I’m talking about myself here. I visited the People’s Republic of China in 1978 to research my novel Peking Duck – an overly PRC-sympathetic work which now seems a quaint artifact of another era. (Ironically, the Amazon link contains a hostile, graffiti-like review from the “left.” Obviously the reviewer didn’t read the book.)
[You're being too hard on yourself. That satire you wrote of "radical chic" tours is kind of witty.-ed. You read it? Before we met.]
Meanwhile, Stanley Johnson, another “honored guest” from those days, discusses his visit to China in 1975 in the context of a Guardian article on Mao – the Unknown Story (the new biography which reports the Great Helmsman was responsible for 70 million deaths, making him history’s greatest mass murderer by far). Here’s Johnson:
I have been indulging, in true Maoist fashion, in my own small bout of self-criticism. Though I have been to China several times and once even wrote a (not surprisingly unpublished) novel entitled Chink in the Armoire, the focus of my attention has been on August 1975 when, with a group of colleagues from the European Commission, I spent three weeks travelling around the country on an itinerary which, remarkably for those days, included Peking, Shenyang, Wuxi, Nanking, Shanghai and Canton.
This was the tail-end of the Mao era. Mao himself was still alive, though ailing. The Gang of Four was jostling Deng Xiao-Ping and his allies for pole position in the race to succeed him. Though the worst excesses were probably over, it was not a happy time, or a happy place.
What astonishes me, looking back, is that we not only swallowed all the garbage we were fed, as we visited one commune, one factory after another; we positively lapped it up. Some of us actually sported Mao hats. All of us had notebooks and pencils in hand and scribbled away as we listened to endless lectures about how the “correct application of Mao-Tse-Tung thought” had led to record steel production from a million backyard furnaces, or to staggering rises in agricultural production.
In the evenings, wherever we happened to be, we were treated to performances of Chinese operas and ballets, all designed to reinforce the message. I can remember the titles of some of them now: The Two Heroic Sisters of the Steppe, The Gallant Aviator Sacrifices Himself for the Party.
I attended similar cultural events and even have on my wall to this day a block print of a collective farm I purchased on my trip entitled “Criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius Promotes Production.” It almost sounds like self-parody now. Almost, but not quite, because the same mind game is continuing today in a different context. People who brand themselves as “progressives,” as I did in the Seventies, excuse the worst kind of totalitarian behavior under other names. And I’m not just talking about obvious whackos like George Galloway and Ward Churchill. I’m talking about the same self-imagined “advanced cultural thinkers” we assumed ourselves to be then. (link via normblog; ht; Jeffrey Wendt)
I think you’re being a bit hard on yourself, with regards to how Peking Duck comes across. I just read it two weeks ago, and maybe it’s the perspective I’m reading from, but I think that Wine’s shattered idealism and the problems with the PRC are very obvious. Perhaps it’s because those ideals themselves are hard to take seriously now, but the novel (like all of the Moses Wine novels I’ve read) reads like a prescient critique of the Left, from someone who never bought in as fully as he wanted to think he did.
Wow. That’s interesting, Eric. I have not read the book in some time, of course.
Recant go on like this!
You keep this up, Roger, and we’ll just have to prohibit you from buying cheap socks and blue jeans, in defense of the Revolution…
Funny you should mention this, Roger. I was thinking about it the other day, preparing to write that post about the mindset of the 70s, 80s, and 90s among liberals such as myself.
It didn’t make it into my post, but I clearly remember exactly what you’re talking about. I didn’t visit China, but I well remember all those “happy camper” reports that came back from the early visits in which the journalists, artists, actors, what-have-yous, were basically fed propagandist twaddle and swallowed it whole.
Of course, at the time, the exact truth was hard to come by, since China had been pretty much closed to visitors prior to that. One could have imagined, however, from previous history, that it wasn’t exactly paradise on earth.
It is very puzzling to see how–there is no other word for it–gullible most of these otherwise cynical and intelligent people were. I think part of what was going on was that their cynicism was reserved for the US and its institutions and actions, which were almost constantly questioned. If that cynicism had at least been an equal-opportunity cynicism, it would have been far better than this strange blend of cynicism about the US and wide-eyed naivete about third-world countries. But that seems to be the standard mindset of the left, both then and now.
