Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium

Chapter XIV 冀

前後左右

 

Chairman Mao has taught us to be constantly on the look out for new developments in the class struggle and to study every move in class conflict within the ideological sphere. … Even under the dictatorship of the proletariat, class enemies tirelessly launch new ideological offensives against the proletarian ruling class. They employ deceptive disguises to camouflage their attacks and constantly resort to various sleights of hand to pursue their goal. … The likes of Liu Shaoqi are ‘two-faced people’ who cannily changed disguise with the aim to dupe the People. For a time, they even managed to deceive some who lacked sufficiently sensitive ideological antennae. …

This passage comes from Three Decades on the Cultural Ideological Battle Front, a textbook assigned to our course on Modern Chinese Literature at Liaoning University in Shenyang in early 1976. It was my first encounter with the expression ‘two-faced people’ 兩面人 liǎngmiàn rén.

The cultural history that we studied in the dying days of the Mao era was crowded with traitors, turncoats, double-agents and spies. It was a veritable history of two-faced people. Following Mao Zedong’s death later that year, the cast of swindlers, crooks, scabs and tergiversators that had animated our classes turned out to consist mostly of wrongfully maligned innocents, if not heroes. They were now on the right side of history while their erstwhile detractors were decried as despicable ‘two-faced people’ who ‘turned black into white’ 顛倒黑白 as part of their nefarious plot to ‘throw the Vehicle of History into reverse gear’ 開歷史的倒車.

My encounters with ‘two-faced people’ would increase in frequency through the end of 1976 and beyond. Then, in late 1977, I met Han Suyin, an internationally renowned interpreter of modern China, and a writer would soon enjoy infamy as one of the most prominent two-faced people on the international scene. When we first met, however, ignominy still lay in her future.

Below, I record the details of my encounter with Han Suyin as a way of introducing the connection between Han and Simon Leys, her most famous critic. I conclude with a note on the value and lessons of Han Suyin’s work.

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The rubric of the following is 前後左右 qiánhòu zuǒyòu, literally ‘front-behind, left-right’, or ‘in all directions’. In the context of Han Suyin’s acrobatic skill, it can also be taken to mean, top is down and heads are tails. This chapter Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium is a companion piece to Recalling an Expert ‘China Expert’, which is itself a supplement to ‘1984年’, a chapter in two parts — Simon Leys on George Orwell in 1984; and, 義憤 ‘Profoundly indignant. Longstandingly indignant. Dignifiedly indignant.’.

‘Han Suyin, Two-faced People and China Experts in a Yin-Yang Nation’ should also be read in conjunction with:

• Chapter Six 陰陽兩界 — The Yin-Yang Nation and the Legacy of 1954
• Chapter Seven 人走茶涼 —When the Tea Goes Cold, 3 September 2024

It is also included in our series Watching China Watching.

My thanks, as ever, to Reader #1 for pointing out various glaring infelicities in the draft of this essay. The remaining blemishes are my burden alone.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
26 September 2024

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Encounters with the ‘High Priestess of Maoism’

Geremie R. Barmé

 

Han Suyin was a glamorous and enthralling public speaker. When I heard her address a capacity crowd at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney on the evening of 30 April 1970, I was enraptured. Dressed in a high-necked Chinese jacket her dark hair in a short bob, Han was as austerely elegant as she was eloquent. Her enthusiastic account of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s radical egalitarianism appealed to a rebellious bourgeois brat from Sydney’s well-heeled Eastern Suburbs (for an interview with Han Suyin in 1967, see here).

(In 1970, I was similarly seduced by Jiddu Krishnamurti, the former World Teacher of the Theosophists, who lectured adoring crowds in Sydney about the meaning of life, spirituality and the path to the sublime. I’d been drawn to the mystical charms of Theosophy in my mid teens around the same time as I developed an enthusiasm for Maoist iconoclasm. Krishnamurti’s otherworldliness were a perfect counterweight to the secular utopianism of Han Suyin’s Mao. For a recording of one of Krishnamurti’s Sydney talks, see here.)

For most of the more mature members of the audience at Paddington Town Hall, Han Suyin was famous for being the author behind the film Love is a Many-splendoured Thing. Han’s novel, A Many-splendoured Thing, mixed romance with the historical drama of China’s Civil War all to the backdrop of the exotic British colony of Hong Kong. Romance, historical drama and China would all feature in her subsequent work and her lecture that night inspired me to read her autobiographical trilogy — The Crippled Tree (1965), A Mortal Flower (1966) and Birdless Summer (1968) — works that framed my understanding of modern China and the legacies of colonialism before I had even started studying Chinese with Pierre Ryckmans in Canberra in early 1972 (I was a reluctant student of Standard Chinese since, originally, I was only interested in the classical language due to the attachment I had developed for Taoism and Chan Buddhism in my high-school days; it would also be a useful adjunct to my main interest: Sanskrit, Tibetan and an immersion in Buddhology). In My House Has Two Doors, the fourth installment of her autobiography, Han would recall her Australia trip with what I would soon learn was a characteristic lack of modesty:

In April 1970, Vincent and I went to Australia for my first lecture tour in that continent. This coincided with the launching of China’s first satellite, which went round and round the planet singing: The East is Red.

[Note: See Launching a Satellite.]

Australia was further discovery of the globe we live on; immensely empty land, a hollow land, baffling because upon its strangeness grow excrescences of little Europe—and yet Australia is geographically in Asia.

Despite adverse newspaper articles, large crowds came to my lectures, and the tour was unexpectedly successful. Afterwards there were witch-hunting questions asked in Australia’s parliament: Why had television and radio given me so much time and exposure? As a result, funds for a certain popular programme were drastically cut, a punishment to the producer for having given me time.

Founded on this lecture tour success, the Friendship Association between Australia and China was started, or so its sponsors were kind enough to tell me.

— Han Suyin, My House Has Two Doors, 1980, p.524

It was not until I met Han in person in Beijing on the evening of 30 November 1977, however, that I would experience her ebullient and, for a twenty-three-year-old, irresistible, style at close range. It was also when I learned a little about the history that she had with Pierre Ryckmans, my Chinese teacher who by then enjoyed international renown (or infamy, depending on one’s ideological position) as Simon Leys.

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In the middle of my third year of undergraduate studies at The Australian National University in Canberra, Pierre had encouraged me to apply for a scholarship to study in China. A student exchange scheme between Australia and China had been negotiated following the establishment of relations between Canberra and Beijing in 1973. With the support of Dr Ryckmans (it would be years before I addressed him by his Christian name), and a reference, I travelled to Beijing in October 1974, even before the end of my third year. Although I primarily wanted to continue my studies in Classical Chinese in the People’s Republic, I also wanted to pursue my interest in contemporary China: the political upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, which to a naïve student in the Antipodes appeared to be an exciting anti-establishment youth rebellion, had appealed to me from my high school years in the late 1960s.

In his insightful study of ‘political pilgrims’, the sociologist Paul Hollander captures the spirit of the times brilliantly. He notes ‘that alienation from one’s own society and susceptibility to the attractions, real or imagined, of others are very closely linked’ and that in ‘the 196os and early 7os the putative emptiness of affluence and material comforts provided the broad background against which specific causes for discontent and social criticism came to be projected: Vietnam, race relations, corporate capitalism, consumerism, or the bureaucratization of life.’

Holland also observes that estranged individuals, of which I was certainly one, found fellowship in ‘kindred voices’ raised

across the various geographical and ideological boundaries, which denounce capitalistic greed and wastefulness, excessive military expenditures, racism, poverty, unemployment, the impoverishment of human relationships, the lack of community, the vulgar noises of advertising, the crudeness of commercial transactions—practically everything that is intensely disliked by the Western intellectual.

As Hollander asks,

How could he fail to find some sense of affinity with those who seemingly share his values, his likes and dislikes? … a favorable predisposition toward these societies was based in part on the belief that they stood for the values the intellectuals cherished. Moreover, their very existence meant that Western intellectuals did not have to retreat to purely utopian alternatives to the evils they deplored. Intellectuals critical of their society must believe that social institutions superior to those in their own society can be created. They must be in a position to point, at least tentatively, to the actualization of their ideals in some existing society in order to lend strength to their social criticism at home. If other societies are no better than the one they know best how can they rise to intense moral indignation about the defects of their own society?

— Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: travels of western intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, 1928-1978, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp.7-8

My years as a student in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenyang before Mao’s death in September 1976 filled out the details of what had been an intense interest in the Cultural Revolution for nearly a decade. The experience was nothing if not sobering.

Our classmates were former Red Guards hand-picked to attend the recently reopened universities for their political reliability and unwavering faith in Mao Zedong Thought. Our teachers ranged from those who were obvious hardline opportunists, to submissive intellectuals fearful of making errors as well as those who had seamlessly accommodated themselves to the ever-shifting orthodoxy while maintaining a measure of sotto voce independence. The latter group had a profound impact on my simplistic views.

Shortly after Mao died, the vast edifice of Maoism, and the culture that we had been studying was crumbling in public. It was a process that I experienced first hand in China and then, in Hong Kong, followed on a daily basis as part of my work in a pro-Beijing magazine and publishing house. Amidst the ruins, some people now questioned out loud the history, significance and meaning of the Chinese revolution itself. Although the de-Maoification would continue for years, my own education, a process that even then I called my ‘Hong Kong detoxification’, had only just begun.

During those early years of de-Maoification, from 1977 to 1980, in Beijing I met some of China’s most famous ‘political pilgrims’ —  Israel Epstein, David Crook, Isabel Crook, Ruth Weiss and Sidney Rittenberg — as well as Gladys and Yang Xianyi, celebrated translators who, although loyal to the socialist cause, had a sardonic, indeed hard won, appreciation of Chinese reality.

Between Hong Kong and Beijing, along with frequent trips to Shanghai and Guangzhou, a parallel world to Official China, one that I would later call The Other China, gradually came into view.

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Xianyi and Gladys Yang had invited me for a pre-dinner drink (or rather two, then three) at their apartment in the Foreign Languages Press compound at Baiwanzhuang before the evening meal. I had met the Yangs in October 1976, shortly after Mao’s death and in the wake of the delirious celebrations of the arrest of ‘The Gang of Four’. Welcoming hosts, the Yangs plied their guests with booze, cigarettes and food; all they asked in return was amusing conversation and diverting gossip. In turn I introduced them to friends at the Australian Embassy and, later, to Linda Jaivin, a Hong Kong-based journalist friend and lively raconteur who dubbed the Yangs’ salon The Baiwan Zhuang Speakeasy. I visited them whenever I could in the late 1970s and was a frequent house guest throughout the early 1980s (see The People’s Republic of Wine and Xianyi 憲益: In Tribute).

On that chilly late-November night, we were just settling in for an evening of conversation, whiskey and cigarettes when none other than Madame Han Suyin swept in, unannounced. A larger-than-life presence who appeared in a tailored great coat and colourful scarf, in person Han was even more charismatic than I remembered. Despite being awed by her air of celebrity, it was her overwhelming self-regard that left the strongest impression. As Pierre Ryckmans, who first encountered Han in the 1950s, remarked to his biographer, Philippe Paquet: ‘When you were talking to her on your own, you got the impression she was haranguing an audience of five hundred people.’ Now, Xianyi, Gladys and I we were a willing captive audience. For me it was an enthralling moment.

The Yangs, whose translations of classical Chinese literature made them famous far outside the narrow realms of current events, had known Han since she had begun her annual pilgrimage to the People’s Republic in 1956. Gladys and Xianyi were a rare team — Xianyi was from a privileged Chinese background and Gladys, who was born in Beijing, was the daughter of a missionary and the scholar Delia Davin, who was a close friend, observed that they ‘had a special affection for the writer Han Suyin, then resident abroad but a frequent visitor to China, because she had described so well the difficulties of growing up in a mixed family in China in an earlier era.’

