The destruction of China

Christopher Booker

'You are all old enough to remember our old towns—towns made for people, horses, dogs 7 and the trams too; towns which were autnane, friendly, cosy places, where . . . ?here was a garden to almost every house and hardly a house more than two storeys high'.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

Letter to Soviet Leaders, 1974. According to the late-lamented Marshall IslcLuhan, we live in the age of the 'global It might be more apt to say that we live. in the century of the 'Potemkin village'. Gngory Potemkin, it will be recalled, was thC favourite of Catherine the Great who, in 1787, when his sovereign was about to make a tour of the newly-annexed Crimea, arranged for a number of large, prosperous,9°1(ing fake villages to be erected along the 1113ne. of her route, so that Catherine would elieve her new dominions to be much richer and more populous than they in fact were. Anything Potemkin could do, his twentieth-century successors have done far more effectively and on an infinitely grander scale. We are all now familiar with the success of the Soviet propaganda campaign in the 1930s, to convince gullible Westerners lhat starving, oppressed Russia was a land oOwnig with creches, power stations and aPPY and contented citizens; or with the Lalous occasion in particular when, in 1944, • ,enrY Wallace and Owen Lattimore were k ` en round the slavecamps of the Kolyma and Magadan, and shown NK VD office staff dressed up as swineherds on a model farm, and healthy, smiling 'prisoners' working in a gold mine. The most eerie thing about the flood of reports which have come out of China in cent years, whether from distinguished vv.estern journalists trotting round with own, Heath or Thatcher, bringing us first"and reports on the menu at banquets in the Great Hall of the Peoples, or BBC-2 films shovving the smiling peasants of the KwangII°. commune indulging in 'healthy selfcriticism', has been how astonishingly r.eminiscent they have been of the general Linage that so many Western visitors gave of Soviet Russia thirty or forty years ago. „ I make no apology for returning to the new renguin Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys, recently reviewed in these columns by John Scott, because it is a very remarkable and 'toying book, which deserves the widest Possible audience. For the first time we have 4 Portrait of Chinese life today as it actually is

or at least as it was six years ago, when Leys

Was last there), written by an art historian Who is soaked in Chinese culture, is married t° a Chinese wife, loves the country 'more than my own' (he is Belgian), and certainly Was able to observe what happened to China

in the crucial period between 1955 and the end of the Cultural Revolution more intimately than anyone else who has so far been able to give us an account of it.

Not the least telling thing about Leys's book is the way he prefaces it with a delight fully scornful account of just how the 'Potemkin village' trick is worked on Western visitors. The visitor's trail lies along the same tiny handful of well-trodden paths—the same three of four cities, the same half dozen 'model' communes, hospitals, factories — meeting only specially-selected and groomed 'workers' and 'representatives of the people'. He stays in hotels which are completely insulated from the rest of Chin ese life. He is taken to the same carefully preserved 'monuments of the past', proudly shown the same archaeological relics dug up during the Cultural Revolution, as evidence of respect forChina's artistic heritage. If he is a Roman Catholic, he may even, as proof of the survival of religious freedom, be taken to a celebration of the Tridentine Mass by a Chinese priest, nostalgically surrounded by all the trappings of Catholic ceremonial such as one would scarcely find surviving in the West. And it is all, of course, a carefullystaged sequence of charades, a series of 'Potemkin villages', giving absolutely no indication of the terrifying cultural and spiritual desert to which modern China has been reduced.

In fact the real theme of Simon Leys's book is the story of the destruction in less than twenty years of what, even as late as the 1950s, was probably the richest and most deep-rooted popular culture in the world. Consider, for instance, the old Chinese passion for opera which, in city and country, at all levels of society, played a part in everyday life as nowhere else on earth('no ceremony, no celebration, no solemn or joyful orexceptional circumstance in life was complete without some piece of opera'). By the end of the Cultural Revolution, the whole of that vast repertoire of traditional opera had simply been abolished. By 1972, the onlyoperas being performed in China, endlessly and identically repeated from one end of the country to the other, down to the tiniest production detail, were six 'feeble Punch and Judy shows, whose only "revolutionary" daring is to manoeuvre on stage, to languorous, Khatchaturianlike music, platoons of the People's Liberation Army complete with banners and wooden rifles'. If you went to the cinema, apart from the occasional documentary, the only feature films you could see were of those same six 'revolutionary model operas'. If you were unfortunate enough to study Chinese literature at Peking University, the only texts you would have had to study (apart from the works of Mao) were the 'childish' librettos of those same six 'operas'.

