Notes From China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Of five boys I questioned in a dormitory room at the Sian College of Engineering, one had been out of school eight years before coming to the university, one for six years, two for five years, and one for three years. They were eager, bright-eyed, very appealing youngsters but hardly equipped for higher education in the academic sense. Nor did they need to be. Courses are now virtually vocational. In the humanities the vocation is revolution: a student of history, for example, is taught in terms of social problems relating to the life of the masses and can look forward, we were told, to a career as a propagandist in which he can “serve the people of China and the world.” In science, judging by the curriculum at Sian, the training is purely technical and mechanical.

  Enrollment on the new basis is so far very limited: Peita with a normal capacity of 10,000 and a faculty of 2,100, admitted 1,000 students drawn from the whole country in 1972. Sian, with a capacity of 7,500 and a faculty and staff of 2,000, has a total student population this year of 1,400. Throughout the country the total number of university students now enrolled is estimated by professional China-watchers in Hong Kong at less than half a million. Grades have been abolished as a bourgeois device to exclude the masses.*

  “Tragically unqualified,” murmured a Harvard professor on his way out of China after visiting Peita. But the question is, qualified for what? The government of China has apparently made up its mind, for the present, that it wants revolutionary impetus more than it wants advanced education; or perhaps that it fears elitism more than it needs intellectuals. China does not need to advance, it needs to catch up, and it may have decided that properly motivated technicians serve this purpose best.

  Here, too, the risk is great. Meanwhile at the top, successive purges have left a vacuum below the aged veterans of the formative years: Mao, Chou En-lai, and Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, aged seventy, who is now filling the place of Lin Piao. The succession is undecided, the factions still at odds, and the threat of Soviet attacks looms over the border. Fear of invasion or nuclear attack preoccupies Peking and explains the obsessive emphasis on arms in the domestic propaganda.

  Under such pressures from inside and out, can the Revolution be kept green, especially after the old guard goes? Under new men, will the insistent nature of a ruling class assert itself in China as anywhere else? Will Liu Shao-chiism revive without Liu Shao-chi? These questions hardly seem to concern the public; they do not ask; they seem to have faith. It has been said by a shrewd observer that they have taken their revolution more seriously than the Russians.

  In quest of a more informed judgment than my own, I asked a foreign diplomat with long experience of China if he felt he was dealing in Peking with a stable government in control of the situation. “In control, yes; stable, no,” he replied. “The storms that shake the system are part of it.”

  * * *

  * Grades and examinations have been restored since this was written.

  IX

  Friendship with Foreign Devils

  ALTHOUGH the term “foreign devils” is no longer used in contemporary China—is in fact so obsolete that Chinese whom we met professed not to recognize or understand the phrase—the concept is alive and still governs, it seems to me, the Chinese attitude. China’s present program, deriving from fear of Russia, is a determined campaign to cultivate the “friendship” of foreign peoples, but the treatment of foreigners is such a hothouse affair as to suggest that the Chinese are not at all at ease in the contact. Underneath, one suspects, the old view of foreigners as strange, unnatural, essentially unwanted creatures, part barbarian, part devil, has not changed fundamentally. The relationship is now conducted according to Marxist dogma but its underlying attitude is as much traditionally Chinese as Communist.

  Two hundred years ago China’s imperial rulers, secluded within their walls of conscious superiority, sensed a threat to a past-oriented society in the dynamism of the West, and tried with guile, persistence, and feeble force to limit contact and frustrate foreign entry. Today despite continuous incantation of the word “friendship,” which we must have heard a hundred times a day throughout a forty-day visit, one cannot escape the impression that if only it were not for world pressures, Maoist China like that of the Ming and the Manchus would be happier if it could withdraw into the broad isolation of the Middle Kingdom.

  Peking’s present rulers, however, are perforce more realistic than the emperors; they know the world is too much with them, too pressing, and too close, to fend off or ignore or do without. They have already taken the great step of embracing a Western ideology in the form of Marxism-Leninism; there is no retreat now from the world. Their initial isolation, resulting from angry rejection of the West and failure to galvanize a revolutionary following in Asia, suddenly became dangerous after their break with Russia in the early 1960s. When the break developed into open hostility, the need for friends, or at least for new options and new alignments, became a necessity, however awkward ideologically. Hence Ping-Pong diplomacy, rapprochement first with the United States, then Japan, and fervent patronage of the small third-world nations.

  Toward Westerners the approach is a curious mixture of exaggerated privilege and strict control. The privileges tend to become embarrassing especially in an otherwise egalitarian society. While the Chinese do not own private cars, the visitor always has a car at his disposal, not only for the planned program but for whatever purpose at whatever hour: at 6 A.M. if one wants to go out early to watch the waking city, at 10 P.M. to come home from the ballet, or for a private visit or shopping tour that might last several hours. The driver waits like an old-fashioned private chauffeur. His convenience is no more consulted, his working hours no more limited than if he were employed by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., in 1920. These arrangements are made by one’s assigned escort who along with an interpreter is constantly in attendance.

