CHINA: Burnout of a Revolution
By By Theodore H. White
Nearly 45 years ago, just out of Harvard and still trying to master the intricacies of Mandarin, Theodore H. White made his way to China and found a land in turmoil. Settling in Chiang Kai-shek's wartime capital of Chongqing (Chungking), then a drowsy Yangtze River port with a population of 250,000, he soon began reporting from there for TIME. One book (Thunder Out of China, 1946), two wars (China against Japan, China against itself) and six eventful years later, he departed, in sharp disagreement with TIME'S Editor-in-Chief, Henry R. Luce, about China's future. In the decades since, he has chronicled some of the major events of our time, from Europe's postwar recovery (Fire in the Ashes, 1953) to America's shifting politics (The Making of the President series, 1960 to 1980). This spring, Pulitzer Prizewinner White returned to China for his first extended visit since the mid-1940s (in 1972 he covered Richard Nixon's brief trip). For nearly two months he crisscrossed China, revisiting Chongqing, now a bursting-at-the-seams metropolitan area of 14 million, exploring the crowded alleys and broad boulevards of Peking and interviewing scores of Chinese, from peasants to Politburo members. Once again he found a land in turmoil; this time, however, it was the turmoil not of war but of change. Here is his report:
That first night back in China, my old friend Wang Bingnan drove me out to visit Fragrant Hill. From the hill you can almost see Peking, 25 miles away. In the evening, when the sun purples the range, the passes in the mountains show the way ancient conquerors cut their entry into the capital. That was the way Mao Tse-tung, the last conqueror, came to view Peking in 1949, when he held it in his hand -- and Mao still haunts Fragrant Hill, as he haunts Peking, haunts all China, haunts its politics, dreams, nightmares.
The story, even now in 1983, started with him. Wang Bingnan was telling me of his first night on the hill back then in 1949. He had arrived with Mao and the Zhongyang, the Central Committee that rules the Communist Party of China. They came as a nomad encampment, several thousand men and women who promised to give new government to the China they had conquered. For two years, they had been wandering the arid northlands, pursued by Chiang Kai-shek's divisions. But Mao had raced his own best troops northeast to Manchuria to encircle and wipe out Chiang's forces. Next he deployed his other armies, first to wipe out the last of Chiang's elite divisions south of the Yellow River, then to seize Peking.
So now, in March 1949, it was over -- or just beginning. That last day's trek, Mao had moved the Zhongyang to Fragrant Hill so its fires twinkled above the capital. Mao's troops were still cleaning out the fallen city, and it was not yet safe for him to enter, even though Nationalist dignitaries were about to arrive to sue for peace. Each morning Chou En-lai and Wang Bingnan would drive down to negotiate; each evening they would drive back to report. Mao was inflexible: no terms for surrender. China was his to remake.
Wang Bingnan remembered how Mao, coming in from the march that first evening, had been offered a bed. He was to sleep on a spring mattress, after 15 years of sleeping on a hard board with only a thin peasant's pad between the board and his body. Wang remembered meeting Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, the next morning. The Chairman had slept badly, she scolded. He had finally decided to sleep on the hard floor where he was more comfortable. After that, Mao always slept on boards as peasants do, even in the old imperial grounds of Peking where emperors once slept.
The Zhongyang was all there on the Hill that first night: Mao himself; his wife Jiang Qing; Chou Enlai; Chu Teh; Peng Dehuai; Liu Shaoqi; the band of comrades who had shaken not only China but the world, comrades whose devotion to one another gave victory to their revolution. After which they murdered one another, tortured one another, tried to assassinate one another, imprisoned and humiliated one another.
Mao, of course, was the greatest name; he went on into Peking and became God -- but also, with almost no doubt, insane. Jiang Qing, a bitch killer and one of the great dragon ladies of Chinese history, now languishes under life sentence in jail. Peng Dehuai, a superlative military leader who had fought side by side with Mao for 20 years, went on to command the front against the Americans in the Korean War and later was named Minister of Defense. But he became the first openly to criticize Mao, and that cost him dearly. He was left to die of cancer in a common hospital ward in Peking, the windows of the ward papered over so he could not see the sun. Liu Shaoqi, named by Mao as President of China, was later dismissed and died in solitary confinement in 1969. Both were posthumously restored to honor in 1981 when they were officially recorded as having been "persecuted to death." They had been brothers in the faith of Mao-Marx-Lenin. But history held truths that overrode Marxism-Leninism as, for example, that suffering is a bond, but power is a drug. And once power was in their hands, the drug addled their minds and together they brought China to the threshold of ruin.
So one must begin the story of China now in 1983 with what happened once the revolutionaries came down from the slope of Fragrant Hill in 1949.
MAOISM: THE
BLOODY SPIKE
Their problem was immensely complicated: How does an army make a government? Armies and generals are not particularly good at governing, and the problem of governing China has always been one to numb the mind. But in 1949 the army, its generals,its tough and cruel party, thought it would be simple.
The key to the problem, as the revolutionary armies and the party saw it in 1949, was Mao's thinking. "Mao Thought" should not be considered simply a dogma, or a slogan, least of all a coherent doctrine. It should be thought of as a spike, driven by the will of one man into the minds of his people, to nail them to his purpose. But in the next 25 years the spike was driven through the living flesh of people until they bled, or hungered, or died at random, until life became chaos. The spike had to be torn out or half China's people would perish. What is going on in China now is a great debate over whether to rip Mao Tse-tung entirely out of history, or whether to let what is left embedded of "Mao Thought" heal over.
Of all this I learned nothing that first night. I learned only later that Wang Bingnan (a hero of the revolution for arranging the Christmas 1936 kidnaping of Chiang Kaishek, later China's senior diplomat in the West) had himself been purged during the Cultural Revolution, condemned to shoveling out barns on a collective farm. When I asked him how the horrors had come about, he murmured, "I myself don't understand" -- and went on to other matters.
Since no outsider can ever really know what goes on in China, I had to content myself for almost two months with assembling fragments of reality, sifting gossip from apparent fact in trying to find out. Of the governing regime in China today, it may be said:
> The old soldiers who have recaptured control are engaged in the most delicate of political tasks, transfer of power. This transfer is not only from one generation to another but is cultural, military, academic, a shift from one set of elites to another.
> It is in America's interest that the Deng Xiaoping regime continue its reforms and peacefully transfer power. In the long run, the progress of Chinese science, technology and industry may challenge America as much as Japan has. But, in the short run, the present transition regime works to the world's good. present transition regime works to the world's good.
> This regime acknowledges the Communist Party to be guilty of sins against conscience and history. It has published an official confession, a story of terror and error, in an effort to set up reasonable government.
