Closeup on China

Despite its "new opening" toward the U.S., the Peking government has allowed only a handful of correspondents from American newspapers and magazines into Red China. By far the finest account so far of life in the land of Mao appears in the November issue of the Atlantic Monthly; the author is Australian Ross Terrill, 33, a contributing editor of the magazine. Harvard's John K. Fairbank, the dean of American Sinologists, calls Terrill's 15,000-word article "the best piece of reporting from China since the late '40s." Other China watchers heartily concur.

After arriving in Canton on June 16, Terrill spent 40 days in the People's Republic, visiting rural communes and vacation resorts as well as seven major cities, including Shanghai and Peking, where he met Premier Chou Enlai. Terrill's determination to see as much as he could--"the actual world of sweat and cicadas, boiled rice and bicycles" --led to what he calls "a friendly tension between the authorities and myself." Because he speaks Chinese, they were worried that he spent too much time mingling with the people. Politely but firmly, they tried to keep him from browsing in local bookstores, visiting abandoned churches or even (in Shanghai) from buying local newspapers.

Shabby Militancy. Despite the zealous attention of his guides and hosts, Terrill was able to produce a report that sparkles with vivid, neatly turned insights. Plastered with fading banners left over from the Cultural Revolution, Canton "has a face of shabby militancy." The sight of people eagerly studying Maoist literature, Terrill suggests, "would surely delight an eighteenth-century philosophe; the 'Word' is sovereign." He was amused to find that brassieres, "though widely available in shops, were not, it seemed, in frequent use."

Terrill found China in the grip of a "mental unity" created by "the myth of Mao thought." Yet in daily life he noted an "appealing imprecision. People wander around; daydream. They don't mince like Japanese, but amble as men in secure possession of the earth under their feet." He also was struck by the candor of those he interviewed. At Canton's Sun Yat-sen University, he talked with Professor Fu Chih-lung, a Minnesota Ph.D. in biology, who had given up theoretical research to develop a new breed of insects that would kill agricultural pests. "It's like the Nixon Doctrine," his guide remarked dryly. "Asians to fight Asians."

Political Laboratory. Kuo Mojo, the venerable head of China's Academy of Sciences, was surprised to learn from Terrill that one of his books, Ancient Chinese Society, was still on sale, even though Kuo was reported to have ordered it burned during the Cultural Revolution. He nonetheless autographed Terrill's copy and let out the news that Chairman Mao, at 77, is learning English, and enjoys tossing around newly learned phrases like "law-and-order."

Terrill is cautious in drawing conclusions, perhaps because he is a scholar as well as a journalist. He has a doctorate in political science from Harvard, where he teaches at the East Asian Research Center. He is also a foreign policy adviser to Australia's Labor Party Leader E. Gough Whitlam. "I do not think the Chinese should be treated like men from Mars," says Terrill, who last visited the mainland in 1964. "We have to ask them the same questions we ask ourselves. China is one of the most interesting political laboratories of modern times." For further proof of this truism, Sinologists are eagerly awaiting a second article by Terrill, on China and the world, that will appear in the January issue of the Atlantic.

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