of Shanghai, is in self-imposed exile in the U.S.,
trying to organize some of the more than 15,000 Chinese students in this
country. Ni's base is at Columbia University, where he supports himself by
tutoring and providing research help to professors. By organizing discussion
groups, Ni hopes to inspire Chinese students to apply Western democratic ideals
when they return to China, just as protesting students inside China have been
doing. "These demonstrations are very important, and all the students here are
interested," Ni says. "The majority believes that the demonstrations are
necessary and will serve as a catalyst for further political reforms."
AN EDGE. In a three-hour interview in a friend's tiny apartment, Ni said the
goal of the protests is not to overthrow the Communist Party but to persuade it
to reform itself. "The people should be able to choose some of their
representatives," he says. "But that doesn't mean a two-party system. Students
and other intellectuals would join the party and reform it from within. The
party would become more democratic."
One advantage Ni has in the U.S. is that Chinese students here are able to
discuss political issues more openly than if they were back in China. "In a
normal society, if people have grievances, they have avenues to express
themselves," says Ni, who left the country in mid-1985. "They can write to
newspapers, draft petitions, and make speeches. But in China there are none
1987 McGraw-Hill, Inc., Business Week, January 19, 1987
of these ways to make the government listen to you."
Ni's views, as mild as they seem by Western standards, are still heresy to
China's vast bureaucracy. "The upper-level cadres get perks for their jobs,"
says Ni, "so these people have a vested interest in stopping reforms."
Ni believes the party, as currently structured, is holding China's economy
back. "There are so many cadres who are unproductive," he says. "They just
take salaries." Because of opinions like that, Ni would be punished if he
returned to China. He hopes one day to go back, but that will happen only after
China makes as much progress in opening up its political system as it has in
spurring its economy.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH