Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium

Chapter XIV 冀

 

Ross Terrill, Insightful Expert on Communist China, Is Dead at 85

In the 1960s, he was among the first Westerners allowed into the country, and for decades he helped the rest of the world understand it.

This is how The New York Times framed the passing of the Australian-born writer on China. Our recollection of Terrill and his achievement is somewhat at variance with an obituary that verges on the hagiographic. I launched the series Watching China Watching in January 2018 with an excerpt from ‘The China Experts’, a review of Terrill’s biography of Mao Zedong by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans) published in The Times Literary Supplement in March 1981.

In One Decent Man, my review-essay of a biography of Pierre published by The New York Review of Books, I observed that:

The written word has thus far given Ryckmans-Leys his own sort of “life-after-life.” During his lifetime he was praised by scholars, writers, and translators including Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, Yang Xianyi, and Dong Leshan; today, figures like the historian and public intellectual Lei Yi and the essayist and publisher Xu Zhiyuan have found a kindred spirit in Leys. The names of his once-famous detractors, by contrast, are now mostly remembered because of the barbs he aimed at them. Readers in China and around the world interested in Chinese history and culture, the spirit of humanism, literature, and the life of the mind will continue to discover and rediscover this navigator between worlds. “Let’s keep reading these works,” the philosopher Jean-François Revel wrote forty years ago in his preface to Leys’s Chinese Shadows, “so that we may see that in the age of the lie, the truth sometimes throws its head back and bursts out laughing.”

Today marks the tenth anniversary of Pierre’s death, on 11 August 2014. Watching China Watching reproduces the full text of his essay on Mr Terrill’s China expertise in recollection. In offering a perspective on how Terrill ‘managed to navigate safely through treacherous and turbulent waters and to keep his Expertise afloat against tremendous odds’ we hope to fill in some small way the gaping lacunæ of that emollient obituary in The Times. It also offers an insight into the balletic talents of a writer who could always right his ship, something that is also evident in his unconscious emulators.

***

Pierre Ryckmans was a Sinologist, art historian, translator, writer and teacher known by his pen name Simon Leys. He was my undergraduate Chinese teacher and the main supervisor of my doctoral studies. Since his death a decade ago, I have repeatedly commemorated his life, work and influence. See:

• A Year without Pierre, 11 August 2015
• Jiǎ Yǐ Bǐng Dīng 甲乙丙丁 — Beginning Chinese with Pierre Ryckmans, 30 November 2015
• An Educated Man is Not a Pot — On the University, March 2017
• The China Expert and The Ten Commandments, 5 January 2018
• Non-existent Inscriptions, Invisible Ink, Blank Pages, 7 January 2018
• One Decent Man, 28 June 2018
• An Old Tale Retold, 29 June 2023
• Simon Leys on George Orwell in 1984, 20 June 2024
• ‘Profoundly indignant. Longstandingly indignant. Dignifiedly indignant.’, 28 June 2024

***

‘The China Experts’ continued to gnaw away at Mr Terrill; I know that for a fact because whenever our paths crossed, be it in Cambridge, MA, or Canberra, ACT, he would make a point of talking about the man he invariably referred to as ‘your teacher’. In the signature orotund verbal style that he employed to issue ex cathedra judgements about China, American, Australia and the world, Mr Terrill would then assure me for the umpteenth time how he and Leys had long ago moved past those ancient misunderstandings. As a matter of fact, he averred, they were pretty much in agreement. This was, of course, nonsense. I can only hope that the subjects of my own barbs will be similarly discomforted long after I am gone.

The China Experts of today — people who are, as Leys observed about their predecessors some forty-five years ago, above all ‘expert at being expert’ — offer their insights via symposia, YouTube conversations, books, essays, podcasts or in the form of personalised (and cash-up-front) study tours of Xi Jinping’s China. As we observe their endeavours, we would do well to recall Ross Terrill’s tireless efforts at aggiornamento. Back in the day, sophists defended their arguments about Mao’s China under the rubric of ‘the China difference’. It was also used to excuse the early unsettling grotesqueries of the Deng era that followed. Today, the self-serving distortions summed up as ‘Chinese characteristics’ 中國特色 and ‘Chinese style’ 中國式 offer ready cover for the apparatchiki, apologists, sophists and opportunist in Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium.