Over the years prior to 1966, Han had frequently popped in to see the Yangs as part of the annual information-gathering tours that fueled her prodigious output. In My House Has Two Doors, the fourth volume of her autobiography published in 1980, she recounts one visit during the Anti-Rightist purge that followed Mao and Zhou Enlai’s disingenuous appeal to intellectuals, bureaucrats, students and workers to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’ as the Party opened itself up to public criticism:

I went to call on the Yangs. Yang Hsienyi and his wife Gladys, a beautiful, able Englishwoman, worked at the Foreign Language Press: both were scholars and superb translators. Their house was the meeting place for Chinese writers, painters, poets and also for many of the foreigners who came through Peking. But they did not wish to discuss the Hundred Flowers. Too many of their friends were being labelled rightists; among them a famous film director, some scriptwriters, a satirist or two, a few poets. However, they did see, as I did, the fundamental foolishness of challenging the Party in its holding of power, either directly or indirectly. ‘Some party cadres are geniuses at detecting innuendoes in almost anything one utters, even remarks on the weather can become matter for political scrutiny,’ said Yang Hsienyi in his bland, dead-pan manner.,

I asked them: Was the Hundred Flowers nothing but a trap?

The words ‘Yes, it was a trap’ had appeared in a newspaper article, which explained that it was the rightists who had trapped themselves. The Yangs did not think it was a trick to catch whatever residual counter-revolutionary thought or sentiment might subsist in the souls of scholars. It was an openly baited, clearly signposted test for anyone who used common sense and was percipient.

— Han, My House Has Two Doors, p.201

[China Heritage Note: this is a reference to Mao’s claim that he set a 陽謀 ‘overt plot’ for the Party’s enemies, as opposed to a 陰謀, ‘underhand scheme’. The newspaper article that Han is referring to is probably Wen Hui Pao’s Bourgeois Orientation Should Be Criticized, published on 1 July 1957. Many of the Yangs’ friends who were caught up in the purge were members of Layabout’s Lodge 二流堂, which they had been involved with in Chongqing during the war.]

A few years later, Han visited again and the vexatious topic of dissent came up again:

‘I hope that now there won’t be any more thought-remoulding for the intelligentsia,’ I said. ‘It’s been greatly softened down,’ said Hsienyi. ‘After all, our intelligentsia have had ten years of liberation and are adapting themselves … ’ Then Gladys would tell me how she had gone through the process. ‘I was teaching in Nanking when Liberation came. I took part in the movement for thought-remoulding. It was extremely painful, but also fascinating. I wept, I broke down, I even became a little hysterical … but at the same time, we were all in it together and there was a sustaining togetherness. I watched myself become other, sprout another me, a personality which no longer suffered alienation. I did, in a way, become someone else, but not altogether; in the end I chose what adapted me and I remained myself. I co-operated in the process, even if, at times, I was co-operating in humiliating myself. Now I am able to see things in several ways at once.’

We discussed what I would have done; and Hsienyi said, ‘You would have remained yourself in the end, but I think you would have pretended a lot.’

— Han, My House Has Two Doors, p.315

[China Heritage Note: Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, New York: Norton, 1961, remains an essential text for understanding the period touched on by Gladys here, as well as in subsequent phases of PRC history.]

Those meetings had been followed by a lengthy hiatus in contact since Xianyi and Gladys were jailed as spies in the mid 1960s, and for a time Han herself had kept a studied distance from China. Despite the disappearance of most of her contacts, Han was soon back in the field and she continued to publish breathless reports of her renewed travels and she was quick to reconnect with the Yangs following their release from jail in 1972. ‘On May 4th, 1972 I was back in China’, she records virtually without missing a beat, now that the most extreme phase of the Cultural Revolution had passed with the mysterious death/ murder of Marshal Lin Biao, Chairman Mao’s ‘close comrade-in-arms and hand-picked successor’.

My friends the Yangs were out of jail and could have me at home for dinner. How wonderful it was, to see some of my old friends again! ‘Chou Enlai’, they said. Of course it was Chou Enlai who had opened the jail gates for them. In the next two years many hundreds of thousands would be released …

Gladys and Hsienyi did not talk of their jail experience for a long time. Gladys had had the worst of it, for she had been in solitary confinement. And this not through viciousness, but through respect for her higher status as a foreigner! This Englishwoman stood the ordeal nobly and came out luminous, calm, and sane, ready to serve China again (although she could have asked to leave). What strength of character! What fortitude! ‘I now understand the quirks of a revolution much better,’ said Gladys in her quiet upper-class voice. …

Hsienyi said he had known about Lin Piao’s downfall probably before many other people in China. ‘Each one of us had a copy of the little red book in jail. One day our jailers asked all of us to give them back. The copies were returned the next day, but the preface page written by Lin Pino had been cut out of each one. That’s how we knew. He was erased, effaced. We looked at each other with big smiles. We thought we would be out very soon.’

The Yangs had returned to their flat, redecorated for them at government expense. Nothing was missing. They were paid their back salaries in full.

— Han, My House Has Two Doors, pp.570-571

Five years later, on that November evening in 1977, Han basked in the afterglow of her audience earlier that day with Deng Xiaoping, the Party leader who had only recently reappeared after having been purged yet again as recently as April 1976. Han, in concert with the Chinese masses — and Zhou Enlai — had excoriated Deng when, in 1967, he had been denounced as the nefarious henchman of President Liu Shaoqi and an enemy of Mao Thought. In her public lectures she had confidently quoted The People’s Daily:

What is the main contradiction in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? It is the one opposing the proletariat to the small number of people in authority who, although they were communists, were following the capitalist road.

The ideas spread by party members in high places who were following the capitalist road had indeed done much harm, promoting careerism and bureaucratic cliques which spread their influence. Of this beginning bureaucratic tyranny, there is much evidence, chiefly in the Chinese press. What characterized these bureaucrats was a certain style of work, a certain way of life; putting themselves above others; ‘becoming lordly; ceasing to participate in manual work; so authoritarian that gradually no one dared to talk to them or to criticize them without being called counter-revolutionary and punished. This kind of totalitarianism, a product, not of socialism, but of degeneration within the socialist structure, the communist party, Mao Tsetung set about to cure.

When Han wrote these words in 1969, she was already a deft hand at ‘whataboutism’, a dialectical sleight of hand that is still popular today:

It was rational for a good many people that the U.S. should go bombing and destroying, napalming and defoliating, and send 540,000 men to Vietnam to ‘save’ Vietnam from ‘communism’, across the Pacific Ocean; but would it appear right if China were to cross the Pacific Ocean to bomb Mexico in order to protect it from Americanism? Even her legitimate right to Taiwan, her own territory, is contested. The murder by machine-gunning of a couple of hundred students peacefully demonstrating in Mexico City is perfectly rational and does not disturb the conscience of the Olympic Committee; but a dozen corpses discovered in a Chinese river discredits the whole Cultural Revolution.

— Han Suyin, Asia Today: Two Outlooks, 1969, pp.66 and 79 respectively 

Now, in 1977 over a year after Mao’s death, Han was delighted to have met with a man denounced by Red Guards as China’s Number Two Capitalist Roader. Deng was not only back but, as Ye Jianying had told her earlier in the year, his star was rising once more. Han had been adroit in positioning herself so that she could offer her thirsty international readership insights into what it all meant and where things were going.

Despite that encounter in the Great Hall of the People, however, even Han Suyin, a reporter who was punctilious about staying in lockstep with Beijing, could not imagine the monumental role that Deng would play in the years to come. No matter, as the political landscape was roiling in 1977, Han proved to be as deft in currying favour with him as she had been with other Party leaders. Long aware of the Eurasian English writer’s formidable international reputation, Deng for his part was quick to seize on an opportunity to promote himself.

I had read the copy of Han’s Wind in the Tower: Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution, 1949-1975, published in 1975, that she had given to Xianyi and Gladys, but at that point I was unaware that a second edition of the book, with a new chapter — ‘The Passing of Mao Tsetung’ — that covered recent developments, including a sympathetic account of Deng’s ouster, was already in the works. (Wind in the Tower was a companion to The Morning Deluge: Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution 1893–1954, a two-volume history and Mao hagiography published in 1972.)

I recalled that meeting between Deng Xiaoping and Han Suyin years later when interviewing the journalist Dai Qing for an academic study of historiography in China. Dai had grown up in the family of Marshal Ye Jianying, the army leader who planned and helped oversee the arrest of ‘The Gang of Four’ in early October 1976, an event known as the ‘Huairentang Coup’ 懷仁堂政變, named after the meeting hall in Zhongnanhai where members of the group were detained.

Shortly thereafter, Ye invited Deng to take refuge in his well-guarded villa at Yuquanshan in the northwest of the capital. There, Dai Qing told me, she witnessed a constant stream of supplicants who came to pay their respects to the twice-purged Party elder. Since Deng was under Ye Jianying’s protection, the visitors knew it would not be long before the twice disgraced leader would be restored to power. During our interview, said ‘It all taught me a great deal about the capricious nature of human sentiment’ 世態炎涼，人情冷暖. Simon Leys makes a similar point in regard to Han Suyin below:

Only political simpletons will be scandalized by her passing on the propaganda of the “Gang of Four” in the West when the Gang was going strong, only to switch to supporting Comrade Deng, now that he has the wind behind him.

But on that liquor-doused evening at the Yangs, Han teased us with hints about the major changes afoot at ‘Party Central’ 中央, the common term for Zhongnanhai. From 1949, the party-state apparatus was headquartered in the lake palaces that hugged the western flank of the Qing dynasty Forbidden City and, since the Communists proved to be even more secretive and treacherous than their dynastic predecessors, Xianyi always referred to the ruler’s compound as ‘The Great Within’ 大內, an imperial term for the court. He smiled his cheshire-cat smile and egged Han Suyin on. Although we gleaned a few tidbits from the exchange that she had with Deng, Han was careful not to reveal too much, although I do remember that near-beatific look on her face, as well as a studied air of mystery, as she inwardly reflected on the insights she had just gleaned. Gladys, an unfailingly caustic observer, later remarked that she could tell that a new book was in the offing.

Han Suyin broke off her monologue long enough to inquire about my background and my relationship with the Yangs. Upon learning that Pierre Ryckmans was my teacher she paid me particular attention; I knew that Pierre’s The Chairman’s New Clothes, an unsparing critique of the Cultural Revolution, had outraged French Maoists (and been quietly applauded by Beijing litterateurs like Yang Xianyi and Qian Zhongshu), but it would be some time before I would appreciate the reasons behind Han’s agita (for the background to Han’s relationship with Pierre, see Philippe Paquet’s account below, under the heading ‘Simon Leys & Han Suyin’). During our subsequent encounters, which continued infrequently well into the 1980s, Han Suyin, like her fellow China Expert Ross Terrill, made a point of mentioning the man she only ever referred to as ‘your teacher’ before launching into yet another mini diatribe. But, in 1977, My House Has Two Doors, the fourth volume in Han’s autobiography, had not been written and Pierre had yet to be ‘triggered’ by it into writing ‘The Double Vision of Han Suyin’ (the text of which is reproduced below). It was only after that did I witness the full extent of the rancour that she felt for Simon Leys. After all, among other things, in his review of Two Doors, Pierre had the temerity to ask out loud how such ‘an authoritative reputation’ as Han’s could have possibly been ‘based on such a shifting standpoint’. Although, I would note that Pierre and Han did share one particular insight: at different times, but in exactly the same words, they both told me that ‘The only religion of the Chinese is China’.

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As I became more familiar with post-1949 cultural history, I realised that Han Suyin’s career as a China reporter cum chronicler flourished just as the the leading journalists and editors on the ground were being silenced. Their number included Chu Anping 儲安平, a man who famously warned of the dangers of The Party Empire 黨天下, Xu Zhucheng 徐鑄成, the editor of Wenhuibao in Shanghai targeted when Mao betrayed the avowed promise of the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956 (see the note above), and Liu Binyan 劉賓雁, a young reporter who enjoyed overnight fame for criticising Party bureaucrats and exposing official corruption. While the free-range Han Suyin would be an international star interpreter of the twists and turns of modern Chinese history, Chu Anping was stripped of his job as the editor of China’s second most important paper and died in mysterious circumstances in the Cultural Revolution. The once formidable editor Xu Zhucheng ended up as little more than a wraith and, although Liu Binyan did eventually enjoy a powerful comeback, he soon found himself the object of crushing official displeasure, later dying in exile in the United States. While ever new generations of editors and journalists foundered, Han Suyin continued to enjoy both the privileges of a valued foreign guest and the precious access of a trusted insider.

