Written in plain, flowing and readable prose this book organises one author’s reflections on the China’s history and development around the ten words that he feels best characterise it. It has an easy, conversational feel of a man recounting stories from his eclectic past. Deceptively homely and easy to read, nevertheless it conjures vivid depictions. He draws on his experiences of childhood during the Cultural Revolution, his work as a tooth-puller and then an author under the Communist regime and observations about China since the advent of the open door policy and market reforms. He moves easily from one anecdote or observation to the next, varying between highly personal, childhood recollections, national news reports and even macro-economic observations. While such a disparate selection of vignettes might run the risk of becoming rambling or veering off topic when dealing with such complex, wide-ranging issues. His account strikes a fine balance between his own experience and his ideas about Chinese culture and history as a whole. Yu Hua always manages to gather together the various strands and leaves you with a feeling of comprehension and appreciation of a zeitgeist that can be absent from more strictly factual or chronological accounts. I felt this was supported by his skill in selecting poignant stories to tell, his eye for detail in furnishing these accounts with details and his smooth prose.
China’s passion for revolution and the chaotic society that it created left me feeling dumbstruck that something so widespread could have happened in such a huge country. How did these ideas take root so rapidly and deeply, I kept wondering? It’s easy, and comforting, to dismiss it as a quixotic mass mania, completely alien to me and the society I know and have grown up in. But this must surely be a mistake as what a Chinese revolutionary, or a Russian one, or a French one or a German Nazi felt at the time is probably what I would have felt in the same context. Whatever seems incomprehensible in history, in some sense, exists within us, however repressed, and needs only the correct circumstances to become patent. While I believe this to be fundamentally true, it is still a huge imaginative challenge to think of having such strong feelings of loyalty and devotion to Chairman Mao and the Revolution that I would happily inform on my friends and family in the full knowledge that they would face prison or be shot. But these things happened with such regularity that it must be accepted, however wild and unlikely it seems today. Yu Hua doesn’t seem to try and spare his own revolutionary activities from the repugnant light that they’re seen in by Western eyes today. He honestly recounts a horrible story about beating up a peasant who had come to his town to illegally sell his oil coupons to fund his wedding. He and his friends do this out of vigilance against counter revolutionaries that seems cruel and unnecessary by today’s standards. Such was the fervour of their revolutionary zeal. Another facet of this incredible enthusiasm that I was unaware of before is the position of popularity that Mao still occupies in China today. In the West, Mao is a criminal; guilty of atrocious human rights abuses with the blood of millions of his starved countrymen on his hands. But 85% of modern Chinese people interviewed think his return would be a good thing! I still find myself incredulous at this statistic even as I write it now and even when I reflect on the huge amount of propaganda that supported Mao’s life and legacy I still find it hard to see why the huge number of deaths under his regime don’t identify him as a shambolic and evil leader among ordinary citizens today although I supposed I could be accused of parroting Western propaganda by saying that!
One aspect that may support this lasting positive view of Mao and Communism is the euphoria Yu Hua describes during the early days of revolution. All classes and factories close as people are all too busy, ‘making revolution’. Goods and services that normally cost money become free, food is abundant and plentiful, people travel freely around the country with all trains and accommodation expenses provided for and everyone feels bound together by feelings of camaraderie and revolutionary spirit. He describes a scene in Beijing when he feels a blast of warm air on a chilly night during the early days of the revolution and eventually discovers its source as tens of thousands of people singing revolutionary songs at a bridge. They have come together to defend it against the army and are undeterred by their lack of weapons such is the strength of their feeling.