This material, which is part of Chapter XIV in Empire of Tedium is also a chapter in Watching China Watching.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
11 August 2024

---

From the Introduction to Watching China Watching

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.

— Albert Camus

In Watching China Watching we offer essays and reflections on studying the Chinese world and approaches to understanding the Chinese People’s Republic. Our method is underpinned by New Sinology.

The men and women who taught us to engage with the Chinese world and to appreciate things Chinese in a holistic fashion were motivated and inspired by many things: their personal histories, a diverse range of interests, as well as a pressing necessity to watch (and to watch out for) China. For many of them, Chinese and non-Chinese alike (after all, some of the greatest China Watchers are from China), China was not a distant subject for study but an essential part of lived reality. Their insights were generally based not on some crude social science or anthropological approach to observing The Other, or the result of dissecting an object rich in possibility as part of some ambitious career trajectory. Their understanding was based as much on entanglement, fraught questioning, a spirit of self-discovery and personal enrichment as the result of a lifelong effort to approach what is in fact an all-encompassing cultural-political world from a broad humanistic perspective.

***

We are interested in the professional China Watchers, a once nearly-defunct claque of people working in government for national political ends, journalists, academics, ne’er-do-wells, as well as the talented curious and literary dilettantes. In the ‘New Epoch’ of Chairman of Everything Xi Jinping, the long-overlooked, or underestimated, skills of being able to read, listen to and understand the bloviations of the Chinese party-state are, perhaps, in vogue once more.

In producing Watching China Watching we also want to leave some material from the past for those who are engaged with the Chinese multiverse and who would watch, learn, imbue and develop their own approach to China and its world as part of their personal human struggle in what is a world of contentious ideas, ideological fabrications, conflicted interests and strained emotions.

Below we first present some observations by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans, one of our Ancestors) on The China Experts, a category of people who have long made an art form, and lucrative careers, out of fake news and fake analysis. For more on the topic of ‘The China Expert’ 中國通, or ‘Old China Hand’, see the editorial introduction to Jao Tsung-I on 通 tōng — 饒宗頤與通人, China Heritage, 23 June 2017.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
5 January 2018

---

***

The China Experts

Simon Leys

Paris taxi drivers are notoriously sophisticated in their use of invective. ‘Hé, va donc, structuraliste!‘ is one of their recent apostrophes — which makes one wonder when they will start calling their victims ‘China Experts’!

Perhaps we should not be too harsh on these experts; the fraternity recently suffered a traumatic experience and is still in a state of shock. Should fish suddenly start to talk, I suppose that ichthyology would also have to undergo a dramatic revision of its basic approach. A certain type of ‘instant sinology’ was indeed based on the assumption that the Chinese people were as different from us in their fundamental aspirations, and as unable to communicate with us, as the inhabitants of the oceanic depths; and when they eventually rose to the surface and began to cry out sufficiently loudly and clearly for their message to get through to the general pubic, there was much  consternation among the China pundits.

Professor Edward Friedman, a teacher of Chinese Politics at an American university, recently wrote a piece in The New York Times that informed its readers that various atrocities had taken place in China during the Maoist era. That a professor of Chinese Politics should appear to have discovered these facts nearly ten years after even lazy undergraduates were aware of them may have made them news only for The New York Times; nevertheless, there was something genuinely touching in his implied confession of ignorance.

Madame Han Suyin, who knows China inside out, seldom lets her intelligence, experience, and information interfere with her writing. One rainy Sunday I amused myself by compiling a small anthology of her pronouncements on China (see “The Double Vision of Han Suyin”), and learned that the “Cultural Revolution” was a “Great Leap Forward” for mankind, and that it was an abysmal disaster for the Chinese; that the Red Guards were well-behaved, helpful, and democratic-minded, and that they were savage and terrifying fascist bullies; that the “Cultural Revolution” was a tremendous spur for China’s economy, and that it utterly ruined China’s economy; that Lin Biao was the bulwark of the Revolution, and that Lin Biao was a murderous warlord and traitor; that Jiang Qing tried hard to prevent violence, and that Jiang Qing did her best to foster violence.

