THE MIND OF CHINA

The chief of state decided that the past must he wiped out. He ordered all philosophical books burned, except for one copy to be preserved in the state library. Many scholars were denounced as economically useless. By contrast, the masses of disciplined peasants and workers were exalted. The state took over control of religion. When intellectuals protested, thousands were condemned to forced labor.

A partial account of Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? Not at all. The Chinese ruler who acted thus was called Shih Huang Ti, the Emperor famed for constructing the Great Wall. In the 3rd century B.C., he forcibly united most of China around the northeastern state of Ch'in and established a tyrannical rule that was soon swept away in civil war. It would be risky to draw any neat lessons from this parallel between past and present. Perhaps the only sure thing to be concluded is that nothing in the world's oldest continuing civilization is wholly new.

Every country is not only a country but also an idea. The idea of China has haunted--and usually eluded--the Western mind ever since travelers set out to find the dream of golden-roofed Cathay. In the Renaissance, Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who reported on China under the Ming dynasty, praised the country's "orderly management of the entire realm." In the Age of Reason, Leibniz suggested that what Europe needed was Chinese missionaries to teach "goodness." In the Victorian era, the U.S. Protestant missionary Arthur H. Smith was shocked by China's "indifference to suffering." The Chinese seemed sober, industrious, cheerful, polite and stoical. But they also seemed superstitious, hostile, unimaginative, politically passive, and arrogant toward those not blessed by Chinese birth.

Many of the apparent contradictions are caused by one basic difference between the West and China. Western man, in the image of Prometheus or Faust, seeks to dominate nature; the Chinese seeks to live in harmony with it. The ideal of harmony--with the universe, with the past, within society--helps to explain China's durability, its long resistance to change, the subordination of the individual to the overall design. Above all, it helps to account for the periodic outbursts of violence in a land that values nonviolence. When society is repressed, when forms are meticulously observed, when balance is sought above all, sooner or later the strain can become too much. The reaction is then apt to be more violent than in a society that is psychologically accustomed to struggle, and considers it a law of life.

The apparent serenity of China has often hidden the recurring tensions between central government and regions, between Emperor and officialdom or ambitious war lords--and, above all, the sometimes intolerable inner tensions of trying to maintain harmony. As China Scholar Etienne Balazs put it: "The smiling landscape is found to be a veil which, when torn asunder, reveals a craggy vista of precipices and extinct volcanoes, reminiscent of the visions with which most Chinese landscape painters were obsessed."

Action by Inaction

What Mao is attempting to do, in effect, is to replace the lingering ideal of harmony--using as much of it as he can for his own devices--with a modern, dynamic system of dialectic struggle. In trying to accomplish this, he must cope with every ancient phase of Chinese mentality, from its basic view of man to the minutest daily practices. The traditional Chinese view of the universe does not, as in the West, see a struggle between good and evil. The famous principles of Yin and Yang imply an alternate cosmic rhythm but not a struggle. Nor is there a relationship of struggle--or love or dialogue--between man and God. China is agnostic and scarcely knows a religion in the Western sense. Confucian teaching is not concerned with metaphysics. As the Master once told his disciples: "Till you have learned to serve men. how can you serve spirits?" In the Confucian view, man is essentially good--which is why the Chinese have a sense of shame but not of sin. To stay good, he needs moral guidance, and to provide it is the essence of Confucianism.

The well-being of the state and people depends on the proper conduct of proprieties and rites, or li--which one scholar calls "the politeness of the heart." This can be achieved by following the five virtues: benevolence, righteousness, propriety, knowledge, sincerity. These must be applied in the framework of the five relationships: prince and minister, father and son, older brother and younger brother, husband and wife, friend and friend.

This practical, moralistic code has encountered many rival teachings, chief among them mystical Taoism, which holds that Tao, or the Way, knows no distinction between big and small, high and low, good and bad. Through wu wei, meaning "action by inaction," man can achieve tranquillity in the midst of strife. As the sage Lao Tzu expressed it:

To yield is to be preserved whole.

To be bent is to become straight.

To be hollow is to be filled.

To be tattered is to be renewed.

To be in want is to possess.

To have plenty is to be confused.