If the consequences of the revolution weren’t so tragic they would certainly be comic. Suddenly, social order is totally inverted. Children can openly insult and assault their teachers, Yu Hua’s brother burnishes his revolutionary credentials by punching his teacher in the face as a 9 year old, and everything is justifiable by reference to one of Mao’s sayings. Usually, ‘to rebel is necessary’. People form themselves into impromptu gangs, claim power and legitimacy from Mao and the Revolution and fight to the death for the government seals that signify power like school children playing capture the flag. Yu Hua remembers walking around his town watching street fights as a form of entertainment in his childhood days. Adults can be cowed by children simply by their threatening to brand them ‘counter revolutionaries’ or ‘capitalist roaders’. Mass humiliation and public execution appear to become the norm in terms of public entertainment. People are thrown in jail or shot for folding a picture of Mao across his face or accidentally contradicting something he said. Rich people suddenly become society’s least fortunate members, almost sure to be purged as capitalists, and those who lost fortunes in the recent past count their lucky stars that they are poor now. This was the case with Yu Hua’s family and is also depicted by the main protagonist in the film To Live. A gang of revolutionaries can authorise travel, condemn people to death, invade people’s homes and steal their property all in the name of the revolution and Chairman Mao. Only to be purged and replaced by another gang proclaiming exactly the same thing! It reminded me of what I have read about witch hunts in Britain during the 16th and 17th century. Everyone lives in fear in a fevered environment of violence and accusations where anything is justifiable by appeal to an unquestioned principle. Everyone accuses everyone of being a counter revolutionary and no one is safe from this ill-defined and changeable crime that carries the most deadly consequences. The contradiction and chaos are too much to comprehend and have all the trappings of high farce. Yu Hua does a good job of capturing some of this topsy-turvy world through his quotidien observations of childhood during this period. Again, it is hard to think of any ideology powerful enough to make me think that shooting my neighbour is a justifiable or acceptable act but surely I would have behaved in the same way or have ended up dead for my failure to conform. What happened to people’s humanitarian conscience in this era? Did people cease to care for one another? How did death and violence become so everyday so suddenly? It shows what a powerful drug revolution must have been.
Yu Hua draws interesting parallels between the Cultural Revolution and China’s economic miracle of the past 30 years. Just as the fervour of revolution swept all before it, now the obsession with wealth, growth and personal gain justifies all. This may be, in part, what makes people nostalgic for certain aspects of revolutionary philosophy. In the same way people went mad for revolution, now people go mad for money and development in a way that Yu Hua depicts as characteristically Chinese. The same zeal that allowed a whole society to be turned on its head has allowed it to grow rich and expand faster than any other in history. But just as the revolution spawned violence, death and tragedy in its wake; so the explosion of capitalism has lead to what Yu Hua calls ‘unequal development’. Old women are bulldozed in their houses by government officials chasing ever higher GDP growth, company directors have their legs broken in pursuit of company seals, corruption has become endemic and the powerful spend millions of dollars on apartments while millions of their countrymen still live in poverty. ‘Copycatting’ and ‘bamboozling’, once frowned upon as immoral and distasteful, are now considered acceptable, even desirable, in the pursuit of wealth. Yu Hua paints both as the results of Chinese avidity and intensity.
There were a couple of things I didn’t enjoy about this book. Both relate to what I see as a tendency to sentimentalise and romanticise. First, although the general quality of the prose is excellent, it is occasionally spoiled by a hackneyed simile or metaphor like, ‘scattered far and wide like leaves in the autumn breeze’ or something equally cliched. Secondly, when Yu Hua relates his tale of copying out illegal books he talks about copying Duma’s ‘La dame aux Camelias’ in one night with his friend. Even though he tells us that the beginnings and endings of these dogeared, underground editions would often be missing, I find it impossible to believe that two young boys copied out 250 pages of text in one night. Especially as this would have been in Chinese characters, which are wildly inefficient and time consuming to write! The subsequent story about how he couldn’t read his friend’s characters and vice versa, while amusing, is equally unlikely as they could hardly have stood under a street lamp and read 200 odd pages out loud in one evening. I suppose Yu Hua is a born storyteller and, like most storytellers, is inclined to embellish his stories a bit for artistic improvement or narrative efficiency! Yu Hua quotes a Chinese saying himself that says, ‘there’s no tax on bullshit’!
On the whole, I enjoyed this book and felt it gave a vivid depiction of a period of Chinese history that is often encountered in a more formally historical fashion. He also draws interesting connections between this period and modern China while making illustrative observations about both. Of course, as I have written throughout this piece, much of the psychology and mindset of this era must remain a mystery to me as an anachronistic observer, living in an entirely different context. Nonetheless, I have the feeling, perhaps misplaced, that I understand a little more now than I did when I started the book.
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