Red Alert

By Richard Stengel

FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH:

THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH ABOUT CHINA

by Richard Bernstein Little, Brown; 260 pages; $15.95

CHINA: ALIVE IN THE BITTER SEA

by Fox Butterfield

Times Books; 468 pages; $19.95

At a 1979 White House banquet honoring China's Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping, Shirley MacLaine enthusiastically recalled a trip to the People's Republic and a meeting with a nuclear physicist. Since being sentenced to a commune to grow tomatoes, she told Deng, the scientist said he felt much happier and more productive. Replied Deng politely: "He lied." Such rosy reports have been as predictable as the years of the Monkey, Pig and Goat, but from time to time, a Dengian antidote has been offered. Fox Butterfield's China: Alive in the Bitter Sea and Richard Bernstein's From the Center of the Earth supply in valuable truths to counter the diseases that afflict so many tourists: romanticism and naivete.

Through a series of mercilessly detailed case histories, the authors confirm that the Cultural Revolution was a nightmare of fanaticism. According to Bernstein, TIME'S first correspondent in the People's Republic, "sheer terror was the common every day experience of millions of people."

It was only in the past few years, Bernstein writes, that "the cacophony of real life became audible above the droning, monotonous Muzak of the regime." Both authors discovered a handful of brave Chinese willing to narrate the horror stories of their lives: scientists and scholars sent to "reform through labor" camps for dozens of years; women tortured and imprisoned for sleeping with their lovers; nameless men punished for their grandfathers' crimes; families murdered for a mere suspicion of disloyalty.

The two books attempt to erase any lingering misconceptions about the once Celestial Empire. Uniformity of dress, says Butterfield, the first New York Times correspondent in China since 1949, does not prove that a society is egalitarian. To acquire virtually anything important in China one needs guanxi, or personal connections. But no guanxi are powerful enough to keep the Chinese citizens safe from surveillance. People are watched not only by intelligence agencies but by every organization that affects their lives. In China, one is guilty until proved innocent, and once accused, the only way to be absolved is to confess. As Butterfield notes, there is no word for privacy in the Chinese language, and there is no room for privacy in Chinese society. China, agrees Bernstein, is a true police state, a society that has "prohibited without providing."

Each journalist recounts horrific incidents of government waste, incompetent planning and incoherent design. China was once Joseph Stalin's most pupil, and though it broke with more than a decade ago, the legacy of Soviet "intensive industrialization" Butterfield cites the all-too-typical $13.3 billion mill designed to manufacture 3 million tons of steel a year. When the Chinese turned on the switch, they found the plant demanded more electric than the entire surrounding could produce.

The Great Helmsman Mao is the architect of catastrophe in both books. His hatred of a bureaucratic elite inspired callow Red Guards to disrupt all order in China, while his contempt for intellectuals lobotomized the finest minds of the nation. The irony of the Cultural Revolution was that it massacred Yet Mao's greatest error was his encouragement of China's population explosion. In three decades of Communist rule, the population has nearly doubled. This increase of 450 million equals the population of the U.S. and Western Europe. As a result, the actual strides in industry, agriculture and public health have been undermined by the great leap forward in births.

Not all the observations are dispiriting. The underlying theme coursing through these informative volumes is that there is a Chinese character no Marxist decree can alter. The rules of the Confucian code, the ancient tradition of decorum known as the li, remain. After 30 years, the People's Republic of China is still more Chinese than Communist.

China: Alive in the Bitter Sea and From the Center of the Earth invite comparison to Chinese art works. In that case, Butterfield's book is an enormous scroll, a teeming, informative landscape of scurrying figures. Bernstein paints with a more expressive, delicate brush. His art is philosophical and impressionistic, elegant and in some ways more moving. Where Butterfield deals mostly with urban China, Bernstein attempts to plumb the interior hinterland, the very heart of China. Together, these complementary volumes reveal the China of dust and sweat--the China of experience rather than imagination. They create a portrait of a society caught between two worlds one dead and the other powerless to be born.

--By Richard Stengel

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