  Foreigners feel themselves surrounded by the trappings of an elite. They stay in separate hotels, dine in separate dining rooms—or screened off from the Chinese if there is only one dining room—travel in separate compartments on trains, wait in separate waiting rooms at the station, are cared for on a separate floor of the hospital. During intermission at the theater we are not left to stand among the crowd but are firmly guided to sit among other foreigners in a private reception room. On the lake at the Summer Palace we cannot engage a rowboat to row ourselves like the Chinese but are grandly deposited in a large covered boat provided with tea and tablecloth and poled by two boatmen. In museums our guides push aside Chinese visitors from the exhibit cases to give us unnecessary room; on the bridge at Wuhan traffic is stopped so that we may cross over to view the river from the other side; at a park our car drives through a pedestrian entrance where the Chinese walk; at a railroad station after imperious horn-blowing we drive through a special gate right up to the tracks. At one of Chairman Mao’s former residences in Yenan (all four of which are visited like stages of the Sacred Way in Jerusalem), a group of about fifty students, seated on the ground before an outdoor plaque listening to a lecture, rises on command to move out of our way as we approach.

  Segregation, self-administered, is a feature in China, and one is sometimes uncertain, as in the screened dining rooms, who is Jim Crow, we or they. (Blacks from Africa are, of course, treated like any other foreigner.) The Chinese consider it a mark of preferment for a foreigner to eat apart, but one feels they also prefer it for themselves. In Yenan where a large new hotel was under construction and we asked what future use was planned for the present one, the reply was, “Oh, that will be for internal visitors.”

  Overseas Chinese who are now visiting the mainland in large numbers are treated as another distinct category between native and foreigner. Although China maintains the theory, like Israel, that its diaspora, regardless of citizenship, has the right of return, it treats the visiting racial compatriots brusquely. With the exception of some distinguished individuals, they are confined to separate hotels, travel under separate arrangements, and are kept as far as
possible from mingling with Westerners. When we made the acquaintance of some overseas Chinese from New York and invited them to join us in the private reception room at an evening performance, our escorts did not trouble to conceal their disapproval. The motive in all this obviously has to do with control and surveillance since the overseas groups can be infiltrated by Kuomintang agents, but their treatment is also quite clearly second-class. Judging by these various distinctions and pockets of apartheid in Communist practice, it is plain that despite ideology, the new Chinese, like the old, are not great believers in the equality of humankind.

  The odd thing is that having demolished extraterritoriality and the unequal treaties, and every last vestige of foreign penetration, and having denounced and metaphorically trampled upon Westerners as imperialist criminals, reactionary oppressors, running dogs, paper tigers, and every other variety of evil, the Chinese seem unable to treat us in the flesh in any other way than as the privileged characters of the bad old Treaty Port days. Queried on this phenomenon, they reply that the former treatment was exacted from them but the present privileges are bestowed by them voluntarily from a desire to make their foreign friends feel comfortable and enjoy their sojourn in China under agreeable conditions.

  This has validity up to a point and one is glad enough to take advantage of it and not to have to travel in the heat of summer in a crowded second-class compartment or eat in the public room of a restaurant surrounded by tables of staring men in their undershirts. The Chinese have an acute and very practical awareness of this problem and since their object is to make the foreigner feel well-disposed, they set about it by attention to his physical comfort, not by democratic leveling. They are probably justified by results although I think the cosseting is overdone.

  My particular experience makes it ungracious to carp. I discovered on arrival that, as a guest of the Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, I was a guest in every sense, including financial, and no amount of protests, pleas, and arguments about the awkward position it put me in as a journalist had the slightest modifying effect. A bureaucratic decision once taken is not easily changed in China. My category was “friend of the Chinese people” and, while cordial, this too was bothersome. I wrote the book that presumably earned it neither as friend nor un-friend but as a historian, which presupposes—if it does not sound pretentious to say so—a certain purity of intent. To the Chinese as Communists, a historian is a propagandist like every other servant of the state, so it would have been useless to try to explain my reservations.

  A “friend of the Chinese people” is decidedly pampered. We had front-row seats—sometimes upholstered armchairs—reserved for us at evening dance performances arranged in the hotels; audiences rose and clapped on our arrival and departure; a special one-car train was put on to take us from Loyang to Chengchow out of schedule; a former cargo boat, cleaned up for passengers and supplied with tea table and twelve in crew, was summoned to give us alone an hour’s cruise on the Yellow River. In Suchow, admittedly a town of rather special flavor, we were ensconced in a separate annex of the hotel with two suites, a private dining room, an attendant butler (there is no other word for him), and, besides the usual tea thermos, cigarettes, and fruit in the bedroom, a fresh plate of candies every day and a fresh arrangement of jasmine buds in the form of a brooch. With everything provided, I, like Queen Victoria, never held a railroad ticket or used a coin.

