Air University Review, May-June 1982

Viewing Flowers From Horseback

China is the major country in the world, and U.S.-China relations will be absolutely vital to us for the next century.¹

So said one of President Reagan’s advisers in defense of Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig’s invitation to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to come shopping in the United States for military hardware. Although the remark is unquestionably an exercise in overstatement, it is indicative of China’s growing importance in international affairs.

This increasing prominence and the PRC’s concomitant "opening" after Mao’s death in 1976 have given rise to several works by Westerners on the subject of "the Chinese." The task they have undertaken is, as one of them acknowledged in an earlier publication, like "viewing flowers from horseback."² The reference is to an old Chinese saying (not Confucian) which means that a person is near enough to notice and make limited observations but not close enough to examine with great care.

The problems in writing accurately about "the Chinese" as in writing about "the Americans" are enormous.³ One is the fact that China, as a geographical entity, is continental in size and exhibits an incredible range of ethnic, linguistic, and regional variations. Within any given region there is a pronounced gulf between the world view and life patterns of the urbanites and the peasantry. Even within city dwellers or peasants of one area, as in any grouping of human beings anywhere, attitudes and behaviors vary according to personality, character, age, sex, and sociopolitical relationships.

A second difficulty is that the Chinese Westerners encounter are, for the most part, individuals who have been metamorphosed in the process of the encounter. By coming in contact with Westerners, they encounter a new environment and a process of hybridization sets in. No longer Chinese pure and simple, they become Chinese who have interacted with Westerners, and their responses, as a result, are colored by this.

The first problem—China’s incredible diversity—is, unfortunately, often dealt with by reducing a great variety of people to a few who are highly visible and easily labeled. This is the case, in varying degrees, with two recent works, one by David Bonavia* and the other by John Fraser.** Of the two, Bonavia is the more experienced. A journalist with the Times (London), he was their correspondent in Moscow from 1969 to 1972 and in Peking from 1972 to 1973. Since that time he has also served as special correspondent on China for the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong.

* David Bonavia, The Chinese (New York: Lippincott & Crowell, 1980, $12.95), 290 pages.

**John Fraser, The Chinese: Portrait of a People (New York: Summit Books, 1980, $14.95), 463 pages.

In The Chinese, David Bonavia set about the formidable task of presenting "a realistic picture of life in the PRC." Beginning with the acknowledgment that no generalization about a nation and its typical attitudes can be true of all its people, he proceeds to do a remarkably creditable job of presenting the variegated fabric of life for the majority of the Chinese. His well-written coverage of topics such as "face," sex, medical care, the legal system, and education reflect his knowledge of things Chinese. Yet on several occasions he does lapse into sweeping generalizations, such as presenting the Chinese as totally purposeful—functionality being their sole guiding principle—and when he paints Chinese children as completely docile.

One very interesting issue Bonavia deals with is violence. In the PRC, violence is rarely sanctioned. It is not admired for its own sake as it often is in the West. In fact, in China violence is often reacted to with revulsion and contempt, whereas in the West, because of our macho tradition, we often glorify it.

John Fraser was picked in 1976 as the successor to Ross Munro, the Toronto Globe and Mail’s correspondent in Peking. Fraser not only had no background in Chinese affairs, he had never even been in a Communist country. He arrived in the PRC in December 1977, where his initial reaction was to superimpose Western fantasies on China; he had come to Shangrila—"a land of almost complete perfection." This euphoria, however, was short-lived, and Fraser proceeded to go full circle to an Orwellian approach to the PRC.⁴ To be sure this is a fairly common reaction, but usually a balance is soon reached. Unfortunately, with John Fraser this equilibrium never came.

His book reveals an utter dislike, and often total misunderstanding, of the political system in the PRC. He sees the leadership as uniformly despising the people and manipulating them for their own ends of seizing or holding power. The average Chinese is presented as being constantly tormented by totalitarianism. Chinese life-style, which Fraser relegates to the last 50 pages of The Chinese: Portrait of a People, is treated in gross generalizations—a consequence of Fraser’s superficiality. The only portion of this work that can be recommended is Fraser’s coverage of "the foreign expert." His account of Sidney Rittenberg, "the most notorious foreign expert of all," is first-rate.

The second dilemma in writing about "the Chinese"—learning about them from Chinese who have experienced metamorphosis as a result of contact with Westerners—is particularly prevalent when using the thousands of refugees in Hong Kong who sell their stories to Westerners.⁵ Fortunately, however, over the years the interview process has been sufficiently refined to the point where it is possible to obtain valuable insights into "the Chinese." Proof of this is B. Michael Frolic’s excellent collection of stories culled from some 200 interviews.*

*B. Michael Frolic, Portraits of Life in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980, $15.00), 278 pages.

Frolic, who teaches politics at York University in Toronto, was originally in Russian Studies. Disillusionment with the Soviet brand of socialism during a 1965 stay in Moscow led to his exploration of the PRC. The result was two "three-week wonder tours," a year of interviewing at the Universities Service Centre in Hong Kong and an appointment as First Secretary in the Canadian Embassy in Peking from July 1974 to September 1975.

