Article by John Derbyshire |
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| China
Diary, Part 3
[Note: These diaries are made up of notes I jotted while travelling in China during the summer of 2001 with my wife Rosie (who is Chinese) and our two small children. They appeared on NRO only in part. Here I have included the full diaries.] Xi'an
City, West-Central China: July
17th to July 20th
--------------------------------------- How
many. A good place to get a feel for this is in the "Forest of
Steles" in Xi'an. Housed
in the sprawling grounds of an old Confucian temple, in a back street near
the south gate of the city, the "Forest" is a vast collection of
inscribed stone steles and tablets from dynasties all the way back to the
Sui. (Early seventh century.
There may be even older ones I missed.
There is said to be one, from the slightly later Tang dynasty,
bearing the cross of Our Lord, inscribed by Nestorian Christians, who were
well-established in China during the Tang.)
There are hundreds of these beautiful things, stacked in ranks and
files in sheds and pavilions all over the temple complex, not especially
well presented and obviously not well cared for.
Such a profusion of old things!
Standing in one of these pavilions, with steles to right, left,
front and back of you, you understand why Chinese people sometimes feel
weighed down by their past. (You
might even understand I
don't why they play elevator music at high volume through oudspeakers
all over the temple grounds. The
day I was there, it was Mooged selections from Simon and Garfunkel,
apparently great favorites with the old Confucian literati.) And
something like the Forest of Steles is merely an outcropping the tip,
in a sense close to the literal, of a huge iceberg.
Most of China's antiquities are underground. The plain around Xi'an, for example, has been continuously
inhabited since the Neolithic. Xi'an
was the nation's capital for well over a millennium, and numberless armies
ebbed and flowed across that plain. I
dare say you could dig a hole almost anywhere here and come up with
something a rusted helmet, a spear point, a coin hoard, a tomb. The Xi'an region now has an excellent system of highways,
most built in the last twenty years.
What did they turn up when digging for these roads?
Were archeologists allowed a quick peek, a few photographs, before
the tarmac went down? I doubt
it. When the Chinese
government has a priority like the road-building program, they would not
let a few old tombs slow them down. How
few. And yet, on the large scale, how little there is to show for
3,500 years of civilization! (The
clichι "five thousand years" is poetic license.
There is no evidence known to me of any real civilization in China
before the mid-second millenium B.C.
The first person whose name we know, who probably existed, and who
was probably Chinese, is Tang the Completer, founder of the Shang Dynasty,
floruit around that time.) It
is very rare to find yourself in any standing structure in China that is
older than the Ming dynasty (14th century).
I doubt there are more than a dozen such. Every time you think you have found one, it's a
disappointment. We took a
long trip out into the Shaanxi countryside to see the Fa Men Pagoda, a
famous center of Buddhist relics (they have four of his finger bones) with
a history going back to the Han dynasty (second century A.D.)
Yes, the reliquaries are very beautiful, and the pagoda certainly
impressive ... until you discover that it was completely rebuilt, from the
foundations up, less than twenty years ago!
The Big Goose Pagoda in Xi'an still has what must be the original
Tang dynasty (seventh century) doorway deeply worn stone covered with
ancient graffiti but I would not vouch for the rest of the structure.
The inside looks like a 1960s-era British railroad station. It
is true that I am a hard man to impress with the antiquity of structures. I
come from Northampton, a small town in the English midlands with a
twelfth-century church on every street corner, and a couple of Saxon ones
in the countryside around. As a child, I played at the foot of the Eleanor Cross,
erected in 1292 by Edward the First to commemorate his wife, Eleanor of
Castile. I have friends in
the north of England who live in a 15th-century manor house.
Does anyone in China a very much bigger country live in a
15th-century structure, play around a 13th-century one, or pray in a
twelfth-century one? I
seriously doubt it. Why is
this? In
part, it is just a consequence of the fact that the Chinese did not build
much in stone. Everything was
wood or brick. That is not a
full explanation, though. My
friends' manor house is wood and brick; and Japan has wooden temples over
a thousand years old. The
main reason is just China's exceptionally violent history.
There have been countless civil wars.
England and Japan have had their share of civil wars, too, of
course; but China's seem to have been conducted with annihilating
savagery. And then, China has suffered many invasions by peoples
Huns, Tibetans, Mongols, Turks who had no respect for Chinese culture
or its productions. (The
destructive contributions of the British, French and Japanese should also
be mentioned in this context, though in the larger scheme of things, and
in spite of being made much of by the communists, those contributions were
negligible. Mao's Red Guards
destroyed ten thousand times more Chinese antiquities than all the foreign
armies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries combined.)
China's ancient structures were, in short, chewed up by the great
sausage-machine of Chinese history, along with untold millions of her
people. There
is, for example, the ludicrous cult of Jiang Zemin, China's current
president, a featureless functionary with the brain of an assistant
sub-postmaster and the charisma of an ashtray.