When Mr Heath admired the 'mediocre Rachmaninoff pastiche' piano concerto known as 'The Yellow River', he was probably not aware that this (in fact prerevolutionary) work may well have been the only piece of music in the pianist's repertoire. And have you ever wondered at the apparent irony that so destructive an upheaval as the Cultural Revolution should also have allowed people the time off to engage in such a harmless and admirable pursuit as archaeology —to produce all those wonderful old Chinese art objects which are now hawked about the world as publicity for the regime (pace the famous 'Jade Princess' exhibition mounted by the Sunday Times in 1973)? The explanation of course is simple. The Chinese soil is an inexhaustible mine of archaeological treasures, whose sites are very well and precisely known'. When in the late sixties the vandals set about destroying tens of thousands of temples, looting hundreds of once venerated tombs, it is hardly surprising that the regime was shrewd enough to save a few gems from the sack, to be later used as evidence for the 'vitality' of revolutionary culture.

But the most haunting image of all is Simon Leys's picture of what has happened to the old city of Peking. When he first knew Peking in 1955, it was architecturally one of the most beautiful cities in the world, 'a cultural legacy of all mankind'. Its ancient walls, its great gates, its delicately-roofed pailous (or street arches), enclosed vistas and arrangements of temples and palaces were one of the most breathtaking and harmonious examples of Chinese art. The streets themselves were humming with life, 'jugglers, booksellers, storytellers, puppeteers, the thousands of craftsmen, the inns, the little shops, the antique dealers and calligraphy shops', giving 'Peking its lovely, diverse and wonderful face, all that made it into an incredibly civilised city'. Twenty years later, with a few carefully preserved exceptions (including the Forbidden City itself), it is all gone. Pailous, gates, walls have simply disappeared (Leys movingly describes his disbelief when, in 1972, he went to look for the ancient gates, as famous throughout the Chinese world as the Great Wall, and found just the 'obscene stum p'o f the last of them being demolished).

'Whole blocks were razed to assuage the hunger of socialist town planners for immense avenues, boulevards and squares. . .intended for parades, massmeetings, pageants and rallies.' Endless acres of empty asphalt lead past serried rows of tatty new concrete slums. The street life has been reduced to glum-looking, identically-garbed grey crowds moving to and from work, like the shuffling toilers in Lang's Metropolis.

Now, when I read this description of a city which twenty-three years ago seemed 'full of youth and life', but where everything today seems 'old, run-down and ramshackle', this

account of the transformation of the rich, organic past of humanity into a grim, concrete wilderness, dominated by bureaucracy, technology and stupefying boredom, I was reminded of a number of things. I was reminded of a passage in Solzhenitsyn's Letterto Soviet Leaders in which he talked about the reconstruction of Moscow in the Fifties and Sixties: 'we have dirtied and defiled the wide Russian spaces, and disfigured the heart of Russia, our beloved Moscow. . .The irreplaceable face of the city and all the ancient city plan have been obliterated, and imitations of the West are being slung up, like the New Arbat; the city has been so squeezed, stretched and pushed upwards that life has . become intolerable.' I was reminded of one of the most remarkable images I have ever seen on television, in a recent documentary — mile upon mile of vast grey concrete slabs of new workers' flats in East Berlin, stretching in seemingly endless, inhuman ranks to the horizon. I was also reminded of a good many parts of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle, Birmingham and other cities in Britain.

We all these days have a certain image fixed somewhere in our minds of the incredible transformation which has come over the life of mankind in the past thirty years — and of which the fate of so many cities of the world has seemed to be only one of the more dramatic outward reflections. The destruction of Peking and the destruction of

Birmingham have only differed in degree. Who, thirty years ago, would have thought it conceivable that the Manchester of Coronation Street back-to-backs or even the Glasgow of the old Gorbals slums would one day be looked back on as 'human', 'colourful', 'alive', almost as objects of nostalgia?

Quite regardless of political ideology, or cultural tradition, it seems as though what has happened has been somehow implicit in the very nature of what mankind as a whole has been doing to itself in the late twentieth century. As Solzhenitsyn was recently saying at Harvard, 'the split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.' And the most remarkable thing of all is the extent to which this tremendous cultural catastrophe has almost universally been carried out, I do not say necessarily always with the best intentions, but certainly in the name of 'humanity', and the 'People.' The most eloquently deceptive 'Potemkin village' of them all has proved to be that vision—whether it took the form of a revolutionary manifesto or an architect's drawing fora new block ofcouncil flats — which promised in advance a truly 'brave new world', in which human beings could live purer, fuller, richer, happier lives. Just why that vision should so universally have proved such a tragic lie is a question I should like to return to in a further article.