Professor Friedman and Madame Han Suyin represent the two extremes of a spectrum—the first one apparently in a state of blissful ignorance, the other knowing everything—yet the way in which both eventually stumbled suggests that, in this matter at least, the knowledge factor is, after all, quite irrelevant. What a successful China Expert needs, first and foremost, is not so much China expertise as expertise at being an Expert. Does this mean that accidental competence in Chinese affairs could be a liability for a China Expert? Not necessarily—at least not as long as he can hide it as well as his basic ignorance. The Expert should in all circumstances say nothing, but he should say it at great length, in four or five volumes, thoughtfully and from a prestigious vantage point. The Expert cultivates Objectivity, Balance and Fair-Mindedness, in any conflict between your subjectivity and his subjectivity, these qualities enable him, at the crucial juncture, to lift himself by his bootstraps high up into the realm of objectivity, whence he will arbitrate in all serenity and deliver the final conclusion. The expert is not emotional; he always remembers that there are two sides to a coin. I think that even if you were able to confront him with Auschwitz, for example, he would still be able to say that one should not have the arrogance to measure by one’s own subjective standards Nazi values, which were, after all, quite different. After every statement, the Expert cautiously point to the theoretical possibility of also stating the opposite; however, when presenting opinions or facts that run counter to his own private prejudices, he will be careful not to lend them any real significance—though, at the same time, he will let them discreetly stand as emergency exits, should his own views eventually be proved wrong.

Ross Terrill, an Australian writer now settled in the United States, has been acclaimed there as the ultimate China Expert. I think he fully qualifies for the title.

Between the Charybdis of Professor Friedman and the Scylla of Madame Han Suyin, Mr. Terrill has been able to steer a skillful middle course. I would not go so far as to say that he has never imparted to his readers much useful insight on China (actually, I am afraid he has misled them rather seriously on several occasions); nevertheless, unlike his less subtle colleagues, he has managed to navigate safely through treacherous and turbulent waters and to keep his Expertise afloat against tremendous odds. By this sign you can recognize a genuine Expert: once an Expert, always an Expert.

When I was invited to review Terrill’s biography of Mao, [Mao: A Biography, New York: Harper and Row, 1980)] I initially declined the suggestion; it seemed to me that the book in itself hardly warranted any comment — however, its significance lies more in what it omits than in what it commits. If I eventually accepted the task, it was not merely to offer a few observations on the “physiologie de l’Expert,” but rather to take the opportunity to correct a bias of which I may have been guilty in the past when reviewing some of Terrill’s earlier works. (These works include 800,000,000: The Real China (1972), Flowers on an Iron Tree (1975), The Future of China (1978), and The China Difference (1979), which, like China and Ourselves (1970), is a collection of essays by various authors, edited and with an introduction by Terrill.)

My first encounter with his writings was inauspicious: opening at random his Flowers on an Iron Tree, I came upon a passage in which he described, as if he had visited it, a monument in China that had been razed to the ground years before. After that, it was hard for me to conjure away a vision of Terrill at work on his travelogue, busying himself with the study of outdated guidebooks without actually leaving his hotel room. For a long time this unfortunate false note was to color (unfairly, no doubt) the impression I had formed of Terrill’s endeavors. Now, not only do I feel that my indignation was somewhat excessive, but I begin to see that in all the liberties Terrill takes with reality, there is always a principle and a method, both of which I completely overlooked at the time: when he sees things which are not there, at least he recognizes that these are things that should be there.

This gives a kind of Platonic quality to his vision—it may be of little practical value, but it certainly testifies to the essential goodness and idealistic nature of his intentions. All too often his statements are likely to provoke strong reactions in any informed reader; but these reactions, in their very violence, appear at once so totally out of tune with the style of this gentle and amiable man that one feels immediately ashamed of them. To attack Mr. Terrill seems as indecent as to kick a blind man’s dog.

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

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

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

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

Terrill visited China several times; his most extensive investigations, resulting in his influential 800,000,000: The Real China, were conducted during the early 1970s—a time that was, by the reckoning of the Chinese themselves, one of the bleakest and darkest periods in their recent history. The country that had been bled white by the violence of the “Cultural Revolution” was frozen with fear, sunk into misery; it could hardly breathe under the cruel and cretinous tyranny of the Maoist Gang. Though it is only now that the Chinese press can describe that sinister era in full and harrowing detail, its horror was so pervasive that even foreigners, however insensitive and well insulated against the Chinese reality, could not fail to perceive it (though it is true, sadly, that too few of them dared at the time to say so publicly).