Every effort is made to show Jiang as being in apostolic succession
from Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiao-ping.
(Mao's actual chosen successor, Hua Guo-feng, has been air-brushed
out of the official Party histories, along with other recent but
inconvenient Party luminaries like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.)
Jiang's "Thoughts" they currently center on something
named "the Three Represents", which nobody can explain to me
because nobody gives a flying foo-yung about them pop up as little
public-service ads, backed by solemn music, in between TV programs.
Writing
about Russia in the Brezhnev years, Hedrick Smith noted that when Stalin's
voice was broadcast over the loudspeakers in public places, everyone
stopped to listen, because they were afraid not to.
When Khrushchev broadcast, people did not stop, but they still
listened, because he occasionally said something interesting. When Brezhnev broadcast, he was talking to himself people
just paid no attention. China
is now thoroughly Brezhnevized in that sense.
Ask a Chinese person for a Mao quote, and they can produce half a
dozen without thinking: "Take
class struggle as the key", "Political power comes from the
barrel of a gun", "Revolution is not a dinner party" and so
on. Ask them for a Deng quote
and, after a moment's thought, they give you either "It doesn't
matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice", or
else "To get rich is glorious".
(The well-known Dengism "Seek truth from facts" is
actually a classical tag from the Han Dynasty.)
Now ask them to quote something from Jiang Zemin.
Puzzled frowns, then laughter.
Nobody can think of anything. Worst
of all, though, are the lies, the endless lies. George Orwell said, during WW2, that he didn't mind people
dropping bombs on him as much as he minded the prospect that the lies of
the bomb-droppers might prevail and truth be forgotten. Living in China, one sees exactly what he meant.
Yesterday, for example, was the fiftieth anniversary of, to quote
from the TV news programs, "the peaceful liberation of Tibet"
that is, of the moment when Mao's armies invaded and occupied
that nation, bringing to her all the horrors of Chinese-style Leninism:
slave-labor camps, man-made famines, the annihilation of language,
religion and culture, all the terrible long Calvary Tibet endured in the
second half of the twentieth century.
There was, of course, no mention of all that on TV, only pictures
of happy Tibetans in colorful costumes, celebrating their good fortune at
having been "liberated" from the burden of governing themselves. Now,
TV news everywhere is heavily doctored, of course. You would never know from watching U.S. network news that,
for example, black Americans and nonblack Americans in the generality
dislike each other, and go to great pains to avoid living in each other's
neighborhoods. In the U.S.,
however, there are at least some news and opinion outlets that contradict
the official lies. An
American who wants to hear non-official versions of his nation's history
and current condition can do so with very little difficulty.
A Chinese person who wishes to seek out the truth about, say, the
Tiananmen Square incident, or the state of public opinion in Tibet, has a
much harder row to hoe, even if he has access to the Internet.
To begin with, he must master a foreign language there is
little on these topics in Chinese (though a new breed of young Taiwanese
journalists is doing some brilliant work in this area). Ninety-five
years ago, Sun Yat-sen stated his "Three People's Principles"
not so much a program for action as an identification of those areas
of Chinese life most in need of modernization and reform.
They were: the
National Question, the form of government, and the economic system.
The National Question has been subsumed in a lie:
the lie that China has the "historic right" to rule over
non-Chinese peoples beyond her borders.
The matter of how China should be governed has been swallowed by
another lie: the lie that
only the Communist Party has a right to rule, and that any alternative
will lead to chaos. And the
economy? Gordon Chang, an
American of Chinese ancestry who has been living, working and doing
business in China for twenty years, has a book coming out next month
titled The Coming Collapse of China, in which he argues that the
Chinese economy, too, is a lie, founded on an irrational banking system,
chronic debt repudiation, and massive (though mostly concealed) state
intervention and favoritism. If
Chang is right, then all three of the pillars on which Sun Yat-sen sought
to establish his new republic are riddled with falsehood.
The one question that people want a writer on China to answer is:
Is China stable? No,
China is not stable. There is
only one kind of stability in this world, the one identified by Samuel
Johnson: "the stability
of truth". Never was a
nation further from the truth about herself, her history, her government,
her economy. Which pillar
will crack and split first? The
nation an uprising in Turkestan, perhaps?
The government a Soviet-style implosion of Party authority?
Or the economy a huge depression?
I don't know; but I do know that nothing stable or enduring can be
built on lies. For all the
bustle and glitz, today's China is, ultimately, a sad, lost, desperate
nation, adrift and rudderless on a sea of lies. We
all the Derbs and our hosts, with various of their relatives went
to a place called Jinyun Temple, in the countryside north of Chongqing (of
which city, Beibei is a satellite town).
