My second best China

Jan Morris

A Pictorial History of the Republic of China: Its Founding and Development Vols I and H (Modern China Press US $100) rlluttered as my brain is, after 30 years of journalism, with so many snatches of half-knowledge, fragments of this and that, incomplete allusions and unverifiable references, that alcove of it reserved for the

subject of China has remained almost virginally blank. China has always seemed just too much, on top of everything else. I know not a single Chinese word. I can name not a single Chinese poet. I don't know where Yunnan is, and I have never sat through more than two-and-a-half minutes of a televised Chinese opera. I accordingly opened this gigantic two-volume Pictorial History of the Republic of China with a sense of mingled impertinence and foreboding.

I skipped the introduction and went straight into the pictures of the first volume. As I had expected, they dazed me. They seemed to be dealing with people, ideas, events, landscapes that were beyond illy grasp. The very language of the text was like some especially invented vernacular, the blurred grey images of 19th-century scenes suggested some form of spectral communication. The heroes of the work were as strange to me as champions of another world, and there seemed to have been entire wars, with hundreds of thousands of dead, with mighty campaigns of invasion and retribution, that I had never even heard of.

Let me take you through a few of those early pages (turning them carefully — the Chinese know everything, it seems, except how to bind a book). Who are these soldiers marching by with what look like fishing rods over their shoulders, watched by ap- parently naked figures holding umbrellas? They are the heroes of the Northern Ex- pedition, 1926, being welcomed by the in- habitants of Hankow. What is this Aztec- like structure with a sun-symbol on top? It is the memorial to the Seventy-Two Martyrs of Huang-hwa-kang. Why is this diminutive

figure wearing a peaked cap and epaulettes? Because she is Lin Su-ai, Commander-in-

Chief of the Restoration Women's Expedi- tionary Force. Who is-fighting whom? Why was Sung Chiao-jen assassinated? What were the Three Principles, or the Twenty- °lie Demands?

If they are pages full of enigma, they are 11.,!ghimare pages too. Corpses are propped disembowelled against walls, malefactors shackled for the execution, suicide squads Pose with drawn swords and cocked rifles,

awaiting the order to immolate themselves against the troops of the perfidious Yuan Shih-kai. Here is a man blistered by poison gas — 'his expression of anger and hatred

should impress any person calling himself civilised' — and here Miao Pin, 'president of the Legislative Yuan in the bogus Nank- ing regime', stands before the tribunal that is sentencing him there and then to death. Mutilated bodies abound, and decapitated heads, and refugees, and chains, and guns, and irrefutable evidence of atrocities.

At first all this left me entirely baffled. I could see no shape to it, and I could not understand what was going on, or what side I was supposed to support in any given con- flict. After a time I began to recognise, though, innuendos in headings and cap- tions. When events were defined, for in- stance, as the Actions of one faction or

another, it meant that they were bad ac- tions, by villains. Conversely when a pro- position was described as a Plan, it was a good plan, drawn up by the patriots. In- cidents, I discovered, were necessarily

nefarious, Interventions were un-called for, Expeditions were always heroic. Uprisings were ambiguous, but I mastered them in time: if they were `stamped out' they were wicked, but if they were 'prematurely revealed' they were righteous. As for the word Revolution, though it appeared on the whole to be used in a laudatory sense, it seemed to be curiously lacking the usual connotations — no cadres, no communes, not a word about dialectic.

On page 223, Volume 1, enlightenment came. There was a picture there of the Commandant,Whampoa Military Academy, 1924 — a cool, smart and evidently intelli- gent young officer. I know that face, said 1 to myself, and turned the pages over, expec-

ting to find some unflattering epithets at- tached to it, like traitor, warlord, plotter or

cynical flunkey. But no, on the contrary, chapter by chapter Chiang Kai Shek seemed to grow in stature and accomplishment, and was pictured in ever more distinguished sit-

uations , and ever more eminent company until at last, Volume it, page 557, I found

Dr Billy Graham himself delivering a memorial elegy in the National Cathedral at Washington DC.

All was clear! 1 should have read the preface! The Republic of China in this book's title is not the People's Republic of China, ruling 1,000m souls in the 3,700,000 square miles of mainland China, but the Nationalist Republic of China, ruling 18m souls in the 14,000 square miles of Taiwan. Suddenly the whole work assumed a recognisable form, and I realised it to be no more than a manifesto for the Kuomintang, from its origins in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty to the oath it demands of its island soldiers today, pledging themselves to the Cause of the National

Revolution and the recovery of the mainland.

Volume II, it turned out, was pure Tai- wanese propaganda — tanks, foreign aid, cement factories, folk dancing, pledges to recover the mainland, the lot. I found it, though, sad rather than ridiculous. What pathos, to cap all those tragedies! To rebellions, civil wars, invasions by Russians and Japanese, economic exploitation and a century of political tumult, the historians of the Cultural Service, Republic of China, must add these records of what seems to be a permanent alienation from their fatherland. The glossier the pictures become, and the easier to understand, the smoother and richer-looking the delegates to the Kuomintang National Congress, the less convincing becomes the purpose of their work, and the more poignant its message.

I did not close its pages very much the wiser. My China cupboard remains almost as empty as it was before. But oddly enough, the longer I pondered the in- ferences of this book, the more clearly I began to distinguish those nuances of em-

phasis and vocabulary, the less im- penetrable the subject seemed to be after all. A few decades of constant study, I decided, and I would begin to get the hang of it.

A Pictorial History of the Republic of China is available from the Free Chinese Centre, 4th floor, Dorland House, 14-16 Regent Street, London SW1.