[Note: Over four decades after I met Han, I would write about the contrast between the freedoms enjoyed by positively disposed foreign correspondents and the plangent fate of independent Chinese thinkers and journalists. See The Good Caucasian of Sichuan & Kumbaya China, China Heritage, 1 September 2020.]

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My future encounters with Madame Han, always chez Gladys and Xianyi were friendly enough, not to mention entertaining; after all, Madame Han was always ‘on’ and knew how to play to the gallery. She also proved to be a prolific correspondent and we exchanged a number of letters, although none contained anything substantial. Not surprisingly, Gladys enjoyed a voluminous epistolary relationship with the acclaimed author and she joked more than once that since Han repeatedly admonished her to save all of her letters, ‘I naturally presumed that she was hoarding her correspondence for posterity’.

I knew Han during the watershed years between when she was still a ‘somebody’ and when, to quote a delightful Clive James essay on the subject of celebrity, ‘being somebody was the only thing that somebody did.’ Even as Han Suyin’s global reputation waned and her local fame was eclipsed by others, she remained unwaveringly confident in her succès d’estime. Still, as the 1980s progressed, I couldn’t help but think of Norma Desmond’s famous line in Sunset Boulevard: ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ Like the fictional Norma, Madame Han was always ready for the next close-up.

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As Beijing struggled to repair the self-inflicted reputational damage it suffered as a result of June Fourth 1989, Han Suyin enjoyed a momentary uptick in the arc of her inexorable decline in ranking. As part of a PR blitz aimed at swaying Western opinion in favour of China after the Beijing Massacre, the newly installed Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin made a point of inviting the once-famous pro-regime propagandist to visit. State media lauded her for her unwavering insights into the Real China, as well as for her various philanthropic activities. The afterglow continued well into the new millennium.

Other formerly mollycoddled international friends and amateur propagandists who were not buoyed either by the kind of reputation or productivity of which Han could boast, gradually became even more of an embarrassment. For form’s sake, and as part of the creaky ‘old friend’ dogma of Beijing, they were tolerated, albeit grudgingly. As this motley crew cascaded down, rung by rung, the ladder of status, their ignominy was reflected in the rank of the leaders who granted them audiences, the frequency and quality of the banquets they enjoyed, the make and model of the limousines that ferried them around Beijing and the accommodations that they were accorded.

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Zhou Enlai, the Intoxicant

The Chinese premier Zhou Enlai played a significant role in the life and writing of Han Suyin, as well as in the intellectual trajectory of Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys). Both writers had impactful meetings with Zhou in the mid 1950s.

Han Suyin would boast that over the course of her sixty trips to China, she had met with Zhou no fewer than eleven times (‘nine full interviews, one lunch conversation, and a casual meeting’). It was evident that her insights into the dizzying cavalcade of Chinese politics relied heavily on his guidance and her Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, 1898-1976 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), an unabashedly hagiographical account, also reflects the role the Premier played in Han’s life:

Nearly two decades after the death of Zhou Enlai, Premier of China, statesman of recognized world stature, an avalanche of articles, poems, and books continues to pour out about him, the personal memories of hundreds of Chinese who met him, worked with him, and felt the magic of the man’s personality enhance their own lives. Millions of young students who have never known him yet talk of him as the most honest, the most dedicated and selfless personality in China’s history. This enduring love, admiration, and respect for the man still known as “the beloved” makes writing a book about him a difficult task. I have tried to find faults, defects, in the man, and have written them down. But in China these foibles are regarded as only more evidence of his regard for others, of his willingness to see someone else’s point of view, of trust and faith in others.

— Han Suyin, Foreword, Eldest Son

In Zhou Enlai: A Life (Harvard, 2024), a far more penetrating work, Chen Jian makes a point of noting that:

Han Suyin, an internationally renowned writer and biographer of Zhou, found it virtually impossible “to find faults (or defects)” in Zhou.

Chen Jian has no difficulty in doing so, although a glaring omission in an otherwise exhaustive account of Zhou Enlai, one based on the available public sources, is the work of Simon Leys. It is a telling omission, in particular since Leys’s succinct evaluation of Zhou in 1984 is more insightful than that of Chen in 2024.

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A year before Han Suyin’s ensorcelling meeting with the Chinese Premier, Simon Leys had his own life-altering audience with Zhou. In an essay on the dark role that Zhou played in the Chinese revolution, which included an appraisal of his sycophantic genius, Leys observed that:

His unique competences made him indispensable; and he cultivated at the same time a quality of utter elusiveness: no one could pin him down to a specific political line, nor associate him with any particular faction. He never expressed personal ideas nor put his own theoretical views on paper. Where did he really stand? What did he actually believe? Apparently, he had no other policies but those of the leader of the moment, and nourished no other ambitions but to serve that leader with total dedication. …

Yet, the brilliance of Zhou’s mind, the sharpness of his intelligence, his personal magnetism, his eloquence and authority constantly belied the kind of bland selflessness which he so studiously displayed in the performance of his public duties. Zhou’s enigma lay in this paradox: that, with all his exceptional talents, he should also present a sort of disconcerting and essential hollowness.

Below, first Han Suyin, followed by Simon Leys, tell us about meeting Zhou Enlai. In homage to Simon Leys’ review of Han’s My House Has Two Doors, which is also featured her, we list Han’s experience under ‘heads’ and that of Simon Leys under ‘tails’.

— Geremie R. Barmé

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Zhou Enlai — Heads

1956: Han Suyin Gains Access to Zhongnanhai

On that afternoon in June 1956 in Peking Zhou Enlai climbed on the rostrum and spoke. He looked happy, his eyes shone. He had delivered the previous day a speech on external policy which contained all the elements of an ‘opening’ upon the world. Now Chou Enlai gave a speech on internal policy that was so contrary to all that was current and habitual in Western minds about China and China’s system that it held me spellbound.

I sat with Jacques Locquin of Agence France-Presse, occasionally translating for him. But my attention was riveted to Zhou and his words, and the translation I made was inadequate. Locquin, however, was so fired by what I told him that he immediately sent a cable to Paris; to which there was no response at all.

Plans for scientific and economic advance; a total reshaping of the economy, and above all, decentralization, the regions being given more power of their own, with less central rigidity. The adjustments to be made between the individual and the group, between the small group and the larger collectivity; between the Party power-holders and the people — all these Zhou talked about. The need for the intelligentsia, for non-communist parties to continue in their useful work of providing through advice and criticism a necessary foil for the Communist Party; the need for destroying the bad habits of commandism and sectarian behaviour in the Party; the need to listen to criticism, even if it was unpalatable … an electrifying speech, and the faces of the listeners showed their elation, their excitement. Zhou managed to pack into that hour the sensation of a new set of policies, the search for a framework to broaden the basis of consultation.

As in 1941, when I had heard Zhou Enlai speak in the streets of Chongqing [the Nationalist government’s wartime capital], because the crowd was so large no hall could contain it, I was moved by some quality in him beyond eloquence or rhetoric. He was not gifted with oratory; but he was immensely impressive through his deep sincerity, the reasonableness and the simplicity of what he said, which everyone understood.

What Zhou Enlai said implied a departure from the accepted theses of how to run a socialist state. And yet I was to discover that he was not its sole originator; it was a combined effort, with Mao Zedong as the visionary behind it; for Chou’s speech was an interpretation of a speech delivered by Mao in April of 1956 to Party secretaries and state ministers and leaders from all over China. Neither was Mao’s speech an individual creation; it was based on work done, for more than two years, by Chinese economists and statisticians and social science researchers probing and studying to discover what was the best, the more effective way to accelerate development in such a backward and poor country as China.

But none of us, at the time, knew of Mao Zedong’s speech, or of the collective effort that had gone into gathering the material for it. In fact, Mao’s speech, which was to be called ‘The Ten Major Relationships’ was not to be officially published until twenty-one years later, in April 1977!

[Note: On The Ten Major Relationships, published for the first time in the fifth volume of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong.]

I have always been puzzled by this extraordinary delay. I think it was a regrettable error; for had this speech of Mao been known earlier, many things which harmed China might not have happened. I was able to obtain an ‘illegal’ version of it in the mid 1960s.

Zhou Enlai’s speech was the foundation (so frail, so chancy at the time) of the democratization of China. Twenty years would go by before its meaning would take hold.

I asked Gong Peng whether I might have an interview with Premier Chou Enlai, and handed her six pages of wide-ranging questions. I then waited about ten days. …

[China Heritage Note: Gong Peng (龔澎, 1914-1970) was Zhou Enlai’s long-term assistant and facilitator. Han had first met Gong in 1940s’ Chongqing and, from the mid 1950s up to her death in 1970, she acted as Zhou Enlai’s ‘Han Suyin handler’. She guided this very special and useful foreign friend in her journeys of discovery around People’s China. Gong was married to Qian Guanhua who was also an influential Party diplomat.]

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A small black car with an unassuming young man in it came to fetch me.

We drove towards Zhongnanhai, where China’s leaders resided; but the young man did not know the exact entrance, so we were ten minutes late.

I was going to see Chou Enlai in his own home.

Through the neat avenue bordered with oleanders to a modest pavilion, and there were Zhou Enlai and his wife Deng Yingchao, and with them only Gong Peng.

It was like a visit to one’s own family, so simple, with no protocol of any kind. In the living room, many books on shelves, but no antiques, no curios, no priceless furniture. Old worn sofas, rattan chairs, a worn and cheap carpet… At one time during the next three hours I had to use the toilet, and went through their bedroom. Small wooden twin beds, old blankets, no carpet on the floor, a washbasin, a desk with a lamp … Spartan. And this was no fake. Zhou simply did not care for any material comfort.

‘So you did not go to the Anshan steel works,’ said Zhou immediately.

I had been offered a visit to the Anshan steel works; they were the pride of China then, set up by the U.S.S.R., but I had refused to go.

‘I don’t understand machines’, said I.

‘I hear you do not go to the United States, although you are popular there through your novel,’ said Zhou Enlai.

‘I don’t go to the United States, Prime Minister,’ I replied.

Zhou glanced at me and that grin, which some newsmen described as utterly devastating, swept over his face. Appreciation, humour, understanding, and beyond that the very human touch of recognition … recognition that in himself also existed those impulses, those dos and don’ts, unexplainable.

Gong Peng said that I was ‘very determined’. ‘See how well she talks Chinese, although she had to fight for a Chinese education, and she has been abroad so many years.’

‘We talk Chinese in Malaya,’ I said.

Zhou then asked about Malaya, and Singapore, and David Marshall. David had by then accepted the invitation to come to Peking.

‘Now,’ said Zhou, ‘you’ve given me a long list of questions. A very long list.’

I had questions about law, legal trials, people’s courts and ‘mass’ judgments with the attendant risk of prejudice and passion; a question on the writer Hu Feng and the demarcation between expression of personal opinion and counter-revolutionary thought or behaviour; the ineptness of Chinese propaganda abroad, with its bombast and smugness; the low political level of criticism of individuals in the mass political campaigns (in so far as I had been able to find out). There were questions about the plethora of bureaucrats, all non-productive, and the rising élitism among the bureaucracy, as exemplified by priorities, perks, such as travel on trains.

There were questions on hygiene, and on the fact that too many meetings after work interfered with normal rest and were injurious to health. I asked about birth control, and finally I tackled the question of ‘socialist realism’ in writing.

‘I’m not going to answer all of them,’ said Zhou Enlai.

He would delegate Marshal Chen Yi [陳毅] to continue the conversation with me another day. Meanwhile, he gave me almost three hours; with measured clarity and conciseness he covered a vast amount of ground. His main theme was the long Chinese Revolution, with its many turns and twists and crises. How many times in the past people had said ‘It’s all over’. But true revolutionaries went on, despite setbacks and failures. And there had to be setbacks and failures; for how otherwise could there be advance? The future was still uncharted ground …

‘But one thing is certain. We are going forward. There is no going back. The door to going back is closed.’

Zhou said this with great passion, with an almost lyrical rising of tone and an abrupt gesture, his eyes flaming.

‘The power we have will not be lightly cast aside, not in the name of pseudo-liberalism, which will only lead to a tyranny like the one we have just emerged from.’ For the future, and because of the needs of the country, ‘we are prepared to go along even with people who disagree with us, provided they do not sabotage the socialist revolution.’