The temple is scattered up the side of a largish mountain.
It consists of numerous old (Ming Dynasty, i.e. 14th-15th century)
prayer-halls and pavilions, all in a dismal state of dilapidation, but
still functioning, with monks and nuns in residence.
It was an intolerably hot day, as it almost always is in Sichuan.
In mid-afternoon, however, the weather broke.
There was a thunderstorm, and we ducked into a cave in the
hillside. Now,
taking refuge from rain in a cave sounds like a good idea at first, but in
fact caves are rather porous places, and soon we were being dripped on
from all points. (The Chinese
character for "cave" includes the "water" symbol.)
To evade the drips, we went deeper into the cave.
The passage descended steadily, but steps had been cut so the going
was not difficult, and light bulbs were strung along the way.
Soon we came to a drip-free interior space large enough to hold the
party, and everyone declared they would go no further.
I was intrigued by the cave, though, and pressed forward alone.
The light bulb zone ended a few yards on, but I am one of those
good Scouts who carry a flashlight everywhere (and a penknife, and a
length of string), so I forged ahead and downwards.
The cave narrowed, and there were parts where I had trouble
squeezing through. At last,
fifty yards or so ahead of the party, I found I was standing on flowing
water. The passage was
developing into the bed of a small stream.
I splashed forward a few yards.
Suddenly,
there in the flashlight beam, was the head of a dragon.
I would not actually swear that it was a dragon; it might have been
some other species of monster. It
certainly had a fearsome countenance, anyway.
It was carved of stone, about two feet high, and lay on the stream
bed, blocking the passage, leering up at me.
It seemed to have just been dropped there, rather carelessly
it was at an angle to the vertical.
To go further I would have to step over it.
Looking beyond, I saw that the stream was much better developed
beyond the dragon head, ankle-deep at least.
This was the end of the line.
I took another look at that fierce head, then turned back.
After
rejoining the party, I told them about the dragon head.
Everyone was polite these were Chinese people, after all
but I detected some skepticism. Rosie eschewed politeness altogether: "My lao-gong [old man] drank too much beer at
lunch." However, there
was a camera in our gear, so I decided to go back and get a photograph of
the dragon's head to vindicate myself.
Twenty yards into the passage, however, I saw that things had
changed rather dramatically. The
rain had broken through the roof, and I was looking at a waterfall, its
spray filling the narrow way, the rock underfoot running three or four
inches deep. I could not get
back to the dragon's head. I
have no photographic evidence of its existence. Later
in the afternoon, out of the cave but caught in another shower, we
sheltered in one of the prayer-halls where a Buddhist service was actually
going on. Standing there
among the chanting congregation, in the stink of incense, the bonze
periodically whacking his gong, a shaven-headed young monk doing those
weird hand-gestures at the altar, me all the while thinking about that
dragon's head in the cave, I had one of my rare moments of genuine doubt
about whether the material world actually exists.
The monk, of course, would have said that it doesn't. The
Seven 'Kill' Stele was erected by Zhang Xianzhong (pronounced "Jang
Shee-en Jwoong"), one of the worst mass murderers in Chinese history,
which is saying a very great deal. He
flourished in the 1640s, when the Ming dynasty was disintegrating and the
Manchus were pouring into China from the north. Zhang was a general in the Ming army. He took himself off with his troops to Sichuan, where he
invested himself with the title "King of the West". At first Zhang was a routine end-of-dynasty warlord, running
a little statelet of his own, distributing land to the peasants, breaking
out now and then to go on a razzia down the valley of the Yangtse.
Then his mind turned some dark corner, and he began killing people.
First
he killed all the educated people always a strong temptation for the
would-be Chinese despot, apparently, when megalomania begins to assert its
grip. Zhang ordered all the
literati of Sichuan to Chengdu, his capital, for a "special
examination". Once they
were there, he massacred them. Next
he killed all the Buddhist clergy. Then
he broadened his field of operations, and began killing at random.
His intention seems to have been to exterminate the entire
population of Sichuan, at that time probably around twenty million. He very nearly succeeded, if the oral tradition can be
believed. Hu-Guang tian
Sichuan, say local people with a shudder and a shake of the head:
that is, there were so few people left alive in Sichuan after Zhang
was through, the province had to be re-populated from the "Hu"
and "Guang" provinces (Hunan, Hubei, Guangxi, Guangdong).
When he ran out of people to kill, Zhang turned his
fury on the inanimate world: he
set his troops to pulling down buildings, broaching dykes and burning
forests. When
news came that forward scouts of the Manchu armies had been spotted in the
north of the province, Zhang gathered all his men together on a plain
outside Chengdu. He made a
speech to them along the following lines:
"The great battle for the Empire is about to begin.
