Poor Cnuts
John Scott
Broken Images: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics Simon Leys, Trans. Steve Cox (Allison and Busby £6.95) On 4 January the Renmin Ribao (People's Daily) published an article succinctly entitled 'Comprehensively and accurately Understand the Party's Policy Towards Intellectuals' which, delivered in the usual patronizing register, suggests that though intellectuals need a spot of 'uniting, educating and remoulding' (sic) they will respond, as do circus animals, to good treatment. 'As to intellectuals with failings and mistakes, warm-hearted help should be given.' Finally it exhorts the cadres and cadresses to `treat intellectuals as members of the working class'. What more could a lad ask for? Even if you don't exactly relish being 'tempted and remoulded' like a lump of old pig-iron on the Party's rolling-mill such an experience is a considerable improvement from the kick in the groin you could expect in the 'glorious Cultural Revolution'.
Again in Beijing Review on 2 February, we are informed that two highly controversial short stories have actually recently been published in China. To date I have, alas, not had an opportunity of obtaining a copy of either of them. One of them The Wound deals with the tragedy of a mother and a daughter victimized dunng the Cultural Revolution, and the following imponderables raised in the Beijing Review's critique are worth a moment or two's reflection: Why should the author choose as the heroine of his story a young girl who Is immature in thought. . . and why should the author lavish sympathy on such a girl? . . . And why those tragic scenes evoking pity on the part of the readers? Do they conform to the requirements of socialist literature? Is it permissible, for instance, to write about the seamy side of our society? When a story describes how the Gang of Four undermines the Cultural Revolution, does it amount to 'besmirching the Culture Revolution'? Do literary works with a tragic end inspire the readers or not?
Though much is undoubtedly happening in today's China in the sphere of cultural activity and a degree of freedom of thought and expression is burgeoning — all of which genuinely heartens me — it is against the background of the attitudes encapsulated in the above priceless gobbets that I would recommend the reader to approach the third excellent work by Simon Leys (alias, Pierre Ryckman), a collection of essays on Chinese culture and politics, for the burden of his tale is, as before, cautionary. Take heed, sinologists, lest you be carried away into transports of delight at the sight of the vindication and rehabilitation of those so cruelly persecuted during the Maoist cultural and political vendetta, and above all I beseech you dance no sycophantic antic for the British sale of 9 Hawker Harriers 10 million sacks of broken milk bottles and half a dozen British Leyland trishaws, for verily in the words of Ian Dury (or was it Alexander Pope?) 'hope springs eternal, right up Your behind'.
Sardonically Simon Leys admits that Mao was 'a genius, as the late Lin Biao used to say' but qualifies this statement with a particularly salutary and useful periodisation for all students of the post-revolutionary era in his chapter 'Mao Zedong and Chinese History': 'Mao, who was unrivalled in desperate situations, soon found himself using his talents to create new disasters once he was master of China, just when the Chinese people, united at last, were looking forward to taking advantage of their newly won peace and order so as to rebuild the country and secure its material prosperity and a renaissance of its cultural brilliance. In three disasters of genius, the Hundred Flowers, the Great Leap Forward and the 'Cultural Revolution', Mao managed first to strangle intellectual creativity by persecuting the literate elite even though it was ready to be loyal, then to break the impetus of the national economy and the faith of the misses by plunging the countryside into famine and sowing confusion in industry, and finally to throw the whole country into a bloody, monstrous chaos which was to cause suffering to millions of innocent people, as well as the destruction of what little cultural life still remained.
And again in 'Aspects of Mao Zedong' he nicely describes the late Chairman: Strangely enough for a leader of such stature, Mao had very little personal Charisma. He was a poor speaker, with a high-pitched, unpleasant and monotonous voice and thick Hunanese accent, of which he never could rid himself . . . but that he was in fact the main organiser of his own cult cannot be doubted: he justified the necessity of it to Edgar Snow by observing cynically, `Krushchev did not build his own cult, look what happened to him!'
Here I might add that though the old Chairman is long dead his cult goes marching on, even if it has been slowed down and kept in step with the interests of the new rulers. No doubt, too, that amongst the dusty stuffed anteaters and moth-eaten squirrel monkeys of the museum Simon Leys describes on p. 96 you can still see the worker-student's filthy old underwear enshrined under a glass case after receiving the honour of being remarked upon by Mao, .though what form that remark took we shall never know. One must, of course, never criticize the Chairman, nor besmirch his bastard brain child — the Cultural Revolution, but vigorously denounce instead Mrs Mao or the Gang of Four and Lin Biao, even if, like everyone else, Simon Leys is fully aware that: Without Mao there would have been no Madame Mao . . . In Europe, in Australia, even in America, we can already hear the usual Peking sycophants zealously denouncing Madame Mao and exposing all the evils of the 'Gang of 4' . . . they might well ask where the 'Gang of 4' had drawn its power from. To ascribe to Madame Mao the main responsibility for the senseless violence and cruelty of the 'Cultural Revolution', for the destruction of Chinese culture, and for the ruthless cretinisation of that sophisticated nation — which have all taken place during the last ten years — would be akin to crediting the ass whose jaw Samson borrowed in battle with the ability to destroy the Philistines.
Perhaps it is in the essays on the great 20th century under Lu Xun that the author excels himself. By laying the ghost of Lu Xun as 'a student of Mao Zedong thought' he presents him. for what he really was, a highly complex yet uncommitted genius who had this to say on the concept of the writer's permanent alienation from political authority: The statesman hates the writer because the writer sows the seeds to dissent: what the statesman dreams of is to be able to prevent people from thinking, and thus he always accuses the artists and writers of upsetting his orderly state.
Yet it is this same Lu Xun who has been apotheothised as a good student of Mao as if he had been just another one of those poor benighted cretins whose belief in the thaumaturgic properties of that Hunan hayseed's rustic pronouncements was sufficient to inspire them to attempt to outdo King Cnut for sheer madness, as Simon Leys describes: H. a student from Swaton, told me that in a coast village in his area, a hundred young people died in a tidal wave. They were trying to protect a dyke which was under construction. After reciting a page from The Little Red Book they had walked waist-deep into the water by rop ing themselves to one another. In their naievety, they were trying to rewrite a famous scene from the 'Modal Revolutionary Opera' Hymn to Lung Chiang. They all drowned. • Poor little Cnuts is all I can add, if you'll excuse the obvious opportunity for metathesis.
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