Article by John Derbyshire |
|
|
|
| China
Diary, Part 4
[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.] Shanghai,
Hangzhou, Suzhou, Zhouzhuang: July
28th to August 3rd And
Chinese people are still astounded to find that foreigners know anything
about their country. I carry
with me the excellent and comprehensive Lonely Planet Guide to China,
which has detailed descriptions of all the best things to see and do in
this country, with good, mostly accurate, historical and linguistic
background, put together by non-academics.
This book is very fascinating to my Chinese friends and relatives. "How do they know so much about China?" they
marvel. The idea that
foreigners know anything worth knowing about China is almost unacceptable
to the Chinese. In my Hong
Kong days, I turned up once to meet a Chinese friend carrying in my hand a
very good book on Chinese history by one of America's finest Sinologists.
My friend an educated man, and nowadays in fact an extremely
rich one inquired about the book.
I showed it to him, and read off the author's very impressive
credentials. My friend
riffled the pages carelessly, then tossed the book back to me, saying:
"Oh, what do foreigners know about China?" They
cannot even imagine the truth which is, that so far as China's
politics and recent history are concerned, any interested foreigner can
quickly come to know far more than almost anybody in China, simply because
he has a larger number of honest sources available to him. There are, for example, at least three plausible theories
about the death of Marshal Lin Biao in the "nine-one-three"
incident of September 13th 1971, but I have never met any Chinese person
who is aware of anything but the official version of Lin's death (which
is, that he died in a plane crash in Outer Mongolia while trying to flee
China with his family). They
are astonished to hear that other theories have been put forward.
In fact, the official version is not particularly unlikely.
The main reason to doubt it is that it is the official
version, put out by the Party propaganda machine, which lies instinctively
and reflexively, even when there is no particular reason to. The
Chinese have never had much access to their own history, in spite of
having independently invented the historical sciences. (The first century B.C. historian Sima Qian has been called,
very justly, "the Chinese Herodotus".)
Down to the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) Chinese historians
were forbidden, on pain of death, from writing about any event later than
the founding of the dynasty 250 years previously.
An English scholar of medieval Chinese history once told me that
the first requirement for deep study in that field is that you learn
Japanese the language in which the best and most objective historical
studies of China are written. We
took a day trip to see Suzhou, about two hours by road from Shanghai, in
company with some Shanghai friends. We
did the sights: very nice.
Then it was evening and the question of dinner arose.
Back to Shanghai for dinner, or eat in Suzhou?
We were hungry, so we opted for the latter.
We picked a restaurant, hired a private room, and settled down to
scrutinize the menu. At once
it started. "Look at the
prices! This stuff wouldn't
cost half as much in Shanghai!"
"Not much of a selection, Shanghai restaurants have far more
choice..." All this, at
the tops of their voices, while two waitresses were standing by to take
our orders. When these ladies had left the room, one of the Shanghai
girls said: "Did you see
their attitude? No manners at
all! No idea how to treat
customers! If this were
Shanghai, they'd have been fussing over us:
'May I get you this, Sir?' 'May
I help you with that, Ma'am?' But
look at that one taking my order. She
just stood there like this..." [The
speaker executed a very exaggerated little mime, hand on hip, gazing at
the ceiling in simulated boredom] "...as
if we'd come to her stupid restaurant just to bother her.
Now if this were Shanghai..." Many
years ago in Liverpool I knew a Shanghai man who had married a Cantonese
girl. With some difficulty:
when the girl's father found out that his daughter's suitor was
from Shanghai, he chased him down Great George Street waving a meat
cleaver. Now I understand
why. Well,
at any rate, Derbyshire's Laws have now definitely broken down.
Derbyshire's Laws were formulated in the early 1980s, when I first
went travelling around mainland China.
They were as follows:
I
got into a spot of difficulty once by momentarily forgetting the Third
Law. Sometime in 1983 I was
washing up at the communal trough of a student hostel in Beijing
University. Next to me at the
trough was a tall, fair-skinned, sandy-haired, blue-eyed American lad who,
after some conversational preliminaries, turned out to be from Wyoming.