This part of the leftist mentality goes something like this (on the psychological end, that is): “I want to think of myself as a good person, not a spoiled/entitled/elitist member of the wealthiest nation on earth, and since I don’t want to have to feel so guilty about being a ‘have’ in a world of ‘have-nots’, I will give all third-world countries the benefit of every doubt.”
Not that you or I (or anyone else on this board, for that matter) ever felt that way, of course
.
“Some of us actually sported Mao hats. All of us had notebooks and pencils in hand and scribbled away as we listened to endless lectures about how the “correct application of Mao-Tse-Tung thought” had led to record steel production” etc.
I still have a dark blue Mao suit that my great Aunt Nora, a journalist from Oakland, brought back from her China trip right after the opening (early-mid 70s?). Wish I could locate her letter about it- all I remember her saying is how the Chinese thought her crazy for wanting “men’s” garb and that they almost wouldn’t let her buy it. (I thought the Chicom women had to wear that unisex outfit-?)
Anyway, Nora Hampton was a strong liberal, was first to put blacks into the society page for the Oakland Tribune (and I believe for all women’s sections across the country), and also a patriotic one. She and her husband were good friends with the Nimitz’s and Uncle John volunteered and went to Marine bootcamp in his 30s so that he could work intell in the Korean war as a journalist. They thought too well of Communist China, though, and bought into anti-Japanese sentiment for the longest while.
I stopped talking politics with Nora when she kept referring to Clinton as “that darling boy”! She has since passed on, but Uncle John is 99 or 100 and still going strong.
Just did the math and checked facts: Uncle John was too old for WWII and pulled strings to go, which he did and served in the Pacific. Later, also served in the Korean conflict as a “journalist”.
(Gee, am nearly as “accurate” as the LAT reporters and editorialists. At least my correction was faster.)
neo-neocon
I think you’ve got it exactly right here…
c
I stopped talking politics with Nora when she kept referring to Clinton as “that darling boy”!…
You were too hard on Aunt Nora, as she saw something in Clinton which I think expalins a lot about his continuing appeal.
My wife always said he was a master at looking like “the boy who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” and somehow, by his charm, made us overlook how really destructive his activities were.
People like myself who, at the time, excused his dalliance with Monica as somehow irrelevant, had also overlooked much more sinister misbehavior on Clinton’s part.
But we were “charmed.”
Jamie Irons
Jamie,
Aunt Nora was a dear, a bon vivant, and an intrepid who once rifled through a hijacker’s belongings while en route to Cuba (found out he was a Black Panther and turned the evidence over to the FBI after leaving Havana). But her politics never evolved and allowed for the intrusion of reality. So we just appreciated her amazing stories and let the “darling Bill”s slide. Believe me, I wasn’t hard on her. Her brilliance just had a blindside when it came to certain people (you, too?!), and so we would just change the subject. Have no idea how she would have reacted to 9-11. To her dying day she loved the Chinese officials and their hospitality. (Apparently, Clinton also liked the Chicoms and their “generosity”-)
Fascinating stuff, c. Here, this is O/T, but this is rich…”Journalists” (note the capital ‘J’) defending the guild from a buncha pro-American radio-active scabs.
I, too, was a useful idiot back in the day. But, really, the 60s was the first time the leftist cant reached the masses (us). Anti-Americanism started with the Cold War and subsequent scoundrels who found it useful, like the PLO, paid it forward.
Today, we are more experienced. We have heard all the pickup lines: what’s your sign; bush lied, people died… Most of the students I meet today reject it. Hopefully, there’s enough smart ones.
“We won’t be fooled agin…”
Roger:
As a yellow dog democrat in my 18 to 36 stage of political myopia I was never a marxist but I was a Communist rationalizer. I swallowed whole the “Yes the USSR or Mao’s China may be less then perfect BUT if we hadn’t been so agressive towards them they might not have felt the need to crack down so hard and contest America at every turn” bilge. The difference between a usefull idiot and true believer is too small to claim one is worse then the other. And of course there was always a “Yes but what about America’s….”, fill in whatever evil American practice that was used to change the subject and confuse the issue.
The truth was out there as early as the 30′s but the genius of world wide Communism was the total control of internal communication and the selctive use of outside observers who were given the Potemkin village tours of the various utopian examples of the brave new world. Outsiders were so eager to get in and they knew that one truthfull report would cut off access for life and subject them to withering criticism from the fellow travellers in their home country. It led to a willing self hypnosis that helped spread the lie.
