Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  IN BEIJING, I find a copy of the criticism. It was published in 1957, shortly after Chen Mengjia had been named a Rightist and an enemy of the Party. The article consists of a long review of Chen’s book on oracle bones: the chrestomathy. The review is sharply critical of Chen’s scholarship, and then, at the end, the attack becomes personal:

  Chen has not presented anything substantial enough to match his arrogance. Chen has an extreme tendency to boast. For example, in the twenty chapters of the book, Chen neglects many essays and theories of other scholars, instead collecting only his own ideas…. This self-boasting attitude should not be accepted by us.

  It’s not hard to find more information about Li Xueqin. In the fields of archaeology and history, his name is everywhere—he publishes about oracle bones, ancient bronzes, bamboo documents. He is brilliant and prolific; a number of scholars tell me that he has the rare ability to do excellent research while also deftly satisfying the Communist Party. One scholar of ancient Chinese tells me bluntly that Li is a “toady”; a number of people mention his criticism of Chen Mengjia.

  In recent years, Li has been the director of the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project. Initiated in 1995, and funded by the central government, the project was designed to establish exact dates for China’s early cultures. Previously, the earliest date in Chinese history for which there was ample archaeological and textual evidence was 842 B.C., but the Chronology Project came up with a new timeline. Internationally, the project has been heavily criticized—many foreign scholars believe that the Chinese are attempting to fortify their history in ways that are more nationalistic than academic. Some say that the project was motivated primarily by a sense of competition with the West, which has earlier recorded dates for cultures such as ancient Egypt. During the Chronology Project, academic differences about ancient dates were sometimes resolved by voting—Chinese scholars gave their opinions, and the year with the most votes won. Domestic press reports were often bizarre:

  CHINA DAILY (December 16, 1998)—A PROJECT TO BRIDGE gaps in China’s ancient history has made remarkable progress after two years of research. China is world-famous for its 5,000-year history as a civilized nation. Unfortunately, a 2,000-year gap in China’s development has concealed the country’s true age…. The missing 2,000 years include the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties and the time before that dating back to well before 2100 B.C., says Li Xueqin, history researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing….

  The exact time marking the beginning of China’s ancient history will be published late next year, said Li.

  AFTER RESEARCHING LI XUEQIN’S career, I arrange a meeting with a friend who is a Chinese journalist. He works for Xinhua, the Party news service, but in his free time he researches history and archaeology. He uses his official position to access restricted documents and explore forgotten events; someday he hopes he’ll be able to publish it all. He likes to say that his left hand works for Xinhua but his right hand works for himself. We are the same age: early thirties, born in the Year of the Rooster.

  I ask my friend for advice about approaching Li Xueqin, and he tells me not to mention Chen Mengjia. I should arrange an interview on another pretext, and then bring up the criticism.

  I ask, “What if he refuses to answer?”

  “Well, he might do that. But if you take him by surprise, maybe he’ll respond.”

  “What do you think he’ll say?”

  “There’s a Chinese saying—‘Like the sun at high noon.’ That’s where Li Xueqin is right now. He’s at the high point of his career. When he looks at that review, I doubt that he thinks, ‘I shouldn’t have attacked my teacher in this way.’ Instead, he probably thinks, ‘Look how much I understood when I was so young.’”

  The reporter continues, “Scholars in this country are like that. It’s a very dark group of people—many of them did things that they shouldn’t have done. I’ve heard that after Chen Mengjia killed himself, scholars went through his office, reading his notes, and some of them later published his ideas as their own. There are many scholars who did things like that in the past, but they won’t admit it. The Chinese don’t like to examine themselves in this way. It’s rare for them to admit that they were wrong.”

  At the end of the conversation, my friend encourages me to pursue the story; he says that too much history of this sort slips away in China. “This isn’t something that a Chinese journalist can do,” he says. “I couldn’t do it for Xinhua, of course. But as a foreigner, you can do it.”

  I MEET LI Xueqin in his office at Tsinghua University. He is almost seventy years old, with a high forehead and heavy bags beneath his eyes—the face of a hardworking scholar. He wears a gray woolen suit, red tie, and slippers. He tells me that he has spent time in the States, including a sabbatical at Dartmouth; he speaks good English. I have told him that I’m interested in the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project.

  “It started with a man named Song Jian,” he says. “He’s a specialist in cybernetics, but he’s always been interested in archaeology. In the early 1990s, he traveled to Europe and the Mediterranean, and he visited many museums, especially in Egypt, Greece, and Israel. Afterward, he thought, ‘Foreign chronology is much clearer than in China.’ He came back and talked to me and other scholars, asking if there was anything we could do. Basically, we decided to get scientists more involved in archaeology and history.”

  The professor explains that astronomers have helped track eclipses that were recorded in ancient documents, and other scientists have contributed their skills to carbon 14 dating. He points out that the project funded work in Anyang—the surveys that first turned up evidence of the underground city.