> Yet always it must be remembered that the old zealots of this regime are married to the thought of unending revolution and still seek to bring Taiwan-back under their flag before they pass on. We have fought one war directly with the Chinese (in Korea) and another by proxy (in Viet Nam); a third confrontation should be avoided at all costs.
GLORY YEARS, NIGHTMARE YEARS
My last previous visit to China was with Nixon in 1972. We knew nothing of what was going on. I tried then to telephone an old friend and was told, "He's not home." When would he be back? "Not certain." This time I found him, and he told me where he had been when I last called: in solitary confinement in a Peking jail from 1968 to 1973. His wife, too, had been in solitary in the same jail. No charge had been brought against either of them, only that he was "under investigation." Greater horrors were taking place in China at the moment of the Nixon visit -- hero leaders killed or forced to suicide; tens of thousands of China's best in jail or enduring savage punishment; scores of thousands killed by fanatics; the army called in to restore order where youthful Red Guards had bloodied the streets in civil war.
But of all this we knew nothing in 1972. Something called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was in full swing. But then, as now, it was as if we were feeling through a membrane: we could sense shapes, forms and fears, almost touch them. But we could not see through the membrane.
Peking now is, to the eye, a far better place. The city's long avenues of young trees, its handsome new architecture, its broad esplanades all promise coming splendor. The people are well dressed. Well-marked buses course their routes -- on time. Men and women are healthy; the children are cherubs; the parks are flecked with the colors of young couples courting or families airing babies. The stores are well stocked, from dumplings to ducks. Bookstores are crowded, moviehouses and theaters jammed. Color television has arrived and with it commercial advertising.
Most of all, Mao is gone. It is as if the city had been sponged of him and his "personality cult." The giant 40-foot-high portrait still hangs above the vermilion Tiananmen. But he now rests silent under a scarlet coverlet in the colonnaded mausoleum that dominates the great square.
People still talk about him -- endlessly -- and when they talk something peels off their normal guarded conversation. They talk of his glory years of triumph, the nightmare years of his horror, of the change that happened in this man who changed their lives, whom they both revile and revere to this day. When one talks to those who knew Mao personally, one comes across an exquisite perplexity as they try to untangle the revolution from the man who made it, the hero of the revolution from the villain who brought it to cataclysm. Those who attended him during his glory days and in his madness wonder what caused the devilish change in him, as well as when it took place.
There is the pathological view. He was, say those who studied the matter, suffering for years from Alzheimer's disease, a brain disorder leading to premature senility. Mao, some say, began to suffer a series of tiny strokes in 1959; others put the date at 1961. Slowly changing in personality, Mao would more and more receive visitors in his bedroom -- a sloven's room, the bed strewn with books, leaflets, reports. Cordoned off from the world, he became the prisoner of his palace entourage, of his wife and of the Shanghailanders who, with Jiang Qing, formed the Gang of Four. "In the old days in Yanan," said one friend, "he would listen first, then talk. Now he talked but would not listen." At the end he would mumble and grunt, interpreters had to bend close to Mao's lips to strain sense from the mumbling. But, by then, all those once close to him had been killed or exiled from his inner court. Jiang Qing transmitted his orders.
What remained constant in Mao was his iron will, the invincible conviction of his own righteousness. Political analysts harp on two words: "speed" and "struggle." Mao had acquired the lust for speed in the last year of the revolution. In the fall of 1948 the commander in chief of his Manchurian strike forces, Marshal Lin Biao, had seized the key city of Shenyang (Mukden); but so many of Chiang Kai-shek's combat divisions were still at large in Manchuria that Lin Biao preferred to move with caution. Mao overruled him. Strike for the escape ports of Manchuria, he said, now. Cut them off. Field success vindicated him. Cut Peking off from Tianjin, Mao next commanded. And he was right. Strike next south of the Yellow River. There, in the famous Huai-Hai battle, half a million of Chiang's troops were captured or came over. On Oct. 1, 1949, less than a year from the seizure of Shenyang to the collapse of all resistance, Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China. Now, more speed!
To the impulse for speed was added the driving force of "struggle." In Yanan (see box), where the clean dry air is intoxicating and the heavens are close enough to touch, "struggle" had become doctrine. Nothing was impossible if his will could drive his people to "struggle against the mountains."
But the flatlands of central China, the wet paddy-fields of south China were not mountains. They could not be climbed, they had to be governed and remade by changing the minds of the peasants who tilled them in the old ways. So, following the revolution came the Great Leap Forward, which collectivized agriculture. So millions died of starvation as China struggled to collectivize. The real China, where peasants sow and reap by season and by sweat, could not be remade with "Mao Thought." By 1958 Peng Dehuai was protesting that collectivization was not working. So was Liu Shaoqi, the President of China. Both were to die.
Just as Mao believed in speed and struggle, he also believed in conspiracy. If China was not moving with the speed he required to the socialist millennium he sought, there must be a conspiracy somewhere. Where else, he decided, but in his own party, where "class enemies" lurked? Yet it was not Mao's enemies who were resisting; it was China itself, and its realities of hunger and hope betrayed. "Mao Thought" could not move people as swiftly as it had moved armies. So, in 1966, Mao speeded the pace. "It was as if the law of inertia took over," said Hu Qiaomu, once Mao's private secretary, today in the Politburo as spokesman of China's intellectuals. "He was speeding the train down the track. The tram came to a bend because the terrain of China is different from what Mao thought. The train could not take the turn. It derailed."
The derailing of China is what is called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. No more ironic title has ever been given to a dogma that tried to erase all culture. China is now recovering at a swifter pace than one could hope. But its people have lost ten, some say 20 years of normal life. The greatest feat of the present regime is that it has had the courage to denounce the disaster, fix blame and reverse course.
A COUNTRY DRIVEN TO CHAOS
The tormented decade of the Cultural Revolution can be divided into three chapters. The first lasted from the outbreak in mid-1966 to the end of 1967, when roving bands of Red Guard youth ferreted out and purged the supposed enemies of Mao in the bureaucracy, in factories, in provincial centers. That period ended in an anarchy so sweeping that the army had to seize the cities and re-establish food supplies. But the army was commanded by Lin Biao, who could see that the old man was failing and that power would go to whoever struck first. Lin miscalculated; his plot to kill Mao was exposed; and when he was killed in an airplane crash while trying to escape in September 1971, the army was subordinate to party again, and the third period began. In this period, which lasted until 1976, party politics were twisted into palace politics, as the Gang of Four sought to ensure the succession for themselves.
