The old Russian airplane
— an Antonov 4 — looked strange with the body of the plane hanging under one
single wing. The plane's tires were so worn that one couldn’t see any threads at all and the seats looked like folding
chairs, but Leonardo and I landed alive in Chongqing despite that.
We hardly believed our
eyes when we saw the Renmin Hotel at a distance, a palace-like buildings
situated on one of the city’s many hills. The Great
Hall of the People was built 1951-54 in neo-traditional style with green roof
tiles and was crowned by a gigantic circle-shaped pagoda that had to have been
at least 40 meters across. On each side was an adjacent building
with smaller pagoda-like gazebos.
We struggled with our suitcases up the long and steep staircase to the entrance of the main building, only to find out that our room was on the fourth floor and that there was no elevator. However, it was worth the effort, since our room was in the “gazebo” to the right and had three large beds, one big floor-standing fan, color TV and two enormous balconies. We also had a bathroom with two (!) toilets, and a separate shower room with both hot and cold water. And all this for seven yuan per person and night! We were delighted all three of us, three, because Sabrina had joined us.
On the boat. September
23, Tuesday
Chongqing’s city center sits on an island in the middle of the Yangtze
River. The city has six million inhabitants, or 13.6 if you count the
outer-laying areas. The climate is subtropical, and it was 37 degrees Celsius
(99 Fahrenheit) when we arrived.
The reason for our visit
was to take the river boat down the Yangtze River, but it turned out to be
difficult to get second class tickets. Sabrina had managed to buy three third
class tickets for the day after tomorrow, but we would rather travel tomorrow,
and in second class.
“That’s impossible,” we were told by a snooty girl at CITS, the
government travel agency.
Leonardo and Sabrina
decided to try to find vacancies at the dock the next morning, which was why I
now had two extra tickets, but I managed to
sell them to two West German girls, Lotte, and Martina.
Back at the hotel, I stopped by the office of the Chongqing International Technical Consulting Bureau out of curiosity. The boy and girl who worked there were very friendly and showed me a personal computer that they took out from a wooden cabinet. They said that it had just arrived and was not used yet. The boy showed me a Chinese character keyboard and described how you use it. The girl said that she had just returned from Beijing and knew the computer sector there. She shared a couple of names in the business and said that she had a friend from school who worked at the People’s Daily.
Later, I switched from
the “suite” we had shared to a bed in a large dormitory with at least
a dozen beds. Around nine o’clock an old man entered the room and took the bed
next to mine. He had two large backpacks, one on the front and one on the back.
He said that he was 82 years old and traveled on his own in China. After an
hour he stood up, walked over to the door where the light switch was.
“Bedtime,” he said, and it didn’t just sound like and order.
He shut the lights and we
other backpackers went to bed without protesting.
He must be a retired
officer, I thought.
The next morning, the guy
from the consulting firm came over to say hello while I waited for the bus to
the boat. With him was Pete Cho, a Cantonese computer expert living in San
Diego and it turned out that he was going to take the same boat as I. We got
along well and exchanged business cards.
The bus stopped in front
of a wide stairway that led down to the river boats. The stairway was 100 meters long and so steep that I was afraid that I may trip and fall with my Samsonite,
but fortunately a man showed up, pointed at my suitcase, and signaled to me
that he wanted to carry it to the boat for me. It would cost three yuan. I felt
bad about putting such a heavy burden on the wiry old man, but it was how he
made a living, so I said yes. He swung the suitcase up on his naked back and
ran down the stairs while I followed him with the rest of my luggage. Once down
there he hurried up the gangway and put down the suitcase on the boat deck. I
gave him ten yuan instead of three. At first, he didn’t want to accept that much, but I insisted and eventually he took
the money.
Once on board, I found out that the beds in third class was four inches to short for me, and the
footboard was made of metal so I couldn’t let my feet stick out. I tried to switch to second
class, but was told that it was impossible, and that the beds in second class
were of the same length. But I had by now learned from my time in China not to
take no for an answer, so I walked over to the second-class section where I met
Pete Cho again, and he offered to talk to the captain.
An hour later all three of us were offered to upgrade, but Lotte and Martina didn’t think it was worth 60 yuan. As for me, I thank God for having changed since I now I have an excellent bed in a two-bed room that has a washing area, a writing desk, and a fan. Besides, I now have access to a resting lounge in the front of the boat with armchairs and a nice view.