Realism of Magic

These comforting paradoxes provided mental escape for the Chinese in times of stress. Thanks to the unique Chinese gift for blending all manner of faiths, Taoism managed to coexist with Confucianism over the centuries. A Chinese in power, it has been said, is a Confucian: out of power, he is a Taoist, and when about to die, a Buddhist. China absorbed Buddhism, too; in China, somehow, the evanescent idea of nirvana became transmuted into a far earthier notion.

While the Chinese mind is earthbound, it is strongly drawn to magic. It sees the world inhabited by a multitude of spirits. Before a house or a temple is built, its location must be carefully considered in relation to mountain or water spirits. Children sometimes dress in striped tiger clothing to ward off evil influences. It is unlucky to meet a bald-headed man on the way to a mah-jongg party and dangerous to help a drowning man, because evil spirits might drag the rescuer down too. The aggregate of thousands of such superstitions is not transcendental or spiritual. It is not an attempt to commune with the unseen forces but to constrain them. It is all part of what Amaury de Riencourt calls "magic realism."

At the center of reality is the family. Until recently, worshiping one's ancestors was the highest spiritual duty; to be loyal to one's kinsmen is still for most the highest social duty. Legend abounds with stories of filial devotion, including the boy Meng who lured the mosquitoes to bite him so that they would leave his mother and father alone. Chinese tradition tells of a son who reported his father for stealing a sheep; the judge decided that the son should be put to death because he had shown greater loyalty toward the authorities than toward his own father. This extreme devotion to family explains why the traditional Chinese has no social conscience in the Western sense, for the community outside family or clan is an abstraction. One looks after one's own, not others: this is at the root of much Chinese corruption.

The Western notion of individualism, which insists on its own rights but respects the rights of others, is hard for the Chinese to understand. Author Lin Yu-tang describes a passenger in a crowded bus triumphantly settling into the only empty seat--the driver's--and refusing to give it up, even though it obviously means that the bus will go nowhere.

In China, anything resembling nationhood was understood only in terms of a kind of superfamily, with the Emperor as the patriarch. Ultimately, in the Confucian view, all government was based on virtue. So long as the head of the great Chinese family was virtuous, all was well with the land; but if the country fared ill, it must be because the Emperor had fallen into evil ways and the "mandate of heaven" had been withdrawn. That was the traditional rationale for the periodic rebellions that brought down every Chinese dynasty. Mencius, a revered follower of Confucius, proclaimed the people's "right to rebellion"--but only as a last resort.

The distaste for force in the Confucian order is profound, one indication being the low social status of the soldier. Men who know how to employ ruse, the traditional weapon of the weak against the strong, are particularly admired. A famous Chinese story describes how a poet wrote a novel considered dangerous by the Emperor and was summoned to court to be punished; he bribed the boatman to travel as slowly as possible, and by the time he arrived, he had written a new novel so fantastic that the Emperor decided he must be insane and spared his life. To many Chinese, that poet is more of a hero than is a conquering general.

Strenuous or dangerous sports were taboo in traditional China. The notion of legal litigation is distasteful, a fact reflected in proverbs like: "Win your law suit and lose your money." Life is regulated more by custom than by law. The ideal demands that disputes be settled by mediation and compromise. "The Chinese people love compromise," said Lu Hsuen, a satirist who died in 1936. "If you say to them," This room is too dark, we must have a window made,' they will oppose you. But if you say, 'Let's take off the roof,' they will compromise with you and say, 'Let's have a window.' "

Reality of Appearance

Part of the distrust of the law--and of legal doctrine--is explained by the general Chinese dislike of abstraction. The Chinese intellect tends not to distinguish between general and particular ideas. The Chinese resists logical analysis in the Aristotelian either/or sense. He reasons in what, to the Western mind, seems a chain of non sequiturs. Similarly, the Chinese tends to regard events, not as a matter of cause and effect, but in terms of symmetrical patterns.

The lack of analytic thinking helps explain the almost magical power individual words seem to have. In his concept of cheng ming, "the rectification of names," Confucius pointed out that names and terminology must be correct, otherwise "the people do not know to move hand or foot." This idea, suggest Edwin Reischauer and John Fairbank in a joint book on Asia, really means not so much that theory should correspond to reality, but "that reality should be made to conform with theory." Similarly, the problem of appearance is involved in the concept of face. Partly, face is a preference of form over reality. Partly, it is a cautious avoidance of precise commitments or statements to avoid the later embarrassment of being wrong.