So much for history. What was happening was the triumph of fantasy over reality, a dogma so strange that endless blood underlined its absurdities. The theory of the Cultural Revolution was summed up in the word egalitarianism. All people must be re-educated to the peasant way of life. Enemies, said Mao, were buried in every party cell, every government office, every university, and must be burned out -- "the capitalist readers," "the stinking intellectuals," "the rightists," "the revisionists." And all across China, the youth, the Red Guards, then the careerists and thugs, responded to Mao's call ("Bombard the Headquarters") to join in the crusade against the hidden enemies. And as they searched for those enemies, they broke into factions and began killing each other.
They tell the stories in China now, some shamefacedly, some still burning with indignation at how the country was driven to chaos. There is a onetime Red Guard still horrified by a single memory. He was at high school in Peking and was awakened one night. A "struggle" meeting was going on in the school courtyard, the Red Guards struggling against two teachers and beating them. He crept down to the courtyard at 5 a.m. and there lay the bodies of the two teachers, beaten to pulp, dead. Another onetime student recalls: "My brother was at Peking University; he was beaten to death; then my mother committed suicide." I spoke to a brigade leader in a distant rural commune who had been hung from a stable rafter for days, suspended by his arms tied behind him, while Red Guards beat him with fists, sticks, irons. Finally his own peasants rescued him. In Chongqing, I spoke to the vice mayor, old beyond his years. He was sent down to an iron mine where he worked underground for three years.
Being "sent down," or Xiafang, as the Chinese call it, was very simple punishment. "Stinking intellectuals" were supposed to learn from the peasants what life is like when one must stoop for hours transplanting rice seedlings in the wet muck. Horror stories spurt -- not grisly horror like eye gouging (which was reported only in south China), but simpler torment like being interrogated round the clock by Red Guards.
High and low alike, anyone with an education, anyone suspected of murmuring protest, in the bureaucracy, or the universities, or the army, could be sent down. All universities, except for military research centers, were closed, some for three years, some for five, some for a full ten. And, as dogma drove the spike into the flesh of the country, even the revered ancients of the revolution were pushed to death. Li Ta, one of the original founding fathers of the Communist Party of China in 1921, was "struggled" against until he committed suicide. He Long, a Robin Hood peasant bandit who became a marshal of the Red Army and helped conquer south-central China for the revolution, had been a hero. He Long suffered from diabetes, but the hospital denied him water, then injected him with glucose instead of insulin. So he died in 1969.
And then, after the street violence of the Red Guard youngsters had subsided, and Lin Biao had been eliminated, it became worse. All power fell into the hands of the palace court that surrounded Mao.
Jiang Qing, of course, wanted to be named Premier to replace Chou Enlai. She named as Minister of Health Liu Xiangping, one of those ruthless women who abound in Chinese history. Liu was not only ignorant of medicine but devoid of decencies. She made the hospitals of the capital hostels of despair. Few could escape her clutch. Old veterans and ranking bureaucrats pleaded not to be sent to the hospitals from which they feared they would never emerge alive. They were told it was the will of the party and off they went. Liu Xiangping was the wife of Xie Fuzhi, chief of the secret police; he fingered victims, she executed.
For sweep of terror, China under the Cultural Revolution was the equivalent of Nazi Germany. Thugs, Red Guard bands and idealists fought in the cities, all rivaling one another to show loyalty to Mao Thought. Stories from the interior convey the sweep of the violence. In Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, the handsome old government palace was blown to bits by Red Guards; in its place they erected a new hall filled only with portraits of Mao. In Chongqing, workers fought each other with machine guns, artillery, armored cars and tanks. In Harbin, the factions used air planes to bomb each other. In Peking, Red Guards stormed and burned the British embassy. In Wuhan, center of the great iron and steel complex as well as of several universities, steelworkers shaped up in three rival bands, while universities formed rival student bands, all warring within and against one another.
So millions suffered. There is no real count of those who died. The final official record says that 34,800 innocent people were put to death and 729,511 subjected to "unwarranted persecution." This takes no account of how many others died --bystanders at riots, those huddling under bombs or artillery, individuals stoned, beaten or stabbed to death.
Common sense itself revolted. The new dogma had not worked and it could not work. So the aging generals of the Civil War and Liberation had to move in, as they did on the night of Oct. 6, 1976.
FALL OF A DYNASTY
Chou Enlai, the last effective rational member of the inner circle, had died in January 1976. Twelve weeks later came the ceremonies of Qingming at which the Chinese honor their dead. Spontaneously, on April 1, thousands thronged Tiananmen Square to mourn him. The next day, more. Then again the following day and the day after, hundreds of thousands, in silent protest against the tyranny of the Gang of Four. Somehow Chou had come to be the symbol of the true faith of the original revolution. In July Chu Teh commander in chief of the revolution's armies, died. Then came the Tangshan earthquake -- and in Chinese folklore great earthquakes always foretell the fall of a dynasty. Finally, on Sept. 9, Mao died, and it was time for someone to move. Either the Gang of Four would wipe out the last resistance and Jiang Qing would reign, or the veterans of the revolution would wipe out the Gang of Four. A classic case of "us" or "them," as tight as the events of 9 Thermidor, 1794, when it became a matter of life or death for members of France's revolutionary Convention: Robespierre would get them, or they would get him.
There is as yet no authentic story of the night of the coup and there may never be. Ye Jianying and Li Xiannian, both old marshals, led the coup. But I rest my knowledge only on the sum phrases I squeezed out of the deputy chief of staff of the army at the time--General Wu Xiuquan, now retired and old. "We controlled the garrison," he said. "We moved into Zhongnanhai (the imperial quarters). No bloodshed, no resistance. We arrested the four, one by one, in their homes." The people of China had had enough of the madness and violence. Not until six days later, Oct. 12, did the people of China learn the madness was over, from BBC out of London, reporting what British intelligence had gathered. In the underground the crab had been the symbol for Jiang Qing. So those who could afford to, ate crabs to celebrate.
This political insanity was put in context during a talk I had with Hu Qiaomu. Slow in speech, broad of nose, gray of hair, Hu had been a Shanghai intellectual in the '30s who trekked north to Yanan and became Mao's private secretary, worked with Deng Xiaoping, rose until 1966 when he, too, was purged.
"They put me through the jet," he said, then abruptly halted. A man put through the jet was forced to crouch motionless for hours or days, his head down and outstretched like the nose of a jet, his arms extended behind him like its wings. While Red Guards changed hourly, the victim crouched and answered questions. Some collapsed, some died. Hu survived but is a frail and melancholy man.
I wanted to question him on his authorship of the confession of error, the official history of the Communist Party, approved by the Zhongyang in June 1981. The structure and thinking, he insisted, were that of Deng Xiaoping; the document was a party document, not his alone.
