Outspoken gentleman
John Scott
The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution Simon Leys (Allison and Busby £6.50 hard, £2.95 soft)
At last the English reader has a chance to read a truly illuminating book on contemporary China, and perhaps the only honest and authoritative one to have appeared which is devoted to those tragic Years making up the period known in the history of that great but unhappy country as the Cultural Revolution — a term which right from the outset the author describes very neatly as having 'nothing revolutionary about it except the name and nothing cultural about it except the initial pretext.' Later on he is to leave the reader with no doubt that the whole painful operation was nothing more than an exercise in the consolidation of Maoist power. Throughout the 255 pages of this book Simon Leys peels away layer after layer of mendacious Paintwork, clumsily daubed on by China's Own state-controlled propagandists and their unwitting dupes abroad, to reveal a carefully documented but impellingly readable exposé of the vicious and cynical political roiling and broiling which preceded the death of the ancient 'helmsman' — better known as T.T. Mao.
Ironically enough it was in the period of the Cultural Revolution and the years immediately following it, i.e. the age of Ping-pong diplomacy and subsequently that of the now deposed Gang of Four and the first of the current reigning Uncle Hua (late Of the Department of Public Tranquillity or, if you prefer in less Orwellian language, the Secret Police), that the Peking regime has received some of its best press in the, at times, childishly gullible media of the West. PoRowing in the wake of Nixon and his horrid crew's trip to Peking the interests of a system which has done its very best to !nuzzle and castrate its artists, silence all truly critical and intellectual expression, bony and bamboozle its hardworking and long-suffering people, have been dutifully served by an extraordinary collection of fellow travellers ranging from 'genuinely Concerned' (sic) Hollywood strumpet voluntaries, clapped-out Members of Parliament, posh Marxists, women's libbing Woman's page columnists, one romantic novelist and even the Master of an Oxbridge college, and above and saddest of all by a number of sinologists both within and without the halls of academe who unlike the aforementioned should have known better.
It is doubtless for the benefit of this last group that the eminent Belgian sinologist and scholar Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys
is merely his nom de plume) has chosen to preface this remarkable work with a quotation in classical Chinese, which since he has supplied no translation or explanatory gloss, i aimed, I surmise, at all hoodwinked sinologists and China commentators, rather than at the naive delegations of Marxist-Leninist Hobbitologists, social scientologists and well-meaning Glasgow schoolchildren who have been just a few of the victims of the Peking junkets supplied by our friends from the Ministry of Public Tranquillity. The gobbet is most appropriate since, though some two thousand years old, it was written by one of the noblest figures in Chinese literature, the courageous Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and originally voiced by an intrepid critic of the tyrannical Lord Shang whose brutal legalist philosophy can be said to have served as useful inspiration to all subsequent Chinese dictatorships, be they imperial-bureaucratic or just plain old proletarian like the current one. In its full context in English it reads: 'A thousand sheepskins cannot compare with one silver fox fur. A thousand sycophantic yes-men are not as good as one outspoken gentleman.'
With this well chosen quotation the author reveals his fine appreciation of the salutary lessons supplied by a true understanding of China's great cultural past, whilst at the same time he exhibits a subtle use of that oldest of Chinese literary weapons, the classical allusion. But of that enough said.
The main body of M. Ryckmans's book is composed of a diary of the principal events throughout the period of the Cultural Revolution proper, i.e. February 1967 to October 1968, and within this section the author documents and comments lucidly on the otherwise often baffling ups and downs of the various warring factions and their pathetic stooges, as well as pinpointing the major phases of the political ebb and flow with commendable precision and foresight for hot I should mention that he actually wrote up and analysed the events in the diary at the time they took place. For this part of the book the author must have digested all available mainland literature (much of which I too consumed at the time but, unlike M. Ryckmans, could not get the better of the acute dyspepsia it gave me) as well as a deal of highly interesting unofficial documents. One of the latter variety is the Red Guard pamphlet, quoted on pp 168170, written to denounce the then disgraced Teng Hsiao-p'ing. Also within the diary section are a number of interesting theories which the author shrewdly deduced way back in 1969. One such is how the Soviet
Union's intransigence vis-à-vis the frontier dispute, was, unbeknown to the Kremlin, destined to serve the political interests of Mao and his army.
An excellent historical survey of the events in China leading up to the Maoinspired cultural revolution prepares the reader for the more demanding reading of the chronological analysis of the diary section, whilst the final chapters are devoted to a postscript which brings the book up to date with the post-Mao era: Then came the announcement that Hua Kuo-feng, who happened to be the head of Public Security, had been officially confirmed as Premier Hua Kuo-feng. No one could be better qualified for the role of leader in a 'socialist-fascist dictatorship of a feudal type.' Predictably enough, huge state-managed demonstrations of dutiful schoolchildren, mobilised civil servants and factory workers marching in good order, mouthing ready-made slogans are now being organised everywhere in the country to celebrate the promotion of the new Lin There is also in this section of the book a useful appendix of important but none too easily obtainable documents plus biographical sketches of the leading actors in this sordid Chinese farce.
Above all, it is the author's sardonic wit which is such a refreshing change from the turgidly earnest low church style with which the pedlars of crap de Chine communiste try to convince us of the wholesomeness of their favourite police state: the new constitution of 1956 provided for the congress to be held every five years. In fact, the mandate of the Eighth Congress (1956) extended over thirteen years. The Chinese Communist Party has never been very concerned about respecting its constitution and one wonders why it feels the need to have one.
At the same time, it is a book throughout which the author reveals an underlying compassion for the ordinary people of China and a true love and appreciation for its culture: The appearance of this book in English, though somewhat belated — it was first published in France in 1971 — should, I hope, herald a new era of far more critical pronouncements on contemporary China in the UK. Finally, I feel the translators are to be congratulated for doing justice to such a magnificent work.
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