*
The vibrations from the
ship’s engines give the journey a comfortable rhythm. We are now at a
segment where the river is narrow and surrounded on both sides by mountains
covered in green vegetation. The landscape is cultivated wherever anything has
the slightest chance of growing. Houses and villages lie close together on the slopes.
As the ship sails down the river, one image of the landscape is followed by the next only to fuse into a feeling, a comfortably diffuse and sun-drenched memory, the way the chain of events in life shapes your view of yourself. To remember the details, to catch the moments, you need to freeze the movement, maybe with a camera or a pen, but the more you experience, the less time you have to write, and when the calm settles in, it is in a way often already too late.
*
The sky is gray on this
our second day on the mighty river. We have passed the Gezhouba Dam in Yichang
where our ship passed through a 22 meter high lock. We have left the dramatic
ravines (The Three Gorges) with their steep rock-walls behind us and are now
overlooking a flatter landscape where distant mountain ridges can be seen in
variations of grey and blue. The river is wider, and the current has slowed
down.
The boat stopped in
Wanxiang at eight in the evening and we had four hours to go ashore. The city
lies at a slope that falls so steeply into the river that we had to climb a
long and stinking stairway to reach the main street. The heat was
oppressive and the air humid and uncomfortable even though it was long after
sunset. Lotte and Martina wanted to find a cold beer, but that seemed
impossible. Finally, they gave up and we decided to sit down at a place
situated on a ledge next to a wide section of the stairway. I had just sat down when I felt
an ice-cold wind coming from the left. Not far from me sat an old man waving a
fan. I mimicked him to say that it was hot, while at the same time wondering
where the cold air came from. Maybe just a whiff of cold air, I thought but
that didn’t make sense. The man with the fan and a couple of other men
understood that I was uncomfortable, and gesticulated towards the back, towards
what I assumed was the kitchen. Do they want to sell me a fan?
"Wu bu dong,” I said, but they continued to point and wave, so I
followed them into a tunnel where I was met by cold air.
It was incredible. I continued further in and found a long restaurant in the shape of a tunnel that went straight into the mountain. And from the depth of the mountain came a steady stream of cold, humid air. We sat down at a table and Lotte went to the front and pointed to a couple of dishes as we felt that we now had to order something. We’ll probably get sick from this, we thought, but when the dishes arrived, they were steaming hot, which was reassuring. Everything was good and we only paid five yuan for the meal. A couple of hours later, we stepped back out into the sauna-like atmosphere and found our way back to the boat.
Dear Carl,
I hope all is well. As for me, I am fulfilling my old dream of
taking a river boat down the Yangtze River (The Chinese call it “the Long River,” Chang
Jiang, which you have to agree with, since it is 6,300 kilometers from the
sources on the Qinghai plateau near Tibet until the river meets the East
China Sea.) It takes six days from Chongqing to Shanghai, but I will step off
the boat after three days, in Wuhan.
The wind is strong, but the old steel ship keeps a steady course, ignoring the permanent revolutions of the waves. You relax when you travel by river boat. It’s like riding a train, but calmer. Once you are on board, there is not a lot you can do but to rest and enjoy the view, which was quite dramatic during the first two days. I spent a lot of time on the foredeck, enjoyed the landscape and photographed small temples balancing on hills looking like sugar cones, and rough rocks plunging straight down into the river, but we are now on the third day and the landscape is flatter and getting a bit boring, which is why I am sitting here in the first-class lounge writing.
(First class is here called second class, which gives a more equal
impression as long as you ignore the fact that there is also a third, fourth
and fifth class. The luxury class seems to be for foreigners, intellectuals,
and party cadres, while the masses must make do according to what they can afford
to pay.)
I have now spent a month in China and the journey has gone very
well. I have met lots of interesting people and managed to get good interviews
even though I am traveling on my own and have not had any official support
which here can be a big problem.
It was much easier to get in touch with people than I had
expected, even though only a small fraction of the population speaks English.
Those who do are however eager to meet foreigners, if not for anything
else than to practice their English.
Of course, China has a special meaning for us old left-wing
radicals who, over time, came to realize that the dreamland we once fell in
love with had little to do with reality. The question is if you can really
understand how naive we were if you have never visited a place like Qingping
Market in Guangzhou where you can buy everything from monkeys and grilled dogs
to snakes and rare birds. We had no idea how old-fashioned Mao's China really
was.