"How did Mao make those mistakes? I asked. After the revolution, Hu replied, it proved more difficult to establish socialism than it had been to overthrow the old regime. Differences between the leadership grew. The old brotherhood began to split with collectivization in 1958 -- a disaster. "Mao knew he had been wrong in the Great Leap Forward," said Hu Qiaomu. But when Peng Dehuai circulated a critical letter, Hu went on, he "was scraping at a wound which, left to itself, might heal. To scrape a man with a healing wound rouses all his irritations, angers him." So Mao got rid of Peng -- first to go of the old guard.
Add to the pressures not only Mao's isolation but his growing distrust of the Soviet Union. "Mao's visits to Russia were not only very short but very unpleasant, " said Hu. Mao believed that the Soviets had bureaucratized their revolution, had betrayed Marxism, were traitors to Communism -- revisionists! If the Soviets had succumbed to bureaucracy, might not the same thing happen in China? Thus, a growing suspicion that revisionism and class enemies might be infecting even his own party. On went Hu, describing the paranoia growing. Mao had disliked intellectuals ever since he had been a $30-a-month librarian in Peking in his youth. "The more knowledge you give the people," said Mao, "the more you hold back revolutionary thought." Or, "The more books people read, the more foolish they become." So Mao let loose the Cultural Revolution, but, said Hu, "once he let the genie out of the bottle, he could not put it back in."
I tried to bring Hu to personalities. Peng had been too proud and stubborn, he said. Lin Biao had been too ambitious, a careerist, sucking up to Mao, then trying to kill him. Finally he came to Jiang Qing. Here Hu's anger burst. "If you were to write a biography of Mao, she would be the tragedy of his life." Then, an anecdote about Jiang Qing escorting Imelda Marcos, the First Lady of the Philippines, on a visit to Tianjin. The state cavalcade roared through the peasants, ran one down and killed him. Stop, said Imelda. No, said Jiang Qing, drive on! The cavalcade drove on.
Did Mao know of the horrors? Both Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi had lived so close to Mao below the ledge in the Date Garden of Yanan -- how could he have let them be put to death? Pathetically, Hu ruminated, then slurred his reply. "No ... no ... Mao did not know. It was all so secret, you understand. Even the Politburo did not know. They put Peng into a hospital under a false name. Even the doctors did not know his real name." Chou tried to find out what was happening to Peng. "He couldn't. It was a secret even from Chou." Mao trusted nobody in the last days.
Yet Hu also told of how Mao, who did not believe in torment but in "reeducation" of his enemies, heard about an old Yanan comrade being imprisoned and tortured. "But this is fascism, not Communism!" cried Mao, and ordered punishment relaxed to house arrest.
I complimented Hu on the official confession. "The problem," he said, "had been how to assign blame yet preserve Mao's merits, though flawed." After three sessions, the Central Committee came up with the compromise that now rules Chinese thinking: there is crime and there is error, and they are different. Mao was not a criminal, said Hu. Mao was guilty of error; he had betrayed Mao Thought, contradicting himself. His merits outweighed his mistakes. Thus, the official history of disaster, the dethronement of a god.
Could terror reign once more? No, said Hu -- and he was firm. A modern country needs intellectuals, scientists. This was Deng's view too. How could modernization proceed without thinking people? I persisted: Could it happen again? No, he answered. Not because of the new constitution. Not because of the transfer of power. No -- because someone who puts his finger on a hot stove gets burned and will not put his finger there again. The terror, Hu assured me, could not return because the people now would not accept it.
UNTANGLING THE MESS
It was two years before the old generals could purge and remold the party. By 1978 they had brought back from disgrace Deng Xiaoping, the deftest politician among them. At the end of 1978, the reorganized Central Committee, under Deng, had repudiated the economics of the Cultural Revolution and ordered reforms. It took two more years to bring to trial and convict the Gang of Four; and in 1981 the Central Committee adopted the official confession of Communist error. It was another year before they elected, in 1982, a new Zhongyang and adopted a new constitution, the fourth since Liberation. So there is now a new ruling regime (see box, page 42).
What is going on under this new leadership is a cracking of the bones of Mao's state -- which had to follow from the cracking of Mao's theories and ideas.
Let another old-guard Communist tell what he found when he was restored to power. Liao Zhili, 68, now deputy director of the State Commission for Restructuring the Economic System, was sent down from 1968 to 1978. Liao grew animated as he told of China as left by the Cultural Revolution.
"It was," he says, "madness. They believed in public ownership of everything. They wanted to eliminate all private workers. In all China there were only 150,000 private workers. They wanted the barbershops, the bathhouses, the shoemaking shops all to be state enterprises. The poorer the people, was their theory, the more 'revolutionary' they would become. We found we had 26 million people unemployed -- and the state was supposed to find jobs for all of them.
"They had two systems for the economy -- 'line authority' and 'bloc authority.' " Line authority ran from the central-government ministries down to the smallest factories and mines in China, north or south. "We found one factory with 4,000 workers but only one toilet. The workers would line up for hours to get to the toilet. But any building of more than 200 sq. ft. had to be approved by line authority at the top, the State Planning Commission in Peking. Should such a committee have to decide about toilets? We had a factory in Hebei that produced good worsteds that people wanted for suits. But the plan called for the mill to produce coarse woolens." So the mill met its quotas in coarse woolens, and they piled up in the warehouses. All over China, Peking set quotas and ignored what the people, the market, demanded.
"Take bloc authority," Liao went on. "That meant the provincial governments did the trading and marketing. Villages in north Jiangsu, for example, raise tomatoes, so they need bamboo staves to make the wicker tepees that hold tomatoes up. Anhui [just across the border] had surplus bamboo. But tomato farmers in Jiangsu couldn't get any bamboo from Anhui because that crossed a provincial border. That's bloc authority."
Suddenly, he exploded:"Peanuts! Everybody in China likes to eat peanuts. But peanuts disappeared entirely; the peasants couldn't ship to the towns. Eggs! You could buy eggs in the city only on holidays. Meat! There was no meat in the cities to buy. Everything was on coupons. Dates! Not even coupons could buy you dates -- you needed a doctor's prescription."
On he went with wry amusement as he told how the new regime was untangling "egalitarianism." It would be years before it was all untangled. But much had already been accomplished, particularly where the peasants had been invited into the "responsibility" system and had restored the market system. It was the countryside where I would see reforms working best.
REMOVING
THE
HANDCUFFS
The countryside means almost anywhere, for 80% of China's people still work in the fields. Start with Sichuan, my home base for six years. The province is so fertile that the old phrase ran, "Anything that grows in China, grows better in Sichuan."