Derb: "I think
you're the first American I've met in China that isn't Jewish."
He made an embarrassed little laugh.
"Matter of fact, I am Jewish..."
Jews in Wyoming! Who
knew? *
Not her real name. Nobody in
these pieces, outside the Derb nuclear family, is referred to by a real
name. This is China. I
am sure this is true. Chinese
people feel about their leaders the way black Americans feel about theirs.
Any folly or incompetence, any crime or cruelty, any corruption or
malfeasance, is forgiven when the leaders stand up to the hated Other.
Jesse Jackson takes advantage of female employees and uses his
tax-exempt "charities" as personal ATMs?
So what he knows how to jab his finger in Whitey's eye, doesn't
he? Jiang Zemin and his capos
are shovelling their nation's wealth into private Swiss bank accounts,
torturing middle-aged women who want to practice meditation, stifling
intellectual activity and persecuting harmless dissidents?
Sure, but look how they stick it to the foreign devils!
I am not exaggerating here: this
is an actual frame of mind, and you do not have to scratch a modern
Chinese very hard to reveal it. Behind
both instances is the same underlying phenomenon: a burning, aching sense of racial inferiority.
In the case of blacks, this arises from their never having created
any civilization of their own. With
the Chinese the neurosis is, if anything, even more acute.
They actually did create a great civilization, and believed it was the
only one in the world; but it collapsed in a cloud of dust as soon as the
white man touched it a trauma from which the mainland Chinese have
not, even now, really begun to recover.
How could they? The
communists work hard to keep that trauma alive, nursing and tending it
with all the patient assiduity of hothouse
gardeners. They have to
it's all they have going for them. This
unhappy little fact was brought home to me at the mausoleum of Yue Fei in
Hangzhou. Yue Fei is a
national hero. He lived in
the early twelfth century, a time of great crisis for the Chinese nation.
The Song dynasty (960-1279: it was, by the way, arguably the most
progressive and creative of China's 24 imperial dynasties) was under
assault by the savage Jin barbarians of the far north.
Yue Fei was commander of the Chinese armies fighting against the
Jin. He won many brilliant
victories against them, and was hugely popular with his troops and with
the common people. At the
court of the Song emperor, however, there was a faction that wanted to
make peace with the Jin, and cede to them the large area of North China
they had conquered. This
faction was led by a senior official named Qin Hui.
Yue Fei, of course, wanted to fight on, to regain the lost
territories. Qin Hui,
however, had the emperor's ear. He
arranged a frame-up of Yue Fei, who was recalled to the capital and
executed. North China was
ceded to the Jin (and the dynasty is thereafter known as the Southern
Song, with its capital at Hangzhou). This
incident is regarded as an outrage by all patriotic Chinese, and seems
even to have aroused strong feelings at the time.
The following emperor had Yue Fei posthumously rehabilitated.
The great warrior was re-buried in a grand mausoleum, which is now
a popular tourist spot. Statues of Qin Hui, of his wife (who was involved in some way
I have forgotten), and two of Yue Fei's subordinates who had co-operated
in the frame-up were set in front of the tomb, all in a kneeling position
kneeling humbly before the patriot they had wronged.
It used to be the custom for visitors to the mausolem to spit on
the statue of Qin Hui. This
has now been forbidden, however, and when I saw it, the statue was
spittle-free. (The only
surface area of its size anywhere in China of which this could be said.) Strolling
around the pleasant grounds of the mausoleum, I wondered aloud to Rosie
who can be taken here as a sort of lay figure, a representative
well-educated thirty-something mainland Chinese whether any bold
historian had tried to make a name for himself by arguing a revisionist
view of the Yue Fei incident, showing that Qin Hui was right and Yue Fei
really a dangerous plotter. Rosie
was scandalized by this notion. "If
anyone wrote such a thing, his statue would be put next to Qin Hui's for
people to spit on." I
persisted, with all the usual arguments about the difficulty of getting to
the bottom of historical matters. President
Kennedy was shot less than forty years ago.