We imagined that we had found the alternative to both the repressive
Soviet bureaucracy and Western capitalism; a society where selflessness
replaced selfishness and where even top leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping were not safe. We read about wallpapers and mass rallies and
imagined that China had a more direct and genuine democracy than the West, but
looking back today, we don't know whether to laugh or cry....
We thought we were materialists, but in retrospect it is clear
that we were sucked into a movement that was essentially religious. What was
Mao's Little Red Book if not a modern version of Luther's Small Catechism? We
fell for the rosy propaganda and believed reports from left-wing intellectuals
who, like Jan Myrdal and Edgar Snow, had become enthusiastic spokesmen for the
regime.
When I now meet people who have been affected by Mao's campaigns,
I realize that we were lucky to have been born in Sweden and not in China. After all,
our version of Maoism was quite innocent. We marched against the war in
Vietnam, raised money for striking workers and tried to build a new
revolutionary party, but that was about it. And the Swedish version of the
"Red Guards" was more pathetic than dangerous. But imagine if we had
been born in China instead! Then perhaps the awakening after Mao would have
been followed by the realization that we had blood on our hands....
You might ask why we didn't see the dark side: why did we fall for
propaganda that was so crude that it should have been seen as ridiculous?
We had simply fallen in love, and when you fall in love, you only see what you want to see. The Chinese leadership hid its secrets with the same precision that a woman applies her make-up. Our eyes were fixated on China, but we only saw what we wanted to see and were blind to anything that didn't match the vision. I wonder if the Chinese leaders didn't laugh at us.
*
I was reminded of Göran Palm and his book Indoctrination in Sweden, which was very
influential. I still remember his vivid description of the shy young man who
hoped to become popular with the girls by smearing Brylcream in his hair; by
consuming everything that the indoctrination had made us want. I was a young shy
man when I read the book and the question of how to become popular with girls
was high on the agenda, even for a young revolutionary! But for Palm, I was of
course duped, a victim of commercialism.
His message was that all cultures indoctrinate their citizens, but
that the indoctrination we in the West were exposed to served capitalism, while
the indoctrination the Chinese and Cubans were exposed to was in the interest
of the people. For Palm, Sweden was a democracy because of bourgeois
indoctrination, and the bourgeois family. In China, on the other hand, Mao
tried to build a new society from scratch, and could therefore not rely on the
traditional family, which was a conservative force.
For Palm, the family was a problem for socialist society, which
had to put 'class' and revolutionary politics at the center instead of private
life. Mao's 'brainwashing' of citizens was therefore a necessity, because
without it, capitalist individualism would take over and the revolution would
collapse as it had done in the Soviet Union.
In other words, Mao wanted a blank slate to write on.
In retrospect, it is easy to see that Palm used his ideological
beliefs to turn black into white and white into black. Since capitalism was bad
and based on family and private property rights, Mao's attempt to destroy the
family and abolish property rights must be good. It didn't matter how many
people were sacrificed on the altar of Maoism. They were necessary sacrifices!
But then again, so were Stalin's sacrifices. It was of course a pity about all
those millions, but steel production multiplied and without steel Hitler could
not have been defeated.
While the Maoists in the West engaged in self-deception, it is
easier to understand why the Chinese leaders controlled the image of themselves
and their society so tightly. It was necessary to protect the mythical core of
the movement, what cannot be felt or said. Most religions do the same,
otherwise they would have no special meaning. For faith to move mountains,
believers must be willing to abandon their skepticism and take the leap into
the unknown.
Mao was enigmatic, but it was precisely the opaque nature of his
official image that earned him a worldwide following. What need did he fill?
What were we looking for? Well, we were looking for an alternative in a
technocratic age that had lost its legitimacy due to the Vietnam War, the race
riots in the US and the growing awareness of poverty and international
injustice. We read the fable of the old man digging away the mountain and
swallowed it as readily as we had as children hearing about Jesus driving out
the money changers from the temple. The moral of the two stories
was not so different. It was right to stand up against injustice and you should
begin with yourself. But where Jesus sacrificed himself, Mao sent his believers
to fight capitalist profiteers and revisionist bureaucrats, political
accusations that were abstract enough to stick to almost anyone who got in
Mao's or his minions' way.