Sichuan used to feed itself. But then, from the czars of the Cultural Revolution, came the order that two rice crops be grown a year. Rice, however, is a tricky crop. Sichuan had evolved its own two-crop culture -- rice in summer and wheat or rapeseed in winter. But Peking had ordered two rice crops a year. So Sichuan tried to meet its quotas. When the climate made that impossible, the government had to send grain into this onetime surplus province, and the peasants hungered.
I found Sichuan enjoying change, as a man does when handcuffs and leg irons are removed. The new reforms were quite simple: the peasants could now decide what to plant and when, and whether to sell any surplus to state markets or free markets. If they met their quotas to the state, the surplus was theirs to eat or to sell. The margin is still precariously thin -- just enough for peasants to keep their chins above water. Five years ago, only their nostrils were visible.
A quick six-day tour of the province, for an oldtimer, is a delight. The small towns throb again, their booths full of sweets, cookies, housewares, clothes, textiles, flower pots and flowers. In big cities like Chengdu and Chongqing, the huge food markets overwhelm the eye with food that can be bought without coupons. Hogs come squealing to market in wheelbarrows, on tractors, even lashed to the backs of bicycles, then reappear in the markets as huge slabs of pink-and-white pork. Peasants bring in their wives' squawking chickens, eight to a basket. Down the market lanes peasants sell geese and ducks; eels from the canal ditches; fish from their ponds; fruit; fresh vegetables; herbs, spices, ginger root; delicacies. Canaries are for sale again, along with other caged birds, and cricket boxes. Shoemakers ply their trade; itinerant dentists, with their foot-paddle drills, have reappeared.
The markets are real. So is the astonishing good health, the ruddy vitality of the people, so different from the scrawny peasants I remember 40 years ago. The gurgling babies pleasure the eye -- no trachoma, no scabies, no rickety limbs, no potbellies of famine.
But the eye can deceive. This has been a great year in China: a prospective record harvest, record incomes. Yet peasant prosperity is fragile. Here was Sichuan in green spring, the wheat turning yellow, soon to be golden. But if the rains fell at the wrong time, the wheat would be beaten to the ground and lost, and there would be a slim rice crop in the fall. This huge province lives on the margin of hunger.
The "responsibility system" in Sichuan has demonstrated that peasants work best when they tend their own fields. For Westerners this recognition seems equivalent to the rediscovery of the wheel. But with a crucial difference. The state, via the commune, has replaced the old landlord. It owns the fields; the peasant rents an allotted share of land; if he meets the state's quota (once called the landlord's rent), he keeps the rest. This is progress. It is harsh; yet the Great Cultural Revolution was far more cruel.
Days later I visited "a big brigade" in the province of Hubei that was beginning to refer to itself, not as a brigade but, again, as a cun, a village. The brigade chief, a bald-headed veteran Communist, explained once more that peasants could now decide on their own crops and routines. "Responsibility" made them care about the harvest. Then, as an afterthought, he added, "It is not only the attention of the farmer that helps. He now uses his own organic material, also the organic material of the chickens and buffaloes to enrich his fields." I read very precisely what he meant. Now that a peasant is responsible for the land allotted to him, he cultivates it like a garden. His excrement, pig excrement, chicken droppings are all sumped together with urine, then ladled into buckets. The peasant then pours the mixture onto each stalk. Ladling the slime onto the seedlings is smelly, unpleasant duty. But the slime works; production had been rising for three years, and the peasants ate well.
Finally we came to the population problem. Since collectivization in 1958, the brigade's population had risen from 1,300 people to 2,720. So in the reform share-out of 1980, the largest plot was four mu (two-thirds of an acre). Too many people, too little land.
The net impression, after weeks in the countryside: China's farms are on the mend; peasants are eating again; a few are even getting rich with rows of chicken coops, private stalls and little carpenter shops.
THE POETRY OF NUMBERS
Industry is enjoying a greater boom, and to China's planners, it is the measure of the country's ability to enter the modern world. Chinese industry is the ultimate challenge to tomorrow's system of world trade, and sooner or later, America must adjust its economy to China's as it tries to adjust to Japan's.
Chinese leaders love to talk of industry, rippling statistics over their stories as satin merchants used to ripple silks over their hands. Probe at a Chinese official and figures immediately begin to flow: the largest cotton industry in the world today, 18 billion sq. yds. annually (6.6 billion in the U.S. in 1981); steel production up from nearly zero 40 years ago to a projected 40 million metric tons this year (1983 projection for the U.S.: 77 million metric tons). Television sets (6 million), washing machines (2.5 million), refrigerators, a precious luxury (only 100,000) trickling out of new factories. None are yet good enough for export, but wait. Already a Shanghai factory ships watches as far away as Singapore, of quality to match the Japanese. A new multiplex cable factory, rising in Chengdu under American direction, will be able in the next few years to meet not only the needs of China's missile systems but also of the urban complexes, where telephone systems are still primitive. On and on goes the poetry of numbers, as planners celebrate the recovery from the dreary years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
The theory of the new responsibility system blankets industry too. Industry is "responsible" to make what people need and to make a profit. Follow this theory, however, down to the assembly lines or the rolling mills, as one does, say, in Wuhan, with its famous iron-and-steel works (capacity: 3 million metric tons a year). Questions pucker. The national plan does not provide enough raw materials to keep this Wuhan installation running at full capacity. Later one learns that the steel industry has managed to misdirect its objectives, so that 20 million tons of steel lie rusting in warehouses.
Another question follows -- that of "technology transfer." The Wuhan works use Japanese and German mills, and the Chinese have begun to ship steel mills of their own design to more backward countries in Africa. Still another question occurs as one paces the high catwalk above the steaming rolling line. What do these people get paid? Sixty Chinese yuan a month on the average, less than $8 take home a week per worker. Double that to include hardship bonuses, medical care, low-cost housing, schools. Call it $20 a week with fringe benefits for a Chinese worker. How can American steelworkers compete, when their wages (plus fringe benefits) run $22 an hour and they work with old equipment?
Follow the big industrial boom further, to textiles and garments. The largest cotton mill in all China sits in Chengdu, in Sichuan. It makes a profit producing for the China market. Its workers get paid perhaps $25 a month in take-home pay. The China market absorbs all the flower-printed cloth that comes off the print mills, but the factory management is under considerable pressure to pursue Western markets and make dollar profits, which are the great prize. Can American textile workers possibly compete? Six dollars a week against an average North Carolina wage of $250 a week less deductions? In Shanghai, the net cost of the labor that goes into making a man's suit is $2. New York's garment industry -- or Philadelphia's, or Chicago's -- cannot compete with that. But what share of the American market do the Chinese plan to capture? And do we wish to hasten or slow the Chinese experiment in transition?