During his time in Hong Kong, Frolic and his two Chinese research assistants conducted extensive interviews. The stories they heard were extremely rich and vivid and resulted in the book’s sixteen revealing and informative narratives. The impressions that emerge from reading these candid, devastating, and frequently funny stories include a people imbued with a strong, underlying patriotism; the rather widespread existence of corruption, cynicism, and hypocrisy; a government reluctant to force its will on the population except on issues that involve political power; the presence of considerable respect for Mao Zedong; and the fact that even in China women are not free from sexual harassment on the job.

While many of these revelations are also noted by Bonavia, Frolic provides more of a feel for the texture of Chinese society. His work is also easier and more enjoyable to read and covers often overlooked sections of "the Chinese," such as overseas Chinese who have returned to the motherland and the some 400 million non-Han Chinese.

This latter topic is the focus of the story entitled "Frontier Town," which is the account of a former resident of Shanghai who was relocated to the province of Qinghai, in the northern part of the Tibetan highlands. In this area the minority groups outnumber the Han Chinese. Because of the strategic significance of the area, efforts have been made by the government to secure the loyalties of the Tibetans and to populate the region with more Han Chinese. This was the reason for dispatching the former translator from Shanghai to the town of Genghe. During the narration of his story, it becomes clear that the government, rather than pursuing a policy of deculturation as Fraser claims, was actually affording considerable protection to the traditional Tibetan life-style and was, in fact, extremely careful in its maintenance of good relations with the Tibetans. One item which fascinated the youth from Shanghai was the fact that Tibetan women had a great deal more sexual freedom than their Han counterparts.

Many of the qualities, such as humor and impartiality, evident in Frolic’s book are also found in Watch Out for the Foreign Guests! by Orville Schell.* He combines Frolic’s academic background with Bonavia’s journalistic talent; Schell did Ph.D. work in Chinese Studies at Berkeley and has written for The New Yorker, Life, and Atlantic Monthly.

*Orville Schell, Watch Out for the Foreign Guests! China Encounters the West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, $8.95), 178 pages.

In 1975 Schell went to the PRC for the first time. While there he worked on a model commune (Dazhai) and in a factory in Shanghai. The result of that visit was presented in In the People’s Republic (Vintage, 1977). During 1978 and 1979 he returned for short periods. Of these visits he remarks that it was "like entering a different country." Whereas in 1975 he experienced "the unexplained refusal of the Chinese people themselves to open up to their ‘foreign friend’," by 1978 and 1979 the Chinese (almost exclusively urban intellectuals) actually approached him in the streets and expressed interest in Western life and customs.

If this turning toward the West and the accompanying willingness to pour out stories of their lives and hopes for the future that Schell experienced is indicative of future relations, it may be possible to begin "viewing the flowers" from much closer proximity. What it did in Schell’s case was result in some remarkable disclosures. The most memorable is the author’s encounter with Benefit-the-People Wang (Wang Zaomin), a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army and a pimp. Wang and his friends, including New Nation Li (Li Xinquo), operated out of a Western-style back-alley dive, the Peace Cafe. Schell returned there on several occasions, fascinated by the overt decadence that was nonexistent before Mao’s death.

This experience and others like it were to Schell indicators of Chinese society in the first stages of cataclysmic change. The metamorphosis caused by Chinese coming into contact with the West had begun within the PRC itself. Wang, Li, and others "were trying to construct a crude replication of the West from the little they knew about it."

To Schell and most individuals in the China field this infatuation with Western ways and goods is very disturbing. What attracted many Westerners into Chinese studies was the PRC independence, her self-sufficiency, her position as the model of socialist purity and promise, and her open defiance of the West. Until 1976 China was aloof and unapproachable— exotic, tantalizing, forbidden fruit. In part the reason for this was that Mao had feared that Western wealth and power would overwhelm the Chinese people. He worried that they would be intimidated and that their self-esteem would be crippled. From what Schell observed, Mao may have been correct, and, if so, the end result could well be the drastic alteration of "the Chinese."

1. Newsweek, June 29, 1981, p. 18.

2. B. Michael Frolic, "Wide-eyed in Peking: A Diplomat’s Diary," New York Times Magazine, January 11, 1976.

3. Perhaps the most successful account of the people of an entire nation is Edwin O. Reischauer’s The Japanese (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). One of the reasons for this success is the remarkable homogeneity of the Japanese, a trait the Chinese do not share.

4. A contrast should be made here between Fraser and Simon Leys. Leys, author of Chinese Shadows (New York: Viking Press, 1977) and Broken Images (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), also writes with an Orwellian approach to the PRC, but he does so with erudition and passion. These two qualities are missing in Fraser’s work.

5. Other problems encountered in using Hong Kong refugees are the limited data base—most of the refugees are from urban areas in Southeast China—and embellishment—refugees who are being paid to tell their story often add to them to create more interest and, hence, increase the market value.

Gerald W. Berkley (B.A., Oklahoma City University; M.A., University of Hawaii; Ph.D., University of Hong Kong) is Assistant Professor of History, Auburn University at Montgomery, Alabama. He has taught and lectured at the University of Maryland, Arkansas State University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Hawaii, American Institute for Foreign Study, and Oklahoma City University. He has published numerous articles and book reviews.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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