Chinese boxes

Edmund Leach

About Chinese Women Julia Kristeva (Marion Boyars.£5.95)

We all of us need to have concrete images for our fantasies of heaven and hell, and ever since Marco Polo Europeans have tended to interpret the empire of the late Chairman Mao as if it were either an earthly paradise or the fountain head of a yellow peril. The mundane reality is less exotic but transient visitors who speak no local language and know no Chinese history are liable to pick up some very strange impressions, This non-book is certainly an oddity, but the gullibility of the public and the mutual self-adulation of the New Left could well make it a success. The author is currently one of the brightest stars in the ever-changing firmament of Parisian intellectual life; a marxist, editor of Tel Quel and Setniotica, her normal stamping ground is in the arcane field of structuralist literary criticism; her competence as Sinologist is zero. The opening paragraph sets the stage: These notes are simply a journal of facts and inquiries inspired by a trip I was able to make to the People's Republic of China in April/May 1974. They are intended to be read particularly in relation to the confusion provoked in our own society by the rise of this dark continent, whose silence and will insure [sic] its own cohesiveness. Women : the women of China. These notes have their origin in my attempt to deal with the tremendous and rapid changes in their condition. That, indeed, is the reason I wrote them in such haste.

That last sentence does not quite ring true. Perhaps there was a contract to fulfil. Certainly Kristeva wasted no time. The trip seems to have lasted .about three weeks. The party visited Peking, Sian, Nanking and Shanghai. The text of the book runs to two hundred pages; it was published in France before the end of 1974. We start off at a high level of private introspection which suggests

a sort of autobiographical, philosophical, travelogue in the manner of Levi-Strauss s Tristes Tropiques modified to suit the temperament of a Virginia Woolf.

. . . in patrilineal society: woman is a specialist in the unconscious, a witch, a bacchanalian, taking her jouissance in an anti-Apollonian, Dionysian orgy. A jouissance which breaks the symbolic chain, the dominance, the taboo. A marginal speech with regard to the science, religion, and philosophy of the polls (witch, child, underdeveloped, not even a poet, at best a poet's accomplice).

This sort of psycho-analytic free association goes on for thirty pages and then we move to China. Kristeva's China is almost completely imaginary but how far does she appreciate this fact ? Is the reader being treated to a leg pull ? Is Kristeva mocking the naïve propaganda of her Maoist hosts? Or has she herself been deceived ? FormallY we are concerned with the history of the changing role of women during the long history of China. We start with the fantasy of a matriarchal heaven which quite certainlY never existed, followed by that of a Confucian dominated patriarchal feudalism, which existed after a fashion but not at all in the sense that Kristeva implies. Here and there a sentence suggests a touch of scepticism. On page fifty-nine, the party visits a , recently excavated archaeological site near Sian: 'Three distinct zones arise on thissoil, whitened by time and limestone, creating before my eyes the distant life which Male, Chang attempts to explain with the help oi Engels.' Surely we are meant to laugh ? On the other hand, Kristeva's staggeringly inaccurate excursions into later Chinese history include details such as the following:— The defeat of the State of the Ern' peror Ming Huang (745) is attributed to this same famous beauty, Yang Guifei, his concubine turned imperial bride, and to her brother his minister. A rebellion among the soldiers demanded that the Emperor strangle Yang Guifei in exchange for the continued, defence of the state against enemy trooPs. The actual history of t his famous episode was rather di fferent. The Emperor, who is nearlY always referred to as Hstian Tsung rather than Ming Huang, was then aged seven*" having reigned for forty-four years.The. year was 755. The 'enemy' were the rebe,i forces of An Lu-shan, the adopted son an°, possible lover of Yang Yii-huan, a woman °I, the highest rank, who had first been married. to one of the Emperor's sons but who had held, since 745, the title of Yang Kuei-fel ('Precious Consort Yang') as head of the imperial harem. The minister in question was not her brother but her first cousin Yang. Kuo-chung, and the 'rebels' who insisted. that the Emperor strangle Yang Kuei-fei were his own palace guard. If you are going to deviate from accuracy as far as that, vyhY mention the details at all ?

Incidentally, Kristeva makes no mention.

ei-f,

of the Emperor Mao's own Yang Kuel,

now under threat of execution by a contemPorary An Lu-shan. But she is not addressing the knowledgeable. 'The phonetic transcription of Chinese names, with the exception of a few well-known cities, follows the pinyin method currently used in China, and in the teaching of Chinese to foreigners. So Kiangsi appears as Jiangxi, Sian asXi'an, and so on. The most incomprehensible of these transformations is that which changes the Manchu lady who was born as Yehonala, but is usually known to history either as Tzu Hsi or as the Empress Dowager (Huang T'ai Hou), into 'the famous Empress X iaogin (Cixi-Ts'eu-Hi). which is elsewhere reduced simPly to `Cixi$ Other oddities provide entertainment. At the University of Peking in the Department Of Chinese 'among the more recent texts, one studies The Dream of the Red Pavilion and The Story of the Riverbank.' Conservatives can be reassured. We are not being told about a special edition of Chairman Mao's thoughts or a rhapsody on the Communist Long March. The classic Hung Lou Meng ( The Dream of the Red Chamber') was written in the mid-eighteenth century, while Shift Flu Chuan, best known as All Men are Brat hers has been variously dated as belonging either to the mid-fourteenth or midsixteenth century ! The second half of Kristeva's book is Concerned with changes in the status of women in China since 1911. The history is less familiar but no more reliable than before. Emancipation started much earlier than Kristeva suggests; some of the most successful popular novels of the early nineteenth century were vigorously feminist and a.nti-establishment. On the other hand her interviews with suitably representative w°11.1eri from the Maoist Utopia read like Icial hand-outs and are in line with a very 1°ng. established Chinese tradition. The official image of what Chinese woman is s,1-113Posed to be has always taken the form of orief biographies, and, despite the shift of namoral

emphasis from Confucianism to

a°,1sni, the general style of what Krisis",va s informants were allowed to say is in ie. Pattern of Liu Hsiang's Lieh-Nii-Chuan 1""graPhie5 of Chinese Women') first Published about two thousand years ago! H.S° we come back to Kristeva herself. Does Projection of her feminist inner thoughts Itt°. an imaginary material reality in Eastern ia tell us anything about the generality of

daywestern women intellectuals at the present ?

Her closing pages show us that she is by nbo means starry-eyed about Maoist China, ofut she manages to extract out of the ideal cOntinuous revolution the _notion of a ntinuing creative instability in the reInatin ns‘iiP between men and women which ineed. not involve a sense of hierarchical dom,„.ation of either over the other. Platitude?

:ell

d Pe. rhaps, but if this book has any value

to is because it may provoke the reader

think again about general issues of this ;atteler .sort rather than in anything that it 'SUS about Chinese women.