This was the United Front theory; a major concept of Mao Zedong, and one which had been practised during the war with Japan, and which had been an indispensable factor in victory.*

* See The Morning Deluge.

‘You think there is no dissent in the Party; this is a common subjective view in the West; that the Communist Party is a monolith …’ It was not so, Zhou said. ‘If you only knew how much we debate, discuss, argue … we often hold very different opinions …’

Again there was a note of passion in his voice. There was always, he said, a lot of talk about individualism in Western countries, but it was in China that with progress, prosperity and security there would come the full blossoming of the individual … for how could there be ‘individualism’ when in so many nations of the world people still died of hunger, were exploited and had no security? The Constitution of 1954 had been a great step forward to ensure the rights of the Chinese people, rights which they had not had before. Had I not personally known what the situation was in Old China?

But the West (and I think here Zhou meant chiefly the United States) found it ‘difficult’ to face what had been inevitable, the triumph of the Chinese Revolution. ‘There is always a time lag in understanding the realities of history.’ It might take a long time before the West accepted these realities, but ‘We are patient. We shall never provoke a war. We want, above all, peace.’ This did not mean knuckling under. He referred to his speech at Bandung in 1955 and how it had been welcomed by so many countries emerging from colonialist dependence. Bandung in 1955 and the Geneva Conference of 1954, which had seen the end of the war in Indo-China, had been landmarks for Asia, Africa and Latin America. But the United States strove to ignore history, and was even contemplating the use of military force to maintain or perhaps extend her hold in Asia. ‘This is wild dreaming,’ said Zhou with great composure.

As for Taiwan, it was China’s territory, and ‘No one on earth shall tell us what to do with our own territory … that is infringement of sovereignty.’

The world of the enslaved had now risen; and there would be battles fought because national liberation never came except through struggles; but this did not mean provoking a war. Neither did it mean attacking others.

Some people thought that once socialism was established everything was like Paradise; others saw it as unredeemed Hell. Actually, ‘we have no experience in socialist construction … we shall have to find the way, which best applies to our own background and concrete conditions …’

I had heard through Peking’s ever-busy grapevine that the Soviet Ambassador, Yudin, had reported to Moscow with great concern about the project of the Hundred Flowers and the new orientation. Zhou did not reply to my hint about this. ‘No one can stop the tide of history.’ Then he went off at a tangent. What kind of life, what frustrations had the intelligentsia of China suffered in the past? ‘Look at your own father, who came back to build a railway in 1913. He had to wait until 1952 to see it built. By us.’

Of course the remoulding of an intellectual was a very painful process, but had the Revolution been easy? ‘Our intelligentsia is, however, progressing towards socialism.’

‘Prime Minister, my rate of progress is exceptionally slow.’

Again that lightning grin, impish; Zhou liked controversy, argument, spirit in others. He hated flattery, fawning, servility. Thirteen years later, one November night in 1969, he would tease me about my rate of progress. This was the night he introduced me, at my request, to the redoubtable wife of Mao, Jiang Qing.

Zhou now described the composition of the National People’s Congress, the highest organ of authority in China from the juridical point of view (but it would take many years until it would assume its proper authority, as it is beginning to do today). He showed me how the eight non-communist parties, which represented at most only 1 to 2 per cent of the population, held around 39 per cent of the seats. The policy was to retain the non-communist parties ‘for a long time to come’. In the same way, urban votes, representing only 10 to 12 per cent of total votes in China, had been given for the time being eight times the weight of rural votes.

Otherwise there would be a complete swamping of the intelligentsia in the cities by the peasantry in the rural villages.

We then spoke of the ‘mistakes and errors’ by Party cadres. ‘I understand you have been collecting examples of such mistakes,’ said Zhou, again with that flashing smile. ‘We do try to avoid them … and we always want to know about them … sometimes the top level does not know what is really happening down below.’ I told him then what Rui [wife of Han’s ‘Third Brother’] had suffered in Sichuan, and both he and his wife listened sympathetically. ‘Yes, such things do happen. We do try to rectify and reappraise, however … and we must not say a system is bad just because mistakes are made. How long has it taken democracy in the West really to function? And what is its true basis? I think you should study more deeply,’ said Zdhou Enlai. ‘I heartily agree, Prime Minister.’

Deng Yingchao then spoke to me. She was a small-boned woman, attractive in her youth and still intensely charming and deeply intelligent. As a student she had been a fiery and gifted orator. She and Zhou Enlai had worked together since their student days; both had participated in the first cultural revolution of May 1919. Deng Yingchao had been one of the pioneers to go among the women factory workers of Tianjin and Shanghai and to mobilize them in the massive demonstrations of the 1920s. She had also run night schools. She had done the Long March, although at the time ridden with tuberculosis. She had had a prize placed upon her capture by the Kuomintang; Edgar Snow has told, in one of his books, of how he helped to smuggle her out of a city and thus escape capture and probably execution.

Deng Yingchao … suddenly spoke about the Communist Party, but in such a poetic way, with such deep feeling, that her words would stay with me vividly until today. The Party, said she, was not something created in the abstract; it could be likened to the white spume on top of the ocean waves. The ocean was the people; the white foam seemed to lead, but it was water-borne and water-bred and could not exist without the water below. ‘This is our experience, those of us who have worked all these years for the liberation of the Chinese people.’ When I took my leave, I felt enlarged, another dimension added to my thinking. ‘China will be all right if there are such people as Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao,’ I thought. ‘I indeed have a great deal to learn … judgments about China are so superficial, I told Gong Peng.

Back at the hotel, Locquin tried to extract something from me but I was unable to convey the warmth, the intimate friendliness and concern which I had felt right through the afternoon with Zhou Enlai. But the newsmen were all, anyway, favourably impressed by Zhou. ‘He is a formidable type, an extraordinary personality’, they would say, as did the diplomats. Zhou did not suffer fools gladly. He would fall silent, his face would darken; he never shouted; but sometimes his hand shook a little with controlled anger. He overworked himself every day of his life; he stretched his mind and those of the people with him to the utmost. Always he would demand facts, clearness, accuracy. ‘We must stop using only percentages, we must use tangible figures.’ Alas, the bureaucracy was stronger; and percentages went on being used, for many more years.

— Han Suyin, My House Has Two Doors, pp.164-174. Links added by China Heritage

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Zhou Enlai — Tails

1955: Simon Leys on the Unsinkable Prime Minister

 

Having been shown around the towns and countryside of China for a month, the Belgian delegation, back in Peking, now had to take stock. ‘It may be in the way the people laugh and have fun that a nation most reveals itself’; Ryckmans decreed, after observing the hordes entertaining themselves on Sunday in the parks of Shanghai. He and his companions may well have had further confirmation of this when they got up close to the one man among the Chinese officials who rarely departed from a smile at once taunting and enigmatic, a man who could give the illusion of always having fun, even in the most perilous situations.

Although the young Belgians, standing at the foot of the Tiananmen Gate, may have spotted Mao perched on top during the May Day celebrations, it wasn’t the Great Helmsman they were given an audience with — but an empty boat. At least, that is how Simon Leys characterised Zhou Enlai thirty years later, borrowing an expression from a lesson given by Zhuang Zi, in the fourth century BC, when he recommended to ‘a ruler who has to sail the turbulent waters of politics’ to learn first and foremost ‘how to become an empty boat’ — meaning, a vessel which the heavy boats that cross its path are happy to skirt around without trying to scuttle.

[Note: Zhuangzi’s parable is encapsulated in the expression 虛船觸舟 xū chuán chù zhōu. For more on this, see  — Li Keqiang, the ‘Empty Boat’ of the Xi Jinping Era, Chapter 27 of Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium.]

The image sums up beautifully the career of the unsinkable prime minister of China, who remained an essential cog of Chinese communism right up until his death in January 1976, escaping all the purges thanks to his exceptional political flair, but also to his mastery of the consummate art of the backflip. Zhou was ‘the eternal and irreplaceable servant of power — any kind of power’, observed Leys in The Chairman’s New Clothes. And Leys put foreigners on guard when they exaggerated, as they did at the time, the role the prime minister played: ‘He may sing well, but we should not confuse the singer with the librettist’ — who remained Mao himself.

Zhou Enlai was scrupulously careful never to put Mao in the shade, even if it meant pulling strings from the wings. He preferred being second in command or, better still, third, but he knew how to make himself indispensable. A loyal underling, he became an enforcer when the turn of events left him with no choice, and in particular when his own political survival, or his life, was threatened. A historian of the Chinese Communist Party charged with writing the official biography of Zhou Enlai, Gao Wenqian had access to numerous confidential documents, and he showed, in a book that appeared after he fled into exile in the United States, how the man had few scruples about letting companions in arms, like Liu Shaoqi and Marshal He Long, be sacrificed. The leftist opponents of the eternal premier, who launched an ultimate and vain campaign against him in 1973 under cover of attacking Confucius and Lin Biao, summed up this elusive personality perfectly in what Leys would liken to the ‘identikit picture of a criminal’: ‘silver-tongued liar’, ‘clever at compromise’, ‘past master in the art of double-dealing’, ‘perpetual advocate of the middle path and levelheadedness’, ‘a man of good taste’, ‘a lover of fine dining’, ‘always dressed in well-cut clothes’.

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Ryckmans did not leave us with an eyewitness account of the long interview Zhou granted the Belgian delegates at the end of their visit on 22 May [1955]. He later reassessed the experience in light of the knowledge he’d acquired in the interval, but at the time, the student couldn’t help but come under the spell cast by a character who was a past master in the art of winning over and captivating foreigners.

Alone among the Maoist leaders, Zhou Enlai had cosmopolitan sophistication, charm, wit and style. He certainly was one of the greatest and most successful comedians of our century. He had a talent for telling blatant lies with angelic suavity. He was the kind of man who could stick a knife in your back and do it with such disarming grace that you would still feel compelled to thank him for the deed. He gave a human face (and a very good-looking one) to Chinese communism. Everyone loved him. He repeatedly and literally got away with murder. No wonder politicians from all over the world unanimously worshipped him. That intellectuals should also share in this cult is more disturbing — although there are some extenuating circumstances.

‘I can state this from direct personal experience’, Leys confessed in that 1985 article, ‘an experience that was shared over the years by hundreds and thousands of enraptured visitors — primary school teachers from Zanzibar, trade unionists from Tasmania, Progressive Women from Lapland.’ And students from Belgium. The fact is that in the eyes of Zhou Enlai, ‘no interlocutors ever appeared too small, too dim or too irrelevant not to warrant a special effort on his part to charm them, to wow them, and to win their sympathy and support’. Ryckmans was doubtless not the dimmest, but he was perhaps the smallest: the fact remains that even the young Ryckmans was entitled to the particular attentions of the red mandarin who was ‘showing tolerance, urbanity and a spirit of compromise to urbane Western liberals’. ‘Why did this impressive statesman deem it fitting to waste an hour of his precious time chatting with ten little pipsqueaks? I never have cleared up that enigma,’ he concluded fifty years after the event.

In 1972, when he was working as cultural attaché at the Belgian embassy in Peking, Simon Leys again saw Zhou Enlai at work. And, each time he appeared, this ‘fascinating and enigmatic personality’ reminded him irresistibly of the King of Qi’s fighting cock, such as Zhuang Zi describes him. A cock that, with patient training, renounces impetuousness and arrogance and cultivates a quiet strength instead: ‘The crowing of the other cocks leaves it impassive. Before its foes, it is as if made of wood. Its inner strength is such that its opponents dare not defy it. They take one look and run away’.

[Note: The passage occurs in ‘Mastering Life’, a chapter in Zhuangzi 《莊子·達生》：紀渻子為王養鬥雞。十日而問：雞已乎。曰：未也，方虛憍而恃氣。十日又問，曰：未也，猶應嚮景。十日又問，曰：未也，猶疾視而盛氣。十日又問，曰：幾矣，雞雖有鳴者，已无變矣，望之似木雞矣，其德全矣。異雞無敢應者，反走矣。]

Ten years later, Leys delivered a less flattering judgement, noting that the posthumous prestige of Zhou was beginning ‘to suffer from a severe revision’. In private conversations, ‘Chinese intellectuals are quick to point out now that … Zhou eventually betrayed them all, and in his relations with Mao he adopted too often the attitude of a coward and a sycophant’. In the French version of that essay, Leys was even harsher: ‘The legendary flexibility [of Zhou Enlai] culminated in smoothing things over, and we can now predict that he will one day look like the Albert Speer of Maoism: he will confer credit, intelligence, efficiency, elegance, rationality and style on a regime whose brutality, incompetence, vulgarity and insanity would otherwise have condemned it to a much swifter end’.

