Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

As a result of these official disclosures, Terrill has now to a large extent already effected his own aggiornamento : his latest book, Mao , as well as some of his recent articles, reflects this new candour. Sometimes it does not square too well with the picture presented by his earlier writings — but who cares? Readers’ amnesia will always remain the cornerstone of an Expert’s authority.

The People’s Daily has already apologised to its readers for “all the lies and distortions” it carried in the past, and has even warned its readers against “the false, boastful and untrue reports” that it “still often carries.” The China Experts used to echo it so faithfully — will they, this time again, follow suit and offer similar apologies to their own readers?

Or perhaps they were living in a state of pure and blessed ignorance. It is a fact that official admissions of Maoist bankruptcy are a very recent phenomenon; nevertheless, for more than twenty years, voices of popular dissent have been heard constantly in China, turning sometimes into thunderous outcry. These voices were largely ignored in Terrill’s works; having first carefully stuffed his ears with Maoist cotton, he then wonders why he can hear so little, and concludes, “To be sure, it is very hard for us to measure the feelings of the Chinese people on any issue”!

Terrill’s approach ignores the very existence of Maoist atrocities. Whenever this is not feasible, two tactics are simultaneously applied.

Tactic number one: similar things also happen in the so-called democracies—“The Chinese had their own Watergate, and worse.” (Note the use of “worse”; compare with “Smith cut himself while shaving, Jones had his head cut off with the guillotine; Jones’s cut was worse.”) Or again, “Red Guards smash the fingers of a pianist because he has been playing Beethoven’s music. To a Westerner who expects to be able to do his own thing, such action suggests a tyranny without equal in history. In New York City, two old folk die of cold because the gas company turned off the heat in the face of an unpaid bill of twenty dollars. To a Chinese who honours the elderly, it seems callous beyond belief.” Terrill has curious ideas about the Chinese; his statement logically means that in China, smashing the fingers of a pianist is a practice that provokes no revulsion because Chinese do not cultivate individual taste in music; moreover, he would have us believe that, for the Chinese, it is perfectly acceptable to smash a pianist’s fingers so long as the pianist is reasonably young… As regards the elderly New York couple, it would not be true to say that their tragedy met only with indifference in the West: actually, it created a feeling of scandal to the point that it was reported in the press and hence could come to Mr. Terrill’s attention; I do not believe that the kind of thing that happened to the elderly New York couple would attract much attention in China. Not because the Chinese are particularly callous, but for the simple reason that they have already used up all their tears, mourning for hundreds and thousands of elderly people — cadres, teachers, etc. — who died not as a result of neglect and administrative indifference, but because they were tortured to death by Red Guards on the rampage. Moreover, if a moral equivalence can be drawn between accidental death and wilful murder, I suppose that the next step for Terrill would be to write off political executions in totalitarian regimes by putting them on a par with traffic casualties in democracies.

The second tactic develops directly out of the notion according to which the smashing of pianists’ fingers should be somewhat more acceptable in countries that have no individualistic tradition: we should endeavour “to perceive China on her own terms.” Once more, the idea is not to hear what the Chinese have to say on the subject of Maoism — an initiative that Terrill never takes (“it is very hard for us to measure the feelings of the Chinese people on any issue”), but merely to see the People’s Republic through orthodox official Maoist eyes. A logical extension of this principle would be to say that Nazi Germany should be perceived in a Hitlerian perspective, or that, to understand the Soviet system, one should adopt a Stalinist point of view (so sadly missing in, for example, the works of Solzhenitsyn or Nadezhda Mandelstam). Here we come to Terrill’s fundamental philosophy: it is indeed (in the words of one of his titles), “the China difference.”

Things happened in Maoist China that were ghastly by any standard of common decency. Even the Communist authorities in Peking admit this much today. Terrill maintains, however, that, China being “different,” such standards should not apply. Look at the cult of Mao, for instance — it was grotesque and demeaning, and the hapless Chinese experienced it exactly as such. Not so, says Terrill, who knows better; being Chinese and thus different, they ought to have thoroughly enjoyed the whole exercise: “To see these pictures of Mao in China is to be less shocked than to see them on the printed page far from China. This is not our country or a country we can easily understand, but the country of Mao… The cult of Mao is not incredible as it seems outside China. It becomes odd only when it encounters our world… It is odd for us because we have no consciousness of Chinese social modes…” (Meanwhile, Mr. Terrill has changed his mind on this question; in his latest book, he now qualifies the cult of Mao as “grotesque.” Such a shift should not surprise — earlier on, he told us that we always “evaluate China from shifting grounds”; he recalls, for instance, that when he first visited China in 1964, he was still a churchgoer and, as such, felt critical of the fact that the Maoists closed churches; but a decade later, as he was no longer going to church, the closed churches did not bother him anymore: “I saw the issue under a fresh lens. I did not put the matter in the forefront of my view of China, and as a result, I saw a different China.” One should pass on this recipe to the Chinese churchgoers; it might help them to take a lighter view of their present condition.)

Following the fall of Madam Mao, the Chinese expressed eloquently the revulsion they felt for her “model operas” (and indeed, it seems that mere common sense should have enabled anyone to imagine how sophisticated audiences normally react to inferior plays); yet Terrill prefers to consider the issue from the angle of “the China difference” and thus produces this original comment: “When Mao’s last wife rode high in the arts, there were only nine approved items performed on China’s national stage. Such a straitjacket over the mental life of hundreds of millions of people seems amazing to a Westerner. Why did the theatre-loving Chinese people put up with it? Again, we can glimpse the size of the gulf between Chinese values and our own by considering one of their questions: How can a people with the traditions of the American Revolution tolerate the cruelty and inefficiency of having some 7 per cent unemployed?” I wonder if the thought of the 7 per cent unemployed in America ever helped frustrated theatregoers in China to put up with idiotic plays; I even doubt that this same thought ever helped the millions of unemployed Chinese to put up with their own condition, which is much worse than the Americans’ since the Chinese state does not grant them any unemployment benefits.

Having analysed at length Terrill’s method and philosophy, I have very little to add concerning his latest effort. Up to the time of the “Cultural Revolution,” the life of Mao had already been studied by a number of serious and competent scholars. In this area, Terrill does not shed new light; he produces rather an anecdotal adaptation of his predecessors’ works, with plenty of dialogue, local colour and exotic scenery.