We have film footage of the event, and independent judicial
inquiries have been carried out at vast expense, yet people are still
arguing about what happened. Are
we quite sure we have all the facts about a palace intrigue of nine
hundred years ago? Rosie
wouldn't hear of it. Yue Fei
was a great national hero, she sniffed.
Qin Hui was a contemptible traitor, who sold himself and his
country for cash. "Everybody
knows." No use to point
out (though I did anyway, from sheer force of habit) that until quite
recently, "everybody knew" that the sun revolved around the
earth, but that careful inquiry had showed this not to be the case.
No use: I had hit the
Wall. This
failure to develop a properly critical attitude to one's culture and
history is a natural consequence of despotic government, with all its
grisly apparatus of propaganda and intimidation.
At any give time there is only one correct "line" in a
despotism. To present any
alternative version of things is at least anti-social, and may be seen as
treasonous. Yet
Qin Hui must have been a man of great intelligence and ability.
He had risen to the highest rank in government via stiff
competitive examinations, and no doubt had survived many savage and
complex court intrigues. Are
we really to suppose that he would have no arguments to bring to his
defense? After all, in any
conflict there is a peace faction and a war faction, and the peace faction
is sometimes right. King
Alfred made peace with the Danes and ceded half of England to them: he is
revered as the savior of his nation.
And powerful, popular generals sometimes do have designs on
the throne most disastrously, in Chinese history, An Lu-shan, whose
rebellion in the middle of the eighth century wrecked the Tang dynasty. Robert
Conquest has noted that most of those people who throw the word
"fascist" around with blithe abandon as a term of abuse would
probably not fare very well in debate with an intelligent, sophisticated
fascist like Benedetto Croce or Joseph Goebbels. Similarly, how many of those who have vented their patriotic
ardor by spitting on the statue of Qin Hui could maintain their opinion of
the matter if he were brought back to life to explain himself? Thoughts
of this kind are inaccessible to anyone educated in communist China.
They cannot think them. Yue
Fei was a good man, who championed the common people and stood up to the
nation's enemies. Qin Hui was a bad man who sold out his country for cash and
engineered the death of her greatest hero.
This view of things may, of course, be true. I am only pointing out that in order to discover whether or
not it is true, one necessary pre-requisite is a critical attitude
that seems not to exist in communist China.
"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you
free," said the founder of my religion.
He forgot to add that the converse also applies:
where liberty is stifled, the truth becomes inaccessible. Guilin
is that place with all the weird limestone mountains leaping up out of the
paddy fields. You have
probably seen photographs. It
is a major destination for Chinese tourists seeing their own country.
All the guide books warn you against the place "the
rip-off capital of China", says one.
They are not kidding. The
first meal we had in Guilin, when time came to scrutinize the check (yes:
I scrutinize restaurant checks:
I'm cheap: okay?) I
saw a twelve-yuan item I couldn't relate to anything.
It turned out to be a "seat charge":
we had been charged three yuan each (about 40’) for the privilege
of sitting down! To the best
of my knowledge, this is a complete innovation in restaurant management. The
worst rip-off, though, is the 50-mile boat trip down the Li River.
This is the most famous scenic ride in China, after the Three
Gorges, most of the way lined with those fantastic rock formations, also
groves of bamboo, picturesque temples, etc. etc.
Inquiring at the hotel desk for a tour, we learned that there are
two price levels: 214 yuan
per head for Chinese passengers, 480 for foreigners.
We said we would like the Chinese rate, please.
Sorry, they said, not possible.
Since I am a foreigner, I have to pay the foreign rate, and in fact
go on a foreigners-only boat departing from a foreigners-only dock.
China used to be riddled with these foreigners-only scams, but I
had supposed that was all in the past.
Certainly this was the first one we had encountered on our present
trip. A
long Alice-in-Wonderland argument followed.
