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China's Transition, by Andrew J. Nathan
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, rapine, torture, corruption, epidemic, famine, forced migrations, wars, riots, strikes, rebellions, and piracy. 1 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. 2 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. 3
"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?" 4
It would be difficult but unnecessary to prove that China's history is sadder than that of other countries on a per capita basis. If nothing else, the scale of horror is unique in this largest of all nations. Nearly thirty 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 revival of female infanticide since the late 1970s, which has claimed what Spence estimates as 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. 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 , 5 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, 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 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 brightest, its own vital elements." So wrote the authors of the television serial River Elegy , whose broadcast on Chinese television 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 farther 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, its 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 reform 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.
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 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 ideals of socialism for twenty years, when those ideas 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, 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 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 "tranformative" (as opposed to the "accommodative") impulse in Chinese culture. 6 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 1989 brought him to the point of predicting the fall of Li Peng-Deng Xiaoping regime, which he saw 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 democracy will emerge after an interregnum of rule by party reformists, 7 in A 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 expelled from the CCP, who later left China 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 was later jailed, 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 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 flow 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 was "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 Chinese.) Lord, too, ends with an obligatory upbeat ending, a parable of a coverlet 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 the 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 post-Mao 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 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. 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 story-teller, 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 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 frères 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 ambasssador, 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 but little 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 structures 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 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
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 scenes but does not tell us who they were. (Or did he wish to spare American readers a surfeit of names filled with X's and Z's 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 towards barbarity and dehumanization . . . always takes 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-civilization as the expression of a free personal decision, but that kind of voluntarist explanation is shallow and unhelpful. 8
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). 9 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 a jar; 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 subhuman; 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. 10
How the personalities of young children were shaped by class labels, units, and campaigns has been brilliantly described by Anita Chan. 11 She 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 the Chinese to the mainstream of history from which Hegel excluded them, even though the history 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.
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 upbeat 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?
Note 1: Jonathan S. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990). Back.
Note 2: Liu Binyan, A Higher Kind of Loyalty, Zhu Hong , trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1990). Back.
Note 3: Bette Bao Lord, Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic (New York: Knopf, 1990). Back.
Note 4: Jonathan N. Lipman and Stevan Harrell, eds., Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 1. Back.
Note 5: "Violence Against Women in Contemporary China," in Lipman and Harrell, eds., Violence , pp. 203-226. Back.
Note 6: Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). Back.
Note 7: Liu Binyan with Ruan Ming and Xu Gang, "Tell the World": What Happened in China and Why , Henry L. Epstein, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1989). Back.
Note 8: Norbert Elias, "Violence and Civilization: The State Monopoloy of Physical Violence and its Infringement," in John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988), p. 197. Back.
Note 9: Thurston, "Urban Violence During the Cultural Revolution: Who Is to Blame?" in Lipman and Harrell, eds., Violence , pp. 149-174; Anne F. Thurston, Enemies of the People (New York: Knopf, 1987). Back.
Note 10: Lynn T. White III, Policies of Chaos: The Organizational Causes of Violence in China's Cultural Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Back.
Note 11: Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985). Back.
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