No group could be more sensitive to the changes required by the transition to an "enterprise" system than the six old veterans of the Standing Committee. Life hurries them on; age presses them. They need new, younger men in the party, in the provinces, in industry. And they must choose their replacements, managers, engineers, scientists, now.
PASSING THE BATON
Transfer of power is particularly dangerous in China, where traditionally it went hand in hand with humiliations and killing. The pattern was quite simple. Warriors conquered power, then found it would not function without scholar-bureaucrats, "mandarins." The aging warrior-leaders of the Standing Committee know they too must create a mandarinate. A few years ago, thinkers and scholars were "stinkers"; today, they are desperately needed. But can the old men shift power to them without upheaval?
The transfer of power is now going on as far down as the six-man oligarchy of Peking can reach. But it is so delicate that their government tiptoes as if through a minefield. To talk about this process, I called on Huan Xiang, a vice president of the Academy of Social Sciences in Peking. Huan too had been humiliated, purged and rusticated. After the Gang of Four was wiped out, he came back to Peking. The old soldiers knew that matters had gone wrong --but only scholars could say how and why. So they called in the scholars, Huan among them, to analyze the disaster.
Then the scholars offered suggestions. Students at universities must be admitted only after tests of competence, not because of party loyalty or class background. Industries must be organized not to meet quotas but to meet need. Planning must fit reality. Most important: peasants must be released from state planning to plant their own crops.
The scholars suggested that the party too had to change. There should no longer be one total authority compelling every unit of the state, from commune to city to Peking, to zig or zag every time the party zigged or zagged. The party's function is to lead. The government has another function: to keep order. Enterprise has yet another function, from village field to factory floor: to produce. Now the entire country was living through experiments, said Huan, trying to separate party apparatus from governing apparatus.
As I traveled the interior, hotels were crowded by provincial party caucuses and provincial "people's" congresses, assembled to follow the new party line -- dismantle, restructure, reorganize. Out of this effort has since come the new National People's Congress. It is difficult to measure the change in texture from the last session of the Fifth Congress (December 1982), for Chinese sources either lack, or refuse to give, comparative figures. One knows, however, that the average age of the 2,978 new members has fallen sharply, as Deng wished. Its composition is remarkable: women, rare in Chinese gatherings, number 632, or 21%; non-Communist Party members make up 37%; industrial managers, intellectuals, engineers count out at 41%; army delegates total only 267, or 9%.
Chinese officials insist that the transfer of power from one generation to another is irrevocable. If one believes them, as they try to believe themselves, then this new National People's Congress may have real power, may mark a change to a Chinese system of checks and balances, Congress checking on government, both checking on party, party interacting on both.
But what if the new Congress is only window dressing, a facade like those before it? To whom, then, will power pass as the old men die off? Does this Congress dare test its will against the will of the party? What haunts thoughtful Chinese and foreign diplomats alike is the guess on the stability of the new regime. How many old hatreds, old scores sputter in opposition to the new course?
THREATS, "RIGHT" AND "LEFT"
The simmer of unrest in China, The simmer of unrest in China, the undersputter, is pervasive. There comes first, when one looks for opposition, the old Red Army. Trained in combat, promoted by victory, its leaders were men of capacity and command. Slowly, so as not to disturb a slumbering volcano, the aging commanders are being urged out. Retirement is greased with comforts: full pay, choice of home anywhere in China, honors and consultancies. The murmur of envy puts it that such retired generals are guaranteed fangzi, chezi, haizi -- quarters at least as good as those they enjoyed as commanding generals, car and driver for life, preference for their children in schools and army.
But detachment from privilege and authority disturbs old men. The army was, in its beginning, the people in arms. Then it became a state within a state, submitting its own budget each year; the official planning authority scrutinized its demands but always approved them. Now, under the new constitution, the "government" theoretically must approve the army's military budget. That way lies trouble, as any American Secretary of Defense can testify. Deng Xiaoping is chief of the party's military commission, which promotes, demotes, transfers and appoints the senior commanders of China's eleven military regions. But the new constitution gives the Congress a military commission too. Since Deng chairs both commissions, all is well momentarily; and the six men of the party's Standing Committee all came out of the ranks. So long as such men control, the Congress will do as they say. But the six old men cannot last forever. Thus it disturbs some important generals that nominal authority has been transferred to the Congress.
The party, too, is restless. Buried deep in the ranks of its 35 million to 40 million members are old careerists and rice-bowl men who grabbed offices during the Cultural Revolution. Many have been forced out. But millions remain, and they must somehow finally be ousted. A purge is scheduled for late this year. Party cells are already being called together to restore the shattered morale of all those who were once willing to give their lives to high purpose but who now, alas, no longer believe. Restoring morale within the party is perhaps even more tricky than subordinating the army to government.
Follows next the threat that the Chinese say "comes from the right." This is serious because it rises not from nostalgia but from simple human envy. I find myself at a livestock fair -- goats, mules, cows, horses, sheep and lambs, pigs and piglets. An old peasant has brought his sow, suckling 13 piglets. He is offering them at 18 yuan ($9) each, more than 200 yuan. And the sow farrows twice a year. The diplomat accompanying me purses his lips. His monthly salary is only 200 yuan; this peasant lives better than he. The diplomat's devotion to his government is total, but how long can such devotion last?
I have to extrapolate the "rightist" threat to the regime from what can only be called the everlasting human residue. That residue of appetite shows in the cities, from Canton to Shanghai to Peking. It is a subtle, subversive threat. The puritan China of Mao frowned on sex. But Mao would erupt from his mausoleum if he could see what Peking now offers (and even more vividly, Shanghai and Canton). I went to see the top-billed vaudeville troupe of China, visiting from Shanghai. Except for concubines, women in China once showed their thighs only to their husbands. Now here were twirlers, dancers, women in tutus, their skirts cut only a few inches below the crotch. Jiang Qing would have condemned them all to stoop labor.
The drive shaft of the rightist threat, however, is not sex but greed. A few Chinese are getting rich. Capitalism has been permitted tiny openings to start up enterprises, so some will grow richer. Yet the main frame of government remains the dedication of civil servants who must work for almost nothing. And even the most dedicated can be lured from devotion by creature comforts. So one hears of corruption now surfacing in the party, street crime growing in the cities, a silent threat to the regime.