For us, the Cultural Revolution was a passionate response to
American imperialism and Soviet repression, and as China kept her secrets,
no one could hear the cries of her victims. Sure, there were a few who tried to
speak out, but they were dismissed as right-wing extremists or CIA agents.
It was only with the death of Mao and the subsequent palace
intrigues that Red China lost its ability to seduce, that the infatuation
suddenly ended and we started using our brains again.
For a while it looked like Deng Xiaoping would lead China towards
democratization, but that was just a tactical feint in the internal power
struggle, because as soon as the student movement was no longer needed, he put
the lid on it.
My impression is that China has a long way to go because it has
barely any democratic tradition to build on, socially, culturally, and
politically.
Maoism is over, but China continues to fascinate, which is why I have spent so much time reading journals from Hong Kong, London, New York, and Taipei. You dropped out of politics long before me, but I wasted my youth on a political side-track. It might have been easier to just forget the whole thing, but at least I wanted to learn something from the experience. I couldn't let go of the idea of China, a country in which I had already invested so much -- emotionally and intellectually. For some old leftists, it was a matter of salvaging what could be salvaged, crossing a line and moving on, but I had gone too far in my research and also lost faith in the philosophical basis of the socialist project. Marx had many merits, he was biting and often correct in his moral critique of capitalism, but his theory of value was wrong, and with that the whole edifice collapsed. Not to mention his political theory and utopian visions. They were naïve and impractical and had devastating consequences when put into action.
I still believe in justice and equality, but not in Marxism's talk
of wage labor as exploitation and certainly not in the alternative, which
Rudolf Bahro dubbed "real existing socialism." There is of course
exploitation, but it is not due to the existence of capital, investment, and
profits, but to the distribution of ownership, access to education, manipulated
markets and unequal power relations inherited from history. You don't have to
be a Marxist to believe in progressive taxes, or even in expropriating private
wealth that has been unjustly accumulated or undermines the market. Even
pro-capitalists may want to overturn the board so that competition can restart
on a more level playing field.
The problem with the socialist alternative is that all states
became corrupt and reactionary after the initial phase of war and
reconstruction. That is why everyone soon felt the need to revive the market
model and introduce more rational reward systems, but for the market to work,
most of the bureaucracy and centralized political control must be replaced by
competition and political democratization. How else will people dare to take
initiative? Which explains why economic reforms are so often met with political
resistance.
Marx was good at criticizing capitalism but offered no real
alternative. What Lenin did was simply to combine the military procurement
model of tsarism with German-style capitalist monopolies and put everything
under party control. If he had lived in Sweden, he would have looked to Gustav
Wasa and Axel Oxenstjerna, who knew a thing or two about state enterprise. It
all worked as long as you could convince people that it was necessary to
sacrifice the present for the future. Mao realized this already in the 1940s in
Yenan, which is why he would rely on constant campaigns. That’s why we had the
'Great Leap Forward' and the Cultural Revolution.
But the crux of the matter was that the model doesn’t work under
peaceful conditions and during gradual economic growth. People lose faith in
the promises of a glorious future and start asking why they don't have food on
the table and clothes on their bodies. An economist might say that the expected
value of the future has been devalued relative to the value of the present. And
it is not only the general public that loses faith, because doubt penetrates
the party and the bureaucracy, creating political competition and further
stimulating corruption as faithless bureaucrats use their power to acquire
goods and services.
Well, Carl, I realize I'm getting ahead of myself, and I'd better
stop, because otherwise I might forget to get off the boat in Wuhan, and
continue to Shanghai, but these are issues I've been wrestling with for a long
time, and besides, I don't think it's just a personal thing. I probably could
have let China go a long time ago if it was a small and insignificant country,
but what happens here will affect the future of all of us. That much is
certain.
It would be wonderful if the dissidents managed to push for
transparency and democracy in China, but we can't count on that. That was one
of the conclusions of my research paper, that democracy is not a necessary
condition for economic modernization. In fact, the reforms could help the
dictatorship, because the market system shrinks the sphere in which the
government interferes with what people do. There are many examples of
dictatorships with fast-growing capitalist economies, but no examples of
socialist democracies. (Here I am of course her not talking about countries
like Sweden with a social democratic system!)
