Greater Walls

By Richard Bernstein

CHINESE SHADOWS by Simon Leys Viking; 220 pages; $10

An old Chinese tale tells about a tyrannical prime minister of the 3rd century B.C. who assembled his courtier to test their loyalty. He had a deer brough before them and proclaimed it a horse. Those who imprudently disagreed paid the price of calling a horse a horse with their lives.

Chinese Shadows is a brilliant, uncompromising account of political distortion and sycophancy in contemporary China. Simon Leys, the pseudonym for Pierre Ryckmans, a distinguished Belgian-born Sinologist, lucidly argues that the Chin of Mao, so far from being a revolutionary paradise of egalitarianism, is a monstrous tyranny ruled over by a new privileged class of bureaucrats and generals.

Leys, who spent six months in 1972 in the People's Republic, begins with a basic fact of life in China; resident foreigners are rigorously cut off from virtually any spontaneous contact with ordinary Chinese people. Diplomats and journalists in Peking are stuck away in "the far-off suburban quarantine station that passes for the foreign quarter." Enter a restaurant, and the foreigner is led away to "a special lounge smelling of camphor," where eating a meal feels "like indulgence in a solitary vice." There are also special stores, exhibits and train compartments, an organization that handles all problems from providing servants to air tickets, and even a beach resort where, except for top bureaucrats, the Chinese are rigorously excluded. What all this indicates to Leys is the obsessive official fear that the masses might be contaminated by the ideas of outsiders.

The quarantine in Peking has its counterpart in the carefully guided official tours by which the Maoist authorities have shrunk the "immense and varied universe" of China. Westerners are limited to the dozen or so cities, factories, communes and schools whose reason for being seems to be the welcoming of friendly travelers. Leys takes the tour, finds that aside from a few carefully preserved historical monuments, China's cultural treasures have been sealed off behind curtains of barbed wire, converted to barracks, or utterly destroyed by the Red Guards during their Cultural Revolution. Leys' long list of such monuments reads like a catalogue of a vanished past. Certainly it belies the propaganda claim that Peking has carefully preserved the country's ancient heritage.

In fact, Leys makes a convincing case for his charge that Peking itself is "a murdered town, a disfigured ghost of what was once one of the most beautiful cities in the world." The fabulous imperial Forbidden City remains; so does the exquisitely harmonious Temple of Heaven --marred only by a huge red screen bearing the inevitable Mao poem. But the capital's ancient wall and magnificent gates have been torn down. Dozens of graceful arches have been destroyed. Whole neighborhoods have been bulldozed for broad, eerily empty avenues. The reasons once again have to do with the politics of totalitarianism. "Exalting deserts of tarmac" are required for those mass demonstrations in which the Chinese pay homage to Maoism.

Devotion is a key concept, one that the author sees as a dominant feature of Maoist politics. He notes the similarity to religious fanaticism: in Shaoshan, the Hunan village where Mao was born, the museum of revolutionary history has been built in duplicate to accommodate the crush of pilgrims. Leys even goes so far as to see in China "the incarnation of a medieval dream, where institutionalized Truth has again a strong secular arm to impose dogma, stifle heresy, and uproot immorality."

Underlying all this is the author's belief that China is a dictatorship by bureaucracy--one made more than normally timid and inflexible by the long power struggle that has occupied the leadership in Peking. In a society where yesterday's hero has so often turned into today's target of vilification, Leys sees a regime that has had to rely on an ever more improbable system of organized lying to explain things to its people. Official language has itself been reduced to a few tiresome but unassailable cliches--the "prefabricated jargon that is a substitute for thought."

Leys' anti-Maoism sometimes leads him to see only evil. Yet his informed subjectivity still comes closer to a believable portrait of China than any Western writer has managed since journalists and scholars began flocking to Peking five years ago. His book should make it almost impossible to visit China without being aware of the Revolution's hidden shadows.

-- Richard Bernstein

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