They: The Chinese boat
is not suitable for foreigners. Me:
I had just been down the Yangtse on a Chinese boat, and enjoyed it
very much. They: The
foreigners' boat is much better. Me: I'm not fussy. Anyway,
my wife is Chinese. Doesn't
that make me honorary Chinese for these purposes?
They: Sorry, it's a
rule, a regulation. Me: What
about our kids? They are half
Chinese. So which boat do
they go on, according to your damn fool regulations? (I was starting to lose it by this point.)
It was useless. The whole thing was set up to squeeze as much money as
possible out of foreigners, and all their responses were tilted to that
intention. I didn't like this
stuff in the early eighties, when it was everywhere in fact, I once
got into an actual, physical, fight about it.
I don't like it now. I
walked away... ...Knowing
perfectly well, of course, that there's always a way to do something in
China, if you persevere. You
just have to find the right "back door".
Rosie and I went into a strategy huddle, then took a taxi to the
dock, several miles outside the town.
Our idea was to cut out the middle man:
send Rosie into the ticket office at the dock, myself out of sight,
to buy tickets at the Chinese price.
Unfortunately the dock office kept peculiar hours, and had closed
for the day. By this point, however, we had struck up an acquaintance with
our taxi driver, a plain-spoken fellow with pungent views about the
Communist Party. It turned
out his wife had a friend who worked for a travel office in the city... He made a couple of calls on his cell phone.
We drove back to town and parked round the corner from the travel
office. Rosie went in and
came out with tickets for us all. Chinese
price. ["Did
they ask to see your passport?" I wanted to know.
No, she said, they had not. Nor
did anyone else at any future point.
This shows that the criterion is blood, not nationality.
To put it more plainly, the whole thing is frank racial
discrimination.] There
was a small fuss when we turned up at the dock the next morning.
The tour guide wanted to know why I wasn't booked on the
foreigners' boat. We stood
our ground, though, and wore her down.
She had a big party to look after, and was running late.
At last she threw up her hands and let us board.
I rode down the Li River on a Chinese boat, at a Chinese fare,
feeling like Rosa Parks. Me:
"They're certainly doing a lot of construction in Guilin." He:
"This new mayor's got things rolling.
He's all right. The
previous one pei! that son of a bitch!
'Black' [i.e. corrupt] from top to bottom.
That airport road you came in on, the one that's all patched up?
That was a ten billion yuan contract [US$1.2bn].
The bastard gave it to who, do you think?
His son! Who of course
pocketed half the money and skimped on the construction." Me:
"How do you get to be mayor of Guilin?
I mean, what's the process?" He:
"What do you think? Diao-xia-lai
[i.e. appointed from Beijing]." Me:
"Oh. I'd read
something about local elections. I
thought maybe there was a vote." He:
"In China? You're
dreaming! There's no
democracy here, not a bit. None
at all. If we had democracy, lao-bai-xing ['old hundred
names', i.e. the common people] could take care of all this corruption.
Everybody knows what's going on.
But there's no democracy in China.
No democracy, no law. Lao-bai-xing
have no way, no way at all. We
just have to put up with it all. Mei
ban-fa [there's nothing you can do]. Mei
ban-fa, mei ban-fa." Don't
let anyone tell you that dissent in China is limited to a few isolated
figures in intellectual circles. It's
everywhere. You hear this
stuff from friends and relatives, cabbies, even waiters in restaurants.
People know what's wrong. People
know what democracy means, and why they need it.
The propaganda of the communists has done a good deal to baffle and
confuse them, but it has not altogether destroyed their common sense. You
get something similar cruising among those amazing limestone crags.
Every one has a name, every one is supposed to resemble something
a woman washing her hair, an elephant, a Buddha, and so on.
My powers in this area are seriously deficient.
There is one famous cliff face that can be used as a sort of
Rorschach test to gauge the talents of the observer.
Up to nine horses can be seen by those sufficiently percipient. "Our beloved Premier Chou En-lai* saw all nine,"
marveled the tour guide. Well,
I saw zero. The whole
business irritates me for some reason.