In Chinese Shadows, Leys would further nail an aspect of Zhou Enlai’s personality ‘that has not been noted by observers: his good taste’. He was, Leys noted with irony, ‘the only member of China’s ruling clique who has never taken advantage of his position to have his poems published. Think about it: it shows uncommon strength of character’.

A Heady Mix

‘I don’t know exactly what they showed you in the course of your travels through China, but I’m sure they only showed you the good side of things’, the head of government and diplomacy of the People’s Republic was careful to tell his guests, for Zhou was also Minister of Foreign Affairs. That is the only thing he said that Ryckmans recorded in his report and he only did so in order to tell us that he wouldn’t contradict the premier on that point. It’s true that the young man was constantly concerned with the credibility of his story. ‘What I saw in China is partial, I’m well aware. But I think I can nonetheless bear valid witness’, he wrote. Referring readers to the articles published by the missionaries expelled from China if they wanted to look ‘behind the scenes’, he felt that ‘a genuine concern for objective truth should force us to get to know the place where those scenes occurred. And even if people think I’m incapable of seeing anything other than what my hosts have let me see’, he went on, ‘people may well be interested in knowing the “good side of things” anyway, because that is also an integral part of Chinese reality’. After describing May Day in all its euphoria, Ryckmans was seized with a scruple, one that sums up the ambivalence in which his whole report is shrouded:

Such is the vision of the foreigner who looks at the People’s Republic through the rose-coloured glasses of an official invitation. Once again, I offer these impressions as I experienced them from day to day: their truth is purely subjective; it is what I genuinely felt, but far be it from me, though, to think that it is a genuine expression of the reality of China. It is merely one viewing angle that should be compared with others.

Invited, in a rare interview with Claude Hudelot on radio station France Culture, to reevaluate that trip twenty years on, Simon Leys fully acknowledged the wonderment that had permeated his discovery of Maoist China and of China, full stop.

That was a really wonderful time, 1955. It was a time when there was still enormous enthusiasm. There was a fervour, a youthful energy, a feeling of creative dynamism in China. And so, for me, it was an absolutely overwhelming shock, that trip. I remember it the way you remember a movie you’ve seen. It’s a succession of images, really beautiful images, fascinating, moving, exciting. But they’re two-dimensional images, there is no relief. Precisely because I did that trip as if I were deaf and dumb. I couldn’t speak the language and I had such a feeling of frustration at not being able to communicate directly with the people. I had the feeling that there was such teeming humanity there, such a wealth of things to discover, to know and understand, but that, as long as I didn’t understand the language, I wouldn’t get through to the other side, I wouldn’t get inside…

[Among] the highlights of the trip, there were things like that meeting with Zhou Enlai, who chatted with us for an hour. You can imagine what that meant to ten young blokes who were absolutely nothing, who didn’t know the first thing about anything … Just how overwhelming it was to have had that meeting with a man like Zhou Enlai.

All of that together, obviously, made for a very heady mix. But I don’t repudiate it, certainly not. [Just as] I don’t repudiate the enthusiastic things I wrote at the time, because it was a thrilling time that made you enthusiastic. All the Chinese friends I talk to who remember those days say the same thing: that at that particular moment, we believed in it, and that’s the big difference with today.

If he feared having been deceived by appearances, if he suspected he hadn’t been able to see ‘the real China’ behind the screen of Maoist propaganda, Ryckmans nevertheless returned home from Peking with a premonition along the same lines as the conclusion Victor Segalen had come to fifty years earlier: that ‘the journey to China was ultimately “a journey deep into self-knowledge” ‘. Those few weeks spent in contact with a different civilisation and people had changed a life. They made a sinologist of an art historian, and a lampoonist of a lawyer. They gave birth to Simon Leys.

— Philippe Paquet, Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds, 2017, pp.86-91, notes added by China Heritage

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Simon Leys & Han Suyin

Philippe Paquet

During the twelve months he ended up spending in Singapore [in 1962], Ryckmans maintained friendly relations with Han Suyin, whom he met frequently (on one such occasion, he caught a glimpse of her third husband, Vincent Ruthnaswany, with whom the novelist lived for the rest of her days). ‘It was a good time in her life’, he recalled. ‘I admired her at the time, genuinely. She was stunning and made a vivid impression. In private, she could be charming.’ As a testament to the friendship, Han Suyin gave Ryckmans a little book she’d published that year. Winter Love wasn’t as well-known as the big popular novels, but it was strange and profoundly moving. It tells of the passionate love of a young girl for another girl, and people must have wondered if it had autobiographical overtones (the story was set in London, where Han Suyin had studied medicine in the 1940s). ‘At the time, the book made a big impression on me (the sincerity of a real experience?)’, Ryckmans told me.

Reading it again today, I admire it even more — in fact, of all Han Suyin’s books that I’ve read, it’s the only one I admire; because it’s the only one that feels sincere and true to me (all the others are fabricated, to please a certain public in a certain way). If I’m not mistaken, it had hardly any success, either (no exoticism: just the London fog; and its subject… was too far ahead of its time) — but I still think it constitutes an essential key to unlocking the rich complexity of her personality.

But if relations between Han Suyin and Pierre Ryckmans were ‘excellent’ in Singapore, they rapidly deteriorated after that. The last meeting between them that was in any way unaffected took place in Hong Kong shortly after Ryckmans’s wedding. Han Suyin asked the newlyweds to lunch. Afterwards, in his estimation, she was never herself again, throwing herself into her new role as propagandist full-time. ‘When you were talking to her on your own, you got the impression she was haranguing an audience of five hundred people.’ Despite all opposition, the novelist had chosen to defend the communist regime, which Leys was to work hard demythologising. And so she condemned his writings and if, by chance, the case she mounted lacked evidence, ‘her generous imagination’ lent the author of The Chairman’s New Clothes words he had never spoken. ‘But instead of being outraged by her inventions’, Leys conceded, ‘I should be grateful to her for her moderation; after all, while she was at it, she could well have accused me of stealing her watch or her umbrella.’

In My House Has Two Doors, Han Suyin attacked the by then famous sinologist for his ingratitude, even though she had given him a helping hand when he was just an obscure student in need. Pierre Ryckmans, she wrote, was the only European who attracted her attention in all those years, and his attitude ought to be similar to the young Asian men and women she generously supported and who, overcome with gratitude, rushed to do one thing only, and that was to pay back their debts. According to her, the young man had wanted to go to China to study there and she had gladly written letters of recommendation for him, but with no result.

Pierre then came to proffer a painting of his, a lion behind the bars of a cage. Not a work of art, but he wanted to indicate the spirit behind his slim, pale, scholarly exterior. ‘I immediately, as a Chinese, made him a gift of five hundred dollars, which he graciously accepted.

Alas, perhaps naturally, Pierre Ryckmans repaid me as some other men whom I have helped have done. He has since become an eminent sinologist, called Simon Leys. And he has written a highly fanciful account of meeting me, in 1972, to discuss the fate of some Chinese writers whom I knew, and whom he did not know.

[Original Note: Han Suyin, My House Has Two Doors, op. cit., p. 226. ‘Nonsense’, Ryckmans commented, seeing this as a manifestation of ‘the mythomania of novelists’. These accusations didn’t stack up – even less so, he added, since ‘that was the only period in my time as a student vagabond that my income as a teacher ensured me a certain prosperity’. (Letter to the author, 14 February 2012, and interview with the author, Malua Bay, 27 March 2013.). See Paquet, 8: 22, p.581.]

Simon Leys relates this famous meeting of 1972, the last between Han Suyin and Pierre Ryckmans, in Chinese Shadows. That day, which was back at the time when he worked for the Belgian embassy in China, Ryckmans ran into Han Suyin ‘by accident’ in the Peking Hotel, where ‘foreign friends’ elected to live. ‘We were staying in the same hotel, but we didn’t see the same reality,’ Leys would later joke.

In her luxurious suite, sipping an exquisite tea (of a variety not found at the grocers I go to), she explains to me what is the true ‘revolutionary-proletarian line’. I listen humbly, sure that I am still trapped in the darkness of feudal thought. After all, she ought to know what she’s talking about: for years she has been coming to Peking annually for a long stay. (She skipped her customary visit only once, in 1967-68, when revolution nearly blazed again in China. Her Swiss bank accounts and extravagant lifestyle might well have gotten her into trouble with disrespectful youth, but now that the bureaucracy, supported by the army, seems firmly back in the saddle, she feels in her element again.

The ‘high priestess of Maoism’ spoke at length about the dynamism of cultural life in China, having taken care to lay out on her table the recent new editions of the great classics of Chinese literature — new editions of such limited print runs’, Leys revealed, ‘that they were inaccessible to run-of-the-mill Chinese readers’. Seizing a moment when his interlocutrice paused for breath, Ryckmans asked her the sacrilegious question he was dying to ask: ‘And Lao She?’ The celebrated author of Rickshaw Boy, who Han Suyin claimed was a friend, had disappeared in the Cultural Revolution, and his death, at sixty-seven, was a considerable embarrassment for the Maoist regime and its zealots in the West. ‘Lao She? What a fool! Why did he stupidly kill himself? Nobody wanted to harm him, and suddenly he takes fright, for nothing!’

In reporting this conversation in Chinese Shadows, rather than naming Han Suyin, Leys referred to her as ‘Madame Z’ which was a nod to her Chinese surname: Zhou. In the ‘short critical bibliography’ that ends the book, Han Suyin is, all the same, explicitly — and ironically — mentioned among the list of ‘uncommon personalities’ likely to help the reader ‘to climb higher and reach the level of intelligence.’ She features there alongside Edgar Snow and John K. Fairbank. Leys specifies that ‘the first is cynical, the second naive, and the third too much of a diplomat.’ ‘Maoism has no more convincing advocates’, he concludes, ‘because (unlike the other members of that flock) they know whereof they speak — even if they do not say all they know.’

A few years later, Leys no longer minced words, for good reason, when he revealed that Han Suyin makes ‘a brief but memorable appearance’ in a short story of Chen Jo-hsi’s which he had just translated — the Taiwanese woman of letters, moved by revolutionary ideals, had, we might recall, lived in China with her husband, from 1966 to 1973; she had come to know the Sino-Belgian novelist there. It was only right, after all, Leys observed: Han Suyin, ‘having become utterly fictitious in real life, deserved to retrieve some measure of reality in fiction!’

[Original Note: Leys, ‘Chen Jo-hsi: A Literary Witness of the “Cultural Revolution” ’, in Broken Images: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, 1980, p. 39. In Keng Erh in Peking, the main character spots Han Suyin on a cruise on the picturesque Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo. She is travelling in style, surrounded by ‘a ring of people, all dressed like mid-level cadre members’, but her boat breaks down. No problem! They’ll get a replacement part from Keng Erh’s boat, even if it means cancelling the trip on all the Chinese passengers who happen to be with him on the now immobilised boat. See The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, translated by Nancy Ing and Howard Goldblatt, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978, pp. 200-202. See Paquet, 8:27, p.582.]

What sickened Leys was not so much the ideas Han Suyin defended but her inconsistency, her bad faith and, ultimately, her dishonesty. The book in which she briefly settled scores with ‘the ungrateful student’ was called in English My House Has Two Doors, and you couldn’t help but joke that the writer used either door, indiscriminately, depending on which way it was facing, always embracing the political line of the moment in Peking.

Thus she is consistently loyal to everybody and anybody, providing that they are safely in power. She was loyal to Chiang Kai-shek and then to Mao Zedong, to Liu Shaoqi and then to Lin Biao, to Jiang Qing and then to Hua Guofeng — and we may be sure she is loyal before the event to whoever replaces Hua Guofeng, no matter who it is, so thoroughly has loyalty to established authority become second nature to her.