THE GREATEST PROBLEM
Of all the threats, however -- the corrosion of money and prosperity, the corrosion of manners invited by the spectacle of bare thighs and soap opera on television -- none is more explosive than the unshaped discontent that pulses from human nature itself. That threat rises from what is China's overwhelming, perhaps insoluble, problem, which is simply: What do you do when you have too many people?
China has more than doubled its population in 36 years, from 455 million people to more than 1 billion. The crunch of people crushes city and country alike. In the cities, housing obsesses talk. Since there is no private housing, no rental housing, the party unit decides, according to rank, pull and number of people in the family, who gets how many feet of living space. Peking offers most -- an average 45 sq. ft. per individual. Wuhan averages 40, Shanghai less, an incredibly tiny 30 sq. ft. per person (apart from kitchen and community toilet). But high officials are rewarded with hundreds of square feet, as are favored foreigners.
The government recognizes, as does the party, that China holds too many people; the figures are grim, inexorable, inescapable. No one knows what can be done about it. Is it too late?
The party and government have a policy: to each family one baby, no more. In the large cities, this is barely enforceable. If a family has more than two babies, some government offices cut the father's salary by 10% or 20%. With the third child, all are declared ineligible for entrance into the quality schools. After one child, patriotic fathers volunteer for vasectomy.
In the countryside, the government is reduced to persuasion, propaganda, occasionally coercion. The new "responsibility system," with each peasant gardening his little plot on his own, makes children useful again; they grow up to weed, plant, harvest; above all, to take care of their parents in old age. Peasants who now begin to prosper do not want just one baby; if the first baby is a girl, the matter is very serious indeed -- girls go off and get married. Thus, a situation that the Chinese themselves find appalling and the government denounces -- the killing of infant girls.
The government hopes education can slow population growth; party units meet with a family expecting a second child and "persuade" the family to end the pregnancy. But some will not be persuaded. In some villages the party requires every woman of child-bearing age to appear every two months for a rabbit test. Some women run away from home until it is too late for an abortion.
Logic lies on the side of the government; the numbers permit no appeal. But love, a formidable counterforce, lies on the side of babies. Even now, China cannot feed its newly swollen cities; 15 million tons of imported grain were needed last year.
There is no internal solution for China except population control. And no external solution except an industrialization effort that could flood the world's markets. The axis of this second thrust is simple: to employ enough of China's surplus population at low enough wages to export Chinese manufactures to earn back from the rest of the world -- above all, from America -- the food, the timber, the cotton, the edible oils, the meat to keep the people above the starvation line.
China's population is thus not only China's problem but the world's. And so one moves inescapably to China's world view and its sour relations with the U.S.
THREE TROUBLESOME Ts
The American embassy in Peking sums up the Chinese-American confrontation as the three Ts: Taiwan, Technology, Trade. In each of the three there is a different family of interlocking problems; but it is only over the issue of Taiwan that they could lead to gunpoint confrontation.
Taiwan involves pride, the nation's sense of itself. And in China, after a century and a half of foreign humiliations, pride has ulcerated. Chinese are taught a modern history that runs from humiliation to humiliation, an abused pride that exploded in the Japanese war of 1937-45. For the old soldiers who lead the government only one thing is lacking to fulfill their young dream of liberating all China -- the liberation of Taiwan, and over Taiwan, Chinese passion boils.
I went to call on one of the old soldiers I had met in Yanan days -- Peng Zhen, who after my visit was elected Chairman of the National People's Congress. Burly, bald, still vigorous at 81, he was abused during the Cultural Revolution, confined under house arrest, rusticated. Now, restored to honor, he is a member of the Politburo again, just a notch below the six-man Standing Committee. In the Great Hall of the People, after he gave me a smiling welcome back, he burst out almost with a roar in an opening statement: "This U.S. Administration says it wants China and the U.S. to be friends, but, as a matter of fact, we are hostile to each other; it says China and Taiwan are both part of the sole legitimate government of China, but they treat us like equal states. How would you feel if we supported California against you? Reagan says Taiwan is an old friend. Does he mean that we are an old enemy? He thinks Taiwan is an unsinkable aircraft carrier, but we are 100 times as large. If it comes to war, which aircraft carrier will sink first?"
Perhaps because he thought he could speak frankly to an old friend, he was lecturing me. He had just been lectured by a congressional delegation headed by Tip O'Neill and was resentful.
"For a century and a half all the foreign powers except the U.S. invaded China," he thundered. "But now you alone are carrying the burden of hate of our people for that century and a half. We want to negotiate a peaceful reunion with Taiwan but, whatever we do, you encourage Taiwan to say no. We offer to let Taiwan keep its own troops, maintain its own social and cultural contacts abroad, make economic arrangements with other countries, but still you encourage them to say no. If Taiwan does not settle with us peacefully, we will settle the problem in any way we think necessary."
Next he turned to the second T, technology. "I want to emphasize this point: even if you won't help us, it will be impossible to obstruct the flow of technology to China." Peng was working himself into a healthy anger for, on technology, the muddle of U.S. policy baffles Americans as much as the Chinese. The U.S. lets India buy sophisticated computers because India is considered a "friendly" state, although its air force is largely equipped with Soviet MiGs and advised by Soviet technicians. China is denied such shipments because it falls under the official category of "Communist state." The classification of Indira Gandhi's India as friendly and China as hostile defies realism.
Later, his eruption subsiding, he let me push him to the Cultural Revolution. He was as indignant about those Chinese crimes as he was about America -- furious at the treachery of Lin Biao, the bitcheries of Jiang Qing, above all at the erasure of law in China. He was the author of the new constitution, and that was what it was all about: law, to govern both party and state.
It is on the third T -- trade -- that U.S. and Chinese futures may most sharply divide. The bureaucrats who direct Chinese foreign trade are the stiffest, most intractable, toughest bargainers in the Orient. Since the resumption of normal relations, Chinese-American trade has boomed to $5 billion, but the Ministry's spokesman fixes on another figure. Of all U.S. imports, only 0.65%* comes from China, and America has run a surplus in trade exchange. I point out that in world trade, surpluses do not balance country by country; we have had a slight surplus with China, a monstrous deficit with Japan. Answer: you import only 0.65% from China. One points out that the National Academy of Engineering has concluded that of America's 2 million textile and garment workers, 1.2 million may be put out of work in the next decade by imports. Answer: you import only 0.65% from China. It is futile to explain that American industry cannot survive in a world where the U.S. remains the only free market. The fate of American workers does not concern him.
Behind his obdurate and inflexible answers lies a reality one cannot dodge: that the Chinese may have finally straightened out their economy. If so, the Japanese challenge to American jobs will be seen as only an opening flare of warning.
