29 MARCH 1986, Page 28

NMI

Requiem for China

Colin Thubron

BEHIND THE FORBIDDEN DOOR: TRAVELS IN CHINA by Tiziano Terzani

Allen & Unwin, £11.95

Tiziano Terzani lived in Peking as Fat Eastern correspondent of Der Spiegel from 1980 until 1984, when he was expelled for his too-critical reporting. Behind the For- bidden Door (deceptively subtitled Travels in China — this is no travel book) is based on those reports, and in their light his expulsion may cause some anger but little surprise. The book is a relentless jeremiad over everything that China has become since communist 'Liberation' in 1949, and therein lie its strengths and its imbalance.

Perhaps in scattered articles the pro- found pessimism of these chapters was forceful; but en masse the impact is not merely depressing but, I think, fatallY top-heavy. In chapter after chapter the suspicion that the author is — at least unconsciously — hunting out only what crass or inhuman (and there's plenty of it) in modern China betrays that he is unsym- pathetic to context and sometimes blind to mitigating factors. The trouble with Behind the Hidden Door, in other words, lies less in what it says than in what it leaves unsaid. Mr Terzani's most moving and original chapters spring from his love of traditional China and his investigations into the des- truction of temples and the emasculation of religion. He is eloquently detailed on the communist despoilment of Peking, and laments it with the same romantic passion As Simon Leys's classic, Chinese Shadows. But Leys was writing at the end of the Cultural Revolution, striking a blow at the facile utopianism of western observers who still believed in Mao's paradise. A decade later, after the Chinese have themselves discredited their own revolution, Terza- ni's threnody strikes one rather differently. In the pragmatic (but not liberal) China of today, his tirade is almost melodramatical- ly black. The only aspects of modern China which meet with his unqualified praise are those in which the country has returned to its old self. He even bemoans the passing of Peking's rickshaws (11,000 in Peking as late as 1957). At such moments he becom- es the classic cultural traveller, who re- quires the Chinese to populate a country of his fantasies rather than one of their own wish. 'Today there is not a single lane that recalls the refined, modest elegance of old Peking,' he writes, 'not a single courtyard with the rarefied atmosphere in which a scholar and his friends could view the blossoming of the chrysanthemums and spend a night writing poems to the moon.' Quite so. Peking is a placeless hulk. But by 1949 Chinese poems to the moon had been turgid for 300 years, and most of the communist evils which Mr Terzani cites belong to an ancient and perhaps ineradic- able China. His elevation of the pre-1949 capital into a kind of epicurean Eden, 'a city of festivals and temple fairs,' is pure romanticism. The most cursory perusal of 19th-century travel books uncovers a hovel-strewn metropolis whose vast major- ity of citizens was living in total squalour. (Indecency, and filth everywhere,' wrote a visitor in 1889. 'We saw many curious sights, but most were of such a nature that I cannot describe them.') It is a pity that this nostalgia vitiates Mr Terzani's perfectly valid lament for the vanished architecture of Peking and other cities. But elsewhere his diligence in delv- ing beneath the shadowplay of tourist China has yielded impressive results. He made fruitful tours of Tibet and Xinjiang, and is stimulating on topics as diverse as the rebirth of kungfu and the breeding of crickets. There is a chilling chapter on birth control and an evocative one on the old Moslem city of Kashgar in Chinese Turkes- tan. He is full of intriguing small facts and ironies. His account of his own interroga- tion and forced 'self-criticism' is fascinating and all too short. And his own children have contributed a precocious piece on the Peking school at which they spent four years — a microcosm of Chinese society at its worst, with its forbidding discipline, its suffocation of the imagination, its routine deceptions, its spyings and critic- isms.

Generally Mr Terzani is, I think, factual- ly accurate. All the stranger, then, is his belief that criticism of the Cultural Revolu- tion and the Gang of Four is no longer heard in China (it is still heard, every- where) or that the reopened temples are uniformly 'not places of worship, but museums for tourists' (perhaps he never travelled in the south or to the remoter Buddhist holy mountains.) Possibly the most valuable function of this book is its questioning of current success stories. Against the much- trumpeted triumphs of the agricultural Re- sponsibility System, greeted with delight (and I-told-you-so's) in the west, Terzani sounds the warning that the diminution of the vast social security provided by the now abandoned communes may bear very hard on the old, the sick and those unsupported by relatives. To this he adds a caution recently raised by Orville Schell in his To Get Rich is Glorious: that the enormous irrigation projects maintained by collective effort since 1949 could fall dangerously into decay.

Unfortunately, Terzani's massed com- plaints — whether of Maoism or of Deng Xiaoping's 'half-reverse' towards the west — are accompanied by no coherent alternative solution, unless he is opting for a return to imperial times and those dirges to the moon. Yet in spite of all, Behind the Forbidden Door is a distinguished addition to the little that has been published on post-Mao China: distinguished for its in- tegrity, its knowledge, and — yes — for its moral outrage.