All those years, Leys had nonetheless forced himself to treat Han Suyin gently. ‘I still respected her’, he explained to me, ‘because she had been through some pretty extraordinary ordeals’. That impediment disappeared after the novelist committed an unforgivable thing in the eyes of the sinologist: in a debate on French television, she insulted ‘Mao’s prisoner’, Jean Pasqualini, scoffing that if he had been detained in China, that was because he deserved it.

[China Heritage Note: Both Chen Ruoxi 陳若曦 and Jean Pasqualini 包若望 feature in Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, (Hong Kong, 1986). Their powerful work remains essential reading for those who would understand the underbelly of the People’s Republic.]

The Ryckmanses admired and were friends with Pasqualini, whom they considered ‘an extraordinary man’. So the incident constituted a casus belli. ‘With that, all the gentlemanly manners I’d observed, because of the past, in relation to Han Suyin fell away — I no longer felt I had to censor my opinions and, for once, I said all that needed to be said, about the vile way she used to kowtow to Maoism and the “Cultural Revolution”.’ This was the subject of an essay published in August 1980, in which Leys delighted in exposing the novelist’s ‘double vision’ by dissecting the English editions of three of her books: China in the Year 2000, Asia Today: Two Outlooks and Wind in the Tower. The exercise was dizzying:

During those hours of reading I often found myself floundering, almost drowning in the roaring tide of the author’s powerful imagination, but at the same time I acquired a firmer grasp of the positively cosmic quality of her overall vision. It is a fertile chaos, a polyphonic coexistence of opposites, a lyrical alternation, a grand dialogue between Yin and Yang. After all, Madame Han Suyin has readily informed us that her house has two doors, and her work resembles those clothes you can buy with two different patterns and colours, so that, depending on your mood or the weather, you can wear them with the outside in or the inside out. I believe that in the trade such clothing is called ‘reversible’ — a useful notion, especially for people fond of turning their coats. Her work, thus, displays two different faces simultaneously, heads as well as tails; the subtle counterpoint can only be properly appreciated if one takes the trouble to bring them into stereoscopic focus.

That’s what Leys did, comparing contradictory quotes, taken from the three books mentioned, on the Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao, the Chinese army, the Red Guards, the economy, and so on. That has given us, with the ‘kaleidoscopic, shimmering texture created by these interwoven contradictions’, one of the most hilarious, but also one of the cruellest satires the sinologist ever wrote. ‘Having been quick to observe that “during the last two decades China has not ceased to prove every pronouncement uttered about her false”, [Han Suyin] no doubt reached the sensible conclusion that if one accompanied every statement by a directly contrary statement, one was mathematically certain of being right at least half the time’, he deduced from the method adhered to by the novelist, for whom the different versions of past and present were similarly true. And he inferred from this that ‘dialectics, the performing art that has given this century’s intellectual circus some of its most breathtaking feats of acrobatics, must obviously be the ideal technique to explain the daring somersaults of the Thoughts of Madame Han Suyin. Dialectically speaking, it was she who was right to be wrong, whereas it is we who are wrong to be right’.

— from Philippe Paquet, Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds, La Trobe & Black Inc., 2017, pp.162-167. Unlesss otherwise indicated, the footnotes in the original text have been deleted 

---

***

The Double Vision of Han Suyin

On the Character of a Trimmer

Simon Leys

“After all, people can change, can’t they?”

— Mao Zedong*

Madame Han Suyin is very popular in the West. In China (except among some bureaucrats of the Propaganda Department) she is unloved, and nowadays most Chinese intellectuals, artists, and writers will frown if you so much as mention her name. Is this an excessively harsh response on the part of the survivors of the “Cultural Revolution”? The publication of her latest book, My House Has Two Doors (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), provides the opportunity to answer this question through a retrospective examination of her work.

* I found this quotation from Mao not in the selected works of the Great Teacher, but in a book by Madame Han Suyin. Since Madame Han Suyin is more than casual toward facts (as some of her hapless acquaintances discovered when finding themselves described in her memoirs), I suggest that this particular Thought of Mao be taken with a good pinch of salt.

Madame Han Suyin likes to take her imagery from the natural world, and many of her books have fine titles: And the Rain My Drink (1956), The Mountain Is Young (1958), The Morning Deluge (1972), and so on. In attempting to put her latest book into perspective, I was inquisitive enough to leaf through a few of her other recent publications: China in the Year 2001 (New York: Basic Books, 1967), Asia Today (Montreal-London, 1969), and Wind in the Tower (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976). (In the passages quoted below I have retranscribed the Chinese names into pinyin, and abbreviated the references to Doors, 2001, Asia, and Wind, respectively.) During those hours of reading I often found myself foundering, almost drowning in the roaring tide of the author’s powerful imagination, but at the same time I acquired a firmer grasp of the positively cosmic quality of her overall vision. It is a fertile chaos, a polyphonic coexistence of opposites, a lyrical alternance, a grand dialogue between Yin and Yang. After all, Madame Han Suyin has readily informed us that her house has two doors, and her work resembles those clothes you can buy with two different patterns and colors, so that, depending on your mood or the weather, you can wear them with the outside in or the inside out. I believe that in the trade such clothing is called “reversible”—a useful notion, especially for people fond of turning their coats. Her work, thus, displays two different faces simultaneously, heads as well as tails; the subtle counterpoint can only be properly appreciated if one takes the trouble to put them into stereoscopic focus. A number of examples follow.

Heads

The great emphasis, in this revolution, [is] on the use of reason, criticism, debate, and not on force. (2001, p.193) What is sought is not the physical punishment of the evildoers, but awareness, rallying and unity… . This experiment bears watching. (2001, p.200) Through the Great Cultural Revolution, the remaking of man is being attempted for one-quarter of the world… . It is Mao Zedong who has seen the problem in its universal terms, the Remaking of Man. (2001, p. 246)

Tails

Passing through the street, I catch sight, here and there, of barbed wire atop walls. Probably temporary prisons. Each organization, factory, university has its own detention area. (Doors, p.513) In the ensuing “investigation sessions” [Luo Ruiqing] was pushed—so it is alleged—through a window, and his leg was broken. He received no medical care for this injury. He was carried to his public humiliation in January 1967, in a large basket, and had to crawl on the floor, dragging his broken leg behind him… . He Long was treated most savagely. He was diabetic and was refused medical care. He was beaten regularly being first wrapped in a blanket so that the welts would not show. (Doors, p.462) Xia Yan was beaten, his leg broken, and he was refused medical care. (Doors, p.471)

Heads

The surprise of the year 1968 was to see Chinese techniques take entirely original forms and realize, even with the Cultural Revolution and its upheavals in process, standards equivalent to, or higher than, those in international use. (Asia, p.102)

Tails

Phenomenal innovations are announced, all proclaimed to be the result of the Cultural Revolution. But I know that a good many were started before the Cultural Revolution … all of them are claimed to be due to workers’ ingenuity, but I know that most of them are due to scientists. (Doors, p.508)

Heads

Far from being an absurdity proceeding from madness or authoritarianism, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a logical, needful, necessary event, the only way … to give the working class the leadership, to give the masses the largest possible democratic voice. (Asia, p.71)

Tails

How was it possible to remain sane with the perpetual noise, the blaring and the shouting and the screaming and the singing? (Doors, p.422) I was extremely nervous, and suffered from fits of depression because of the Cultural Revolution… . (Doors, p.477) In July and August 1967, everything seemed to go crazy in China. (Doors, p.480) The Mayor, Vice-Mayor and Party officials of Shanghai were hauled to criticism meetings, paraded through the city…. All over China such displays took place, designed to strike terror… . The writer Zhao Shuli was taken from village to village through the northwest… . He died of the ordeal. And all that in the name of democracy.* (Doors, pp.461-62)

* Sentences in italics appear only in the French version, La Moission du phénis, p.83.

Heads

And for those who still think that there will be “Stalinist” purges and liquidations, I now quote from The Red Flag: “Even diehard capitalist-roaders should be allowed a way out… .” A way out, in the great tradition of Chinese humanism. No liquidations, no massive purges. … (Asia, pp. 73-74)

Tails

There were figures of 90,000 casualties in Sichuan and a good many too in Yunnan. Guangzhou was ugly with summary executions by rival factions…. (Wind, pp.316-17) “A reign of gratuitous terror—horrifying,” said others. In every city and quarter it was different: from harassment to murder, from endless interrogation to beating to death. By October, in Peking alone, 86,000 “counterrevolutionaries” had been discovered. In Shanghai 400,000 “bourgeois and capitalists” were removed from their houses. (Doors, p.456)

Heads

Of course [the Cultural Revolution] was grueling … a number of mistakes were made … but taken all in all, it is certain that violence was not condoned, nor was it on the large scale which Western reports made it out to be… . (Asia, p.72) It fell to Jiang Qing to denounce the Ultra-Left, and she was the first to do so… . Jiang Qing was the deputy head of the Cultural Revolution Group, in no sense responsible for their depredations, for she was the first to fight against them. … (Wind, pp.316-17)

Tails

Jiang Qing’s speech to the Red Guards in Peking on 22 June 1967 aroused unprecedented fighting … and provoked many deaths. (Moisson, p. 168)* [Jiang Qing] then used a phrase which … was the green light for continued violence, at a time when the Red Guards were attacking army garrisons and raiding arsenals. (Doors, p.475)

* This paragraph, which should appear on p.513 of Doors, was deleted from the English edition and is to be found only in the French version.

Heads

Direct collision between China and the U.S. A. is now almost inevitable; the military-industrial complex of the U.S.A. wants to attack, to drop the first bomb on China. This will be the signal for “total war which knows no boundaries.” (2001, p.170)

Tails

There would not be a war between America and China now. Mao’s faith that the two peoples, the Americans and the Chinese, would inevitably become friends again one day, expressed so often through the years, had now seen fruition. (Wind, pp.366-67)

Heads

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution tries to abolish servility and unthinking obedience, docile tools and slavishness. “Dare to think, to act and criticize.” Not 700 million docile tools, but 700 million original thinkers, “700 Million Mao Zedongs” is the aim. (Asia, p.71) The core of the problem of building a socialist economy without exploitation … is to change the content of motivation, to provide, through continuous and painstaking socialist education, through rectification campaigns and movements, a change in behavior “within the soul of man.” This conversion has been attempted before, in religious systems, but not with the thoroughness of a science, which is Mao Zedong’s treatment of this psychological remaking. (2001, pp.185-186)

Tails

“I’ll go crazy if I see one more Mao religious service,” said Richard Hung to me… . [He] had come upon a dawn ceremony—a courtyard full of people swinging their bodies in ecstasy in front of a large portrait of Mao Zedong. This was the morning invocation, asking Chairman Mao for directives: rocking of the body, chanting, dancing with “offer hearts,” gestures, calling upon Mao in a litany of praise (“great, great, great”) for his orders for the day. Then there was the opening of the little red book, and the quotation on the page fallen upon was the answer. … “It’s like the Holy Rollers and consulting the Bible for answers and the Moral Rearmament People who speak to God,” said Richard. He did not think he could put up with it any longer. (Doors, p.497)

Heads

Lin Biao’s appearance does not indicate a military takeover but the continuation of the revolutionary tradition, in which it is the function of the People’s Liberation Army to “train cadres and successors of the Revolution.”… The possibility of a revisionist coup against Mao’s leadership was removed by Lin Biao reasserting the political and ideological primacy of Mao Zedong Thought in the army. The Chinese, therefore, do not regard the ascension of Lin Biao as a takeover but as the reassertion of ideological primacy over purely military ambitions. (2001, pp.191-92)

Tails

Five out of the thirteen military regions were under Lin Biao’s appointees. … Six of his followers and his wife, Ye Qun, were ensconced in the Military Affairs Committee. He had a web of his own appointees in some important revolutionary committees. There was a dominance of military personnel in the Central Committee… . (Wind, p.341) Lin Biao’s short dominance represented a tendency ingrained in the minds of the Chinese people: the acceptance of authoritarianism (Wind, p.376) The Lin Biao affair pinpointed the danger of recrudescent warlordism. (Wind, p.377) Lin Biao, his wife, Ye Qun, and son … [began] the plot to launch a military coup d’état, and perhaps to assassinate Mao… . (Wind, p.346)