Well, the fact that our dreams failed us is not the same as saying
that the world is okay as it is. We still have hunger and war, and the balance
of terror still casts its shadow over us.
I am not among those who believe that privatization and
self-reliance can fill the black hole left by the collapse of our dreams of
collective solutions. It's as if someone is whispering in our ear that we
shouldn't give a damn about the world because the market will take care of
everything. Bingo! But that's just bullshit. We can still dream of change and
who knows, maybe part of the answer is in China now that we can see the country
as it really is. Maybe it is possible to combine collective responsibility with
a democratic political system. Maybe Wei Jingsheng has part of the answer when
he calls for a fifth modernization, democracy. Of course, he is in prison, but
that doesn't mean he is wrong.
My head was full of questions when I came here. I don't think I
will find the answers to all of them, but at least I will know a bit more about
what I am talking and writing about. This is a beginning, a new beginning.
Well, my friend, I must stop now, or I'll be late for dinner! Have a good time and I look forward to seeing you back home in Svedala.
September 25, 1986, somewhere on the mighty Chang Jiang,
Johan
September 26
I took out the books I
bought in Hong Kong since the landscape had become flatter and less dramatic. I
began with Travels in Tartary, Thibet and
China. My edition was from 1928 and had a long and very interesting preface
by Paul Pelliot. He wrote that Abbé Huc was the author of
both books, although many of his stories in the first book reflect the
experiences of Joseph Gabet who had been at the mission before Huc arrived.
Apparently, our good abbé did not hesitate to take literary liberties if he
thought it made the story better, but the travelogue is generally credible,
according to Pelliot.
I skimmed through Travels in Tartary, but then switched to
The Chinese Empire, which is a
continuation of the first book and feels more relevant to my journey.
The first thing that
strikes you when you read Huc is that he is a wonderful writer why you soon
forget that you are reading a book from the mid-19th century. This is in stark
contrast to Marco Polo, who dictated his book from his prison cell after
returning from his twenty-four years in Asia. I realize that it must have been
extremely exciting to read the book when it was published in the early 14th
century since it was all news to most readers (which at that time could not
have been very many as this was before Gutenberg and books were copied by
hand!) Reading the book today is a completely different matter. It's almost
like reading a guidebook that is impersonal and full of lists and details that
you don't know if you can trust or how to interpret. It becomes tedious in the
long run unless you are a researcher with a special interest.
But Huc's writing is
engaging, and you quickly get a sense of the narrator as a person and come to
feel that you know him. The only problem is that he uses strange transcriptions
of Chinese names. It is neither Wade-Giles nor pinyin, but it is often possible
to work out which places he is referring to. Tching-tou=Chengdu and
Sse-tchouen=Sichuan.
He is also fearless in sharing his views and makes interesting comparisons with Europe and France. He writes in the preface that he wants to try to correct "the erroneous and absurd ideas" that have prevailed about the Chinese people since "ancient times."
Huc traces many of these ideas to people who have visited China, but also to people who "never set foot in the country." When the first Catholic missionaries arrived in China, they came from a Europe that according to him was shaken by intellectual and political anarchy.
“The comparison was certainly at that time not to the advantage of Europe, and the missionaries were inclined to admire everything they saw in the new country of their adoption.
They often exaggerated what was good in it, and they did not see the accompanying evil, and thus they have often published, in perfect good faith, descriptions of China that were much too flattering to be correct.”
In contrast, 19th century missionaries met with a country in deep crisis, while Europe was modernizing. The result was bleak depictions of China. Then came the “tourists,” which only added to the confusion.
“They have seen little indeed, but that has not prevented them from writing much, and often from slandering the Chinese, for no other reason than that the missionaries formerly overpraised them.”
Since they only visited a few coastal cities and didn't speak the language, there wasn't much they could report other than what they heard and read in embassy reports, which were rarely very well informed.
One difference from those who traveled to China in the 1960’s and 1970’s was that these were well-controlled group trips. I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with a correspondent covering China in the second half of the 1970’s. The journalists were under constant surveillance and had limited freedom of movement, so many ended up drinking at the Beijing Hotel. A situation that was probably not entirely different from the one Huc described.