Like words, numbers have near-occult importance. This is apparent from the ancient Book of Changes, according to which all the laws of nature can be condensed into eight tri-grams and 64 hexagrams, down to such didactic concepts as the five relationships, the six domestic animals, the seven apertures of the head, etc. The mystical rather than analytical preoccupation with numbers, plus a practical concern with ethics, explains in part why China failed for so long to develop natural sciences. In a society where scholarship emphasized rote memory of officially interpreted historical accounts rather than deductive reasoning, there was little room--or need--to seek new knowledge; everything under the Chinese sun had already happened, and all one had to do to cope with a situation was to find an example in the classics and follow that precedent.

It was the lack of science, the absence of intellectual equipment or desire to accept change that proved so disastrous when, in the 19th century, the West broke through the Great Wall of Chinese isolation. The Mandarins, that elite corps of scholar-officials who had so long governed under the Emperors--in the words of one Western scholar, as "managers before their time"--finally lost their power to manage. Always opposed to specialization, in the belief that the really wise man can know and do everything, they were unable and unwilling to cope with modern knowledge. Suddenly, the old formulas no longer worked. Numbers, concepts, labels could not prevail against modern guns and machines. So long unshaken in its sense of superiority, China in the last years of the Manchu rule suffered military defeat and economic exploitation. A social order based on harmony with nature was shattered by the West's promethean energy. Suddenly, it was devastatingly clear that the Middle Kingdom was not really at the center of the universe.

Mandate of History

Viewed against the backdrop of China's past, the Communist regime shows an intricate pattern of change and sameness. Some observers see in Red China merely a more ruthless version of the Celestial Empire. Says Amaury de Riencourt: "Drab caps and standardized tunics have replaced the glittering apparel, peacock feathers, jewels and silk brocades of former times; but the contents are the same."

A new generation of scholar-officials interprets the doctrine, which has been put into little red plastic books and spread across the nation for all to memorize. The loyalty to a dynastic ruler has been replaced by adherence to a political party--and to the father figure of Mao himself. Whipping up the old xenophobia and banking on the old lack of individualism, Mao is trying to establish a central regime more stringent than any China has ever known--and, like all past rulers, facing regional opposition. His party cadres travel across country to spy and supervise, as did the imperial secretaries and "censors"; like the Manchus, Mao discourages the use of government officials in their native areas.

Above all, the notion remains that theory can be imposed on reality. Confucius believed that the power of the mind could "move heaven and earth." Mao seems to have a similar belief in that power: the Great Leap Forward can be accomplished, steel can be made in the backyard, revolution can be rendered permanent, if only the will is there. The old numbers game survives in such slogans as the "Three Antis" (anticorruption, anti-waste, antibureaucratic abuse). The cult of the right term coincides with the endless Communist name calling and with such moves as changing Peking's Legation Street to Anti-Imperialist Struggle Street.

The Communists used the force of face when they paraded opponents through the streets in dunce caps; reportedly, such humiliation has led many to kill themselves. In turn, Mao's critics "have to wait for Mao's fanatical crusade to wear itself out, and then use his ideology to pick up the pieces and get Chinese Communism back on the rails," writes Harvard's Fairbank in The New Republic. "In pre-Communist parlance this means they must save the old man's face."

Yet the breaks with the past are at least as significant as the parallels. Both Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek fought in some measure against the Confucian tradition, passivity and family loyalties. Mao is continuing the fight more ruthlessly. Where the old China put soldiers at the bottom of the social order, Red China glorifies them. A streak of neo-puritanism now replaces the older hedonism. The family is under heavy attack. One effective campaign involved a marriage-reform law, which was aimed at female equality. The People's Communes, with their central mess halls, were intended to subordinate family loyalties to the state. No longer is a son punished for informing against his father; on the contrary, he is ordered to do so. Ancestor worship is also being stamped out; thousands of ancestral cemeteries have been dug up. Children are not taught the five relationships of Confucius, but learn the five loves instead: "love of country, of the people, of work, of science, of the people's property."

How successful the Communists are in changing the old thought patterns, no one can say. Until its recent easing, the Red Guards' roving revolution suggested turmoil that reached the roots of the nation. Mao may be gambling with the mandate of heaven--or of history. Endurance is the greatest Chinese virtue. The Chinese express it by saying: "We know how to ch'ih-ku--to eat bitterness." Without doubt the bitterness of Communist rule will profoundly change China. In the process, China will also change Communism.

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