  “There isn’t such a big difference between our chronology and the previous views,” he says. “For example, let’s look at the end of the Shang dynasty, when they were defeated by the Zhou. This is a critical moment in history, but in the past there have been forty-four significant different opinions about the date, involving a range of one hundred and twelve years. Using the most reliable sources, we narrowed it down to a range of thirty years—1050 to 1020 B.C. We decided that the most exact date was 1046 B.C. Now we aren’t saying that this is definitely correct. But from the information we have right now, it’s the most appropriate.

  “This is really just a start,” he says. “We’re preparing for another project about the origins of Chinese civilization. Of course, some people have said that we are trying to extend Chinese history, but that isn’t true. We just want to figure out how China developed. It’s no different from studying ancient Greece, or Egypt, or Israel. These other ancient cultures have all been studied more than China. And Chinese civilization has a special characteristic: it still exists, whereas the others have all disappeared.”

  I WAIT FOR half an hour before changing the subject. I take the critical review from my bag and set it on the table between us. If Professor Li has any initial reaction, he keeps it hidden.

  “I was reading some of your articles,” I say, “and I noticed this one about oracle bones. I also saw that K. C. Chang praised your theory about the Shang sacrificial names.”

  “Yes, that meant a lot to me,” the professor says with a smile. “But I didn’t even see what he had written until much later. He was in Taiwan when he first read my paper, and of course there wasn’t any contact in those days. I never actually saw his remarks until 1971.”

  I point to Chen Mengjia’s name, which appears in the title. “I’m also interested in this oracle bone scholar,” I say. “I’ve heard about him from people in Anyang and also in Beijing. Were you his student?”

  “He was a teacher here at Tsinghua, but I wasn’t formally his student,” Professor Li says, and then he explains his background. Originally, Li Xueqin had studied mathematical logic, but then, in the years after the Communist victory, Beijing’s universities were reorganized. During an interruption in his formal coursework, the young logician pursued his hobby of studying oracle bones.

>   “I had been interested in them since I was eighteen or nineteen,” he says. “When I was young, I was interested in anything that I didn’t understand. It might sound strange, but whenever anything struck me as symbolic or complicated, I wanted to figure it out. That’s what attracted me to logic. And when I first looked at the oracle bones, I couldn’t understand them, and that made me want to know more.”

  He continues: “When the Kuomintang fled the mainland, they had taken the oracle bones with them, but rubbings had been published in books. Many of them hadn’t been studied carefully or even pieced together. In my spare time, I worked on this; I arranged the broken pieces, figuring out how they fit together. I had some success, and eventually it was brought to the attention of Chen Mengjia and others. They asked me to work on the oracle bones at the Institute of Archaeology. I was essentially a research assistant to Chen Mengjia.”

  There’s a slight shift in the man’s voice. His expression is unchanged—the tilt of his jaw is the same, and his eyes hold steady. But he speaks faster now and the pitch of his voice has risen. He tells the story:

  “After 1957, he was named a Rightist—they put that hat on him. Those were difficult years for him. And during the Cultural Revolution, people who had been Rightists had even more serious problems. That was why he killed himself.

  “At that time, I was at a different research institute, so we weren’t at the same place. I believe that he killed himself in the summer of 1966, but I didn’t hear about it until the winter. When I found out, I was very upset. He was a great scholar. And after the Cultural Revolution was finished, we took good care of his things, his notes and books.”

  His story is finished, but I open the review. In the center of the last page, the personal attacks on Chen Mengjia stand out in ugly phrases:

  The professor’s gaze settles somewhere between the document and the floor. “This isn’t something that we should talk about,” he says. “Chen Mengjia was a great man, and I’d rather not discuss these things.”

  “I’m just trying to understand what happened,” I say. “I’ve seen many criticisms of him, and most of them were much worse. Everybody tells me that it’s the way things were at that time. As a foreigner, it’s hard for me to understand this kind of thing, so I wanted to ask you about it.”

  Now the professor realizes why this interview is taking place. But the emotions that I expected to see—annoyance, defensiveness, even anger—haven’t materialized. If anything, the man just looks tired, the bags sagging heavy beneath his eyes.

  “It’s not difficult just for foreigners to understand,” he says. “It’s difficult for young Chinese to understand. At that time, there was a kind of pressure on us to write this sort of thing. The Institute of Archaeology asked me to write it. I was very young and I couldn’t refuse. You’ll notice that I avoided saying anything political. I never used the word ‘Rightist,’ or any of those terms. And I put all of that criticism into a single paragraph, at the end.”

  He’s right: the personal attack is condensed into a space of only five lines.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” the professor continues. “There was no problem with the scholarly points that I made in the other parts of the essay. But the personal criticism was something that I didn’t want to write. After that essay was published, I rarely saw Chen Mengjia. But occasionally in the early 1960s, I encountered him at the Institute of Archaeology, and whenever that happened, I didn’t feel comfortable speaking to him. I just couldn’t hold a conversation, because my heart felt bad. I always regretted that article.”

  He continues: “I think that people understood. Much later, after he was dead, I still had contact with his friends, and occasionally I saw his wife. None of them ever attacked me. I think they understood what had happened, but I still felt bad. Mei banfa. There was nothing I could do about that.”

