Circling the Square
Geremie Barme
MOVING THE MOUNTAIN: MY LIFE IN CHINA FROM THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION TO TIANANMEN SQUARE by Li Lu Macmillan, £13.95, pp.224 THE SEARCH FOR MODERN CHINA by Jonathan D. Spence Hutchinson, £19.95, pp.876 There is a saying going around Peking today that reflects a great deal about the psychology of that deeply wounded city. It runs: 'The elite intellectuals are waiting for a Cai E [the Republican army, many of whose members rebelled against the dicta- tor Yuan Shikai]; the romantics are waiting for a Jing Ke [a classical knight-errant who made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the King of Qin]; realists are waiting for the King of Death Ito do away with Deng Xiaoping and the others]; and everyone else is waiting for Godot.' In his autobiography, Moving the Mountain, the ex-student leader Li Lu refers to the would-be assassin ling Ke a number of times and even compares him- self to that valorous figure of old.
Here I was, [Li says of himself, setting out for Peking amidst the student demonstra- tions of April last year] trying to tame this modern dynasty, more powerful even than the Qin dynasty . . . I had to laugh at myself for even comparing myself to Jing Ke. He had carried a dagger with him on his mission. All I had was some underwear in my pocket, and a head full of dreams.
With his clean underwear and tragic dreams (ling Ke was, after all, killed for his failure to assassinate the king), Li Lu may have been as well-equipped to change the nature of communist rule in China as anyone else that fateful spring.
Whereas the Chinese government claims to have found in the 1989 protest move- ment a plot to overthrow the Communist Party and convert the People's Republic into a bourgeois republic and vassal of the West, most of its participants yearned mainly for recognition and dialogue. Li Lu was one of the activists on Tiananmen and a close comrade-in-arms of Chai Ling, the leading female commander of the move- ment. In his autobiography, he provides a fascinating account of his own life and his
involvement in the protests.
Li is a member of the post-Cultural Revolution generation. Their idealism re- flects a strange mix of a half-baked under- standing of Chinese history and an over- exposure to revolutionary propaganda. Whereas the details of his later career as a student activist in the 1980s are cast in a rambling and error-ridden form (he passes over the 1986 student movement and dates it as 1987, and claims that former Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang was expel- led from his job when he resigned, albeit at the insistence of his elders), he claims nearly total recall when recounting his youthful struggles with neighbourhood committee hacks and Party thugs, right down to verbatim records of overheard conversations. Elements in his personal tale include an oppressive Party hierarchy, the horrors of the Tangshan earthquake which Li experienced and a desolate emo- tional landscape. The author is tireless in telling us of his idealism and determination as the organiser of a forum for university students, but his analysis of the problems of China in the 1980s is superficial and trite. The paucity of real ideas or substan- tial programmes of reform among presum- ably the best educated generation of young people in China in decades was a remark- able and depressing fact of the 1989 de- monstrations.
One may wonder whether Li Lu, in recalling his youth in such detail, is embel- lishing his personal history so as to weave a book-length narrative out of his 20-odd years of life, but the book remains a readable and revealing account of the stunted intellectual state and extreme emo- tionalism of one major student activist. It helps explain why the speeches of some of these activists now in exile are still of such a jejune nature, and leads to a none-too- optimistic assessment of the movement's chances of success in the near future.
The Search for Modern China, which ends where Li Lu both begins and ends the Peking Massacre — is a volume of magisterial size which follows the history of China through the past 300 years. Jonathan Spence, an historian with a considerable
literary bent, has brought his formidable talents to work on a huge range of informa- tion to write an extremely readable and thorough narrative. In it the reader is given access to an impressive amount of recent Western research on China since the 16th century. It is a history that tells of the Chinese nation's extraordinary achieve- ment and strength, but also of its endemic impotence and confusion. If it is a commonplace to state that China has been in decline for many centuries, Spence gives us in this single ambitious volume a de- tailed and approachable chronicle of that decline.
One searches the sources in vain, how- ever, for recent original Japanese and Chinese scholarship on the subjects discus- sed, and Spence's talent for cultural digres- sions — which add greatly to the narrative — are sometimes marred by questionable interpretations (comments on eccentricity in literati art in the Qing Dynasty seem not entirely accurate) and minor factual errors (the 20th-century artist Feng Zikai was not a close friend of Lu Xun, for example, but did enjoy a working relationship with Lu Xun's brother, Zhou Zuoren). Similarly, the early history of the Communist Party is dealt with in a fashion that does little to help the reader understand why the past ten years have been possible and the horror of 1989 inevitable.
The collapse of the traditional Chinese world view in the late 19th and early 20th century is observed, but the reader senses little of the extraordinary angst and loss that this has caused the Chinese intel- ligentsia — something still very much at the centre of the intellectual, cultural and political turmoil of China today. The read- er sometimes gets the feeling that the wealth of detail and the span of time have so preoccupied the writer that he has not given himself time to dwell on the passion and the dilemmas that make Chinese his- tory such a compelling story.
Geremie Barme recently coedited with John Minford Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, published by Bloodaxe Books at £7.95.
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