"The situation of travellers in China is not usually an enviable one. At their departure from Canton they are imprisoned in closed boats; they are guarded carefully from sight all along the great canal; they are what we may call put under arrest immediately on their arrival at Pekin; and, after two or three official receptions and interrogatories, they are hastily sent back again. As they are not allowed the slightest communication with the outer world, they can really describe from their own knowledge nothing more than the hedge of soldiers by which they have been surrounded, the songs of the boatmen who have accompanied them, the formalities employed by the inspectors who have searched them, and the evolutions of the grandees who prostrated themselves with them before the Son of Heaven. The history of the whole affair has been given by one of these travellers with as much naïveté as precision. He says, ‘they entered Pekin like beggars, stayed in it like prisoners, and were driven from it like thieves.’ (Account of the Embassy of Lord Macartney.)”
*
Lotte and Martina share a
cabin with a woman called Fanny Denim. After lunch I saw her on foredeck with a
middle-aged couple. She eventually abandoned her company and came over to me.
"I've been reporting
from China for ten years, but this is my first time on the Yangtze," she
said as she introduced herself.
She looked about 30, had
straight black hair, red sunglasses and was sexy without being particularly
beautiful. We talked for a long time, while enjoying the view. She said that
she was from Australia but lived in Hong Kong and spoke both Mandarin and
Cantonese.
When we split, I asked
her what her favorite place in China was.
"Gulangyu," she
said instantly, adding that it was a small island off Xiamen which faces
Taiwan.
"I'm going there," I exclaimed.
*
Back in my cabin, I
continued with The Chinese Empire.
Huc and Gabet were thrown out of Tibet but had to take the long and sometimes
very dangerous route between Lhasa and Chengdu, as the Chinese governor did not
want the world to know that there was a shorter route south to India. On the
plus side, they traveled escorted by mandarins who both kept an eye on them and
paid for food, transportation, and accommodation.
Huc's tales of the
perilous passage over snow-covered mountain passes and encounters with
swindlers (some of whom were government officials) and bandits reminded me of
Don Quixote's wanderings through Spain. Huc is a wonderful narrator, and you
forget that you are reading a travelogue and not an adventure story! In addition,
there are these wonderful reflections from a man who does not see the world
from a narrow European perspective.
Huc writes that the Europeans have seen the Chinese as a unique people since the 13th century, a people different from all others, but they have at the same time arrived at completely opposite views of this people. Voltaire admired the Chinese and their system, while Montesquieu saw only oppression and misery, a people languishing under the most brutal despotism.
“These two portraits, drawn by the authors of L’Esprit des Lois, and L’Essai sur les Maeurs, have very little resemblance to the original. There is gross exaggeration on both sides, and the truth is certainly to be sought for between them.
In China, as everywhere else, there is a mixture of what is good and bad, of vice and virtue, that may give occasion to satire or panegyric as the attention is fixed on one or the other. It is easy to find among a people whatever you desire to see in them, if you set out with a preconceived opinion and the resolution to preserve it intact. Thus Voltaire was dreaming of a nation whose annals should be in contradiction with Biblical tradition, a people rationalistic; anti-religious, and whose days nevertheless flowed on in uninterrupted peace and prosperity. In China he thought he had found this model nation, and he did not fail to recommend it to the admiration of Europe.
Montesquieu, on the other hand, was putting forth his theory of despotic government, and wanted some example to illustrate it. He took the Chinese for this purpose; and showed them trembling under the iron rod of a tyrant, and crushed beneath a pitiless system of legislation.”
*
Here we have a simple missionary who does not hesitate to slap two heroes of the Enlightenment on the wrist! He was of course a Catholic and not very fond of the Enlightenment, but unlike Voltaire and Montesquieu, he knew Chinese and had traveled in and around the country for several years.
*
For Huc, the family is the basis of both society and power in China. The emperor is the "son of heaven" and the father figure of the citizens. He has his legitimacy, his mandate, from heaven. And just as he must show allegiance to heaven, men at all levels of society must be obedient "sons" of the emperor. All morality is based on this subordination, and the rites that govern the lives of subjects constantly remind them of the hierarchy of power.
”Every crime, every attempt against the authority, property, or life of individuals, is treated as filial disobedience; while, on the other hand, all acts of virtue, devotion, compassion towards the unfortunate, commercial probity, or even valour in battle, are referred to filial piety; to be a good or a bad citizen, is to be a good or bad son.”