  Throughout the interview, I have been writing, and now Professor Li looks at my notebook.

  “I would prefer that you not write about this in the New Yorker,” he says slowly. “It’s a personal problem. I’d rather you just wrote about the chronology project and those things that we talked about earlier.”

  I say that I won’t write about it unless I can explain everything fully.

  “It’s hard to understand, apart from the fact that it was a horrible period,” he says. “By the time the Cultural Revolution happened, if people criticized you, then you truly believed that you were wrong. I was also criticized at that time, and I believed the things that people said. Everybody was like that; it was a type of social psychology. There were so many enemies—everybody was an enemy, it seemed.”

  AFTER THE INTERVIEW, I wander through the Tsinghua campus. It’s a sunny morning, and the snow on the ground melts away into uneven patches of gray. The campus is beautiful, and in addition to its excellent academic reputation, the university stands as a monument to recovery. In 1901, after foreign troops put down the Boxer Uprising, the occupying armies forced the Qing to agree to reparations of 330 million dollars. The Americans dedicated their share to Chinese education; eventually, some of the money was used to found Tsinghua.

  Near Professor Li’s office, I visit an old tablet dedicated to the memory of Wang Guowei, one of the early oracle bone scholars. A ring of pine trees surrounds the ten-foot-tall tablet. The inscription is dated in the old Kuomintang style: the Eighteenth Year of the Republic. That was 1929—two years after Wang Guowei drowned himself out of despair at the fall of the last emperor. Back then, one of his friends wrote a memorial essay:

  Whenever a culture is in decline, anyone who has received benefits from this culture will necessarily suffer. The more a person embodies this culture, the deeper will be his suffering.

  My Xinhua friend was right—some things are easier for a foreigner. But perhaps they are easier for the wrong reasons. On my way to Tsinghua, I had told myself that it was necessary to take the professor by surprise, because otherwise this detail of the past might disappear. But it would have felt better if the man had become defensive or angry; it was much worse to see the regret. The author of that criticism had been twenty-four years old.

  21

  State Visit

  February 23, 2002

  PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH SPENT THIRTY HOURS IN CHINA. ON THE way, he stopped in South Korea, where he stared through binoculars across the Demilitarized Zone. Less than a month earlier, the president had declared that North Korea, along with Iran and Iraq, constituted the “Axis of Evil.” At the DMZ, somebody mentioned that a North Korean museum across the border included a display of hatchets that, in 1976, had been used to kill two American servicemen. “No wonder I think they’re evil,” President Bush said.

  The trip to Beijing coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of President Nixon’s first visit to China. During President Bush’s visit, two events were open to journalists and were televised live across China: a joint press conference with President Jiang Zemin, and a speech by the American president at Tsinghua University. At the press conference, the two men smiled and spoke around each other, the way that leaders of these nations always had. President Bush mentioned Taiwan:

  “We believe in the peaceful settlement of this issue. We will urge there be no provocation. The United States will continue to support the Taiwan Relations Act. China’s future is for the Chinese people to decide, yet no nation is exempt from the demands of human dignity. All the world’s people, including the people of China, should be free to choose how they live, how they worship and how they work.”

  President Jiang, when asked about the possibility of regime change in Iraq, said:

  “I think, as I made clear in my discussion with President Bush just now, importantly that peace is to be valued most…. Let me conclude by quoting a Chinese proverb: ‘More haste, less speed.’ That is to say, despite the fact that sometimes you will have problems that cry out for immediate solution, yet patience is sometimes also necessary.”

  That evening, at a state banque
t, President Jiang Zemin entertained the guests by singing “O Sole Mio.” He took turns dancing with Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice. The following morning President Bush went to Tsinghua University.

  THE FOREIGN JOURNALISTS met at the Shangri-La Hotel, where the government provided special buses to take us to Tsinghua. I found a seat behind two members of the State Department press corps. Like most of the Washington reporters, they were white men with short hair and dark suits. They talked constantly about politics and journalism. Eavesdropping was easy because they ignored anybody who was not a member of the State Department press corps.

  “Powell’s a smart guy.”

  “I always think of him as the adult supervision of the administration.”

  “I don’t think he has a Kissingerian sense of the big picture, though.”

  It was 8:25 in the morning and the bus idled out in front of the Shangri-La. We had been scheduled to leave at eight.

  “Bush’s view comes from Marvel comics. Evil one, evil leader. But Powell looks at the whole thing holistically.”

  “Bush wants to make sure that everybody is—like us, basically.”

  “If you look at who’s actually killing people, I’m not worried about Osama bin Laden. I’m worried about Colonel Sanders, the Bud Man, and the Marlboro Man.”

  “Why can’t they find him? He’s six-four and he walks with a limp.”

  “Maybe he’s gone to a place with lots of tall people.”

  “Where are all the bicycles around here?”

  “It’s a Potemkin village, writ large. REALLY large. This is China.”

  “Why are we sitting here so long?”

  “Welcome to China. You have to learn to wait fast. When the security zealots at the White House and the control freaks here get together—Security City.”