Yet what did Terrill see? “To be frank, my weeks in China exceeded expectations. … The 1971 visit deepened my admiration for China and its people. …” In that hour of ferocious oppression, suffering, and despair, of humiliation and anguish, he enjoyed “the peace of the brightly colored hills and valleys of China … the excellence of Chinese cuisine. …” Do not think, however, that his enjoyment was merely that of a tourist: “I happen, too, to be moved by the social gains of the Chinese revolution. In a magnificent way, it has healed the sick, fed the hungry and given security to the ordinary man of China.” Maoism was “change with a purpose. … the purposive change bespeaks strength, independence, leadership that was political power in the service of values.” “China is a world which is sterner in its political imperatives but which in human terms may be a simpler and more relaxed world.” How much more relaxed? Even though the country is tightly run, “this near total control is not by police terror. The techniques of Stalinist terror-armed police everywhere, mass killings, murder of political opponents, knocks on the door at three A.M., then a shot—are not evident in China today. … Control is more psychological than by physical coercion… the method of control is amazingly lighthanded by Communist standards. …” “The lack of a single execution by the state of a top Communist leader is striking . . . even imprisonment of a purgee is rare. … Far more common has been the milder fate of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in 1966. … They lived for many months in their own homes. No doubt they lounged in armchairs and read in the People’s Daily the record of their misdeeds. … Liu was sent to a village, his health declined, and in 1973 he died of a cancer. …” (Actually, if one did not know of Terrill’s essential decency, one might suspect him of making here a very sick joke indeed; Liu, who was very ill, was left by his tormentors lying in his own excrement, completely naked on the freezing concrete floor of his jail, till he died. As for Deng, though it is true that he was less roughly treated, he confessed in a recent interview that he spent all those years in constant fear of being assassinated.)

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

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

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is only on the subject of Mao’s last years that Terrill might have provided an original contribution. Unfortunately, the diplomatic constraints that he imposed upon himself when dealing with topics that are still taboo for the Peking bureaucracy prevented him from tackling seriously the two central crises of Mao’s twilight: on the one hand his attempts at destroying Zhou Enlai, and on the other the emergence of a popular anti-Mao movement that culminated in the historic Tian’anmen demonstration of April 5, 1976. On the first point, though he has already noticeably shifted his views, Terrill remains unable to confront the issue squarely—as this would entail the admission that the “Gang of Four,” which persecuted Zhou until his death, was actually a “Gang of Five” led, inspired, and protected by Mao himself. On the second point, he entirely ignores the vast, spontaneous, and articulate movement of anti-Maoist dissent (the famous “Li Yizhe” Manifesto of 1974 is not even mentioned) and curtly dismisses its climax—the April Fifth Movement, whose importance in Chinese contemporary history already ranks on a par with the May Fourth Movement—terming it a mere “riot,” a “melee” barely worth one page of sketchy and misleading description.

If these failures tend to disqualify Mao as historiography, the book still presents in its form and style a quaint charm that will certainly enchant readers of the old Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat series: chronological indications are mostly provided in terms of “Year of the Rat” or “Year of the Snake”; Terrill’s disarming weakness for zoomorphic similes finds new outlets: since Mao once described his own character as half tiger and half monkey, we are kept informed, at every turn of his career, of what the tiger does, and what the monkey: “It irritated the monkey in him that Lin Biao spoke of absolute authority,” and so forth. These touches will delight Terrill’s younger readers, while adolescents may find more enjoyment in passages such as this description of Mao’s accession to full power: “Jiangxi had been mere masturbation, alongside this full intercourse with the radiant bride of China.”

1981

***

Source:

• Simon Leys, ‘All Change Among the China-Watchers’, a review-essay of Mao: A Biography by Ross Terrill (1980), The Times Literary Supplement, 6 March 1981, reprinted under the title ‘The Benefits of Amnesia’ in the 15 May 1981 issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review and included as ‘The China Experts’ in The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1986, pp.194-208.

***

---