It still goes on today. You can count on at least 3 to 6 stories a year in the op-ed section of the LA Times recounting the horrors of the blacklist.There was just another one last weekMcCarthy was a demagogue and a drunk but the flipside of the story that some of the “martyrs” were active members of a commintern controlled party that’s goal was a Soviet stlye government in America that would have been led from Moscow. The new Radosh book received a quick notice and the subject will never recieve the attention that the “heroes’ of the black list receive. Until it was shown to be a undeniable fact that Hiss and the Rosenbergs were indeed spies the yearly stories of these victims of the pernicous American slander machine were a regular staple of the LAT oldies list that they trotted out when they needed a new dose of self loathing.
The new report on Mao will be reported and then put on the shelf.Pinochet, and the dictators or victims of the post war South American governments are reviewed in detail every year in the LAT. Combine all the victims of the repressive regimes we were either supporting or turning our heads to their actions and they don’t get within hailing distance of Mao. Even the recent hectoring of Japans history books will receive more play in the Times. But Mao will get a drive by so they can get back to doing their 400th Pinochet story.
Kevin Peters
“Yes but what about America’s….”
Oh Kevin, shame, shame. Yeah, some of my friends were like that, drove me crazy because they would then mention something utterly trivial. I never thought much of the Communist regimes because they lied: lied about production, lied about being peace loving, lied about agriculture. I hate lies.
Back to Mao, I visited China in 1988 with a girlfriend who was under the influence of Shirley McLain, you know, how the communes were wonderful and women had achieved full equality. I bit my tongue because it was pointless to argue with her or suggest that maybe McClain was a silly fool. I did get some revenge however: we were walking along the waterfront in Shanghai and witnessed an argument between a man and a woman. There was shouting, yelling, abuse, all the standard man having a fight with his woman stuff. My girlfriend was shocked, shocked, I tell you. How could such things go on in the land of perfection?
Buddy,
That “Truth Tour” link was a bit of good news and sad, too, that it’s at all necessary. After so many years since ‘Nam, we still have the MSM insisting on telling the war story their way to serve their beliefs and conceits, and regular citizens, troops, locals in theater and the government who may have a different perspective and set of facts be damned. In fact, the entire war effort seems to be important to the MSM only insofar as it can be made to validate their power to shape opinion and their left-think. The journalists’ sneering objections to this “Truth” project were telling.
Were it not for the net, what would many of us here believe about current events and politics, and even 20th c. history? And, why do some smart people never amend their politics when given new circumstances or information, and others like Roger- even in the heart of Hollywood!- can alter their politics to stay true to their core principles?
C:
It cracked me up when I read the line that the radio group had made up their minds before going over to Iraq. The MSM has been writing their pre-conceived notions of the war since the start nad then ignoring their own incorrect dire predictions as if they never wrote them. Before afghanistan started all you could read that was how the Soviet Union was broken on the backs of the afghanistan mountains and we were going to repeat their mistakes.As the troops were stalled by the windstorms as they cruised towards Baghdad the Quagmire chorus began and it hasn’t stopped since then. The LAT ran articles that compared the upcoming battle of Baghdad to stalingrad and predicted 19 to 20 thousand casualties. A year or so later the same ppaper would claim that evryone knew that we would be victorious in a easy fashion and the post victory policies should have been planned better.
The effort to turn this war into another Vietnam is wrong on almost every count. The are similar only in the manner that it is a war, we have had casualties and it is overseas. On every other point they are widely different in scale, capabilities of the opponents and in the power of the countries helping the terrorists. The differences so overwhelm any similarities that you have to be historically retarded to make the claim.
There are plenty of valid critiques of the war but the MSM is acting as if the planning of a war is the same as planning on how many bottles of Scotch you need for a DNC fundraiser. It makes me sick to my stomach.
Kevin Peters
(Iraq is) similar (to Nam) only in the manner that it is a war, we have had casualties and it is overseas.
Kevin, aren’t you forgetting that we are oppressing -Ism fighters in a non-Western country with different customs and skin color and who only want to take their country back from us Pale Riders and Yankee hegemonists? There is one critical difference, though: the anti-war music these days is pathetic compared to the glory days of ‘Nam, forcing today’s brave war correspondents and editors to play forty year-old tunes in their heads as they write up the war.
