Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

His hands were as long and sensitive as a woman’s… Whatever else he might be he was an aesthete. I was in fact repelled by the feminine in him. An instinctive hostility sprang up inside me, and I became so occupied with trying to master it, that I heard hardly a word of what followed… The following months of precious friendship both confirmed and contradicted his inscrutability. The sinister quality I had at first felt so strongly in him proved to be a spiritual isolation… In him was none of the humility of Zhu De. Despite that feminine quality in him, he was as stubborn as a mule, and a steel rod of pride and determination ran through his nature.

In complete contrast with the intellectual revolutionary elite of his time, which was sophisticated, urban and cosmopolitan, Mao belonged to the old inward-looking peasant world. His intellectual landscape was furnished not so much with Western Marxist writings — which he read belatedly, in a haphazard and superficial way — as with Chinese classical literature, historiography and fiction, with which he developed a lively if patchy and unsystematic familiarity, typical of a self-taught provincial genius.

When already the master of China, he had himself photographed at his desk for an official portrait: it was not by accident that the collection of books stacked in front of him was not one of Marxist classics, but a famous series of eleventh-century Chinese manuals on imperial bureaucratic government. His attacks against Confucius sprang from a pathetically Confucian frame of mind; he still lived in a world — utterly foreign to younger Chinese generations — where Confucius occupied the place and fulfilled the function he envisaged for himself, that of Supreme Teacher of an all-encompassing orthodoxy. The anti-Confucius campaign was but one more expression of the living anachronism he himself had become. His world was still a ritual world, ruled by ideology rather than laws, by dogmatic scriptures — yesterday the Confucian classics, today the Little Red Book — rather than popular debate.

When he pronounced “the primacy of the red over the expert,” he was merely rephrasing a 2,400-year-old axiom from the Confucian Book of Rites : “What is achieved by technique is inferior, what is achieved by virtue is superior.” Such deep roots in the Chinese traditional universe accounted for his most brilliant achievements in the past: when waging guerrilla war in the remote peasant heartland of old China, he had no rival. But when it came to confronting a new world and a new age, when he had to guide China into the modern era, his very strength turned into his worst limitation. He always tried to reduce new problems and issues to terms more familiar to him, those of the backward peasant hinterland, the nostalgic arena of his early victories.

He attempted to move the fight back to his own battlefield, away from the disquieting areas of contemporary ideas and technology that were the preserve of people of whose language he had only an uncertain grasp — those odious intellectuals, academics, specialists and experts for whom he demonstrated a relentless and obsessive hatred.

Here lies his tragedy: he outlived himself by some twenty years. If he had died a few years after the liberation, he would have gone down in history as one of China’s most momentous leaders. Unfortunately, during the last part of his life, by stubbornly clinging to an outdated utopia, by becoming frozen in his own idiosyncrasies and private visions, less and less attuned to the objective realities and needs of a new era, he became in fact a major obstacle to the development of the Chinese revolution. The ultra-conservative faction (mistakenly labelled “Left” by some Western observers), bent on keeping China in tight isolation in order to preserve her ideological purity, used him as a buttress in their last, most desperate stand against the long-overdue movement towards a true modernisation and opening of the country.

China has lost her “Great Leader.” This should allow her at last to start forging ahead again, after an all too long and abnormal interlude of chaotic rule and cultural stagnation. For a nation such as the Chinese, the loss should not be crippling: do truly great peoples ever need a “Great Leader”?

1976

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IN ANY debate, you really know that you have won when you find your opponents beginning to appropriate your ideas in the sincere belief that they themselves just invented them. This situation can afford a subtle satisfaction; I think the feeling must be quite familiar to Father Ladany, the Jesuit priest and scholar based in Hong Kong who for many years published the weekly China News Analysis . Far away from the crude limelight of the media circus, he has enjoyed three decades of illustrious anonymity. All “China watchers” used to read his newsletter with avidity; many stole from it — but generally they took great pains never to acknowledge their indebtedness or to mention his name. Father Ladany watched this charade with sardonic detachment. He would probably agree that what Ezra Pound said regarding the writing of poetry should also apply to the recording of history: it is extremely important that it be written, but it is a matter of indifference who writes it.

China News Analysis was compulsory reading for all those who wished to be informed of Chinese political developments: scholars, journalists, diplomats. In academe, however, its perusal among many political scientists was akin to what a drinking habit might be for an ayatollah, or an addiction to pornography for a bishop: it was a compulsive need that had to be indulged in secrecy. China experts gnashed their teeth as they read Ladany’s incisive comments; they hated his clear-sightedness and cynicism; still, they could not afford to miss one single issue of his newsletter, for, however disturbing and scandalous his conclusions, the factual information he supplied was invaluable and irreplaceable. What made China News Analysis so infuriatingly indispensable was the very simple and original principle on which it was run (true originality is usually simple): all the information selected and examined in China News Analysis was drawn exclusively from official Chinese sources (press and radio). This austere rule sometimes deprived Ladany’s newsletter of the life and colour that could have been provided by less orthodox sources, but it enabled him to build his devastating conclusions on unimpeachable grounds.

What inspired his method was the observation that even the most mendacious propaganda must necessarily entertain some sort of relation with the truth; even as it manipulates and distorts the truth, it still needs originally to feed on it. Therefore, the untwisting of official lies, if skilfully effected, should yield a certain amount of straight facts. Needless to say, such an operation requires a doigté hardly less sophisticated than the chemistry which, in Gulliver’s Travels , enabled the Grand Academicians of Lagado to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and food from excreta. The analyst who wishes to gather information through such a process must negotiate three hurdles of thickening thorniness. First, he needs to have a fluent command of the Chinese language. To the man in the street, such a prerequisite may appear like elementary common sense, but once you leave the street level and enter the loftier spheres of academe, common sense is not so common any longer, and it remains an interesting fact that, during the Maoist era, a majority of leading “China experts” hardly knew any Chinese. (I hasten to add that this is largely a phenomenon of the past; nowadays, fortunately, young scholars are much better educated.)