Which of course sounds like the teachings of Confucius. As long as the emperor has the backing of Heaven, the citizens must normally bow down (but Huc and Gabet, on the other hand, traveled in China just as the Taping Rebellion broke out, which was a clear sign that the emperor was losing his heavenly mandate!)
“It follows from this political fatalism, that in epochs of revolution the struggles are terrible, until some decided success and evident superiority have become, for the people, a sign of the will of Heaven. Then they rally at once round the new power, and submit to it for a long time without any hesitation.”
In other words, the
emperor has unlimited power, but only if he is perceived as legitimate. And
because he sits at the top of an enormous hierarchical and difficult-to-control
bureaucracy, it is by no means certain that he will always get his way. Power
is mediated and the mediator has de-facto power as well.
I think Mao understood
the Mandate of Heaven quite well, because every time his policies failed, he
found a scapegoat to blame the failure on. Machiavelli would certainly have
given him high marks! When the Great Leap resulted in mass starvation, he
blamed the Soviet revisionists and "China's Khrushchev," i.e., Liu
Shaoqi. And then he unleashed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,
clearing out potential rivals while allowing millions of young people to vent
their frustrations in a bloody carnival.
Was Mao just another emperor? How about this example from 1069? At that time there was a radical adviser (Wang-ngan-ché) to an emperor of the Song dynasty. Huc calls him the Chinese socialist and thinks he sees great similarities with the French socialists of his time!
"’The first and most essential duty of a government,’ said the Chinese socialist, ‘is to love the people and to procure them the real advantages of life, which are plenty and pleasure. To accomplish this object it would suffice to inspire every one with the unvarying principles of rectitude; but as all might not observe them, the state should explain the manner of following these precepts, and enforce obedience by wise and inflexible laws. In order to prevent the oppression of man by man, the state should take possession of all the resources of the Empire, and become the sole master and employer. The State should take the entire management of commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with the view of succoring the working classes and preventing their being ground to the dust by the rich.’”
This certainly resembles the so-called 'Stalin model' of the theory of comparative economic systems, although Stalin and Mao were less focused on public welfare than Wang-ngan-ché. But the methods of controlling and managing the economy have great similarities, including price controls. Land was nationalized and farmers were allocated a plot of land each year to cultivate with seed, which they borrowed from the state and then paid back after the harvest.
“’It is evident,’ said the partisans of the new scheme, ‘that by these means abundance and happiness will reign throughout the land. The only people who can suffer by this state of things are the usurers and monopolists, who never fail to profit by famine and all public calamities, to enrich themselves and ruin the working classes. But what great harm will it be to put an end at last to the exactions of these enemies of the people? Does not justice require that they should be forced to restitute their ill-gotten gains?’”
Depending on the harvest,
the government could tax the more fortunate provinces and subsidize the less
fortunate ones. In this way, no one would suffer shortages and "the state,
as the sole speculator, would realize enormous profits every year which could
be used for public investment for the benefit of the public." At least
that was the idea!
Mao was a librarian in
his youth, so it's not unlikely that he knew about China's "first
socialist."
But Karl Marx, who was
living in Paris at the same time as Huc and Gabets were on their "long
march" to save the "heathens," would hardly see this early
Chinese model as an example of the "scientific socialism" he was
currently formulating. I wonder if Huc knew of Marx, but it seems unlikely
since the Manifesto was only published in 1848 and by then Huc and Gabet were
already back in Macao.
According to the sources Huc cites, the "socialist" reforms were abandoned after the emperor's death. The chroniclers, of course, reflected the perspective of the upper classes, so it is not surprising that they were outraged by the reforms, perhaps most notably Wang-ngan-ché's "cultural revolution."
“But that which excited the public opinion most deeply against this bold reformer was his attempt to remodel literature, and subject it to his despotic system. Not only did he change the form of examination for the grades of literary rank, but he caused his own commentaries on the sacred books to be adopted as the correct explanation, and ordered that the signification of the characters should be referred to the great dictionary which he had himself composed. This last innovation it was, probably, which drew upon him the implacable hatred of the great number of his enemies.”
When I read this, I think
of Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return that Milan Kundera discusses at the
beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of
Being. Were Mao's revolutions examples of eternal returns, or just examples
of "nothing new under the sun"?
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