Country Joe and the Fish, where fo’ art dou when yo pipples needja?
I never thought China was anything but a hellhole and I offered prayers of gratitude for not being born there the way Orthodox Jews thank God for not being born female (which I can sometimes see their point)…
Being Chinese *and* female would be particularly awful. In a post recently, I cited some statistics on what Rudolph Rummel calls “democide” — that is, a government’s deliberate slaughter of its people.China is known to have killed 65 million of its people. That is, of its adults and children. However, Mr. Rummel adds another gruesome footnote to this:
“But one may consider that Chinese abortions are often administered by allowing the mother to go through labor, then crushing the childís skull with forceps as it is being born. This seems quite a bit like murder. Additionally, there have been numerous reports of infants being murdered following birth. Infanticide is not the official policy of Communist China. It is, however, the actual policy, official denials not withstanding.
The number of deaths resulting from *coerced* abortions and infanticide since 1971 is estimated at over 110 million, making this perhaps the greatest crime in all of history.”
See my post for some good links to 20th century mass murder #s. China is waaay past everyone else.
Dublin Blogger
A piece of cold comfort: China is facing the same, or worse, numbers as the rest of us in its steep demographic decline. Ain’t none of us going to be around to see the global effects of all this “birth” control via infanticide, but we have the comfort of knowing our descendants will be cursing us for having to live out the laws of a whole bunch of unintended consequences we imposed on them with all our Henny-Penny-the-sky-is-falling “scientific” reasons why we had to limit the population.
Welcome to the new world religion: scientism. It’s no less fundamentalist than any of those other smelly orthodoxies the msm so condescendingly points their fingers at.
BTW, Mr. Rummel doesn’t address the fact that the majority of infanticide victims were female. China is going to have/does have a huge cohort of young males coming along just in time for a renewal of saber-rattling.
Dymphna,
It is more probable that the over supply of males is considered serendipitous by the central government. The policy of infanticide is a product of the static analysis for which Marxism is renowned. Having adopted the policy, the government cannot be but happy and may even have anticipated that one end would be a reduction in the number of females who live to reproduce.
I tend to think of the program as one of slave breeding rather than warrior breeding. China had a superabundance of males of military age prior to the initiation of the one child program. They could levy a hundred million man army tomorrow but they could neither feed nor transport it. Masses of troops simply do not have the strategic value that they once did.
Wrt demographics, it would seem, Dymphna, that after re-assembling such infinitely-measured star-dust just-so into a new being, and then having someone lucky enough not to’ve met the future at the same age, use the word “science” to pop the little thing at birth, like a faulty balloon or something, Mother Nature would not be too pleased. But what do I know.
–Anti-Americanism started with the Cold War—
Not exactly.
It started right out of the box. Were we “admired” because we broke free? Yes, but they wouldn’t extend credit.
Outside of WWI and WWII, we were never liked. Maybe I should say by the big boys of Europe – “the world.” We as a country need to come to terms w/that.
I just began reading The American Enemy by Philippe Roger. Their naturalists started out by hammering the American continent before we were Americans, everthing is smaller here, including the humans. The land is this, the land is that, and some had never even visited.
Just 100 pages in and I’m wondering if we’ve written as many books about them as they have about US. If we haven’t, it’s downright creepy IMHO. They are obsessed.
And if you consider BBC radio is still the most-listened to station, they’ve been anti-American 80 years. They’ve had the world-wide reach.
And I toured behind the Iron Curtain in 1982. I carry around my pic of an anti-American painting on a brick wall from East Germany.
We’ve always been alone and we always will be.
“Independence forever.”
John Adams advice to Americans on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
6/30/1826
Sandy P, like, this?
Until I started to read this blog the only Moses Wine mystery I had any knowledge of was the movie version of The Big Fix which I liked. Though I read alot, mysteries, outside of Raymond Chandler, were not on my reading list. About a month ago I picked up three of the Moses Wine books, Peking Duck, California Roll and The Straight Man. Read Peking Duck first and am starting now on California Roll. It is a pleasure to discover a new (to me) series of books to read. On Peking Duck I agree completely with Eric in the first comment.