I take Jane Austen's point about other people's pleasures, but, I'm
sorry, this just seems infantile to me.
My Chinese fellow-tourists, however, were into it oohing
and aahing and congratulating each other with great gusto when they
"got" one of the supposed resemblances. The
whole silly business reached a fever pitch at the Assembled Dragons cave,
which we took a walk through after the river trip.
The cave half a mile or so long is chock-full of
stalactites and stalagmites, every one of which resembles something.
Helpful little signs were set up, in Chinese and Chinglish, to help
you get the resemblance. "Old man guarding treasure", "Cat conceals in
banyan tree", "Imperial concubine bathing", "Golden
cock heralds the dawn". Possibly
inspired by that last, and much to Rosie's disgust, I started seeing other
things in the formations, things it would not be proper to name in a web
site intended for family viewing. From
there I ascended to an even higher plane of awareness, in which the twists
and folds of limestone resembled nothing at all.
Like the hero of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea, I had
attained an unmediated apprehension of reality, a communion with the thing
itself, the Kantian ding an sich, and the stalactites and
stalagmites were just ... stalactites and stalagmites**.
This level of consciousness is, I maintain, inaccessible to the
Chinese. *
A Stalinist mass murderer who went to Hell in 1976. **
How do you remember which is which? I
was taught to do it by saying to myself that a stalactite needs to hang on
tight. An American
friend, however, points out that the spelling of the two words diverges at
the sixth letter: "c"
for "ceiling", "g" for "ground".
I bet there are half a dozen other mnemonics for this that I don't
know. Now,
this man is very far from being a friend of the Communist Party.
He is, in fact, thoughtful, well-read (he is the only
mainland-Chinese I have met who has heard of NR), and extremely
intelligent, almost completely apolitical. Yet he has internalized the Big Lie of modern China:
that if you speak out against the communists, you are "against
China". The Party is the
nation, the nation is the Party, and to dislike the communists is
unpatriotic. It was, of
course, no use to remind him that the CP is just a political party, and
that we are against the Democratic Party, too.
Did that mean we were "against America"?
No use, he had internalized the Big Lie.
Bad news folks: an
awful lot of Chinese people have. All
together now, you know the tune: Without
the Communist Party There
would be no New China.... --------------------------------------- I
find it difficult to write objectively about Hong Kong.
For me, this city, generally advertised as coldly commercial,
culture-free and soulless, is a deeply romantic place.
It was here that I learned some of life's sterner lessons.
It was also here that I had the most fun I ever had, and made my
firmest Chinese friend one of those friendships so intimate and
understanding you can resume conversations interrupted by a departure
several years previously. Together now, in a restaurant, we talk easily and happily, no
hesitation or reserve between us, and get gently drunk on imported beer,
as we used to when we first knew each other too many years ago now.
At that time we both worked for an American firm that was in
serious difficulties, to the degree that we were paid as and when there
were funds to pay us. On one
occasion, we had financed the Saturday night beers by raiding the coin box
of the company's Coke machine. We
reminisced and laughed about this and many other things, then said
farewell in the style of knights-errant in the old stories, when they
separate after some shared adventure:
Hou hui you qi "There will be another time."
A hundred Chinese poems about friendships and partings tolled in my
head. Driving
to the airport in the early morning, I watched the Kowloon street names
click past: Nathan Road,
Jordan Road, Argyle Street... Every
one with a story, every one with a memory, happy or sad, sweet or sour. Milestones on the road from the unforgettable blithe follies
of youth to the dull getting and spending of middle age. More and more depressed now at parting from a place I love so
deeply, my imagination fled from the past to the infinite future.
I saw the slow decline of the city, the gradual slipping-back into
opium dreams and stasis, as China's immemorial torpor reasserts itself;
then, further forward to the end of all things. When
the great markets by the sea shut fast All
that calm Sunday that goes on and on: And
even lovers find their peace at last, And
Earth is but a star, that once had shone. Goodbye, China. Hou hui you qi. |