JOURNEY THROUGH PARADOX
A journey through China today is a journey through paradox. But no one can understand the paradoxes unless one keeps in mind the history behind them. The men who dominate China were, long ago, students and idealists. They became cruel as they fought and, as they governed, the logic of Communism drove them to further cruelty --until they learned that absolute cruelty has its limits in absolute madness. What they are doing now is trying to untangle their old dreams from the madness those dreams begot.
The epicenter of the paradox lies in the everlasting clash of constraint (unlimited government control) with freedom (unlimited license to people). China's leadership knows that China cannot go forward without huge grants of initiative to its people. But the clash begins at the very bottom, in the danwei, the lowest-level building block of the party's control, which denies every grace of liberty to its members.
You cannot understand China without understanding the danwei.
Everyone in China must belong to a factory, neighborhood, peasant or office danwei. The danwei controls your life. You introduce yourself on the telephone by identifying the danwei to which you belong. The neighborhood danwei assigns you to a job; then you belong to the factory danwei, which decides when you can have a baby and how large an apartment you live in. It can also transfer you to a danwei in a distant province and your wife to another. And so, up the line, to absolute control.
Since such absolute control did not work, the new leadership is trying to transfer more authority to the provinces, more autonomy to the cities, more responsibility to the peasant villages. But, as reins are let loose, other problems sprint. How does one settle the impending dispute between the provinces of Sichuan and Hubei over how they will share the electric power from the huge dams planned in the throat of the Yangtze gorges? Or deal with the growing resistance of newly autonomous provinces to the army's network of farms, arsenals, production plants? What does the new peasant "responsibility" imply with its grant of free dom to let peasants grow then-own crops? If too much enterprise develops in the countryside, can it be denied to city dwellers? Can city youths be denied the right to open shops, restaurants, trading booths?
The contradictions and paradoxes bewilder any one who tries to chart China's future. Chinese have synthesized insulin, flung satellites into space, made nuclear bombs -- yet do not supply their villages with adequate common matches. Baoshan, the huge new steel complex near Shanghai, is a state-of-the-art operation. But steel production requires heavy cargo of both coking coal and ore, and the river creek on which the Baoshan plant was built could not take heavy-laden ships. So iron ore must be shipped to the Philippines and then transshipped in small boats to Baoshan.
The paradoxes can be traced in a single two-day trip down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Wuhan. In Chongqing I visit an electronics plant that makes oscilloscopes and instruments for testing TV equipment. Dust-free and climate-controlled, the plant requires visitors to don clean slippers before entering. Inside are young women of 20 to 25 making circuit panels. They are only three or four years out of the paddy fields, but their product is superior.
Down the Yangtze from Chongqing I see stone hackers carving building blocks out of the riverbed reefs -- labor so uselessly expended when concrete is available that it can only be economical if recognized as forced labor. Farther down the river, at Wanxian, a young woman stevedore, of the same age as the oscilloscope workers, bends and stoops; all her muscles quiver as she heaves and finally lifts two huge buckets of pig livers for the third-class passengers. She staggers, makes it, totters up the gangplank. She is followed by other young women, beasts of burden, staggering under the bales, the cartons, the loadings of the vessel. I am pleased to watch them revolt, screaming, shaking fists at the forewoman who commands them. But next morning I am passing through the stark wonder of the gorges themselves and come to Gezhou Ba, the great dam that is the first to harness the Yangtze since nature began melting the snows of the Tibetan highlands to carve a passage to the ocean. All of Gezhou Dam, its machinery, its turbines, locks and spillways, transformers, are of Chinese design and manufacture: advanced technology in any country.
So, all in 48 hours: peasant girls trained to make sophisticated oscilloscopes and circuit boards; forced labor cutting hard rock with mallet and chisel; then young women, treated as beasts; then the pride of Chinese technology.
The journey raises more questions than answers, and the questions plague the Chinese themselves. Why are some young women working in dust-free plants while others slave at muscle work? Who shall be privileged to join at the cutting edge of new enterprise, who left behind? How much relief from suffering can the Zhongyang give its people now, without stealing time and resources from the China of tomorrow?
THE LAST STRUGGLE
When I came to China more than 40 years ago, I came believing it was a land whose pride had been erased. But, watching the Chinese fight Japan, I learned that pride, personal and national, still smoldered. Mao brought it to flame. I watched him change their thinking to that of eternal "strug gle" -- better to die than to submit.
The Chinese are still Mao's "struggle" people. They have "struggled" against the Japanese and hate them yet. They have "struggled" against Soviet ideas and repudiated them. They have "struggled" against the barbarities of their own government and leaders, and erased many. Today their struggle is against the realities of their own immense dimensions, the crushing limits of their backwardness. Yet some may find it easier to struggle against an outer enemy to restore national pride. And Americans must recognize that pride as they try to avoid the traps that pride may set. America and China are locked in a narrow, dangerous passage of history. The transition regime in Peking is trying to recapture control of events. But in its own way, by trying to re-establish some system of law rather than seek a liberty that China has never known. To impose American standards on their internal struggle is irrelevant.
So one returns from China, as one first arrived there long ago, hopeful yet fearful. Memory recalls most sharply not the old China of 1939 but the first night of this 1983 visit.
That first night, when Wang Bingnan offered me his banquet of return, another old friend joined us on Fragrant Hill -- Qiao Guanhua. Qiao and I had been friends in our youth, when he was a fiery left-wing journalist. Later, as Foreign Minister of China, he and Henry Kissinger worked out the landmark "Shanghai Communique" of 1972, in which America recognized that Taiwan was part of China, but insisted on a "peaceful" solution. Qiao Guanhua had gone on with Mao to the end; he was released from house arrest by the new regime only last year; his wife, suspect because she had been close to Jiang Qing, had been under house arrest with him.
This night Qiao Guanhua would not let himself be cornered on his stewardship of Chinese foreign policy under Mao; nor on his arrest after Mao's death; nor on the Cultural Revolution. I pressed him on what had gone wrong in China since our youth and his triumphant career; he dodged. When I finally pressed, deeply and hard, on the transition, he elegantly replied, "You must remember what Hegel said, that a man reaches an understanding of the history of his own time step by step -- only step by step."
Qiao Guanhua was ill when I met him, a scarf wrapped around his throat. He was in the hospital when I left. I do not think I will ever see him again. But I remember his words, "step by step." Which is the way that both we and the Chinese must go through this passage of history. No "ultimate solutions" are possible, either for the Chinese or ourselves; but "step by step" we may get there.
* American figures show that goods of Chinese origin totaled 0.9% of all U.S. imports. The Chinese do not include in their figures goods transshipped through Hong Kong for reexport to the U.S.
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