Heads

The role of the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution has been very important. The army was given the following orders: If hit, do not retaliate; if shot at, do not fire back; and do not lose your temper under any circumstances… . Because the soldiers never fired at any group (though at times shot at by saboteurs …) the Liberation Army earned for itself an extremely high level of awareness and performance. (Asia, pp. 68-69)

Tails

But in May 1968 in China the People’s Liberation Army had been empowered to shoot down those who refused to relinquish their weapons… . From May to July, grim and bloody battles were fought… . Some commanders, however, did not exhibit much tender care for the young. The mopping-up operations they undertook, while they heartened the population, were certainly tough upon errant Red Guards. (Doors, pp.481-82) Huang Yongsheng, the military commander [of Guangzhou], harshly suppressed Red Guards who called him “the butcher of Guangzhou.” (Wind, pp.316-17)

Heads

The Red Guards at one time so luridly described in the West were … to educate themselves, to reason, to debate… . Their contribution was great and significant; they unearthed many agents of the Kuomintang and some spies, caches of bullion and weapons. (Asia, pp.64-65)

Tails

A team of Red Guards came to investigate [my friends, the Peis]. “I nearly went through the window,” said Mrs. Pei when at last she talked to me, in 1975. “I begged them to let me die. What did they want, what did they want? Why were we treated in this way…? They said we had returned [to China] to spy.” (Doors, pp. 457-58) Other relatives of Hualan have died; two of them, husband and wife, committing suicide. They were called traitors; accused of “collusion with the outside,” beaten. . . . It is quite a miracle that Hualan was not ill-treated because of me. … I walked the small lanes of Peking. . . immediately, children ran to announce my coming to the street committee, and people came to stare at me. Spy mania. (Doors, p.493) Band after band of Red Guards came down our street… . [A neighbor] “told the Red Guards that we had foreign goods, and they turned up everything in our house, dug up the floors and the garden, chipped the plaster off the walls to uncover gold pieces or documents. They took away books, pictures, vases, anything ‘old’ or ‘foreign,’ and also a table and a cup-board.” (Doors, p. 457)

Heads

Everyone praised the [Red Guards] whose conduct was excellent … and who were very clean, well-behaved and polite… . To pinpoint a few cases of bad conduct is to ignore the discipline and good example of the great majority of these youngsters… . Never had China been so exuberant, so alive, so full of the sound of drums and cymbals and so colorful… The Red Guards were not allowed to carry weapons nor to arrest or try anyone… . The Red Guards performed a task no one else could have; they literally spring-cleaned the cities… . (Wind, p.292)

Tails

There were so many absurd and ugly things being done, like the trials in Shanghai of cadres supposed to have committed adultery, who were beaten on the buttocks by self-appointed youthful judges. (Doors, p. 458) The brutalities inflicted upon hapless individuals during June and the first part of July [1966] were nothing compared to what happened when the Lin Biao-Jiang Oing alliance won the struggle in August … [in the universities] we saw the teachers sweeping the grounds, cleaning the water closets and the kitchens. Some wore dunce’s caps and others were abused as freaks and monsters. (Doors, p.431)

Heads

The Red Guards … learn democracy by applying democratic methods of reason and debate. (2001, p.200) [The Red Guards movement], therefore, was no hasty impulsive action, opening the gates to “hooliganism,” as reported so erroneously in the Western press. (2001, p.189)

Tails

But the worst [of the Red Guards] not only burnt books and destroyed historic monuments; they also killed and tortured. (Doors, p.458) “The Red Guards … came to get [Ho]. They took turns beating him in the courtyard… . Then they took him away in a truck to the Western Hills where they kept their prisoners. I never saw him again. I don’t know why they singled him out. Sometimes it was all so capricious.” (Doors, p.457) In the general disruption of order the cities jails were opened and criminals released. … “They did terrible things … if some of us learnt to torture people and to rape, it was they who incited us to do it.” (Doors, pp. 468-69)

Heads

The situation at the close of 1966 during the full blossoming of the great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was described as follows: “A vigorous and lively political situation initiated by comrade Mao Zedong is taking shape throughout our country, in which there are both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of will and personal ease of mind.” This unprecedented and massive experiment is … China’s way of preparing herself for the future … to go on building, as fast as possible, a socialist system which will provide both material security for the millions, and a freedom of spirit which also has never existed in the past millennia. (2001, pp.203-204)

Tails

The neighborhood atmosphere had changed—it was hostile. And always in the common courtyard there would be one or other member of the street committee watching us. … After I had left, Third Uncle’s rooms might have been searched… . Third Uncle sat in a frightening calm, his body all gathered together, coiled upon the fear at its core. (Doors, p.449) Throughout my Manchurian travels I was not left alone, except at night in my bedroom. Even if I went to the toilet, in some factories and communes, a girl worker would come along with me, and watch me. (Doors, p.503) [An overseas Chinese teacher told me]: “I saw [the Red Guards] come for me. I was paralyzed … I could do nothing but open the door for them. For six weeks they stayed with me in relays, group after group, questioning me; night and day and day and night… I slept no more than two or three hours a night because they woke me up to question me … why had I so many Western friends?” (Doors, pp.456-57)

Heads

The Cultural Revolution is also an enormous spurt to production, to the development of productive forces along socialist lines, for it liberates the innovating spirit of millions, instead of holding them in uncomprehending docility… . A new leap forward can be expected, bringing greater acceleration to the development of the economic base. (Asia, p.70) In terms of practical economics the Cultural Revolution produces and provides the revolutionary impetus necessary for the accomplishment of the economic breakthrough during the period of the Third Five-Year Plan (1966-70)… . An upsurge in production has been reported in the first months of its inception. This second leap envisages … another speeding-up of development, to promote an even greater economic growth rate… . (2001, pp.201-02)

Tails

Throughout the months since that fateful August of 1966 Zhou [Enlai] had striven to minimize disruption. He had forbidden the interference of the Red Guards with communes and with factories … “revolution must stimulate production, not destroy it.” But in November, he seems to have lost out on this point… . (Doors, p.464) In February [1967], at a high-level meeting presided over by Zhou Enlai, Marshal Ye Jianying and other veterans of the Long March protested at the shambles being created… . By then almost all the ministers in charge of production were being denounced or hauled away to kangaroo courts held by Red Guards. The Coal Minister would die of a heart attack under the verbal abuse he endured. (Doors. p.466) Not all the factories were working, and in those I saw, about one-third of the machinery was idle. When I pointed to the empty benches, I was told that the workers were “resting” or that “we have fulfilled our quotas for the month,” which meant that the workers had not turned up, or that raw material for processing had run out, or that the machines needed repairing… . I was not impressed by the young workers. They dawdled and smoked in small groups in the workshops; they played basketball in the courtyards; they loafed on the streets. (Doors, p.485) The young workers do not exhibit any discipline. I find dozens of them loafing about in the park with their girlfriends. (Doors, p.499) In Shenyang … the walls of factories are pockmarked with traces of bullets. Gaunt, roofless structures reach upward, as after a bombing. There is litter, and cinders; burnt down plants. (Doors, p.502) The steel plant of Anshan has been badly mauled. Large machinery sprawls in despair on the ground, surrounded by squatting workers trying to repair it. (Doors, p.504) In Lanzhou the Cultural Revolution has been grim and fearful. “The workers in the factories shot at each other,” says [our official guide]. (Doors, p.546) In Loyang the tractor factory is a mess. Screws and bolts and spare parts of every description litter the floor in untidy heaps; the engineer who takes me around … says, “Our production is not too good.” Of all the disciplines, only archaeology has never been obstructed during the Cultural Revolution. (Doors, p.611)

***

Instead of simply admiring the kaleidoscopic, shimmering texture created by these interwoven contradictions, the more petty-minded viewer may ask the reason for it. Madame Han Suyin’s own answer to this question is yet again a splendidly manifold thing.

“In any circumstance, see how the wind blows, and never, never stick your neck out,” she wisely recorded in her notes (Doors, p.495). Maoist policy is full of twists and turns, “but still, I managed. Life had never been a smooth tarred road, but a brusque and capricious river, and one learns about canoeing in wayward water” (Doors, p.522). Obviously, Madame Han Suyin is a seasoned mariner. Having been quick to observe that “during the last two decades China has not ceased to prove every pronouncement uttered about her false” (2001, p.2), she no doubt reached the sensible conclusion that if one accompanied every statement by a directly contrary statement, one was mathematically certain of being right at least half the time. And in any case, truth is a situational matter. “But I know you have not lied,” she tells friends who have told her lies. “The human capacity for self-persuasion is infinite. The human soul is an assembly of contradictions. And therefore both of your versions, the one of those years, and the one you give today, are correct” (Doors, p.485).

We may assess the reliability of Madame Han Suyin in the same spirit as Mark Twain boasted about his own strength of character when he insisted that giving up smoking was the easiest thing in the world—he’d done it a hundred times already. Thus she is consistently loyal to everybody and anybody, providing that they are safely in power. She was loyal to Chiang Kai-shek and then to Mao Zedong, to Liu Shaoqi and then to Lin Biao, to Jiang Qing and then to Hua Guofeng—and we may be sure she is loyal before the event to whoever replaces Hua Guofeng, no matter who it is, so thoroughly has loyalty to established authority become second nature to her. If, in the thick of this absorbing exercise, she comes to the point of totally overlooking the fate of the Chinese people, and even of actually censoring their cries, then we must clearly excuse her, because, you see, in Asia there is no credence to be given to the hubbub rising from the masses: “Especially in feudal Asian countries, where the gap between fact and fiction, truth and lies, is so very small” (Doors, p.473). So the safest approach is to stick to the official communiqués provided by the currently ensconced editorial staff of the Beijing Review.

Only political simpletons will be scandalized by her passing on the propaganda of the “Gang of Four” in the West when the Gang was going strong, only to switch to supporting Comrade Deng, now that he has the wind behind him. No, the amazing thing is their amazement. After all, it is more than two thousand years since Sima Qian immortalized the phenomenon in a superb passage in his Records of the Historian. After a period of disgrace, Lian Po [廉頗], famous general of the kingdom of Zhao, was restored to the sovereign’s favor. “At the moment of his disgrace all his clients had abandoned him; once he was restored to his command they came back to him. ‘Get out,’ he shouted, and one of them replied: ‘Come, sir, let us be men of our times. Surely you must know that it is the law of the market that governs human relations? You fall into disgrace and we leave you; you regain the king’s favor and we return to serve you. It is as simple as that—nothing to make a fuss about.’ ”

[China Heritage Note: The passage in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian referred to here reads as follows: 廉頗之免長平歸也，失勢之時，故客盡去。及復用為將，客又復至。廉頗曰：客退矣。客曰：吁。君何見之晚也。夫天下以市道交，君有勢，我則從君，君無勢則去，此固其理也，有何怨乎。]

Yet there are occasions when Madame Han Suyin is overcome by a fit of unwarranted modesty, when she confesses to an ignorance we may find it difficult to credit: “But it was impossible at the time [1969] (and would be impossible for some years, in fact until the end of 1976) to obtain definite, hard-core information on what had happened, although I did my best” (Doors, pp. 482-83).

So this particularly gifted, particularly well-informed woman, with her privilege of unrestricted entry and direct access to the Chinese leadership, knew less than poor drudges like L. Ladany, Simon Leys, Jacques Guillermaz, Ivan and Miriam London, and others (the names are cited in chronological order) who, on the basis of mere scrutiny of the Chinese press or interviews with refugees, managed between 1971 and 1973 to publish the gist of what she claims to have learned only this late in the day. If Madame Han Suyin had kept this up, she might almost have convinced us that we were geniuses at observation. Unfortunately, what she tells us today happens to include decisive experiences and facts that she admits having already collected in China as early as 1966 and 1969–but that did not inhibit her from writing two or three books and even more magazine articles in the same period, presenting the exact opposite of what she already knew.

But in reply to this, she now alleges her worries about endangering the members of her family living in China. This is a noble concern, and one shared by thousands of Chinese living abroad—but these same Chinese have proved that there were many honorable solutions to the problem, the simplest and most usual being not to write effusive books about the “Cultural Revolution.” Of course, that would raise the further problem that those profit-minded bourgeois publishers in the West are not known to pay royalties on silence.

