Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

All too often his statements are likely to provoke strong reactions in any informed reader; but these reactions, in their very violence, appear at once so totally out of tune with the style of this gentle and amiable man that one feels immediately ashamed of them. To attack Mr. Terrill seems as indecent as to kick a blind man’s dog.

His basic approach is that of the perfect social hostess guiding the dinner-table conversation: be entertaining, but never controversial; avoid all topics that might disturb, give offence or create unpleasantness; have something nice to say to everybody. (His Mao , for instance, is dedicated “To the flair for leadership which is craved in some countries today, and equally to the impulse of ordinary people to be free from the mystifications of leadership.” His next work will probably be dedicated “To the Hare — and to the Hounds.”)

Most of Terrill’s utterances come across as bland and irresistible truisms. (For which he seems to share a taste with some famous statesmen. Remember de Gaulle: “China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese”; or Nixon’s comment on the Great Wall: “This is a great wall.”) Here is a sampling from his books: “A billion people live in China, and we don’t”; “Chopsticks are a badge of eternal China, yet it seems that eternal China might now be changing into another China”; “It is not very startling to say that China needs peace; so does every other country. But not every country gets peace.” “Change will not make China like the United States. But it will make post-Mao China different from Mao’s China” (change generally does make things different from what they used to be, while different things are seldom similar); “Mao rules them, Nixon rules us, yet the systems of government have almost nothing in common”; “Could the Congo produce a Mao? Could New Zealand?” (One is tempted to add: Could Luxembourg produce a Mao? Could Greenland? Or Papua New Guinea? The possibilities of variation on this theme are rich indeed.)

Under this relentless tir de barrage of tautologies the reader feels progressively benumbed. Sometimes, however, he is jerked out of his slumber by one of Terrill’s original discoveries: “Superstitions are gone that used to make rural people of China see themselves as a mere stick or bird rather than an aware individual.” If he genuinely believes that in pre-Communist China people saw themselves as “a stick or bird,” we can more easily understand why he deems Maoist society to have achieved such a “prodigious social progress.”

Terrill claimed that he was not a proponent of Maoism, but he made no secret of his admiration and sympathy for the regime (“[it is] somewhat absurd for non-Chinese to think of themselves as ‘Maoists.’ To be Maoist — when far from China — is hardly helpful to China, one’s own society, or the relationship between the two. The editors of this book [ China and Ourselves ] are certainly not Maoists. They admire the Chinese revolution”) — this very regime which, as we now learn from the People’s Daily and from Deng Xiaoping himself (and even, to some extent, from Terrill’s latest writings!) went off the track as early as 1957 and ended up in a decade of near civil war and of “feudal-fascist terror.”

Terrill visited China several times; his most extensive investigations, resulting in his influential 800,000,000: The Real China , were conducted during the early 1970s — a time that was, by the reckoning of the Chinese themselves, one of the bleakest and darkest periods in their recent history. The country that had been bled white by the violence of the “Cultural Revolution” was frozen with fear, sunk into misery; it could hardly breathe under the cruel and cretinous tyranny of the Maoist gang. Though it is only now that the Chinese press can describe that sinister era in full and harrowing detail, its horror was so pervasive that even foreigners, however insensitive to and well insulated against the Chinese reality, could not fail to perceive it (though it is true, sadly, that too few of them dared at the time to say so publicly). Yet what did Terrill see? “To be frank, my weeks in China exceeded expectations… The 1971 visit deepened my admiration for China and its people…” In that hour of ferocious oppression, suffering and despair, of humiliation and anguish, he enjoyed “the peace of the brightly coloured hills and valleys of China… the excellence of Chinese cuisine…”

Do not think, however, that his enjoyment was merely that of a tourist: “I happen, too, to be moved by the social gains of the Chinese revolution. In a magnificent way, it has healed the sick, fed the hungry and given security to the ordinary man of China.” Maoism was “change with a purpose… the purposive change bespeaks strength, independence, leadership that was political power in the service of values.” “China is a world which is sterner in its political imperatives but which in human terms may be a simpler and more relaxed world.” How much more relaxed? Even though the country is tightly run, “this near total control is not by police terror. The techniques of Stalinist terror — armed police everywhere, mass killings, murder of political opponents, knocks on the door at 3 a.m., then a shot — are not evident in China today… Control is more psychological than by physical coercion… the method of control is amazingly light-handed by Communist standards…” “The lack of a single execution by the state of a top Communist leader is striking… even imprisonment of a purgee is rare… Far more common has been the milder fate of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in 1966… They lived for many months in their own homes. No doubt they lounged in armchairs and read in the People’s Daily the record of their misdeeds… Liu was sent to a village, his health declined and in 1973 he died of a cancer…” (Actually, if one did not know of Terrill’s essential decency, one might suspect him of making here a very sick joke indeed; Liu, who was very ill, was left by his tormentors lying in his own excrement, completely naked on the freezing concrete floor of his jail, till he died. As for Deng, though it is true that he was less roughly treated, he confessed in a recent interview that he spent all those years in constant fear of being assassinated.)

According to Terrill, Maoism has worked miracles in all areas: it “feeds a quarter of the world population and raises industrial output by 10 per cent per year”; it has achieved “thirty years of social progress”; thanks to it, even the blind can now see and the paralytic can walk, as Terrill himself observed when visiting a hospital: “The myth of Mao is functional to medicine and to much endeavour in China… it seemed to give [the patient] a mental picture of a world he could rejoin, and his doctors a vital extra ounce of resourcefulness…” In conclusion, “there are things to be learned [from Maoism]: a public health system that serves all the people, a system of education that combines theory and practice, and economic growth that does not ravage the environment.”

The impossibility of substantiating these fanciful claims never discouraged Terrill; for him, it was enough to conjure up those mythical achievements by a method of repetitive incantation, reminiscent of the Bellman’s in Lewis Carroll:

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:

That alone should encourage the crew.

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:

What I tell you three times is true.

Alas! After he had said it three times, there came the turn of the Chinese to talk, and they told the world quite a different story. Not only the dissenters writing on the Democracy Wall in Peking, but even the Communist leadership itself was to expose in gruesome detail the dark reality of Maoism: the bloody purges, the random arrests, tortures and executions; the famines; the industrial mismanagement; the endemic problems of unemployment, hunger, delinquency; the stagnation and regression of living standards in the countryside; the corruption of the cadres; the ruin of the educational system; the paralysis and death of cultural life; the large-scale destruction of the natural environment; the sham of the agricultural models, of Maoist medicine.