I want you all to fight like true soldiers, with nothing on your
minds save the thought of victory. To
make sure you are not distracted or weakened by other concerns, I hereby
order you to kill your womenfolk and your children." To give the example, Zhang thereupon turned, drew his sword,
and slew his eight wives, who were standing by him. Thus inspired, his troops all butchered their own families,
until the ground was soaked with the blood of these innocents.
Zhang then rode out to meet the Manchus.
Fortunately the Manchus were terrific archers, and a well-placed
arrow ended the career of the "King of the West".
(According to my informant, anyway.
The 20th-century Chinese writer Lu Xun, who read the dynastic
histories for pleasure, gives a different version of Zhang's end, which
might be more reliable.) At
some point in his career of homicide, Zhang felt it necessary to explain
himself to the world. He
therefore caused a stele to be erected, inscribed with the following three
lines of seven Chinese characters each:
Tian sheng wan wu yi yang Ren, Ren wu yi shan wei bao Tian, Sha
sha sha sha sha sha sha. Here
is a translation (with, for a Chinese reader, an understood
"but" between first and second lines, and a
"therefore" between second and third): Heaven
has brought fourth numberless things for the nourishment of Man. Man
does not do one good deed in recompense to Heaven. Kill
kill kill kill kill kill kill. That
was the Seven 'Kill' Stele. It
was still standing outside Chengdu well into the last century.
Five or six years ago I asked a friend visiting the city to try to
locate it for me. However,
the local authorities told her it had been blown up by a PLA demolition
squad sometime in the 1970s. It
is a measure of the moral atmosphere of Chinese communism that this
revolting psychopath, on account of his early land-to-the-peasants moves
and his patriotic opposition to the Manchus, is rated as a "positive
character" in communist history books even, in one 1979
encyclopedia, a "hero of the common people". [N.B.
Zhang had a Portuguese Jesuit in his entourage, who survived and
wrote a book in French about his experiences.
The School of Oriental and African Studies in London has a copy.
Alas, I cannot read French. If
anyone knows of an English translation, I should very much like to get a
copy.] A
lot of people think the Three Gorges Dam project is misguided, and will
bring about environmental disaster. That
I cannot judge (though, bearing in mind a certain 1950s British war movie,
there is surely no more tempting object for a ballistic missile targeting
group than a large dam in a densely-populated area).
I am willing to say, though, that I don't mind very much; though I
think, if I were Chinese, I should mind much more. The Gorges are mildly impressive to a foreigner, but for a
Chinese person they are much more than that.
Almost every mile and the combined length of the Gorges is over
eighty miles has associated with it, in the mind of an educated
Chinese person, some poem or historical incident.
I flatter myself that I am better acquainted with Chinese
literature and history than the average round-eye, but I was way out of my
depth cruising the Gorges. "Oh,
look!" Rosie would say, "That's where so-and-so marched his
armies along the cliff path to outflank what's-his-name in the Three
Kingdoms [a classic historical novel], remember?"
No, sorry, honey, don't remember that bit.
The damn book is 3,000 pages long in English.
"Ah you see that crag?
That's the one Li Bai is looking at in that poem ... you know the
one ..." And everyone
starts chanting the poem in unison. Li
Bai's collected poems (I translated one for NRO Weekend a month or
two back) fill three fat volumes, and at least half of them seem to be
about cruising the Yangtrse. With
the best will in the world, and the utmost respect for Chinese literature
and history, both of which I have, this gets tiresome after a while.
If you want to take a trip down the Gorges while there is still
time, and to get the most out of it, I recommend a good reading program
beforehand, under the guidance of a Chinese person with a good literary
education. The
main reason I don't mind the rising of the waters, though, is the happy
thought that all the cheesy tourist traps, tacky theme parks, and
chancrous industrial towns that blight the passage through the Gorges will
disappear for ever. Good!
I will make just one or two exceptions here. The temple of Zhang Fei, for example. He was a principal character in the great Three Kingdoms
drama (an actual historical period late second to late third century
A.D. immortalized in a novel by Luo Guan-zhong, of which there is an
English translation by C.H. Brewitt-Taylor), a defender of the kingdom of
Shu, which corresponded to present-day Sichuan.
Some assasins in the pay of the King of Wu, Shu's enemy, killed
him, removed his head, and set off with it for Wu to claim their bounty.
While on the road, they learned that the politics of the kingdoms
had shifted, and that Wu was now allied with Shu.
Deducing that their trophy was now more likely to bring them
trouble than reward, they tossed it in the river.
The local people, who had revered Zhang Fei as their protector,
fished it out and gave it a decent burial.
Then they built a temple over it.
You can still visit the temple, which is quite appealing, in that
gaudy Chinese way, though of course much rebuilt.
I doubt any of the present structure is over a hundred years old. |