  Yet the effect of all this gracious attention was not so much to make one feel oneself an object of friendship as of manipulation. And it was reminiscent. I looked up in Stilwell and read aloud to my daughter my own account of Wendell Willkie’s visit to Chungking in 1943. “In the manipulation of foreigners every Chinese from amah and houseboy to the Generalissimo and Madame considered himself expert. In this matter Chinese confidence in themselves was supreme and their skills unsurpassed. They were adept, unrelenting, smooth and more often than not successful….Willkie’s visit supremely illustrated the Chinese process of influencing American public opinion. ‘He’s to be smothered,’ Stilwell wrote. There was to be an unbroken schedule of banquets, receptions, reviews, dinners, visits to schools, factories, girl scouts, arsenals. He was to be installed in a Chinese guest house as the guest of the Chinese Government…”

  Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs, and even between nations, in some personal feeling. Intercourse with Chinese is anything but personal. They never talk about their personal lives; they never bring wives to a banquet to meet foreigners, which makes the banquet clearly not a social occasion but a job, and no amount of routine toasts to “Friendship” can make it otherwise, especially as the Chinese Communists are neither so glib nor so practiced in the job as were the cohorts of Chiang Kai-shek. Even artificial friendship, however, is a step forward from hostility.

  For domestic consumption the stress on “friendship” is essential. The theory is that capitalist governments are bad but people, that is the “masses,” are good; therefore all peoples are friends of China and vice versa. This takes care of any incompatibility that a member of the Chinese public might feel between official denunciation of American imperialism on the one hand and personal welcome to individual Americans on the other, or between watching the former Japanese invaders depicted nightly onstage as atrocious villains while the Shanghai Ballet troupe tours Japan with fanfares of mutual friendship.

  The doctrine is apparently found convincing by the public. One certainly meets a fund of genuine friendliness in the provincial cities and countryside expressed in smiles and spontaneous clapping. This new practice, derived perhaps from the Russians, has spread down to tiny children in rural villages who see a foreigner and clap of their own accord, which must say something of the attitude of their parents. Adults, too, in some places will clap on their own initiative. But during institutional visits the effect on the foreigner of being met coming and going by large groups rising to their feet and clapping is absolutely unnerving.

  The other reaction to foreigners is staring. One cannot walk down a street or in a park, museum, store, or any public place without attracting crowds who fill the sidewalk or form a circle or just stop short and stare, openly, brazenly, greedily. Sometimes it is with frank curiosity, sometimes with utter astonishment as if we were Martians wearing feathers, or indeed foreign “devils.” Given the continued propaganda that presents all foreigners in Chinese history as unrelieved oppressors and robbers, it is hardly surprising that the sudden appearance of foreign “friends” in Chinese streets causes mouths to drop open. Occasionally the stares express antagonism and remind one uneasily of the recent antiforeign violence of the Cultural Revolution and earlier outbursts of xenophobia over the last hundred years. Although our guides once or twice seemed unnecessarily nervous, we never once encountered outright hostility. The overwhelming impression was one of a naturally friendly people.

  Once, as we were leaving a high school in Peking, a group of students crowded around us with intense eagerness at the door, each one trying to shake our hands as if it were terribly important to make physical contact, and all the faces glowing with real personal smiles (not the fixed ones of the dance performances). One felt an outpouring almost of love which was hard to fathom. Perhaps they were trying to demonstrate their faith in the good people–bad government doctrine.

  Whether official China counts seriously on disengaging peoples from their governments I cannot say. But motives for the friendship campaign are certainly not sentimental, as I learned from the most illuminating remark made to me in China. It came in conversation at Peking University with President (in current terms, Vice-Chairman of the University’s Revolutionary Committee) Chou P’ei-yuan and Professor of History Chou I-liang. In the course of discussing the startling shifts in the foreign policy of both our countries as reflected in the recent rapprochement, I asked whether the decision to open relations with an imperialist-aggressor super-power caused much disruption
or dissent in the Central Committee. Not at all, I was blandly told; negotiating with an antagonist was consistent with Chinese Communist practice; they had negotiated, even collaborated in the past with Chiang Kai-shek, why not Nixon? This I understood, I replied, but was it part of negotiating with an antagonist to warmly welcome his nationals as “friends”? This time something more than the ritual answer came through. “Friendship,” said Professor Chou I-liang with a slight bow in our direction, “is a form of struggle, too.”

  “Struggle” is the key word in Communist China. Nothing is casual, nothing—including contact with foreigners—left to find its own level. Like the Emperors and the Kuomintang, the Communists consider the contact something to be managed for a purpose. They are very concerned with making a good impression and believe that by controlling what the visitor sees and what he does not see that they can control, or at any rate condition, his reaction. All tours are programmed and escorted, usually by a plethora of personnel caused by the addition of local escorts in each city and local guides at each site. All conversations, meetings, and briefings must be conducted through an interpreter whether or not there is knowledge of English on the other side (which is never acknowledged), with several silent listeners and note-takers in attendance. Every visit, even to a museum or the zoo, has to be arranged in advance; there is no such thing as going anywhere unannounced. The manner is polite, never peremptory, and one’s permanent escorts are likable people who try genuinely to meet one’s desires if they can. When one finds, after judicial testing, just the right balance between acquiescence and demand, they can even be flexible. When we asked for a day on our own in Yenan, which is small enough to find one’s way around without getting lost, they made no objection.