Madame Han Suyin will undoubtedly (and rightly) complain that I have an inferior grasp of dialectics: “It is impossible to explain, or try to explain, the historical processes in China in the twentieth century, and the thought of Mao Zedong, without referring to dialectics….” (Asia, p.34). Dialectics, the performing art that has given this century’s intellectual circus some of its most breathtaking feats of acrobatics, must obviously be the very technique to explain the daring somersaults of the Thoughts of Madame Han Suyin. Dialectically speaking, it was she who was right to be wrong, whereas it is we who are wrong to be right.

In any case, the media-sociologists and other experts who investigate the machinery of mass communications would certainly benefit from a study of this odd phenomenon: when has such an authoritative reputation been based on such a shifting standpoint? The sole constant factor in her work is the faithfulness with which events have confuted her analyses and forecasts at every turn. This paradox—so solid a reputation built on such a slippery foundation—tends to bear out the old bewilderment once voiced by Henry de Montherlant: “In the main, people do not read; if they read, they do not understand. And those who understand forget.”

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Source:

• Originally published in Encounter, August 1980, and collected in Simon Leys, The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1986, pp.177-193

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Why Read Han Suyin Today?

Geremie R. Barmé

 

Han Suyin died in 2012, just as Xi Jinping rose to dominate China’s party-state-army. For over sixty years she had tirelessly chronicled the Chinese revolution and the evolution of the Communist party-state. She was unabashedly partisan and as an international propagandist on behalf of the Communist Party’s cause she has, to this day, no rival. (And, yes, Gladys Yang was guessed correctly, Mme Han’s voluminous correspondence can be found in the Han Suyin Collection at Boston University. The sixty-nine linear feet of material comprises 146 boxes and four packages.)

Latter-day journalists, some more professional than others, have recorded developments in post-Mao China in books, reports and essays that offer an interconnected account of the rapidly changing landscape of the country and Beijing continues to cultivate what, in the 1960s, the French journalist Jacques Marcuse called VIPP, ‘very important potential propagandists’. None, however, have gained the sustained access to Party leaders, or their ‘wisdom and guidance’, that Han enjoyed from 1956 and few have had the finely honey balletic skills to follow her winding path, even though that is not necessarily for want of trying.

The People — The Chinese People — were the ultimate Eidolon of Han’s efforts. This capacious and amorphous category proved to be as malleable as Maoist policy itself. By the end of the Mao era, few real, as opposed to abstract, people in China had avoided being victimised at one time or another by his mercurial rule. Han’s belief in herself, her mission and her vision of China mimicked the self-image that Marxist-Leninist ideologues promote for the agents of history. Like Mao himself, Han Suyin was confident that she was playing a unique historical role, one that accorded with the needs of The People, as imagined and fashioned by the Communist Party. She also quietly struggled with the ‘burden of guilt’ imposed by the Communists on the country’s intelligentsia, the wavering bourgeoisie and class enemies that demanded constant self-critique. In pursing her intellectual and racial reconciliation with the Fatherland, Han was strident and in doing so she was willingly guided by Zhou Enlai, China’s consummate ‘influencer’ and Mao’s silky soft-sell surrogate.

In some ways, Han Suyin was the globally accessible embodiment of a China that was dominated by the Communist Party and self-isolated from the Western international world: she was passionate, calculating, romantic, pragmatic, determined and relentless. In her books, which number in the dozens, she combined a gift for narrative with a romantic spirit and a historical sensibility that acutely followed the dominant narrative of Beijing. She was an agent for what we have elsewhere dubbed China’s twentieth century ‘mytho-poetic historical complex’ — a vast multifaceted enterprise that was also a slow-moving juggernaut that has seen aspects of traditional Chinese culture, thought and statecraft fashioned by modern political players and thinkers into the all-embracing matrix of the one-party state. Romantic tropes have been fused with revolutionary aspiration and hard-nosed political policy to create a hybrid Chineseness that, in recent years, Beijing speaks about in terms of ‘cultural continuity’ 文脈 and ‘spiritual connectivity’ 魂脈. Han Suyin’s narratives can still be appreciated for crystallising this enterprise though, for the serious and literate student of the modern Chinese world, Mao Zedong’s poems (in Chinese!) are a more succinct and ready entrée to this mytho-poetic historical realm. Mao’s unmistakable diction, his rhetorical flourishes, turns of phrase, metaphorical bravado, the sheer ‘revolutionary romanticism’ of it all, as well as his employment of refashioned classical tropes combined with a breathtaking afflatus were composed in an unmistakable, and often convention-defying, calligraphic hand and promoted for decades (see 毛主席詩詞 and 毛主席詩詞書法作品). Today, lines from Mao’s poems, images, allusions and quotations remain  a universal and recognisable feature of China’s media landscape.

Re-reading Han Suyin’s work today also offers us insights into the skillful art of a passionate propagandist who flourished because of, and not despite, the Doublethink, or ‘dialectical magical thinking’ required by Official China. As Simon Leys put it in the above:

Dialectics, the performing art that has given this century’s intellectual circus some of its most breathtaking feats of acrobatics, must obviously be the very technique to explain the daring somersaults of the Thoughts of Madame Han Suyin. Dialectically speaking, it was she who was right to be wrong, whereas it is we who are wrong to be right.

Han Suyin was able to weave deftly the shifting Party line through her books, articles, interviews and public lectures. The alchemy with which she turned turgid talking points into readable prose is worth studying in its own right. She was a one-woman influence operation and interested readers today will still be able to appreciate the artfulness of a decades-long performance that so breezily and voluminously disguised, relativised and explained away the grotesque and bloody realities of Maoist China.

No one did it quite like Han Suyin, and still no one can. China Heritage has featured some of the new pretenders and pro-Party knowledge economy amateurs in essays like Captive Minds and Academic Angst. Today, pro-Beijing writers, thinkers, businesspeople, online influencers, and wannabe propagandists come in many forms. Operating within a byzantine matrix of ‘international agit prop’ 大外宣 efforts, they  offer, for want of a better term, what ’boutique prop-info’ 精巧小外宣. Among the party-state-adjacent purveyors of opinion, there are home-grown former diplomats and internet personalities, clutches of pseudo academics and careerist spruikers pushing a low-key sales pitch, as well as a bevy of foreign ‘useless idiots’. That’s not to mention the earnest ‘professional Chinamen’ residents in the People’s Republic who appear to share the zealotry, if not the deep-seated commitment, of yesteryear’s Israel Epstein and Ruth Weiss, both of whom were mentioned earlier.

On X and various social media platforms there are shadowy battalions of the Water Army 水軍 (short for 網絡水軍, also known as 網絡打手，論壇寫手、網絡槍手、網托 or, more pointedly, as 五毛、粉蛆、自干五), a disparate rabble of opinionators great and small. As yet none have achieved the fluency and pirouetting skill of Han Suyin; indeed they are probably unaware that even the most successful of their ilk fall far short of Madame Han’s global reach, influence and popularity. But, then, the information ecosystem of China, as well as the multi-vocal competition among China influencers bares little resemblance to Han’s time when one voice could so easily dominate.

In the above, we recounted Han’s encounter with Zhou Enlai in 1956. Many of the topics that she touched on then, ones that would feature in her later work, will resonate with readers today. Students of contemporary China would be well advised to familiarise themselves with her work so as to better appreciate the long history of issues that remain vital to China’s political life, propaganda efforts and international stance — human rights, Tibet, dissent, the role of ideology, the collective vs the individual, Taiwan, the post-colonial world, American imperialism, internationalism, the rise of Asia, the unaligned nations (latterly the Third World and what is now called the Global South), and so on. Han Suyin is also eloquent in framing China’s particular form of state universalism in terms of what is now widely appreciated as the rather clichéd tactic of whataboutism. Her critiques both of lingering colonialism and imperialist ambition also remain salient, whether it be in regard to the United States or, for that matter, Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

So, Han Suyin is still worth reading, even if only in small doses. To reiterate, she offers up a heady brew: dramatic, romantic, aspirational, finger-waggingly didactic, self-servingly smug and, ultimately, duplicitous. Yet Han’s talent as a writer, and her fluency as a pro-Beijing propagandist, are undeniable. The first three volumes of autobiography still outstrip most popular accounts, both official and independent, of China’s ‘century of humiliation’, and even now her history of the Chinese revolution could well well serve as a model for influencers and writers who charge themselves with ‘telling the China Story well’. Her historical account is suffused with the kinds of egregious distortions and self-serving nonsense still promoted by the Communist Party in the name of history and which its fellow-traveller publicists, be they Chinese and foreign, continue to parrot. Indeed, today’s captive minds, soft-propagandists, smug kumbayistas and Foghorn Leghorn podcasters could do worse than to emulate her; in fact, they often do, albeit unconsciously. As I see it, however, Han Suyin — a Version 1.0 propagandist — with whom I became familiar in the 1970s, still outperforms latter-day imitations, knock-offs and shoddy upgrades.

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Yet, there is more to Han Suyin, including what she called her ‘intimate internationalism’. As a woman of Chinese and European descent hers was a powerful voice. It was one that enthralled me when I first heard it in Sydney in 1970. She might have been dogmatic and stentorian, but she was not without insight, empathy and a left-leaning vision, some aspects of which can well be appreciated even today.

In an age when being a biracial, bicultural figure with pro-Communist politics condemned her in the eyes of many, Han’s sheer élan and undeniable talent bolstered her international success. She embodied the appeal of China as an exotic underdog and as a self-proclaimed progressive force isolated by the United States and its allies. Han, and the China that she conjured up, were at the forefront of a broader diffuse struggle with the legacies of colonialism, feudalism and imperialism. She would, however, be fain to admit that the People’s Republic was also heir to many of the things that she excoriated with such conviction, at least not in public. As a result, her spirited advocacy readily came across as shrill, one-sided, disingenuous and profoundly hypocritical. In this, too, she was an embodiment of the revolutionary China that she loved so deeply. In an era in which so much that was old is new again, does Han Suyin not also warrant a niche in the pantheon of Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium?

However, Han Suyin clones would be well advised to heed the lessons of her career. Although Han enjoyed access, fame and celebrity for decades, long before her demise in 2012 she had become little more than an anachronistic footnote. Sic transit gloria … You, too, may hanker for her once-lofty status, but vanity and its vainglorious enterprises are as ephemeral as ‘fleeting fog’ 過眼雲煙 . There can be little doubt that today’s hacks, promotors, poseurs, journalistic apologists and careerists will march on regardless, unaware for the moment that they will invariably fare far worse than Mme Han.

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Selected Bibliography

(Most of these books can be read online via the Internet Archive.)

Han Suyin

Autobiography

• The Crippled Tree (1965) – covers China and her and her family’s life from 1885 to 1928
• A Mortal Flower (1966) – covers the years 1928–38
• Birdless Summer (1968) – covers the years 1938–48
• My House Has Two Doors (1980) – covers the years 1949–79 – split into two when released as paperback in 1982, with the second part called Phoenix Harvest
• Wind in My Sleeve (1992) – covers the years 1977–91

History-adjacent works

(guided by Zhou Enlai who, for the most part, followed the official historical periodisation and contents of Selected Works of Mao Zedong.)

• The Morning Deluge: Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution 1893–1954 (1972)
• Wind in the Tower: Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution, 1949–1975 (1976)
• China 1890–1938: From the Warlords to World War (1989; historical photo-reportage)
• Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China (1994)

Fantasy:

• Lhasa, the Open City (1976)

Simon Leys

• The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1986
• The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2012
• Philippe Paquet, Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds, Melbourne: La Trobe & Black Inc., 2017
• In Memoriam — Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys), 11 August 2021
• The President & The Chairman in Retrospect, 24 February 2022

Other references

• Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, New York: Norton, 1961
• Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: travels of western intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, 1928-1978, Oxford University Press, 1981
• Feng Cui, Alex Tickell and Luke Kang Kwong Kapathy, eds, Han Suyin: Literature, Politics and Translation, a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol.57, no.2, 2021, in particular Shirley Chew, The outlandishness of Han Suyin with particular reference to My House Has Two Doors, op. cit., pp.185-197
• 毛主席詩詞
• 毛主席詩詞書法作品

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Appendix: Hu Yaobang Replies to Han Suyin

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Source:

• 胡耀邦同志給英籍女作家韓素音的覆信，《文藝通報》，第一輯，第19頁

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